Medvedev v. Putin?

There may be a slight element of Western wishful thinking in this analysis, but as a backgrounder to the first Medvedev-Obama encounter (and the apparent back-and-forth between Moscow and the White House), it makes for interesting reading.

Who's Afraid of Low Birthrates?

Yglesias wonders, in the context of the Georgian Patriarch's pro-natalist baptism policy:

Less clear to me is why so many people seem concerned by the specter of low birth rates. Historically, low levels of population are associated with high average living standards. That should be less true in the modern world where we're not as dependent on agriculture for our economic activity. But the logic hasn't completely vanished. If there were dramatically fewer people in the United States it would be much more realistic for us to all be eating free-range organic grass-fed beef. And even amidst a real estate bust, the country is far too crowded for a middle class family to afford a spacious residence in the most desirable markets such as San Francisco or Manhattan.

As appealing as the vision of a depopulated America where we all get to live like Manhattan gourmands may be, I think it's worth taking note of this Ezra Klein post from the very same day, which cited Angela Merkel explaining her aversion to the kind of big-ticket stimulus that most American liberals are pining for:

It is not, she pointed out, simply a philosophical difference. Borrow and spend today, repay down the road, is a particularly difficult proposition for a country with a shrinking population, she said.

"Over the next decade we will undergo a massive demographic change, and, therefore, borrowing is a greater burden for the future than in a country with a much more continuously growing population, as in the United States of America," Mrs. Merkel said.

Now perhaps these are overstated fears - and of course Ezra's response (and Matt's, in a related post) is that this can all be solved with higher immigration rates. But with apologies to Harry Truman, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think that if you want to live like a Whole-Foods-shopping San Franciscan Democrat, you need somebody, somewhere, to procreate like a megachurch-attending Republican. 

The Church, AIDS and Africa, Cont.

My comments on the question of Pope Benedict's culpability for mass suffering and death in Africa has generated quite a lot of reader email, as you might expect. Here's a representative note, from a reader who works for a "leading global health organization":

... while I probably wouldn't accuse the Pope directly of causing "massive death and suffering," here are some facts: many, if not most, Catholic hospitals and dispensaries in Africa refuse to give out condoms. Their staff, both Africans and Westerners, constantly promote the myths, half-truths and outright falsehoods about birth control that perpetuate early births, poor family planning, a whole host of STIs (including HIV) and, by extension of all this, crushing, grinding poverty and maternal and child mortality. This is fact in every African country I have worked in.

That the Catholic Church provides - through its hospitals, clinics, schools and organizations like Catholic Relief Services - many other incredibly valuable services to people in the developing world, including Africans, makes it deserving of praise; but equally, it does not excuse the Church from knowingly doing direct harm to public health efforts in the region of the world most affected by HIV/AIDS.

And here's another:

It seems that your main source of frustration is the hyperbolic - these comments will result in "massive death and suffering" - reaction to Pope Benedict's comments.  I wonder what you think about the more subtle assertion that Pope Benedict's comments may contribute to confusion and misperception about how HIV/AIDS is transmitted, whether or not condoms are effective in preventing transmission, and to what extent that confusion may counteract or negate the work of public health officials attempting to reduce the rate of transmission. Both here at home, and in Africa, providing education and accurate information about how HIV is transmitted is an important part of the battle ... Clearly the Pope has the obligation to advocate Catholic principles and dogma, but need that advocacy come at the expense (potentially) of established science/medicine?  Would it not have been possible to advance the Catholic position preferring abstinence without intimating that condoms are not an effective tool in preventing the spread of HIV? 

It seems to me that much of the anger directed at the Pope's comments is a response to something new (condoms are not the solution) as opposed to something old (we prefer abstinence).  I wonder whether a statement that ignored the condoms issue entirely would have been received as negatively, and attacked as ferociously.

I agree with the second emailer that the Pope would have been well-served to confine himself to remarks promoting monogamy and fidelity, and shouldn't have waded into social-science-y pronouncements about the overall efficacy of condom-promotion efforts. But the anger that Benedict's remarks generated isn't a new thing by any stretch. John Paul II may have been more circumspect in his criticisms of the prophylactic approach to AIDS-fighting than his successor, but he was regularly accused of having "killed millions" of helpless, hopeless Africans even so.

And I agree with the first emailer: Catholics have absolutely no business spreading misinformation, cherrying-pick data and otherwise exaggerating the dangers of condom use. I'm sure that these kind of ideological blinders are a serious problem for public-health efforts in Africa. I'm just less sure that they're the only kind of ideological blinders that we should be worried about.

I should note that I don't pretend to be an expert on this topic, and my own conservative and Catholic biases have no doubt shaped the reading that I've done about AIDS-fighting strategies. But it's my impression - created, in large part, by reading Helen Epstein's The Invisible Cure (and if there's a devastating rebuttal to her arguments, please send it my way) - that an awful lot of the money poured into condom-promotion over the years would have much been better spent promoting "partner reduction" in cultures inclined to promiscuity and de facto polygamy instead. This isn't the same as promoting abstinence exclusively, and indeed, Epstein is witheringly critical of some of the abstinence-only programs that American dollars have funded in the Bush era. But "partner reduction" is a lot more consonant with the Catholic Church's longstanding position - that it's better to promote monogamy and fidelity than to take promiscuity as a given and make it as safe as possible - than you'd think from the overheated talk about how the Vatican's flat-earth position on condoms has cost millions of lives.

What's more, I have a hard time believing that the public-health and foreign-aid community's longstanding preference for condom promotion has nothing to do with ideological biases of their own. Yes, the Catholic Church's conservative position on sexual morality determines which public-health interventions the Vatican willing to support, and limits the willingness of Catholic institutions to simply follow the data wherever it leads. But what's true of Catholics is true of other groups as well. And when you read Epstein on how slow the AIDS establishment was to acknowledge the importance of partner-reduction - or when you read about Bill Gates getting booed at an international AIDS conference when he mentioned abstinence and fidelity - it's awfully hard to escape the conclusion that the combination of a liberationist view of sexual ethics and a post-colonial unwillingness to critique existing African patterns of sexual behavior has seriously hampered the international community's efforts to curb the spread of HIV.

This doesn't mean that conservative Catholics should turn around and suggest that the AIDS establishment has blood on its hands for privileging condom distribution over cultural change. That kind of rhetoric is inappropriate and stupid, period. All I'm suggesting is that there are many more shades of gray to this story than you'd think from the way that the media likes to cover it.

Conservatives, Crime Policy, and the Black Vote

A little while ago, Shelby Steele wrote an op-ed discussing the problems that conservatives have appealing to minorities, and especially African-Americans. As long as the black experience is shaped by a sense of grievance and alienation, Steele suggested, there will always be an essentially "anti-conservative orientation" to minority politics, and liberals will always be able to outbid the Right for their votes. There's no way, in the end, for a conservative party to be more activist than the Left, more outraged about the sins of the past, and more redemptorist in its vision for what American politics should do to remedy injustices historical and structural. Instead of trying to out-liberal liberalism, Steele wrote, conservatives need to be true to their best selves as conservatives, and hope that minorities eventually come around to a political vision that treats them as individuals rather than members of a caste, offering "human rather than racial dignity," and "the discipline of ordinary people rather than the virtuousness of extraordinary people."

Treated as a view from 30,000 feet, I basically agree with this argument. You cannot expect the descendants of slaves and the heirs of segregation to embrace a conservative politics en masse until we're much, much further out of those institutions' shadow than we are today; by the same token, it would be bad for conservatism, and for America, if the Right were to seek black votes by jettisoning its core premises, and simply giving up (as the Bush Administration sometimes seemed eager to do) on its long-running critique of the diversity-and-dependency two-step that undergirds modern liberalism's approach to racial issues. Given where the two groups are starting from, in other words, conservatives shouldn't hope for more from African-Americans, and African-Americans more from conservatives, than either group is likely to deliver.

But drop down to ground level for a moment, and consider Ta-Nehisi's response to my post on prison reform. Here we have an issue - the design of our criminal-justice system - that's of burning concern to the African-American community. It's not an easy issue to wrestle with by any stretch: My preferred approach to reform, for instance, would marry a reduced incarceration rate to a substantial increase in the police presence on America's streets, which if implemented clumsily (as most policy shifts are) could mean fewer black men behind bars, but more tragedies like the death of Ta-Nehisi's friend. But it's also an issue where conservatives could embrace policy shifts without compromising their core beliefs - the question of where to strike the "build prisons or hire cops" balance is a practical rather than a philosophical one - and in the process, I think, substantially change the way the Republican Party is perceived in the black community. Also, it would be the right thing to do. 

This is something I think that arguments like Steele's - which are common on the American Right - lose sight of. As I remarked in the context of the Europe-or-America debate, there are a lot of big-picture political issues that boil down to philosophical differences, and that can't (and shouldn't) be resolved or finessed through clever policy thinking. But there are also a lot of political issues that boil down a question of resource allocation: We're going to spend X dollars on prisons and police (or on the military, or on the school system or the highways or what-have-you), and the question is how. And getting that "how" right can make an awfully big difference - to the African-American community, and to many other people as well.

The Heresies of Freeman Dyson

If for some unfathomable reason this engaging Times profile - which focuses on his late-in-life career as a global warming skeptic - is your first sustained encounter with the mind of Freeman Dyson, I highly recommend browsing at length in the NYRB's archive, or else buying the essay collection drawn from its pages, and from earlier publications. (I haven't read it, but I should note that a friend swears by The Starship and the Canoe, a dual biography of the space-besotted Dyson and his treedwelling son George.) You'll find that the climate-change debate isn't the only place where he tiptoes beyond the scientific current consensus. For instance, here's an excerpt from Dyson's review (behind the subscriber firewall) of a book on ESP:

... The hypothesis that paranormal are real but lie outside the limits of science is supported by a great mass of evidence. The evidence has been collected by the Society for Psychical Research in Britain and by similar organizations in other countries. The journal of the London society is full of stories of remarkable events in which ordinary people appear to possess paranormal abilities. The evidence of entirely anecdotal. It has nothing to do with science, since it cannot be reproduced under controlled conditions. But the evidence is there. The members of the society took great trouble to interview firsthand witnesses as soon as possible after the events, and to document the stories carefully. One fact that emerges clearly from the stories is that paranormal events occur, if they occur at all, only when people are under stress and experiencing strong emotion. This fact would immediately explain why paranormal phenomena are not observable under the conditions of a well-controlled scientific experiment. Strong emotion and stress are inherently incompatible with controlled scientific procedures ...

