The Millman Chart and the GOP

Responding to my post on why the Right needs realists, Noah Millman summons up his soon-to-be-famous chart of American foreign-policy types:

Mumbai

Happy Thanksgiving, indeed. From the Lede, last night:

Earlier, Suketu Mehta, who compared Mumbai to New York in his book Maximum City, attempted to put the scale of the attack in Mumbai in perspective for New Yorkers, saying that it would be "as if terrorists had taken over the Four Seasons and the Waldorf=Astoria and then were running around shooting people in Times Square."

One thing that's worth noting, amid all the horror, is the resilience of Indian society in the face of terrorism - not just today, but every day of late. As the above suggests, these particular attacks are in a class by themselves, and the reports that the gunmen were targeting Americans and Britons - and Jews, perhaps - has obviously given them a worldwide resonance that they might not have otherwise enjoyed. But for Indians, this spasm of violence represents an escalation, rather than a rupture with what their country experiences day-to-day: As the L.A. Times points out, "2,300 people died in 2007 in attacks by various groups in India, making it perhaps the country most affected by terrorism in the world."

Yes, in part this may reflect the deplorable failure of India's counterterrorism efforts. And yes, even independent of terrorism, I suppose you could argue that the subcontinent's extremes of poverty, disease and violence make Indians much more inured than the inhabitants of the developed West to extremes of suffering and horror jostling their way into everyday life. But still: If you try to imagine how the United States would bear up under the kind of horrific drumbeat of small and large-scale attacks that India's experienced in the last few years, it's hard to feel anything save admiration - and, on this day, thanksgiving - for Indian courage and resilience under fire.

Why The Right Needs Realists

I did a rambling, unfocused, "y'know"-ridden pre-Thanksgiving Bloggingheads with Matt Yglesias, in which among other things we discussed the way the Obama Administration seems to uniting realists, liberal hawks and progressives under a single foreign-policy tent:



As you can see, we both agree that this is probably an unsustainable state of affairs, but it's interesting to speculate about which ideological camp might drift back into the Republican Party over time. The easy answer is the realists - that's where they mostly came from in the first place, after all. But of course there's also a sense in which a certain kind of liberal hawk has more in common ideologically with a certain kind of neocon, on foreign policy questions at least, than realists and neocons have in common with each other. This is where the whole McLieberman notion came from; it's why Matt can write, plausibly, that, "on foreign policy, traditional Republican realists have a lot more in common with liberal Democrats than either do with Democratic hawks"; and it's why the following analysis from Michael Goldfarb has a lot going for it:

The liberal internationalists, led by Hillary, will also be a powerful force in the new administration, and in their battles with Obama's realists they may find willing allies among the neocons on the right. After all, liberal internationalists have been allied with out-of-power neoconservatives before, most notably during the fight inside the Clinton administration over U.S. policy in the Balkans.

On the surface, then, a long-term political sorting along Goldfarbian lines - with realists and progressives, both chary about committing U.S. troops abroad, associated with one political party, and liberal hawks and neocon hawks in the other - makes at least as much sense as the traditional progressives/liberal hawks versus realists/neocons alignment. But only on the surface. Ultimately, the two parties' foreign-policy elites need to map onto the two parties' domestic constituencies, which is why the McCain-Lieberman idea was a political non-starter: Yes, neoconservatives can cooperate with liberal hawks on specific issues, but they can't permanently share a political coalition, because on most other fronts liberal hawks are, well, liberals and neocons are conservatives.

True, some liberal hawks have a weak enough attachment to liberal domestic-policy goals to be comfortable shifting over into an essentially conservative coalition, just some neocons have a weak enough attachment to conservative domestic-policy goals to be comfortable shifting over to an essentially liberal coalition if it seems more welcoming to their foreign-policy ambitions. But for the most part, liberal hawks belong in a liberal party, not a conservative one, even if it leaves them sharing a coalition with progressives who disagree with them about where and when the U.S. should use force.

Likewise, realists ultimately belong in the conservative coalition - or at least some realists do. It's of course possible to be a liberal realist, rather than a conservative one - someone with wants left-of-center governance at home and balance-of-power calculations abroad - and some of the realist-oriented figures who've migrated toward Obama probably fit the "liberal realist" description. But the conservative coalition ought to naturally produce realists from its ranks, for their sake and its own, because realism's cold-eyed pursuit of the national interest is the most logical and productive elite-level expression of the Jacksonian, don't-tread-on-me nationalism that holds sway among a large swathe of the conservative base. Neoconservatism can and should speak for part of the American Right, but it can't speak for the whole of it; it's Wilsonian impulses will always be a bridge too far for many conservatives whose instincts run instead toward "to hell with them" hawkery. This "more rubble, less trouble" tendency within the Right's coalition needs to be channeled in a constructive direction by the right-wing elite, or else it runs toward jingoism and folly of various sorts. And such channeling is a natural job for a potent conservative realism, as is the task of balancing neoconservatism's tendency toward hubris and unrealpolitik. But within the right-wing intelligentsia, at the moment, it's a job that isn't getting done.

Huck and Sarah

From this week's New Yorker:

Asked about Sarah Palin, he responded, "She, uh, was an appropriate choice, because she put John McCain back in the game." That was the get-along answer, but a few minutes later the new, aggrieved Huckabee resurfaced. He recalled, "It was funny that all through the primary--I mean literally up until McCain got enough delegates to win--people said, 'You know, Huckabee's really running for Vice-President. Gee, Huckabee would be a great Vice-President.' And from that day forward, when I actually was no longer running for President, nobody ever said, 'Gee, Huckabee would be a great Vice-President.' " Neither was he quite so unperturbed by the Palin pick: "I was scratching my head, saying, 'Hey, wait a minute. She's wonderful, but the only difference was she looks better in stilettos than I do, and she has better hair.' It wasn't so much a gender issue, but it was like they suddenly decided that everything they disliked about me was O.K. . . . She was given a pass by some of the very people who said I wasn't prepared."

Hey, I didn't forget you, Huck! Meanwhile, Allahpundit notes that he has a point:

Er, what is the major difference between her and Huck, aside from the fact that he has much more executive experience than she does? He's impeccably socially conservative; so is she. He's questionable on amnesty; so is she. He's prone to anti-Wall Street rhetoric aimed at pandering to blue-collar voters; so is she. The big rap on him is that he's always seemed a tad too comfortable with regulation for Republican tastes, but he stridently opposed the bailout while she supported some form of intervention to avert another Great Depression. (She's opposed to additional bailouts.) It can't all come down to taxes, can it? The 'Cuda's record isn't spotless there, either.

He goes on to suggest that the big difference is a matter of tone: "Palin's charm rests in her perceived authenticity whereas Huck's guileless nice-guy persona is forever being undercut by sniping at Republican rivals and "innocent" misunderstandings that look suspiciously like sly, nasty attacks." Maybe - but Palin didn't seem to have much trouble working barbed remarks into her "authentic" rhetoric. I'd say the difference has more to do with the fact that Huckabee was running in a primary campaign, when both he and his Republican opponents had an interest in highlighting his deviations from party orthodoxy - in his case, to win favorable press coverage and separate himself from the also-ran pack; in their case, to undercut his appeal among ideological conservatives. Palin, on the other hand, was dropped straight into a general-election campaign, which created a completely different dynamic. Since she was standing in the way of Barack Obama's coronation, she took immediate and constant fire from liberals in a way that Huckabee never did, which endeared her instantly to conservatives who might otherwise have looked askance at her gubernatorial record and occasional campaign-trail deviations from the right-wing line. And whereas Huckabee actively embraced his role as a "new kind of Republican," the McCain campaign quickly gave up on its half-hearted attempts to portray Palin in that light, and instead ran with the narrative that she represented the beau (belle?) ideal of traditional conservatism.

Also, obviously, the personal details made a big difference. Huckabee had a good "up by your bootstraps" personal story, but Palin had a better one. A self-made Alaskan who hunts moose is more appealing/interesting than a self-made Arkansan who fries squirrel; the Down's Syndrome child trumps the weight-loss story; etc. And yes, yes, of course - if Mike Huckabee had been Michelle Huckabee instead, with heels and hair and sex appeal instead of a receding hairline, that would have probably given him a boost as well.

That Didn't Take Long

Me, last week:

Obama already made fans of Niall Ferguson and Eli Lake; by 2012, I wouldn't be surprised if he's converted Max Boot as well.

Max Boot, today:

As someone who was skeptical of Obama's moderate posturing during the campaign, I have to admit that I am gobsmacked by these appointments , most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain ... Only churlish partisans of both the left and the right can be unhappy with the emerging tenor of our nation's new leadership.

Take it away, Massie ...

The Mind of a B-List Actor

Sometimes I like Entourage, but I've had it in for Adrian Grenier ever since he singlehandedly dragged The Devil Wears Prada down from an A- movie to a B, so my answer to the interesting question of whether he's a good enough actor to play a bad one is a resounding no. (And if you want a more revealing look inside the mind of a not-quite-good-enough Hollywood star than Grenier's mediocre thespianing provides, I recommend turning off HBO and digging up the great New Yorker profile of Jaime Pressly - "The Almost It Girl" - that Rebecca Mead wrote five years ago.)

Best. Cabinet. Ever?

Ezra Klein throws some much-needed cold water on all the excitement about how smart and experienced and hyper-competent the Obama Administration is shaping up to be:

"Isn't it amazing," asks Krugman, "just how impressive the people being named to key positions in the Obama administration seem? Bye-bye hacks and cronies, hello people who actually know what they're doing. For a bunch of people who were written off as a permanent minority four years ago, the Democrats look remarkably like the natural governing party these days, with a deep bench of talent." That certainly feels true. But the Bush administration started out with a fairly deep bench. Colin Powell as Secretary of State. Paul O'Neill --a former deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and a past chairman of the RAND Corporation -- as Secretary of the Treasury. Columbia's Glenn Hubbard as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice providing foreign policy expertise. Indeed, the Bush team was lauded for being such a natural entity of governance: These were figures from the Nixon and Ford and Bush administrations, and they were backed by graybeards like Baker and Scowcroft and Greenspan. What could go wrong?

In a related vein, a reader suggests re-reading David Brooks' recent column praising Obama's team ... and then comparing it to this 2001 piece Brooks wrote praising Bush's cabinet. The two pieces don't repeat themselves, exactly, but they rhyme - because the Bushies looked pretty good on paper, too.

Trade-Offs

The theme of my commentary on the Russo-Georgian War was the need for America to choose between grand strategies: If we're fighting a global war on terror that tends in practice to be concentrated in places like Afghanistan, I suggested, we can't simultaneously be going all in on a strategy of democratic enlargement that involves taking sides against Moscow in its Near Abroad. Others disagreed: Max Boot, for instance, was quick to downplay Russia's capacity to make life difficult for us if we were to kick off a serious proxy struggle in the Caucasus. For instance, he wrote, Moscow couldn't "send high-tech munitions to insurgents fighting American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq" without risking that the weapons would end up being used "by Islamic extremists within in its own borders." And so on.

At the time, this struck me as a distinctly ... unimaginative way of thinking about how and where the Russians might retaliate against the United States. If the Russian Army were bogged down in a nation-building effort in, say, Saskatchewan, I think a savvy American government would be able to find lots of way to make life steadily more difficult for them that stopped short of shipping surface-to-air missiles to the People's Army of Saskatoon. Like, say, making it awfully hard for them to resupply:

While McKiernan is quick to tell reporters that "Afghanistan is not Iraq", the program he outlines for the country looks a lot like the one adopted by military officers in Anbar province, where "insurgents" were broken off from al-Qaeda "terrorists" and brought into local governing coalitions ...

McKiernan faces obstacles in making his plan work. A Washington Post article of November 19 detailed these obstacles, focusing on Taliban attacks on the supply route into Afghanistan from Pakistan. But that's only a part of the problem. The other was caused by the Bush administration. "We should have alternative supply routes through the north and not have to rely on the roads from Pakistan," a senior serving army officer says, "but we can't get a northern route because the Bush administration pissed off the Russians in Georgia."

