By Ryan McNeely

How I wish there were more than twenty-four hours in the day:

– You might as well face it: they’re addicted to Bush.

– How the GOP could kill health care reform without repealing it.

– Swearing to uphold the Constitution while advocating secession? And when is impeachment going to be taken “off the table”?

– Ezra Klein’s excellent interview with Kent Conrad.

– “Breitbart lied about Shirley Sherrod. Now he’s lying about the NAACP.”

– Unsurprisingly, there are problems with some military commission convictions.

– Barney Frank and Felix Salmon now back Elizabeth Warren for CFPB.

– James Clyburn pokes fun at the Vice-President.

In honor of Netroots Nation, Viva Las Vegas.

Brad Plumer has a nice post about climate change counterfactual scenarios asking various “what ifs” and wondering whether they could have led to a bill.

I’ve been interested in various aspects of counterfactual since college when I read Niall Ferguson’s excellent book Virtual History, studied David Lewis’ work on the metaphysics of counterfactuals, and did a philosophy of history class with Robert Nozick. To make a long story short, the upshot of that kind of analysis is that it really depends how you specify your counterfactual. If you want to ask “would a McCain administration have led to a better outcome for climate legislation,” in other words, you need to ask yourself “why in this scenario would McCain have won the election?” After all, it’s very hard to imagine a scenario in which the 2008 congressional elections come out the exact same way but Barack Obama somehow loses. In the real world, the same dynamics that powered Obama to victory also drove the election of Kay Hagan and Tom Perriello and Mark Begich and any number of other downballot candidates. A scenario in which Democrats win landslide congressional victories but Obama loses would have to entail something pretty odd happening and the precise nature of what that is would have a big impact on subsequent events.

Something similar happens when you ask about “what if climate had gone before energy.” During 2007 and 2008 both Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama fairly strongly signalled personal preferences for energy reform as a higher priority than health reform, I judgment that I also share. But Obama reversed course on this for reasons having to do with the different status of the issues inside the progressive political coalition. So there’s a difference between asking “would the outcome have been different if the underlying coalition dynamics that drove Obama’s choice had been different” (plausibly yes) and asking “would the outcome have been different if Obama made an idiosyncratic effort to swim against the tide of coalition dynamics” (almost certainly not).

The best-specified counterfactual I can think of that leads to a more successful outcome actually has nothing to do with the specific political dynamics of the climate debate. That would be something like “what if decisive Federal Reserve action had led to substantially more robust economic growth in the second half of 2009 and the first half of 2010?” Had that happened, public opinion on Barack Obama and all Obama-related policy proposals would be more positive. What’s more, narrative about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would be much more positive. So GOP rejectionism on the Affordable Care Act would have been a tactical failure and rejectionism on ARRA would have been a strategic failure, and you’d see many more voices from within the conservative coalition urging people to adopt a more cooperative stance to shed the “party of ‘no’” stance.

That’s my view. Which is in part a long-winded way of saying that I’m detecting at Netroots Nation a self-critical vibe within the green community that I don’t really think is justified. In terms of what political advocacy organizations can be reasonably expected to achieve, the climate change groups have been extremely effective. But a whole set of other problems related to the economy have dragged their program down. Much the same could be said about immigration reform, which has also been the victim of a political dynamic that’s extrinsic to the immigration issue silo.

The association of progressive reform with the Great Depression sometimes confuses people about this, but if you look at the timeline correctly you’ll see that even though the 1933-37 period was “part of” the Depression it was actually a period of extremely rapid economic growth following four years of epic collapse and preceding a secondary recession. That “everything was terrible and then FDR came in and conditions improved rapidly” dynamic was highly supportive of the president’s legislative agenda.

One of the mysteries of the Obama administration, discussed a bit but not really resolved at an excellent panel on judicial issues I attended this morning, is why he’s been so slow to put names forward to fill vacancies on the federal courts. It’s true that there’s been a fair amount of obstruction, but the obstruction has been facilitated by the White House’s lackadaisical attitude toward the issue.