As heresy goes, this seems to me to be a step beyond doubting the scientific rigor of An Inconvenient Truth.

Let The Wild Rumpus Begin

Well, this should be interesting, at the very least ...

The AIDS Libel

I was going to let the latest round of outrage about the Pope, condoms and AIDS pass without throwing in my two cents, but then Jeff Goldberg went and linked to David Rothkopf's list of the world's "biggest losers," which includes Benedict XVI ("a creepy old ex-Hitler Youth member," in Rothkopf's words) for his supposed contribution to "massive death and suffering" in Africa. It's almost as if Jeff's trying to get a rise out of me!

So: I could respond to Rothkopf's claim, and others like it, by suggesting that the Pope's "chastity, not condoms" message to Africans struggling with the HIV epidemic has at least somewhat more evidence behind it than you'd think from the media drumbeat surrounding the issue. But I think the more apposite response is to ask Rothkopf for his evidence that the Vatican's refusal to promote condom use has contributed to disease and death on a grand scale. Do religious Africans have higher infection rates than the irreligious? Do heavily-Catholic populations contract HIV in higher numbers than Muslim, Protestant, or animist populations? Are frequent mass-attenders more likely to contract the disease than infrequent churchgoers? Do graduates of Catholic schools have higher infections than their peers? Are Africans who seek treatment at Catholic hospitals more likely to pass the disease along than people who get their medicine from secular institutions?

"The most striking thing about these articles claiming the Vatican makes Africans die from AIDS is the dearth of factual material," Brendan O'Neill wrote during the last spasm of outrage on this front. His cursory look at the data suggested that no, there was no correlation between being the sort of African most likely to listen to the Pope about sex and being the sort of African most likely to contract HIV. But that was several years ago: Perhaps some new evidence has come to light that Rothkopf would like to share with us. If he has any, I will happily publish it.

In the interim, though, I would suggest that he take a step back and consider that Benedict XVI is the head of an international institution that does as much to fight disease and poverty as any NGO in the world. The Church runs hospitals, clinics, and schools; it channels hundred of millions of dollars in donations from the developed world to the wretched of the earth; it supports thousands upon thousands of priests, nuns and laypeople who work in some of the most difficult and dangerous conditions in the world. And it does so based on the same premises - an attempt to be faithful to the commandments of Jesus Christ - that undergird the Pope's insistence on preaching chastity, rather than promoting prophylactics. There are many other NGOs working in Africa that proceed from different premises, and take a different attitude toward matters sexual as a result, and if David Rothkopf prefers their approach that's perfectly understandable. But unless he's willing to tell the Catholic Church that it should fold up its charitable operations in the developing world and go home, I'd prefer to be spared the lectures on how the Pope is responsible for "massive death and suffering" among populations for whom Catholic institutions have provided lifelines beyond counting over the years, just because he isn't willing to to use his pulpit to preach the importance of playing it as safe as possible, health-wise, while you're committing what the Church considers mortal sin.

Crime and Punishment

Isaac Chotiner, on that Atul Gawande piece I just mentioned:

Gawande makes the case that [solitary confinement] can plausibly be called torture. He mentions that few if any other countries keep their prisoners in such conditions, and regrets this unfortunate example of American exceptionalism. However, he leaves one important point out of his otherwise exhaustive case ... Gawande never considers the idea of punishment as an end in itself, and it is here, I think, where liberal writers tend to miss a major motivating factor in our crime policy. There are numerous historical and religious reasons for this belief, and without getting bogged down in too many details, it is worth pointing out that many people believe wrongdoers "deserve" punishment for bad deeds. Others like, I would assume, Gawande, see no value in punishing people unless it serves distinct ends (keeping criminals off the street, deterring crime, etc.). Now, I happen to agree with Gawande, and I see no value in punishment for punishment's sake, but it is probably safe to say this is not a majority opinion in America. 

I don't think it's necessarily clear from the piece that Gawande sees no value in retributive justice. Certainly his argument doesn't require rejecting retribution in toto: You don't have to abandon the idea that wrongdoers deserve punishment to accept that solitary confinement is much more cruel and unusual than you might think if you've never experienced it, and thus probably shouldn't be meted out as often as it is. Just because a criminal deserves punishment doesn't mean that he deserves any punishment. Indeed, if you want a legal system in which punishments are designed to fit crimes, then that's arguably all the more reason to want a prison system that metes out punishments as they're designed to be meted out, and that doesn't permit or practice cruelties above and beyond what legislators, judges and juries have asked for.

I also wonder about Isaac's broader premise: Is it really the case that most liberals - or "liberal writers," at least - reject outright the notion that lawbreakers deserve punishment for their crimes? Obviously, left-wingers tend to emphasize rehabilitation more than right-wingers do, but my assumption has always been that most liberals would agree in some sense with the premise that punishing criminals is a matter of justice as well as deterrence. But I suppose could be wrong.

The Tough-On-Crime Trap

Atul Gawande's New Yorker piece on solitary confinement deserves to be read in tandem with Cato Unbound's symposium on American incarceration rates. The former looks at a particular issue in prison policy, and the latter at the general trend toward ever-greater imprisonment, but both invite the reader to ponder the ways in which one of the biggest policy successes of the past twenty-five years - the large-scale reduction in the crime rate - has enmeshed us in a net of moral compromises from which it's difficult to escape.

The turn toward mass incarceration and tough sentencing was championed, largely by conservatives, in response to what amounted to a long period of emergency in American life: A murder rate that had doubled over twenty years, a robbery rate that had quintupled, an urban landscape that seemed increasingly ungovernable, and so on. And the turn worked: The estimates of its impact vary, but most scholars agree that increased incarceration played a substantial role in the plunging crime rates of the 1990s.

But as you might expect, a policy turn undertaken during a period of emergency will eventually produce diminishing returns - as Steven Levitt puts it, "the two-millionth criminal imprisoned is likely to impose a much smaller crime burden on society than the first prisoner" - even as it imposes substantial moral costs. And precisely because the tough-on-crime approach was largely vindicated by events, it's extremely difficult for elected officials to walk back from some of the dubious practices that have grown up around it - like, say, the possibly cruel-and-unusual use of long-term solitary confinement. As Gawande writes:

Commissioners ... could eliminate prolonged isolation with the stroke of a pen. So, I asked, why haven't they? He told me what happened when he tried to move just one prisoner out of isolation. Legislators called for him to be fired and threatened to withhold basic funding. Corrections officers called members of the crime victim's family and told them that he'd gone soft on crime. Hostile stories appeared in the tabloids. It is pointless for commissioners to act unilaterally, he said, without a change in public opinion.

This political dynamic explains why the chances for effective prison reform probably depend on Nixon-to-China conservatives, who can put the credibility the Right has built up on law and order to good use. (It wouldn't hurt if conservatives were willing to champion some alternative approaches to crime reduction as well.) But they probably also depend on crime rates staying flat, or falling - and in the current downturn that may be too much to hope for.

The Rise and Fall of Culture11

An interesting, largely fair-minded look at a much-too-short-lived experiment.

The Life and Death of Miss Jade Goody

Via Alex Massie, a life story that no contemporary novelist could invent - and that no future historian of the reality-TV era will be able to resist.

Collapse or Consolidation?

Andrew Stuttaford's big Standard piece on Europe and the economic crisis offers a lot to chew on, but the essential argument is this: Having created a continent-wide government (and governing class) whose responsibilities far outstrip its democratic legitimacy, the nations of Europe risk reaping a populist whirlwind - which "threatens to push already alienated electorates in the direction of the extremist politics of left or right" - as they attempt to navigate through the current crisis. "After decades of routinely bypassing its voters," Stuttaford suggests, the European Union "may well no longer have what it takes to secure their approval for the harsh medicine and painful sacrifices necessary to bring the EU through this ordeal in one piece." 

I wonder, though, if this passage won't turn out to be the most prophetic part of the piece:

... some glass-is-half-full Europhiles believe that the fact that no country can easily work its way through these tribulations alone will conclusively make the case for still closer European integration to some of the EU's more reluctant federalists. You can be sure that this is a rationalization that Brussels will look to exploit: Rahm Emanuel is not the only politician unwilling to waste a crisis. The EU's policy response to the slump is likely to have two objectives: the reconstruction of member-states' economies and the destruction of what's left of their autonomy.

Back here in the States, a week of non-stop "off with their heads" chatter about AIG has left almost everybody in agreement that the primary political fallout from the crisis will be the revival of populism, red in tooth and claw. But if the worst doesn't come to worst, and Western governments manage to muddle through the next couple years without going the way of Iceland, I think it's just as likely that we'll look back on the crash of '08-'09 as having produced a spasm of kabuki populism, followed by the consolidation of even more power in the hands of elite institutions, whether they're in Brussels or the Washington-New York corridor.

If the Western leadership class survives the current crisis, after all, the lesson they're going to draw from it is relatively simple: We must never let this happen again. And while that impulse could be a spur to greater decentralization and democratization, it's more likely to be produce greater supranational regulation, more expansive bureaucracy, and a more hand-in-glove relationship between big government and big business than existed before the crisis. In theory, one way to respond to a "populist whirlwind" would be to make governments more accountable to the voting public. But in practice, I suspect, the more likely response will be to build stronger dikes and firewalls against the dangerous and unpredictable masses, producing post-crisis institutions that are even more insulated from democratic accountability than they were before.

The Religion of John Rawls

Tyler Cowen calls this piece, on Rawls' relationship to Christianity, "one of the best mid-length essays I've read in some time." I concur. Here's a passage from Rawls' senior thesis, entitled " A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith" (and written, as the title suggests, when he was still a believer), that gives you a taste of the Christian thinker he might have been:

We reject mysticism because it seeks a union which excludes all particularity, and wants to overcome all distinctions. Since the universe is in its essence communal and personal, mysticism cannot be accepted. The Christian dogma of the resurrection of the body shows considerable profundity on this point. The doctrine means that we shall be resurrected in our full personality and particularity, and that salvation is the full restoration of the whole person, not the wiping away of particularity. Salvation integrates personality into community, it does not destroy personality to dissolve it into some mysterious and meaningless "One."

