Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 83

Angela Merkel: The Real Conservative

I’ve long been fascinated by Angela Merkel, and not entirely sure why. She’s been German Chancellor for nine years now, is the most powerful politician on the continent, and has approval ratings of over 70 percent. And yet she somehow eludes easy characterization and her studied affect of dullness deflects any serious scrutiny. And so she has hovered around the edges of my brain – a Thatcher who is also an un-Thatcher, a woman in power for a decade who somehow doesn’t prompt the polarization and drama of the Iron Lady.

George Packer’s long but rich profile manages to crack this puzzle a little. Merkel’s strain of tedium is mostly of the good kind. She’s so thoroughly a pragmatist that she has largely overcome the left-right ideological battle in Germany. And, partly because she was in East Germany at the time, she missed the culture war battles of the late 1960s and 1970s. And so she has risen above the fray – while never veering very much from the dead center of German politics. And yet, she is also a brilliant, revenge-seeking pole-climber of the first order (and I mean that very much as a compliment). This story is eye-opening:

Angela was physically clumsy—she later called herself “a little movement idiot.” At the age of five, she could barely walk downhill without falling. “What a normal person knows automatically I had to first figure out mentally, followed by exhausting exercise,” she has said. According to Benn, as a teen-ager Merkel was never “bitchy” or flirtatious; she was uninterested in clothes, “always colorless,” and “her haircut was impossible—it looked like a pot over her head.”

A former schoolmate once labelled her a member of the Club of the Unkissed. (The schoolmate, who became Templin’s police chief, nearly lost his job when the comment was published.) But Merkel was a brilliant, ferociously motivated student. A longtime political associate of Merkel’s traces her drive to those early years in Templin. “She decided, ‘O.K., you don’t fuck me? I will fuck you with my weapons,’ ” the political associate told me. “And those weapons were intelligence and will and power.”

She bided her time but delivered a ballsy coup de grace to her party leader Helmut Kohl. And I loved this story of how she actually won the Chancellorship after a close election which her main rival, Gerhard Shröder, assumed guaranteed his victory over the schlubby, gray woman seated next to him:

On Election Night, Merkel, Schröder, Fischer, and other party leaders gathered in a TV studio to discuss the results. Merkel, looking shell-shocked and haggard, was almost mute. Schröder, his hair colored chestnut and combed neatly back, grinned mischievously and effectively declared himself the winner. “I will continue to be Chancellor,” he said. “Do you really believe that my party would take up an offer from Merkel to talk when she says she would like to become Chancellor? I think we should leave the church in the village”—that is, quit dreaming. Many viewers thought he was drunk. As Schröder continued to boast, Merkel slowly came to life, as if amused by the Chancellor’s performance.

She seemed to realize that Schröder’s bluster had just saved her the Chancellorship. With a slight smile, she put Schröder in his place. “Plain and simple — you did not win today,” she said. Indeed, the C.D.U. had a very slim lead. “With a little time to think about it, even the Social Democrats will come to accept this as a reality. And I promise we will not turn the democratic rules upside down.”

Two months later, Merkel was sworn in as Germany’s first female Chancellor.

In this deft political style and in her post-ideological politics, she reminds me of Obama but with far less rhetorical skill and far more political success. Packer is too kind, I’d say, about the consequences of her austerity program for the entire euro zone, but he captures something deeper about Merkel’s significance. The country’s strength perhaps needs this undemonstrative figure wielding it; it defuses opposition and calms neighbors’ fears. But her stolidity, complacency and risk-aversion at the helm of a satisfied and prosperous country also taps a deeper German longing and an old German past:

“West Germany was a good country,” Georg Diez, a columnist and author, told me. “It was young, sexy, daring, Western—American. But maybe it was only a skin. Germany is becoming more German, less Western. Germany has discovered its national roots.”

Diez didn’t mean that this was a good thing. He meant that Germany is becoming less democratic, because what Germans fundamentally want is stability, security, economic growth—above all, to be left in peace while someone else watches their money and keeps their country out of wars. They have exactly the Chancellor they want.

She is the very model of a modern German politician, a woman whose empiricism and skepticism makes her arguably the leading conservative figure of our age. And by “conservative”, I don’t in any way mean “Republican.”

