Is Feminism The New Natalism?

... it's tempting to dismiss concerns about demographic decline as an anti-feminist race panic. The thing is, though, rapidly declining birth rates really are a problem, especially for the sort of generous welfare states that liberals love ... I get why liberals have shied away from this discussion, since there's so many uncomfortable issues involved. But they really shouldn't, because the only solutions to the problem are liberal ones! Basically, the societies where birthrates have plunged to dangerous levels - Russia, Catholic countries like Poland, Spain and Italy, as well as Japan and Singapore - are all places that make it very difficult for women to combine work and family. In countries that support working mothers, like Sweden, Denmark, Norway and France, birthrates are basically fine - they're either just at replacement, or shrinking in a very slow, totally manageable way. (The United States is the exception, for a whole host of reasons - some intuitive and some surprising - that I'll elaborate some other time.) That's why the Tory MP David Willetts, in a very smart 2003 report on the threat low birthrates pose to Europe's pension systems, wrote that "feminism is the new natalism." As he explained:
 

The evidence from Italy, and indeed Spain, is that a traditional family structure now leads to very low birth rates...[a] brief tour of birth rates in four European countries helps demonstrate what modern family policy must be about. It has nothing to do with enforcing traditional roles on women...In most of Europe women still aspire to having two children but in Italy and Germany it is very difficult to combine this with women's other aspirations.

In other words, the threat of population decline is one of the best arguments yet for socialized day care, family leave, and other dreamy Scandinavian-style policies. It's a discussion we should welcome.

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

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

The debate about mothers and work: it always ends--doesn't it?--with Sweden. Oh, if America could only be like Sweden--such a humane society, with its free day care for working mothers and its government subsidies of up to $11,900 per child per year. The problem? One hates to be Mrs. Red-State Republican Bringdown, but yes ... the taxes. Currently, the top marginal income-tax rate in Sweden is nearly 60 percent (down from its peak in 1979 of 87 percent). Government spending amounts to more than half of Sweden's GDP ... On the upside, government spending creates jobs: from 1970 to 1990, a whopping 75 percent of Swedish jobs created were in the public sector ... providing social welfare services ... almost all of which were filled by women. Uh-oh. In short, as Gilbert points out, because of the 40 percent tax rate on her husband's job, a new mother may be forced to take that second, highly taxed job to supplement the family's finances; in other words, she leaves her toddlers behind from eight to five (in that convenient universal day care) so she can go take care of other people's toddlers or empty the bedpans of elderly strangers. (As Alan Wolfe has pointed out, "the Scandinavian welfare states which express so well a sense of obligation to distant strangers, are beginning to make it more difficult to express a sense of obligation to those with whom one shares family ties.")

The Case of Howard Ahmanson

Who's Afraid of Low Birthrates?

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.

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.

... 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.

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.

The AIDS Libel

The Life and Death of Miss Jade Goody

Kinsley and Stem Cells, Revisited

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.

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.

The Church and the World

Secular America and the Culture War

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

... 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.

Abortion Reduction Revisited

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.

Obama's Traditionalists

Darwin and Christ

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).

Abortion, Contraception and the States

How Shame Works

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

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

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

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

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

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

Point-Counterpoint

Authoritarianism Just Around the Corner

Roe and the Culture War

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

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

Ending or Winning?

Roe Turns Thirty-Six

Achieving Our Country

Race and The Israel Lobby

It seems to me, from reading your blog post and from watching your Bloggingheads with Matt Yglesias, that part of your problem with The Israel Lobby is that, intentionally or not, it mimics certain anti-Semitic tropes. Isn't that exactly, though, the kind of argument that has been directed at conservatives regarding race, to their great consternation? With issues like affimative action or similar, conservatives have been accused of being near-racists, like racists, arguing in similar ways to racists.... And over and over again, conservatives have replied that nuance matters, context matters, intent matters, details matter. Surely the same is true when it comes to criticizing Israel and accusations of anti-Semitism. If nothing else, your opinion reinforces the notion that, when it comes to Israel, we don't play by the usual rules, and everyone has to be a little careful, not say too much, not go too far from the conventional path. That's not a good thing, I don't think.

Neuhaus, Ctd.

Neuhaus and Liberalism

In his obituary for Richard John Neuhaus, Douthat claims, in response to some nameless silly person (who just happens to be me), that Neuhaus was dedicated to reconciling Christianity with the liberal tradition. I suspect that will sound pretty odd to those familiar with Neuhaus' role in arming the conservative side of the culture war with arguments intended to decimate liberalism. But then everything begins to make sense once you follow the link that Douthat supplies with his statement, which brings you to a Neuhaus article on "The Liberalism of John Paul II." Oh, that liberal tradition. The liberalism that traces American democratic ideas not to the Enlightenment but to medieval Christendom. The liberalism that believes (in Neuhaus' words, written in 1984) that "only a transcendent, a religious, vision can turn this society from a disaster and toward the fulfillment of its destiny" as a "sacred enterprise." The liberalism that holds (in Neuhaus' words, written in 1997) that the American experiment "may well be ending . . . under the iron rule of the 'separation of church and state.'" The liberalism that espouses the Manichean view that one of the country's two major political parties, the nation's media, and its courts--and perhaps 52.9 percent of the American people--are in the grip of a bloodthirsty "culture of death" that needs to be combated by champions of the "culture of life," who just so happen to make their home in the country's other major political party. That's the liberalism of John Paul II and Richard John Neuhaus.

And therein lies Neuhaus' greatest ideological innovation. Rather than maintaining that the religious right should replace liberal politics with some other, religiously grounded form of political association, he insisted that, properly understood, liberal politics is (or once was, or should be--on this he was often unclear) a religiously grounded form of political association. Viewed in this way, the Pope, Neuhaus himself, and their Protestant friends (like Pat Robertson, Chuck Colson, James Dobson, Ralph Reed, and Karl Rove) become America's true liberals, while all those millions of Americans on the right and left who prefer a more mundane form of politics (and who in nearly every other context are considered liberals of the classical or modern variety) become the antagonists the true liberal tradition.

Damon and I have been round and round on these questions many times before (though unfortunately our major exchange has vanished into the maw of TNR's archives), so I'll be brief. Basically, if you set aside the tendentiousness, there's truth to what he says above. Neuhaus argued that the American constitutional order, and the form of liberalism it embodies, "is premised upon moral truths secured by religion," to quote from his essay on John Paul II and the liberal tradition. Moreover, he believed that the modern left's emphasis on the separation of religion and politics (as opposed to church and state) ran toward illiberalism, and that the left-wing promotion of legalized abortion and euthanasia amounted to a frontal assault on essentially liberal principles - human rights and human dignity and so forth. These are not uncontroversial views, to put it mildly, and they certainly made him a conservative in the modern political landscape. But they are views have deep roots in Anglo-American political history - the notion that liberalism's basic premises depend in some sense upon religion, in particular, is as old as Hobbes and Locke - and as such they properly belong within the big tent of the American liberal tradition, rather than outside it. And a liberal tradition that cannot find, within its many mansions, room for Neuhaus (and, yes, for John Paul II as well), is a liberalism that any Christian worth his salt should think twice for before subscribing to.

For more on the Linker critique of Neuhaus's work, Noah Millman and Russell Arben Fox have characteristically thought-provoking musings. And for anyone interested in passing a fuller judgment on Neuhaus' thought, and its relationship with the liberal tradition, I recommend going to the horse's mouth: To the above-mentioned essay on JPII and liberalism; to Neuhaus's fascinating exchange with Stanley Fish on religion's compatibility with liberal democracy (and vice versa); to his rebuke to the theonomist temptation; to his recent lecture on "Our American Babylon" (which forms the basis, I believe, of what will be a posthumously published book); and to many other places as well. Whatever one's opinion of Neuhaus's political and theological commitments (and here I think Damon would agree), his writings ought to be required reading for anyone concerned with religion, politics, and the first principles (or "first things") that undergird the two - and he deserves as wide an audience, if not a wider one, in death as he enjoyed in life.

Richard John Neuhaus, RIP

The Church and the Morning After Pill

Ross Douthat faces a fascinating (to me) dilemma: the Vatican officially says one thing about the morning-after pill, but Ross believes that the Vatican has reached an incorrect conclusion based on a misunderstanding of reproductive science.

Ross is a Catholic. If a friend said to him that she wants to take the morning-after pill, but is concerned that it might be the moral equivalent of an abortion, so she wanted his recommendation -- what would he be morally obliged to advise?

It seems to me from the Church's perspective, if he advised his friend to take the pill, he would be committing a sin. But what if you, like Ross, honestly believe the Church has erred on the facts? Is an orthodox Catholic -- that is, a Catholic who actually believes that his conscience is bound by the teachings of the Church -- therefore required to counsel what the Church counsels, even if he thinks in good faith that the Church has fundamentally erred? Isn't an orthodox Catholic required, moreover, to believe that the Church teaches truth in matters of faith and morals, and that despite the appearance of error, the individual Catholic is, in fact, wrong?

An orthodox Catholic is required to believe that the Church teaches truly in matters of faith and morals. He is not required to believe that the Church teaches truly in matters of science; indeed, the Church does not have "teachings," properly understood, on scientific questions.  Where the two intersect - well, there things get a bit dicey. My sense of that matter is that I am bound to accept the Church's moral judgment that the taking of innocent human life at any stage from conception to natural death is a grave evil (and would not have become a Catholic if I did not), but that I am not bound to accept a Vatican document's summary of where the science stands regarding whether the morning-after pill does in fact take a life, by preventing implantation of a fertilized embryo. And therefore, to take up Rod's hypothetical, if someone contemplating taking the morning-after pill asked for my opinion on the matter, I would tell them that I've seen no persuasive evidence that suggests that emergency contraception is anything save, well, contraception - whose use is sinful according to Catholic teaching, obviously, but not nearly so gravely sinful as abortion. That doesn't mean I would urge them to go take it: It just means that if they asked me if I thought it was an abortifacent, I'd feel obliged to say no.

Abortion and the Morning After Pill

Is Planned Parenthood Pro-Life?

My Tax Dollars At Work

The 3 percent pie slice in the 2005-06 financial report, representing 264,943 abortion customers served, can only be described as deliberately misleading.

One way Planned Parenthood massages the numbers to make its abortion business look trivial is to unbundle its services for purposes of counting. Those 10.1 million different medical procedures in the last fiscal year, for instance, were administered to only 3 million clients. An abortion is invariably preceded by a pregnancy test--a separate service in Planned Parenthood's reckoning--and is almost always followed at the organization's clinics by a "going home" packet of contraceptives, which counts as another separate service. Throw in a pelvic exam and a lab test for STDs--you get the picture. In terms of absolute numbers of clients, one in three visited Planned Parenthood for a pregnancy test, and of those, a little under one in three had a Planned Parenthood abortion.

Man Gave Names To All The Animals

This Telegraph story is headlined "words associated with Christianity and British history taken out of children's dictionary," but the purge of animal names from the (admittedly only 10,000-word) Oxford Junior Dictionary seems just as disquieting as the disappearance of words like minister, monastery, monk, and nun. Here's some of what's out:

adder, ass, beaver, boar, budgerigar, bullock, cheetah, colt, corgi, cygnet, doe, drake, ferret, gerbil, goldfish, guinea pig, hamster, heron, herring, kingfisher, lark, leopard, lobster, magpie, minnow, mussel, newt, otter, ox, oyster, panther, pelican, piglet, plaice, poodle, porcupine, porpoise, raven, spaniel, starling, stoat, stork, terrapin, thrush, weasel, wren.

And here's some of what's in:

Blog, broadband, MP3 player, voicemail, attachment, database, export, chatroom, bullet point, cut and paste, analogue

Celebrity, tolerant, vandalism, negotiate, interdependent, creep, citizenship, childhood, conflict, common sense, debate, EU, drought, brainy, boisterous, cautionary tale, bilingual, bungee jumping, committee, compulsory, cope, democratic, allergic, biodegradable, emotion, dyslexic, donate, endangered, Euro

Apparatus, food chain, incisor, square number, trapezium, alliteration, colloquial, idiom, curriculum, classify, chronological, block graph

I mean, fair enough about "budgerigar" and "boisterous." But there's something awfully depressing about the idea that the word "database" is more relevant to your average British ten-year-old than the word "guinea pig."

Litmus Tests

... pro-lifers have often made the compromises that Ross articulates insofar as they have focused on those issues. But are pro-life voters willing to elect politicians who favor legal abortion, but also support "modest state-level restrictions, from parental notification laws to waiting periods to bans on what we see as the grisliest forms of abortion"? My sense is that when it comes to politicians they are willing to support, pro-lifers aren't willing to back anyone like that.

A Movement That Can - And Cannot - Compromise

The Grand Duke's Last Veto

The Kids Are (Comparatively) Pro-Life

On the touchstone issues, the Court has given a substance to equality in freedom that has extended the protected sphere of individual choice and has expanded the privileged range of individuals who enjoy it. This in turn has prepared the way for further extension and expansion. The Court has done so in the face of respectable alternative interpretations of the substance of equality in freedom, which stress the social costs of expanding choice, particularly the damage done to the material and moral preconditions for maintaining a society of free individuals. Both interpretations of the substance of equality in freedom -- that which focuses on releasing individuals from fetters and that which concentrates on the need to restrain individuals and prepare them for the responsibilities of freedom -- belong to the liberal tradition. Yet in the contest between them, the liberal spirit naturally prefers measures that enlarge the realm of individual autonomy or promote a more egalitarian society over those that seek to contain the social costs of those measures and to conserve the background conditions that keep autonomy from deteriorating into anarchy.

... we refer to conservatives on the abortion question as pro-life and progressives as pro-choice, yet both camps are pro-personal freedom. Proponents of a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy defend the personal freedom of women in the form of their interest in maintaining control over their bodies and their lives. Woman can enjoy neither freedom to live their lives as they see fit nor equality in politics and the marketplace, pro-choicers argue, if they must unwillingly carry a fetus to term and bear the burden of an unwanted pregnancy.

But conservative opponents of abortion also invoke personal freedom. They emphasize the rights of the unborn child -- who, they contend, is a living person in the morally relevant sense. While they do not reject a woman's right to control her body and determine the shape of her future, they do maintain that the unborn child's right to life supersedes it. Alternatively, conservatives invoke the freedom connected to federalism and self-government, arguing that justices of the United States Supreme Court, with no foundation in the Constitution, have invented abortion rights, thereby imperiously deciding a moral question that the Constitution leaves to the free choice of the people through their democratically elected state legislatures. Powerful conservative voices do oppose abortion on religious grounds, out of belief that the unborn child is an embodied soul, that is, even in the earliest stages of development, a unique human being. But when they participate in the public debate, the pronounced tendency of conservative opponents of abortion is to make their case in the language of freedom. This is certainly true when they sit on the United States Supreme Court.

Contrary to Professor Laurence Tribe, who famously argued that it presented a clash of absolutes, the public debate over abortion reveals a clash of competing interpretations of freedom. Or rather, it presents a tendency on the part of partisans to absolutize competing imperatives that arise out of a shared belief in the fundamental importance of freedom.

The Moral Obligation To Study Election Returns

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

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

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

The When and the Why of Abortion

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

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

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

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

Presidents and Heretics

Abortion and the Art of the Possible

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

On The Possibility of An Abortion Compromise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Souls On Ice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the whole thing.

A Foray Into Racial Awkwardness

Regarding Douglas Kmiec

Obama, Pro-Lifers and FOCA

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

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

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

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

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

Two Paths To Reform

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

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

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

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

Obama, Abortion and the GOP

Losing the Youth Vote

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

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

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

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

Palin, Plumbers, and Polarization

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

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

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

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

Reasons To Welcome a Liberal Era

Too Soon To Tell

Frankly, I find this extremely unconvincing, and I daresay even pernicious ... What Jon needs to show is that there is a threshold on the conservative channels of the moral equalizer below which social stability is threatened. In the talk, he barely gestures toward evidence to this effect ... Indeed, my sense is that the societies in which the space between high liberal settings and low conservative settings is the greatest-that is, the most imbalanced-are by and large the best places for human beings to live. 

My own view is that there is a distinctive form of liberal order achieved by extended market societies. As Hayek noted, the decisive shift in human history was the shift (in some places) between personal to impersonal exchange. And part of this is a shift from personal to impersonal mechanisms for achieving order. If the conservative dimensions are so important, Jon needs to explain why the people of the advanced market democracies are so much more liberal than they used to be, so much less conservative, and yet so much less disordered (i.e., less violence, less war, etc.) 

I think the answer is that in Hayek's "extended order," the conservative sentiments play a relatively small and decreasing role. A more thoroughly liberal moral culture evidently not only sustains order, but sustains an order that leaves us healthier, happier, and orders of magnitude wealthier. If cranked-up conservative sentiments were necessary to sustain that order, then their decline would indeed endanger us, and could not constitute moral progress. But insofar as they have become superfluous, the failure to further suppress them is a failure of further moral progress. This is not a story of liberal/conservative Yin and Yang. This is a story of Yin devouring Yang. 

I admire Jon's anthropologist's impulse to take the variety of moral cultures seriously, and to take our own society's mostly intra-liberal moral pluralism seriously. But I think he's making a mistake if he think his work points toward the importance of the conservative sentiments. It's pointing me toward a clearer grasp of the ecological conditions under which those sentiments are functional and adaptive. And we aren't in them. When we recognize that, in the advanced world, those conditions have largely vanished-when we recognize that is partly what makes it the advanced world "advanced"-the question cannot be "Why do we need to respect tribalism, subordination, and moralized disgust?" The question is what to do with impulses that now hurt more than help, but are written into us anyway. 

I have a Fukuyaman streak that thinks Will might be be proven right about this in the long run - that the levels of wealth generated by market capitalism will rise and rise, cushioning away the impact of any negative externalities that the "conservative" moral instincts may be evolved/designed to guard against. But I also think that it's way too soon for the partisans of a purely liberal order to get cocky. The liberal impulses have been gaining ground against the conservatives ones ever since Christianity came on the scene, but they started from a pretty weak position: It took them the better part of two thousand years to reach parity, and only in the twentieth century did they really gain the upper hand, making it possible for Will and others to fantasize about a world in which the non-liberal sentiments can be ignored and/or discarded. Today, the world's most liberal societies are still only a couple generations deep into a massive experiment in the kind of social organization that Will favors, and I'm not sure that results to date are a guarantor of future returns.

Take the Sexual Revolution in the United States, for instance - which represented a massive ratcheting down of the "purity/sanctity" index, to borrow Haidt's terms, and a ratcheting up of a more "liberal" approach to sexuality. If you'd freeze-framed America in 1991 or so, a generation into this particular experiment in a more liberalized morality, it wouldn't have been hard to make the case that the costs were exceeding the benefits: Alongside the increase in sexual freedom, you had skyrocketing divorce, teen pregnancy and out-of-wedlock birth rates, rising rates of STDs alongside the then-uncontainable plague of AIDS, a thirty-year crime wave that many social scientists believed would be compounded by a new generation of "super-predators," and various other stark indicators of social decline. Flash forward fifteen years, of course, and things look much better on many of these fronts, which has prompted various people to argue that we've passed through what Francis Fukuyama terms a "Great Disruption" (and then through what Tom Wolfe famously called a "Great Relearning") and reached a stable post-Sixties equilibrium. But there are still reasons - some of which are detailed in Grand New Party - to be pessimistic, or at least not completely optimistic, about the long-term consequences of the Sexual Revolution. Yes, there's much more reason for optimism today than there was in 1991. But I don't think the trends that produced a great deal of early-1990s declinism are quite far enough in the rearview mirror to be dismissed as just a temporary pit stop on the road to the broad sunlit uplands of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the European version of the liberal experiment currently involves the intersection of a post-Sexual Revolution birth dearth with immigration policies seemingly designed without much input from Haidt's "conservative" moral impulses - particularly the whole "ingroup/loyalty" business. Now maybe this experiment, despite some hiccups along the way, will work out to the long-term benefit of the all the peoples involved. I know that Will assumes it will, and it's quite possible he's right. But there, I think, it's definitely too soon to tell for sure. The indicators point in a lot of directions at once, and it's by no means absurd to suspect that we'll look back from the vantage point of 2100 or so and say that Europe would have been better off if the conservative moral impulses hadn't ceded the floor quite so completely to the liberal ones in the latter part of the twentieth century.

It's also worth pointing out that we don't really have any idea how Will's "distinctive form of liberal order achieved by extended market societies" would handle a severe and extended economic shock of the sort that (God willing) we've just narrowly avoided. The last time the liberal West endured such a shock, the results were extremely ugly, and it was touch-and-go for a while whether democracy would survive at all, or whether the Wilkinsons and Douthats of the future would be competing for blogging licenses in a world divvied up between competing totalitarianisms.

Of course, maybe the totalitarian moment was only made possible because the liberal weltanschauung hadn't advanced far enough, and there was still enough conservative atavism left for fascists and communists to batten on. Maybe we've advanced past all that: Maybe we won't have to find out how Will's Yang-less order bears up under severe stress; maybe we will, and it'll bear up fine.

But I tend to think that the liberal as well as the conservative moral impulses off Haidt's list went into the forging of totalitarianism, and that conservative as well as liberal impulses served as bulwarks against the worst crimes and excesses of that era. And with that in mind, the fact that rising liberal sentiments and declining conservative ones have correlated, to date with greater human flourishing overall seems somewhat short of dispositive proof that we can do without the latter entirely.   

Obama and the Race Card

In Fairness ...

Jindal, Race, and the Right

 ... never underestimate the Republican desire to get on the high horse of anti-racism and egalitarianism, to say nothing of the even greater desire to demonstrate that they are in no way racist ... The small cottage industry out there cataloguing the "real racism" of liberals represents a genuine conviction in the modern GOP that they are the only true defenders of color-blind equality. The Republican obsession with Jeremiah Wright cannot be understood apart from this "fight the real racists!" mentality. The enthusiastic reception of Palin and the sudden willingness to label any criticism of her as sexism and elitism reflects a similar impulse to out-egalitarian the egalitarians. This is opportunistic insofar as it is aimed at confusing conventional definitions and throwing the opponent off guard ("we're the real feminists, so there!"), but it is quite serious in that reflects a widely-held Republican belief that their agenda and their party represent "empowerment" for women and minorities.

This seems to me not only convenient but largely wrong: Liberation theology has barely entered into the presidential season, and all the Muslim, terrorist pal, falsified birth certificate, not "the American president Americans are looking for" garbage of the cycle seems far more closely connected to Obama's "name, ancestry and skin color" than to his "academic-lefty and urban-machine milieu." ("Socialist" probably fits Douthat's explanation a bit better.) As a coverted Hindu whose legal name is still Piyush, whose parents arrived in the states not long before his birth and who attended an Ivy League university, Jindal would be open to many of the same kind of idiot smears directed at Obama, should any of his GOP opponents for the nomination care to make them.

Jindal, Obama and the GOP

... while there are plenty of 2012 GOP presidential aspirants who have reason to be unhappy with the McCain campaign's decisions over the last couple months (and, in particular, the Palin choice), a case could be made that no one's nearish-term prospects have been hurt more than Bobby Jindal's.

Though rarely explicit (and certainly not exclusive) a large portion of the GOP's closing argument this cycle has been to stoke white, working class fear and suspicion of the Other. The dark-skinned man with the foreign-sounding name may be a Muslim, or a socialist, or a friend of terrorists, or a racial huckster, or a fake U.S. citizen, or some other vague kind of "radical." You may never be sure which he is (maybe all of the above), but in your gut you simply don't "know" him the way you know the other candidates. This is not, to put it mildly, a message likely to benefit Bobby Jindal.

Now, yes, four years is a longer time in politics than it used to be. But I still don't see these toxins leaching out that quickly, particularly from a GOP that will, in all likelihood, continue trying to raise subliminal doubts about Obama's Americanness. Add to this the blunt fact that the GOP probably can't afford to lose racist white voters, especially in the South (you think a Jindal - Obama race wouldn't invite a conservative, white, third-party candidacy?), and I think Jindal's chance of being the nominee in 2012 is, despite his obvious talents, pretty close to nil. The GOP isn't going to be looking for its own Obama; it's going to be looking for an anti-Obama.

I think this vastly, vastly overestimates the extent to which the attempt to "Otherize" Obama has been about race qua race (and racism qua racism), and vastly underestimates the extent to which it's been about the way Obama's name, ancestry and skin color have dovetailed with other aspects of his background - from his liberation-theology church to the academic-lefty and urban-machine milieu in which he spent much of his early political career - that the GOP would have tried to play up against any Democratic candidate (and especially in a year when the party didn't have much else going for it). If anything, I think the way the McCain campaign has finished up - and the way the media has covered it - works to Jindal's advantage in 2012: Conservatives are going to be extremely eager to prove that they only hate Obama because he's a radical, not because they're racist, and what better way to demonstrate that than to nominate a dark-skinned conservative with a funny-sounding name? Indeed, much of the current affection for Jindal among movement conservatives - and especially in talk-radio land - can be traced to precisely such a yearning for a conservative Obama: A multicultural prince who channels Ronald Reagan, and whose nomination would at least reduce the taint of racism that clings to the American Right.

Likewise, the idea that Jindal, if nominated, would invite a right-wing third party challenge aimed at peeling off racist Southern whites strikes me as fanciful in the extreme. Maybe the usual sad-sack Libertarian nominee would do slightly better in a Jindal-Obama race than in, say, a Pawlenty-Obama race because of some sort of racist peel-off ... but I'm pretty doubtful on that score as well. If Bobby Jindal can win the Republican nomination and then the governorship in Louisiana, he isn't going to have any race-based trouble as a GOP candidate on the national stage. 

A Boy's Life

My Good Opinion of Alec Baldwin ...

Palin And Her Critics/Apologists

This may make them poison to undecideds who suffer, more than most, from class anxiety. But do not despise the undecideds. Even conservatives can contract Scheiber Syndrome. Think of David Brooks, Christopher Buckley, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, and George Will. The symptoms? Curiously amplified, obsessively repeated, sometimes elaborately stage-whispered doubts about the Republican ticket.