I wonder whether the young Rawls qualified his use of the term "mysticism" elsewhere in the essay, since what he's critiquing here strikes me as a particular form of mystical pursuit - the kind that we associated with pantheism in general, and Eastern religion in particular. The mysticism that's specific to Christianity - from John on Patmos to Saint John of the Cross; from Teresa of Avila to Teresa of Calcutta - has always sought a union with God that specifically doesn't exclude particularity and distinction, or seek the dissolution of individuality in the warm bath of divine love. This is why the image of romantic love (brides and bridegrooms, a lover seeking his beloved, etc.) has long been a dominant metaphor in Christian mystical writing: It evokes a union that achieves intimacy and ecstasy without sacrificing personality or bodily integrity - an encounter that brings us face to face with God, but doesn't require our being subsumed into Him.

But I suppose I don't have to wonder exactly what Rawls meant: I can go buy the book.

The JournoList, Revisited

Reihan does a good job of exploring what you might call the "sociology of political journalism" angle to the liberal list-serv story, which to my mind is the main thing that makes it worth remarking on.

Kinsley and Stem Cells, Revisited

Michael Kinsley was kind enough to respond to this post, in which I objected to his suggestion that pro-lifers who oppose embryo-destructive research don't mean what they say, because if they did they'd want to forbid embryo destruction in fertility clinics as well. He writes:

Douthat's reply was that (a) opponents of stem-cell research do indeed oppose the creation and destruction of all embryos in fertility clinics, and not just the ones that are used for scientific research; but (b) accepting fertility clinics as a given is a compromise with reality, and stem-cell opponents deserve congratulations for playing democracy according to the rules; and (c) in particular, they were, and are, simply asking not to be coerced through the tax system into having their dollars spent in a way they find morally repugnant.

Let's start with (c). Although it's rarely put this way, coercion--especially financial coercion--is at the heart of any political system, including democracy. Almost the whole point of politics is to decide what money is spent communally, and how. Obviously the system can't work if everyone gets to withhold tax dollars from projects they disapprove of. I and many others, for example, would have preferred to not to have our tax dollars go to finance the Iraq war. I'm sure Ross Douthat would have had no problem seeing why that wouldn't work.

Well, sure. But policy choices aren't always a zero-sum game. In the case of the Iraq War, if the government didn't organize an invasion (using the anti-war minority's money to pay for it), it wasn't going to happen: Halliburton and the Blackwater Group weren't about to step up the plate with a private-sector alternative. But research on embryonic stem cell research could happen in the absence of government involvement, and indeed it has - thanks to my own alma mater, among other institutions.

This doesn't make a half-a-loaf compromise, in which the research is allowed but left unfunded, something that Michael Kinsley has to accept. He has every right to seek the coercion of his pro-life antagonists and the use of their tax dollars for the research that he favors; such coercion, as he says, is a normal feature of democratic life. But the fact that he prefers to seek the full loaf doesn't mean that a compromise isn't possible, or that pro-lifers, conscious of the unfavorable landscape in which they're operating, shouldn't be agitating in its favor. After all, some of the pro-life movement's bigger successes, post-Roe, have involved eliminating or reducing public funding for abortion, even as the procedure itself has remained legal and widely practiced. Fighting against government funding for stem-cell research is the equivalent of the Hyde Amendment approach to government funding for abortion: It may not work, but that doesn't mean it doesn't make political sense.

Kinsley goes on:

If it was a tactical compromise to make an issue of stem-cell research while ignoring the vast majority of surplus embryos produced in fertility clinics that are simply destroyed, this compromise was a mighty strange one. Ordinarily, if you intend to compromise, you start by playing up your maximalist position as much as possible, emphasizing how strongly you feel and how difficult it will be to accept half a loaf. Then you compromise. In this case, though, Douthat can only point to a couple of columns by Will Saletan in Slate--one about the octuplets controversy and the other about some law in Italy--to support his contention that pro-lifers "would like to heavily regulate fertility clinics." Maybe they would, but this has played absolutely no part in the stem-cell debate. In Bush's original speech announcing his stem-cell research restrictions eight years ago (now praised by conservatives as a masterpiece of moral reasoning the way liberals praise President Obama's speech on race in Philadelphia) Bush actually praised the work of fertility clinics, claiming--correctly--that in-vitro fertilization has brought happiness to many.

Actually, as Larison notes, Bush's speech came in for quite a bit of criticism from pro-lifers, many of whom eventually came around to defending it because it was clear from the political landscape that this was the best they could hope for. And is it really the case that with every new controversy and debate (and the stem-cell debate was very much a new one for pro-lifers in 2001), the thing to do is "play up your maximalist position as much as possible" before proposing compromises?

I think not. The maximalist pro-life stance - a Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would constrain fertility clinics and abortion doctors alike - is already embedded in the GOP platform, and I can introduce Kinsley to plenty of pro-life groups that spend a lot of energy on whole-loaf campaigns, from the sponsors of Colorado's "personhood" amendment to the "Pill Kills" folks at the American Life League. But most pro-life successes, as I've noted before, involve incrementalism and compromise. If you're a pro-life group working on a partial-birth abortion ban, does it really make sense to kick off your campaign with an extended restatement of their opposition to abortion at every stage of pregnancy? If you're trying to pass a parental-consent law, do you really want to start out by proposing that abortion be banned outright for teenagers, and only work your way around gradually to the provision you actually hope might pass? Most Americans already know that the pro-life movement has a maximalist view of what abortion law should be, I think, which means that restating your maximalism at every opportunity isn't a savvy approach to negotiation - it's a good way to get people to tune you out.

What's more, politics is all about doing your best with the opportunities that present themselves. Kinsley's right that once you get beyond the funding question, there's no necessary reason for pro-lifers to focus more energy on embryo-destroying research than on the general embryo destruction that goes on in fertility clinics. (Though research on embryos created expressly for that purpose is another matter.) But the debate centered around research, rather than fertility clinics, during the Bush years in large part because the government's policy toward funding such research was on the table for review in 2001, creating an opportunity to nudge policy in a slightly more pro-life direction. No such opportunity, so far as I can tell, presented itself where fertility clinics were concerned - or at least, it hadn't until the public outrage surrounding the "Octomom" prompted some pro-lifers to see an opportunity to enact restriction on fertility clinics.

Which was, of course, the point of mentioning "some law in Italy" (as Kinsley puts it). The law in question, passed a while back amid Octomom-style outrage over Italy's freewheeling fertility clinics, is exactly the sort of restriction that Kinsley claims American pro-lifers don't really support, fearful hypocrites that they are. Maybe he's right: Maybe Italian pro-lifers are just more serious and consistent than their American counterparts. (Catholics do tend to be more rigorous in their opposition to killing embryos than, say, Mormons - hence Orrin Hatch's support for stem-cell research, for instance.) But it seems more likely that the Italian pro-lifers are just making the most of a more favorable political environment for clinic regulation than exists in the United States - and that if the American pro-life movement were suddenly transplanted to the Italian environment, its leaders wouldn't be shy about taking up the fertility-clinic issue.

Kinsley concludes by suggesting that he's harping on fertility clinics for essentially tactical reasons: He thinks that the "fertility-anomaly hasn't even occurred to most pro-lifers," and "that when they realize that their logic in opposing stem-cell research would condemn all IVF as well, it will give many reasonable pro-lifers pause--maybe even about their pro-life position in general, certainly about their opposition to stem-cell research." Speaking for all the "unreasonable" pro-lifers out there, I don't think this is a crazy view of the overall political dynamic. Just as lots of people who call themselves pro-choice blanch, for intuitive reasons, at abortions that take place after the first trimester, some Americans who oppose abortion don't really mind the destruction of embryos, and would look askance at a pro-life movement that sought to regulate fertility clinics. But there's a difference between this claim and Kinsley's initial one, which is that the people who are deeply involved in these debates don't understand their premises, and don't really mean what they say. I can assure him that we do. The attempt to apply one's principles pragmatically, and with an eye toward the art of the politically possible, isn't evidence that those principles don't exist.

Is There A New Progressive America?

Here's an interesting go-round between Jay Cost and Ruy Teixeira, pivoting off the latter's recent report on "A New Progressive America." I'm on Teixeira's side insofar as it's possible to make predictions about the political future; I'm on Cost's insofar as it isn't. Put another way, I think it would be very difficult to put together a similarly-persuasive report making the case that there's a "New Conservative America" aborning: To the extent that current trends predict future results, current trends are favorable to liberals. The Democratic coalition is growing, and the GOP coalition is shrinking; young voters are to the left of their elders on every issue except abortion and Social Security; and there are deep social trends at work that seem likely to expand demand for government. If the same sorts of people who are voting for liberals now continue voting that way, and the same sorts of people voting for conservatives do the same, we're headed for a long, long progressive ascendancy.

But of course current trends don't always predict future results. Contingency matters enormously. To take the most recent example, the events of 9/11 temporarily dislodged the emerging Democratic majority; if Bush had been a more a successful President, it might have dislodged it permanently, making the 2002 election a template for future struggles between the parties. To take an older example, after LBJ trounced Goldwater in 1964, nobody could have know that the uptick in crime would become a three-decade crime wave, or that the growing quagmire in Vietnam would last for a decade, let alone that these would become decisive factors in our national politics. Which is why this is the strongest part of Cost's rebuttal:

Teixiera's argument about future political demography assumes a static quality to American politics that is ahistorical ... For instance, consider that while John McCain lost the nationwide popular vote by seven points, he won the white Catholic vote by five points. From a historical perspective, this is remarkable. John Kennedy won 81% of non-Hispanic white Catholics, Lyndon Johnson 79%, and Hubert Humphrey (who lost in a three-way race) still won 55%. Forty years ago, any liberal analyst would have concluded that the white Catholic vote belongs to the Democrats. Yet today, we see the GOP holding white Catholics amidst a popular vote wipe out.

Similarly, who would have ever thought that the "white working class" - the backbone of the New Deal coalition for decades - would support the Republicans by 18-points as the nation supported the Democrats by 7? That is the most dramatic proof that voting coalitions are not static - and that we cannot extrapolate future alignments from current ones.