(Photo: Photos of German Chancellor and Christian Democratic Union (CDU) candidate Angela Merkel are seen on the front pages of German newspapers on September 23, 2013, a day after general elections. By Barbara Sax/AFP/Getty Images.)

“Straight Inmates Fake Being Gay To Live There”

Ani Ucar reports on the gay wing at LA’s Men’s Central Jail “an exceptionally rare, if not unique, subculture, the only environment of its kind in a major U.S. city”:

Nothing like it exists in America’s 21 largest urban jails, all contacted by the Weekly, where officials described in far more modest terms their own steps to deal with and house gay inmates. San Francisco has a transgender housing area, but gay inmates live among the general population. In New York’s Rikers Island, whose similar gay wing was shuttered in 2005, a jail spokesman laughed out loud, saying that whoever decides which men get placed in L.A. County’s gay jail wing “must have really good gay-dar.”…

MCJ’s gay wing was set up in response to a 1985 ACLU lawsuit, which aimed to protect homosexual inmates from a higher threat of physical violence than heterosexuals faced. But something unexpected has happened. The inmates are safer now, yes. But they’ve surprised everyone, perhaps even themselves, by setting up a small and flourishing society behind bars. Once released, some re-offend in order to be with an inmate they love. There are hatreds and occasionally even severe violence, but there is also friendship, community, love — and, especially, harmless rule-bending to dress up like models or decorate their bunks, often via devious means.

Mark Joseph Stern comments:

The gay wing, of course, is still a jail, and most inmates yearn for their eventual release. Many were disowned by their families after coming out and turned to drugs to cope. About 150 of the 400 inmates take self-improvement classes to help them stay clean when their sentences end, but a number of repeat offenders wind up back behind bars. Life in the gay wing isn’t a happy ending, nor is it necessarily a new beginning. But in America’s cruel, overcrowded prison system—where brutality and sexual violence toward LGBTQ inmates is horrifically common—the gay wing serves as a tiny bright spot of hope.

Obamacare’s Auto-Renewal Mess

It could create a backlash:

Unless people provide updated information and have their eligibility re-determined, most who received subsidies for marketplace coverage in 2014 will automatically receive the same dollar level of subsidies in 2015. (These subsidies consist of advance payments of premium tax credits, which are paid to insurers on enrollees’ behalf to help cover the enrollees’ premiums.) But since many factors that affect the level of people’s subsidies change from year to year, a high percentage of people who auto-renew will receive advance premium credits that turn out to be too low or too high. To avert such problems, consumers need to return to the [Federally Facilitated Marketplace] (rather than auto-renewing) to receive an updated eligibility determination. That is the only way to ensure they receive the correct level of benefits.

Adrianna McIntyre is concerned:

According to Gallup, only seven percent of newly-insured exchange enrollees plan to shop around. An overwhelming 68% plan to keep their current plan; the remaining 25 percent expect to find coverage elsewhere, drop coverage, or aren’t sure. Call me a skeptic, but I’m hard-pressed to believe two-thirds of exchange enrollees fully understand the volatile nature of subsidies and want to keep their current plans anyway.

Hence, the administration considering changing enrollees’ plans for them:

Under current rules, consumers who do not take action during the open enrollment window are re-enrolled in the same plan they were in the previous year, even if that plan experienced significant premium increases. We are considering alternative options for re-enrollment, under which consumers who take no action might be defaulted into a lower cost plan rather than their current plan.

Suderman opposes this move:

It’s not just auto-reenrollment. It’s auto-reassignment, at least for those who pick that option. Basically, if you like your plan, but don’t go out of your way to intentionally re-enroll, the kind and wise folks at HHS or state health exchanges might just pick a new plan—perhaps with different doctors, clinics, cost structures, and benefit options—for you. And if you want to switch back? Good luck once open enrollment is closed. There’s always next year.

An Untreated Case Of Market Failure

Jeremy A. Greene is alarmed by the cost of certain generic drugs:

Drugs previously available at pennies per pill now cost hundreds of dollars per bottle. And not just esoteric, small-market drugs, either: the antibiotic doxycycline, a workhorse drug for common infections from sinusitis to pneumonia, cost $20 per 500-count bottle last October. Last month, the average price for the same supply was $1,849. For a drug initially approved by the FDA in 1967, the price hike seems mystifying.

