Iraq as Success Story

Matt's right; this Brian Doherty piece on why the Iraq War may yet be regarded - wrongly - as a good idea is very smart. And I basically agree with its premise - that we shouldn't let any successes achieved from here on out blind us to the absolutely disastrous consequences of the initial invasion. Eventually, as Julian Sanchez notes, Iraq is bound to settle down, in some sense at least - but this settling down, if and when it comes, won't prove that the war was a good idea in the first place.

However, something like the reverse is also true: Just because the initial invasion was almost certainly a mistake doesn't necessarily mean that the continued presence of U.S. troops is a mistake as well. And I detect some goalpost-shifting here among the partisans of immediate withdrawal. Back in September, when Petraeus was testifying and the fur was flying, Matt was making roughly the same point that he and Julian and Brian Doherty are making now, except that he was saying things like "maybe Bush can change his line to the idea that if we just keep staying the course for 4 or 5 more years, casualties will drop massively because everyone will already be dead or displaced." Now it's less than two months later, the violence has continued to diminish, and Matt's response is: "After all, internecine violence in Iraq won't continue forever and since most ethnically mixed neighborhoods have already been cleansed, it's at least plausible that the worst is behind us." And he's right - it is at least plausible. But given that only six weeks ago he was throwing out "4 or 5 more years" as a timeline for when Iraq might start to settle down, I think it's also "at least plausible" that when we look back on the last year of American military operations in Iraq, we'll judge them to have played a major role in putting the worst behind us earlier than most people anticipated.

I'm not nearly as optimistic ("Iraqtimistic"?) on that count as this gentleman, mind you, but I'm hopeful.

What Compassionate Conservatism Did

I'm working on a review of Michael Gerson's book, so I basically want to keep my powder dry on the subjects that everyone's talking and talking about. But this, from Matt, seems worth a rejoinder:

It's clear that there's a strain of Republican Party rhetoric that's similar in spirit to the Catholic-inspired Christian Democratic parties of the European center-right. Gerson, both as a speechwriter and as a columnist, clearly falls into that tradition. So, too, for most of his presidency has George W. Bush. And now on the campaign trail Mike Huckabee has taken up that banner.

But what neither Bush nor Huckabee nor anyone else seems to have offered is a policy agenda that cashes the rhetorical checks they're spreading around. If the libertarian tradition in the GOP mostly consists of a free-market agenda that's friendly to the interests of rich people and big companies, the Bushian deviations from the free-market line have overwhelmingly been aimed at advancing lobbyist-friendly policies. Similarly, Mike Huckabee talks a good game about inequality, but his distinctive policy proposal is a massively regressive (and phenomenally stupid) National Retail Sales Tax. There's just no there there. In practice to find Republicans likely to support programs that help poor people, you need to look to the generically "moderate" (i.e., vulnerable) Republicans representing culturally liberal coastal areas — Susan Collins, Gordon Smith, etc. — and Christian Democratic talk remains just that: talk.

I don't entirely agree. Bush did have a pseudo-Christian Democratic policy agenda: It consisted of the faith-based initiatives, No Child Left Behind, the prescription drugs bill, and immigration reform. The first was small potatoes, but the rest weren't small at all. Now it's true that both the prescription drugs bill and the immigration bill were friendly to business interests as well as to seniors and recent immigrants, which is what you'd expect from an administration where both Gerson and Dick Cheney had the President's ear. But there's no inherent contradiction in giving more money to schools or seniors and to corporations (though there's the problem of how you pay for it all); or in helping illegal immigrations toward citizenship and helping businesses keep their supply of cheap labor. And those combinations constitute a large chunk of the Bush domestic-policy record - or the attempted record, in the case of immigration reform.

I should add that I think it's a record that points to a significant problem with any "compassionate" or "big government" or "Christian Democratic" conservatism - the tendency to just co-opt liberal ideas and make them more business-friendly, while leaving anything distinctively conservative by the wayside. But I don't think you say there's no there there and leave it at that.

The Religious Right After Bush

Jeff Sharlet is right that the "end of the religious right" has been breathlessly predicted many times before, and that evangelical Christians aren't going to cease being an important force in American life just because their supposed "crack-up" was splashed on the cover of the Times Magazine. And Father Neuhaus is certainly right to point out the silliness of liberal mood swings where social conservatism is concerned: As he writes, they "scare themselves by creating the boogeyman of a monolithic theocratic assault and then console themselves that the advancing forces are in disarray." (You can read Sharlet's post, in part, as a furious scream directed at suddenly-complacent liberals: "Don't you get it! The boogeyman's still out there ... homeschooling its children ... telling them not to have sex before marriage ... running crisis pregnancy centers ... trying to convert the heathen overseas - and it'll get us eventually!")

But while the Times article in question didn't deliver anything close to what was promised by its over-the-top advertising and sweeping claims, I think its core points, however modest, were all worthy of note: First, that the close personal identification evangelicals felt with George W. Bush has given way to a certain amount of disillusionment with his Presidency, which feeds into a suspicion of politics in general that's always latent among conservative Christians; second, that the issue matrix, if you will, for religious conservatives may be slowly changing, with concerns about the environment and global poverty rising and the focus on homosexuality, in particular, diminishing; and third, that "none of the 2008 Republican front-runners come close to measuring up to President Bush in the eyes of the evangelical faithful," which is creating significant fault lines and stresses as social conservatives decide where to cast their vote, stresses which didn't really exist over the past eight years.

So yes, as Fr. Neuhaus writes, "there is no evangelical crackup ... there is a normalization of conservative Christian activism in the public square. As on the left, organizations and activists on the right maneuver mightily to direct sometimes contentious constituencies toward their preferred political outcomes." But it's precisely as a look at some of the arguments associated with this maneuvering that - once I tuned out the heavy breathing - I found David Kirkpatrick's article to be an interesting read.

The New Class Warfare

Maybe it isn't a conscious strategy for the Democrats, but it makes a certain sense: Take from the super-rich, who aren't tax-sensitive, and the pretty-damn-rich, who will probably vote for the GOP no matter what, and give to upper-middle class professionals, a constituency where the Dems have been making inroads for a while now. Greg Mankiw reports, Reihan comments.

A Clinton Restoration?

Among the strongest non-ideological arguments against the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, to my mind, is the one that Andrew, among others, has frequently marshaled - that putting her in the White House would keep the country mired in the Bush-Clinton civil war that's defined our politics for quite a while now, trapping us all in the political psychodrama of the Baby Boomers for another 4-8 years. The question is whether this sort of reasoning has any resonance with the general public. Matt Continetti, parsing AEI's latest political report, offers reason to think it doesn't:

In September, when ABC News / Washington Post pollsters asked respondents whether they approved of Bill Clinton's presidential job performance, 66 percent approved and 32 percent disapproved. Furthermore, when those pollsters asked whether respondents were "comfortable with the idea of Bill Clinton back in the White House," 60 percent said yes, they were comfortable, while 30 percent said they were uncomfortable.

I'm pretty sure those numbers would begin to move if the pollsters scanned likely voters in a presidential election. And if the Republican National Committee spent millions on a slew of negative ads reminding the country of Clinton's bad karma. I'm just not sure how much the numbers would move - or in what direction.

Still, as it stands, about two-thirds of the country wouldn't mind if Clinton were back. Republicans to whom I've talked have long thought that if people realize that a Hillary Clinton presidency would mean the return of Bill Clinton and all of his, you know, baggage, then those people would not want Hillary Clinton to become president. Maybe that's not quite true.

If you followed politics religiously, as everyone who writes about politics for a living does, the Clinton years were a poisonous and depressing era in American history, and another Clinton term sounds like an enormously wearying prospect. But of course most Americans don't follow politics religiously; they tuned out the Clinton wars then, and I'm sure they'd be happy to tune out a revival of the Clinton wars now, if putting Hillary in the White House would bring back certain other aspects of the pre-9/11 era. A "back to the Nineties" narrative sounds like a terrible idea if you care about the quality of life inside the Beltway, but I doubt that's nearly as important to most voters as it is to us pundit types.

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

There's Only One October

Jim Caple, before Game 4 of the World Series:

This is the seventh series this postseason and it likely will be the fifth to end in a sweep (of the 22 previous teams to take a 3-0 World Series lead, 19 swept it). Of the other two series, one ended in four games. Even the one series that went the limit scarcely had a good game -- the average margin of victory in the American League Championship Series was five runs, with Boston outscoring Cleveland 30-5 the final three games. And let's not get into all the days off without any game at all.

You know a postseason is bad when the most interesting moment is an invasion of insects.

Obviously, I'm not complaining about the outcome, but Caple's right. Buster Olney has similar thoughts, behind the ESPN firewall, and he makes the larger point that really, there hasn't been a good World Series since the Tribe-Marlins tilt of 1997.* (And that one involved the Marlins depriving the Indians of a championship, so I've basically stricken it from my memory.) I would add that the postseason as a whole hasn't produced any really memorable series in the three years since the Yanks-Red Sox war in '04 (and the neglected, but likewise excellent, Cards-Astros battle the same year). Yes, the Sox-Indians went seven games this year, as did the Mets-Cards semi-final in '06, but I wouldn't call either one a series for the ages, and beyond that it's been a sweep here, and a sweep there, with precious few of the extra-inning marathons and shocking turnarounds that you look for in postseason baseball.

Continue reading "There's Only One October" »

(N)autocracy

I've griped about this before, but he keeps doing it, so once again - Robert Kagan's column about "the surprising resilience of autocracy in China, Russia, Venezuela and elsewhere" is at least somewhat undercut by the fact that neither Venezuela nor Russia are really autocracies, as the word is actually defined, and China certainly isn't one.

Just saying.

Update: As is Daniel Larison.

Nothing To See Here

Sorry for the light posting - I'm crashing on a piece, and bleary-eyed from the World Series. While I recover, go read David Kirkpatrick on the religious right's semi-crack-up, if you haven't already; also Theodore Dalrymple's fine City Journal essay on the new atheism; any number of things in the new Claremont Review of Books; and Terry Teachout:

I suppose we all reach a moment in our lives when we lose interest in the new, and I suspect that moment comes sooner for technology than for art. For now I seem to be staying fairly open to new things--my experience as a blogger suggests as much--but I have yet to send my first text message, nor does my somewhat superannuated cellphone contain a digital camera. On the increasingly rare occasions when I feel the need to take a picture of something, I buy a disposable film camera, the postmodern equivalent of a Brownie, at the corner drugstore.

Today a friend walked into my office, all abuzz over some new online service or gizmo - let's call it "Z." He tried to describe to me what it does, failed, and said: "Oh, it's like a much slicker version of Y." I responded, "What's Y?" He said - "Oh, well, it's the newer, more popular version of X." I said: "What's X?" Which suggests that I'm well on my way to crossing the Teachout threshold.

And that reminds me - as a public service announcement, I should mention that while I have a Facebook account, I have never ever used it for anything (except once to look at someone else's Facebook page), and frankly I don't even know my own password. So if you've asked me to be your friend or otherwise acted friendly in the Facebook realm, I'm not ignoring you: I'm just ignoring, you know, the modern world.

The Zeal of a Convert

Ryan Lizza's piece on Mitt Romney is just as good as everyone says, but I found this passage somewhat puzzling:

In private, a Romney aide frankly conceded that, aside from accusations of “flip-flopping,” his greatest political liability is his religion, which is unfamiliar to most Americans. Jan Shipps, a leading non-Mormon scholar of Mormonism, said that it was useful to consider the difference between Romney and Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, who holds the highest government post of any Mormon in American history. “Reid is a Church member,” Shipps said. “But he is a convert. I’m sure he’s devoted, I’m sure he’s a tithe-paying member and all of that”—devout Mormons contribute ten per cent of their earnings to the Church—“but he was not born into the Church. He didn’t get Mormonism with his mother’s milk, as it were. But Romney is a sixth-generation Mormon”—what scholars call a DNA Mormon. “His ancestors were some of the very first converts.”

I suppose I see what Shipps is getting at - Romney's family history emphasizes Mormonism's various strangenesses in a way that Harry Reid's non-Mormon family history doesn't. But if you're trying to decide whether you should vote for a politician with peculiar-seeming religious beliefs, wouldn't you be much, much less likely to vote for them if they were a convert, like Reid, than if they'd been born into the faith? After all, most people stay in the religion they're born into, regardless of its theology or history; conversion, by contrast, suggests a much more profound assessment, and acceptance, of your religion's beliefs and practices. So one can look askance at Mormon teaching and still say, well, of course Mitt Romney's going to stay in the Church - he's just sticking with the faith of his father and mothers (and mothers, and mothers ...). But Reid deliberately chose Mormonism (and apparently persuaded his wife to convert from Judaism as well), which suggests a different and more radical acceptance of its doctrines than you'd expect from a member of the Romney family.

(And I don't mean to single out Mormonism here: If you think that anyone who believes in Roman Catholicism should have their head examined, then a convert-politician - like, say, Bobby Jindal - ought to be much weirder and more worrisome than a cradle Catholic office-seeker.)

Heads A-Blogging

Me and Matt, on Hillary's electability, how to take down Rudy Giuliani, and other pressing issues of the day.

"The Only Thing That Worries Me About You Is Your Optimism"

That would be Jose Maria Aznar to George W. Bush, a month before the invasion of Iraq. Read the whole thing.

Masscult and Podcult

James Wolcott, on the controversy over JPod's appointment to be editor of Commentary:

... it's ridiculously prissy for Podhoretz's doubters and detractors to act as if Commentary risks infection from the alien virus of popular culture. Before it became strictly the lyric sheet for perpetual war, Commentary ran numerous essays about popular culture without feeling it had to apologize to Lionel Trilling. It ran a number of Robert Warshow's influential essays, it published Jewish hipsters such as Albert Goldman, Seymour Krim, and the young future director James Toback, for years it featured a film-review column by William S. Pechter, it even made room for Clive James's brilliant tour de force about Norman Mailer's Marilyn ...

Point is, if I know about Commentary's record of popcult coverage, shouldn't its contributors and donors have more of a clue instead of treating young Pod as if he were the lucky sperm club's tribute to Roger Ebert?

Indeed. The Times quotes Podhoretz saying that there won't be a "popping up" of the magazine - i.e. no "cover stories on 'Gossip Girl'" - but I'm with Andy Ferguson:

[JPod]'s style is a mix of “Mad magazine meets Foreign Affairs,” said Mr. Ferguson, who added he should develop that sensibility as editor. Commentary has such an air of sacred reverence around it, he said, that Mr. Podhoretz, may be “the only intellectual and conservative in America who is not intimidated by it and who could therefore change it.”

I suspect that Commentary won't stop running the occasional unpersuasive defense of neoconservatism under its new editor, but I'm hoping that - JPod's protestations to the Times notwithstanding - it makes room for that Gossip Girl piece. (I'm sure Reihan would be available to write it.)

Friedmanland

While I agree with Peter Suderman that the whole "me and my cool friends are doing our best to change the world, but it's so hard" meme (propagated here, commented on here and here and here) is deeply irrititating, it's not nearly so annoying as the Thomas Friedman column that kicked off the discussion, which I only just now got around to reading. After complaining that today's younger generation are "too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country's own good," Friedman writes:

Generation Q would be doing itself a favor, and America a favor, if it demanded from every candidate who comes on campus answers to three questions: What is your plan for mitigating climate change? What is your plan for reforming Social Security? What is your plan for dealing with the deficit -- so we all won't be working for China in 20 years?

I'm sorry, but this is just ... just ... asinine. The notion that today's college kids are going to forge a mass movement capable, in Friedman's words, of "speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall" to protest the growth of the federal deficit - which is likely to start rising again soon, but currently is only 1.2 percent of GDP - and the absence of Social Security reform (an issue that only Republicans want to talk about at present, and one where the time horizon for action is still measured in decades) suggests a truly awesome detachment from the realities of American politics, American life, and human nature. But then again, this passage appears in a piece in which Friedman, without a trace of irony or self-awareness (but to the sound of Matt's jaw hitting the floor), dubs my peers ''the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad," so "awesome detachment" might be too kind a phrase for what's going on here ...

Incidentally, if you're a NYRB subscriber, or have three bucks to burn, I highly recommend John Gray's savaging of The World is Flat from a couple years back. And if not, there's always Matt Taibbi's classic review, which (as always with Taibbi) isn't half as funny as it thinks it, but remains pretty damn funny for all that.

The Safe Choice

I agree with Jonah that a Hillary candidacy offers certain advantages to the GOP; I'm just not sure that this means the Democrats would be wrong to nominate her. As I've probably said before, Hillary may not be the best choice for the Democrats, but she's definitely the safest; I think nominating her more or less guarantees the party 48 percent of the vote, since she's sufficiently tested and savvy and all the rest of it to make a Dukakis or Dole-style wipeout almost completely unimaginable. And in a year when things will (probably) be going the Democrats' way anyway, there's a lot to be said for nominating a known quantity and assuming that, in spite of what Jonah rightly calls the "irreducible core" of anti-Hillary sentiment, the political landscape alone will ensure that her guaranteed 48 percent rises to 51-53 percent by November '08. Whereas Obama and to a lesser extent Edwards both have a higher ceiling, but also a much lower floor, since neither has been through the fire already the way Hillary has (indeed, Obama has never run against significant GOP opposition of any kind), and either one could flame out disastrously in the heat of a general-election campaign.

In the next Atlantic, Andrew has a long and (to my mind) largely persuasive piece making the case that Obama, out of the candidates running, is the most likely to be a truly transformational figure in American politics, carrying us past the polarization of the Baby Boom era into whatever's waiting on the other side. But the flip side of this is that Obama could also be a disaster as a general-election candidate in a way that Hillary almost certainly couldn't be - and for a Democratic Party that sees the next election as theirs to lose, the risk-reward calculus probably militates in her favor.

In a semi-related vein, I liked Ramesh's "one term for McCain" idea when he floated it months back, and I still like it now that he's re-issued it.

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

Dumbledore Is Gay (II)

Of my remark, in response to J.K. Rowling's "by the way, Dumbledore's gay" announcement, that "a writer confident in her powers wouldn't feel the need to announce details like this," Neil Gaiman - yes, that Neil Gaiman - writes:

All that tells us is that Ross Douthat doesn't write fiction.

(Ouch.)

You always wind up knowing more about your characters than you can get onto the page. Pages are finite, and the story isn't about giving you all the information about everyone in it any more than life is. Things the author knows about characters (or at least, strongly suspects -- it's never really real until it hits the page, because the process of writing is also a process of discovery) that don't make it onto the page could include the characters' backstory, what they like to eat, the toothpaste they use, what happens to them after the story is over or before it began, and what they do in bed. That something didn't turn up in the books just means it didn't make it onto the page or wasn't relevant to the story. (Or even, it made it in and the author cut that scene out because it didn't work. One of my favourite scenes in Anansi Boys went because it made the chapter work better when it was gone.)

(I remember being astonished when I learned a few years ago, from an obituary, that two teachers I'd had as a child were a same-sex couple. Mostly astonished because at the age where they taught me, I didn't imagine that teachers had romantic lives, or were even entirely human; and learning that they were a pair reconfigured everything I knew about them, which wasn't very much.)

Neverwhere has two gay characters who are Out, as far as the book is concerned, and one major character who is gay but it isn't mentioned, simply because that character was one of many people in that book who don't have any sexual or romantic entanglements during the story. So it's irrelevant.

... And, truth to tell, sexuality tends to be such a minor thing, if you have several hundred characters running around in your head. You know more than you've written. One of the characters in Wall in Stardust, for example, is not what he is pretending to be in a way that has nothing at all to do with sex, although the clues are all there in the book, but if I don't do another story set in Wall you'll never find out who he is, or even why he's interesting.

