Barack Hitler Obama

It's remarkable what those fiendish GOP operatives can squeeze into thirty seconds: Not only does McCain's "celeb" ad have "Barack Obama will rape yo daughters overtones," says Rick Perlstein (who's apparently under the impression that most Americans think of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears as stand-ins for their daughters), but it was edited to blatantly evoke Triumph of the Will as well - the better to freak out elderly Jews in South Florida, perhaps. Comparing the "Celeb" ad to stills from Leni Riefenstahl's work, Perlstein writes: "I actually wonder if the Republicans had a crew on the scene to capture just the right angles; for instance, the identical camera placement shooting the speaker over the shoulder at stage right." If he actually wonders that, I fear for his sanity. Here's a tip for liberals: If your candidate is going to stage enormous rallies in front of tens of thousands of chanting Germans (with monuments to Prussian military might in the background) in the middle of his Presidential campaign, it isn't the GOP's fault if the footage comes out looking a little like Hitler at Nuremberg.

Britney and Crypto-Racism

Via Chris Bodenner, John Riley explains why we should read that McCain ad as a miscegenation dog whistle:

We just got off a conference call with Camp McCain, defending their new ad comparing Barack Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. They said they thought the ad was legitimate because Obama is a big celebrity..., and Britney and Paris were Number 2 and 3. The problem: Anyone with even a vague sense of pop culture knows that Britney and Paris are yesterday's news. Here's a link to Forbes' Celebrity 100. Paris and Britney don't even make the list any more. Instead, the top 10, in order: Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, Angelina Jolie, Beyonce Knowles, David Beckham, Johnny Depp, Jay-Z, The Police, JK Rowling, Brad Pitt. So, they didn't pick other big celebrities, who were either men, or black, or married. What they picked was two sexually available white women.

Except that those other big celebrities are all famous for actually accomplishing something - they're celebrities whom people admire, or at the very least approve of. For many people, comparing Obama to Tiger Woods or David Beckham or J.K. Rowling would be a compliment. Whereas the whole point of picking Britney and especially Paris Hilton is that they're figures of ridicule, famous primarily for being famous and widely derided as embarrassing airheads who only exist to feed the paparazzi machine. In other words, if you're going to attack Obama's celebrity by comparing him to frivolous Hollywood types - which is a silly and juvenile thing to to do, to my mind (though see Rich Lowry for the defense) - Paris and Britney are exactly the figures you'd choose for the ad. In fact, it's hard to think of a white male equivalent who's actually famous-for-being-famous enough for an ad like this to work. (No, Brandon Davis doesn't cut it.)

Meanwhile, I'm trying to imagine what Josh Marshall would have said if the McCain campaign had run the ad with Tiger Woods, Beyonce and Jay-Z in it instead ...

Dana Milbank, Crypto-Racist?

That's the takeaway, so far as I can tell, from this Josh Marshall post, which starts with the dubious claim that this McCain ad - which Ramesh and John Weaver rightly call childish - is actually playing on white America's subliminal fears that Barack Obama wants to sleep with promiscuous white starlets, and proceeds to the claim that any pundit (like Milbank, say) who uses the word "presumptuous" to describe Barack Obama is just playing along with the McCain campaign's vile attempt to caricature Obama as an "uppity young black man whose presumptuousness is displayed not only in taking on airs above his station but also in a taste for young white women."

Look, I understand that liberals are frustrated at Barack Obama's inability to pull away in the polls, despite all the favorable tailwinds he's enjoying and the fact that John McCain is running a staggeringly inept campaign. I'd be frustrated too! But that isn't a reason to make yourself sound like a paranoid idiot.

Can Conservatives Govern?

Sometimes, yes. Via David Frum (and not, as he points out, the front page of either the Times or the Post), the latest figures show that homelessness dropped by 12 percent between 2005 and 2007, with a particularly sharp decrease in the "chronically homeless" population. As Frum notes, a large share of the credit should probably go to the Bush Administration's homelessness czar, Philip Mangano, whose innovative approach to the problem earned him a profile in the Atlantic four years back:

Mangano believes that many professional activists, though well intentioned, have given up on ending homelessness. They have accepted the problem as intractable and fallen back on social work and handouts as a way to make broken lives more bearable. In doing so, he says, they have allowed "a certain amount of institutionalism" to take root. The Bush Administration proposes to solve the problem by beginning with the hardest cases: the 10 percent who are severe addicts or mentally ill, and consume half of all resources devoted to homeless shelters. Mangano believes that by moving these chronic cases into "supportive housing"--a private room or apartment where they would receive support services and psychotropic medications--the government could actually save money, and free up tens of thousands of shelter beds.

And sure enough, four years later ...

Housing officials say the statistics, which are collected annually from more than 3,800 cities and counties, may reflect better data collection and some variation in the number of communities reporting. But officials also attribute much of the decline to a policy shift promoted by Congress and the administration that has focused federal and local resources on finding stable housing for homeless people suffering from drug addiction, mental illness or physical disabilities, long deemed the hardest to help in the homeless population.

In Grand New Party, we cited the Bush Administration's homelessness policy as a possible bright spot in an otherwise lackluster domestic-policy record, and an example of the sort of "applied neoconservatism" that the Right desperately needs - a politics that seeks ways to reform the welfare state in conservative directions, rather than just me-tooing liberalism or demanding government's abolition. It's good to see at least modest evidence that we were right.

WFB and Playboy

James Rosen offers an interesting and judicious account of the Buckley-Hefner relationship.

Debating The Dark Knight

Peter Suderman calls for a chill-out:

Let's be clear: The Dark Knight is in many ways a very good movie, but it's no masterpiece, and it's certainly not worth seeing five times in a weekend, or maybe even five times ever. It's not Godfather II, or Aliens, or even Terminator 2. It isn't a flawless movie -- not by a long shot -- and pretty much all of the complaints about its plot holes are reasonable and accurate. It's only Shakespearean in the sense that the entirety of the last few centuries of popular drama have been influenced by the Bard. What it is, though, is a compelling, comparatively thoughtful summer movie with tremendous scope, real moral complexity, beautifully moody cinematography, a handful of breathtaking action scenes, and one genuinely brilliant and powerful performance from Heath Ledger. Do the film's most slobbering boosters deserve ridicule? Probably. Does the film (or those who enjoyed it) deserve epic griping sessions from those who didn't care for it and are peeved that it made enough money to buy functional Bat-suits for everyone on the production? I think not. It's understandable that the film's combination of critical and financial success might create the impression of overkill. But just as the exuberance of the film's loudest supporters needs to be tempered, so does the grousing of the embittered minority who disliked it. It's not solid gold encrusted with perfectly cut diamonds, but it ain't peanut-ridden crap either.

Well, I don't know. Obviously the stakes in any argument about a given movie's worth are pretty low, but to the extent that debates about popcorn movies can be said to matter, I think that this one does. Based on its critical reception (and its staggering box office), The Dark Knight looks like it has a chance to do something that none of the recent spate of comic-book blockbusters have managed - namely, enter the middlebrow pantheon and be remembered as one of modern Hollywood's classic blockbusters. I'm thinking here of films like, yes, Aliens and Terminator 2; I'm also thinking of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Lord of the Rings; E.T. and Back to the Future, Stars Wars and Jaws and quite a few others as well. These aren't all the sort of classics that you'd teach in film school (though some are), but they're classics all the same, and the debate over The Dark Knight will have a real impact on whether Nolan's film enters that charmed circle, whether it gets one foot in but always has its quality contested (which is what's happened to Titanic, I think), or whether it's remembered the way I think Iron Man will be, or the first two Spiderman movies: As a high-end summer thrill ride that isn't, in the end, in the same league with Marty McFly and Luke Skywalker, Ripley and Indiana Jones. So I say let the haters hate.

Gopnik on Chesterton (II)

If Gopnik is somewhat unpersuasive in his discussion of G.K. Chesterton's anti-Semitism, he is likewise unconvincing when he tries to argue that Chesterton's political ideals were fulfilled in Franco's Spain:

... he dreamed of an anti-capitalist agricultural state overseen by the Catholic Church and governed by a military for whom medieval ideas of honor still resonated, a place where Jews would not be persecuted or killed, certainly, but hived off and always marked as foreigners. All anti-utopians cherish a secret utopia, an Eden of their own, and his, ironically, was achieved: his ideal order was ascendant over the whole Iberian Peninsula for half a century. And a bleak place it was, too, with a fearful ruling class running a frightened population in an atmosphere of poverty-stricken uniformity and terrified stasis -- a lot more like the actual medieval condition than like the Victorian fantasy.

Here I'm with Commonweal's Matthew Boudway, who writes:

There are many good ways to interpret Chesterton's distributism, and there are good ways to criticize it. But this is not one of them. It is a very long way from the Napoleon of Notting Hill to Alcázar. Chesterton was, as Gopnik insists, a localist, but there was really nothing localist about Franco's regime, which was characterized by strict centralization, cultural uniformity, and militarism -- things Chesterton always opposed. (Ask a Catalonian about Franco's tolerance of localism.) Chesterton's main criticism of "Prussianism," and later of Nazi Germany, was not, as Gopnik says, that it resembled Judaism in its belief in a chosen people, but that it was essentially militarist and autocratic. Despite Chesterton's "medievalism," it is not at all obvious what sort of modern political mechanisms would have best embodied his distributist theory, which is arguably the theory's greatest weakness. What is clear is that distributism was as different from Franco's brutal politics as it was from Bernard Shaw's socialism. Gopnik is impatient with such theoretical distinctions. For him, it is all about tendencies: all radical critiques of capitalism tend toward Communism, which has failed, or toward some kind of anti-Semitic authoritarianism. One is allowed to have a few mild reservations about capitalism, of course, and even to look down at the pitiless people who seem to have fewer reservations (i.e., Republicans), but any less mild opposition to our political economy, whatever its name or origin, is headed toward trouble: if not the Gulag or the gas chamber, then the Inquisition.

Tellingly, that the word "distributism" doesn't even appear in Gopnik's essay. There are plenty of things to be said against Chesterton's vision of political economy - for instance, that like other attempts to forge an agrarian third way it's unmoored from the structure of modern economies and from contemporary politics as it's actually practiced. (I wouldn't go quite that far myself: I think there are real insights to be gleaned from distributism - some of which found their way into Grand New Party - even if its adherents have a habit of falling back on Middle Earth when asked for real-world example of their ideal society in action.) But whatever you think of distributism's merits, surely a politics whose chief weakness is that it's so impractical as to have (almost) never been tried ought to be immune from the sort of lazy reductio ad fascism that Gopnik's employing here.

Gopnik on Chesterton (I)

I've been meaning to say something for a while about Adam Gopnik's recent New Yorker essay (not online, unfortunately) on G.K. Chesterton, which I didn't find nearly as excellent as Rod Dreher did. Gopnik is of course a brilliant writer in his way, but his way tends, as Rick Brookhiser aptly put it, to make his own sensibility the measure of all things. He's a classic example of the cosmopolitan as provincial: He has something clever to say about everything under the sun, but where something more than cleverness is called for he's often at a loss, or else inappropriately facile. His breadth is astonishing, his depth considerably less so; he's a liberal ironist who often seems unable to imagine how anyone could have ever been anything else. This means that he's precisely the right man to explain, say, a Parisian restaurant war to an American audience, or to gently mock the over-enthusiastic reception that greeted the Gospel of Judas. And it makes him a fine guide to G.K. Chesterton the literary stylist, where both his praise and his criticisms seem to me judicious and on point. Where other aspects of Chesterton are concerned, though ... well, not so much.

