Harry: OK, folks, snack time. I’m thinking we should order a couple pies from that new gourmet pizza place.

Darrell: What, Mama Solyndra’s? That place is so overpriced! Let’s just go with some chips and salsa from the corner store; I was planning to make myself a sandwich when I get home anyway.

Mary: Show of hands? [The group votes.] Bad luck this time, cheapskate, Mama Solyndra’s it is.

Barack: OK, everyone throw in, I’ll call for a couple extra-larges. Oh, and Harry brought the beer, so everyone chip in for that too.

Darrell: Hmph, alright, alright, lemme find my wallet.

Half an hour later, the food arrives.

Darrell: Let’s see, I guess the pesto and ricotta looks like the best…

Mary: Woah-ho-ho there Grabby McGrabberson! What do you think you’re reaching for there? As I recall, you didn’t think Mama Solyndra’s was worth it. You wanted us to tighten our belts and cut our snack spending. And now you want a slice? Guess that was all a lot of empty talk—what a hypocrite!

Darrell: Hey, I still think we should go with chips next week, but I threw in like everyone else, so unless you feel like returning my $10…

Harry: What are you, a comedian? You know the rule. We all vote on what we’re getting, and everyone splits the check.

Mary You’ve got some serious chutzpah! Sitting there with a slice in your hand, and you’re still talking about how you want to gut our pizza budget? Well actions speak louder than words, Darrell: If you had any integrity, you’d drop that slice right now.

Barack: You are looking pretty hypocritical there, Darrell. I don’t know how you expect anyone to take you seriously when you start badmouthing Mama Solyndra’s next time.

Darell: What? You guys, I said I don’t think it’s worth it. I wouldn’t have bought any if we were getting single slices, but it’s not like you gave me a choice about paying in! Now I’m not even supposed to enjoy any of the food I got outvoted about paying for?

Mary: Not really; it just means that from now on, you have to shut up about how overpriced it is and start voting for Mama Solyndra’s.

Fade to black.

It may be a bit inconvenient to keep up unhinged appearances over time, however, when you’re sharing closer quarters than Nixon and Khrushchev, especially if you sometimes need to collaborate on less hostile terms now and again. But of course, the folks involved in the detailed negotiations didn’t want their counterparts to think that they were crazy either: It was that other guy, Nixon, who they had no choice but to obey. Ideally, you want to be seen as rational yourself but accountable to a madman, at least on the specific point the threat is about.

Fast forward to 2011. Informed conservatives generally seem to agree that the debt ceiling has to get raised one way or another. They may all agree that large cuts in both discretionary spending and entitlements are desirable and, in the long run, necessary. But they also, however grudgingly,  allow that implementing all those cuts immediately and abruptly, in the middle of a recession, risks economic implosion and unnecessary suffering. Hitting the ceiling is not automatically the same as a default, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea either. That makes it hard to use the debt ceiling as leverage to extract concessions on those necessary spending cuts unless Democrats believe that Republicans are genuinely willing to court catastrophe. But under normal circumstances, it’s almost impossible to make any progress pushing back against the long-term economic problem created by promising ever more benefits financed with debt. So if you can’t lock in spending cuts in a situation like the current one, where the debt is politically salient, good luck getting them any other time.

But Republicans are in luck. Because the base doesn’t think a failure to raise the ceiling could have serious negative consequences as long as the right’s pundit ecosphere continue to insist it won’t (and those who get an attack of bad conscience can be written off as victims of leftist brainwashing). Assuming that messaging is sticky enough to be hard to reverse before the deadline, the threat suddenly gets a lot more credible. “Yes, we know it’s dangerous to walk away without reaching a deal—but the folks who determine whether we win our primaries and keep our seats don’t. So we’re going to have to walk away anyway unless we get everything on their wish list.” It’s a little risky, of course, because you can’t have them so out of touch that they don’t accept any deal you make, but if it works it suggests a method to the madness.