There is no cure, but there is an etiology. All share a dreadful secret--their writing is driven by an anxiety to be tastemakers to the gentry, not merely thinkers and entertainers. There is nothing more anxious-making than striving to create taste for the classes, not masses, or even to keep up with it. (The struggle to do so is etched in the lines of Tina Brown's face.) But what the classes think is a matter to which the GOP standard-bearers are sadly but nobly indifferent.

Imagining An Obama Administration

[Given the current polling], conservatives will really want to know how an Obama blowout and a seized-up Congress could also make for a best-case scenario. Simple: a narrow McCain win or loss will keep Republicans locked in a death struggle over the true meaning of conservatism and the identity of the party. So long as Congress doesn't flip completely and utterly into Democratic hands, a landslide for Obama will do conservatives much more good than harm. Without an all-powerful Democratic House and Senate behind him--or, more likely, in front of him, pulling him along -- a President Obama (even with an apparent mandate) would be high on inspiration and togetherness but low on power and ambition.

Hemmed in by the realities of an overstretched and strained economy, intense yet delicate military commitments abroad, and the broad but vague longing among the American people for a simple change in political tone, Obama would function largely as a figurehead -- something conservatives wary of executive Bridezillas could appreciate. Liberals would get all the catharsis they wanted without really being able to effect much substantive change. The left would get the healing, the right would keep the hope. And as the Obama administration became consumed in the patient, laborious, and incremental task of leading a nation unified mostly in exasperation and exhaustion, conservatives would be able to clear their minds and clean their house -- their most important task of all.

I almost buy it in theory, but as a live possibility it seems increasingly remote. The problem, as I've argued before, is that it's very difficult to decouple a party's fortunes at the Presidential level from its fortunes at the Congressional level these days. And as a result, the looming Obama landslide seems almost certain to push Congress - and especially the Senate - well beyond anything that could be described as "gridlock," leaving the GOP perilously close to a rump position. In that scenario, my biggest fear is that the economic crisis ends up tying  Obama's hands somewhat on issues of spending and taxation - and related fronts like cap-and-trade as well, perhaps - which in turn forces him to placate the feeling-its-oats Democratic base by expending political capital on other, less immediately-expensive liberal projects. Like, say, the immigration reform of La Raza's fondest dreams. Or the Freedom of Choice Act, and various other unpleasant items on the pro-choice wish list. Or a run of judicial appointees who make John Paul Stevens look like Clarence Thomas.

To some on the Right, I imagine this sort of prioritization would be treated as relatively good news. But as someone who would take Barack Obama's agenda on taxes over his agenda on certain other fronts any day of the week, it seems pretty close to a worst-case scenario to me.

Ayers, McCain and the Dow

Gloves, Off

Palin's Future (Or Lack Thereof)

McCain's Last Month

What's the way out? An Ayers/Wright offensive simply isn't going to hack it; even I can't be bothered with it today between covering my face and peeking through my fingers at the sinking Dow. A sustained attack on the left over Fannie/Freddie will help, but I don't know how you push that message through to low-information voters with the time left. It seems unlikely in the extreme that people who don't follow this from day to day are to going react to a meltdown on Wall Street by electing the guy from the party commonly derided as a pawn of big business. On the contrary, the worse things get, the better The One's vacuous rhetoric sounds. After all, what surer tonic could there be for a looming depression than Hopenchange? Pricetag: $5 trillion. Horrifying exit quotation from an unnamed McCain advisor suggesting they're ready to give up: "If we keep talking about the economic crisis, we're going to lose." Note to Team Maverick -- you have no choice.

From Willie Horton To William Ayers

Continue reading "From Willie Horton To William Ayers" »

The William Ayers He Knows

Continue reading "The William Ayers He Knows" »

Line Of The Day

If you transported Zucker back to 1978 and pitched him Animal House, he'd direct Niedermeyer: Man of Iron.

Palin's Appeal

Now the simple fact of the matter is that Palin is an unpopular figure. There's no sense arguing about this. Likewise, the polls show unambiguously that most people who watched her debate performance were unimpressed. And yet among male conservative pundits .... gushing praise was extremely common. But before this loose talk of a Palin 2012 campaign takes off, people need to realize that her appeal seems grounded in the psychosexual hang-ups of conservative men. Her hyper-unpopularity with women makes her an unpopular figure overall, and talk of her mesmerizing qualities doesn't change that.

Dispatches From The Culture War

Palin and Her (Conservative) Critics

Superstitious Minds

The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?

The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.

Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama's former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin's former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.

Hat tip: MBD, who has the requisite reference to the most famous aphorism G.K. Chesterton didn't actually coin.

Porn and Adultery, One More Time

Getting Culture War Ads Right

9/11, Then and Now

Overreach

... there may have been good ways to take shots at Obama over the "lipstick on a pig" comment. But the Republicans are coming across as whiny grievance-mongers. Don't they realize that this harping on ambiguous slights is what people hate about political correctness? It was bad enough when liberals were trying to destroy Palin. Now Republicans are trashing her brand. They're undermining the basis of her appeal as a different, tougher kind of female politician.

Pro-Lifers and "Fecundity"

Some commentators have detected moral relativism in the untroubled, even edified conservative response to the obstetric developments in the McCain campaign; but I see something even more sinister. I see the teleological suspension of the ethical. You remember the teleological suspension of the ethical. It is the recognition that, whereas there is morality in religion, religion is not the same as morality, and may justify an exemption from morality. I know of no religion in which this handy power of extenuation is not used. The telos, in the case of Bristol Palin, is life; and a fine telos it is. The casuistry goes something like this: since there are no unwanted babies, there are no unwanted pregnancies. "It can sometimes result in the arrival of new life and a new family," Gerson cheered. For "evangelical Christianity (in most modern forms) is not about the achievement of perfection." If evangelicals are so exquisitely conscious of our creatureliness, why have they devoted so many decades to reviling the imperfections of others? If they are, as Gerson says, "about the acceptance of forgiveness," why do they diabolize difference? The fecundity of Bristol Palin is a windfall for Jesus, but the fecundity of black girls is the doom of the republic.

Murphy Brown and Bristol Palin

Remember Murphy Brown? I always thought the former vice president was on solid ground when he called it morally irresponsible to encourage women without the TV character's resources to embark on child-rearing on their own. In today's GOP, Quayle wouldn't condemn Murphy Brown. He'd call her up to the stage and salute her for choosing life.

Jamie Lynn, Bristol and Hypocrisy

You don't suppose, even for a second, that people are angry at the social conservative movement for choosing this one particular person to rally around? Show me James Dobson praising Jamie Lynn Spears pregnancy, for example, or any other social conservative declaring her pregnancy to be a great and wonderful thing.

"In the 32-year history of Focus on the Family, we have offered prayer, counseling and resource assistance to tens of thousands of parents and children in the same situation the Palins are now facing. We have always encouraged the parents to love and support their children and always advised the girls to see their pregnancies through, even though there will of course be challenges along the way. That is what the Palins are doing, and they should be commended once again for not just talking about their pro-life and pro-family values, but living them out even in the midst of trying circumstances.

"Being a Christian does not mean you're perfect. Nor does it mean your children are perfect. But it does mean there is forgiveness and restoration when we confess our imperfections to the Lord. I've been the beneficiary of that forgiveness and restoration in my own life countless times, as I'm sure the Palins have.

"It's a tragedy when a 16-year-old who is not really prepared for all the responsibilities of adult life is going to be now faced with all the responsibilities of honest-to-goodness adult life," he told CBS News in Iowa.

"Apparently, she's going to have the child and I think that is the right decision, a good decision, and I respect that and appreciate it," Huckabee continued. "I hope it is not an encouragement to other 16-year-olds who think that is the best course of action."

"But at the same time I'm not going to condemn her," he said. "I just hope that she will make another right decision and that's to give that child all the love and kindness and care that she can."

So, to recap: Teen pregnancy, bad; carrying the child to term, good; Spears-Palin hypocrisy, not so much.

A Thought Experiment

Conservatives and Inequality

Abortion and the Two-Parent Family (II)

As the stigma attached to unwed motherhood has diminished, the United States has seen both a huge increase in the proportion of babies born out of wedlock -- now reaching almost 37% --and a striking decline in the incidence of abortions.

In 1981, 29.3 abortions were carried out for every 1,000 women of childbearing age in the United States. By 2005, that rate had tumbled to 19.1 per 1,000 women.

The experience of the Palin family symbolizes the effect of the pro-life movement on American culture: Abortion has been made more rare; unwed motherhood has been normalized. However you feel about that outcome, it is not well-described as either left-wing or right-wing.

The Times and Christians, Cont.

Venom, Abortion, and Bristol Palin

Sarah Palin on Sex Ed

The Times Discovers Christians

Abortion and the Two-Parent Family

... these two conservative social goals--ending abortion and upholding the model of the nuclear family--were always in tension. The reason is that, like it or not, the availability of legal abortion supports the kind of family structure that conservatives once felt so strongly about: two parents raising children in a stable relationship, without government assistance. By 12^th grade, 60 percent of high school girls are sexually active or, as Reagan put it, "promiscuous." Teen-pregnancy rates have been trending downward in recent years, but even so, 7 percent of high-school girls become pregnant every year. And the unfortunate reality is that teenagers who carry their pregnancies to term drastically diminish their chances of living out the conservative, or the American, dream.

... Give the anti-abortion extremists credit for living their principles. If they weren't deadly serious, they wouldn't sabotage their party's political prospects or sacrifice so many other values they hold dear for the sake of denying exceptions in cases of rape and incest. But Sarah Palin's pro-life extremism is as ethically flawed as it is politically damaging to the GOP. By vaunting their pro-life agenda over everything else, conservatives are abandoning one of their most valuable insights: that intact, two-parent families are best for children and for the foundation of a healthy society.

Sarah's Big Night

McCain's Judgment

Ferraro Then, Palin Now

Where is it written that only senators are qualified to become President?...Or where is it written that mere representatives aren't qualified, like Geraldine Ferraro of Queens?...Where is it written that governors and mayors, like Dianne Feinstein of San Francisco, are too local, too provincial?...Presidential candidates have always chosen their running mates for reasons of practical demography, not idealized democracy.... What a splendid system, we say to ourselves, that takes little-known men, tests them in high office and permits them to grow into statesmen. . . . Why shouldn't a little-known woman have the same opportunity to grow?. . . .the indispensable credential for a Woman Who is the same as for a Man Who - one who helps the ticket.

A Further Note On The Palin Coverage

Publications I Normally Admire

Can you share with us ... which publications have disgraced themselves in your eyes?

No Party For Pro-Choicers?

Validation

Obama-Carpathia '08

Ross thinks it's "(ahem) a joke," which it is. A harmless joke, given the legions of evangelical Christians waiting for the Rapture and convinced that only the Republican party represents the will of God? I guess it's just as well that Ross thinks the religious right is entirely a function of the liberal media's imagination.

Obama the Antichrist?

The visual images in the ad, which Davis says has been viewed even more than McCain's "Celeb" ad linking Obama to the likes of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, also seem to evoke the cover art of several Left Behind books. But they're not the cartoonish images of clouds parting and shining light upon Obama that might be expected in an ad spoofing him as a messiah. Instead, the screen displays a sinister orange light surrounded by darkness and later the faint image of a staircase leading up to heaven.

Perhaps the most puzzling scene in the ad is an altered segment from The 10 Commandments that appears near the end. A Moses-playing Charlton Heston parts the animated waters of the Red Sea, out of which rises the quasi-presidential seal the Obama campaign used for a brief time earlier this summer before being mocked into retiring it. The seal, which features an eagle with wings spread, is not recognizable like the campaign's red-white-and-blue "O" logo. That confused Democratic consultant Eric Sapp until he went to his Bible and remembered that in the apocalyptic Book of Daniel, the Antichrist is described as rising from the sea as a creature with wings like an eagle.

Sapp knows that the phrasing and images could just be dismissed as a peculiar coincidence. After all, it was Oprah Winfrey who told an Iowa crowd that Obama was "the one!" But, he insists, "the frequency of these images and references don't make any sense unless you're trying to send the message that Obama could be the Antichrist."

Gopnik on Chesterton, Yet Again

In these books, Chesterton becomes a Pangloss of the parish; anything Roman is right. It is hard to credit that even a convinced Catholic can feel equally strongly about St. Francis's intuitive mysticism and St. Thomas's pedantic religiosity, as Chesterton seems to. His writing suffers from conversion sickness. Converts tend to see the faith they were raised in as an exasperatingly makeshift and jury-rigged system: Anglican converts to Catholicism are relieved not to have to defend Henry VIII's divorces; Jewish converts to Christianity are relieved to get out from under the weight of all those strange Levitical laws on animal hooves. The newly adopted faith, they imagine, is a shining, perfectly balanced system, an intricately worked clock where the cosmos turns to tell the time and the cuckoo comes out singing every Sunday. An outsider sees the Church as a dreamy compound of incense and impossibility, and, overglamorizing its pretensions, underrates its adaptability. A Frenchman or an Italian, even a devout one, can see the Catholic Church as a normally bureaucratic human institution, the way patriotic Americans see the post office, recognizing the frailty and even the occasional psychosis of its employees without doubting its necessity or its ability to deliver the message. Chesterton writing about the Church is like someone who has just made his first trip to the post office. Look, it delivers letters for the tiny price of a stamp! You write an address on a label, and they will send it anywhere, literally anywhere you like, across a continent and an ocean, in any weather! The fact that the post office attracts timeservers, or has produced an occasional gun massacre, is only proof of the mystical enthusiasm that the post office alone provides! Glorifying the postman beyond what the postman can bear is what you do only if you're new to mail.

Just as we all like love tales because there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales -- because they find them romantic. In fact, a baby is about the only person, I should think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read without boring him. This proves that even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

Silly Season

Chesterton, Solzhenitsyn and Liberalism

Britney and Crypto-Racism

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

Gopnik on Chesterton (II)

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

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

Obama and the Evangelicals, Cont.

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

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

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

The Case Against Incest

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do Critics Matter?

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

Who Speaks For Islam?

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

Continue reading "Who Speaks For Islam?" »

We Are All Christianists Now

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

My Big Idea: Supreme Court Supermajorities

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

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

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

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

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

Dobson vs. Obama

Apologies for the lack of new content, Grand New Party-related and otherwise; book publicity and blogging don't mix well, apparently. Regular posting will hopefully resume soon; in the mean time, I have some thoughts on the Dobson-Obama spat up at the Current.

Porn and Adultery (III)

A reader points out that the real question is where giving foot massages falls on the infidelity continuum:

The natural follow-up, of course, is this: Would you watch porn with Marsellus Wallace's wife?

Porn and Adultery (II)

So, a question for Will Wilkinson et al (and judging by the commentary, there's a lot of al out there): If your wife/monogamous partner sought regular sexual gratification through watching prostitutes have sex with one another, you would have no grounds on which to feel jealous or perturbed? No grounds for feeling that they were being in some sense unfaithful? Really?

My point here, to be clear, is not that regularly watching hard-core pornography is exactly the same thing as committing adultery. My point is rather that there's a consistent continuum here - as opposed to the sort of inconsistent continuum that Will accuses me of mustering - that links the varying ways that a person who's committed to sexual monogamy can find sexual gratification outside of marriage. And I think that regular consumption of hard-core pornography is closer to the actual adultery end of the continuum (insofar as it involves actual-existing other people and actual physical acts) that it is to the "occasionally entertaining sexual thoughts about that cute girl on the subway" end of the continuum, and as such it's not "insane" to see morally meaningful similarities between porn-watching and cheating on your spouse.

Porn and Adultery

Riffing on these comments from a Fox News sexpert, which raise the idea that "using porn, at least beyond a magazine like Playboy, is the equivalent of having an actual affair," Julian Sanchez writes:

This is tossed off as though it ought to be obvious to the ordinary reader. It strikes me as obviously insane. I can think of any number of valid concerns one might have about what sort of porn one’s partner is consuming, or the extent of it. But the proposition that one of them is any similarity between porn viewing and “having an actual affair” would not have occurred to me. Is this view held by any significant number of sane people?

Well, look at it this way: Is there any similarity between "having an actual affair" and having sex with a prostitute while you're married? I think most people would answer yes. Then consider: Is there any similarity between having sex with a prostitute while you're married and paying to watch a prostitute perform sexual acts for your voyeuristic gratification? Again, I think a lot of people would say yes: There's a distinction, obviously, but I don't think all that many spouses would be inclined to forgive their husbands (or wives) if they explained that they only liked to watch the prostitute they'd hired. And hard-core porn, in turn, is nothing more than an indirect way of paying someone to fulfill the same sort of voyeuristic fantasies: It's prostitution in all but name, filtered through middlemen, magazine editors, and high-speed internet connections. Is it as grave a betrayal as cheating on your spouse with a co-worker? Not at all. But is it on a moral continuum with adultery? I don't think it's insane to say yes.

The Survival of Culture

Here's a fascinating exchange between Will Wilkinson and Megan McArdle, pegged to this Kerry Howley piece, on whether people invested in the survival of their culture (and particularly of Western, liberal culture) should panic over plunging fertility rates. Obviously I'm in the camp that considers declining birth rates to be a serious problem for the liberal West, and so obviously I agree with Megan's point that "the most important core beliefs most people have are transmitted not through dialogue, but through inheritance," and its corollary that no matter how "immense" and "salient" the rewards of the "liberal market culture" that Will favors, it will be much harder to pass it on down through conversion than through child-rearing. That being said, culture certainly can be passed on through conversion - otherwise Christianity wouldn't have survived Goths and Franks and Vandals - and given that low fertility rates and open borders seem to be integral to the sort of culture that Will favors, I think he more or less has to take the position that he's taking. Like it or not, the aspects of liberal modernity that he approves of aren't going to passed on through inheritance fast enough to keep up with the changing population composition of the West, and especially Western Europe, so it's conversion or nothing.

Moreover, despite my skepticism about the viability of the sort of social order that he favors, I'm enough of a Fukuyaman that I won't be shocked if Will ends up vindicated.

Perfect Madness

John Podhoretz nominates this Judith Warner post for the "Repulsive Blog Item of the Year Award." I would second the nomination, but I also think it's worth zeroing in the structure of Warner's post, which reflects the kind of gonzo inanity that's made her a hathetic joy to read for a long time now. The item starts with her reading about hymen restorations among Muslim women in Europe, which in turn inspires her to forage for a Times story she's clipped about father-daughter "purity balls." At which point you think you know where this is going: Toward a "plague on both your houses" attack on the creepiness of Muslim and Christian fixations on female virginity. And if you're a fair-minded reactionary, as I like to fancy myself, you think to yourself: Well, that's a little bit of a stretch, but those purity balls are high on the "ick" factor ...

But then Warner pulls the rug out from under you:

“From this, it’s only a matter of degree to the man in Austria,” I’d scribbled across the first page [of the purity ball story].

"The man in Austria"? Wait for it ...

The “man in Austria,” of course, was 73-year-old Josef Fritzl, who was around that time also making headlines after it was discovered that he had kept his daughter, Elisabeth, 42, locked up in a cellar for 24 years, during which time he’d raped her regularly, and had her bear him seven children.

Yep, that's the Judith Warner I've come to know and love. (Though I still think that Warner's meditation on why her readers shouldn't resent her for having a summer place in Normandy remains in a hathos-inspiring class by itself.)

The Character Issue (II)

Matt writes, in response to my thoughts on McCain's divorce:

That's cogently argued. But note that it's a cogently argued brief for the view that cultural conservatives ought to deploy the marital indiscretions of liberal politicians as a political issue while ignoring the indiscretions of conservative politicians. Just note that what looks like hypocrisy from the outside can often have a perfectly coherent explanation to the believers.

I can see how it reads that way, but it wasn't exactly what I meant. If the hypocrisy Matt's describing actually worked, in the sense of moving us closer to a standard in which jilting your wife disqualified you from a political career, I suppose there might be something to be said for it. But it's pretty clear from the whole impeachment debacle that it doesn't: All conservatives did in that case was open themselves up to, well, charges of hypocrisy, leading to a denouement in which one of their own, Bob Livingston, fell on his sword while Bill Clinton got away scot-free. So no, I don't think that "cultural conservatives ought to deploy the marital indiscretions of liberal politicians as a political issue." I think that cultural conservatives ought to criticize public figures of both parties when they behave egregiously in their personal lives, and I think that - all things being equal - they ought to reward politicians who don't abandon their spouses, or dally with interns in the Oval Office, or maintain second families on the side. But all things aren't equal, politics is the art of the possible, the Nelson Rockefeller standard isn't coming back anytime soon - and so again, I don't think that McCain's deplorable conduct in the 1970s justifies voting for Obama.

I should add, just in case it isn't clear, that the reason to have a taboo against electing politicians who have ditched their wives isn't because leaving your wife makes you "morally unfit" for the Oval Office in some absolute sense; I don't think it does. (If I thought so, obviously, that would be a reason not to vote for John McCain.) It's because we want to discourage men from ditching their wives, and closing off certain very public avenues of advancement isn't a bad way to go about discouraging that sort of thing. The point is to deter misbehavior, not to protect the country from the perils of being governed by a rake.

Update: Okay, yes, "scot-free" is a little strong ...

The Character Issue

Nick Beaudrot and Matt Yglesias want to know what I think about John McCain's less-than-heroic treatment of his first wife. Beaudrot writes:

If you think a candidate's behavior in his or her personal life bears relevance to his merits as a Presidential candidate, McCain's dalliances with other women and near gold-digging appear fundamentally disqualifying, roughly on par with anything Rudy Giuliani did to his spouses.

Well, as a card-carrying defender of the Freak Show, I see no reason why McCain's 1970s behavior shouldn't be an issue in the Presidential race; if McCain's beloved high school teacher is relevant to the campaign, then so is his treatment of Carol McCain (and their children). I don't, however, think the comparison to Giuliani quite holds up: Not only because Rudy's callousness was considerably more public than McCain's, but - more importantly - because McCain's first wife has remained friends with him, and supported him politically, which contrasts sharply with Rudy's estrangement from his ex-wife and children. And this difference probably explains why McCain's '70s caddishness hasn't become a big issue in the past, and won't become one in this election cycle: The American people, I expect, will take the view that if the wronged party seems to have forgiven McCain for jilting her, it would be churlish not to do the same.

As for my view of the matter - well, as I've mentioned before, I tend to agree with James Poulos that an America in which politicians had a more difficult time recovering from flagrant private misbehavior would be a better place to live and vote and marry in. It's not that I think an adulterer can't be an effective political leader; it's that I'd like to see the social costs of sexual misconduct go up, at least on the margins, and having certain avenues to prominence closed off to you if you decide to ditch your family and take up with a younger, richer, healthier woman seems like a reasonable cost to impose on would-be divorcees. All of that said, though, we're obviously a long, long way from that state of affairs, and things being what they are, I'm not going to argue that social conservatives should deliver the White House to Obama in order to make a futile protest against the decline of masculine honor among our politicians.

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

Conservatives and "Liberal Guilt"

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

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

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

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

Continue reading "Conservatives and "Liberal Guilt"" »

"Lithe Vegan Bodies"

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

Don't Think of the Children

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

Pinker vs. Humanism

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

Pinker On Dignity

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

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

Conversations About Feticide

Ryan Anderson writes up what sounds like a fascinating Princeton symposium on the question "Is It Wrong To End Early Human Life?"

Taking the Bait

Daniel Larison wants to know what I make of this passage, which kicks off Damon Linker's review of Charles Marash's Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel From Political Captivity:

Who would now deny that the political ascendancy of the religious right has been bad for the United States? Its destructive consequences are plain for all to see. It has polarized the nation. It has injected theological certainties into public life. It has led political leaders to invest their aims and their deeds with metaphysical significance. It has made America a laughingstock in the eyes of the educated of the world. And it has encouraged devout believers to think of themselves as agents of the divine, and their political opponents as enemies of God.

I hesitate to dignify the deeply irritating "all reasonable people must agree with the self-evident truth of my argument" trope with a rejoinder, but since Daniel asks ... well, look, obviously if you disagree with the religious right's various policy objectives, you'll think that its rise ("ascendancy" seems like a little much, doesn't it?) has been bad for the United States. That's a perfectly reasonable position to take. But it isn't what Linker's arguing here. The "destructive consequences" he's talking about all seem to have to do with the nature of our political culture, not the shape of our public policies - specifically, the level of polarization, moral absolutism, and us-versus-them Manichaeism in American political life, with the damage to our reputation among "the educated of the world" thrown in for good measure.

On the last point, I imagine Linker could find some polling data to back up his argument, though I'm also pretty sure that European sophisticates were wont to look down their noses at American rubes long before Pat Robertson came along. As for the rest of his claims, the available evidence seems to run the other way. Perhaps Linker has a different timeline in mind, but I would date the modern religious right's rise to the late 1970s, and I would urge anyone who honestly believes that the level of polarization, absolutism, and Manichaean excess has risen in our politics since the Seventies to read Rick Perlstein's Nixonland and reconsider. The parties have grown more polarized vis-a-vis one another since then, true, but our politics in general have grown vastly more peaceful, even as arguments over civil rights and Vietnam have given way to arguments over issues like abortion and gay marriage. Which ought to suggest, at the very least, that there's no easy correlation to be drawn between the influence of religion on democratic politics and the tendency of democratic peoples toward division, self-righteousness and violence.

One could, of course, dispute the premise that the politics of the Sixties and the early Seventies were any less flavored by theological concerns and metaphysical yearnings than the era that followed; indeed, I would be inclined to dispute it myself. But that still doesn't provide any grounds for claiming that the religious right "injected" theology into politics in some uniquely destructive way. Rather, it suggests that what Linker sees as an alien and destructive innovation - religious conservatism's intermingling of politics and metaphysics - is actually a more or less constant feature of American life, and one whose consequences for civil order and national unity have been far less dire during the post-'70s culture war than in the supposedly-more-secular era that preceded it.