I'll start with his lengthy attack on Chesterton's "Jew-hating," which culminates in this peculiar passage:

The insistence that Chesterton's anti-Semitism needs to be understood "in the context of his time" defines the problem, because his time-from the end of the Great War to the mid-thirties-was the time that led to the extermination of the European Jews. In that context, his jocose stuff is even more sinister than his serious stuff. He claims that he can tolerate Jews in England, but only if they are compelled to wear "Arab" clothing, to show that they are an alien nation. Hitler made a simpler demand for Jewish dress, but the idea was the same. Of course, there were, tragically and ironically, points of contact between Chesterton and Zionism. He went to Jerusalem in 1920 and reported back on what he found among the nascent Zionists, whom he liked: he wanted them out of Europe and so did they; he wanted Jews to be turned from rootless cosmopolitans into rooted yeomen, and so did they.

Chesterton wasn't a fascist, and he certainly wasn't in favor of genocide, but that is about the best that can be said for him-and is surely less of a moral accomplishment than his admirers would like. He did speak out, toward the end of his life, against the persecution in Nazi Germany, writing that he was "appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities," that "they have absolutely no reason or logic behind them," that "I am quite ready to believe now that Belloc and I will die defending the last Jew in Europe." Yet he insisted, "I still think there is a Jewish problem," and he denounced Hitler in the context of a wacky argument that Nazism is really a form of "Prussianism," which is really a form of Judaism; that is, a belief in a chosen, specially exalted people.

But the whole point of the "in the context of his times" argument is precisely that by the standards of the '20s and '30s, it was morally impressive for a political writer to reject both fascism and communism, to praise Zionism, and to speak out forcefully against Nazi anti-Semitism - and not in its eliminationist phase, but in its very earliest stages. (Chesterton died in 1936.) This does not excuse Chesterton's anti-Semitism by any means, but it makes him an odd target, out of all the writers and thinkers of that period, to single out for particular opprobrium. Here I think Gopnik is indulging the chauvinism of hindsight: The assumption that everyone who partook of the attitudes that helped make the Holocaust possible should be judged and condemned on the basis of what we know now, rather than what they knew then. It's the Goldhagen approach to assigning culpability, in which even people who opposed Hitler - even people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who died fighting him - are to be judged, and harshly, if they failed to live up the standards that Western society only adopted after the Holocaust provided a terrible example of where these thoughts and impulses can lead.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, it's worth pointing out that a great many opponents of slavery in the United States, Abraham Lincoln included, were racists in much the same way that Chesterton was an anti-Semite - possessed of ideas about black inferiority, the necessity of the separation of the races, and so on and so forth, that look morally abominable to us today. But it would be at least mildly peculiar to attack Lincoln, let alone the more strident abolitionists of that era, on the grounds that by saying that their racism needs to be understood in the context of their times we're just "defining the problem," because their time was the time when slavery was at its zenith. It was, sure - and they were the ones opposing it! Now of course Hitler had many critics purer than G.K. Chesterton, and Zionism had champions less bigoted - but not so many, in that dark time, that we can deny Chesterton at least a modicum of credit for getting certain big things right.

As for Chesterton's parallel between "Prussianism" and the conception of the Jews as a chosen race - well, Gopnik can call it "wacky" if he likes, but the notion that Nazi racial theories, and especially the half-baked attempt to forge an "Aryan Christianity" purged of Judaic elements, were rooted in jealousy and imitation of the Jews as well as hatred strikes me as a subtle and important point. (In George Steiner's instantly-controversial novella The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., he places exactly this argument in Adolf Hitler's mouth - and not, I think, merely in an attempt to dismiss it.) Indeed, I think the parallel is useful for understanding not only the Nazis but a wide variety of contemporary race-based theologies - from black liberation theology, to take a much-in-the-news example, to the more Arabist strains within Islam - that seek to claim for their ethnicity the particular favor that God has bestowed upon the Jews. Obvious, this sort of argument is outside Gopnik's intellectual comfort zone. But that's a problem with his narrow frame of reference, not the argument itself.

Our Enemy, The Payroll Tax

What Noah Millman said:

We shouldn't be raising the payroll tax - we should be cutting it, and offsetting the cost of the cuts with spending cuts (means-test benefits?) and/or other tax hikes that will be less economically destructive (cut the mortgage deduction? institute a value-added tax?). Either party could grab this - the payroll tax is a tax on employment, a burden on business that discourages job creation; a regressive tax on hard-working people trying to put food on their families that exempts dividend-clippers and other trust-fund scumbags; an inducement to hire undocumented immigrants who live in the shadows - there are GOP-friendly and Democrat-friendly arguments to cut or eliminate the payroll tax and fund our Social Security obligations in a more economically efficient manner (and then we could have a healthy debate about what that manner might be). There ought to be a bidding war over who will do more for payroll tax relief! Instead, we're going the other way.

The Case Against Re-Re-Remarriage

Matt makes it:

I was thinking recently that if you really wanted to do something to shore up the sanctity of marriage then rather than ban gay marriages you ought to ban, say, fourth marriages. It's one thing to say that people who make a mistake ought to get a second chance, but serial nuptuals really do make a mockery of the institution's basic premises in a way that same-sex couples don't. Maybe some people just need to admit to themselves that they have no business making promises of life-long commitment.

Initially, I wanted to ban third marriages, but it seems worth watering the proposal down in order to enhance political feasibility and secure access to the much-vaunted "three strikes and you're out" catchphrase.

In the interests of pushing the envelope, I'll take the the anti-third marriage position - ticking off Rush Limbaugh yet again, no doubt - thereby making Matt's "three strikes and you're out" approach the moderate, bipartisan position on the question. Now all we need is for David Broder to write a column endorsing it ...

The Limits of Batman

A.O. Scott, on the box-office juggernaut:

I don't want to start any fights with devout fans or besotted critics. I'm willing to grant that "The Dark Knight" is as good as a movie of its kind can be. But that may be damning with faint praise. There is no doubt that Batman, a staple of American popular culture for nearly 70 years, provided Mr. Nolan (and his brother and screenwriting partner Jonathan), with a platform for his artistic ambitions. You can't set out to make a psychological thriller, or even an urban crime melodrama, and expect to command anything like the $185 million budget Mr. Nolan had at his disposal in "The Dark Knight." And that money, in addition to paying for some dazzling set pieces and action sequences, allowed Mr. Nolan and his team to create a seamless and evocative visual atmosphere, a Gotham nightscape often experienced from the air.

But to paraphrase something the Joker says to Batman, "The Dark Knight" has rules, and they are the conventions that no movie of this kind can escape. The climax must be a fight with the villain, during which the symbiosis of good guy and bad guy, implicit throughout, must be articulated. The end must point forward to a sequel, and an aura of moral consequence must be sustained even as the killings, explosions and chases multiply. The allegorical stakes in a superhero are raised -- it's not just good guys fighting bad guys, but Righteousness against Evil, Order against Chaos -- precisely to authorize a more intense level of violence. Of course every movie genre is governed by conventions, and every decent genre movie explores the zones of freedom within those iron parameters ... "The Dark Knight" has some advantages from being the second movie in a series, with less need for exposition and basic character development, and its final act is less of a letdown.

Instead the disappointment comes from the way the picture spells out lofty, serious themes and then ... spells them out again. What kind of hero do we need? Where is the line between justice and vengeance? How much autonomy should we sacrifice in the name of security? Is the taking of innocent life ever justified? These are all fascinating, even urgent questions, but stating them, as nearly every character in "The Dark Knight" does, sooner of later, is not the same as exploring them.

I say something very similar in my own review, forthcoming in the next NR, which takes the possibly daft point of view that over the long haul, Tim Burton's interpretation of the Batman saga - especially Batman Returns - will hold up somewhat better than Nolan's mega-grossing effort. (And the box-office numbers are stunning: Watch your back, Titanic.) This is not to say that The Dark Knight isn't a remarkable achievement in certain ways. But I think you can feel the strain as Nolan labors, sometimes successfully but more often not,  to transcend the genre he's working in, whereas Burton was content to have fun within the lines, making the most of his material's essential two-dimensionality rather than struggling against it. His Batman movies don't kinda-sorta want to be The Godfather; they just want to be Batman movies. And I think they're slightly better for it.

Brief Hiatus

Posting will be light-to-nonexistent for the rest of today - not that you'll notice the difference, given how light posting has been all week - while the Atlantic's technological whizzes transition this blog to a newer, better Movable Type platform. (Comments posted during the transition may vanish into the ether.) So have a great weekend, and I'll be back to my usual pace, such as it is, on Monday.

Yglesias Versus GNP

Since turnabout is fair play, here's Matt grilling me and Reihan about Grand New Party:

And be sure to check out our burgeoning A/V page as well.

The American Heresy

From Jody Bottum's very fine essay on American Protestantism in the latest First Things, a brief analysis of the theology of Katherine Jefferts Schori, presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church:

To be saved, we need only to realize that God already loves us, just the way we are, Schori wrote in her 2006 book, A Wing and a Prayer. She’s not exactly wrong about God’s love, but, in Schori’s happy soteriology, such love demands from us no personal ­reformation, no individual guilt, no particular penance, and no precise dogma. All we have to do, to prove the redemption we already have, is support the political causes she approves. The mission of the church is to show forth God’s love by demanding inclusion and social justice. She often points to the United Nations as an example of God’s work in the world, and when she talks about the mission of the Episcopal Church, she typically identifies it with the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals ... Her Yahweh, in other words, is a blend of Norman Vincent Peale and Dag Hammarskjöld.

The Norman Vincent Peale bit, I think, is particularly telling, because it gets at something that I think is often missed about the current religious landscape: Namely, the extent to which Schori's theological premises are shared across the culture-war divide, by Christians who oppose gay marriage and abortion and voted eagerly for George W. Bush as well as by liberal Protestants who consider the contemporary GOP an abomination. Peale's heirs occupy the pulpits of what remains of the Protestant mainline, but they preach from the dais at numerous evangelical megachurches as well. The people who read Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer and The Prayer of Jabez may be more politically conservative then the people who read A Wing and a Prayer, and read certain passages of Genesis and Leviticus more literally, but the theology they're imbibing is roughly the same sort of therapeutic mush. Indeed, the big difference between the prosperity gospel that Osteen and his ilk are peddling and Schori's liberal Episcopalianism has less to do with any theological principle and more to do with what aspect of American life they want God to validate. And this difference, I suspect, has a great deal to do with social class. Osteen and Co.'s God wants us to pursue financial fulfillment because they're largely preaching to entrepreneurial, upwardly-mobile members of the middle class, whereas Schori's God wants us to pursue a more personal fulfillment - sexually, emotionally, philanthropically - because she's preaching to a demographic that, financially speaking, has already got it made. (Which, in turn, is why it isn't a surprise that as American evangelicals grow more prosperous, they're starting to discover their God's Dag Hammarskjöld side as well.)

