Our Brand Is (In) Crisis

But don't worry, all we need to do is shed the mantle of GOP corruption, get back to the right-wing basics and everything will be fine. Oh, and maybe elect a new American public while we're at it ...

The Outsiders

Despite the fact that I'm apparently an establishment flunky who's "ready for embalming" (the times change, but the paleocons are just as good at winning friends and influencing people as ever), I quite agree with Daniel McCarthy that George Packer's "Death of Conservatism" essay would have profited from some engagement with the dissident factions on the Right, include Ron Paul supporters, Crunchy Cons and others. In Packer's defense, though, his essay was focused more on the intersection of conservative ideas and the modern Republican majority than on conservative ideas per se - which is one reason, for instance, that it made sense for the piece to begin with Nixon and Buchanan rather than with WFB and National Review, which is where essays that survey the modern Right usually start. There's a lot of interesting intellectual action among the dissident conservatives, but if there's a big gap between the ideas being peddled by the reformist conservatives nearly-embalmed establishment hacks quoted in the Packer piece and the world of actual-existing Republican politics, then the gap between the Paulite paleos or the "Wendell Berry-Michael Pollan Right" and the American political scene is roughly the size of the Grand Canyon. Bridging this gap (in the absence of a Peak-Oil-related national trauma, that is) has always been the challenge for the traditionalist right; as someone who follows the intellectual debate among dissident conservatives with interest and sympathy, I would only suggest that pissing on anyone to the left of Pat Buchanan might not be the best way to go about it.

Mark Schmitt on the GOP

I suppose I agree with Mark Schmitt's overarching thesis in his essay on the GOP and identity politics: The Republican Party, with few winning policy issues on which to campaign, has fallen back on symbolic issues related to culture, patriotism and American identity in an attempt to hold its fraying coalition together. But many of the specific claims he makes seem more than a little puzzling. Conor Friedersdorf, ex-Atlantic intern extraordinaire, does a good job highlighting a few of them, including Schmitt's peculiar description of "welfare, crime, and immigration" as "symbolic issues" (which would seem to define the term "symbolic issue" as "any issue the Democrats tend to lose on"), and his even more peculiar claim that "the Democratic presidential nomination battle between an African American and a woman has not exacerbated left identity politics but brought it to a peaceful close." (As Conor says: "!?") To wax solipsistic for a moment, I thought I'd focus on a passage that relates to our book, in which Schmitt writes:

The more specific ideas proposed in some of these books are mostly smart and palatable. If the intellectual commissars of the opposition party were Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, who in Grand New Party propose supplementing a mild social conservatism with actual economic supports for fragile families, our political system would be nicely balanced. If former Rep. Mickey Edwards' call in Reclaiming Conservatism for a respectful constitutional libertarianism and a restoration of the balance of powers were the Republican ideology, I would think of the party as a sometimes useful check on the ambitions of liberalism. But most of these ideas are not what they claim to be: plans for renewing the party by anchoring it in a rediscovery of the moral absolutes of conservatism. Rather, they are purely improvisational, tactical positioning--attempts to meet the public demand for action on health care and climate change without accepting liberal solutions, much like the Bush Republicans' attempt to meet the demand for prescription-drug coverage under Medicare. These are elegant, short-term compromises disguised as ideology.

I confess that I have not read Rep. Edwards volume as yet, so I can't speak to his claims, but this strikes me as a peculiar description of our project. I must have missed the section where we claimed to have rediscovered "the moral absolutes of conservatism" (perhaps Reihan wrote it, and slipped in just before the book went to press), and the notion that we have "disguised" our policy proposals as "ideology" strikes me as absurd. Indeed, to the extent that you can read Grand New Party as saying anything about ideology, right-wing or otherwise, I would suggest that we are hostile to it: We tend to take the Kirkian (and, I would submit, '70s neoconservative) view that conservatism ought to be inherently anti-ideological, and we view the ideological turn on the American Right - the confusion of policy positions, which by definition ought to be open for debate and alteration, with "moral absolutes" that no true right-winger should deviate from - as a serious problem for conservatism, both in the Bush years and before.

As for whether our proposals are essentially "improvisational" and "tactical" - well, I would submit that there's plenty of material in our book that could ground a conservative party long after the particular controversies of 2008 have run their course. (It might ground it on a disastrous foundation, but that's a separate argument.) In another sense, though, Schmitt is clearly right - it's just that the quality he's describing is a feature rather than a bug. That's because my own (highly provisional) definition of American conservatism would run something like this: A commitment to the defense of the particular habits, mores and institutions of the United States against those socioeconomic trends that threaten to undermine them, and those political movements (generally on the left, but sometimes on the right) that seek to change them radically in the pursuit of particular ideological goals. Any politics that takes this sort of conservatism as its touchstone will by its very nature be "provisional" and "tactical," in the sense that the threats to the American way of life, and the fronts on which it makes sense for conservatives to battle, are constantly shifting around. There are no final victories for conservatives: We are not struggling to "achieve our country," but to sustain it, and so "elegant, short-term" resolutions are often all that we should aim for.

Letting Webb Be Webb

To my suggestion that an Obama-Webb ticket would widen the Democratic tent, Ramesh responds:

But since joining the Senate, on what issue has Webb himself been "something other than a party-line liberal"? Has he even said anything that marks him as a different kind of Democrat?

By and large, the answer is no - to the disappointment of his paleo admirers, among others. And there's no question that for the symbolism of an Obama-Webb ticket to work, it would have to be wedded to something more tangible than what Webb has brought to the table in the Senate - some specific policy proposals, for instance, that would allow Webb to act like a heterodox figure, rather than a guy with a history of interesting views who's sublimated them all in service to his party's orthodoxy. But taking some positions that clash with the Democratic establishment's views is something Obama ought to contemplate anyway - so why not pick Webb and then make him the point man for, say, an embrace of class-based rather than race-based affirmative action? (He sounds like he would be happy to oblige.)

