As we know,
There are known knowns. …

Can anyone think of an example? I can’t. I suppose adding “I call bullshit” won’t get my question printed by the FT…

Assuming you are wrong, are you willing to compensate the poor people (eg those in Bangladesh) whose lives are ruined by global climate change? And, given the way people like you have been rather too eager to ignore past promises, how about you put up the money in escrow right now.

But of course, we all know the answers to this already, don’t we. If it’s a rich person inconvenienced by the noise of a highway or the effluent of a factory, that’s grounds for a lawsuit; if it’s a poor person, well suck it up.

To refresh the memories, here’s what Abby Thernstrom said:

[I]n Guinier’s world, black constituents can lack representation even if their elected officials are black. If the officeholders are not “community-based,” “culturally rooted” and politically and psychologically “authentic,” then they’re “tokens” – contaminated by white support. Thus neither Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder nor Andrew Young counts as a “black advocate”; they are too “assimilated” into the political mainstream. The authentic black has a “distinctive voice” and a level of group consciousness incompatible with white enthusiasm.

The content of Thernstrom’s claim was ludicrous, bearing no relation to Guinier’s actual writing; but what was really astonishing about this hit job (as opposed to similar items by Clint Bolick and Paul Gigot in the Wall Street Journal) was Thernstrom’s pretense that she was citing Guinier in those scare quotes. Apparently, TNR was familiar with fabricated quotes and intellectual fraud long before anyone heard of Stephen Glass.

From pages 55-58:

Authentic black representation, or “descriptive” representation, is the first important building block for those who believe in black electoral success theory. Authenticity refers to community-based and culturally rooted leadership. The concept also distinguished between minority-sponsored and white-sponsored black candidates. . . .

Authentic leadership is electorally supported by a majority of black voters and is, at its best, culturally similar to its constituency base. Thus, authenticity subsumes two separate concepts, the political and the cultural. Black representatives are authentic because they are elected by blacks and because they are descriptively similar to their constituents. In other words, they are politically, psychologically, and culturally black.
. . .

These facts distinguish the authentic representatives from those officials who are handpicked by the ‘establishment,’ or who must appeal to white voters in order to get elected. Establishment-endorsed blacks are unlikely to be authentic where they are not elected as the representatives of choice of the black community. In addition, these officials are not “of” the community if they are marginal community members whose only real connection with black constituents is skin color. . . .

Authenticity recognizes that black voters are a discrete “social group” with a distinctive voice. As I argue below, authentic representation also facilitates black voter mobilization, participation, and confidence in the process of self-government.

Authenticity, however, is a limited empowerment tool. . . . For example, where ‘authentic blacks’ are elected by whites with significant black support, electoral ratification by a majority of those blacks voting may not in fact send a recognizable message regarding substantive policies. . . . Thus, even where black support provides a critical margin, successful black candidates in majority-white electorates may not necessarily feel obligated to black voters.As for the other quotes, note page 40:

“Twenty-nine years later we have not yet overcome. The promise of our political system has yet to reach beyond symbols to commitments, beyond token appointments to representative black advocates, beyond electing black candidates to mainstreaming black issues.”

“These representatives may also be coopted by the dominant majority and thus may effect little substantive change in policy. Once assimilated into the political mainstream, black officials may define their political agenda without reference to or consultation with a community base.”

Notice the bolded text—EVERY LAST ONE of Thernstrom’s quotes came straight from Guinier. She didn’t “fabricate[]” anything.

Nor, contra Berube, did Thernstrom misinterpret Guinier, even though she does take quotations from here and there. If you read the above passages, it’s clear that Guinier was indeed calling for “authentic” black representatives, denigrating as not fully authentic those blacks who come from majority-white districts, criticizing those blacks who are mere “tokens” rather than “black advocates,” and so forth. Did Thernstrom simplify? No doubt she did; but anyone who tries to summarize this kind of dense academic work for a lay audience will end up simplifying certain points.

Indeed, Guinier’s prose is so abstract and dense that there may well be differences of interpretation—but these can be legitimate and in good faith. What’s not in good faith is the charge that Thernstrom was merely “fabricat[ing]” quotes.

———————————————————————[from Michael Bérubé]

Well, functional, I’m impressed that you actually went back and checked The Tyranny of the Majority. Kudos for that, but I’m sorry you put your comment here in the Vaclav Klaus thread instead of simply waiting for my next post at CT, because I almost missed it entirely. Since Friday I’ve been on vacation, and I’m now sitting in an internets cafe in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. So I don’t have my copies of Tyranny or Thernstrom’s TNR essay with me, but I’ll try to respond anyway.

