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On the eve of another US military intervention in the Middle East, the American left finds itself conflicted, and therefore relatively quiet. According to the Pew Research Centre, 56% of Republicans support military action against Syria compared with 46% of Democrats; 24% of Republicans and 34% of Democrats are opposed.
While these are not majorities in opposition to intervention, they are sizable portions of the American public, especially among Democrats. So why has the anti-war left, which organised demonstrations with hundreds of thousands of participants in the runup to the Iraq war, been invisible on Syria?
There are three reasons. First, the anti-war movement has withered over the past six years, as Democrats rose to power and withdrew the US from Iraq.
Second, it is harder to organise the left against a Democratic president. Partisans on both sides are understandably less outraged by aggressive use of executive authority in national security when their own party is in power, since they assume a president from their party is more honest and competent. If President Obama says Syria has used chemical weapons, most liberals are unlikely to fear it is a repeat of George W Bush's false claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Third, a limited bombing campaign against Syria would claim few, if any, American lives. Nato's recent intervention in Libya successfully prevented atrocities against civilians at an estimated cost to the US of only $1.1bn.
The politics of military interventions often create unusual political alignments. Elites, centrists, newspaper editorials and the top foreign policy advisers in both parties tend toward hawkishness, while each party has a non-interventionist wing on its perimeter. Among Republicans these tend to be small government absolutists. Among Democrats it is the left wing, including members of the House progressive caucus. More than 100 House members, from both parties, have signed letters to Obama stating that he must receive congressional approval before taking military action in Syria.
Establishment Democrats are generally sympathetic to circumscribed humanitarian interventions, such as the Nato bombing campaign in Kosovo during the Clinton administration. If the cost is manageable and the cause is moral, they see the intervention as warranted. That's why, for example, Tom Perriello, a former congressman who opposed the Iraq war and now runs the Centre for American Progress action fund, is in favour of a "surgical" strike against Assad.
But one of Perriello's colleagues, Matt Duss, a CAP foreign policy analyst, argues that the costs of intervention outweigh the benefits. Writing in the American Prospect, Duss worries that US intervention could strengthen the Assad regime's internal political appeal, provoke a Syrian retaliation against Israel, and empower hardliners and marginalise moderates in Syria's ally Iran.
Most of all, liberal intellectuals fret about the rule of law, both domestically and internationally. Some left-leaning domestic law experts, such as Scott Lemieux, argue that for Obama to take military action without congressional approval would be illegal. Liberal foreign policy experts, such as Mark Leon Goldberg, say it would be illegal under international law and set a precedent that more belligerent future presidents might abuse, as Bush did in Iraq. Liberals worried about international legitimacy are especially leery now that the British parliament has voted not to join an action against Syria.
Some liberals are trying to put the humanitarian case for a bombing campaign in its proper context. Matthew Yglesias of Slate notes that, based on estimates from charitable organisations, "if the United States was able to spend the $1.1bn we spent on the Libya operation on long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets we could have saved almost 590,000 lives" [by preventing malaria]. This is the kind of internationalism liberals hoped Barack Obama would pursue.
When Democrats nominated Obama in 2008, they were choosing a change from the pro-war centrism of the Clintons. They wanted a president who had opposed the Iraq war, and they chose a constitutional lawyer who had spent a comparatively short time in Washington, DC. But, on national security matters, Obama has consistently made the same choices Hillary Clinton would have made. Syria is just the latest example of that.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
Public opinion, like old generals, is always preparing to fight the last war
When it turns its attention to thinking about conflict, politics – and public opinion – is an oddly backwards process. Journalists and other analysts tend to look for guidance on future developments from past events. Egypt is compared to Algeria in the runup to the civil war; Syria to the Balkans.
History and experience act as a filter that can distort as much as elucidate. It is largely forgotten now, overlooked in the one-line description of Tony Blair and George W Bush as the men who lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, but there was a wider context to their conviction. Many spies, politicians and military men believed that the Iraqi dictator held such weapons, because their experience of Saddam's use of poison gas in Halabja and during the Iran-Iraq war, and his headlong pursuit of weapons of mass destruction technologies, made it inconceivable that he might disarm.
Because they thought that he must be hiding something, there was a built-in confirmation bias to the hunt for what they believed was hidden.
Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have shown how badly military interventions can go wrong. After a decade of pointless, counterproductive wars, the public and politics in the western countries involved are sick of war, dubious of the promises made for humanitarian intervention.
And what we have forgotten is where the doctrine of the "responsibility to protect" came from – not from the often shabby little wars of the 2000s but from real humanitarian catastrophes where intervention was late or absent and genocidal acts took place – in Rwanda and in Bosnia.
The Syrian conflict confirms many of our prejudices. For those on the left opposed to intervention, who see any military strike as rash and illegal, it appears to provide the pretext for the latest in a long series of attacks on Muslim and Arab countries, led by an overreaching US, a willfully selective and hypocritical affair.
For those who believe in intervention on humanitarian grounds, the case is made equally strongly. A country disintegrates, 100,000 people die, poison gas appears to have been deployed and the burden of the worst atrocities seems to fall on the country's dictatorial regime.
If it's easy for those with set ideological ideas about how the world works to come to their conclusions, Syria is less easy to interpret for those of us who want to try to see it not as a reflection of something else, but for what it is – a horrible conflict that in many ways demands a forceful response, but where any such response is so fraught with risk as to make it difficult to contemplate.
The question then – as put by the always thoughtful veteran journalist Robin Lustig on Friday – is this: "Is doing nothing really an option?" Clearly, it is, but then another question immediately follows: is there any point, any further escalation in horror, at which doing nothing will no longer be an option? What if there's another chemical weapons attack, in which 5,000 people are killed? 10,000 killed? Is there anywhere you would draw a red line? Might MPs have cause to regret their vote in the weeks and months to come?"
In a way the difficulty is that when we make judgments such as this we cannot separate ourselves from the prevailing mood. For societies, the experience of war alters the assumptions that guide how we consider the risk involved. Like a kind of psychotropic drug, it alters political and cultural perceptions. Looking at Syria we can't help but see it through the filter of Iraq, through a mood of sharpened scepticism of the media, politics and intelligence agencies.
In some ways it has always been thus. The old military maxim about generals always preparing to fight the last war, has been echoed in the cycles of public opinion in the past century.
The terrible cost of the first world war saw a rise in interest in pacifism, which by the 1930s saw a significant faction in the Labour party around George Lansbury, who opposed rearmament, and who led the party until being replaced by Clement Atlee in 1935. It was a mood music that fed into Neville Chamberlain's desire for appeasement. To avoid war. To negotiate a settlement.
Britain's role in the second world war, and the heroic narrative that took shape around that victory, permitted the UK to ignore its declining international role and to behave with the swagger of an imperial power.
If there is a flip side to this kind of imperial hubris, it is over the long shadow cast by conflicts that either are wrong or come at too high a price in the modern era. Events such as Suez, the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the US experience in Vietnam and, later, Somalia, all cast the same long shadow.
To answer Lustig's question – at which point do we change our minds? – history, that unreliable guide to the future, suggests it is often when we are taken by surprise. US isolationism in the 1930s largely imploded with Pearl Harbour, echoing a similar trend in the UK.
All we can really say today is that the vote in parliament finally internalised all the lessons of Iraq for Britain's political classes. For Syria, poor bleeding Syria, the past and present are awful. Its future and how the international community might have to respond – despite the acres of predictions in the past few days – remains unwritten.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
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Spare a thought this Labor Day holiday, when you fire up the barbecue for the last weekend of the summer and raise a beer for the workers in this country, for some of the notable men who have lost their jobs over the past 20 years. I'm thinking of Richard Fuld, Dennis Kozlowski and Eckhard Pfeiffer.
They aren't union leaders who were fired for organizing for better wages or men who lost their jobs to sweatshop labor in Bangladesh. They aren't even the engineers who have been put out to rust by robot-run assembly lines. They don't really number among the almost 20 million who are estimated to be unemployed or underemployed.
No, these three names popped up in a review of the "Bailed Out, Booted and Busted" – a study released Wednesday by the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington DC of the 241 people who have ranked as the highest paid CEOs in the US in the past two decades.
An astonishing 38% of these titans of finance and industry have either been kicked out of their jobs, put in jail or had to have their companies be rescued from bankruptcy. Fuld, Kozlowski and Pfeiffer are three that top the list.
"Outrageous pay packets seem to encourage outrageous behavior," says Sarah Anderson, one of the authors of the new report.