I think the crucial question here is whether Dumbledore being gay is just a "a minor thing," just one of many quirks that the reader doesn't need to know while reading the books but might be interested to discover after the fact - or, as with Gaiman's two lesbian teachers, whether it's something that "reconfigures" everything we thought we knew about the Hogwarts Headmaster. I would submit that it's closer to the latter than to the former, given the role Dumbledore plays in the saga and the significance of his varied relationships to all the other players in the story; it isn't quite the equivalent of Rowling never giving the reader any clue that Snape was in love with Lily Potter, only to mention it in passing at a public appearance in 2009, but it's closer to that sort of thing than to, say, a piece of interesting trivia about how Minerva McGonagall once dated a guy from Slytherin. I'm not saying that every piece of information about every character needs to be spilled out on the page; I'm not even saying that one should be able to know, from reading the books, that Dumbledore is homosexual. I'm just saying that a writer with confidence in her powers would write that sort of important detail into the story in such a way, whether explicit or implicit, that she didn't feel the need to explain it after the books came out. (I'm trying to picture Melville patiently explaining to the Illustrated London News that yes, Claggart did have a thing for Billy Budd - or Proust telling a Paris audience: "Don't you get it? The narrator's gay! Albertine's a guy!")

Continue reading "Dumbledore Is Gay (II)" »

The Iraq War and the Movies

Chris Orr and Dana Stevens discuss.

Bet On Colorado

The Red Sox were only seven games better than the Rockies over the course of the regular season, a nearly-meaningless edge when you're talking about a seven-game playoff series. In the second half of the season, they were considerably worse. In the postseason, they've gone 7-3; the Rockies have gone 7-0. Admittedly, the National League offers markedly inferior competition, and I do think the Red Sox are a better team than the Colorado. But 2-1 favorites? Not hardly.

(All betting lines provided for informational purposes only.)

The Perils of Book Reviewing

In which Mom wasn't stuffed in a freezer, after all.

You're What's Wrong the GOP. No, You Are.

Let's drill down a bit in the Erick Erickson analysis I mentioned yesterday:

While the media has been filled with stories about the socons ready to bolt from the GOP if Rudy is the nominee, the real story and the untold story is that the business community is even more ready to bolt from the GOP. For the last eight years they've watched as the socons have scored every significant win on the right — stem cells, judges, etc. Only against Labor have the fiscal guys scored wins. But there have been no budget cuts, no culling of pork, steel subsidies, etc.

The fiscal guys see the writing on the wall. They see Hillary's position. And they are just about ready to cut a deal. And then you have the Republican libertarians who are just about ready to really vote for Ron Paul, doing to the GOP in 2008 what Ralph Nader voters did for the Democrats in 2000.

Of course social conservatives could argue it exactly in reverse, pointing out that stem cells and Terri Schiavo were symbolic gestures with little practical import; that Bush invested far more political capital in his (successful) first-term tax cuts and and his (failed) second-term push for Social Security reform than he ever did in, say, the stillborn push for a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage; and that the GOP Congress passed bill after bill larded with giveaways for various favored industries. (Those conservative judges Bush appointed tend to be relatively business-friendly as well.) Obviously, the various interest groups in the "fiscal con" coalition - business interests, supply-siders, deficit hawks, and libertarians - have policy goals that cut in different directions, and the latter two groups, in particular, have plenty of cause for disappointment with Bush. But it's far from clear that the last six years have been a net win for the social right and a net loss for everybody else in the coalition; it might be more accurate to say that both social conservatives and small-government conservatives have taken a back seat to supply-siders and business interests.

Meanwhile, a friend writes:

I find it fascinating that the major players in the Republican coalition, the SoCons and FiscalCons, instead of attacking the neo-cons and hawks, are spending their time fighting with each other.

It's true: As in the Cold War, foreign-policy hawkishness has become the glue holding the fragile GOP coalition together, even as Iraq has made foreign policy a general-election liability for the Right, instead of the asset it was in the Reagan years. Which is one way to explain the weird aftermath of the '06 debacle, in which social conservatives and fiscal conservatives each blamed one another for the defeat, when it was perfectly clear that the Iraq War had more to do the party's degringolade than the corruption of the small-government movement or the excesses of the religious right.

Update: I should note that the title of this post owes a substantial debt to the Dougherty Doctrine, which holds that all debates about the future of the GOP boil down to the following: "If it were more like me, the Republican Party would be better off. It’s failing because it’s like you."

The Most Obnoxious People in Sports

Via JVL, your (semi-accurate, alas) guide to being an insufferable New England sports fan. (I get the feeling the author doesn't much care for Bill Simmons ...) Meanwhile, Ben McGrath profiles Scott Boras.

Why Not Huckabee?

Why won't social conservative bigwigs back the Huck? Erick Erickson suggests it's because they're political realists who know that Huckabee's unacceptable to the fiscal cons, and thus would actually fracture the Right's coalition more than Rudy would. Ambinder agrees, but also speculates that the "SoCon establishment in Washington fears Huckabee because Huckabee can empower social conservatives DIRECTLY, without the mediating influence, or dollars, of the SoCon establishment." Both these theories are plausible; I'd only add that every would-be endorser wants to back a winner, and Huckabee still has a much slimmer chance of taking the GOP nomination than Romney and Thompson, the other plausible recipients of a SoCon Establishment blessing. (Likewise, electability - or the lack thereof - is one of the many reasons why Brownback probably won't endorse Huckabee.)

In any case, it's hard not to be impressed with the political feat that Huckabee pulled off this weekend - spiking, at least temporarily, the SoCon leadership's endorsement of Romney by sheer force of rhetoric. Or so Erickson says:

I'm told that people in the room tabulating the votes were stunned by Huckabee's showing. Stunned, for some of them, is an understatement. It seems clear to me that this was an opportunity for the leaders of the social conservative movement to sigh, shrug, and embrace Romney. They intended to.

They gave Romney a platform by himself on Friday night. They played heroic anthems for his entry and departure. He had the night all to himself. And he did well. Then Huckabee showed up the next day, sharing the same time cluster as Rudy. And Huckabee, with a speech he wrote himself, was magnificent.

Now, you can call me partisan or biased or whatever you want, but all I'm doing here is reporting. The leaders of the social conservative movement who were present, the Arlington Group members you hear so much about, were ready and willing to get on board Romney's campaign on Saturday morning. Then Huckabee spoke. Then the straw vote was tabulated. Then they realized that were they to do so, it would put them completely out of step with their members.

"With a speech he wrote himself." Hard not to like the guy ...

Update: See also Amy Sullivan's take.

Becoming the Yankees

William Rhoden:

The door is open for the Red Sox, with a rich baseball tradition and a high payroll, to replace the Yankees as the team the nation loves to hate ... The possibility is there for the spending: no more just missing the brass ring, but rather grabbing that ring season after season. But does Red Sox Nation really want to do this?

Vince Lombardi’s exhortation that winning is the only thing, in retrospect, has caused unimaginable heartache and blues. It sounds good but is probably antithetical to inner peace.

Look around. The pursuit of winning has tempted some of us to break rules, tear moral fiber, take performance-enhancing drugs and jettison a manager who failed to lead his team past the first playoff round for three consecutive years.

I would ask Boston fans whether they really want to see their team do this. Do they want a franchise whose ethos is that winning titles is the only thing?

Here's the problem: I understand where Rhoden's coming from, and there's no question that I look at the Yankees and their fans and feel more than a little pity for them, trapped as they are in a cycle where the ordinary joys of having a winning baseball team are overshadowed by a grim win-at-all-costs mentality. But I'm not sure what the Red Sox organization is supposed to do to avoid this fate: Yes, they should avoid signing unlikeable mercenaries who can't perform in the clutch (ahem, Kevin Brown), but overall I think they have an obligation, having grown financially fat off the dollars generated by a passionate fan base, to plow that money back into the team on the field. (This was always something you had to respect about Steinbrenner: He was crazy and horrible and tyrannical and all the rest, but you always knew that he was in it to win baseball games, not to get rich.) And if you do plow the money from a passionate fan base back into the team, and do so intelligently, you're going to have the chance to grab the brass ring season after season - which in turn creates the sort of unreasonable expectations that the Yankees currently labor under.

Rhoden raises the spectre of the Sox signing Alex Rodriguez this winter as an example of what turning into the Yankees might mean, and I take his point - but look, if the Red Sox ownership has the chance to sign Rodriguez for an amount that makes sense given the team's resources, what should they do? Not sign him, out of some sense that it's bad form to want to win as much as the Steinbrenners of the world? Surely not. Yes, they should consider the character of the team as well as its rotisserie value; yes, they should spend more money on the farm system than on free agents (more Pedroias, please, and fewer Julio Lugos); yes, they shouldn't adopt Steinbrenner's star-chasing obsessions when the stars in question are passing their primes. But if you're the custodian of a franchise like the Red Sox, the trap of high expectations is one that you have to be willing to step into, even knowing what it's made of baseball in the Bronx.

Dumbledore Is Gay

I don't think there's much to say about this, except that it seems like a case of J.K. Rowling trying to retroactively bestow a level of adult complexity on her characters that they don't possess on the printed page. A writer confident in her powers wouldn't feel the need to announce details like this after the fact, and a writer who understood the strengths and limitations of her creation would recognize that trying to smuggle this level of psychological realism into the Potter series is a fool's errand that can only diminish her achievement - by reminding adult readers of what it isn't (a serious work of realistic fiction, I mean), rather than letting them enjoy it for the gripping, inventive children's fantasy it is.

Update: My response to Neil Gaiman's remarks is here.

Foreign Aid and Tax Credits

Justin Muzinich is a friend of mine, but don't let that dissuade you from reading the very sharp op-ed he's co-penned in today's Times.

Huckabauer

In the midst of an engaging back-and-forth with Reihan about Mike Huckabee, Daniel Larison writes:

Incidentally, aside from his having an agreeable personality and executive experience, what substantially distinguishes Huckabee’s social conservatism plus populist streak from a similar Gary Bauer-type candidacy? What policies does Huckabee advocate that should make him more appealing than a Bauer?

Right, that's the rub: Huckabee has the rhetoric of a reformist (Sam's Club?) Republican, but when it comes to interesting domestic policy ideas that distinguish him from the rest of the field, he's got ... um ... this. (The Ponnuru plan, meanwhile, which would be an obvious fit with his rhetoric, languishes without a GOP champion.) Still, even without much in the way of innovative policy proposals, having the whole "agreeable personality and executive experience" thing down isn't small potatoes: Gary Bauer, after all, was a D.C. activist with little charisma and next-to-zero leadership experience, and as such (and I like Gary Bauer!) was a preposterous standard-bearer for any kind of reformist conservatism, whereas Mike Huckabee is a successful and popular former governor of a red-to-purple state, whose track record in government compares favorably to most of his competitors in the GOP field. There's no question that Huckabee would need to flesh out his agenda to make himself anything more than an early-primary spoiler, and I agree with Daniel that there may be more-impressive candidates waiting to take up the "different kind of Republican" mantle come 2012. But even now, he's a vastly more interesting political figure than Gary Bauer ever was.

Who Owns the GOP?

David Brooks and Dean Barnett both tackle Huckabee's gradual rise today, and both see a lot of promise: Brooks writes that whereas "each of the top-tier candidates makes certain parts of the party uncomfortable ... Huckabee is the one candidate acceptable to all factions," while Barnett acknowledges that the Huck's "taxing and spending in Arkansas may not be every conservative's ideal," but suggests that he "probably has fewer policy skeletons in his closet than anyone else in the field."

I dunno - as Matt says, taxing and spending are a pretty big deal in the GOP, and it's clear that Huckabee wouldn't be acceptable to this particular faction, at the very least. Throw in his wetness on immigration and his various rhetorical forays toward a "conservatism of the heart" on trade and inequality and so forth, and you have a candidate with as many deviations from GOP orthodoxy as John McCain and Fred Thompson, certainly, if not Giuliani and Romney (both of whom have enough skeletons to fill the whole house).

Which is why the current Republican race is so interesting - it's a laboratory, in a sense, for determining which interest groups really have clout in the GOP primaries, and which issues really excite the faithful. If Rudy Giuliani wins the nomination, it will tell us a lot about the real influence (or lack thereof) of folks like James Dobson; if John McCain gets the nod, we'll know that immigration and (to a lesser extent) campaign-finance reform are more important to activists than to actual voters; if Huckabee becomes a significent spoiler (or, though it's much more unlikely, an actual contender) then we'll know the Club for Growth doesn't have quite as much clout as most people, left and right, assume to be the case. And if Fred Thompson or Mitt Romney wins, it will reinforce the notion that all of the various issues and interest groups jostling in the GOP tent really are a package deal, and that the best way to take the nomination, now and forever, is to make sure you've checked all your boxes, even if it means flip-flopping like crazy.

Haggis Hearts Kucinich

Why am I not surprised?

Always Scribble, Scribble, Scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?

I'm late joining the back-and-forth between Ezra Klein and Jason Zengerle - continued here and here and here, with Matt chiming in here - on whether there's anything like merit pay for journalists, but here's my two cents. I basically agree with Ezra that print journalists' salaries tend to be determined "through some undefined mixture of our editors liking our work and our office presence, the time we've been at the magazine, our age, and so forth," and that this doesn't bear much of a resemblance to a system that pays teachers based on their students' test scores, which is the sort of "merit pay" that kicked off the whole discussion. Jason's right that some media institutions, the Atlantic included, make an effort to figure out who's reading what in the magazine and filter that information into staffing decisions, but I don't think I'm giving away any trade secrets when I say that this remains a highly inexact science, and one that plays a pretty small role in how much everyone gets paid.

However, one factor that Ezra leaves out is output, and especially freelance work, which for many journalists is either a major source of supplementary income or their only source of income, and which follows a somewhat stricter, easily-defined metric than salaries at the Prospect or the Atlantic: The more words you write, the more you get paid. It's not exact by any means, since a freelancer who writes 10,000 words for Esquire and GQ over the course of a year will make more money than one who writes 20,000 words for the assortment of Beltway political magazines, but it's a place, and a pretty important one, where the statistical correlation between performance (measured by words produced) and pay is somewhat more direct.

And then there's the blogosphere, where we do know (roughly) who reads what, and how well individual writers are doing in attracting readers. At least a few prominent bloggers already have deals with their publications whereby they're paid more for higher traffic, and less for lower traffic, and of course if you run your own blog, your blog-ad revenue is determined by how many readers you attract. So as journalism becomes less print-bound and more bloggy, Ezra's claim that journalists don't get paid for performance, of some kind at least, will be less valid than it today. Whether it's the sort of performance that makes for high-quality journalism is another question entirely.

Giuliani's Nader?

Inspired by Matt Continetti's thoughts on the likelihood of a social-conservative third-party challenge if Rudy get the GOP nomination, Reihan writes:

Would such a party, drawing 10 percent of the population at most, concentrated almost entirely in the Old South, doom the rump Republicans?

Consider the 2000 election. Al Gore campaigned hard in Madison, Wisconsin at the tail end of the election in an effort to blunt the Naderites. In 1948, in contrast, Truman won a resounding victory despite the defection of the Dixiecrats and the Wallace Progressives. Why was that? As a border-state culturally conservative social democrat, he was able to portray the Democrats as Roosevelt’s national party. By naming Joe Lieberman as his running mate, Gore gestured in the direction of making the Democrats the national party. But there was something about Gore’s cultural profile that undermined this effort.

What if the rump Republicans recast themselves as the national party? For example, though the party would be divided between pro-abortion and anti-abortion factions, it would be united around the principle of local democracy. It’s easy to imagine many of the rebels being drawn back into the fold over time, and it’s easy to see how such a party, having jettisoned elements that repel voters outside of the South, could do reasonably well.

I think Reihan's absolutely right that Gore could have turned Nader's run to his advantage; I'm less convinced that Giuliani could do the same with a pro-life challenger, if only because the Republican brand is at such a low ebb right now that there are more severe limits on the next GOP nominee's ability to win over independents than there were on either Truman in '48 or Gore in 2000. But this doesn't mean that an attempted third-party challenger would doom Giuliani: As Matt says, the infrastructure social conservatives say they need for such a run is unlikely to materialize, which in turn means that you'd need a candidate with at least a certain amount of star power (at least as much as, well, Ralph Nader) to make voters pay any attention at all - and I really don't have a clue who that candidate would be. Rick Santorum isn't walking through that door ...

All this is complicated, of course, by the possibility of a Ron Paul third-party run, which would give conservatives a staunchly pro-life alternative in the race, but perhaps not of the sort that Richard Land and James Dobson are dreaming of.

Christians and the Constitution (II)

As promised, more thoughts on Jonathan Rowe's quarrel with the claim that the American founding lacked a political theology. Here's Rowe:

America’s founders likewise, following Locke, were devout theists and gave God a prominent role in politics. See for instance, the Declaration of Independence. However, the God to whom America’s founders appealed — the individual rights granting Nature’s God — arguably was not the Biblical or Christian God. For one, the Biblical God does not grant men unalienable individual rights, certainly not a right to political liberty while the God of the American founding did. Further, on matters of religious toleration, the God of the American founding was not a “jealous” God but granted men an unalienable right to worship, in Jefferson’s words no God or twenty gods.

In studying their public and private writings in detail I have concluded that America’s principle founders (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin) were not closet atheists but really did believe in this rational, benevolent, unitarian deity who fit their republican ideals much better than the Biblical God could. The inescapable conclusion is that America does have a political theology; it is just not Christianity. (For more on America’s founding creed, see this article.) Nature’s God was theologically unitarian, universalist (did not eternally damn anyone) syncretist (most or all world religions worshipped Him), partially inspired the Christian Scriptures, and man’s reason was ultimate device for understanding Him. He was not quite the strict Deist God that some secular scholars have made Him out to be. But neither was He the Biblical God. Rather, somewhere in between.

There is, I think, a great deal to this line of argument. One doesn't have to share David Gelernter's triumphalism to think that there really is a politico-theological tradition, broadly defined, that one could reasonably call "Americanism" - a kitchen-sink mix of Providentialism, Deism, gnosticism, and Hegelianism that links the Founders to the Transcendentalists to the Progressives to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. And as Rowe points out, "the tension between America’s non-Christian, generally theistic civil religion, and orthodox Christianity does not so easily resolve." That's why if you scratch the surface of many nominal American Christians, you'll find that they really believe in the Osteen-ish tenets of moralistic therepeutic Deism, a faith that lines up more neatly with American political theology; it's why, as well, so many Christian patriots expend so much effort convincing themselves (but not many other people) that America was really founded as a bastion of orthodox Christian belief.

It's also why, like Andrew, I'm personally grateful that the American Constitution is an essentially secular document - not because it protects atheists from rampaging Christianists, but because it allows orthodox Christians like myself to be loyal to America's government without requiring us to accept, whole hog, the not-quite-Christian political theology that has infused American political life from the Declaration of Independence onward. That's the beauty of our Constitutional order: It allows one to be American without being an Americanist.

You Can't Go Home Again

Do go read Patrick Deneen, Rod Dreher, James Poulos, Matt Frost, and Rod again on the topic of why the young and ambitious (even, or especially, the young and ambitious conservatives) abandon their home towns for the pleasures of the metropolis. Among other things, it's a discussion notable for Deneen's sharp explication of how Hamilton saw it all coming, and Frost's somewhat-unfair but amusing coinage of the term "Berry's Razor" (after Wendell, of course) - "which declares that any undesirable social or economic phenomenon can be explained by self-indulgence."