Basically, you’ve adduced all the raw material from which Thernstrom put together her cut-and-paste. But in the passages you cite, I read Guinier as saying a bunch of fairly obvious things, and I read Thernstrom as twisting them into something quite sinister, like so: after the dismantling of Jim Crow, one goal of the civil rights movement was to elect black officeholders. This had its limitations, though, since black elected officials didn’t always represent the interests of their black constituents. So people came up with the “authenticity” criterion to distinguish black elected officials who represented their black constituents from black elected officials who didn’t. This had its limitations as well, because some “authentic” black officeholders wind up getting corrupted (or just compromised) by interests that are inimical to their black constituents.

Now, all of that happens to be quite true to the point of obviousness. What Thernstrom does, then, is to take Guinier’s account of the “authenticity” criterion and use it to paint Guinier as a kind of Identity Politician from Hell who will mau-mau the Department of Justice and convert the Civil Rights Division into the Division of Hating Whitey (and Blacks Supported by Whitey). (I’ll say more about this below.) And Thernstrom does this by taking the word “tokens” and the word “assimilated,” 22 pages apart, and stitching them into an account of her own making. Once again with feeling, here’s Thernstrom:

If the officeholders are not “community-based,” “culturally rooted” and politically and psychologically “authentic,” then they’re “tokens” – contaminated by white support.

But as you note, functional, the word “token” comes from a completely different context: Guinier’s (true/ obvious) observation that “the promise of our political system has yet to reach beyond symbols to commitments, beyond token appointments to representative black advocates, beyond electing black candidates to mainstreaming black issues.” I think it’s wrong to claim that Guinier is suggesting, in this passage, that “tokens” are tokens simply because they’re “contaminated by white support.” And I don’t see how anyone could take issue with the substance of Guinier’s claim that our political system has not moved beyond token appointments and electing black candidates. But note that Thernstrom isn’t even bothering to take issue with that claim; instead, she’s just mangled Guinier’s point beyond recognition.

Likewise, when Thernstrom writes

Thus neither Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder nor Andrew Young counts as a “black advocate”; they are too “assimilated” into the political mainstream. The authentic black has a “distinctive voice” and a level of group consciousness incompatible with white enthusiasm.

– she builds this pastiche out of the two passages you cite from Tyranny: in the first, Guinier attributes that “distinctive voice” to black voters, who, she writes, “are a discrete ‘social group’ with a distinctive voice.” No mention is made of this voice’s incompatibility with “white enthusiasm”– except by Thernstrom. In the second, the word “assimilated” comes from the passage in which Guinier notes (once again, to the point of obviousness) that some “authentic” black officeholders wind up getting corrupted (or just compromised) by interests that are inimical to their black constituents:

These representatives may also be coopted by the dominant majority and thus may effect little substantive change in policy. Once assimilated into the political mainstream, black officials may define their political agenda without reference to or consultation with a community base.

In all seriousness, functional, I can’t see how someone can claim that Guinier is wrong about this—or that Thernstrom has paraphrased it accurately.

And yet I have to admit this much: I missed the single words “token” and “assimilated” 22 pages apart in Tyranny. You’re right, Thernstrom didn’t make them up; she merely took them out of context, and I didn’t see them. I will revise the paperback edition of What’s Liberal accordingly. Still, I don’t think I can convince you that Thernstrom did something seriously wrong here. You seem to be either a good friend or an admirer of the person you call “Abby,” and you think I’ve mistreated her. Very well. Back in a 1998 essay, as you note above, I described Thernstrom’s essay as a piece of intellectual fraud on a par with the essays of Stephen Glass. I no longer think it’s quite that bad, and thus did not say so in What’s Liberal. And for the record, I don’t think of Thernstrom as being Malkinesque, though I do think that her TNR essay on Guinier is a close cousin to Horowitz’s account of my work in The Professors. It’s a cut and paste piece of hackwork. But– to return us, again, to the main point– in the spring of 1993, Thernstrom was not trying to offer an accurate account of Guinier’s work and argue against it. Thernstrom was working for an explicitly political purpose: to induce President Clinton to withdraw her name from consideration for the post of Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. In order to do that, she put Clint Bolick on the case and then cobbled together a hit-job essay of her own, suggesting that Guinier not only believed in but would try to enforce a draconian “authentically black” litmus test for enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Henry’s original question remains: how to deal with interlocutors who are trying not to thrash out an honest intellectual disagreement but to advance a partisan political agenda. There’s more on that subject, as it pertains to Guinier, available here.

Crusaders against global warming are (sometimes) ideologues, and they’re right; denialists are (probably always) ideologues, and they’re wrong. Score: crusaders win, 2 to 0.5. Denialists are half-right on one of two questions.

