 |  | | April 1, 2015 |  | No. 165 | | By Jonathan V. Last | |  |  |  | | | | COLD OPEN |  | | | In economic theory, "signaling" is an action one party takes that has, superficially, no plausible economic explanation. The reason the action is undertaken isn't because the action itself is helpful, but because the action transmits important information to a second actor.
So, for instance, the entire field of higher education is essentially a big production in signaling, with students paying lots of money to achieve-not because a college education is worth anything as a good, but because the students hope that the the credential will signal value to potential employers. You don't pay $200K for a bachelor's in history from Williams because the class on colonial oppression in West Africa is worth the price of a house. You pay it because you hope that Goldman Sachs sees a Williams diploma as proof of intelligence and will want to hire you.
Political life is full of signal theory, too. Why do reporters ask politicians what they think about evolution? Practically speaking, no one really cares what a senator or a congressman-or even a president-thinks about evolution. But what a politician says about evolution is a handy signal to certain types of voters telling them what they're supposed to think. So if you're a nice, well-educated cog in the Goldman Sachs machine who thinks that, generally speaking, public-sector unions are harmful, that the federal government is operating in a suboptimal manner, and that the mullahs of Iran probably shouldn't be allowed to have nuclear weapons, you might consider voting for someone like that tough, can-do governor from Wisconsin.
But then someone asks the governor whether or not he "believes in evolution" and he doesn't answer by jumping up and down chanting and "Darwin! Darwin! Darwin!" And suddenly you understand: This guy isn't really like you. Better to let Iran have nukes.
You got the signal loud and clear.
President Obama has always been skilled at sending out very precise, targeted signals, whether it's to mainstream swing voters or to his liberal base. But the group Obama works hardest at signaling to is the young, Millennial hipsters who were so vital to his 2008 victory over Hillary Clinton.
As a substantive matter, Obama's presidency has been terrible for these people. High unemployment numbers for recent graduates. No bending of the curve on college tuition prices. An entitlement system that gets less solvent by the day. And a new healthcare regime that's an explicit transfer of wealth from younger, healthier workers to older folks and the unemployed.
Yet Obama has made sure to signal that, despite everything, he's really on their side. We see these signals in the big show he makes each year of filling out his NCAA bracket. (It's not like there's a war on or anything.) We see it in his choice of bffs. And above all, we see it in his TV habits, where Obama goes out of his way to let it be known that he's a huge fan of HBO and Millennial darling shows such as Game of Thrones and True Detective.
It defies reason as to why a president who has to confront real-world things like ISIS beheadings (sometimes of American citizens) would want, or need (or have time) to watch the GoT "Red Wedding." Except that it's the most SWPL-show on TV. So there we are.
Of course, the original Stuff-White-People-Like HBO show was The Wire. (Seriously, it's #85 on the SWPL list.)
All of which is a long wind up to point out that last week the White House sent out an email written ("written"?) by David Simon. Who produced The Wire:
I'm a reporter who covered the police beat in Baltimore. Today, I make television shows. And last Friday, my phone rang. Someone on the other end told me that the President of the United States wants to have a conversation about criminal justice policy in America.
In his effort to try to reconsider some of the sentencing excesses and the levels of incarceration that have become so problematic in America, the President wanted to discuss these issues with me -- particularly because a lot of them were rooted in a television show that we did several years ago called "The Wire." In that show, we were trying to explore what the drug war has become in America and what it was costing us as a society.
So I went to Washington earlier this week and sat down with the President. We shared our experiences, our perspectives on the drug war, and the changes we hope to see.
That's right. The president of the United States-who's also a constitutional law scholar!-decided that in order to get his arms around reforming the criminal justice system he had to consult with the producer of a fictional TV show that went off the air seven years ago.
Either that, or he decided to use David Simon to remind the HBO demographic that no matter what happens with Iran, they shouldn't worry. He's still one of them. | | | | LOOKING BACK | | | | | "Everywhere Klein looks, from the war in Iraq to the downfall of communism to the 1973 military coup in Chile to the tsunami in Indonesia, she sees this sinister pattern. And she sees something even more sinister: a link between the free marketeers' use of mass shock to tear down faulty institutions and remake society, and bizarre CIA-funded experiments in the 1950s conducted by psychiatrist Ewen Cameron-nicknamed 'Dr. Shock'-designed to 'unmake and erase faulty minds' by electric or drug-induced shocks and then rebuild the patient's personality. The free-market reformer and the torturer are spiritual twins.
