The Man that's Left

Over the weekend I finished another book lent to me by my magnanimous friends, David Frum's The Right Man and I think it may be worth couple of comments.

Firstly, let me come clean: I may be the only person in Europe, but I hope Bush wins this November. There are several reasons for it – but the most important one is perhaps his loathing by media and intellectual elites on both sides of Atlantic. If anybody manages to win against them, it will not, unfortunately, change their worldview (it'd be seen just as another victory of the global capital), but it will be great fun watching them anyway.

The other reason – and please let me stress that I don't presume to to influence the US citizens, who are certainly more knowledgeable about the situation than I am – is that Kerry is not a good man for the job, and I explain shortly why.

But back to the book. It is reasonably well written, slightly longer than necessary, but it certainly does not presume to be more than an electoral may fly. The genre of legends or hagiographies suffers the dearth of new entries and the story of St. George fighting the Terror is a welcomed addition. And actually, the eye-witness account of 9/11 in Washington is really moving and worth reading the book alone. The book also gives interesting insight of the presidential administration workings and handful of anecdotes about the recent events.

What's difficult to understand from the book, is what the word 'conservative' means these days. Certainly it is not anything Edmund Burke would approve of, as Frum constantly praises Bush for being, if anything, radical. "This changed four decades of US policy to China," or "This turned the policies of six American presidents on its head," exclaims Frum as if scrapping old policies was virtue in and of itself. Obviously, David Frum, if he was reading this, would point out that the old policies left America vulnerable and allowed 9/11 to happen. This is a very strong point, but it cannot carry everything. These policies also allowed America to win the Cold War and made it into the strongest economy in the world.

Frum also tells us that Bush's favourite predecessor is Dwight D. Eisenhower. Now, this was a man that believed that most changes are for the worse and that the best strategy is to let events take their course. Dull and unattractive, but very conservative, and almost exactly opposite to what Bush is doing.

When starting to write this article, I found David Frum's homepage so that I could post a link here. I took a look at his Diary at National Review that was linked there and within minutes I ran across a piece espousing an idea that forms one of the more disconcerting threads of his book; namely, that the "right not to live in fear" is superior to any other rights, and that all other rights may be curtailed in order to honour it.

In fairness, it must be told that Frum does not use words "right not to live in fear". On the other hand, I doubt he could credibly deny that he believes that curtailing some civil rights and liberties, in order to gain information that may protect lives of thousands of citizens, is morally both acceptable and desirable.

But this an illusion. For one thing, everybody lives in fear to some extent, depending on his experience and worldview. For the other, the administrative measures short of totalitarian police state are pretty useless. The European countries, with their compulsory ID cards, national databanks not circumscribed by any Personal Data Protection Acts, and distinctly police-friendly tradition, were unable to fight effectively RAF, Red Brigades or ETA.

And most importantly, the civil liberties are priceless in themselves. There is an illuminating quote, but as my memory fails me, I don't know by whom, nor the exact wording (and I would be grateful to any reader who would point this to me). But the story goes like this: an Act was presented sometime in the middle of the 19th century to the British Parliament giving some extra powers to the police (or maybe establishing the police). To which one of the MPs replied: "I would rather that six more men are stabbed to death on Charing Cross Road a year, than such an intrusion on our liberties be tolerated!"

This is an honest stance. We cannot have the pie and eat the pie, and we cannot have complete security and complete freedom at the same time. However, I think that freedom is a central American value and all attempts to diminish it must be watched with utmost suspicion.

In this context it is interesting that the lunatic right-wing fringe groups, in themselves very useful for US political life, as they allow politicians like e.g. Ronald Reagan to appear as centrists, that these groups, whose abhorrence of the federal government is only matched by their contempt of it, embrace Bush so unquestioningly, despite his administration increasing the federal powers so dramatically.

This I think is also the biggest problem with Kerry. He is certainly no civil liberties activist and his ideas and speeches suggest he is even greater statist than Bush.

Just as he glorifies Bush's domestic measures, Frum is also enthusiastic about the interventions abroad. Now this is the most contentious issue and one that cannot be adequately covered in couple of lines. Suffice to say that now I sincerely wish Iraq may have a stable regime, respecting the rule of law, and that have a stab at creating it was an interesting gamble. But a gamble nonetheless. Frum has no new arguments that weren't repeated many times already and I am not going to dwell on them. Just as with domestic security, he seems to be fascinated by the very fact that something new is happening, the novelty to him is the mark of quality.