Basically, if Obama thinks the country has shifted far enough to the left that he can run the way he's run to date - as the Democrats' Reagan, the most liberal major-party nominee in years - and win handily, then it might make sense to double down on that bet, pick a conventionally-liberal running mate, and try to win a sweeping mandate for a left-liberal revival. But if he thinks the race will be close, and that he'll need to tack toward the center to win it, then picking Webb and giving him something heterodox to say would be a pretty good way to go about it.

The Case Against Webb

James Joyner has a good round-up of the arguments against the Webb-for-veep meme. Daniel Larison makes the strongest case:

Democrats cannot defeat today’s GOP in a bidding war over who is more militaristic and irresponsible in foreign policy, just as the GOP can never outbid the Democrats when it comes to making lavish, irresponsible promises about domestic spending. To fight the election on this ground is a losing proposition for Democrats, and this is why efforts to out-veteran the veteran opponent, which is part of the rationale for selecting Webb, will simply draw attention to the “weaknesses” that have been attributed to Obama. It is an attempt to beat the opposition at its own game with a candidate who is uniquely ill-suited to playing that kind of game. Hence he has tried to frame the election in entirely different terms, because once the election is defined along tradiitional lines he probably knows that he will lose.

Suppose he chooses Webb. What then? Each time someone explains why he chose Webb, the answer will come back that he had to choose someone who had served in the military (because he hadn’t) and whom Middle Americans could accept (because they couldn’t accept him), and so each time Webb is mentioned voters will be reminded of the critique of Obama. He has negatively defined himself in ways that are particularly advantageous to his opponent. Instead of destroying or cancelling out the critique, it would strengthen it, and simultaneously play the game of the “old politics” that Obama professes that he wants to escape. Is there an electoral reality that confirms that Obama has political weaknesses with certain constituencies? Of course. The trick, then, is not to dwell on those weaknesses and not obsess over winning over voters who cannot be won over. The larger point would be that if Obama is so unelectable that he cannot put together a winning coalition without accomplishing the impossible and winning over these die-hard anti-Obama Democrats of Appalachia and so forth, it won’t matter whether he chooses Webb or Tony Hawk. Meanwhile, choosing Webb sends the signal that he is going to chase a will o’ the wisp and lacks confidence in his ability to win without that sort of overt symbolic pandering.

There's definitely something to this argument: I think that by picking Al Gore in 1992, for instance, rather than some Dem graybeard with stronger foreign-policy credentials, Bill Clinton sent an effective signal that he wasn't going to play by the GOP's rules, and that he was going to double down instead of the theme of change, both political and generational, that animated his campaign. But the beauty of the Webb pick is that it has the potential to offer the best of both worlds. Yes, it addresses some of Obama's weaknesses (national security, the white working class) and maybe helps him in the potential swing state of Virginia. But it also doubles down on one of his biggest strengths - specifically, the notion that he's the standard-bearer for a post-partisan Democratic Party. After all, what separates Webb from, say, a John Kerry or a John Edwards - both of whom appealed to Democrats because they seemed to (but didn't really) shore up the party's weaknesses on national security and with the white and Southern working class - is that he really is a different kind of Democrat. He isn't a conventional left-liberal who happens to have a military record and/or a Southern accent; he's a more sui generis figure, a cultural (though not social) conservative with heterodox views on a variety of issues.

This is why, were I Obama, I would look at the left-liberal case against Webb - on the grounds that he's too anti-feminist, too pro-military, too skeptical about affirmative action and immigration, too hostile to Hollywood and academia - as an advertisement for the pick. An Obama-Webb ticket wouldn't send just a message that people who share the same ethno-cultural identity as Jim Webb can have a home in the Democratic Party, the way Kerry and Edwards were supposed to show that veterans and Southerners could too be Democrats; it would send a message that people with Webb's views can have a home in the party. It would lend substance to Obama's thus-far insubstantial claim to be something other than a party-line liberal, and in the process it would have the potential to achieve at the national level what the Congressional Dems have successfully done at the local level - namely, expand the definition of what it means to be a Democrat. That's the promise, as-yet-unfulfilled, of the Obama campaign. And that's how you build a lasting majority.

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

More Pollack

I have a Current up expanding on my love for Tootsie. Also worth your time: David Edelstein on Pollack the actor, Jeff Goldberg on Pollack the screenwriting coach, and the comments thread (featuring the supposedly-retired Matt Zoller Seitz!) at the House Next Door.

Rays Fever!

Nearly a third of the way through the season, the best record in baseball belongs to ... the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. But the AP couldn't resist taking a dig at Rays fans yesterday:

While Tampa Bay is 11 games over .500 for the first time, the Rays drew an announced crowd of just 12,174 for the holiday game.

Baseball fandom depends on two things: The experience of the current season, and the memory of seasons past. The Rays finally have a current season worth getting excited about (at least so far), but they've been playing for a decade without producing a single non-embarrassing memorable moment - and they play in a city where half the population are transplanted Yankees, Mets and Red Sox fans, all of whose teams have been consistently interestingly for the past ten years. Speaking as a transplanted Sox fan myself, it would take more than two good months of baseball to make me start caring deeply about the fate of the Washington Nationals, and if the Nats subject us to another seven years of Rays-style baseball and then turn in two good months of play in the spring of 2015, I'll be even less likely to leap headlong on to the bandwagon. This isn't a brief for fair-weather fandom: I stuck with the Red Sox and Patriots through the mid-'90s lean years, and I'll happily stick with them long after the current run of championship play has come to an end. But there's a difference between sticking with your favorite team through thick and thin and signing up to root for a lousy team that's never had any thick at all. I have nothing but respect for those Tampans who do root for the Rays as passionately as any fan of a more distinguished franchise - their reward will be great in baseball heaven - and I'm pulling for their team to have a great year, for the same reason that I was pulling for the Rockies last season: I want to see a long-dreadful franchise make the Leap, I want to see Tampa fall in love with Scott Kazmir and James Shields and Evan (not Eva) Longoria, I want the '08 Rays to give future generations of Floridians a reason to identify with their hometown team. But I don't blame the people of Tampa for not showing up in droves just yet.