Negotiations with the Russians over a northern resupply route that would be place the 67,000 US and NATO soldiers at the end of "a secure tether" have been stalled, according to this officer. "This is typical of the White House, they can't see beyond tomorrow. They have never been able to plan ahead, to think through the consequences of their actions. They're so proud of themselves, and we're the ones who suffer."

This comes via Larison. Now you don't want to place too much stock in one officer's waspish comments, but it seems pretty clear that the U.S. and our allies would benefit from a stable northern supply line into Afghanistan, and it's clear as well that the Russians aren't exactly falling over themselves to lend a hand. Of course Boot might just retort that we can work around this problem, and that anyway our supply lines into Afghanistan are less important that the survival of democracy in Georgia. But I think this is a salutary reminder that there's at least something to be said for concentrating on winning the wars you have before you involve yourself in new ones.

The Moral Obligation To Study Election Returns

George Weigel, on the election and the Catholic vote:

This year, the pro-abortion candidate carried every state in what Maggie Gallagher calls the "Decadent Catholic Corridor" -- the Northeast and the older parts of the Midwest. Too many Catholics there are still voting the way their grandparents did, and because that's what their grandparents did. This tribal voting has been described by some bishops as immoral; it is certainly stupid, and it must be challenged by adult education. That includes effective use of the pulpit to unsettle settled patterns of mindlessness. This year, a gratifying number of bishops began to accept the responsibilities of their teaching office; so, now, must parish pastors.

In 1980, '84 and '88, Republican (and pro-life) Presidential candidates managed to capture nearly all of the Midwest and the Northeast, "settled patterns of mindlessness" notwithstanding. Now here we are twenty years later, with FDR and JFK even further in the rearview mirror - and yet Weigel wants to chalk up the Republican Party's horrible showing in these regions to mindless "tribal voting" among Catholic Democrats? This is self-deception, and it ill-behooves pro-lifers to engage in it. John McCain did not lose this election because the Catholic clergy failed to anathematize Barack Obama loudly enough, or because Pennsylvanians and Michiganders thought they were voting for Roosevelt or Truman. He lost it because his party flat-out misgoverned the country, in foreign and domestic policy alike, and because of late the culture war has mattered less to most Americans than the Iraq War and the economic meltdown. And pro-lifers who see the GOP as the only plausible vehicle for their goals have an obligation to look the party's failures squarely in the face and work to fix them, instead of just doubling down on the case for single-issue pro-life voting.

No, social conservatives aren't the problem for the GOP. But they haven't been the solution, either: Too often, on matters ranging from the Iraq War to domestic policy, they've served as enablers of Republican folly, rather than as constructive critics. And calling Catholics who voted for Obama "mindless" and "stupid" is a poor substitute for building the sort of Republican Party that can attract the votes of those millions of Americans, Catholic and otherwise, who voted for the Democrats because they thought, not without reason, that George W. Bush was a disastrous president whose party should not be rewarded with a third term in the White House.

Christina Romer, Tax Cutter?

Of the three big economic-team appointees Obama announced today, Christina Romer is the most obscure; she's also, as Mankiw, Wilkinson and Pethokoukis point out, the one who should give Americans the most hope that Obama won't be significantly hiking their taxes any time soon.   

JFK, Round Two

On the other hand, maybe the progressives are absolutely right to worry about what the Clinton-to-State pick portends:

George STEPHANOPOULOS, on GMA, re the president-elect and the economy: "He's already doing more than any incoming president has ever done this quickly ... One Obama adviser told me what they'd like is a combination of 'Team of Rivals' and 'The Best and the Brightest,' which was the David Halberstam book about the incumbent Kennedy administration.

As Jason Zengerle puts it: "Maybe the Obama adviser reading The Best and the Brightest hasn't gotten to the part about Vietnam yet."

Getting Out of Iraq

In a rare harmonic convergence, the Hillary-to-State news has Daniel Larison and Michael Goldfarb arguing along similar lines, joining the chorus of voices who see Obama's likely national-security appointments as a blow to those who hoped for a real progressive turn in foreign policy. Having basically made this argument myself, let me offer one thought by way of counterpoint - namely, that foreign policy is one arena where progressives might (might!) end up being well-served by having their agenda implemented by other people.

By "their agenda" I mean specifically the withdrawal from Iraq, which Chris Hayes, the world's smartest progressive, has long insisted is the one issue where Obama absolutely has to deliver for the left if he doesn't want to provoke a full-scale progressive revolt. As Iraq has grown more stable and the rest of the world more chaotic, it's become easy to lose sight of just how difficult disentangling ourselves from our Mesopotamian occupation may turn out to be. Both his own promises and the agreements we've made with the Iraqi government bind Obama to make the attempt: We will not, I'm certain, withdraw with the kind of haste that he promised in his primary campaign, but we will withdraw nonetheless. But there will be difficulties - maybe a lot of difficulties - along the way, and it's very easy to imagine a scenario in which the withdrawal from Iraq ends up dominating the foreign-affairs side of the ledger in Obama's first term, and not necessarily in a good way. And by putting the job in the hands of Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton - a Republican appointee and a primary-season rival who attacked him from the right on foreign policy - Obama has effectively given realists and liberal hawks partial ownership of whatever happens in Iraq between now and 2011. In a best-case scenario for progressives, Gates and Clinton will play the role Colin Powell played in the run-up to the Iraq War (except with a better final outcome, obviously): Their association with the policy will help keep non-progressives on board when things get dicey, and then once the job is done they'll be pushed aside and someone like Susan Rice will take over Obama's post-occupation foreign policy.

Obviously I don't really think it will work out quite like that. But just as the neoconservative agenda was better-served, at least in the short run, by having Powell as one of the public faces of Iraq War hawkery (rather than, say, John Bolton), I think there's at least a plausible scenario in which the progressive movement ends up being better off in the long run if Hillary Clinton, rather than someone to her left, is at the helm when a spasm of violence pushes Iraq back on to the front pages, and Republicans start accusing the Obama Administration of squandering the Bush-Petraeus gains with a too-precipitous withdrawal.

The Future Beckons

And apparently it's going to involve woolly mammoths with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads ...

Democracy In America

Via Allahpundit, you too can play Minnesota Election Judge. 

Getting Back In The Game

What Yglesias says here about conservatives and transportation policy - that there are plenty of free-market reforms that the Right could and should be championing, but isn't - applies to a host of topics. I was on a later panel at the NRI event he cites, and I tried to make exactly this point: On too many issues, conservatives have simply avoided the most important emerging debates, changing the subject whenever possible and leaving liberals to argue against liberals when it isn't. This is true, too often, in transportation and infrastructure policy; it's been true for some time in the climate change debate (though I'm hopeful that this changing); and it's often true in education, where the most interesting arguments are between liberal reformers and liberal interest groups, with conservatives sitting on the sideline talking about vouchers and occasionally praising the Michelle Rhees and Corey Bookers of the world.

This problem is not, repeat not, a matter of conservatives needing to abandon their core convictions in order to win elections, as right-of-center reformers are often accused of doing. Rather, it's a matter of conservatives needing to apply their core convictions to questions like "how do we mitigate the worst effects of climate change?" and "how do we modernize our infrastructure?" and "how do we encourage excellence and competition within our public school bureaucracy?" instead of just letting liberals completely monopolize these debates, while the Right talks about porkbusting and not much else.

The Legs of the Stool

Poulos, responding to this post:

Ross also claims that "Of the three legs of the modern right-of-center stool - social conservatives, small-governmenteers, and foreign-policy hawks - it's the hawks who almost always have the least to fear from savvy Democratic Administrations." But there are growing numbers of social conservatives out there -- including Catholic Democrats -- who actually do like the idea of universal health care and a New Deal for energy, and know they can't do much about the liberal judges who will prop up the incoherent and crippled Casey/Roe regime. And small-governmenters will continue to accept more cultural libertarianism for the void that political libertarianism used to fill -- bigger cages, longer chains, as some punks put it not so long ago.

I take James' broad point, but I was making a narrower one. It's certainly the case that a successful Obama administration has the potential to peel both socially-conservative and libertarian voters away from the Republican coalition, albeit for different reasons - as indeed, an ascendant Democratic Party already has. But I had the GOP's activist and journalistic core in mind - the people who staff think tanks and advocacy groups, who write for the Standard and NR, and so forth. And within that core, I think, you're a lot more likely to hear and see national-security hawks praising Obama, arguing that his foreign policy actually displays real continuity with George W. Bush's approach, and so forth, than you are to hear, say, pro-lifers praising his judicial appointments or small-government conservatives praising his budgetary priorities. Or put another way, I suspect that Obama will receive more kind words from Robert Kagan and Max Boot over the next four years than he will from, say, Robert George or Dick Armey. But obviously this is all supposition; time will tell.

Things That Could Have Been Brought To My Attention Yesterday

In today's Journal, Newt Gingrich and Peter Ferrara argue that instead of Barack Obama's hodgepodge of tax credits, we should have a straightforward middle-class tax cut that lowers the 25 percent bracket to 15 percent. It would also be nice, they note, to cut taxes for everyone else as well, and to lower corporate rates and capital gains rates. But "in the current political climate," they allow, "we should focus on the middle-income tax rates that are attractive to cut ... This would continue the tax cuts for low- and moderate-income workers Republicans have been adopting for 30 years now."

I'm very glad to see Newt Gingrich coming around to the idea that Republicans shouldn't just say "cut capital-gains taxes!" in response to every political and economic circumstance. I would have been even gladder, though, if he had come around during the 2008 Presidential campaign, when it might have made a difference. "Tax cuts for low- and moderate-income workers" was exactly the kind of thing the McCain campaign needed to be selling, and wasn't. Yet you can search Gingrich's pre-election commentary in vain for any hint that the "current political climate" might require that the GOP present a slightly different tax message than the one McCain was offering. Indeed, less than a month before the election, Gingrich and Ferrara took to the pages of the Weekly Standard to critique Obama's tax plan, and offer a conservative alternative to "benefit middle-America." Their alternative consisted of  ... corporate tax cuts, capital-gains tax cuts, and private accounts carved out of Social Security. 

I'm glad, as I said, that defeat seems to have had a clarifying effect upon Newt's views on tax policy. I'm just wish that his change of heart had happened when the GOP was still in a position to profit from his advice.

Barack Obama, Liberal Hawk?

Yglesias cries foul on my last post, with its prediction that Obama would end up earning a "strange new respect" among some right-wing hawks - and that he might even end up bomb, bomb, bombing Iran:

A phased withdrawal from Iraq plus a stepped-up campaign against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan wouldn't be a lurch to the right, that's what Obama's been calling for throughout the campaign. And, indeed, way back in 2002 he was saying that instead of invading Iraq, we should have a stepped-up campaign against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But add "authorize airstrikes against Iran" to the mix, and then you're talking about something entirely different. Obama made repeated, explicit promises during the campaign for a new approach to Iran, and the new approach wasn't "bomb, bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran."

First, I should have been clearer: I don't think Obama is going to "lurch to the right," exactly, on foreign policy. Rather, I think there was an assumption among many on the right (and in some precincts of the left) that he would swing to the left once in office. That assumption always seemed to me more rooted in paranoia and/or wishful thinking than in Obama's actual rhetoric and proposals, and I think that the hints we've gotten about his personnel choices to date bear my assumption out. If Barack Obama's comfortable with the idea of Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State, he's just not going to be the ridiculously-dovish President a lot of right-wingers kept insisting he might be.

The Iran issue is a separate and much more speculative matter, I admit, but here I think Matt and I just disagree about how to think about the incoming President's foreign policy vision. He sees Obama's various breaks with establishment thinking during the campaign as marking a real departure from the sort of liberal hawkery that made so many establishment liberals sympathetic to the invasion of Iraq. And I see them as representing a much more superficial departure, in which the lessons of Iraq are 1) don't invade Iraq and 2) take diplomacy more seriously that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld did. These are, of course, perfectly plausible lessons to take, but they don't amount to a strategic rethink of America's approach to the Middle East, or the world. And they don't tell us that much about how Obama will handle the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran - especially in a political landscape where letting the Iranians get a bomb might expose him to effective political attacks from the right. So in the short run, yes - I fully expect him to attempt the diplomatic offensive he's promised vis-a-vis Tehran, and obviously I hope that it succeeds. But I think there's good reason to expect that he'll fail, meetings with Ahmadinejad or no, and I think that both Obama's strategic premises and the hints we've had on his personnel choices suggest that if Iran looks poised to go nuclear in, say, late 2011 or so, nobody should be surprised at all if our new commander-in-chief decides that he doesn't want a nuclear-armed Iran as part of his legacy, and acts accordingly.

