Apologies ...

... for the light posting, which will continue through the weekend. On Monday, we kick off our second annual experiment in live-blogging the Aspen Ideas Festival (here's last year's foray), at which point I'll be coming to you live from deep in the Rockies, where I'll hopefully avoid coming down with altitude sickness this time around.

Knocked Up And Abortion, Uncut

Draw your own conclusions. (And obviously, obviously, this is NSFW.)

Your Republican Party

Tony Fabrizio polls; Marc Ambinder reports; Reihan analyzes.

Bringing It All Back Home

Bill Kauffman makes the case for secession.

Waiting For Harry

Alan Jacobs - an occasional contributor, I might note, to the new American Scene - gets his Potter on.

The Dismal Art

I finally got around to reading - okay, skimming - Tom Junod's Esquire profile of Angelina Jolie, which Ron Rosenbaum famously called "the worst celebrity profile ever written." Junod's campaign for Angelina's canonization provides plenty of ammunition for this judgment, in a certain way, but I would submit that Rosenbaum is missing the point: Given that it is self-evidently impossible to write a good celebrity profile, the only thing that a talented writer can strive for in such circumstances is the sort of maximal absurdity that's calculated to, well, drive a Ron Rosenbaum around the bend. Insofar as Junod achieved this with his self-evidently ridiculous "this is a 9/11 story" story about Jolie, he should be applauded, rather than condemned.

Or put another way - given a choice between reading Junod's ludicrous, pretentious, wildly over-the-top Jolie profile and a typically dreadful, "I spent thirty minutes with a star and I'm being paid to make her seem sexually attainable to my readers" celebrity piece like, say, GQ's cover story this month on "The Summer of Jessica Biel," I'll take Junod every day of the week.

The New American Scene

They're still working out some kinks in the site, I believe, but if you don't go check out the kick-ass design and crack team of bloggers Reihan has put together over at what was once our shared home, well, you shouldn't be reading blogs to begin with.

Knifed In the Ankle?

Jonah chides me for lending legitimacy to the comparison, which he suggests is implied by the term "stabbed in the back," between American conservatives today (or after Vietnam) and post-World War I German right-wingers. This was certainly not my intention: I didn't mean to "gamely go along" with any such comparison, but merely to acknowledge what I think is the self-evident reality that many conservatives blamed our defeat in Vietnam on liberals who undermined the war effort at home, and that a similar narrative seems to be developing on the Right where Iraq is concerned. If there's a better, less historically-loaded shorthand for this narrative than "stabbed in the back," I'm happy to propagate it. But while obviously there are lefties who would love to draw the Republicans-to-Nazis analogy, I think the term has a general application that's independent of the connotations Jonah imputes to it. (For instance, when Max Boot - no Iraq-War dove or liberal lapdog he! - wrote a column criticizing this narrative earlier this year, he used precisely the same language, writing that "Just as it did during the Vietnam War, a myth is likely to develop in which America's valiant fighting men and women were stabbed in the back by unpatriotic, even treasonous, reporters.")

Jonah also writes:

I think Ross is basically wrong when he says that the Vietnam syndrome didn't help conservatives. Vietnam saturated American politics in myriad ways that helped the Reaganite Right, particularly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, become the party of American confidence. "Morning in America" makes little sense without Vietnam.

I didn't mean to imply that the need to kick the Vietnam syndrome, get back on our feet and start kicking ass again wasn't part of the narrative that Republicans rode to power in the 1980s; obviously it was. But I think that when this narrative was deployed most successfully, by Reagan and others, it didn't involve blaming liberals for losing Vietnam so much as it involved blaming them for being overly traumatized by our defeat and acquiescing to American decline as a result of that trauma. It's a subtle distinction, maybe, but I think an important one.

The Stab in the Back

Two out of two Matts agree: If the U.S. pulls out of Iraq or fails to bomb Iran, the "stab in the back" narrative is going to become the centerpiece of a revived post-Bush conservatism, and progressives need to steel themselves to combat it.

Myself, I think that liberals should be praying that the Right embraces the "stabbed in the back" theory of what went wrong in Iraq (and possibly Iran as well), because it will push conservatives toward political irrelevance. Yes, many conservatives have long nursed the belief that we could have won in Vietnam if liberals hadn't turned gutless and anti-American, but this belief hasn't won the Right any elections: Not in a country where large majorities consistently say that the Vietnam War wasn't worth fighting. The association of conservatism with foreign-policy strength and liberalism with foreign-policy weakness emerged from the Vietnam era, true, but it emerged because the trauma of Vietnam pushed liberalism to the left of the country on foreign policy and defense in general, not because the majority of Americans were mad at liberals for losing Indochina specifically. (They were more likely to be mad at liberals for getting us into the mess in the first place.) And the successful conservative foreign-policy rhetoric of the last forty years has traded on Democratic weakness in the face of the Soviet/Islamist threat, not on rehashing the battles of 1966-75. Ronald Reagan didn't go around giving speeches about the Tet Offensive and the Treason of Walter Cronkite - he talked about Iran or Afghanistan, Star Wars or defense spending, Central America or the Berlin Wall. So when Dinesh D'Souza tells conservative cruisegoers that "it's customary to say we lost the Vietnam war, but who's 'we'? ... The left won by demanding America's humiliation," he isn't broadening conservatism's base - he's shrinking it. Which is what a post-Bush conservatism that obsesses over how the liberal media undid the Iraq Occupation by failing to "report the good news" would do as well.

Cruisin' With The Right

I know it's been a whole ten years since Eric Alterman unburdened himself of 5,000 words on the plutocratic excesses of the NR cruise for the Nation - only to have his own magazine start cruising itself shortly thereafter - but the bulk of Johann Hari's dispatch from the belly of the conservative beast feels stale to me even so. The concept is part Hunter S. Thompson, part David Foster Wallace, and part Tom Wolfe; the execution has a college journalism-ish, "find a place where the wackos gather and make fun of them" feel to it. (Who would have ever guessed that Muslim-bashing, Jimmy Carter-hating wingnuts go on ideological cruises? Next up: "Berkeley - It's Still Full of Marxists!") I've done some of those myself; I should know.

Still, it's worth reading for the miniature portrait of Bill Buckley and Norman Podhoretz, passing like, er, ships in the night:

Continue reading "Cruisin' With The Right" »

Heads A'Blogging

Me and Jon Chait, hating on David Broder together.

Updike on Shlaes Revisited

I just re-read my earlier post and I think I'd like to disassociate myself from my own snarkiness. Sure, Updike's essay wasn't very good at all, but neither was it bad enough to be described as "solipsistic flapdoodle," and I'm not sure why I was so obnoxious about Updike not being a professional historian. (Shlaes isn't one either, technically.) Particularly since with this piece and his earlier Aimee Semple McPherson review, Updike seems to be tackling books that fall outside the usual New Yorker orbit - and even if he ends up giving them the usual New Yorker gloss, it's still a tendency that ought to be encouraged.

Also, it's more interesting to use the review to analyze the psychology of the typical Depression-era voter - which Updike's FDR-voting ancestors assuredly were - than to make fun of Updike's leaps in logic. Here's Daniel Larison's take:

Updike’s story is an interesting portrait of how government-exacerbated crises can work, perversely enough, to instill even greater support for the government: the Depression was so miserable that people became grateful for whatever assistance they could get, even though the very programs they were using were working, on a macro level, to perpetuate their misery.

I basically agree with this, though being somewhat more sympathetic to big gummint than Daniel I would suggest that the relief programs that people were most immediately grateful for - and that were politically necessary, I would submit, if not always economically ideal - weren't usually the ones that did the most damage to the economy. You could have had the unemployment relief and the jobs programs, in other words, without the attempts have the government rig wages and prices - or the WPA without the NRA, the CCC without the AAA, if you follow me. (Ah, the New Deal ...)

Update: Isaac thinks I was right to begin with.

God is Not Great Is Not Great

You can find my contribution to the great Hitchens debate in the latest Claremont Review of Books.

Updike on Shlaes

As a non-historian who aspires to review works of history here and there - and perhaps even write one, who knows? - I don't want to begrudge a non-historian like John Updike the chance to review Amity Shlaes' revisionist history of the Great Depression. But if you're reviewing a book that makes specific historical arguments - helpfully summarized here by Shlaes herself - about whether the New Deal did or did not make the Great Depression worse, you need to do better by way of analysis than this (extended) "rebuttal":

Continue reading "Updike on Shlaes" »

The Bridge

I saw two movies over the weekend, A Mighty Heart and The Bridge, a 2006 documentary about suicide and San Francisco's Golden Gate. Both were interesting misfires, and they misfired in similar ways - by misunderstanding where the central drama of their story was located, and heading off in another direction instead. In the case of A Mighty Heart (of which I'll have more to say, probably, in the next National Review), this meant turning the story of Daniel Pearl's kidnapping and murder into the attempted canonization of Angelina Jolie - sorry, Marianne Pearl. In the case of The Bridge, it meant chasing the stories of the people who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, rather than the story of the bridge itself.

The director, Eric Steel, spent a year filming the bridge from afar, a feat of cinematic endurance that enabled him to film at least half-a-dozen suicides in the act of jumping. This astonishing, morbid footage is the spine of his documentary; the rest of it is taken up by interviews with the jumpers' nearest and dearest, and with one jumper who leaped at age eighteen and survived the fall, buoyed up to safety by a passing seal. Steel was inspired to embark on the project by an article on Golden Gate bridge-jumpers that Tad Friend wrote for the New Yorker, but his film misses what made that piece so interesting. Friend investigated both the Golden Gate Bridge's history as a suicide magnet and San Franciscans' odd relationship to this history, from the media frenzy over the five hundredth and thousandth suicides to the city's resolute (and popular) refusal to put up the kind of barrier that might prevent so many people from leaping to their deaths. Steel, by contrast, largely leaves this sort of context out and focuses on the suicides themselves, using the bridge as a gorgeous, inscrutable backdrop for a series of conversations about mental illness that are depressing without being particularly illuminating. All suicidal people may not be alike, but in The Bridge, at least, their families and friends' accounts tend to blur into one another, while the Golden Gate itself hovers untouched in the background, its dark allure a mystery that the film circles but isn't brave enough to approach.

Photo by Flickr user Marymactavish used under a Creative Commons license.

The Vice President in His Labyrinth

Reading the first part of the Post's series on the vice-presidency of Dick Cheney - a man who “expresses indifference, in public and private, to any verdict but history’s” - I kept thinking of what Scooter Libby's defense team presented as a typical morning briefing for Cheney's chief of staff during the period when he claimed to have had a memory lapse. Here it is, via JPod:

"Bomb defused . . . explosions . . . East African extremist network . . . Info on possible Al Qaeda attack in U.S. . . . concern about specific vulnerability to terrorist attack . . . Israeli military action . . . Country's security affecting Al Qaeda . . . International organization's position concerning country's nuke program . . . Iraq's porous borders present security threat . . . Demonstrations in Iran turn violent . . . Israeli offer of cease fire to Palestinians . . . Memorandum assessing Iranian presidents view on terrorism . . . Problems in leadership in PLO . . . Info on 1920 Mesopotamia and insurgency on modern-day Iraq . . . Potential effect of improved governance in Iraq."

This was just one day in June 2003. And that's not even the end of that single intelligence briefing, which also contained a Terror Threat List updated daily.