Obviously the world of religious conservatism also includes lots of people who are invested in actual Christian orthodoxy, as opposed to the Osteen-Shori vision of God as a really powerful life coach. But the theological continuum that encompasses both Schori-style liberal Protestants and Oprah-watching, The Secret-reading spiritual seekers - call it moralistic therapeutic deism, call it gnosticism, call it the American heresy - extends way deeper into the "religious right" than a lot of people think.

Obama In Berlin

Yes, of course the Hitler comparisons are absurd, but I'd really like to know which genius on the Obama campaign thought it would be a good idea to have their candidate conduct a major campaign rally in Europe with three months to go till the election and their candidate, despite an incredibly favorable climate and a fumbling opponent, still clinging to a 2-4 point lead in the polls? Overall, the overseas tour has been good to Obama, both for the obvious reasons and because making joint appearances with foreign leaders is a solid-enough way to build up his credibility as a potential Commander-in-Chief. But photo ops are one thing, Beatlemania-style rallies are quite another - and having your candidate appear in front of tens of thousands of adoring European fans when your campaign's biggest problem, as John Judis puts it today, is that "Obama remains the 'mysterious stranger' rather than the 'American Adam' to too many voters who are put off rather than attracted by his race and exotic background" strikes me as the height of political folly. The Berlin rally probably won't hurt Obama - voters aren't really paying attention to anything election-related right about now, and it'll be forgotten by the time the fall campaign begins in earnest. But it could do some minor damage, and it certainly won't help him. (If he's counting on the expat vote to put him over the top, then he's in more trouble than anyone thinks.) Is it too late to call the whole thing off?

A Correction

I misread this Peter Robinson post as a transcription of an email exchange with John Cogan, rather than a distillation of Robinson's exchanges with his own emailers. Robinson clarifies here. My apologies to Professor Cogan.

Waiting For Andromeda

Christopher Hitchens, having demonstrated to everyone's satisfaction that blind salamanders disprove the existence of God (or something like that), adds this characteristic flourish:

... to the old theistic question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" we can now counterpose the findings of professor Lawrence Krauss and others, about the foreseeable heat death of the universe, the Hubble "red shift" that shows the universe's rate of explosive expansion actually increasing, and the not-so-far-off collision of our own galaxy with Andromeda, already loomingly visible in the night sky. So, the question can and must be rephrased: "Why will our brief 'something' so soon be replaced with nothing?" It's only once we shake our own innate belief in linear progression and consider the many recessions we have undergone and will undergo that we can grasp the gross stupidity of those who repose their faith in divine providence and godly design.

What I like about Hitchens is how often he slips into exactly the sort of self-satisfied misanthropy that you find among the people he theoretically hates the most - the nutty apocalypticians and Left Behind devotees, that is. If the world were to end tomorrow in the hail of fire, I'm confident that one of the last things to be heard on Earth, before the meteor hits, would be the sound of Hitchens and Tim LaHaye both shouting in perfect unison: See, I told you so!

Hooper Goes Hollywood

What a comfort it is to learn that the makers of the new Brideshead Revisited tried to ignore the famous mini-series and "return to the book" for inspiration. This act of fidelity to what Waugh wrote would be slightly more impressive if they had actually decided to adapt what they found in its pages, rather than ... well, I'll let the filmmakers tell it:

As much as it is a story about a lost period of English history — a final shining moment before everything changed forever — “Brideshead” is a novel about the inexorable pull of Catholicism. The issues it raises are particularly relevant now, Mr. Brock said, though viewers may interpret what they see differently depending on the role of faith in their own lives ...

“In that tug between individual freedom and fundamentalist religion, there’s a story that’s apposite for our time,” Mr. Brock said. “In the modern age that’s something we’re all dealing with.”

...

An important divergence in tone from Waugh’s novel, Mr. Jarrold said, comes in the closing scene, when Charles — now back at Brideshead during World War II — talks to Lieutenant Hooper, a fellow soldier who has a rough accent and the forthright views of a modern man unimpressed by the aristocracy. How to portray him led to long discussions about the way that Waugh “is sometimes profoundly undemocratic” and disdainful of Hooper and what he represents, Mr. Jerrold said.

In the book Hooper is “described as a traveling salesman with a wet handshake,” he said. “But he’s the future of England, and the hope of the 1945 generation, and we’ve put a positive spin on him.”

We’ve put a positive spin on him ... I love it! And so would Waugh, I suspect, since the two men sound, frankly, less like real-life Hollywood boobs than like Wavian caricatures of the same. Catholicism is wicked and fundamentalist, Hooper is the hope of the future - but of course they're being very faithful to the book!

The Road To Serfdom?

That's what President Bush has put us on, according to Peter Robinson, who cites, to prove his point, the following chart:

Note that the increase looks roughly twice as shocking as it actually is because the chart-makers, John Cogan and Glenn Hubbard, decided to start with a baseline of $200 billion rather than zero. They're honest enough to allow that a chunk of this increase is inflationary, and another chunk homeland-security related; what they don't show, though, is the growth of the U.S. economy during the same period, and how the Bush-era increase in discretionary domestic spending looks in historical context as a percentage of GDP. To his credit, Robinson queried Cogan on this point:

Q: The chart shows the increase in spending in dollar terms. Haven't you been able to find a chart that shows the increase in spending as a proportion of GDP?

A: No, I haven't—not in the time I've had available for Googling this weekend, which, since I've been scrambling to get the family ready to go back East for a couple of weeks (we're off at 4.30 this very morning) amounted to a little under half an hour. Sorry about that. And I'll check in the from the beach when I can.

Um ... what? According to Cogan's bio, he's a professor in the Public Policy Program at Stanford University, and his "current research is focused on U.S. budget and fiscal policy, social security, and health care" - yet he can't find a chart showing one of the most relevant statistics to a debate about whether George W. Bush is a wild and crazy overspender? I know where to find those statistics right off the top of my head, and I'm a rank amateur: Just head to CBO.gov, click on Historical Budget Data, and flip to page 8, where you'll discover that in 2001, when Bush took office, discretionary domestic spending accounted for 3.1 percent of GDP, and in 2007 it accounted for ... 3.3 percent of GDP. In the years between, it rose as high as 3.6 percent of GDP, which is on the high side by post-Reagan standards (we averaged 3.25 percent a year in the 1990s), but way lower than in the profligate, post-Great Society Seventies, when we were spending as much as 4.8 percent of GDP a year on domestic programs.

The bottom line: The Bush years haven't been a small-government success story by any means, and fiscal conservatives have every right to be disappointed. But the road to serfdom this ain't. (Certainly Friedrich Hayek himself, who vigorously defended free markets without taking anything like the Norquistian position on the pressing need to drown the welfare state in a bathtub, wouldn't recognize it as such.)

The Elephant In The Room

It strikes me as just slightly odd that Post reporter Theola Labbé-DeBose, like Michelle Obama a Princeton grad, could write an entire mini-essay on "Michelle, meritocracy and me" - about the special difficulties faced by black Americans trying navigate the overclass, and her worry that "no amount of pedigree and personal polish will let us entirely escape suspicion, mistrust and jealousy" - without even mentioning affirmative action, let alone pondering its impact on the elite African-American experience. "I've given a lot of thought to the intersection of race, education and meritocracy," she writes, "based on both my personal experience and my job covering schools for The Post." Maybe she should think a little harder.

Obama and the Evangelicals, Cont.

There are two ways to read Pew's numbers on evangelical voters and the '08 election. You could read them the way Mark Hemingway does, emphasizing the fact that Obama is currently running a point behind where John Kerry was among white evangelicals at this point in the 2004 race. Or you could read them as good news for Obama, since McCain is currently running eight points behind where George W. Bush stood at this point in '04. I'd choose the latter reading. In July of 2004, only 4 percent of white evangelicals said they were undecided about whom to vote for. Now 12 percent say that they are - and while it's possible that nearly all of those undecideds will come home to the GOP once the chips are down, undecided voters do tend to break against the incumbent party, which seems to open a pretty sizable opening for Obama.

When all was said and done, Bush took a whopping 78 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2004. If Obama can hold the evangelicals who are supporting him now, and swipe two-thirds of the undecideds, he'll hold McCain to just 68 percent of this demographic - which could easily turn out to be an election-tipping difference. The opportunity is there. Obama just needs to figure out if he's willing to take the political risks necessary to exploit it.

Update: Obama's performance at Saddleback (and McCain's) will probably be at least mildly important in determining how those undecided evangelicals cast their votes.

Al Gore, Political Visionary?

So says E.J. Dionne, arguing that Al Gore's speech yesterday showed the Democrats how they should talk about rising fuel prices - by offering voters a "bigger offer" on energy, a long-term vision rather than a short-term fix.

Well, that's one way to look at Gore's speech, which argued that "the survival of the United States of America as we know it" and indeed "the future of human civilization" are at risk, and the best way to avert disaster is to "commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years." Here's a slightly different take, from James Pethokoukis:

Gore's fantastic—in the truest sense of the word—proposal is almost unfathomably pricey and makes sense only if you think that not doing so almost immediately would result in an uninhabitable planet. Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens recently came out with a plan to generate 20 percent of America's power through wind. His estimate was that it would cost $1 trillion to build that capacity and another $200 billion to update our electrical grid to transmit that energy around the country ... By my math, using Pickens's numbers, converting the whole economy to renewable energy in a short period of time might cost $5 trillion—and that is if you assume that government-led projects come in on budget. (Remember, the current U.S. gross domestic product is $12 trillion.) That would be like creating another Japan. Or fighting World War II all over again. The latter analogy is especially apt since the Gore Plan would effectively transform our free-market economy into a command-and-control war economy full of rationing and scarcity ... Again, all this makes sense if you think we are doomed otherwise.

This isn't the first time Gore has made a proposal with jaw-dropping economic consequences. Environmental economist William Nordhaus ran the numbers on Gore's idea to reduce carbon emissions by 90 percent by 2050. Nordhaus found that while such a plan would indeed reduce the maximum increase in global temperatures to between 1.3 and 1.6 degrees Celsius, it did so "at very high cost" of between $17 trillion and $22 trillion over the long term, as opposed to doing nothing. (Again, just for comparative purposes, the entire global economy is about $50 trillion.)

So yes, there's a sense in which Gore is making Americans a "bigger offer" than the "drill here, drill now" crowd. The notion that it's a winning political offer seems a little more dubious.

The Shock Doctrine

Speaking of the perfidious Chait, his essay on Naomi Klein in the latest TNR is pretty damn good.

The Lies of Jonathan Chait

Somehow I missed this outrageous smear (probably because I was still icing my sprained ankle when it went up):

On Saturday, TNR beat a combined Atlantic Monthly/National Journal squad in softball 10-9 in a 10-inning thriller. The highlight of the game was Ross Douthat injuring himself while--this is true--attempting to wave home a runner while coaching third base. (Those worried about the future of theoconservatism and right-of-center populist reform will be happy to learn that Douthat limped off the field but later returned.)

Attempting to wave home a runner? Let's just be clear about this: I twisted my angle while leaping up and down to celebrate having successfully waved a runner - the tying runner, I might add, with two outs in the bottom of the last inning - home all the way from first (a gutsy call, in other words, worthy of the greatest third base coaches of all time) on an error by TNR's third baseman. I trust Frank Foer has already ordered an internal investigation at his publication to determine how this outrageous slander slipped by the fact-checkers.