Eyes on the Prize

Jim Geraghty:

So Joe Lieberman is keeping his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee on the say so of 42 Senate Democrats AND President Obama; his Secretary of State might be Iraq War supporter and preconditionless-summit opponent Hillary Clinton; no one will be prosecuted for waterboarding, Bush's guy John Brennan may take over at CIA and Bush's man Robert Gates may stay on as Defense Secretary.

I don't know how the liberals feel, but so far the Obama administration rocks.

Michael Goldfarb:

Pardoning Lieberman, reaching out to Clinton, and keeping on Gates -- perhaps things won't be as bad as we feared.

I suspect we'll be seeing quite a few comments along these lines as the Obama Administration proceeds. Of the three legs of the rmodern right-of-center stool - social conservatives, small-governmenteers, and foreign-policy hawks - it's the hawks who almost always have the least to fear from savvy Democratic Administrations. And Barack Obama is nothing if not savvy.

Here's a fearless prediction: On an awful lot of issues, the Obama foreign policy will end cutting to the right of Bill Clinton's foreign policy, which was already more center-left than left. Even with the GOP brand in the toilet, Republicans are still trusted as much or more than Dems on foreign policy, mostly for somewhat nebulous "toughness" reasons. So why give the Right a chance to play what's just about its only winning card, when you can satisfy your base with a phased withdrawal from Iraq that's scheduled to happen anyway while waxing hawkish on Pakistan, Afghanistan ... and who knows, maybe Iran as well? (I have a sneaking suspicion that a President Obama will be slightly more likely to authorize airstrikes against Iran than a President McCain would have been.) Meanwhile, on detainee policy, wiretapping, etc. you can earn plaudits from liberals for showily abandoning the worst excesses of the Bush era, while actually holding on to most of the post-9/11 powers that the Bushies claimed. Obama already made fans of Niall Ferguson and Eli Lake; by 2012, I wouldn't be surprised if he's converted Max Boot as well.

And with his right flank safely guarded (assuming, of course, that Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iran doesn't become his Administration's Iraq), he'll have that much more political for the big-ticket goals that will guarantee his place in the liberal pantheon - universal health care, a New Deal for energy policy, a succession of young liberal judges who will tilt the Supreme Court leftward for a generation, etc. Among right-wing hawks, there will be strange-new-respectful talk about Obama's centrist instincts, his Scoop Jackson-ish tendencies, his Reaganesque blend of idealism, pragmatism and strength. Meanwhile, the rest of the right-wing coalition will be getting steamrolled.

The When and the Why of Abortion

Ed Kilgore:

Here is the real deal on abortion policy: activists on both sides of the abortion debate understand yet rarely acknowledge that a critical plurality of Americans don't much like abortion but care a whole lot about when and why abortions occur.  That plurality position, especially from the point of view of anti-abortion activists, is morally and metaphysically incoherent; if a fertilized ovum is a full human being with an immortal soul, and putative constitutional rights, then it doesn't much matter when or why it is aborted; the result is homicide. 

The RTL movement's focus over the last decade on restricting late-term abortions has thus been morally dishonest, but politically smart.  But they've missed the connection between "when" and "why" concerns.  Much of the popular support for so-called "partial-birth" abortion bans has flowed from a common-sense concern that unwanted pregnancies could and should have been avoided in the first place through birth-control methods that many RTL activists view as abortifacients, or through earlier-term clinical abortions. In other words, from a RTL point-of-view, the prevailing popular opinion is that women seeking late-term abortions should have instead committed homicide earlier, through either pharmaceutical or surgical means. 

But there's still another disconnect between RTL and popular opinion that goes beyond "when" questions: "why" questions. While public opinion research on this subject is terribly insufficient, I think it's plain that Americans care as much about why as when abortions are undertaken. Abortion-as-birth-control is unpopular (again, excepting the RTL presumption that many birth-control methods actually involve abortions). So, too, are "convenience" abortions: those undertaken for "lifestyle" reasons. But short of mandatory sodium pentathol doses for applicants for abortion services, it's very hard to legislate against the kinds of abortions that a majority of Americans would actually want to prohibit. 

A couple of points. Philosophically speaking, it may be true that there's a gulf between pro-lifers and some inhabitants of the mushy middle on the when/why issue Kilgore identifies: Pro-lifers obviously wouldn't endorse a "she should have aborted earlier!" theory of late-term abortions, but perhaps many Americans who support some abortion restrictions would. I'm not certain, though, whether this matters in practice when it comes to imagining legislative compromises that might be possible in a non-Roe/Casey world. Some Americans, myself included, would support a ban on second-trimester abortions because they favor any restrictions that expand the protections afforded to the unborn; others might support such a ban because they think unwanted pregnancies should be disposed of in the first trimester or not at all. But the end result would be the same - a shift toward a philosophically unstable but politically plausible middle ground on abortion - and of such inconsistencies are successful coalitions and compromises made.

It's harder, for the reasons Kilgore lays out, to envision a compromise based on the "why" issue - but perhaps not as impossible as he imagines. You could imagine, for instance, an America in which second-trimester abortions are straightforwardly illegal, and a series of surmountable impediments to abortion - for instance, a requirement that women obtain pre-abortion counseling that actively discourages the procedure - are thrown up in the first trimester, as they are in some Western European countries. (A commenter in the Schwenkler thread recommends Mary Ann Glendon's Abortion and Divorce in Western Law on this subject, and I second the motion.) Again, you could imagine pro-lifers supporting such measures on the grounds that they bias the law in a pro-life direction, and Kilgore's "when/why" pro-choicers supporting them on the grounds that they'd presumably help discourage abortions of convenience without actually preventing abortions of necessity. (In a similar "no abortions of convenience" vein, you could also imagine a law that banned repeat abortion - which is to say, almost half of all abortions in the U.S. - though obviously enforcement would be extremely difficult.)

As you might expect, given the foregoing, I don't see anything "morally dishonest," as Kilgore puts it, about the pro-life approach to partial-birth abortion. Yes, of course, the pro-life movement's goals extend well beyond restricting one particularly barbaric third-trimester procedure. But you take restrictions - and the opportunities to highlight the inhumanity of abortion - where you can get them, and there's no reason why pro-lifers have to preface every single argument they make against partial-birth abortion with oh, and by the way, you know we want most other forms of abortion banned as well. (It's not like the movement's goals are some big secret!) Consider: Would it have been "morally dishonest" for opponents of slavery to promote, say, laws prohibiting the flogging or castration of slaves, even though such laws didn't actually do away with slavery? Surely not - and even if such laws didn't directly free anyone from bondage, they would have been a plausible way of highlighting the basic inhumanity involved in owning slaves. And so it is with partial-birth abortion. All abortions involve the dismemberment and destruction of a growing human life; it's just that the partial-birth procedure makes the thing more explicit, and more horrifying. And even if all that a ban does is call attention to what's involved, more generally, in "terminating a pregnancy," that's a pro-life goal worth pursuing.

I think Kilgore is on stronger ground, though, with his critical references to pro-life attacks on the morning-after pill and (especially) the birth-control pill. My views on this subject are colored by the fact that I don't find the argument that either pill should be classified as an abortifacent particularly convincing, and I don't think the pro-life movement is helping its cause by blurring the lines between actual abortifacents, like RU-486, which are taken with the intent to abort an embryo, and contraceptives that are designed to prevent conception, but may have the secondary effect of preventing implantations on rare occasions. (At the moment, moreover, the evidence that this ever actually happens is relatively thin.) I think a pro-life movement that expends a great deal of energy campaigning against the pill is essentially assuming the permanence of Roe and Casey, and placing its hopes in a much broader cultural transformation that seems extremely unlikely at the present pass. It's behaving like a Church, in a sense, rather than a political movement, and I already have a Church: The point of the pro-life movement, as I see it, is to seek discrete and plausible political change, not to seek a revolution in the post-Sexual Revolution human heart.

Time Passes

Via Tyler Cowen, Jason Kottke has a post that vividly illustrates how music and movies from your childhood become "oldies" and "classics" without your even noticing it. To wit:

Watching Star Wars today is like watching It's a Wonderful Life (1946) in 1977 ...

Listening to Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit today is equivalent to playing Terry Jack's Seasons In The Sun (1974) in 1991.

Watching The Godfather today is like watching Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) in 1972.

To me, the most telling/shocking example is Back to Future. Kottke notes that watching it today is like watching 1962's To Kill a Mockingbird in 1985. But here's the more frightening point: In just seven years, we will be as distant from the Marty McFly Eighties as that era was from the George McFly 1950s. Which means that to achieve the same narrative effect, a Back to the Future remake that came out in the Obama Administration would have to send its leading man hurtling back through time to ... 1985.

As Marty might say: Heavy.

Presidents and Heretics

If you're following the interesting debate over whether Barack Obama is a Christian, one thing to keep in mind is the extent to which heresy of various sorts pervades American Christianity at this point - and, moreover, the extent to which it cuts across confessional, cultural, and political lines. The Obama interview that provided the grist for this conversation does indeed suggest, as Larison puts it, that our President subscribes to some sort of semi-Arian conception of the nature of Christ, which isn't surprising at all given that he entered Christianity through the liberal-Protestant gate. But heresy of this and other stripes is hardly confined to liberal Protestants. Americans of all denominations are pretty murky about even the most important theological questions, and thus as likely to offer semi-Arian (or semi-Pelagian, or semi-Nestorian, or what-have-you) formulations out of ignorance as out of considered belief. And of course a distinctively American strand of heresy is integral to a large swathe of what we think of as "conservative" Christianity: You could call it Americanism or Moralistic Therapeutic Deism or something else entirely, but whatever label you choose it owes as much to Emerson, Hegel and Norman Vincent Peale as to Nicaea and Chalcedon, and its emanations and penumbras influence everything from the prosperity gospel to the foreign policy of George W. Bush.

Now it's true that if he had been asked about Christ's nature, Bush - or Ronald Reagan, to take another conservative President with an idiosyncratic religious sensibility - might have given a more Nicaean answer than Obama did in the interview in question. But then again maybe not! (And God only knows what John McCain, the most pagan Presidential contender we've had in some time, might have said.) Given the muddled way in which most Americans approach religion, and the pervasiveness of heterodoxy, I suppose I'm basically with Alan Jacobs: I think that figuring out exactly what sort of things Obama believes about God and Christ and everything else, and how those beliefs may affect his Presidency, is ultimately a more profitable pursuit than arguing about whether he should be allowed to call himself a Christian. Or put another way: I expect my Presidents to be heretics, but I think it matters a great deal what kind of heretics they are.

Abortion and the Art of the Possible

I want to take up a point the indefatigable Freddie DeBoer raises in the comments to the John Schwenkler post I just mentioned:

I just don't understand what a real compromise position would look like. To me, the question is whether a fetus is a human or not. If yes, abortion is horrific in almost every instance. That's why I think it's much more difficult for the pro-life side to compromise. I can certainly understand, and in certain cases would myself advocate, a call for the attempt to reduce the number of abortions, completely absent from defining a fetus as human. Whereas once you say that abortion is murder, I don't understand any morally sufficient compromise position. And it's both pro-life boilerplate, and explicitly stated in the Republican party platform, that the GOPs stance is that a fetus is a human. I know some people argue that you can think a fetus is a person and still have a compromise position. I just think that stance, frankly, is kind of loony, when you really consider the consequences of that thinking.