People in D.C. love to play the “What Happened to Dick Cheney?” game. How did somebody so clinical and cautious and coldblooded end up as the architect of what seems in hindsight like such a cockeyed Iraq policy? How did the Ford-era Chief of Staff famous for insisting that everyone in the White House respect “the process” of policymaking become such a loose cannon, brazenly bypassing rival Cabinet agencies and making enemies of everyone from Colin Powell to John Ashcroft, while advancing increasingly implausible arguments to defend his own office from scrutiny by either Congress or the press? How did the man who was supposed to be the Bush Administration’s grownup-in-chief become associated with a national security strategy premised on the “one percent doctrine,” arguably the least level-headed response to terrorism imaginable?

Continue reading "The Vice President in His Labyrinth" »

Against Bipartisanship

And Michael Bloomberg. Jonathan Chait says what needs to be said.

(And speaking of Chait, this discussion promises to be entertaining.)

Update: If only I read David Broder's column, I would have noticed this delicious irony.

Good News For Republicans

Americans still don't trust government.

The liberal spin on these numbers is summed up by Stanley Greenberg:

In their breathtaking incompetence and comprehensive failure in government, Republicans have undermined Americans' confidence in the ability of government to play a role in solving America's problems ...

The scale of damage done to people's belief in government is enormous. The results of a February study we conducted for Democracy Corps that assessed people's attitudes toward government stunned us. By 57 percent to 29 percent, Americans believe that government makes it harder for people to get ahead in life instead of helping people. Sixty-two percent in a Pew study said they believe elected officials don't care what people like them think, and the same number believe that whenever something is run by the government it is probably inefficient and wasteful. The Democracy Corps study found that an emphatic 83 percent say that if the government had more money, it would waste it rather than spend it well. The government receives a job approval rating of more than 50 percent on only one issue -- national security. On nearly every other issue, a majority of Americans disapprove of government's performance.

So Americans' distrust for government is all the Bush Administration's fault, huh? Let's look at the trends over time, courtesy of Pew:

Continue reading "Good News For Republicans" »

Lazy Friday Blogging (II)

I've been meaning to work in some baseball blogging here and there on this site, in imitation of Matt's basketblogging, and a slow Friday seems like as good a time as any to link to this site, which isn't always executed quite as well as I'd like - though the Dewey entry hit me right in the "deep well of male emotion" spot - but which has the potential to become the online version of one of the great baseball books of all time.

Lazy Friday Blogging (I)

Okay, it's no Veiled Conceit (where have you gone, Veiled Conceit?), but this site has a certain potential.

Whistling Past Dixie

I like Alex Massie and Daniel Larison's contributions to the whole "does the South hold American politics hostage" debate that Paul Waldman and Kevin Drum kicked off, largely because - as you might expect - I didn't find the original complaint particularly persuasive. Drum's suggestion that "most Southerners just flatly refuse to vote for anyone who comes from north of the Mason-Dixon Line" is a particularly self-defeating form of liberal condescension: It's the same line of identity-politics thinking that convinced certain Democrats that the way to win over the hawkish rubes out in the heartland was to nominate a veteran for President in '04, and have a lot of veterans at their convention, and talk a lot about "reporting for duty." Of course Southerners are somewhat more likely to vote for Southerners than non-Southerners, everything else being equal, and maybe they're somewhat more likely to vote for one of their own than a Californian or a New England Yankee would be. (It wouldn't be surprising if a region that's considerably more culturally particularist than the rest of America cared more about, well, cultural particularism in assessing Presidential candidates than the rest of the country does.) And sure, Waldman's probably right that John Edwards "can go to places where Clinton, and to an extent Obama, can't." But not that many places. Remember that Edwards ran for President in '04 in part because he was probably going to lose his N.C. Senate seat anyway, and he didn't do Kerry any good in the Carolinas in the general election. Indeed, you could argue that he owes his current prominence almost entirely to liberal identity politics: Had he hailed from Oregon, say, instead of tobacco country, there's little chance that Kerry would have picked him as a running mate in '04, and even less chance that he'd be considered one of the "big three" Democratic contenders this time around.

Continue reading "Whistling Past Dixie" »

Divided They Fall

If there's any state where a semi-obscure social conservative ought to be able to make some noise, it's Iowa. And sure enough, if you add Sam Brownback's six percent to Mike Huckabee's seven percent in this Mason-Dixon poll, you have "Smike Brownbuckabee" nearly tying Rudy Giuliani for third place, and only four points behind Fred Thompson for second. As the various front-runners start to go after one another, you could imagine Brownbuckabee building some under-the-rader momentum and maybe even sneaking out a win in the Caucuses, which would create media interest and momentum, boost fundraising, and give him a chance to at least be an influential spoiler in the later primaries.

Unfortunately, "him" is a "them."

Push It To The Limit

Just a little something to get you through the afternoon.

In Defense of Circumcision

Since Andrew is on one of his periodic anti-circumcision crusades, I thought I'd say a few words in the procedure's defense. Since this is a family blog, I've placed them safely below the fold.

Continue reading "In Defense of Circumcision" »

The Art of the Possible

Matt writes:

“Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical,” US President George W. Bush said yesterday “a nation founded on the principle that all human life is sacred.” That, of course, came during his address on the need to ban embryonic stem cell research.

Except that it didn't. Rather, it came during his address on the need to veto a bill permitting the use of federal funds to undertake embryonic stem cell research. The conclusion, however, seems unrelated to Bush's line of reasoning. If the cells are sacred human life, then surely it's not okay to kill them in a privately financed manner. The nonsensical nature of Bush's position on this issue is old news, but continues, in my view, to be under-remarked upon in mainstream coverage of the issue. Years ago, he hit upon a goofy split-the-difference compromise and ever since then he's been wandering the country insisting that he's taking a bold stand of principle.

I feel like I've heard this line of argument a lot, and in some sense of course it's true: If killing embryos is wrong in the way that Bush suggests it's wrong (and in the way I think it's wrong) then it should be prohibited, not merely left unfunded. But in another, more accurate sense, the critique is somewhat silly. Bush's approach isn't a "goofy split-the-difference compromise," it's a politically realistic split-the-difference compromise, which is what politics happens to be all about. Let's suppose, for instance, that a President believes - as many people do - that free health care is a universal human right, and that the government, not private organizations, should provide it. And let's suppose that the Congress passes a bill that gives free health insurance to children, but not to adults. And let's further suppose that said President signs the bill, and in the course of the speech remarks that "I applaud the Congress for recognizing that health care is a universal human right." Obviously in one sense this is BS, since the bill doesn't recognize any such thing - but it's still a smart thing for the President to say. Sure, he could be completely honest and say: "This bill is a small step in the direction of my real goal, which is the complete takeover of the health care industry by the U.S. government." And similarly, Bush could have vetoed the stem-cell bill while remarking that he hopes to one day ban all embryo-destructive research, and maybe even pass some Italy-style laws protecting embryos in general. That would have made him consistent; it would also have made him an idiot.

(In a related vein, for anyone interested in the embryo controversy - regardless of your point view - this Mother Jones article from last summer on America's "embryo glut" is required reading.)

Obama-Bloomberg '08

It's Paul Starr's idea, and it makes an awful lot of sense to me. Bloomberg isn't going to be President - no way, no how - and at some point he has to be smart enough to figure that out. As a Vice-Presidential candidate, though, his moderate liberalism would help balance a more liberal nominee like Obama or Edwards, his executive experience would shore up a ticket that would otherwise lack any, and he might help secure the Northeast in the event that the Dems were up against Giuliani. Far more important, though, would be the narrative (and you know how I feel about veeps and narratives). The press that gave us stories like this one wouldn't care that Bloomberg was never really a Republican: They would take the "unity ticket" concept and run with it. For Obama, in particular, whose whole campaign is predicated on getting beyond our differences and so forth, the patina of bipartisanship would be invaluable.

As for whether Bloomberg would be content playing second fiddle, well, as Starr points out, both Al Gore and Dick Cheney have proved that "the vice presidency is no longer something to be scoffed at." No doubt he would be promised some important policy bailiwicks within an Obama Administration, and while his age might preclude him running for President after the eight years are over, that ain't necessarily the case. (Bloomberg seems pretty vigorous at the moment.) And again, barring a series of extremely unlikely events, he isn't going to become President in 2008 anyway. The Vice-Presidency is a pretty impressive consolation prize, and it's one that might actually be within his grasp.

Hef's Women

As a frequent, albeit unwilling, viewer of The Girls Next Door, I found Daphne Merkin's meditation on the show for Elle at once maddening (since I found myself disagreeing with her about seventy percent of the time) and fascinating (since she's wicked smart). It makes an interesting companion piece to Jon Zobenica's great Atlantic essay on Playboy, which of course, being a subscriber and all, you've already read.

The Future of Homosexuality, Again

A while back, during the whole "gay sheep" controversy, I remarked that if homosexuality can be detected in utero, we're likely to start aborting gay fetuses long before we start trying to "cure" them, because "there will almost certainly be a period of years or decades when it becomes possible to estimate your child's probability of homosexuality in utero, but not to 'inoculate' said child against same-sex attraction." But the more I read about the state of the science on same-sex attraction, the less I'm sure that's right. Consider this fascinating article on "The Science of Gaydar", which has this to say about the state of the "what causes homosexuality" debate:

Because many of these newly identified “gay” traits and characteristics are known to be influenced in utero, researchers think they may be narrowing in on when gayness is set—and identifying its possible triggers. They believe that homosexuality may be the result of some interaction between a pregnant mother and her fetus. Several hypothetical mechanisms have been identified, most pointing to an alteration in the flow of male hormones in the formation of boys and female hormones in the gestation of girls. What causes this? Nobody has any direct evidence one way or another, but a list of suspects includes germs, genes, maternal stress, and even allergy—maybe the mother mounts some immunological response to the fetal hormones.

So even if homosexuality turns out to have a genetic basis, which I assume it does, it's perfectly possible to imagine researchers finding a way (as the article puts it) "to regulate hormone flow and direct the baby’s orientation" without attaining any of the breakthroughs in gene therapy that would be required to reengineer the genes themselves. (Whereas with Down's Syndrome, say, it seems - based on my admittedly sketchy understanding of the science - to be gene therapy, abortion, or nothing.) In which case you won't have genetic screenings for homosexuality that force socially-liberal parents to decide whether their commitment to gay equality outweighs their desire for grandchildren, and socially-conservative parents to decide whether their opposition to abortion outweighs their distaste for the idea of gay offspring; you'll just have a regimen of hormone treatments that promises to keep your embryo straight, which is something that both sides of the culture war will find much easier to justify.

Anyway, that's just one of the interesting issues the article raises, so go read the whole thing.

Bloomberg Roundup

While Hizzoner keeps pretending he won't run, I recommend reading Marc, Matt and David Frum on the potential impact of his candidacy.

My own takes are here and here.

The Left Ascendant

Rod writes, of the Taibbi discussion:

To be clear, I don't believe that we're going to see a left-right fusion of any sort. The value I see in Taibbi's essay is his sense that the left doesn't have a lot to offer now -- that it's populated by a bunch of cranks and juveniles who are great at whining and complaining, but who don't offer much practical help. Ross has said that it's ridiculous for a leftie like Taibbi to complain about the worthlessness of the left when everything's coming up roses for them in advance of the 2008 election.

