The Tea Parties

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 Supposedly Free West"?

If his novelistic imagining of totalitarian horror now looks a bit dated, it is partly because his fiction provided the dusty epitaph on a dusty tombstone that he himself helped to carved; and, anyway, his coinages, like "doublethink" and "Newspeak" and "Big Brother," now live an unexpectedly acute second life in the supposedly free West. (To see Fox News go after Jeremiah Wright or Bill Ayers for days on end during the last Presidential election was to think, simply, "Hate Week.")

The Coming Tax Revolt?

Just something to ponder. For a couple years now, there's been a growing chorus of pundits, analysts and -- most significantly -- conservative reformers who've claimed to one degree or another that the GOPs anti-tax posture has lost its political salience. There are good arguments on that score, and bad ones. But it seems to me that the tax issue is on its way back. And while nothing is certain, I think it's reasonable to argue that the obituaries for tax cuts as a winning issue for Republicans were almost surely premature.

The Case of Howard Ahmanson

The Naive Opposition

It's not what you do when you're responsible for running the government. It's what you propose when you're responsible for running the messaging.

Conservatives, Crime Policy, and the Black Vote

The AIDS Libel

Crime and Punishment

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

The Tough-On-Crime Trap

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

The Rise and Fall of Culture11

Collapse or Consolidation?

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

The JournoList, Revisited

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.

Is There A New Progressive America?

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

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

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

The Rise of Ezra Klein

Dated Paul, Married Sanford?

A Crisis of Confidence

The Case For Small Government

Steele's Stumbles

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.

Barack Obama and the New Center-Left

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.

Going Galt

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

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

A Final Word On Rush

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

Small-Government Egalitarianism, Revisited

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

Obama's Traditionalists

Barack Obama, Deficit-Cutter?

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

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

The Pursuit of Social Democracy

Does Rush Matter?

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

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

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

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

Rush and Oprah

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

The Limbaugh Speech

Layer Cake

If Obama Fails ...

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

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

The Tent Shrinks

Abortion, Contraception and the States

The Convention Speech That Wasn't

The Other Jindal

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

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

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

Snap Judgments

Re-Running McCain

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Abortion?

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

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

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

Liberaltarianism, One More Time

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.

Is The GOP Hopeless?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Authoritarianism Just Around the Corner

The Future of Liberaltarianism

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

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

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

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

Greg Mankiw and the Republican Party

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

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

The Grabbing Hand

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

The Trouble With Centrism

Liberals, Ideology, and Big Government

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

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

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

Autopsying Conservatism

The Shadow of the Stimulus

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

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

Deficits Don't Matter?

... a lot of this stuff whether or not it really "belongs in the stimulus" seems irrelevant to me. If you have a program that actually is worthy, then funding it will make the country better, whether or not it truly "belongs" in the stimulus. If you have a program that's worthy, and that doesn't really belong in the stimulus, and you have a Republican who doesn't think the program is worthy, and he'd be willing to vote for the stimulus if you stripped that program from the bill, then it seems to me that you have a decent case for dropping a worthy program. But if you're Ben Nelson and you think the program is worthy, then why not just support the worthy program? It's true that doing so doesn't fit a perfectly pristine notion of how the legislative process should work, but anytime the process is working in favor of worthy programs rather than crappy ones, that's a lot better than the normal functioning of the legislative process.

In Defense of Mitch McConnell

Perspective

The current recession may turn into a small depression, and may push global living standards down by five percent for one or two or (we hope not) five years, but that does not erase the gulf between those of us in the globe's middle and upper classes and all human existence prior to the Industrial Revolution. We have reached the frontier of mass material comfort--where we have enough food that we are not painfully hungry, enough clothing that we are not shiveringly cold, enough shelter that we are not distressingly wet, even enough entertainment that we are not bored. We--at least those lucky enough to be in the global middle and upper classes who still cluster around the North Atlantic--have lots and lots of stuff. Our machines and factories have given us the power to get more and more stuff by getting more and more stuff--a self-perpetuating cycle of consumption.

Our goods are not only plentiful but cheap. I am a book addict. Yet even I am fighting hard to spend as great a share of my income on books as Adam Smith did in his day. Back on March 9, 1776 Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations went on sale for the price of 1.8 pounds sterling at a time when the median family made perhaps 30 pounds a year. That one book (admittedly a big book and an expensive one) cost six percent of the median family's annual income. In the United States today, median family income is $50,000 a year and Smith's Wealth of Nations costs $7.95 at Amazon (in the Bantam Classics edition). The 18th Century British family could buy 17 copies of the Wealth of Nations out of its annual income. The American family in 2009 can buy 6,000 copies: a multiplication factor of 350.

Books are not an exceptional category. Today, buttermilk-fried petrale sole with pickled vegetables and parsley mayonnaise, served at Chez Panisse Café, costs the same share of a day-laborer's earnings as the raw ingredients for two big bowls of oatmeal did in the 18th Century. Then there are all the commodities we consume that were essentially priceless in the past. If in 1786 you had wanted to listen to Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro in your house, you probably had to be the Holy Roman Emperor, Archduke of Austria, with a theater in your house--the Palace of Laxenberg. Today, the DVD costs $17.99 at amazon.com. (The multiplication factor for enjoying The Marriage of Figaro in your home is effectively infinite for those not named Josef von Habsburg.)

Keynes thought that by today we would have reached a realm of plenty where "We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin."

But no dice. I look around, and all I can say is: not yet, not for a long time to come, and perhaps never ... There is a point at which we say "enough!" to more oat porridge. But all evidence suggests Keynes was wrong: We are simply not built to ever say "enough!" to stuff in general.

Ending or Winning?

The Case For A Torture Commission, Cont.

Means and Ends

Lincoln, Wilson and FDR-each of them was responsible for far more deaths and far more destruction than Che Guevara or any of a number of Arab nationalist figures ever was, but two important things separate them in the eyes of the general public: they did not personally kill anyone, and the causes for which their armies killed and destroyed are widely considered to be the just and right ones. That is to say, the exact same moralizing, or rather anti-moralizing, that the ends justify the means that Che used in rationalizing revolutionary violence is employed to praise and sanctify approved figures who authorized much larger slaughters for the "right reasons." [emphasis mine - RD] Not only have sympathetic, shoulder-shrugging, anti-moralizing stories been told about these men, but we have built large physical monuments to them (or at least to two of the three mentioned above), which is rather more troubling in its way than silly people who wear T-shirts or directors who minimize the moral failings of their main characters.

Small-Government Egalitarianism?

Roe Turns Thirty-Six

The Lefty Press in the Age of Obama

... the important thing Obama could do for the "liberal" media is not have dinner with them. That's good for egos but meaningless for influence. It is, however, well within Obama's power to increase the influence of progressive outlets. Covering the presidency is the central concern of political reportage. And an outlet's ability to cover the presidency can be affected by the favor of the President. If The American Prospect and TPM Cafe and Huffington Post and others of our ilk were given the occasional interview with Obama, and fed useful scoops, that would rapidly increase our readership, our importance in the broader media ecosystem, and the likelihood that members of our outlets would go on to hold key positions in more mainstream institutions. To give just one example, if was understood that Mark Schmitt had more contacts with the Obama crew than Howard Fineman, the Sunday shows would be more likely to turn to Schmitt for analysis. In the long-run, that would be good for both Obama and for progressivism. And he wouldn't even have to waste time watching me chew my dinner.

The Pro-Cheney Case For A Torture Commission

A Little Carter, A Little Reagan

Quote For the Day

Achieving Our Country

The End of the Bush Presidency

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.

Hope Is Not A Strategy

In recent days, however, Israeli moderates and the center-left have been faced a new and bizarrely troubling thought: What if this most denounced of wars actually does some good?

Lurking at the margins, are signs that this war may have positive downstream effects for Israel, and for Palestinian peace prospects as well. Much of this hinges on the effect it may ultimately have on Iran and its satraps. In fact, viewed against the report that the Bush administration forbade an Israeli air strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, the war, as horrible as many of its direct results have been, may actually serve to break the momentum of the Iranian juggernaut. What can safely be assumed, is that if Iranian influence continues to grow in the Holy Land, peace prospects will be extinguished for years to come.

As if to emphasize the ambivalence that Israelis feel, polls have shown a large majority supporting the war, but only a tiny percentage believing that the offensive will achieve even the limited goal of ending Palestinian rocket fire into Israel.

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.