Except that we live in a pluralistic democracy, not under the rule of a philosopher-king, and the fact that compromises between factions with vastly different views on fetal humanity will inevitably result in philosophically-muddled legal regimes isn't a reason to prevent, via judicial fiat, those compromises from taking shape. Here's an (admittedly imperfect) analogy. Suppose you believe, as some people do, that health care is a universal human right, and that any death that could have prevented by a single-payer system is a blot on the human rights record of the country that allows it to happen. But then suppose you live in a democracy with no publicly-funded health care at all, and with clear majorities opposed to using public funds to guarantee universal health care - but with majorities that do seem amenable to some sort of very basic guarantee of health care to the aged, the poor, and the very young. Would it be "kind of loony" to compromise your firm belief in health care as a basic human right by supporting the creation of Medicare and Medicaid? Of course not: Any serious advocate of health care as a human right would take that compromise in a heartbeat, given the alternative, even though it's in some sense "morally insufficient" to what they'd like to see the government be doing. And likewise, I think most serious pro-lifers would welcome a legal compromise that moves the ball some distance toward a regime that's consistent with their view on feticide, even if the result is philosophically muddled (it's not as if the Roe-Casey regime is a model of philosophical rigor in the first place), and doesn't deliver full protection to the unborn.

Falls the Shadow

Yglesias has a smart post on the potential gulf between the GM bailout smart liberals would like to see take place and the GM bailout as it's actually likely to happen.

I feel like some of the commentary on the prospect of an auto industry bailout is starting to remind me of some of the stuff I fell for before we invaded Iraq. The kind of thing where someone yes, "yes this sounds like a bad idea, but if we do it like this and like that and like this then it'll all be okay, therefore we should do it." Which is fine. But we also need to ask ourselves, if we accept the proposition of Detroit's management, the UAW, and Michigan politicians that what's good for General Motors is good for America, how likely is any of this stuff to happen.

... The mere fact that it would be desirable to do something to keep everyone who depends on the car industry for a living that simultaneously restores the domestic car firms' economic viability and serves environmental policy goals doesn't make it possible.

Words for pundits and policymakers to live by, I'd say.

On The Possibility of An Abortion Compromise

A fine post from John Schwenkler:

... if the pro-life position on abortion is unpopular, then so is the pro-choice one; or rather, each is unpopular under certain descriptions and popular under others, in ways I'll make more precise in just a moment. When you look at the polling on the issue, what you see is that while there may be a slightly higher preference for the "Always Legal" position than the "Never Legal" one, both of those positions together only make up somewhere between a quarter and a third of the electorate, the vast majority of which occupies the mushy territory in the middle. But - and this is the crucial observation here - the first of these views just is the view of the Democratic Party, since so long as Roe v. Wade and the body of jurisprudence that follows in its wake remains in place it is necessarily the law of the land that there can be no meaningful abortion restrictions whatsoever. And so to the extent that the GOP is the anti-Roe party while the Democrats represent the pro-Roe constituency, it is the latter position that is in fact the extreme one, while the former position is itself a mild step that is pretty much a prerequisite to the sort of compromise that Freddie suggests pro-lifers should be agitating for. (On which more, again, in just a moment.)

Secondly, however, the above observation is complicated by the way voters respond to questions about abortion rights when they are couched in terms of Roe itself: somewhere between a half and two-thirds of the electorate seems to be committed to the claim that Roe should not be overturned, despite the fact that such a position is directly at odds with many of those voters' commitment to the need for legal restrictions on abortion rights and the fact that Roe rules such restrictions out of court. The reasons for this inconsistency are manifold and not worth delving into at the moment, but the crucial point at present is just that the Democratic position in support of Roe is one that is popular despite the incompatibility of such a position with the middle-ground stance on abortion that is occupied by the vast majority of American voters. Put slightly differently, and by way of an entirely reasonable bit of speculation about the source of this inconsistency, the point is that the pro-life position on Roe is one that is unpopular only because voters think that overturning Roe would mean eliminating abortion rights altogether, whereas in reality it would make possible exactly the sorts of compromises that most voters claim to want.

Thirdly, and bringing both of these points together, I for one would be happy to see conservatives couch their arguments against Roe (or for a constitutional amendment that would disembowel it, on which topic see my exchange with reader Ed Baird toward the bottom of the comments here) in terms of the sorts of federalist or possibility-of-compromise language that I've been using here, but the fact is that I think Ross was right when he recently remarked (somewhere; I can't find the reference) that such a position would be politically untenable because it would jettison the support of the "extreme" pro-lifers whose dollars and voices presently keep the movement going. But if Freddie and others like him would really like to work toward some sort of compromise, the fact is that the first step will have to come from the Left, not by way of hollow talk of "reducing the need for abortions" (imagine if Civil Rights leaders were told to focus their attention only on the "underlying causes" of racism!), but by working to actualize the sorts of legal frameworks that would make genuine compromise - that is to say, the sorts of late-term-with-exceptions restrictions that Americans overwhelmingly support - possible.

Actually, I don't think I've said anything about the untenability of pro-lifers speaking the language of compromise, federalism, etc; indeed, I think given how adept many pro-life groups have become at pursuing the very, very incremental goals that are possible within the Roe framework (restrictions on partial-birth abortion, parental notification laws, etc.), it's not implausible to imagine them being willing to talk compromise more often on the bigger issues as well. Obviously it's a movement that tends to attract absolutists, but I think pro-lifers have been far more flexible and pragmatic in how they've pursue their goals - especially over the last decade - than they're often given credit for.

Meanwhile, Schwenkler's larger point is especially worth keeping in mind when confronted - as pro-lifers often are - with arguments like this one, from P.J. O'Rourke:

Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people's business: abortion. Democracy--be it howsoever conservative--is a manifestation of the will of the people. We may argue with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we must submit to the fact of being married. Get a pro-life friend drunk to the truth-telling stage and ask him what happens if his 14-year-old gets knocked up. What if it's rape? Some people truly have the courage of their convictions. I don't know if I'm one of them. I might kill the baby. I will kill the boy.

If we take O'Rourke's hypothetical on its own terms, it reads as an argument for, say, a legal regime that makes abortion available to women/girls below the age of consent - and I think I speak for many pro-lifers when I say that I would gladly entertain that sort of compromise, as part of a broader package of restrictions, if we were drawing up abortion law from scratch. But it's not even close to an argument for the legal regime we have, in which no middle ground is even possible. And so long as Roe remains inviolate, those who urge pro-lifers to "compromise" without providing any legal ground on which a compromise could be forged are effectively telling them to just give up on their movement's goals entirely.

Bail The Presses!

BusinessWeek's Jon Fine gets down to nuts and bolts on how this journalism bailout thing might work, offering up two potential "Newspaper Rescue Acts":

Debt Relief/Subsidization. The U.S. assumes all outstanding debt at all newspaper companies. At midyear that was $14 billion for the publicly traded players (excluding News Corp., which only owns two U.S. newspapers, but more on them later), $12.5 billion for the Tribune Co., plus more for other private players. The U.S. may take equity stakes in all companies, should the government deem this wise. This plan also includes a onetime sum to offset current revenue shortfalls. Newspapers took in $45 billion from advertising in '07; let's assume ad declines this year and next will total $15 billion. Cost: Around $45 billion.

Industry Digitization. Think of the "license fee" British households pay to the BBC. Government will subsidize Amazon's (AMZN) Kindle (or equivalent device) and mandate that each household purchase one for $50. (Households below the poverty line will get one free.) This plan also provides several billion dollars to develop new digital news products, retrofit or dispose of obsolete assets (like printing presses), and roughly maintain existing newsroom staffs. Government again has the option to secure passive equity stakes. We will stress this plan's "green" aspects. Cost: Approximately $55 billion.

Okay, so maybe it wouldn't come quite as cheap as I'd hoped. But I'm pretty sure we're worth it.

Star Trek Returns

The bootleg trailer for J.J. Abrams' Trek film is here, though probably not for long, and it kicks you upside the head like a good Romulan ale. The spoilers that have leaked out thus far, though, are less encouraging. A while back, in a debate with Peter Suderman that's vanished into the American Scene's lost archives, I argued that the Trek franchise needed a complete reboot - one that keeps the iconic characters, keeps the Enterprise's five-year mission, and keeps the basic outlines of the Federation-Klingons-Romulan political dynamic, but otherwise untangles itself from the burden of maintaining real continuity with the five television series and ten movies that have come before. I suggested Batman Begins as a model, and wrote: "If Star Trek is going to boldly go into the twenty-first century, it needs to consider becoming something a little bit more like the Superman and Batman stories - that is, a pop culture mythology that can be reinterpreted and refashioned every generation or so." (And of course another obvious model would be the radical - and radically successful - reboot that ex-Deep Space Nine scribe Ronald Moore provided to Battlestar Galactica, which has basically displaced Trek as the gold standard for modern space opera.)

Interestingly, Babylon Five's J. Michael Straczynski wrote a proposal for a Trek series in 2004 that was conceived along precisely these lines, promising to completely reimagine the Kirk-Spock-McCoy Enterprise's five year mission. But it looks like the franchise's custodians decided not to take the leap: Based on what we know about Abrams' Star Trek, it sounds like a straightforward, none-too-imaginative prequel to the original series - and worse still, one that's sufficiently insecure about its relationship to the canon (and the fan base, presumably) that it's shoehorned in Leonard Nimoy as a time-traveling Spock, in the same way that the first Next Generation film felt compelled to shoehorn in a quasi-time-traveling James T. Kirk.  Nothing soured me on the Trek franchise quite as much as its promiscuous use of time travel (culminating, of course in the absurd "Temporal Cold War" from Star Trek: Enterprise), and Abrams' decision to haul it out immediately as an excuse for a Nimoy cameo is a pretty bad sign, both for this film and for any others that end up following.

Update: Thanks to the Wayback Machine, here's my original tangle with Suderman in its entirety. (I had unkind things to say about time travel then, too.)

Souls On Ice

"Few issues," Ronald Green writes, "are likely to generate more emotional opposition than federal funding of stem cell research." Fortunately, he has a plan for how Barack Obama should proceed:

Obama should minimize opposition by following the lead President Bush established in 2001. In justifying his policy of funding research on a limited number of human embryonic stem cell lines, Bush stated that "the life and death decision" had already been made on the embryos used to create those lines.

This is true of thousands of frozen embryos stored in fertility clinics around the country. More than 500,000 embryos created by in vitro fertilization to help couples have children are being stored. A large percentage of those embryos will never be used, because the couples have succeeded in having children, have given up or have grown too old to try. There is very little market for embryo adoption, so most of these embryos are destined to be destroyed. Circumstances have rendered the "life and death" decision on them almost as certain as it was on the embryos used before 2001 to make the stem cell lines that were approved to receive federal research funding.

By executive order, Obama could authorize the NIH to invite couples who planned to discard their frozen embryos to donate them for research. The couples would have to affirm that they no longer intended to use the embryos and had already decided to destroy them. Instead of the embryos merely being thawed and incinerated, as happens today, their cells could be used to produce lines for stem cell research. The moral parallel here is organ donation after death. In this case, the embryo's death is an unavoidable result of its creation and subsequent non-use for reproductive purposes. The production of stem cells from these embryos could easily be accomplished without federal support, and the resulting stem cells could be donated for federal research.

Like President Bush, President Obama could limit federal research to embryos created for reproductive purposes and abandoned before the statement of his policy. There are more than enough of these embryos to create all the lines we need for research. Under such a policy, there would be no use of embryos created with the intent of stem cell research.

Of course, when Bush talked about stem cell lines from embryos for whom "the life and death decision" had already been made, he was referring to embryos that were actually already dead. Whereas Green is redefining the phrase so that it refers to over 500,000 embryos that are very much still alive, and whose killing and subsequent dissection for (federally-funded) research is to be licensed on the grounds that "circumstances" have made their deaths "unavoidable." I think there's at least a slight difference between the two approaches.

Here I would ordinarily make some withering comment about the hollowness of the supposed "pro-life" case for Barack Obama, but in this instance it has to be allowed that John McCain's position was no better. Instead, as a counterpoint to Green's blithe and breezy take - "the embryo's death is an unavoidable result of its creation and subsequent non-use for reproductive purpose" - let me recommend (not for the first time) Liza Mundy's 2006 story in Mother Jones on America's embryo glut, and the moral dilemmas facing parents with offspring on ice. A few quotes:

... As with ultrasound technology--which permits parents to visualize a fetus in utero--ivf allows many patients to form an emotional attachment to a form of human life that is very early, it's true, but still life, and still human. People bond with photos of three-day-old, eight-cell embryos. They ardently wish for them to grow into children. The experience can be transforming: "I was like, 'I created these things, I feel a sense of responsibility for them,'" is how one ivf patient put it. Describing herself as staunchly pro-choice, this patient found that she could not rest until she located a person--actually, two people--willing to bring her excess embryos to term ...