"Yes, this really is as kooky as it sounds. Klein's argument frequently lapses from standard left-wing polemic into sheer weirdness. Thus, she finds it telling that Guantánamo Bay detainees scheduled for release were allowed time in a room where they could watch movies on DVD, eat pizza and hamburgers, and 'chill out.' In Klein's reading, 'that was actually the plan'-break the prisoners down through abuse, then fill their emptied minds with American junk culture and junk food. On a grander scale, Klein suggests that the Bush administration deliberately fostered chaos in Iraq after the invasion, since a smooth transition to Iraqi self-government would have inhibited privatization and other free-market reforms in the service of world corporate dominance-never mind that Klein herself acknowledges the eventual abandonment of many free-market reforms in Iraq."
-Cathy Young, "Reveling in the Financial Crisis" from our March 30, 2009, issue.
Remember you get full access to THE WEEKLY STANDARD archive when you subscribe. | | | | | | | | THE READING LIST | | | | | Mr. Mike: Saturday Night Live's first head writer. (You read it for the articles.)
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Meet Daniel Norris: the real-life Sidd Finch.
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Andrew Stiles goes to Iran. And it is awesome. | | | | INSTANT CLASSIC | | | | | "James Jeffrey, Obama's former Ambassador to Iraq, cuts through the commentary on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East with a certain pithiness: 'We're in a goddamn free fall here.'"
-Walter Russell Mead examining Obama's Middle East "strategy," March 27, 2015. | | | | THE LAST WORD | | | | | Indiana. Oh, Indiana.
The biggest problem with gay marriage-as people have pointed out over and over-is that creating a constitutional right to same-sex marriage sets up an unavoidable collision between gay rights and religious liberty. For years most gay-rights advocates insisted that this wasn't true even while a small minority of them not only admitted that it was true, but saw this conflict as a feature, not a bug, of the same-sex marriage movement.
And so gay marriage has moved with unsurprising swiftness from plaintive appeals for freedom to legal coercion aimed at dissenters. Which is why some people are now trying to shore up the legal protections for religious freedom that, in case you've forgotten, is specifically enumerated in the actual Constitution. For whatever that's worth these days.
Enter Governor Mike Pence, who became History's Greatest Monster last week by signing an Indiana law that attempts to buttress religious freedom. For which he earned the bitter disdain of enlightened America, including noted supply chain analyst and legal scholar Tim Cook. (Who, when he's not lecturing Americans about how terrible and bigoted they are, spends his time getting rich by running large parts of his business out of China and pushing his wares in countries where homosexuals are routinely executed.)
It's difficult to fully convey the level of hysteria surrounding the Indiana law. It really is amazing to behold, especially because it tends to be entirely devoid of any grasp of either the law or the facts on the ground. But fortunately, my colleague John McCormack has been doing yeoman's work explaining just what's going on.
You can start here with his fantastic FAQ on the issue. (Spoiler alert: When Ashton Kutcher and Miley Cyrus are on one side of a con law dispute, you can take the other side pretty much ten times out of ten.)
It turns out that the first religious freedom law was passed by notable anti-gay bigot Bill Clinton in 1993 and that another noted bigot-Barack Obama-voted for a similar law when he was a state senator. McCormack also explains why states pass their own versions of this law when there's already a federal law (because City of Boerne v. Flores). And then he goes on to relate a lengthy email exchange with UVA law professor Douglas Laycock, an expert on the case who explains why laws like the one Indiana just passed are (1) a shield, not a sword; and (2) absolutely necessary. And Laycock is a guy who signed a pro-same-sex marriage amicus brief.
If you want to see the left's freakout at its most incoherent, had a look at this long clip of McCormack on MSNBC's Morning Joe. McCormack explains legal history and concepts like the balancing test. The people up in arms over the Indiana law have nothing to say but warbling about "The polls! The polls have changed so quickly!"
Governor Pence is right. Right on the law and right on the facts. Here's hoping that he sticks to his guns.
Best,
Jonathan V. Last
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