Plantinga v. Dennett

Now this a discussion I wish we could have seen on YouTube.

Update: There seems to be an audio version here.

Layer Cake

I liked Patrick Ruffini's attack on the Right's Joe the Plumber Wurzelbacher (enough with the nonsense, right?) fixation. But I also liked Daniel Larison's critique of Ruffini's post. And that's because it's useful to think of the problems facing the American Right in terms of layers of misapprehension.

The first layer is pure denialism - the kind of denial that Rush Limbaugh is practicing when he reads anyone who didn't like Bobby Jindal's speech out of his version of conservatism; the kind of denial that insists the Joe the Plumber gambit was a roaring success and that only snobs would have any problem with Sarah Palin's interview prowess; the kind of denial that boos Tucker Carlson for allowing that the New York Times has good reporters; the kind of denial that thinks the GOP can climb back to power on a tower of tea partys and cracks about volcano monitoring. And every attack on this sort of folly is to be welcomed.

But not every attack goes far enough. And I think Larison is right to see in Ruffini's post an essential faith that if you got rid of all the gimmicks and the nonsense and had sober-minded, eloquent people selling the current Republican message on the merits, the GOP would be "the natural governing party" of these United States. This is the second layer of right-wing misapprehension, which recognizes that conservatism has an image deficit and a seriousness deficit, but doesn't go far enough in allowing that it has a substance deficit as well.

The Right has a messaging problem, yes - but it also has a message problem. It could be America's natural governing party, sure - but as long as its economic agenda looks like Jim DeMint's alternative stimulus, full stop, nothing else to see here, it won't be. Republicans are in deep trouble because the economic meltdown was piled on top of George W. Bush's personal unpopularity - but they would be in some kind of trouble no matter what, because the right-wing message on domestic policy hasn't been resonating with "the people in the middle culturally and economically," who Ruffini rightly identifies as the backbone of any plausible conservative majority, for going on years and years now. The current crisis hasn't created the problem; it's taken an existing problem and throw it into sharp relief.

Recognizing that this problem exists is only the beginning of the argument, obviously. Once you allow that conservatism needs a renovated agenda, it's possible to feud endlessly about what that agenda ought to be. But even getting to that feud, and leaving the layers of misapprehension about conservatism's current prospects behind, would be a worthwhile achievement for the Right.

If Obama Fails ...

... and the Republicans are still floundering, what happens? Yglesias says the GOP comes back anyway:

[A] hard-right agenda ... certainly isn't where the country is right now but it's not so unreasonable to think that things might change. I think we'll be growing again in late 2012 and Obama will probably get re-elected no matter Republicans say or do. But it's possible that things will really go off the rails and we'll have a years-long L-shaped recession in which case if what the opposition party has to offer is hard-right nihilism, then hard-right nihilism is what the voters will embrace.

Will Wilkinson says don't bet on it:

... Obama seems to be very boldly arguing: "If not my specific package of policies, then surely disaster!" I think this can be a bit perilous but in this case probably smart since the Republicans are so hapless. If Republicans can sabotage the thrust of the Democrats' policies -- refuse funding for your state, call for a spending freeze -- and the recovery occurs anyway, then Obama's bold conditional is decisively falsified. But voters aren't logicians, and if we get a recovery, Obama's going to get the credit anyway. So that tack seems like a loser for the Republicans even in the best case. (And in the worst case -- everything goes further south and they get pinned with the blame -- totally disastrous.) The only plausible Republican strategy is to put forward an attractive personality able to forcefully and intelligently explain in a relatively detailed way why the Dem's plans are likely to fail, and to forcefully and intelligently articulate a plan likely to work better. That's the only way to sow broad doubt in the wisdom of the majority's leadership: offer an alternative that looks at least as or more credible. David Cameron is a great example of how to do this incredibly well. But as Jindal's embarrassing performance shows, the GOP has absolutely no one capable of doing anything approaching this. So, as far as I can tell, the GOP is going to continue to get flattened, Obama will get basically whatever he wants, and if it doesn't work, then it almost worked and who else are you going to trust?

It's worth bearing in mind that there's a third option. When Jim Fallows anticipated a different (though not entirely different) economic calamity in his big "Countdown to a Meltdown" essay for us several years ago, he framed the whole thing as a strategy memo to a soon-to-be-elected third party candidate, who was on the verge of triumphing after two consecutive failed post-Bush administrations, one Democratic and one Republican. This is obviously an unlikely scenario - but there's nothing written in stone that says the current two-party lock on the presidency has to endure unbroken forever, and a long L-shaped recession in which both parties look ineffectual is exactly the kind of time when unlikely scenarios start looking at least somewhat more likely. Ross Perot's 1992 candidacy, you'll recall, was premised on the idea that the GOP had failed and the Democrats couldn't be trusted; if Obama's presiding over an economic disaster in 2012, then a third-party run premised on the idea that the Democrats have failed and the Republicans can't be trusted might do rather well indeed.

At the very least, I bet Ron Paul could get 5 or 10 percent of the vote running as an Independent in that landscape ...

The Tent Shrinks

At this rate, pretty soon it'll just be Rush and his microphone.

Abortion, Contraception and the States

To Reihan's objections (and those of some readers), I should say that I didn't mean to oversimplify the state-by-state picture on abortion, which is inevitably rather complex. (For instance, it's no doubt true that some of the extremely low abortion rate in Utah and Idaho is explained away by the extremely high abortion rate next door in Nevada, and obviously different dynamics are at work in states with low abortion rates and high out-of-wedlock birth rates, like Louisiana and Mississippi, and states with low abortion rates and lower-than-average out-of-wedlock birth rates, like Utah or Iowa.) All I'm saying is that it's hard to find support for the following propositions, which Will Saletan regularly advances - that a concerted governmental push to expand the use of birth control is the best way to dramatically reduce the number of abortions, and that the intransigence of religious conservatives on this question is keeping the abortion rate artificially inflated. At the very least, the picture is a whole lot murkier than that - and if you really want to prioritize abortion reduction, I think there's considerably more evidence to support a supply-side approach (i.e., making them harder to get) than the demand-side approach that Saletan and others champion.

I should add that I don't expect or want American social policy to reflect the Catholic Church's teaching on contraception, I don't have a problem with our public health services providing access to birth control (if the money in question isn't filtered through Planned Parenthood, that is), and I agree with Reihan that social conservatives shouldn't reject programs like the one in question out of hand. But I also think that an awful lot of the policies liberals like to champion in this area - expanded public-school sex ed programs chief among them - don't deliver anything remotely like the benefits they promise. And I'm extremely wary of defining "common ground" on abortion in terms that essentially require the pro-life movement to give up the store in the legal debate, in exchange for at best marginal returns where the abortion rate is concerned.

The Convention Speech That Wasn't

Larison's take on Jindal's tone-deaf address seems spot-on to me.

The Other Jindal

From Michael Gerson's (pre-speech) column on Bobby Jindal:

At a recent meeting of conservative activists, Jindal had little to say about his traditional social views or compelling personal story. Instead, he uncorked a fluent, substantive rush of policy proposals and achievements, covering workforce development, biodiesel refineries, quality assurance centers, digital media, Medicare parts C and D, and state waivers to the CMS (whatever that is).

Some have compared Jindal to Obama, but the new president has always been more attracted to platitudes than to policy. Rush Limbaugh has anointed Jindal "the next Ronald Reagan." But Reagan enjoyed painting on a large ideological canvas. In person, Jindal's manner more closely resembles another recent president: Bill Clinton. Like Clinton (a fellow Rhodes scholar), Jindal has the ability to overwhelm any topic with facts and thoughtful arguments -- displaying a mastery of detail that encourages confidence. Both speak of complex policy issues with the world-changing intensity of a late-night dorm room discussion.

It's great that he can give a speech like that to conservative activists. Seriously. But it would be even better if he had given a speech like that - a speech that suggests that Republicans are capable of actually running government, as well as running against it - to the American people last night. Instead, we got this:

Their legislation ... includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a 'magnetic levitation' line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called 'volcano monitoring.' Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, DC.

Ch-ching! And hey, it worked for McCain, right? 

Snap Judgments

Obama was fantastic - worlds better than his inaugural. He laid out the most ambitious and expensive domestic agenda of any Democratic President since LBJ, and did it so smoothly that you'd think he was just selling an incremental center-left pragmatism. I think that he has an acute sense - more acute than most people in Washington, probably - of just how much running room is open in front of him at the moment, and he intends to make the absolute most of it. Burkean temperament or no, this was not a Burkean speech by any stretch: It was the speech of a man seeking to turn a moment of crisis into a domestic-policy revolution, and oozing confidence from every pore along the way. Now all he has to do is find a way to pay for it ...
 
And Jindal - yeah, he was just as lousy as everybody's saying. As far as themes and messaging went, he basically chose option A on Ambinder's list - government isn't the solution; pork is the problem; etc. - and embedded it in a weak, sing-song delivery that I suspect left even the people who respond favorably to that message cold. Sure, responding to a Presidential speech is almost always a thankless, hopeless job - but shouldn't someone as smart as Jindal have recognized that, and either turned the opportunity down flat, or found a way to sound like something other than a kindergarten teacher delivering familiar GOP talking points? In the event, his speech was the capstone on a lousy night for conservatism: If that's the best the Right has to offer as a rebuttal to Obama, American liberalism is going to be running untouched down the field for years to come.

Re-Running McCain

Like I said, I'm trying to be patient with the Obama-era GOP: It's a leaderless party in an awfully tough spot. But that doesn't mean that Fairbanks, Yglesias, and Weigel aren't making good points about the weirdness of a battered political party deciding to re-run the none-too-successful tactics of its just-defeated Presidential candidate.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Abortion?

I admire the persistence with which Will Saletan argues for common ground in the abortion debate, and attempts to sell his fellow liberals on the notion that reducing the abortion rate belongs in the Democratic Party's agenda. But I remain unconvinced that his preferred method for such reductions - a dramatic new push, whether political or cultural, to expand the use of contraception in the United States - would produce anything like the results that he envisions.

Consider, for instance, the idea that the government should dramatically expand eligibility for free contraception through Medicaid, a notion that conservatives objected to when it was tacked onto the stimulus package, and which Saletan links to as part of his latest proposed framework for an Obama abortion agenda. Here's Adam Thomas and Isabel Sawhill, both serious folks and proponents of the proposal, on the potential impact of such an initiative:

A recent Brookings Institution policy brief concluded that, in states that have already been granted income-eligibility waivers, this policy led to a significant reduction in the number of sexually-active women who have unprotected sex. We have incorporated this finding into a cutting-edge simulation model of family formation. Our results suggest that a similar expansion in contraceptive services in the remaining states would reduce the annual number of children born out of wedlock by more than 25,000, would reduce the number of pregnancies to unmarried teenagers each year by 19,000, and would reduce the annual number of abortions to unmarried women by nearly 12,000.