How is this possible?

In the generic drug industry, market failure occurs when a crowd of different companies that once competed to sell a drug like doxycycline ditch it to pursue more profitable drugs, leaving just one generic supplier—or a new gray-market monopoly able to raise prices just like brand-name manufacturers. This happens in part because generic companies are drawn toward the market exclusivity of newer drugs when they come off patent, in part because of bottlenecks in the supply of precursor chemicals, and in part because of shrinking margins in the production of older generic drugs. The stampede leaves the supply of many older but essential medicines in the hands of just a few suppliers, whose production lines are unprepared to deal with surges in demand, leading to shortages of key pharmaceutical agents needed for the treatment of cancer, pneumonia, and heart disease, as well as for basic anesthesia. Prices eventually recede—but by then, usually, other drugs are seeing similar cost surges.

The Norms Obama Broke

Sean Trende is concerned about the unintended consequences of Obama’s executive action:

Contrary to some of the louder reactions, our Republic can withstand this breach. The real problem is that our history suggests that once these norms are violated, Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again. We see this with the sorry state of our judicial nomination process. What probably started with an arguably justified filibuster by Republicans and conservative Democrats of Abe Fortas’ nomination as chief justice of the Supreme Court (he really did have some ethical issues), escalated to the defeat of Robert Bork on ideological grounds and a blockade by Democrats of many of George H.W. Bush’s nominees in the final years of his term, to a more extensive blockade of many of Bill Clinton’s nominees for most of his term by Republicans, to the filibuster of many of George W. Bush’s Court of Appeals nominees by Democrats, to Republican threats of dismantling the judicial filibuster in response, to Republican filibusters of Obama’s appellate and District Court nominations, to the actual dismantling of the judicial filibuster by Democrats.

Both parties played a role in these latter developments, and the Bush presidency clearly saw its fair share of broken norms (using the threat of budget reconciliation to pass tax cuts; the midterm firings of U.S. attorneys). But this proves nothing. The point is that once you start down a road, you don’t go back. No one who voted to filibuster Fortas would have agreed that the endgame would be routine filibustering of District Court nominations and the beginning of the end of the filibuster, but that’s exactly what happened. No one really thought that the creation of reconciliation would enable the enactment of $1.3 trillion in tax cuts. And so forth.

Scott Lemieux dismisses such worries:

Both the second Bush administration and the actions of Republicans in Congress make it abundantly clear that the next Republican in the Oval Office is going to push toward – and probably beyond – the limits of his legal authority, no matter what Obama does. (For instance, George W Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program, established by executive order, contradicted a statute outright, which Obama’s order does not.) If hypothetical president Rand Paul wants to refuse to enforce the Civil Rights Act, he’s not going to be dissuaded because Obama refused to act on immigration.

Drum thinks the whole thing is politically brilliant:

Is there a price to be paid for this? If you think that maybe, just maybe, Republicans were willing to work with Obama to pass a few constructive items, then there’s a price. Those items might well be dead in the water. If you don’t believe that, the price is zero. I’m more or less in that camp. And you know what? Even the stuff that might have been passable—trade authority, the Keystone XL pipeline, a few tweaks to Obamacare—I’m either opposed to or only slightly in favor of in the first place. If they don’t happen, very few Democrats are going to shed any real tears.

That leaves only presidential appointments, and there might be a downside there if you think that initially Republicans were prepared to be halfway reasonable about confirming Obama’s judges and agency heads. I kinda doubt that, but I guess you never know. This might be a genuine downside to unleashing the tea party beast.

Yuval Levin feels Obama is overstepping:

If the Constitution is merely a technical legal document, it might (perhaps) be possible to defend this action as somehow within the bounds of the president’s enforcement discretion. But because the constitution creates a political order—a structure for the political life of an actual society—it is very difficult to sustain such a defense in the real world. That combination of factors means that a judge might well sustain the president’s action as minimally defensible if it was challenged in court but the Congress cannot consider it so. And both would be playing their proper constitutional roles.

Suderman suggests a remedy:

If members of Congress think actions beyond a certain size and scope should be illegal, then they ought to write a law explicitly saying so, tightly and clearly defining how, when, and under what circumstances the executive is allowed to act.