There’s a similar phenomenon in American politics, which I long ago mentally dubbed The Voldemort Effect. Maybe it’s always been this way, but it seems like especially recently, if you ask a strong political partisan—conservatives in particular, in my experience—which political figures they like or admire, and why, they’ll enthusiastically cite the ability to “drive the other side crazy.” Judging by online commentary, this seems to be an enormous part of Sarah Palin’s appeal. Palin herself certainty seems to understand this. Her favorite schtick, the well to which she returns again and again, is: “Look how all the mean liberals are attacking me!” Weekly Standard writer Matt Continetti even titled his book about the ex-governor “The Persecution of Sarah Palin.” Perversely, liberals end up playing a significant role in anointing conservative leaders.

This is, I think, a bipartisan phenomenon everyone at least subconsciously recognizes: A political figure—though more often a pundit than an actual candidate or elected official—gains prominence largely as a function of being attacked or loathed with special vehemence by the other side. Which means it’s crying out for a convenient shorthand so we can talk about it more easily; I propose “The Voldemort Effect.”

I had the sense that a year or so back, the Obama administration was rather cannily trying to exploit the Voldemort Effect deliberately, treating Rush Limbaugh as the de facto conservative/Republican leader in hopes that conservatives would fall in line, precisely because Limbaugh is very popular with the conservative base and not so much with everyone else. Which, incidentally, is a danger of the Voldemort Effect: It tends to encourage the base to embrace polarizing figures who turn off moderates, which I suspect is why it is normally observed with pundits (who can do that and remain successful) rather than with candidates.

The key point I want to make here is that when major party activists put the guilt-trip on supporters significantly to their left, they engage in what looks like very fallacious reasoning. The point is that a voter considering a protest vote against the Dems from the left has three options on election day:

First, stay at home
Second, vote for their minor party or abstain
Third, vote Democrat

And the thing is that the major party activist has to steer them between the Scylla and Charybdis of the first two choices, both of which might superficially look more attractive than voting for a candidate you don’t support. To do so, they need to make two contradictory arguments.

Obviously the problem to overcome in getting you to drag your ass (note American spelling) down to the polling station is the Paradox of Voting. Which isn’t really a paradox; it could more accurately be titled “The Actual Extremely Low Expected Value Of Voting”. This requires an appeal to your civic sense of duty; remember Martin Luther King, etc. In other words, they need you to see it as your duty to society to vote, or alternatively to see your vote as an important form of political expression.

However, once your ass is duly dragged and you’re in the voting booth, the last thing they want you to do is your civic duty (which would be to vote for the candidate you think is the best; that’s how voting systems work, strategic or tactical behaviour is a pathology of a badly designed system) or political expression (which also wouldn’t have you voting for their guy). Once you’re there, they want to argue in purely instrumental terms – you have to vote for the Democrats because if you vote for your minority party, you have no chance at all of being the marginal voter.

I considered the same quandary way back in 2004, and maybe it’s worth revisiting now. This is a problem that generalizes far beyond voting to a whole class of collective action problems or “tragedies of the commons” that have something like the following structure: There’s a system in which each individual’s rationally self-interested choice is what we’ll call the “defect” option—don’t bother to vote, overgraze the pasture, pollute, whatever. Moreover—and this is a difference from the traditional prisoner’s dilemma—holding everyone else’s choices constant, no individual’s choice to defect makes a difference to the collective outcome. My voting won’t change the outcome of the election; my constraining my livestock’s consumption won’t prevent the pasture from being overgrazed; my factory isn’t going to measurably effect the scope of climate change.

One traditional way out of this—the Kantian option—is to say that everyone has a moral duty to act on the maxim that they could will universally. In other words: Figure out what course of action would be best if everyone acted that way, and do that. This is both intuitively appealing, and for some cases seems to work pretty well, at least in theory. You can figure out the sustainable level of grazing or emissions and some procedure—whether simple or complicated—for determining everyone’s fair share of the total, and say that’s the limit everyone ought to observe. Enforcement, of course, is another matter, and determining both the correct collective limit and the right mechanism for apportioning shares may be technically quite tricky, but the general shape of the solution is relatively straightforward.