That sounds enormously impressive - until you consider that as of 2004, there were 2.8 million pregnancies among unmarried women in the United States, and roughly 1 million abortions. Which means that the universalization of this program, according to its supporters, might reduce the national abortion rate by somewhere between 1 and 2 percent. That's not nothing, obviously, but it's not a whole lot either - and in a country of millions upon millions, where countless trends shift the number of pregnancies and abortions around from year to year, it's perilously close to statistical noise. When you consider that there's good reason to think that Roe v. Wade raised the abortion rate by well over 50 percent, I think you can see why most opponents of abortion look at a "more birth control" strategy as a cop-out, rather than a cure.

But don't listen to me; listen to Will Saletan, in his recent Times op-ed on the same subject:

Eight years ago, the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed over 10,000 American women who had abortions. Nearly half said they hadn't used birth control in the month they conceived. When asked why not, 8 percent cited financial problems, and 2 percent said they didn't know where to get it. By comparison, 28 percent said they had thought they wouldn't get pregnant, 26 percent said they hadn't expected to have sex and 23 percent said they had never thought about using birth control, had never gotten around to it or had stopped using it. Ten percent said their partners had objected to it. Three percent said they had thought it would make sex less fun.

This isn't a shortage of pills or condoms. [emphasis mine - RD] It's a shortage of cultural and personal responsibility. It's a failure to teach, understand, admit or care that unprotected sex can lead to the creation -- and the subsequent killing, through abortion -- of a developing human being.

Well, yeah. But from this admirable premise, Saletan circles back, inevitably, to blaming conservatives yet again - not for supporting policies that cause a shortage of contraceptives, this time, but for cultural messaging that discourages people from using them. Pro-lifers need to recognize that "a culture of life requires an ethic of contraception," he writes. "Birth control isn't a sin or an offense against life, as so many girls and Catholic couples have been taught. It's a loving, conscientious way to prevent the conception of a child you can't bear to raise and don't want to abort."

This makes it sound like the long shadow of Humanae Vitae and the malign influence of the Quiverfull movement are a big part of America's abortion problem. But if religious-conservative objections to contraceptive use were actually a big part of the cultural background to our abortion and out-of-wedlock birth rate, you'd expect to see some actual evidence of it. For one thing, you'd expect evidence that the Catholic Church's position on birth control has a significant impact on American Catholic sexual behavior, let alone on sexual behavior in the society at large. But the vast majority of Catholics are already on board with Saletan's premises. Around 80 percent think the Church should change its teaching on contraception. 88 percent of Catholic doctors prescribe it. As many as 95 percent of married Catholics use it. And I'm pretty sure that the 5-10 percent of Catholics who do obey the Church's teaching aren't having all that many abortions.

Moreover, if Saletan's diagnosis were correct, you'd also expect the pockets of America most influenced by religious conservatism to provide object lessons in the folly of trying to build a culture of life without a culture of contraception. But look at American abortion rates by state: The states with the lowest abortion rates are places like the Dakotas, Utah, Kentucky, West Virginia, Kansas, and Mississippi; the states with the most are places like California, Connecticut, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts. There are liberal states with low abortion rates (your Maines and Minnesotas), and right-tilting states with higher ones, but by and large the most religiously-conservative states seem to be doing a pretty good job on that whole culture of life business already, despite their failure to recognize the moral imperative of welcoming Planned Parenthood with open arms.

As I said, I applaud Saletan's search for common ground, and I recognize that the distance between his idea of compromise and mine reflects deep philosophical differences than no data set can bridge. But I also think it also reflects faulty empirical premises about what causes high abortion rates (and what produces lower ones), and I wish he'd reassess them.

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism?

Matt Continetti's essay on the crisis of American authority called to mind this passage from a perceptive analysis of neoconservatism that Tod Lindberg published several years ago:

... The neoconservative critique of capitalism drew heavily on Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In the neoconservative view, capitalism -- salutary though it was with respect to the efficient allocation of goods and services and accordingly unparalleled as a means for the advancement of people's material prosperity -- was in crisis. The source of this crisis was the deficiency of self-propulsion of capitalism itself. Capitalism, in this view, required something neither contained within nor perpetuated by its system of market economics. This "something" was, in effect, Weber's Protestant ethic: a set of virtues or habits of character -- including thrift, industry, temperance, patience, persistence, and so forth -- whose origin and sustenance came from religious faith and the expectation of salvation as a reward for right earthly conduct. In the absence of these virtues, capitalism could not flourish. Yet capitalism itself did nothing to encourage the virtues upon which it depended. On the contrary, in certain respects, capitalist consumer society worked to undermine those virtues. Whereas once Americans thought it morally praiseworthy and necessary to save money for future consumption, with the arrival of installment credit in the early twentieth century, the habit of deferred gratification gave way to a demand for instant gratification. In the long run, the demand for instant gratification would subvert properly functioning markets and the long-term time horizon required for the success of capitalism.

... by the mid-1980s, many of those traveling under the "neoconservative" label (whether they did so voluntarily or not) had abandoned the original neoconservative critique of capitalism. There were, no doubt, many reasons for abandoning it, including the abatement of inflation and the beginning of a long period of economic growth following the 1982 recession. Stagnation and decline no longer looked to be quite so certain an eventual future as they did in the 1970s. Moreover, with the arrival of glasnost and perestroika in Mikhail Gorbachev's Soviet Union, centrally planned economies no longer looked to be at all a viable alternative to, even if a poorer performer than, market economies. It became increasingly clear that central planning was a route to economic disaster. The notion that a centrally planned system was somehow going to displace the market systems that were doing so well became less and less plausible.

I think, however, that the most important reason for the neoconservative abandonment of the neoconservative critique of capitalism is that it became harder and harder to find evidence regarding the "depleting moral capital" of capitalism. I do not mean by this that capitalism came somehow to be regarded as a source of moral regeneration or of morality (though some were willing to go that far); I mean only that the system's potential for self-perpetuation became more evident. In practice, the system did not lack, but rather seemed to embody, whatever "ethic" was necessary to propel market economies. This "ethic," moreover, was looking less and less Protestant in character and more and more entrepreneurial, involving the acceptance of risk in exchange for the prospect of reward.

I take this view of the resilience of capitalism and market economics to be conventional wisdom now -- and, moreover, to be correct.

The Lives They Lived

I wouldn't say that it was a good a night for Oscar, overall. (Penn over Rourke? Alas ...) But I was glad to see the mad Frenchman from Man on Wire pick up a statue, at least. And the "In Memoriam" montage gets me every time.

Oscar Counterprogramming

Hard to do better than a lengthy conversation about Mulholland Drive, I'd say.

Or, alternatively, an appreciation of The Devil's Advocate.

Oscar, Oscar

It looks like an unfortunate trifecta for this weekend's Academy Awards: A mediocre year for the movies, a distinctly lousy (and little-seen) set of nominees, and a seemingly predictable night of winners to look forward to. True, almost every Oscar night includes at least one upset, so at least there's that possibility to liven things up - but in many of the big categories, the favorite is also the person or film that I'd like to see win. I'll allow that Slumdog Millionaire is overloved, but in this lackluster field of nominees, Danny Boyle and his movie deserve the Oscars they probably have coming to them. Last year I took some pleasure in rooting against Ratatouille for Best Animated Film (it won anyway), but this time around the presumptive favorite, Wall-E, is my favorite too. It's unfair to the other actors in the category that Best Supporting Actor has turned into the Heath Ledger Memorial Award (how can you deny Matilda her statue?), but if anything I think the sense of duty surrounding Ledger's accolades obscure just how fantastic his performance really was. Mickey Rourke's work in The Wrestler was likewise all that it's cracked up to be - and the only person who could possibly upset him is Sean Penn, who doesn't need any more awards or attention. (Rourke's crazy-man act is reaching the point of diminishing returns, too, but he needs to be officially apotheosized before we can get sick of him.) 

That only leaves one (admittedly-implausible) upset to pull for: I'm hoping that Meryl Streep's legion of admirers takes enough votes away from Kate Winslet to let Anne Hathaway somehow sneak off with the statue for her turn in Rachel Getting Married. Don't get me wrong - I love Kate Winslet, always have, and I'm sure her acceptance speech will be entertaining. But first of all, nobody associated with The Reader should be rewarded for their efforts in any way. (I don't agree with everything Ron Rosenbaum says about the film, but I agree with enough of it). Second of all, Winslet was nominated for the wrong movie; she should have been nominated for Revolutionary Road instead. And third, even if the Academy hadn't bollixed the nominations, Hathaway's work in Rachel was still the more revelatory performance - and it was embedded in a superior film to boot.

Obviously, there's a long tradition of giving great actors their Oscars for the wrong movies (see Pacino, Al, and many others), and Winslet's award will be a reward not only for The Reader but for Little Children and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and even Titanic, among many other fine performances. And when Hathaway wins her Oscar in 2017 or so, Rachel Getting Married will doubtless be one of the movies on the Academy's mind when they reward her for playing Marie Curie, or a paraplegic lesbian math genius, or the wife of a concentration camp commandant who falls in love with a Jewish prisoner, or whatever.

But I live in hope: If Marisa Tomei can beat Vanessa Redgrave, Joan Plowright, Miranda Richardson, and Judy Davis at one go (an upset looks better and better with every passing year, by the way - unless you really loved Enchanted April), then Hathaway's unbearable, remarkable performance can win the Academy Award it deserves, and Winslet can put her speech in the drawer and wait another few years for Oscar glory.

Hip-Hop Republicans

Michael Steele sounds clownish, and merits some mockery, but he isn't entirely wrong: Symbolism matters in politics, and there are almost certainly some votes to be gained for the GOP simply by easing the party's optics and rhetoric in a more youth-oriented, multicultural, self-aware direction. (As Mike Huckabee has demonstrated, just being less crabby and more self-deprecating can make a difference in how the media covers you.) But the basic dynamic that Daniel Larison identifies is still the most important one: Policy choices matter most, and for a losing political party whose current raft of policy proposals are deeply unpopular, better communication strategies and candidate recruitment only make sense as a supplement to a message adjustment, not as a substitute for it.

Liberaltarianism, One More Time

Will Wilkinson was taken with this Mark Thompson post, and so was I - albeit for somewhat different reasons. The undercurrent in my frets about a future in which libertarians are absorbed into contemporary American liberalism, as you can probably tell, is my sense that there are real affinities between my own probably half-baked vision for conservative renewal and what the liberaltarians say they're up to; I see them as sparring partners on many issues, obviously, but as potential allies on many others.

So for instance, when Thompson writes that "by treating any and all social safety nets as irreversible steps on the Road to Serfdom, we allow liberals and progressives to shape those policies in ways that are inefficient, ineffective, and overbroad - even though Adam Smith, Hayek himself, and Friedman each advocated for a form of social safety net, demonstrating that social safety nets can be consistent with libertarianism," I think, this is exactly the way that conservatives more generally should be thinking about the welfare state. It's true that Grand New Party was written, in part, as a critique of a certain kind of "libertarianism" - the kind that sees Rudy Giuliani's "tax cuts plus nothing" primary campaign as a model for Republicans, for instance - and obviously the book partakes of a moralism that many libertarians find distasteful. But on a lot of fronts, our analysis was informed by what we (and especially Reihan, as you might expect) saw as the smartest libertarian thinking on policy issues. It isn't a coincidence that Reihan and I and Will Wilkinson all supported a payroll-tax cut as an alternative to the stimulus package, for instance: A smart right-populism and a smart libertarianism have a lot of disagreements, but a lot to talk about as well. And the whole idea of a libertarianism that engages with the welfare state as it actually exists, and seeks revolutions within the form that enhance liberty and opportunity, is roughly what I want to see from the American center-right at the moment - which makes me loath to see people who have ideas along similar lines fleeing into the center-left.