But Ilya Somin doubts that will solve the problem:

Even if Congress were more assertive, it could not prevent the president from exercising extremely broad discretion in a world where almost everyone is a federal criminal, and he has to pick and choose a small fraction of those criminals to go after. If we truly want to limit executive discretion and selective enforcement of laws, the best way to do so is to cut back on the scope of federal law to the point where the president has the resources to go after all or most offenders. Better still, federal law could be limited to those activities for which there is a broad consensus that they really are serious offenses that cannot be left to the states, and must be targeted by the federal government. If a president still chose not to enforce them, or did so only selectively, he (and his party, if they choose support his actions) would suffer a tremendous political backlash.

Prejudice By Numbers

In an excerpt from The Formula, Luke Dormehl raises concerns about law enforcement’s increased use of algorithms:

As slashed budgets lead to increased staff cuts, automated systems have moved from simple administrative tools to become primary decision-makers …

The central problem once again comes down to the spectral promise of algorithmic objectivity. “We are all so scared of human bias and inconsistency,” says Danielle Citron, professor of law at the University of Maryland. “At the same time, we are overconfident about what it is that computers can do.” The mistake, Citron suggests, is that we “trust algorithms, because we think of them as objective, whereas the reality is that humans craft those algorithms and can embed in them all sorts of biases and perspectives.”

To put it another way, a computer algorithm might be unbiased in its execution, but, as noted, this does not mean that there is not bias encoded within it. Implicit or explicit biases might be the work of one or two human programmers, or else come down to technological difficulties. For example, algorithms used in facial recognition technology have in the past shown higher identification rates for men than for women, and for individuals of non-white origin than for whites. An algorithm might not target an African-American male for reasons of overt prejudice, but the fact that it is more likely to do this than it is to target a white female means that the end result is no different.

The View From Your Window

Ludlow, Vermont, 6.55 am

What To Think Of Bill Cosby? Ctd

Lots of readers are still sounding off on this story:

I think the Cosby downfall has been the product of two things: our current cultural shift in thinking about sexual assault, and the democratization of the news cycle via social media. Once the young people get a hold of something, they push it to the surface and drive into action the crusty old media, who love to kowtow to the famous and powerful.

Another:

I was glancing through the latest blog entry about Bill Cosby and the thoughts on separating the character on TV from his real person … I just don’t think that’s possible. Because that’s the way he wanted it. He didn’t just play America’s favorite dad on TV; he parlayed that into a secondary career, via speaking engagements at colleges, or inserting himself into the public discourse as some sort of voice of wisdom on how other people should raise their children or conduct their lives. He wasn’t just an actor/comedian.

If these allegations turn out to be true, then every time you watch a re-run of The Cosby Show, his character – upstanding family man – will look macabre, not funny.

And I just remembered a quote I had read from his book Fatherhood (published in 1987 – three years into his role as America’s Favorite Dad) and knowing what we know now about the alleged assaults frequently being on young women in their late teens, it just gives me a chill:

A father… knows exactly what those boys at the mall have in their depraved little minds because he once owned such a depraved little mind himself. In fact, if he thinks enough about the plans that he used to have for young girls, the father not only will support his wife in keeping their daughter home but he might even run over to the mall and have a few of those boys arrested.

Yeah, I guess he’d know.

I so want this to not be true. But the man who made me want to eat Jello is making me queasy.

Another insists that “Cosby was never a good guy”:

One of the interesting things about the Cosby implosion is that in addition to all the allegations of rape, groping, and harassment, there are an awful lot of people chiming in on blogs to relate personal anecdotes about when they learned firsthand that Bill Cosby is an asshole. At commencement speeches, football games, and other public appearances, Cosby appears to have bullied and belittled people, sometimes to the point of tears. None of this rises to the level of sexual violence, but it’s an interesting complement to all the rape allegations.

An expert weighs in:

As someone who has been a therapist for both those convicted of sex crimes and victims of sex crime, the whole Bill Cosby issue has been difficult to watch. The primary reason being, that most of the defense seems to, on some level, rest on the belief that people have a connection to this man based on his public persona. Or even in the case of Whoopi Goldberg, a personal connection. But both of these relations assume that we can somehow know how a person will act in all circumstances, based on how they react to us and a what we can observe in some situations.