The Israel Lobby And Its Critics

Without refighting the battles over The Israel Lobby all over again, I'll say this much. Whatever the flaws of the essay, it was far from "lousy," and the book addressed and fixed many of the flaws in the original essay. It is true that the book did not take into account the role of other Near Eastern governments and their lobbies (from my perspective, more attention to the complementary influence of pro-Turkish and pro-Israel lobbies would have made their claims stronger), but if you want to talk about farragoes of oversimplification and half-truths I could recommend any one of a dozen reviews and columns that misrepresented and distorted the claims of the authors in the sloppiest and most tendentious ways. The reception of the essay and the book was irrational in the extreme, and did more to validate main parts of their thesis than anything they could have written or demonstrated.

A New Foreign Policy

Just War and Modern Warfare

Terrorist attacks on Israel are indeed revolting and indefensible. But the bombing of densely populated areas, however accurate, is certain to cause the deaths of many innocents.

How then can it be defended? In what important way is it different from Arab murders of Israeli women and children?

One is directly deliberate. The other is accidental but unavoidable. I wouldn't say that was a specially important distinction, especially if you are a victim of it.

Samuel Huntington, RIP

New York, Swing State?

The "Insights" of Paul Ehrlich

This was the key insight in Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (Ballantine, New York, 1968), as well as one of those in Harrison Brown's prescient earlier book, The Challenge of Man's Future (Viking, New York, 1954). The elementary but discomfiting truth of it may account for the vast amount of ink, paper, and angry energy that has been expended trying in vain to refute it.

Dr. Holdren, now a physicist at Harvard, was one of the experts in natural resources whom Paul Ehrlich enlisted in his famous bet against the economist Julian Simon during the "energy crisis" of the 1980s. Dr. Simon, who disagreed with environmentalists' predictions of a new "age of scarcity" of natural resources, offered to bet that any natural resource would be cheaper at any date in the future. Dr. Ehrlich accepted the challenge and asked Dr. Holdren, then the co-director of the graduate program in energy and resources at the University of California, Berkeley, and another Berkeley professor, John Harte, for help in choosing which resources would become scarce.

In 1980 Dr. Holdren helped select five metals -- chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten -- and joined Dr. Ehrlich and Dr. Harte in betting $1,000 that those metals would be more expensive ten years later. They turned out to be wrong on all five metals, and had to pay up when the bet came due in 1990.

Now, you could argue that anyone's entitled to a mistake, and that mistakes can be valuable if people learn to become open to ideas that conflict with their preconceptions and ideology. That could be a useful skill in an advisor who's supposed to be presenting the president with a wide range of views. Someone who'd seen how wrong environmentalists had been in ridiculing Dr. Simon's predictions could, in theory, become more open to dissenting from today's environmentalist orthodoxy. But I haven't seen much evidence of such open-mindedness in Dr. Holdren.

Caroline On My Mind

What Would Gore Have Done?

[Ross argues] that basically anyone other potential president in Truman's shoes would have done the same thing as Truman. But you simply can't make the same argument about Bush. Indeed, it's not even clear that every potential Republican president would have approved of water-boarding. I think you can fairly argue that Truman was in something of a historical--if not moral--bind. Some people will argue that Bush was also. But for the point Ross makes about Truman to be true of Bush, he would need to prove that Al Gore, and even John McCain, a torture victim himself, would have approved of water-boarding.

While the struggle to defeat Fascism and Communism were worthy endeavours for which America deserves historical credit, both wars were fought in ways that would have landed American presidents before a war-crimes tribunal, at least according to the human rights standards that Americans have helped to foster, America's struggle against fascism included the only military use of nuclear weapons by any nation and the firebombing of German cities for no strategic purpose other than terrorising civilians; America's war against Communism involved training our client states in the use of assassination and torture - often against very bad men who were torturers and murderers themselves.

The first time I proposed a snatch, in 1993, the White House Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, demanded a meeting with the President to explain how it violated international law. Al Gore belatedly joined the meeting, having just flown overnight from South Africa. Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides for Gore: "Lloyd says this. Dick says that. Gore laughed and said, 'That's a no-brainer. Of course it's a violation of international law, that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.'"

Caroline 2016!

If Caroline Kennedy is appointed to the Senate and wins reelection, and Barack Obama serves two successful terms, Senator Kennedy from New York, into her second term after two high-profile campaigns, having amazed the pundits with her ability to step on and off charter jets in Rochester and be friendly to members of the City Council, will be an automatic top-tier candidate for president.

Sounds good, but if we do it, let's do it the right way -- by electing a completely different Democratic ticket, having the VP resign and Caroline appointed to replace him, and then having the president resign. The Gerald Ford plan, in other words. That way she doesn't have to fatigue herself by campaigning.

Thinking About Torture (III)

Bernie Madoff, Stimulus Czar?

What about that guy who set up the phony investment company? Can the Treasury make a new one of those, only bigger? He took money away from people and gave it to charities and the needy and the arts and higher education. That sounds like stimulus so why are we sending him to jail? Wasn't he ahead of the curve?

Thinking About Torture (II)

It may be clear that coercion is sometimes the right choice, but how does one allow it yet still control it? Sadism is deeply rooted in the human psyche. Every army has its share of soldiers who delight in kicking and beating bound captives. Men in authority tend to abuse it--not all men, but many. As a mass, they should be assumed to lean toward abuse.

... And how does one define "coercion," as opposed to "torture"? If making a man sit in a tiny chair that forces him to hang painfully by his bound hands when he slides forward is okay, then what about applying a little pressure to the base of his neck to aggravate that pain? When does shaking or pushing a prisoner, which can become violent enough to kill or seriously injure a man, cross the line from coercion to torture?

... when the ban is lifted, there is no restraining lazy, incompetent, or sadistic interrogators. As long as it remains illegal to torture, the interrogator who employs coercion must accept the risk. He must be prepared to stand up in court, if necessary, and defend his actions.

Thinking About Torture

The polemical energy of Mayer's book comes from her outrage at the violation of these values. In her introduction, she characterises the Bush Administration's conduct in the War on Terror as "a quantum leap beyond earlier blots on the country's history and history," and "a dramatic break with the past." She invokes the judgment of the eminent liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, that "no position taken has done more damage to the American reputation in the world - ever."

But Mayer overplays her hand, going on to write that "in fighting to liberate the world from Communism, Fascism and Nazism, and working to ameliorate global ignorance and poverty, America had done more than any nation on earth to abolish torture and other violations of human rights." Here Mayer confuses the fact that America has always supported human rights in principle with the idea that it has always championed them in practice.

The tactics of the New Paradigm, after all, did not have to be invented from whole cloth. After September 11, Cheney turned to the CIA's archives in search of examples that had worked in the past. "He was particularly impressed," Mayer writes, "with the Vietnam War-era Phoenix Program.

"Critics, including military historians, have described it as a programme of state-sanctioned torture and murder. A Pentagon contract study later found that 97 per cent of the Viet Cong it targeted were of negligible importance. But as September 11, inside the CIA, the Phoenix Program served as a model."

Mayer doesn't have another word to say about the Phoenix Program, and her reticence is telling, in a book that is otherwise so exhaustive in the way it details the histories of its major players and the institutional background of the responsible agencies. The Phoenix Program was a CIA-directed operation to interrogate, detain or assassinate a network of Viet Cong insurgents who were themselves torturing and assassinating South Vietnamese officials. A Senate investigation later concluded 20,000 Viet Cong were killed in the process.

Mayer doesn't specify what Cheney took from the Phoenix Program, but he certainly found confirmation that we had done these things before, and on a massive scale. CIA interrogation manuals issued in 1963 and 1983 and used by American client states in the proxy battles of the Cold War in Latin America and elsewhere also listed ways to force a recalcitrant subject to talk. She quotes a historian of the CIA noting that our latter-day torturers not only used those techniques, "they perfected them" - underscoring the fact that they were already there to be perfected.

Mayer is too scrupulous a reporter not to mention these departures from American values. But she is also too committed to a particular narrative - in which America's status as the country that "had done more than any nation on earth to abolish torture and other violations of human rights" has been suddenly hijacked by bad men in the Bush administration - to follow that disclosure to its conclusion.

Which is simply this: America has always remained true to its values - except in the rather numerous instances when it has violated them.