I just don't see this. If Ross is right, would he have instructed the disillusioned rightists of The American Conservative to quit complaining about conservatives in 2004, because the GOP was doing well at the polls?

I should have been clearer in my earlier comments. I don't just think that the left is doing well politically; I think that they may get the chance to enact a pretty substantial and wide-ranging policy agenda if things go well for them in '08. Taibbi (and Rod) think liberals don't have anything substantive to offer; I think that's plain wrong, and it's a dangerous delusion for conservatives, in particular, to entertain. True, what the left has to offer now is roughly the same thing it offered in the 1970s and '80s, which is to say a dramatic expansion of the welfare state - but the ideas for how to go about this are much sharper than they used to be, thanks to years in the wilderness and a greater appreciation for free markets, and the political climate is a lot more favorable to a renewed push for social democracy than it was in, say, 1979. If Taibbi disagrees with this agenda, fine, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't, and that's what makes his whinging so irritating: He's trotting out warmed-over Thomas Frank, kvetching about how the DLC made the Democrats "sell out on financial issues in exchange for support from Wall Street" and how "no one has stepped up to talk to the 30 million working poor who struggle to get by on low-wage, part-time jobs" in a year when (as Matt points out) the Dems have moved so far toward the "progressive" wing of the party that Hillary Clinton, the rightward-most of the leading candidates, is running well to the left of John Kerry in 2004.

Charlotte Simmons Goes To Yale

So a Yalie named Aurora Nichols - a financial-aid student, and the daughter of community college grads - did a senior project that was supposed to be a commentary on class and money in the Ivy League: She took pictures of her everyday purchases - deodorant, takeout, etc. - and interspersed them with her classmates' abstract paintings. This earned her a profile in the Hartford Courant, which in turn earned her, well, commentary like this on a Yale message board:

"The thought if people having to rub elbows with such a gauche and uppity poor and worse her yokel trash family made me ill. Why do we have to be egalitarian?"

Ah, Yalies. And then this:

"Her story is proof that elites lower the bar for poors. 5th in her class at a TTT high school, and a 1440 SAT should not be getting her into Yale."

Seems like a straightforward morality play, right? On the other hand, here's an example, from the Courant profile, of how the brutal realities of class differences were rubbed in Aurora's face at Yale:

Continue reading "Charlotte Simmons Goes To Yale" »

Yes, I Am Not a Libertarian

But I thank Will Wilkinson for calling that to my attention.

More seriously, I think Will is slightly misreading my original post, in which I was setting forth what I think are many liberals' unspoken premises about policies that allow for large-scale immigration - namely, that they're a form of de facto humanitarianism, and thus to be supported. I do not believe myself that "voluntary trade between American employers and Mexicans workers [is] equivalent to 'humanitarian spending.'" Rather, I believe that many people on the left think this way, at least in some sense (at the very least, it seems clear to me that most liberals don't support immigration for the same "voluntary trade 4Ever" reasons as Will and the Wall Street Journal), and so I was trying to argue with them on those grounds.

But Will is of course right that I don't share his premises either. For instance:

Continue reading "Yes, I Am Not a Libertarian" »

Our European Future

James Poulos and Rod Dreher think I'm misreading Matt Taibbi's cri de coeur about the lameness of liberalism, and maybe I am. I think they're misreading the contemporary American left, though, if they think there's any kind of significant fusionism waiting to happen between disillusioned lefties and the anti-Bush Right. Sure, on the margins you can find some left-wingers "experiencing the [same] sort of nauseous reappraisal of Democratic orthodoxy as certain young conservatives are concerning post-Bush Republican orthodoxy," as Poulos puts it. But most of the smart young lefties I know aren't interested in some grand convergence with disillusioned populist-conservatives; they're interested in harnessing the kind of "office-park populism" that gave us Jim Webb and Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester in order to dramatically expand social democracy in the United States. For some, this means a return the old-time religion (a higher minimum wage, strong unions, government jobs programs, etc.); for others, it means a smarter, more growth-friendly form of social democracy (think Denmark, rather than France); for most, it means some combination thereof. But the overall model is still bigger government plus cultural permissiveness, not some kind of "small is beautiful" left-conservatism out to defend the permanent things against the ravages of modernity.

The left's vision of an expanded welfare state as both the answer to populist anxieties and the guardian of social liberalism is a perfectly coherent worldview, and it's one that I think has a good chance of accomplishing many of its objectives over the next few decades. (When I say that things are going well for liberals right now, that's what I mean - not just the Dems might trounce the GOP in '08, but that the overall political climate is as favorable to social democracy as it's been in thirty years.) But it's not the kind of worldview that's likely to want, or need, an alliance with the partisans of crunchy conservatism and putting Kansas First. Rod Dreher would find things to like about a more Europeanized United States - there'd be more concern about the environment; more vacation days for working parents; lots of anti-consumerist rhetoric floating around; and so forth. But it would be a defeat, not a victory, for his side of things, and all the failings of the contemporary Republican Party shouldn't convince anyone otherwise.

The Cheney Primary

Matt thinks it's peculiar that Fred Thompson is angling for Lady Thatcher's blessing, and suggests that "it all points to a weird quandry for the follow-the-leader party. Bush is too unpopular to be the ring everybody wants to kiss, Reagan is dead, and H.W. Bush is the incumbent's father ... So you've got Thatcher serving as a kind of ersatz symbolic leader of American conservatism." What's more interesting to me, though, is that Thompson seems to be treating Dick Cheney as the symbolic leader of American conservatism. I thought Thompson's frequent talk about the Scooter Libby case was part of his (quite savvy) stealth campaign to woo the conservative base, but in light of this passage (from that Thatcher story) it seems like part of a broader effort to position himself as Cheney's natural heir:

The campaign will also begin rolling out a slate of advisers ... Liz Cheney, the former State Department official and the vice president's elder daughter, is consulting on foreign policy. Longtime GOP guru Mary Matalin, a friend of Thompson, will help shape the campaign's message.

That would be the same Mary Matalin, of course, whose fingerprints have been all over three of the biggest right-wing fiascos of the last twenty years: George H.W. Bush's 1992 Presidential campaign, Dick Cheney's Vice-Presidency, and Threshold Books' fall catalogue.

The Case Against the Case Against Hillary

"We have no excuse if Hillary Clinton becomes president," Andrew writes. "We know what and who she is." Well, who and what is she? He quotes Elizabeth Kolbert reviewing the two new Hillary bios:

At a retreat for Democratic senators in the spring of 1993, Clinton was asked whether it was realistic to pursue such an ambitious health-care program, given her husband's many other legislative initiatives. She responded that the Administration was prepared to "demonize" those who opposed the task force's recommendations. "That was it for me in terms of Hillary Clinton," Senator Bill Bradley, of New Jersey, told Bernstein. "You don't tell members of the Senate you are going to demonize them. It was obviously so basic to who she is. The arrogance. The assumption that people with questions are enemies. The disdain. The hypocrisy."

Fair enough. But even leaving aside whether Bill Bradley's memory of that experience is entirely uncolored by anti-Clinton bias, this exchange took place fourteen years ago, in the midst of Hillary's second, and worst, year as First Lady. I'm certainly prepared to believe that this self-righteous, with-us-or-against-us streak remains an important part of her personality today; on the other hand, she has been a United States Senator for the past six years, and at the very least it seems fair to weigh her record in the Senate against her record as Bill Clinton's health care czarina. My colleague Josh Green profiled Hillary-the-Senator, for instance, and argued that she seems to have taken the lessons of the early 1990s to heart - if anything, he suggested in his conclusion, she's taken them too much to heart:

Continue reading "The Case Against the Case Against Hillary" »

The Art of the Trailer

Somewhere along the line, it was decided that an effective trailer needs to give away at least seventy-five percent of the movie it's advertising - up to and including any plot twists that take place before the sixty-minute mark. I don't mind spoilers all that much, so I've made my peace with this tendency; given how voraciously I consume trailers, I don't really have much choice. But it's still nice to see a teaser trailer like this one for I Am Legend that manages be riveting while giving almost nothing away. If you know a thing or two about Richard Matheson and/or the horror genre, you'll know what's sharing New York City with Will Smith; if not, you'll want to know, which is how a good trailer ought to make you feel.

Immigration and Inequality

Last week, Matt explained why liberals who worry about inequality don't worry about reducing illegal immigration:

What most liberals think is that we should resist efforts to frame the economic problems of working class Americans as solely a matter of zero-sum competition with Mexican peasants, as opposed to something that could be more productively dealt with through measures that might compromise the interests of the global elite.

Of course, one might argue that reducing illegal immigration is something that would “compromise the interests of the global elite” – which is one reason (among many others, some of them quite high-minded) why so many members of that elite are on the “left” on immigration. A slightly better way of putting what Matt is driving at, I think, is this: Large-scale immigration from Mexico to the United States is a form of de facto humanitarianism, and since Americans are generally leery of humanitarian spending (primarily because we overestimate the size of our existing foreign aid budget), liberal humanitarians have a vested interest in preserving the existing immigration system. It’s a rare issue where business interests line up on the side of raising the living standards of Third World peasants, and why mess with a good thing? Better, as Matt suggests, to go after the global elite in other arenas – like tax policy, say – where the business class’s preferred policies don’t have humanitarian externalities.

To which one might respond that there’s something slightly perverse about pursuing humanitarian ends through policies that lower the incomes of your poorest citizens and raise the incomes of your richest citizens. If I proposed a new AIDS-in-Africa initiative and advocated funding it through a regressive tax that included a tax credit for families making over $75,000, I doubt that many liberals would line up behind the proposal.

I would add that I’m by no means opposed to other measures that “compromise the interests of the global elite” to help out the American poor and working class. But the measures I would support – which range from wage subsidies to scrapping the payroll tax and replacing it with a VAT that hits the rich hardest – tend to involve using the government as a middleman, raising wages by redistributing income. I’m increasingly persuaded that this may be a necessary evil, but it’s far from ideal, and where when there’s an opportunity to raise wages without bringing the tax code into it, I think we should take it - particularly when it involves what's supposed to be a pretty basic function of government.

Stop Bitching, Start a Revolution

I've read a lot of "why liberalism is so screwed up" pieces, like this one by Matt Taibbi, over the last decade or so, and they've usually made me feel warm and fuzzy with schadenfreude. But enough is enough. At least until December 2008, I declare a moratorium on left-of-center whinging about how screwed up the left-of-center is. It's one thing to complain when you're down and out, getting smacked upside the head by Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman; it's quite another to complain, as Taibbi does, that your side of the political spectrum is "a skittish, hysterical old lady ... easily mesmerized by half-baked pseudo-intellectual nonsense, and quick to run from anything like real conflict or responsibility" when the world is actually going your way. And I say that even though I actually agree some of the substance of what Taibbi has to say about the tensions and contradictions with American liberalism; it's not that he's wrong, it's that his tone is all wrong for a political moment when his side happens to be winning.