Goodbye To Matt

Congratulations are in order whenever someone accepts a new position, of course, but I hope Matt won't mind if I add that I was very sorry to hear that he'd decided to leave the Atlantic to take a job at the Center for American Progress. Partially, this reflects pure selfishness on my part: I like Matt a lot, I've enjoyed having him as a colleague (and a sparring partner), and I'll miss his company in the office as well as the presence of his commentary on the Atlantic's site. But it also reflects slight disappointment at where he's decided to go. Maybe this is foolish: I respect his desire to be in the arena, TR-style, rather than on the sidelines, and there's no doubt a touch of concern-trolling involved whenever I fret about how the new progressive ecosystem seems hell-bent on imitating a lot of the things I find unpleasant about my own side of the partisan divide these days - the team-player mentality, the tendency toward cocooning, the obsession with policing orthodoxy, etc. Certainly, I have no doubt that Matt will remain Matt - independent-minded, acerbic, not suffering fools gladly - even under the umbrella of an explicitly partisan organization. But I also think that American politics benefits from having smart writers of both political persuasions who have one foot in movement politics and one foot outside it, and given that Matt is one of the smartest liberal writers in my generational cohort, I'm sad to see him giving up on this balancing act. He'll do well, and better than well, wherever he goes - but part of me suspects that over the long run he could do more, both for himself and for progressivism, if he were ever-so-slightly outside the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy rather working for it directly.

Obviously, I blame David Appell for this.

The Hayes-Douthat Slugfest

It's been happening all week, first at TPMCafe and then in this Bloggingheads conversation. Here's a short clip, in which I offer my two cents on the Obama cartoon controversy:

Our remarks on Obama's fundraising, though, seem to have been overtaken by events.

The Case Against Incest

Via Rod, I think this British essay making the case for incest being no big deal (the title, "I had sex with my brother but I don't feel guilty," more or less tells it) inadvertently makes a pretty good case for why incest is, in fact, a really bad idea - because it corrupts not only the siblings involved, but the lives of the people around them:

Over the next few years we had sexual encounters every six months or so, each time going farther and farther until I was 17, when we had full sex for the first time. We both went out with other people and there was never any jealousy, although I found it hard to be physically intimate with anyone else. Part of that was because sex with Daniel was so amazing that I had no patience for all the fumbling that seemed to happen with other boys ...

By the time he met Alison he was working and I was a student, and I knew that this relationship was different, but it still came as a shock when he told me he wanted to marry her. However, I was more shocked when he said: “You only have to say and I won't marry her, but then I want us to stay together and not see anyone else. We could be the old boring brother and sister who never got married, but ended up sharing a house because no one else would have them! I know this is meant to be wrong but I've never felt anything so right.” This echoed everything that I've thought about our incestuous relationship over the years. After hours of discussion we agreed that it was time to stop the sexual side of our relationship and also decided that telling anyone else was a bad idea, parting in tears afterwards.

I know Daniel loves Alison, but she's very wary of me. I'm pretty sure that she doesn't see me as a sexual threat, but she thinks of me as an emotional rival and I suppose she's right. It's not unusual - there are countless people dealing with all the emotions that result from partners becoming officially family. ....

Three months ago I met Derek and I think this is going to be a lasting relationship. The sex is certainly amazing and he's a warm and lovely man, so I have high hopes for this. The trouble with having someone like Daniel in your life is that it leaves you with very high expectations, but it's hard knowing that the one person you love above everything is out of bounds. Perhaps worst of all is the fact that you can't tell anyone, as his or her disgust would ruin everything.

Memo to Alison and Derek: Run as fast as you can.

The Case of the Hundred-Dollar Paperback

Mick Sussman has a really interesting (to me, at least) post at the Times's Paper Cuts blog about the phenomenon of used books that seem to be vastly overpriced on Amazon - a post prompted by his attempt to purchase Rick Perlstein's unjustly out-of-print Before the Storm, which is currently priced at $131.09 for a paperback, and (oddly) only $89 for a hardcover. I bought Perlstein's book used myself, a couple years back, but at the point, if memory serves, it was going for a much more reasonable price. (This was before Nixonland came out, of course.) I had a similar experience to Sussman, though, when I needed a copy of Kevin Phillips' The Emerging Republican Majority; I don't remember exactly how much I spent, but it was something far more obscene than the $47.86 that it currently takes to get a copy.

In the spirit of authorial solidarity, incidentally, I urge anyone who wants to read Before The Storm - which is well worth your time, as I'm sure I've mentioned before - to wait until next summer, when Nation Books plans to bring it back into print. No matter how high the price of a used copy rises, the writer himself doesn't see a dime of it.

Comments

Just a quick announcement: From now on, one of the Atlantic's crack interns will be going through the comment threads at the end of every business day, deleting any comments that run afoul of our comments section's terms of service, which state that "By using this service you agree not to post material that is obscene, harassing, defamatory, or otherwise objectionable." I've instructed him to err on the side of deletion if he's uncertain about whether a comment crosses the line; I apologize if this has a chilling effect on freewheeling argument, and I especially apologize for not having time time to police the comments (and participate in the discussion more often) myself. If you feel that your thoughts have been unjustly deleted, feel free to send me an email, but in general I hope that this will encourage a greater degree of civility. We'll see how it goes.

Tony Snow, RIP

Not knowing the man, I didn't have much to offer over the weekend, but for anyone who hasn't seen it, I would recommend Elizabeth Edwards' Newsweek piece on his passing.

Bishirjian Continued

Larison writes, of this post:

It’s a little disappointing that of all the insightful points Mr. Bishirjian made about the threat of centralisation and regimentation to a sane and humane social order Ross finds the references to a flat tax and some kind of education reform to be the most interesting.

Actually, the fact that Bishirjian's essay made many theoretical points with which I agreed was precisely why I thought his completely unimaginative, Limbavian proposals for what conservatives ought to actually do were worth highlighting.

Larison goes on:

The link is to the NYT profile of Limbaugh, which includes his six-point list that overlaps in some places with policies Mr. Bishirjian supports. What is notable about this and Ross’ ongoing spat with Limbaugh is that when it comes to practical politics Limbaugh and Ross are effectively in agreement about what the government should be doing far more often than Bishirjian and Limbaugh are. Limbaugh may nonsensically complain that Ross and Reihan want to embrace the New Deal, as if the GOP hadn’t already abandoned overturning that agenda decades ago, but for all practical purposes Limbaugh generally proposes very little (except perhaps for Social Security privatisation) that could be fairly described as being in any way anti-New Deal.

Bishirjian is proposing a thoroughgoing repeal of the centralised administrative state that has grown up over the last century, but while he is making many proposals that might find an audience in conventional GOP circles he is also making a fundamentally communitarian case for building up intermediate institutions that would probably give Limbaugh hives.

I apologize for being somewhat reductionist here, but while I take Daniel's point, I think that conservatism - and especially its dissident factions - could benefit from fewer airy discussions of the ideal conservative social order, and more meat-and-potatoes discussions of what a renewed conservative movement that flowed from these first principles would actually be for. As a result, I don't have that much patience for sweeping calls for a "thoroughgoing repeal of the centralised administrative state" when those calls are wedded to a specific domestic policy agenda that is more or less identical to what Rush Limbaugh is already urging on the GOP. If Bishirjian had ended his essay simply by calling, as some other dissident-conservative writers have, for a depoliticization of the conservative movement, and a renewed focus on cultural activism and "building up intermediate institutions" that can eventually contest with the administrative state for influence, I would have disagreed with him, but I would have respected him for proposing an actual alternative to the current conservative mindset. But in point of fact, he marries very general calls for a renewed conservative communitarianism with a few very specific policy suggestions - a flat tax, Social Security privatization, and a reduction of the capital gains tax rate - that strike me as profoundly unhelpful to conservatives in their current situation, either because they're impractical or because they have very little to do with the broader state-shrinking project he claims to be engaged in. (An administrative state funded entirely by a flat tax would, I suspect, look exactly like the one we have today, except the tax burden would be more regressive.) Hence my frustration with the essay.

Paleoconservatism and Practical Politics

Writing in Modern Age, Richard J. Bishirjian concludes an essay on "Why I Am A Conservative" with this peroration:

How, then, do we successfully save a public space for ordered living? First, of course, we must educate ourselves in the wonderful literature of the West and in the recovery of philosophy that émigré conservative scholars from Western Europe brought to this nation when they were exiled from West, East, and Central Europe. And once having educated ourselves, we can commence the work that is necessary to preserve and grow private institutions—including private colleges and universities—voluntary associations, privately held businesses that employ family members, and other forms of community—including churches and synagogues—that traditionally act as buffers between our private lives and the centralized administrative state. And we must break up the monopoly of public education!

We must also aspire to enlarge and enrich civil society by reducing the scope of governmental agencies, programs, corps, and their intrusive oversight of our private lives. Can we not have a flat tax? And what about privatization of Social Security and the FAA’s air traffic control? A consistent policy of outsourcing of government services that can best be performed by the private sector must become basic policy of the American government. And the Republican Party, if there is one left after the election of 2008, must take tax reform seriously, including capital gains tax reform. At the margins of this effort to reduce the state, we must ask if there is any reason why our national historical parks should not be turned over to private entities committed to the preservation of history? When I visit King’s Dominion, Busch Gardens, or Six Flags I see what private enterprise can do to entertain thousands of persons daily. But visit Bunker Hill, Appomattox, or Yorktown Battlefield, and you see 1950s technology and the mentality of government wardens.

Now here's what I find interesting. Earlier in the essay, Bishirjian - good paleocon that he is - goes on a tear against the contemporary conservative movement, complete with a sneering reference to the jingos in "mass media Talk Radio." Yet when it comes time to advance a domestic political agenda - one that's in keeping with European philosophy, "ordered living," and the Great Tradition of the West - his proposals are essentially identical to Rush Limbaugh's preferred domestic policy! (Allowing for the idiosyncratic riff about our national parks, of course.) This isn't necessarily an inconsistent approach to politics - somebody can be completely wrong in one sphere, and completely right in another - but I think it ought to jar Bishirjian enough for him to at least consider the possibility that the Limbaugh approach to conservative governance isn't the only one there is.

Scheiber on Sam's Club

Noam Scheiber highlights an event that I've been meaning to mention - the great Sam's Club smackdown taking place at New America this Thursday night. In the same post, he also responds at length to my earlier post on the GOP's relationship to its corporate moneymen; I'll try to respond in turn, either on the blog or at the panel, but for now just go see what he has to say.

Rush Versus Me

The fun continues. (And my name is fiendishly difficult to pronounce - it's "Dow-thut," to rhyme with south and mouth and almost every other "ou" word in the English language, but for some reason everyone defaults to Doo-that or Doo-tah - so I don't hold that against him.)