The Natives Ate P.F. Chang's

What Ezra, Matt and Megan said about the Times's self-consciously condescending mass review of the greater New York area's chain restaurants. I would only add that the concept behind the feature - sending food critics to write about popular establishments that almost never get reviewed - is perfectly sound; it's just the "let's treat this like an anthropologist's trip to darkest Peru" execution that's cringe-inducing.

Miley Cyrus Knows What She's Doing

I agree with my fellow moralistic scold, Rod Dreher, that the MSM handwringing over how Miley Cyrus's handlers should have known better than to let the fifteen-year-old pose for the Vanity Fair photo that she's now apologizing for is more than a little ridiculous; the whole thing looks like a staged controversy, not a real blunder. If you're trying manage a transition from tween sensation to alluring grown-up star, doing an artsy, sexually-suggestive photo shoot and then hastily apologizing for it seems like a brilliant career move - you reap the benefits of the Vanity Fair treatment while simultaneously distancing yourself from it. And I also agree with Poulos that the photo in and of itself isn't problematic. You can make perfectly tasteful art, as he says, from the "worshipful celebration of the fecundity of the pubescent female body." The problem comes in because we inhabit "a culture in which 'worship' seems to mean corrupting unceremoniously and kicking to the curb." One day you're posing for Annie Leibowitz; the next you've ended up in the Britney-Lindsey-Paris circle of celebrity hell.

Where I part ways from James and Rod, though, it on what this incident portends for Miley's future trajectory. Precisely because I think the Cyruses are stage-managing this whole "controversy" - and doing so pretty adeptly - I'm inclined to think that maybe, just maybe, they have enough worldliness and self-awareness to navigate Miley's adolescence without letting the celebrity machine grind her down into Britney Redux. That machine isn't evil because it corrupts every young woman who steps into its gears; it's evil because it preys upon the weak and the damaged and the dumb, the girls who aren't equipped to deal with the intersection of their celebrity and their sexuality, and with the culture's desire to use them up and throw them away. And while this whole phony controversy doesn't make me think that highly of Miley Cyrus and the people around her, it does make me think that they might be smart enough - and, yes, cynical enough - to play the system, rather than letting the system play them.

Obama, Abortion, and 95/10

Doug Kmiec, pro-lifer and Obama endorser, explains how Obama can retroactively justify Kmiec's endorsement finesse the abortion issue:

By embracing a proposal equivalent to what the leaders of his own counsel of advisors have already endorsed: the so-called 95-10 legislation. This idea satisfies neither side of an absolutist clash completely - how could it and still be common ground? - yet it strives for a 95% reduction in abortion over 10 years, not by legal mandate that would contradict the Senator's belief that this decision must remain that of the mother, but instead by ensuring that no woman faces such decision without having already had the benefit of responsible information about abstinence and contraception. In the event of a pregnancy, the proposal would supply objective information about fetal development, the proper guidance of a parent if the prospective mother is a minor, and the public's assurance of necessary economic support to carry the pregnancy to term, and if it be the mother's informed choice, the adoption of her child.

You can read up on the 95/10 plan here, on the website of Democrats for Life. They describe it as "a comprehensive package of federal legislation and policy proposals that will reduce the number of abortions by 95% in the next 10 years." I would describe it as a grab-bag of modest proposals, some of them creditable, that might reduce the abortion rate by 10 percent over 95 years. And while I would be delighted to see Obama endorse the plan, since it's always nice to have pro-choice politicians on the record suggesting that abortion is a bad thing and we ought to have less of it, I have a tough time seeing it happening. Unlike Hillary Clinton, whose gender and record and reputation offers her enough maneuvering room to occasionally play the "safe, legal and never" card, I suspect that Obama simply doesn't have enough feminist cred to even tiptoe off the liberal reservation on abortion. But I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

The Art of Smashmortion (II)

Yep, it's a hoax - or, if you prefer, "a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body."

Yesterday's Culture Wars

This interesting Louis Menand review of David Hajdu's book about the "great comic-book scare" in Fifties America seems worth quoting in the context of my last two posts:

Other people’s culture wars always look ridiculous. That’s partly because we frame cultural controversies as battles between the old and the new, and, given that the old is someone else’s status quo and we have no stake in it, we naturally favor the new. So one way to look at the comic-book inquisition is to see it as an effort to repress an edgy, provocative, satirical popular form and to dictate to people what books they should and should not read. In this view, a big, powerful, established social entity (consisting of psychiatrists and government officials) is squashing a bunch of little, powerless entities (consisting of individual comic-book artists and readers).

Continue reading "Yesterday's Culture Wars" »

Bill Cosby And Cultural Decline

I highly recommend Ta-Nehisi Coates' profile of Bill Cosby in the latest Atlantic, but one passage seemed worth plucking out and arguing with. Here's Coates:

Cosby’s, and much of black America’s, conservative analysis flattens history and smooths over the wrinkles that have characterized black America since its inception ... Indeed, a century ago, the black brain trust was pushing the same rhetoric that Cosby is pushing today. It was concerned that slavery had essentially destroyed the black family and was obsessed with seemingly the same issues—crime, wanton sexuality, and general moral turpitude—that Cosby claims are recent developments ...

In particular, Cosby’s argument—that much of what haunts young black men originates in post-segregation black culture—doesn’t square with history. As early as the 1930s, sociologists were concerned that black men were falling behind black women. In his classic study, The Negro Family in the United States, published in 1939, E. Franklin Frazier argued that urbanization was undermining the ability of men to provide for their families. In 1965—at the height of the civil-rights movement—Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s milestone report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” picked up the same theme.

At times, Cosby seems willfully blind to the parallels between his arguments and those made in the presumably glorious past. Consider his problems with rap. How could an avowed jazz fanatic be oblivious to the similar plaints once sparked by the music of his youth? “The tired longshoreman, the porter, the housemaid and the poor elevator boy in search of recreation, seeking in jazz the tonic for weary nerves and muscles,” wrote the lay historian J. A. Rogers, “are only too apt to find the bootlegger, the gambler and the demi-monde who have come there for victims and to escape the eyes of the police.”

Beyond the apocryphal notion that black culture was once a fount of virtue, there’s still the charge that culture is indeed the problem. But to reach that conclusion, you’d have to stand on some rickety legs. The hip-hop argument, again, is particularly creaky. Ronald Ferguson, a Harvard social scientist, has highlighted that an increase in hip-hop’s popularity during the early 1990s corresponded with a declining amount of time spent reading among black kids. But gangsta rap can be correlated with other phenomena, too—many of them positive. During the 1990s, as gangsta rap exploded, teen pregnancy and the murder rate among black men declined. Should we give the blue ribbon in citizenship to Dr. Dre?

In one sense, these are all good points: The supposed golden ages of the past had problems of their own, which are connected to the problems we have today; the impact of pop cultural trends on sociological trends can be vastly overstated; gangsta rap is as much a manifestation of pre-existing pathologies as it is a cause of new ones; etc. But there's also a sense in which Coates' argument here, with its emphasis on the perpetual recurrence of cultural declinism among reformers and intellectuals, runs the risk of eliding the reality of actual-existing cultural decline. The fact that legends of a golden age can obscure a far more complicated reality doesn't change the fact that cultural indicators do vary from era to era; true, no era is Edenic, but some periods simply are more virtuous than others. The fact that prior generations of intellectuals fretted, Cosby-style, about African-American crime rates, family structure, and so on doesn't change the fact that those problems have grown much, much worse in the interim. And the fact that some moralistic crusades are foolish and misguided doesn't mean that all of them are. The anti-jazz crusaders confused the music with the venues where it played, but that doesn't mean that they were wrong to inveigh against alcoholism and gambling, and the fact that fifty years later jazz has become easy-listening music for the haute-bourgeoisie doesn't mean the same thing will happen - or should happen, more importantly - to this kind of thing.

The Art of Smashmortion

There's a sense in which the best pro-life response to the Yale student whose "senior art project" involved repeatedly impregnating herself using artificial insemination and then taking abortifacent drugs to induce miscarriage would be to ignore her completely, rather than rewarding her with the spluttering outrage she's obviously seeking. That said, as much as I'd like to see the appalling Ms. Shvarts denied the satisfaction of the publicity she craves, there's a larger sense in which stories like these - with the uncomfortable questions they raise for at least some segments of the pro-choice side - are too helpful to the pro-life cause to be ignored. So keep flogging it, Drudge!

Also, am I the only one who detects a whiff of fraud about this project? I mean, does this sound like any Yale seniors you know?

She said she was not concerned about any medical effects the forced miscarriages may have had on her body. The abortifacient drugs she took were legal and herbal, she said, and she did not feel the need to consult a doctor about her repeated miscarriages.

I know, I know, she's passionate and fearless about her "art," willing to go to any lengths to shock the bourgeoisie. But still ...

Update: Yuval Levin shares my skepticism.

Roberts and Roe

Larison on the Chief Justice:

I don’t think that John Roberts sat before the Judiciary Committee and perjured himself when he said that he thought that Roe was the “settled law of the land” and then went on to say, “There’s nothing in my personal views that would prevent me from fully and faithfully applying that precedent.” To expect that Roberts is a reliable anti-Roe vote is ultimately to believe him to be a liar, in which case it is not clear why anyone would trust him one way or the other.

I don’t believe that John Roberts is a liar either, but I don’t think his comments – delivered when he was being confirmed to the federal appeals court, not the Supreme Court – in any way preclude his voting to overturn Roe now that he's on the high court. (This is one of those rare occasions when I find myself agreeing with Media Matters.) A federal judge can’t overturn a precedent without more or less guaranteeing that he'll be reversed on appeal, so there’s no reason not to promise to faithfully apply it; a Supreme Court Justice, by contrast, can change long-settled law if he deems it necessary. And Roberts was very circumspect in his confirmation hearings about his opinion of Roe and Casey, going no further than the anodyne statement that Roe is “settled as a precedent of the court.”

The widespread confidence that Roberts will be content to chip away at Roe appears to be based, variously, on his confirmation-hearing comments, on amateur psychologizing about his moderate temperament, and on the assumption that no GOP President would risk his party's fortunes by actually appointing more than a handful of anti-Roe judges to the Supreme Court. My own confidence that he would overturn Roe - or at least revise it beyond recognition - is based on amateur psychologizing as well, in a sense, but I think I have a fair amount of evidence on my side.

At the risk of over-generalizing, I would venture that there are three crucial factors in predicting whether a male Supreme Court Justice would vote to overturn Roe: His judicial philosophy, his religious tradition and how seriously he takes it, and (perhaps most crucially) what his wife thinks about abortion. In Roberts, we have a man who is 1) a judicial conservative, of the sort that would be inclined to treat the penumbras and emanations that create the abortion license with a certain skepticism no matter what; 2) a Roman Catholic who chooses to attend one of the more conservative parishes in the Washington D.C. area; 3) the husband of a similarly-devout Roman Catholic, who serves as legal counsel for Feminists for Life (!); and 4) the father of two adopted children. (The relevance of that last point to a person's sentiments about the abortion debate should not be underestimated.) None of this makes him a certain vote against the Roe-Casey regime, but so far as prognostication goes it's hard to imagine stronger evidence - save a direct statement on the matter - in favor of counting him as such.

Pro-Lifers and '08

I have a Current up about the Douglas Kmiec and Andrew Bacevich endorsements of Obama, and what, if anything, they tell us about the fate of the "Catholic vote." But I wanted to make another point on the subject as well. I'm an enormous admirer of Professor Bacevich, but I wish his Obama-endorsing piece hadn't stacked the deck so much; specifically, I wish he'd made a more detailed case for why issues of war and peace ought to outweigh the abortion issue for pro-life voters in '08, rather than claiming, implausibly:

... only a naïf would believe that today’s Republican Party has any real interest in overturning Roe v. Wade or that doing so now would contribute in any meaningful way to the restoration of “family values.” GOP support for such values is akin to the Democratic Party’s professed devotion to the “working poor”: each is a ploy to get votes, trotted out seasonally, quickly forgotten once the polls close.

You hear this sort of thing frequently from pro-lifers who have grown disillusioned with the GOP, and there's some truth to it: A lot of Republican leaders could care less about Roe and would prefer, if anything, to see it upheld, and even if Roe were overturned abortion would remain legal in most of the country. Nonetheless, it remains the case for all the pro-choice sympathies of leading GOPers, the Republican Party nearly succeeded in overturning Roe v. Wade fifteen years ago, and would have if one man - Anthony Kennedy - hadn't changed his mind about the issue at the last minute. It also remains the case that the Bush Administration has seemingly brought to Supreme Court within a single vote of undoing what Kennedy wrought in 1992. It further remains the case that while overturning Roe wouldn't magically restore us to some Ozzie-and-Harriet wonderland, returning control over abortion law to the hands of the voting public remains a necessary goal for any pro-life, socially-conservative politics that takes itself seriously as a change agent in American life. And it further remains the case that to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 is to give up on overturning Roe for at least a decade, probably for two, and possibly for all time. These realities may not require pro-lifers to vote for John McCain, but they deserve more serious consideration that Bacevich affords them.

Wright and Left

If you haven't had a bellyful of the Wright debate by now, I recommend Chris Hayes's Nation piece on the subject, and Reihan's response.

What's The Big Deal About Sex?

Will Wilkinson, on the ethics of renting your body out for sex:

... absolutely every form of labor involves renting out your body. The language of “selling your body” is generally intended to elicit a “wisdom of repugnance² disgust response, but it just doesn¹t when you consider that folks like Ross and me get paid for things we do with our bodies - thinking, typing. Surgeons rent out their brains, and steady hands, to meet people¹s health needs. Construction workers rent out their arms, legs, backs, brains. Etc. I sell my body for a living. So do you.
I think the real claim is not about bodies, but about vaginas and penises in particular ... But bracket your intuitions about the commercial use of genitalia for a moment and consider that a good volume of trade in sexual services involves renting an expert hand. Couldusing your hand to give another person an orgasm possibly be a form of self-inflicted violence? Delivering manual relief is a great kindness, a sweet thing to do … unless you do it for money! At this level, Ross¹s claim is evidently ludicrous. Sweet charity cannot be transformed into self-inflicted violence by a twenty dollar bill.

Kerry Howley makes a similar point:

There are any number of activities that we classify, in different contexts, as both work and markers of intimacy. You can prepare a meal for your family in the morning as an act of love, and for customers in the afternoon as a source of income. You can take care of a sick spouse and expect nothing in return, and take care of sick strangers and demand a paycheck. Yes, yes, I know - sex is different. But I'm still waiting for a convincing explanation of how and why that doesn’t hinge on the stigmatization of sexually active women.

She’s right: Any distinction between renting out your body for sexual gratification and renting out your body to, say, hammer nails is only persuasive if you accept the contention that there is a significant distinction between sexual intercourse and other kinds of human activity. And she’s also right, I think, that any such distinction has implications for sexual morality in general, not just prostitution. If you think that sex, by virtue of being bound up not only culturally but biologically with emotional attachment on the one hand and reproduction on the other, is a unique kind of physical act, one that’s intimate by its very nature in a way that, say, preparing dinner isn’t, then it makes sense to assign a hierarchy of moral value (and moral stigma) to different kinds of sexual activity – most likely with monogamy at the top, serial monogamy somewhat lower, promiscuity lower still, and activities that treat sex as a commodity to be bought and sold somewhere near the bottom. I don’t think, however, that accepting this sort of hierarchy, and believing that some of the acts at the bottom deserves to be banned as well as stigmatized, requires you to shun any girl with multiple notches on her bedpost as a slut, any more than believing in a moral hierarchy that runs from true generosity to miserliness requires you to show the mildly stingy the same disdain you would bestow Ebenezer Scrooge or Mr. Potter. (Though I will admit that given the history of the sexual double standard, one can certainly see where feminists get the idea that any sexual standard at all is just a stalking horse for misogyny, and that they have to throw out moral distinctions entirely to get rid of the bathwater of patriarchy.)

I have a serious question, though, regarding the point of view that treats the handjob as just another form of manual labor, no different from laying bricks or mowing lawns. There’s been a lot of talk during this whole debate about the fact that many prostitutes were sexually abused as children, and from my point of view, of course, this correlation makes perfect sense: If you’re abused by others as a child, you’re more likely to seek out self-destructive behaviors as an adult. In the Wilkinson-Howley worldview, I presume, the correlation has more to do with our unjust war on sex than with anything inherent to the sex trade: If prostitution is outlawed and pushed to the margins of society, only marginal, damaged people end up becoming prostitutes. You’d have more well-adjusted call girls, presumably, if streetwalking were legalized.

Now this is fair enough so far as it goes, but it seems to beg an important question: Given the premises of the pro-prostitution worldview, what’s so abusive and damaging about incest and molestation in the first place? If there’s no moral distinction between giving a handjob in exchange for twenty dollars and getting paid twenty bucks to wash dishes or mow lawns, then why is there a moral distinction between a father who teaches his daughter how to pound nails and one who teaches his daughter to do something more intimate and (to go all wisdom-of-repugnance on you) disgusting? I understand that the kids involved aren’t “consenting adults,” but if selling sex is just like selling labor, and adults force kids to perform all kinds of menial tasks as part of their education, why can’t adults force kids to have intercourse too – especially if they’re safe about it? If selling sex is no big deal because sex itself is no big deal, what’s the big deal about incest?

Prostitution and Subsidiarity

I'd like to associate myself with Jim Manzi's remarks on the subject.

Prostitution, Morality and the Law (II)

Noah Millman, responding to my earlier post:

But there are lots of ways to abuse yourself, right? A steady diet of Krispy Kremes would do some serious abuse to your body (or, I should say, the body that is you – in this scheme, the body is not an owned thing that is yours). Not serious enough to warrant legal sanction? Well, gluttony is one of the seven deadlies, right up there with lust. And the medievals did have all sorts of laws regulating consumption. Are we going there? Or pick some other sex examples: I don’t believe Ross approves of legislation against sodomy, masturbation or adultery. But those are all behaviors that are traditionally understood to be “self-abusive” (indeed, what does “self-abuse” traditionally mean?), and the last of them (adultery) isn’t even arguably victimless. Why not ban them? The law can be a moral teacher, after all, even when it’s not aggressively enforced, as Ross himself says.

Why are some forms of paternalism – of which morals legislation form a sub-category – OK and others are insulting to a free people? I don’t think you can get back to an answer that prostitution is the sort of thing we should keep illegal without some argument about the power relations that predominate in the transaction in question.

I actually think it’s perfectly possible to distinguish between forms of moral paternalism without resorting to arguments about whether the behavior that's up for regulation is ultimately non-consensual. Here are four grounds one might employ: The seriousness of the form of self-abuse in question, the avoidability of the abuse (to borrow from from Aquinas's argument that the law should only prohibit vices "which it is possible for the greater part of the multitude to abstain from"), the plausibility of regulation, and the private/public distinction. So masturbation, for instance, is a private and well-nigh universal vice (among men, at least) with no plausible means of interdiction. Sodomy and adultery are likewise acts that can only be regulated through extreme invasions of privacy; moreover, the fact that homosexuality seems to be an innate orientation rather than a choice means that even if one views same-sex sodomy as immoral, it isn't plausible to expect "the greater part of the multitude" who are inclined toward homosexuality to abstain from it. (I'm stretching Aquinas's argument a bit, but not implausibly, I think.)

The possession and abuse of illegal drugs can similarly only be prohibited at a significant cost to personal privacy. I tend to think the gravity of the self-abuse involved outweighs the cost to privacy, but only in some cases: If you’re growing marijuana in your basement, the law should probably leave you alone; if you’re running a meth lab, it probably shouldn’t.

Continue reading "Prostitution, Morality and the Law (II)" »

Prostitution, Morality and the Law

Megan writes:

Revulsion against sex work isn't unique to female prostitutes. We're also repulsed by men who sell themselves to women, even though there's a general cultural assumption that a healthy man wants to have sex with nearly every female he sees. Something about sex work violates a deep belief--whether cultural or hard wired I don't know--that sex should only be traded for affection.

But if the only prostitutes were men selling themselves to women, no one would want to make it illegal. Supporting yourself that way might bring social opprobrium, like becoming a Morris dancer or eating live chickens--can't you find something better to do? But we wouldn't criminalize it in the name of protecting them from violence, criminals, or the untold horrors of multiple anonymous sexual encounters.

Um ... I would still want to make it illegal. I wouldn't want to make it illegal in the name of protecting gigolos from violence or unprotected sex, but then again, that's not fundamentally why I think female prostitution should be illegal either. I think the "protecting vulnerable women" case against legalizing sex work is a perfectly reasonable supplemental argument for keeping the ban in place, but ultimately the case for the ban stands or falls on one's view of morals legislation: First, whether it's appropriate for the law to restrain people from activities that are freely chosen but ultimately self-abusive and morally degrading, and second, whether prostitution, female and male alike, is sufficiently self-abusive and degrading to warrant legal sanction.

Pace Glenn Greenwald, I suspect that a great many people in the United States would answer yes to both questions. But based on the response to the Spitzer case (and the Vitter case before it), it appears that nearly the entire liberal (and libertarian, though that's to be expected) intelligentsia would answer no the first, and dismiss the second as an irrelevancy.

Hence the search, among those liberals leery about making sex work legal, for arguments that suggest that all prostitution is essentially non-consensual - that it's too exploitative by its very nature to count as something "consenting adults" should be allowed to do. But the evidence they muster tends to depend on a pre-existing moral bias against making prostitution legal. For instance:

... most women in prostitution, including those working for escort services, have been sexually abused as children, studies show. Incest sets young women up for prostitution — by letting them know what they’re worth and what’s expected of them. Other forces that channel women into escort prostitution are economic hardship and racism.

All true - but the obvious pro-legalization rejoinder is that being sexually abused as a child, or being born poor and black in inner-city Baltimore, pushes people toward all kinds of life choices that we don't choose to regulate. We don't forbid women who were molested by their fathers from dating older men who treat them unkindly and use them for sex, and we don't make it illegal for poor women to work unpleasant jobs cleaning houses or serving food at McDonalds. It only makes sense to ban prostitution if it's in the same moral/legal category as incest itself, rather than being akin to the kind of run-of-the-mill exploitative relationship that incest might incline a woman (or man) toward later in life. Which is to say, laws against prostitution ultimately depend on the assumption that the state has an interest in preventing serious forms of self-abuse, and that renting out your body to satisfy another person's sexual needs is a form of self-inflicted violence serious enough to merit legal sanction irrespective of why and how you decided to become a prostitute in the first place.

I should note that taking this position, as I do, doesn't preclude supporting changes in how we enforce prostitution laws - by targeting johns and pimps, say, and letting streetwalkers off with a slap on the wrist - any more than my belief that crack cocaine ought to be illegal means that I wholeheartedly support the war on drugs. The view that the law should be a moral teacher where certain forms of conduct are concerned leaves one with plenty of latitude for making prudential decisions about how and where that teaching should be carried out.

The Two Faces of Neoconservatism

Reihan has a pair of interesting posts on this Peter Berkowitz op-ed, which argues that in their headlong rush to champion the invasion of Iraq many neocons weren’t being true to neoconservatism’s skeptical view of government action and human nature, and this Mark Lilla review of Jacob Heilbrunn’s They Knew They Were Right, which argues that the Iraq War was the fulfillment of neoconservatism’s tendency toward a politics defined by manichaeism, chest-thumping and hysteria.

Who’s right? Why, both of them. From its inception, neoconservatism has been distinguished by both pragmatic and apocalyptic strains, which have coexisted not only in the same movement but often in the same people. There are a host of factors driving this “two-faced” tendency, but I think Lilla’s point about neoconservatism being essentially a politics of reaction is a useful place to start. I don't mean to use the term “reaction” pejoratively here, and I think Lilla goes too far arguing that a politics of reaction must perforce lead to either nostalgic quietism on the one hand or "eschatological dreams of a counter-revolution" on the other; to my mind, calling the neocons reactionaries is just a simple way of describing the fact that neoconservatism began by defining itself primarily by what it wasn’t - namely, the late-60s and ‘70s Left. That Left tended toward utopianism in domestic policy and permissiveness in the social and cultural arenas; thus neocons were skeptical and empirically-minded on domestic policy (Lilla notes the modest founding motto of the old Public Interest - "to help us all, when we discuss issues of public policy, to know a little better what we are talking about") and more moralistic, pessimistic and declinist than the left on matters cultural. On foreign policy, things were more complicated, since neocons perceived the '70s liberalism to be simultaneously too utopian in its confidence in a foreign policy founded on the promotion of human rights and peaceful cooperation, and too ineffectual and weak-minded in its insistence on the limits of American power. Thus the neocon reaction tended toward hardheaded realism on the one hand, epitomized by Jeane Kirkpatrick's famous "Dictatorships and Double Standards," which Berkowitz's op-ed references, and a sweeping faith in American power on the other, epitomized by ... well, a host of recent examples spring to mind.

As that host suggests, over time the messianic and apocalyptic strands in neoconservatism have tended to crowd out the pragmatic and the realist strands - because the Cold War ended and American power seemed temporarily unlimited; because the neocon domestic policy agenda made more headway than the cultural agenda; because, as Steve Sailer notes, the earlier generation of neocons were more likely to be social scientists and the later generation has been more likely to be pundits; and a variety of other reasons besides. But like Reihan and Berkowitz, I'm hopeful that the chastening impact of the Iraq War and the changing of the generational guard provides an opening the revive the pragmatic, empirical meliorist style of neoconservative politics - a style that I would associate myself with, and that seems increasingly like the only plausible alternative to a resurgent and ambitious liberalism.

No Babies, No Problem

I'm with Rod Dreher: I went into this Nation piece on conservative demographic panic hoping for a smart, nuanced left-wing take on the thorny problem of the West's changing demographics - one that took some jabs at the "demographic winter" hype and accused social conservatives of using the spectre of population decline to justify their nostalgia for pre-modernity and the patriarchy (which would be a fair accusation, in some cases), but also acknowledged that demography is going to cause some real problems for developed societies over the next century, and grappled seriously with the possibility that falling birthrates might be one of the larger challenges facing the socialist, tolerant, post-historical paradigm so dear to readers of The Nation.

Instead, the piece basically reads: Patriarchy patriarchy patriarchy, Catholic evangelical fascist, Mussolini Hitler, racist racist racist. I guess The Nation knows its audience, but still ...