Look, liberalism has a lot of problems. FDR isn't walking through that door. And so on. But America's liberal political party just scored an enormous political victory, taking back both houses of Congress from what was supposed to be an invincible GOP machine, and there are plenty of reasons - from electoral math to fundraising numbers to, well, the polls - to think that 2008 is going to be a banner year for liberals/progressives/whatever. The right had the left on the ropes for a long time, but for now, at least, it's the other way around. Public opinion is going liberalism's way on everything from gay marriage to taxes to health care to poverty to global warming, and the Iraq War has temporarily undone conservatism's long-running advantage on foreign policy. There's more money flowing into liberal coffers than ever before; the left is well ahead of the right in internet organizing; the rising generation is having its political views forged in the crucible of the Bush years, with predictable consequences - and for once, the right-wing coalition's intellectual contradictions are more pronounced than liberalism's divisions.

Obviously, all of this could turn on a dime. But at the moment, liberalism looks less like a "hysterical old lady," and more like a winning coalition, than it has in years or even decades. There will be plenty of time for bitching if the Democrats blow it in '08; until then, spare me.

The Continuing Conversation

Alex Massie continues the Knocked Up-and-abortion discussion. Russell Arben Fox rounds up the Rorty conversation, and pitches in with his two (okay, more like fifty) cents. And Emily Nussbaum has a great essay on the narrative arc of The Sopranos, and how David Chase related to his audience. Here's an excerpt:

... the moment that really wrenched the show off its axis was a brief, almost throwaway scene in the third season, in an episode titled “Second Opinion.” I remember the first time I watched it, the way it seemed to invert everything that came before. Carmela goes to a psychiatrist we’ve never met before, a Dr. Krakower. She is eager to make the session a referendum on personal growth: She wants to “define my boundaries more clearly”—from her perspective, the issue is that she’s unhappily married. She’s toying with divorce.

But Krakower cuts her off. With riveting bluntness, he addresses Carmela not as a seeker but as a sinner. She is not Tony’s wife, he informs her; she’s his accomplice. She needs to leave now, reject Tony’s “blood money,” and save her children (“or what’s left of them”). And he adds a remark that might serve as a punch line for the series: “One thing you can never say, that you haven’t been told.”

Read the whole thing.

Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Him

It's nice to have everything I've ever assumed about Zach "voice of my generation" Braff - no, not that he's a no-talent poseur; you can tell that just by watching his movies - more or less confirmed.

And by "confirmed," I mean "confirmed by an anonymous source in an online gossip item." Obviously. But the circumstantial evidence keeps piling up.

Secularism and Marxism

Ruminating on whether the new mass secularism is really all that new, Jonah writes:

... both Waldman and Ross seem to be ignoring a fairly large elephant in the corner: Communists — or Marxists, doctrinaire socialists, dialectical materialists, whatever you want to call them. Here was a very tribal bunch. They were dedicated to the overthrow of religion and religious opiates. They protected themselves in tribal fashion in academia, government and politics. They defined themselves largely by what they hated. Etc, etc. Indeed, it's worth remembering that both Marx and Engels came to their Communism via their atheism rather than the other way around (Josh Muravchik's book Heaven on Earth makes this point vividly).

Oh, definitely - but it's important to distinguish the American experience from the European here. While Communism was certainly a tribal phenomenon in the American context, it was never a mass phenomenon in the way that the new secularism seems to be, or seems capable of becoming. It was an intellectual tribe, but not a political demographic. In Europe, by contrast, Marxism was a mass movement, as were various other anti-clericalist ideologies. That's why my Atlantic piece argues that the rise of a politically-assertive secular demographic in American life, however narrow its appeal, represents an unexpected case of continental convergence, in which America's religious politics are likely to look at least somewhat more like Europe's going forward. (And vice versa, I suggest, given the culture-war battles provoked by the rise of Islam across the Atlantic.)

Though it's certainly possible, as a commenter points out, that if the religious right fragments (and the Republican Party goes into the political wilderness), the nascent mass secularism will fragment as well, and what seems to be an anti-clerical dawn in American life will prove to be a false one. At the very least, there's going to be ebb and flow in the culture wars, and since we've just experienced a high tide in the Bush years it's likely that passions will cool off somewhat in the short run. Still, my sense - based both on the data and on my own personal experience - is that mass secularism has put down sturdier roots in American soil of late than anyone would have expected, say, thirty years ago, and that it's both something new and something that's here to stay.

The New Secularism

Paul Waldman, in the Prospect:

In 1984, 7.3 percent of respondents answered "none" when the General Social Survey asked what their religious preference was. Twenty years later, nearly twice as many, 14.3 percent, gave the same answer. Of course, the number of non-religious people will varies depending on how you ask the question. (For instance, the National Election Studies asks respondents whether religion plays an important part of their lives; in 2004, 23 percent said no.) But however you define them, no one doubts that their numbers are increasing.

So the question now is whether non-believers will, in large numbers, begin to define themselves as a tribe of their own ... Whatever the answer is, the possibility does seem real for secularism to achieve a new awakening of its own as a political and social movement.

This dovetails - unsurprisingly, since we're looking at some of the same data - with my piece in the latest Atlantic, which you could read for the price of, say, two lunches at Subway if you felt like taking advantage of this only-for-blog-readers subscription deal. (But no pressure.) The argument, in short, is that just as the elite-level secularization of the 1960s and '70s (in the intelligentsia, the Courts, and the Democratic Party) produced backlash in the form of the religious right, so now that backlash has bred its own backlash, in the form of a mass secularism whose attitudes toward religion, politics, and church-state separation are more European than anything we've seen before in American political life. This, not the supposed right-wing religious revival that conservatives champion and liberals dread, is the newest new thing in American political life, and the trend that's likely to have the most impact on the culture wars over the next decade or so.

Veepstakes II

Of my last post, Isaac Chotiner writes:

I think the reason to pick Warner would in fact be that he would likely win Virginia. Sure, Lieberman or Cheney or Gore may have helped around the edges, but it's hard to believe any of them actually flipped electoral votes. Media narratives are important, but I just cannot believe any veep pick really matters at all, unless they can bring around a state (obviously if Kerry had landed McCain or some other wild scenario were to play out the vice presidential nominee would matter). I'd be happy if the Dems just went for a pick that guaranteed them Colorado or Arizona or Missouri or Iowa. It's hard to believe we can expect more from the #2 on the ticket.

There's no way to settle the question of how much media narratives are shaped by VP picks, obviously, but I think it's important to recognize that the last two elections - which came down to the need to flip a state here or there, usually by a percentage point or two - were relatively anomalous, and in most Presidential elections one of the candidates establishes a substantial lead over the course of the summer (or earlier) and then holds on through the fall. The size of the "bounce" that a candidate gets around his convention, in particular, usually tells you what his chances are in November: If you're trailing in the polls, summertime is your best chance to pull even (as Gore did in '00), and if you don't (as Bush didn't in '92, and Dole didn't in '96), the race is usually finished. Obviously, a Vice-Presidential pick is just one factor that determines the size of this "bounce," but it's a visible and much-discussed factor, and something that the media seizes on when they write the gauzy stories about "Tom Democrat: His American Journey" and "Is Mike Republican A New Kind of Conservative?" that usually fill the summertime lull before the conventions.

Continue reading "Veepstakes II" »

Veepstakes

Sure, it's too early, but Marc Ambinder floats Mark Warner on the Democratic side and Mike Huckabee for the GOP. Both are from the South, which makes a certain sense, given that this is likely to be the first Presidential election since 1988 when neither candidate hailed from Dixie - or since 1984, if you count George H.W. Bush as a Texan. I'm pretty skeptical, though, of the notion that "regional balance" is a particularly important value for a campaign to seek these days. It made more sense in an era when political parties were uneasy, ideologically-diverse coalitions, and when machines could really deliver a state to a candidate: Picking Lyndon Baines Johnson as his running mate, for instance, pretty clearly helped put JFK over the top in '60, whether you believe there was fraud in Texas or not. Nowadays, though, the parties are more ideologically coherent, and regional loyalties are more attenuated; hence John Edwards' failure to help John Kerry in the South in '04, and Al Gore's failure to carry his home state four years earlier.

It seems to me that what you're looking for these days is a nominee who gives you a narrative that the media can embrace, more than one who gives you a slight boost in a swing state or region. Thus Gore was a good pick for Clinton in '92, even though they were both Southerners, because he reinforced the whole "New Democrats, new generation, new direction" theme that the press ran with throughout that election. Similarly, I think that Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman helped their respective tickets in '00, even though neither Wyoming nor Connecticut mattered to the outcome: Cheney by lending necessary gravitas to a campaign premised on restoring honor, dignity and so forth; Lieberman both by being the first Jewish nominee and by having a reputation as a Clinton critic, which at once turned the dull-seeming Gore into a trailblazer and helped him distance himself from the Clinton scandals. I know Democrats soured on Lieberman in '00 because of his debate performance and what they perceived as his weakness during the recount, but picking him gave Gore an enormous boost that August, and helped the Democrats close what had been an impressive Bush lead in the polls.

Obviously there's no way of knowing how things will play out this time around. But here's one example of what I mean: If Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination, he has an interest in picking a Southern running mate (like Mark Warner, say) less because the pick might help Obama carry some Southern states than because the narrative that such a pick projects - a black candidate with a white running mate from the old Confederacy! - dovetails perfectly with Obama's "beyond our differences" appeal.

Hillaryphobia

In the midst of a piece on religious-right leaders and what they would do if Giuliani were the GOP nominee, we have this:

Several social conservative leaders are leaving a narrow window open to supporting Giuliani in the general election if the New Yorker wins the GOP nomination.

"Where Mayor Giuliani is today, I absolutely could not support him. However, I would not completely rule it out," said Pat Mahoney, executive director of the Christian Defense Coalition. "There's two words that change the whole dynamic, and those two words are Hillary Clinton."

Now maybe Mahoney is just using "Hillary Clinton" as a stand-in for "any pro-choice Democrat," in which case fair enough - but from the way he and many on the Right talk about the Senator from New York, it often seems that there's some special reason why social conservatives should fear her above any other Democrat. This, in spite of the fact that it's pretty clear that Hillary would be the most rightward nominee to emerge from the Democratic primaries. She'll probably be indistinguishable from an Obama or an Edwards on the social issues, but if there's any daylight between them, the nature of their respective constituencies - and what seem to be Hillary's own political instincts on abortion - will push her toward the middle, not the left. At some point, the Right needs to get over its fears of Hillary the feminist extremist, and recognize her for the DLC liberal that she's become - someone to oppose, certainly, but not the worst the Democratic Party has to offer by any means.

That Is Not What I Said

Andrew, on my post about Linker, Rorty, the religious right and liberalism:

Ross responds by arguing that Richard John Neuhaus and his theocon friends are only interested in persuasion and changing the culture, not using the levers of politics and the law to insist on their religious convictions. Please.

Please yourself. I said no such thing. I said that Linker sometimes seems to oppose both political action based on religious conviction and non-political attempts to Catholicize (or Rortyize, or whatever) the culture through proselytization and persuasion. I also said, as I've said many times before, that I disagree on both counts: I think that Americans should be free to proselytize privately and that they should feel comfortable using "the levers of politics" (I love how Andrew makes the democratic process sound sinister) to promote policies that spring from religious convictions. And obviously Richard John Neuhaus is interested in doing both; only an idiot would claim otherwise, and I don't know why Andrew is mistaking me for one.