This doesn't mean that there aren't good reasons to flee! But I think that the liberaltarians shouldn't get too carried away by their sudden rediscovery of deep philosophical affinities between libertarians and left-liberalism. These affinities of course exist, but they exist in part because America is a liberal country, where almost everybody has philosophical affinities with everybody else. In a later post, Thompson argues that the Right might benefit from losing its libertarian component because "a conservatism that lacked libertarianism would be able to form around a more ideologically coherent set of beliefs akin to traditional conservatism ...  I can't think of a more appropriate counterweight to [the liberal worldview] than a political coalition formed around the idea of social, economic, and political stability, and a deep-seated sentiment for tradition." I respect the people trying to build a conservatism along these lines, but I just don't think it's possible in the American context: The appeal of dynamism, to borrow from Virginia Postrel, is too pervasive to admit of an effective political coalition organized in opposition to it. Which means that a Right that lost its smartest dynamists wouldn't suddenly be taken over by the Daniel Larisons and Patrick Deneens of the world. It would still be a pro-growth coalition - Rush Limbaugh is nothing if not a liberal in that sense - it would just be a much, much dumber one.

Yes, there's a best-case scenario in which the dumbening of the American Right works out fine for libertarians, because the infusion of "liberaltarianism" suddenly makes the left-of-center much smarter and more freedom-friendly about issues of economic policy. But I think the more likely scenario is that the liberaltarians vanish into the center-left without much of a ripple, leaving a right-wing rump to battle eternally with a fat, lazy, none-too-libertarian left-liberalism. And in fact, that worst-case scenario already exists: It's called the state of California.

The Crisis of the Middlebrow Movie, Cont.

I bet if the Great Emancipator were a superhero (or a '70s-vintage serial killer), Spielberg wouldn't be having so much trouble getting funding ...

How Shame Works

I hope to come back to my conversation with Ta-Nehisi about marriage and all the rest of it soon, but for now I'll just throw out a quick take on the back-and-forth about shame that the discussion has spawned. Here's Adam Serwer:

Conservatives regularly overestimate the beneficial effects of shame. Shame provokes response in the form of impulse, not long term planning. A person who is ashamed isn't going to think, "I'd better get a degree" or "I'd better get married," they're going to think in the short term about what they can do to rectify their sense of self-worth.

How do you see people--men in particular--act when they're ashamed? You rarely see them do something like get married or get a fantastic job; usually they're going to hurt or exploit someone, make them feel as low as they do--this is the lesson learned by the shamed from the shamer, regardless of the lesson the shamer thinks they're teaching the shamed.

I think this overgeneralizes somewhat: The responses to shame are as variable as the human race itself, and the fact that shaming sometimes sets off a self-destructive spiral doesn't mean that in other cases it can't spur repentance, and an amended life. And I think that Megan's response gets at an essential point, which is that shame is useful as a deterrent even when it fails as a corrective. Having your mother kick you out of the house if you get pregnant out of wedlock probably isn't going to improve your life chances, but the fear that your mother might kick you out stands a good chance of deterring you from making a bad decision in the first place. The fact that shame provokes an impulsive response is a feature, not a bug, when you're trying to deter bad behavior that is itself impulsive.

But obviously the destructive cycle Serwer's describing does exist: When people make bad choices, a culture of shame and stigma can make their lot in life worse, not better. Rod Dreher and Peggy Noonan, whose comments on the subject Serwer cites, both make the point that you can strike a balance: "Stigmatize having sex and having babies outside of marriage," as Rod puts it, "while at the same time loving and trying to help those who have babies outside of marriage." This is true in theory, and sometimes true in practice ... but human beings what they are, social stigmas are usually effective precisely because they create suffering, and exclusion, and cautionary tales. Therefore it's not quite right to say, as Rod does, that lifting the stigma on unwed childbearing involved "false compassion." The compassion involved was and is real, and so are its beneficiaries. Many lives really were improved as American society became more tolerant of unwed motherhood - just as many lives were improved when divorce became easier to obtain, and bad marriages easier to walk away from, and so on.

But many other lives were not. And so the battle between social conservatism and social liberalism at the moment isn't a battle between competing utopias, but a battle over which tragic choice is worse: The choice to stigmatize, which can damage and even ruin lives, or the choice to destigmatize, which can damage and ruin countless lives as well. It's a hard enough call that I can safely say I would have sided with the social liberals in a different time and place. But we've come a long way down their road, and I think we know enough about the consequences to say that there would be real gains to human welfare available - for downscale Americans, especially, but not only for them - if we were to go some distance in a more conservative direction.

Whether that's possible, of course, is another question entirely. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth the trying.

Thinking Better Of It

I meant to say this late last week, but forgot: Good for Damon Linker, and may his willingness to backtrack be an example to all of us who occasionally wander a bit too far out on intellectual limbs in the course of the day's blogging.

Point-Counterpoint

On the one hand, Richard Florida's cover story in the latest issue of our magazine, on how the crash will incentivize the reurbanization of America, and benefit mega-cities over exurbs and small towns; on the other hand, David Brooks' column today, on Americans' persistent attachment to the suburbs and the Sunbelt. These two realities aren't always mutually exclusive, as partisans of the Northern Virginian suburbs will be happy to inform you, but the tensions between them - which are culture-war tensions, too, because of the way built environments shape and are shaped by family formation - will define a lot of domestic-policy debates across the next few decades.

The Crisis of the Middlebrow Movie

Apropos of my exchange with Peter Suderman about the comic-bookification of the movies, Peter Bart has a piece (not online) in the latest Vanity Fair that's worth quoting:

Hollywood's seasoned corporate moguls, such as Brad Grey, at Paramount, and Alan Horn, at Warner Bros., acknowledge that the movie business is splitting into two distinct sectors, which have little if anything to do with each other. The principal focus of the major studios is to manufacture tent-pole pictures, most of them based on comic books and video games, and to connect these projects to a maze of ancillary promotions - toys, cars, tie-ins, etc. There has been growing skepticism about the "tween" films - not movies aimed at pre-teens but films such as Body of Lies and The Women, which despite stars qualify as neither franchise films made for teen males nor as "art" films for adults. In the tent-pole business, the concept is the star. Heath Ledger helped The Dark Knight, just as Robert Downey, Jr. added pizzazz to Iron Man, but they weren't the franchise. Tobey Maguire was almost replaced twice as Spider-Man when his demands became too exotic.

This leaves the art-house business to those veteran players who can cope with hardscrabble budgets and understand how to beat the bushes for acquisitions ...

I'm not really worried about the art-house business: Hardscrabble efforts like Rachel Getting Married or The Wrestler often turn out better than their glossier, "let's win an Oscar" counterparts anyway. (You could make five Wrestlers for what it cost to churn out The Reader, and I wish that somebody had.) But I am worried about the fate of the "tweener" - the mass-market, middlebrow films for grown-ups that the studios have traditionally excelled at making. Nobody should shed any tears over the box-office failure of The Women or Body of Lies, obviously, but they're useful stand-ins for genres that don't belong in the art house and don't come with a built-in teen-male audience: Genres like the smart action flick and the female tearjerker; the historical epic and the high-concept thriller, and so forth. In a Hollywood bifurcated the way Bart describes it, we wouldn't have had Jaws or Die Hard, Braveheart or Terms of Endearment, Pretty Woman or Silence of the Lambs or Saving Private Ryan. For that matter, we wouldn't have had original franchises like Indiana Jones or Back To The Future, Star Wars or The Matrix. Where's the comic book tie-in? The pre-existing audience? Why should a studio take the risk when it can just make another Friday the 13th instead?

This is an old concern of mine, and I don't want to overstate the problem: There are plenty of good middlebrow films being made, from thinking man's action movies like the Bourne saga to Pixar's high-concept family films to current hits like Slumdog Millionaire - which, like Juno last year, is earning mass-market grosses on an art house budget - and Coraline. (And of course, there are other dynamics at work besides comic-bookification: One reason that there aren't many big new historical epics being green-lit at the moment, for instance, is that we just endured a slew of lousy examples of the genre.) But as Hollywood adjusts to depression economics, I'm expecting the dynamic Bart describes to sharpen - and I expect that moviegoers will be the poorer for it.

When The Last Pentecostal Is Strangled With the Entrails of the Last John Bircher ...

... Will Wilkinson will consider giving a damn about the fate of the Republican Party.

(Hey, it couldn't hurt to ask.)

Is The GOP Hopeless?

David Frum, pulling no punches:

Have you heard about the marsh mouse? The little swamp critter that got $30 million of stimulus bill spending thanks to Nancy Pelosi? Of course you have! The mouse was highlighted on Drudge and chortled over by Glenn Beck. One Republican congressman actually dandled a toy mouse in debate.

The story's not false exactly. The stimulus money really does contain money for wetlands restoration. One of the wetlands that might benefit really is located on San Francisco Bay. And the marsh mouse really does live there.

... The problem with the story is not that it was false. The problem with the story is that it was stupid.

The US economy has plunged into severe recession ... President Obama and the Democrats have responded by steering the US radically to the left ...And facing all this - we're talking about mice?

Could we possibly act more inadequate to the challenge? More futile? More brain dead?

We in fact have a constructive solution to offer, one that would deliver more jobs faster: the payroll tax holiday, an idea endorsed by almost every reputable right-of-center economist. But that's not the solution being offered by Republicans in Congress. They are offering a clapped-out package of 1980s-vintage solutions, including capital gains tax cuts. Capital gains! Who has any capital gains to be taxed in the first place?

I spent a lot of time during the election just past issuing complaints roughly like this one about the McCain campaign, and the GOP more generally. I've issued fewer over the last few weeks - partially out of exhaustion with the topic, and partially out of a sense that there's nobody to issue them to. At least during the 2008 election the party had a titular leader, from whose campaign a constructive new direction for conservatism might plausibly originate - even if the campaign in question seemed to have little interest in pursuing any such new direction. Whereas today's Republican Party has no leaders at all, if you define leaders as politicians with the credibility and power to chart a new course for the party, as opposed to having it charted for them by the GOP's most vocal constituents and most ideological backbenchers. John McCain was mistrusted by the base, but he at least had run, and won, a national primary campaign, and thus could claim some sort of a mandate to lead the party. Whereas the GOP's leaders in Washington, your Mitch McConnells and John Boehners, owe their power entirely to backroom politics: Nobody loves them, nobody trusts them, and as a result they're in no position to execute the kind of pivots that the party needs to make. One can reasonably expect them to do better than they've done to date when it comes to articulating an actual alternative to Obamanomics - i.e. more Larry Lindsey, less Jim DeMint - but one can't expect them to do much better. They simply don't have enough room to maneuver.

