Thursday, January 30, 2020

Elizabeth Warren for President

Ezra Klein's quasi-endorsement of Warren is worth reading just to understand the powers and limitations of the Presidency. I'm happy for my movement to get its principles from Bernie Sanders; I want Elizabeth Warren to sit in the President's chair at meetings with top federal bureaucrats.
Campaigning in the age of television frames the presidency as a communications job, which, sometimes, it is. But those powers are overstated: Presidents are rarely able to dramatically change public opinion, and their interventions are as likely to hurt legislative efforts as help. By contrast, campaigns understate both the power and the difficulty of leading the world’s most powerful and consequential bureaucracy, and the next president will face a particularly hard version of that job, as Donald Trump has driven out a tremendous amount of civil service talent and demoralized many of those who remain. Warren has proven herself the candidate with the right skills and vision to rebuild. 
Warren’s work on the CFPB gave her something rare among political candidates. One is interest in, and experience with, the federal bureaucracy itself. She understands the regulatory process, how it works, who has access to it. She knows which meetings matter, where power sits, which explanations for why something isn’t possible or isn’t happening are merely stalling tactics. She has seen, firsthand, the entry points that lobbyists and special interests use to hijack the process, the difficulties of collaboration among agencies. 
What’s more, Warren’s political project is regulatory in nature: She wants to change how markets are governed so there’s more true competition, more information empowering and protecting consumers, and more broadly shared gains. When Warren says she’s “a capitalist to her bones,” this is what she means: She believes in the power of properly regulated markets, and she intends, as president, to properly regulate them.
The president has far more direct control of regulation than redistribution, and as such, much of what Warren wants to do — from using antitrust enforcement to break up monopolistic firms to simplifying consumer financial products to cancelling student loan debt to cracking down on the risks too-big-to-fail banks can run — can be done through powers the executive branch already holds. 
The next Democratic president is likely to face a Senate where Mitch McConnell remains majority leader, and even if Democrats manage to take back the gavel, the most optimistic outcome is a slim majority with the hinge vote being West Virginia’s Joe Manchin or Alabama’s Doug Jones — and that’s before taking the filibuster into account. It is possible, perhaps probable, that the president’s primary power will come through their control of the executive branch. Warren is the candidate who would be most interested in, knowledgeable about, and effective at wielding it.

Ezra then goes on to how Warren is better on Medicare for All. Biden and Buttigieg oppose it; Sanders thinks he can pass it without eliminating the filibuster. Warren supports it and has a plan for the hardest part, passing the Senate. First, pass a public option in 2021 with 50 votes, which we're moderately likely to have, while it takes really extreme scenarios to have the votes for Medicare for All. Then come the 2022 Senate elections where only 12 Dems are up for re-election and 22 Republicans are. If Democrats win half the races, they gain five seats. And with those votes, you can go for full M4A in 2023.
Warren’s careful navigation of the Medicare-for-all debate has widely been considered a misstep for her campaign, as her admission of the political realities alienated single-payer diehards who don’t want to admit the need for any initial compromises, while her endorsement of Sanders’s underlying bill and her specificity on financing opened her up to attack from the moderates. But what’s actually happening here speaks to Warren’s strengths: She’s developed a more politically realistic proposal and path than what Sanders offered, and a more ambitious and compelling vision than what the moderates have proposed. 
The truth of the Medicare-for-all debate is that it is extremely unlikely any president will pass a single-payer bill, but Warren is the only candidate to propose an even glancingly plausible strategy. As has been a hallmark of her campaign thus far, she’s taken the systemwide barriers to passing single-payer seriously, and has worked to come up with answers. Presidential campaigns reward uncut political optimism pumped right into the electorate’s veins, but carefully navigating a system designed to frustrate change is what a president actually has to do.
It's important to get a sense of which politicians are good at which positions. Nancy Pelosi and Jeff Merkley are great legislators. AOC has built a new kind of social media policy intellectual position around her distinctive package of skills. Bernie is the movement-father who gives voice to the voiceless and summon the AOCs from the bars of New York City to Congress.

Elizabeth Warren should be President. Bernie is second best; Biden is the worst major Democrat; any Democrat over Trump. But Warren is the best for making executive appointments, keeping bureaucrats in line with progressive priorities, and devising a legislative strategy with Pelosi and Schumer. And that's what this job is about.

In primaries you have to be flexible and switch over if your favorite candidate becomes nonviable by the time you vote. But I hope I can vote for her.