Alternative History

Reading Michael Gerson's attack on conservatives fleeing Bushism, I found myself wondering what would have happened if Bush had followed through on his 2000 promises to be "a different kind of conservative" on the issues he championed in the campaign - education, prescription drugs, and faith-based initiatives - but had then toed a much firmer small-government line on (to pick a few examples) the transportation bill, the energy bill, and McCain-Feingold, wielding a veto pen instead of either standing aside or actively working to push pork-laden legislation through. Put another way, I wonder if small-government conservatives would be so angry at Bush today if he had deviated from their orthodoxy on a narrow but important group of issues, but had found more opportunities to present himself as responsive to their concerns, instead of stiff-arming them even on issues like campaign-finance reform that had little to do with either winning elections or advancing his "different kind of conservative" agenda. I suspect that immigration "reform" would have still been a deal-breaker for a lot of a right-wingers, but it's an interesting hypothetical to contemplate, and I bet a few (richly-merited) vetoes would have gone a long way toward moderating the conservative antipathy to this Administration that's built up over the past few years.

A lesson of Bush's souring relationship with many small-government conservatives, I think, is that it's one thing to ask people to compromise some of their principles to build a winning coalition; it's quite another to simply dismiss a large chunk of your political base by saying, as Gerson does in his column, that being "a different kind of Republican" means being "the kind that isn't libertarian or nativist," full stop, end of story. Libertarians and "nativists" (love that derogatory language!) may have had too much influence in the 1990s GOP, and I'm obviously closer to Gerson in my wariness about giving the small-government right the reins to the party going forward. But there wouldn't be a conservative movement or a Republican coalition without these groups, and while it's one thing for a politician who wants to take his party in a new direction to take on some Sister Souljahs along the way, it's quite another to make almost every domestic-policy moment feel like a Sister Souljah moment.

The Pope and the Rabbi

Religious dialogue, the way it ought to be. (hat tip: Amy Welborn)

Linker, Rorty and the Theocons

I've been following Matt's back-and-forth with Damon Linker over Linker's interpretation of Richard Rorty with interest, not least because what Matt sees as Linker's misunderstanding of Rorty and Rawlsian liberalism seems to me to be linked to some of Linker's arguments about the "theocons."

Continue reading "Linker, Rorty and the Theocons" »

Inequality and Family

As you might expect, the smartest piece in the New York Times Magazine's gala inequality issue belongs to Roger Lowenstein, better known (to me, at least) as The Guy Who Killed Social Security Reform. Still, you might notice a few words missing from his discussion of why "so many have been stuck for so long at the bottom and in the middle" - words like marriage, divorce, fatherhood, and illegitimacy. Sure, the rich-poor disparity in family structure - which is increasing even as the overall divorce rate is trending down - isn't the only factor driving inequality, but neither is it something to be passed over in silence.

The View From Nowhere

Steven Landsburg compares how much open immigration costs low-wage American workers to how much it benefits the immigrants themselves, and reaches this, ah, debatable conclusion:

The most conservative standard assumption is that the value of an extra dollar is inversely proportional to your income, so an extra dollar is worth five times as much to a $2-an-hour Mexican as it is to a $10-an-hour American ... Accounting for all that, it turns out that the immigrant's $7 gain is worth about five times the American's $3 loss. In other words, to justify keeping the immigrant out, you'd have to say he's worth less than one-fifth of an American citizen.

By contrast, there was a time when the U.S. Constitution counted a black slave as three-fifths of a full-fledged citizen. Alabama Gov. Bob Riley has recently apologized for the ravages of slavery. How long till politicians apologize for the ravages of our restrictive immigration policies?

Actually, the U.S. Constitution only counted black slaves as three-fifths of a full-fledged citizen for the purposes of apportioning Congressmen; otherwise, it counted them as property or not at all. The problem with slavery was, well, slavery, not the three-fifths compromise, which was just a legal epiphenomena of the peculiar institution. Prior to abolition, slaves weren't legal persons; after abolition, they became Americans, hobbled by Jim Crow but technically entitled to all the benefits of citizenship. They never actually existed in the kind of three-fifths limbo that Landsburg conjures up.

Needless to say, the situation with Landsburg's hypothetical would-be migrant is completely different. Rather than a slave seeking legal acknowledgement of his humanity, you have a Mexican citizen seeking access to the financial benefits of American citizenship. The slaves lacked legal protections of any kind; our hypothetical Mexican lacks, well, access to better pay. What we're haggling about in the latter case, in other words, isn't the recognition of human rights, but to what extent a state should pursue policies that benefit foreign nationals at the expense of its own citizens.

I don't have a definite answer to this question. I wouldn't mind if our foreign aid budget were higher; on the other hand, I'm not at all bothered by the fact that our government spends far more on welfare programs at home than it does on humanitarian aid abroad, even though by Landsburg's argument it means that we're treating a Congolese refugee as one-seventieth of a human being. This seems to me self-evidently ridiculous, for the same reason that it would be ridiculous to claim that by spending $30,000 on a nursing home for my father and giving $30,000 to a crowded homeless shelter in the same year, I'm behaving as if the homeless people's lives are worth literally hundreds of times less than my father's. I have less of a responsibility for them, sure, but the fact that moral responsibilities vary, for governments as well as people, isn't a sign of our moral deficiency; it's a recognition of a basic principle that all of human society - yes, even Peter Singer's family - depends upon to flourish.

Last Man Standing

Tyler Cowen:

I've said it before, I'll say it again. No matter what your politics, contemporary northern Europe represents a high point in human civilization.

No matter what your politics? I give you Harry Lime:

"In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Okay, so Harry Lime is a rather unpleasant character, and one can quibble with his interpretation of history - but the point stands. Contemporary northern Europe is a high point in human civilization only if your standards are those of, well, contemporary northern Europe. Those standards are certainly defensible, and indeed I share some of them myself, but it's very easy to imagine all sorts of politics - ranging from Christian to Nietzschean, from Qutbian to Confucian - that would call the Nordic countries a low point, or at least a mediocrity, on the axis of human achievement.

Made in America

"I'm not saying there's nothing out there," Tony tells Paulie near the end of the Sopranos finale, after the superstitious capo describes catching a glimpse of the Virgin Mary in the Bada Bing. "But you gotta live your life."

Continue reading "Made in America" »

Abortion By The Numbers II

Ramesh investigated the "how many women have abortions" question back in 1999, it turns out:

The statistics are spotty - reporting requirements vary, and are often lax. But assume there have been about 35 million abortions since Roe v. Wade. A Statistical Abstract makes it possible to calculate how many American women have spent how many child-bearing years since Roe; it won't alter the numbers much to assume none of them have died. Accept, finally, the Alan Guttmacher Institute's estimate that 48 percent of abortions are repeats, and the calculation results in AGI's figure ... that 43 percent of women will have an abortion by age 45.

But this number doesn't account for repeat repeat abortions. The Centers for Disease Control has a 36-state estimate from 1995-1 have no idea how these states compare to the others-in which 10.7 percent of abortion patients had had two previous abortions and 6.7 percent had had 3 or more. Plugging those in yields a number closer to 33 percent of women having an abortion by age 45. The number would be a little lower if the abortion rate of the last ten years were used rather than the post-Roe average.

And of course at that point the abortion rate still had further to fall. Nonetheless, as Ramesh said then, "after any amount of fiddling ... it's still a dauntingly big number." It is indeed, and one can object to pro-choicers who massage the data to boost their side's case while still acknowledging their underlying point: Abortion is woven deeply into the fabric of American society, and in this sense, at least, the change that pro-lifers seek is a radical one.

Rudy the Social Conservative?

Last week, defending the notion of Giuliani as someone social conservatives should be comfortable voting for, JPod wrote:

Giuliani spent years and fought 30 lawsuits and the horrified cluckings of the New York Times and the New York Civil Liberties Union trying to save family neighborhoods from the blight of porn shops (which are often mob fronts as well as porn distributors). He was successful. In my estimation, that was the most powerful and successful family-friendly, socially conservative act of governance I've ever seen — and it was undertaken and continued in the teeth of ferocious resistance that would have cowed almost any other politician in America.

This was part of the secret of Giuliani's success in New York - his ability to marry two seemingly contradictory political types, the socially-liberal, upscale Rockefeller Republican and the culturally-conservative, working-class Reagan Democrat, into a single persona. He was the Manhattan of his adulthood and Brooklyn of his youth all at once: When the subject was abortion or gay rights or gun control, he was Christie Todd Whitman; when it turned to porn shops or taxpayer-funded blasphemy or deadbeat dads, he was Bill Bennett. (It helped that the biggest issue when he became mayor, crime, was a rare place where the two types saw roughly eye to eye.)

The difficulty with his Presidential candidacy, though, is that the Rockefeller Republican side of his persona, the tax cuts and Planned Parenthood side, has eclipsed the Reagan-Democrat side. Or at least it isn't clear what he has to offer the Reagan Democrat constituency on domestic policy, given that nobody's looking for a President who'll clean up the porn industry or shut down the NEA. (Though I should note that Reihan and I suggested some issues he might take up.)

Maybe it doesn't matter: Maybe this will be a foreign policy election to the exclusion of every other issue, and the Reagan Democrat vote will be won or lost based on how well Giuliani can make swing voters hear Reagan on Communism when he talks about Iraq and the War on Terror. But my suspicion is that before the race is over, he'll find himself wishing that there was a culture-war debate roiling working-class neighborhoods - in Ohio, say, or maybe Florida - where he could comfortably and plausibly come down on the same side of the issue as Bill Bennett.

Photo by Flickr user VictoryNH used under a Creative Commons license.

How The Sopranos Ends III

Believe it or not, I still don't know - some blogger I am! - thanks to a confluence of events that will prevent me from seeing the final episode until this evening. So apologies for the lack of insta-analysis, and if blogging is light today, it's because I'm limiting my consumption of media to places that won't give anything away - which in our spoiler-obsessed age is precious few.

(And I won't read the comments on this post till tonight either, so no need to self-censor.)

Abortion By the Numbers

Back to Dana Stevens, and "the 77 percent of Americans who support abortion rights—and the 40 percent or more of American women who have exercised that right." Ramesh says most of what needs to be said about the first statistic, which may be technically "true," but only if you count as "pro-choice" voters who support legal abortion in cases of rape, incest, fetal deformity, and so forth. (That is, in a vanishingly small percentage of all abortions.) The numbers on abortion are almost infinitely malleable, depending on how you ask the question, but there seems to be a consistent constituency of around forty percent for the current abortion regime, around twenty percent for the strict pro-life positions, and around forty percent for further restrictions of varying degrees. Pro-lifers like to say that seventy percent of Americans oppose ninety percent of abortions (or variations on that theme), which is a little bit of a stretch, but at least as close to the truth as what Stevens is claiming.

Stevens' second statistic - the percentage of American women who have had abortions - is likewise dubious, though it may not be all that far off. I haven't found a really rigorous analysis of this question, but the Guttmacher Institute says "at current rates more than one-third will have had an abortion by age 45," while the National Abortion Federation (presumably drawing on the same data) says "35% of all women of reproductive age in America today will have had an abortion by the time they reach the age of 45." So not quite forty percent, but within hailing distance. I can't find the underlying data that Guttmacher and the NAF are using, so I did some of back-of-the-envelope math using this Guttmacher figure:

Given that almost half of all abortions are repeat abortions, my calculations suggest that if the 2001 rate held for the following twenty-nine years, a girl who was fifteen in that year would have roughly a 29 percent chance of having at least one abortion over her reproductive lifetime. That's lower than the Guttmacher estimate, but then again the '01 rate was the lowest in a generation; if the far higher 1981 rate held for a generation, my back-of-the-envelope math suggests that forty percent of women would have at least one abortion over that span. So maybe that's where Stevens' number comes from, and the 35 percent number that Guttmacher cites averages out the last couple decades. But if there's a more detailed analysis out there I'd love to see it.