The Times and Life

Naturally, I agree with Ramesh that the peculiar TNR Online piece arguing that the New York Times's abortion coverage is undermining the pro-choice side of the argument is somewhat less than persuasive. The author's three main examples only prove her point if you think the Times has an obligation to treat their pages as an auxiliary wing of Planned Parenthood. (Which to be fair, does seem to be roughly her position.) Moreover, it isn't all that hard to find counter-examples - try here or here or here, to pick a few - where the Times' coverage was presumably more to her liking. Then there's the difficulty that if you're going to remark on how the Times Magazine covers abortion, it's tough to ignore the cover story they ran in 2006, all about the nightmare of El Salvador's abortion ban - in case anyone missed the relevance to the U.S., the piece was called "Pro-Life Nation - which didn't quite manage to get the facts all right. I expected the TNR piece to simply gloss over that incident; instead, the author brazens it out:

Then there was the disturbing flap at the Magazine two years ago, after a cover piece about illegal abortion in Latin America reported on a woman in El Salvador who supposedly was criminally convicted for aborting her 18-week fetus. Post publication, it turned out the woman was actually judged guilty of murdering her newborn, full-term baby. The reporter had never bothered to read the court records, and the Magazine's factcheckers hadn't either. In its eagerness to champion abortion rights in a country that has none, the paper had gotten sloppy. And on its own national turf, where long-established rights are being chipped at, sloppiness runs in the other direction.

So a prominent case in which the Times ran a factually-inaccurate, "too good to check" piece that just happened to double as a brief for the pro-choice cause is somehow an example of their supposed anti-choice turn. As I said, somewhat less than persuasive.

The Archbishop's Academentia

Alan Jacobs, in a fine post, suggests that Rowan Williams is afflicted with “verbal academentia." Frankly, I can't think of a better coinage to describe what’s wrong with the Archbishop’s approach to his office, both in the shari'a controversy and elsewhere.

Consider, for instance, this years-old public conversation with Philip Pullman, which was held shortly after the Archbishop praised and recommended an adaptation of His Dark Materials then playing at the National Theatre. It’s all very polite and erudite and engaging - all very academic, one might say - as the two men range across gnosticism, Original Sin, the role of fiction in education, the representation of religion in cinema, and what-have-you. You can see that Williams just lights up at the chance to be set down in the same room with Pullman, and set free to chat with him: What a fascinating fellow this atheist childrens' book writer is! What a fine chance to discuss the fascinating theological implications of his anti-theological work! Of course every child in England should read the book, and then sit down over tea and have a similarly fascinating discussion about the ever-so-complicated questions it summons up! etc.

Now of course there's a sense in which this style of engagement is preferable to, say, organizing a hamfisted boycott of Pullman's work, as some of the thicker tribunes of Christendom are wont to do. But at least boycotts get at an essential point that Williams' debating-society approach misses, which is that Pullman's arguments aren't just being thrown out for the sake of some ivory-tower bull session about theology - they're embedded in a work of propaganda that's designed to win the hearts and minds of his young readers away from anything resembling Christianity. This doesn't mean that Williams should have kicked over his chair, crossed the stage and hurled holy water in Pullman's eyes, but it would seem to require something more from him that the sort of cheerful, but of course dear boy spirit with which he approached the conversation, as though he and Pullman were fellow Christ's College students chatting about metaphysics over late-night glasses of port.

In the His Dark Materials debate and the shari'a affair alike, one has the sense that Williams doesn't quite understand how poorly his academic approach to controversial questions translates to the real world. Very few readers of Philip Pullman's novels are being inspired to a deeper engagement with Christian theology, as the Archbishop hopefully suggested they might be; similarly, the "parallel jurisdictions" emerging in Britain's Muslim communities bear little or no resemblance to the sort of high-minded framework he gestured at in his address. This doesn't mean that an academic approach, whether to atheism or Islam, is always and everywhere inappropriate; far from it. It's just inappropriate for Rowan Williams, given the office that he holds, and the duties - defending the faith, speaking out against injustice - that he's charged with.

Don't Stand So Close To Me

The GOP leadership's disembodied presence at yesterday's March for Life obviously grates a bit, as it always does. On the other hand, it's worth noting that the pro-life movement is arguably more popular than the Republican Party these days. So maybe pro-lifers should be thanking Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, et. al. for staying away.

Jamie Lynn and Huckabee, Cont.

He's got her back.

Should Jamie Lynn Spears Heart Huckabee?

Andrew writes:

Isn't Huckabee the obvious representative of all the Jamie Lynn Spears' out there? I mean: he's got a following for a reason.

Oh, snap.

Except, of course, that there's actually a serious argument for why Mike Huckabee (or any social conservative) ought to find his strongest constituency among people with the misfortune to grow up in a world where meeting your boyfriend at church and having his baby out of wedlock aren't mutually exclusive propositions.

Take it away, Reihan ...

Jeffrey Rosen Versus Clarence Thomas

What Alan Jacobs said. I am by no means in the "Clarence Thomas, Real American Hero" camp, and much of Rosen's analysis seems to me astute. But I am persistently puzzled by the unwillingness of white male journalists, in particular - for whom a meritocracy-plus-affirmation action system of advancement provides constant validation, and constant confirmation that they're getting ahead on innate talent and hard work alone - to generate sympathy for a figure like Thomas, who feels, for not-incomprehensible reasons, that his successes have been won (as Jacobs puts it, quoting, Stanley Fish) "in such a way as to render them bitter to the taste." You don't have to like him or agree with him to understand, better than Rosen seems to, where his anger might be coming from.

I would also add, to Rosen's remark that "it is no more possible to feel pity for [Thomas] than for Britney Spears," that the comparison is ridiculous (persecution by the paparazzi is by no means comparable to the combination of segregationist racism, affirmative-action condescension and Uncle-Tom vitriol that has made Thomas the angry man he is today) and that even if it weren't I do feel pity for Britney Spears, and I'm a little puzzled by anyone who doesn't.

Who Needs Marriage?

A couple weeks ago, remarking on the coexistence of steadily rising illegitimacy with relative social peace over the last decade, Andrew wrote:

... social conservatives have long argued that the breakdown in traditional family structure is the core reason behind other social ills, such as crime. Perhaps it isn't in all social settings. Perhaps living in sin for a while before marriage is actually a social good for some; perhaps lower rates of marriage are not the end of the world - as many victims of awful marriages can attest. Perhaps child-birth outside marriage is not necessarily a bad thing if the relationship is solid and care for the child is secure. Perhaps, in other words, holding the family of the 1950s up as the standard by which all family structure should be measured is not, in fact, very helpful. I don't know, but it seems one obvious inference from the data worth exploring further.

It seems clear from looking at Europe that Andrew's right, up to a point: Child-birth outside marriage doesn't necessarily lead to negative social outcomes "if the relationship is solid and care for the child is secure," which it usually is in countries like Sweden where most children born out of wedlock are still raised in two-parent households. Unfortunately Americans aren't Swedes, and marriage qua marriage tends to be a much more important indicator of well-being, both for children and for parents, in the United States than it does in Europe. Perhaps this will not always be so; perhaps the coexistence, in the 1990s and early Oughts, of falling crime and higher rates of out-of-wedlock births are a leading indicator of the Swedenization of American social norms. But I doubt it, not least because the secondary consequences of family breakdown, persistent inequality and social immobility chief among them, appear to have worsened over the last decade, while support for an expanded welfare state - Swedenization of a different sort! - has risen over the same stretch. It seems more likely that the lesson of the Nineties is that a long economic boom and the end of willfully counterproductive poverty policies can make up for growing social disarray in other areas. And counting on another tech boom or another poverty-fighting reform as successful as the shift from AFDC to TANIF seems like a poor guide to social policy.

All of this is a long way around to noting that the latest numbers on out-of-wedlock births have been released (though they're only receiving attention from immigration opponents, so far as I can tell), and the news is, well, not good: Up among blacks, up among whites, way up among Hispanics. Here's hoping Andrew's right about what this portends, or what it doesn't. But here's betting that he isn't.

Pullman Versus Tolkien

From an interview with the Dark Materials author:

His story is a rival to the narratives put forward by two earlier Oxford writers, J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and C.S. Lewis's "The Chronicles of Narnia". Pullman loathes the way the children in Narnia are killed in a car-crash. "I dislike his Narnia books because of the solution he offers to the great questions of human life: is there a God, what is the purpose, all that stuff, which he really does engage with pretty deeply, unlike Tolkien who doesn't touch it at all. ‘The Lord of the Rings' is essentially trivial. Narnia is essentially serious, though I don't like the answer Lewis comes up with. If I was doing it at all, I was arguing with Narnia. Tolkien is not worth arguing with."

It’s true that Lewis and Tolkien are engaged in very different projects, and the former is more didactic than the latter; that Pullman would see this as a reason to dismiss the Rings saga as “trivial” tells you a great deal about where his own fantasy saga went wrong. Being a Christian, I’m favorably inclined to Lewis’ polemical intentions, but even I can see that they sometimes step on the toes of his storytelling. Which is to say that I can see why Pullman-the-atheist would find them deeply irritating. But an appropriate response to this irritation would have been to write an “atheist’s Narnia” in which the polemic is less abrasive – and therefore more effective, perhaps – than Lewis’s Christian sallies sometimes are. More myth, in other words, and less message; more Middle-Earth, perhaps, and less Narnia. Instead, Pullman seems to have set out to take the things he hated about Lewis’ writing and recreate them, but at a heightened, more hectoring pitch. The world-building that makes The Golden Compass so compelling and fun – the panzerbjorn and the witches, the Jules Verne-meets-Tolkien landscape – is thus gradually abandoned as His Dark Materials progresses, no doubt on the grounds of its inherent “triviality,” in favor of a thudding polemic that passes well beyond Lewis and approaches the didacticism of Ayn Rand.

I also liked this bit:

Pullman says that people who are tempted to take offence should first see the film or read the books. "They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence. It's very hard to disagree with those. But people will.”

Indeed. This is Atlas Shrugged in a nutshell: A style of literature-as-polemic that seeks to persuade the reader of its argument by associating those characters who share the author’s point of view with every possible virtue, and those who don’t with every possible vice. The result is a self-contained world – where Christians are all Nazis, say, or successful capitalists are all saints and geniuses – that’s persuasive so long as the reader stays immersed in it, but that can’t survive any contact or contrast with reality.

Mid-Century Exceptionalism

You'll often hear that when George Romney, Mitt's father, was contemplating a presidential run, almost nobody cared about his Mormonism - which shows how far we've fallen from the ideal of church-state separation. Except that public opinion hasn't really changed between then and now:

As far back as 1967, only three-quarters of Americans said they would vote for an otherwise well qualified person who was a Mormon. This year – some 40 years later -- the results to this question are almost exactly the same.

Larison writes:

[George Romney] did face this problem, but failed to gain any ground as a presidential candidate before there was that much time for the issue to become a prominent one. We may forget, as we now enter the eleventh month of this election campaign (11 down, 11 to go!), that Romney started his campaign for the Republican nomination in November 1967 and by the end of February he was out. He was a declared candidate for a little over four months. He had made his famous “brainwashed” remark earlier in 1967 before becoming an avowedly antiwar candidate (an example his son has definitely not followed). His son started organising the preliminary elements of his presidential campaign in 2005, and there has been active speculation about his presidential run since mid-2006 at least. There has been much more time to ponder the implications of this factor, much more time to do a lot of polling on it, and much more time for pundits and bloggers to write endless commentaries on the topic.

The issue has taken on added significance in the nominating contest because evangelicals, many of whom would have been Democratic voters in 1967-68, have since started voting Republican much more frequently. As a Republican candidate before the 1968 realignment, Romney would have been more insulated from the early pressures his son is now experiencing. Had he been a Democrat, the issue might have become more significant in the nominating contest.

I would only add that a lot of people are confused about why religious issues appeared to be less salient in the politics of 1950s and 1960s.

Continue reading "Mid-Century Exceptionalism" »

What's Wrong With His Dark Materials

It isn't that Philip Pullman's trilogy is anti-Christian (though obviously that doesn't make me favorably disposed to it). Nor is it that the saga is badly-written; Pullman is, of course, an immensely talented writer, as anyone who read The Ruby in the Smoke could have told you even before The Golden Compass made him world-famous. No, the problem is that the wheels come rattling off the storytelling wagon in the third volume (The Amber Spyglass, that is), thanks to a combination of preachiness and terrible, terrible plotting. In his great essay on the series, Alan Jacobs blames this squarely on Pullman’s atheism, suggesting that "powerful alternative versions of the biblical narrative can only be told by people who are themselves passionately theological." I was persuaded by this argument, but I didn’t realize how persuasive it really is until I read this critique (via Jeffrey Overstreet) by the fantasy writer John C. Wright, which lays out, piece by piece, how the story Pullman should have been telling, and seemingly set out to tell, was undone by the message he was trying to push. An excerpt follows below the fold:

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Mormonism And Its Enemies (III)

Nate Oman responds to my comments on his earlier post:

I would be the last to deny that there are real and important theological differences between Mormonism and Protestantism or Catholicism. However, it is not simply these theological differences that account for the strange political salience of Mormonism as an issue for some non-trivial segment of the Republican base. Rather, I think that the fact that the details of Mormon theology matter so intensely as a political issue for some voters comes from their need to assert -- if only to themselves -- their theological integrity in the face of political compromises. It is not Mormon theology but the strange series of historical accidents that pushed conservative evangelical protestants and conservative catholics into alliance that is causing most of Romney's "Mormon problem," a development that Mormonism had very little to do with. Furthermore, the fact that this same non-trivial chunk of the Republican base believes that the theological marker for ecumenism is also a valid reason in principle for rejecting a Mormon candidate is simply a graphic illustration of the problems of conflating ecumenism and political coalition building. It also illustrates that at least for some, Mormonism's status as a religious outsider is sufficient reason to relegate Mormons to the status of outsiders within the political community as well. Supporter of a basically liberal political order (and member of the Mormon tribe) that I am, I find that a bit disquieting.

Point taken. I've spent a perhaps-inordinate amount of time defending the idea that it's reasonable to vote against a candidate because of his religious beliefs, and with that in mind I think it’s perfectly understandable that evangelical Christians would feel more comfortable voting for Huckabee than for Romney because they share a theological bedrock with the one and not the other. (In this vein, I like Matt's comments about how he wouldn't vote for a Jew for Jesus if there were other candidates on offer.) But these sort of choices, however understandable on an individual level, are problematic when they start defining a political coalition: The more religious conservatives appear to be treating theological issues, rather than the political issues they inform, as crucial election-season litmus tests, the more they’ll shrink their tent (there are a lot more Mormons than Jews for Jesus in the United States), alienate potential friends, and provide ammunition to the theocracy-shouters. If social conservatism is going to matter in American politics over the long run, then evangelicals would probably do well not to disqualify a Mormon from high office in advance, even if they choose not to vote for him when other alternatives are available. I’m not brave enough to venture into amateur speechwriting, but in an ideal world this is a point that Mitt Romney would strive – subtly, subtly – to get across on Thursday night.

Mormonism And Its Enemies (II)

Russell Arben Fox points me to this provocative meditation on anti-Mormonism, from Nate Oman:

... I think that Romney's speech will serve at least in part as an anvil on which one of the more surprising alliances in American politics will be hammered out: the one between conservative Catholics and Protestants. It wasn't so long ago that the idea of an Evangelical-Catholic alliance would have been anathema to both sides ... That changed beginning in the 1970s, when conservatives from both traditions decided that the forces of secularism were a greater threat than either Rome or heresy. The alliance, however, is not an entirely easy one. (Witness for example, the furor caused by Francis Beckwith's conversion from Evangelicalism to Catholicism.) I suspect that not too far below the surface of the Religious Right one will find a deep-seated theological ambivalence: Did the religious conservatives sell-out theologically by clasping hands across what had been the ultimate divide in American religious politics?

Part of this tension has been managed by the promotion of "The Great Tradition," a somewhat fictitious creation, that like 'Judeo-Christian culture," provides a coping mechanism for the cognitive dissonance created by the contradictory pulls of politics and theology. In effect, it allows Protestant and Catholic intellectuals to tell themselves, "I didn't sell out my beliefs for control of Congress; after all we both believe in Nicea and Chalcedon." In a world of un-conflicted sectarian competition, I suspect that the Mormon rejection of the creeds didn't matter all that much. Sure, it meant that Mormon theology was wrong, but everyone else's theology was wrong too, so there was no special Mormon problem. Likewise, Mormon rejection of the creeds didn't matter all that much when Ike presided over a culturally self-confident and complacent Protestantism. "Letting Mormons sit at the table," the Protestants in effect told themselves, "doesn't say anything about Protestantism because everyone understands that we wield ultimate control." (Hence, for example, Mormon apostle Ezra Taft Benson -- pictured at his swearing in left -- could serve in Ike's cabinet without the sky falling for Evangelicals.) Not so in a world where Protestant hegemony is challenged by the forces of godlessness.

Hence, I suspect that the reason why many within the Religious Right want to deny Romney (or any other Mormon) the Presidency is because Mormonism is an important theological marker that legitimizes the other theological compromises that have made the coalition possible. "Sure, we'll work with the Papists," the conservative Evangelical subconscious can say to itself, "but the Mormons are one theological compromise too far. I am not a theological sell-out because while I will accept Mormon votes, I will not accept a Mormon leader." Soft-bigotry against Mormons facilitates broader theological cooperation.

As a Mormon, I have to say that living on the anvil where the concerns of others get hammered out can be a bit uncomfortable. On the other hand, I take solace in the fact that much of the time it probably really isn't about my religion.

This analysis makes a lot of sense; I only object to note of self-pity at the end. Just because evangelicals (and Catholics, to a lesser extent) are using Mormonism as a marker to legitimize their own theological compromises doesn't mean it isn't a reasonable marker to use. It isn't only about Oman's religion, but it is about it to a great extent: Mormonism is a useful marker of how far ecumenism can go (and how far it can't) precisely because there are much, much deeper theological commonalities between, say, the Vatican and the Southern Baptist Convention than between either body and the the LDS Church. And while it's true that Mormons get more attention, and hostility, than other similarly-heterodox strands of American religion, they're at least partially victims of their own success. If the Jehovah's Witnesses, say, were doing as well as the Mormons are at winning converts, their tenets might be playing the same sort of "here's where the Great Tradition stops" role in debates over ecumenical cooperation. But they aren't, so they don't.

As an outside observer, it seems to me that Mormonism has a divided soul - there's a yearning for acceptance within the firmament of Christianity (and a hint of self-pity concerning other Christians' unwillingness to welcome them with open arms), combined with a pride in everything that makes the Latter-Day Saints unique. I'm inclined to think the latter is the healthier sentiment for members of a young and rising faith. Attention, and the hostility that comes with it, is the price of being a successful religion, as the larger history of Christianity's rise attests: You don't see Christopher Hitchens writing polemics against the Mithraists or the cult of Isis, after all.

Romney's Mormon Speech

Marc has a good rundown of the pros and cons. Jay Cost, in a characteristically sharp piece, notes that this sort of reactive turn-on-a-dime is par for the course for the Romney campaign:

His candidacy has been the most transparently strategic this cycle. McCain is up? Go after McCain. McCain is down? Leave McCain alone. Thompson enters the race and seems a threat? Take a cheap shot about Law and Order. Thompson fades? Ignore him. Rudy is up? Go after Rudy. Huckabee is up? Go after Huck. You need to win a Republican primary? Make yourself the most socially conservative candidate in the race. And on and on and on.

If somebody asked me which candidate on the Republican side has won just a single election (in a year that his party did very well nationwide) -- I would answer Mitt Romney, even knowing nothing about anybody's biography. This kind of transparency is, to me, a sign of political inexperience. He's only won one election, and it shows.

Meanwhile, Larison explains what makes the speech so hard:

The impossible balancing act is stressing the political irrelevance of the theological differences Mormonism really does have with Christianity while simultaneously claiming that this very same religion, whose distinctive substance is supposed to be irrelevant, informs and shapes his “values” that he will rely on to make judgements about policy. Another part of the balancing act (which is where it becomes really dangerous politically) is to declare that it is “un-American” to judge a candidate based on his religion without insulting the millions of voters who consider a candidate’s religion an important part of selecting their preferred candidate, while also paying homage to the “separation of church and state” without actually endorsing the idea that the separation of church and state has any constitutional basis (which a fairly large number of religious conservatives doesn’t accept). His speech will have to go something like this: “My faith, which is very important to me and has made me who I am, should not be important to you, but it is important that we have a person of faith leading this country, and that person happens to be me.”

Put me down in the "it's a big mistake" camp. The speech should have been given at the very beginning of the primary season, or after Romney won the nomination; it doesn't make sense to give it in response to Mike Huckabee's rise in the polls. Huckabee is vulnerable on all sorts of issues, and Romney has the money and the infrastructure to make sure that every GOP primary voter in America - let alone Iowa and South Carolina - knows all about the tax increases and the ethics complaints and the softness on illegal immigration and all the rest of it. Going after Huckabee on these issues probably wouldn't prevent the Arkansas governor from consolidating his current level of support, but the right line of attack should be able to stall his momentum in states like New Hampshire and Michigan and South Carolina, where Romney is well-positioned even if he loses Iowa.

But instead of making the conversation about issues where Huckabee is vulnerable and Romney isn't, the Romney campaign has guaranteed that for the next two weeks at least and probably beyond, the media conversation will be about, well, Mormonism. If there were more time before the actual voting begins, that might not be the worst thing in the world; they could get the wave of coverage out of the way, inoculate themselves to some extent, and then shift gears and start hammering Huckabee on taxes and immigration and so forth. But there isn't time: Christmas is coming, there's a very narrow window in which to define Mike Huckabee as a Mexican-loving crypto-liberal, and the Romney campaign has just ensured that everyone will be talking about the Urim and the Thummim instead of the Arkansas gas tax. Unless Romney gives the best speech in the history of speeches, I just don't see how that helps him win - in Iowa, New Hampshire, or anywhere.

Photo by Flickr user NJRon using a Creative Commons license.

The Gospel According to ... Ialdabaoth?

I am shocked, shocked, that the much-hyped "Gospel of Judas," a dull third century Gnostic text that purports to tell the Passion story from the Iscariot's point of view, would turn out, upon more careful examination, to be something other than the cross between "Gregory Maguire Does the New Testament" and The Da Vinci Code that everyone made it out to be. I mean, really - how could Elaine Pagels possibly lead us astray?

Needless to say, while the new translation alters Judas's role in the story - he's a an agent of the wicked demiurge the Gnostics blamed for sin and suffering and the whole of creation, not a tragic hero - it doesn't sound as though it much alters the substance of the text, which like most of the "lost gospels" is at once historically bogus and theologically unappetizing (with a Jesus who tends to sound, in Adam Gopnik's priceless phrase, like "the ruler of a dubious planet on Star Trek"). But of course the lost gospels' quality and historical credibility - or lack thereof, in both cases - have never had much to do with their appeal.

Chuck Norris and the Culture War

Is there a contradiction between Mike Huckabee's cultural conservatism and his trumpeting of endorsements from icons of, well, trash culture like Chuck Norris, Ric Flair and Ted Nugent? Adam Thierer makes a strong case, but Reihan isn't so sure.

Ethical Concerns And Church-State Violations

I was thinking about saying something about this Richard Cohen column while I was ranting at Jon Chait about religion and democracy, but decided to let it slide. In the aftermath of the stem-cell news, though, it seems worth bringing up again. Cohen writes:

Back before Bush, it was considered narrow-minded and, worst of all, elitist, to judge a person by the intensity of his religious convictions. Belief was not supposed to matter, and so it was impermissible to conclude anything about a person even if he thought Darwin was wrong or, more recently, that homosexuals chose their sexual orientation, presumably just to irritate the Christian right. Religion was irrelevant. Everyone said so -- and I agreed.

Bush changed that. He infused government with religion, everything from ineffective programs that promote sexual abstinence to an adamant refusal to authorize federal spending for most embryonic stem-cell research. The administration even erected barriers to the marketing of the Plan B morning-after pill. All these measures ran up against obstacles that were essentially religious, not strictly scientific, in nature.

Richard Cohen, meet James A. Thomson:

Dr. Thomson’s laboratory at the University of Wisconsin was one of two that in 1998 plucked stem cells from human embryos for the first time, destroying the embryos in the process and touching off a divisive national debate.

And on Tuesday, his laboratory was one of two that reported a new way to turn ordinary human skin cells into what appear to be embryonic stem cells without ever using a human embryo.

The fact is, Dr. Thomson said in an interview, he had ethical concerns about embryonic research from the outset, even though he knew that such research offered insights into human development and the potential for powerful new treatments for disease.

“If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough,” he said. “I thought long and hard about whether I would do it.”

He decided in the end to go ahead, reasoning that the work was important and that he was using embryos from fertility clinics that would have been destroyed otherwise. The couples whose sperm and eggs were used to create the embryos had said they no longer wanted them. Nonetheless, Dr. Thomson said, announcing that he had obtained human embryonic stem cells was “scary,” adding, “It was not known how it would be received.”

Hmmm. So he found the work ethically troubling, but decided to go ahead, on the justification that the embryos he would use were slated for destruction anyway. This is, of course, distinct from George W. Bush's more conservative position, which was that we should provide federal funds only for research on stem cells from embryos that had already been killed - albeit while making no attempt, one might add, to impede private research like Dr. Thomson's. But just how distinct are they, and what's the nature of the distinction? Well, that's a good question ... and hey, maybe Richard Cohen can answer it. He seems pretty sure of himself, after all. So my challenge to Cohen is this: Please explain why the Bush position is so distinct from Dr. Thomson's as to make the latter a responsible scientist, and the former a dangerously-religious zealot who elevated faith over "science," and permanently effaced the bright line between church and state. I'll give you, say, nine hundred words or so to do so.

Meanwhile, I'd saying something snide about this passage ...