Part of what I wonder here is isn’t the failing a broader institutional one. After all, Democrats had eight years of George W Bush to draw up lists of potential nominees — it should have been possible for the Senate caucus, in consultation with outside groups, to produce on day one a list of well-vetted candidates that the Majority Leader and the Judiciary Chairman were prepared to go to bat for.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about his father and War and Peace:

My Dad read War and Peace before he went off to Vietnam. He must have been about 16, a poor black kid trying to find his way out of Philadelphia. By the time he came to Tolstoy, he’d seen his father alive for the last time. He’d come home, as a six-year old, and seen all of his home set out in the street. He’d lived in a truck for a week, and he’d come to believe that if he stayed in Philly, he would be killed. Still awaiting him was the murder of two of his older brothers, the service, the Panthers, and a tribe of children.

What moves someone like that to Tolstoy? What allows you to cross that long, dreamy bridge from the ghettos of America to the parlors of old Russia?

I think to anyone who’s read and loved Tolstoy, it’s clear enough that the answer is simply that his work has a universal appeal. It works for a 17 year-old prosperous white kid from Manhattan in the late 1990s and it works for a 16 year-old black kid from Philadelphia in the late 1960s. But the main theme of Coates’ post is that he finds himself unable to get in to War and Peace. And I wonder how hard it must be these days. The explosion of digital culture is, on net, a very good thing. But it necessarily crowds out some activities and one of the things it must do the very most crowding-out of is one’s capacity to read giant honking novels. I find it hard to imagine myself undertaking a project on the W&P/Moby Dick/Brothers Karamazov scale in the era of ubiquitous connectivity. I think this is something we may just be losing as a society.

The Tolstoy-curious may want to consider attempting something less daunting—Hadji Murat, Death of Ivan Ilych, or Family Happiness.

By Ryan McNeely

Matt is completely correct about how climate change legislation ultimately died: basically Republican politicians who claim to care about climate change won’t support any attempt to actually deal with climate change. The big question right now seems to be “what should people who care about the issue do” to affect the debate? Matt discussed civil disobedience yesterday, but due to the complicated politics of the issue it’s a bit hard to decipher where the swing votes really are. I guess the two potential strategies would be to try to rally Democrats to become more engaged on the issue (read: make the Congress generally more progressive) or to de-politicize the issue, go after reasonable conservative elites and try to get them to basically shame moderate Republicans into following the logic of their own stated positions.

I noticed on the CAP graph of state per capita emissions that eight of the ten states with the highest emissions were McCain states, and often strong McCain states (in fact, three high emission states are three of only five states where Obama underperformed Kerry). Plus, Obama won Indiana — one of only two high emission states won by the President — by an extremely narrow margin. Here’s a chart plotting the rank of each state’s Obama vote share vs. the per capita CO2 emissions:

Now, this is not a very rigorous metric — it simply ranks the states in order rather than comparing actual vote spreads to actual emissions. And it doesn’t get at the true veto points (Senators) but rather looks at presidential vote strength. Finally, there are some outliers — for example, maybe Idaho’s Senators could be bought-off somehow, as Idaho has the fourth lowest emissions but was Obama’s fourth worst state.

But there’s definitely a relationship here. And I think one can potentially draw the conclusion that, moving forward, climate change is destined to become an even more partisan issue. If that’s the case, the strategy for dealing with the problem wouldn’t materially differ from the strategy for advancing any other progressive agenda item — activists should simply try to make the Congress more Democratic and more progressive.

A number of people have asked me about the stylish F*ck Tea t-shirt I had on last night, it came to me courtesy of The Agenda Project (which has cool slogans: “What if someone told you that politicians were the least important part of politics”) and you can find for sale here along with other anti-Tea Party swag:

On the back it says “Progress is the real American Party,” which I think is correct. The United States was founded fairly explicitly on a set of liberal ideals—pragmatic egalitarian cosmopolitan individualism is the American creed and the progressive movement is largely about trying to make those ideals a reality. John Boehner’s view that human freedom somehow reached a peak in the 1950s and that therefore a reactionary politics is going to be liberatory is absurd.