Dying Into Life

"Faith is not a state of mind but an action in the world, a movement toward the world."

Read the whole thing.

How The Sopranos Ends II

It doesn't comport with my own theory about the show, but Matt's prediction would make for a pretty neat (and plausible) twist ending.

Also, is this Robert Iler quote suggestive, or am I just overanalyzing?:

Did he think Tony was ultimately a good father? “Yeah,” Mr. Iler said, but he added, “I think sometimes he loved his son, but he hated him a lot more of the time.”

Was a good father? As in, past tense? As in, one or both of them dies in the finale?

Okay, it was probably just the way the writer asked the question. I'll calm down now.

Speaking of Judd Apatow

Good times.

Knocked Up, Again

I'm a little baffled by Dana Stevens' piece on abortion and Knocked Up, which doubles as an extended response to my post on the subject. In her original review, she wrote about "the nonexistence of abortion as an option" in the movie, and argued that this "omission smells of the focus group." I responded that actually, abortion is presented as an option in the movie; it's just presented in an extremely negative light. "I have no idea where Judd Apatow stands on the politics of abortion," I wrote - and added that "if I had to guess, I'd say he's probably a Saletan-style 'it's bad, but it has to be legal' type" - but the movie he's made pretty explicitly presents abortion as 1) a real option and 2) "a really horrible thing to do." This may not be sociologically realistic, I noted, given who the characters are supposed to be, but neither is it the "omission" that Stevens suggested it was.

In her response, Stevens first admits that yes, the movie does address abortion, and in so doing "discredits the ... moral standing" of the only character making an extended case for terminating the pregnancy. But then she writes:

The question is, from whose point of view is it that abortion is "a really horrible thing to do"? Apatow's? We have no idea from the film what the filmmaker's personal abortion politics are—I'd imagine that he votes pro-choice, whatever his reservations as an individual—but for the purposes of this discussion, it doesn't matter. Apatow's reticence on the subject seems to spring less from personal conviction than from the fear of offending his audience's sensibilities. This kind of Trojan horse moralism is maddeningly common in pop-culture representations of abortion, which seem muzzled, invisibly policed, by either the pro-life lobby or the fear of it.

"From whose point of view"? From the movie's point of view, obviously! Yes, as I said myself, we don't know Apatow's politics, and it's quite likely that he supports legal abortion. But he's made a movie that - as Stevens now admits - doesn't just skirt the issue, but goes out of its way to make "smashmortion" seem like the wrong choice. He could have easily followed the pattern of, say, the Sex and the City episode where Miranda almost gets an abortion - an episode that spent twenty minutes patting the pro-choice side on the back before having Cynthia Nixon's character decide to keep the baby. But he didn't; he made a movie that makes the case for abortion seem like the province of gross slacker males and uptight, materialistic WASP shrews. Stevens is free to assume that he did so "less from personal conviction than from the fear of offending his audience's sensibilities," and to see in this the dread hand of the pro-life lobby, crushing artistic freedom yet again. I'll just stick to, you know, analyzing the movie.

Then she writes:

That same Atlantic blog post concludes with the opinion that the movie is "almost naively pro-life"—that Alison decides to keep her baby because "killing it" would be "obviously and terribly wrong," and Alison, bless her heart, is not a "bad person" who would do such a thing. The 77 percent of Americans who support abortion rights—and the 40 percent or more of American women who have exercised that right—can be excused for wondering where that supposedly obvious moral consensus is coming from.

Um, that's precisely why I said it's naively pro-life - because it doesn't really acknowledge the existence of a pro-choice case that isn't associated with horrible mothers and misognyist roommates. Again, it's not me that Stevens should be arguing with; it's Apatow. And incidentally, if 77 percent of Americans are really pro-abortion rights, then why does making a movie that takes an "abortion is bad" approach "smell of the focus group"?

Of course, those statistics are largely rubbish. But I'll get to that later.

The MSM and Immigration

If you thought, like Matt and Mickey Kaus, that Dan Balz's "news analysis" was the sine qua non of mainstream media mindlessness on immigration, I invite you to consider Nathan Thornburgh's "case for amnesty" in Time Magazine - the most embarrassing venture in fact-free sanctimony I've read in some time. Not because there isn't a case to be made for amnesty, but because such a case - particularly coming from an ostensibly nonpartisan publication like Time - would need to actually address some of the arguments on the other side, and at least pretend to a knowledge of the actual contours of the immigration debate. (It might also help if the author didn't draw nearly all his examples from a single town: Beardstown, Illinois.)

I'll confine myself to sniping at a few passages.

Continue reading "The MSM and Immigration" »

How The Sopranos Ends

Here's the TNR prediction thread. Here's New York Magazine's staff predictions. And here's David Edelstein:

I don't believe that Tony will die because I think David Chase will want to visit him again sometime in the future. He has too much stature to kill off just yet. Chase is too canny to make the mistake made by, say, John Updike: Having failed to channel a young would-be terrorist very convincingly, Updike is probably pacing his room at this very moment and moaning, "Why why why did I have to kill Rabbit?" ...

Tony will lose the foundation of his life. He will lose at least one member of his immediate family, although which one is difficult to guess. Anthony Jr. has become paralyzed by self-doubt and conscience, so he is already effectively out of the picture. That leaves Meadow and Carmela. I'm guessing Meadow because it would be harder to live with her death than Carmela's — and of course it would mean the end of his marriage in any case.

I, too, have come around to the view that Tony won't die - not because I think Chase wants to revisit him, but because I think the show is about the hell that wicked people make for themselves here on Earth, and killing Tony, in a way, feels like letting him off too easily. The Sopranos happily kills off its quasi-innocents (Adriana, Bobby Bacala), its unreflective sociopaths (Richie Aprile, Ralphie, and now Sil), its screwups (Vito, Christopher) and its rats (Big Pussy and a host of others), but Tony and Carmela are the only characters smart enough to understand on some level that they've damned themselves, and I think Chase will leave them alive with that knowledge. (Unless he wants to end it with Tony headed for the light - or the Finnerty family reunion - and finding his mother waiting for him.)

And I'm with Jeffrey Goldberg: Killing Meadow off is way too much of a Godfather III rip-off, and killing A.J. off just feels like a waste of time at this point. So I'm going to join Goldberg in suggesting that the finale will end with the Soprano nuclear family still intact and even with Tony back on top, in some limited sense at least; if any mob boss gets capped in the final hour, I'm betting that it will be Phil Leotardo. The show isn't about the life and death of Tony Soprano, in the end; it's about his soul, and the audience's (increasingly-vain) hope that a criminal they liked might be able to escape his pathologies and find redemption. The end of Tony's therapy, which closed off this possibility once and for all - with Melfi closing the door on him, in a scene that echoed the closing door at the end of the original Godfather - is the only ending that story needs. Killing him would be superfluous.

Romney, Headed For A Fall

Just keep telling yourself that, Daniel ...

Science Has Spoken, The Case Is Closed

Two years ago - has it really been that long? - I wrote a quick piece for TNR Online arguing that conservatives who embrace "intelligent design" are playing into their enemies' hands. Here's the nut graf:

In the long run, though, intelligent design will probably prove a political boon to liberals, and a poisoned chalice for conservatives. Like the evolution wars in the early part of the last century, the design debate offers liberals the opportunity to portray every scientific battle--today, stem-cell research, "therapeutic" cloning, and end-of-life issues; tomorrow, perhaps, large-scale genetic engineering--as a face-off between scientific rigor and religious fundamentalism. There's already a public perception, nurtured by the media and by scientists themselves, that conservatives oppose the "scientific" position on most bioethical issues. Once intelligent design runs out of steam, leaving its conservative defenders marooned in a dinner-theater version of Inherit the Wind, this liberal advantage is likely to swell considerably.

I think this argument hold up rather well, and I thought of it while reading Jerry Coyne's attack on Sam Brownback, which contains various unobjectionable points about the nature of science and so forth, but then arrives at this conclusion:

What happens if scientific truth conflicts with a politician's "spiritual truth"? This is not a theoretical problem, but a real one, as we see in debates about stem-cell research, abortion, genetic engineering, and global warming. Ignorance about evolution may be widespread, but it's not nearly as dangerous as dogmatic certainty about the real world based on faith alone.

Uh-huh. I'm very curious to know what the "scientific truth" about abortion, stem-cell research and genetic engineering happens to be. (Somehow I assume it tracks remarkably well with liberal policy prescriptions on those issues.) But here's the thing - whenever conservatives attack a scientific consensus because they don't like its moral and political implications and don't have adequate firepower to carry the day (which the intelligent-design crowd doesn't, to my mind, in its battle against Darwinian theory), they make it that much easier for folks like Coyne to wrap their own moral convictions in the mantel of absolute scientific truth and caricature anyone who disagrees with them as "anti-science" yahoos. And you don't win many debates, in a society as mad for technological progress as ours, if you find yourself cast as an enemy of Science.

Just something for the Sam Brownbacks and Mike Huckabees to consider ...

American Gangster

It's hard to go wrong with Russell Crowe - but it's possible. It's harder to go wrong with Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott - but again, it happens. Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott and Denzel Washington, though - no, I don't think you can go wrong.

Romney's Big Mo

Okay, maybe "big" is a little much. But he has seems to have a clear path, barring a Fred Thompson surge, to winning Iowa. An Iowa victory in a noncompetitive race isn't all that impressive, but neither is it just a native-son victory like Tom Harkin in 1992, so a win will give him at least a slight bump in media attention heading into New Hampshire, where he's certain to be competitive anyway. If he takes New Hampshire, he'll be headed into Florida as a two-time winner, which in a foreshortened primary season will make him the natural rallying point for the anti-Giuliani vote. It's a safe bet, I think, that the race will either be over or down to two candidates after Super Tuesday, and I also think it's a safe bet that Rudy will be one of the final two; Romney's Iowa edge, if he can hold it, makes it that much more likely that he'll be the other man standing at that point. (Though of course the flip side of this is that if loses New Hampshire to anyone except Rudy, he's probably toast.)

I also think Rich Lowry makes a good point (one of several in the post) about Romney and the debates:

I take it for granted Romney is going to be polished and make a good impression, so I may discount it and judge him in a more niggling way. But most voters won't do this.

Which may explain that Frank Luntz focus group.

(And yes, I'm trying to give Daniel Larison an ulcer.)

Advice For Joe Klein

And for us all, from David Frum.

Quote For the Day

I'm no great fan of Stephen Schwartz's politics - other neoconservatives are accused of being Trotskyists; he seems to actually be one - but this, on Paul Berman on Tariq Ramadan, is a pretty good line:

Berman’s opus appeared like an iceberg in the middle of the Potomac: immense, dismal, unexplainable, melting before one’s eyes.