I don’t mean to get too mind-fuck-y, but when can we lay that belief to rest? I mean how many bootleg-produced crime docudramas and news clips of those knowing the perpetrator do we need to watch, where they teary eyed proclaim, ” they would never be capable of this”, before we understand that someone who can display empathy and charisma in one arena, be capable of evil in another? We can generate composite sketches of people, but that is about it.

Look, 15 women have made accusations and those that have come forth have remarkably similar stories. Some of them are highly accomplished, who are doing nothing but risking their own livelihood by sharing their story. Further, the stories that I have heard are all consistent with trademark characteristics of someone with power, who grooms their victims and understands their own social capital and how that can be used against their victims.

Either these women held a conference, read intensive literature on the hallmarks of serial rapist and the abuses of power and decided to come forth, or Bill Cosby is a wonderful comedian, transformational role model for thousands, public intellectual and a rapist. As someone who both hates binaries and grew up loving Bill Cosby, both options area tragedy. But they also cannot be true at the same time.

Another reader remarks on this chilling YouTube:

The buried AP footage should be mandatory viewing for those who are blaming Cosby’s accusers. What you see in the iced stare that causes the interviewer to squirm is the classic Jedi mindfuck of a predator. Cosby insists that the mere posing of a question be censored: “If you want to consider yourself to be serious.” He repeatedly inverts reality by claiming AP’s “integrity” lies in NOT doing their job as journalists. In this footage, we see the reporter and producers cave swiftly to the chilly, implicit menace that Cosby radiates, as well as to the narcissist’s inverted truth.

I know that gaze well. As a writer whose career began at Playboy – and as any female writer today will confirm – these assaults-qua-career-transactions are standard fare. Experience with abuse at home made me hypervigilant against the situations Cosby’s accusers describe, but I’ve seen them and occasionally (very shamefully) neared them. You can blame the victim, but first watch how Cosby flips the tables on these journalists, convincing them there’s more integrity in helping him cover his crimes than in exposing them. That’s the power of a narcissistic predator. It’s real. And his threat feels real. What has silenced this victims for so long is their willingness to blame themselves.

Many thanks for your thoughtful coverage of this story.

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

One reason I’ve been somewhat forgiving of Obama’s executive action on immigration deportations is that I see it as a function not of his choice to be an “imperial” president, but as a result of unprecedented Republican obstructionism. It is, for example, jaw-dropping to hear the GOP declare its shock at the president’s refusal to take into account the results of the mid-terms as a democratic norm he should respect. These are the same people who, in January and February of 2009, responded to Obama’s landslide amid a catastrophic and accelerating depression by giving him zero votes on a desperately needed stimulus package.

We now know they decided as a conscious strategy to say no to anything and everything the new and young president, inheriting two failed wars and an imploding economy, wanted or needed. They were nihilist then as they are nihilist now with respect to the practical demands of actually governing the country. At some point, something had to give, and I can see why, after the GOP had again refused to allow immigration reform even to come to a vote in the House, he might have decided to fuck it.

But here’s how Ross understands this history:

Obama never really looked for domestic issues where he might be willing to do a version of something the other party wanted — as Bush did with education spending and Medicare Part D, and Clinton did with welfare reform. (He’s had a self-admiring willingness to incorporate conservative ideas into essentially liberal proposals, but that’s not really the same thing.)

Again, I just do not recognize this reality. What exactly did the GOP want in 2009? That’s hard to say. But on the issues on which Obama had campaigned – say, the stimulus, healthcare, climate change and immigration – he embraced conservative ideas, as Ross concedes. He packed the stimulus with tax cuts (and still got no GOP votes); he embraced Mitt Romney’s and the Heritage Foundation’s version of healthcare reform over his own party’s preference for single payer (and was treated as a commie because of it); he supported cap and trade on climate change – again a policy innovated on the right (and got nowhere); and on immigration, he backed George W Bush’s formula but sweetened it over six years with aggressive deportations and huge increases in funding for the Mexican border. So what on earth is Ross talking about?

