Monthly Archives: March 2013

the limits of putting yourself in their shoes and looking with their eyes

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Yesterday in Jerusalem, the president told the story of Israel, much as mainstream Israelis understand it, and then asked his audience to see the Palestinians’ side of the story. Those passages in his speech drew applause. I used to think that the ability to see the other side was an unambiguous moral gain that would increase the chance of peace–because, as Obama said yesterday, “peace begins, not just in the plans of leaders, but in the hearts of people; not just in some carefully designed process, but in the daily connections, that sense of empathy that takes place among those who live together.”

But this is what I experienced last summer in Israel and the West Bank that complicated that assumption for me. Senior members of the Israeli establishment–diplomats, politicians, and officers in the IDF (up to Lieutenant General rank)–are all excellent at explaining “the Palestinian narrative.” They are quick to tell you that Israelis and Palestinians are two wounded peoples, with the Holocaust on one side and Al-Nakba (the Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948) on the other. They express views much like Obama’s on Thursday:

It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of their own — (cheers, applause) — living their entire lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements, not just of those young people but their parents, their grandparents, every single day.

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Me and others being shown the “Security Barrier” by the IDF Colonel who chose the locations.

 

They will say this kind of thing in plain sight of the security fence (a.k.a. West Bank barrier) that they have built to separate themselves from Palestinian neighborhoods–choosing where it lies and who can cross it, and governing both sides.

I am convinced that they do not merely repeat but actually believe in their hearts the kinds of sentiments to which the President called them in this part of his speech:

But I — I’m going off script here for a second, but before I — before I came here, I — I met with a — a group of young Palestinians from the age of 15 to 22. And talking to them, they weren’t that different from my daughters. They weren’t that different from your daughters or sons.

I honestly believe that if — if any Israeli parent sat down with those kids, they’d say, I want these kids to succeed. (Applause.) I want them to prosper. I want them to have opportunities just like my kids do. (Applause.) I believe that’s what Israeli parents would want for these kids if they had a chance to listen to them and talk to them. (Cheers, applause.) I believe that. (Cheers, applause.)

They cheered Obama in Jerusalem, and last summer I observed a moving encounter between an Israeli intelligence officer and a Palestinian businesswoman–mother to mother, wishing each other the best. I think this kind of recognition has grown over time. Mrs. Netanyahu summarized the old popular view when she claimed, “When the Jews came to this area, there were no Arabs here. They came to find work when we built cities. There was nothing here before that.” That is not PC any more; now the kinds of people I talked to know all about the Palestinians under Turkish and British rule and what they lost in ’48.

But … that doesn’t lead to action. You can be sincerely empathetic but not willing to do anything to remedy a situation in which you are complicit. Americans are like that every day. To name a timely example, we were involved in killing between 150,000 and 1 million Iraqis over the past ten years, and not many of us did anything to stop that. Detroit now encompasses a contiguous abandoned urban area larger than Manhattan, and not many Americans lift a finger. I am not equating Iraq, the West Bank, and Detroit–merely noting that empathy doesn’t often cause action.

But I worry about something worse. Being able to express empathy, even if it is perfectly sincere, makes one feel better and also wins the trust of third parties. I was disarmed hearing Israeli leaders tell me the “Palestinian narrative.” When an Israeli settler leader failed to acknowledge the Palestinian perspective, he lost me completely. When the Fatah representatives whom we met in Ramallah refused to acknowledge that Israelis believe they have a historic link to the land, I marked them down a notch in my own mental estimation, thinking they were narrow-minded.

This means that empathy not only fails to produce justice; it can be an asset in an unjust conflict. In the Israeli case, empathy is the kind of asset that comes from being fairly secure day to day and from having a wealthy, highly educated, cosmopolitan population. Israelis recently voted on the basis of the kinds of consumer-oriented, domestic issues that usually move US voters; peace was a side issue, just as it was in the US in 2o12. The Tel Aviv real estate market is booming. Its citizens can afford to hope that Palestinian kids succeed. But will they let them?

the Pledge of Allegiance

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I will be talking to a reporter later about the Pledge of Allegiance, which is apparently disappearing from California schools. I recognize that this is a classic hot-button issue because deliberately removing the Pledge is seen as an attack on God and country (both named in the modern text). That supports a broader narrative in which patriotism and faith are seen as threatened by secular critics who use the machinery of the state, especially public schools, to push their vision.