As I see it, there are a few ways to imagine the GOP acquiring the kind of innovative leadership it desperately needs. In one model, somebody who's already in the party's D.C. leadership builds up enough credibility with the conservative base - by successfully derailing some key Obama initiatives, for instance - to promote a new policy agenda without being dismissed as a sellout. The Grand New Party-reading Eric Cantor would be an obvious candidate for this role, and so might Michael Steele, if the GOP has a good midterm election cycle. Both men seem like forward-thinking politicians who are trapped, at the moment, by the need to say the things (and only those things) that the party's base wants to hear; both might become something more impressive if they get some victories under their belts.

But that's a big if - which is why the more likely road to revival for the GOP probably starts outside Washington, with politicians who can afford to be experimental without constantly worrying about what Rush Limbaugh would say about them. This is one of the ways reform happened in the Democratic Party of the '70s and '80s: You had a collection of distinctive and innovative political figures - your "Atari Democrats," your neoliberals, your "New Democrats" - who were testing out new ways of being liberal in statewide races long before their ideas were embraced by the party nationally. (Some of them still haven't been, of course, as Mickey Kaus will be happy to inform you.) What the Republican Party needs, above all, is a generation of politicians who can fill the "center-right" space currently occupied by time-servers like Arlen Specter and Susan Collins with a politics that's oriented around policy, rather than process. It needs a reform caucus that's actually interested in reform (as opposed to deal-cutting), and that's populated with politicians who have tried something new in difficult political terrains, and proven that it might work.

If such a caucus doesn't emerge in Washington, though, then the party has to hope it emerges in the statehouses - and that one such statehouse occupant has what it takes to win the party's nomination, the Presidency, and singlehandedly turn the GOP away from it's self-defeating, self-destructive habits along the way. This is both the easiest way for the party to acquire the leadership it needs, and the hardest: It's the easiest because it only requires the emergence of one great politician, rather than the slow cultivation of a generation of them; and it's the hardest because it depends on the skills and vision of a single reform-minded leader, rather than a pooled efforts of like-minded cohort. Some of the failures of the Bush Administration, it's worth noting, reflect precisely the latter set of dangers: You had a President trying, fitfully but with some sincerity, to create a new kind of conservatism (compassionate, big-government, whatever) without the kind of institutional and intellectual support that his project required. And it's easy to imagine the next Republican President - whether it's Jindal in 2016 or whomever - running into the same sort of problems, and running aground on them as well.
 
But those risks would be preferable to what seems to me like the worst-case scenario for a Republican revival, in which the party regains power without having developed any new leadership at all - as the beneficiary of a disastrous "Obama economy," but without any ideas for how to handle the situation save the same "clapped-out package of 1980s-vintage solutions," as Frum puts it, that too many Republicans are content to offer now. Which is why my watchword for now is patience: The only way conservatism is really going to come back is gradually, and the best thing for right-of-center thinkers to do is to call out bad ideas and promote good ones, and wait for politicians with the wit and courage to give some of the best ideas that bubble up a trying-out. This may not happen at all: The Republican Party could remain dysfunctional for years. But I'm trying not to get too discouraged if it doesn't happen in the first few months of Barack Obama's Washington.

The Future of Liberaltarianism (II)

No, wait, I take it back; maybe I don't wish Will Wilkinson's quixotic project well, for reasons suggested by Reihan's vision of a liberaltarian future:

... I'm on the political right, but I think liberaltarianism is a healthy, constructive development. If social democracy comes roaring back, as I think is very likely, a renewed liberaltarian liberalism could become the new center or even the new right -- this was roughly the case in Cold War Europe.

I think this is unlikely; I also think that a shift in this direction has the potential to turn out badly for almost everyone involved. Here I'm starting from the premise that American politics has been fitfully sorting itself into a meritocracy-versus-populism dynamic, with one party (the Democrats) dominated by the mass upper class and the other party (the GOP) representing the middle and working-class voters who resent this newish elite, for good reasons and for bad. The European model Reihan gestures at has succeeded - to date - by largely marginalizing the latter temper, with the result that the continent's right-populist types (your Le Pens and your Haiders) are simultaneously more extreme and more powerless than the equivalent figures in the United States. But conservative populism in the United States is way too potent to be marginalized in that fashion, I think - which makes it very hard to imagine a scenario where Lindsey-Wilkinson liberaltarianism becomes the right-of-center counterweight to social democracy, and the voters and interests that currently comprise the base of the Republican Party simply fade away into irrelevance.

What could happen, instead, is a bigger-tent liberalism - somewhat chastened, perhaps, by some big-government failures in the Obama era - that makes libertarian intellectuals feel welcome, engages them in conversations about smarter regulations and more efficient tax policy, and generally woos them away from their culturally-dissonant alliance with people who attend megachurches and Sarah Palin rallies. This would make for a smarter left-of-center in the short run, but I think in the long run it would be pernicious. It would further the Democratic Party's transformation into a closed circle of brainy meritocrats, and push the Republican Party in a yet more anti-intellectual direction. And it would produce an elite consensus more impervious to structural critiques, and a right-wing populism more incapable of providing them. The Democratic Party would hold power more often, and become more sclerotic as a result; the GOP would take office less often, and behave more recklessly on those rare occasions when it did manage to seize the reins of state.

This is obviously a political gloss on what is essentially an intellectual project, and I know Will, like many libertarians I admire, prides himself on not thinking in terms of partisanship. But for anyone who cares about political outcomes, I think it's important to consider the correlation of forces when you set out on ideological projects - especially in a country where the two-party structure has been as durable as it's been in ours. I understand the impulse for smart, independent-minded libertarians to flee what seems like an increasingly anti-intellectual American Right and seek conversations and alliances with the friendlier parts of the left-of-center. But the vacuum on the Right also militates in favor of smart, idiosyncratic thinkers trying to fill it, instead of fighting for a seat at the crowded liberal table. That doesn't mean registering as a Republican, attending CPAC, or casting a vote for McCain-Palin (or the next iteration thereof). But it means being open to the possibility that the old fusionism, battered and bruised as it is, may still hold as much promise for the advancement of libertarian policy goals as "liberaltarianism" ever will. I'm sure that the right-of-center conversation would be smarter, richer and better off the more a Will Wilkinson or a Brink Lindsey were involved in it - and that goes for your Tyler Cowens and Megan McArdles as well. And I'm pretty sure that the country would be better off as well.

Authoritarianism Just Around the Corner

It's possible you've also already been following the debate prompted by Damon Linker's attack on Andrew Bacevich's vision of conservatism; if not, go here and here and here; here for Linker's response to his critics; and here and here for more. I would just throw in two points. First, I think that Linker's determined quest to defend his vision of liberalism against all enemies, and to rout theocratic authoritarianism from the field once and for all, is reaching a point of seriously diminishing returns. It always struck me that the small coterie of intellectuals surrounding First Things were exceedingly unlikely candidates for the role Linker cast them in - a near-existential threat to the liberal order, etc. - but at least he was overhyping people who had some claim to political influence. In his latest jeremiad against the illiberal menace, on the other hand, he's moved on to targeting "paleoconservatives" like Daniel Larison, Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher, all of whom are notable not only for being marginal to American politics as its currently practiced, but for liking it that way.

Which brings me to my second point. At the heart of Linker's critique of the theocons, supposedly, wasn't their religious and cultural conservatism per se but their decision to marry religious conservatism to a particular political faction, and to attempt to impose their beliefs on their fellow Americans by legal fiat. So you would think that he would have a high appreciation for the Drehers and Deneens of the world, who conceive of their religious conservatism as a cultural project first and a political project a distant second, if at all ... who have been just as fierce as Linker, if not fiercer, in their attacks on the contemporary Republican Party, the contemporary conservative movement, and the presidency of George W. Bush ... and whose central critique of American culture, that it could stand to inculcate more self-discipline and self-restrain in its citizenry, is looking reasonably compelling at the moment. But no: He wants to rout them from the field as well, attacking even an apolitical cultural conservatism for embodying "the suicide of the critical intellect" (a phrase that seems like a remarkably lousy fit for the group of wildly heterodox, combative and contrarian writers in question), meeting an appeal for greater private virtue with a defense of the virtues of fornication, and insisting that the "Benedict option" in any form is the royal road to Marcel Maciel-esque corruption. Which goes to the suspicion that cultural conservatives always have about the liberal order: That it claims to create a political framework that's studiously neutral between competing modes of thought and life, but when push comes to shove it wants to impose liberalism all the way down.

The Future of Liberaltarianism

You've probably been following this conversation, but here's Will Wilkinson's response to Jonah Goldberg and John Hood on the question of what happens to the Wilkinson/Brink Lindsey theory of "liberaltarianism" in the age of Obama:

I'll let Brink speak for himself, but I'm not that interested in short-term partisan politics. I'm interested in a much longer-term project. I want to help create the possibility of a popular political identity that takes the value of human liberty, in all its aspects, really seriously. As I see it, this project involves an attempt to reunify the separate strands of the American liberal tradition. I'm not sure what it is about that project that would that lead Jonah to think Brink or I should be vexed by the behavior of the Democratic Party and it's operatives...

I think ... the romance of transformative hope is going to wear off pretty quick as all-but-uncontested Democratic policy deepens and lengthens the recession. There's a lot of culturally and psychologically liberal people out there who are, and are going to be, interested in a liberalism that actually works. I want to use this time of ferment to work on developing the missing option in American politics: an authentically liberal governing philosophy that understands that limited government, free markets, a culture of tolerance, and a sound social safety net are the best means to better lives.

So "whatever happened to liberaltarianism" is that it's an ongoing project to change who talks to whom, to freshen the stale dialectic of American politics, and to create new possibilities for American political identity.

This is consonant with what Will's written before on the subject, and as a fan of long-term, slightly quixotic political projects I wish him well. That being said, to become a viable form of political identity, as opposed to a theoretical one, liberaltarianism would need some actual liberals to jump on board the Rawlsekian train. It doesn't have to happen immediately, but it needs to happen at some point - and in that regard, the leftward trajectory of American liberalism at the moment ought to be at least somewhat discouraging to Wilkinson and Co. Yes, maybe when the Obama Administration fails to deliver the eschaton, there will be renewed interest on the American center-left in a libertarian-infused "liberalism that works." But sometimes statist failures only breed more statism. And just as I often fret that my hopes for a right-of-center majority lie somewhere back in the wreckage of the Bush years, I think the liberaltarians ought to worry, just a little, that their moment actually arrived in the Clinton years, and that it's already behind them - somewhere back in the vast obscurity of the political past, where the dark fields of the republic roll on under the night.

Greg Mankiw and the Republican Party

A couple of days ago, Yglesias dinged Greg Mankiw for suggesting elegant right-of-center alternatives to the stimulus package that are untethered from political reality. Mankiw responded with a defense of impractical ideas, and yesterday Yglesias responded in turn:

I think it's great for well-informed people to write about abstract policy ideals. At the same time, if you're going to comment on public affairs, it seems worthwhile to comment on what's actually happening. There are, right now, four ideas that have substantial support in congress. There's the House stimulus bill, the Senate stimulus bill, the Jim DeMint alternative that consists of large permanent tax cuts, and there's the idea of doing nothing.

