Libya as a Moment of Clarity
by rrusczyk, Apr 6, 2011, 1:57 AM
The current mess in Libya, and Obama's comments on it, clarified for me my instincts about the candidates in the 2008 election. The conventional wisdom was "McCain is strong in foreign policy and Obama is strong in domestic policy." I always thought that characterization was backwards. I trusted McCain more on domestic policy and Obama more on foreign policy. Hearing and watching Obama on Libya has helped me be able to enunciate exactly why I felt (and still feel) this way.
Obama is essentially saying about Libya that there is no simple rule that can be applied to foreign intervention. It's very complicated, and must be handled on a case-by-case basis. We can't simply write a rule that works for all cases. I buy that (I'm not as sure about his actual decision, but that would be true no matter what that decision was), and if I had to choose between Obama and McCain as President for this particular decision, I'll take Obama -- McCain's foreign policy view seemed much less nuanced, and much more "right-and-wrong" simplistic.
But on domestic policy, the two flipped. Obama's view (to the extent he would ever state or hint at it) seemed to be one of "government technocrats can solve these problems." That is, there are "experts" who know the right thing to do on energy, or health care, or whatever. McCain's view (again, to the extent he would come close to stating it) was "the government doesn't know your situation better than you do, so better for you to decide". McCain's view, as simplistic as it sounds, was the one that embraces the complexity of the problem. That is, local conditions are so variable and important, and the future so hard to predict, that allowing local decisions on these matters is much more effective than inflicting global ones. That's much like Obama's foreign policy, but the opposite of his domestic policy.
Unfortunately, conveying and understanding this complexity doesn't sell. Hence, Obama's simplistic view of domestic policy was deemed the most "informed" and McCain's simplistic view of foreign policy was similarly deemed more "wise" (not by everyone, of course, in either case). Both ends of this conventional wisdom, I think, were (and still are) dead wrong.
Students, parents, and teachers occasionally ask me what I would do if I ran educational policy in the United States. I typically answer something along the lines of, "I would try to find ways that no one entity or person can run educational policy." I think education as a whole, like foreign policy and domestic policy for a nation, is far too complex a problem for a single person or single centralized entity to solve. Moreover, the downside of inflicting mistakes on an entire generation are far too large. It's much better to have the higher variance of allowing localized decisions.
Fortunately, technology empowers those who would take matters into their own hands, by making localized decisions of their own, or by creating options that others can choose to follow. In that sense, I'm already doing exactly what I would do if I "ran educational policy in the United States", and I think (hope?) we have only scratched the surface of what's possible.
Obama is essentially saying about Libya that there is no simple rule that can be applied to foreign intervention. It's very complicated, and must be handled on a case-by-case basis. We can't simply write a rule that works for all cases. I buy that (I'm not as sure about his actual decision, but that would be true no matter what that decision was), and if I had to choose between Obama and McCain as President for this particular decision, I'll take Obama -- McCain's foreign policy view seemed much less nuanced, and much more "right-and-wrong" simplistic.
But on domestic policy, the two flipped. Obama's view (to the extent he would ever state or hint at it) seemed to be one of "government technocrats can solve these problems." That is, there are "experts" who know the right thing to do on energy, or health care, or whatever. McCain's view (again, to the extent he would come close to stating it) was "the government doesn't know your situation better than you do, so better for you to decide". McCain's view, as simplistic as it sounds, was the one that embraces the complexity of the problem. That is, local conditions are so variable and important, and the future so hard to predict, that allowing local decisions on these matters is much more effective than inflicting global ones. That's much like Obama's foreign policy, but the opposite of his domestic policy.
Unfortunately, conveying and understanding this complexity doesn't sell. Hence, Obama's simplistic view of domestic policy was deemed the most "informed" and McCain's simplistic view of foreign policy was similarly deemed more "wise" (not by everyone, of course, in either case). Both ends of this conventional wisdom, I think, were (and still are) dead wrong.
Students, parents, and teachers occasionally ask me what I would do if I ran educational policy in the United States. I typically answer something along the lines of, "I would try to find ways that no one entity or person can run educational policy." I think education as a whole, like foreign policy and domestic policy for a nation, is far too complex a problem for a single person or single centralized entity to solve. Moreover, the downside of inflicting mistakes on an entire generation are far too large. It's much better to have the higher variance of allowing localized decisions.
Fortunately, technology empowers those who would take matters into their own hands, by making localized decisions of their own, or by creating options that others can choose to follow. In that sense, I'm already doing exactly what I would do if I "ran educational policy in the United States", and I think (hope?) we have only scratched the surface of what's possible.
February 2012
January 2012