Yang describes this as one of "the genuine paradoxes of power that no nation-state aspiring to global leadership can evade." And indeed, the most compelling and intellectually-consistent condemnations of the Bush Administration have come from precisely those factions - on the left, and also the small-r republican right - who believe that the United States should not aspire to global leadership, because such aspirations require unacceptable compromises with the bloody realities involved in power politics and empire.

For those of us, though, who persist in the belief that some sort of American global leadership is better, for all its inherent problems, than most of the alternatives, Yang's analysis has to be reckoned with in ways that go beyond simply describing Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and the CIA "black sites" as unique affronts to American values. These and other Bush-era sins have to be considered in the context of previous moral compromises that we've found a way to live with.

For instance: The use of the atomic bomb. I think it's very, very difficult to justify Harry Truman's decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki in any kind of plausible just-war framework, and if that's the case then the nuclear destruction of two Japanese cities - and indeed, the tactics employed in our bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan more broadly - represents a "war crime" that makes Abu Ghraib look like a trip to Pleasure Island. (And this obviously has implications for the justice of our entire Cold War nuclear posture as well.) But in so thinking, I also have to agree with Richard Frank's argument that "it is hard to imagine anyone who could have been president at the time (a spectrum that includes FDR, Henry Wallace, William O. Douglas, Harry Truman, and Thomas Dewey) failing to authorize use of the atomic bombs" - in so small part because I find it hard to imagine myself being in Truman's shoes and deciding the matter differently, my beliefs about just-war principle notwithstanding.

The same difficulty obtains where certain forms of torture are concerned. If I find it hard to condemn Harry Truman for incinerating tens of thousands of Japanese civilians, even though I think his decision probably violated the moral framework that should govern the conduct of war, I certainly find it hard to condemn the waterboarding of, say, a Khalid Sheikh Muhammed in the aftermath of an event like 9/11, and with more such attacks presumably in the planning stages. I disagree with Charles Krauthammer, who has called torture in such extreme circumstances a "moral duty"; rather, I would describe it as a kind of immorality that we cannot expect those charged with the public's safety to always and everywhere refrain from. (Perhaps this means, as some have suggested, that we should ban torture, but issue retroactive pardons to an interrogator who crosses the line when confronted with extreme circumstances and high-value targets. But I suspect that this "maybe you'll get retroactive immunity, wink wink" approach probably places too great a burden on the individual interrogator, and that ultimately some kind of mechanism is required whereby the use of extreme measures in extreme circumstances is brought within the law.)

Yet of course the waterboarding of al Qaeda's high command, despite the controversy it's generated, is not in fact the biggest moral problem posed by the Bush Administration's approach to torture and interrogation. The biggest problem is the sheer scope of the physical abuse that was endorsed from on high - the way it was routinized, extended to an ever-larger pool of detainees, and delegated ever-further down the chain of command. Here I'm more comfortable saying straightforwardly that this should never have been allowed - that it should be considered impermissible as well as immoral, and that it should involve disgrace for those responsible, the Cheneys and Rumsfelds as well as the people who actually implemented the techniques that the Vice President's office promoted and the Secretary of Defense signed off on.

But here, too, I have uncertainty, mixed together with guilt, about how strongly to condemn those involved - because in a sense I know that what they were doing was what I wanted to them to do.

Oh, not in every particular: As was often the case with the Bush Administration, I didn't envision many of the stupidities involved (reverse-engineering interrogation from training exercises designed to prepare for ChiCom brainwashing? really?); or the way that the debates over torture would intersect with controversies over executive power, the design of military tribunals, and so forth; or the precise scale and scope that any "torture-lite" program would take on. But I certainly remember how I felt about interrogation in the aftermath of 9/11: I felt that we were all suddenly in a ticking-bomb scenario, that the gloves have to come off, and that all kinds of things needed to be on the table. When Dick Cheney said that we have to work on "the dark side" in the post-9/11 environment, I thought that he was only stating the obvious. When Cofer Black, the CIA man who's depicted, perhaps unfairly, as a blundering fool in Mayer's account, appeared in accounts of Bush's late-2001 cabinet meetings as the guy who said of Al Qaeda, "when we're through with them they will have flies walking across their eyeballs," my instinctive reaction was hell yeah. And when Bowden walked Atlantic readers through the debate over torture-lite, I knew whose side I was on. Read it for yourself:

The word "torture" comes from the Latin verb torquere, "to twist." Webster's New World Dictionary offers the following primary definition: "The inflicting of severe pain to force information and confession, get revenge, etc." Note the adjective "severe," which summons up images of the rack, thumbscrews, gouges, branding irons, burning pits, impaling devices, electric shock, and all the other devilish tools devised by human beings to mutilate and inflict pain on others. All manner of innovative cruelty is still commonplace, particularly in Central and South America, Africa, and the Middle East ...

Then there are methods that, some people argue, fall short of torture. Called "torture lite," these include sleep deprivation, exposure to heat or cold, the use of drugs to cause confusion, rough treatment (slapping, shoving, or shaking), forcing a prisoner to stand for days at a time or to sit in uncomfortable positions, and playing on his fears for himself and his family. Although excruciating for the victim, these tactics generally leave no permanent marks and do no lasting physical harm.

The Geneva Convention makes no distinction: it bans any mistreatment of prisoners. But some nations that are otherwise committed to ending brutality have employed torture lite under what they feel are justifiable circumstances. In 1987 Israel attempted to codify a distinction between torture, which was banned, and "moderate physical pressure," which was permitted in special cases. Indeed, some police officers, soldiers, and intelligence agents who abhor "severe" methods believe that banning all forms of physical pressure would be dangerously naive. Few support the use of physical pressure to extract confessions, especially because victims will often say anything (to the point of falsely incriminating themselves) to put an end to pain. But many veteran interrogators believe that the use of such methods to extract information is justified if it could save lives--whether by forcing an enemy soldier to reveal his army's battlefield positions or forcing terrorists to betray the details of ongoing plots. As these interrogators see it, the well-being of the captive must be weighed against the lives that might be saved by forcing him to talk. A method that produces life-saving information without doing lasting harm to anyone is not just preferable; it appears to be morally sound.

Reading Mayer's book, the recent Senate report, and other sources, it seems clear that this was roughly the logic that motivated much of what was authorized in CIA prisons, in Gitmo, and eventually in a suicide-bomber-raddled Iraq - a logic that convinced figures like Rumsfeld and George Bush that they were stopping short of torture (think of Rumsfeld's dismissive margin comment, as he authorized long-term standing, that he stood for 8-10 hours a day, so why shouldn't prisoners?) even as the the practices they authorized led inexorably to abuse, violence and even death.

Some of the most passionate torture opponents have stated that they never, ever imagined that the Bush Administration would even consider authorizing the sort of interrogation techniques described above, to say nothing of more extreme measures like waterboarding. I was not so innocent, or perhaps I should I say I was more so: If you had listed, in the aftermath of 9/11, most of the things that have been done to prisoners by representatives of the U.S. government, I would have said that of course I expected the Bush Administration to authorize "stress positions," or "slapping, shoving and shaking," or the use of heat and cold to elicit information. After all, there was a war on! I just had no idea - until the pictures came out of Abu Ghraib, and really until I started reading detailed accounts of how detainees were being treated - what these methods could mean in practice, and especially as practiced on a global scale. A term like "stress positions" sounds like one thing when it's sitting, bloodless, on a page; it sounds like something else when somebody dies from it.

Now obviously what I've said with regard to the financial crisis is also true in this arena: With great power comes the responsibility to exercise better judgment than, say, my twenty-three year old, pro-torture-lite self. But with great power comes a lot of pressures as well, starting with great fear: The fear that through inaction you'll be responsible for the deaths of thousands or even millions of the Americans whose lived you were personally charged to protect. This fear ran wild the post-9/11 Bush Administration, with often-appalling consequences, but it wasn't an irrational fear - not then, and now. It doesn't excuse what was done by our government, and in our name, in prisons and detention cells around the world. But anyone who felt the way I felt after 9/11 has to reckon with the fact that what was done in our name was, in some sense, done for us - not with our knowledge, exactly, but arguably with our blessing. I didn't get what I wanted from this administration, but I think you could say with some justification that I got what I asked for. And that awareness undergirds - to return to where I began this rambling post - the mix of anger, uncertainty and guilt that I bring to the current debate over what the Bush Administration has done and failed to do, and how its members should be judged.