... Based on what his ideal policy would be, it seems to me that Mankiw probably, like me, prefers the Democratic bills to doing nothing and prefers nothing to the DeMint plan. But Mankiw hasn't come out and said that. Instead, he's blogged about his ideal bill and linked-without-comment to lots and lots of stimulus opponents. And I haven't seen him offer any commentary or links on the main Republican alternative. One interpretation is that this is Mankiw being loyal to the abstract purity of the economics discipline. But it's unlikely that anyone so committed to the abstract purity of the discipline that he wouldn't offer an opinion on legislative options would have served as Chairman of the CEA. More plausibly, as a former CEA Chair who hopes to work again in Republican Party politics, Mankiw is hesitant to offer an honest opinion of the congressional GOP's legislation or the relative merits of their ideas and the congressional Democrats' ideas.

Jon Chait calls this a "fairly devastating critique." I'm not so sure, because I'm not so sure it's fair to call the DeMint plan the "main Republican alternative" to the stimulus. It's the alternative that liberals like to highlight, because it's the most ideologically-rigid and fiscally irresponsible, but you could just as easily call John McCain's proposal the main Republican alternative: It attracted more Republican votes than DeMint's, and its lower price tag, shorter-term horizons, and payroll-tax component puts it closer to Mankiw's ideal stimulus, I think, than either the House bill, the Senate bill, or the "doing nothing" option. (And there have been some other Republican amendments proposed as well, a few of which Mankiw might support - though none are as comprehensive as McCain's proposal, or DeMint's.)

That being said, the DeMint proposal did attract thirty-six Republican votes, and it does reflect where a large portion of the American Right stands at the moment - i.e., appropriately firm in their opposition to the Democratic agenda, but disconnected from both fiscal and political reality in their proposed alternatives. Republican office-holders need to thread a needle where this landscape is concerned, but conservative intellectuals have an obligation to be forthright about it: I understand Mankiw's reluctance to muck around in the realm of the politically-feasible, but the Republican Party and the country alike would be better off if he and others like him didn't just propose good right-of-center ideas, but called out bad ones.

Being British, Then and Now

From the decline-and-fall annals, it seems like these two items belong together - perhaps with this essay to link them up.

Social Conservatism and the Coates Family

In the course of a discussion of Big Love, Ta-Nehisi had a moving post about his own family's complications, which I linked to in a post of my own, via a remark that HBO's portrait of suburban polygamists "captures the kinds of familial confusions that post-Sexual Revolution Americans already experience as a matter of course." Now he writes, in response:
 

I would obviously differ with Ross over the "familial confusions" and "post-Sexual Revolution" characterization of my own family. To the contrary, I'd say if you laid out the basic, traditional values you'd want parents to communicate to kids we had them.

It's true that there are seven of us by four mothers. It's true that we didn't all grow up under the same roof. It's true that some of us did time in the projects, and some of us didn't. But it's also true that I've got a brother who's a civil engineer, another who's a programmer for Pixar, a sister who works for the AARP, a brothers who just graduated and is apping for law school, a brother and sister who work with my Dad at the company he founded in his basement, and so on...

It's also true that I'm the one who spent the most time in a "traditional" two-parent household. But more true, is that out my Dad's kids, I'm the biggest screw-up. I'm the only one who was kicked out of high school--twice. I'm also the only one who didn't graduate from college. I was also the second youngest to have a child. When I dropped out, it was like the world ended for my parents. And then it ended again when Kenyatta got pregnant. And then it ended again when we didn't get married. And then it ended again when I came to New York. And the saga continues...

My point is that while we didn't have the artifice of the traditional family, in terms of values, goals and outcome--to paraphrase Malcolm--we were the family the Waltons thought they were. We were the ones Reagan and the conservatives were waiting for--they were just too single-minded to see.

I think he's reading my language as more pejorative than I intended it: The word "confusions," in particular, was just a stand-in for "complicated, hard-to-summarize family structures that don't fit the nuclear-family model." But let me uncork one of my patented on-the-one-hand, on-the-other hedges in response to Ta-Nehisi's broader point. On the one hand, what he's getting at here is precisely the thing that a lot of socially-conservative rhetoric is deaf to - which is not just the extent to which the post-nuclear family society is already here, but the extent to which, for an lot of people in this enormous country of ours, it basically seems to work. One man's "dysfunctional family" is another man's, well, family: That divorced father with the second wife is your father, and his second round of kids are your half-siblings; that out-of-wedlock baby is your baby, or else your nephew or your cousin or your best friend's child); and so on. (Without "family breakdown" of various kinds, millions of Americans wouldn't even exist.) The generalizations, whether moral or social science-y or both, that undergird social conservatism often break down on a case-by-case basis. There are third marriages that are healthier than first marriages; unwed mothers who do a better job than married ones; kids who are better off being raised by a village, if you will, than by an abusive biological father. And it's a rare American who hasn't experienced or at least crossed paths with a family like Ta-Nehisi's, where the supposed "dysfunction" turns out better for almost everyone involved than what a lot of ostensibly more-functional families have to offer.

But on the other hand, the generalizations matter too. The "artifice" of the traditional family isn't just an artifice, and the values that social conservatives hold so dear - monogamy, marriage vows, the idea that every kid deserves a mother and a father in his life - don't just exist to make people in non-traditional families feel bad about themselves. In the aggregate, Dan Quayle was right. In the aggregate, marriage is better for kids than single parenthood. In the aggregate, marriage is better for men and women than long-term cohabitation. In the aggregate, divorce is bad news - for your finances, your health, and your children's long-term prospects. And in the aggregate, if you're concerned about income inequality or social mobility or the crime rate or just about any area of socioeconomic concern, then you should be at least moderately fretful about the long, slow decline of the American two-parent family - among blacks, whites, and Hispanics alike.

These aggregates don't capture the lived reality of millions of American lives, and they can easily become rote and hollow pieties. But they capture a pretty important reality nonetheless.

Here I hope Ta-Nehisi won't mind my quoting his post about why he and his partner, Kenyatta, are unmarried despite having a child together, which I meant to link to months ago. You should read the whole thing, but here's an excerpt:

As much as I can recall, there were basically three reasons for us to get married. 1.) I might leave. Marriage would force me to do the right thing. 2.) To declare our commitment to each other before a community of people whom we loved. 3.) The business reasons--the legalities of your estate and guardianship. I found--and still find--the first two reasons were utterly unconvincing. The third held some sway, but with the help of a lawyer we've managed to take care of that. The first turned marriage into a kind of insurance policy, and I just believed that if you felt you needed insurance for the person you were having kids by to stick out, you needed to reconsider the whole proposition. The commitment and community reason held some appeal. But I believed, and still believe, that long-term romantic partnerships are between the two people entering into it.

I hated the idea of public declarations, because the life blood of the relationship--what bills to pay, how to raise your child, your love life--all of that happened when no one else was around. Kenyatta knows more about me than any human being walking the earth--and this is as it should be. No one knows more about my strengths and my weaknesses, my failings and my successes. I trust her to the end. But that trust was worked for--it was not declared or conjured by the presence of other people ...

That gets at the essential truth for me--a relationship couldn't be about talking to other people. It couldn't be about telling other people what I was gonna do; it had to be about the actual work. From that perspective, a wedding was abominable to me. It was the antithesis of everything I wanted--a vain spectacle of love, when love is to be demonstrated, it is to be done, it is to be worked like a job ....

There's serious truth here - but again, it's not the only truth. Yes, the best relationships shouldn't need institutional hedges against infidelity and/or abandonment. But an awful lot of relationships worth fighting for do end up benefiting from being hedged around with institutional supports - because life is long, people are complicated, and you don't always know when you're starting out what you'll need to reach the end of the road together. Yes, relationships are about the two people involved far more than they're about anybody else. But that doesn't mean that they aren't also about the community, particularly when kids are involved. The private is central and essential, but it still spills over into the public; your relationship is about you and your partner, but it's also, inevitably, about your friends and neighbors as well.

And these two points go hand in hand. When people don't do the right thing, whether by their partner or more importantly by their kids, it's by definition a problem for the community, because it's the community that's left to pick up the pieces. Which is why it makes sense for your community to ask you for a public commitment when you set out to rear a family, whether you think that you and the mother/father of your child needs such a thing or not. You may be sure that you're in the kind of relationship that won't benefit from an institutional commitment, but the community doesn't know that: It just knows that in the aggregate, public commitments tend to be stronger than private ones - and thus better for parents, for children, and for society writ large. So a community that asks for public commitments isn't disrespecting your potential exceptionalism; it's just asking you to respect the aggregate, and to set an example for the people who might not be as exceptional as you.

And the truth, as anyone who's read his blog or his book knows full well, is that Ta-Nehisi is exceptional - the exceptional son of an exceptional father and family. But most people aren't exceptional. Most American families in which a single man fathers seven kids by four mothers don't produce engineers, Pixar programmers, and writers for the Atlantic. And that's why norms matter, why institutions matter - and sometimes why stigmas matter as well. Not for the sake of Ta-Nehisi's partner and child - I think things are going to turn out pretty well for the family Coates no matter what - but for the sake of all those people who won't be as lucky in their mate and in their parents.

About That Pelham Remake ...

As if on cue, here's the poster. (And now that I've seen his badass tattoo, all my doubts about Travolta filling Robert Shaw's shoes have been put to rest ...)

The Grabbing Hand

This strikes me as a rather odd argument from Michael Kinsley. He notes that as of 2004, the typical American couple aged 65-74 had accumulated a net worth of $691,000. He further notes that many of these couples will die well before they've spent their way through their nest egg, "passing hundreds of thousands of dollars on to the next generation in their wills." Then he points out that at least some of the money these well-heeled retirees pass on to the heirs will come, not from their own savings, but from Social Security and Medicare - which "are supposed to be insurance against the perils of old age," rather than "gifts or subsidies to the children of retirees." Which leads him to this conclusion:

... if our elderly woman dies with $691,000 in the bank, it's evident that she didn't need the government money to pay for her health care or to avoid plunging into poverty. She wasn't lying or cheating--she might have been legitimately worried--but her worries turned out to be unnecessary. And society, having kept its promise to her, should get at least part of that money back. Oh, yes, designing a system to achieve this would be a nightmare--maybe impossible. The incentive for old folks to squander their savings would be enormous. Maybe it can't work. But the point is worth keeping in mind as we enter President Obama's "new age" of "hard choices."

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't Kinsley's premise just an argument for the well-worn but nonetheless-correct idea that we ought to keep entitlements solvent by means-testing them? And if that's so, why in God's name would you possibly want to devise some sort of cumbersome system in which "society" (i.e. the government) reclaims unspent Social Security checks after a retiree shuffles off this mortal coil, when you could just cut smaller checks to well-off retirees in the first place? With means-testing, people would pay Social Security taxes, and then be paid benefits proportionate to their ability to support themselves in old age. With Kinsley's system, people would pay Social Security taxes, be paid benefits once they retire, and then have those benefits reclaimed, somehow, after they die, to be re-spent on other worthy causes. In other words, the government would take your money, give it back to you, and then take it back again, this time permanently, if you don't spend it before you die. Which approach sounds more efficient and reasonable to you?