The Blog Glut

Catching up on my movie-watching is hard; keeping up with the proliferating campaign-related blogs is next to impossible. First my friend Matt Continetti starts up a must-read election blog for the Standard. Then Noam Scheiber and Michael Crowley kick one off over at TNR. Slate already has one; now they've added two new crack-for-political-junkies features. And of course I'm already struggling to keep up with all the scoops on the Best Reported Blog About Politics.

The only good news for a beleaguered political junkie like myself is that what Jay Cost (in a sharp post that I found, naturally, while browsing Continetti's blog) calls the "real campaign" - as opposed to the perpetual campaign - is finally, finally, about to begin.

The Movie Glut

Maybe George Clooney's inability to open a movie is confirmation of David Denby's contention (unavailable online, but helpfully analyzed by Isaac Chotiner here) that we're running out of movie stars. But I think this alternative explanation for Michael Clayton's poor showing may be closer to the mark:

"A lot of movies are going after the same audience," says a studio chief. The Kingdom; Elizabeth: The Golden Age; 3:10 to Yuma; Into the Wild; Darjeeling Limited; Lust, Caution; Eastern Promises … and many more to come. "It's a tough market," the studio chief continues. "If you don't have a defined perspective, you're just one of the many." He also argues that Michael Clayton should have been released on fewer screens. The movie is sophisticated and plays pretty urban, he explains, so putting it out on 2,511 screens put it in a lot of places where it wasn't going to rack up much business. "If it had gone out on 1,500 screens and it did $10 million, you'd say, 'Hey, it did pretty well,' " he says.

I know I'm way behind in my moviegoing this fall; of course, I did just take two weeks off, so I'm probably a lousy case study, but it does feel like there's been an avalanche of "grownup films that might be worth seeing" over the past month. You can add We Own the Night, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and a few more to the list above, and then this weekend will tack on Gone Baby Gone, Rendition, Things We Lost in the Fire and Reservation Road. What's strange is that after that, the wave of prestige pictures subsides, with one a week or less (an American Gangster here, a No Country For Old Men there) opening in the month of November; the Christmas season, too, seems to have fewer Oscar-bait pictures than usual. Apparently, early autumn, rather than the holiday season, has become the preferred time to release the the films that make Hollywood feel good about itself.

Defining Neoconservatism Down

Joshua Muravchik, explaining why neoconservatism remains our surest guide to the struggle against jihadism:

As for the neoconservatives, they have taken their lumps over the war in Iraq. Nonetheless, the tenets of neoconservatism continue to offer the most cogent approach to the challenge that faces our country. To recapitulate those tenets one last time: (1) Our struggle is moral, against an evil enemy who revels in the destruction of innocents. Knowing this can help us assess our adversaries correctly and make appropriate strategic choices. Saying it convincingly will strengthen our side and weaken theirs. (2) The conflict is global, and outcomes in one theater will affect those in others. (3) While we should always prefer nonviolent methods, the use of force will continue to be part of the struggle. (4) The spread of democracy offers an important, peaceful way to weaken our foe and reduce the need for force.

These "tenets" are pretty anodyne, I'd say. Certainly most liberal internationalists would claim to agree with them; I'd imagine you could get many self-styled realists to say the same (particularly tenets 1-3); and depending on how you interpret them, I could see myself agreeing with all four. Of course, these banalities aren't what actually define foreign-policy neoconservatism, as Muravchik more or less allows elsewhere in the essay. Rather, the neocons are distinguished by what Muravchik, quoting Max Boot, calls their "hard Wilsonianism": The "hard" part makes them more likely to resort to force than liberal internationalists, while the Wilsonian part makes them more likely than realists to favor putting military force in the service of democracy-promotion. It's these tendencies, not Muravchik's four tenets, that look dubious in the aftermath of Iraq, and it's in defending how they played out in our invasion of that unhappy country that Muravchik is largely unpersuasive.

Reducing the Abortion Rate

David Edelstein, reviewing Tony Kaye's abortion documentary, Lake of Fire:

I’m glad Nat Hentoff is in the movie. I remember the civil-liberties beacon from my days at the Village Voice, where he was shunned by most of the women on staff for his views on abortion. He’s a lefty atheist who also happens to believe that life begins when the sperm meets the egg—a view I find convincing. But the answer, as the movie’s pro-choice activists maintain, isn’t banning abortion but making birth control easier to obtain ...

Meanwhile, Will Saletan glosses the latest findings on this subject:

A study concludes that the global abortion rate is falling thanks to birth control. Data: 1) The rate fell 17 percent from 1995 to 2003. 2) The biggest drop was in the former Soviet bloc and "did coincide with substantial increases in contraceptive use in the region." 3) Previous studies found that "abortion incidence declines as contraceptive use increases." 4) Abortion bans don't correlate with low abortion rates. 5) Abortion bans do correlate with high rates of unsafe abortion. Authors' conclusion: If you want fewer abortions, don't ban them; provide more birth control and sex education. Liberal reaction: Bush is making things worse by censoring abortion counseling and pushing abstinence instead of condoms. Pro-life rebuttal: 1) The data are unreliable. 2) They're being spun by pro-choice "scientists." Human Nature's view: Reducing abortions through birth control is a no-brainer.

The difficulty isn't that the data are unreliable or the scientists dishonest; it's that - as Matt points out - these kind of cross-country comparisons don't actually tell you all that much about the landscape of abortion and contraception in the contemporary United States. We know that as poor countries get richer, better-educated, and so forth, contraception use goes up and abortion rates tend to go down; what we don't have is any evidence that increasing government funding for sex ed and birth control in a rich country like the United States, where contraception is already widely available, has an appreciable impact on the rate of unintended pregnancy, and thus abortion. Most of the evidence that I've seen suggests that it doesn't. Whereas we know that when abortion was legalized in America in the early 1970s, the abortion rate went up dramatically; we also know that Western Europe, which has lower abortion rates than the U.S., also has (somewhat) more restrictive abortion laws. Which suggests if you're serious about reducing the abortion rate in America (as opposed to taking the "more abortion is a good thing" line that Matt espouses), the Edelstein-Saletan answer is something of a cop-out; if some kind of restriction isn't on the table, you probably aren't going to get very far.

Christians and the Constitution

Andrew, in the midst of an engaging Cato Unbound dialogue with Mark Lilla, Philip Jenkins, and Damon Linker:

America is substantively and experientially a deeply religious country, and its political discourse has always been saturated with religious rhetoric and imagery ... It is a country whose politics is experientially creedal. It doesn't incubate the kind of high Tory pragmatism that I admire in the English experience; or even the kind of atheist secularism that helped spawn socialism in other developed countries in the twentieth century. But the power of that religious presence — I call it “Christianism” and describe it at length in The Conservative Soul — is in many ways a testament to the strength of the secular constitution that resists it. In fact, I think that without the kind of secularism that Mark detects in the founding documents and Constitution, America would long since have succumbed to some version of theocracy or another.

Mark's basic point is that this is the natural and historical state for humankind. The achievement of keeping God at arm's length in the ordering structure of a polity is very, very rare. Very few countries have achieved it in the history of the world. America's genius is to have sustained it, even while fostering an intensely religious, roiling, and often apocalyptic culture. So Damon is right to worry about theology's political claims — especially in the last few years, and during various spasms of the past. But he is wrong in thinking, I believe, that this will lead to a collapse of the American system as such. It could lead to disastrous social policies, civil dissension, social conflict, and what we have come to call a "culture war." But even then, the impulse to junk the Constitution as a whole, and the ability even to amend it, is limited. In fact, it is remarkable how modest many Christian fundamentalists have been in addressing the Constitution's core secularism. Whether out of national pride or simply denial, it remains a fact that the main policy goals of Christianists in American history has been in amending the Constitution or bypassing it, rather than attacking it frontally.

I think the sheer diversity of religious belief and institutions in the U.S. would make the possibility of an American theocracy pretty remote, whatever our constitution looked like - particularly given that the number of theocracies instituted in the nation-states of the modern West as a whole is close to zero. (It's pretty close to zero for the pre-modern West, for that matter.) It’s possible to imagine a much more politically fragmented North America producing some localized theocracies, along the lines of Deseret and Puritan New England, but on a national level .. not so much.

I'm more sympathetic to the rest of Andrew's comments here, but it's precisely the aspects of American political history that he gets right - particularly the resilience of the constitutional order in spite (or because!) of the persistence of God-infused political activity - that makes his promiscuous use of scare-terms like “Christianist” so silly. The fact that religious conservatives, with the occasional exception, share the same commitment to the Constitution as liberal believers and secularists – and that much of the culture war, from abortion to school prayer to gay marriage, boils down an argument between two perfectly lucid, un-theocratic readings of said Constitution – and that if anything, the religious right tends to be more committed to upholding the actual text of the Constitution than their more secular foes – well, all of these points suggest, at the very least, that constantly slinging around terms that effectively equate James Dobson with a shari’a-happy Islamist might not be the most accurate way to analyze the intersection of religion and politics in the contemporary United States.

Also, you should definitely read Jonathan Rowe's critique of the Lilla thesis, which is helpfully linked from the Cato Unbound page. I'll try to say something more about the issues it raises later on.

The Base Is Restless

I'm late coming to this, but Dave Weigel is right: This WSJ poll of GOP primary voters is pretty damn interesting. 59 percent of Republican voters agreed with the statement that "foreign trade has been bad for the U.S. economy, because imports from abroad have reduced demand for American-made goods, cost jobs here at home, and produced potentially unsafe products." Sixty-one percent supported "tougher regulations to limit imports of foreign goods." Fully a third stated that they would support "some tax increases" in order "to help reduce the federal deficit and to pay for expanding health care programs to cover the uninsured." For the party of free trade, free markets, and low taxes, these ought to be very troubling numbers.

(Incidentally, 48 percent said that the next President should take a "different approach" from George W. Bush, up seven points in four months.)

Gone Baby Gone

It sounds like the movie's pretty good, but (as David Edelstein suggests) you should really, really read the book first. Not just because it's probably the best mystery novel I've read since P.D. James' A Taste For Death, but because there's no way the big plot twist (not whodunit - I had that pegged pretty early in the book - but why) and the sense of being "ripped in half," as Edelstein puts it, that comes with it, will carry the same force on screen as it does on the page. Read it first, then see what the Affleck brothers have made of the story. You won't be sorry.

The Netroots and the London Tabloids

A very long, very interesting piece of analysis from Alex Massie. A snippet:

Atrios (Duncan Black) for instance, is a tabloid columnist manque. He has exactly the right combination of spite, sneering and bullying for the job. It's ferociously partisan and bracingly, gratuitously unfair, mean-spirited, sexist, wearisome, entertaining, etc etc. That's why his blog is gripping. In other words: it works. If you were to put a British tabloid in Washington, Atrios would be right at home on its op-ed pages (and his presence would add greatly to the gaiety of the nation). His "Wanker of the Day" feature is a stylistic flourish that would be right at home on the pages of Britain's best-selling newspapers. It's also easy to imagine the Firedoglake collective on the pages of a British mid-market tabloid.

Read it all.

Respecting the Rockies

I worry that my earlier reference to the flukishness of the Rockies' current run suggests a general lack of respect for that team and its accomplishments. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I've been following the Rockies on-and-off all season, usually via this guy's blog; along with the Brewers, Royals, and Pirates - and until last year, the Tigers - they're one of the down-and-out franchises I pull for every season (except when they play the Red Sox, of course). I won't say I saw this run coming, but at the very least I could talk intelligently about Troy Tulowitzki, Manny Corpas and Ubaldo Jimenez back in August.

The crucial question, of course, is whether a team that's less than fifteen years old deserves the same kind of goodwill that older teams - and long-suffering fan bases - like Detroit and Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and Kansas City merit from out-of-town baseball fans like myself. The other day, Bill Simmons wrote of the NLCS:

No matter how much you love baseball, it's nearly impossible to care about the Colorado-Arizona series. You might watch it, you might enjoy it, you might even gamble on it ... but unless you're an absolute baseball nut or a Rockies/D-backs fan, how could you honestly care who wins when neither franchise is older than Jamie-Lynn Spears? It's like going to a wedding in which you don't know anything about the bride or the groom ...

Anyway, a friend of mine who works in the sports world got me thinking about this on Monday when he e-mailed just to say, "Colorado versus Arizona might be the least watched LCS in baseball history. Who the hell cares about either team? I'm convinced that sports is all about history. If there's history, it's interesting. If not, who cares? People need the emotional attachment that comes from a lifetime of cheering for the same team -- and especially when their parents rooted for the same franchise."

He's since backtracked a bit, but it's a reasonable point: Aren't the Rockies too new, too un-historied, their fans too unacquainted with suffering, to deserve our love?

I say no, and here's why. Unlike other recent expansion teams - the Marlins, the Diamondbacks - who have tasted way more success than their fan bases deserve at this stage in their history, the Rockies have entered baseball the old-fashioned expansion-team way: With a decade or so of relative futility. Sure, they had some decent teams in the mid-'90s, and snuck into a Wild Card berth once, but basically they've been terrible, with six straight losing seasons to their name before this year. Which is how it's supposed to be for expansion teams: You break in your fan base with consistent mediocrity punctuated by outright awfulness, whittle your attendance down from the sellouts of the opening season or two, and then, once you've acquainted the good people of your city with years of losing baseball, you make the Leap. This Rockies' team is thus the equivalent of the '69 Miracle Mets, or the '95 "Refuse to Lose" Mariners: It's a squad that fans will remember for years and decades as the team that put baseball on the map in Denver with an absolutely incredible, improbable, only-in-baseball late-season run. And like those teams, it deserves the affection of baseball fans everywhere. The kind of history that Simmons and his friend are talking about has to start somewhere; for the Rockies, it starts here.

The Art of the Possible

Jonah G., on the question of whether we should have taken down the Soviets circa 1947, instead of wimping out, Kennan-style, and reconciling ourselves to two generations of enervating containment:

Before one engages the question of what was possible, it makes sense — and is very clarifying — to address the question of what was most desirable. And on this score, it seems to me any realistic examination of costs and benefits would find that it would have been far more preferable to take care of the Soviets at the time. It would have saved lives, reduced misery, unleashed prosperity, diminished fear and improved the lives of millions if not billions of people for two or more generations in innumerable ways. Contrafactuals are often childish because we never know what resides behind curtain number 2 when we retroactively decide we shouldn't have opted for curtain number 1. But, it doesn't seem unreasonable to say that if we'd forced regime change on the Soviet Union in, say, 1946, that there would have been no Vietnam and, perhaps, no Korean War and no permanently Red China (which alone would have reduced the pile of 20th century corpses considerably). Eastern Europe would not have been immiserated and enslaved. While the space program would have suffered without the Space Race, it seems a sure bet that the net gain of liberated human genius would more than have compensated for that.

The reason this is important is that there seem to be lots of people who think the Cold War was not merely the best we could get, but the ideal policy option period. It wasn't. The Cold War consensus agreed to kick the can down the road for half a century, leaving open all sorts of terrible possibilities regime change would have foreclosed. It maintained a balance of terror, and wrote-off millions of decent freedom-loving people to economic misery and political tyranny and warped our own politics and economy in not entirely healthy ways.

I certainly don't disagree that the Cold War was very, very bad for America in myriad ways, but I’m skeptical about Jonah’s formulation that we should always address the question of what’s “most desirable” before engaging the question of what’s actually possible. Yes, considering the ideal outcome can be clarifying in some cases, but it’s just as likely to degenerate into an exercise in fantasy politics. Of course it would have been desirable for the U.S. to find some relatively low-cost way to “take out” Russia’s Communist Party in the late 1940s and install a more democratic, pro-American government in Moscow; of course managing this trick would have spared our country, and the world, countless miseries over the next five decades. (Though the law of unintended consequences is a harsh mistress, and a different set of miseries might have come rushing in to fill the breach.) But low-cost regime change in late-1940s Russia was so far outside the realm of possibility (even before Stalin acquired atomic weapons) that I don’t see what’s gained by insisting that we give the ideal outcome its due; I don’t think it’s all that meaningful, frankly, to talk about “ideal policy options” that weren’t really options at all. Particularly since history is littered with policymakers who spent so much time meditating on the awesomeness of the the “desirable” option that they persuaded themselves to ignore all the reasons that it wasn't actually possible and go for it anyway.

Continue reading "The Art of the Possible" »

When They Were Kings

Let's start back in with baseball, since it's where I'm having the easiest time catching up. Here's Joe Sheehan, explaining why Yankee fans shouldn't be disheartened to see their team turning into this decade's answer to the late-'90s Atlanta Braves, a good team bounced again and again in the first round of the playoffs:

A more concrete problem is that postseason series, best-of-five or best-of-seven sprints, are poor tools for separating the evenly matched teams that play them. The gaps between even the best and the worst playoff teams are small when reduced to a week’s worth of games.

Last year, the Mets (97-65) met the Cardinals (83-78) in the National League Championship Series. That 14-victory gap made it seem as if the Mets should be a big favorite. In fact, that difference amounted to one victory every two weeks or so during the season. That is inconsequential over the course of a postseason series. The Cardinals went on to win the pennant and the World Series.

If a 14-victory advantage can be negated in a playoff series, how does one make meaningful distinctions when four contenders finish with 94 to 96 victories, as in the American League this year?

This is a crucial question for the Yankees. They were 12-1 in postseason series from 1996 to 2000 on their way to four World Series championships; they have since gone 5-7, with two World Series appearances and no titles. The Yankees have been eliminated in the first round the last three seasons.

When looking at the big picture, though, the Yankees’ recent futility does not stand out. What is notable and unusual is their four championships in five years. The correlation between regular-season quality and postseason success is weak, and the Yankees’ achievements from 1996 to 2000 are a statistical anomaly.

Like most wonky baseball fans of my generation, I'm much more likely to call some highly unlikely development - like, for instance, the play of the Colorado Rockies over the last four weeks - a statistical anomaly and leave it at that than to wax eloquent about how the anomalous team or player has more "heart," or somehow just "knows how to win." In the case of those all-conquering late-'90s Yankees teams, though, I turn into a grizzled old scout, shaking my head and muttering about intangibles. With the exception of the 114-win '98 team, none of those Yankee squads were obviously head and shoulders above the competition as far as regular-season stats were concerned; Sheehan notes that they "featured power pitching, good defense and a great closer," all of which "correlate well with postseason success," but you could say the same of other ninety-win teams, in that era and others, that didn't come close to pulling off what the Yankees pulled off. Which would ordinarily lead me to call their run a fluke - except that I was there, I saw them play, and against all my pro-stathead instincts, I'd bet a not-insubstantial sum of money that if you replayed the postseasons of 1998, 1999 and 2000 a hundred or a thousand times over, those Yankee teams would win through many more times than the statistics suggest they would. It makes me cringe to say it, but I really do think that particular combination of players just, well, knew how to win, like no team I've seen before or since.

And God, I hated them for it.

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

Back

First, an enormous thank you to Reihan, for being so prolific and wonderful in my absence. Second - well, I'm not sure what's second. I went cold turkey for the past sixteen days - no blogs, no email, no internet at all except to check weather reports in Greece - and there's something more than a little overwhelming about stepping back into the river of information and realizing that I need to start coming up with opinions again. At the moment, my only recently-formulated perspectives involve the books (yes, books - I'd almost forgotten about them) that I read while I was away: I've decided that Borges, whom I'd barely dipped into before the last two weeks, is flat-out fantastic (by no means an original opinion), that Dennis Lehane is a vastly better crime novelist than Ian Rankin, and that The Looming Tower, while certainly a remarkable feat of reportage, is overrated as a work of narrative nonfiction. Beyond that, I've got nothing, and it'll probably be a day or so before I get back in the rhythm of blogging. (I have an awful lot of baseball reading to catch up on, among other things.)

So ... it's good to be back (well, sort of), I hope you missed me, and I'll deliver more content, I promise, as soon as I finish readjusting.

