Tom Pepinsky

Category: Current Affairs

  • The Failed ACA Repeal: Five Political Science Questions

    As I wrote some months back, this is the best time ever to be a political scientist. The past six months of debate about repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act is one of the most important public policy debates in recent American history. With the failure of Skinny Repeal, here are five questions about the Affordable Care Act and the politics of replacing it, inspired by five core concepts in political science.

    Structure versus Agency. Is the fundamental problem with the ACA repeal the fact that the ACA is complex legislation that affected many parts of the U.S. economy that had become fairly popular in a closely divided Senate (structure), or the failure of the White House and the Congressional GOP leadership to craft effective legislation and persuade the GOP majority to go along with it (agency or leadership)?

    Credible Commitments. Four GOP Senators asked for a credible commitment from the House GOP leadership that the so-called Skinny Repeal would not be the final bill upon which the House voted. Speaker Ryan’s inability to provide such a commitment doomed the effort. What would have truly credible commitment by Speaker Ryan have looked like? Was it even possible?

    Status Quo Bias. When the status quo is suboptimal, it would seem straightforward that any superior plan would be preferred. The ACA is suboptimal, but the GOP effort to repeal it was shrouded in uncertainty about its replacement. Would a better strategy have been to specify clearly the alternative, even had it been largely unpopular?

    Policy feedback. New policies create new politics. The labelling of the ACA as “Obamacare” is a strategy to associate a complex policy regime with a polarizing individual, but the ACA proved substantively valuable even to many of the former President’s staunchest critics. How did this happen? In what ways was this intended policy-feedback-by-design, and in what ways unintended?

    Mobilization and resistance. American progressives have been tirelessly working to protect the ACA. Senators Collins, McCain, and Murkowski are hardly progressives. So what effects did progressive mobilization ultimately have? Agenda setting in the media? Coordinating the health care establishment? Others? Nothing at all?

    I’d happily read a long essay about any of these questions. Feel free to leave your own political science-inspired questions in the comments.

  • Beyond Thucydides: More Classical Political Texts for the White House

    International Relations Twitter lost its mind yesterday when it was revealed that the Trump White House is reading Thucydides; or at least, they are reading people who have read Thucydides (see Dan Drezner on what this means for the administration, and Authur Waldron for a nice critique).

    Now, there is a debate within IR about whether or not students should have to read the Melian Dialogue for any reason other than to pass PhD comprehensive exams. If you’re one of the IR faithful who has made his or her way through the assigned reading, well, I find Thucydides probably as boring as you find Thucydides. He’s a little bit long-winded, and he doesn’t translate very well into our generation. The History of the Peloponnesian War is part of the IR canon, almost certainly, for reasons of intellectual history rather than because Thucydides is the only classical thinker worth reading.

    What other classical texts IR scholars ought to read to learn the deep lessons of history, war, and the state? By far the most common classical text to appear on IR syllabi other than The History of the Peloponnesian War is The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Beyond that…almost nothing. There are certainly important lessons on statescraft from Ibn Battuta or one of his contemporaries, but this lies beyond my area of expertise. But I do happen to know of two criminally neglected classical sources from Southeast Asia, though: the Nāgarakṛtāgama and Hikayat Abdullah.

    The Nāgarakṛtāgama, attributed to one Mpu Prapañca, records the Majapahit Empire, one of the great empires of Asia, during its golden age. It contains descriptions of the court, its ceremonies, and—importantly—relations with neighboring empires and lessons learned from them. Hikayat Abdullah is an account by Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir Munsyi of the Malay world in the early 19th century. It catalogues the international relations of the colonial era from the perspective of a colonial subject who is a thoughtful observer of both indigenous leaders and the colonial administrations extending their authority through the region.

    What of their political lessons for modern IR? I used a passage from one of each as an epigraph for my first book* (scroll to page 4 [PDF]), and each is relevant today.

    If the fields are ruined, then the city too will be short of sustenance.
    If there are no subjects, then clearly there will be other islands that come to take us by surprise.
    Therefore let them be cared for so that both will be stable; this is the benefit of my words to you.
    – Mpu Prapañca, the Nāgarakṛtāgama

    The lesson to learn is about the domestic foundations of state strength, something that President Trump’s White House might take seriously.

    Many are the places and lands which have been destroyed by the depredations of the young scions of the ruling house, whose rapacious hands can no longer be tolerated by the people.
    – Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir Munsyi, Hikayat Abdullah

    The lesson here is quite obviously about the political foundations of internal state weakness, a reflection of both “first-image” arguments about what leaders do with, implicitly, a “second-image” argument about what types of regimes allow them to behave that way. It is perhaps not a lesson that likely to influence the current administration.

    NOTES

    * In the earliest drafts of the manuscript I included a third epigraph that might be relevant to today’s White House, from The First Circle. I am not making this up.