I don't usually watch the Today show - I like my journalism a little more sophisticated than Matt Lauer watching FBI agents marking shell casings and concluding that "the investigation is ongoing" - but it happened to be on this morning, magnifying the impact of the Orlando shootings with pictures of the victims and a tragic violin rendition of the show's theme music. I didn't learn much about the massacre that I couldn't get from better news outlets, but I did catch the interview with Hillary Clinton, and heard the question: what kind of "dramatically different" actions would she take to make sure such an attack didn't happen again?
Not "effective" actions, or "sensible" actions, but "dramatic" actions. Just by hearing the question asked, it's evident that Mrs. Clinton is at a disadvantage when it comes to addressing this situation.
Back in grad school I read a paper by Bueno de Mesquita, "Politics and the Suboptimal Provision of Counterterror." As the author puts it, "when there is divergence between voters and government preferences, strategic substitution among different modes of attack by terrorists and agency problems between the voters and government create a situation in which the politically optimal counterterrorism strategy pursued by the government in response to electoral and institutional incentives is quite different from the security maximizing counterterrorism strategy." This can be drastically shortened to "voters like style over substance."
When something like Orlando happens, we want our government to take action, to take the steps that will ensure that it can't happen again. Unfortunately, we can only see some of the steps the government can take in response to this threat, such as beefing up the number of security forces out patrolling. Other tactics such as infiltration of terrorist groups or freezing their financial assets, that's all undercover and out of sight. Even more unfortunately, these latter steps are the more successful means of stopping terrorists, because if we can see those extra security guards, so can the terrorists, so they know to hit a different target.
But, since voters want to feel safe, they put more emphasis on these showy, less-effective attempts to stop terrorists than trusting that the government is doing all that it can in some covert struggle happening out of sight. And since government officials want to get reelected, they might feel tempted to focus their resources on the tactics that will appease the voters. And thus voters demand bad strategies because they're the most visible strategies.
So this morning Mrs. Hillary Clinton got to answer some questions in what was mostly a forgettable interview. She refused to "declare war on a religion," talked about government and non-government entities working together to combat the threat of lone wolf, self-radicalized killers, and called for restrictions on gun sales to people being investigated by the FBI. Sensible steps. Boring steps.
And in contrast, we have Trump, who even after learning that the shooter was a self-radicalized, American-born terrorist, still stuck by his campaign plank of banning Muslims from entering the country. He's fighting for this policy that would have had absolutely no effect on the shooting, but boy, it sure is dramatic, huh? It certainly seems to fire up a regrettable number of voters. So what if it feeds the terrorists' rhetoric and gives American Muslims less reason to believe in the United States?
I guess you could compare terrorist attacks to a Twitter war. It's not a perfect comparison, of course - when someone spews hate at you online, it's best to ignore it, while if someone murders your citizens, you bring them to justice. But in both cases it's better to react with restraint than flip your lid and get drawn into a vitriolic shouting match. You don't let some attention-seeking internet tough guys change who you are.
And this is why the current election, and how it's playing out in social media, is so troubling. One of our candidates is attempting to stay above online mud-slinging, and her biggest foray into this war of words was the suggestion "Delete your account." The other candidate thrives in such a domain, built his campaign on inflammatory rhetoric and outrageous accusations.
So, when - not if - another terrorist attack happens, who do you want in the White House? Someone who wants a boring but practical approach to combating this violence? Or someone advocating dramatic action, action that goes against America's principles, action that wouldn't prevent violence, action that gives people another reason to hate our country?
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