Update: Clearly the AP didn't get my memo.

Why Veeps Matter

Even though he starts out agreeing with the David Brooks column I was just arguing with, Josh Patashnik comes around to an point I can get behind:

... it also surprises me how little regard some people have for the vice presidency. I've heard people argue against Webb, Chris Dodd, and Evan Bayh on the grounds that their selection would jeopardize a safe Democratic Senate seat. This isn't a totally irrelevant consideration, but it should still be way down there on the priority list. There are a hundred senators, and seats change hands relatively frequently.

By contrast, a vice-presidential nominee is somebody who (in addition, of course, to being potentially a heartbeat away from the presidency) will instantly become one of the four or five most recognizable figures in the party, and will likely be a frontrunner for the presidential nomination at some point in the future. It's somebody who, with any luck, will be popular enough to campaign with and raise money for candidates across the country for years to come. And yet the conversation hardly focuses on this at all. One of the most important things a party does is cultivate talent for the future, and selecting a vice presidential nominee is absolutely critical in that regard. It's like deciding what to do with the top pick in the NFL Draft. Are you going to wind up with a Peyton Manning, or a Tim Couch? I can give you three reasons why the GOP presidential field was so weak this year: Dick Cheney, Jack Kemp, Dan Quayle.

Granted, there are other factors to consider ... But far and away the most important question is: Is this somebody you want closely identified with your party brand for the next two decades? Anyone trying to make the case for selecting a particular running mate should be prepared to explain why the party will benefit if that person becomes, overnight, one of its biggest names.

As far as the GOP's (rather thin) roster of rising stars goes, I think this argument would militate against picking Bobby Jindal and in favor of picking Sarah Palin. Jindal already has a national profile (and a movement-conservative cheering section), and having him as the whiz-kid Republican Governor of post-Katrina Louisiana is arguably better - both for the party and for him - than having him as the (very) junior partner in a weak Republican administration that's facing off against an ascendant Democratic Party. Palin, on the other hand, has no such national profile, and absent unforeseen developments is unlikely to obtain one so long as she's occupying a governor's mansion that's just south of Yellowknife. Like Jindal, she's a great political story, but it's hard to see how that story gets told unless the Palin brand gets taken national somehow - and it might be worthing risking subjecting her to the "losing veep's curse" to give her a place on the national stage.

That said, it's be hard to blame her if she wanted to put her family first for the next few years or so.

Do Veeps Matter?

David Brooks:

... most of the commentary on vice president picks is completely backward. Most discussion focuses on what state or constituency this or that running mate could help carry in the fall. But, as a rule, recent vice presidential nominees haven’t had any effect on key states or constituencies. They haven’t had much effect on elections at all, except occasionally as hapless distractions.

A vice president can, however, have a gigantic impact on an administration once in office (see: Cheney, Richard). Therefore, a sensible presidential candidate shouldn’t be selecting a mate on the basis of who can help him get elected. He should be thinking about who can help him govern successfully so he can get re-elected.

From this premise, Brooks goes on to argue that Obama should consider picking Sam Nunn and Tom Daschle, both of whom are sufficiently uninspiring choices to harden my suspicion that the premise might be flawed. For one thing, while it's true that Dick Cheney and Al Gore have been more influential than previous vice presidents, it's by no means certain that the pattern will continue (and even Al Gore wasn't all that influential, particularly as his relationship with Clinton cooled). Indeed, given the cautionary example of Cheney, it's easy to imagine the next few Presidents steering back toward the model that prevailed throughout much of American history, and limiting the vice president's portfolio to the office's traditional duties - attack dog, goodwill ambassador, and resentful heir apparent.

As for whether a veep pick can swing an election - well, certainly it doesn't have the impact that the level of breathless speculation in the media (and this blog is as guilty as any other outlet) would lead one to believe it does. And Brooks is right that the days when picking a native son would deliver a contested state seem to be behind us. But that doesn't mean that an inspired choice can't have a powerful impact on the overall narrative of a Presidential campaign. As I've argued before, I think that Clinton's pick of Gore in 1992 and Gore's pick of Lieberman in 2000 changed the dynamics of both races in the Democrats' favor, and while Clinton might have won without Gore, I'd be willing to wager a lot of money that Gore wouldn't have won the electoral or the popular vote if he'd gone with, say, John Kerry instead of Lieberman. It's true that even the most inspired pick can't save a doomed campaign, and it's likewise true that often there aren't any inspired picks available, in which case picking someone who can help you govern may make a certain sense. But while I'm not sure there's an ideal running mate for McCain floating around the Republican Party at the moment, on the Democratic side I'm pretty sure that Obama can do a Webb of a lot better than Sam Nunn or Tom Daschle. (And posts like this one only harden that conviction.)

Conservatives and "Liberal Guilt"

This Ron Rosenbaum column praising liberal guilt (and suggesting that conservatives ought to feel some too) inspires Ezra Klein to write:

People don't like to feel guilt, particularly over actions they didn't directly commit. But rather than simply deny culpability, conservatives have managed to recast feeling guilt as a character flaw, as political weakness, as soft-headed emotionalism. This serves a lot of people's purposes, of course, particularly folks who come from a political movement that opposed desegregation as recently as 45 years ago, but it doesn't actually make any sense.

I think Reihan makes one important rejoinder to this point, noting that part of the conservative critique of "liberal guilt" has to do with the (arguably) perverse effects of a politics based on remorse over what your ancestors did - whether it's left-wing Westerners making excuses for Third World tyrants or left-wing Americans accusing anyone who wanted to talk about crime and social pathology in minority communities of "blaming the victim."