Electoral politics is not akin to Newtonian physics, where you derive your equations and then predict everything from here to eternity. Instead it's unpredictable. Why? One reason is the parties. They select issue positions and emphases to steal the other side's wavering voters and undermine its voting coalition. Again, recent electoral history has demonstrated that both parties are quite adept at this game. In light of that, how can we know whom Hispanics, Asians, "professionals," young voters, or anybody will support in 2048? I'd suggest we cannot. Using demographic estimates to predict long-range political preferences is an impossibly difficult task.

Well, yes ... except that I think probabilities matter a little bit more than Cost allows. Even allowing for his caveats, if you were asked to pick which coalitions you'd rather have at the moment, based on demographic strength alone, you'd choose the Democratic coalition in a heartbeat. Not because we know what's going to happen, but because we don't - and a bet based on probabilities is better than a shot in the dark.

The Rise of Ezra Klein

It's awfully hard to say anything that constructive about the infamous JournoList without having access to the kind of discussions that take place on it. When I first heard about it, a while back, it seemed like it might be an example of the movement-ification of American liberalism, in which left-of-center types (especially people in the press) who once would have airily dismissed the idea that they belonged to a partisan "team" began attempting to imitate the conservative movement out of horror at its successes. But then again maybe the email list is just a wonderfully high-minded attempt to "illuminate standard political reporting with expert policy commentary," with no partisan purpose whatsoever. How should I know? I'm not on it!

Either way, though, isn't the real story here not the list itself, but the man behind it? I mean, email chains come and go, but the ability to bring your elders together for a common purpose is a rare thing indeed in media-intellectual circles. Isn't it possible that we're seeing the emergence of Ezra Klein as the William F. Buckley of movement liberalism - the wunderkind around whom older thinkers orbit, with JournoList as the equivalent of National Review in the Fifties, and with your Paul Krugmans, Jeffrey Toobins and Joe Kleins playing Willmoore Kendall or James Burnham to his WFB?

Okay, fine, maybe the parallel doesn't quite hold up. But I do think that Ezra's organizational genius is ultimately the story here, his modesty about his own importance notwithstanding.

The Church and the World

Via John Schwenkler and Commonweal, it's nice to see somebody in the Vatican finally saying the right things - the Christian things, if you will - about the horrible case of the nine-year-old Brazilian girl who had an abortion after being impregnated by her stepfather, and whose mother and doctor were publicly excommunicated by the local archbishop shortly thereafter. It was also a pleasure, in a related vein, to read the Pope's impressive letter offering clarifications, regrets, and some pushback to his critics regarding his handling of the SSPX affair. (It included this much-quoted line, almost touching in its innocence of the contemporary media: "I have been told that consulting the information available on the internet would have made it possible to perceive the problem early on. I have learned the lesson that in the future in the Holy See we will have to pay greater attention to that source of news.") In both cases, you can see Rome taking baby steps toward a new and necessary approach to its engagement with the media, and with contemporary society in general.

That's the good news. The bad news is that in both cases - but especially in the case of the Brazilian abortion, where the absence of charity was palpable and ugly - the damage has already been done, and can't be undone by having a spokesman or a bishop or even the Pope saying the right things weeks after the fact. This will always be a problem, to some extent, since while the institutional Church is not a democracy, neither is it a monolith: Save on rare occasions, it will always speak with a multiplicity of voices, some of them wise and loving and some of them ignorant, or tone-deaf, or legalistic, or cruel. But for the Church to carry out its mission, and turn outward to the world rather than inward on itself, the latter sort of voices can't always be the ones that speak up first and loudest, and have their words carried halfway around the world before wisdom and charity have even gotten out of bed.

Dated Paul, Married Sanford?

Michael Brendan Dougherty's profile of Mark Sanford makes for interesting reading; so do the follow-ups from Reihan (here and here) and Larison. You can imagine a very ideologically interesting Republican primary in which a figure like Sanford came on strong as a more mainstream version of Ron Paul (small-government rigor plus foreign-policy noninterventionism, minus the nutty-uncle factor), while someone like, say, Jon Huntsman ended up representing the party's moderate wing. It could be a Goldwater-Rockefeller race for the new millenium - potentially disastrous for the party, sure, but potentially fruitful as well.

Then again, you could have imagined a very ideologically interesting Republican primary featuring a cast of characters as diverse as Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and John McCain - but instead, they mostly fell over one another trying to play a caricature of Ronald Reagan. The process of running for president isn't kind to ideological outliers (unless they're nothing-to-lose figures like Paul), which is why Mark Sanford, presidential candidate, might turn out to be a lot less interesting than the guy who shows up in Dougherty's profile.

A Crisis of Confidence

These are ugly, ugly numbers no matter how you slice them. But those who slice with outlandish coup scenarios in the back of their minds will note the American military now earns a "great deal" of trust from a larger swathe of the American public than the White House, Congress, the media, and organized religion combined.

Griefs Observed

I don't really have any commentary to offer here, but it's been striking to read Amy Welborn's reflections (start here, then go here and here and here and keep going to the present) following the untimely death of her husband alongside Meghan O'Rourke's ongoing meditation on mourning (here's the first entry; here's the latest) in the wake of her mother's passing. There are continuities, but the counterpoints are what's most remarkable: O'Rourke is secular and agnostic, exploring what it means "to grieve in a culture that - for many of us, at least - has few ceremonies for observing it"; Welborn is a Catholic, experiencing a seemingly-unbearable grief in the context of a fervent faith. You may be reading both already; if you aren't, you should be.

Our French Future?

Via Megan, Henry Farrell scoffs at the kind of "don't let America turn into France" anxieties gestured at in my previous post:

There is something very, very strange in my eyes about this kind of argument. On the one hand. a notion of a healthy American culture of can-do entrepreneurialism, which has survived for centuries and caused America to prosper. On the other, the claim that the combination of broader-if-not-quite-universal healthcare, a slightly easier time for unions, and a return to the relatively mild form of progressive taxation we saw in the 1990s would very probably lead to the destruction of said robust culture. Something here Does Not Compute.

There's no question that the distinctively American approach to markets and government is more resilient than you'd think from reading some doomsaying conservatives these days - just as the welfare state that FDR and LBJ built is a lot more resilient than you'd have thought by reading some doomsaying liberals during the Bush years. And the broader point that Farrell goes on to make - that "national economic trajectories are quite robust," and even in crises, "advanced capitalist countries tend to tinker around the edges of their institutional systems rather than opt for wholesale reform" - is a good one, and a reason for limited-government optimism no matter what Obama's budgets look like.

That being said, the fact that America in 2050 isn't going to look exactly like France (or Denmark, to take a model that's actually closer to many liberals' beau ideal these days, I think) circa 2008 doesn't mean that conservative anxieties about the potential growth of the welfare state are just so much hyperventilating. Even absent the Obama agenda, America's "national economic trajectory" at the moment puts us on a glide path to large, large increases in the size of government, thanks to the ever-expanding cost of entitlements. At the same time, American demographics have been shifting - thanks to high levels of unskilled immigration, the decline of the two-parent family, and the broader aging of the population - in ways that tend to increase the public appetite for government spending. Obviously all of the projected entitlement-related increases won't happen - the enduring American aversion to taxation will see to that. But some of them will. And when you marry this long-term picture to a liberal agenda that seeks to take federal spending to 28 percent of GDP in the very short run, and whose promises to bring it back down to 22-23 percent of GDP are based on implausibly rosy forecasts, I don't think it's unreasonable for conservatives to envision - and fret about - a future America with a public sector that's much, much larger than it is today.

Again, Farrell's right - that future America won't really look like present-day France, once you drill down to the specifics of the programs that have expanded, the taxes that are used to pay for them, and so forth. But saying "let's not turn into France" is a form of shorthand, not a rigorous comparison of systems: It's a way of saying "let's not dramatically change the relationship between the American state and American society," at a time when both short-term politics and long-term trends make a substantial change seem possible.

The Case For Small Government

That was the subject, broadly speaking, of Charles Murray's address at the annual AEI dinner, and like Jonah Goldberg and John Miller I found a lot to like in the speech, but some things to raise an eyebrow at as well. At bottom, I think the argument suffers from a problem that's common to both sides in the debates over the desirability of European-style social democracy - namely, the hope that what's ultimately a philosophical and moral controversy can have a tidy empirical resolution. So long as Murray's speech is making the philosophical case for limited government - that human existence in the shadow of a nanny state doesn't conduce to "Aristotelian happiness," as he puts it, because it strips human beings of the deeper sorts of agency and responsibility that ought to be involved in a life well lived - he's on firm (if obviously arguable) ground. But when he segues into the possibility that the emerging science of human nature will "prove" the limits of welfare-statism, and force liberals to give ground, I think he's indulging in a conservative version of Jon Chait's famous argument that liberals support bigger government because they're rigorous empiricists, whereas conservatives oppose it because they're hidebound dogmatists. In both cases, there's an unwarranted hope that the right facts and figures can settle a debate that ultimately depends on the philosophical assumptions that you bring to it.

I don't want to dismiss the arguments about the practical costs and benefits associated with different styles of welfare states, mind you. I like those arguments, and they matter a great deal. I would just deny that they can come close to settling, in any meaningful sense, the debate over how big the American welfare state should be overall, and whether we should copy Western Europe or disdain it. That's because both the American and the European models of government are successful in purely practical terms, to the extent that purely practical terms exist - which is to say, both models have provided, over an extended period of time, levels of prosperity and stability unparalleled in human history. (Yes, the stresses that Islamic immigration and demographic decline are imposing on Europe are real and serious - but I think it's too soon to say, with Murray and many on the Right, that "the European model can't continue to work much longer," full stop. The end of history may be more resilient than we think!) And as long as this remains the case, where you come out on the debates over whether we should prefer the continent's sturdier safety nets to America's lower unemployment and higher growth rates (or the continent's more equible provision of health care to America's lead in health-care innovation, or what-have-you) will ultimately boil down to values as much as it will to what the numbers say.

How much do you prize equality and ease of life? The more you do, the more you'll favor a European approach to the relationship between state and society. How much do you prize voluntarism, entrepreneurship, and the value of lives oriented around service to one's family, and to God? The more you do, the more you'll find to like in the American arrangement. Where this debate is concerned, I'm proud to stand with Charles Murray - but I don't think that we should labor under the false hope that scientific advances are going to tilt the argument dramatically in our direction.