Reihan: Goodbye!

This will be last day filling in for my friend, colleague, and co-author Ross Douthat, who will be returning from his adventures abroad next week. Though I strongly suspect I've driven away the lion's share of Ross's audience over the last couple of weeks, I hope you'll come back for what will be his triumphant return, for your sake: I think of myself as a pretty discerning judge of these things, and I genuinely think Ross's posts are unmissably excellent. You might say, "But Reihan, you're Ross's crony and comrade, and thus you can't be trusted!" Consider this: which came first, the chicken or the egg? The "egg" in this case was the unmissability, and it definitely came first. I have now dropped a logic bomb. Please be seated, as the aftershocks will continue to rattle your teeth for many hours.

There's a lot more I'd like to discuss with you: Matt has a post that parallels some of my own thoughts on David Brooks' latest, Shellenberger and Nordhaus, and the Republican future. I was impressed by Dani Rodrik's post on "a progressive trade agenda," which offers a lot of room for right-left consensus, particularly when we draw on the insights of Tadashi Nakamae on the (un)sustainability of export-driven growth. The brilliant Mark Graham has (briefly) reemerged with a characteristically bizarro paean to one of the child stars of Kid Nation. And of course there's always more to say about opening the social graph, with Tim O'Reilly leading the way.

Late last year, I purchased a copy of Everyware, Adam Greenfield's manifesto on ubiquitous computing. I lost the book. But now I've found it! Ubicomp strikes me as one of the most important subjects of our time. The book is a mixed bag, to be sure, but it's also an excellent introduction. Given the extent and the destructiveness of extreme poverty and the ecological crisis, perhaps this will strike you as absurd. I tend to think that these issues are interrelated in ways that will become increasingly clear. That is to say, increasingly clear after you've hit your head with a hammer several times, which is my morning ritual.

Also, I wanted to press for the making of Hollywood's first Bollywood crossover/buddy cop adventure film. It seems high time we saw something like this: the scenario is easy to imagine, what with the involvement of Muslim extremists in the Bombay underworld and the Bombay underworld's stranglehold over the film industry. Imagine a tough-as-nails American FBI agent infiltrating this "colorful" yet spectacularly corrupt world, falling hard for one of the local stars or starlets, teaming up with a canny Indian commando. This could go smashingly well, whether as screwball, dramedy, or even straight action-adventure. Some years ago, I had an idea for a movie called "Outsourc'd." To my great chagrin, the movie has since been made in what will likely be a far superior form ("Outsourced"). Fortunately, I have three other "secret projects." But not even an army of goons wielding hot pokers could get those treatments out of me. I know how Hollywood works: by pouring molten lava into the maws of loose-lipped rubes like yours truly. This hayseed is hiring a lawyer first.

But that's enough of that. Though I'm not much of a blogger (I much prefer writing ill-tempered un-rhymey rhymes), I've helped bring together a group of smart and mostly amusing people at The American Scene, Ross's old hangout. It's a neat group that posts on a wide variety of subjects, some of which might be of interest to you. We're about to relaunch with the aid of a new CMS, which should have things working smoothly and attractively (very important, as you know) in the near future. So do come for a visit if you have the time.

Reihan: Doris Lessing

One thing that's very neat about Doris Lessing winning a Nobel is that she is a science fiction novelist. That's right. Check out The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, which blew my mind when I found it in The Strand many years ago.

Reihan: myPanopticon.com

I've been playing around with the beta version of iwantsandy from Values of n and I was thinking: this isn't intrusive enough. My guess is that it will get better very fast, but right now I just email, "Remind me of X in 5 days," and "Sandy," my digital assistant, sends me a reminder. Google Calendar does this already, but I suppose the idea is that the Sandy approach is intuitive. Why don't we integrate Sandy-style functionality into Gcal?

Or, much better still, why not have my digital assistant scour through all of my emails to extract information concerning the things I need or would like to get done? That is step one, which we see to some crude degree in Google Apps. Next, the digital assistant could monitor all of my phone conversations and everything I read on the web, and it could use FriendFeed functionality to track the related doings of my friends.

Over time, I could identify patterns: who are my real friends? Who deserves the most substantial birthday presents? Eventually, we could incorporate aspects of the MyLifeBits project, including a camera and recorder around my neck that would allow me to monitor daily interactions and conversations to provide even richer data for mining purposes.

And of course all of this would be advertiser-supported. My digital assistant would anticipate my needs and wants, and it would pay for them by drawing funds directly from my checking account. The recommendations engine would be powered by a social network and not by an Amazon-style massified approach.

This will strike most of you as a dark caricature of the present. I very sincerely would like to have access to all of this information, which would of course be encrypted and very, very private. I could mine my own data, and allow trusted corporate partners to do the same.

P.S.- I would also like to incorporate an advanced version of the CRON-o-meter, an awesome program designed to monitor intake of calories and nutrients.

Reihan: Always Bet On Bueno de Mesquita

This is slightly terrifying:

To verify the accuracy of his model, the CIA set up a kind of forecasting face-off that pit predictions from his model against those of Langley’s more traditional in-house intelligence analysts and area specialists. “We tested Bueno de Mesquita’s model on scores of issues that were conducted in real time—that is, the forecasts were made before the events actually happened,” says Stanley Feder, a former high-level CIA analyst. “We found the model to be accurate 90 percent of the time,” he wrote. Another study evaluating Bueno de Mesquita’s real-time forecasts of 21 policy decisions in the European community concluded that “the probability that the predicted outcome was what indeed occurred was an astounding 97 percent.” What’s more, Bueno de Mesquita’s forecasts were much more detailed than those of the more traditional analysts. “The real issue is the specificity of the accuracy,” says Feder. “We found that DI (Directorate of National Intelligence) analyses, even when they were right, were vague compared to the model’s forecasts. To use an archery metaphor, if you hit the target, that’s great. But if you hit the bull’s eye—that’s amazing.”

The next paragraph begins,

How does Bueno de Mesquita do this? With mathematics.

I was hoping it would begin,

How does Bueno de Mesquita do this? By crushing monkey bones and garlic into a mystical powder using his grandmother's mortar-and-pestle.

My question: how sure are we really that Bueno de Mesquita is not in fact using a mystical powder? I see no convincing evidence to the contrary.

Reihan: Thoma-graphy

I think of Mark Thoma as a service-oriented blogger, who enriches the blogosphere with his nose for news. But I particularly enjoy it when he offers a memoir-istic interpretation of economic change. His thoughts on the economic status of his working-class parents are particularly interesting.

There seemed to be an understanding that workers had families to raise. Somehow, my parents - a worker at a parts counter and a peach factory worker - owned a house in a decent neighborhood and while it was tough some months, we had health care through my dad's job and most of the middle class trappings (even if we did get a color TV much later than the neighbors). He didn't work at a great big place or anything, probably ten to twenty employees total, but they still had health care, etc. It's hard to imagine two workers my parents age (in their later 20s) working at those jobs and being able to afford those things today.

I know the empirical evidence doesn't give a lot of weight to the union story for preventing inequality, but looking back it's hard not to believe that the evidence somehow misses an ethic that was present then, something larger than unions alone, something that is less present today, a social relationship between employers and employees that kept employers from pushing wages as low as they possibly could go.

I have a somewhat darker sense of that time, and a somewhat more optimistic sense of what the future will likely hold. All the same, Thoma provides valuable insight into the power of economic nostalgia, and why middle-class squeeze is such a potent issue.

Reihan: A Vastly Preferable Elephant

Artist Vivienne Fleischer has created one of the coolest images I've ever seen.

If I could cover my wall with a mural of this, I would.

Reihan: You Can Bring A Horse to Water ...

... but should a mandate that your horse drink, particularly when the cost of uncompensated water-drinking is relatively low and any water-drinking mandate will involve a complicated, potentially intrusive set of regulations?

I'm talking about healthcare, of course, and though I've expressed strong support for mandates, I do think opponents are raising very valid questions. The default approach advanced by Matt thus has a lot of appeal.

My own view is shaped by that of Michael Graetz and Jerry Mashaw in True Security: I think we need an approach to healthcare centered on protecting families from income shocks. (Graetz and Mashaw happen to like mandates, but the idea of catastrophic coverage is at the heart of their proposal.) That's why federal reinsurance proposals strike me as an attractive interim step.

The focus on covering the uninsured leads some of us to forget that many of the insured are underinsured, and that many more face steeply rising costs: the healthcare problem extends far beyond the 47 million. Which is why John McCain's approach has some political promise. Assuming you really can deliver lower costs, the anti-nanny, anti-mandate argument suddenly has a lot of teeth.

I like the idea of relaxing medical licensure and promoting the growth of low-cost walk-in clinics, as well as promoting best practices, etc.

And this idea is also pretty good:

He would give all Americans a refundable tax credit to help them buy insurance, totaling $2,500 per person or $5,000 per family. They would get the tax credit whether they were to get insurance through work or buy it on their own. The existing tax break for employer-sponsored insurance would be eliminated, taking a step away from the work-based model in place for the last half century and toward an individual market.

But will there be a reinsurance component? If not, this is pretty thin gruel.

The DeLong utopian plan is still the best.

Reihan: Who Cares About Academic Diversity?

If Paul Graham and Paul Krugman are right and the modern research university is doomed, why are conservatives and moderates so fixated on the alleged left-wing bias of the academy? Krugman's sketch of the medium term future sounds right to me.

Eventually, of course, the eroding payoff to higher education created a crisis in the education industry itself. Why should a student put herself through four years of college and several years of postgraduate work in order to acquire academic credentials with hardly any monetary value? These days jobs that require only six or twelve months of vocational training -- paranursing, carpentry, household maintenance (a profession that has taken over much of the housework that used to be done by unpaid spouses), and so on -- pay nearly as much as one can expect to earn with a master's degree, and more than one can expect to earn with a Ph.D.. And so enrollment in colleges and universities has dropped almost two-thirds since its turn-of-the-century peak. Many institutions of higher education could not survive this harsher environment. The famous universities mostly did manage to cope, but only by changing their character and reverting to an older role. Today a place like Harvard is, as it was in the 19th century, more of a social institution than a scholarly one -- a place for the children of the wealthy to refine their social graces and make friends with others of the same class.

Making friends, as Graham noted, is not trivial. It is really, really important. But of course it can happen beyond a college campus, and some (like Nat Torkington) have argued that new technologies have allowed us to scale up these networks.

Most higher education in the United States happens in non-elite, non-selective institutions that deliver valuable skills at a too-high cost. The elite, selective slices of higher education are essentially extremely expensive theme parks staffed by highly-educated people who like ideas and having a fairly relaxed schedule. There are, to be sure, exceptions like the brilliant Anthony Kronman who pursue a distinctive mission, to groom leaders, etc. Most use the small handful of Kronmans to valorize what is an attractive, harmless, yet not obviously particularly noble lifestyle choice. I say leave them in peace.

This is also why I think the fight over preferential policies in higher education is an utterly counterproductive sideshow: if these policies really do exist for the psychic benefit of a handful of administrators, leave them in peace and help those who bear the brunt of these policies, and here I mean students negatively impacted by mismatch who belong to all groups, both underrepresented and overrepresented, in some other way. Let's fight poverty, let's help parents stay together, and let's be sure that poor children get more hours of direct instruction. These steps will have a far more meaningful impact on our collective well-being.

Reihan: Empowered Nerds and the Coming Dropout Boom

An exciting thought, or possible a sobering one, from Paul Graham:

We now think of it as normal to have a job at a company, but this is the thinnest of historical veneers. Just two or three lifetimes ago, most people in what are now called industrialized countries lived by farming. So while it may seem surprising to propose that large numbers of people will change the way they make a living, it would be more surprising if they didn't.

More specifically, the massification of the start-up process will, Graham argues, make it more meritocratic.

Instead of going to venture capitalists with a business plan and trying to convince them to fund it, you can get a product launched on a few tens of thousands of dollars of seed money from us or your uncle, and approach them with a working company instead of a plan for one. Then instead of having to seem smooth and confident, you can just point them to Alexa.

I think this is great news, but it's certainly true that any transition of this kind involves a lot of frictional loss. What will happen to the "smooth and confident"? Lets hope that ex-cheerleaders like Trent Lott and George W. Bush aren't forced to become pom-pom-shaking cocktail servers for harried nerd executives.

Rising affluence and the further privileging of the relatively creative and self-starting will run right into dramatic innovations in homemade psychopharmocology: imagine the non- or under-motivated becoming high-functioning soma-tose zombies.

P.S.- More good news from Graham:

In the US it's a national scandal how easily children of rich parents game college admissions. But the way this problem ultimately gets solved may not be by reforming the universities but by going around them. We in the technology world are used to that sort of solution: you don't beat the incumbents; you redefine the problem to make them irrelevant.

The greatest value of universities is not the brand name or perhaps even the classes so much as the people you meet. If it becomes common to start a startup after college, students may start trying to maximize this. Instead of focusing on getting internships at companies they want to work for, they may start to focus on working with other students they want as cofounders.

This sounds extremely appealing, and it is very relevant to the psychological role of an "affirming structure" for the Organization Kids. Amazingly, resume-building young people built-to-flourish in the meritocracies of the present may well be uniquely unsuited to the meritocracies of the future, though that is kind of an uncharitable view. We'll see.

Reihan: To Exist or Not to Exist?

There's been some heady philosophical discussion over at Free Exchange over ... existence.

Yes, people generally prefer existing. But the possible people implicit in couples' germ cells are not actual people, and therefore do not have preferences. Conception and birth are preconditions for having preferences. I call this the "lucky souls fallacy". Imagine pre-actual persons gathered outside the gate of existence. Each soul holds a number in its tiny incorporeal hands, badly hoping to be called. An ethereal presence stands at the gate shouting numbers. Lucky souls get to go to the front of the line, through the gate, and straight into a real pulsing zygote.

Only thus does the "decision to have kids" create a "massive benefit" to the kid. Lucky soul! But Mr Mankiw is right. What childbirth does is create a life -- a new nexus of benefits and harms, a new container of utility (to be reductively economistic about it). But by itself reproduction confers no benefit on the child produced, since there was no prior hollow soul longing to be filled by the breath of being.

And thank goodness this is true: if it weren't, we'd face the "repugnant conclusion."

“For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living.”

That said, I do take the position Glaeser does not, that under certain circumstances bringing a child into the world does represent an external benefit to society as a whole. This, of course, is by no means self-evidently clear: I can also see a plausible case for voluntary human extinction, particularly after having recently spent several hours in the company of some very boring and self-regarding people.

The website for Alan Weisman's excellent The World Without Us begins with a flash animation sequence. As it fired up, I saw the silhouette of a man who, I assume, had just finished the book. I then imagined that said silhouette, now full of despair over a world gone terribly wrong, would then stand on top of a chair and hang himself. That, alas, didn't happen.

Reihan: Defending Wes Anderson

As a part-time ethnic militant, let me just say that the anti-Anderson animus is nutso. Take Thea's remarks:

Like Pagoda, the cute little Indian man in the Royal Tenenbaums (who also appears in Bottle Rocket and Rushmore) who exists solely to do Royal’s bidding, and has an adorable lack of morality. Or the slew of characters of colour - the Brazilian David Bowie (played by Seu Jorge who actually has quite an illustrious film and recording career); Vikram Ray, whose character’s main feature is that he was “born on the Ganges”; the Filipino pirates - in The Life Aquatic.

Pagoda is my heroo: tough and loyal, yet quite willing to stab Royal in the belly when appropriate. He's nobody's fool. If you miss that about him, I have to wonder how closely you're paying attention. And as for The Darjeeling Limited, a movie I saw with my mom, a Muslim woman with a lot of "ethnic pride" who hates V.S. Naipaul for his unflattering depictions of India and Islam (unfairly, in my view), it portrays a lot of its Indian characters -- particularly the railway porters, one of whom is a turbaned Sikh who speaks flawless American English (strange that the ethno-police haven't picked up on that one) -- as cosmopolitan, intelligent, and more than a little disdainful of the goofball foreigners.

These characters are funny not because of their personalities or life situations - unlike Anderson’s white characters - but solely because they’re brown. It’s like Anderson is saying, “The pirates are Filipino! How hilarious is that??” Needless to say, I don’t get the joke.

Again, I have to ask: are we watching the same movies? Because I grew up in a "majority-minority" community and attended a high school that was about 50 percent Asian, I guess I don't have the same chip on my shoulder: white people strike me as amusing and a little exotic, which is not to say I don't think well of them as a group. Some of my best friends are white people. If anything, I actually think Wes Anderson movies are highly ethnic movies about highly distinctive white subcultures: in The Royal Tenenbaums, he "gets" the subculture of cerebral slightly Judeo-Hibernians. Once we give up on the idea that white people are the center of the universe, which we should, it makes sense to have a Tyler Perry of the white man. That's Wes Anderson.

I mean, do you see me writing essays about Tyler Perry's depictions of Banglo-Americans? Or R. Kelly's unflattering portrayal of a plump white Southern wife who two-times her husband with a midget (the midget who was, in a particularly memorable episode, revealed to be, "the baaaaaaby's daaaaaa-ddyyyyyyy")? I mean, no. Because it's absurd. Because these movies have a deeper meaning, and a certain degree of focus and specificity helps these movies realize their ambitions.

How about Wes Anderson's view of women? People: Wes Anderson's view of all women is strange. They are inscrutable by nature, they are highly vexatious, and they invariably lead their male admirers to do insanely stupid and self-destructive things.

This is what really breaks my heart: Wes’ track record with women of colour. Anderson just loves pairing women of colour up with dorky white dudes, shortly after dorky white dudes have been dumped or rejected by white ladies. Even though Rushmore’s Margaret Yang is the fullest of all of Wes’ colour characters, she is still paired up with the loveable/hateable Max after Ms Cross turns him down. It’s the same story with Inez, the lovely Latin American hotel cleaner in Bottle Rocket.

Whoa, this is reading into things in a spectacularly strange way. I'm afraid the sample size is a little small, romances do happen on post-heartbreak foreign adventures (one would hope so), not all of us travel on the basis of an elaborate color-coded map of the world, e.g., I was just dumped by a black woman, so I can only travel in nations that are populated primarily by people of African origin, Margaret Yang was not so much "Asian" as a human being who was brainy and misguided enough to date a pint-sized megalomaniac, etc. I mean, Margaret Yang is a perfect example: like it or not, I think her Asianness really was incidental to her character, and if anything it was a rare Anderson concession to realism: American high schools, even in otherworldly quasi-WASPtopia Texas, are multiracial. Sorry guys: this is of course highly inconvenient in the framework of racial correctness which apparently demands, again, that all rebound relationships must be between partners of the same ethnoracial group.

The interracial relationships in Anderson’s films are not radical. They simply reinforce racism’s most current and insidious form - they take cultural appropriation to the ultimate level by appropriating actual women of colour, a la Gwen Stefani.

*Cough*, "stick to your own tribe, Stefani"! The author doesn't see the irony in this: not only did Stefani "appropriate actual women of colour" (whatever that means: sounds insidious), but she also had long-term relationships with men of color, something that would have exercised the boundary-policers of another generation. She's also a native of Southern California, where Asian kids "appropriate" black and white and Latin styles and sensibilities all the time and are fortunately not aggressively prosecuted for racial copyright violations.

I realize that The Darjeeling Limited isn't getting the best notices, but you know what? It's a damn good movie about being in a twilight age. It takes place in a beautiful place, and it is affecting without being maudlin. Know why the Indian characters aren't at the heart of the movie? Because it's about three American brothers, and how "deeply" are Indian dudes and dudettes, who have jobs to do and lives to attend to, going to engage with them? I mean, if the brothers befriended some fascinatingly unconventional Indian fellow who defied all of our notions of what it means to be brown (this Indian guy hates chapatis and loves burritos!) over the course of three days, I'd find that implausible and frankly idiotic. To be sure, South Asia is, in my limited experience, a pretty verbal place, and plenty of people will talk your ear off. But oh no, that's another stereotype!

