Balkinization: Emergency as opportunity

Emergency as opportunity

Christopher Caldwell compares the Democrats' response to the fiscal crisis to a key element of the Bush' Administration's response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks: the invasion of Iraq:

Whether reasonable or unreasonable, the Democrats’ spending priorities antedate the financial crisis. Pre-existing agendas in politics are easily painted as evidence of bad faith. In 2004, as the Iraq occupation ran into trouble, a flurry of books presented the Bush administration’s obsession with Saddam Hussein before 9/11 as prima facie evidence of the administration’s crookedness. Democrats were not noticeably quick to call this standard unfair.

President Obama has gone beyond the minimum requirements of bipartisanship to ensure the stimulus is transparent, once enacted. Accounts of the programmes will be posted on an easily accessible website. At his urging, Democrats stripped non-essential measures that could rile Americans needlessly, such as several hundred million dollars for family planning. And Mr Obama is popular, albeit not as popular as George W. Bush on the eve of the Iraq war.

Bipartisanship offers little shelter over the long run. The stimulus will be expensive, more expensive than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined and Nancy Pelosi, Senate majority leader, has called it a mere “down payment”. The stimulus bill, whether it succeeds or fails, could be the Democrats’ Iraq. Like Iraq, it is a long-standing partisan project that is being marketed as an ad hoc response to a national emergency. It reflects the pre-existing wishes of the party’s most powerful interest groups more than the pre-existing wishes of the country. Democrats are now liable to be judged by the standard they created when they abandoned the Bush administration over the Iraq war: you break it, you own it.

Caldwell's is worried that the stimulus contains many provisions that will be hard to end once the economy rights itself: it will contain welfare programs and grants to the states as well as infrastructure investments and big public works projects like the space program that (Caldwell believes) the public can rally around.

The larger and more interesting point, however, is one that I'd like to focus on here. Emergency creates opportunity. In politics, certain proposals for reform may languish for many years because opponents prevent them in a sort of political equilibrium. Crisis or emergency disturbs that equilibrium, changing the space of political opportunities, and thus may make these reforms possible, whether the reforms are good ideas or not.

For example, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, advocates of reforms in intelligence and surveillance practices pushed for extensive changes in the USA Patriot Act. These reforms were not dreamed up in the days immediately following 9/11; quite the contrary, they had been proposed for many years but lacked political and bureaucratic sufficient support and were thought problematic from a civil liberties perspective. After 9/11 shook up the existing political formation, and created a demand to do something and fast, proponents of these measures saw an opportunity to get what they had been seeking for many years.

Similarly, the 9/11 attacks gave an opening for proponents of overthrowing Saddam Hussein to make the case that he was related to the 9/11 attacks and that, even if this were not so, he was posed an enormous threat that the United States could not afford to take lightly following the deaths of 3,000 Americans. Here again, emergency created an opportunity for people in government to put into practice policies that they had already been advocating for some time, but which were unacceptable politically.

The fact that people take advantage of perceptions of emergency in this way is an undeniable fact of politics. It explains many features of governance, including, for example, the American space race and the investment in science in the midst of the cold war (the launch of Sputnik is often seen as the wakeup call, but America was already investing in science beforehand because the Cold War had been going on for some time).

But the fact that emergency creates opportunity tells you nothing about the quality of what is being proposed in a time of emergency. Some proposals, like the Bush Administration's decision to invade Iraq, have not turned out well at all. The American investment in science during the Cold War (and especially after Sputnik) were probably beneficial on the whole. Some features of the Patriot Act were useful and long needed reforms of intelligence capability, while others were overreaching. In the same way, we can expect that the stimulus will contain some good and bad features judged in hindsight.

The more important criticism to make about the stimulus package is not that it is opportunistic, playing off of emergency, but that the perception of emergency may cause the public and their representatives to look less closely at what government is doing, and to give less than a thorough airing of what is being done. (It's worth noting that in ordinary times representatives may not understand what are voting on in detail, but in emergencies this may be especially so).

In this case, however, Obama, as Caldwell notes, has made efforts to be transparent. It is pretty clear that some expenditures in the stimulus are paving the way for comprehensive national health care reform. But this was a key campaign pledge, so it is hardly surprising that such spending is being included in the stimulus. Indeed, in general Obama is using the opportunity created by the emergency to facilitate some key campaign ideas-- like infrastructure investment-- that would have required considerable expenditures and would meet with more resistance in ordinary times. But these are not ordinary times, and so he is using the emergency as a method of changing political priorities. (Roosevelt did something similar during the New Deal). Ultimately, whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on the quality of the policies that he pushes through during this crucial period, and whether the programs and investments we make today pay off in the future. We will not know for some time.

Posted 10:25 AM by JB [link]