Well, I am not on that side of the debate, and I don’t agree about the trends. It’s interesting, for example, that under-30s are the least likely to see our wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan as mistakes–by a large margin in the case of Vietnam. It’s hard to square that with the idea that they have been educated against patriotism.

But let me turn the question around and ask it this way: If there had never been a Pledge of Allegiance and we were thinking of making one up and requiring it for all students, would that be a good idea? The following specific questions would then arise, I think:

  • Can minors make a pledge? (They cannot in legal contexts; contracts that they enter are generally considered voidable.)
  • If you solemnly pledge something, why should you repeat that daily? Isn’t a pledge a pledge?
  • What should students learn from the exercise of daily repeating some words in class? For example, if the draft text of a pledge is going to include the word “indivisible,” shouldn’t 100% of students who repeat it daily be able to explain what that word means and what it implies about state secession? More broadly, what words and ideas should they learn?
  • Assuming that the objective is for students to think certain things about the US, is repeating a short memorized statement every day the best way to accomplish that? What are the learning outcomes (for kindergarteners, for high school seniors)?
  • Who should write and approve this text, and must it be the same for every class in every school in every community of every state?
  • Can God be mentioned in a public school? What is the meaning of the phrase “under God” in the current text? Does it mean, for example, that the speaker affirms the existence of one omnipotent deity who has blessed the United States? If that’s its meaning, may non-monotheists recite the words without foreswearing themselves? May Christians, Jews, and Muslims who deny the fundamental legitimacy of the state (as Tolstoy did) recite this text? What about Christians who read Matthew 5:34-5: “But I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God’s throne /Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the great King.”
  • What about the students who (for whatever reason) don’t want to pledge? The Supreme Court has ruled that individuals don’t have to stand or say the words. But was the Court right, and would the same decision be appropriate regardless of the content of the pledge? For instance, if schools merely required students to pledge not to harm each other, would a student have a right to opt out?
  • What if the parent and the student diverge on this matter? Does the child of a Jehovah’s Witness have the right to say the pledge even though his father considers it blasphemous? At what age is the choice up to the parent versus the child?
  • How should schools treat dissenters? Should they merely tolerate the rare individual who quietly sits through the pledge? Or should they invite discussion of the pros and cons?
  • May and should students who are not citizens of the United States take the pledge?
  • If you are going to pledge allegiance to something, should it be to the flag? To the republic? To the people who constitute the republic? To certain principles that underlie the republican form of government?
  • Could the government of the United States hypothetically take actions that would render the pledge void?
  • What (if anything) should students pledge to do? Is pledging allegiance enough–and is it even meaningful–if it doesn’t imply any action?

bloggers remember what they wrote when the Iraq war started

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Blogging was still pretty new in March 2003, but I was already at it. This week, on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War, veteran bloggers have been reviewing their own opinions when it started. (See, e.g., contrasting posts by Jonathan Chait and James Fallows). Reflection is a valuable activity because we ought to learn from mistakes. I don’t find a strong statement for or against the invasion on my blog, probably because I was a bit conflicted–and also, I rarely opine on anything unless I think my professional work gives me a comparative advantage that I ought to share. But I did post this on March 31, 2003, and it brings back vivid memories:

We’re back from a week in Greece. This is a civic/political blog, not a personal diary, so I will refrain from describing our many adventures. I can, however, file a report on how the current war looks from Greece. A few vignettes:

  • We’re staying in the medieval walled village of Kastro, on the island of Siphnos—at the opposite side of the island from the port. It would seem to be a remote and isolated spot (especially during the off-season, with all ferries cancelled because of gale-force winds), far from the world and its troubles. But when we go upstairs to answer the phone in our landlords’ apartment one morning, the whole family is weeping (quite literally) at al-Jazeera’s coverage of the first marketplace bombing in Baghdad. The father clutches his chest and says, “My heart is black, black. Bush—this all for money.”
  • A repeated scene, replayed in every taverna, coffee shop, ferryboat lounge, and hotel lobby we enter. A TV is on in the corner showing the al-Jazeera feed from Baghdad with Greek commentary that we can’t read, while Greeks, wreathed in cigarette smoke, sit watching and forming their opinions. These TV’s are often our only source of news, so we peer at the Greek text for clues about what is happening one time zone to the east, conscious all the time that everyone knows we are Americans.
  • Eating ice cream at the elegant cafe atop Lykavittos Hill, overlooking the Parthenon and hundreds of thousands of Greeks who are marching from Parliament toward the U.S. Embassy. We’ve picked this spot, in part, because we’re responsible for two kids whom we want to keep away from any rioting, and we don’t think that the marchers will possibly try to ascend Lykavittos. Chants, unintelligible to us, float up from the Athens streets.