Yes, Obama does have ambitions to be a transformational president, a liberal Reagan. And, after two thumping victories, he still has a solid shot at getting there. And if we had a reasonable or even feisty opposition party – as opposed to a foam-flecked insurrection against everything – that legacy would have been even more informed by conservative thought and ideas. And the idea that no executive action is allowed is just as silly. The executive branch has a key role in determining things like the level of permissible carbon emissions (via the EPA), or priorities in immigration enforcement (via ICE), or national security (via the Pentagon, NSA and CIA). At some point, in other words, it was the GOP who made this president more executive-minded, by removing every other pathway for him to pursue what the country elected him to do. Because they never really accepted that he had won big majorities twice for a reason. And that reason was change.

This weekend, we ran in full a speech by the evangelical scholar and leader David Gushee, changing his mind on gay rights. A reader writes of it:

I’m not a Christian and I have to admit that I often skim or skip much of your Sunday content because it just doesn’t resonate with me. But I just watched Dr. Gushee’s speech straight through and I have to say thank you for posting it. As someone totally outside the Christian — and certainly evangelical — community, I doubt I would have been exposed to this otherwise. What an astonishingly moving speech. I don’t for a second pretend to understand the evangelical world, its movements or its politics. But I know that most evangelical people are good, well-meaning individuals, just trying to live in the world in a manner true to their ideals and beliefs. I can’t see how they could watch this speech and not be moved by it, even if it challenges some of their core thinking. It’s an elegant and in some ways courageous statement given the social community Dr. Gushee lives in.

It sure is. It’s one of those speeches within which the world shifts a little – permanently. It’s really worth your time. Other posts worth a revisit: a premonition of what might happen in Ferguson this week; Ursula Le Guin’s defense of fantasy fiction and of writing itself; the small sadnesses in YouTube; a devastating poem about the end of a marriage; the cartoon genius of Richard Thompson; what Jesus can mean in Iraq today; and a DFW classic quote on why he will one day be entirely forgotten (if not by the Dish).

The most popular post of the weekend was Illiberal Feminism Strikes Again, followed by Julie Bindel’s critique of the same. 20 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here - and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish - for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here and Dish t-shirts here.

See you in the morning, as the Iran talks reach their moment of truth.

(Photo: Lesley McSpadden, the mother of slain Ferguson teen Michael Brown, talks to a crowd of protesterson November 23, 2014 in advance of the Grand Jury verdict on police officer Darren Wilson. By Sebastiano Tomada/Getty Images.)

This Is The Way “Benghazi” Ends …

Isn’t there something quite delicious in the House Intelligence Committee’s conclusion that there is nothing – absolutely nothing – scandalous about “Benghazi” apart from what we knew already: that the outpost was poorly protected and that the State Department had been complacent about consulate security? Even Paul Mirengoff has to take his lumps:

The Committee concludes, among things, that CIA personnel on the ground in Benghazi during the attack behaved bravely and made reasonable tactical decisions that saved lives, and that the CIA received all military support that was available. It further concludes that after the attack, the administration’s initial public narrative (via Susan Rice) on the causes and motivations for the attack was not fully accurate. In addition, edits made to the Benghazi “talking points” were not fully accurate, and the process that produced the talking points was flawed. However, the Committee stops short of finding misconduct or bad faith on the part of Susan Rice or any other administration official.

Butters, who’s long been having a series of primary-enhanced conniptions about the whole thing, nonetheless evinced the classic Republican denial response: “I think the report is full of crap.” His only basis for saying that is that the report relied on the testimony of Obama administration officials – even though it also sought testimony from a bunch of Republican conspiracy theorists, even though it was packed with Republican ideologues, even though it had enormous reach and subpoena power.

At the Dish, we tried long and hard to find something in the Benghazi story that could really stand the test of moderate scrutiny … and failed. I even jumped the gun and impugned the honesty of Ben Rhodes at one point in trying to be as skeptical of administration assurances as any journalistic outfit should be. But after a while, we decided to ignore the issue unless something striking or new came up. In retrospect, that was the right call.

When you think of the staggering amount of time and resources devoted to chasing down this rabbit-hole, you have to wonder what is really fueling the GOP. I don’t think it’s a positive agenda to tackle some of our obviously pressing problems: eleven million undocumented immigrants, climate change, Iran’s nuclear potential, Jihadism in Iraq, soaring inequality. I think it’s rabid hatred of a president who does not share their priorities and a desperation to find some kind of quick and easy way of consigning him to a treasonous asterisk. They’ve failed on both counts.