Those Were The Days

Calling this the the "A.D.D. election," the guys at First Read describe last week thusly:

It’s another whiplash week. It's amazing how many Fridays we look back at the week and just shake our head... This really is turning into the A.D.D. election. Here’s the week that was… in reverse order… Phil Gramm's “mental” comments (btw, isn't "mental" such an '80s word?), Jesse Jackson “nut”-ty remarks, Iran’s missile tests (and that McCain “killing them” joke), FISA (Obama’s reversal and Clinton voting against it -- so did Biden, by the way), Clinton donors not happy with Obama’s debt relief efforts (and Obama briefly forgetting to mention the former rival at a joint funder), that McCain bio spot invoking the culture wars of the 1960s, the scrutiny of the candidates’ economic plans, more courting Latinos, Webb off the veep list, Carly Fiorina's Viagra/birth control comment, the T. Boone Pickens energy ad launch, the RNC energy ad and the first Obama response of the general election, and, of course, we started the week with Obama announcing he was moving the last night of the Dem convention to a football stadium. Whew. It's no wonder neither candidate has been successful at taking one of their "insert issue here" weeks from start to finish. There are just an incredible amount of distractions even during a supposed slow period like this one in July. ... But seriously, can either of these candidates get the message THEY want out there for even a 48 hour period? Calling you, Wes Clark, Phil Gramm.

Well ... use the words "whiplash" and "A.D.D." if you want, but I think this paragraph, with its roll call of minor controversies (the FISA flap and the Iranian missile tests are the only items that actually matter for policymaking, and I suspect that neither of them will matter much to the outcome of the election), is a perfect distillation of how unfavorably the largely-fake excitement of the general-election campaign contrasts with the actual excitement of the just-past primary campaign. The main difference, obviously, is the absence of actual voting from here till November: Pundits like to compare election coverage to sports coverage, but having a primary or caucus every week made the nomination contests feel like a baseball or football season in a way that the general-election competition simply can't compete with. There was a legitimate (if sometimes-disputed) way to keep track of wins and losses, and "winning the week" meant that you actually gained something that counted (i.e. delegates), instead of a couple days of favorable, quickly-forgotten press coverage and maybe, maybe, a one or two-point blip in the polls. Whereas after the agony and ecstasy of New Hampshire and Florida, Super Tuesday and Texohio, the Huckabee surge and the McCain comeback, the Giuliani fade and the too-little, too-late Hillary revival, the road to November feels less like an actual sporting event than like a four-month version of Super Bowl Week, with tons of media-abetted sound and fury signifying next to nothing. It was the same way in 2004 and 2000, I suppose, but I was spoiled by the primaries; I want that sort of excitement back. It's enough to make you think that we should run our general election across two months, as a rolling series of regional votes, just for the drama of it all.

See also Ambinder for a more eloquent version of this point.

Debating GNP

Reihan and I will be discussing Grand New Party with a group of highly intelligent people this week at TPMCafe, so check it out if you dare ...

Generation Kill (II)

Nancy Franklin's assessment of the whole thing, sadly, matches up with my assessment of part one:

... it’s a little surprising that Simon went for this material at all. If you watched TV during the first two weeks of the war, you’ll remember that it was covered exhaustively and enthusiastically, as if it were a hot, sandy pep rally. Troop movements, weather conditions, equipment, terminology, and geography—reporters practically got drunk on it all, egged on, presumably, by the networks, some of which sported American-flag graphics during their war coverage. However you judge the response of American news organizations during the early days of the war, they certainly made those days vivid to viewers, and they helped us understand the terrible significance of the resistance the Marines faced in southern Iraq as they made their way from Kuwait to Baghdad. Wright’s pieces, coming out so soon after the invasion, brought the same kind of reality home—even more so, since he had greater control over his narrative than the TV reporters did: they were literally blown about by the wind while they were on camera and sometimes were made almost invisible by all-encompassing sandstorms. But that unforgettable time was more than five years ago, and I don’t see anything to be gained by retracing the path from Kuwait to Baghdad. Tell us, as they say, something we don’t know.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

Grand New Party draws very heavily on secondary sources, which means not only studies and reports but also books, magazine articles, newspaper columns, and so forth, and as a result we attempted to give nods throughout not only to the direct sources for data, policy ideas, anecdotes, etc., but also to the writers who called them to our attention in the first place. And so I should apologize to Steve Sailer, who correctly suggests that a passage about the UK's crime and illegitimacy rates, which appears on page 161 of GNP, draws on data points that I first encountered in an April 2005 column he wrote about the British working class. I should add that failing to credit Steve for calling the data in question to our attention was entirely my oversight, and not Reihan's; if there's another edition of the book at some point, I'll make sure that the oversight is corrected.

Generation Kill

Obviously, any follow-up to The Wire was bound to suffer by comparison, but the first episode of David Simon's Iraq War miniseries, Generation Kill, was a pretty big letdown nonetheless. I'll be coming back to it next week - first episodes are always a tough thing to pull off - but so far a miniseries that promised to show us "the new face of American war" looks like a mash-up of things we've seen before: Its portrait of American man-children in the desert that will be familiar to anyone who's seen Jarhead, or Three Kings, or Stop-Loss, or even documentaries like Gunner Palace. It's competent, sure, but it isn't particularly revelatory - and with Simon and Co. involved, revelatory is what I was hoping for.

The GOP's Carter Moment

Very broadly speaking, when you look at people who gravitate toward the two political parties, the GOP tends to be the party of economic optimists - people who are confident about their professional lives, their future prospects, and the country's economic health - and the Democratic Party tends to be the party of people who worry and fret about both their personal fortunes and those of the nation as a whole. This divide has a host of implications, but I think Phil Gramm's instantly-controversial remarks about America being in a "mental recession," in which a "nation of whiners" can't see through all the media hype about bad economic news and recognize that "we've never been more dominant; we've never had more natural advantages than we have today," is a good example of one of them: When economic times are tough, Democratic politicians and pundits tend to go way overboard exaggerating how dire things are, while Republican politicians and pundits tend to go way overboard insisting that everything's fine and the public needs to stop whining, stop listening to the media, and start enjoying the good times. In 1979, the tendency to play to type produced Jimmy Carter's famous malaise speech, in which the American people were informed that the solution to their economic problems was to accept a wartime mentality in which the government would massively regulate the energy sector and everyone would have to make do with much, much less. In the 2000s, it's produced too many Republicans who think and talk like Phil Gramm, whether they're insisting that a sluggish economic recovery with weak wage growth for most middle-income Americans actually represents "the greatest story never told," or claiming that we can just "drill our way out" of the current energy crunch.

Of course there's some truth to Gramm's remarks about America's fundamentals remaining strong (though the claim that "we've never been more dominant" seems like something of a stretch - the post-World War II era says hello), just as there was truth to the late-'70s anxieties about what America's dependence on foreign oil portended for the future. But there are other relevant truths as well, the art of politics involves striking a balance, and a political party that lurches too far toward either Panglossianism or pessimism isn't long for power. Just ask Jimmy Carter.

Grand New Party and Practical Politics

The talk of Cameronism reminds me that I've been meaning to address Daniel Casse's very kind review of our book for Commentary, which includes the following caveats:

The main trouble with Grand New Party lies ... in the decision of the authors to attempt both a policy analysis and a partisan political strategy in one and the same volume. When it comes to the latter, Grand New Party is unpersuasive.

In response to the GOP’s growing electoral strength in the 1980’s, the Democratic party tried to make itself more appealing to certain tightly defined demographic groups: urban liberals, Jews, blacks, gays, union members, and so on. Pollsters like Stanley Greenberg and Mark Penn, both of whom worked for Bill Clinton, went further by categorizing voters into “single urban environmentalists,” “married minivan drivers,” and the like. Grand New Party assumes that similar techniques will work for the GOP—that is, that a new coalition can be galvanized into formation by means of a list of bite-sized policies for bite-sized constituencies.

There is scant evidence that this is the case. Indeed, the Democratic effort itself proved unsuccessful when Hillary Clinton, guided by Mark Penn, sought to use it to catapult herself to the Democratic nomination.

Consider Douthat and Salam’s central notion of appealing to families as a powerful voting bloc. Demographically, the United States has an aging population, and most current polling shows that the older voters become, the less interest they have in supporting policies that help parents and children. Nor, despite the strong case made by Douthat and Salam for a governmental helping hand, are voters in general clamoring for an expansion of government services. A May 2008 survey by Rasmussen Reports found 62 percent of respondents preferring fewer government services, with lower taxes. Nowhere does this book present a realistic political strategy for reversing such sentiments.

The innovative policies proposed by Douthat and Salam might indeed bring about welcome changes for many working-class Americans. To that end, Grand New Party can serve as a valuable resource for the next Republican President’s domestic-policy team. It will, however, be far less useful as an electoral weapon for this year’s Republican presidential candidate.

I think Casse's broad point is a fair criticism: The second half of the book does try to interweave policy and politics, but it focuses more on the former than the latter, and it's not surprising if some of our attempts to play political strategist for would-be Sam's Club candidates feel a little forced. Our main goal was to pool a wide variety of policy ideas that future right-of-center candidates might draw on, and as a result I think the book probably has more to offer a politician looking for proposals to weave into a pre-existing stump speech or campaign narrative than to one looking for a complete blueprint for how to run for office as a Republican in 2012 or 2016.

That being said, I would push back a bit on the specifics of Casse's critique. I'm second-to-none in my disdain for the "microtargeting" approach to politics, and while it's true that our book gets somewhat micro at times - when we're talking about telecommuters, say, or Plains State farmers, or homeschoolers - by and large I find the claim that we're offering "bite-sized policies for bite-sized constituencies" (which is a fairly common critique of the book, I've noticed) a little puzzling. If anything, I think the book errs somewhat in the opposite direction, by generalizing (and sometimes overgeneralizing) about very large, very diverse constituencies - the working class first and foremost, which after all is a majority of the American electorate under our definition, but also groups like "working families" and "parents who send their kids to public schools" and "suburbanites" and "Americans who have employer-provided health care." Indeed, we repeatedly criticize some of the most common forms of right-wing microtargeting - whether we're arguing against the Bush Administration's assumption that the way to win Hispanics is to pander to their ethnic loyalties, or advising social conservatives to broaden the often-sectarian appeals of the religious right into a more ecumenical language of moral renewal, or criticizing economic conservatives' focus on a somewhat-chimerical "investor class." I certainly take Casse's point about the limits of a pro-family party's appeal in an aging society with declining marriage rates; indeed, I think these demographic trends are one of the biggest challenges facing the GOP over the next twenty years. But I still think that the voting blocs we're talking about - families with children, Americans with a high school diploma and some college, etc. - are large enough that a party that focuses on their interests would be engaged in the sort of macro-targeting that can build enduring majorities, rather than the sort of Rove or Penn-style micro-targeting that gets you to 51 percent by the skin of your teeth.

I'd also add that we have no interest in reversing the American bias in favor of lower taxes and fewer government services - we like that bias, and if anything our long-term goal is to strengthen it, by addressing the social and economic forces that (in our view, at least) are eroding it. But I think that the sort of polls Casse cites are a little misleading, since when you ask Americans about whether government should spend more or less in specific areas, they tend to become considerably more favorable to expanding government's role, and considerably more hostile to spending cuts. This is the landscape in which conservatism has to find a way to operate - a landscape in which Americans favor less government in the abstract, but more government on a case-by-case basis, which in turn means that a would-be center-right majority needs to offer an agenda of welfare-state reform, rather saying "no" to everything the Democrats propose and leaving it at that.