And now we’re back. Time always seems to slow while you travel, or expand like a fan with all the details of each day still clear in your mind. It seems forever since you left your usual life. And then you return to your routine, and the fan snaps closed. You feel that you were gone for just a dimly remembered day or two.

young people most positive about the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam

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This surprised me:


Negative views of each of our recent wars rise with age. Under-30s are the least likely to say that Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam were mistakes. This surprises me because young people voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama in 2008, when he was seen as the most antiwar of the major Democrats. In contrast, seniors voted for George W. Bush in 2004, for John McCain in 2008, and for Mitt Romney in 2012. Yet they are more likely to see Iraq and Vietnam as a mistake than the under-30s, and for Vietnam, there is a 27-point gap.

(I acknowledge that nine years have  passed since 2004. Today’s 18-29s were far too young to vote in that election, and some of today’s seniors were just 56. But still, the age pattern seems strong and almost monotonic.)

the new manipulative politics: behavioral economics, microtargeting, and the choice confronting Organizing for Action

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In the era of digital networks, you can enable waves of innovation and creativity by inviting people to form their own groups and contribute their own tools and culture. In the era of digital networks, you can also manipulate masses of people into doing what you want them to do by maintaining and exploiting a vast merged database of human activities, interconnections, and expressions.

These are warring impulses and rival temptations. Each is enabled by recent technology, but each also reflects a whole philosophy or worldview that makes it seem exciting and desirable. Since 2007, the Obama team has been pulled in both directions. The President’s new grassroots lobbying operation, Organizing for Action (OFA), could still go either way. I don’t think the administration and its friends recognize that they face a fateful choice, nor do they understand the dangers inherent in the new manipulative politics.

Barack Obama has a special affinity for decentralized politics, rooted in his years as a community organizer, and he was perfectly positioned to take advantage of the populist power of the new digital and social media. Back in May 2008, Steve Teles and I wrote:

While [Hilary] Clinton has depended for support on large-dollar donors and existing Democratic Party organization, Obama has shown an ability to mobilize thousands of citizens for his campaign. He has raised money from over a million people, and his Facebook page has 800,000 supporters.

It is precisely this network, which connects the Internet to the grassroots, that will need to be activated to counter the furious opposition to health care reform by supporters of the status quo. Obama should say in no uncertain terms that as soon as he is elected in November, he will immediately make good on his promise that his campaign is about what “we” can do. He should commit to turning his remarkable electoral machine into the most powerful mass movement for policy change since the civil rights movement.

After the election, the administration did not engage Obama’s grassroots base to counter the fierce opposition we had predicted. I lamented that lapse in a 2010 Huffington Post piece and many others also observed it. Lately, the President has explicitly called his failure to engage supporters his worst mistake, recalling that the “energy just kind of dissipated, and we were only playing an inside game.”

The energy of 2008 had many sources–including the simple desire to vote the Republicans out–but it was sustained by citizens who invented their own messages and built their own networks. Again, this strategy was enabled by new technologies (the Internet, smart phones, and social networking sites), but it also reflected a philosophy that gave its proponents morale and inspiration. They saw themselves as pushing power to the edges of the network.

The 2012 reelection campaign, however, was won by “backroom number crunchers,” analysts with access to a vast national database. According to Time’s Michael Scherer, they could “run tests predicting which types of people would be persuaded by certain kinds of appeals. Call lists in field offices, for instance, didn’t just list names and numbers; they also ranked names in order of their persuadability, with the campaign’s most important priorities first.” (For more reporting on what Reid Cherlin called the “whiz-bang technologies and startup geniuses” of the Obama campaign, see this summary.)

All this was possible because we now conduct so many of our routine activities online, where they can be saved and tracked. What we buy, whom we know, and how we vote can all be entered into databases that are sold and merged. Meanwhile, behavioral economics, prospect theory, the latest marketing science, and popular works by the likes of Malcolm Gladwell and Cass Sunstein tell us that: (1) people’s behavior is predictable, but it does not depend on rational calculations of benefits versus costs; (2) we can get people to do what we want by subtly shifting messages or the way we frame choices; and (3) this is all good  because we can attain desirable social outcomes without paying people or threatening people to do the right thing. Governments needn’t ban or tax harmful products; they can “nudge” citizens into avoiding them. Campaigns don’t have to raise billions of dollars for broadcast ads, but can instead hire a few computer geniuses to target messages to people who think they want them.