With a case like voting, though, it’s another matter, because it’s a premise of the system that people are supposed to register their presumptively diverse opinions about which candidate or policy would be best. If you actually acted on the Kantian maxim in the voting booth—selected the candidate you genuinely believe to be best—you’d probably end up with a lot of people writing in a huge variety of names. You can, of course, argue that there’s some one best candidate, and selecting that person is the uniquely moral choice. But the premise of a democratic system is precisely that we don’t have a ready collective answer to that question—voting is the process by which we try to approximate an answer by aggregating people’s different opinions. And even if you think you know the ideal candidate, given this fact of disagreement, voting for thatperson can seem like “defecting” in another sense: Given that, realistically, the winner is going to be one of two (or occasionally three) contenders, the “cooperative” outcome is going to be the one where people with roughly similar views converge on a compromise candidate rather than one’s personal first choice. We can think, by analogy, of driving: It might be that for some obscure reason having to do with human physiology, a system in which everyone drives on the left side is actually slightly safer—but that doesn’t make it the moral thing to do if the local norm is to drive on the right!

Yet here’s the paradox Davies is pointing out. Once you start modifying your rule to take into account what everyone else is likely to do—asking what rule you can will given that, in fact, many or most people will not act on the rule you’d ideally universalize—it’s not clear where you stop. In other words, once you allow that your own action is contingent on the predictably non-ideal actions of everyone else, why aren’t you back where you started, acknowledging that your own vote almost certainly won’t affect the outcome, and so your optimal response is to stay home?

One way out of the paradox, of course, is to have a voting system in which everyone ranks as many candidates as they please, allowing everyone to genuinely act in the way they would universalize without generating a perverse result. (For the most part, anyway: As Arrow proved, no voting system can entirely eliminate perverse results.) But that’s not much help for someone trying to decide what to do here and now.

The solution I gestured toward in the 2004 post was a kind of quasi-universalization principle, where you don’t ask what rule you’d want everyone to act on, but rather what rule you’d universalize within a symbolic community of like-minded folks. Alas, the same problem recurs at this stage. Which is the relevant community? If you’re a progressive, and a relatively conservative Democrat is likely to win anyway, should your imagined caucus be left-of-center folks, or people more closely aligned who might register a protest vote without changing the outcome?

In a system of perfect transparency and frictionless negotiation, people could just actually negotiate this—arguably that’s what the point of the primary system is, and sites like Nader’s Traders back in the 2000 election took the idea a step further, though ran into legal difficulties. Still, in principle at least, it looks like a coordination problem that’s intractable as a matter of abstract moral logic may become manageable—thanks to the Internet—if we leverage the more general moral obligation to abide by commitments with actual negotiation. If that’s right, then maybe Davies gets it backwards when he says that the choice between abstaining, voting Democratic, or registering a third-party protest vote, is “up to the conscience of the individual voter to make.” Maybe, instead, the way to go about it is to begin with large communities of broadly shared ideals and abide by the rule governing the symbolic sub-communities that emerge from pre-electoral deliberation. In theory, even at the deliberative stage, you can run into rapidly alternating equilibria, or suboptimal but sticky ones, but since people aren’t all making simultaneous choices about which sub-community to align with, people can probably work it out in practice.

That’s be the best I can come up with, anyway; better thoughts welcome in the comments.

First, CBS.  Frankly, the journalist in me finds it sort of offensive that they were willing to publish serial plagiarist Ben Domenech on any topic—some things really ought to earn you a lifetime ban from respectable outlets. In the specific instance, I think Domenech himself can probably be forgiven for believing—as a whole lot of people did—that Kagan was out, and saying so in a tossed-off blog post. But CBS is supposed to fact check these things—see whether Kagan herself has actually acknowledged anything of the sort in print—before running with potentially controversial claims. There’s no real excuse for this to have run in the first place.