... Dr. Robert Nachtigall, a veteran San Francisco reproductive endocrinologist, directed a study of patients who had conceived using ivf together with egg donation, another rapidly growing niche of fertility medicine ... Hard as it was deciding whether to go ahead with egg donation, these parents said, it was harder still deciding the fate of their leftover embryos

... Struck by these unprompted revelations, [Nachtigall] and fellow researchers decided to do a new study, this one looking explicitly at the way patients think about their unused, iced-down embryos ... Strikingly, Nachtigall found that even in one of the bluest regions of the country, which is to say, among people living in and around San Francisco, few were able to view a three-day-old laboratory embryo with anything like detachment ... Couples, he found, were confused yet deeply affected by the responsibility of deciding what to do with their embryos. They wanted to do the right thing. All of the 58 couples in his study had children as a result of treatment, so they knew, well, what even three-day-old embryos can and do grow into ... "Some saw them as biological material, but most recognized the potential for life," Nachtigall told colleagues at the asrm meeting. "For many couples, it seems there is no good decision; yet they still take it seriously morally."

For virtually all patients, he found, the disposition decision was torturous, the end result unpredictable. "Nothing feels right," he reported patients telling him. "They literally don't know what the right, the good, the moral thing is." In the fluid process of making a decision--any decision--some try to talk themselves into a clinical detachment. "Little lives, that's how I thought about them," said one woman. "But you have to switch gears and think, 'They're not lives, they're cells. They're science.' That's kind of what I had to switch to." Others were not able to make that switch, thinking of their embryos as almost sentient. "My husband talked about donating them to research, but there is some concern that this would not be a peaceful way to go," said one woman. Another said, "You start saying to yourself, 'Every one of these is potentially a life.'"

... Of the 58 couples Nachtigall and his group interviewed, the average couple had seven frozen embryos in storage. The average embryo had been in storage for four years. Even after that much time had elapsed, 72 percent had not decided what to do, and a number echoed the words of one patient: "We can't talk about it." The embryos keep alive the question of whether to have more children, a topic on which many spouses disagree. "I still have six in the bank," said one woman, who had not given up the idea of bearing them. "They call to me. I hate to talk about it. But they call to me."

Read the whole thing.

Jindal Tackles Health Care

This will bear watching. 

The Journalism Bailout, Ctd.

I offered the carrot; Megan offers the stick:

... you know that normally, I'd take the libertarian side and argue against this. But the news business is special. Without us, you wouldn't know anything. Besides, it provides millions of low-paying, insecure jobs to overeducated yuppies who are going to move back home, into your basement, if you don't do something, quick. 

And the news business is the other industry that can, all by itself, send the real economy into a tailspin. You think you're worried about a depression now? We could make you really depressed. I'm not threatening, or anything; I'm just saying, it's a nice country you've got here. It would be a real shame if someone convinced consumers to stop buying Blu-Ray players and shift their savings into canned guns and ammunition.

And remember - as a wise man once said, what's good for The Atlantic is good for America.

Provocation of the Day

Alex Tabarrok:

The Federal Government owns more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and it owns nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming.  See the map for more.  It is time for a sale.  Selling even some western land could raise hundreds of billions of dollars - perhaps trillions of dollars - for the Federal government at a time when the funds are badly needed and no one want to raise taxes.

More, and the map, here.

Where's The Journalism Bailout?

David Frum, on the fate of GM:

Last week, the stock of Las Vegas Sands Corporation collapsed. Bankruptcy seems a real possibility. Indeed, the whole casino gambling industry in Nevada is facing the worst crisis in at least a generation, maybe ever. Casino gambling directly employs more people than the domestic automobile industry. Add in the supply chain for both industries, and casinos still employ almost half as many people as the automobile sector.

So what about a bailout for the casino industry? Ridiculous! Right? But why right?

More importantly, what about the journalism industry? What about us - my friends and co-workers, and friends of friends and co-workers of co-workers, who've spent the last five years watching our business slowly circle the drain? Doesn't America need the New York Times as much at it needs the Chevy Cobalt? Isn't the Star-Ledger as important as the GMC Savana? Sure, GM employs roughly five times as many people as all all of America's newsrooms combined - but that just means that we'd be much, much cheaper to bail out! GM needs $25 billion, but we'd settle for, I dunno, five billion? Pocket change, in other words! And we'd be so, so grateful. If you think your coverage couldn't get more lovey-dovey than it already is, Mr. President-Elect, the magazine and newspaper editors of America stand ready to prove you wrong - and all for a fraction of what it took to bail out those ingrates on Wall Street.

More seriously, go read Megan on GM: I'm not sure if she's right, but she's on a roll.

Should Conservatism Be a Movement?

I meant to say something earlier about Austin Bramwell's attack on the idea of a conservative "movement." He writes:

Movement conservatives have in fact produced few of the conservative ideas in general circulation. Even the movement's intellectual founders--men like James Burnham, Richard Weaver, and Whitaker Chambers--did their best work before they decided to pool their energies into a movement. Take any movement conservative position: the original insights usually came from someone with little initial interest in building a conservative movement. Originalism in constitutional law was developed by Raoul Berger, a Harvard liberal; free-market ideas by academic economists working within the mainstream of their profession; anticommunism by disillusioned leftists, only some of whom (from Chambers and Burnham to the later neoconservatives) went on to form or join the conservative movement; foreign-policy realism by émigré academic Hans Morgenthau ...

Only the non-movement conservatives have managed to upset the intellectual consensus, for they speak to the intellectual establishment rather than at it. Consider the major traumas of establishment liberalism: Jane Jacobs's Death and Life, Daniel Moynihan's 1965 Report on the Negro Family, E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Harvard commencement speech, Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. At the time, not one of these authors was known as a movement conservative.

This is an overstatement, but one with no small amount of truth to it. But I hardly think it's unique to conservatism, or uniquely damning as a critique. In most successful political movements, the big ideas precede the institutions designed to promote them - or put another way, the philosophers describe the world, and then their disciples set out to change it. It does not discredit the modern environmentalist movement, for instance, to note that Rachel Carson's Silent Spring wasn't published by the National Wildlife Fund.

Bramwell continues:

That leaves but one rationale for the movement: to preserve conservative ideas in an inhospitable world. No sentiment is more widely shared by movement conservatives than that they are an embattled minority fighting a hateful enemy. Yet none of the elements of movement conservative ideology by itself poses any career hazard. Mickey Kaus opposes open borders; Nicholas Wade of the New York Times and New Republic contributor Steven Pinker believe in the reality of race; Al Gore is a critic of modernity; Jewish atheist Nat Hentoff is pro-life; Bill Cosby excoriates black culture; Camille Paglia lambastes feminists; Gregg Easterbrook is a skeptic of environmentalism. Some movement conservative views, such as support for the free market, are firmly a part of mainstream discourse. Others, such as a fondness for tradition, can be found all over the political spectrum. On close examination, it is difficult to find a movement conservative idea to which mainstream organs of scholarship and opinion are actually closed.

Well, not exactly. The rationale for the movement and its institutions is to advance right-wing ideas, not to preserve them. And while it's true that many individual ideas identified with modern conservatism are held and defended by non-conservative thinkers, it's awfully hard to argue that, say, Nat Hentoff has done more for the pro-life cause than the National Right to Life Committee. If you want your ideas translated into actual policy, a few sympathetic columnists won't do the job: You need think tanks and activist groups and lobbyists. You need, in other words, a movement.

This doesn't mean that there isn't a broader truth to what Bramwell says next:

Take a hypothetical young talent with contrarian inclinations. Movement conservatives would counsel him to make his way up their ranks. But suppose he ignores their advice and joins the New York Times--or the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. There, even if he never classifies himself as conservative, he pursues stories that expose the perverse incentives of well-intentioned policies, the human costs of mass immigration, or the reality that, as Steve Sailer puts it, "families matter." Not only are his eccentric interests not a liability, they may even prove to be an asset. His ability to see the world differently gives him a monopoly on stories that his colleagues cannot or will not spot themselves.

If the climate of opinion ever shifts, it will be thanks to non-movement conservatives working within mainstream establishment institutions.

As a critic of right-wing cocooning (and the employee of a mainstream publication!) obviously I'm sympathetic to this argument. But I think Bramwell is setting up something of a false choice here. Consider the example I cited above, the environmental movement. On the one hand, there's a whole constellation of what you might call "movement" institutions, large and small, that have grown up to promote green ideas - the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation, the National Resources Defense Council and Gristmill, and so on down the list. But these institutions haven't prevented the vertical integration, if you will, of people who share environmentalist premises into the New York Times and the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, or into any other establishment institution, from Harvard to Hollywood. Movement and non-movement environmentalism exist in symbiosis, rather than in tension: Reporters favorably disposed to green ideas cite papers from environmentalist think tanks; major universities run environmental studies programs that draw on the work done by movement environmentalism, and so on.

The same thing happened, on a much broader scale, with early-twentieth century progressivism, which had all kinds of movement-ish qualities but nonetheless managed to co-opt the establishment of its day. Indeed, nearly every successful movement, from abolitionism to gay rights, has advanced on two fronts simultaneously, creating new institutions and conquering old ones at the same time. And if late-twentieth century conservatism has been less successful in this regard than other mass movements - if we've reached a point where conservative institutions seem intellectually exhausted, but the establishment remains largely unconquered by conservative ideas - then the problem probably lies with the limits and weaknesses and contradictions of the American Right itself, rather than with the fact that it decided to sell out and become a movement.

Sarah Palin and the MSM

James Poniewozik and Jason Zengerle both note that (in Zengerle's words) "for someone who spent so much time railing against the mainstream media in the run-up to the election, Sarah Palin sure is spending a lot of time giving the dread MSM post-election interviews." Poniewozik notes that "she'll only have the white-hot pop-cultural attention--already starting to cool--for a while longer," so it makes sense to make the most of it. That's true enough, but I'd also note that a post-election goodwill tour might be Palin's best chance for a while to change the "Palin Rules" that have governed her media coverage since August - rules which state, so far as I can tell, that almost any negative claim made about the Alaska governor is to be published first and double-checked later. (The rules were set during the convention-week feeding frenzy, and excused on the grounds that the media had to play catch-up on an unknown nominee, but now that Palin's no longer a candidate for vice president they seem to still be in effect.)

The McCain campaign, in its infinite wisdom, decided that the appropriate response to this and other apparent displays of bias was to go to war against the press - and we all saw how well that worked out. It may be that unfair coverage of various sorts is just baked in the cake for Sarah Palin from now on. But if she wants to run for national office in the future, trying to charm the "elite liberal media" into changing how it covers her seems like a savvier bet than just complaining about its bias.

Newt and New Ideas

Those inclined to support Newt Gingrich's apparent bid to chair the RNC on the grounds that he's always flush with new ideas should go back and re-read the former Speaker's list, from back in May, of policy proposals that the GOP ought to embrace to avoid disaster in November. If you find Newt's manifesto - which urged Republicans to "overhaul the census and cut its budget radically," to "implement a space-based, GPS-style air traffic control system," and to double down on porkbusting, among other ideas - to be a plausible blueprint for a Republican revival, then he's your man. If you have the same reaction I did, though, you might want to root for Michael Steele instead.

A Foray Into Racial Awkwardness

Is there any way for a white American to say that the election of Barack Obama makes him feel happy for black America without sounding condescending, inappropriate, and weird? Probably not. (I think this Maureen Dowd column stands as a particular painful example of the genre, even though - or perhaps because - it strains for levity along the way.)

Nonetheless, I'll take the plunge and say that this Ta-Nehisi post made me feel, well, really happy for black America.

(Cringe!)

Jindal Takes A Pass

Why do conservatives hold out such hopes for Bobby Jindal? Because he's a smart, smart guy.