I understand that means-testing is anathema to many liberals, who want to keep the "middle class" in middle-class entitlement, lest public support for the system erode.  (And not, of course, because they have an ideological bias toward bigger government - perish the thought!) But Kinsley isn't one of them: He even argued for means-testing in the midst of great liberal freakout over Bush's Social Security reform package. So why would he trade an idea that makes all kinds of sense for an idea that's at once cockamamie and unworkable? It can't just be for the sake of having something new to say about the issue, can it?

The Remaking of Pelham One Two Three

In my last post, I noted that "an industry that can remake The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is an industry that can remake anything." This was ambiguously phrased, as Jonah Goldberg's outraged pro-Pelham response makes clear, so let me rephrase it: An industry that remakes an unimprovable, not-all-that-famous, era-specific film for absolutely no good reason will remake anything. Remaking Pelham is the equivalent of Richard Linklater's equally pointless Bad News Bears remake (and not just because they both star Walter Matthau), except that Bears is a more famous film, so at least Linklater's effort had an obvious commercial rationale. (Happily, though, it tanked anyway.) Moreover it's only been a few years since Spike Lee made Inside Man, an intermittently-entertaining thriller that was absolutely rife with Pelham homages, and that starred Denzel Washington as the New York cop charged with defusing a hostage situation. Naturally, the Pelham remake stars ... Denzel Washington as the New York cop charged with defusing a hostage situation. Brilliant! Though not quite as brilliant as casting John Travolta in a role previously occupied by Robert Shaw: That casting coup requires an idiocy so sublime it can only be called genius, which is of course exactly what you'd expect from a film directed by Tony Scott.

Let's go to the videotape:

Telling and Retelling

It's a rare day when I can recruit Peter Suderman to my superhero-movie skepticism, so I have to pounce on this:

I am worried, to an extent, about the way Hollywood is trending towards recycling its properties. Yes, Tinseltown has been peddling recycled goods for a while now, but increasingly, it seems as if most major projects are sequels, adaptations, or reboots. But I'm genuinely starting to wonder if we aren't headed toward a Hollywood that looks a lot more like the world of comics than the world of novels.

My worry is that rather than storytellers, the big Hollywood studios will become property owners, each with its own stable of recognizable icons, some brought from other mediums, some original to cinema: Transformers, Freddy, Jason, Spider-Man, Batman, James Bond, Jason Bourne, Robocop, Aliens, and on and on and on. My sense is that just as the major comic book publishers have largely spent their time and money recycling the same familiar characters for the last five decades or so, the big movie studios are trending toward a similar model. In the last few years, we've seen Die Hard, Rambo, Rocky, and Indiana Jones revived. We've watched Bond and Batman get total overhauls. A Robocop reboot is in the works. Kids shows from the 1980s seem to be hot properties: Transformers and Ninja Turtles have already made comebacks, G.I. Joe is coming this summer, and He-Man is on its way. And, of course, there's another Friday the 13th film hitting theaters this week.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love comic books, comic-book movies, and serialized genre fiction of all sorts. But it does strike me as sort of a shame that Hollywood, perhaps the greatest outlet for popular storytelling the last 100 years, now seems far less concerned with telling stories and far more concerned with retelling them.

Hollywood has always retold more than it's told, whether it's churning out westerns or zombie movies or paranoid thrillers. And that isn't necessarily a bad thing: William Shakespeare rarely made up his own stories, after all, and our pop culture would be a lot poorer without the reboots of James Bond and Battlestar Galactica, to take a couple of recent examples of successful recycling jobs. But the recent superhero glut represents, as Peter's analysis suggests, a symbiosis between the movie business and another creative industry that tends even more than Hollywood toward endless sequel-making, recycling, rebooting and spin-offs. And I think it's reasonable to fret about a compounding effect. Obviously, an industry that can remake The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is an industry that can remake anything, but your average film - even your average blockbuster - doesn't have sequels and spin-offs and imitations in its DNA quite the way a superhero movie does. Which means, I fear, that the more of them you get, the more of them you get, until it's Aquamen all the way down.

A-Rod For the Hall?

Jayson Stark, on baseball's latest tarnished star:

I'm willing to bet right now that Alex Rodriguez will join that Cooperstown missing-persons list -- no matter how many home runs he hits, no matter how he chooses to spin Selena Roberts and David Epstein's impeccably reported story on SI.com.

So if that's true, think of where this sport almost certainly will find itself 15 years from now:

The all-time hits leader (Mr. Peter E. Rose) won't be in the Hall of Fame.

The all-time home run leader (assuming that's where A-Rod's highway leads him) won't be in the Hall of Fame.

The man who broke Hank Aaron's career record (Barry Bonds) won't be in the Hall.

The man who broke Roger Maris' single-season record (Mark McGwire) won't be in the Hall.

The man who was once the winningest right-handed pitcher of the live-ball era (Roger Clemens) won't be in the Hall.

The man with the most 60-homer seasons in baseball history (Sammy Sosa) doesn't look like he's headed for the Hall, either.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Stark's right about what the baseball writers will do when the rest of the steroid era's stars hit the Cooperstown ballot. But I think that I would vote for A-Rod to go the Hall of Fame - and for Bonds, and for Clemens, and maybe even for Sammy Sosa. I don't know exactly where steroid use should sit on the hierarchy of sins against the game: I think it's worse than throwing spitballs and not as bad as throwing games, but how much worse and how much less noxious I'm not entirely sure. But I do know that to date, the only otherwise-deserving players who've been denied entry to the Hall - Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson - have been those who were guilty of infractions that got them banned them from the game for life. Now perhaps steroid users should be banned for life, but the fact remains that A-Rod and others stand accused of violating a rule that carried no penalty save treatment at the time that they (and dozens if not hundreds of other players whose names haven't been leaked) broke it, and that today only gets you banned outright if you're a three-time offender. And I think it's a good rule of thumb that if you're allowed to continue playing major league baseball after committing a given infraction, you shouldn't be disqualified - informally or formally - from its Hall of Fame.

This isn't to say that the steroid effect shouldn't be considered in evaluating a player's fitness for the Hall. I wouldn't give A-Rod or Bonds the honor of a first-ballot induction, and I think that evidence of steroid use is a good reason for keeping borderline HoF candidates out. If you think a player wouldn't have reached Hall-worthy numbers without cheating - as I suspect McGwire wouldn't, for all his gifts - then don't vote him in. But there's no question that Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez and Roger Clemens would have made the Hall without the edge that steroids provided. And if you grant that premise, I think that they belong there, unless the sport is willing to take the plunge of banning them from the diamond permanently.

The Trouble With Centrism

The liberals are angry, and not without reason. You can imagine a world in which "centrist" Senators used their awesome deal-making powers to forge compromises that incorporate ideas from the left and right alike. A world in which moderate "gangs," in David Brooks' formulation, actually put meat on the bones of Barack Obama's promise to end politics as usual. A world in which Susan Collins, Ben Nelson, Arlen Specter and Joe Lieberman emerged as ardent champions of, say, a stimulus approach divided evenly between billions in Keynesian spending and billions for the sort of payroll tax proposal that people like Larry Lindsey and Greg Mankiw have been championing - or some similarly wonky, high-concept policy compromise. A world of bipartisanship and postpartisanship and everything in between.

But that's not the world we live in. In this world, centrist Senators exist to take politics as usual - whether it's tax cuts in Republican eras, or spending splurges in Democratic ones - and make it ever so slightly more fiscally responsible. So if the GOP wants, say, $500 billion in tax cuts, the country clearly needs $400 billion in tax cuts - but not a penny more! And if the Democrats want $900 billion in stimulus, then the best possible policy outcome must be ... $800 billion in stimulus! To read this Arlen Specter op-ed, justifying both the stimulus package and the cuts the "gang of moderates" have attempted to impose, is to encounter a mind incapable of thinking about policy in any terms save these: Take what the party in power wants, subtract as much money as you can without infuriating them, vote yes, and declare victory.

Now fiscal responsibility is generally a good thing, and so a centrism mindlessly focused on tweaking legislation away from deficit spending has its uses. But what Nelson, Collins, Specter and Co. have done isn't a new kind of politics. It's the definition of politics as usual. And in this particular case, there's a reasonable argument that it's actively pernicious - that if you can't shrink the stimulus package much more substantially than the centrists have done, you shouldn't shrink it at all. There's a case to be made for a stimulus that's radically different than the one we have now; there's a case to be made for a stimulus that's like the one we have now, but a great deal smaller and more targeted; and there's a case to be made for a stimulus that's absolutely gargantuan. But thanks to the centrists, we're getting the cheapskate version of the gargantuan version: They've done absolutely nothing to widen the terms of debate about what should go into the bill, and they've shaved off just enough money to reduce its effectiveness if Paul Krugman is right - but not nearly enough to make it fiscally prudent if the stimulus skeptics are right. 

This means that if the damn thing doesn't work, we won't even know whom to blame. But it wouldn't be crazy to start by blaming the centrists.

Science and Other Beliefs

Jim Manzi and Alan Jacobs have already commented on Jerry Coyne's brief for the utter incompability of science and religion, and I basically share their view of the difficulties with Coyne's argument. The core problem, it seems to me, is that Coyne wants to contrast scientific rigor with religious fuzziness and only religious fuzziness; he doesn't want to admit that many realms of human thought and argument are more like theology than chemistry, which is to say that they don't come with a "laboratory-tested" seal of approval.

So he sets up the contrast between religion and science as follows:

What, then, is the nature of "religious truth" that supposedly complements "scientific truth"? The first thing we should ask is whether, and in what sense, religious assertions are "truths." Truth implies the possibility of falsity, so we should have a way of knowing whether religious truths are wrong. But unlike scientific truths, religious ones differ from person to person and sect to sect. And we all know of clear contradictions between the "truths" of different faiths. Christianity unambiguously claims the divinity of Jesus, and many assert that the road to salvation absolutely depends on accepting this claim, whereas the Koran states flatly that anyone accepting the divinity of Jesus will spend eternity in hell. These claims cannot both be "true," at least in a way that does not require intellectual contortions.

Assertions about God's nature also differ among faiths. Giberson explains, for example, that "centuries of Christian reflection on the nature of God have highlighted various characteristics of God: justice, love, goodness, holiness, grace, sovereignty, and so forth." But to those of other faiths, God can be vengeful, as Yahweh was in the Old Testament. Jews cannot imagine an incarnated God, the Word made flesh. Hindus, like ancient Greeks, accept multiple gods with different personalities. To deists, god is apathetic, while many theologians in all the monotheistic faiths claim that we cannot know anything about God's attributes. So which of these many characterizations is "true"? Anything touted as a "truth" must come with a method for being disproved--a method that does not depend on personal revelation. After all, thousands of people have had delusional revelations of "truth" with horrifying consequences.

As Manzi notes, "what Coyne is implying here is that scientific truth is the only form of truth; that no other way of knowing anything has any value or worth responds." But that's not what he actually believes, because further down in the essay we have this:

... the most important conflict--the one ignored by Giberson and Miller--is not between religion and science. It is between religion and secular reason. Secular reason includes science, but also embraces moral and political philosophy, mathematics, logic, history, journalism, and social science--every area that requires us to have good reasons for what we believe.

