Abbreviated Friday Reads: June 22, 2012

Jonathan Bernstein has a meandering and wonderful post on the Veepstakes and navigating the difficult ground between aggregate social "behavior" and individual "action":

This turns to be a fairly important point. It's a subject that Hannah Arendt wrote about long ago when she presented the contrast between "behavior" and action, in which behavior is defined as conforming to larger historical laws or trends (see The Human Condition, especially 41-45).

When we talk about politics, we need to somehow keep both things in mind, simultaneously. On the one hand, people do "behave" all the time, in theoretically perfectly predictable ways. I know that an overwhelming percentage of African American voters will support Barack Obama this November, and that an overwhelming percentage of LDS voters will back Mitt Romney, and there's nothing wrong with me "predicting" that, just as there's nothing wrong with predicting that Veepstakes isn't likely to affect voter choices. Just to emphasize (given what Williamson said), that has nothing at all to do with how well-informed or ignorant voters might be -- well-informed voters, overall, are somewhat more predictable than ignorant voters (because they're more likely to be solid partisans).

And yet. Action is always possible. Choice is always possible. Action, as Arendt argues, is as unpredictable as behavior is predictable. Of course it is not without influences, but it involves deliberate choice.

Ezra Klein is on a vital tangent lately, criticizing the practice of contemporary political media:

As New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait wrote, “It’s obviously true that political campaigns will take their opponents’ statements out of context. That is probably unavoidable. The key step I’m focusing on here is when the journalist internalizes the work of the oppo researcher. Perhaps, in the end, the dumbest, least fair, most context-free interpretation of the line will ultimately prevail. But when journalists assume this will happen and make no effort to fight against that process, we go from merely reporting on the stupidity of politics to becoming accomplices of it.”

We also reduce the amount of useful information politicians offer to the public, making our jobs harder in the long term. What Obama no doubt learned from his “gaffe” news conference is that he shouldn’t do many news conferences. The downside risk of a poorly phrased, extemporaneous comment vastly outweighs the likelihood that whatever serious message he seeks to convey will make it through the media’s filter. What Romney learned from Obama’s news conference is that, if he’s lucky enough to become president, he shouldn’t do many news conferences, either. The sad part is, both politicians probably learned the right lesson — at least for their purposes.

Yglesias tries to reclaim the word "privatizing" from the right.


More neat stuff from Wonkblog. Sarah K provides a great chart on "how we die."