Closing Ranks

One thing that struck me while reading about last week's big right-wing activist summit is that the rumors of the looming conservative civil war may turn out to be greatly exaggerated. Oh, the pundits will fight, as they have been for a while, but for a serious circular firing squad you need the activist groups to turn on one another. You might think that a defeat like the one the GOP endured last week would prompt Grover Norquist to argue that the Republican Party needs to ditch its warmongers and its theocrats, or prompt Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council to argue that the GOP needs to ditch its flat-tax obsessives, or prompt the Federalist Society's Leonard Leo to complain about all those anti-intellectual hicks who loved Sarah Palin. But in practice the incentives probably cut the other way: Nobody wants to fire the first shot against their fellow movementarians, because then everybody else might just close ranks and train their fire in your direction. So the social-conservative activist groups will stand by the economic-conservative activist groups, and so on, lest they all hang separately - just as the Democratic Party's various interest groups all stuck together in the Eighties, holding firm to the belief that there was nothing wrong with liberalism that couldn't be fixed with more liberalism, rallying around Walter Mondale when that squishy centrist Gary Hart looked poised to knock him off in the '84 primaries, and going on, of course, to a resounding victory in the 1984 general election. Or something like that.

Regarding Douglas Kmiec

In response to those liberals who have written in taking me to task for refusing to give Douglas Kmiec's arguments the respectful consideration they supposedly deserve, I would suggest a thought experiment. Imagine that John McCain had narrowly defeated Barack Obama last week, and that Slate sponsored a dialogue on the future of the Democratic Party in which Joe Lieberman showed up to offer pious lectures on how the Democrats could retake the Presidency. Then further imagine that instead of being a hawkish liberal who supported John McCain because of their shared hawkishness - a position that's internally consistent, whatever else you think about it - Lieberman were instead a longtime anti-war voice in American politics, a Paul Wellstone or Russ Feingold figure, or even a strident pacifist. And then imagine that the Connecticut Senator had spent the campaign insisting that John McCain was actually the best choice, not for hawkish liberals, but for his fellow anti-war activists ... on the grounds, maybe, that Obama wouldn't really get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and that John McCain's "League of Democracies" idea offered the best blueprint for an end to international conflict in the long run. How much respectful consideration would Lieberman's arguments merit, under those circumstances?

Look, there are a variety of not-unreasonable ways for Americans who believe the unborn deserve legal protection to justify a vote for Barack Obama. But to claim that a candidate who seems primed to begin disbursing taxpayer dollars in support of abortion and embryo-destructive research as soon as he enters the White House somehow represented the better choice for anti-abortion Americans on anti-abortion grounds is an argument that deserves to met, not with engagement, but with contempt.

The Ironist-in-Chief

JPod, on Obama's Nancy Reagan line:

... I'm sorry he's getting hammered for it, because it made him seem like a more interesting person. Now, Obama is nothing if not an interesting person. His book Dreams from My Father is a very, very interesting self-portrait -- my friend Andy Ferguson has gone so far as to call it a "small masterpiece," which is higher praise than I would give it (and, moreover, from a source who is far less inclined to lavish praise than I am). But it is the nature of politics that it forces interesting people to turn into less interesting people, because displays of personality can always be taken the wrong way. Obama just learned a lesson about that, and it may force him to continue to keep his guard raised lest too many signs of his ironist's temperament emerge to give the 24-7 news maw something to chew over.

I agree. And Obama's "ironist's temperament" doesn't just make him a more interesting politician than your average baby-kisser: It has the potential to be crucial to his success as President. Mass democracy has a way of creating cults of personality around its most charismatic national politicians - we've seen this with the Kennedy brothers, with Reagan, and even with Sarah Palin - and it's very easy to imagine an Obama Presidency that ends up being captive to the unprecedented hero-worship he generates, and the image that his fans have of him as a transformational President even before he's taken over the Oval Office. I think something like this may have happened to George W. Bush in the aftermath of September 11th: The idea that his might be a world-historical presidency seemed to take over his actual presidency, to its great detriment. And where Obama is concerned, I think we should all hope that his more ironic instincts - his writerly detachment from the absurdities of politics and from his own celebrity - survive his ascension to the highest office in the land, as a useful guard against the hubris to which he'll otherwise be tempted.

Bloggingheads in the Time of Obama

On the day after the election, Robert Wright was kind enough to grill me about the GOP, Grand New Party, and related issues, and you can watch the results here.

Obama, Pro-Lifers and FOCA

Intemperate broadsides against Douglas Kmiec aside, I'll have more to say early next week, hopefully, about pro-lifers in the age of Obama. For now, let me quote Damon Linker, who notes that the Democrats didn't make much headway among the most religious - and by extension, most pro-life - Americans, and then offers the following advice to the Democrats:

Rejoicing in their victory, many liberals will be inclined to say good riddance to such voters. And this may make electoral sense. Perhaps the combination of long-term demographic trends and the incompetence of Republican governance over the past eight years have forged a center-left electoral coalition that will persist for years to come. Maybe the theoconservative base of the Republican Party will wither away on its own, now that it's been deprived of the oxygen of direct political influence. Perhaps the GOP will purge itself of its religious faction in the violent recriminations that have already begun, leaving devout Catholics and evangelicals to wander in the wilderness without a political home, much as Protestant fundamentalists did during the four decades following the humiliation of the Scopes Trial of 1925.

Maybe, but I wouldn't bet on it. As long as the Democratic Party continues to take its cues on social policy from those who refuse any compromise on abortion, it will give the Republicans the gift that keeps on giving: a large, stable, immensely loyal bloc of voters passionately committed to protecting (as they see it) innocent human life from lethal violence and those who champion the right to inflict it ...

It wouldn't take much to undermine the morale of a significant number of these ideological combatants, and perhaps even to inspire them to defect to the Democratic side of the aisle. For starters, President Obama could privately urge congressional Democrats not to take up the Freedom of Choice Act--a piece of legislation that, if passed, would instantaneously erase the (quite modest) legislative accomplishments of the pro-life movement over the past two decades and thus provoke it more effectively than anything since the Supreme Court's Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision of 1992 ...

Beyond that, Obama could follow the lead of Bill Clinton in combining a stalwart defense of the right to choose with an acknowledgement that the decision to have an abortion is a choice that troubles the consciences of many millions of Americans--including many millions who steadfastly support abortion rights. Clinton's "safe, legal, and rare" served him well in this regard, but surely an orator as gifted as Obama could forge an even finer phrase or passage of prose to capture the often tragic moral complexities surrounding this most divisive of issues.

To actually win more than a handful of committed pro-life voters, I think Obama would need to go a lot further than showing restraint on FOCA and forging some fine turns of phrase about the tragedy of abortion. But if all he wants to do is keep pro-lifers disheartened and demobilized, then following Linker's advice and reining in the pro-choice side's more maximalist ambitions seems like by far the wisest way to approach the issue.

Inequality and the GOP

Yglesias, Wilkinson and Manzi had an interesting round-robin on the subject yesterday.

Two Paths To Reform

The nice thing about a resounding defeat is that everyone can look at the exit polls and find confirmation that the GOP needs to do better among their favored constituency. I can read the exits and see a party that lost six points, compared to 2004, among voters making $30,000 to $50,000, seven points among voters making $50,000 to $75,000, six points among high school graduates and seven points among voters with "some college," and interpret all of this as evidence that the GOP needs to a better job of, well, winning the working class (and saving the American Dream!) David Frum, on the other hand, can look at polls showing that McCain lost three points among college graduates, nine points among people making $100,000 a year, and an astonishing seventeen points among people making over $200,000 a year, and argue that the party faces a stark choice: It can keep trying to maximize its share of the white working class vote, perhaps by nominating candidates like Sarah Palin, or it can make the wiser choice, in Frum's view, and try to win back rich, well-educated white Americans by embracing "painful change" on issues like the environment and abortion. (Frum's binary assumes, I should note, that the GOP can't improve its standing among Hispanics, at least in the short term.)

Now obviously a successful party would want to regain ground on multiple fronts at once - winning back working-class voters and wooing the college-educated and upper-income demographics. And obviously how you do this depends on who and where you are: A Republican running for office in, say, suburban New England will need to be more pro-environment and more pro-choice than the national party, and a GOP that's losing ground almost everywhere has every reason to be accommodating of regional differences - just as the Democrats have been of late, by mounting pro-life, anti-immigration candidates for office in conservative districts and reddish states.

But for the national party, Frum is right that there are real choices to be made. If you follow the Douthat-Salam model, which Reihan has dubbed "lower-middle reformism," you're going to be crafting a message aimed at the place where the non-college educated and college-educated categories bleed into one another - one pitched to the exurb-living college graduate who picked up a degree from a regional public university (or jumped from school to school and didn't finish in four years, like Sarah Palin), and who probably has more in common, culturally and economically, with a lot of grads of community colleges and technical schools than he does with someone who went to, say, Swarthmore. This approach requires talking a lot about the famous "kitchen table" issues - public education and transportation, crime and health care costs - and trying to expand the definition of what it means to be "pro-family" without abandoning the GOP's core pro-life convictions. If you follow the model Frum recommends in his column, on the other hand - call it "upper-middle reformism" - and pitch your message to the Obama-voting, ex-Rockefeller Republicans making $150,000 a year, then you're talking to a "post-material" group of people who worry less about day-to-day economic concerns and more about causes like global warming - making Frum's vision of a pro-choice, pro-carbon tax GOP a more plausible fit. (Frum has also proposed a fat tax, which is likewise something that seems most likely to appeal to the healthy, wealthy voters at the upper tail of the income and education distribution.)

Again, I don't think this is a completely either/or matter for the GOP. A party that restores its reputation for competence and policy seriousness, as the Republicans desperately need to do, will win back voters across the income and educational spectrum, no matter what specific positions it takes. But insofar as there's a choice to be made, I think building a coalition of social conservatives and social moderates from the middle of the income and education distribution makes much more political sense than trying to hold together a coalition of social conservatives from the middle of the distribution and social liberals from the upper end. Joe the Plumber and Joe the Office-Park Employee make much more plausible political bedfellows than Joe the Plumber and Joseph the Hedge Fund Guy. Moreover, I think a conservatism that's primarily oriented around the interests of the first pair of Joes is the better choice for America as well - because these are voters who face the most significant socioeconomic challenges in the current landscape, and who most deserve a government, and a right-of-center politics, that looks out for their interests. As a wise conservative writer put it not that long ago:

... The county's new wealth and diversity have created important new social problems. The schools are stressed. The roads are choked. Land use is more contentious ... For most of the Bush administration, G.D.P. grew strongly, the stock market boomed, new jobs were created. But the ordinary person experienced little benefit. The median household income, which rose in the '90s, had only just caught up to its 2000 level when the expansion ended in 2007.

... Between 2001 and 2008, the amount that employers paid for labor rose impressively, at least 25 percent. Yet almost all of that money was absorbed by the costs of health insurance, which doubled over the Bush years. In the 1990s, thanks to the advent of H.M.O.'s, health-care costs rose more slowly, so more of the money paid by employers could flow to employees.

Out of their flat-lining incomes, middle-class Americans have had to pay more for food, fuel, tuition and out-of-pocket health-care costs. In the past few months, they have suffered sharp tumbles in the value of their most important asset, their homes. Their mood has turned bleak. Almost 70 percent disapprove of the policies of George W. Bush. At intervals over the past two decades, Gallup has asked Americans whether the United States is a society divided into "haves" and "have-nots." Back in 1988, more than 70 percent of Americans rejected this description. This year, the country split evenly: 49-49. When asked, "Are you better off than you were five years ago?" only 41 percent of middle-class Americans say yes, the worst result since pollsters started asking the question half a century ago.

It's this pervasive economic unease that is capsizing the Republican Party ...

This writer, of course, was David Frum.

Obama, Abortion and the GOP

The Slate dialogue continues, and I say some very unkind things about Douglas Kmiec.

Losing the Youth Vote

Patrick Ruffini has the grisly details. Greg Mankiw ventures a conjecture:

Why? I am not enough of a political scientist to be sure, but recent conversations I have had with some Harvard undergrads have led me to a conjecture: It was largely noneconomic issues. These particular students told me they preferred the lower tax, more limited government, freer trade views of McCain, but they were voting for Obama on the basis of foreign policy and especially social issues like abortion. The choice of a social conservative like Palin as veep really turned them off McCain.