Steele's Stumbles

I think Marc's analysis - both of where Michael Steele has gone wrong, and what he needs to do to right himself - has things just about right. The tragedy of Steele's RNC chairmanship to date is that he's been lousy at precisely the thing he was supposed to be good at - namely, giving the Republican Party a successful public-relations makeover - without demonstrating any obvious aptitude for the things (organization, etc.) that various Republicans worried he wouldn't be successful at. As one of Marc's sources notes, his desire to charm has been his undoing: He's been just as "comfortable with the media," in a sense, as his boosters hoped he would be, but there turns out to be a difference between being "comfortable" talking about the Republican Party on television and being good at it.

If I may overgeneralize a bit (and in a self-serving way) from an extremely small sample size, I think Steele's stumbles, while different in form from Sarah Palin's unsuccessful broadcast-network interviews (he's said too much; she didn't say enough ... and was tongue-tied doing it), reflect a similar underlying difficulty - the attempt to brazen through an intellectual vacuum with charisma alone. Both Steele and Palin are extremely charismatic, as American politicians go, which is a big reason why Republicans of different stripes - moderates for the Marylander, conservatives for the Alaskan - have been so excited about them. But they've both attempted (or been asked) to chart a new direction for the Right on style alone, and they've floundered as soon as they've been pressed for substance. Steele has responded by telling his interlocutors whatever they want to hear, Palin responded by telling her interlocutors next to nothing at all - and the results, in both cases, are and were unfortunate.

The point here, to return to an earlier theme, isn't that a brilliant rat-a-tat-tat of bright policy ideas from either Steele or Palin's lips would suddenly convert an audience of fence-sitting voters to rock-ribbed conservatism. It's that given conservatism's current straits, having something intelligent and fresh-sounding to say about how your political persuasion bears on the great issues of the day ought to be a baseline for rising right-of-center politicians. Insufficient, yes, but necessary all the same - not least because if you haven't figured out something smart-sounding to say in advance, all the charisma in the world won't save you from saying something foolish.

Don't Go Away

Blogging may be sparse at the moment, but I'll be writing in this space for another month, so I hope you'll keep checking in. For now, though, I'll send you off to other places: To the latest issue of the Atlantic, where you'll find a provocative excerpt from Robert Wright's next book (thick with claims I hope to argue with at some point), as well as Hanna Rosin on breast-feeding, T.C. Boyle on California wildfires, Josh Green on the Harvard of pot schools, James Parker on slasher films, and much, much more; to the latest TNR, for David Nirenberg's fascinating review essay on Paula Fredriksen's Augustine and the Jews; and to the latest New Yorker, for D.T. Max's engaging profile of Tony Gilroy.

The Times and Me

As Marc is reporting (amid many undeserved compliments), I'll be leaving the Atlantic to join the New York Times next month. I'll have more to say on this front soon, but for now the only thing to say is thanks - to the Atlantic, for everything and then some; to my readers for, well, reading me; and to the Times, for taking an awfully big chance. 

Secular America and the Culture War

This big religious-identification study is getting a lot of attention, and justly so, for showing the rise of freelance religiosity on the one hand, and straightforward secularism on the other. (The two trends blur into one another, obviously.) If I may take the liberty of dipping into my own archives, I think this piece from 2007 on a similar theme - I focused on the parallel rise of European-style secularism in the U.S. and American-style culture war skirmishes in Europe - holds up relatively well. This point, in particular, seems worth highlighting, amid all the bright talk about how Barack Obama's going to end the post-Sixties kulturkampf:

Religion stirs up the most controversy, a group of Harvard economists recently argued, when roughly half the population is actively religious; conflict ebbs when the devout constitute large majorities or small minorities. The more evenly divided a culture finds itself on the ultimate questions, the more likely politicians are to pursue "strategic extremism" and mobilize one side against the other. Precisely this kind of polarization dominated European politics from the French Revolution until the middle of the 20th century, sparking regular clashes-- Germany's Kulturkampf, France's Dreyfuss Affair, Spain's Civil War--between secular and religious ideologies.

America has long avoided this trap by enjoying near-universal piety; Europe, at least lately, has escaped it by cultivating near-universal skepticism. But if the religious gulf between the two continents narrows, the divides within each one are likely to open ever wider ...

In other words, unless conservative religiosity goes into a steeper decline than is visible in the latest data - and such a decline is possible, of course - the growth of "Godless America" may only make the culture wars hotter over the short run.

Stem Cells and Moral Seriousness

Michael Kinsley, writing in praise of the Obama Administration's inevitable decision to get the government into the business of embryo-killing:

... let's be clear: There is NO "medical ethical quandary" involved in the decade-long dispute over stem cells. There is only the appearance of an ethical quandary, created by people who either don't understand or willfully misrepresent the facts. "Quandary" is a particularly insidious word. Compare it to "controversy." There is undeniably a controversy about stem cells: two sides, disagreeing strongly. But "quandary" suggests that the controversy is legitimate--that a fair-minded person would have to recognize some degree of merit in both sides of the argument, wherever he or she might ultimately come down. In a "quandary," there actually are (dread phrase) "no easy answers."

.... If you wish to believe that every fertilized egg is a human being with full human rights, that is your privilege. I disagree, which makes it a controversy. If I felt you were serious, we would have a quandary as well. But there's no quandary because you're not serious. Your actions are too different from your words. You are doing absolutely nothing about the millions of fertilized eggs that are destroyed naturally every year (in miscarriages so early that the potential mother is not even aware of them), or the thousands that are produced and unused by fertility clinics going about their normal work (which are either discarded or pointlessly frozen in the hope of some miraculous ethical breakthrough).

The anti-abortion forces who have delayed stem-cell research by a decade are not morally serious. If they were, they would be trying to get laws making the work of fertility clinics illegal, not concentrating on the tiny fraction of surplus embryos from those clinics that are going to a worthwhile purpose.

Kinsley has made this argument before, and time has not improved it. Pro-lifers are often damned for being uncompromising zealots; here Kinsley is taking a case where the pro-life movement pretty clearly has gone in for compromise - drawing the line at having their tax dollars used for embryo-killing, rather than trying to get the practice banned outright - and damning them for being morally unserious. Heads he wins, tails we lose, I guess.  As should be clear from other examples, at home and abroad, most pro-lifers would like to heavily regulate fertility clinics, and would support efforts to give every embryo a chance at life. (I will pass over his line about miscarriages, which seems to imply that a "serious" pro-life movement would be trying to pass laws against accidental deaths.) But that's not where the national debate is at the moment, to put it mildly, so instead pro-lifers have done what you're supposed to do in a democracy, which is to meet the general public where they are. This doesn't make them insincere; it makes them sensible. (By Kinsley's screwy logic, a supporter of universal health care in a country where half the country's uninsured and there's no chance of passing single-payer would be "morally unserious" if he concentrated his energy on, say, mandating health care for newborns; after all, what about the millions of people who aren't newborns?)

Also, to the extent that pro-lifers do accept the current fertility-clinic culture as a given, I still think there's a worthwhile moral distinction to be drawn between "pointlessly" freezing the embryos left over from an attempt to have children, and just handing them over to be killed. Yes, a frozen embryo will probably be destroyed eventually, and the pro-life gesture involved in freezing it is probably just an empty gesture. But there's still a difference between a situation in which death is probable and a situation where it's inevitable, and I think it's a mistake to efface that line as completely as Kinsley's argument would have us do.

Barack Obama and the New Center-Left

There was a brief period during the Presidential transition when conservatives became - well, excited isn't quite the right word, but certainly encouraged by the names associated with the new administration. From Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates to the Rubinites charged with matters economic, there seemed to be good reason to think that personnel might be policy, and Obama's administration would prove more Clintonite and centrist that most people on the Right had dared to hope.

You don't hear that theme much among conservatives much nowadays. Instead, we're back to the Obama-as-radical chatter that predominated among right-wingers in the waning days of the Presidential election. As with the Ayers-mania of that unhappy period, some of this talk is miles over-the-top - for instance, the absurdist speculation about the President's "Leninist" plans to bring the U.S. economy to its knees, the better to advance the power of Leviathan. But some of it is justified: Obama is proposing the most thoroughgoing transformation of domestic policy offered by any President since Reagan, and possibly since LBJ. Which raises the question - what happened to the cautious Clintonism that Obama's appointments seemed to promise?

One answer is that Charles Krauthammer was right, months ago, when he suggested that Obama is a foreign-policy pragmatist and a domestic-policy transformationist: He "wants experts and veterans," Krauthammer wrote, "to manage and pacify universes in which he has little experience and less personal commitment" (thus the Clintonites in finance and foreign affairs), while he focuses like a laser-beam on health care summits and green-energy programs. Another answer is that Clintonism was always centrist more out of necessity than conviction, and thus the Obama Administration is offering, to some extent at least, the kind of agenda that Clinton would have offered (and did offer, in 1993 and 1994) had Nancy Pelosi, rather than Newt Gingrich, been running Congress in the Nineties.

But there's a third answer as well - which is that the smart center-left, embodied by Larry Summers as much as anyone, has moved steadily leftward over the last ten years, as part of a broader Bush-era rapprochement between the Democratic Party's moderate and liberal factions. On health care, the environment, income inequality and other fronts, figures like Summers are closer to their erstwhile lefty antagonists than they used to be, sharing common ground even when they don't have identical policy preferences. Thus the Obama team can include many of the same people who worked for Bill Clinton in 1998 or so, and still produce a more leftward-tilting policy agenda than the second-term Clinton White House - because the people in question don't have the same priorities they did a decade ago.

Neither, it's worth noting, does the country. American public opinion has moved leftward with the Clintonites, and under the influence of the same trends and events - from the mounting health-care crisis to the post-Clinton return of wage stagnation to the current financial debacle. And this is what's missing from the conservative attacks on Obama's radicalism - a recognition that the political landscape has shifted dramatically since the days when Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich were struggling over the American center, and that in the absence of a conservatism that's responsive to the changing situation, yesterday's radicalism can start to look a lot like today's common sense.