But the deeper question remains: Its political consequences aside, is guilt an appropriate response to the sins of your ancestors (whether biological or ideological)? Or is it a character flaw - a form of self-congratulatory scrupulosity? I'm not sure what my answer would be, but I don't think it's fair to say that the latter argument "doesn't actually make any sense."

Continue reading "Conservatives and "Liberal Guilt"" »

Sydney Pollack, RIP

By far the best way to honor him, as a director and an actor, would be to Netflix Tootsie immediately:

"Lithe Vegan Bodies"

What happens when Georgetown preppies try to figure out out how to hit on U Street hipsters? Answer: Pure comedy gold. (via Megan's lithe vegan blog)

Where The Answer Is Always Socialism

He and I may have our differences, but I always enjoy reading Will Wilkinson on John Cassidy. (Previous installments here and here.)

Does Libertarianism Kill Non-Profits?

That's basically the thesis of this Thomas Frank column, in which he shows up at an America's Future Foundation panel on the dilemma of working as activists versus selling out to the Man, and waxes eloquent about the irony of seeing young libertarians, subsidized by the very not-for-profit concerns they (supposedly) disdain, being pushed out of their cozy idealistic lives by the remorseless logic of the free-market ideology they champion. He wraps the whole thing up with a flourish:

To their credit, the nonprofit libertarians I watched the other night did not ask for sympathy. Their own doctrine won't permit it. Having spent years urging lawmakers to wreck the social order that once made occupations like theirs tenable, they will cling stubbornly to their free-market idol all the way down.

The trouble, as Peter Suderman points out, is that life in the nonprofit sector is in many ways more tenable than its ever been before. Indeed, as Doron Taussig noted in his Washington Monthly review of Daniel Brooks' The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America (cited favorably, of course, in Frank's column), "the number of Americans employed by nonprofits doubled between 1977 and 2001, a much faster growth rate than both the government and for-profit sectors." In other words, all those Reagan-Gingrich-Bush years of free-market idolatry have been awfully good to the viability of occupations untainted by the profit motive.

What they haven't been good to, necessarily, is the category of well-educated people who want to work in the non-profit sector and earn incomes comparable to their peers at law firms and investment banks and sundry other for-profit concerns. This is the "status-income disequilibrium" that David Brooks made famous, and it's by no means an unimportant phenomenon: Just ask Michelle Obama, or (a bit closer to home) any late-twentysomething journalist who knows that he's about to start envying the paychecks, if not the lifestyle, of his JD and MBA-sporting friends. But of course the economic trends - toward a mass upper class, and an astonishingly wealthy top one percent - that breed "keeping up with the Joneses" stress and paycheck envy among not-for-profit toilers are also the trends that have made the non-profit industry (which depends, after all, on mass-upper-class largesse) more viable and successful than its ever been before, and it's by no means clear that you can have the one without the other. There are ironies here, in other words, but they aren't exactly the ones that Thomas Frank has in mind.

The Unity-Ticket Mirage

I think the most important point to be made in response to Jonah's suggestion that McCain pick a Democrat as his veep is that crossing party lines to pick a nominee is only really plausible for a nominee who's working from a position of enormous strength, which McCain decidedly isn't. There are two reasons for this: First, because only a strong nominee can afford to absorb the backlash from his base that picking a member of the opposition party would inevitably invite, and second, because only a strong nominee can persuade a prominent member of the opposition party to stake his career on a risky unity ticket. This is why, as I've argued before, a McCain-Lieberman ticket would only make sense in a world where a successfully-prosecuted Iraq War had left the GOP poised to enjoy an FDR-style majority for a few election cycles; it's also why, as one of Jonah's correspondents notes, the ideal time for a Republican to pick a moderate Democrat as his running mate would have been the Reagan '80s, not the post-Bush Oughts. It's not that there aren't any moderate-to-conservative Democrats anymore: In a (very) different world, you could imagine a unity ticket joining McCain with figures ranging from Evan Bayh to Bob Casey, Jr. to (ahem) Jim Webb. It's that none of them have any reason to hitch their fortunes to a fading GOP brand. And the only guy who does, Joe Lieberman, seems unlikely to bring enough post-partisan cred to the ticket to make up for the revolt he would doubtless inspire on the right.

But yes, I know, there's always the dream of Michael Bloomberg ...

Tucker!

I can't imagine that the sort of people who attend the Libertarian Party's convention would have any interest in handing their nomination over to Tucker Carlson. But as someone who thinks we need more Pat Buchanan-style (or Boris Johnson-style, to take a more successful example) crossovers from political journalism to actual politics, I'm all for his giving it a try.

Conservatism and Solutions

Andrew's thoughts on the George Packer "Death of Conservatism" essay are well worth your time, but obviously I'm more sympathetic toward Yuval Levin's rejoinder. When it comes to his differences with the various reform-minded conservatives mentioned in Packer's piece - myself included - I feel like Andrew is mistaking a policy disagreement for a major philosophical difference. He writes, for instance:

[Their] argument is framed in such a way as to violate conservatism's core insight ... Conservatism is not, to my mind, about solving problems, which is why it remains a very problematic governing philosophy for modern Americans. It is about a modesty toward what problems government can ever solve. Its responses to emergent questions will not be an attempt to "solve" them, but to ameliorate them with a narrow set of tools. And the narrower the better.