So what does the Republican Party need to do to get the youth vote back? If these Harvard students are typical (and perhaps they are not, as Harvard students are hardly a random sample), the party needs to scale back its social conservatism. Put simply, it needs to become a party for moderate and mainstream libertarians. The actual Libertarian Party is far too extreme in its views to attract these students. And it is too much of a strange fringe group. These students are, after all, part of the establishment. But a reformed Republican Party could, I think, win them back.

As a former Harvard undergraduate myself, I would caution Professor Mankiw against doing too much generalizing based on the political views of that institution's student body. Certainly younger voters in the aggregate are more socially liberal than their elders, especially on issues like gay marriage. But if you believe studies like this big Pew survey from 2007, they're more liberal on economic issues as well. For instance:

Gen Nexters are more pro-government than older age groups on several dimensions. They are much less likely to characterize the government as wasteful and inefficient. On balance, the general public agrees with the statement, "When something is run by the government, it is usually inefficient and wasteful" (55% agree vs. 41% disagree). A strong majority of Nexters (64%) reject this idea.

The views of the general public on this issue have shifted over time with fewer Americans now saying the federal government is inefficient and wasteful. But today's young people have a much more positive view of government in this regard than young people did a generation ago. In the late 1980s, 18-25 year-olds were evenly divided on this issue: 47% agreed that government is often inefficient and wasteful, 47% disagreed.

They're also more liberal on the environment, on immigration, government regulation of business ... really, on any issue you care to name, with two exceptions. One is Social Security: According to Pew, twentysomethings are much more likely to favor partial privatization of Social Security than older Americans (or at least they were before the bubble burst). And the other, pace Mankiw, is abortion: The report observes that "in spite of their more liberal views on other social issues, Gen Nexters do not differ from the rest of the population on the issue of abortion."

Sarah Palin's Next Act

Chris Beam and Allahpundit have smart takes.

Michael Crichton, RIP

He died yesterday, and like C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley - both of whom entered the next life on November 22, 1963 - his passing was overshadowed by larger events. Not that he was in Lewis's or Huxley's league, obviously: Peter Suderman's observation that most of his novels "were blockbuster scripts written in choppy prose" is pretty much on the mark. (Not coincidentally, Crichton was a prolific screenwriter and producer as well.) But one of them - I mean Jurassic Park, of course -  transcended its wooden characters and workmanlike prose to achieve something like a platonic ideal of a certain kind of thriller. It's almost impossible to imagine a better marriage of sci-fi and page-turning potboiler than what Crichton came up with in that novel - and while the Spielberg adaptation obviously adds a certain amount of, ah, visual stimulus to the equation, I still think the book is better. Read it, if you haven't, and may its author rest in peace.

America The Center-Left?

Mark Steyn:

As for us losers, there's no point us going down the right-wing version of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Any shrill vicious ad hominem invective would be much better directed at each other. The Republicans lost this election. I disagree with Lisa. I think we are near a point at which America joins the rest of the west as a center-left society - that's to say, a society whose assumptions about the role of government and the size of the state are far closer to Continental social democracies than to the Founding Fathers. In a grim media-cultural environment, the temptation for American conservatism is to be seduced into becoming one of those ever so mildly right-of-left-of-right-of-left-of-center parties they have in Europe. We should have the fight about conservatism's future vigorously and openly - perhaps at Bud's Roadhouse out on Route 137 in lieu of All-Girl Mud-Wrestling Night.

I actually share Steyn's diagnosis of where America might be going. (And I'm a big fan of Bud's Roadhouse.) The difference between us, I think, is that I look at the current landscape and see an America where a certain amount of flexibility, pragmatism and new thinking among conservatives - as opposed to Jeff Flake standing athwart earmarks yelling stop - is a prerequisite for restraining the slow slide to the center-left, whereas Steyn seems sees the push for reform itself as symptom of that slide. But at least we've achieved some degree of consensus!

The Conservative Future

I'm participating in a Slate discussion about the Right's future over the next two days. My first contribution is here; I highly recommend Jim Manzi's post; and I'll have something to say in response to Doug Kmiec's contribution later on.

It Could Have Been Worse

The electoral college was a blowout, but it looks like I came pretty close calling a 52-47 split in the popular vote. Turnout wasn't all that much higher than in 2004, which means the Democrats did not suddenly discover a vast new untapped source of votes that will change American politics for a generation. If Gordon Smith, Norm Coleman, Saxby Chambliss and Ted Stevens (oy) hold on, then the Republicans will have come out of this better, perhaps, than could have been reasonably expected.

Is this cause for conservative encouragement? Well, maybe. "They won't have another chance quite like this one for a long time," David Freddoso writes of the Democrats. That's probably true. But a lot depends, as I suggested a month ago, on whether this year ends up for Republicans like the Democrats' 1980, or the Democrats' 2004. And if it's like 1980, which I suspect it is, then it's very easy to imagine the Republicans telling themselves "hey, things could have been worse" all the way to a Mondale-style drubbing four years from now. (It's pretty easy to see that scenario shaping up, for instance, in some of the Palin-in-2012 playbooks currently circulating.) Events, and the effectiveness of Obama's Presidency, will shape the GOP's future, but so will the choices made by figures like Palin and Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Bobby Jindal - and they should choose with the lessons of the Eighties Democratic Party uppermost in their mind.

Remarkable

I hope I will be forgiven a touch of hyperbole when I say that it's hard to imagine a more inspiring back-to-back of political addresses than McCain's concession and Obama's victory speech.

God bless America, and good night.

Congratulations, President-Elect Obama

Like many conservative writers, my good opinion of Barack Obama diminished somewhat over the course of the campaign. Part of this was the inevitable hardening of the partisan arteries that takes place during a Presidential year, but part of it was that Obama's particular gifts - his combination of charisma and thoughtfulness, and his ability to project sympathy for positions he does not himself hold - created unreasonable initial expectations for the kind of actual compromises he might make with conservatives. You start with the fact that he seems to understand your side of the argument, and the next thing you know you're imagining scenarios in which he moves the Democratic Party to the center on abortion, or comes out against race-based affirmative action, or offers some other grand, conciliatory gesture that you'd like to see American liberalism make.

None of this was ever terribly plausible, of course, given Obama's actual record - and it was especially implausible in a year when running as a "generic Democrat" has such obvious upsides. Obama moved to the center on issues where Democrats more or less have to be move to the center - making hawkish gestures on foreign policy, promising middle-class tax cuts, etc. - but there was never any way that he was going to live up to the hopes of the various conservatives who said favorable things about him in the early going (unless they engaged in outright self-deception, as some did). Unlike previous Democratic nominees, Obama was operating in an environment where his side had the upper hand on almost every issue, and there was actually more risk than reward involved in straying too far off the liberal reservation. And the campaign he ran reflected that reality, rather than living up to its initial promise to transcend the left-right divide.

So I was disappointed in Barack Obama, but I also realize that his campaign wasn't addressed to me: It was addressed to the constituents of a potential center-left majority, and that's the majority he won tonight. Whether this majority holds together will depend on how he governs, but for the moment he has achieved something that no Democratic politician has achieved in a generation: He's carved out a mandate to take America at least some distance in a leftward direction, and he has left the conservative opposition demoralized, disorganized, and arguably self-destructing. Obviously, this achievement was made possible by the blunders of his predecessor, the floundering of the McCain campaign, and the good fortune of running against the incumbent party during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. But great politicians are almost always lucky politicians, and Obama's good fortune does not diminish the magnitude of his triumph tonight, and the credit that he and his campaign deserve for the race they've run.

And then, of course, there's the fact that Obama has just been elected President of a nation in which he could have been bought and sold as a slave just seven generations ago. I don't think there are any words adequate to the occasion of America electing its first black President, so I'll just say this: This may be a bleak day for the Republican Party and for conservatism, but come what may in the years ahead, it's a great day for our country. Barack Obama deserves congratulations, tonight, but so does the nation he's about to govern: We've come a long, long way.

The End of An Endless Campaign

Matt Continetti ponders the long, long road to today's decision:

It's worth revisiting why this has been a long campaign. The reason has nothing to do with when the primaries were scheduled. The early primaries were a symptom, not a cause. The cause is Bush. Starting with Hurricane Katrina, a large portion of the country simply wrote off Bush's presidency. That grew worse as the Iraq war worsened and the Democrats took Congress in 2006. As Jeffrey Bell has pointed out, Bush's dismal popularity has driven all politics ever since. It is the country's desire to move beyond Bush, as well as his lack of a successor, that has made this election last so long and propelled Barack Obama to the edge of the presidency. For these reasons alone, George W. Bush is one of the most consequential presidents in history.

No matter who wins today, Bush has only two-and-a-half months left as president. The Bush effect on American politics will vanish. His successor will determine the next debates, issues, controversies, and scandals. And he will likely be far more popular than Bush 43. The next campaign will not be as long as this one.

Not that this wasn't fun and all, but here's hoping he's right ...

Ideology And Policy

While we wait for history (of some sort, either way) to be made, I just wanted to pull out this passage from Yuval's post yesterday on the looming fights over how to reform conservatism:

... these fights need to be had on substantive grounds. Rush Limbaugh and Ross Douthat may disagree about what was best about Ronald Reagan, but do they disagree about the McCain health care plan? I think they don't. The challenge for conservatives if we find ourselves in the minority in the next few years will be to offer substantive conservative-minded specifics as alternatives to the Democrats' proposals. The philosophical arguments about the nature of conservatism are important and interesting, we all should and will engage in them. How could we resist? That we have such arguments is one of the greatest strengths of the conservative movement in America. But they will not yield conclusions, and in themselves they won't do much either way for our electoral fortunes either. Substantive ideas and arguments will, and they will help conservatives unite as well. How and why social, fiscal, and national security conservatives belong under one tent is a lot harder to argue in theoretical terms than it is in practical terms. And there is a deep conservative philosophical truth there, a Burkean truth: politics must be practical and not just theoretical.

I agree - but I trust Yuval would agree with me when I note that in the end, forging a new Republican agenda will require right-wingers to make ideological compromises about what conservatives should stand for, and not just transcend their differences through really smart policy. Ramesh Ponnuru can design and redesign his family-friendly tax proposals to his heart's content, but he isn't going to persuade Kimberley Strassel on the merits unless she and the rest of the Wall Street Journal editorial board become convinced that they need to significantly temper their vision of a GOP oriented around supply-side purism. (Or to take the matter in reverse, no brilliantly-designed new set of tax proposals from the WSJ crowd is likely to persuade Ramesh that the GOP's big problem is too much "braying" against abortion.) Similarly, Jim Manzi can propose new directions for the Right on global warming until the polar bears come home, but he and Rush Limbaugh aren't going to agree on policy so long as Rush persists in his view that climate change is just a liberal hoax. And so forth.

There are some debates where policy innovation can help right-wing thinkers find common ground, certainly - especially in cases like health care, where the intra-conservative battle lines aren't already drawn in blood. And policy innovation is a good thing no matter how much common ground it generates in the "whither conservatism" debates. But no matter how smart the wonks involved, there are going to be a lot of issues where the right-of-center candidates of the future are just going to have to decide in one side's favor, and let the other side(s) gnash their teeth.

The Audacity of Timing

Alex Massie has a long, thoughtful post on how the man and the moment (seem to) have met - and a shorter post pointing out how fortunate Obama was to lose in his first try at national office.

Palin, Plumbers, and Polarization

Chris Caldwell, on class and the election:

... the Palin pick was the electoral equivalent of an atomic bomb. It was one of those tactics that turns into a strategy. What the Palin pick did was to unleash a latent class tension in American life and turn the two parties, previously somewhat socially mixed, into vehicles of social classes. Prominent intellectuals who once leaned rightward sorted themselves into the Obama camp. So did most north-eastern Republicans. The party has focused on its proletarian rump. Rallies have grown more strident, with howls of 'Communist!' when Obama's name is mentioned. McCain singled out an Ohio man -- 'Joe the Plumber' -- who had buttonholed Obama as he canvassed his neighbourhood. Soon McCain and Palin were building a following of tradesmen with sobriquets out of children's books: Tito the Builder, Suzanne the Sandwich-Maker. There have been a lot of books lately urging Republicans to think more about the interests of their lower-middle-class base. That is a problem that is going to take care of itself.