But the White House response has been phenomenally stupid on a number of levels. They could simply have said that Kagan has never publicly discussed the details of her private life either way, which would have been enough to establish that the CBS story overreached. By going further and asserting that Kagan is straight—though in the absence of a verbatim quote, it’s possible that a spox really just flubbed an attempt to deny the “openly” part—they’ve made it actually newsworthy if the claim turns out to be false. Moreover, as many have noted, responding as though being called a lesbian constitutes a “charge” is a stupid goof in 2010.

The really ridiculous bit, though, is the insinuation that there’s some kind of right-wing “whisper campaign” to spread the “rumor” that Kagan is gay. Bollocks.  The reason people in the Beltway or the legal academy thought Kagan was gay—in fact, was openly gay—is that there’s a huge community of Harvard alums and legal scholars who have, for years, always talked as though that was the case.  And by this, I don’t mean they looked at her haircut and jumped to conclusions—I mean that it was as unremarkable (and unremarked upon) to hear a reference to Kagan and her girlfriend having been at such-and-such an event as it would be to hear that Antonin Scalia and his wife had been seated across the table. I guess it’s (just barely) conceivable that all these folks—not, for the most part, conservatives—somehow got it wildly wrong via some 80′s-sitcom type confusion about a platonic roommate or something. But to call it a “rumor” really gives the wrong impression, and to pretend that it’s some recent invention of conservatives is just completely false.  There were a whole lot of very surprised liberal lawyers in DC last week.

Finally, while I of course agree with the general consensus that orientation is irrelevant to one’s judicial qualifications, there are two caveats. First, it’s clearly just true that some folks (myself included!) would consider it a nice milestone to have the first openly gay justice—just as many people were happy to see the first Hispanic justice confirmed. That’s not reason enough to out someone, certainly, but it’s not like it’s totally irrelevant politically. Second, while the mere fact of sexual preference is nobody’s business if a nominee prefers to keep it private, it’s hard to say the same about the identity of a nominee’s long term romantic partner.  High-powered lawyers, after all, often date or marry people who are themselves powerful lawyers, executives, activists, and so on. This potentially raises questions about when and whether prospective justices would be required to recuse themselves from considering certain types of cases. So I’ve actually got to conclude—somewhat reluctantly, since it would surely be exploited by scumbags to launch unfair attacks—that if Kagan has a long-term partner, then if she’s being considered as a potential Supreme Court justice, the public would be legitimately entitled to know that person’s identity, at least.

In the original post I suggested that the cocktail party attack itself might be a form of projection on the part of folks who are, at some level, acutely aware that their own careers depend on hewing pretty close to a party line. But I think there’s something else going on here too. One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!)  This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile. Think of the complete panic China’s rulers feel about any breaks in their Internet firewall: The more successfully external sources of information have been excluded to date, the more unpredictable the effects of a breach become. Internal criticism is then especially problematic, because it threatens the hermetic seal. It’s not just that any particular criticism might have to be taken seriously coming from a fellow conservative. Rather, it’s that anything that breaks down the tacit equivalence between “critic of conservatives and “wicked liberal smear artist” undermines the effectiveness of the entire information filter.  If disagreement is not in itself evidence of malign intent or moral degeneracy, people start feeling an obligation to engage it sincerely—maybe even when it comes from the New York Times. And there is nothing more potentially fatal to the momentum of an insurgency fueled by anger than a conversation. A more intellectually secure conservatism would welcome this, because it wouldn’t need to define itself primarily in terms of its rejection of an alien enemy.

To prevent breach, the internal dissident needs to be resituated in the enemy camp. The Cocktail Party move serves this function particularly well because it simultaneously plays on the specific kind of cultural ressentiment that so much conservative rhetoric now seems designed to stoke. Because it’s usually not just a tedious charge of simple venality—of literally “selling out” to fetch better-paying speaking gigs or book deals.  You can clearly make a damn good living as a staunch conservative, after all, and Bruce Bartlett doesn’t exactly talk as though he’s gotten a big income boost out of his apostasy. No, the insinuation is always that they’re angling for respectability, because even “one of us” might be tempted by the cultural power of the enemy elites, might ultimately value their approval more than that of the conservative base. It’s a much deeper sort of purported betrayal, because it’s a choice that would implicitly validate the status claims of the despised elite. You’re supposed to feel as though you’ve been snubbed socially—discarded for “better” company—which evokes both more indignant rejection of the quisling and  further resentment of the liberal snobs who are visiting this indignity on you.  In a way it’s quite elegant, and you can see why it’s become as popular as it has.  But it’s fundamentally a symptom of insecurity—and a self-defeating one, because it corrodes the kind of serious discussion and reexamination of conservative principles and policies that might help produce a more self-assured movement.