I agree - an essential modesty about the scope of government action and its ability to "solve" the great problems of the day is crucial to conservatism. (Which is why I wear as a badge of honor the remarkably similar liberal rejoinders to Grand New Party offered by Packer and E.J. Dionne - Packer's complaint that Reihan and I are "unprepared to accept as large a role for government as required by the deep structural problems they identify," and Dionne's lament that we're unwilling to accept "the level of intervention in the economy that the current inequities may require.") But this first principle only gets us so far, as Andrew's next paragraph suggests:

To give one example: the gas and climate question. Conservatives will not deny the problem but nor will they impose an onerous or overly-ambitious solution. If the evidence emerges that our carbon dependence is both damaging our environment and empowering our enemies, then change is necessary. But an elaborate cap-and-trade government monitored and imposed scheme is not appealing; or a government-engineered switch to biofuels (unintended consequences). A clear, solid carbon tax that simply encourages individuals and companies to innovate and switch to renewable energy would be a conservative solution. Simple, transparent, and targeted correctly with a minimal growth in government power. If fiscal circumstances permit, you can balance such a tax hike by lowering income tax or providing safety-net subsidies to those most in need as a result. And a truly conservative president would not be afraid to say, in his or her best eat-your-vegetables tone, that this is the only workable solution and that the alternative is worse.

I think this is a good example of why arguments about what "true conservatives" will do often don't tell us very much. Sure, a conservative might support a carbon tax for the reasons Andrew lays out - but then again, a conservative might instead agree with Jim Manzi that any carbon tax will perforce be both onerous and overly-ambitious. Moreoever, a conservative might also disagree with premise that climate change is the most pressing "emergent question" that our government ought to "ameliorate" and favor reform on other fronts instead.

I don't deny that on questions having to do with the scope of government action Andrew may be marginally to my right. (Though not far enough to prevent him from supporting Barack Obama.) But overall, I think our disagreements have more to do with differing assessments of the big problems the U.S. is facing - he's primarily worried about global warming and the looming entitlement crunch, so far as I can tell, and I'm more concerned about issues related to family structure, mobility and inequality - than with deep-seated ideological differences that make him a "true conservative" and me something else. Not that Andrew and I don't have deep-seated ideological differences, mind you - I just don't think the question of whether government should try to "solve" every problem or merely "ameliorate" the most pressing ones is one of them.

Terminal Narcissism

Yesterday, New York's Daily Intel offered the following fret about ex-Gawker editor Emily Gould's big cover story in the Sunday Times Magazine - a personal essay about personal lives in the age of blogging, or something like that:

What troubles us about Gould's oncoming article is not that it will be a rehash of everything we've seen before. It's that people will mistake her perspective on the Internet, writing, and fame as the perspective of an entire generation of bloggers. (Much the way, as the Observer noted, Joyce Maynard's essay in the Times Magazine in 1972 seemed to speak for a generation of young women.) In our experience reading her work, she rarely ventures outside of her own head. Hence, not the best representative of a social subclass. Millions of people blog, many of them about themselves. But if past work is anything to judge by, we're not going to be reading about them this weekend. Except for the ones Gould slept with.

They needn't have worried: I seriously doubt that even the least internet-savvy reader will mistake Gould's astonishingly dull non-romp through her deeply trivial travails for the voice of a generation of bloggers. The only question is who comes out of this piece looking worse - Gould herself, or whichever editor thought her limp prose and less-than-riveting love life deserved 7937 words in one of America's best magazines.

Strange Maps

Noah Millman may not have persuaded me that Bob Barr will be a big factor in the '08 race, but his latest post has me convinced that neither Karl Rove's consulting firm not Howard Dean's pollster should be trusted when it comes to Barack Obama's electoral-college strengths and weaknesses.

Doubting the Barr Factor

The argument about whether Bob Barr would take more votes from Obama or from McCain is an interesting academic exercise, and I agree with Noah Millman that one can imagine all sorts of interesting ways that a Barr bid could affect the election. But even if Barr gets the Libertarian nomination - by no means a sure thing - I'm distinctly unpersuaded that he'll get enough media coverage or raise enough money to be more than a very, very minor factor in November. I have a few reasons for thinking this, but the biggest one is that nobody likes Bob Barr.

Well, fine, "nobody" is a little strong - the guy won four House elections, after all. But Barr is neither a political icon for a generation of true believers (see Nader, Ralph) nor a natural rallying point for a resentful identity politics (see Thurmond, Strom and Wallace, George) nor a massively wealthy, massively entertaining, essentially sui generis figure like Ross Perot. If there's a promising parallel for Barr in the annals of third-party politics, the closest one would be John Anderson, who did manage to swipe seven percent of the vote in 1980. But for Barr to run as a Libertarian in 2008 isn't really like Anderson's Rockefeller-Republican campaign in '80; it's more like if Anderson had left Congress in the early '80s and then changed his ideological colors sufficiently to mount an independent bid from George H.W. Bush's right in 1988. Okay, that's an imperfect analogy, but hopefully you take my point: There's space for a spoiler candidate in this race, but Barr isn't the right person to fill it. He's too uncharismatic and too unknown, and to the extent he is known it isn't for the sort of politics he's lately adopted - rather, it's for impeaching Bill Clinton, which doesn't seem like a particularly useful calling card in the '08 election.

My bold prediction: Barr will do roughly as well as Pat Buchanan did in 2000, benefiting from the more favorable landscape for a right-of-center protest candidate but suffering from a lack of the charisma, celebrity and committed followers that Pitchfork Pat brought to the '00 race. He won't be included in the debates, the media will largely ignore him, and he'll end up being a factor only if the election comes down to some butterfly ballots in South Florida. There is an anti-war, anti-immigration libertarian who could have had at least a Nader-style impact on the general election - but his name is Ron Paul, and he isn't running.

Barack Gore?

Via Kaus, Howard Dean's pollster and Karl Rove's consulting firm agree: The electoral college math doesn't look all that great for Obama. Meanwhile, Ambinder asks the big question:

... are the demographics of Obama's coalition so skewed (in terms of previous coalitions) that his national lead will greatly overstate his relative strength in the electoral college? Or is Obama's new coalition so robust as to absorb some of the bleeding of white, working class men in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania and still end up winning?

If it's the former - if Obama ends up winning the popular vote by an even wider margin than Gore did, but losing by a Pennsylvanian whisker in the electoral college - then the 2012 campaign will begin in November, and McCain's presidency will have been dealt a wound from which he'll have an awfully hard time recovering.