The Pickens Plan

It scores high on the folksy scale, at least:

Matt comments here. Naturally, I'm curious about the Manzi take.

Alan Wolfe, Renaissance Man

Via Will Wilkinson, I see that Alan Wolfe's grasp of economics is about as impressive as his grasp of American conservative thought.

Albion's Seed

Without wading too deeply into the debate over my colleague Matt Yglesias's patriotism, let me just say that while I'm second to none (well, okay, maybe not none) in my appreciation for the American founding, I think that anyone doesn't feel at least a frisson of regret over how the split between the American colonies and Great Britain happened ought to return to their history books and reconsider.

Cameronism and Grand New Party

Needless to say, I found a lot to like in this speech, which David Cameron just delivered in Glasgow. Andrew, though, thinks it sets up a striking contrast with our book:

I'm struck, in contrast to R&R, how restrained Cameron is. His policy prescriptions - more autonomy at the bottom of public services, more accountability within the public sector, a gentle tax incentive for marriage - are more in line with traditional conservatism than wage subsidies, for example.

Honestly, I think this is a bit silly. Yes, we have some proposals in Grand New Party - wage subsidies being the biggest example - that go beyond what Cameron's Tories have proposed, but there are also plenty of areas where the Tory Party (which operates in a vastly different political landscape than the American Republican Party, obviously) is considerably to our left - and to Andrew's, presumably - on taxation, spending and welfare policy. As for that "gentle" tax incentive for marriage ... well, let's look at what the Cameron Tories are actually proposing: A tax allowance of roughly £1000 a year for parents who stay home with their kids, front-loaded per-child tax benefits that offer parents £2800 a year while their kids are below the age of three, and increased tax credits for low-income parents, which would offer 1.8 million British couples roughly £1600 a week a year [sorry, typo]. Translate those pounds into dollars, and those population figures into an American context, and you've got a set of proposals that might be slightly less pricey than the $5000-per-child tax credit and the (fiscally unspecific) notions of benefits for stay-at-home parents we propose, but that are certainly in the same general ballpark - and that actually go further than our basic proposals (though not our ideal ones) in terms of directly discriminating in favor of marriage. I understand that Andrew wants to like the Cameron Tories, and that he's suspicious of some of the ideas Reihan and I have put forward (and they merit suspicion!), but the notion that Cameronism is way closer to some platonic ideal of "traditional conservatism" than what we're talking about in Grand New Party just won't wash.

Update: See also Reihan's remarks on the subject, especially his observation that "if Cameron embraced an agenda like the one outlined in Grand New Party, he would likely be accused of being a libertarian radical hellbent on destroying the most cherished parts of Britain’s welfare state."

Running on the Surge (II)

Via Andrew, here's a rough version of the sort of ad I think the GOP nominee ought to be running - though it isn't McCain-specific, and as a result it's focused on "staying the course" rather than "who do you trust?," which is the question McCain will win the election on if he manages to win it:

Meanwhile, Matt thinks the notion of running on the surge is a "little bit crazy." He writes:

The smart Iraq strategy for McCain is the one he was using before the current "Obama's a flip-flopper" tactic came into vogue, namely one that's less focused on lying about Obama and more focused on telling big lies rather than small ones. It's absolutely vital for McCain to repeat, loudly and falsely, that there's a very good chance of al-Qaeda taking over Iraq and using it as a base from which to attack the American homeland and that Obama believes he can appease al-Qaeda by giving them Iraq. He needs to say lots of stuff about how "unlike my opponent, I don't think al-Qaeda will be satisfied with Iraq; unlike him I remember what happened the last time we allowed them to take over a country."

The lie on which the war was initially sold, and the lie on which it retained its popularity, was that the war was directly necessary for U.S. national security in a very simple and straightforward sense. That required, yes, some whoppers but they were whoppers about the sort of thing (preventing a WMD terrorist attack on American soil) that would constitute a good reason for starting a war. All this "success of the surge" business is incredibly abstract and totally disconnect from anything real people care about -- I can tell you which Americans have died because of the surge, but I have no idea which Americans are supposed to have benefited from it.

Setting aside the "is McCain lying about Obama?" question - while noting for the record that the Democratic nominee has flip-flopped a great deal of late, and that he did support a rapid withdrawal from Iraq during the period when AQI's influence in that country was at its height - I think Matt makes a good broad point: Forward-looking arguments about specific potential dangers to the U.S. tend to be more potent than backward-looking arguments about dangers that have been averted. The question is whether the rule holds in this particular instance, and I'm just not convinced it does: I think McCain's ownership of the surge is a unique political case, and that having staked his career on a strategy that very few other politicians supported he simply has to make his (apparent, possibly temporary) vindication the centerpiece of his campaign. Obviously, McCain can make forward-looking and backward-looking arguments at once: He can take credit for the recent improvements in Iraq while simultaneously warning of the dangers that would follow from a swift withdrawal. The question is where he puts the emphasis, and I remain convinced that emphasizing the surge, and the successes that seem to have flowed from it, sets up a stronger contrast with Obama than talking incessantly about the future dispositions of U.S. forces in Iraq - an arena where Obama can, and will, blur the differences between the two candidates in a way he can't if the debate focuses on the recent past.

And yes, Matt's of course correct that framing the argument this way requires persuading the American public that the stability of Iraq ought to matter to us for reasons (both strategic and moral) that go beyond the immediate risk of terrorist attacks in the U.S. homeland. But frankly if John McCain can't make that case then he isn't going to win the election anyway, so he might as well give it a shot.

The Case Against Wall:E

No discussion of Pixar would be complete without a link to Noah Millman's contrarian take on the company's latest hit. (I wondered about EVE's trigger-happiness too ...)

The Case of Jesse Helms

The liberal blogosphere wants to know: Why have conservatives lined up to say kind things about the late Jesse Helms? Partially because nobody wants to speak ill of the dead, but largely because Helms was an sometimes-effective, always-steadfast champion of conservative causes for decades, and there's a sense on the right that the liberal case against Helms-the-awful-bigot is really just the latest manifestation of the long-running liberal attempt to argue that (as William Voegeli puts it in a fine essay on race and the Right in the latest CRB) "the essence of conservatism is and always has been Dixiecrat-ism ... [and] that everything that conservatism has accomplished and stood for since 1965—Reagan, the tax revolt, law-and-order, deregulation, the fight against affirmative action, the critique of the welfare state...everything—is the poisoned fruit of the poisoned tree."

Regular readers will know that I sometimes have sympathy for these sentiments, and that I tend to be sensitive to the way that liberals cry "racism!" in an effort to disarm conservative arguments on issues ranging from crime to affirmative action to Jeremiah Wright. And in that vein, I should note that I'm not convinced that Helms' famous "white hands" ad merits the sort of outraged denunciations that Andrew and Max Boot have offered up today - since if it does, the implication would seem to be that any hard-hitting attack on racial preferences is ipso facto racist.

But a specific ad is one thing; Helms himself is another. He simply was an awful bigot, and worse he was an awful bigot who never expressed a shred of remorse, so far as I know, for his toxic approach to issues ranging from civil rights to HIV to foreign affairs. Far from being the sort of politicians who conservatives ought to defend, out of a sense of issue-by-issue solidarity, he's the sort of politician conservatives ought to carefully distance themselves from, because his political style brought (and continues to bring) intellectual disrepute to almost every cause with which he was associated. Inherent to conservatism is the responsibility to stand up and say to bien-pensant opinion: Just because a bigot opposes something doesn't mean it's a good idea. But the necessity (and difficulty) of making that case, whether the issue is affirmative action or "comprehensive" immigration reform or the NEA and Piss Christ, is all the more reason for conservatives to keep their distance from actual bigots, even (or especially) when they're representing the great state of North Carolina in the U.S. Senate. Jonathan Rauch had it right in 2002: If Ronald Reagan and Helms had similar positions on countless issues, that doesn't prove that Helms was good for conservatism; it only suggests that conservatives should look for more Reagans, and fewer Jesse Helms. I'm happy to defend Helms' views on a variety of issues, but the man himself has no business in the right-wing pantheon, and the conservatives who have used his death as an occasion to argue that he does are doing their movement a grave disservice.

Pixar and the Goldman Aphorism

Peter Suderman, riffing on the issue of whether critics matter:

If movie reviewers are such good predictors of financial success, why hasn’t some studio caught on and put a bunch of them on the payroll? It’s not as if the studios aren’t actively pursuing every conceivable formula and strategy to predict what will and won’t work at the box office. As Malcolm Gladwell reported in The New Yorker a few years back, they’re all spending an awful lot of time and money searching for something like a guaranteed success, an answer to the movie industry’s longest standing problem, put famously by William Goldman: Nobody knows anything. (emphasis mine - RD)

Here's a Wall:E-related thought: How gaga you go over the Pixar oeuvre, I think, depends on how much stock you put in the Goldman take on hit-making. If you think making a really good, really popular film is a mysterious, alchemical process that nobody can consistently wrap their minds around, then each Pixar movie looks like nothing short of a miracle. But another way to look at it - the correct way, in my view - is that Pixar's track record of putting out one excellent, crowdpleasing movie after another (they're up to nine and counting, assuming you include the just-okay Cars and accept the critical consensus on Ratatouille) ought to at least partially disprove Goldman's aphorism. Like Jeffrey Katzenberg's run at Disney or the entire careers of Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, the lesson of Pixar is that the formula for making hit movies is relatively simple: Find talented people with an instinct for high-quality middlebrow entertainment (i.e. John Lasseter, not David Lynch); let them do their thing without too much interference from people whose primary talent is rising to the top of a cutthroat corporate culture; sit back and enjoy the box-office bonanza.

Don't get me wrong: I love Pixar, and I mean this observation as no slight on what they've accomplished. I just think that their success shouldn't be treated as some sort of cosmic miracle that can't possibly be repeated elsewhere, but rather as a blueprint for how the movie industry as a whole could stop force-feeding bad movies to the public, and start making better ones.

GNP Update

For those who live in Washington and can't get enough Grand New Party (and how could you?), Reihan and I will be doing an AEI event tomorrow at 2 PM, with David Frum and Ruy Teixeira as our interlocutors. (Translation: We'll get grilled.)

Also, since Bill Bennett was kind enough to have us on his show this morning, let me add my voice to the chorus promoting a McCain-Bennett ticket ...

Running On The Surge

Patrick Ruffini wonders about the McCain strategy:

The issue I keep coming back to is Iraq. Why isn't McCain telling people that he is the key reason why things are turning around in Iraq? His decisive support for the surge was a key part of his message in the primaries, but has been nonexistent in the general.

This may seem like an odd issue on which to engage. Iraq is supposed to be toxic. And yet McCain has repeatedly engaged on it, most recently in challenging Obama to go to Iraq with him ... Bringing things back to the surge would actually allow McCain to trash the incompetence, etc. of the previous Iraq strategy, aligning himself with most voters. But by elevating the issue, he'd also be performing a public service -- aligning public support for the war with the partisan divide, hence increasing it, and getting the message out about the improving situation on the ground. At a minimum, an effort like this, even if it fell short, would render a rapid withdrawal under an Obama administration politically untenable.