Abortion Reduction Revisited

Will Saletan has a thoughtful response to my latest critique of his abortion-reduction proposals. You should read the whole thing, but here's the heart of the matter:

I don't have a brilliant program in mind. All I have is process of elimination: If most people in this country, including me, aren't willing to ban abortions (check), and if you can't stop people from having sex (check), and if contraception is the only other way to prevent pregnancy (check), and if providing access to contraception hasn't solved the problem (check), then the remaining factor is human failure to use the contraception. Target that problem. I don't care whether it's through the federal government, states, clinics, schools, churches, or Conan O'Brien. All that matters is sending a forceful message that if you're not prepared to become a parent, you must either avoid vaginal intercourse or use birth control religiously.

If sex-ed programs aren't getting this message across, come up with better sex-ed programs. Or go through churches, doctors, parents, Facebook, Webkinz--whatever. Keep trying until you find something that works.

Given his premises, this seems fair. Ultimately, I think Saletan's project founders on the difficulty of moralizing about something that you aren't willing to regulate in any significant way: Law and culture are intertwined, especially in a rights-conscious society, and if you want to teach people that they ought to use condoms because "unprotected sex can lead to the creation -- and the subsequent killing, through abortion -- of a developing human being," as Saletan's original piece put it, then you need a legal regime that treats the killing of said developing human being as something other than a constitutional right on par with freedom of speech, religion or assembly. But on this much, he and I agree: If you start with the premise that neither American abortion law nor American patterns of sexual behavior can be altered in any significant way, and you want fewer abortions nonetheless, then trying different ways to promote the use of birth control "until you find something that works" is really all you have left. 

Going Galt

Speaking of Aynworld, I enjoyed this Will Wilkinson riff:

By the way, Atlas buffs, the point of Atlas Shrugged is not that you are John Galt. The point is that you are not John Galt. The point is that you are, at your best, Eddie Willers. You're smart, hardworking, productive, and true. But you're no creative genius and you take innovation -- John Galt -- for granted. You don't even know who he is! And this eventually leaves you weeping on abandoned train tracks. 

I think Obama's policies will be bad for innovation, but not because higher marginal tax rates will lead our best and brightest to retire from the field of endeavor. I'm rather more worried that our best and brightest will follow the incentives and go Robert Stadler. I'm worried that our money, which might otherwise have gone to capitalize real innovation, will be confiscated in order to finance government directed "investment" instead. Our economy can readily absorb a passel of drop-out Willerses (though Eddie never quits!). It's the misdirected capital embodied by the Stadlers and their Project Xes that really hurts.

A Final Word On Rush

Ruffini writes:

My overall sense is that the Frums and the Douthats of the world would be well served by staying away from this argument. As Ross himself has written, the grassroots needs elites -- and the elites need the grassroots. By trying to isolate Rush, the elites break down this elegant separation and veer into micromanaging the grassroots -- a losing proposition, particularly against a brand as sticky as Rush.

I take the point: I originally only meant to take a mild and passing swipe at Rush's CPAC speech, and I somewhat regret wading in deeper. (Such are the perils of blogging ...) But it's also worth remembering that Limbaugh's critics have ended up having this fight in part because Limbaugh has come after them. Rush was attacking David Frum as a sell-out and a surrender monkey before Frum was attacking him, and the CPAC speech was just the latest blast in Rush's long-running campaign to isolate would-be conservative reformers - a campaign that's seen him go after everyone from Jim Manzi to Newt Gingrich to yours truly.

Now obviously we're all big boys and we can take it, and Ruffini has a good point about discretion being the better part of valor in these kind of debates: Reformist takes on conservatism will survive even if Rush's attacks go unrebutted, and reformers might even win a few more converts if they aren't perceived as locked in a death-struggle with talk radio. But the deeper problem here isn't that a few conservative pointy-heads are getting their egos bruised by Rush's broadsides; it's that conservative politicians seem to be spending an awful lot of time looking over their shoulders these days, worried about what Limbaugh and company have to say about them. (Bobby Jindal's much-panned response to Obama, for instance, could have been ghost-written by Rush, and sure enough, Rush was the only one who liked it.) And this is something that reformers should be worried about: The GOP's leaders desperately need some space in which to experiment a little, on policy and otherwise, and they don't seem to have it at the moment. Maybe criticizing Limbaugh isn't the best way to open up that space - but at the very least you can see where the impulse comes from.

Small-Government Egalitarianism, Revisited

In my original post on Obama and starve-the-beast, I referenced this Yglesias item from a week or so ago - which offered, I think, an illuminating look at the roots of progressive thinking about taxation and income inequality. Drawing on this Lane Kenworthy post from last year, which considered the relationship between taxation, spending, and income inequality in developed countries, Yglesias wrote:

... if you look around the one at what it is countries do to mitigate income inequality, nobody is substantially equalizing things through the tax system, but many countries are substantially equalizing things on the spending side ... Not that progressive taxation is a bad thing, or meaningless in the contribution it makes, but clearly insofar as direct public policy interventions (as opposed to things like wider distribution of educational attainment) are going to reduce inequality, it needs to be done on the spending side. Now this raises the question how do you get the spending side to do more? Is it by "means testing" existing programs and creating new small-bore "targeted" programs aimed at the neediest? Well, not really ...for inequality reduction, it is the quantity of taxes rather than the progressivity of the tax system that matters most. Affluent countries that achieve substantial inequality reduction do so with tax systems that are large but no more progressive than ours.

As readers of Grand New Party know, one of the biggest things that separates my views on domestic policy from what I think it's fair to call the conservative mainstream is a concern about socioeconomic stratification (and, more exactly, its impact on socioeconomic mobility), and a belief that welfare-state spending should provide a safety net and promote upward mobility. What separates my views from progressives like Matt, on the other hand, is a belief that we should be able to pursue this goal without having the government swallow an ever-larger share of GDP. Of course the easiest way to reduce stratification is just to dramatically increase "the quantity of taxes" and let government spending do the rest - but if we're trying to strike a balance between liberty and equality, rather than just shrugging our shoulders and embracing a little more soft despotism and a little less voluntary association, then the idea of a means-tested and targeted welfare state looks like something worth pursuing.

Obviously, this kind of "small-government egalitarianism", to borrow Edward Glaeser's apposite phrase, isn't going to achieve the levels of equality, economic and otherwise, that prevail in small, ethnically-homogeneous social democracies. But that doesn't bother me: I don't want what Denmark has; I just want policies that do a bit more to mitigate what Clive Crook calls  the present "stickiness" of wealth and poverty in America - and I don't think it's implausible to imagine this happening within a welfare state that's no bigger than the one we have now. Look at this chart, for instance, which Matt borrowed from Kenworthy:



Yes, inequality reduction tends to go up with government revenue. But the countries are more scattered than the straight line indicates: Look at Australia, for instance, way over there on the left, taking only slightly more in taxes than the U.S. does at present, but doing a lot more than we do to mitigate inequality. (It's probably not a coincidence that Australia has been way out ahead of most of the developed world when it comes to means-testing.) There's no inherent reason, it seems to me, why the United States couldn't hold its position as the lowest-taxed country on the chart, while targeting and means-testing its way up the y-axis a bit. Small-government egalitarianism hasn't been tried and found wanting; it's just seemed too small-government-y for liberals, and a bit too egalitarian-sounding for many conservatives, and thus been left untried.

The Case For Reading Ayn Rand

I liked this post, from Megan:

... I look to Atlas Shrugged more for conveniently totable beach reading than an economic blueprint. What's interesting to me, though, is how many details Rand did get right--like the markets in "unfreezing" Ukrainian bank deposits, so similar to the frozen railroad bonds of Atlas Shrugged. Or the cascading and unanticipated failures, with government officials racing to slap another fix on to fix the last failing solution. If only the people in her novels had acted remotely like actual people, rather than comic book characters, I, too, would be rereading the thing now.

She was able to describe these things so well, of course, because she'd seen what an economy looked like while it was being wrecked. All of Rand's writing is dominated by the fact that she lived through the birth pangs of Soviet Russia, and saw her family's business destroyed by Lenin's ideology, and extraordinarily incompetent economic management.  Her philosophy does not work, at least if by work we mean generate a framework by which a person or society can order itself. But she was actually a really very gifted observer, and she had a quite subtle understanding of how all the interconnected elements of an industrial economy fit together. It's a pity she didn't quite get how human beings worked, especially herself.

I've no doubt said this before, but Atlas Shrugged is well worth your time even if you aren't interested in the half-baked, Nietzsche-for-capitalists philosophizing. As far as pop-fiction apocalypses go, Rand's portrait of an industrial America buckling under the weight of worldwide socialism is up there with Stephen King's The Stand - it's mad, doomy and often riveting, with atmosphere to burn. (Just flip forty pages or so ahead when you reach John Galt's speech ...) Rand wasn't much on interiority, as Megan suggests, but her caricatured characters reveal an eye for certain American types, and her prose, however awful in patches, occasionally achieves the kind of grinding momentum that you get from bad-yet-somehow-good writers like Theodore Dreiser. Great literature it isn't, but if you start in you'll almost certainly get sucked in, which is more than you can say for quite a few thousand-page efforts.

(The less said about The Fountainhead, on the other hand, the better ...)

Obama's Traditionalists

I don't have much to add to the interesting interesting discussion about Barack Obama's remarkable gains among traditionalist Catholics; I think all of the theories being floated - from the impact of the Iraq War to the possibility that pro-life Catholics might have been more willing to vote for a pro-choice Protestant like Obama than for a pro-choice Catholic like John Kerry - probably contain some element of truth. As an inveterate Doug Kmiec critic, though, I'd be cautious about overestimating the impact of the "pro-life, pro-Obama" lobby on this shift: Not because the Kmiecs of the world didn't have an impact, necessarily, but because I suspect Steve Waldman is right that their biggest impact came in giving pro-life Catholics "permission" to do something that they wanted to do anyway ... and the reasons that a Catholic traditionalist might have wanted to vote for Obama anyway are probably bigger problems for the anti-abortion movement in the long run than the tissue-thin claim that the Democratic candidate was somehow the real pro-lifer in the race.

Barack Obama, Deficit-Cutter?