The Great Higher Education Debate

There's been a surfeit of interesting commentary lately that touches on higher education, and more specifically the question of whether too many people are going to college: Start with Professor X's view from "the basement of the ivory tower" in the latest Atlantic and Charles Murray's essay on "educational romanticism" in the New Criterion, then take up these posts from Rod Dreher (and the accompanying comment threads) and Russell Arben Fox, and then see Matt and (especially) Kevin Carey, who pushes back vigorously against the thesis that we're trying to push too many people through higher education.

My own somewhat mealy-mouthed take is that Carey and Charles Murray are both right: There are people going to college who shouldn't be and there are people who aren't going to college who should be; there are people in Professor X's classes who deserve better than a "college of last resort" and there are people in Professor X's classes who would be better off doing something completely different with their time. Which means that I think we ought to be spending more public dollars on the sort of colleges that educate "lower-income students, first-generation students, disadvantaged students, working students, immigrant students, minority students, older students, disabled students, students from often dismal high schools," to quote Carey's litany, and fewer public dollars on the kind of schools that exist to provide the "college experience" to the children of the mass upper class. (More public money for Virginia's community colleges, in other words, and less for a school like UVA - or again, more public money for people who want to go to school part-time or over the internet, and fewer public dollars for kids who want to spend four years on a brick-and-mortar campus.) But I also think that we ought to become vastly more flexible in our understanding of what constitutes an ideal post-high school education, and what our high schools should be preparing their students for - which means more vocational education, more shop class as soulcraft, and fewer attempts to pretend that everyone can read Hamlet, or score above the national average on the Math SAT.

1976 All Over Again?

Matt ponders the apparent liberal ascendancy:

So in a bad mood, one wonders if it didn't feel this way in 1976 -- or even more so in January of 1977. Conservatism triumphant, yet unmoored from principle in the figure of Richard Nixon, then brought into a disgrace from which the more moderate Gerald Ford couldn't solve it. A new president from the outside promising change, and a new bumper crop of "watergate class" members of congress ready to shake things up. But it all went to shit. I am, personally, an apologist for the Carter administration which I think was doing good things and got torpedoed by an unfortunate combination of objective reality (oil shocks, the need to curb inflation) and blinkered behavior by congressional leaders. Others read those events the other way 'round and see Carter as brought down by his deficiencies. You could even push the analogy further by considering the looming shadow of the Kennedy family and its circle of retainers, convinced that they deserve to rule and more interested in seizing the mantle than in cooperating to make a success out of the Carter administration.

This is, not coincidentally, how I think about the looming GOP dégringolade when I'm in a good mood. Indeed, in Grand New Party we explicitly compare Bush to Nixon in this regard - a President who assembled a coalition that might have provided the foundation for a lasting conservative majority, but whose blunders undid all his political successes and left his party seemingly worse off than when he found it. Which might mean, in turn, that if circumstances (and their predilection for infighting, and the fact that the resurgent liberalism hasn't quite honed its message to a Reaganesque point) conspire against the Democrats, the GOP will just need someone who can play Reagan to Dubya's Nixon in 2012 or 2016 - re-assembling and expanding his coalition, learning from his mistakes, and building a new conservative majority while the ashes of the old one are still warm.

There are a variety of reasons to think that it won't be this easy (starting, of course, with the fact that nothing about Reagan's victory in '80 was inevitable or easy, either), but one worth highlighting here is the problem of institutional inertia. Conservatism in the late '60s and '70s was essentially making things up as it went along, which made it flexible enough to adapt pretty readily to changing circumstances; conservatism in the early '00s, on the other hand, has all the features of a movement that's been too long in power, with entrenched institutions and rigid orthodoxies all over the place. In other words, today's Right resembles the liberalism of the Seventies much more than it does the conservatism of that era. Which means that even in the Obamafied Democratic Party makes a mess of things and the GOP reaps the benefits in 2012, it will be awfully hard for Republicans - like Carter-era Democrats before them - to overcome these structural obstacles and achieve more than a temporary revival.

Don't Think of the Children

Speaking of stories without children, I was struck by the fact that New York's fairly rote meditation on whether men should feel okay about committing adultery (blah blah Europeans are more sophisticated, blah blah evolutionary psychology, blah blah polyamory, blah blah porn) contained exactly three references to the fact that marriages often involve, you know, kids as well as spouses. There was one quote suggesting that women should put up with adultery because it's better for the children than divorce; one line noting that "recent analyses of genetic databases reveal that fully 10 percent of people have different biological fathers from the men they name as their fathers"; and one line mentioning "Congressmen Vito Fossella and his two families." Two families - why, it's almost as if the link between sex and children might be an important factor in the whole "why be faithful" debate ...

Revisiting Children of Men

Dayo Olopade, on the coming dystopia:

Mohan Munasinghe, reporting for Britain's intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC), thinks reports of our civilization's demise have been greatly underexaggerated. According to the substance of a talk Munasinghe gave recently at Cambridge, we are headed for an ugly, dystopian future driven by resource shortages and overpopulation that will produce devastating competition and in all likelihood, more walls and more wars. "Climate change is, or could be, the additional factor which will exacerbate the existing problems of poverty, environmental degradation, social polarisation and terrorism and it could lead to a very chaotic situation," he says. (See the rawkin' Children of Men for more on how "chaotic" that could look.) [emphasese mine - RD]

This is a hobbyhorse of mine, but as my previous forays on the subject are either behind the NR subscriber wall or lost in TNR's vanished archives, let me try the patience of my readers by noting that Olopade has inadvertently put her finger on the problem with Alfonso Cuaron's adaptation. The film's hellish, quasi-totalitarian dystopia does indeed feel like a compelling vision of a future dominated by "resource shortages and overpopulation"; unfortunately, the whole frickin' point of the story is that it's set in a world where women stopped being able to have children about twenty years back. Cuaron's vision channels doomsayers like Mohan Munasinghe to impressive and riveting effect, but unlike the dystopian vision in the film's source material, it more or less wastes its supposed premise in the process.

