Kuttner on 'The Competence Dodge'

Back in 2004, which, I suppose, translates into two generations ago in Internet time, I started criticizing liberals who kept discussing the blood-drenched occupation of Iraq in terms of "incompetence." Sure, they were right that the Cheney-Bush-Rumsfeld troika had displayed stunning incompetence in Iraq. But the real issue, I argued, was not how badly they had botched the cakewalk. Rather it was the fact that they had invaded in the first place. That they had based their invasion on lies that led to the deaths and maiming of hundreds of thousands of people was more important in my mind than that they had done so incompetently. Some of the worst thugs on the planet have been competent at their thuggery.

At the heart of their twisted perspective was the idea that if liberals had been in charge of a necessary and righteous invasion, everything would have been hunky-dory. This I took to be just an updated version of the Cold War liberals' justification for the ghastly U.S. wars in Southeast Asia. Not the kind of message progressives should be delivering anytime, much less in an election year.

In November 2005, Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias went a good deal farther than my simple whining and wrote a fine piece at The American Prospect called The Incompetence Dodge. An excerpt:

The incompetence critique is, in short, a dodge -- a way for liberal hawks to acknowledge the obviously grim reality of the war without rethinking any of the premises that led them to support it in the first place. In part, the dodge helps protect its exponents from personal embarrassment. But it also serves a more important, and dangerous, function: Liberal hawks see themselves as defenders of the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention -- such as the Clinton-era military campaigns in Haiti and the Balkans -- and as advocates for the role of idealism and values in foreign policy. The dodgers believe that to reject the idea of the Iraq War is, necessarily, to embrace either isolationism or, even worse in their worldview, realism -- the notion, introduced to America by Hans Morgenthau and epitomized (not for the better) by the statecraft of Henry Kissinger, that U.S. foreign policy should concern itself exclusively with the national interest and exclude consideration of human rights and liberal values. Liberal hawk John Lloyd of the Financial Times has gone so far as to equate attacks on his support for the war with doing damage to "the idea, and ideal, of freedom itself."

It sounds alluring. But it's backward: An honest reckoning with this war's failure does not threaten the future of liberal interventionism. Instead, it is liberal interventionism's only hope. By erecting a false dichotomy between support for the current bad war and a Kissingerian amoralism, the dodgers run the risk of merely driving ever-larger numbers of liberals into the realist camp. Left-of-center opinion neither will nor should follow a group of people who continue to insist that the march to Baghdad was, in principle, the height of moral policy thinking. If interventionism is to be saved, it must first be saved from the interventionists.

The piece didn't get as much attention as it should have. White House "incompetence" - without reference to wrongheadedness and lies - was still used as a campaign centerpiece by many Democrats in the 2006 election. By then, of course, they also had the terrible example of the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina to bolster the incompetence theme.

In the January/February issue of The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner has a new piece up which takes a page from Rosenfeld and Yglesias. It's called The Competence Dodge. It's short, and it only covers one arena, economics. But the competence dodge can be applied more broadly. An excerpt:

Here is where the competence dodge fails. Nobel laureate Joesph Stiglitz and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Chair Sheila Bair, to name just two, are also utterly competent, but they have more radical views on remedies than Obama's senior economic team. ...  Alan Greenspan was technically competent, too, but entirely wrong on whether markets could regulate themselves. Summers professes markedly different views than those he held a decade ago, citing changed circumstances. Summers, then a deregulator, now wants tougher financial regulations. Once a budget-balance man, Summers now calls for big deficits.

But the devil is in the details. Is the stimulus package a one-shot or the beginning of a permanent increase in public investment? Will Geithner and Summers pursue a more competent version of the Paulson bailouts, or more fundamental interventions? Should they nationalize a bank or two rather than just throwing money at bankers? Should entire categories of exotic derivatives be prohibited? Should credit-rating agencies become public utilities? Should distressed mortgages be refinanced directly by the government? Recovery will hinge on getting all this right.

In his views on economic policy, as in his life journey, Barack Obama is still a work in progress. As president, he will need to be the boldest and most competent of the lot.

This holds true as well in national security, where Bob Gates and General Jim Jones are no doubt competent, but who both speak for larger defense budgets and a larger Army and Marine Corps.

Competence vs. incompetence obviously ought to be no contest in any administration. But for progressives, 21st Century governance means more  than just doing a good job, it means doing the right job. Doing what's right and doing it right should be an inseparable pair.