If anything, Romney is the anti-Huckabee. There is not the slightest hint that his religion has constrained his politics in any way. You name the issue and he's been for it and against it -- gun control, abortion, gay rights. Call this what you may, it is proof that Romney is not enslaved by any dogma. His religion, to which he is committed, is distinctly his business and would not, as far I can tell, have any bearing on his presidency.

... but it would be tough to top Larison.

A Pro-Choice GOP?

Hadley Arkes, on the prospect of a Giuliani nomination:

... there is in his campaign a sobering truth that cannot be evaded: The nomination and election of Rudy Giuliani would mark the end of the Republican party as the pro-life party in our politics. And that would be the case regardless of whether pro-lifers respond to his nomination by refusing to vote for Giuliani, forming a third party, or folding themselves into a coalition that succeeds in electing Giuliani.

... What is engaged here is a truth about the nature of political parties that has gone remarkably unappreciated: Parties have the means of changing their own constituencies or their composition. By altering their appeals, they drive some groups out and bring others in. If a Republican party, reconstituted in this way, manages to win, the Republican establishment will readily draw the lesson that they can win convincingly without pro-lifers and their bundle of causes: the destruction of embryos in research, assisted suicide, the resistance to same-sex marriage. Indeed, a Republican party shorn of those people and their baggage may seem to offer a stronger, more durable majority than the party that eked out victories by narrow margins in 2000 and 2004.

Pro-life voters may subordinate their concerns and join the new coalition, but the lesson extracted will be the same … for all practical purposes, nearly any interest will trump the interests of the pro-life community.

Arkes' mordant analysis calls to mind the WSJ article that prompted my back-and-forth with Larison over the GOP and Roe. To highlight the shifting demographics of the two parties, the Journal featured Angela Williams, a Hispanic union member who makes $39,000 a year and votes Republican because she's pro-life, alongside Jim Kelley, a private-equity big shot who leans Democratic in part because he doesn't like the GOP's focus on the social issues. This juxtaposition prompted Matt Continetti to write: "So far the GOP hasn't come up with a reformist agenda to cater to voters like Williams. They may want to do so before Election Day 2008." Which of course is one of my hobby horses - but let's play devil's advocate for a moment, and imagine a Republican that takes regaining the Jack Kelleys of the world as its principle goal, rather than expanding its support among the Angela Williamses. Is such a GOP imaginable? More importantly, would such a GOP, to borrow Arkes’ words, “offer a stronger, more durable majority” than the current Republican incarnation?

Continue reading "A Pro-Choice GOP?" »

Stem Cells, Race, and the Future of the Science Wars

On what looks like a great day for scientists and for opponents of embryo-destructive stem cell research (by no means mutually-exclusive categories, believe it or not), Jody Bottum writes:

Abortion skewed the political discussion of [stem cells], pinning the left to a defense of science it doesn’t actually hold. The more natural line is agitation against Frankenfoods and all genetic modification, particularly given the environmentalism to which the campaign against global warming is tying the left.

Narratives about positions on public policy are like enormous steamships: It takes a long time to turn them around. But if the news of stem-cell breakthroughs prove accurate, we may well see over the next few years a gradual reversal in news stories and editorials. Watch for it, now that abortion is out of the equation: Much less hype about all the miracle cures that stem cells will bring us, more suspicion about the cancers and genetic pollution that may result, and just about the same amount of bashing of religious believers—this time for their ignorant support of science.

The stem cell news comes, interestingly, just as Will Saletan bravely attempts a summary of the emerging scientific consensus on racial differences in intelligence, another issue where the left doesn't much care for science has to say. You could see this dovetailing with Jody's point, and presaging a realignment in the Science Wars, away from the Bush-era debates and toward a landscape in which the mass media becomes consistently skeptical about scientific research on issues related to race and genetic engineering. But I'm not so sure. Among real lefties, maybe so, but the people who really pushed the "killing embryos will save your grandparents" narrative forward weren't the types who usually crusade against frankenfood; they were moderate liberals, politicians and pundits alike, who saw an opportunity to tap into the talismanic power of "Science" to drive a wedge into the GOP coalition. And no matter what comes of the stem-cell debate, that talismanic power isn't going anywhere - not in Western modernity, not by a long shot. If you want to see the shape of things to come, look at Saletan's conclusion:

Hereditarians point to phenylketunuria as an example of a genetic but treatable cognitive defect. Change the baby's diet, and you protect its brain. They also tout breast-feeding as an environmental intervention. White women are three times more likely than black women to breast-feed their babies, they observe, so if more black women did it, IQs might go up. But now it turns out that breast-feeding, too, is a genetically regulated factor. As my colleague Emily Bazelon explains, a new study shows that while most babies gain an average of seven IQ points from breast-feeding, some babies gain nothing from it and end up at a four-point disadvantage because they lack a crucial gene.

The study's authors claim it "shows that genes may work via the environment to shape the IQ, helping to close the nature versus nurture debate." That's true if you have the gene. But if you don't, nurture can't help you. And guess what? According to the International Hapmap Project, 2.2 percent of the project's Chinese-Japanese population samples, 5 percent of its European-American samples, and 10 percent of its Nigerian samples lack the gene. The Africans are twice as likely as the Americans, and four times as likely as the Asians, to start life with a four-point IQ deficit out of sheer genetic misfortune.

Don't tell me those Nigerian babies aren't cognitively disadvantaged. Don't tell me it isn't genetic. Don't tell me it's God's will. And in the age of genetic modification, don't tell me we can't do anything about it.

No, we are not created equal. But we are endowed by our Creator with the ideal of equality, and the intelligence to finish the job.

Some people, right and left, look at science that doesn't dovetail with their philosophical preconceptions and deny the science. (Sometimes they're right to do so, one might add, since scientists have been known to get things wrong from time to time.) But in a society built on the dream of progress, most people, liberals and conservatives alike, look at things Saletan's way: If we don't like what science tells us, well, then science can find a way to fix it.

Mitt Romney and Faith-Based Politics

Jon Chait refers to me as "brilliant" in his latest TRB, no doubt in an attempt to defang my inevitable rejoinder to his critique of "faith-based politics" - but no such luck, Chait! He begins by complaining about evangelical Christians who might not vote for Mitt Romney because he's a Mormon:

If it were possible for a politician to sue voters for religious discrimination, Mitt Romney would have an open-and-shut case against the Republican electorate. Here is a man possessing all the known qualifications for the job of GOP presidential nominee--strong communications skills, a successful governorship, total agreement on every issue, Reaganesque hair--and yet he may well be denied it on account of his faith. In a poll released in June, 30 percent of Republicans said they'd be less likely to vote for a Mormon. One conservative televangelist dispensed with the subtlety and warned his flock,"If you vote for Mitt Romney, you are voting for Satan!" These attacks have nothing to do with how Romney would conduct himself as president. They're purely theological. Romney's critics are declaring they couldn't support Romney on the sole basis that they consider Mormonism un-Christian.

Well, first of all, polls like this one (see Table 4) suggest that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to rule out voting for a candidate on the basis of his Mormon faith. Now maybe all those anti-Mormon Democrats are African-American Baptists or working-class Catholics, but Dems with a post-grad education are more anti-Latter Day Saint than Dems with just a high school degree, which at the very least suggests that there are plenty of secular voters who wouldn't pull the lever for a Mormon. Not, presumably, because they want to establish an "only Trinitarians need apply" standard for public office in the U.S., but because they consider Mormonism weird and cultish, and they don't want a President who buys into its tenets.

Continue reading "Mitt Romney and Faith-Based Politics" »

Race, the GOP, and Paul Krugman

His latest column is yet another broadside in the whole "does race explain the Republican realignment" argument, and as you might expect, it combines convincing specific examples of Republicans playing the race card in the South with totally unconvincing macro-level analysis. For instance, there's this:

... everyone knows that white men have turned away from the Democrats over God, guns, national security and so on. But what everyone knows isn’t true once you exclude the South from the picture. As the political scientist Larry Bartels points out, in the 1952 presidential election 40 percent of non-Southern white men voted Democratic; in 2004, that figure was virtually unchanged, at 39 percent.

First, as Matt has pointed out, the fact that the bulk of the white-male shift occurred in the South doesn't mean that white males were simply changing their party allegiance in response to GOP race-baiting. Most white Southerners were conservatives - on God, gays and guns, among many other issues - who happened to vote for the more liberal party in the '30s and '40s because it was the segregationist party, and once that issue receded, and the Republicans moved rightward, you would have expected them to shift to the more conservative party even in the absence of dog-whistle politics.

More importantly for the sake of this example, 1952 is a really poor baseline to use for comparisons to present-day politics, since it was an exceptional year - a Republican landslide in a Democratic era, created by Eisenhower's celebrity and ostentatious moderation, Truman's unpopularity and Stevenson's mediocrity as a candidate. Ike took 55 percent of the vote to Stevenson's 44 percent, meaning that the GOP vote was much higher than the FDR-to-LBJ norm in almost every demographic category - and for Bush to match Eisenhower's share of the non-Southern white-male vote fifty years later while winning only 51 percent of the vote to Kerry's 48 suggests that conservative have made gains between then and now in that demographic, rather than just treading water as Krugman suggests.

Moreover, even if the Republicans had merely tread water it would still be an impressive achievement, given that a rightward shift - all other things being equal, which they weren't - would have been expected to produce a 1964-style result, in which the GOP consolidated the South and lost ground everywhere else. Arthur Schlesinger famously announced that the results of '64 proved that "if the parties were realigned on an ideological basis ... the Democrats would win every election and the Republicans would lose every election." It was an entirely plausible contention at the time, and Krugman's "race explains everything" narrative doesn't explain why he was proven wrong.

Continue reading "Race, the GOP, and Paul Krugman" »

Sesame Street, Adults Only

Virginia Heffernan reports:

Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street” are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia.

Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

Heffernan has some fun with what the warning might be referring to - "Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist" - but it turns out that her jokes are pretty close to the truth:

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

Read the whole thing, and prepare to be depressed. (But also informed: I had no idea that Sesame Street was designed specifically for the “4-year-old inner-city black youngster," or that "in East Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1978, 95 percent of households with kids ages 2 to 5 watched “Sesame Street.”)

The GOP, Pro-Lifers and Roe

Larison waxes indignant:

I understand why pro-life voters typically align with the Republicans. In theory, it makes sense: we pro-lifers vote for you Republicans, and you work to overturn Roe and generally oppose abortion itself (and, by extension, euthanasia and ESCR and so on). It sounds like a fair deal, until you, the pro-lifers, realise that you never really get very much out of it in all these years. But what about getting a majority on the Court, someone will ask. Well, pro-lifers have helped put Republicans in executive power for what will soon be twenty of the last twenty-eight years, during which time these Presidents have nominated seven Supreme Court justices, five of whom are still on the Court today. There has been a Republican-appointed majority on the Court for most of my lifetime, and most of the Republican appointees came in during the Reagan years or later, and yet Roe is realistically farther away than ever from being overturned than it was fifteen years ago. The latest two justices made it clear in their confirmation hearings that they accepted Roe as established precedent–and their nominations are supposed to represent the great clout and triumph of pro-life voters! Someone might point to the various bad choices and disappointments among the nominees in the past (Souter, O’Connor, etc.) and claim that pro-lifers just need to remain patient and gradually build up that anti-Roe majority they have imagined for such a long time.

Given the record of the last three decades, what makes them think that anything will change in the next administration or the one after that? The trouble with pro-life voters is that most routinely vote for the GOP, so the latter have no real incentive to keep them interested or give them anything more than symbolism or limited measures designed to keep them just attached enough to retain their loyalty for another cycle. Someone will say, “Well, that’s politics for you,” but my point would be that pro-life voters need to be much more shrewd in their willingness to withhold support and extract concessions. Yes, this is politics we’re talking about, which is why pro-lifers should play the game a lot better than they have been doing. Those who follow the path of Pat Robertson to pay obeisance to Giuliani are declaring to the party, “Please, exploit us for your own advantage!”

I agree about Robertson and Rudy, but otherwise I think this assessment is far too harsh. Consider what the pro-life movement has been up against over the last thirty years. First, Roe was decided with a 7-2 majority, meaning that opponents needed to flip three justices to overturn it, not just one or two. Second, it took the better part of a decade for the pro-life movement to even get off the ground in any substantial way, and for the evangelical-Catholic alliance on the issue to take shape. Third, elite culture in the United States - the culture of the media, of Manhattan and Washington D.C., and of the law schools that produce most future SCOTUS judges - is unremittingly hostile to pro-lifers. Fourth, Roe has the weight of both stare decisis and public opinion (however misinformed) on its side, which tends to give its defenders the political and legal high ground.

Yet in spite of all these handicaps (and I can think of several others), the alliance between pro-lifers and the GOP pushed Roe to the brink of extinction in the late 1980s. Obviously, the Souter pick was unforgivable, but even so, it took the combination of a shameful-but-effective Democratic smear campaign against Robert Bork and Anthony Kennedy's last-minute change of heart to save Roe from being overturned in 1992. Near-misses aren't the same thing as victories, but it's worth pointing out that from the vantage point of the early 1970s, when the Times famously declared that the Court had "settled" the abortion issue, this was closer to success than anyone would have expected a rag-tag band of religious conservatives to come. And the next Republican President - Bush, that is - looks to have improved on the Reagan-Bush record: This administration has had two SCOTUS vacancies, and filled both with judges who I would deem very likely to overturn Roe, or at least drastically reduce its scope, should the opportunity arise. It's true that if you think, as Larison does, that "Roe is realistically farther away than ever from being overturned," then yes, pro-life support for the GOP has been nothing short of folly. But I think he misjudges Alito and Roberts, and that Roe is closer than ever to being overturned - one vote away to be precise.

(Of course - returning to Daniel's final point, with which I agree - this makes it all the more baffling that the Pat Robertsons of the world have decided that now, of all times, is the moment to decide that abortion should take a back seat not only to fighting Islamists, but to "the control of massive government waste and crushing federal deficits," in Robertson's less-than-immortal words. Or that the National Right to Life Committee, in an effort to stop Robertson's preferred candidate, would decide to throw its weight behind a guy who's running fourth or worse in the early primary states, when there are several candidates with comparable anti-Roe bona fides and better poll numbers.)

Like Sheep Among the Wolves (And Not In A Good Way)

As one might have expected, the National Right to Life Committee's explanation for why it endorsed Fred Thompson doesn't make a lick of sense. As Larison writes:

The NRLC claims that “he is best positioned to top pro-abortion candidate Rudy Giuliani for the Republican nomination,” which I would like to believe (since I stupidly predicted that Thompson would win) but which I also know at this moment to be utter nonsense. Clearly, from a purely “he can beat Giuliani” perspective you would have to go with Romney, which is horrific but nonetheless it is the reality at the present time.

It would be one thing to endorse Thompson on the grounds that he has a solid voting record (and they did cite this at the announcement), or that he is more reliable and trustworthy than the other leading candidates. But this appeal to his potential as the Bane of Giuliani seems as wrong as it gets.

Coincidentally, Marc has the latest CBS-NYTimes polls from New Hampshire and Iowa. If you run your eyes down the list of GOP candidates, you'll find Fred Thompson running fourth in the caucuses, with nine percent of the vote; in New Hampshire, he's sixth, at six percent. But I guess he's got Rudy right where he wants him.

I don't always buy into the notion, advanced by Jon Chait among others, that the economic right calls all the shots in the GOP. I do, however, think that the folks at, say, the Club for Growth are a lot better at the hard business of intra-party infighting than some of their friends and rivals on the religious right.

Fred Thompson and Pro-Life Folly

I don't see how anyone can read the transcript of Fred Thompson's Meet the Press appearance - not just the portions where he discusses Roe v. Wade and federalism, but his inarticulate attempts to talk around the question of whether first-term abortion should be illegal - and think that in a field that includes several other pro-life candidates (Romney, McCain, Huckabee), it's Thompson who most deserves the endorsement of the country's leading pro-life advocacy group . Yes, McCain and Romney have their problems as well, from the perspective of a pro-life purist; yes, Huckabee is a long shot. But particularly given what a lousy campaign Thompson has run - it's not as if the NRLC is guaranteeing itself a place at the front-runner's table with this endorsement - one of those three has to be the better choice.

Ron Paul and the Pro-Life Vote

David Frum:

from a pragmatic political point of view, it's also true that the Paul candidacy helps rather than hurts my party and my preferred nominee, Rudy Giuliani. Rudy is in no danger of losing Republican primary voters to Ron Paul. And if (as I have speculated) Paul mounts an independent candidacy in the general election, he will draw votes from disaffected Democrats, disappointed in Hillary Clinton's failure to articulate a more radical antiwar message. As third-party candidates go, Ron Paul is Nader, not Perot.

To which Ramesh responds:

I keep reading posts about how Ron Paul will, in a general election, primarily appeal to the antiwar Left and thus help Republicans. But don't forget that Rep. Paul is a pro-lifer, and single-issue pro-life voters might not have anywhere else to go next fall.

Ramesh is right: If Giuliani is the GOP nominee and Paul mounts an independent bid, the impact of Paul's pro-life stand could end up determining which party he takes more votes from. I could see it being negligible, with most pro-life voters not even being aware that Paul opposes abortion (it isn't exactly front and center in his campaign at the moment). But I could also see it being the straw that, in a close election, breaks Giuliani's back.

Further Considerations

For a more substantive treatment of the issues raised in the last two posts, here's Ramesh on the response to his book, and Larison on the Weyrich endorsement of Romney.

Reductio Ad Carota

Back when some folks on the right (myself included, though the posts have vanished into the ether) were griping about the absence of a critical, substantive liberal response to Ramesh Ponnuru's Party of Death - and yes, I know, the title was inflammatory, and books with inflammatory titles don't deserve to be read, etc. etc. - someone responded (again, in a post I can't find) that they already knew what the pro-life arguments were on abortion, they'd heard the debate a hundred times before, and unless Ramesh's book had discovered some new, as-yet-unconsidered argument against feticide and embryo-killing, it was just the same old song, and they didn't need to hear it again.

Now of course The Party of Death covered all sorts of ground beyond the "is it murder/should it be legal?" debate - but even setting that aside, I would find the "nothing new to see here" line much, much more convincing if it didn't appear that no less eminent a figure than Garry Wills, who boasts a long career as a (Catholic!) public intellectual on the front lines of the culture war, seems to seriously believe that it's worth his time to explain to abortion opponents that the pro-life principle is mistaken because "harvesting carrots, on a consistent pro-life hypothesis, would constitute something of a massacre."

The Lincoln Wars

Noah Millman, on pieces like this one:

I freely admit my partisanship towards the victorious Union cause, but I do not recognize that cause as described by Lincoln’s idolators.

This seems like a particularly fine way of phrasing a sentiment that I happen to share.

The Evangelical (Non) Crack-Up, Cont.

A smart, evenhanded take - by a Slate intern who hails from God's Harvard.

Your Moment (Okay, Hour) of Phelps

With the charming folks at the Westboro Baptist Church taking it on the chin from a Baltimore jury for their "God Hates Fags" picketing of American soldiers' funerals, now seems like a good time to link to this, from the intrepid Louis Theroux:

The Zeal of a Convert

Ryan Lizza's piece on Mitt Romney is just as good as everyone says, but I found this passage somewhat puzzling:

In private, a Romney aide frankly conceded that, aside from accusations of “flip-flopping,” his greatest political liability is his religion, which is unfamiliar to most Americans. Jan Shipps, a leading non-Mormon scholar of Mormonism, said that it was useful to consider the difference between Romney and Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, who holds the highest government post of any Mormon in American history. “Reid is a Church member,” Shipps said. “But he is a convert. I’m sure he’s devoted, I’m sure he’s a tithe-paying member and all of that”—devout Mormons contribute ten per cent of their earnings to the Church—“but he was not born into the Church. He didn’t get Mormonism with his mother’s milk, as it were. But Romney is a sixth-generation Mormon”—what scholars call a DNA Mormon. “His ancestors were some of the very first converts.”

I suppose I see what Shipps is getting at - Romney's family history emphasizes Mormonism's various strangenesses in a way that Harry Reid's non-Mormon family history doesn't. But if you're trying to decide whether you should vote for a politician with peculiar-seeming religious beliefs, wouldn't you be much, much less likely to vote for them if they were a convert, like Reid, than if they'd been born into the faith? After all, most people stay in the religion they're born into, regardless of its theology or history; conversion, by contrast, suggests a much more profound assessment, and acceptance, of your religion's beliefs and practices. So one can look askance at Mormon teaching and still say, well, of course Mitt Romney's going to stay in the Church - he's just sticking with the faith of his father and mothers (and mothers, and mothers ...). But Reid deliberately chose Mormonism (and apparently persuaded his wife to convert from Judaism as well), which suggests a different and more radical acceptance of its doctrines than you'd expect from a member of the Romney family.

(And I don't mean to single out Mormonism here: If you think that anyone who believes in Roman Catholicism should have their head examined, then a convert-politician - like, say, Bobby Jindal - ought to be much weirder and more worrisome than a cradle Catholic office-seeker.)

Friedmanland

While I agree with Peter Suderman that the whole "me and my cool friends are doing our best to change the world, but it's so hard" meme (propagated here, commented on here and here and here) is deeply irrititating, it's not nearly so annoying as the Thomas Friedman column that kicked off the discussion, which I only just now got around to reading. After complaining that today's younger generation are "too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country's own good," Friedman writes:

Generation Q would be doing itself a favor, and America a favor, if it demanded from every candidate who comes on campus answers to three questions: What is your plan for mitigating climate change? What is your plan for reforming Social Security? What is your plan for dealing with the deficit -- so we all won't be working for China in 20 years?

I'm sorry, but this is just ... just ... asinine. The notion that today's college kids are going to forge a mass movement capable, in Friedman's words, of "speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall" to protest the growth of the federal deficit - which is likely to start rising again soon, but currently is only 1.2 percent of GDP - and the absence of Social Security reform (an issue that only Republicans want to talk about at present, and one where the time horizon for action is still measured in decades) suggests a truly awesome detachment from the realities of American politics, American life, and human nature. But then again, this passage appears in a piece in which Friedman, without a trace of irony or self-awareness (but to the sound of Matt's jaw hitting the floor), dubs my peers ''the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad," so "awesome detachment" might be too kind a phrase for what's going on here ...

Incidentally, if you're a NYRB subscriber, or have three bucks to burn, I highly recommend John Gray's savaging of The World is Flat from a couple years back. And if not, there's always Matt Taibbi's classic review, which (as always with Taibbi) isn't half as funny as it thinks it, but remains pretty damn funny for all that.

Why Not Huckabee?

Why won't social conservative bigwigs back the Huck? Erick Erickson suggests it's because they're political realists who know that Huckabee's unacceptable to the fiscal cons, and thus would actually fracture the Right's coalition more than Rudy would. Ambinder agrees, but also speculates that the "SoCon establishment in Washington fears Huckabee because Huckabee can empower social conservatives DIRECTLY, without the mediating influence, or dollars, of the SoCon establishment." Both these theories are plausible; I'd only add that every would-be endorser wants to back a winner, and Huckabee still has a much slimmer chance of taking the GOP nomination than Romney and Thompson, the other plausible recipients of a SoCon Establishment blessing. (Likewise, electability - or the lack thereof - is one of the many reasons why Brownback probably won't endorse Huckabee.)

In any case, it's hard not to be impressed with the political feat that Huckabee pulled off this weekend - spiking, at least temporarily, the SoCon leadership's endorsement of Romney by sheer force of rhetoric. Or so Erickson says:

I'm told that people in the room tabulating the votes were stunned by Huckabee's showing. Stunned, for some of them, is an understatement. It seems clear to me that this was an opportunity for the leaders of the social conservative movement to sigh, shrug, and embrace Romney. They intended to.

They gave Romney a platform by himself on Friday night. They played heroic anthems for his entry and departure. He had the night all to himself. And he did well. Then Huckabee showed up the next day, sharing the same time cluster as Rudy. And Huckabee, with a speech he wrote himself, was magnificent.

Now, you can call me partisan or biased or whatever you want, but all I'm doing here is reporting. The leaders of the social conservative movement who were present, the Arlington Group members you hear so much about, were ready and willing to get on board Romney's campaign on Saturday morning. Then Huckabee spoke. Then the straw vote was tabulated. Then they realized that were they to do so, it would put them completely out of step with their members.

"With a speech he wrote himself." Hard not to like the guy ...

Update: See also Amy Sullivan's take.

You Can't Go Home Again

Do go read Patrick Deneen, Rod Dreher, James Poulos, Matt Frost, and Rod again on the topic of why the young and ambitious (even, or especially, the young and ambitious conservatives) abandon their home towns for the pleasures of the metropolis. Among other things, it's a discussion notable for Deneen's sharp explication of how Hamilton saw it all coming, and Frost's somewhat-unfair but amusing coinage of the term "Berry's Razor" (after Wendell, of course) - "which declares that any undesirable social or economic phenomenon can be explained by self-indulgence."

Reducing the Abortion Rate

David Edelstein, reviewing Tony Kaye's abortion documentary, Lake of Fire:

I’m glad Nat Hentoff is in the movie. I remember the civil-liberties beacon from my days at the Village Voice, where he was shunned by most of the women on staff for his views on abortion. He’s a lefty atheist who also happens to believe that life begins when the sperm meets the egg—a view I find convincing. But the answer, as the movie’s pro-choice activists maintain, isn’t banning abortion but making birth control easier to obtain ...

Meanwhile, Will Saletan glosses the latest findings on this subject:

A study concludes that the global abortion rate is falling thanks to birth control. Data: 1) The rate fell 17 percent from 1995 to 2003. 2) The biggest drop was in the former Soviet bloc and "did coincide with substantial increases in contraceptive use in the region." 3) Previous studies found that "abortion incidence declines as contraceptive use increases." 4) Abortion bans don't correlate with low abortion rates. 5) Abortion bans do correlate with high rates of unsafe abortion. Authors' conclusion: If you want fewer abortions, don't ban them; provide more birth control and sex education. Liberal reaction: Bush is making things worse by censoring abortion counseling and pushing abstinence instead of condoms. Pro-life rebuttal: 1) The data are unreliable. 2) They're being spun by pro-choice "scientists." Human Nature's view: Reducing abortions through birth control is a no-brainer.