Reform and Revolution

From Yuval Levin's fine piece on how McCain should be running:

"A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve" was Edmund Burke's definition of the statesman two centuries ago, and it remains the hallmark of conservatism. While American conservatives have sometimes liked to think of themselves as revolutionaries (or radical counter-revolutionaries), the most significant accomplishments of the conservative movement have actually been targeted reforms that turned existing institutions to conservative ends. The Reagan "revolution" gave us a tax code better suited to entrepreneurship and growth. The Gingrich "revolution" gave us a welfare system with incentives geared toward encouraging independence and initiative. Conservative reform of urban law enforcement, and early efforts at reform of local education (through school choice), have improved what we have, rather than rejecting it. Reform, not revolution, is the conservative path to supporting strong families and free markets.

To this analysis, I would add one further point: The likely alternative to the reformist tendency on the Right - a tendency to which Yuval and I both subscribe, obviously, and which is limned by George Packer in this week's New Yorker - is a right-wing politics that would tend to be simultaneously revolutionary and quietistic. Or, perhaps more aptly, that would cycle between radical dreams and resigned, "let's withdraw from politics" pessimism. This "revolution or bust" tendency has defined traditionalist conservatism for some time now, with an alienation from actual-existing American politics coexisting with sweeping visions for what American politicians ought to be doing with themselves instead; it's manifested itself frequently among religious conservatives over the years as well; and in an era of liberal re-ascendency, it's easy to imagine such a spirit engulfing the entire American Right. You start by telling yourself that retrenchment - whether to the age of Gingrich or Reagan or Robert Taft - is the path to victory, and you end, when victory doesn't materialize, by embracing defeat as a badge of honor, and pining for either the barricades or the monastery.

I should add that of course there are times when quietism is the better part of valor, and times when revolutions are necessary things. And given my own declinist instincts, I can easily imagine myself ending my writing career sharing the "only a revolution (or the Benedict option) can save us now" point of view that some of my favorite dissident conservatives partake of. But I'm not ready to take that path just yet.

Prince Caspian

I'm still sorting through my own thoughts before I buckle down to write my NR review, but after spending some time marinating in the Narniaphile reaction, I think that to the extent I liked the movie, it was largely for the same reasons as Frederica Mathewes-Greene: The filmmakers took what is easily the weakest of the Narnia novels, rejiggered the narrative and altered the plot, and produced an entertaining, swashbuckling medieval war movie set against a Narnian backdrop. To the extent that I disliked the movie, meanwhile, it was for the same reasons as Steven Greydanus: In the course of making a poorly-constructed book into an entertaining fantasy adventure, the filmmakers largely purged the original story of its most distinctive thematic elements, and the results owe more to Braveheart and Lord of the Rings, in certain ways, than they do to C.S. Lewis.

Having registered this complaint, though, I can't help be disappointed over Caspian's disappointing box office. Precisely because I've had issues with both of the first two adaptations, I've been looking forward to seeing what a director untainted by the Shrek franchise can do with the later books of Narnia (especially my three favorites), and the worse Caspian does, the greater the chances that it'll be Dawn Treader and out for the franchise.

Religion, Happiness and Socialism

Will Wilkinson has an interesting post responding to Arthur Brooks' interesting work on religion and happiness in the United States, in which he (Will, that is) points out that the religion-happiness correlation seems to be America-specific, and that the advance of secularization in Western Europe has coincided with an increase in levels of reported happiness on the continent. Here's Will's take on the America-Europe discrepancy:

Brooks rightly points out that in the U.S. a great number of community organizations are anchored in religion. And sociality and community are key to happiness. So, sure, non-religiosity in the U.S. is likely to be a socially alienating and stigmatized kind of non-conformism ... It seems to me that Brooks has simply found that America has a religious culture, and therefore it’s less trouble to be religious in the U.S., not that religiosity has some kind of deep connection to happiness.

No doubt there's some truth to this (though I would venture that non-religiosity is somewhat less socially alienating than it used to be). But my suspicion is that the difference has something to do with the role of the welfare state as well - that the benefits of belonging to a religious community are greater in the U.S. than in Europe in part because our welfare state is smaller, and religious participation provides both tangible and intangible forms of security that are more valuable in a society where the free market is more freewheeling and the welfare state weaker. If you're a Christian who prefers the American model, you might say that the Europeans use government as a substitute for God; if you prefer Europe's path to modernity, you'd probably say something about Americans clinging to churchgoing because it's the only protection available against the harsh brutality of our jungle capitalism. Either way, I suspect that this symbiosis between high levels of religiosity and economic individualism is at the heart of American exceptionalism - which is another way of saying that libertarians root for secularization at their peril. (Though perhaps Will has some data in his infinite file cabinet of happiness research that blows my hypothesis out of the water.)

Those Who Can't, Re-Enact

Now this is how to teach history. (hat tip: David Frum)

The Audacity of the Party Line (II)

In a Q&A with New York's John Heilemann, the GOP strategist Alex Castellanos remarks:

BHO is going to need a few Sister Souljah moments. To demonstrate strength, he will need to stand up and speak truth to power, poke his finger in the Democratic Establishment's eye. Example: Marion Barry, D.C.'s former crack mayor, is now supporting vouchers for D.C. schoolchildren, in opposition to education unions and much of the Dem Party Establishment. Obama should join him. The Dem Establishment better start looking around to see which one of them he's going to throw under the bus as soon as the Denver convention is over and he takes the bus out of town.