Addendum: My friend Andrew Grossman writes to object:

Interesting, but you are much too dismissive of those who constitute “the contemporary conservative movement.” Do you really believe that Washington’s movementarian conservatives cloister themselves in conservative castles? Perhaps that’s true in the hinterlands—though I have seen it only rarely during my stint in Texas—but it is not in Washington. If nothing else, pretty much everyone goes to the same bars and trivia nights or, for the older set, charity fundraisers and (yes, generally) cocktail parties. I like the idea of “epistemic closure” for its explanatory power, but it is not an accusation I’d throw around lightly.

Speaking at the presidential palace in Kabul, Mr. Karzai showed himself to be at the top of his game. He skillfully co-opted his Pashtun base while making a powerful appeal to the technocrats who have lately been disappointed in him, and at the same time he reassured the Afghan public that his patience with civilian casualties is wearing thin. A palace insider, who asked for anonymity in order to be able to speak candidly, said, ‘If Karzai can continue to signal the West that he is concerned about corruption without alienating his warlord allies, he will likely be able to defuse the perception of a weak leader and regain his image as a unifying figure who can play the role of both modernizer and nationalist.’ Still, the palace insider acknowledged, tensions remain within Mr. Karzai’s own inner circle. At one point during the swearing-in ceremony, observers noted that Mohammad Hanif Atmar, his interior minister, seemed to ignore the greeting of Amrullah Saleh, the intelligence chief. The two have been rumored to be at odds ever since last year’s controversial election. A palace spokesman, speaking on background, denied that the incident had any significance. ‘The sun was in Hanif’s eyes—that’s it,’ the spokesman said.”

Addendum: David Frum makes the point that Democrats are almost certainly delighted to raise Palin’s profile, for the same reason they treated Rush Limbaugh as the de facto leader of the Republican party a year ago: They’d much rather the face of “the opposition” be someone who’s unpopular with the general public. That’s probably right, but a it’s got to be finessed—stunts like Gibbs’ grocery list are good for a chuckle, but they end up making the administration look petty as well. The trick is to raise your preferred opponent’s status with the GOP base, and only with the GOP base.

But I think it’s probably worth probing the underlying intuition here: Why is it that so many people who clearly do think books and magazines and talk radio shows enjoy unambiguous constitutional protection, despite being corporate funded or operated, are simultaneously absolutely sure that paid broadcast spots are in an utterly different category? If one is above all concerned with exacerbating the translation of economic inequality into political inequality, it seems rather odd.  In effect, it means you only get to use your corporate money to get your agenda on the airwaves if (like GE or Time Warner) you’re big enough to buy them wholesale. But that’s OK, because you can pump money into all those other means of trying to influence voters; it’s just broadcast advertising that’s out. So I’d like to flip the reductio question around and ask: Given that people seem to mostly agree that all this other stuff constitutes protected political speech, why do so many people have such a different attitude about paid ads?

My hunch is that it has something to do with the imagined audience.  Political content is generally sought out and consumed by people who are already politically engaged and informed, and probably have some settled partisan commitments already. Broadcast ads basically deliver a vague positive or negative association, maybe by force of sheer repetition, to people who might not otherwise be paying any attention. So there’s a temptation not to think of it as speech—at even a debased sort of attempt at reasoned persuasion—but rather as a kind of low-grade brainwashing. That might not be far wrong, but I dislike the idea of importing a pessimistic view of our savvy as citizens into our thinking about the protection due political speech, even where the pessimism is defensible.