Fuld raked in $466.3m in salary and stocks in seven years as CEO of Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street investment bank, before the company collapsed in September 2008, precipitating the last financial crisis. He's just one of 112 such CEOs whose companies were given a total of $258bn in taxpayer bailouts.
Kozlowski ran Tyco, a conglomerate which bought companies that did everything from laying undersea fiber-optic cables to making fire-fighting foam, from 1992 to 2002. He paid himself $170m in 1999 and $125m in 2000. Found guilty of systematically looting the company in 2005, he was sent to jail, and is now serving time at a minimum-security facility near Central Park in Manhattan.
He joins 18 other top paid CEOs in the past 20 years that have led companies that were "busted" or ordered to pay more than $100m each for fraud-related fines and settlements.
Then there's Pfeiffer, who ran Compaq computer from 1992 to 1999, and was fired when his company lost business to rivals Dell and Gateway. Like 27 other CEOs on the list, he was smart enough to have given himself a generous "golden parachute" contract, allowing him to walk away with $416m in compensation on his final payday.
It's easy to argue that there are a couple of bad apples in every cart, but think of it this way: if two out of every five pieces of fruit in a store were rotten, it would behoove the manager to tell stockers that if they didn't cull the bad ones, customers would take their business elsewhere.
In other words: shouldn't we be asking companies' boards of directors to tighten the rules on CEOs to make sure they don't fail at such an astounding rate? And what better way than tying it to their pay packets? And if the boards won't do this, could government step in, if only to save the companies from their own CEOs abject levels of failure?
One of the simplest reforms that shareholder activists have lobbied for is a report by companies to shareholders comparing CEO compensation to that of their worst paid worker. This has been mandated by the US Congress under the 2010 Dodd-Frank legislation but companies have fought tooth and nail against this being implemented.
Corporate America has been backed up by business school pundits who say that CEO compensation is not a matter that government should regulate. I asked VG Narayan, who runs the Board of Directors Compensation Committee Executive Education Program of the Harvard Business School what he thought of the IPS findings. "It's terrible when poor performance gets rewarded with a high level of compensation," he said via email.
But he firmly believes that corporate boards and executives are best placed to fix this. "Governmental and shareholder second-guessing on pay would create an environment of fear in which no board would dare try an approach that's different from the herd's or that is tailored to the company's particular strategy," Narayan wrote in 2009. "For instance, if the maximum ratio of CEO pay to worker pay were mandated, companies might respond by outsourcing the work of the lowest paid workers rather than curbing CEO pay."
David Larcker, the director of the Corporate Governance Research Program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, also says that governments should be cautious about scaring away these CEOs.
"Executive compensation may be the lightning rod for shareholders in the wake of the financial crisis, but the truth about how pay should be structured is clouded by a lot of popular myths," Larcker wrote in 2011. "Boards have to consider that how much they pay will have an impact on the types of people who want to take the CEO position. You don't want to drive talented CEOs out of public companies so that they can avoid scrutiny over how much they are paid."
Well, these business schools have had decades to preach about better practices. Workers jobs are being outsourced anyway, and the CEOs are still getting away with outrageous pay packages. And the IPS study shows that these CEOs aren't that talented – since they are failing at an incredibly high rate.
As Anderson says:
Boards of directors are not going to change this. They are mostly made up of other CEOs who says if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Unless regulators, lawmakers or shareholders do something to stop this madness, 20 years from now today's corporate compensation will seem as modest as the pay levels of 1993.
The IPS report suggests several additional legal reforms in addition to encouraging narrower CEO-worker pay gaps such as bolstering accountability to shareholders and extending accountability to broader stakeholder groups.
Plus governments can eliminate taxpayer subsidies for excessive executive pay and encourage reasonable limits on total compensation by not giving out contracts to companies who pay excessive CEO salaries (effectively subsidized by the taxpayer) and rewarding those who pay their workers well.
Maybe fewer businesses would fail and more workers would be able to celebrate Labor Day if CEO's had a government-led incentive to do a better job in the first place. Hopefully, the US Congress will get on this when they return from their summer vacations and barbecues.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
["Rich Businessman Lighting Cigar With $100 Dollar Bill" on Shutterstock]
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[Image via AFP]
Once you control for region, it turns out that Democrats were actually more likely to support the 1964 Civil Rights Act
With Republicans having trouble with minorities, some like to point out that the party has a long history of standing up for civil rights compared to Democrats. Democrats, for example, were less likely to vote for the civil rights bills of the 1950s and 1960s. Democrats were more likely to filibuster. Yet, a closer look at the voting coalitions suggests a more complicated picture that ultimately explains why Republicans are not viewed as the party of civil rights.