The Princess and the Senate

... the plot has some weaknesses. Perhaps it's still possible to be a different kind of senator, in the Paul Simon-Pat Moynihan mold: a legislator-intellectual, above and in the fray at the same time, who leaves office with his good name intact. Caroline Kennedy's desire to deploy her brains and her celebrity on a grander stage, primarily in service of public education, is admirable. But even if her motives are pure, and even if she's able to navigate the swamp of modern politics, there'd be something sad about seeing her subjected to all the grubby gossiping and money-hustling that the job inevitably entails. We'd be gaining a senator, possibly even a good one. But we'd be losing an icon.

I didn't think it was possible, but in a sense Smith has managed to out-Marcus Ruth Marcus: He's taken her starstruck case that Caroline Kennedy should get a Senate seat handed to her a silver platter because, well, she's an American Princess and turned it into an argument that Kennedy shouldn't take the seat because her fairy princess-y combination of gifts (she's a icon-cum-intellectual, a celebrity brainiac Cinderella, and she has a servant's heart besides) makes her way too good for the job!

(Because if there's a name that screams "too pure for the grubbiness of politics," it's definitely Kennedy ...)

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.

Petraeus 2012 (But Not How You Think)

... the other day I was part of a conversation in which people were talking about the Blagojevich mess, and I overheard an elderly veteran say, "What we need in this country is a coup. Just bring the military in and straighten things out."

I asked him if he really meant that, and if he understood what he was saying.

"Hell yeah," he said. "Look at 'em." He meant Congress and Wall Street.

I think we'll be hearing a lot more of this in the years to come.

Pragmatism They Can Believe In?

The chief failure of Bushism, according to Sunstein, is not its content but its form. Not the substance of ideology but the fact that he was too wedded to it, too rigid and dogmatic. It's a view widely held in Washington. Many, like Sunstein, have drawn a lesson from the past eight years that is not about the failure of conservatism - neo or otherwise - or the dangers of the particularly toxic ideological disposition of the Bush administration ... No, through a kind of collective category error, they have alighted on a far more general moral to the story: ideology, in any form, is dangerous. "Obama's victory does not signal a shift in ideology in this country," wrote Roger Simon in Politico. "It signals that the American public has grown weary of ideologies." No less an ideologue than Pat Buchanan has come to this same understanding. "If there is a one root cause of the Bush failures," he wrote, "it has been his fatal embrace of ideology."

If "pragmatic" is the highest praise one can offer in DC these days, "ideological" is perhaps the sharpest slur. And it is by this twisted logic that the crimes of the Bush cabinet are laid at the feet of the blogosphere, that the sins of Paul Wolfowitz end up draped upon the slender shoulders of Dennis Kucinich.

Obama could do worse than look to John Dewey, another onetime resident of Hyde Park and the founder of the University of Chicago Laboratory School, which Obama's daughters attend. Dewey developed the work of earlier pragmatists in a particularly fruitful and apposite manner. For him, the crux of pragmatism, and indeed democracy, was a rejection of the knowability of foreordained truths in favor "variability, initiative, innovation, departure from routine, experimentation."

Dewey's pragmatism was reformist, not radical ... Nonetheless, pragmatism requires an openness to the possibility of radical solutions ... Dewey understood that progress demands that the boat be rocked. And his contemporary Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood it as well. "The country needs," Roosevelt said in May 1932, "and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands, bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach."

That is pragmatism we can believe in. Our times demand no less.

Too Big To Fail, World Edition

... Where the discussion isn't going, at least in public,  (or the PR level), is the possibility that the first foreign policy crisis the administration will face will be the complete economic collapse of a large, unstable nation. To be sure, Pakistan is nearly broke, and U.S. policy makers seem to be aware of that; but a worldwide demand crisis could lead to social unrest in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, Singapore, the Ukraine, Japan, Turkey or Egypt (which is facing an internal political crisis of epic proportions already). The U.S. won't have the resources to, say, engineer the rescue of the peso again, or intervene in Asia as in 1997.

The public rhetoric from Team Obama seems to treat history as having ended in early October, which is understandable; the priority right now is on the liquidity crisis, the structure of government and the peopling of the administration and the domestic economy.  Most of the administration's major policy voices don't have the luxury of time to game out scenarios. Now -- it can fairly be said that Treasury nominee Tim Geithner, himself an assistant secretary for international economic affairs during the Clinton administration, is aware of the precarious state demand in certain critical countries, as is Larry Summers.  The question: what's the administration's policy in this area? Which countries can we afford to let fail? Which unstable states would concern us the most? Is there something the U.S. can do, in advance, should do, in advance, to forestall the collapse of other economies?

Luck, Hard Work and Meritocracy

These two stories about Gladwell are both true, and yet they are also very different. The first personalizes his success. It is the classically American version of his career, in that it gives individual characteristics -- talent, hard work, Horatio Alger-like pluck -- the starring role. The second version doesn't necessarily deny these characteristics, but it does sublimate them. The protagonist is not a singularly talented person who took advantage of opportunities. He is instead a talented person who took advantage of singular opportunities.[...]

Many people, I think, have an instinctual understanding of this idea (even if Gladwell, in the interest of setting his thesis against conventional wisdom, doesn't say so). That's why parents spend so much time worrying about what school their child attends. They don't really believe the child is so infused with greatness that he or she can overcome a bad school, or even an average one. And yet when they look back years later on their child's success -- or their own -- they tend toward explanations that focus on the individual.

One (perhaps obvious) thing that's worth noting here is that meritocracy, whatever its weaknesses, really does inculcate an extremely potent ethic of near-obsessive hard work - and it really does discriminate, in the rewards it bestows, between people who work hard and people who don't. This means that while meritocratic success tends to be inherited, in an important sense - because the whole culture of obsessive hyper-achievement is just that, a culture that some Americans are raised in and steeped in and some aren't - everybody doesn't inherit the same level of success. Getting into the right kind of schools because you have the right kind of parents is generally a necessary condition for ascending the meritocratic ladder, but it isn't a sufficient one; it tends to create a floor for failure, but it doesn't guarantee a ceiling for achievement. And this is true of narrower sorts of luck, as well, whether it's Bill Gates having a computer lab in his high school or Matt Yglesias starting a blog in the early days of the blogosphere: Tens of thousands of people started blogs in 2003 or 2004, but not very many people kept up the damn astonishing blogging pace that Yglesias has maintained ever since.

Thus the importance of the 10,000 hours aspect of Gladwell's argument - and thus, too, the psychological phenomenon Leonhardt is describing. Before you've put in your ten thousand hours (or before your child has done so), it makes sense to focus intently on the preconditions for success, rather than assuming that with enough hard work and talent you or your offspring can overcome any obstacle thrown in your way. But many of those preconditions are set, by definition, early in the life cycle, and the experience of actually succeeding takes place over the course of years of often-grinding work, in which a given meritocrat's work ethic makes a significant difference in how well you do relative to your peer group. (Not as much of a difference as being born a Kennedy, of course, but then again we only have so many fairy princesses ...)

By the time you reach the end of your career, then, what seems like the defining experience of your life isn't the broad luck of being born in the upper-middle class, or the narrower luck of being in the right place at the right time to join a hedge fund, or start a popular blog, or found a software company. It's the mad, mad treadmill that you've been running on since high school or earlier, the experience of which instills the not-unreasonable sense that despite all your advantages, you really do deserve your success.

Why Liberals Can't Govern

The Case For Caroline?

At the same time ... it would be silly to imagine that every senator or other person in high office has paid his -- or her -- political dues. A big bundle of cash -- see, for example, Jon Corzine, former Goldman Sachs chairman, former senator from New Jersey, now New Jersey governor -- is helpful for vaulting your way over the drudgery of doing time on the state Senate subcommittee on pensions. Ditto other forms of celebrity -- see, as an example, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Before getting all huffy about Caroline Kennedy's qualifications for the job, let's take a breath and remember Jesse Ventura and Sonny Bono.

Indeed, it's not a bad idea to have some senators who bring different experience to the chamber. Corzine's financial acumen, for instance, helped make him an impressive senator; it's too bad he's not there now as Congress wrestles with the financial crisis. Kennedy would bring to the table a serious understanding of the Constitution -- she's written a book on the subject -- and an expertise on education reform. She hasn't exactly been, to use the dangerous phrase of the woman she might replace, having teas and baking cookies.