Thinking like this is a trap.

Jonah Weiner (Third World avenger!) has a related take in Slate. In truth, this is a really good commission: it is an unfamiliar interpretation of a touchstone for my generation. That doesn't mean it's right.

A few quick things: Kumar Pallana (Mr Pagoda, Mr Littlejeans, etc.) isn't just an "actor" Anderson hired. He's a friend of the Wilson brothers and Anderson from his days as proprietor of the Cosmic Cafe, which was a center of a lot of local artistic "happenings." There are Asian characters in Anderson's movies at least in part because ... there are Asian people in the world. Henry Sherman, the black financial advisor in The Royal Tenenbaums who married the Tenenbaum matriach at the close of the movie, represents ... um, legions of black financial advisors, some of whom are presumably kind of shy and awkward and into the color blue.

As for Rita, the railway steward who makes out with one of the Whitman brothers, um, would you rather she have fended off his amorous advances with an, "Oh no no no no no, sir! It would offend one of my many-headed gods! We are not so liberated like your Western hussies, sahib! Oh yes, bheri bheri good." before doing a little head-waggle, memorably described by Seth Stevenson:

To perform the head waggle, keep your shoulders perfectly still, hold your face completely expressionless, and tilt your head side-to-side, metronome style. Make it smooth—like you're a bobble-head doll. It's not easy. Believe me, I've been practicing.

I leave you on that note.

P.S.- Everyone, please read my friend Christian Lorentzen's essay on Wes Anderson and why hipsters should be shot (gently). I hadn't read it until a friend very kindly sent it my way.

But come on, Anderson and hipsters are too self-conscious, too postmodern, to be racist. Hipsters, though, they may be mostly white (and rich) welcome minorities to their ranks. In fact they get worried if there aren’t enough colors on the social palette; you could hear something genuinely troubling when the Moldy Peaches used to sing, “I’m running out of ethnic friends.” This all seems resonant with a theory I have heard spouted (though never read) by and about young people today—that growing up in “diverse communities” with friends of every color and creed, they are “postracial.” It follows that they make racist jokes without malice, as a way of rebelling against the tyranny of political correctness. Perhaps this is true, and maybe it’s not even such a bad thing: racism isn’t racism anymore it’s just breaking of taboo. We can poke a little fun at Filipinos and Sikhs and Arabs and Germans and people from Kentucky, and then all listen together to the ebony-skinned Brazilian man on the deck of the Belafonte singing “Ziggy Stardust” in Portuguese.

There's a lot of truth to this, though I don't quite share Lorentzen's disdain.

Reihan: Healthcare and Family Values

I'm late to the story of the Frost family, but it perfectly illustrates the tension between "pro-family" conservatism and "anti-statist" conservatism. I use scare quotes because both terms are of course self-serving. Anti-statists could claim to be the real pro-family faction because they want to place families and not the state at the heart of economic life. On the other hand, it's not obvious that the present US healthcare regime is in fact less statist than a lot of the plausible alternatives: huge amounts of money are being shaped and spent by the state, but in a decidedly inegalitarian way. Real anti-statists need to do more than defend the status quo, and to their credit they generally do. (The solutions proposed are sometimes dotty, but that's another matter.)

Here's my question: Would the world really be better off if, say, the four Frost children saw far less of their parents than they already do? I ask because we could imagine a world in which the Frost parents worked (even) longer hours a jobs that provided health care benefits, which would take an emotional toll not only on them but on their children, particular in light of the impact of the car accident. The children of parents who work night shifts, for example, tend to do worse in school, and they tend to have more behavioral problems. And we're talking about run-of-the-mill families, facing no sudden medical catastrophes.

I realize that this will strike some readers as absurd: tough luck, you'll say. My own parents worked four jobs between them until my father lost his public sector day job, at which point he concentrated full time on his small business. My mother kept working two jobs until health concerns made that impracticable. From fairly early on, I was a latchkey kid and my two older sisters did a lot of the things (attend PTA conferences, monitor my homework) parents normally do. We were well cared for, and I think the three of us turned out reasonably well. So I can see, in theory, the source of resentment: we have to work, and so should you. But who thinks the Frost parents aren't doing their best to balance all of the needs of their children?

When small-government advocates argue that S-CHIP is supposed to be public assistance for the poor, they make an excellent point. Targeting aid to those who need it most makes sense when we're talking about scarce resources. But this begs the question: how scarce are the resources we're talking about, namely federal health care dollars? Are we really distributing these dollars in the smartest, most equitable way? Should a family like the Frosts have to plead poverty when they're raising four kids, who will grow up to make contributions to our tax coffers (to put this in the crudest possible terms) that more than outweigh the costs of keeping them healthy?

If S-CHIP is the wrong way to help families like the Frosts, and I don't dismiss this possibility, this requires an alternative strategy to meet their needs, not Dr. No politics. For me, the most relevant fact is the asymmetric shock: the impact of a car crash on the family's economic well-being.

I'm pretty uncomfortable talking about a particular family in this way. There's no way to fully understand the choices they've had to make. I will say that demonizing them is a lot worse than dumb, and I hope the person who cooked up the idea of putting a 12-year-old in the spotlight has a better appreciation of the dangers, not least of them exposure to crazy vitriol, involved.

Reihan: One of the Cleverest Things Ever Said ...

... by a minor celebrity. I'm referring to Jennifer Love Hewitt's remarks, which can be found here.

Reihan: The Flypaper Theory of Blogging

Last summer Amy Sutherland published a much-discussed piece in The New York Times, "What Shamu Taught Me About A Happy Marriage." The premise was that we ought to approach changing the behavior of the people we love the way animal trainers approach their charges: positive reinforcement works. Sutherland said it best.

The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't. After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.

Back in Maine, I began thanking Scott if he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper. If he threw in two, I'd kiss him. Meanwhile, I would step over any soiled clothes on the floor without one sharp word, though I did sometimes kick them under the bed. But as he basked in my appreciation, the piles became smaller.

I was using what trainers call "approximations," rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior. You can't expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can't expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock. With the baboon you first reward a hop, then a bigger hop, then an even bigger hop. With Scott the husband, I began to praise every small act every time: if he drove just a mile an hour slower, tossed one pair of shorts into the hamper, or was on time for anything.

This is a little like Matt Yglesias's highly sophisticated approach to Joe Klein.

At any rate, it does occur to me now and again that the netroots could probably use some more good cops to go along with the bad cops. If, say, Klein not only got a torrent of critical email when he wrote something that pissed us off but also a torrent of positive email when he wrote something liberals liked, then he'd probably find himself writing more liberal stuff over the long haul, no? Being nice is no fun and I'm basically an asshole as a general matter, so I don't really want to do it, but surely a big community site like dKos could get the job done.

And of course most bloggers are, um, not sunny and upbeat people, so it's no surprise that a far more common approach is to ignore the "good" and hound the "bad." Because Matt has an ironic sensibility, he understands why this approach fails.

I'm attending a webby conference tomorrow, so posting will be light.

Reihan: The Black Hole of Empire

Apropos of nothing, I wanted to share this image from a lecture that was recently canceled by a scholar I follow somewhat closely:

Because there is no explanation of why the lecture was canceled, I have to assume the worst: Professor Chatterjee has been sucked into the "black hole of empire," which I assume is located in the basement of the Pentagon or perhaps in the C-suites of The Carlyle Group. In truth, I'd rather not rib because Chatterjee wrote one of my favorite books, The Politics of the Governed.

Reihan: Will Playlist Be The Best Movie Ever Made?

All indications suggest that the answer is yes.

Based on the novel by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, story revolves around two bridge-and-tunnel teenagers, nursing broken hearts, who fall in love during one sleepless night in New York while searching for their favorite band's unannounced show. Peter Sollett ("Raising Victor Vargas") is directing from a script by Lorene Scafaria.

And it stars the excellent Kat Dennings and the slightly "played-out" but still endearing Michael Cera.

Oh hell, Vulture keeps delivering. Looks like Playlist will have stiff competition.

Woo’s Killer Gets Korean-American Remake: Korean American director John H. Lee will direct a remake of John Woo’s seminal action film The Killer, set this time in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, Chinatown, and South Central and starring a yet-to-be-determined Korean lead. Though Lee plans many changes for his version, he assures Woo purists that lots and lots of people will still be shot by guns.

Did you hear that explosion? That was the sound of my mind exploding. I've never seen The Killer, but I sense that this film will be a landmark in Asian American history.

Reihan: Glaeser on the Downside of Devolution

Ed Glaeser has written a fascinating column on the AMT that will take some time to unpack.

I have always been skeptical about localizing responsibility for welfare, because when localities raise taxes to care for the poor, then businesses and the rich just run away. The federal government should fight the tendency of the rich to flee the poor, but when the AMT eliminates the deductibility of state taxes, it just increases the incentive for the prosperous to move to low-tax, low-service states.

This, of course, puts Glaeser at odds with Milton Friedman libertarians who see this incentive as a feature, not a bug, of the devolution or downloading of government functions to the lowest practicable level. One reason conservatives like Ramesh Ponnuru (I think) have called for eliminating the state and local tax deduction is that it would help revive anti-tax politics at the state and local level. My feelings are mixed. I actually agree with Glaeser: better to have a smart, coherent welfare system at the federal or at least state level than a patchwork that encourages the arbitrary and often harmful shifting around of the poor. And yet state and local tax burdens are an imperfect proxy for the quality of social services. Better to upload welfare responsibilities (and, presumably, download others).

There's actually a lot more in this column to discuss, but I'll leave it there for now.

Reihan: Nationalism and the Superstate

Alex Massie has a terrific post on the EU and the rise of minority (what an awful term) territorial nationalisms.

Very briefly, what is the political valence of these nationalisms, and of Eurofederalism? I mean, it obviously varies from case to case. The now-dead call for "Padania" had a right-wing orientation. Scottish nationalism and the various Iberian minority nationalisms have a generally left-wing orientation.

The pro-market Anglophone right-liberals American conservatives tend to identify with (for obvious reasons) are almost invariably Euroskeptics. But of course the middle European Christian Democratic center-right is very Europhilic. We could just as easily imagine the opposite being true, with market liberals pro-EU and social market conservatives anti-EU. As Perry Anderson argued at length in the LRB, the EU we have represents the Hayekian ideal of inter-state federation that dampens economic nationalism and thus institutionalizes economic liberalism. There is some truth to this.

Though generally sympathetic to Euroskepticism, I actually found Glyn Morgan's The Idea of a European Superstate extremely convincing: the EU is not a superstate and it ought to be a superstate so that it can exercise power, whether in concert with the United States or in pursuit of its own conception of world order. Having two Western superstates rather than one and two-dozen squabbling pygmy-states makes a lot of sense in a world that will be increasingly shaped by non-Western powers. This notion has obvious conservative sympathies.

Reihan: Is Ron Paul A Bad Libertarian?

Alex Massie leads me to wonder: Should libertarians think Paul is bad for the movement? After all, he comes from an anti-immigration right-populist tradition that sharply contradicts the cosmopolitanism that increasingly defines libertarianism. It's clear that Ron Paul is more Bob Taft or than he is a modern-day hipstertarian, which is part of his charm. David Weigel asked the right questions back in May: if Paul gets more attention in the next few weeks, that will also mean increased scrutiny. Will the resulting "revelations" about his decidedly unconventional views on the gold standard, etc., which Paul has made no effort to hide, undermine libertarians as they attempt to spread their intellectual influence leftward?

Whether or not the "liberaltarian" strategy is embraced by social-democratic liberals (verdict: unlikely), there are obvious reasons for libertarians to emphasize their dovish, culturally liberal side. The increasing willingness of libertarians to embrace tactical interventions (e.g., wage subsidies help shore up the legitimacy of the market economy, so let's use them) means that in theory they could become a free-floating answer to the German Free Democrats in their prime. That is an obviously attractive and not-impossible goal.

I don't know, I figure movement libertarians have in mind a very long-term strategy that only glancingly involves, say, the Republican presidential primary of 2008. The Paul campaign strikes me as a narrow phenomenon that mostly reflects a quirky, populist subculture (or Birchers and Buchananites) meeting an affluent, angry subculture (of anti-war non-movement libertarians). Paul is thus unlikely to do any lasting damage to the libertarian brand, and his candidacy will in all likelihood help the broader movement flourish. (By, among other things, introducing some non-trivial number of young people to new and appealing ideas.)

Reihan: Bidding War

Now that Alistair Darling has "borrowed" key Conservative ideas, most importantly raising the threshold for the inheritance tax, the danger is that we'll see a bidding war: more tax cut promises, more spending promises, and ... an opportunity for a Lib Dem comeback under Nick Clegg or Chris Huhne?

Reihan: The Infobeam

While reading Fred Vogelstein on Facebook,

Down the road, I imagine that if I'm burglarized and put that on my Facebook page, every one of my neighbors -- and the police -- will know that too. I know bloggers who use Facebook to automatically tell their readers what's on their mind by having Facebook keep track of the books and articles they read every day. They do that in addition to posting mini-essays, photos and movies. There is already lots of talk about how someday our Facebook page, or something like it, will serve as our universal identity -- where hospitals can go to check our health insurance, where banks can go to check our employment and credit-worthiness, even where the Internal Revenue Service can go to find our tax data.

I was reminded of David Gelernter's notion of "the worldbeam."

Your beam consists of every electronic document you have ever created or received, in chronological order. Every e-mail and voice mail and MP3 and project report, snapshot, video, shopping list--all there, encoded, for your eyes only. Your private documents are encrypted automatically; to get access to the Beam you'll need to pass a biometric test, provide a password and, probably, a key card. It sounds cumbersome but will become as natural as starting your car.

And, of course, your beam will include every friend and contact, and will be able to intelligently track the nature of your relationship. By identifying the people you communicate with most (in the infospace if not in the meatspace, though that is the next step), you will "see" who matters to you most. Sort of. Instead of imposing logic on a jumble of facts, you will see patterns emerge.

The most important thing is that we retain ownership and control over this information. Vogelstein almost gets this right.

If we, the users, through our Facebook page, become the hub, and they, the corporations, our spokes, the idea that we once worried about Microsoft's monopoly or, as we do now, Google's growing power in online advertising, will seem very silly indeed.

Of course, we can't allow Facebook to be in sole control of this information either.

It should be obvious that the idea of our social graph as hub will markedly change the way we consume media. Blogging is a neat tool, but a crude one in many respects. People forget that this is a transitional technology, and that our machines will get far more sophisticated about identifying the news we want and the news we need. A handful of smart and/or social aggregators have already emerged, like FeedEachOther, and I'm confident that this will keep evolving in a very cool way.

Reihan: Is 'Walberg' German for 'Bozo'?

Attention Tim Walberg: you are a bozo. And incidentally, my mother, a US citizen and taxpayer who has been working to improve the nutritional health of underserved Americans for literally decades, is fasting for Ramadan. She thinks you are a bozo too.

Reihan: Louis Gets Lipo

The greatest broadcast journalist of our time, Louis Theroux, tackles plastic surgery. And yes, he gets liposuction, which as you can see he badly needs.

Reihan: Bill Kristol and Burma

Has it occurred to anyone that Bill Kristol is extremely aware of the role he plays in public life, and that he calls for military action against Burma not because he is a war-mad kook but because he wants to broaden our sense of what we can realistically accomplish there?

Reihan: Snark-Countersnark-Snarky-snark

On the rare occasions I indulge in snark, it is out of either laziness (rare) or frustration (common). Which is why I'm always surprised by snark-addicts: where's the fun? Roger Cohen wrote a clueless column snarking at anti-war liberals. The reliably smart Michael Tomasky wrote some boilerplate quick-take countersnark. And, via Chris Hayes, I see Cohen is engaging in defensive snarking. Now comes the time we engage in accusations and counter-accusations regarding who is and is not truly anti-Stalinist. This is what we've been reduced to.

Let me just say: I'm pretty sure that if I were actively participating in intellectual debates in the 1950s or 1980s that I'd have a whole slew of opinions that are both wrong and interesting, so I think we should be careful about assuming that of course we'd see the Soviet Union for what it really was with great moral clarity, etc. Plenty of people saw the Soviet Union for what it really was precisely because they were lunatic Neanderthals, and thank goodness for that. I consider myself a lunatic Australopithecene.

PS- Matt has more substantive thoughts here!

Reihan: The Jeff Jarvis Show

That's a sitcom I'd enjoy very much.

Sadly, I don’t own an iPhone. My teen son has one, bought with the proceeds of his Facebook application programming. His mother has ruled that if he can teach his dad to write apps, then perhaps I, too, can afford the wondrous gadget.

Reihan: Marc Andreessen on Bionic Woman

Watch and be amused as a smart man asks some very glaring questions about this season's smash-hit. I worry that a nation that watches and enjoys Heroes and Bionic Woman is inviting a slap upside the head from enlightened Lost-loving extraterrestrials.

Reihan: Social Software Gluttony

Check out this very smart post by Nat Torkington on the limits of social software.

I see it as Dunbar's Number (expanded by social software) clashing with a literally astronomical upper bound—there are only a finite number of hours in a day. Even when software lets us use our hours more productively, we simply expand the number of tools we use and the number of people we communicate with until we're out of time again.

Torkington ends with an almost-profound thought.

The acquisition drive for social contacts reminds me of the acquisition drive for material goods. At the risk of diving into the highly questionable field of evolutionary psychology, it's because we were limited for millennia. We could only have so many friends, there was only so much "stuff" to have. Those with a drive to collect friends or material possessions prospered and spread their genes. Now, thanks to Twitter and Wal-Mart, there's an endless supply of people to interact with and plastic objects to accumulate. Facebook is the candy bar of the 21st century—it tastes good because for millennia it was rare and necessary, not because in the modern day and age we actually need it. And, like sugar, it won't go away no matter how much we fret about it.

This reminds me of Tibor Scitovsky's The Joyless Economy. One of my dreams in life is to write The Joyful Economy, but I'm not sure anyone else would find this amusing.

Reihan: The Logic of Tax-Cutting

I've never been a great enthusiast for tax cuts per se. I much prefer tax reforms that make the burden more family-friendly and more growth-friendly. My sense is that we should keep taxes as low as possible for as long as possible consistent with maintaining high-quality public services. This means that "shifting the tax burden from the rich to future generations" is a bad idea. Tax cuts today often mean big tax hikes tomorrow, as Daniel Shaviro convincingly explained a few years back.

But of course the United States has a characteristically "exceptional" approach to taxes. Despite the fact that there was no real clamor for across-the-board tax cuts during the first Bush term (from pressure groups, yes, from the middle-class voters who theoretically decide elections, no), we got them in the spades. The rich were the big beneficiaries, of course, but middle-class voters found that state and local taxes, health care, and housing now far outweight the federal tax burden as a source of anxiety. Naturally, this has increased demand for government. This dynamic will define US politics for the next few years.

New Labour seemed to have "solved" this puzzle by delivering macroeconomic stability and a highly opaque tax code loaded with user fees, a stamp duty, and other "revenue enhancements." New Labour's (attractive) message was that you get what you pay for when it comes to public services, so the public must accept somewhat higher taxes in exchange for more choice and higher quality.