The difficulty isn't that the data are unreliable or the scientists dishonest; it's that - as Matt points out - these kind of cross-country comparisons don't actually tell you all that much about the landscape of abortion and contraception in the contemporary United States. We know that as poor countries get richer, better-educated, and so forth, contraception use goes up and abortion rates tend to go down; what we don't have is any evidence that increasing government funding for sex ed and birth control in a rich country like the United States, where contraception is already widely available, has an appreciable impact on the rate of unintended pregnancy, and thus abortion. Most of the evidence that I've seen suggests that it doesn't. Whereas we know that when abortion was legalized in America in the early 1970s, the abortion rate went up dramatically; we also know that Western Europe, which has lower abortion rates than the U.S., also has (somewhat) more restrictive abortion laws. Which suggests if you're serious about reducing the abortion rate in America (as opposed to taking the "more abortion is a good thing" line that Matt espouses), the Edelstein-Saletan answer is something of a cop-out; if some kind of restriction isn't on the table, you probably aren't going to get very far.

Christians and the Constitution

Andrew, in the midst of an engaging Cato Unbound dialogue with Mark Lilla, Philip Jenkins, and Damon Linker:

America is substantively and experientially a deeply religious country, and its political discourse has always been saturated with religious rhetoric and imagery ... It is a country whose politics is experientially creedal. It doesn't incubate the kind of high Tory pragmatism that I admire in the English experience; or even the kind of atheist secularism that helped spawn socialism in other developed countries in the twentieth century. But the power of that religious presence — I call it “Christianism” and describe it at length in The Conservative Soul — is in many ways a testament to the strength of the secular constitution that resists it. In fact, I think that without the kind of secularism that Mark detects in the founding documents and Constitution, America would long since have succumbed to some version of theocracy or another.

Mark's basic point is that this is the natural and historical state for humankind. The achievement of keeping God at arm's length in the ordering structure of a polity is very, very rare. Very few countries have achieved it in the history of the world. America's genius is to have sustained it, even while fostering an intensely religious, roiling, and often apocalyptic culture. So Damon is right to worry about theology's political claims — especially in the last few years, and during various spasms of the past. But he is wrong in thinking, I believe, that this will lead to a collapse of the American system as such. It could lead to disastrous social policies, civil dissension, social conflict, and what we have come to call a "culture war." But even then, the impulse to junk the Constitution as a whole, and the ability even to amend it, is limited. In fact, it is remarkable how modest many Christian fundamentalists have been in addressing the Constitution's core secularism. Whether out of national pride or simply denial, it remains a fact that the main policy goals of Christianists in American history has been in amending the Constitution or bypassing it, rather than attacking it frontally.

I think the sheer diversity of religious belief and institutions in the U.S. would make the possibility of an American theocracy pretty remote, whatever our constitution looked like - particularly given that the number of theocracies instituted in the nation-states of the modern West as a whole is close to zero. (It's pretty close to zero for the pre-modern West, for that matter.) It’s possible to imagine a much more politically fragmented North America producing some localized theocracies, along the lines of Deseret and Puritan New England, but on a national level .. not so much.

I'm more sympathetic to the rest of Andrew's comments here, but it's precisely the aspects of American political history that he gets right - particularly the resilience of the constitutional order in spite (or because!) of the persistence of God-infused political activity - that makes his promiscuous use of scare-terms like “Christianist” so silly. The fact that religious conservatives, with the occasional exception, share the same commitment to the Constitution as liberal believers and secularists – and that much of the culture war, from abortion to school prayer to gay marriage, boils down an argument between two perfectly lucid, un-theocratic readings of said Constitution – and that if anything, the religious right tends to be more committed to upholding the actual text of the Constitution than their more secular foes – well, all of these points suggest, at the very least, that constantly slinging around terms that effectively equate James Dobson with a shari’a-happy Islamist might not be the most accurate way to analyze the intersection of religion and politics in the contemporary United States.

Also, you should definitely read Jonathan Rowe's critique of the Lilla thesis, which is helpfully linked from the Cato Unbound page. I'll try to say something more about the issues it raises later on.

The Ahmadinejad Follies

From the LA Times, via Chris Suellentrop:

These critics not only disrespect such core American principles as academic freedom and freedom of speech, they disrespect the intelligence of Ahmadinejad’s audience. It isn’t likely that many were swayed by his wild-eyed questioning of the facts of the Holocaust or who was really behind the 9/11 attacks. The biggest laugh of the afternoon came when, in response to a question about the Iranian regime’s brutal treatment of homosexuals (a crime punishable by death), Ahmadinejad remarked, “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.” He also declared that “women in Iran have the highest level of freedom” even though they are forbidden from such basic social activities as attending soccer games, and said “we are friends with the Jewish people” while attributing nearly all the world’s ills to Jews. It’s hard to believe that anyone with a third-grade education would find him convincing.

In 1939, a journalist named Alan Cranston was outraged by a sanitized English-language translation of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” so he edited his own abridged version that bared the German dictator’s sinister soul. Cranston, who later became California’s longest-serving Democratic senator, understood something that Obama, Romney, McConnell et al do not: The best way to discredit a tyrant is to let him do it himself, in his own poisonous words.

This is astonishingly dumb. As Matt says, "free speech" is not at stake in a private university's decision to invite speakers to address its student body. Nor, I hope, was anyone who opposed the Iranian President's appearance seriously worried that he was going to convert his Ivy League audience to Shi'a radicalism. But just because a bunch of Columbia students found him ridiculous doesn't mean that everybody else did - and it's the "everybody else" that he was playing to.

And yes, of course one shouldn't censor the rantings of a tyrant to make him sound moderate. But the notion that "the best way to discredit a tyrant is to let him do it himself, in his own poisonous words" is just pious nonsense untouched by experience. A dictator's "poisonous words" are quite often the source of his strength, not a chink in his armor; so it was with Hitler, and so it is (albeit to a far, far lesser extent) with Iran's dinner-theater demagogue. Alan Cranston's more-accurate translation of Mein Kampf was an admirable contribution to the West's understanding of the Nazi regime, no doubt, but if I recall my history right, it didn't exactly bring Hitlerism to its knees.

The Uses of Illiberalism

Will Wilkinson has a pair of provocative posts on the Haidt thesis, one responding to Yuval Levin, one responding to me. Here are some excerpts from the latter:

Whatever else you might say about them, family, community, and religion are the chief preserves of illiberal sentiment in our society. Of course, family, community and religion don’t have to be illiberal. For example, most strands of Christianity have been successfully “civilized” — by which I mean radically liberalized — by the liberalizing pressures of modernity. One of the problems with conservatives is that, over and over again, they confuse an attack on the illiberal elements of family, community, and religion as attacks on family, community, and religion itself. For example, arguments for gay marriage are not arguments against the family, despite what most conservatives insist. They are liberal argument for equal-opportunity families. Arguments for racial integration aren’t arguments against community. They are liberal arguments for non-racist communities. Etc. If family, community, and religion (and other civil society institutions) are stabilizing, which I don’t doubt, they can be stabilizing without being unjust and harmful.

I would agree that you can liberalize family, community, and religion, and that this process has sometimes been a good thing for everyone involved. But I think that each of these aspects of human affairs must by definition retain an illiberal core, or else cease to exist in any meaningful sense. So for instance, one can reduce the duties that children owe their parents, and the power of parents over children, without eliminating the family entirely. But you cannot treat parents and children, or husbands and wives, as free agents with no obligations to one another save those they deliberately choose, without vitiating the very concept of family. Similarly, nation-states can reduce the distinctions they make among their citizens, and between their citizens and the foreign-born, without ceasing to exist as meaningful communities. But if they eliminate the latter set of distinctions entirely, as libertarians sometimes seem to suggest they should, so that everyone is effectively a citizen of everywhere else, then the very concept of community, or at least political community, ceases to have any practical meaning.

Continue reading "The Uses of Illiberalism" »

Bollinger v. Ahmadinejad

Larison nails it:

On reading the blog account of the big to-do at Columbia today, it occurs to me that Ahmadinejad must have found Bollinger’s “sharp challenges” much as Francis Urquhart described Prime Minister’s Question Time: “very frightening -- like being mugged by a guinea pig.”

Consider this “challenge”:

Why do you support well-documented terrorist organizations that continue to strike at peace and democracy in the Middle East, destroying lives and the civil society of the region?

You could almost imagine Ahmadinejad replying, “I thank the honourable gentleman for his concern for peace and democracy, which my government has always shared. We have always worked to bring peace and democracy to the rest of the world, because we love all of the nations of the world. Naturally, we abhor terrorism and I refer the honourable gentleman to my previous answer.”

In his speech, Ahmadinejad did actually say, “we love all nations.” ... The point is that posing such questions to a demagogue simply lends meaning and importance to whatever the demagogue says in response. It sets him up to blather on about whatever he would like to say. If he ignores the questions, nothing has been proved that we did not already know, and if he answers them he will invariably spin them to his advantage. Demagogues often have a good knack for turning a phrase and playing to a crowd - that’s how they got to be demagogues.

The core of the problem, to my mind, is summed up by Bollinger's remark, in his email to the school, that this was an opportunity for Columbia students to "listen to ideas we deplore." This sort of earnest liberal piety demonstrates a fundamental inability to grasp what someone like the Iranian President is all about. If Ahmadinejad were interest in making a serious, sustained case for political Islam, or even if he were presenting a David Irving-style brief on the Holocaust, there might be some value in having him appear at Columbia and face questions - perhaps not from the university president, but from someone well-suited to engage with his arguments. (If Sayyid Qutb were alive and writing, for instance, I would be very interested to watch him debate a liberal, secular Ivy League political philosopher.) But the Iranian President was never going to actually elucidate or defend his most controversial ideas before a Western audience - and certainly not at Columbia University, of all places! Not when he could further his objectives by refraining from saying anything at all.

So ask him about the Holocaust, and he'll say that further research is needed, and besides, why should the Palestinians suffer for whatever may or may not have happened to Jews sixty years ago? Ask him if he wants to destroy Israel, and he'll tell you: "We love all nations. We are friends with the Jewish people." Ask him about women's rights, and he'll say: "Women in Iran enjoy the highest levels of freedom." Ask him about the execution of homosexuals, and he'll tell you that there are no homosexuals in Iran. Ask him about nuclear weapons, and he'll tell you that Iran wants to live in peace with its neighbors and the world. And so on and so forth. There are no controversial ideas here; there are, in fact, no ideas at all. Which is why it didn't matter what Bollinger said: He was being played for a fool right from the beginning.

Power and Weakness

Ezra:

I genuinely don't understand the quaking fear over Ahmadinejad's interview at Columbia. When did America become so weak, so insecure, that we mistrust our capacity to converse with potentially hostile world leaders? Do we really believe the president of Columbia is so doltish as to be outsmarted by a former traffic engineer from Tehran? Do we really see no utility in publicly grilling prominent liars in such a way that their denials lose credibility? What do we have to lose from a foreign leader, even a hostile one, somberly laying a wreath at the site of a tragedy? When did we become so afraid? And for all the conservative talk that a loss in Iraq will diminish our reputation for strength and thus harm our security, how must it look when some three-foot tall Iranian firebrand keeps trying to dialogue with us and we keep dodging his calls?

I think it's worth distinguishing between two inter-related objections to Ahmadinejad's Columbia appearance. The first, which is mine, is that it's shameful for a great American university to supply a prominent platform to an odious figure like Iran's President, particularly at a time when his government is almost certainly involved in attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. The second, which can follow from the first but doesn't necessarily, is that the act of inviting Ahmadinejad to speak is a manifestation of American weakness that may eventually contribute to our destruction at the hands of our enemies. For hints of the latter take, see this Roger Kimball post, in which he quotes from Bagehot:

History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.

Were the year 1938, and the speaker in question Adolf Hitler as opposed to Ahmadinejad, this quotation would feel more apropos. But this is where I part ways with some of my confreres on the right: I don't think it's accurate or useful to suggest that the American intellectual class is preparing our country for "destruction" by extending a nauseating degree of courtesy to a poisonous Iranian demagogue. The German Fuhrer was actually an existential threat to the free nations of the West, and the failure of the chattering classes of his era to reckon with that threat did prepare their nations for the destruction visited on them in World War II. Whereas Ahmadinejad is a tinhorn rabblerouser with a tenous grip on power, and the country he attempts to rule is a paper tiger whose quest for nuclear weapons is a manifestation of its weakness, not its strength. I despise him, and I fervently wish that I inhabited a country whose great universities had the good sense not to treat his appearance in New York as an occasion for a lesson in "free speech." (Particularly given the slight double standard that occasionally seems to be at work in American academia these days.) But I don't fear him, because I think that America is easily strong enough - and our enemies weak enough, more importantly - to survive the folly on display at Columbia University today.

Update: See also Reihan's thoughts.

Ahmadinejad at Columbia

Gotta agree with Kristol on this one.

Why I Am A Social Conservative

Everybody's talking - Andrew, Rod, Will (who got there first), the Times - about Jonathan Haidt, his theory of moral instincts, and how it applies to American politics. I thought I'd jump in, starting with a long quote from Haidt's recent critique of the Dawkins-Hitchens-Harris tribe of neo-atheists.

In my research I have found that there are two common ways that cultures suppress and regulate selfishness, two visions of what society is and how it ought to work. I'll call them the contractual approach and the beehive approach.

The contractual approach takes the individual as the fundamental unit of value. The fundamental problem of social life is that individuals often hurt each other, and so we create implicit social contracts and explicit laws to foster a fair, free, and safe society in which individuals can pursue their interests and develop themselves and their relationships as they choose.

Morality is about happiness and suffering (as [Sam] Harris says, and as John Stuart Mill said before him), and so contractualists are endlessly trying to fine-tune laws, reinvent institutions, and extend new rights as circumstances change in order to maximize happiness and minimize suffering. To build a contractual morality, all you need are the two individualizing foundations: harm/care, and fairness/reciprocity. The other three foundations, and any religion that builds on them, run afoul of the prime directive: let people make their own choices, as long as they harm nobody else.

Continue reading "Why I Am A Social Conservative" »

Reproductive Rights and Neo-Eugenics

I trust that Kevin Drum will be writing a very strongly worded letter to the editors of Dissent regarding their regurgitation of talking points straight from the right-wing sandbox. (hat tip: Cheryl.)

All snideness aside, the essay in question is very much worth your time.

The Canon Wars

Rachel Donadio, on Allan Bloom:

Today it’s generally agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon wars. Reading lists were broadened to include more works by women and minority writers, and most scholars consider that a positive development. Yet 20 years later, there’s a more complicated sense of the costs and benefits of those transformations. Here, the lines aren’t drawn between right and left in the traditional political sense, but between those who defend the idea of a distinct body of knowledge and texts that students should master and those who focus more on modes of inquiry and interpretation.

It's this latter debate that's crucial to understanding what's wrong with the contemporary university. In a better world, the multiculturalists and the canonists should have been able to meet halfway - preserving the idea of a canon, while expanding it to include more works from outside the circle of Dead White Males. Such a compromise would have ended up cluttering syllabi with more politically-correct junk than a reactionary like myself might like, but it would have preserved the essential liberal-arts notion that there are great books, and that one of the missions of the university should be to expose its students to as many of them as possible.

This did happen to some extent: As Donadio writes, "In 1965, the authors most frequently assigned in English classes were Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope and T. S. Eliot, according to a survey by the National Association of Scholars ... In 1998, they were Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Milton, Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison." Obviously, having Morrison and to a lesser extent Woolf in that group is somewhat depressing, but it wouldn't be all that objectionable if most students at top-flight colleges were being required to read this group of authors; a week wasted on Sula seems a small price to pay for a student body that's acquainted with Shakespeare's tragedies. The trouble is that they aren't. Instead of keeping requirements in place but compromising on their content, too many colleges - my alma mater included - rushed to embrace the "modes of inquiry" (or in Harvard-ese, "approaches to knowledge") view of education, and then breathed a sigh of relief that they'd set aside the messy debates over whether there's a Proust of the Papuans, while freeing their overspecialized young professors from the burdens of teaching survey courses. And that was how the canon wars ended - they made a desert, and called it peace.

Paul Krugman Explains It All

At the end of his contribution to the great Chait debate, Krugman writes:

I’m surprised that Jon doesn’t talk at all about the key political role of race in the political shift in this country. Reagan didn’t start as a supply-sider: he started as the enemy of welfare queens in their welfare Cadillacs. And what I’ve learned from Larry Bartels, Tom Schaller, and other political scientists is that race is really central to the whole thing. Here’s a preview quote from my own book:

“The overwhelming importance of the Southern switch suggests an almost embarrassingly simple story about the political success of movement conservatism. It goes like this: thanks to their organization, the interlocking institutions that constitute the reality of the vast right-wing conspiracy, movement conservatives were able to take over the Republican Party, and move its domestic policies sharply to the right. In most of the country, this rightward shift alienated voters, who gradually moved toward the Democrats. But Republicans were nonetheless able to win presidential elections, and eventually gain control of Congress, because they were able to exploit the race issue to win political dominance of the South. End of story.”

Really? That's it - that's the whole story? The Cold War, the crime wave, the sexual revolution and Roe v. Wade, the tax revolts, and about sixty other smaller things that I can think of were all trumped by the race issue? What an utterly ridiculous interesting idea.

You can find some of my earlier thoughts on this question here and here; I also think this Yglesias post (written in response to a previous Krugman foray on this topic) makes a great deal of sense. More generally, I would suggest that anyone who tells you that there's "an almost embarrassingly simple story" that explains thirty years of American politics (and happens to prove that their political opponents are evil bigots, and bigot-enablers) probably needs to do a little bit more reading on the subject.

Huckabee the Extremist

I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to Garance Franke-Ruta's suggestion that Mike Huckabee might be too far right on social issues to be a winning Presidential candidate, but I think this is a bit much:

I mean, just look at his agenda. Mr. Guitar-Rocker Folksy Nice Guy wants to: eliminate all contraception education in schools; use our tax dollars to fund ideological and ineffective abstinence education programs in those schools; and get rid of condom distribution in schools in favor of Bible distribution programs that have been overturned by the courts. He favors: a federal marriage amendment to the U.S. constitution; a human life amendment; the teaching of creationism to children; and the South Dakota law that banned all abortions and was so extreme the state's own highly traditionalist voters overturned it in a referendum.

... In short, Huckabee, the former Baptist minister and religious TV executive, is the candidate of exhausting and divisive social issues and the ongoing war by what Andrew Sullivan calls Christianists against the mainstream views of the majority of the American people. But, hey! As long as he can tell a good joke and strum a guitar, right?

Um, about "those mainstream views of the majority of the American people" ... Yes, it's true that Huckabee's abortion position and his opposition to sex ed in schools place him decidedly to the right of the public. (Although many Democrats are to the public's left where funding for abstinence education is concerned.) But as for the rest, well, more than half of John Kerry voters shared Huckabee's position on teaching evolution in public schools, and as of 2006 a slight majority supported the federal marriage amendment. I don't know how Americans feel about handing out Gideon Bibles in classrooms, but seventy percent or so reliably support returning prayer to public schools, which I assume was the issue that Huckabee was gesturing at in that comment.

Continue reading "Huckabee the Extremist" »

The Morning After

Responding to a reader's suggestion that one can both believe that abortion should be outlawed and believe that killing a baby is morally worse than killing an embryo, Andrew writes, "I wonder if this argument leads one to believe that morning-after contraception is less morally troubling than second trimester abortion?" The obvious answer seems to me to be yes (this is a point that came up a long-ago blog discussion of abortion, for those interested in wading into the weeds). But it's also worth noting that case of the morning-after pill is distinct from the case of the late-term abortion in another way, because it isn't clear that the most common form of morning-after pill is an abortifacient at all. I made this point a while back in the context of the debate over the South Dakota abortion ban, when Will Saletan argued that it's morally inconsistent for a state to ban abortion but permit - or even encourage - the use of Plan B. Not so, I wrote:

The law's provision allowing "the sale, use, prescription, or administration of a contraceptive measure, drug or chemical" before a pregnancy can be detected is an obvious nod to morning-after pills like Plan B, as Saletan admits. Now, it's true that Plan B can act as an abortifacient, by inhibiting implantation of a fertilized ovum. At least, it can in theory. But it's designed to work as a contraceptive, one that prevents ovulation and fertilization - and its abortifacient effect seems to be largely speculative at this point. Which means that a woman taking Plan B is intending to contracept, using a method that has a microscopic chance of accidentally causing an abortion - and this seems obviously different, legally speaking, from a woman who deliberately procures an abortion. Accident is different from intent: After all, it's been argued that the regular-old birth control pill itself (of which, I believe, Plan B is just a particularly high dose) can lead to abortions in extremely rare situations, leading some Protestants to join the Catholic Church in rejecting its use. But I don't think that this means that pro-lifers are logically required to support a legal ban on the Pill.

For the curious, here are a pair of studies that suggest that Plan B does not, in fact, have an abortifacient affect. And you can find a more in-depth look at the subject from a pro-life blogger here.

(Of course, it's also worth noting that if emergency contraception may not be as close to abortion as some pro-lifers suggest it is, neither does it seem to have the kind of potential to reduce the abortion rate that many Saletan-style "queasy-about-abortion" pro-choicers credit it with.)

Conservatives vs. Africa

While I share the Corner consensus that the frequent invocation of African proverbs by Democratic politicians is kind of annoying, I think Matt Feeney's critique of right-wing Africa-bashing scores some significant points as well.

Is Larry Craig Heterosexual?

Probably not. But last week, Christopher Hitchens played devil's advocate:

But there's actually a chance—a 38 percent chance, to be more precise—that the senator can cop a plea on the charge of hypocrisy. In his study of men who frequent public restrooms in search of sex, Laud Humphreys discovered that 54 percent were married and living with their wives, 38 percent did not consider themselves homosexual or bisexual, and only 14 percent identified themselves as openly gay.

Here's Andrew, on the same study:

I'm not sure I buy that. I'll bet many of them are closeted, conflicted or gay-and-married-to-a-woman. They say they're hetero, sure. But the Onion had the best riposte to that.

I don't buy the numbers Hitchens cites, either - not least because they're from 1970, a much more closeted time than ours. But on the other hand, there is clearly some percentage of heterosexual men who engage in gay encounters outside of the all-male environments, like prep school and prison, where opportunistic homosexuality is most common. Yes, there's evidence to support the proposition that male bisexuality doesn't exist as a distinct category of sexual orientation (though I retain some skepticism about this finding), but even if there's a gay-straight binary, in some sense, on the level of biochemical arousal, there's also clearly a certain number of people whose behavior places them in the 2-4 range on the Kinsey scale, and not all of them are gay men who are lying to themselves. Consider the findings of the same recent study that seeks to debunk the idea of bisexuality as a distinct sexual category:

In the experiment ... the researchers asked the men about their sexual desires and rated them on a scale from 0 to 6 on sexual orientation, with 0 to 1 indicating heterosexuality, and 5 to 6 indicating homosexuality. Bisexuality was measured by scores in the middle range.

Seated alone in a laboratory room, the men then watched a series of erotic movies, some involving only women, others involving only men.

Using a sensor to monitor sexual arousal, the researchers found what they expected: gay men showed arousal to images of men and little arousal to images of women, and heterosexual men showed arousal to women but not to men.

But the men in the study who described themselves as bisexual did not have patterns of arousal that were consistent with their stated attraction to men and to women. Instead, about three-quarters of the group had arousal patterns identical to those of gay men; the rest were indistinguishable from heterosexuals.

Now obviously it's impossible to know what the overlap is between the population of self-described "bisexuals" in this survey and the population of men who troll for sex in public restrooms. But it's suggestive, at least, that there might be a one-in-four chance that when Larry Craig says he's not and never has been gay, he's telling the truth.

Social Conservatism and Double Standards

I understand that there's a difference, legally-speaking, between pleading guilty to a criminal offense and tacitly confessing to a crime you haven't - and probably won't - be charged with, but I still think it's unfortunate that Larry Craig might be forced to resign by his fellow Republicans, while David Vitter has apparently survived being outed as a client of a major D.C. prostitution ring. I agree with Megan that what Craig did was arguably a greater betrayal of his wife than what Vitter may have done, but from any social-conservative calculus (or at least my social-conservative calculus) prostitution has to be considered a greater social evil than cruising for gay sex in bathrooms. This relates to a point I fumbled through in my conversation with Mark yesterday - the unfortunate extent to which socially-conservative politicians have focused their fire on gays, because opposing gay rights was for a long time an 80-20 issue for the Right (though no longer), while studiously ignoring the various beams in heterosexuals' eyes. It's a hard pattern to break, but the GOP could find worse places to start than making sure that Vitter shares whatever political fate awaits Larry Craig.

Repression and Republicans

On the case of Larry Craig, David Freddoso wonders "Why is it that Republicans — Craig, Mark Foley, and David Vitter — are the ones who keep getting caught in sex scandals nowadays?" No doubt some of it is random clustering (why does that phrase suddenly sound dirty?); I don't think the Vitter case speaks to any deep truth about a particular Republican predilection for prostitutes, for instance. And some of it is that there's a greater incentive for the media to go digging through the dirty laundry of politicians who trumpet their support for "family values," because of the hypocrisy factor. But it also stands to reason that the party that's associated with conservative beliefs about sex, marriage and family would include a higher percentage of the sort of people who try to avoid acting on their own homosexual inclinations for the sake of those beliefs - and that this higher rate of repression would breed a higher rate of embarrassing scandals.

The contrast between Craig - or Ted Haggard - and Jim McGreevey is instructive, in this regard. McGreevey was conducting long-term affairs with men, which suggests a person who had attained a certain comfort with his homosexuality, even as he attempted to keep it a secret. Whereas Craig and Haggard both seem to have sought out gay encounters in as furtive a fashion as possible, as someone would who's giving in to what they consider an immoral temptation, rather than merely acting on a desire they would prefer to keep hidden from the public. And not coincidentally, given this difference in how they approached their sexual desires - and the kind of scandals that ensued - both Craig and Haggard are Republicans, while McGreevey is a liberal Democrat.