Well until the late 60s they weren’t – conservation was part of conservatism. You wouldn’t call Teddy Roosevelt, or the Sierra Club of the 1950s, left. For that matter the Nazis were fanatical conservationists (in contrast you’ve only got to look at what happened to the environment in Eastern Europe under the communists).

And, yeah, what other said about slocum’s truly ridiculous first post.

For many on the left (this is my sense) the motivations for taking action on global warming are a combination of wanting to do something about climate and wanting to do something about ‘curing our sick materialist society’ (or some such). That being the case, one can reasonably suspect that any particular action that’s proposed as an anti-global warming measure is partly (or mostly or wholly) something else

By extension of this logic, we should also note that many self-identified conservatives have openly admitted their belief in and anticipation of the end times described in the Book of Revelations; this should lead us to reasonably suspect that resistance to anti-global warming measures is partly (or mostly or wholly) a strategy for hurrying those end times along.

It’s not completely clear to me why environmental movements have historically been associated with the political left (a slippery term in itself), but I humbly offer that this association is not as firm as it once was, and that it now mostly shows up in the rhetoric of the American right. What if we pretend for a moment that environmental concern is not an issue of political affiliation, and further ask who stands to benefit from doing something or doing nothing?

As to the costs of renewables, it largely depends on which ones you are talking about. In any case if we ensure consumption acurately reflects the true costs (which as you say is easier said than done – how exactly do we put a price on the loss of the culture, livelyhoods and homes of people living in low lying countries?) then investing in renewables becomes more attractive, and the price goes down in the long run.

In any case if one thinks these are “far reaching restrictive measures” then perhaps one should start reading about liberties in countries outside of western europe and north america. At worst all the above is a similar economic change to the shift of manufacturing industries from the west to the developing world.

Oh, I’m for that (although defining ‘true cost’ is non-trivial and not necessarily non-political). I find this formulation reasonably attractive, for example:

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/comment/story.html?id=d84e4100-44e4-4b96-940a-c7861a7e19ad&p=2

encourage investment in alternative technologies and improve public transport, constitute “far-reaching restrictive measures?”

Why? Because rather often the ‘investment in alternative technologies’ is both extraordinarily expensive and a complete boondoggle (see ADM, ethanol, baptists & bootleggers).

And what’s my problem with ‘improving public transport’ in the form of light rail? My problem is that it’ll cost an enormous sum of money and, in my area, I am quite confident that the ridership will be extremely disappointing and come nowhere close to justifying the cost—the reason being that people now live spread out all over the place and there’s nowhere you could put a rail line and stations that would be sufficiently convenient to more than a very small fraction of the population. The ridership will be so low that, like our heavily-subsidized, mostly empty bus system, it won’t even be a fuel-efficient form of transport.

I must disagree with Matthew Gordon: I think that is trolling at its most exquisite.

Well, yes, I think Kunstler is totally off base. But the point is not that the leftist critique of our materialist, globalized, capitalist society is wrong, but that, right or wrong, it is intertwined with climate change advocacy.

For many on the left (this is my sense) the motivations for taking action on global warming are a combination of wanting to do something about climate and wanting to do something about ‘curing our sick materialist society’ (or some such). That being the case, one can reasonably suspect that any particular action that’s proposed as an anti-global warming measure is partly (or mostly or wholly) something else.

Take, for example, the leftist enthusiasm for local food networks. Shipping fresh produce by air is carbon intensive (and carbon taxes would make that prohibitive), but shipping non-perishable foods by cargo ship and/or rail is not—climate change is just not a good reason to totally restructure our food networks.

Or consider the leftist enthusiasm for mass transit. It’s not at all clear that, from a carbon standpoint, mass transit is a better option than efficient autos, ride sharing, and HOV lanes, and yet where I live, possible light and commuter rail projects are being sold, in part, as needed to address climate change.

Put yourself in my (libertarian leaning) position as one who, contra Kunstler, is generally positive about modern society and would like to see it continue (yes, including Vegas and Wal-Mart) albeit in less-carbon intensive form.

Please, Slocum. If you shot Kunstler he’d collapse in a pile of his own straw.

As you can see here, it’s not at all hard to find enthusiasts for parts of his program anyway.

Please admit that it’s true that there are many on the left who were early and enthusiastic supporters of action on global warming because they hope rather than fear that it will force radical changes to our social and economic systems

You would like somebody (unspecified who) to admit that some group of people (also unspecified) hold some belief that you don’t deny is correct, but hold it for a reason that you feel is odious. And, once that somebody has admitted this to you, then you will…what? Engage in a serious discussion about global climate change? I think that’s the best thing we could hope for out of the bargain, and frankly, engaging you in discussion is not much of an incentive.