I say "solved" because there is an increasing sense that the British public hasn't been getting what it's paid for. And so the appeal of tax cuts is rising from the dead. This is particularly interesting because until relatively recently, the Conservatives have been terrified of promising tax increases for fear of being painted as extremists who want to gut public services. Even now they are careful to at least pretend to responsibly cost out any tax cuts and to propose revenue replacements. George Osborne's promise to slash the inheritance tax is (it now seems clear) largely responsible for Gordon Brown' retreat from a fall election.

Anatole Kaletsky has a brilliant column on what's going on:

After many years of disappointment about public service standards, voters are deeply sceptical about promises from all politicians, regardless of party, to improve education, clean up hospitals or make the streets safe. This does not mean that voters are indifferent to policies on crime, health and education. They care about public services a lot and would reject any party that looked like doing major damage in these areas. They may not, however, attach much weight to any promised improvements until these are clearly demonstrated in their own lives. Tax cuts, on the other hand, are palpable as soon as they are announced.

Kaletsky has some other more striking observations.

Young voters trying to climb on to the housing ladder were attracted by the cuts in stamp duty. Even more importantly, middle-aged, middle-class women, eager to maximise the legacies that they can leave to their children and grandchildren, will vote for any party promising to relieve them of inheritance tax.

This is despite the fact that:

Inheritance tax is, from an egalitarian standpoint, the fairest and most progressive of all taxes.

As Americans know very well, certainly with regards to the inheritance tax,

such an “immoral” and “regressive” tax policy seems to be exactly what voters – including many marginal Labour and Liberal voters – enthusiastically support. And all over the world – in America, Ireland, Japan and more recently even in France and Sweden – we have seen regressive consumption taxes rising, while “progressive” taxes on wealth and inheritance disappear, providing disproportionate benefits to the wealthiest voters.

What all this means for observers of the American political scene is not immediately clear, but I have some theories. I'm hoping to write more about this in the near future.

Reihan: Columbus Day

For those of you who haven't read Carol Swain's The New White Nationalism in America, the basic premise is that the changing demographic composition of the US population and the logic of official multiculturalism will soon lead to a potent white identity politics. Michael Lind made a similar argument in his brilliant The Next American Nation over a decade ago. This comes to mind because it happens in a context of declining "ethnic" allegiance among whites: consider the marked lack of hullabaloo over Columbus Day this year, a holiday that at least in part reflects the political and cultural clout of Italian Americans. One of my best friends is in the first year of an anthropology Ph.D. program at Yale, and she didn't even register that yesterday was Columbus Day: on campus, at least, that battle has long since been settled.

Will we eventually miss transactional ethnic politics? While talking to a cynical ethnic businessman a few months ago, he told me that when the Italians shake you down it's called "the mafia" and when members of underrepresented groups shake you down it's called "the coalition." Suffice to say, he's not the most enlightened character in the world, but his remarks reflect this idea that transactional ethnic politics are alive and well, on a much-reduced scale, in the big cities.

But if Swain is right, the new new thing is a kind of racial tribalism that will make wrangling over Columbus Day look like a breeze. More worrisome still, it's not obvious that intermarriage and assimilation will do much to blunt its effects.

I tend to be pretty optimistic about the prospects for ethnoracial conflict in the United States. In my admittedly limited experience, this country has adapted remarkably well to pretty dramatic changes in its population. Any prejudice I've encountered has been massively outweighed by indifference or maybe good-natured curiosity. I am interested, and of course concerned, to see if anti-Muslim sentiments become an enduring feature of the landscape. And I'm hoping the Republican Party doesn't choose to become "the white party," though it's easy to see how that would make for an accessible if not exactly attractive strategy. We'll see.

As for Columbus Day, it occurs to me that the so-called "Columbian Exchange" was probably the most important thing to ever happen to humans on Earth. Consider, and here I'm drawing on blogosphere favorite 1491, how badly things could have gone, say if indigenous Americans had contracted diseases from domesticated animals that could have spread back to the "Old World": the massive die-off in the Americas that is rightly remembered as a central tragedy could have been replicated in the rest of the world easily enough. Somehow what was torn asunder was going to be brought back together. Perhaps peace-loving Americans would have, given some time, traveled to Europe or Africa first. But one has to assume that this would have only delayed the die-off.

(Felipe Fernández-Armesto, one of my heroes, has a short book on The Americas offers a useful, contrarian look at some related issues. It turns out that he was recently beaten up by crazy cops.)

R: Mark Daily

Read this.

Reihan: Priceless Giuliani Moments

There are too many to count in Michael Powell's piece on the Giuliani's radio days, but here's one:

Gravel-voiced Joe from Dutchess County asked in 1999 why the mayor did not attack President Clinton at a fund-raising dinner. When the program returned after a commercial break it sounded as if Joe still was on the line. It was the mayor, imitating Joe’s dese-dem-dere voice.

“This is, uh, Joe from, ahhh, Dutchess County. I unnerstan’ youse went too easy the other night because people applauded or they didn’t applaud for ya or sumthin’—I don’t remember.” Mr. Giuliani giggled. Then he speculated that maybe Joe was a long-term resident of a state prison.

I don't know quite what to think of Giuliani these days, but I do know I admired him back then. So much so that I was at one point pretty enthusiastic about a Giuliani presidential run. This, of course, begs the question: what about Giuliani's alleged racial insensitivity, a subject that comes up in the article? To my mind, Giuliani would have profited from access to a wider circle of advisors and experts. I mean, I think that is generally true about all of us. But I also think it is better to speak frankly to anyone irrespective of their background. Abusive harangues are bad, but it's important to remember that Giuliani was an equal opportunity offender in this regard. He reduced plenty of white men to tears. I'd rather deal with someone profoundly unpleasant than someone who condescends

Reihan: Lincolnian Conservatism?

I think it's worthy of note that Matt Continetti, David Brooks, and other quirkycons ("neoconservative" is a little limited) claim Abraham Lincoln as their "grandaddy." Paleocons, of course, despise Lincoln as a centralist tyrant. Liberals lionize him as one of their own: a partisan of human freedom, a strong state, and democracy. Quirkycons ("reformocons" seems self-serving) look to his strange mix of strong statism, Whiggish pefectionist moralism, the cult of self-reliance, and democratic triumphalism. I guess this is true of all great historical figures: we see what we want to see.

Reihan: Ideological Conservatism

While reading David Brooks terrific column on the creedalization of American conservatism, I thought to myself, "Self, is creedalization so bad?" I'm not so sure.

Continue reading "Reihan: Ideological Conservatism" »

Reihan: Don't Tase for Me, Tase-rgintina

I know Matt Continetti pretty well, and so I was struck by this blog post about Continetti. It starts off with a reference to Fred Thompson giving a mostly-charming, homespun answer to a question about college loans. To my mind, the answer wasn't quite anti-intellectual, but rather a boilerplate reference to his hardscrabble upbringing. It nevertheless prompted this reaction:

Continue reading "Reihan: Don't Tase for Me, Tase-rgintina" »

Reihan: The Kerry '04 Scenario

While talking to Andrew Sullivan about the relative fortunes of Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, he noted that McCain, like Kerry in '04, could end up the last man standing.

And as I considered this scenario, it occurred to me that the parallels were pretty clear: just as Dick Gephardt launched a kamikaze attack on Howard Dean, it's easy to imagine Giuliani and Romney at each other's throats until Iowa Republicans declare them both utterly unpalatable. There is plenty of ammunition for both of them. Fred Thompson, in contrast, has a longstanding friendship with McCain, which suggests that (a little unrealistic, I know) that he'd be willing to pull his anti-McCain punches.

Of course, both Giuliani and Romney will have enough resources to keep fighting. So did Dean, for a while at least. I realize that this is all a little too neat.

Reihan: A Very Smart Post on the Dread 'Media Bias'

By Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. His basic take is that while journalists tend to be "cosmopolitan," and thus more likely to favor free trade and free-ish migration, a mix of idealism (about government and public service) and cynicism (about corporations and corporate power) means they can't generally be characterized as right-leaning on economic issues.

Reihan: Free Flight Revisited

I've long been a big fan of James Fallows' vision for the future of air travel: very simply put, replace an overreliance on big planes and big airports with a shift towards smalll planes and small airports. This would do a lot of good for all the reasons Fallows outlines in this post.

Pilots have seen first-hand that the only scarce resource in the air-traffic system is takeoff/landing slots at 15 or 20 big airports, and positions in the queue for those slots. Otherwise, the skies are virtually empty and most of the country's 4000-odd airports are underused. Of course that one scarce resource is the same one airline passengers confront day-in and day-out.

But making flying even more attractive than it already is would presumably have a very steep environmental cost. Yes, there are exotic research programs dedicated to sharply reducing the emissions impact of air travel, but they are very, very far from achieving viable commercial products.

This is why I was so disappointed in the near-universal condemnation of the Conservative party's Quality of Life report. ConservativeHome, no friend of the report, summarized it here. To me, it seemed like a mostly sober, modest response to real environmental challenges. Of course, the "optics" were all wrong, and it's certainly true that green issues are presently the concern of AB1 voters. The hope is that we'll eventually be able to articulate an environmental agenda that has resonance with working- and middle-class voters. But anyway, Gummer-Goldsmith put a lot of stock into discouraging domestic air travel. It would be extremely difficult for us to do the same in the US for obvious reasons, though there are certainly heavily-traveled corridors in which we could sharply improve the quality of air travel alternatives.

Reihan: Isolation Kills

As a lot of you know, one of the great killers of older Americans is social isolation. But of course social isolation is a killer of younger Americans as well. We know a lot less than we'd like to about what helps lead happy, fulfilled lives. But we do know that having a large and flourishing social network has a lot to do with it. That's why I think cohousing is so crucially important. Yes, we all need some private space. But do we need nearly as much as most of us (outside of the cramped studio apartments of our big, expensive cities) consume? And while the habits of others can indeed drive us up the wall, as demonstrated by countless nightmarish roommate stories, note that we don't even bother to comment on the quite pleasant roommate stories: it's too commonplace to even mention the various ways friends and even semi-strangers contribute to your well-being when in close quarters. That's why I was so pleased by the following comment, which I will highlight.

It's so nice to come home to a lived-in house. Parties get organized without having to do any work. Your social network gets quadrupled. And I got to play with the 1-year old girl, who was super cute, and occasionally watch her for 15 minutes while her mother ran upstairs. Fun without responsibility ;) I had a few other friends at the time with small children, and the universal story was that staying home with your baby means that you go crazy because of the isolation and lack of social interaction. Well, Maggie (the mother) had plenty of social interaction & adult conversation right at home, and her daughter was very outgoing, comfortable with strangers, and got lots of attention from all of us, which she loved.

Another commenter, Wax Banks, noted that cohousing is likely to remain a niche affair. To make cohousing more attractive, you need a considerable amount of space and perhaps even dedicated architecture, and that costs money. Most of our housing stock is built to accommodate conventionally "private" living arrangements. My hope is that the voluntary sector, and perhaps an enlightened billionaire, will try to construct miniature intentional communities built along these lines, perhaps for environmental reasons. We see a handful of planned and semi-planned religious communities, but my hope is that this would take root in nonreligious, nonideological "serendipitous" communities as well.

It helps that the US population is growing very fast: if there's room for another 100 Celebration, Floridas, surely there's room for retrofitting scoores of neighborhoods for cohousing. Yes, let's have small private kitchens. But let's also have larger communal kitchens and shared living spaces, etc. This is, as Raines Cohen put it, about increasing our options, not decreasing them.

As for the skeptics, your points are well taken: you are and will likely remain in the vast majority. I do wish housing were priced properly, i.e., consonant with environmental impact. But that's just me.

Reihan: Markets and the Left

One thing a lot of classical liberals fail to understand is that the left is far more sophisticated about markets than they think. The meliorist left sees markets in a mostly benign light. And the alterglobalization, participatory left has a fundamentally different, solidaristic orientation that can't be "disproven" by arguments from inefficiency. But I do think this Alesina-Giavazzi essay is useful nevertheless for all the reasons Free Exchange explains better than I can.

It is particularly important to understand that a roughly similar set of institutions mean very different things in different contexts. For example, the kind of labor market protections that seem benign (wrongly, in my view) in Western Europe are clearly pernicious in a place like India or even Brazil, where the formal sector is a far smaller partof the broader economy. That's why an attack on "neoliberalism" writ large is so flawed: "neoliberalism" can, in an essentially feudal economy, be a destabilizing force on behalf of the very poor. And the "neoliberal" structural reforms pursued by the Nordic economies have preserved the most valuable parts of the social-democratic inheritance.

This is part of the reason why I find Roberto Unger very interesting. Smart liberals tend to dismiss Unger and his "superliberalism" for the decent reason that it is highly, eccentric, deliberately obscure, and, well, illiberal: if the rule of law is the sine qua non of a liberal society, a context-smashing "destabilization branch" is clearly illiberal. But Unger is smart enough to know that in the Third World, a "centrist" politics is often more radical (in the best sense) and pro-poor than a "social-democratic" politics that represents the interests of a narrow, entrenched, privileged minority of formal sector employees.

Reihan: Reader's Digest on the Greenest Cities

You can find the article here. Stockholm does very well, shockingly enough, and US cities perform dismally, with New York doing the best at 15 out or 72. This is why I suggest you all move to "Reihantown," a carless utopia full of cheerful shanty-dwellers living under thatched roofs. Seriously speaking, I do think "Reihantown" would be pretty green given that none of the Reihanians will have the hand-eye coordination it takes to drive an automobile or for that matter a rider-mower. We will travel through the city like monkeys with zip-lines. And we'll like it very much.

Reihan: A Pox on All Their Houses!

Will wonders never cease? Now, I have to say: this sounds like a successful rom-com, with the jaded cynic being won over by the clueless yet charmingly brassy poster.

Reihan: Selfish Altruism

While perusing Lifehacker (in life, some read Lifehacker, others read Gawker), I hit upon a link to an oddly titled post at lifehack.org, "Four Rules to Understand What Makes People Tick." Now, in my experience there are only two Rules: (1) Fear and (2) Shame, and subrules like, (1) Strike fear into their hearts until they succumb to a shame-spiral and (2) Shame them until they weep, and soon they will fear further shameful weeping. But according to the good people at lifehack.org, the rules are that

Rule One: People mostly care about themselves

Rule Two: People are motivated by selfish altruism

Rule Three: People don't think much

Rulfe Four: Conformity is the norm

This is pretty deep, man. And pretty plausible. I would add a few more rules.

Rule Five, or the Rule of the Jaguar Bone: He who wields the the femur bone of the mightiest Jaguar shall have unto him untold power.

Rule Six, or the Rule of the Magestone: She who unites the seven stones shall unite the elemental forces, and the circle shall be closed and the Earth will darken.

Wait, no, neither of those make any sense. Anyway, check out those rules, hu-mans. Soon they will be obsolete as robots seize control. Skynet Forever!

Reihan: Ruffini on the Sitemeter Anomaly

This post by "rightroots" mastermind Patrick Ruffini might strike you as a little obscure, but it has important implications: what if we're sharply overcounting visitors to high-traffic blogs? Advertisers are using far more sophisticated metrics, to be sure, but these Sitemeter stats have some weight when it comes to projecting an appearance of real-time political influence. I'd be eager to know more. Then, of course, there is a wealth of opportunities to "juke the stats."

Reihan: The Knicks, the Bulls, and the All-Brooklyn People's Revolutionary Army

In a trenchant post on nationalism, patriotism, and team loyalty, Matt refers to the "two kinds of Knicks fans." At the risk of oversimplifying Matt's point, loyal-yet-sober Knicks fans had some critical distance: they acknowledged the weaknesses of their team while firmly hoping that it would improve in the fullness of time. For Matt, this is not unlike a left-of-center patriot, who has high aspirations for her country and a keen sense of the many ways in which it falls short. The other type of Knicks fan imagined that her team was manifestly superior to other teams, regardless of the outcome of games. Any setbacks were attributed to some kind of dark conspiracy. And Matt believes that this resembles the stance of right-of-center nationalists, diagnosed in Anatol Lieven's (thought-provoking) America Right or Wrong.

But what about those of us who grew up in Brooklyn and refused to root for any New York sports teams on grounds that Brooklyn ought to be a sovereign republic?

In thinking back to my brief tenure as "Subcommandante" of the All-Brooklyn People's Revolutionary Army, I most vividly remember my ardent love of the Ugandan flag, which features a Grey-crowned Cane. At the time, I foolishly believed that the bird was in fact a rooster. And so I devised the Halloween costume that I'm proudest of to this day: I was dressed normally, but with a (fake) rooster sitting on my shoulder, the premise being that I was, "rocking out with my rooster out."

Reihan: Larison on the Depressed, Drunken Blue Elephant

Possibly the most entertaining thing you will read all day. After taking a gander at next year's RNC logo, our favorite Byzantinist writes the following:

Is the message of this logo that the Republican Party is drunk (the stars)? Depressed (hence the blue)? Insane? Perhaps the message is that the party’s being chopped to pieces, or gradually erased from existence and disappearing into the background?

Reihan: No Money, Mo' Problems

From the Wikipedia entry for columnist and former Conservative MP Matthew Parris:

As an MP he took part in a documentary requiring him to live for a week on state social security payments set by the Conservative government for which he was an MP. The experiment came to an embarrassing end when he ran out of money for the electricity meter.

Reihan: Bring Back Communes!

We all know that the kibbutzim failed as a social experiment: those that thrive today operate on markedly different principles than those of their utopian forebears. Having learned quite a lot about how and why so-called "intentional communities," I really think we need to take another crack at building an alternative to single-family living arrangements. No, I don't mean we need to build more multi-family apartment buildings or condos, though we should certainly do that. I mean I think we need to encourage families and couples to "double up," i.e., to live in closer quarters with strangers. If this sounds to you like Soviet-style communal apartments, you're on the right track.

Continue reading "Reihan: Bring Back Communes!" »

Reihan: Rethinking Trade?

As someone who thinks the Republican party should move to the center on issues ranging from healthcare to inequality to taxes, I often point to the marked divergence between mass and elite Republican opinion on these and other issues. Consider this, from the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News Poll:

While 60% of respondents said they want the next president and Congress to continue cutting taxes, 32% said it's time for some tax increases on the wealthiest Americans to reduce the budget deficit and pay for health care.

This comes as no surprise to me, and I think this reflects an admirable appreciation of reality on the part of 60% of respondents. But the bad news is very bad:

Six in 10 Republicans in the poll agreed with a statement that free trade has been bad for the U.S. and said they would agree with a Republican candidate who favored tougher regulations to limit foreign imports.

Again, this shouldn't be surprising. As Brink Lindsey has argued, Republicans and Democrats alike tend to sell free trade exactly the wrong way, in crude mercantilist terms. Trade barriers

are a tax on American economic health for the benefit of narrow interests that cannot possibly justify their special immunity from market discipline. The fact that other countries have similar policies or worse is no reason for us to cling to our own folly.

Unfortunately, the current US trade agenda is increasingly more about imposing our (insane) intellectual property rules on the rest of the world and less about lowering our own trade barriers.

I tend to think we need is a trade and development agenda organized around building a global middle class and encouraging environmentally sustainable growth. I realize that this will sound very fishy to ardent free traders. Let me state for the record that I think we should unilaterally zero out all tariffs, and that any environmental rules should be settled upon by a multilateral process that is sensitive to the dangers of protectionism.

Reihan: Wham Bam Thank You Cam(eron)

One of my favorite bloggers, Alex Massie, is thrilled with David Cameron's performance during the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool.

The speech may have been short of soaring rhetoric, but that's no bad thing these days. Cameron's task was not to show off with jokes or applause lines of lofty rhetoric but to show that he had bottom. By and large, I think he succeeded.