The surge also happens to be a remarkable testament to McCain's judgment and his aptitude to be Commander-in-Chief. Though energy might be a more profitable issue in some respects, I don't know that McCain has room to get the contrast he needs on it given his past opposition to things like ANWR. McCain can get an election winning contrast on Iraq if he can use his positioning to improve the underlying optics of how the public perceives the issue.

I'd second the motion. If I were the McCain camp, I'd be running a slew of ads emphasizing 1) how bad things looked in Iraq in late 2006, 2) how much better they look today, and 3) the lonely role that McCain played in championing the surge. The ads should contrast McCain with Rumsfeld and with Obama (implicitly linking the Democratic nominee to the pre'-07 approach to Iraq), they should feature testimonials from U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians, and they should hammer away at a single theme: We were losing, now we're winning, and John McCain made all the difference.

I'm skeptical that this will provide an "election winning contrast," as Patrick phrases it, but then I'm skeptical that there are any "election winning contrasts" available to McCain at this point. I am sure, though, that foreign policy is the GOP nominee's strongest terrain, and that if the foreign-policy debate boils down to McCain and Obama bickering over who has the best plan to capitalize on the success of the surge, then Obama can neutralize McCain's edge - both because his "withdrawal over 16 months" plan is closer to what most Americans say they believe than McCain's more open-ended position, and because Obama is politically skillful enough to finesse his way toward a Nixonesque "peace with honor" message that won't be easily dismissed as "cut and run." The only sure way for McCain to make the Iraq issue work for him is to make the debate about the recent past rather than the future, and to use the experience of the last two years - where (at least for the moment) he looks good, and Obama looks bad - to increase his advantage on the "who do you trust?" scale. This approach is fraught with risk, of course, because if the election becomes about the less recent past - i.e. the decision to invade Iraq in the first place - it's advantage Obama once again. But risk is something the McCain campaign needs to learn to live with.

U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Andy Dunaway.

Rush and the American Right

Writing in response to Rush Limbaugh's remarks on our book, Reihan compared El Rushbo to Oprah Winfrey, and I think the Times profile of Limbaugh this weekend's Times Magazine confirms that insight. The piece paints Rush, accurately I think, as a fascinating and enormously talented entertainer, a guy who addresses the anxieties, aspirations and prejudices of put-upon, middle-class white men in much the same way Oprah speaks to the anxieties, aspirations and prejudices of angsty middle-aged white women. If Oprah is selling, in myriad ways, a particular (and particularly American) worldview - one defined by self-help and sisterhood and spirituality - then so is Rush: He's a voice for a self-reliant, up-by-your-bootstraps vision of American life, in which perpetual material abundance is available to anyone willing to work for it, and people who insist that there are limits to growth just don't understand what the U.S. of A is capable of.

The major difference between the two, of course, is that Rush's worldview has explicit political implications - a suspicion of regulators and taxmen and bureaucracies of any kind, a hatred of political correctness and sex- or race-based victimology - whereas the politics of Oprahland are (usually, though not always) implicit. In this sense, the absolute best parallel to Rush in the cultural firmament is probably Jon Stewart, whose Daily Show is to the weltanschauung of bright young East Coast liberals what the Rush Limbaugh Show is to the worldview of their SUV-driving, self-made uncles out in flyover country.

What does this mean for Rush's relationship to Republican politics? Just this: In the same way that every ambitious Democratic politician ought to be attuned to how Jon Stewart covers the news, so every right-of-center politico should keep an ear to the portion of the dial where Rush holds forth - because the Limbavian worldview, and the people he speaks for, represents an important (and valuable) slice of American conservatism, and indeed of America itself. But those same politicians should remember, as too many conservatives seem wont to forget, that Limbaugh is first and foremost an entertainer, and to mistake him for a strategist or policy wonk or political philosopher is to make a category error of epic proportions. Letting Rush define who is and is not a conservative, or what the national GOP can and cannot stand for, is the equivalent of the Democratic Party inviting the writers of the Daily Show to hammer out their party's platform - or the Roman Catholic Church turning the next edition of the Catechism over to Oprah.

Happy (Belated) 4th

I'm back from Aspen, but Megan has ably taken my place, and there's more video coming in all the time, featuring everyone from Michael Chertoff to Sandra Day O'Connor to our own James Bennet and Robert Kaplan. Here's the rest of the party-politics Table (continued below the fold):

Continue reading "Happy (Belated) 4th" »

The Table At Aspen (III)

Here's part two of the party politics conversation - and there's lots more Aspen video going up all the time over at our Ideas Festival page.

What Prequels?

Matt pays a visit to the galaxy far, far away:

I was watching Star Wars IV: A New Hope last night on television, and somehow it occurred to me for the first time that a new generation who watches the six movie cycle starting with The Phantom Menace is going to wind up with a very different perception of the story than the original audience got. This is true in terms of a few big plot points, like that whole thing about Darth Vader being Luke's father, but also in terms of some broader atmospheric points. The beginning A New Hope is cloaked in a sense of mystery. For all we know old Ben Kenobi really is just a crazy old man and Han Solo's skepticism about "hokey religions" is justified. The audience rides along with Luke throughout the film, learning to trust in the power of the Force. New audiences won't have that experience, they'll already know much much more than Luke does about the Jedi, the Empire, the Skywalker clan, etc.

Maybe this will be true of the general public, but I can promise you this much: In the Douthat household, the prequels don't exist - not now, and certainly not in a future where I'm charged with introducing a new generation to the Skywalker universe. Indeed, I intend to carefully vet all of my children's friends to ensure that there's absolutely no risk of a playdate or sleepover bringing them in contact, even fleetingly, with Jar Jar Binks, Count Dooku, the midichlorians and Padme Amidala, Queen of frickin' Naboo.

The Table At Aspen (II)

Here's the first segment from another Aspen Table, in which Matt, Marc and I chatted with David Brooks about the future of the political parties:

The Art House As A Luxury Good

Continuing on the theme of highbrow movies and the box office, Steve Sailer has an interesting post about differential pricing and art-house flicks:

... movie tickets are more or less fixed in price. So, every filmmaker is competing in the same game. Julian Schnabel and Wong Kar-Wai are going head to head against Michael Bay, and they're all being measured by tickets sold ...

Is the single priced movie ticket eroding slowly? When I started writing this post, I figured there would be evidence that we are headed toward more stratified pricing. Yet, the more I think about it, the less evidence I see for it.

For example, for about five years now, the weekend evening movies at the Arclight on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood (the old Cinerama Dome location) have been $14. It sells reserved seats, which is a pretty stupid idea because you can stand in line to buy tickets for a half hour while the couples ahead of you debate over whether they'd prefer to sit on the left or right sides. Yet, the films shown at the Arclight are only vaguely more upscale than average. The movies it plays make it seem like more of a mass market Date Night destination than a place where the elite meet to seat themselves.

And, in general, "arthouse" tends to be a synonym for worn-down theatre on its last legs before it becomes a revivalist church for an ambitious preacher. The Laemmle arthouse chain in LA charges between $8.50 and $10 per ticket for prime times, which isn't above average for their expensive neighborhoods ... Anyway, it's kind of neat that movies remain a democratic institution with a simple-minded pricing scheme in an otherwise increasingly tiered and marketing-modeled America.

It's my impression that the new breed of art-house theaters (here are two local examples) are rather more posh than the run-down art houses of the past, and that they do cater deliberately to a more elite, Bobo crowd - in their ambience and decor, in the movies they choose to run, and in the concessions they serve. Indeed, I suspect that to the extent that differential pricing shows up in American cinemas, it runs through concessions rather than through ticket prices - which makes sense, given that the concessions are where theaters make most of their money anyway. So a ticket to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is no pricier than a ticket to Hancock, but whereas the masses buy their popcorn and soda and candy, the elites at the E Street Cinema end up shelling out for microbrews and Whole Foods-style snacks and gourmet coffees.

The Table At Aspen

We've been taping The Table here at Aspen, with distinguished guests taking part as well as the usual Atlantic crew. Here are the first two segments of a conversation with C. Daniel Mote, Paul Verkuil, and Michael Bennet, on the subject: "Is Higher Education For Everyone?"

Continue reading "The Table At Aspen" »

Do Critics Matter?

I was all set to attend what sounded like a great discussion on "The Dumbing Down of American Culture: Fact or Fiction?," featuring our own Michael Hirschorn (he of "The Case for Reality TV") - but then it was cancelled. So as a poor substitute, I'll offer a link to this Slate piece, in which Erik Lundegaard argues that once you control for marketing budgets and theater saturation (big things to control for, obviously), well-reviewed movies tend to outgross their badly-reviewed competitors. Lundegaard goes on to suggest that this proves that "quality matters," and that this means in turn that movie critics matter as well. I'd like to think so, and I'm sure they matter on the margins - I know I've avoided films I was intending to see because a critic I respected panned them - but in the aggregate I think his model is slightly flawed: He looks at the relationship between good reviews and good box office across a movie's entire run, a period in which word-of-mouth presumably becomes a big factor in how the movie performs. On the assumption that what your friend tells you about a given film may matter way more than what a critic tells you, I'd like to see the same analysis re-run but confined entirely to opening weekends, when word-of-mouth presumably is close to a non-factor, and when the critics are a moviegoer's only guide to which films are worth seeing and which can be safely skipped.

Who Is Obama?

Matt, writing on yesterday's "Race and Politics in America: Where Are We in 2008?" panel here at Aspen:

Continuing with my Shelby Steele blogging, he went into what I thought was a really unfair attack on Barack Obama, drawing an invidious comparison between Obama and John McCain and Hillary Clinton on the grounds that we don't really know who he is. Instead, says Steele, Obama is running on a vague sense that he's a talented politician and a black guy. At first I thought he was going to take this in an unverifiably airy direction, but then he specifically said of McCain that if he's elected "we know what road that guy’s going to go down" whereas we don't know the same for Obama.

Now of course it's possible -- likely, even -- that many Americans don't know what road Obama would go down as president. But he's unveiled a fairly detailed policy record, and assembled a fairly consistent record in public life. It's John McCain, by contrast, who was against the Bush tax cuts before he was against them it's McCain who sponsored an immigration reform bill and then said he would have written against it. It's McCain who wants credit for tackling climate change but opposes all legislation aimed at curbing carbon emissions. It's McCain who's trying to run on an appealing biography while leaving cloudy impressions of his policy agenda.

I take his point, but if Steele had stuck to what Matt terms the "unverifiably airy" side of things - to Obama's personality instead of his policies - I would have taken his point as well. It's true that Obama's policy positions have been no more fungible than McCain's (though no less fungible as well, as evidenced by his recent maneuverings), and in many respects they've been considerably more detailed. But there remains, I think, a striking opacity to Obama - the deep structures that inform his thinking aren't out in the open for anyone to see, the way they are with McCain, and in certain ways I feel like I know less about Obama the man than I did when he had just started running for President. This has been reflected across his life and political career: I don't agree with the entire Steve Sailer take on Obama, but Sailer is on to something when he writes that the Democratic nominee seems to have "spent his life trying on different personalities," while his core has remained something of a mystery - perhaps even to himself.