The whole thing is here. (hat tip: Andrew)

Why Are Americans So Religious?

Because we're geographically mobile and ethnically diverse, says Brink Lindsey. Because our families are stronger than Europe's, says Mary Eberstadt. My own preferred explanation - which is doubtless a small part of the pantomime - is theological rather than sociological: Christianity has thrived in the United States by adapting its theology to the habits and mores of the American people, in a way that religion in Europe hasn't managed to do. America is an Emersonian country, and its religious innovators have invented an Emersonian form of Christianity - which some might suggest isn't Christianity at all, of course - that's nicely tailored to the broader culture in which it swims. Call it gnosticism, or Moral Therapeutic Deism, or just plain Americanism - it means Elaine Pagels and Karen Armstrong for highbrow audiences and T.D. Jakes and Joyce Meyer for the masses, and it works.

If Christianity in America meant the Christianity of Benedict XVI - or even the Christianity of C.S. Lewis, for that matter - I bet that about 15 percent of the country would be practicing believers. But you don't get Benedict or even Lewis from most pulpits; you get socially-conservative Emersonianism in Red America and socially-liberal Emersonianism in Blue America. This wouldn't fly in the European cultural context, but maybe there's a form of organized religion that would - its theology just hasn't been invented yet.

Hearting Huckabee

I went to a Pew Forum lunch yesterday with twenty-odd journalists and Mike Huckabee, who had just flown in from the New Hampshire debate. (He was on a USAir flight with four other candidates, and he joked that if the plane had gone down, the headline would have been: Giuliani, McCain, Romney campaign in Iowa; other candidates die in plane crash.) Huckabee was, well, everything you'd been led to expect: Folksy, anecdotal, humorous and charming, albeit in a manner that probably plays better on the stump than it does with a pack of D.C. journalists. (I tried to tune out during the three questions about evolution.) In spite of their shared home town, he lacked Bill Clinton's amazing policy fluency, and when the questioners drilled down a bit below the platitudes - well, what should we do about health care? - he fumbled a bit, and circled back to his generalizations. Still, those generalizations were exactly the kind of things I wanted to hear, all about there being more to domestic policy than tax cuts, how disappointing it was that nobody wanted to talk about education or health care at the debates, how important it was for the GOP to address the kitchen-table concerns of working-class voters, and so forth.

But it's clearly the wrong year for him, even leaving aside the disadvantages - his lack of name recognition or a fundraising base; his distinctively Southern persona (I'm not sure America's quite ready for a Baptist minister as President) - that he'd have in any case. In a certain way, a friend pointed out to me afterward, he's running the way Bush did in 2000, talking about broadening the party's appeal on domestic issues and waxing eloquent (in his only extended riff on foreign policy) about the U.S. needing to cultivate humility in international affairs. This is language that I think the GOP needs to find its way back to eventually, but it's not the language that's going to win you the Republican primary in 2008. The rest of the country is looking, it seems, for a President who can end the war in Iraq and move on to addressing a litany of domestic concerns; the Republican base, though, is looking for a President who can win the war in Iraq, and that's not a contest that Mike Huckabee is equipped for.

Photo by Flickr user Holtocw used under a Creative Commons license.

The Limits of Government

Brink Lindsey writes:

Ross is correct that many of Bush’s greatest misses (prescription drug benefit, steel tariffs, farm bill, energy bill, transportation bill, McCain-Feingold) should be chalked up to vote-buying expediency rather than any considered Hamiltonian governing philosophy. However, I think a good argument can be made that the explicit abandonment of any principled commitment to limited government greatly facilitated this binge of corruption.

The strongest case for strict limits on what government can do isn’t that it’s theoretically impossible for government to exceed those limits to good effect. Rather, government’s activities should be circumscribed because, in the real world, they will almost never be guided by dainty theoretical considerations. Instead, political expediency, as determined by unprincipled hacks, will usually carry the day. And the Bush administration’s sorry record now serves as People’s Exhibit A in that case.

The point is well taken, and I really, really don't want to suggest, in my ongoing arguments with small-government conservatives, that I'm a partisan of the "when someone's hurting, the government has got to move" school of thought. (Call it "Gersonism," perhaps.) For "Hamiltonian conservatives" - or Sam's Club Republicans, or just-plain neoconservatives, or whatever you want to call the non-libertarian domestic policy Right - one of the big lessons of the Bush years has to be that you can't just wash your hands of the principle of limited government, as too often this Administration has seemed to do, and expect the results to be pretty. The siren song of statism is just too strong: You need the partisans of limited-government looking over the shoulder of every bill and policy proposal, asking "is this necessary? is this something the government ought to be doing?"

Continue reading "The Limits of Government" »

Policy Matters

Whatever you think of No Child Left Behind - and I'm decidedly agnostic - it's probably not a coincidence that the domestic-policy issue where this President seemed to be most engaged with policy detail may also turn out to be the only domestic-policy issue where he leaves a somewhat successful legacy behind.

Although to be fair, you could argue that he's been deeply engaged on immigration "reform" as well - or at least he seems to care about it in the same visceral way he cared about passing education reform - and that may turn out, well, rather less well.

Tatonka!

Okay, so this is pretty incredible. (hat tip: Megan) It seems like conventional nature-film fare at first, but keep watching:

Mormonism and Democracy

Speaking of faith and reason ... every year, twice a year, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life holds a conference for journalists in Key West, featuring all sorts of fascinating speakers as well as a really nice beach. I went last winter, but unfortunately wasn't able to attend this spring's session; happily, they post transcripts online, and if you're looking for a lively discussion of Mormonism in America, I highly recommend browsing through this talk (and the Q&A that follows) given by Richard Lyman Bushman, a professor at Columbia, a Mormon, and a biographer of Joseph Smith.

(More thoughts, and some excerpts, from Mollie at Get Religion.)

Huckabee on Evolution

Roll the tape:

Of this, and Jamie Kirchick's suggestion that Huckabee believes in "fairy tales," Matt writes:

My understanding is that Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama all believe that Jesus Christ died for the sins of mankind and then rose from the dead. This strikes me as a hell of a tall tale. But, obviously, it's not what you'd call a rare view in the United States and if we're going to start writing off politicians who believe in "fairy tales" of this sort there's going to be nobody left.

I like Huckabee, and to a certain extent I liked his answer, but I don't think this will quite fly. I understand that atheists and agnostics have a vested interest in arguing that all religious beliefs are equally absurd - that there's no difference between believing n the God of Abraham and the flying spaghetti monster, say, or between a belief in the possibility of miracles and the belief that the Genesis account is literally true; and that the only reason the Book of Mormon looks more implausible than the New Testament is because the New Testament is older, and so forth. But serious Christians should reject that view (for reasons that I think should be self-evident, though I'm sure I'll have reason to elaborate on them at a later date), and within Christendom there's a pretty big distinction between the faith-and-reason crowd and the kind of fideism that Huckabee seemed to be gesturing at last night. I don't necessarily object to a President who claims to be agnostic on evolution, and I think Huckabee's point that "I’m not planning on writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book ... I’m asking for the opportunity to be president of the United States" is basically correct. But all things being equal, I would prefer a President who can reconcile his belief in the truth of Christianity with what seems to me to be the only conclusion that reason allows for at the moment - namely, the common ancestry of life on Earth.

Crusading Conservatism?

Continuing this discussion, Jonah writes:

While I have specific criticisms for all of them, my common critique of Bushian compassionate conservatism, Brooksian National Greatness, Buchanism and Crunchy Conservatism is the common sense of crusade to all of them. There are times for crusades, to be sure. But I don't think conservatism should ever be redefined as one lest it become just another populist fever. And I'll go a step further. The reason Bush pushed me toward libertarianism is because I think any agenda built on the logic of the crusade is either doomed to failure or destined to be very un-conservative. It's in the nature of things that you will always leave some children behind.

As for specific reforms, by all means go for it! I'm all for fixing what's broke, when we can, where we can. Thommy Thompson is a hero for his pioneering contributions to welfare reform (which, contrary to popular understanding wasn't entirely an exercise in shrinking government). Giuliani saved my home town. But he didn't do it as part of some warmed-over social gospel, to provide "meaning" to people or as part of some vaguely utopian agenda. He did it out of good old fashioned bourgeois notions of public order, right and wrong and the belief that if government gets out of the way people can manage their own affairs. By all means, conservatives should fix the tax code, shrink the federal government, improve the health care system (hopefully with market based reforms), and help families. I'm even for censorship . But let us have no more New Politics and redeeming crusades. They always end in disappointment, at least for conservatives.

I basically agree with this.

Continue reading "Crusading Conservatism?" »

The Teflon President

My latest Bloggingheads appearance, alongside the redoubtable Mark Schmitt, finds me whining (yet again) about the absence of a non-Ron Paul critic of Bush's foreign policy in the GOP field. Daniel Larison, parsing a Washington Post poll, reminds me (yet again) why there isn't one:

The response to question 45 is amazing. Asked of “leaned Republicans” whether Bush is leading the GOP in the right direction or the wrong direction 65% still say he is leading the party in the right direction ... The support for Bush’s party leadership helps to explain why most of the GOP presidential candidates are not heading off in bold new directions. They find themselves confronted with core constituencies that apparently think Mr. Bush has been good for the Republican Party and is doing the right sorts of things for that party, so they have to play along. It is basically inexplicable why all these Republicans think this, but there you have it.

These are numbers from after the start of the pundits' revolt over immigration reform, mind you. It's an axiom of American politics, apparently: Come what may, the base will always like George W. Bush.

Buchanan '08

Matt writes:

Buchanan's 2000 campaign struck me as wildly undermotivated at the time. By today, it looks very well motivated in retrospect -- there seems to be a clear political space for someone who espouses a Buchanan-esque combination of foreign policy restraint, globalization skepticism, nativism, and culture war populism. Crucially, this political space also seemed to be open in 2004. If Buchanan had run then rather than in 2000, it seems to me that he could have easily picked up 3-4 percent and tipped the election to Kerry.

I dunno - I agree that Bush version 2000 (he of the "humble" foreign policy) wasn't the ideal candidate for a Buchananite to run against, but in a certain way '00 was a better year for a third party candidate than '04, because the stakes in the election seemed to be so low, so why not cast a protest vote? In the Bush-Kerry race, by contrast, a lot of the pundits didn't much like either candidate, but everyone seemed to agree that the stakes in the election were extremely high (I'm not sure that view has been borne out by events, but that's an argument for another day), and that nothing less than the security of the United States was at stake. To overgeneralize a bit, it was a "fear" election on both sides - liberals were terrified of what another four years of Bush would mean for the country, conservatives were terrified of what a President Kerry would mean for the War on Terror, and independents broke left or right depending on which fear they gravitated toward. Sure, there were some anti-Iraq War conservatives floating around, but most of them were either hard-line war-on-terror hawks who regarded the Iraq War as a mistake but also a fait accompli and wanted to keep the Republicans in charge to protect the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, and so forth - or else they were Rockefeller Republican types who were socially-liberal enough to feel comfortable pulling the lever for Kerry. Throw in the fact that the Republican base had forged a personal bond with Bush in a way they hadn't yet in 2000, and the absence of immigration as a galvanizer for anti-Administration feeling on the right, and it's hard for me to imagine Buchanan getting any more traction in '04 than he did four years before.