He even declined to throw too much red meat to the party faithful. Immigration and Europe were raised, but not major themes. He didn't even launch a passionate, indignant assault upon the Labour Party and Gordon Brown. What he did do, however, was come across as a thoughtful young man who had thought long and hard about the problems facing British society. It wasn't enough, he said, for the Tories to point out why Labour has failed to meet its own targets. The Tories had to understand - and persuade the country - why Labour had under-achieved and under-whelmed.

Having just seen the speech, I was thoroughly impressed as well. But it's important to remember that it took ten long years for the Conservatives to get to even this uncertain point, when they will still most likely be defeated in a general election held in the fall. Will it take Republicans a decade to get back in step with the mood of the country? Barring a minor miracle, my guess is that it will take at least that long.

Reihan: Bill Richardson for Senate?

Yglesias says yes. I did too, but then a resident New Mexican explained to me that Tom Udall would have a better shot. We might then have two brothers, Mark and Tom Udall, in the US Senate.

Is is too much to ask for two African Americans?

P.S.- I knew they were cousins! Argh! Of course, this makes my not-so-funny gag inspired by my Muslim origins utterly obsolete.

Reihan: Hung!

At the risk of spoiling the results for those of you who missed the Top Chef finale, I'd like to second Matt Yglesias in praising the show and in declaring my support for Hung. But my support for Hung was, though I am loathe to admit it, based in simple ethnic nationalism. In truth, my loyalties were with the brash, abrasive, and diminutive Howie, covered in vivid detail by Grub Street. Once Howie was knocked out, I was adrift. Hung was, let's be frank, kind of an obnoxious blowhard, always shocked by the merest criticism. "You thought I shouldn't have served braised human flesh! Wow, I mean. Wow. That's weird. But okay ..."

Here's the thing: he was the last short man standing, and also (let's put all our cards on the table here) he was a scrappy immigrant. Now, I'm not an immigrant, but I did move from Brooklyn to Washington, D.C. In that disorientation and displacement, I identify with Hung's journey from Vietnam.

One thing I found a little creepy: everyone said he was utterly soulless (*cough*, sounds like an Ivy League admissions office), and so he talked about his "soul" during his "let's emote" session at the end of Part I of the Finale. That struck me as ... soulless. I'd have much preferred a bold statement of, "They say I ain't got no soul. That I'm a robot. WELL-I-AM-ROBOT, MUST-DESTROY-HUMANS!" and then fired a red beam from the middle of his forehead that vaporized Padma Lakshmi.

As for Padma Lakshmi, some say ill-considered plastic surgery has given her a Michael Jackson nose. I say, first, that no one talks about Tom Colichio that way, which suggests a certain level of misogyny. And, second, I think she's quite beautiful. (And South Asian! Woo!)

That's enough for the ethnic and heightist and displacedist nationalism.

Reihan: Why Paul Kagame is Important

Many years ago, Fareed Zakaria began a fascinating with Lee Kuan Yew, one of my personal heroes, with the following:

"ONE OF THE ASYMMETRIES of history," wrote Henry Kissinger of Singapore's patriarch Lee Kuan Yew, "is the lack of correspondence between the abilities of some leaders and the power of their countries." Kissinger's one time boss, Richard Nixon, was even more flattering. He speculated that, had Lee lived in another time and another place, he might have "attained the world stature of a Churchill, a Disraeli, or a Gladstone."

If anything, I think this is an understatement. And I wonder if we'll soon be saying the same thing about Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda. Read this very short op-ed to see what I mean.

I realize that there is a pattern of Westerners fawning over this or that African leader, and the romance usually ends badly. Lest we forget, Robert Mugabe was once celebrated throughout the world. Yet it's precisely the bourgeois banality of Kagame's ambitions that I find so encouraging. He's not tugging at heartstrings, but rather setting achievable ambitions and building the institutional capacity he needs, with considerable help from friendly outsiders, to achieve them.

Reihan: Shifting the Immigration Equation

The great egalitarian objection to mass immigration, and more specifically the low-skill influx, is that it increases wage dispersion. How? There are a lot of ways in which low-skill and high-skill workers are complementary: a low-skill writer like yours truly can delight and entertain high-skill mathematicians, giving them the inner strength they need to finish proving a particularly vexing theorem. But if there are only a handful of low-skill writers, our services will soon become quite dear, and those high-skill mathematicians will be weeping, unproductively, over their keyboards. That's when a boatload of Indian writers suddenly show up, wittier and far faster than me, to drive down the price of my services. Suddenly theorems are being proved left and right! So the mathematicians see their pay packets skyrocket!

But wait: what if we also brought in a ton of Indian mathematicians? That would subject high-skill natives to the same pressures faced by low-skill natives. And it would, to my mind, almost certainly be a good thing. As this very erudite and very mysterious Free Exchange blogger points out, Alan Greenspan agrees. Good for him!

Taking this to the real world for a moment, there is an added advantage: agglomeration economies are a powerful thing, and concentrating the best minds in the world in a particular region almost certainly accelerates the pace of innovation. As for the "brain drain" from the poor world to the rich world, the "brain drain" is increasingly the "brain circulation," with valuable human capital flowing back, sparking new agglomerations and new innovations.

Reihan: Pre-Tax Inequality

Will Wilkinson has a thought-provoking post on pre-tax income inequality in the US and Germany. Most of us are familiar with the fact that after-tax (or rather after taxes and transfers) income inequality is markedly higher in the US than in Germany. But pre-tax, the levels are roughly the same. A few weeks ago, I puzzled over this in a short post.

Keep in mind that Germany absorbed the DDR in 1989. At unification, the population of West Germany was at 63 million. The population of East Germany was 16 million. Massive transfers have failed to close the gap between the neue Lander and the more prosperous south and west, though I imagine intra-national migration has helped somewhat. In 2007, Germany has a population just above 82 million, which implies a population increase of 3 million over 18 years: negligible. At 300 million, the US population has increased by about 52 million since 1990. And of course "immigrants, legal and illegal, account for about 40 percent of population growth." (Let's treat this number as a guideline: it wasn't calculated for the increase between 1990 and 2007! But I imagine the actual result wouldn't be far off.) A large share of immigrants, like my parents and many of my friends, come from the developing world; and many of these immigrants are low-skill, a pattern that often persists into the next generation.

All this is to say that we do pretty well, and the Germans do pretty badly, in terms of inequality of market income. I don't know exactly what this means, but it struck me as worthy of note.

Well, Will has a straightforward interpretation.

But it seems to me to fit pretty well with the weak effect of the relationship between declining unions and rising inequality found in other research, and suggests that the structure of basic American political-economic institutions is not especially conducive to inegalitarian outcomes.

That sounds about right.

There are some on the left who want the US tax-and-transfer regime to be more generous towards the poor and lower-middle-class. And there are others who seek large-scale structural shifts in the US economy, shifts that aim to change the pre-tax balance of economic forces. I actually don't think it's obvious that we should exclusively pursue the first path. The idea of a "property-owning democracy," in which ownership of income-producing assets is spread far more evenly, is about this pre-tax balance. You might say it is about strengthening the relative bargaining position of the working poor. But I do think open labor markets are the wrong target. Far better to use wage subsidies and other tools like it than to adopt, say, centralized wage bargaining.

The Scandinavian settlement, favored by many on the left and which I find pretty attractive as well, is built on (a) broad-based taxes, (b) relatively open labor markets, (c) extremely low trade barriers, and, most importantly and most distinctively, (d) high-quality public services. We mustn't forget that (a) and (d) are closely related. As Peter Lindert has argued, the consumers of (d) tend to pay for (d) thanks to (a).

The implications, to my mind, are that (1) the federal government ought to and almost certainly will have a much larger role in guaranteeing high-quality healthcare for all Americans. After some political wrangling and rear-guard actions by the small-government right, this will become a consensus position: the thorny questions will be over the delivery of services and the extent of redistribution. Hopefully any reform will make the "hidden welfare state" less opaque. And (2) we will, sooner or later, move in the direction of a VAT.

Reihan: My Favorite Actor

First, I'll note that I've never liked the term "actress." We find "doctress" absurd, and with good reason. Acting is a profession, and I don't see why "actor" shouldn't be a gender-neutral term.

With that said, my favorite actor is probably Michelle Monaghan. Turns out she is funny and self-effacing as well as supremely talented.

To my chagrin, she is starring opposite Ben Stiller in The Heartbreak Kid. My sense from the trailers is that Monaghan's character is not crippled by profound self-loathing or deep-seated body image "issues" (e.g., the delusion that one's body is covered by an impenetrable layer of poisonous quills deadly to anyone but Ben Stiller, thus making physical intimacy with the non-Stiller population essentially impossible). So how exactly do you expect me to believe that she'd fall in love with Ben Stiller? The notion that any human being, or coyote or armadillo, could "fall for" Stiller defies credulity.

"But this happened in real life!," you object. And it's true, Stiller does have a wife. Do you have any solid proof that some kind of foul play or black magic was not involved? Perhaps Stiller called upon some sort of mystical runestone or magical flute to effect his nefarious design.

To use a favorite blogospheric turn-of-phrase, I declare the burden of proof to be on those of you who believe Stiller is not a dangerous necromancer who must be banished to the outer reaches of space. Take that!

Reihan: A National Party No More?

Michael Barone is talking up the chances of a longshot Republican, Jim Ogonowski, who is running against Democrat Niki Tsongas in a special election in the Fifth District of Massachusetts. Ogonowski has become a cause of choice among members of the "rightroots," forward-looking Republicans like Patrick Ruffini who (in a neat historical reversal) are drawing on insights from the "netroots" on winning elections and shaping the ideological direction of their party.

Chances are that Ogonowski will lose. But how is it that Ogonowski is even remotely competitive in this deep blue district? Barone has a theory.

Ogonowski is running a 2007 campaign, emphasizing different issues from Republicans in 2004 or 2006. One is taxes. With the Bush tax cuts scheduled to expire in 2010, taxes will go up unless Congress acts; Tsongas, like most House Democrats, wants to repeal some but not necessarily all of the cuts. Ogonowski says the average family in the district will pay $4,000 in additional taxes if the cuts are allowed to lapse. This is an affluent district, with a median income of $56,000 in 2000, well above the national average. The tax issue has not done much for Republicans in this decade. But with the tax cuts scheduled to expire, it may be more salient now.

Another sense in which Ogonowski is running a 2007 campaign is his approach to the Iraq war.

He says he was opposed to going to war in Iraq but now wants us to pursue success; he opposes raising the retirement age for Social Security.

This is an important and telling mix of positions, which will be crucially important to any Republican revival outside of the South. And a Republican revival outside of the South is particularly important for all the reasons Christopher Caldwell laid out in a very prescient article published almost ten years ago in The Atlantic and ably summarized here.

Reihan: The Best Resume of All Time?

Here's a candidate: Tom Billings, a man who passed away recently. As you can see from the excerpts below, he had a very full life.

Continue reading "Reihan: The Best Resume of All Time?" »

Reihan: A Conservative Comeback?

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. But it seems the Cameron Conservatives are not doomed just yet.

The Tories now have a huge opening to ram home to the public what everyone in Westminster knows: Brown is just as keen on spin as Blair. The line of attacks should be, if Brown will play politics with the deployment of British troops overseas is there anything that he won’t do to win?

Add to this, the brewing row over the apparent use of Treasury officials to discredit Tory tax plans and Brown has got himself on to a very sticky wicket at just the wrong time. Cameron will step up to the podium on Wednesday with the Tories in far better shape than anyone would have expected this time last week. If he delivers, the Tories might just find themselves with the big ‘mo behind them.

That, of course, is a big "if." Now, you might be wondering: what's at stake here? Lefties can be forgiven for thinking that a Cameron defeat would be a very good thing. After all, the rap on him is that he is "Chameleon Dave," an essentially Bushian figure who uses sugary language to sell a musty and divisive agenda. Or lefties could see that Cameron represents a marked shift on the right, away from classical Thatcherism in favor of a more modest, meliorist politics that accepts the basics of the Thatcherite settlement and the Blairite settlement. To the extent the Cameron Conservatives want to shrink the size of government, they mean to shrink its relative size by growing the economy and the voluntary sector. You can disagree with this, but lefties would be right to see this as a "taming" of the political right, a phenomenon also seen in Sweden's Reinfeldt government.

Reihan: Swiss-o-philia

Because there was an awful fire in my neighborhood recently, I am feeling even more pro-firefighter than usual. Enjoy.

I sense I'd enjoy this more if I could understand French.

Reihan: Tiny Masters of Today Get Cranky

The coolest kids in America* on homework and teachers:

Hi! So you’re in sixth grade now, right? How do you like it? Well, it’s lot different, because it’s my first year in middle school. I personally think there are too many teachers. Because your teachers don’t care if your other teachers give you too much homework! They just give you more. It’s so inconsiderate! Middle school is kind of fun because it makes you feel older. It’s more like high school. You can do things by yourself.

This is how I feel about life: I'm in the 105th grade now, and I can watch The Twilight Zone at 2 AM and eat lunch wherever I want: rad.

* Or maybe the coolest kids are Smoosh.

Reihan: Has the US Learned How to Defeat an Open-Source Insurgency?

John Robb says no, but with an interesting wrinkle.

After four painful years, the US military has stumbled upon (mostly due to the now classic Jihadi overreach -- as in Afghanistan, Somalia, etc.) the only model for fighting a mature open source insurgency: a decentralized model of security that forgoes centralized defense/police forces in favor of a plethora of independent militias. The success of this model in reducing violence (at least in the short term) in Anbar province, has led to its replication in other provinces.

Yet this new decentralized strategy

runs counter to all of the classic goals of counter-insurgency and more importantly, the stated (and implied) goals for the US in Iraq:

* A viable central government. Every time a militia is stood up, it is at the direct expense of the central government. It loses the essential requirement for any viable state: a monopoly of force.
* A grand political bargain. An open-source counter-insurgency locks Iraq into a patchwork of mini-fuedal principalities with a large diversity of primary loyalties. Political settlement now becomes impossible since the sheer diversity of armed interests will overwhelm any attempt at reconciliation.
* A safe place for private oil companies and a long term US military presence. This new patchwork of armed groups in Iraq ensures chaos, which will make it impossible to attain any level of modern normalcy. Vendettas between militias, betrayal (of US troops), rampant crime/theft/corruption, and more is on the dinner plate for decades to come. Finally, the open source insurgency won't go away. It will only return when it revises its methods in light of the new conditions.

So even the good news is not unambiguously good.

Reihan: Enthusiast Dollars and Opportunist Dollars

Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama in Q3 fundraising. Perhaps this is unfair of me, but how many donors or bundlers do you think contribute to the Obama campaign because they are certain he'll win and they want a seat at the table? And now how many donors or bundlers contribute to the Clinton campaign because they think she is a safe bet?

HuffPo a Go Go

Arianna and Lerer keep going from strength to strength.

Good for them! My guess is that they'll soon face some stiff competition.

Reihan: He's a Hypnotist

This story reminded me of this song.

Reihan: PMCs and Imperialism in Iraq

What exactly was the Iraqi government hoping to accomplish by banning Blackwater? A few thoughts:

(1) This was a symbolic gesture for domestic political consumption; the Iraqi public is outraged by a foreign occupation, and passing this legislation is a relative inexpensive way of signaling nationalist resistance: that Blackwater is a small part of the PMC landscape lends credence to this notion, which I think reflects the conventional wisdom.

(2) Because PMCs are such a central part of the US presence, undermining them is a way of undermining said presence -- and this in turn furthers the goal of a Shia leadership that sincerely believes it can successfully vanquish the Sunni minority through sheer ruthlessness.

(3) Chris Hayes sees the Blackwater imbroglio as further proof that "Iraq is an imperial project." And that's clearly true in a sense. Similarly, the US occupation of Germany and Japan and Austria (radically different for all of the obvious reasons) saw to it that any armed resistance was crushed, co-opted, or otherwise contain to maintain suzerainty. Indeed, the imperialist component of American influence was in fact greater during the Cold War according to the very smart Nexon-Wright analysis (which I found via M.Y.).

Clearly we're in a strange and different situation in which the United States is in a very antagonistic relationship with its supposed "client state," the Shia-dominated Iraqi semi-state. Banning Blackwater would undermine the ability of US forces to continue as the dominant military presence in Iraq (see 2), so it's hardly shocking that the Iraqi government would press for such a step. So Chris is right: the US presence has to be justified by something more than, "Hey man, we're just here to support a fledgling democracy." But of course the rationale for the US presence has long since moved past that point to, "We need to contain the chaos and tamp down the violence." That's where the argument is happening now, and that's where there are very convincing arguments (in my view) on both sides.

Reihan: '00s Nostalgia

As 2007 draws to a close, it's time to steel ourselves for the '00s retrospectives. Remember Ellen Feiss?

Possibly the greatest advertisement ever made, much better than the unreleased Ellen Feiss Powerbook video. But yeah, she still seems pretty stoned.

What a totally strange decade. The world was collapsing, yet the culture was vibrant and vital. In the near future, The American Scene will have a mini-symposium on the '00s: what were the unique and likely to last cultural phenomena? The return of Weltanschauung politics, Web 2.0 and the democratization of culture, the death or transcendence of hip-hop, etc. ...

Reihan: My Social Security Plan

Andrew Samwick ably summarizes the current state of the debate among Democrats.

What I'd like to see is a combination of Swedish-style notional accounts and Phil Longman's Early Retirement accounts. Let's absolutely not "carve-out," and let's emphasize growing the labor force by discouraging early retirement and reducing the tax burden on so-called "secondary earners," and perhaps by pursuing some limited, modest pro-natalist measures.

Continue reading "Reihan: My Social Security Plan" »

Reihan: The Googlopticon?

This will be an amazing book.

One of the great attractions of Google is that it appears to offer so many powerful services for “free,” that is, for no remuneration. But there is a non-monetary transaction at work between Google and its users. We get Web search, email, Blogger platforms, and YouTube videos. Google gets our habits and predilections so it can more efficiently target advertisements to us. Google’s core business is consumer profiling. It keeps dossiers on all of us. Yet we have no idea how substantial or accurate these digital portraits are. This project will generate a better sense of what is at stake in this “gift” transaction and will generate new theories of corporate surveillance that get beyond the trite “Panopticon” model.

Call this the non-fiction answer to Cory Doctorow's Scroogled.

And how does this map onto changing generational attitudes about privacy, explored in Emily Nussbaum's rivetingly brilliant "Say Everything." David Brin's now-decade-old The Transparent Societyhttp://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/fftransparent.html, a blogosphere favorite, explored the promise and peril of this kind of openness, ultimately coming down on the side that greater transparency is very good. I tend to agree. The wonderful 1-800-GOOG-411 harvests our voice information to build better speech recognition technology. I am an eager and enthusiastic participant in this effort. But who will own all of this information? I almost wish they were forced to work with a consortium of public and private entities when working on projects of this vast scope, to better ensure that these technologies will diffuse rapidly.

Reihan: Why the Tesla Roadster Won't Transform the Way We Drive

FuturePundit pours cold water on a very ambitious project.

They've got a car they've designed with very light and expensive materials. They probably have little or no luggage space. I bet it doesn't do well in crash tests either. They are using the best batteries they can find. Yet it is good for only 245 miles. Plus, once you've driven three and a half to four hours with it you've got to stop and wait just as long for it to recharge. This is a local car, not suitable for cross-country travel. In order for batteries to totally replace liquid fuels future batteries have got to store more electric power per unit weight and be capable of recharge in 1% of the time of current best-of-breed batteries. Is this physically possible?

I certainly hope so. The great thing about FuturePundit is that every post is very thorough and offers plenty of background information. It is thus a terrific resource even for those who disagree with the editorial voice. Check it out.