Let's use the 1964 Civil Rights Act as our focal point. It was arguably the most important of the many civil rights bills passed in the middle part of the 20th century. It outlawed many types of racial and sexual discrimination, including access to hotels, restaurants, and theaters. In the words of Vice President Biden, it was a big "f-ing deal".
When we look at the party vote in both houses of Congress, it fits the historical pattern. Republicans are more in favor of the bill:
80% of Republicans in the House and Senate voted for the bill. Less than 70% of Democrats did. Indeed, Minority Leader Republican Everett Dirksen led the fight to end the filibuster. Meanwhile, Democrats such as Richard Russell of Georgia and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina tried as hard as they could to sustain a filibuster.
Of course, it was also Democrats who helped usher the bill through the House, Senate, and ultimately a Democratic president who signed it into law. The bill wouldn't have passed without the support of Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana, a Democrat. Majority Whip Hubert Humphrey, who basically split the Democratic party in two with his 1948 Democratic National Convention speech calling for equal rights for all, kept tabs on individual members to ensure the bill had the numbers to overcome the filibuster.
Put another way, party affiliation seems to be somewhat predictive, but something seems to be missing. So, what factor did best predicting voting?
You don't need to know too much history to understand that the South from the civil war to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 tended to be opposed to minority rights. This factor was separate from party identification or ideology. We can easily control for this variable by breaking up the voting by those states that were part of the confederacy and those that were not.
You can see that geography was far more predictive of voting coalitions on the Civil Rights than party affiliation. What linked Dirksen and Mansfield was the fact that they weren't from the south. In fact, 90% of members of Congress from states (or territories) that were part of the Union voted in favor of the act, while less than 10% of members of Congress from the old Confederate states voted for it. This 80pt difference between regions is far greater than the 15pt difference between parties.
But what happens when we control for both party affiliation and region? As Sean Trende noted earlier this year, "sometimes relationships become apparent only after you control for other factors".
In this case, it becomes clear that Democrats in the north and the south were more likely to vote for the bill than Republicans in the north and south respectively. This difference in both houses is statistically significant with over 95% confidence. It just so happened southerners made up a larger percentage of the Democratic than Republican caucus, which created the initial impression than Republicans were more in favor of the act.
Nearly 100% of Union state Democrats supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act compared to 85% of Republicans. None of the southern Republicans voted for the bill, while a small percentage of southern Democrats did.
The same pattern holds true when looking at ideology instead of party affiliation. The folks over at Voteview.com, who created DW-nominate scores to measure the ideology of congressmen and senators, found that the more liberal a congressman or senator was the more likely he would vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, once one controlled for a factor closely linked to geography.
That's why Strom Thurmond left the Democratic party soon after the Civil Right Act passed. He recognized that of the two parties, it was the Republican party that was more hospitable to his message. The Republican candidate for president in 1964, Barry Goldwater, was one of the few non-Confederate state senators to vote against the bill. He carried his home state of Arizona and swept the deep southern states – a first for a Republican ever.
Now, it wasn't that the Civil Rights Act was what turned the South against the Democrats or minorities against Republicans. Those patterns, as Trende showed, had been developing for a while. It was, however, a manifestation of these growing coalitions. The South gradually became home to the conservative party, while the north became home to the liberal party.
Today, the transformation is nearly complete. President Obama carried only 18% of former Confederate states, while taking 62% of non-Confederate states in 2012. Only 27% of southern senators are Democrats, while 62% of Union state senators are Democrats. And 29% of southern members in the House are Democrats compared to 54% in states or territories that were part of the Union.
Thus, it seems to me that minorities have a pretty good idea of what they are doing when joining the Democratic party. They recognize that the Democratic party of today looks and sounds a lot more like the Democratic party of the North that with near unity passed the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 than the southern Democrats of the era who blocked it, and today would, like Strom Thurmond, likely be Republicans.
© Guardian News and Media 2013
[1962 photo of Barry Goldwater via Wikipedia.com]
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