Jon Chait takes exception to my suggestion that the Obama budget lays out a kind of starve-the-beast in reverse:

In the most important sense, this is completely wrong. Obama's budget is not a net spender. It would reduce the deficit by some $2 trillion over the next decade (big PDF link; see page 115) compared to continuing current policy. (You can quibble about the "current policy" baseline -- some of the Iraq expenditures would probably have declined under even a Republican administration -- but the basic fact that Obama's policies reduce the deficit on the whole is hard to dispute.) By contrast, all of Bush's major deficit-increasing initiatives -- the tax cuts, the war in Iraq, the Medicare benefit -- came without any attempt at all to pay for them. And, by the way, most of the people who are complaining about Obama's fiscal irresponsibility today uttered not a peep of complaint about Bush.

Ramesh Ponnuru isn't convinced, and neither am I. That deceptive baseline makes all the difference in the world; take it away, and what you have is Obama reducing the deficit from recession-era highs created by TARP and the stimulus package - which are both designed to be temporary anyway - to recovery-era lows that are no lower, as a percentage of GDP, than the deficits Bush ran during his administration's years of economic growth. (This is leaving aside the rosiness of the growth and revenue-collection scenarios underlying the budget's number-crunching, and the fact that it only includes a "down payment" on the still-hypothetical health care reform that Obama wants as the domestic-policy centerpiece of his administration.) Now it's true that some voices within the Obama Administration wanted to run a higher deficit still, and the President apparently sided against them. But that doesn't change the fact that the projected post-recession deficits are in the same range as Bush's pre-recession deficits, if not slightly higher.

But don't listen to me; listen to Jon Chait:

Now, I'll concede that Douthat has a point in spirit. Obama does not get the deficit all the way to where it ought to be. If the economy recovers by 2011, as he projects, and we experience continued growth through 2019, and we're still running the 3.1 percent of GDP deficit he forecasts -- well, that would be a problem. [emphasis mine - RD] It's totally unfair to compare a president who made the problem vastly worse with one who alleviates the problem considerably. But it is interesting to ponder why Obama doesn't go further in the direction of fiscal responsibility.

This isn't a point "in spirit" - it's a point in fact. When the recession is over, and the stimulus spending has finished running through the economy, Barack Obama's budget projects the same level of deficit spending that the United States experienced from 2000 to 2007. The difference is that whereas Bush ran deficits in part as an attempt to establish a lower baseline for tax rates, Obama would run deficits in part as an attempt to establish a higher baseline for government spending. His accounting may more honest than Bush's, as Chait argues in a follow-up post, but that doesn't change the basic reality of what this administration is proposing: Its budgets would use substantial deficit spending to finance an expansion of government, while putting off the tax increases that would be required to pay for it. And I think it's fair to call that "starve the beast" in reverse.

Darwin, the Fall, and Christian Fantasy

Now this is my kind of reader:

Further to your post, I wonder if you've ever read any of Tolkien's later philosophical musings about his mythology, in particular the essays and drafts collected in the volume Morgoth's Ring. Tolkien says that Morgoth -- the original Satanic figure responsible for the fall of the elves and (implicitly and off camera) the fall of humans -- imbued the physical world with a large part of his evil essence: "Just as Sauron concentrated his power in the One Ring, Morgoth dispersed his power into the very matter of Arda, thus 'the whole of Middle-Earth was Morgoth's Ring'". This explains why, from the elvish point of view, death is the "gift of men" because it gives them a ticket out of the fallen, Morgoth-tainted world. The problem with this from a orthodox Christian perspective is that death is supposed to be the punishment for the Fall and not part of the solution for the Fall.  Tolkien was very much troubled by this deviation from orthodoxy and justified it by saying his mythology was just the elves' imperfect understanding about how things worked. But I find Tolkien's mythology/theology to make more sense and it certainly fits better with the idea that evolution "red in tooth and claw" is part of the residue of the Fall.

I think there's arguably an intimation in Genesis of the idea of death as a gift as well as a punishment - not a solution to the Fall, exactly, but perhaps a mitigation of it. After Adam and Eve have taken the forbidden fruit, God declares that Man is to be banished from Eden "lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever," which could be read as a suggestion that the only thing worse than a life corrupted by sin is an eternal life corrupted by sin. C.S. Lewis, Tolkien's fellow Christian fantasist, developed this theme in The Magician's Nephew, by having Jadis, Queen of Charn (and the future White Witch) consume the Narnian equivalent of the fruit of the tree of life, which comes equipped with the warning that anyone who eats of it under the wrong circumstances "will find their heart's desire and find despair." When Aslan is asked, later on, about the fruit's effect, he answers: "She has won her heart's desire; she has unwearying strength and endless days like a goddess. But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery...."

The Pursuit of Social Democracy

Barack Obama won the 2008 Presidential election on an agenda that tilted him further leftward than most recent Democratic nominees on nearly every issue. The one big exception was taxes, where he ran to the center, offering what was arguably a larger middle-class tax cut than the Republican candidate, and promising that the only tax increase he contemplated would fall on the richest Americans, and merely return tax rates to the levels of the Clinton years. This maneuver helped win him the election, by blunting the GOP's attempts to paint him as a tax-hiker - but it left him well short of a mandate for the kind of social democracy that many liberals see as their goal. That's because, as commenters across the spectrum agree, you can't fund social democracy just by making the tax code ever more progressive: At some point, you need to raise revenue from the middle class.

What Obama does have, though, is an atmosphere of crisis and a massively-unpopular opposition party, which grants him an unparalleled political opportunity to pass whatever spending the Democratic Party likes, and damn the short-term cost. And what you see in his budgeting proposals, I think, is the liberal equivalent of the conservative attempt to "starve the beast." In both the Reagan and Bush eras, Republicans passed tax cuts and ran up large deficits while hoping that by starving the federal government of revenue they would curb its long-run growth. Obama's spending proposals would effectively reverse that dynamic - they would create new spending commitments and run up large deficits, in the hopes that the dollars poured into health care and education will create a new baseline for government's obligations, which in turn will create the political space for tax increases on the middle class. Like the starve-the-beast approach, the Obama strategy puts off the hard part till tomorrow: Give them tax cuts today, conservatives said, and they'll swallow spending cuts tomorrow; give them universal health care, universal pre-K, subsidies for green industry and all the rest of it today, liberals seem to be thinking, and they'll be willing to pay for it tomorrow.

The fact that starve-the-beast didn't work out as well as small-governmenteers hoped doesn't make the Obama strategy misguided. Both political parties are living in the shadow of the hard choices that are going to be imposed by the insolvency of America's entitlements: At some point soon, liberals are going to have to accept somewhat less spending than they'd like, and conservatives are going to have to accept somewhat higher taxes. And if you can change the baseline of social spending that Americans expect from their government before that day of hard choices arrive - and once created, government programs are awfully hard to get rid of, whether they're actually effective or not - then you've tilted the landscape of negotiation in liberalism's favor, and ensured that a post-Obama entitlement compromise will look a lot more like social democracy than a pre-Obama compromise would have.

But of course none of this will work if the American economy doesn't escape its current downward spiral. If you're running enormous deficits and don't have any economic growth to show for it, it doesn't matter how popular your social-spending programs are in the short run, as more than a few ex-Latin American leaders will be happy to attest. And what does make the Obama strategy misguided is that it looks increasingly like a substitute for a depression-fighting strategy - and what's worse, a substitute that has the potential to actually make matters worse, when Obama, liberalism, and America all desperately need things to get better.  

Does Rush Matter?

Jay Cost, responding this column from Reihan among other things, doesn't think any of the sturm und drang over Limbaugh makes a difference:

When appealing to a political audience as broad as the voting public, you are confronting a large majority of voters who pay relatively little attention and are essentially non-ideological in their political orientation. That means the idea of converting somebody from "liberalism" to "conservatism" as a precursor to getting his vote is simply not going to yield many votes. If it did, this is what candidates - who have the greatest interest in winning votes - would try to do. Instead, they speak in sound bytes and they have Stevie Wonder or Hank Williams, Jr. open their political rallies.

But it's precisely because symbolism matters as much or more than substance that the amount of attention Rush Limbaugh is grabbing at the moment is bad for the GOP. Yes, elections aren't won by having a bunch of clever conservative intellectuals go around writing columns and giving speeches that convert people from liberalism to conservatism. And they aren't won, usually, by clever policy proposals either. But they are won, quite frequently, by politicians and parties that present themselves as the sort of people who seem to be interested in clever policy proposals, and who seem as well like they might be able to convert you to their way of thinking (and be interested in hearing about yours) if they had a few hours to talk to you about the matter. And the success of Barack Obama - his ability to woo non-ideological and politically underinformed voters - flowed and flows in part from his ability to project just these qualities, even as he pushes a substantive agenda that's left-liberal to the core.

Rush Limbaugh, on the other hand, projects a different set of qualities, and comes freighted with a different set of associations. Rich Lowry, while disagreeing with the thrust of Limbaugh's critique of would-be conservative reformers, says he finds "the attacks on Rush from the right mostly stupid, cringe-inducing, and wrong," citing as a prime example this David Frum post, which references Limbaugh's weight, history of drug problems, and various other personal foibles while drawing a contrast between a liberalism embodied by Obama and a conservatism embodied by El Rushbo. Now maybe Frum's decision to get personal is cringe-inducing, his overall point is neither wrong nor stupid: To a non-ideological voter who's uninterested in policy and forms his perceptions of liberalism and conservatism largely through symbolism and sound bites, a conflict between Obama on the one hand and Limbaugh on the other will almost inevitably redound to liberalism's benefit.

This doesn't mean that the Limbaugh v. Obama dynamic that Rush and the Democrats are mutually laboring to cultivate is going to be decisive in future elections and debates. I certainly wouldn't disagree with Cost's point that "elections are fought over the state of the union and the country's opinion on how the majority party has managed the government," and that parties and politicians mainly get to tinker at the margins. But a lot of action happens there nonetheless - and the fact that it isn't going to determine the outcome of the 2012 election doesn't change the fact that the Limbaugh-related action over the last couple of weeks has been bad for conservatism's image, and its political prospects as well.