Reihan: Speaking of Milk, and Climate Change

A poignant note from the milkman to The Oil Drum's Euan Mearns:

Dear Customer,

Doorstep Milk Prices - Sunday 30th September 2007

I am sure you will be well aware by now, from the extensive on-going press coverage, of the substantial increase in prices affecting the numerous agricultural associated products.

The primary factors influencing the increase in milk costs are due to the heightened demand for dairy products along with availablity issues. These issues are being intensified by the extreme weather conditions currenly being experienced around the world, which in turn has increased our costs considerably in recent months.

This increase will help to secure the future of our milk supply and the continutaion of the Doorstep Service.

Doortstep Price Increase as of 30th September 2007

Pint Glass - will increase by 4 pence per pint
500 ml carton - will increase by 4 pence per 500 mls

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your loyal custom and continued support.

Mearns ends his post on a dark note.

Does this provide a glimpse of the future? We may have to eat fewer eggs, less pork and bacon and drink less milk.

The prospect of drinking less milk is part of why I've moved well past the Lomborgs on the world on this issue; my current position is, let's take sweeping measures and lets offer many billions of dollars to anyone who can reliably scrape carbon and other harmful emissions out of the atmosphere and banish them for good.

Reihan: Cradle of Civilization

The controversial-yet-indispensable Razib Khan offers this handy map that tracks the diffusion of agriculture from the Fertile Crescent to points beyond.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with Razib about the imperialism of the milk-drinkers: how a handful of light-eyed Volga dwellers, powered by immunity-bolstering cow milk, were able to transform the face of the world. (Milk: How A Frothy White Beverage Created All Civilization, and How the Irish Saved It, and How It Explains the World By Making the World Flat.) As a great lover of milk, this pleased me. And yet I thought about my indigenous ancestors facing off against these cow-loving hordes and I thought, "Does ancestral loyalty demand that I stick to milk?" I'll tell you this much: my ancestors clearly weren't drinking NesQuik, so I can give up the charade of wanting to live like them. For example, I also enjoy living in a structure with a roof.

Reihan: Kitsch Covers

I will take a principled stand. Kitsch covers of pop songs should be really excellent and faithful to the source material, like Ted Leo's celebrated "Since U Been Gone" cover. This Amanda Palmer cover of "Umbrella" is, as we used to say when I was a kid, "wack."

Have you found that your slang is now laughably out-of-date? I still like to say "rad." My plan is to stick with it, and have it become a kind of generational marker.

Reihan: I Find Les Savy Fav Intimidating

I've listened to only one of their albums, or rather I've purchased only one and listened to a handful of songs. I'm convinced that I need to give the band some care and attention, yet I'm gun-shy about buying the new one, despite the very attractive cover art.

Reihan: Extremely Frustrated About Lack of Aliens in America on iTunes

Vulture said Aliens was brilliant way back in May, and they tantalizingly suggested that I "season pass it" via iTunes. As of yet, I can't. And so I still haven't seen the first episode. Given that the subject matter is of intense personal interest, I'm kicking myself for missing it. I also missed Matt Pond PA, thinking that his slightly somber music would prove soporific, and that I'd turn somnambulant (and perhaps get stabbed). Troy Patterson reviewed Aliens, but I still don't know what to expect.

Whoa! It appears "Luke" is the dad! And the previews are excellent! Let's cross our fingers.

Reihan: Tom Goldstein on the Coming Supreme Court Switcheroo

This piece, by supremely well-regarded Supreme Court analyst Tom Goldstein, is exactly the kind of political analysis I like: it is sensitive to context, it makes an effort to anticipate the predictable responses of activists, and it provides new information for casual readers.

The upshot is that the upcoming term won't end as this one did, with headlines and TV reports describing the court as profoundly conservative, triggering praise from the right and howls of protest from the left. Instead, we will see (mistaken) talk of the court's "surprising" tack back to the left. In fact, this commentary will be wrong: The justices and their views will be exactly the same come June 2008; it is the cases that will be different. But the misleading sense of direction that's likely when the term ends next June could make the court a galvanizing campaign issue for Republicans, not Democrats.

Yesterday, a friend noted that the tyranny of the clever argument can be paralyzing: some smart writers spend all of their energy thinking of something offbeat to say, when they could instead simply convey striking facts. I guess I suffer from this same disease, so I'm reluctant to criticize this tendency. But it does say something about the rising popularity of activist media relative to interpretive media in the opinion space. Perhaps because I'm a fogey, or at least fogey-identified, I still enjoy kooky-argument-driven stuff more.

Reihan: Words I'll Never Say

"He should shut up."

Daniel Larison and I disagree about a lot (I'm all about wage subsidies, robots, and Gramsci; he's more about the Southern Agrarians), but boy, he sure is smart, and evidently people who should be a little more generous or at least patient find him hard to understand.

One of my running jokes with friends is that I really like the idea of Weltanschauung parties. Say I worked out at the SPD gym, joined the Young Socialists militia, and bought all my groceries at the Rosa Luxemburg Foodmart. But when I read lines like the above I think, you know, that would probably be really bad.

Reihan: Understanding the Casualty Numbers

What should one take away from these apparently-encouraging casualty numbers? I mean this

The number of American troops and Iraqi civilians killed in the war fell in September to levels not seen in more than a year. The U.S. military said the lower count was at least partly a result of new strategies and 30,000 additional U.S. forces deployed this year.

and this

More dramatic, however, was the decline in Iraqi civilian, police and military deaths. The figure was 988 in September - 50 percent lower than the previous month and the lowest tally since June 2006, when 847 Iraqis died.

Pro-surge commentators seem confident that this is a byproduct of the surge, and that this is a sign of progress to come provided we stick with their proposed strategy. I imagine there's another interpretation. Who has the best take?

Reihan: Hurray for Dani Rodrik!

I say that as a general matter about the "heterodox" economist, who has done a tremendous amount to usefully complicate our thinking about trade barriers, capital flows, import substitution, the welfare state, and other issues falling under the rubric of globalization. His weblog is a delight.

I particularly like him for the reason I like his frequent interlocutor Tyler Cowen: I think Rodrik suffers from the some of the same cognitive biases that I do, in favor of the interesting answer and the interesting outcome. This leads me, and I think Rodrik, to sometimes underemphasize some obvious yet important truths.

But this specific "hurray" is for this short post, or at least the principle behind it. My hope is that the generation of lefty intellectuals represented by Chris Hayes, Brad Plumer, Dan Kurtz-Phelan, and Sasha Polakow-Suransky, and of course the Stakhanovites Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein, will displace books like The Shock Doctrine. That, alas, will take a while.

P.S.- From a reliably smart friend:

I'm fairly certain that the Naomi Klein review that Rodrik links to is written by someone who didn't read the book.

Reihan: The Closest I've Ever Come to Riding a Bicycle

During my 27 years on Earth, I've tried learning how to ride a bicycle about half a dozen times. My father made an attempt when I was very small, and many friends have tried in the years since, most recently this past summer. Somehow I've never been able to get it together. A few summers back, during a tremendously fun modern Orthodox (mOrthodox) wedding weekend I rode a tandem bicycle over the Golden Gate Bridge with one of my much taller friends. We were a spectacularly odd pair, and I failed to pull my weight. The pain in my midsection was, shall we say, uh, memorable. This past weekend, while horsing around with some cronies, I came upon this really neat piece of ephemeral public art, and I had no choice but to take advantage.

This photo is, er, at a kooky angle. Note that I'm carrying a can of Goya Frijoles Negros, one of my favorite foods. Rest assured, I did not snatch it from a food pantry. I did get some dirty looks.

Oh dude, I couldn't get this to work. Consider yourself spared from a powerfully disturbing image.

Reihan: Marginalization and the Ironic Left

Earlier today I wrote a extremely short post on Vietnam revisionism that some have interpreted as "snarky." Well, revisit the post and imagine if it were instead entirely literal.

My sense is that Perlstein, for perfectly respectable reasons, wanted to discredit a strain of thinking about Vietnam, and so he chose two books that are emblematic (in different ways!) of this strain. There are other books that would lead you to a wider discussion of Vietnam revisionism, but this wider discussion would be less effective in achieving the end of discrediting a particular strain of thinking.

Focused enmity is an important part of almost any political movement's strategy: the goal is to shift the terms of the debate (the "Overton window") over time in a more favorable direction. And so right-wingers, during their ascendancy, sought to marginalize those segments of the left that argued (often very convincingly) for measures that would move U.S. society in a social-democratic direction. (I think this effort had mixed results to say the very least: many decent ideas were tossed out with the bathwater, though let's not kid ourselves about the state of the debate circa the Ford White House.) In a similar vein, a lot of smart liberals I know spend a lot of time thinking about how to use a very favorable intellectual climate. Should the left seek to discredit right-wing ideas? Of course. Should the left build an alliance with the mainstream to enduringly marginalize right-wing ideas? I think this is increasingly the goal.

Some lefties, generally the more savvy and (I hate to say this, because it's subtler than this) more intelligent, see the irony in these efforts. Right-wing pressure groups in the 1970s and 1980s railed against the left-wing media. The "problem" was solved in part by technologies that allowed entrepreneurs to serve this disgruntled audience, e.g., talk radio, Fox News, etc. An ironic left recognizes that the so-called "MSM" isn't "right-wing" the way Reed Irvine believed it to be "left-wing," yet it also knows that MSM personnel are more susceptible to the kind of subtle social pressures they can exert. (As Jon Chait memorably argued, the "MSM" is upper-middle biased more than right- or left-biased: the same neoliberal consensus enshrined by the Clintons, but maybe a little more conservative on entitlements.) So the ironic left creates parallel pressure groups.

Here's the thing: the first ironic generation is supplanted by a second unironic generation that is "activist" in the same way the kids at CPAC are "activist": unreflective, tough, eager to strike back. (Note that young people can be part of the ironic left: Matt Yglesias is one of its standard-bearers, though of course the ironic left can't have a standard-bearer by its very nature.) The ironic left seeks to marginalize, in the hopes of "achieving our country." The foot soldiers put the plan into effect, often without understanding the nature of the project. Many hail from monolithically right-wing communities, where they were among (or at least perceived themselves to be among) a small minority of tolerant, bright people. So the war against the other team maps onto a complicated, shifting set of personal resentments and rivalries.

My sense is that Perlstein, clearly a brilliant writer, is part of the ironic left. He recognizes himself as part of a longer-term historical project designed to make the United States a more just, egalitarian, robustly democratic society, and I'll bet he sees a continuity between the progressives of today and the abolitionists and Tom Paine republicans of the past. For America to move forward in what he sees as the right direction, he needs to engage in gloves-off intellectual combat against a powerful ideological machine backed by corporate America, not marred by false consciousness, and furthered by armies devout religious believers and other people who are marred by false consciousness.

As someone who has strong sympathies with social-democratic politics and with conservative politics (I'll have to explain this at some point, but my guess is that only my mother would find this to be of interest), I find Charles Beardian thinking from the left and right alike mostly depressing and unedifying, but I do want to see how it all plays out. That's why I think of myself more as an omnivorous observer than as an activist. I haven't voted since 2000, though I should say that this mostly reflects a deep disdain for my options. (I was a big believer in proportional representation, and I'd vote for it tomorrow if I could.) I go where the most odd and interesting debates are happening. Were I ever to engage in more-than-mild criticism, it would be directed against the smug and self-satisfied and mean-spirited. But there's so much of this going around that policing it would be exhausting, not to mention profoundly unfun.

One tragedy of contemporary conservatism is that there's no such thing as an ironic right, apart from a few dozen people, most of them quite amusing.

Reihan: The 'War on Terror' Conservatives

Soren Dayton raises interesting questions concerning the tension between the short-term ends of Republican politicians and the long-term ends of conservative activists.

The movement activist offers a strategy for moving the country to the right over the long-term. And over the medium-term, the movement activist actually probably grows his organization and his power with a target like Hillary Clinton to attack. And this is the point. Many, many conservative consultants will say in private that they know that they will make a lot of money attacking Hillary Clinton if she is President. And many suspect that she can’t be beat. The one way for them to lose is to lose influence in the party over the short term. And that’s what Giuliani brings, especially if we manages to win.

Because my general sense is that the conservative movement is badly in need of shaking up, this kind of reflects well on Giuliani. Ross and I wrote a short piece a few months back outlining how Giuliani could become a vehicle for a lower-middle reformist agenda. By now it seems clear that this lower-middle route hasn't been pursued: quite the opposite. The style of confrontational politics he's chosen hasn't been anti-shirker, anti-corporate crime, anti-cronyism. It's been, as Dayton suggests, a right-nationalist style focused almost exclusively on a maximalist approach to the War on Terror. And it's by no means clear that this is a tactical mistake. Back to Dayton:

As the Elephant in the Mirror poll pointed out, there are now about an equal number of "War on Terror" conservatives as there are social conservatives. This kind of situation is how parties change. There is an underlying reality to a Giuliani candidacy that a lot of pundits have not understood yet. The post-George W. Bush, post-9/11 party is different than it used to be. More socially conservative, but also more conservative on the war on terror. And Rudy is their ticket to a seat at the table.

One wonders what the foreign policy landscape will look like in five to ten years. The Cold War shaped the party coalitions for decades, which makes the sense: the Soviet threat was an apparently immovable part of the landscape, and it shaped everything from attitudes towards the size of government to ethnic allegiances. I wonder about the staying power of the "War on Terror" framework politically speaking, and whether or not we're seeing an unsustainable boom in "War on Terror" nationalism.

My preferred alternative is "moralistic domestic reformism." More on that to come.

Reihan: Heroes, and I Don't Mean That Abomination of a TV Program

This now-ancient post by Alex Tabarrok on the virtues of direct instruction reminds me: we need more robots. I dream of the day when, as fightin' public intellectual Will Wilkinson once suggested to me, people will pay a premium for "organic" novels written by actual humans, sometime after superintelligent machines supplant human creators of literary fiction. That day is coming soon. I'd say give it a decade. My hope is that we'll soon have robot fan fiction that can, for example, tells me what happens after the extremely abrupt ending of American Pastoral. Seriously, what if all unsatisfactory endings could be supplemented by robot-produced B- level "sequels" offering plausible scenarios concerning your favorite characters?

That I'd consider this a very good thing should give you some indication of the extent of my philistinism.

Reihan: The Campaign Standard

By now I hope you've taken some time to check out The Campaign Standard, a new blog from The Weekly Standard. I should make my bias clear: the main contributor is Matthew Continetti, a friend of who has amazingly catholic tastes and a deep knowledge of campaign politics. But you also get to read Richard Starr, a cutting wit who doesn't write nearly enough, and who introduced me some time ago to parkour gym training.

There are those of who resist the charms of The Weekly Standard, perhaps because you blame them for all the troubles in the world. You're missing out: having spent a lot of time reading the magazine, and a fair bit of time in the company of those who make it happen, I can assure you that these are deeply eccentric people, and I mean that as the highest compliment. You will be entertained and you will be provoked, provided you avoid anything written by "Reihan Salam."

Reihan: The Next Time You Use A Kleenex

... think of this deeply creepy twenty-year-old advertisement that still haunts the nightmares of the Japanese.

Funnily enough, that's exactly how I feel whenever I blow my nose, and I'm sure it's the same for you.

The source for this wonderful video. What a splendid website: check it out!

P.S.- For those who can't get enough of the Japanese and their use and abuse of aging American celebrities, please consult Japander.

P.P.S.- One of my best friends just said, "I love Japan. I almost think the country exists solely for my entertainment. I don't think this about any other country." Knowing GCAW as well as I do, I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if Japan really was a free-floating mirage-nation conjured up by one of his fever-dreams, or something he cooked up with the aid of a Navajo peace-pipe. This notion is only slightly undermined by the fact that I've met many people who claim to be Japanese. One of these days I'll make it there, and I'm pretty sure most people will suspect that I'm some kind of illegal alien. Of course, they said the same thing about Phil Collins.

Reihan: A Lettter to Apple

One of my heroes, 21-year-old technologist David Recordon (now of Six Apart and a leading light in the effortt to open the social graph) has written a letter to Apple that I endorse from beginning to end.

I have no problem bricking a phone if it was unlocked (I switched to AT&T despite hating everything that company stands for) or not allowing a firmware downgrade, but I do have a large problem bricking phones for no reason other than having third-party applications installed. The reason this affects me so strongly is that your company is now creating fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the minds of your power users as to if it is safe to apply an Apple update. Thus even if my phone is not designed to brick during the update, by bricking some phones the level of FUD is too high for me to be willing to update my own. You've shifted me from needing to be an early adopter to preferring to wait to see if I will be hurt by a software update; this is not good.

Tim Wu anticipated some of these issues in the best analysis of the iPhone to date.

Reihan: Under the El

A Phildelphia friend, a very reliable source, just sent me a link to David Kessler's ongoing documentary project, Shadow World, which tracks the life of a small corner of Philadelphia. I wanted to say "blighted" corner, yet that sounds very wrong somehow. After watching a few episodes, I found the stories compelling, and at times a little familiar. Like most of us, I've known people just a bad decision or two away from their straitened circumstances. I feel a lot of hesitation about what you might call "poverty pornography," which tends to be manipulative in the extreme. And yet I think Kessler's work is better than that: the stories are confessional, and the women and men are clear-eyed about their circumstances.

I should warn you: the material can be dark and disturbing, and there is plenty of foul language.

Reihan: The Missing Vietnam Book

Rick Perlstein's very Perlsteinian review of Mark Moyar and Lewis Sorley mysteriously overlooks another revisionist account of the Vietnam War: Michael Lind's Vietnam the Necessary War. But when the Movement comes first, it's important not to confuse the issue with idiosyncratic thinkers and quirky, inconvenient interpretations.

Reihan: Tough on Crime, Tough on the Causes of Crime

That was the great Blairite turn of phrase that marked helped define New Labour and the Third Way more broadly: a smart approach to crime involves more than a head-busting "prison works" approach built on mass arrests. Keep in mind that offenders tend to come from high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods where the taboo against law-breaking has already been badly undermined by mass arrests. So thank goodness Los Angeles is pursuing a different strategy. Read Brad Plumer for the broader context.

Reihan: Magazine Avenger

So it seems Entertainment Weekly did more than jack a clever featurelet from New York's Vulture, one of my favorite blogs. The victim of this outright thievery was an unnamed, often-masked comrade of mine. Clearly someone needs to be disciplined, possibly with an enormous atom-smashing hammer. Show yourself! And feel the force of my atom-smashing hammer!

Reihan: Putting the P in PMC

Briefly, I wrote a short post on private military contractors late last week, and a number of smart observers asked, among them Matt Yglesias, "Why private?" Robert Kaplan does an excellent job of laying out the key points in favor of PMCs. For me, the most important advantage they have is that, as John Robb put it (I should have excerpted his post), they are scalable and contingent. When you need trigger pullers, PMCs can deliver trigger pullers: they ramp up hiring, they train personnel for the tasks at hand or find them. Most are retired military personnel, but because these are nimble organizations, they can also draw on other sources. And when you no longer need trigger pullers, at the end of a short-term military campaign, say, PMCs shed staff. The same is not true of conventional military forces. That is very valuable.

P.S.- A friend, who has met a number of PMCs in Iraq, notes that they tend to have an impressive amount of local knowledge, more than is typical of US infantrymen. This is predictable: after all, they are older, more experienced, and they make it their business to learn as much as possible about their surroundings, and they are not slowed down by a sometimes unwieldy chain-of-command that isn't always good at getting soldiers the information they need when they need it. This is not to suggest that our volunteer army is anything less than highly competent and professional, but it's no surprise that smaller, nimbler organizations are going to be better and faster at learning. And when you're dealing with a fast-moving, ever-evolving insurgency (really a collection of dozens of groups with their own agendas), this counts for a lot.