But '08, on the other hand, might be a different story. Not for Buchanan himself, presumably - he's too old and too overexposed at this point - but if Rudy Giuliani (or even John McCain) takes the GOP nomination, there will be a lot of disgruntled cultural conservatives out there, creating an obvious opening for a third-party candidate running to the nominee's right on abortion and immigration while advancing a Jacksonian critique of the Iraq War (if not necessarily a Ron Paulesqe critique of American foreign policy since 1945). The difficulty is that it's hard to think of a national figure who's a natural fit for that role.

Though you know, Dan Quayle is only sixty ...

Ambinder '08

You may have noticed that the Atlantic's blogging empire now includes Marc Ambinder, last seen starring in The Note: First Blood, Part II, and The Hotline II: The Wrath of Chuck Todd. He'll be crushing his enemies, driving them before him, and hearing the lamentations of their women; also, he'll be reporting on the '08 election and national politics.

The Eye of the Beholder

Ezra Klein on Knocked Up:

The flick is pro-choice in the most literal sense of the term. Katherine Heigl's character receives advice in both directions, and then makes a decision -- a decision the audience may very well conclude is the wrong one. But she has a choice; nothing is forced on her, and the most explicit scene on abortion features an eloquent speech by her mother advising her to end the pregnancy because, at this point, she's not ready, and these are not the right circumstances. Heigl, it turns out, disagrees, but that's a perfectly allowable, and indeed respectable, decision within the choice framework.

Which just goes to show you, I guess, that the preconceptions you carry into a movie make all the difference in the world. Ezra, who's of course pro-choice, watched a mother urge her daughter to "take care of it - just take care of it!" so that someday she can have "a real baby," and saw an "eloquent" statement of the pro-abortion position. I saw a mother who seemed to exist only to make the pro-choice side look deeply unpleasant: She was the embodiment of the uptight, respectability-uber-alles, Rockefeller Republican WASP, dropping into a movie whose genre is deeply inhospitable to that type - and moreover, she never showed up again in the film (not even at the birth), save for a cameo during the closing credits, apparently leaving Katherine Heigl's character to fend for herself once she declined to "take care of it."

But maybe Ezra has it right, and I was just looking at the thing through choose-life-colored glasses.

I Draw The Line At the Gadsden Purchase

J. Goodrich, on the conservative crack-up:

Immigration is the point where the odd marriage that makes up the Republican base falls apart, the marriage between social conservatives (who are mostly not wealthy) and wealthy business interests. The social conservatives want a big fence around America (as they define it), whereas the business interests want cheap labor to successfully cross that fence. There was no way that Bush could have satisfied both of these desires at the same time.

"As they define it"? Did I miss the memo where immigration restrictionists want to fall back to the Nueces River and build the border fence there? Or the one where they advocated the conquest of the Maritime Provinces, followed by the construction of a Maginot Line along the Quebec-New Brunswick border?

Seriously, how does Goodrich "define" America? Does it include Mexico? France? Or is she too principled a strict-constructionist to recognize the Louisiana Purchase?

Myrna Minkoff vs. Sam Brownback

One of the more annoying aspects of the whole Amanda Marcotte affair was the fact that various young liberals I respect felt the need - out of friendship, or a desire to circle the wagons, or a little of both - to use the controversy as an occasion to throw valentines to the Minkoff of the blogosphere, describing themselves as "big fans" of her work and praising her "gifted, expressive, and wide-ranging" writing style.

That would be this Amanda Marcotte, just so we're clear. I would have described her prose as "Menckenesque," myself, but to each his own ...

The Lessons of Bushism

Jonah raises an excellent question - do conservatives of a non-libertarian stripe have a leg to stand on in their criticisms of the Bush Administration's domestic policy? After all, he argues, the ideological touchstone of this Administration has been a critique of libertarianism and small-government conservatism, and if we don't like what Bush has wrought - with immigration "reform" being the latest example - than don't we need to admit that the critique was a mistake, and join Jonah in becoming "more libertarian in response to the Bush years"? In effect, he's tossing the same accusation at Rod Dreher that Andrew hurled at David Brooks a while back: Andrew argued that Bush has gone wrong by being too Brooksian, Jonah suggests that Bush has gone wrong by steering too close to Crunchy Condom (and a Pat Buchananesque "conservatism of the heart," for that matter), and the upshot for both Andrew and Jonah is that the reform-conservatives have been discredited, and only a purer small-government conservatism retains any credibility. If innovation gave us Bush, then innovation must be a bad idea.

Continue reading "The Lessons of Bushism" »

Zodiac Revisited

You probably didn't see David Fincher's Zodiac when it came out this spring, at least judging by these box office numbers. But you should have.

Your Debate Coverage

No, not that one: I mean Reihan, Ruffini and yet more Reihan on the future of the conservative movement.

Test

This is a test:

Whores For Money

This interview almost - almost - makes me want to forgive George Clooney for Good Night and Good Luck and Syriana. (I'll never forgive the critics who pretended they were good movies.)

America The Fortunate

In our enemies, that is. The latest group of terror plotters seem to be smarter than the idiots from New Jersey who were planning to attack Fort Dix - at the very least, they picked a more intelligent target to go after than a military base - but geniuses they aren't. Here's one of them explaining why hitting JFK Airport would be more damaging to America than the attack on the twin towers:

"Any time you hit Kennedy, it is the most hurtful thing to the United States. To hit John F. Kennedy, wow ... they love John F. Kennedy like he's the man ... if you hit that, this whole country will be mourning. You can kill the man twice," Defreitas said in another conversation.

Yep, they've got America figured out, all right ...

Choosing Life

This is my last Knocked Up post, I swear (must ... finish ... actual ... review), but I couldn't let this Dana Stevens line pass:

Allow me to briefly divagate here on the nonexistence of abortion as an option in Knocked Up. This omission smells of the focus group, and it's a disappointment in a movie that otherwise prides itself on its unsentimental honesty about the realities of unplanned parenthood. It's just not believable that, in Alison and Ben's upper-middle-class, secular L.A. milieu, abortion would not be matter-of-factly discussed as a possibility in the case of a pregnancy this accidental. If she doesn't want one, great—obviously, there'd be no movie if she did—but let's hear about why not. Otherwise, her character becomes a cipher, a foil for Ben's epiphanies about growing up, without being allowed any epiphanies of her own. The biggest unanswered question about Heigl's character is one the movie never tiptoes near—why does she decide to keep the baby?

Now Stevens is right that a typical young, upwardly-mobile, apparently-secular female professional who gets pregnant from a one-night stand with a loserish guy is a prime candidate to get an abortion, and the Knocked Up scenario is, in that regard, sociologically unlikely. But it's simply not true that the movie tiptoes around the abortion issue, or makes it seem like the option doesn't exist: There are two conversations in which first the hero and then the heroine are explicitly urged to get an abortion, Seth Rogen's Ben by one of his slacker housemates and Katherine Heigl's Alison by her mother. And it's very clear, in the context of the film's script, why Katherine decides to keep the baby - because abortion is a really horrible thing to do, and only a buffoon (Ben's friend) or a hissable villain (Alison's Mom, who tells her to wait till she's ready to have a "real baby") would tell someone to get one. I have no idea where Judd Apatow stands on the politics of abortion - if I had to guess, I'd say he's probably a Saletan-style "it's bad, but it has to be legal" type - but as far as the morality of the procedure goes, Knocked Up is almost naively pro-life: Of course Alison decided to "keep" the baby, the script suggests, because killing it would be terribly and obviously wrong, and she's not a bad person. This may be sociologically unrealistic, but it's not a "let's not offend the audience" cop-out.

Defending Bill O'Reilly

Hey, somebody has to do it. Everyone's all riled up about these comments, which O'Reilly made during an interview with John McCain:

But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you're a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right. So I say you've got to cap with a number.

Now, is O'Reilly really saying that we need to defend the precious white, Christian, male power structure against a foreign onslaught, as his critics are suggesting? Or is he just saying, rather clumsily, that the "far-left" sees open immigration as a way to socially engineer America as we know it - which they perceive as dominated by a pernicious, patriarchal, Anglo-Saxon power structure - out of existence, as part of their "hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go" agenda? I think it's ambiguous, and it seems at least as likely that he's caricaturing lefty views as that he's expressing his deep, dark Christofascist fantasties. (The "which you're a part, and so am I" line, in particular, sounds like an attempt at a joke to me - akin to my self-identifying with "the patriarchy," for instance, in a discussion of feminist interpretations of American politics, even though I don't actually think of myself as part of any such beast.) So when O'Reilly says that "in that regard, Pat Buchanan is right," it seems to me that he's saying that Buchanan is right on the narrow point that lefty multiculturalists see open borders as a weapon in their struggle to Rigoberta Menchu-ize Western Civilization, and that conservatives should be opposed to anything that lefty multiculturalists favor.

Things To Watch Today

The production values aren't as good as, say, Tea Partay, and the script isn't quite as funny, but no discussion of douchery would be complete without it:

Things To Read Today

Rod Dreher on how Boss Hogg crowded out Jefferson Davis in the Southern imagination. Michael Brendan Dougherty on paleoconservatism's long war. Megan McArdle's latest epic blog series, this time covering mass transit. Reihan on Chris Caldwell (and the Caldwell itself, of course, if you haven't already).

What Is Secularism?

I can't recommend Razib's enormously intelligent post on religion, secularization, and various associated topics highly enough, and Reihan's (somewhat more personal) response is likewise thought-provoking. I'd only quibble with Razib's remark that "Europeans are post-Christian, but not predominantly 'secular,' if that means lack of belief in God and a 'spirit or life force'" - not because he's wrong that a widespread "supernaturalism" prevails even (or especially) in the absence of organized religion, but because I think that it's worth employing a definition of secularism that doesn't conflate it with atheism.

In the forthcoming, not-yet-online Atlantic, for instance, I have a short piece analyzing the rise of mass secularism in America, which draws on this paper by Michael Hout and Claude Fischer on the remarkable growth in the percentage of Americans with "no religious preference." Hout and Fischer attribute this growth, in part, to people self-defining against organized religion because of its association with conservative politics, but (like Razib) they shy away from calling this phenomenon "secularism" because many of the "no religious preference" types retain supernatural beliefs. But I tend to think that the term "secularism" is actually most useful, and exact, when applied to a political hostility to organized religion of precisely the kind that Hout and Fischer are documenting, rather than to a more general disbelief in the supernatural. "Secularist" should be synonymous with "anti-clericalist," in other words, rather than with "unbeliever." (It seems like a poor definition of secularist that excludes Deists like Thomas Paine and Voltaire - or that excludes Sam Harris, for that matter, because of his forays into Eastern mysticism.)

There are two strains of secularism, I would argue, which are usually intertwined but philosophically distinct: A soft secularism that argues for a legal separation of church and politics - no school prayer, no federal funds for churches, etc - and a hard secularism that militates for a complete separation of religion and politics, and shades easily into hostility toward organized religion in a general. But neither form precludes private belief in the supernatural. A perfectly "secular" society would be defined not by universal atheism, but by a religion-free politics in the short run, and probably a long-run "decoupling," as Razib puts it, of supernatural beliefs from religious institutions.

The dictionary, of course, tries to have it both ways, like the squish it is.

Photo by Flickr user Dhammza used under a Creative Commons license.