But "reason" and the "scientific method" are not coterminous: One can reason productively about questions that cannot be resolved through falsification tests. If this weren't the case, philosophy departments, historians, polemicists, and many social "scientists" would be out of business in a hurry. Indeed, if you took the two paragraphs quoted above, which dismiss the truth claims of religion, and substituted, say, "political philosophy" for "faith and "religon" throughout, the critique would make just as much sense (and just as little). Political philosophies vary from person to person and sect to sect; there are clear contradictions between the "truth claims" of, say, Locke and Hobbes, let alone Rawls and Plato; assertions about the nature of man differ wildly from philosopher to philosopher; and there's no empirical test one could devise, so far as I know, to disprove the arguments of The Genealogy of Morals.

Now of course religion is not a thing like political philosophy. But there are similarities between the way that belief operates in both religion and in politics. In making their case, an apologist for Christianity and an apologist for, say, liberal democracy are likely to draw on a similarly hodgepodge-ish set of claims - some philosophical, some historical, some scientific, some anthropological and some personal. Which is to say, both political and religious beliefs depend, in part, on an agglomeration of contentions and experiences that persuade, rather than a set of findings and experiments that prove. Obviously this analogy breaks down in  crucial respects: Cults of personality aside, there's no direct analogue in politics to the kind of personal experience in which the most intense forms of religious belief are grounded. But where the intellectual case for religion is concerned, the analogy holds up well enough to be worth keeping in mind when confronted with the following argument from Coyne:

In the end, then, there is a fundamental distinction between scientific truths and religious truths, however you construe them. The difference rests on how you answer one question: how would I know if I were wrong? Darwin's colleague Thomas Huxley remarked that "science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact." As with any scientific theory, there are potentially many ugly facts that could kill Darwinism ... Since no such facts have ever appeared, we continue to accept evolution as true. Religious beliefs, on the other hand, are immune to ugly facts. Indeed, they are maintained in the face of ugly facts, such as the impotence of prayer. There is no way to adjudicate between conflicting religious truths as we can between competing scientific explanations. Most scientists can tell you what observations would convince them of God's existence, but I have never met a religious person who could tell me what would disprove it. And what could possibly convince people to abandon their belief that the deity is, as Giberson asserts, good, loving, and just? If the Holocaust cannot do it, then nothing will.

But of course people move in and out of religions all the time, based on experiences they've had, polemics they've read, and so forth. The belief in God is no more impervious to argument, alteration or abandonment than a belief in Randian objectivism or Rawlsian liberalism. Pace Coyne, the problem of theodicy does, in fact, persuade some people to abandon their belief in God - just as the sense that they've encountered God in prayer does, in fact, persuade some spiritually-inquisitive agnostics to take up a religion. Some religions' claims about the world look more implausible than others; some religions (like some political ideologies) lose adherents because their predictions don't come true; some religions clash directly with the current scientific consensus and some do not. (Even Coyne, who I think wildly overstates the conflict between Christianity and science, allows that "pantheism and some forms of Buddhism" are potentially compatible with scientific truth.) It's true that I can't think of a single one-off experiment that would disprove my belief in God once and for all, but I can think of all kinds of experiences and discoveries that would weaken that belief. And I'm pretty sure that Mother Teresa doubted the truth claims of Christianity more frequently than, say, Howard Dean has ever doubted the truth claims of the Democratic Party.

None of this means that Coyne is wrong to argue that science is more empirically-rigorous than religion, and thus worth favoring, provisionally at least, whenever a scientific claim conflicts directly with a religious one. But the standards of scientific rigor simply aren't the only standards that there are for holding warranted beliefs. And if you applied Coyne's "method of disproof" standard to every important question in life, you'd end up paralyzed by indecision - you'd never cast a vote or marry a woman, let alone choose which God to worship, or whether to worship one at all.

A Rare Combination

Kaus, on the just-stiffed Anthony Zinni:

There aren't many respected foreign policy machers who were right on the Iraq war (no) and on the surge (yes).

It's true! So true, in fact, that I'm having trouble coming up with many more names who belong in this small but praiseworthy club. Seems like a question for the hive-mind at Foreign Policy ...

Liberals, Ideology, and Big Government

Several years ago, in a piece that's long since vanished into The New Republic's world-devouring archives, Jon Chait suggested that liberalism was, by its very nature, more pragmatic and less ideological than conservatism. (As you may remember, this contention was not met with universal agreement from thinkers to his right.) The nub of his argument ran as follows:

We're accustomed to thinking of liberalism and conservatism as parallel ideologies, with conservatives preferring less government and liberals preferring more. The equivalency breaks down, though, when you consider that liberals never claim that increasing the size of government is an end in itself. Liberals only support larger government if they have some reason to believe that it will lead to material improvement in people's lives. Conservatives also want material improvement in people's lives, of course, but proving that their policies can produce such an outcome is a luxury, not a necessity.

The contrast between economic liberalism and economic conservatism, then, ultimately lies not only in different values or preferences but in different epistemologies. Liberalism is a more deeply pragmatic governing philosophy--more open to change, more receptive to empiricism, and ultimately better at producing policies that improve the human condition--than conservatism.

The piece concluded with a bold prediction, which seems worth re-examining now that the Democrats are actually running the government:

Bush's administration gives primacy to political advisers over policy wonks in large part because they have no need to debate their ends, only the means of achieving them ... The next liberal administration, whenever it happens, will not be nearly so certain. Aside from rolling back conservative excesses, its economic agenda will take its cue from external events, and the decisions it arrives at could, in time, be cast aside through experimentation. Ultimately, those policies, whether they move left or right, will be measured against their effect on people's lives, not the degree to which they bring the government closer to some long-ago agreed-upon vision. In time, those policies will be altered yet again to suit a changing world. This is known as progress.

We're only two weeks into the new age of liberalism, but so far, Chait's been utterly vindicated, don't you think? Indeed, the above paragraph strikes me as a near-perfect distillation of the process that has produced the current stimulus package: A clear-eyed, cool-headed, non-ideological pragmatism, untouched by any pre-existing wish lists or biases. 

I'm being sarcastic, obviously. Yet of course there are many, many smart liberals - from Paul Krugman to, well, Barack Obama - who would say that Chait has been vindicated, because whatever its faults the stimulus bill is ultimately non-ideological: Shoveling vast amounts of money out the door is simply what you do in circumstances like these if you want to avoid utter economic calamity. The money-shovelers are empiricists, in other words, and their opponents are know-nothings.

But this is one of the many, many cases where the Chait thesis breaks down, because of course the empirical conclusions that undergird the pell-mell rush to spend as much money as possible are eminently contestable, and the contest tends to break down along, well, ideological lines.So smart liberals are more likely to find the Keynesian model persuasive (and crack jokes about the need for "Keynesian reeducation camps" to get the voting public on board), smart libertarians and conservatives are more likely to raise doubts about its track record - and the question of which comes first, the ideology or the empirical analysis, is essentially unanswerable. Some people are Keynesians because they find the case for stimulus persuasive, presumably; some people find the evidence for Keynesianism persuasive because they're liberals, and thus predisposed to support government spending in general; and many people fall somewhere in between. And the same goes on the other side: I like to think that I'm interested in evidence-based policymaking, but I'm sure that I wouldn't find Tyler Cowen and Greg Mankiw's stimulus skepticism half so persuasive if I weren't already predisposed to tilt against trillion-dollar boosts to big government. In either case, where you place the burden of proof - about the stimulus, or about any government intervention to come - depends on the philosophical premises you start with.

This is not to say that there aren't degrees of ideology and degrees of pragmatism, or that some thinkers and some politicians aren't more empirical than others. And it's certainly possible to imagine - and hope for, from this administration - a liberalism that's more pragmatic and evidence-based than was George W. Bush's conservatism. But the debates that have dominated the first two weeks of the Obama Presidency ought to be an object lesson in why ideological preconceptions always matter, no matter how empirically-minded you aspire to be.

Refugee, Run

No musings on the follies of Davos Man, I think, would be complete without a link to this bit of beyond-parody folly.

(h/t: Alex Massie)

Autopsying Conservatism

I apologize for throwing up nothing but links today, but I think that between John O'Sullivan, Russell Arben Fox, Yuval Levin, Damon Linker, and Conor Friedersdorf, you can get a pretty good sense of the strengths and weaknesses of Sam Tanenhaus's big "end of conservatism" essay in the latest TNR without my chiming in.

Potpourri

Jonathan Last on the sports bubble.

Peter Suderman on the difference Liam Neeson makes.

Yuval Levin on the meaning of Sarah Palin.

Cato Unbound debates the value of partisanship.

Five looks at Terence Stamp.

Alan Jacobs looks at Auden.

And if for some reason you haven't read Mark Bowden on the making of an NFL telecast, do so now, before the memory of (possibly) the best Super Bowl ever starts to fade.

Hard Lessons

I'm probably not going to make it all the way through the Inspector General's illuminating and depressing report on everything that went wrong in Iraq; you probably aren't either. Fortunately, David Frum is doing it for us. 

Anne Rice's Christ

This has not been Roman Catholicism's finest month, to put it mildly. The Pope's badly-handled de-excommunication decision is still rippling, and the Vatican has only just now gotten around to issuing the sort of statements that should have accompanied the initial announcement. And yesterday came news that the late Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ and a favorite of John Paul II, may have been even more like a character straight out of a Jack Chick pamphlet than he previously appeared: To the persuasive accusations of sexual abuse, it seems we can add mistresses and illegitimate children as well.

The only good news (for Catholics, but not only for Catholics) is that institutional failure has been a constant in the life of the Church for two thousand years and counting, and Catholicism's capacity for renewal - on a corporal and individual level alike - has endured for two millenia as well, the errors and crimes of its leaders notwithstanding. For a modest example of what such renewal can mean in practice, I recommend this exploration of Anne Rice's recent return to Catholicism, and of her attempt - which may be more successful than you'd expect - to paint a fictional portrait of Jesus of Nazareth. (And I hope you won't be dissuaded from reading the essay just because the author is my mother.)

Alas, Babylon

Via Rod Dreher, here's Federico Fubini on the cluelessness of Davos Man:

Publicly, the discourse is all about the dangers of "false market assumptions" and the now-infamous "financial engineering." (I seem to remember it being called "financial innovation" last year.) But offstage, top bankers, private equity bosses, and hedge fund stars keep chitchatting and socializing, just as if banks had not had $1 trillion write-downs, the financial markets had not lost $25 trillion, and up to 30 million jobs were not at risk around the world.

To achieve this state of mind, any human being probably needs to construct a formidable mental shield. A survey I personally conducted at Davos this year of 60 top central bankers, financial market regulators, fund managers, and industry opinion-makers gives an idea of what this shield looks like.

When participants were asked whether they think they have done something in their career which "might have contributed, even in a minor way, to the financial crisis," 63.5 percent opted for a clear "no"; 31.5 percent went for a "yes," often adding in the same breath that nobody in the industry can honestly claim otherwise; and 5 percent said "maybe."

The "yes" people were then asked to explain what triggered their wrong decisions. They had three options: "too much optimism" (68.7 percent), "I felt I had to keep dancing while the music was playing" (31.3 percent), or "greed" (0 percent).

David Rubenstein, cofounder and managing director of the Carlyle Group, expressed surprise at the results. "How strange," he said. "I thought 100 percent of them would say they had nothing to do with it."