Rush and Olbermann

I basically agree with Jonah Goldberg's point about the limits of the Limbaugh-Oprah comparison, which is one reason my original post circled around to a Rush-Jon Stewart analogy instead. But I think he's missing the point with this:

Why, for instance, is Limbaugh less serious a spokesperson for a point of view than, say, Keith Olbermann or, for that matter, Bill Moyers? Olbermann, who started out as a sportscaster, says things his ideological opponents don't like into a TV camera. Limbaugh says things his ideological opponents don't like into a radio microphone. Limbaugh's more successful at it. Again, I think people look foolish when they are starstruck -- particularly starstruck in large crowds -- about anybody. But, I'm not sure that the adjective "entertainer" takes you very far analytically here at all.

But look - the point of calling Rush an entertainer isn't to say that nobody should ever listen to him or care about what he has to say. The point is that by virtue of being an entertainer, and having the incentives of an entertainer, he's a poor candidate to fill the role of spokesman (and ideological enforcer) for the conservative opposition - a role that he seems eager to take on, and that Barack Obama is very eager to see him occupy. I don't think Limbaugh is a less serious voice for conservatism than Keith Olbermann is for liberalism. But that's because I don't think either of them should be taken all that seriously - because they're media personalities whose primary loyalty is to their image and their audience, and whose primary purpose is to provoke and get attention. And I think it should go without saying that American liberalism would be in serious, serious trouble if someone like Olbermann were occupying the kind of role on the left-of-center that Limbaugh seems to be shouldering his way into at the moment.

Just imagine, for a moment, how conservatives would react if four months after the worst defeat liberalism had suffered in a generation, an Olbermann (or a Moyers or a Michael Moore or a Bill Maher or whomever) showed up to deliver the keynote address at a liberal equivalent of CPAC, and during the course of his speech he blasted every Democrat who disagrees with him as a miserable sell-out, suggested that conservatives are fascists and conservatism a psychosis, lectured the crowd on the irrelevance of policy ideas to liberalism's political prospects, and insisted that the only blueprint liberals need to win elections is the one that Lyndon Johnson used to rout Barry Goldwater. And then further imagine that both before and after this speech, a series of left-of-center politicians ventured criticisms of Olbermann, only to beat a hasty and apologetic retreat as soon as he turned his fire on them. Conservatives would be chortling - and rightly so! Not because liberalism needs to purge or marginalize its Keith Olbermanns, or because impassioned liberal entertainers don't have a place in left-of-center discourse - but because when your political persuasion faces a leadership vacuum, you don't want to have it filled by someone who appeals to an impassioned but narrow range of voters, and whose central incentive is to maximize his own ratings.

Remember when National Review ran a cover story about Howard Dean, entitled "Please, Nominate This Man!"? That's how liberals feel about Rush Limbaugh at the moment: They can't get enough of him. I don't see any reason why conservatives should be playing into their hands.

Darwin and Christ

From a provocative list of propositions (via John Schwenkler) about the great evolutionist and religion:

From the beginning, it was moral panic more than scientific scruple that drove Christians to jump on the bandwagon of anti-Darwinism. But it wasn't just driven by the ignominy of the common biological ancestry of all hominids ... even more significant was the elimination of teleology from the study of nature and its implication for social ethics. But this is actually exceptionally good news. Because the fact that "the causal heart of Darwinian theorizing is against the idea of progress" (Michael Ruse) clears an intellectual space for biblical eschatology: more precisely, for the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the world's apocalyptic counter-evolutionary moment in which the weakest kata sarka turn out to be the "fittest" kata pneuma. John Howard Yoder famously said that "those who bear crosses are walking with the grain of the universe." Strictly speaking, that should be: against the grain of "nature, red in tooth and claw" (Tennyson; cf. Romans 8:22), and with the grain of the new creation, where babies play with sidewinders (cf. Isaiah 11:8).

As this provocation suggests, the debate over Darwinism and Christian faith, properly understood, has less to do with the question of whether we should think of God as a designer who fine-tunes flagella, and more to do with how the theory of evolution fits into the deep and interesting tension that's always been at the heart of Christian accounts of creation. On the one hand, we inhabit a universe whose combination of order and majesty - the laws of nature and the astonishing beauty of the world they undergird - is to be taken as evidence of God's existence and His goodness. On the other hand, we inhabit a world that's been corrupted by sin, and that "groaneth and travaileth in pain together" as it awaits renewal and rebirth. And from Paul to Thomas Aquinas to C.S. Lewis, Christian thinkers have labored over the balance between these two premises, returning again and again to the question of just how fallen the world really is.

If Darwinism poses a challenge to Christianity, then, it's on grounds that have less to do with God's existence than with His nature, and the nature of the world. The realization that evolution by natural selection has produced humankind effectively heightens the role of physical evil in creation: A material world shot through with suffering and death isn't just a necessary backdrop to the human drama, it's the mechanism that's made human existence possible in the first place.

This realization doesn't necessarily undercut the traditional Thomist understanding of physical evil. If we agree with Aquinas that physical evils are necessary to the existence of a material universe, then there's no logical bar to saying that they're essential to the genesis of a creature made in God's own image as well. But if you dwell on the sheer scope of physical evils involved in this process, as any serious consideration of evolution forces you to do, you can see the intuitive appeal of the alternative approach suggested in the passage above - in which evolution-by-natural-selection is treated as part of the essential fallen-ness of the world, and "Nature red in tooth and claw" becomes one of the powers and principalities that Christ came to overthrow.

As I've suggested before, this treatment of the problem of physical evil would require a not-insignificant re-examination of the traditional understanding of the Fall. But at the very least, these are the kind of questions that evolutionary theory ought to prompt Christians to debate, instead of expending their energy arguing about, say, whether special creation was necessary to produce the eye.

Rush and Oprah

Hugh Hewitt writes that Limbaugh's speech at CPAC "will be talked about for years and even decades." I hope he's wrong about that, but he's definitely right about this:

A week ago a reporter from a major American newspaper called me to talk about Rush.  I agreed to do the interview provided it was recorded and that I could air it after the story the reporter was working on ran.  The reporter asked me if Rush was a "leader," and I said no.  He is, I continued, a communicator, a pundit and an entertainer, one of the two best in the country --along with Oprah.  And a man of extraordinary influence.  I think the Rush-Oprah comparison startled the reporter, but it is exactly correct.  They have the same reach, and though they have almost completely different approaches to life, both are deeply sincere about their views and thus far beyond merely "effective."  Both communicators change lives.

Not only do I think this is true, I've actually said it myself! (Though Reihan said it first.) But if you accept the parallel with Oprah, then you also need to recognize that if American liberals treated someone like Ms. Winfrey the way the adoring CPAC-goers treated Rush - not just as a great communicator and entertainer, but as an arbiter of what their movement is and ought to be, and what their party should be standing for - they'd look like starstruck fools. And rightly so.

So I'm glad to hear Hewitt say that he thinks of Limbaugh as "communicator, a pundit and an entertainer," rather than a "leader." But I wish that more conservatives understood the distinction.

Fooled By Randomness?

Even Warren Buffet is allowed to have an awful year from time to time. But reading about Berkshire Hathaway's losses over the weekend, all I could think about was the fate of Victor Niederhoffer.

God and Man in Big Love

In my last post on Big Love, I described the show as "arguably - arguably! - one of the most sympathetic portraits of conservative religious belief on television." Writing on last week's episode, one of the show's finest, Todd VanDerWerff took up that theme:

Television doesn't do terribly well in portraying people of faith. To a real degree, this is a function of television being a mass medium and mass media wanting to do their best to keep their audiences as mass as possible, even in today's age of niche markets. To some degree, this has to do with fundamentalist Christian and Mormon audiences in the U.S. being deeply suspicious of a pop culture that portrays them as buffoons more often than not. Indeed, a good number of evangelical Christians have embraced The Simpsons' Ned Flanders, satirical warts and all, simply because he's a nice guy trying to live up to his creed in a world that continually tests him ...

... I say all of that, but Big Love has pretty much just gone ahead and MADE a show about the struggles of having faith in the modern world and has done so in a largely respectful and fascinating way on the network you'd least expect to be interested in broadcasting the good, clean fun of living by a strict religious creed. Big Love's occasionally anthropological feel - the series tends to shoot the religious ceremonies of the Henricksons as though it's a National Geographic documentary - is often overwhelmed by the sheer compassion it feels for all of its characters (outside of, arguably, Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton), who seems to be viewed as venal and unsalvageable). There's another scene in "Come, Ye Saints," scripted by Melanie Marnich and directed by Dan Attias, that struck me silent with its beauty. Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin), reeling from the death of her mother and the revelation that Bill's oldest son Ben (Douglas Smith) is in love with her, is destroyed when she accidentally leaves the urn carrying her mother's ashes atop a car and then drives off, scattering the ashes to the wind. She finally seems to let loose some of the grief she's been carrying, and then, Bill baptizes first wife Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn) in a hotel room hot tub as a proxy for Margene's mother, ensuring that when Margene dies, her mother will be there waiting for her on the other side.

It would be easy to play this scene for goofy laughs (it IS a pretty weird concept), but Big Love plays it for every ounce of poignancy it can muster, from the look of comfort on Goodwin's face to the cool lighting of the hotel room. "No soul is lost," says Bill, and for an instant, Big Love strikes you with the sensation of why these people are in this seemingly unsustainable setup, of why anyone would want to be a part of a religious tradition seemingly at odds with the modern world ... 

I'm sure that this is part of why I like the show so much - because at its best, it successfully dramatizes the tension between traditional religion and modern American life that every serious believer ought to feel. And not only those tensions related to sex (though obviously they loom large - this is an HBO soap opera, after all), but the broader dissonance between what it takes to be a Christian and what it takes to be an American success story, with a business empire, a big house (or three), and all the rest of it.

Yes, this dramatization takes place through the lens of Mormon fundamentalism (with the ghoulish Juniper Creek compound, I suppose, as the equivalent of the Benedict Option), which stacks the deck against traditional religion even as it raises the dramatic stakes. But the risk of sounding like a more extreme version of the evangelicals who love Ned Flanders, I'll take what I can get.

The Limbaugh Speech

My reaction to the thing is too predictable to be worth going over, but if you're interested in the state of American conservatism I'd certainly advise you to read it - or better, to watch it, assuming you have an hour you can block off for the task. Andrew Breitbart, in a fawning tribute, calls it "an address that could have altered the election had it been delivered early last fall by any Republican presidential candidate." And on that, at least, we can agree.