Sunday, January 26, 2020

Seeing politicians the utilitarian way

I don't know how clearly my utilitarianism comes through in my political posts. Obviously, it affects my goals. But it also affects how I emotionally respond to political figures themselves.

Utilitarians want to increase everyone's happiness. In large-scale politics, this requires us to take a zoomed-out perspective where we can see all the happiness. From this perspective, each person's happiness is tiny.

Powerful politicians still stand out because their effects on others' happiness are so great. But their own happiness is no greater than anyone else's. The reason to focus on them is the consequences: averting calamities like war and climate change that could harm many. The greater my power to help, the less I can let personal resentments lead me to suboptimal strategies on such important issues. The right emotions to cultivate toward politicians will concern their powers to affect outcomes, and not their own character.

In Kantian language, I must regard politicians not as persons, but as things. I shouldn't get caught up in judging them personally. I have to focus on how useful they can be in avoiding disasters, and how to use them effectively.

This sits well with me, because I don't see myself as a person in the Kantian way. I'm just a thing with feelings. I hope I have pleasant feelings. And I really want to be a useful thing.

Saturday, January 18, 2020

Solving the Sanders-Warren mystery

New reporting by Ryan Grim suggests an explanation of how the recent Sanders-Warren drama came to be. It's worth spelling out.

A conversation in 2018 ended with Warren thinking Sanders was saying that a woman couldn't win the election. (I imagine him emphatically warning about how awful Trump would be to her, as she was aware, and leaving his purpose unclear. You can vary the details.) It affected her deeply, and she told some people in DC what she thought he said shortly afterwards. And now those people, or some entity down the rumor mill, leaked it.

Neither campaign says they leaked it. Both must be right. Obviously, both need the other's voters to come over if they win, and this story disrupts that. It's two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, which register second choices, so alliances benefit both. This exactly the time to stick together.

When would they leak this, if they were going to? Maybe before Super Tuesday, when second choices won't register and alliances don't work, to break a panicked deadlock as Biden towers over them. But not now. It's the worst time. These people didn't get this far by missing the most obvious strategic dynamic concerning their campaigns. That all means it's the perfect time for an enemy to drop a bomb on them. It's right after the weird Bernie instructions-to-volunteers memo put both campaigns on edge, and right before the final pre-Iowa debate.

Warren is honest, and she's telling us what she honestly thinks Sanders said. It's easy to see why he couldn't convince her otherwise under these conditions. Recognizing that you completely misunderstood what an old friend said a year ago is hard enough when the two of you aren't running opposed Presidential primary campaigns two weeks before Iowa, with all the tensions, communication barriers, and reasons for mistrust that involves. They're competing for the most powerful position on Earth, surrounded by employees whose job is to help them defeat the other. And they have powerful enemies who want to split them apart.

In best-case scenarios, Bernie and Elizabeth overcome all this, discover their enemy, and vow never to be separated again. Obviously, that's unlikely. But supporters of either candidate, or both, would do well to push in that direction.

Sunday, January 5, 2020

Iran and the US after Soleimani

Increased violence will probably follow the US assassination of Qasem Soleimani. Iran will retaliate, probably through regional proxies like Hezbollah or the Houthis. If Trump escalates in response, things could get very bad, so I hope a new shiny object distracts him.

Either way, the only winners here are defense contractors and oil extractors. Russia is a big oil producer, and the Moscow stock exchange hit an all-time high on the news of the assassination.

This is a moment when the differences between Democratic and Republican foreign policy are clear. Obama had the opportunity to assassinate Soleimani several times, but didn't do it. For one thing, Iran would quickly replace Soleimani. The replacement might not be as skilled, but Iran would be more angry at America, and retaliation would be the first order of business.

For another thing, Obama wanted Iranian leaders to agree to a nuclear nonproliferation deal, and killing their colleagues with missiles would complicate negotiations. After taking over from Bush, who branded Iran part of the "Axis of Evil", Obama repaired relations and got his deal. International inspectors verified that Iran was abiding by its commitments, and enriching uranium only at the level required for a peaceful program.

Then Trump came. He withdrew from the Iran deal and reimposed sanctions. With the deal dead, Iran has grown its enriched uranium stockpile beyond what was allowed. And now Trump has committed an assassination.

Iran is full of cool young people who don't want to live in a theocracy. I hope that someday they'll get their wish, and Iran will be a liberal democracy in a big international alliance with the US. (I hope we'll be a liberal democracy then too.) But what we've become and what we've done makes that happy future less likely than it used to be.