The debates about whether religion is good for society are endless for a reason: There are too many variables, too many religions, and too many definitions of "good" to make anything like a universally-accepted answer possible. But I'm pretty comfortable saying that a certain kind of religion is good for a certain kind of person. And it's hard to escape the impression that the world would be in better shape today if more of our elites - our bankers and financiers, our tycoons and captains of industry, and yes, our Presidents as well - had spent the last decade's worth of Sundays on their knees listening to readings from Ecclesiastes, and Jansenist-inflected sermons about the innate depravity of man. 

Big Love and the Art of the Soap Opera

I'm of the opinion that the first season of The O.C. - and only the first season - is the finest teen soap opera ever made. I'm also of the opinion that the thing that made the first season so great was the thing that made subsequent seasons unsuccessful - the decision to take a set of narrative arcs that earlier soaps would have stretched out across multiple seasons, and cram them all into a single year of television. Thus a single subplot on The O.C. could have easily filled an entire episode of Dawson's Creek, and a single episode usually contained as much drama as three hours of 90210. This made for riveting television while it lasted, but it didn't last long: By the second season, the show felt increasingly tired and desperate; by the fourth, it was a joke. (The series finale achieved, I think, a kind of perfect dreadfulness rare among once-good shows.)

I've been anticipating a similar fate for Big Love, HBO's polygamist soap opera, since its crammed-full-of-plotting first season: This is great, I thought, but they're going to run out of gas soon enough. But here we are in the third season and somehow the thing just keeps getting better, even though the average episode probably telescopes in more subplots and reversals than The O.C. ever did. (A major character's mother died this week, and it was about the fifth-most-important thing going on in the episode.) This is a testament to, among other things, the nearly-infinite dramatic possibilities presented by the show's premise, and the remarkable work the cast does selling it. (Orange County sturm und drang has nothing on Mormon drama, it turns out - and with all due respect to Peter Gallagher and his awesome eyebrows, The O.C. never had anyone half as good as Harry Dean Stanton, or Chloe Sevigny, or Amanda Seyfried for that matter.) But it's also a testament to the way the show fits the times, and holds up a mirror to their confusions. Conservatives who interpret Big Love as an attempt to mainstream polygamy have it wrong, I think - or at least, they're missing the bigger picture, which is that the show succeeds because its portrait of polygamous marriage captures the kinds of familial confusions that post-Sexual Revolution Americans already experience as a matter of course. (And it does so, not incidentally, through what's arguably - arguably! - one of the most sympathetic portraits of conservative religious belief on television at the moment. But that's a subject for a longer post.)

I don't want to overrate Big Love: It's still ultimately a soap opera, with a soap opera's various tics and weaknesses, and its fundamental mode is melodrama. But it's well on its way to becoming not only the finest soap opera ever made about suburban polygamists, but one of the finest grown-up soap operas, period.

The Internet Taketh, and the Internet Taketh Away ...

On the one hand, the shuttering of Culture11 and the dissolution of Pajamas Media's blogger ad network are the sort of unfortunate events that you'd expect in a downturn: Startups and experimental business models always do badly in economic crunches. But given how badly things are going for the media's established business model, and the work that it sustains - and here I recommend Conor Friedersdorf, late of Culture11, on what the collapse of local newsgathering can mean for a city - I hope I'll be forgiven for seeing their fate as a particularly grim indicator of just how far we are, amid the ongoing crack-up of print journalism, from having anything capable of replacing it.

Albeit in very different (and small-scale) ways, Culture11 and Pajamas Media were trying to model the kind of low-overhead, disaggregated, bloggy form of journalism that the relative optimists - like our own Michael Hirschorn - have been predicting will eventually occupy at least some of the space being vacated by newspapers and magazines. And their models failed: One no longer exists, and the other is doubling down on "Joe the Plumber" webTV. This doesn't mean that similar publications and networks won't eventually succeed, obviously. But it's a reminder of how far away "eventually" might be, and of why people keep talking up endowments as the only plausible way of keeping certain forms of journalism going in the post-print age - because the old business model is dying without anything cropping up that seems remotely capable of taking its place. One Huffington Post, I'm afraid, does not a dynamic new-media future make ...

Roe and the Culture War

There's been a lot of interesting conversation inspired by Damon Linker's long post on ending the culture war, and specifically his suggestion that overturning Roe would lead, eventually, to greater political peace on the abortion issue. Here's Damon's take on the psychology of the pro-life movement:

Some Americans believe that an abortion is an act of lethal violence against an innocent human being whose rights (like everyone else's) should be protected by the state. Other Americans believe that the only legally relevant moral considerations in an abortion are the wishes of the pregnant woman -- which of course presumes that the fetus is not a human being in need of protection against lethal violence. These are contrary and incompatible metaphysical assumptions about matters of life and death and human dignity. On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court declared that the fundamental law of the United States affirms the position of the second group and rejects the views of the first. On that day, the Constitution ceased to be neutral on this matter of metaphysics.

The pro-life movement, which overlaps to a considerable extent with the modern religious right, was conjured into being not by the fact that some states prior to 1973 permitted abortions but by the Supreme Court's assertion that the metaphysical convictions of abortion opponents are incompatible with the nation's fundamental law. The pro-life movement is thus in large measure an expression of identity politics. It amounts to a spirited refusal on the part of a group of Americans to accept that its views are constitutionally unacceptable. Pro-lifers are saying, in effect: "This is my country, too, and so you are wrong to think that We the People affirm the right of a mother to murder her baby. We the People affirm no such thing."

I can certainly recognize my own feelings about the issue in this description. It's hard to come up with a parallel case that isn't hopelessly imperfect and/or loaded, but I think that liberals interested in imagining their way into the pro-life psyche might start with the kind of alienation that many of them experienced during the Bush years ... then imagine a Supreme Court ruling that wrote a blank check for interrogation into the U.S. Constitution, so that no act of Congress could touch the President's right to torture ... and then further imagine that waterboarding and worse things became a routine, rather than extraordinary, aspect of American counterterrorism and law enforcement efforts over subsequent years and decades.

Allowing, again, for the immense imperfection of the analogy (yes, the government performs torture and merely allows abortion; yes, the number of waterboardings would never, ever approach the number of abortions; and so forth) this is roughly the kind of landscape that pro-lifers have inhabited for thirty-five years: Not only is the law of the land hostile to our convictions, but those convictions are officially deemed beyond the constitutional pale and thus essentially un-American. Symbolically alone, this would be a galvanizing force for any political movement. But the constitutionalization of abortion policy makes a substantive difference, too, or so pro-lifers believe: When you actually poll Americans, or contrast our abortion laws with those on the books in countries that are in other respects more socially liberal than we are, the most plausible "compromise" on the issue absent Roe looks substantially closer to the pro-life position than the legal regime we have now. Which leaves pro-lifers convinced that the Supreme Court's jurisprudence has done to abortion policy what liberals think David Addington and company tried to do with the President's power to order torture - it's taken a distinctly minority opinion about a fraught issue and insisted that it's the only position the American government is allowed to take.

Overturning Roe, then, would have a double effect on pro-lifers - it would simultaneously remove the alienating impact of a legal regime that tries to read our views out of the political debate entirely, and enable us to put our theories about American public opinion on abortion and what kind of legal restrictions are possible to the test. Whether this would de-escalate the abortion wars in the long run is obviously hard to say. I suspect that the Linker thesis is correct, and that a short-term spasm of abortion politicking would give way to greater calm on the issue; certainly, I imagine that I would personally feel a lot calmer about the issue if it were de-constitutionalized, whether or not doing so led to the kind of legal gains that I think pro-lifers can reasonably hope for. But there's no way to know for sure.

Either way, though, I don't think that the hope of calming the culture wars should prompt liberals to support overturning Roe. If you're an unconflicted supporter of abortion rights, obviously, then you shouldn't support overturning the decision, period: If second-trimester abortion is really a fundamental human right, then there's no reason to risk it's availability for some nebulous hope of a less polarized America. And if you are conflicted about abortion's moral and legal status, as many liberals claim to be, then you should want Roe overturned because, well, it's the right thing to do: Because it's absolutist, anti-democratic, and a stumbling block to any enduring middle ground. The question of social peace, in either case, ought to be strictly secondary; what matters is whether Roe is legally sound, and morally acceptable. And if you think of yourself as being in the muddy middle on abortion, your answer to both questions ought to be "no."

The Shadow of the Stimulus

Freddie DeBoer, disagreeing with my take on Yglesias's "what's wrong with filling the stimulus bill with non-stimulative liberal goodies?" argument:

To me, the central point of Matt's post isn't that deficits don't matter in a time of financial crisis and liquidity traps; the point is that, when Republicans aren't going to play ball no matter what, why not cram a bill full of things Democrats want? By refusing to vote for the stimulus package en masse, the Republicans have cut themselves out of the game. If some number of them would get on board, given the many large concessions that Democrats have made in hopes of enticing them, then they'd have something to bargain with. But by signalling that they were uninterested in compromise, they became an obstacle to work around or run over. If that's going to be the case either way, why not work to help the liberal cause?

Just to be clear, I don't think the Democrats need to be cautious about what they put into the stimulus in order to get Republican votes for it; I think they need to be cautious because when you embark on an enormously expensive gamble, you want to be sure that it's the gamble you really, really want to take. Given the choice, I'm pretty sure that most smart liberals would rather have a big-ticket health care reform - which is likewise a big political risk - than have the bill the House just passed. It's quite possible they'll be able to get both. But it's possible they won't - and the bigger (and more non-stimulative) the stimulus gets, the bigger a liability it will become for the Democrats if it isn't perceived as a success, and the more it will stand in the way, potentially, of the deeper reforms that liberals are hoping to attempt.

Chris Caldwell's analogy between the bill and the Iraq War is somewhat overstated, but I think he has the dynamic essentially correct:

The stimulus will be expensive, more expensive than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined and Nancy Pelosi, Senate majority leader, has called it a mere "down payment". The stimulus bill, whether it succeeds or fails, could be the Democrats' Iraq. Like Iraq, it is a long-standing partisan project that is being marketed as an ad hoc response to a national emergency. It reflects the pre-existing wishes of the party's most powerful interest groups more than the pre-existing wishes of the country. Democrats are now liable to be judged by the standard they created when they abandoned the Bush administration over the Iraq war: you break it, you own it.

As Caldwell suggests, the crucial issue here isn't how many Republican votes the stimulus package gets; the Iraq War got plenty of Democratic votes, and that didn't prevent it from becoming an albatross circling the Bush Administration's second term. The issue is the risk the Democrats are taking, period, by spending enormous sums that aren't obviously justified by the current crisis, at the start of an administration in which they're hoping to push through enormous structural reforms as well. Those reforms have something like a mandate, since Barack Obama campaigned, and won, on promises to fix the nation's health care system and reform the energy sector. But he didn't campaign promising to spend massively on existing government programs - and the more massive the forthcoming burst of spending gets, the bigger the risk that it will end up swallowing the broader ambitions of this administration's first four years. This doesn't mean liberals are wrong to take the stimulus money and run with it, but they should at least be clear-eyed about the political risks involved.