Friedersdorf on Ygleisias on Clinton

"“Clinton is clearly more comfortable than the average person with violating norms and operating in legal gray areas.”
-Matt Yglesias


...“More than almost anyone else around, she knows where the levers of power lie, and she is comfortable pulling them, procedural niceties be damned.”
-Matt Yglesias


...Yglesias’s opportunistic support for extraordinary, legally questionable uses of executive power and his dubious claim that “liberals need an iron fist in the White House to make progress” is a naked embrace of the process-be-damned logic that has been contributed to horrific government abuses in both recent memory and U.S. history. Against all that, Yglesias posits that aggressive, norms-violating uses of executive power can bring marginal gains to the domestic agenda of technocratic progressives.


...Why does he think that progressives should embrace that tradeoff? Perhaps his judgement is clouded by his status as a movement wonk: He is far more likely to be invited to a Clinton White House to share his policy views than to have its occupant bomb his ancestral village, surveil the place of worship of his family members, or send him to die in a foreign conflict where the U.S. does not achieve its objectives.


...For whatever reason, Yglesias is apparently blind to the fact that executive power wielded for foreign-policy and national-security purposes is far more consequential in terms of lives lost, money spent, and human rights abrogated than anything the left can achieve domestically through executive orders. This is partly because stupid wars of choice like Vietnam and Iraq are easily the most ruinous projects a country can undertake; and partly because starting wars, killing innocents, and violating civil liberties are irreversible acts, whereas a domestic agenda achieved via executive order could mostly be overruled by Congress or undone by the next non-progressive president."
-Connor Friedersdorf
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/hillary-clinton-dick-cheney-thomas-more/409522/