I don't know about Jesse Ventura, but I find Schwarzenegger and Sonny Bono's pre-political careers as self-made showbiz entrepreneurs - to say nothing of Jon Corzine's career in finance - much more impressive than anything Caroline Kennedy has ever done. Her life has been dedicated to worthy pursuits, by and large, but most of her accomplishments (fundraising for New York public schools, editing essay collections in honor of her father, etc.) are classic "born on third base" endeavors - laudable enough without being terribly impressive. And all of the names on Marcus's list actually submitted themselves to the democratic process on their way to the Senate, the House, and the California's Governor's Mansion; for an appointment to fill a vacant seat (especially a safe vacant seat), the bar ought to be set a bit higher than "she's more qualified than Sonny Bono."

There are any number of intriguing subplots at work here. Her uncle's illness, and the "dream will never die" emotion of having Caroline in place to carry on his work. The don't-mess-with-my-family payback dynamic of putting in for the job to shove aside Andrew Cuomo, her cousin Kerry's former husband.

Imagine, by the way, how Hillary Clinton must be feeling. After all that work, after all those years, she not only lost the presidential nomination to Barack Obama, she now may be yielding her Senate seat to a woman who emerged from the political shadows to give Obama the benediction of the Kennedy legacy.

What really draws me to the notion of Caroline as senator, though, is the modern-fairy-tale quality of it all. Like many women my age -- I'm a few months younger than she -- Caroline has always been part of my consciousness: The lucky little girl with a pony and an impossibly handsome father. The stoic little girl holding her mother's hand at her father's funeral. The sheltered girl, whisked away from a still-grieving country by a mother trying to shield her from prying eyes.

In this fairy tale, Caroline is our tragic national princess. She is not locked away in a tower but chooses, for the most part, to closet herself there. Her mother dies, too young. Her impossibly handsome brother crashes his plane, killing himself, his wife and his sister-in-law. She is the last survivor of her immediate family; she reveals herself only in the measured doses of a person who has always been, will always be, in the public eye.

Then, deciding that Obama is the first candidate with the inspirational appeal of her father, she chooses to abandon her previous, above-it-all detachment from the hurly-burly of politics.

I know it's an emotional -- dare I say "girly"? -- reaction. But what a fitting coda to this modern fairy tale to have the little princess grow up to be a senator.

This is, of course, a pretty good distillation of the case against dynastic politics: Namely, that it transforms the business of republican self-government into a soap opera, in which the public/audience thrills to the "intriguing subplots" involving a President's daughter, a President's wife, and a Governor's son who happens to be the President's daughter's sister's ex-husband ... and sighs, enraptured, at the "fairy tale ending" when the President's daughter grows up to have a Senate seat handed to her as a reward for having endorsed the President-elect. This sort of politics is entertaining to write about, which is one reason why fantasy sagas and Shakespeare are generally more interesting than Washington novels. But after twenty years with the same two families in the White House - which nearly became twenty-four (or twenty-eight) - for a political columnist to endorse a pointless escalation of dynastic politics because it fulfills the fairy-tale mythos her generation spun around a mediocre, tragically-murdered President and his good-looking family isn't "girly"; it's an embarrassment.

Mr. Cao Goes To Washington

Our Enemy, The Payroll Tax (Revisited)

Bill Kristol and Big Government

Five Republicans have won the presidency since 1932: Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes. Only Reagan was even close to being a small-government conservative. And he campaigned in 1980 more as a tax-cutter and national-defense-builder-upper, and less as a small-government enthusiast in the mold of the man he had supported -- and who had lost -- in 1964, Barry Goldwater. And Reagan's record as governor and president wasn't a particularly government-slashing one.

Even the G.O.P.'s 1994 Contract With America made only vague promises to eliminate the budget deficit, and proposed no specific cuts in government programs. It focused far more on crime, taxes, welfare reform and government reform. Indeed, the "Republican Revolution" of 1995 imploded primarily because of the Republican Congress's one major small-government-type initiative -- the attempt to "cut" (i.e., restrain the growth of) Medicare. George W. Bush seemed to learn the lesson. Prior to his re-election, he proposed and signed into law popular (and, it turned out, successful) legislation, opposed by small-government conservatives, adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare.

Around the time that Buckley founded National Review, the federal government's share of GDP had been rising steadily for more than thirty years, from 3 percent in 1925 to 18.8 percent in 1962. In the Sixties and early Seventies, it seemed extremely plausible that the United States was a glide path to European-style social democracy. Then came the conservative ascendancy - and thirty years later, in 2001, government's share of GDP stood at ... 18.4 percent of GDP. (It's inched up somewhat, of course, under George W. Bush.) Now obviously there are a variety of reasons why the size of government stopped rising after the Seventies, but far from least among them is the influence that Buckley-style small-government conservatism has wielded over public policy lo these many years. (And remember that he promised to stop history, not to roll it back.)

So: If you're a small-government conservative, you'll tend to oppose the bailouts, period. If you more or less accept big government, you'll be open to the government's stepping in to save the financial system, or the auto industry. But you'll tend to favor those policies -- universal tax cuts, offering everyone a chance to refinance his mortgage, relieving auto makers of burdensome regulations -- that, consistent with conservative principles, don't reward irresponsible behavior and don't politicize markets.

Similarly, if you're against big government, you'll oppose a huge public works stimulus package. If you think some government action is inevitable, you might instead point out that the most unambiguous public good is national defense. You might then suggest spending a good chunk of the stimulus on national security -- directing dollars to much-needed and underfunded defense procurement rather than to fanciful green technologies, making sure funds are available for the needed expansion of the Army and Marines before rushing to create make-work civilian jobs. Obama wants to spend much of the stimulus on transportation infrastructure and schools. Fine, but lots of schools and airports seem to me to have been refurbished more recently and more generously than military bases I've visited.

Again, I agree with parts of this. But the first paragraph's claims are too sweeping (for one thing, a smart small-government conservatism should be able to distinguish more explicitly than Kristol does between necessary bailouts and unnecessary ones - which is why the prospect of the auto bailout has been greeted very differently among the smartest libertarian bloggers than the financial bailout was), and the second paragraph's claims are ... well, frustrating is a word that springs to mind.

Too often, when domestic-policy debates come up, conservatives are far too eager to change the subject: The public says education; the Right say "let's talk about capital-gains tax cuts." The public says health care; the Right says "let's talk about terrorism." The public says infrastructure; the Right says ... "let's refurbish military bases"?? Apparently so.

There are very, very good reasons to think that the United States has a serious problem with aging transportation infrastructure, which happens to be an area where government by necessity has a substantial role to play. It would behoove conservatives, then, to join the debate over how to modernize our infrastructure - as, to their credit, some are - rather than just ceding the field completely to Barack Obama. Whereas trying to turn a conversation about highways, roads and rail into an conversation about why we need to spend more money on the military seems like a good way to convince Americans that the Right is pretty much only interested in talking about warfare and taxation, no matter what else happens to be on the country's mind.

Update: See Yuval in Kristol's defense.

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 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 Wire's Politics

Writing to affirm what people are saying about my faith in individuals to rebel against rigged systems and exert for dignity, while at the same time doubtful that the institutions of a capital-obsessed oligarchy will reform themselves short of outright economic depression (New Deal, the rise of collective bargaining) or systemic moral failure that actually threatens middle-class lives (Vietnam and the resulting, though brief commitment to rethinking our brutal foreign-policy footprints around the world). The Wire is dissent; it argues that our systems are no longer viable for the greater good of the most, that America is no longer operating as a utilitarian and democratic experiment. If you are not comfortable with that notion, you won't agree with some of the tonalities of the show. I would argue that people comfortable with the economic and political trends in the United States right now -- and thinking that the nation and its institutions are equipped to respond meaningfully to the problems depicted with some care and accuracy on The Wire (we reported each season fresh, we did not write solely from memory) -- well, perhaps they're playing with the tuning knobs when the back of the appliance is in flames.

... If The Wire is too pessimistic about the future of the American empire -- and I've read my Toynbee and Chomsky, so I actually think a darker vision could be credibly argued -- no one will be more pleased than me as I am, well, American. Right now, though, I'm just proud to see serious people arguing about a television drama; there's some pride in that.

Why The Right Needs Realists

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

Huck and Sarah

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

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

Best. Cabinet. Ever?

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

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.

Christina Romer, Tax Cutter?

JFK, Round Two

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

Getting Out of Iraq

Democracy In America

The Legs of the Stool

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

Things That Could Have Been Brought To My Attention Yesterday

Barack Obama, Liberal Hawk?

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

Eyes on the Prize

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

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

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

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.

Jindal Tackles Health Care

Should Conservatism Be a Movement?