Back to the Right Man. Frum is certain that George W. Bush is the one for the next four years. This is an assertion that, with all due respect, I doubt. But he may be the Man that is Left to voters.

One-round, one-mandate

When out little country (Czech Republic, or Czechland) entered EU couple of months ago, I was standing by the window, watching the celebratory fireworks, listening first to our national anthem, then to the anthem of EU. This, as you may know, is Beethoven's Ninth symphony and I realized an interesting thing. Beethoven originally composed it to the words of Schiller's poem 'An die Freheit' (Ode to Freedom). However, this idea didn't go down well with the Austrian censors, and the title (and content) was changed to 'An die Freude' (Ode to Joy). Nothing seems to me to be a more fitting image of the today's EU as this piece of historic trivia.

Now Czechland is discussing another think typical attribute of EU countries – its proportional electoral system. While seemingly giving more power to minorities, thus being more 'democratic', it dilutes the responsibility of both individual politicians and political parties.

I have little illusions about accountability of politicians under any electoral system, and I am also pretty sure that the electoral system in this country won't change, if only because it didn't do so in the past fifteen years. But for the sake of the argument, let's pretend that this can happen in principle.

The majority (one-mandate constituency) system comes in two basic flavours: one round (winner takes all) and two round (the two candidates from the first round go to face off in the second round). The first has the advantage of being simpler, the later has the disadvantages of being more expensive and also more prone to party horse-trading. However, if any majority system has any chance of being accepted in this country, it is the two-round one, as it gives the smaller parties at least some chances of survival.

But couldn't we combine the two systems into one? If the voter marked his candidates in the order of precedence, it could be then used to emulate the two-round system. When counting votes, we first count the "first place" votes for each candidate. If one candidate gets more than half of the total ballots casts, he wins. If there is no such candidate, we add the votes for the "second place" to each candidate. Again, if somebody now has more than half of the total ballots cast, that candidate wins. The process is repeated until all places are processed, if still nobody gets over one half of votes, the candidate with most votes wins.

If all voters mark just one candidate on their ballot, this system would be tantamount to simple one-round system; if everybody ordered all candidates according to his preferences, the system would work actually better than the two-rounds one (but it could be made to work exactly the same way; the kind reader will figure out how).

Such a system – and no doubt I am not the first person to think about it, and I would be grateful to any reader who would let me know how it is called among electoral professionals – would have an advantage of forcing the parties to show their hand before the elections. Quite often, the period between the two rounds of elections is filled with the most ignominious haggling. The parties and candidates that were at each other's throats become best of friends just to defeat somebody even more loathsome to them. This period of shameless political cynicism would be eliminated but the voters would not be robbed of choice. Instead of necessity to vote for the lesser evil, they would be able to vote for the greatest good and check the lesser evil only as a second alternative.

I wonder if such system is used anywhere in the real world.

Burnrated

This being the first post and all, this is going to be quite short and less than interesting.

Anyway, I just finished The Burnrate by Michael Wolff, an interesting if too wordy account of the dotcom gold fever. A more cynical observer would note that the book is the author's attempt to cut his losses from his Internet enterprise; i.e. if he was not able to make money then by taking his company public, he is going to make them selling this book. However, as someone who tried it, I can affirm that book publishing is in fact a harmless hobby, not a way to get money.

Wolff tells about several (six, if by my count) interesting deals he and his backers attempted at the time and describes in great deal how they all failed. While it appears that the book is focused on a reader who never moved in the world of corporate negotiations, it must be most appealing to the readers with similar experience. Here they can see that they did not anything wrong; it is normal that the execs don't return phone calls, that the assurances of one day are flatly denied the morning after, that nobody takes responsibility for decisions.

The problem with the book is that is just too wordy. A good editor could cut it to half, without any perceptible loss of information. It is even more ironic because Wolff repeats several times that he is a man of pen, a journalist, that writing is what he does best. This is a thing I noticed elsewhere, too: the people from journalistic schools believing that they learned how to write and therefore this is something they can do best. Sure, Wolff is no fresh graduate, and wrote hundreds of thousands words, so it is no wonder he thinks he is a writer. But I took a look at his latest article (the link above) and it just like the book: scratch out every second word and it would be twice as good. He is not a writer, he is just a journalist.

If you can find somebody -- as I did -- who would lend the book to you, then I would recommend reading it, otherwise it has just too low value per pound of paper.