Blue People

The Ticking Bomb

Everyone is getting all exercised about the "ticking bomb" scenario, apparently because some commentators (seemingly including NPR's Diane Rehm) believe that it is an unanswerable argument in favor of torture.

Let's leave aside for the moment the extreme implausibility of the situation. We've learned that a nuclear device is planted in an American city, set to explode at some unknown time. Furthermore, we've captured a terrorist who we know for sure knows where the bomb is and when it will go off. All of this begs the question: how did we learn all this yet fail to learn the exact location of the bomb? How do we know that the terrorist knows, but not what he knows? All of this is fanciful in the extreme.

But let's go further. If you were an al-Qaeda cell planning this attack, don't you think that you would:

a) set up all kinds of blind alleys for investigators to follow and get bogged down in;
b) make damn sure that all of your operatives with critical knowledge were well away from the scene, say, in the mountains of northwest Pakistan, before the event was imminent?

Lastly, and simplest of all: the argument that even a saint would engage in torture under these circumstances is completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not torture should be legal. Our policy should be very simple, along the lines suggested by John McCain: torture is illegal, period. If in some extreme circumstance operatives of the US government find it necessary to torture someone in their custody, they will do so knowing that they risk prosecution.

The option of clemency is always there if it is the only way to serve the larger interests of justice.

Friedman (Benjamin, not Thomas)

I've been working through Benjamin Friedman's new book, "The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth". Friedman's thesis is easy to summarize: when times are flush, and most people are advancing economically, the political temper grows more liberal. While I'm only about a fourth of the way through, it can be seen already that Friedman is going to be able to draw upon many examples from history (mostly but not exclusively in the US).

This dovetails nicely with a couple of other recent points of discussion. First, there is the general problem for progressives, how to get the country out of the ditch into which it's fallen. Secondly, on a more micro level, we have Gene Sperling's new book, "The Pro-Growth Progressive", which covers the prescriptive side of the topic that Friedman covers diagnostically.

In a nutshell, we aren't going to have a more progressive politics until we have not just a growing economy, but growth that benefits a large segment of the population. This is fine, except that right now we don't know how to achieve this type of growth without confronting head-on the fact that the market is generating wildly maldistributed results. Not only that, we have to deal with the fact that the tools for addressing this maldistribution are largely unavailable. We are talking, at a bare minimum, a repeal of the Bush tax cuts, and to do this we are going to have to overcome the institutional clout of the Republican party (as documented by Hacker and Pierson in "Off Center").

None of this is an excuse for refusing to address the issue. But it does mean that the kind of trimming that we associate with the Clintons, and more recently with the well-known Galston/Kamarck paper, is not going to be of any use. What we need to do is stand up forthrightly and proclaim our support for policies that - at the moment - don't have much chance of being enacted into law, but which are nevertheless the right policies, and which therefore need to be defended.

But let's not be too pessimistic. I can think of at least two large-scale reforms that would get very substantial grass-roots support: national health insurance, and energy policy reform. We need to push these programs hard, drum up support at the grass roots, and hold the GOP's feet to the fire. We can't let our proposals be guided by our notions of what would get through Tom DeLay's office. Eventually, with enough patience and persistence, we can reach a stage where DeLay (and his like) won't be a factor.