My Super Sweet Fifteen

From Liza Mundy's piece on the Quinceañera:

But the real worry is that the next generation isn't being tamed so much as unleashed, though not exactly liberated. These girls' post-quince lives will not be nearly so closely supervised as they might have been in their home countries, and they won't move toward anything like the same conclusion. Latina teens are among the most at-risk group of teenagers. Despite a high rate of religiosity, they are—like so many children of first-generation immigrants—often alienated from their parents' worldview. It doesn't help that more than 25 percent of Hispanic children live below the poverty line. They are also the fastest-growing teenage demographic: By 2020, one in five teens will be Hispanic. According to the National Campaign To Prevent Teen Pregnancy, Latinas have the highest teen birthrate of all major U.S. racial/ethnic groups: 51 percent of Latina teens get pregnant at least once before the age of 20, nearly twice the national average. Alvarez interviews one hairdresser who notes that of seven girls he styled for their quinces, four invited him, within the year, to a baby shower ...

It is notable that the quinceañera, which originated as a prelude to a wedding, in this country seems to have become a substitute for the wedding a girl may never have. One of Alvarez's central questions is why parents are willing to spend so much arduously earned money—the average price of a quince is $5,000; the colloquial phrase for giving a party you can't afford is "throwing the house out the window"—on a one-night blowout. The answer is that for many of these girls, a quince is the only blowout her parents can be sure of giving.

The Mundy piece calls to mind Heather Mac Donald's City Journal essay on Hispanic family values, which includes this passage:

Continue reading "My Super Sweet Fifteen" »

All For Secularism

Andrew:

I suppose it is worth noting that Sam Brownback's recitation of the "All for Jesus" line is a quote from Mother Teresa that he apparently deploys in his stump speech regularly. It isn't his original formulation but he uses it to describe his political motivation. It is the core of his political message. In a religious context, it is a vulgar but completely legitimate expression of faith. In a political context in a secular society, it is a toxin that will eventually corrode civil discourse into sectarian warfare. Which is, of course, what the Christianists want. They have the biggest sect, after all.

Yes, indeed: Today, 15 percent of the vote at the Iowa Straw Poll; tomorrow, majoritarian theocratic tyranny. (Hitler came to power by democratic means, you know ...)

I would go on, but it would just be the usual tedious argument about how Andrew misunderstands American history, American religion, and the intersection thereof, and how he's trying apply a continental model of faith and politics to a context where that model has never applied, and so and so forth. Instead, I'll punt to Larison:

Sullivan’s larger point is worth keeping in mind: so long as it remains nicely separated from anything involving real life, confined to an irrelevant private sphere of “religion” that need never include venturing outside beyond the front door, religious faith is fine, albeit a bit crude for the high-minded doubt-filled pundit, but once it moves into the public sphere it is poisonous and vile. Devotion to the Lord, once it escapes the safe environs of the closet, becomes an acid that destroys the bonds of the political community. That is what Sullivan and other such “skeptical” conservatives believe about religion. Religious conservatives would do well to remember this whenever they are tempted to entertain sympathy for the appeals of the “skeptics” to reason and moderation.

I would only add that I think the sentence "it is a vulgar but completely legitimate expression of faith," with its snobbish overtones and arm's-length distaste for Mother Teresa (!), is the most unfortunate - and revealing - part of the whole post.

Update: A bit more - okay, a lot more - here.

Your (Don't Call It) Eugenics Roundup

I said I wouldn't post any more about this, but I'm going to cheat a little by posting links to other people, starting with Yuval Levin:

... surely the most essential problem with the eugenics movement was not coercion or collectivism. It wasn’t even the revolting notion of some duty to improve the race. The deepest and most significant contention of the progressive eugenicists was that science had shown the principle of human equality to be unfounded. These eugenicists badly misread Darwin. The eugenicists of today, in contrast, employ actual scientific principles to support their beliefs; nevertheless, their abuse of science is no less misguided. It is, again, being used to demonstrate distinctions among human beings that—the new eugenicists claim—are so fundamental as to make some lives not worth living, and therefore not worth protecting.

The challenge of eugenics was, and is again, a challenge to our egalitarianism. That is what lies at the heart of the abortion debate, and of the larger debate about emerging biotechnologies. These arguments are not about when a new human life begins—an empirical matter not in real dispute—but about whether every human life is equal. That question is a perfectly serious one, and there are defensible positions on both sides. But too many American progressives have answered in the negative without thinking through the consequences. And increasingly the reasons they give are not liberal reasons—reasons of liberty and personal choice—but scientific reasons, be it the great promise of some very particular avenue of medical research, or the instrument readings that demonstrate Down’s or another genetic condition.

See also Cheryl Miller, Matt's remarks and Reihan's response, and Cheryl again.

The Right's "Science" Problem

Isaac Chotiner (and various commenters) seem to think it's self-evidently ridiculous for me to put quotation marks around the "Science" that liberals claim to be defending against conservatives, given that conservatives are, in fact, arrayed against the scientific consensus on several issues. By coincidence, I wrote a piece on roughly this subject in 2005, during the intelligent design debate, and here it is. It's behind the TNR firewell, so I've pulled out some excerpts below the fold.

Continue reading "The Right's "Science" Problem" »

Dept. of Pyrrhic Victories

Obviously, the political undesirability/demonization of the term "liberal," and the left-wing adoption of the term "progressive" instead, has been an epiphenomenon of a larger conservative ascendancy in American life, and as such it isn't something right-wingers can really complain about. Still, I don't think conservatives should consider it a great victory that the modern Democratic Party's leading candidate wants to associate herself with a political tradition that, insofar as it's philosophically distinct from liberalism (and obviously there are many historical complexities involved here), is from the conservative perspective more dangerously utopian as well. I take Matt's point that "Progressive" is basically just a useful umbrella term for a left-of-center coalition. On the other hand, I'm not so sure that it's a coincidence that the revival of progressivism as a political label has coincided with a more strident secularism/atheism, a greater obsession with the supposed right-wing threat to "science" (read: left-wing policy preferences on stem cell research, cloning, genetic engineering, etc.), and a greater sympathy for Darwinism-as-a-universal-theory among thinkers associated with the political left. In one sense, as I've argued elsewhere, conservatives should welcome the relabeling of liberalism as a blow for linguistic precision; at the same time, I think it's at least partially the reflection of trends within the left that conservatives should regard with suspicion, if not outright hostility.

A Modest Proposal

Via Larison, here's Jim Pinkerton:

... with all due respect to former Vice President Al Gore, we might as well just say it bluntly: Muslims with atomic weapons are a greater threat to America than global warming.

When kids see "Harry Potter," they should be thinking first about defending their country, and their civilization, against evildoers wielding weapons of mass destruction. After that's taken care of, they can then worry more about carbon dioxide.

Or perhaps left and right could agree that children should be brought up to live in fear of neither global warming nor weapons of mass destruction. Would that be too much to ask?

Resign, Senator

Ruth Marcus is right about David Vitter, and E.J. Dionne and David Ignatius are flat wrong: Making use of a prostitution ring isn't a private matter, and Vitter should not be sitting in the United States Senate while the "D.C. Madam" is facing up to 55 years in prison for selling what he was apparently interested in buying. I hope Deborah Jeane Palfrey does call him as a witness, so that he can explain how his phone number ended up on her call list, and whether the "very serious sin" he admits to committing includes, you know, breaking the law. Sure, maybe he only got a massage - you know, just like Ted Haggard - but at the very least his constituents have a right to hear him explain himself.

"What about the thousands of other people whose phone numbers are on the D.C. Madam's call list?" Ignatius asks. "Are they fair game?" Um, well, insofar as being on her call list suggests that they solicited sex for money, then the answer seems to me to be yes. If a politician were caught with his name on the "call list" of a prominent drug dealer, he wouldn't be able to wriggle out of it by admitting to a "serious sin" and leaving it at that. And unless prominent Republicans are prepared to join Matt in supporting the repeal of laws banning prostitution - which I certainly hope they aren't - then they shouldn't be backing Vitter's "it's a private matter" line. It isn't. It's a crime.

Bringing It All Back Home

Bill Kauffman makes the case for secession.

Cruisin' With The Right

I know it's been a whole ten years since Eric Alterman unburdened himself of 5,000 words on the plutocratic excesses of the NR cruise for the Nation - only to have his own magazine start cruising itself shortly thereafter - but the bulk of Johann Hari's dispatch from the belly of the conservative beast feels stale to me even so. The concept is part Hunter S. Thompson, part David Foster Wallace, and part Tom Wolfe; the execution has a college journalism-ish, "find a place where the wackos gather and make fun of them" feel to it. (Who would have ever guessed that Muslim-bashing, Jimmy Carter-hating wingnuts go on ideological cruises? Next up: "Berkeley - It's Still Full of Marxists!") I've done some of those myself; I should know.

Still, it's worth reading for the miniature portrait of Bill Buckley and Norman Podhoretz, passing like, er, ships in the night:

Continue reading "Cruisin' With The Right" »

Whistling Past Dixie

I like Alex Massie and Daniel Larison's contributions to the whole "does the South hold American politics hostage" debate that Paul Waldman and Kevin Drum kicked off, largely because - as you might expect - I didn't find the original complaint particularly persuasive. Drum's suggestion that "most Southerners just flatly refuse to vote for anyone who comes from north of the Mason-Dixon Line" is a particularly self-defeating form of liberal condescension: It's the same line of identity-politics thinking that convinced certain Democrats that the way to win over the hawkish rubes out in the heartland was to nominate a veteran for President in '04, and have a lot of veterans at their convention, and talk a lot about "reporting for duty." Of course Southerners are somewhat more likely to vote for Southerners than non-Southerners, everything else being equal, and maybe they're somewhat more likely to vote for one of their own than a Californian or a New England Yankee would be. (It wouldn't be surprising if a region that's considerably more culturally particularist than the rest of America cared more about, well, cultural particularism in assessing Presidential candidates than the rest of the country does.) And sure, Waldman's probably right that John Edwards "can go to places where Clinton, and to an extent Obama, can't." But not that many places. Remember that Edwards ran for President in '04 in part because he was probably going to lose his N.C. Senate seat anyway, and he didn't do Kerry any good in the Carolinas in the general election. Indeed, you could argue that he owes his current prominence almost entirely to liberal identity politics: Had he hailed from Oregon, say, instead of tobacco country, there's little chance that Kerry would have picked him as a running mate in '04, and even less chance that he'd be considered one of the "big three" Democratic contenders this time around.

Continue reading "Whistling Past Dixie" »

In Defense of Circumcision

Since Andrew is on one of his periodic anti-circumcision crusades, I thought I'd say a few words in the procedure's defense. Since this is a family blog, I've placed them safely below the fold.

Continue reading "In Defense of Circumcision" »

The Future of Homosexuality, Again

A while back, during the whole "gay sheep" controversy, I remarked that if homosexuality can be detected in utero, we're likely to start aborting gay fetuses long before we start trying to "cure" them, because "there will almost certainly be a period of years or decades when it becomes possible to estimate your child's probability of homosexuality in utero, but not to 'inoculate' said child against same-sex attraction." But the more I read about the state of the science on same-sex attraction, the less I'm sure that's right. Consider this fascinating article on "The Science of Gaydar", which has this to say about the state of the "what causes homosexuality" debate:

Because many of these newly identified “gay” traits and characteristics are known to be influenced in utero, researchers think they may be narrowing in on when gayness is set—and identifying its possible triggers. They believe that homosexuality may be the result of some interaction between a pregnant mother and her fetus. Several hypothetical mechanisms have been identified, most pointing to an alteration in the flow of male hormones in the formation of boys and female hormones in the gestation of girls. What causes this? Nobody has any direct evidence one way or another, but a list of suspects includes germs, genes, maternal stress, and even allergy—maybe the mother mounts some immunological response to the fetal hormones.

So even if homosexuality turns out to have a genetic basis, which I assume it does, it's perfectly possible to imagine researchers finding a way (as the article puts it) "to regulate hormone flow and direct the baby’s orientation" without attaining any of the breakthroughs in gene therapy that would be required to reengineer the genes themselves. (Whereas with Down's Syndrome, say, it seems - based on my admittedly sketchy understanding of the science - to be gene therapy, abortion, or nothing.) In which case you won't have genetic screenings for homosexuality that force socially-liberal parents to decide whether their commitment to gay equality outweighs their desire for grandchildren, and socially-conservative parents to decide whether their opposition to abortion outweighs their distaste for the idea of gay offspring; you'll just have a regimen of hormone treatments that promises to keep your embryo straight, which is something that both sides of the culture war will find much easier to justify.

Anyway, that's just one of the interesting issues the article raises, so go read the whole thing.

Secularism and Marxism

Ruminating on whether the new mass secularism is really all that new, Jonah writes:

... both Waldman and Ross seem to be ignoring a fairly large elephant in the corner: Communists — or Marxists, doctrinaire socialists, dialectical materialists, whatever you want to call them. Here was a very tribal bunch. They were dedicated to the overthrow of religion and religious opiates. They protected themselves in tribal fashion in academia, government and politics. They defined themselves largely by what they hated. Etc, etc. Indeed, it's worth remembering that both Marx and Engels came to their Communism via their atheism rather than the other way around (Josh Muravchik's book Heaven on Earth makes this point vividly).

Oh, definitely - but it's important to distinguish the American experience from the European here. While Communism was certainly a tribal phenomenon in the American context, it was never a mass phenomenon in the way that the new secularism seems to be, or seems capable of becoming. It was an intellectual tribe, but not a political demographic. In Europe, by contrast, Marxism was a mass movement, as were various other anti-clericalist ideologies. That's why my Atlantic piece argues that the rise of a politically-assertive secular demographic in American life, however narrow its appeal, represents an unexpected case of continental convergence, in which America's religious politics are likely to look at least somewhat more like Europe's going forward. (And vice versa, I suggest, given the culture-war battles provoked by the rise of Islam across the Atlantic.)

Though it's certainly possible, as a commenter points out, that if the religious right fragments (and the Republican Party goes into the political wilderness), the nascent mass secularism will fragment as well, and what seems to be an anti-clerical dawn in American life will prove to be a false one. At the very least, there's going to be ebb and flow in the culture wars, and since we've just experienced a high tide in the Bush years it's likely that passions will cool off somewhat in the short run. Still, my sense - based both on the data and on my own personal experience - is that mass secularism has put down sturdier roots in American soil of late than anyone would have expected, say, thirty years ago, and that it's both something new and something that's here to stay.

That Is Not What I Said

Andrew, on my post about Linker, Rorty, the religious right and liberalism:

Ross responds by arguing that Richard John Neuhaus and his theocon friends are only interested in persuasion and changing the culture, not using the levers of politics and the law to insist on their religious convictions. Please.

Please yourself. I said no such thing. I said that Linker sometimes seems to oppose both political action based on religious conviction and non-political attempts to Catholicize (or Rortyize, or whatever) the culture through proselytization and persuasion. I also said, as I've said many times before, that I disagree on both counts: I think that Americans should be free to proselytize privately and that they should feel comfortable using "the levers of politics" (I love how Andrew makes the democratic process sound sinister) to promote policies that spring from religious convictions. And obviously Richard John Neuhaus is interested in doing both; only an idiot would claim otherwise, and I don't know why Andrew is mistaking me for one.

Last Man Standing

Tyler Cowen:

I've said it before, I'll say it again. No matter what your politics, contemporary northern Europe represents a high point in human civilization.

No matter what your politics? I give you Harry Lime:

"In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Okay, so Harry Lime is a rather unpleasant character, and one can quibble with his interpretation of history - but the point stands. Contemporary northern Europe is a high point in human civilization only if your standards are those of, well, contemporary northern Europe. Those standards are certainly defensible, and indeed I share some of them myself, but it's very easy to imagine all sorts of politics - ranging from Christian to Nietzschean, from Qutbian to Confucian - that would call the Nordic countries a low point, or at least a mediocrity, on the axis of human achievement.

Abortion By The Numbers II

Ramesh investigated the "how many women have abortions" question back in 1999, it turns out:

The statistics are spotty - reporting requirements vary, and are often lax. But assume there have been about 35 million abortions since Roe v. Wade. A Statistical Abstract makes it possible to calculate how many American women have spent how many child-bearing years since Roe; it won't alter the numbers much to assume none of them have died. Accept, finally, the Alan Guttmacher Institute's estimate that 48 percent of abortions are repeats, and the calculation results in AGI's figure ... that 43 percent of women will have an abortion by age 45.

But this number doesn't account for repeat repeat abortions. The Centers for Disease Control has a 36-state estimate from 1995-1 have no idea how these states compare to the others-in which 10.7 percent of abortion patients had had two previous abortions and 6.7 percent had had 3 or more. Plugging those in yields a number closer to 33 percent of women having an abortion by age 45. The number would be a little lower if the abortion rate of the last ten years were used rather than the post-Roe average.

And of course at that point the abortion rate still had further to fall. Nonetheless, as Ramesh said then, "after any amount of fiddling ... it's still a dauntingly big number." It is indeed, and one can object to pro-choicers who massage the data to boost their side's case while still acknowledging their underlying point: Abortion is woven deeply into the fabric of American society, and in this sense, at least, the change that pro-lifers seek is a radical one.

Rudy the Social Conservative?

Last week, defending the notion of Giuliani as someone social conservatives should be comfortable voting for, JPod wrote:

Giuliani spent years and fought 30 lawsuits and the horrified cluckings of the New York Times and the New York Civil Liberties Union trying to save family neighborhoods from the blight of porn shops (which are often mob fronts as well as porn distributors). He was successful. In my estimation, that was the most powerful and successful family-friendly, socially conservative act of governance I've ever seen — and it was undertaken and continued in the teeth of ferocious resistance that would have cowed almost any other politician in America.

This was part of the secret of Giuliani's success in New York - his ability to marry two seemingly contradictory political types, the socially-liberal, upscale Rockefeller Republican and the culturally-conservative, working-class Reagan Democrat, into a single persona. He was the Manhattan of his adulthood and Brooklyn of his youth all at once: When the subject was abortion or gay rights or gun control, he was Christie Todd Whitman; when it turned to porn shops or taxpayer-funded blasphemy or deadbeat dads, he was Bill Bennett. (It helped that the biggest issue when he became mayor, crime, was a rare place where the two types saw roughly eye to eye.)

The difficulty with his Presidential candidacy, though, is that the Rockefeller Republican side of his persona, the tax cuts and Planned Parenthood side, has eclipsed the Reagan-Democrat side. Or at least it isn't clear what he has to offer the Reagan Democrat constituency on domestic policy, given that nobody's looking for a President who'll clean up the porn industry or shut down the NEA. (Though I should note that Reihan and I suggested some issues he might take up.)

Maybe it doesn't matter: Maybe this will be a foreign policy election to the exclusion of every other issue, and the Reagan Democrat vote will be won or lost based on how well Giuliani can make swing voters hear Reagan on Communism when he talks about Iraq and the War on Terror. But my suspicion is that before the race is over, he'll find himself wishing that there was a culture-war debate roiling working-class neighborhoods - in Ohio, say, or maybe Florida - where he could comfortably and plausibly come down on the same side of the issue as Bill Bennett.

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

Abortion By the Numbers

Back to Dana Stevens, and "the 77 percent of Americans who support abortion rights—and the 40 percent or more of American women who have exercised that right." Ramesh says most of what needs to be said about the first statistic, which may be technically "true," but only if you count as "pro-choice" voters who support legal abortion in cases of rape, incest, fetal deformity, and so forth. (That is, in a vanishingly small percentage of all abortions.) The numbers on abortion are almost infinitely malleable, depending on how you ask the question, but there seems to be a consistent constituency of around forty percent for the current abortion regime, around twenty percent for the strict pro-life positions, and around forty percent for further restrictions of varying degrees. Pro-lifers like to say that seventy percent of Americans oppose ninety percent of abortions (or variations on that theme), which is a little bit of a stretch, but at least as close to the truth as what Stevens is claiming.

Stevens' second statistic - the percentage of American women who have had abortions - is likewise dubious, though it may not be all that far off. I haven't found a really rigorous analysis of this question, but the Guttmacher Institute says "at current rates more than one-third will have had an abortion by age 45," while the National Abortion Federation (presumably drawing on the same data) says "35% of all women of reproductive age in America today will have had an abortion by the time they reach the age of 45." So not quite forty percent, but within hailing distance. I can't find the underlying data that Guttmacher and the NAF are using, so I did some of back-of-the-envelope math using this Guttmacher figure:

Given that almost half of all abortions are repeat abortions, my calculations suggest that if the 2001 rate held for the following twenty-nine years, a girl who was fifteen in that year would have roughly a 29 percent chance of having at least one abortion over her reproductive lifetime. That's lower than the Guttmacher estimate, but then again the '01 rate was the lowest in a generation; if the far higher 1981 rate held for a generation, my back-of-the-envelope math suggests that forty percent of women would have at least one abortion over that span. So maybe that's where Stevens' number comes from, and the 35 percent number that Guttmacher cites averages out the last couple decades. But if there's a more detailed analysis out there I'd love to see it.

Science Has Spoken, The Case Is Closed

Two years ago - has it really been that long? - I wrote a quick piece for TNR Online arguing that conservatives who embrace "intelligent design" are playing into their enemies' hands. Here's the nut graf:

In the long run, though, intelligent design will probably prove a political boon to liberals, and a poisoned chalice for conservatives. Like the evolution wars in the early part of the last century, the design debate offers liberals the opportunity to portray every scientific battle--today, stem-cell research, "therapeutic" cloning, and end-of-life issues; tomorrow, perhaps, large-scale genetic engineering--as a face-off between scientific rigor and religious fundamentalism. There's already a public perception, nurtured by the media and by scientists themselves, that conservatives oppose the "scientific" position on most bioethical issues. Once intelligent design runs out of steam, leaving its conservative defenders marooned in a dinner-theater version of Inherit the Wind, this liberal advantage is likely to swell considerably.

I think this argument hold up rather well, and I thought of it while reading Jerry Coyne's attack on Sam Brownback, which contains various unobjectionable points about the nature of science and so forth, but then arrives at this conclusion:

What happens if scientific truth conflicts with a politician's "spiritual truth"? This is not a theoretical problem, but a real one, as we see in debates about stem-cell research, abortion, genetic engineering, and global warming. Ignorance about evolution may be widespread, but it's not nearly as dangerous as dogmatic certainty about the real world based on faith alone.

Uh-huh. I'm very curious to know what the "scientific truth" about abortion, stem-cell research and genetic engineering happens to be. (Somehow I assume it tracks remarkably well with liberal policy prescriptions on those issues.) But here's the thing - whenever conservatives attack a scientific consensus because they don't like its moral and political implications and don't have adequate firepower to carry the day (which the intelligent-design crowd doesn't, to my mind, in its battle against Darwinian theory), they make it that much easier for folks like Coyne to wrap their own moral convictions in the mantel of absolute scientific truth and caricature anyone who disagrees with them as "anti-science" yahoos. And you don't win many debates, in a society as mad for technological progress as ours, if you find yourself cast as an enemy of Science.

Just something for the Sam Brownbacks and Mike Huckabees to consider ...

Quote For the Day

I'm no great fan of Stephen Schwartz's politics - other neoconservatives are accused of being Trotskyists; he seems to actually be one - but this, on Paul Berman on Tariq Ramadan, is a pretty good line:

Berman’s opus appeared like an iceberg in the middle of the Potomac: immense, dismal, unexplainable, melting before one’s eyes.

The whole thing is here. (hat tip: Andrew)

Huckabee on Evolution

Roll the tape:

Of this, and Jamie Kirchick's suggestion that Huckabee believes in "fairy tales," Matt writes:

My understanding is that Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama all believe that Jesus Christ died for the sins of mankind and then rose from the dead. This strikes me as a hell of a tall tale. But, obviously, it's not what you'd call a rare view in the United States and if we're going to start writing off politicians who believe in "fairy tales" of this sort there's going to be nobody left.

I like Huckabee, and to a certain extent I liked his answer, but I don't think this will quite fly. I understand that atheists and agnostics have a vested interest in arguing that all religious beliefs are equally absurd - that there's no difference between believing n the God of Abraham and the flying spaghetti monster, say, or between a belief in the possibility of miracles and the belief that the Genesis account is literally true; and that the only reason the Book of Mormon looks more implausible than the New Testament is because the New Testament is older, and so forth. But serious Christians should reject that view (for reasons that I think should be self-evident, though I'm sure I'll have reason to elaborate on them at a later date), and within Christendom there's a pretty big distinction between the faith-and-reason crowd and the kind of fideism that Huckabee seemed to be gesturing at last night. I don't necessarily object to a President who claims to be agnostic on evolution, and I think Huckabee's point that "I’m not planning on writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book ... I’m asking for the opportunity to be president of the United States" is basically correct. But all things being equal, I would prefer a President who can reconcile his belief in the truth of Christianity with what seems to me to be the only conclusion that reason allows for at the moment - namely, the common ancestry of life on Earth.

I Draw The Line At the Gadsden Purchase

J. Goodrich, on the conservative crack-up:

Immigration is the point where the odd marriage that makes up the Republican base falls apart, the marriage between social conservatives (who are mostly not wealthy) and wealthy business interests. The social conservatives want a big fence around America (as they define it), whereas the business interests want cheap labor to successfully cross that fence. There was no way that Bush could have satisfied both of these desires at the same time.

"As they define it"? Did I miss the memo where immigration restrictionists want to fall back to the Nueces River and build the border fence there? Or the one where they advocated the conquest of the Maritime Provinces, followed by the construction of a Maginot Line along the Quebec-New Brunswick border?

Seriously, how does Goodrich "define" America? Does it include Mexico? France? Or is she too principled a strict-constructionist to recognize the Louisiana Purchase?

Myrna Minkoff vs. Sam Brownback

One of the more annoying aspects of the whole Amanda Marcotte affair was the fact that various young liberals I respect felt the need - out of friendship, or a desire to circle the wagons, or a little of both - to use the controversy as an occasion to throw valentines to the Minkoff of the blogosphere, describing themselves as "big fans" of her work and praising her "gifted, expressive, and wide-ranging" writing style.