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Palin and the MSM

Newt and New Ideas

A Foray Into Racial Awkwardness

Jindal Takes A Pass

Closing Ranks

Regarding Douglas Kmiec

The Ironist-in-Chief

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

Bloggingheads in the Time of Obama

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.

Inequality and the GOP

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.

Sarah Palin's Next Act

America The Center-Left?

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

The Conservative Future

It Could Have Been Worse

Remarkable

Congratulations, President-Elect Obama

The End of An Endless Campaign

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

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

Ideology And Policy

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

The Audacity of Timing

It's a Wonderful Movie Reference

The Nightmare Scenario

Around the Horn

Madelyn Dunham, RIP

Reasons To Welcome a Liberal Era

Lost Horizons

Missing Karl Rove

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.   

Annals of Alternative History

And of course there's also a universe in which John McCain accepted John Kerry's offer of the VP slot, and the two of them ran and won a bipartisan ticket committed to ending the incompetence of the Bush administration and prosecuting the war in Iraq the right way. That world would likely have involved a "troop surge" and reliance on the sort of counterinsurgency theories associated with David Petraeus (who, at the time, was a favorite of Bush-critical journalists).

Obama and the Race Card

In Fairness ...

Heads, You're a Racist. Tails, You're a Racist!

I mention the Bradley effect because I think, too, that McCain and Sarah Palin's attack against Obama for advocating "spreading the wealth" and for "socialism" and for pronouncing the civil rights revolution a "tragedy" because it didn't deal with the distribution of wealth is aimed ultimately at white working class undecided voters who would construe "spreading the wealth" as giving their money to blacks. It's the latest version of Reagan's "welfare queen" argument from 1980. It if it works, it won't be because most white Americans actually oppose a progressive income tax, but because they fear that Obama will inordinately favor blacks over them. I don't doubt that this argument will have some effect, but I suspect it's too late and that worries about McCain and Republican handling of the economy will overshadow these concerns.

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. 

The End of Conservatism?

While some older conservatives like Kristol have increasingly identified with the fundamentalist critique of modern society -- last year Kristol published an extended polemic in Commentary against "secular humanism" -- younger conservatives on campus and on congressional staffs tend to be far more cosmopolitan in their attitudes. According to one estimate, about 50 percent of the members of Ivy League conservative organizations and about 75 percent of the Washington Bush-Quayle staff are pro-choice. And many Washington conservatives such as Policy Review editor Adam Meyerson see Massachusetts's pro-choice, pro-gay rights Governor Weld as a promising presidential choice.

Liberal or Conservative?

Was this one of Bush's more liberal policies?  I'd say yes. By providing a housing solution free of charge, federal and state governments had to cough up a lot of money.  As McClatchy notes, though, that saved money that would have gone to acute-rescue efforts like shelters and crisis treatment centers. Housing gave the previously homeless an opportunity to seek employment, creating a net revenue gain rather than a funding drain. Whether or not anyone wants to call it liberal, it certainly proved more cost effective than the other liberal plans in place during the previous generation.

Moderate Republicans, Reformist Conservatives, and Other Animals

I read your posting on Limbaugh's monologue. There is one point I do not understand. You seem to claim that a bad campaign by McCain justifies moderate Republicans jumping ship. I do not understand why that in anyway justifies the actions of moderate Republicans in endorsing Obama after the Republican party nominated their candidate John McCain over the objections of conservatives. Even if the dubious claim that McCain ran a "substance-free campaign" is true, it should not cause anyone who seriously follows politics into believing that somehow Obama is more in tune with moderate/ centrist/"reformist" Republicans than John McCain. This is simply style over substance at its worst. The fact that a number of "reformist conservatives" have so endorsed Obama suggests a dangerous level of opportunism on the part of these people. It is reasonable for more tradiutional conservatives to conclude on the basis of this action that at least these Obama-endorsing reformist are not to be trusted by any type of conservatives when rebuilding the movement post-McCain. (I am curious. Would you agree with Limbaugh on this at least?)

Rush Limbaugh Explains It all

I wish to reach around and pat myself on the back. Way back during the Republican primaries ... we were told Ty the Republican Party hierarchy that the only chance the Republican Party had (by the way, we were told this also by some of the intellectualoids in our own conservative media) to win was to attract Democrats and moderates; and that the era of Reagan was over, and we had to somehow find a way to become stewards of a Big Government but smarter that gives money away to the Wal-Mart middle class so that they, too, will feel comfortable with us and like us and vote for us.

In that sense, it was said the only opportunity this party has to regain power is John McCain. Only John McCain can get moderates and independents and Democrats to join the Republican Party, "and we can't win," these intellectualoids said, "if that didn't happen." Well, the latest moderate Republican to abandon his party is William Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts who today endorsed the Most Merciful Lord Barack Obama. He joins moderate Republican Colin Powell. He joins former Bush press spokesman Scott McClellan.  He joins a number of Republicans like Chuck Hagel, Senator from Nebraska ...

Now, I wish to ask all of you influential pseudointellectual conservative media types who have also abandoned McCain and want to go vote for Obama (and you know who you are without my having to mention your name) what happened to your precious theory?  What the hell happened to your theory that only John McCain could enlarge this party, that we had to get moderates and independents? How the hell is it that moderate Republicans are fleeing their own party and we are not attracting other moderates and independents?

... When I saw the Weld thing today I smiled and I fired off a note to all my buddies and I said, "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait! How can this be? How can this be?  This is the kind of guy that our candidate was supposed to be attracting, and we were supposed to be getting all these moderates from the Democrat Party," and we will, by the way. We're going to get some rank and file, average American Democrats that are going to vote for McCain.  But these hoity-toity bourgeoisie... Well, they're not the bourgeoisie, but... Well, they are in a sense. They're following their own self-interests, so I say fine. They have just admitted that Republican Party "big tent" philosophy didn't work. It was their philosophy; it was their idea. These are the people, once they steered the party to where it is, they are the ones that abandoned it.

The Absence of Policy

Biden's Epic Gaffe, Cont.

It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

What is remarkable about what Biden was saying as he addressed a crowd of Seattle Obama fans is that he was telling a progressive crowd bluntly that a President Obama is probably going to use military force in the early months in response to a crisis or foreign conflict. Biden was telling them that it is going to seem completely unnecessary and contrary to everything Obama voters think they are getting when they elect him.  What could he have meant when he says that the administration is going to need the help of these Seattle progressives (and others like them) "in the community"? My guess is that he was saying that all of the antiwar progressives who have flocked to Obama are going to be deeply disillusioned by Obama's response to said crisis and there is a danger that the administration will become politically isolated as Obama's core supporters lose confidence in him at a supposedly critical juncture.

Biden's Epic Gaffe

In the 2008 election we were participating in circa August, Sen. Joe Biden's musings would have traversed the river separating gaffe from Gaffe. If the economy weren't collapsing, if Barack Obama's national security credentials were still suspect, if the conflict in Russia and South Osettia had yet to be resolved, then one can envision a scenario where Biden's comments would be given a gloss a la Gerald Ford's freeing Eastern Europe.

Spreading the Wealth (III)

Haters

There's a classic genre of New York street art that casts Republicans as, literally, the devil. Some of my earliest memories in Manhattan are of being somewhat freaked out by large posters of Ronald Reagan with red eyes and horns; some of my kids' first memories of Brooklyn will be of stenciled images of George W. Bush with horns.

It's a sign of the odd dynamic of the Republican ticket that ultra-partisan New York Democrats never really came around to loathing John McCain with the passion Reagan and Bush inspired. Indeed, that was initially a bit of a strength of the ticket: McCain has preserved his appeal to moderates, and wasn't a polarizing figure.

But Palin, as she's rallied the base, does seem to have filled that slot, as this reader picture from 38th Street and 9th Avenue shows.

Spreading the Wealth (II)

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.

Spreading the Wealth

Is Joe The Plumber Fair Game?

... Running with thinly-sourced or unconfirmed allegations about Wurzelbacher's personal life--his financial records, his license situation, his marriage--goes too far. Wurzelbacher doesn't seem particularly skittish about speaking his mind or getting attention for it. But there's no way he could be prepared for the kind of scrutiny that comes with being the political world's most famous talking point.

As a result, writers should allow Wurzelbacher a bit more privacy than they would the typical public figure. And when printing anything that touches on his personal life, even remotely, they should be sure to confirm it first. So far, it seems, writers haven't always done that.