The Democrats are now the partisan home of the upper crust of the American meritocracy, of the credentialled classes, the classes that believe every endeavour is some variety of IQ test. USA Today did a review of fund-raising data and discovered that Obama dominates fundraising among the leaders of 'finance, insurance, real estate, health, communications and law'. His campaign has run through hundreds of millions more than McCain's, and will spend a quarter of a billion dollars on television alone before this election is over. Obama has far more than twice as many ads up in Colorado, Georgia, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. In Florida, he has run 18,909 ads to McCain's 5,702. The Democratic party is the vehicle through which, after a populist interlude, the governing classes are proposing to take their country back. Obama is a restoration candidate but that doesn't mean he has a plan.

There's some smart analysis here, especially in the latter paragraph, but I don't know what Caldwell means by "a problem that is going to take care of itself." It certainly didn't take care of itself in this election: Instead, you had a lot of posturing from the Republican ticket about how the GOP is the more proletarian party, joined to very little substance addressed to the actual interests of lower-middle-class voters. If the Palin pick had actually turned into a vehicle of class polarization, and if for every lost country-club Republican the GOP ticket were adding a Joe the Plumber or a Tito the Builder to its pool of voters, then the polls wouldn't look nearly so dire for McCain. But compare the last Pew poll conducted in this race to the results from 2004. Among voters without a college degree, George W. Bush beat John Kerry by 53 to 47 percent; in 2008, Obama's going into today's vote leading 47 to 43 percent in that working-class demographic. The same goes if you define class in terms of income rather than education. In 2004, Kerry beat Bush by just one point among voters making $35,000-$50,000; among voters making $50,000-$75,000, Bush beat Kerry by thirteen points. Fash-forward to '08, and according to Pew, McCain's beating Obama by only six points in the $50,000 to $75,000 demographic, and he's losing to the Democrat by seven points in among voters making between $35,000 and $50,000.

In other words, the GOP has lost ground both among the elites and among the proles in this campaign. The Palin-and-the-plumber strategy didn't polarize the race by socioeconomic class: It cost the Republicans votes among the upper crust, most likely, without gaining them anything with the Joe Sixpack demographic, which is going for Obama too. All of this is subject to revision pending tonight's actual results, but for the moment it looks like the GOP's relationship to working class voters worsened considerably between 2004 and 2008, Palin-related class tensions notwithstanding, creating a problem for Republicans that may be resolved eventually (ahem), but almost certainly won't take care of itself.

It's a Wonderful Movie Reference

I like Edward Rothstein's columns and I enjoyed this piece, but I feel like somebody else got there first.

The Ghosts of Elections (Recently) Past

I've spent the last couple of weeks gently tweaking my panicky, paranoid liberal friends who just can't help fretting that Obama's seemingly insurmountable lead in the polls will be undone on election day. But now that the day itself has arrived, I know what they mean: Even though I don't really see any way that McCain can win this thing, I've been conditioned - by the stalemate in 2000, by the exit-polling disaster in '04, even by New Hampshire flipping for Hillary this year - to assume that some sort of bizarre election-night twist will keep us up till three AM, half-drunk and reeling. The notion of an election where the anchors know who's won by mid-afternoon, and where the suspense for television viewers ends early (when Virginia and Pennsylvania both go Obama's way, perhaps), seems like something old-fashioned, something retro, something out of my childhood that couldn't possibly happen in the crazy world of twenty-first century America. So while my rational mind expects an easy Obama win, as of this morning my irrational mind is suddenly convinced that come nine PM tonight, some furrow-browed announcer will be remarking on his this is much, much closer than anyone expected ...

The Nightmare Scenario

It almost goes without saying, but John Podhoretz offers some reasons (and there are more, I think) why nobody should be rooting for a McCain victory in the electoral college if he can't win the popular vote.

Around the Horn

For election eve, a potpourri of links related to the future of the Right ... 

... Yuval Levin, who's almost always more sanguine than yours truly, discusses what reform conservatism might mean. (And see Jonah Goldberg's response as well.)

... Allahpundit parses the final Fox poll, and offers some astute thoughts on how the Joe the Plumber gambit and the selling of Sarah Palin worked out - or didn't.

... Peggy Noonan and Kathryn Jean Lopez, in conversation.

... Bill Voegeli on how to reform Big Government.

... Tucker Carlson talks Romney and 2012; Reihan talks Mitch Daniels.

And finally, my prediction for tomorrow: Obama 52, McCain 47, and the following electoral-vote breakdown:

Madelyn Dunham, RIP

This is simultaneously immensely, immensely sad, and such a remarkable coincidence as to feel like a small, inscrutable brush stroke of Providence.

(Don't start with me, Hitchens ...)

Reasons To Welcome a Liberal Era

Less conservative-bashing in the popular culture, and more stuff like this:

Lost Horizons

I had a succession of meals last week with smart conservative friends, and I found them all relatively sanguine about the defeat that's almost certainly about to be inflicted on the American Right. Each of them, in different ways, express a mix of enthusiasm for the "whither conservatism" battles ahead and relief at the prospect of finally closing the books on the Bush years. This has been an exhausting Presidency for conservatives as well as liberals, and for many people on the Right the prospect of being out of power has obvious upsides: No longer will every foul-up and blunder in Washington be treated as an indictment of Conservatism with a capital C; no longer will right-wingers feel obliged to carry water, whether in small or large amounts, for a government that's widely perceived as a failure; and no longer will the Right have the dead weight of an unpopular president dragging it down and down and down. Defeat will be depressing, of course - none of my friends were Obamacons by any stretch - but it could be liberating as well.

This was how I expected to feel about a McCain defeat, too, and I've been trying to figure out why I don't - why I feel instead so grouchy and embittered (clinging to my guns and my religion, and all that), and more dispirited than liberated. I didn't have particularly high hopes for a McCain-led ticket in the first place: I never went in for the Mac-worship many journalists have practiced over the years, and part of me was dreading having to spend four years trying to explain that yes, I want a reformed conservatism, but no, I don't like the kind of reform-ish quasi-conservatism that the McCain Administration is advancing. And then there were all the other reasons to think that a GOP defeat might not be so bad: You can't win every election; it's hard for a political party to change its ways without the clarifying effects of a devastating defeat; Obama's a smart guy who'll probably make at least some policy choices I support; the election of a black President will be a great day for America; etc.

And yet here I am, sour and world-weary. Part of it, I'm sure, has to do with the pace and rhythms of blogging, which even at my extremely sedate clip is wearing after a while: I feel like I've gone round and round on the same points and controversies for an eternity already, and the prospect of going round and round for years to come ... well, let's just say I'm thinking of mainly writing about the movies for the next decade or so. And part of it probably has to do with the madness that afflicts anyone who writes a book offering advice to politicians. Every pundit labors under the delusion that if only his favored candidates would listen to him, they'd win every election and get every policy decision right - and this goes double, if my own experience is any guide, for pundits who write books that come out in election years. I've been more frustrated with the McCain campaign than with any previous ticket, I think, in part because some delusional part of my subconscious doesn't understand why they can't just let me take over their campaign and set things right. After all, I wrote a book! Come on, people!

And then, of course, there's the whole Sarah Palin business, where a politician I liked and touted from afar ended up as a hate figure to many Americans, a late-night punchline to many more, a deranging influence on a number of writers and the locus for an incredibly wearying internecine feud among right-wing pundits. (Which is to say, maybe it's a good thing the McCain campaign didn't listen to my other suggestions ...)

But I think the deeper reason for my political gloom has to do with something that Jonah Goldberg raised in our bloggingheads chat about conservatism - namely, the sense that the era now passing represented a great opportunity to put into practice the sort of center-right politics that I'd like to see from the Republican Party, and that by failing the way it did the Bush Administration may have cut the ground out from under my own ideas before I'd even figured out exactly what they were.  As I said to Jonah. I have all sorts of disagreements with the specific ways President Bush attempted to renovate the GOP, on the level of policy and philosophy alike. But the fact remains that the renovation Bush attempted was an effort to respond to some of the political, social and economc trends that Reihan and I discuss in Grand New Party - and those of us who want a reformed conservatism have to recognize Bush's attempt, and reckon with his failure.

This is by no means a new insight, but it's one that's been brought home to me by the looming end of the Bush Era and the struggles of the McCain campaign. Conservatism in the United States faces a series of extremely knotty problems at the moment. How do you restrain the welfare state at a time when the entitlements we have are broadly popular, and yet their design puts them on a glide path to insolvency? How do you respond to the socioeconomic trends - wage stagnation, social immobility, rising health care costs, family breakdown, and so forth - that are slowly undermining support for the Reaganite model of low-tax capitalism? How do you sell socially-conservative ideas to a moderate middle that often perceives social conservatism as intolerant? How do you transform an increasingly white party with a history of benefiting from racially-charged issues into a party that can win majorities in an increasingly multiracial America?  etc.

Watching the McCain campaign, you'd barely even know that these problems exist, let alone that conservatives have any idea what to do about them. But there were people in the Bush Administration who did understand the situation facing the Right, and set out to wrestle with these challenges - and as a result, George W. Bush had a real chance (especially given the political capital he enjoyed after 9/11) to establish a model for center-right governance in the post-Reagan era. That he failed is by no means the greatest tragedy of the last eight years, but it is a tragedy nonetheless - for conservatives, and for the country.

I'm not counseling despair here: There were people in 1976 who thought Richard Nixon had irrevocably squandered the chance to build a new right-of-center majority, and looked how that turned out. But for now, as America goes to the polls, I find myself stuck thinking about the lost opportunities of the last eight years, and the possibility that they may not come round again.

Missing Karl Rove

After the election we're going to read a lot of analyses like this one from Mark McKinnon, arguing that second-guessing is unfair, and that in an impossible year for Republicans, Steve Schmidt and company did the absolute best they could. Today, before McCain roars back in the last three days and renders all the second-guessing moot (feeling jumpy, liberal America?), I want to draw a line in the sand and say No. Allowing that this was a hard time for a Republican to run for President, and allowing that Barack Obama might well have won the White House no matter what McCain did, it's still the case that this has been a lousy, lousy conservative campaign for the Presidency. (Poulos' line about how it's been consistently "flying beneath the pride of conservatives and Republicans" seems like a good way of putting it.) I've defended the McCain folks against the liberal hysteria that treats this as the Most Evil Right-Wing Campaign Ever, and I'd defend them again. But that famous line from Talleyrand - it was worse than a crime; it was a mistake - seems applicable here: It's been worse than an evil campaign; it's been a dumb one.

Not always and everywhere: There were moments when the frantic tactical improvisation worked out well (the "celebrity ad," for instance), and McCain's convention speech was well-crafted and well-aimed, and the Palin pick was the right kind of gamble, I think, even if it was taken without adequate preparation and/or consideration of what they might be getting themselves into. But in the aggregate ... well, I always thought that Karl Rove's political genius was overrated, and that huge political opportunities (to say nothing of policy opportunities) were left on the table during the campaigns of the Bush years. And obviously Rove, Ken Mehlman and company were running campaigns in considerably more favorable political environments. But watching the McCain-Palin ticket stagger through the closing months of this campaign, pinning their hopes on a working-class backlash against the progressive income tax in a state that no Republican has carried in twenty years, has given me a newfound appreciation for Rove's abilities: He might not have found a way to win in 2008, but I don't think his efforts would have been quite so embarrassing to watch.

Maybe I should insert a caveat here, something along the lines of "if McCain wins on Tuesday, Schmidt and Co. are geniuses after all." But the only way McCain wins, so far as I can tell, is if Russia invades Western Europe on Monday, or if the America that shows up to vote next week looks and votes not at all like the America that's been showing up in polls and surveys and every other indicator that political professionals have to work with. Maybe it will: Maybe there are unmappable effects at work in this race, and maybe after Tuesday the entire polling industry will have to close up shop in disgrace. But the job of a campaign is to put their candidate in a position to win with the electorate as it's possible to understand it, not with some hypothetical electorate that might emerge to save you from the fate that all the indicators predicted. Rove succeeded at that task; the McCain campaign appears to have failed. Which means that if they win on Tuesday, it won't be because they were better than we thought they were, but because they were luckier - luckier than we thought, and luckier, as well, than basically every Presidential campaign in the modern history of America.