Which prompts Noam Scheiber to remark: "Problem is, Obama doesn't really do crass, symbolic politics. At least he hasn't really in the past." The link in that sentence runs to a Scheiber piece that worries over whether Obama is cynical enough to fight the GOP machine, and that includes this passage:

The run-up to South Carolina was rife with talk that post-racial Obama was morphing into a decidedly pre-post-racial candidate. To reverse the slide, blogger Mickey Kaus suggested he give a speech embracing class- rather than race-based affirmative action, something Obama had flirted with in the past. Kaus had a point: The atmospherics would have been irresistible to ambivalent whites. I pushed a milder form of the idea on my own blog. Not long after, I got a response from an Obama adviser: Never gonna happen. Urging Sister Souljah politicking on him was the surest way to provoke a scowl.

In the discussion that followed this piece, Noam clarified that he didn't mean that an Obama embrace of class-based affirmative action was "never gonna happen," just that Obama would never make a policy leap like that "as a direct response to a sudden political problem." Fair enough, but if Obama won't take on the Dem party line during the primary season because that would be "crass, symbolic politics," and if he won't take on the Dem party line after the convention because that would "crass, symbolic politics" ... well, it'll be hard to escape the conclusion that Barack Obama is just a Democratic party line kind of guy.

Pinker vs. Humanism

Alan Jacobs picks up on another odd feature of that Pinker essay - its apparent horror at the notion that the humanities, and particularly literature, might have any bearing on contemporary bioethics debates.

Redeeming Dubya

The latest issue of the Atlantic is up online, and it features (among many other pieces, some on more urgent topics) my take on why the American memory might yet smile on George W. Bush - and why that would be a bad thing.

In The Year Two Thousand (And Thirteen)

I basically agree with the Wehner-Levin-Lowry consensus on McCain’s “2013” speech, which (to quote Yuval) “puts him in the odd position of talking in the past tense about the future, which both causes his promises to sound more arrogant (if not naïve) than they have to and robs him of the forward looking rhetoric a speech like this could lean on (that of, for instance, Barack Obama).” But for a campaign in search of a narrative, I think the idea behind the speech is potentially sound. Obviously, I’d prefer to see McCain use his campaign to blaze an ideologically-innovative trail toward a new conservative majority, but I don’t think that’s in the cards – and if it isn’t, the narrative suggested by his “look back from 2013” address makes a certain kind of of sense. It casts McCain as a deliberately transitional figure, a tough and experienced foreign-policy hand who you can trust to clean up the messes Bush has left us overseas, and a bipartisan dealmaker who will work the Democratic majority at home. Vote for me if you aren’t sure about giving the Democrats complete control of the government, this narrative says. Vote for me if you want a respite from the culture wars, it argues. Vote for me if you want a grown-up to put our post-9/11 foreign policy on a sounder footing before taking a chance on a liberal President, it suggests. Vote for me because I’m not asking you to join me in any new crusades – because I’m not invested in my own greatness – and because I’m more interested in restoring stability than starting a revolution, or building a thirty-year majority.

And McCain's new Iraq promises are important to this narrative, for the reasons Jim Antle lays out:

McCain doesn't alter his policy goals in Iraq, he doesn't give us any strong reason to believe he will be able to deliver on what he is promising, and his past Iraq predictions haven't always panned out. But McCain is emphasizing the return home of most of our troops as an explicit near-term goal. The perception that McCain would stay in Iraq for 100 years is a losing message when pitted against a candidate who is even semi-credibly promising withdrawal. But a Nixonian peace-with-honor gradual drawdown without disavowing the war aims is a stronger position politically. The Democrats can promise to withdraw faster than McCain, but George McGovern can tell you that this approach does not always work. The American people want to get out of Iraq and win the war. Whether or not this is possible, they might prefer a candidate who promises both to a candidate who promises one or the other.

Nixon’s ’72 landslide, you’ll recall, didn’t do much for the GOP as a whole, and a McCain campaign predicated on bipartisanship at home and peace with honor abroad would probably have few coattails as well. But it might represent a path to victory in a year when by rights the Republican nominee ought to have no chance - especially if it were paired with a one-term pledge (though I'm pretty sure McCain won't actually want to go that route), which would allow McCain to say, to a country wary of taking big risks and worn out from eight long years with the "rebel-in-chief": Vote for me and I'll be temporary.

Pinker On Dignity

Steven Pinker's assault on the President's Council on Bioethics and its recently-released of batch of essays is just as shoddy and bizarre as Yuval Levin says it is. What's most striking to me about the Pinker piece, though, is something I've observed in a lot in the contributions from his side of the bioethics debate during the Bush years - namely, the tendency to write in a tone so shrill and apocalyptic that if you'd just landed in the United States and had only the Pinkers of the world to guide you, you'd think that the advocates of an anything-goes approach to contentious issues like, say, aborting the unfit or embryo-destructive research were an oppressed and embattled minority, bravely speaking out against a tyrannical legal regime that forbids any sort of research that doesn't pass master with Leon Kass and his Catholic cronies. In reality, of course, Pinker's preferred public-policy landscape - in which short of preventing mad scientists from operating on handcuffed, screaming subjects, the law takes an essentially laissez-faire attitude toward the frontiers of biomedical research, leaving the thornier questions to be resolved, as Pinker puts it, by letting "millions of people weigh the costs and benefits of new developments for themselves" - is more or less the approach that America has been taking ever since the Sixties, with occasional moratoria and/or extremely modest restrictions on federal funding the most that bioconservatives have been able to hope for.

Now, given Pinker's premises - he suggests in his conclusion that any restriction on scientific research amounts to mass murder, because "even if progress were delayed a mere decade by moratoria, red tape, and funding taboos, millions of people with degenerative diseases and failing organs would needlessly suffer and die" - I suppose that constant alarmism about the theocon menace makes a certain sense. But when you're on the other side of the debate, as I tend to be, it's a little odd to watch one of your opponents work himself into paroxysms of hysteria when a (powerless and relatively obscure) Presidential Commission dares to suggest that it might be worth merely having a discussion whose premises don't mesh precisely with the Pinker worldview.