One reason I feel strongly about this is that I've seen it all happen before. As you may recall, back in 2007, a young boy from Baltimore named Graeme Frost was tapped to give the Democrats' weekly radio address. Congress was in the middle of debating whether to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP). Frost, who relied upon the program to cover ongoing medical treatments from a severe car accident, used his story to argue for the program's growth.

Within days, though, right-wing bloggers started digging into the Frost family story in order to prove he didn't really need S-CHIP. To make their point, they published "revelations" based on hearsay, hasty public records searches, or mere suspicion. The Frosts had new marble countertops in their kitchen! They had enrolled their kids in one of Baltimore's toniest private schools! They could have bought insurance if they wanted it!

Right-Wing Pundit Armageddon!

In an otherwise good post, Ross Douthat refers to "the great right-wing pundit civil war." Maybe we'll have one after the election, but the current fight is not yet nearly as big or bitter as the divisions over Colin Powell in 1995, the First Things controversy in 1996, the Bush-vs.-McCain contest in 2000, or even immigration in 2006-7.

Explain Yourself!

To me, the crux of the matter is that McCain can't get out of the habits that served him very well when he was a Senator building a glowing national reputation largely by talking directly to elite members of the political press. If you watched the previous two presidential debates, plus the VP debate, plus about half of the Democratic primary debates, plus the prime time speeches at the Democratic National Convention, and you've seen a dozen Obama surrogates yakking on cable a dozen times each just since Lehman Brothers went under then it gets kind of boring to watch Obama stay calm and repeat his talking points on the key issues.

But the debate is targeted at folks who haven't watched all that stuff. And a lot of McCain's best moments will have gone way over the heads of most people.

For example, he alluded at one point to a desire to allow more imports of sugar ethanol. Now if you're familiar with the details of the ethanol debate, you'll know that McCain's stance on this is correct on the merits. And you'll also know that Obama is a big support of corn ethanol both because they grow corn in downstate Illinois and because they made a big push for the Iowa Caucuses. McCain, by contrast, has a long and principled record on corn ethanol that's hurt him in Iowa. This isn't the biggest deal in the world, but it is a nice illustration of some of McCain's key campaign themes. And yet he didn't try to explain it at all. Similarly, he's had a knack for besting Obama on national security issues nobody cares about, like the relationship of US-Colombia trade deals to the US-Venezuela proxy conflict playing out in the Colombian jungle. People figure that Obama seems like a smart guy, and if something important happens involving a guerilla group nobody's heard of fighting a president nobody's heard of in a country nobody cares about, that Obama's up to the task of coming up with a good idea -- meanwhile, McCain has no education policy.

McCain's Mistake?

While nobody could have predicted that a global financial crisis would erupt in the fall of 2008, it was observable a year ago that the incomes of the middle class had stagnated during the Bush years. (I know because I observed it--in fact, in 2007 I published a whole book largely on this very point.) McCain previously had expressed doubts about many Bush policies, from the tax cuts of 2001 to the administration's easy indulgence of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2005. He could have continued that theme in 2007 and 2008. He could have campaigned as Nicholas Sarkozy to Bush's Jacques Chirac--a critic from within the party who offered change combined with practical experience and a moderate worldview.

... The moment at which such a message became impossible for McCain was his decision to embrace the full re-enactment of Bush's tax cuts. It must have seemed an easy decision back in the primary. It was a litmus test for many conservative voters and, after all, with Democrats poised to expand their majorities in the next Congress, there was zero likelihood those tax cuts would ever be enacted.

Trouble is, by founding his campaign on a full supply-side message, McCain denied himself the opportunity to say anything new. Worse, because that message originally took shape as a (correct) response to the problems of the 1970's, McCain's attempt to dust it off and reuse it as a response to the very different problems of the 2010's only made him look more out of date.

The Palin Effect

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.

Me Versus The Corner

Lessons of the Bush Era

You had me, until: "...And in such thinking lies the seeds of years or even decades of defeat."

It hasn't for the Left, who have been shouting for eight years that the Republicans cheat, the Media is biased against them, and the Democrats aren't fierce enough to win, and have been methodically culling the center-left out of their party and going on to greater and greater triumphs despite it.

Or because of it. Maybe.

The Liberal Media's Conservatives (II)

It's not the dissent from McCain/Palin, or that these commentators are "aware of their audience" that I find so alienating. It's the glee. And the public rush to the liberal embrace. I mean if Kathleen Parker is conscience-bound to oppose Sarah Palin, then so be it. But does she have to go hold hands with Steven Colbert and make wisecracks about "bubba fantasies" in the South? You say it's not about getting invited to all the cool parties, but it sure doesn't seem like these high-minded folks are turning down any invitations.

Continue reading "The Liberal Media's Conservatives (II)" »

The Liberal Media's Conservatives

... with Obama now with an 6-8 point lead, some in the DC/NY corridor these last three weeks figure it's time now to jump on, or at least sort of jump, since the train they think is leaving the station and there might be still be some space at the dinner table on the caboose. They also believe as intellectuals that the similarly astute Obamians may on occasion inspire, or admire them as the like-minded who cultivate the life of the mind-in contrast to the "cancer" Sarah Palin, who, with her husband Todd, could hardly discuss Proust with them or could offer little if any sophisticated table-talk other than the chokes on shotguns or optimum RPMs on snow-machines.

The GOP and the Investor Class

While I'm on the subject of capital-gains tax cuts and political strategy, this seems like a good time to cite my friend Matt Continetti's 2005 profile of Eliot Spitzer, which included a prescient explanation of why a growing "investor class" doesn't guarantee a growing share of the vote for the GOP:

... while universal stock ownership may be desirable for other reasons--most economists believe that lower-income Americans would benefit from having at least some of their savings in stocks--it hardly guarantees political catnip for Republicans. For one thing, if 80 or 90 percent of Americans own stocks and bonds, "investors" will no longer be a class at all--unless it's the class of all voters, in both parties. Furthermore--and more immediately--there's a corollary to the investor-class thesis that favors Democrats. As more people enter the market, they may turn to politicians who offer protection from rapacious capitalists and irresponsible money managers. Burned by market downturns, they will want politicians to go after those who did them harm. And those politicians, in turn, will say they are "saving" markets in the process. Politicians like Eliot Spitzer.

Spitzer is gone, of course, and this isn't an exact summary of how the current financial crisis has played out for the GOP. (And as I've said before, I don't think that a straightforward focus on punishing the bad guys, as opposed to finding solutions, plays that well with voters caught up in an economic calamity.) But the broad point is timely, and true: When the stock market drops, the average middle-class investor may be more likely to look to the Democrats than to the Republicans for answers, and an ever-larger investor class may actually be more supportive of regulation - the better to minimize the short-run risks their portfolios and 401(k)s face, even at the expense of long-run gains - than a middle class that isn't heavily invested in the stock market.

If You Don't Have Something Useful To Say ...

As part of a plan to reinvigorate his flagging campaign, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is considering additional economic measures aimed directly at the middle class that are likely to be rolled out this week, campaign officials said.

Among the measures being considered are tax cuts - perhaps temporary - for capital gains and dividends, the officials said.

Be Careful What You Wish For

After the last few electoral cycles, and in the face of depleted American power and a remarkable financial shock that remind us how transitory worldly glory is, I turn more and more to the basic lesson of Geoffrey Parker's Success Is Never Final ... The lesson of the book, as the title suggests, is that victories are ephemeral and the seeds of later defeat are being sown in the midst of what everyone regards as progress and success.   

... this basic lesson seems to get away from people, especially in election years.  As November approaches, memories seem to get very short. Where just a few years before there was loose talk of thirty-year dominance of the Presidency on the model of the early 20th century GOP, there is now the fear of a long sojourn out of power. To avoid this, disaffected conservatives are supposed to "come home," but in November just as in 2006 it will not matter whether McCain succeeds in retaining the GOP core ...There may be a few more defections from the GOP on the right this year, but not that many. What seems certain is that, except for a shrinking, irreducible core of right-leaning independents, everyone who is not a registered Republican will be backing any candidate that is not McCain.