Overall, this quality has been an asset to Obama as a national politician, since it allows his supporters to read their own biases and convictions into his candidacy: You can vote for him because you think he's the left-wing Reagan or because you think he's a cool centrist with a Burkean temperament; you can rally around him because he embodies African-American advancement or because he transcends racial categories entirely; etc. And it may be an asset to him as President as well: Dwight Eisenhower, one of our greatest twentieth-century chief executives, was also one of our most mysterious and opaque. But as someone who always wants to know more, rather than less, about people running for President, even (or especially) when the "more" goes to personality rather than policy, I wish I had a slightly better sense of what makes Obama tick.

Who Speaks For Islam?

The bad news at the Aspen Ideas Festival is that you can't attend two panels at once - which meant that while I was listening to David Brooks yesterday, I had to miss our own Jeff Goldberg moderating a discussion on Islam between Irshad Manji and Dalia Mogahed. Fortunately, Jennie Rothenberg (our crack web editor) was in attendance, providing commentary as well as the following clips:

Continue reading "Who Speaks For Islam?" »

Supreme Court Supermajorities, Cont.

Naturally, the idea isn't original to me: Jed Shugerman, an assistant law professor at Harvard, recently wrote a paper making the case for a 6-3 rule (though you'd need a Harvard ID or a Lexis/Nexis password to read it). He writes in an email:

There's actually a long record of these proposals throughout American history, but oddly, there are fewer efforts now even though there are more 5-4 decisions. You don't need to amend the constitution to force the Court to follow this rule. I argue that Congress could legislate this rule under Article III as a "regulation" of and "exception" to the Court's jurisdiction. But all you need is one judge -- the one in the middle -- to adopt this rule. Justice Kennedy, for example, could simply write, "I agree with many of the arguments by four of my colleagues that statute X is unconstitutional, but I do not believe we as a court should overturn the considered and democratically accountable wisdom of Congress without more consensus."

The rule does not create serious problems for lower courts. If a lower court rules that a statute is unconstitutional, the party losing that decision (the appellant) would regularly receive enough votes by the Justices (four) necessary for hearing the case, and then four Justices would be sufficient to preserve the statute as valid. If there are no other grounds for the party challenging the statute to prevail, then the party relying on the statute wins. But this is the problem in terms of practice. Five judges would not be enough to invalidate the statute, but those five could find other ways to limit the statute (a narrow interpretation of its text) or to rule in favor of the litigant challenging the statute. ln a legal system, you can only hope that judges will take rules seriously, and that applies to much more than the proposed supermajority rule. And that problem of judicial activism makes the turn to rules of judicial restraint all the more important, even if they can be evaded by some Justices some of the time.

Here's another variant on the argument.

Is The iPhone Making Us Stupid?

That's one of the topics Walter Mossberg gestured at this afternoon in a talk on "the Future of the Internet and Rise of the Cell Phone," in which he declared that the PC has peaked, and that the future of the internet belongs to pocket computers like the iPhone. The future of the internet, and the future of us: "The internet is a grid," he remarked, "and we're all going to be living on it, and carrying it in our pocket all day long." Mossberg delivered this assessment with a strong note of techno-pessimism woven in: A lot of his talk had to do with the issues constant connectivity raises for deep knowledge ("people hate iPhone users," he remarked, "because you can never have an argument about facts without them whipping out the phone and looking up the answer" - a description that I'm afraid I resemble, even though I have a Blackberry and not an iPhone) and deep reflection (in the future, Mossberg noted, we may never be free of "that subtle feeling that maybe you need to check Slate, or Facebook"), and he echoed some of the points that Nicholas Carr makes in his Atlantic essay on how the internet may be changing the way we think, and not necessarily for the better.

Tellingly, nearly all the questions that followed had to do with how the attendees could get their internet service to work more cheaply and smoothly - especially in Aspen.

The President's Unconscious

My morning session here at Aspen featured David Brooks talking about the subject of his next book, which will focus on the brain, neuroscience, sociology, politics, and the intersection thereof. He cautioned at the beginning that he's only a quarter of the way through the book, and the talk reflected that fact: It was more a diffuse collection of observations, anecdotes and arguments than a tightly-focused narrative. But even in inchoate form, the morning left me with the distinct impression that this book has the potential to catapult Brooks into Thomas Friedman or Malcolm Gladwell territory - except that unlike, say, Blink it'll actually be good as well. (And yes, I'm feeling pretty favorably disposed toward Brooks right now, so take my sentiment with however much salt you'd like.)

I'll try to post some video later (we're hoping to splice together highlights of these panels), but for now I'd just like to pluck out one politically-salient observation he made. Brooks talked a lot about the unconscious, likening the mind to a boy riding an elephant - the boy is your conscious mind, the elephant is everything else, and you need to really understand elephants to know what's going on. This point segued, among many other digressions, into a discussion of how unconscious mental structures affect politicians, and here Brooks brought up President Bush, and remarked that in all of his conversations with the President he'd always been struck by the extent to which Bush seemed (unconsciously, in ways he'd never articulate if pressed) to think of decisions in terms of fifty-year time horizons - almost as if he couldn't conceive of political action except in long-run terms. I'm paraphrasing a bit here, and this might not be exactly what Brooks meant, but I think it's an interesting way to think about what's gone wrong - and occasionally right - in the Bush Presidency, and especially the extent to which Bush's actions have been influenced, unconsciously or consciously, by the long-running American narrative of What Makes Presidents Great, often to the detriment of his day-to-day execution of the job.

Brooks also noted, echoing Yuval Levin's argument about honor politics, that McCain's unconscious structures are essentially pre-Christian - and not just, he added, because McCain is older than Jesus Christ. The crack, inevitably, prompted an objection from an outraged seventysomething attendee, who wanted to make it clear that she wasn't older than Jesus. Good times ...

We Are All Christianists Now

Props to Andrew, I suppose, for allowing that his favored candidate's canny embrace of faith-based initiatives counts as "Christianism" under Andrew's understanding of the term. In an ideal world, this might prompt a broader reconsideration of the term's usefulness as a tool for political categorization in a nation where religion and politics are as interwoven (on the left and right alike) as they've always been in the United States, but I'm not holding my breath.

Flexibility and Family

I don't want to be that guy who relates everything back to his book, but ... this passage from Russell Shorto's Times piece on fertility in Europe and elsewhere dovetails awfully well with what Reihan and I talk about in Grand New Party vis-a-vis work-life balance, and the sort of policies social conservatives should champion:

Last year the fertility rate in the United States hit 2.1, the highest it has been since the 1960s and higher than almost anywhere in the developed world. Factor in immigration and you have a nation that is far more than holding its own in terms of population. In 1984 the U.S. Census Bureau projected that in the year 2050 the U.S. population would be 309 million. In 2008 it’s already 304 million, and the new projection for 2050 is 420 million.

“Europeans say to me, How does the U.S. do it in this day and age?” says Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau in Washington. According to Haub and others, there is no single explanation for the relatively high U.S. fertility rate. The old conservative argument — that a traditional, working-husband-and-stay-at-home-wife family structure produces a healthy, growing population — doesn’t apply, either in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world today. Indeed, the societies most wedded to maintaining that traditional family structure seem to be those with the lowest birthrates. The antidote, in Western Europe, has been the welfare-state model, in which the state provides comprehensive support to couples that want to have children. But the U.S. runs counter to this. Some commentators explain its healthy birthrate in terms of the relatively conservative and religiously oriented nature of American society, which both encourages larger families. It’s also true that mores have evolved in the U.S. to the point where not only is it socially acceptable for fathers to be active participants in raising children, but it’s also often socially unacceptable for them to do otherwise.

But one other factor affecting the higher U.S. birthrate stands out in the minds of many observers. “There’s much less flexibility in the European system,” Haub says. “In Europe, both the society and the job market are more rigid.” There may be little state subsidy for child care in the U.S., and there is certainly nothing like the warm governmental nest that Norway feathers for fledgling families, but the American system seems to make up for it in other ways. As Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania writes: “In general, women are deterred from having children when the economic cost — in the form of lower lifetime wages — is too high. Compared to other high-income countries, this cost is diminished by an American labor market that allows more flexible work hours and makes it easier to leave and then re-enter the labor force.” An American woman might choose to suspend her career for three or five years to raise a family, expecting to be able to resume working; that happens far less easily in Europe.

If I may wax chauvinistic for a moment, I think the American model is self-evidently better: As Reihan suggests, a more flexible approach to work and childrearing represents a place where feminism and social conservatism don't have to be at odds, and indeed can reinforce each other's insights. This means that to the extent that we should consider doing more, a la Europe, to ease the burdens on working parents, we should be forging pro-family policies that strengthen our existing flexibility - as opposed to expanding the more inflexible, Europe-style policies that effectively penalize women (or men) for taking time off when their children are young, rather than outsourcing their care to strangers and going back to work.

My Big Idea: Supreme Court Supermajorities

Like my colleagues, I'm out at the Atlantic-sponsored Aspen Ideas Festival for the next few days, and last night I attended the opening ceremonies, where a parade of worthies stood up to offer their "big idea" for the week. Matt's already taken note of the evening's most interesting moment: Shelby Steele choosing "the case against white guilt" as his big idea, which led to a certain amount of seat-shifting among the predominantly-liberal audience, who are after all attending a Festival that frequently partakes of precisely the spirit Steele was criticizing. Which is to say: Good on the organizers for having him. (Though I agree with Matt that Steele largely lost me when he concluded by arguing that "white guilt" is largely responsible not only for the failures of affirmative action, but for our military difficulties in Iraq as well.)

Steele was followed to the podium by Sandra Day O'Connor, who delivered rather less memorable remarks about civic engagement, which included her usual bit about how we need more respect for the judiciary and fewer attacks on activist judges in our public life. She seemed like a perfectly nice, perfectly intelligent person, but listening to her I experienced something like the feeling Jim Manzi expresses here: Namely, a mix of annoyance and outrage at how many significant controversies in American life have come down to the question of what Sandra Day O'Connor (and now Anthony Kennedy, of course) thinks about the matter.

With this in mind, here's my big idea for the week. Over the past few years of court-watching, I've gradually moved from supporting some version of Scalia-style originalism to a much more radical judicial minimalism, in which the Court would be obliged to show far greater deference to the other branches of government than either liberal or conservative jurists show today. (I have, of course, no qualifications to argue seriously for any theory of jurisprudence, but set that aside.) Of course, judicial nominees' fine-sounding theories of minimalism have a way of collapsing upon contact with the kind of power the Supreme Court wields, so perhaps we ought to consider enforcing it - for instance, by requiring a supermajority of the Justices (either 6-3 or 7-2) to deem any existing legislation unconstitutional.

Essentially, this model would mean that whenever there are strong arguments on both sides of a given constitutionality question - the sort of situation that produces most of the 5-4, "how will Kennedy vote this time?" decisions - the Court would be forced to defer to the legislative branch. The theory would be that in a polarized Court, if you can't convince at least one Justice who doesn't share your ideological preconceptions to side with you - and there are plenty of recent cases where John Roberts has done exactly that, so it isn't a pipe dream - the issue should be left to the public and their representatives to hash out. (And note that I'm arguing against interest here, because this rule would leave my least-favorite ruling - Roe, decided by 7-2 - in place, while overturning recent decisions - on guns and affirmative action, among others - that I agree with.)

Of course there are all sorts of reasons why this wouldn't work - but hey, it's an Ideas Festival, dammit! I'm just throwing it out there!