That would be this Amanda Marcotte, just so we're clear. I would have described her prose as "Menckenesque," myself, but to each his own ...

28,000 Words Later

I did it. I read - with, okay, some skimming here and there - Paul Berman's behemoth of an essay on Tariq Ramadan. And you know what? There's a pretty good piece buried under all those words, one that uses Ian Buruma's favorable treatment of Ramadan, and his unfavorable treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to illustrate the tendency of Western liberals to prefer Islamists of a seemingly-moderate stripe to anti-Islamists, like Ali, who seem too strident. Such a piece would have been a valuable contribution to the debate over whether Western liberalism should seek dialogue with the more moderate elements within political Islam - with Ramadan a prime example - or pursue confrontation instead, along the lines suggested by Ali. I'm by no means certain which side of that debate I'm on, Buruma's or Berman's, but that's all the more reason for TNR to run an essay that contributes substantially to the argument.

But such a piece could have been about, oh, I don't know, 5,000 words long. A 28,000-word essay, by contrast, needs to do more than raise troubling questions about Tariq Ramadan (which Berman successfully does); it needs to demolish him, to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt the debt he owes to Qutbian thought and beyond Qutb to National Socialism, to lay bare his sympathies for global jihad and expose his desire to bring the whole edifice of European liberalism crashing down. It needs to include more meat, less hemming and hawing ("I have no way to resolve this quandary, except to hazard a guess that all these writers, friend and foe alike, may have arrived at a truth ...), fewer forays into portentous speculation ("And does he dream in secret of something larger? Maybe he does, on some theological level, which would not be unusual. All great religions dream great (and dangerous) dreams") and equally portentous understatement ("a fascist label, or some reasonably similar term, seems faintly applicable--or more than faintly--even now ...). It needs to include, above all, fewer passages like this one:

Caroline Fourest, in Brother Tariq, makes the argument that, in the end, the ambiguity in Ramadan's outlook can only serve to confer legitimacy on the revolutionary Islamist idea, which is willy-nilly bound, in turn, to elevate ever so slightly terrorism's prestige. Fourest pictures a young man from North Africa in France, attending a lecture by Ramadan, and she wonders what ideas somebody like that might take away. Hamel, in The Truth About Tariq Ramadan, scoffs at Fourest's argument and observes that, for all the accusations against Ramadan, nothing has ever been proved, and out of the many thousands of people who have in fact attended his lectures, only a single person, a man from the Lyon district, is known to have ended up in Al Qaeda's Afghan training camps. Who is right in this dispute?

Hamel, the scoffer, would carry the day in a court of law. Still, it is easy to imagine that, in a small way, Fourest may be on to something.

"Ever so slightly ... it is easy to imagine ... in some small way." When Berman writes of Ramadan's discussion of Salafist terror that "a veil of timidity and euphemism hangs over the entire discussion, which could lead a sleepy reader to miss his meaning altogether," he could just as easily be describing his own essay, which builds up great expectations but turns out to include nothing that could not have been argued more tightly, more briskly, and more convincingly at a fifth the length.

Two Faces of Libertarianism

It's interesting that the most compelling moment of the Presidential campaign so far involved a face-off between Rudy Giuliani and Ron Paul, because the two men demonstrate just how much two candidates can diverge on policy matters and still both be cast as the "libertarian" in the race. Paul is a libertarian of process and results, you might say: He wants a system of government designed to maximize individual freedom, which to his mind involves a return to lost constitutional principles that strictly circumscribe what the federal government can and cannot do. Giuliani, by contrast, is a libertarian of results alone, and only on certain issues. He wants to maximize "reproductive freedom," for instance, and doesn't care if doing so involves ceding enormous authority to unelected judges; he wants taxes to be low, but doesn't question the principle of income taxation (as Paul does), and so forth. On other issues, meanwhile, he's decidedly authoritarian, which is why it's passing strange to see so many self-described libertarian conservatives - Ryan Sager, for instance - swooning for a guy who has the potential to be Dick Cheney Part II on civil liberties, except with a zest for gun control thrown in.

Passing strange, but perhaps a sign of which face of libertarianism has the broader appeal these days. When the Davids (Boaz and Kirby) at Cato did their analysis of the "libertarian vote", they largely bracketed questions about foreign policy and the national security state, and defined their subjects as voters committed to "economic dynamism and social tolerance" - a description, not coincidentally, that fits Giuliani to a tee. Insofar as there's a constituency for something called "libertarianism," then, it may be a constituency that's comfortable with the sort of libertarianism that Rudy represents, authoritarian tendencies and all. In the world of think tanks and punditry, there are plenty of libertarians (Andrew, for instance) who find Rudy's views on social issues appealing and his views on civil liberties appalling, but I'm not sure there are that many voters who share that consistency. Instead, it seems - at least based on Giuliani's poll numbers compared to Ron Paul's - that a libertarianism that's pro-choice, pro-growth and pro-"enhanced interrogation techniques" is the only libertarianism that has any mass appeal these days.

Of course, one could argue that a libertarianism that's comfortable with wiretaps, gun bans, waterboarding and so forth is no libertarianism at all - which is why when John Tabin frets about whether libertarianism "can survive Ron Paul," I think he's somewhat missing the point. If anything, the question is whether a principled, consistent libertarianism (which I don't endorse, but do admire) can survive Rudy Giuliani, whose candidacy may invite Americans with libertarian inclinations to accept an expansive interpretation of executive power and a dim view of civil liberties in exchange for lower dividend tax rates and the right to abortion - and may demonstrate that this is a trade that today's "libertarian" voters are happy to make.

Monumental Banality

Read Jonathan Last's account of how the Flight 93 Memorial is shaping up, and weep.

The photo above, incidentally, is of D.C.'s World War I Memorial, which is simple, small, lovely and inspiring, even though it probably didn't cost $44.7 million dollars and definitely doesn't include any windchimes. Go figure.

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

The Wisdom of Repugnance

Julian Sanchez is quite right about this: If you support the blanket legalization of abortion, there's really no reason to find the abortion of embryos and fetuses with genetic defects any more morally problematic than the abortion of embryos and fetuses for financial reasons, or personal reasons, or almost any other reason you care to name. If anything, as Julian says, it's arguably less morally problematic:

I am supposing, for instance, that as self-identified pro-choicers, they're not raising a fuss about abortions had on the grounds that a child would be too disruptive or economically draining at some point in a woman's life. Why are these very reasons suddenly suspect if instead it's that the added difficulty of raising a child with a serious disability would be too disruptive or economically draining?

Julian suggests that this is "a case [where] people are vaguely uneasy about something that seems analogous to various other objectionable things," - i.e. Nazi-style eugenics - "but where in fact the analogies break down precisely at the points of objectionableness." For my part, I like to think that people are uneasy about the practice because they understand on some fundamental level that abortion is wrong, and killing a fetus because of something particular to its nature, rather than something particular to the mother's situation, throws the wrongness into relief - by serving as a reminder that a fetus is alive, with human qualities, and that in killing it you're killing a creature rather than a thing.

How Dare They?

Scott Lemieux wonders "how on earth" Christine Stansell's retelling of the history of abortion rights made it into the New Republic, since it breaks with the Jeff Rosen-Ben Wittes "Roe is bad law" line. I wondered how on earth it made it into the New Republic because it's completely tendentious and unconvincing. There is, for instance, the assertion that "before Roe v. Wade, abortion was as widely practiced as it is today," a canard that requires one to believe, among other implausibilities, that the abortion rate went down after legalization. There's the historical cherry-picking - a ballot initiative here, a Saturday Evening Post headline there - to suggest that public opinion and the Supreme Court were on exactly the same page in the late Sixties and early Seventies. (They weren't.)

And then there's this, which isn't so much wrong as delightfully obtuse:

So how, despite public opinion, did abortion opponents manage to waylay and subvert pro-choice measures in state after state before 1973? The answer lies in the intractable determination of religious conservatives to recast abortion as a debate over the primacy of child-bearing and the personhood of the fetus, rather than as an issue of women's well-being.

So you're saying that they used the power of argument to defeat you! Those ... those unspeakable bastards!

Clinton's Character

Of my suggestion that it's a little convenient for liberals to play the character card in the case of Rudy Giuliani when they tended to dismiss it where Bill Clinton was concerned, Matt writes:

But look, here, by the time the extent of Bill Clinton marital issues came to light in 1998, the man had been President of the United States for more than a few years, so it was hardly necessary to go searching around for hints and clues as to whether or not one would approve of his conduct in office. Indeed, my sense is that conservatives mostly regarded Clinton's misconduct in this regard as a kind of synecdoche (or maybe metonymy -- sorry, Mr. Glassman!) for an failed presidency. Most Americans, by contrast, viewed Clinton's presidency as reasonably successful and his conduct vis-a-vis his wife, children, and Monica Lewinsky therefore not-especially-relevant to their judgments.

Um ... the extent of Bill Clinton's marital issues only came to light in 1998? My sense is that the only people who were all that surprised by the Monica Lewinsky scandal were Clintonista liberals who'd managed to convince themselves that everything we knew about Clinton's years as an Arkansas hound dog had been invented by David Brock. Everyone else knew who Clinton was in 1992, and definitely knew by the time 1996 rolled around, and both times Democrats dismissed the character argument as irrelevant, and adopted the European principle that private lives shouldn't matter in politics - precisely the principle that Emily Bazelon wants to throw overboard where Rudy is concerned.

Continue reading "Clinton's Character" »

Hate Crimes and Hypocrisy

On the question of whether hates crimes legislation should be extended to cover gays, Ramesh writes:

[Brad Plumer] seems to think that it would be bigoted for conservatives to accept laws against hate crimes while opposing their extension to cover hate crimes motivated by hostility to gays. I don't see why a conservative who thinks hate-crimes laws are a bad idea generally couldn't conclude that they aren't going to be uprooted from the statute books but shouldn't be expanded in scope, either. Politicians make this sort of judgment all the time.

To which Andrew responds:

If gays were a minor or trivial category in this area, Ponnuru might have a debater's point. But, as a proportion of their population, gays are the largest single group victimized by hate crimes in the U.S., just behind all those targeted for their various religions (which includes over 90 percent of Americans, as opposed to the 3 percent that gays make up.) Doesn't excluding the most vulnerable group suggest a bizarre set of priorities? Take Ponnuru's and my religion, Catholicism. In 2004, there were 57 hate crime incidents recorded against Catholics. In the same year, there were 1,197 such incidents against gays - and yet Catholics vastly outnumber gays in the general population. What sense does it make to include Catholics (and Zoroastrians and Mormons) in hate crime laws but not gays - who are exponentially more likely to be victims?

But if you oppose hate crimes legislation in principle (as Andrew does, for what I think are very good reasons) but recognize that it's politically unfeasible to roll back the laws we have on the books, the fact that gays "are the largest single group victimized by hate crimes in the U.S." would seem to be an argument against extending hate crime laws to cover them, not an argument in favor of it. Suppose I opposed any ban on abortion, but lived in a country where the practice was illegal in the third trimester, and where public sentiment made rolling back the late-term ban unfeasible. Then suppose a politician proposed extending that ban to cover the first two trimesters. It wouldn't make any sense for my pro-life friends to say, in an effort to persuade me to support the ban's extension: "hey, we already have a ban on abortion, and most abortions take place in the first two trimesters, so if you accept the late-term ban, you should accept the early-term ban as well." If a law's bad, but you can't get rid of it, the last thing you would want to do is expand it dramatically.

I understand where Andrew's coming from in this argument - he's reacting against the double standard of having hate-crime protections for Catholics but not for gays, and he's of course right that the reason that many GOP lawmakers feel comfortable drawing the hate-crimes line where they do is because of the persistence of anti-gay sentiment. His opposition to hate crimes laws, in other words, is taking a back seat to his desire for gay equality; if we're going to have unjust laws, he thinks, they should cover gays as well as blacks and Jews and so forth. But if you believe that prosecuting someone for what's in their heart, as opposed to what they've done, is illiberal and arguably unconstitutional, does it really make sense to dramatically expand such prosecutions just to prove a point of principle? Or put another way, if hate crimes laws are really "a contest of vulnerability in which one group vies with another to establish its particular variety of suffering, a contest that can have no dignified solution," as Andrew once eloquently put it, then why does he want homosexuals to be ushered into the contest? Just because Pat Robertson doesn't want them there?

Rush Limbaugh, Animal Lover?

I wasn't quite as irritated with this Will Saletan column as Megan McArdle; I just thought it was a little obtuse. Against people who claim that tolerance for gays has paved the way for bestiality chic, as embodied by the quasi-documentary Zoo, Saletan argues that the men who love horses are more like frat boys than gay men, more Rush Limbaugh than Tony Kushner. "At the core of [the zoophiles'] mentality is a craving for otherness," he writes. "Zoophilia isn't homo. It's hetero. Very hetero." Later, he argues that zoophiles treat horses the way misognyists treat "bimbos," that horse-on-man action is a way "to get away from failed marriages and friendships," and that the nights when the men get together to "pester the horses" have the air of a "frat party," rather than a gay orgy. He concludes: "If you're worried about where this mentality comes from, don't look at Brokeback Mountain. Look at Limbaugh."

Continue reading "Rush Limbaugh, Animal Lover?" »

Sex Ed That Works?

Jennifer Roback Morse explains it all:

Continue reading "Sex Ed That Works?" »

Not So Shocking

The Times has a piece today about shock jocks in the post-Don Imus landscape, arguing that talk radio "remains as arguably and insidiously untamed in the days after Mr. Imus’s collapse as it was before." (What "insidiously untamed" means" I'm not quite sure ...) The story's sampling of beyond-the-pale remarks includes a host describing a caller as a "brain-dead fetus” and a “late-term abortion that somehow crawled out of the Dumpster”, and another one asking a professional whistler: "Would it be possible, could you whistle ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ while I rape a girl?” But then there's this:

Mr. Muller ... also suggested on the same broadcast that “radical Muslims” would not stop until they had flattened American religion like a steamroller.

His children, he predicted, “will probably be killed because I’m bringing them up Catholic, and maybe their children will be brainwashed and put into some sort of situation where they’re wearing a burka and they follow Shia law, because that’s what these radicalized Muslims want.”

He also mused about several other matters, including, “I just wonder why we care so much about Virginia Tech kids.” He quickly qualified the remark by saying, “Don’t pull that out of context,” before indicating that soldiers killed in Iraq deserved comparable gestures of mourning.

Um - so what precisely is beyond the pale about this? The last bit is an example of choosing your words poorly while making a completely reasonable point; the material about "radical Muslims," meanwhile, is obviously alarmist and over-the-top in its predictions about the future, but is the Times really arguing - on the day a Zawahiri videotape gets released, no less - that there aren't radical Muslims who would like to flatten America and impose shari'a on the West? Whether we should take their threat all that seriously is an open question, and I'm certainly not a fan of, say, Presidential candidates building their entire foreign-policy agenda around the dangers posed by a new Caliphate; for the most part, I think we should spend more time laughing in the face of radical Islam's dream of overthrowing the U.S. than we spend obsessing about it. But that doesn't mean the Zawahiris of the world aren't dangerous, or that people who call attention to their long-term goals are bigots and/or racists, which I assume is how the Times means for us to regard Mr. Muller.

Now maybe he did say something beyond the pale: Maybe he went on to conflate all Muslims with al Qaeda, or suggested that the entire population of Dearborn should be deported, or argued that Islam ought to be outlawed in the West. (And I'm sure you can find more than a few shock jocks who've made comments along those lines.) But the Times doesn't quote him saying anything like that, and as a result the story leaves you with the impression that anyone who thinks that "radical Muslims" want to take down the U.S. is a ranting bigot and ought to be hounded from the airwaves.

Quotes For The Day

"The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist."

- Philip Roth, "Writing American Fiction," 1963

"James E. McGreevey, the nation's first openly gay governor, has become an Episcopalian and wants to become a priest in that faith, according to a published report ...

McGreevey, 49, shocked the nation in August 2004 by proclaiming himself "a gay American" who had an extramarital affair with a male aide, and that he would resign that November.

He has applied to the General Theological Seminary in Manhattan and is awaiting word of whether he has been accepted to the program there, the newspaper said, citing two people familiar with McGreevey’s plans who declined to be identified because McGreevey has not formally announced his plans."

- New York Daily News, May 2, 2007

Here Comes Incest?

So says Jeff Jacoby. I'm skeptical - not because the right to incest doesn't arguably follow from the logic of gay marriage, as Jacoby says, but because I think the demand for marrying one's sister is far too low to overcome the "ick" factor involved. The gay population is small, but not that small - even at 2-4 percent of the American population, it's large enough to create both a mass constituency for gay marriage and a still-larger percentage of Americans who count homosexuals as their friends and neighbors, and understandably wish them happiness as a result. Whereas even if the incest taboo begins to fray, I think the number of would-be Ptolemies and Cleopatras is so vanishingly small that Americans - including Supreme Court Justices - will never have much of an incentive to put the logic of Lawrence v. Texas ahead of their repugnance.

Moreover, the case for gay marriage appeals to Americans' sense of fairness in a way that the argument for incest doesn't. If gays can't (or shouldn't) marry straights, the pro-gay wedlock argument runs, then they deserve to marry someone. Whereas a straight guy who wants to marry his sister isn't just asking for the right to marry the kind of person he's attracted to - he's asking for the right to marry a specific person, and that's more easily refused.

The Seamless Garment of Death

Memo to Dean Barnett: If you're looking to persuade me that torture is a necessary wartime evil, it's probably not a good idea to start by comparing it to abortion and the firebombing of Dresden. Just a thought.

(Mark Shea has a more thorough response to Barnett's weird exercise in right-wing relativism.)

Zero Grazing

Like most conservatives, I'm all for a little hypocrisy now and then - it's the tribute that vice plays to virtue, the glue that holds society together, and all the rest of it. It does seem, though, that the Bush Administration's abstinence advocates have stretched this principle to the breaking point.

I don't really have much to say about the fate of Randall Tobias, the Deputy Secretary of State who seems to have frequented escort services when he wasn't out promoting the ABC method of AIDS prevention ("abstain, be faithful, use a condom"). If you're curious about the question of how best to fight AIDS in Africa, though, I highly recommend this New York Review of Books essay from two years back on Uganda, which has been something of a success story in the effort to drive down HIV rates. The author, Helen Epstein, argues that neither abstinence education nor condom distribution really addresses the root of the problem, which has more to do with the consequences of polygamy, formal and informal, than any other single factor:

Continue reading "Zero Grazing" »

The Wrong Pander

I'm not sure it says anything good about Rudy Giuliani, the Republican Party or the country as a whole that he seems more willing to throw his political convictions to the winds on gay marriage than on abortion. I never expected him to leap over to the pro-life side, obviously, but he could have come out as a pro-choice opponent of Roe v. Wade, on the Wittesian grounds that having the Supreme Court make abortion law has been bad for our politics. That would have been a flip-flop, sure, but one that landed him in a principled place and might have made him attractive to a lot of pro-life voters. Instead, he's decided to cast himself as the candidate who's for civil unions but against, well, actual-existing civil unions - presumably with the calculation that pandering to social conservatives on gay marriage is safer for the general election that being on the record as opposing Roe, which even pro-life candidates have been wary of doing. That calculation may be correct, given that Americans tend to describe themselves as pro-Roe even though majorities oppose its substance; on the other hand, civil unions command majority support in many polls too, and I suspect, and hope, that being pro-choice will hurt Rudy more in the primaries than being anti-civil unions will help him.

In the long run - or at least the short long run, since God knows where we'll be in 2250 - the pro-life movement is likely to remain a potent force in American politics, whereas I think it's clear that the crusade against gay marriage and civil unions is already petering out. (It's succeeded in nearly every state where it could plausibly succeed, and it would take an overreaching Supreme Court decision to fan it back to life, which is possible but unlikely.) And it would be nice to see the GOP candidates recognize that fact, instead of tailoring their panders to fit the political landscape of 2004.

Why Americans Have More Children

A fascinating post from Will Wilkinson, riffing on Nicholas Eberstadt's American Interest essay on America's enduring demographic exceptionalism.

(See also Reihan's post on the Eberstadt essay.)

Why "Fake Populism" Sells

Noam Scheiber makes an interesting argument:

Liberals ... assume that what most Americans want from politics is a modest improvement in their lives: Affordable health care, retirement security, good schools for their children. Under this paradigm, voters should prefer a politician whose life experience has taught him how difficult it can be to get by without such staples. The fake populist is maddening because he professes to understand their concerns but has zero life experience (or at least recent life experience) that would make such understanding possible.

But suppose most working-class voters want something entirely different from what liberals assume. Suppose they don't want to be slightly better off than they are today. Suppose they want to be rich. And the way they evaluate candidates, who are frequently rich themselves, is by wondering: Is this the kind of rich person I'd like to be? Now ask yourself: If you were a working-class voter in Middle America, what kind of rich person would you want to be? Would you want to be the kind of rich person who eats at pricey French restaurants, plays classical guitar, and vacations among the cognescenti in Sun Valley, Idaho? Or would you want to be the kind of rich person who noshes on peanut butter and jelly, reads Sports Illustrated, and kicks back at a ranch in the middle of nowhere? The difference between you and the first kind of rich person is a vast cultural chasm.

... that's more or less what Fred Thompson and George W. Bush are suggesting when they throw on the shit-kickers and turn up the drawl. Sure, they're phonies. But if you were rich, you'd want to be the same kind of phony, not a John Kerry kind of phony. (Though, come to think of it, Kerry's actually pretty authentic as a rich guy.) Liberals see richness and hominess as contradictory. But, for many working-class voters, they're complements. They like their rich people homey, and their homey people rich.

This is a sharp analysis, but I think it overstates the extent to which fake populism's appeal is a matter of Americans wanting to be rich themselves - though of course they do - when it's really just a matter of the enduring American tendency to prize cultural equality far more than economic equality. (Or "civic equality" more than "money equality," to borrow Mickey Kaus's terms.) We like our rich people just fine, in other words, so long as they don't put on airs, summer on Nantucket, or marry Teresa Heinz. This doesn't mean that being from a working-class background doesn't give an American politician a certain edge - Bill Clinton, for instance, used his childhood in Hope, Arkansas to pretty good effect - but in a race between two rich Ivy Leaguers, which is what the last couple Presidential elections have been and the next one may turn out to be, you're much more in tune with the democratic zeitgeist if you're faking populism than if you're being true to your inner millionaire.

Though come to think of it, what's necessarily "authentic" about Kerry's kind of millionaire lifestyle, and what's so "fake" about a rich person who wears cowboy boots, drinks beer and reads SI? It's only "fake" if you're pretending, and while Fred Thompson may be putting on an act, I'm pretty sure that George W. Bush really likes all the accoutrements of Crawford living, and that he'd be wearing cowboy books and talking with a twang even if he'd never run for office. In his famous piece on Bush-hatred, Jon Chait called the President a "pampered frat boy masquerading as [a rough-hewn Texan], with his pickup truck and blue jeans serving as the perfect props to disguise his plutocratic nature." Pampered he certainly is, but I don't think the jeans and truck are really "props" in any meaningful sense. His father faked being jes' folks, but Bush the younger, for all his blue-blood ancestry, isn't putting on an act; he is what he is, a rich guy with democratic tastes. Call him a "fake populist," if you want, but the label only fits because his policies aren't populist; his populist personality is real enough.

All Creatures Great And Small

I got most of the way through Manohla Dargis' review of Zoo, the new, Extremely Serious look at bestiality - it's the tragic tale of a man who died after sexual congress with a horse - and I actually thought she was making fun of the idea that we should admit the poor, misunderstood zoophiliacs (or is it zoophiles?) into the charmed circle of modern tolerance. But not to worry - she doesn't much care for the self-serious movie, but she's down with its message:

After all, Bible-believers notwithstanding, if you eat and wear animals and agree that it’s O.K. to torture them in the name of science and beauty, what’s the big deal? Human beings subject animals penned in factory farms to far more grievous abuse than anything apparently done to the horses in “Zoo,” and on a daily basis human beings also subject themselves to greater risk. One zoophile’s fond memories of cooking up ham for his brethren indicate that theirs was not a PETA-approved animal love, true. But, as Mr. Devor makes clear, again and again, these were men who truly loved their animals in sickness and in health and, at least in the case of one unfortunate soul, till death finally did part them.

So, just to be clear, the only reasons that someone who isn't a Biblical literalist could think that bestiality is immoral are 1) that it causes physically pain to the animals involved and 2) that it's physically risky for the zoophile. Which implies that it's impossible, in the land of Dargis (and many of her readers, presumably), for an activity to be morally degrading unless it risks physical harm - and even then, humans "subject themselves to greater risk" when they're rock-climbing, say, or going through childbirth, so what's the big deal if sex with horses is a little bit risky, too? Danger is the spice of life, right?

This is one of those divides, I suppose, across which there's almost no point arguing, because the usual way to argue against the madness of Darghis-style "tolerance" is by reductio ad absurdum, and I don't think you can get that more absurd than waxing eloquent about zoophiles as "men who truly loved their animals." Not that they didn't love them, in some sense; I'm sure they did, just as Timothy Treadwell, the doomed protagonist in Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, loved his bears until they killed him, too. Indeed, I suspect that both Treadwell and the zoophiles fit the profile I sketched out here, of people seeking to transcend the difficulties of being human by going downward, toward the animal world we've half-left behind, rather than up toward God as most contemporary religions seek to do.

But Treadwell's inappropriate intimacies with animals involved a video camera and foolishly-close proximity, not a stallion's member - and Herzog, to his everlasting credit, didn't make a movie pretending that Treadwell' insanity was in the intolerant eye of the beholder. "While I find [the zoophiles] view problematic, I don't see the point of making an anti-horse-fucking film," David Edelstein writes in his review of Zoo. "By all means, let them make their case." But if you let them make their case without a frame of sanity around it - the kind of frame that Herzog's Grizzly Man provided, and that it sounds like Zoo does not - then you aren't just letting them explain what they did; you're endorsing it. And so are the critics who praise this movie.