... What conservatives who want to remain politically engaged with the party that has failed them time after time (the non-Larisonians, if you like) need to do is make whatever efforts they can to limit losses in Congressional elections this year.  Strategists need to assume a McCain defeat, which seems increasingly likely, and get into a position that will make the 2010 midterms somewhat competitive. Objective economic conditions seem likely to worsen in the coming year, and there is every reason to think that unified Democratic government will overreach as unified governments tend to do. If McCain were somehow to prevail on 4 November, the calamity that would befall the Congressional GOP in 2010 would great and would help to erase all political gains of the previous sixteen years. Those conservatives who do not want to be consigned to the wilderness for the next decade or two need to think about the long-term consequences of a McCain victory, which would be disastrous for conservatives both in policy and political terms in the next several electoral cycles.

A Bailout For The Middle Class

How should government demonstrate concern for regular people? John McCain's plan to refinance mortgages shows that he has the right impulse, but this is not the best approach. Rearranging home loans one by one would be a slow process when what's needed is quick action. It would be almost impossible to rearrange the loans fairly: Prudent home buyers who have kept up with their payments might lose out to imprudent ones who stretched too far; folks who rented while saving for a home would get nothing. Besides, McCain's plan could exacerbate the financial crisis in a perverse way. Help for families who are behind in their mortgage payments could encourage others to stop paying, too, in which case loans that are now good would quickly turn rotten.

The fastest and fairest way to help ordinary people is via a budget stimulus package. Part of the extra spending should be distributed to state governments, which are having trouble maintaining Medicaid and other programs as recession eats into their tax revenue. Part of the extra spending could go to infrastructure projects, though this tends to be a slow way of getting cash into the economy. But much of the stimulus should be in checks made out directly to citizens. Wall Street is getting its bailout. Main Street deserves one also.

Ayers, McCain and the Dow

Realignment and Contingency

The 1936 election has become the most celebrated textbook case of ideological realignment of the American electorate. However, a careful look at state-by-state voting patterns suggests that this resounding ratification of Roosevelt's policies was strongly concentrated in the states that happened to enjoy robust income growth in the months leading up to the vote. (As usual, voters seem to have been quite myopic--huge variations in income growth in 1934 and 1935 had no discernible effect on 1936 voting patterns.) Indeed, the apparent impact of short-term economic conditions was so powerful that, if the recession of 1938 had occurred in 1936, Roosevelt would probably have been a one-term president.

Considering America's Depression-era politics in comparative perspective reinforces the impression that there may have been a good deal less real policy content to "throwing the bums out" than meets the eye. In the U.S., voters replaced Republicans with Democrats and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Sweden, voters replaced Conservatives with Liberals, then with Social Democrats, and the economy improved. In the Canadian agricultural province of Saskatchewan, voters replaced Conservatives with Socialists and the economy improved. In the adjacent agricultural province of Alberta, voters replaced a socialist party with a right-leaning funny-money party created from scratch by a charismatic radio preacher, and the economy improved. In Weimar Germany, where economic distress was deeper and longer-lasting, voters rejected all of the mainstream parties, the Nazis seized power, and the economy improved. In every case, the party that happened to be in power when the Depression eased dominated politics for a decade or more thereafter. It seems farfetched to imagine that all these contradictory shifts represented well-considered ideological conversions. A more parsimonious interpretation is that voters simply--and simple-mindedly--rewarded whoever happened to be in power when things got better.

The Limits of McCainism

Patrick Ruffini on the debate:

To me one thing stood out. John McCain's maverickness is not gone. McCain doesn't need to return to his old maverick self.  If anything, McCain's maverickness is the problem.

I noticed this whenever someone would ask about the economy. McCain would launch into a tirade against the greedy special interests on Wall Street. Obama would tend to lead with how it affected the voter. Two very different reactions. And I can't help but think that Obama's response connected better.

McCain has long tried to appropriate the populist, muckraking instincts of TR and the progressive Republicans. But there's a reason why these tactics haven't worked since, well, TR and the progressive Republicans.

Yes, voters may say they are mad about corporate pay, and Wall Street, and a do-nothing, self-aggrandizing Congress. But they are ultimately looking out for #1. The most relevant questions are and have always been: what are you going to do my taxes? my health care? my job?

This is why populism ultimately has such weak appeal. Sticking it to corporate CEOs and greedy politicians doesn't in and of itself put food on the table.

Conservatives have long understood populism as a weakness in liberal economic rhetoric, allowing us to win debates we otherwise would not have won by deploying more grounded, solution-oriented arguments (e.g. populist rants against trade and greedy CEOs who outsource vs. the direct benefits to the consumer of cheaper goods and services). But now this populist rhetoric is being visited on our own house.

In a time of crisis, people especially want to know what this means to them. And in this light, I can't help but think that John McCain's rush to indict distant bogeymen and his Senatese reminiscences about fighting the good fight against the bums in Washington fell a little flat.

I would quibble with what I think is Ruffini's somewhat narrow definition of populism, but overall he's right. This has always, always been a problem for McCain: His strongest instinct, when confronted with any domestic-policy problem, is to find a black hat to pin the blame on and then punish them for it, rather than looking for the smartest possible solution. And in a crisis that nobody really understands, and where the blame for what's happened runs through Main Street as well as Wall Street and Washington, McCain's usual "punish the bad guys" message just doesn't seem like what voters want to hear.

Home Economics

"These days, you have to struggle," she said. "As a kid, I used to be able to go to the movies or to the zoo. Now you can't take your children to the zoo or go to the movies, because you've got to think how you're going to put food on the table." Snodgrass's parents had raised four children on two modest incomes, without the ceaseless stress that she was enduring. But the two-parent family was now available only to the "very privileged." She said that she had ten good friends; eight of them were childless or, like her, unmarried with kids. "That's who's middle-class now," she said. "Two parents, two kids? That's over. People looked out for me. These kids nowadays don't have nobody to look out for them. You're one week away from (a) losing your job, or (b) not having a paycheck."

Of course the problem is that once you recognize the truth of this line of analysis, you're still left wondering what, exactly, you're supposed to do about it. Stopping committed gay and lesbian couples from getting married won't, in the real world, help people build the sort of stable family structures that are an important part of emotional and economic support and security for those who have it. Nor does it really seem plausible to me that any government safety net, no matter how generous, could realistically fully make up the gap. And it's hard for me to imagine a government "marriage promotion" initiative that's heavy-handed enough to be effective, but not so heavy-handed as to be frighteningly authoritarian. But as a pure matter of electoral politics, I think it would probably be easy enough for an enterprising politician to talk a little bit more explicitly about this kind of thing and that would probably help candidates connect with people who, not wrongly, see linkage in their lives between "cultural issues" about family life and the economic challenges facing their family.

The Unplayed Card

... as the night went along, did you get the impression that Obama comes from the radical Left?  Did you sense that he funded Leftist causes to the tune of tens of millions of dollars? Would you have guessed that he's pals with a guy who brags about bombing the Pentagon? Would you have guessed that he helped underwrite raging anti-Semites? Would you come away thinking, "Gee, he's proposing to transfer nearly a trillion dollars of wealth to third-world dictators through the UN"? Nope. McCain didn't want to go there.

Great. Memo to McCain Campaign: Someone is either a terrorist sympathizer or he isn't; someone is either disqualified as a terrorist sympathizer or he's qualified for public office. You helped portray Obama as a clealy qualified presidential candidate who would fight terrorists. If that's what the public thinks, good luck trying to win this thing."  

Insta-punditry

Palin's Future (Or Lack Thereof)

McCain's Last Month (II)

Relative to past presidential nominees - Barack Obama has little relevant experience. His résumé is comparable to past "phenom" candidates Thomas Dewey and William Jennings Bryan. As a political matter, this means two things for Obama. First, as everybody knows, it is a direct weapon to use against him, which the McCain campaign has been doing for some time with its "Ready to Lead?" attacks.

Second, it means the definition of "Barack Obama" is more open to interpretation than other past nominees. The Obama campaign has used this vagueness to great effect. Simply put, because Obama has a slender record, he can be many things to many people. He can be the prophet of a new age to the chi tea crowd in Hyde Park, and a hardy Jacksonian fighter to the black coffee crowd in Youngstown. Politicians have been doing this dance routine for centuries. The fact that Obama's story is hardly conditioned by a paper trail enables him to do this with more facility than most contemporary politicians.

But this does not mean that Obama "is" only who he says he is. His thin record is potentially a double-edged sword because anybody can try to define him. With the mentioning of William Ayers, the GOP has just now begun the process of offering its alternative definition of the junior senator from Illinois. It waited until October because, as I noted last week, anywhere between 20% and 30% of the electorate is now making up its mind. This is the time to begin this process.

Blue America

Bet On America

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

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The William Ayers He Knows

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