Indeed, the Obama reelection campaign got its voters out, including (as we find) young voters–notwithstanding evidence that they were relatively unenthusiastic during the campaign. We found in October that about 15% of young people had been contacted by a presidential campaign, about 60% of those by the Democrats. The targeting was efficient: young African American women in Southeastern states got relentless attention, for example, and everyone received messages tailored to their interests. West Coast females in their forties heard from George Clooney because, as Scherer reports, the actor “had an almost gravitational pull” on women “likely to hand over cash.”

These skills have evident value to private corporations who (Suzy Khimm reports today) are courting the Obama campaign’s “young geniuses.” But deep in her story is an indication that the campaign’s success was at least partly a result of sharing power rather than micro-targeting voters:

Sam Graham-Felsen, the “chief blogger” of Obama’s 2008 campaign, found that private audiences were so willing to pay for his insights that he was able to leave his post-election job at Blue State Digital for the speaking circuit. But he wasn’t always sure that corporations were thrilled about following his advice. “I talked about the freedom I was given as a blogger to really speak with an authentic voice,” he says. “But the main hurdle is a lot of corporate audiences are terrified of giving up message control.”

Now the same techniques and skills are being handed over to a formally independent grassroots lobby, the OFA.

One problem with that effort is the source of cash. In the LA Times, Matea Gold reports, “Obama stayed for two hours at the Organizing for Action dinner, whose attendees included wealthy donors who had been asked to give $50,000 each. During meetings last month between the group’s leaders and top campaign fundraisers, the idea was floated to name those who raise $500,000 a year to an advisory board that would meet quarterly with the president.” My former boss Fred Wertheimer argues–and I agree–that “President Obama has set out on a dangerous and unprecedented path as he begins his second term in office. … As far as I know, this is the first time a president has outsourced an important responsibility of his presidency to a private sector organization that is financed by unlimited private funds and that is, in effect, operating as an arm of the presidency.”

But it’s not only the source of money that is troubling. OFA may bring to governance and advocacy the methods of data-mining, micro-targeting, and experimentally tested messages that helped the President win reelection. I understand that the center-left doesn’t want to disarm unilaterally, and if these techniques work, they probably must be used in some form. But they pose serious dangers:

  1. You can use people for what you need and then ignore them. The campaign was eager to mobilize young African American women in Southeastern states last fall. But what incentive has OFA to solicit their opinions now? They don’t have a lot of money to contribute, and most live in safe districts that are sure votes for or against the administration in Congress. OFA will turn its attention to donors and persuadable people in swing districts. But what kind of a social contract is that? You vote for someone so that he can ask someone else’s opinion after the election.
  2. A candidate can say different things to different people without being accountable for his overall positions. To be sure, that has always been possible behind closed doors, and the Internet has in some ways made it more difficult. Mitt Romney’s “47%” remarks went to audiences he didn’t expect. But that was a blatant error. Now candidates can subtly shade their messages to increase their impact on the specific target audiences without anyone noticing.
  3. A combination of money and high-tech expertise now confers power. It’s only a matter of luck if the good side happens to have more of those commodities. And even the good guys may be over-influenced by the people who provide their money and tools.
  4. Campaigns and governments can get people to do what they want without the accountability that comes from spending money or making and enforcing rules. For example, if the government compels everyone to buy a certain kind of insurance, its power is overt and can be challenged. But if it enrolls everyone in the insurance scheme and allows them to opt out, it appears to have created a choice. Yet behavioral economics predicts that lots of people will end up with the insurance. In that case, the government shapes behavior without appearing to have coerced anyone. Likewise, if you get a personalized message from George Clooney asking you to contribute to Obama, it all seems very optional and inoffensive until you realize that data-mining and cluster analysis predicted you would open your wallet at the mere sound of his name (while someone else heard from Jay-Z).

Microtargeting is like using drones: it’s great if you’re the only one who has them. Of course, it’s a lot better to be microtargeted than to be hit with a drone strike, but in both cases, the only decision-maker is the one with the machinery. Even if OFA makes effective use of the new data analytics to advance good causes between now and 2016, they must also consider whether these tools are a net benefit for democracy, and if not, what to do about that.