Conservatism is the theoretical voice of … animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, agency, the prerogative of the elite. (7)

He digs up fun quotes from old, odd sources.

“In order to keep the state out of the hands of the people,” wrote the French monarchist Louis de Bonald, “it is necessary to keep the family out of the hands of women and children.” (15)

At this point conservatives get ticked off: Louis de who?

Can’t pin us to some dead monarchist! Guy was French! Robin is guilty of tarring all of conservatism with the broadest, blackest brush. It’s paranoid stuff. Nasty sniffing around in the alleged id. No respect for the superego.

This sort of dispute is hard to adjudicate, because the only way to do so rigorously is with specifics – examples and counter-examples. But really Robin isn’t claiming that there are no counter-examples to his claim. He is saying his model is the paradigm. He is modeling the typical, not the invariable, conservative. The conservative response is that – today – only conservative extremists think in this bad way. It’s no accident that Robin has to run off to Old Europe for the juiciest quotes. The rest he gets from more contemporary conservatives when maybe they slipped in an interview and said something they didn’t quite mean, or they exaggerated for effect and … taken out of context …

Let’s take a crack at defending Robin, like so. Ross Douthat’s latest column in the NY Times is a good fit for Robin’s thesis. Douthat is no one’s notion of a radical conservative. He’s a squish (well, that’s what lots of conservatives think of him.) His job is to make conservatism sound reasonable to urbane liberals. None of that seamy underbelly, talk radio-style stuff.

So if even Douthat fits Robin’s model – that doesn’t prove anything. Still …

So what’s the issue? Read the op-ed. And the news article that goes with. The thesis: it’s an infringement of liberty – and fundamentally destructive to values of community – to force religious organizations to provide health insurance that covers contraception.

I’m going to trust your reading comprehension skills re: op-ed and article (although, if these skills fail you, in some demonstrable way, I reserve the right to point this out in comments.) Now: what is it that Douthat really wants?

Reading between the lines I just trusted you to read: it’s obvious to me he wants what Robin says conservatives always want. Douthat says the issue is liberty and community. But honestly: he’s a kinder, gentler, crypto- de Bonald. Much, much kinder and gentler, I’m sure. The crypto goes like so, in Robin’s formulation (following Karl Mannheim): “Because freedom is the lingua franca of modern politics … conservatives have had “a sound enough instinct not to attack” it. Instead, they have made freedom the stalking horse of inequality, and inequality the stalking horse of submission.” (102)

But reading between the lines can be tricky, admittedly. I suppose we can’t prove what’s in the man’s soul. But it is noteworthy that the structure of moral concern he’s expressing is implausible. So probably his actual concerns are somewhat different. (It is possible, I suppose, that Ross Douthat just has an implausible soul. What are the odds?)

Douthat says: Conservatives aren’t just about the rugged individualism. They are also about voluntarist communitarianism. That scene in “Witness” where they raise the barn, if you recall it. That kind of stuff.

Douthat says he is concerned about that stuff – voluntarist communitarianism – withering in the face of statism, exemplified by this forced-to-insure-contraception situation.

Here’s the problem: suppose we rewrite the “Witness” scene, like so. The good people are about to raise the barn for a lady who needs a barn but, at the last minute, they find she is on the pill. So they refuse to raise the barn.

You might say: that’s their right! You might say: jerks! You might say a third thing. But hold that thought, as we are not done yet.

A man from the government now shows up and tells the barn-raisers that, henceforth, if they are going to raise barns, they can’t refuse to raise them for women on the pill. (They don’t have to build everyone a barn, but this cannot be the exclusion condition.)

What’s the issue now? If you think it’s the nobility of voluntarist barn-raising, or lack thereof, you haven’t been keeping score. We can shift to “The Jerk” for adaptable filmic material: “He hates barns!” Or, more charitably, “He hates voluntarily raised barns!” If you think the man from the government is taking aim at the barn, you are a jerk.

No, seriously: if the barn-raisers really value voluntary barn-raising so damn much – if that is their first concern – they will build the barn, pill be damned. Likewise, if government man is mostly concerned with barn prevention, he won’t let them do it even if the woman gets off the pill. (I have intentionally made government man’s rule sort of dumb and potentially problematic to show that the legal intricacies of the situation, while no doubt very interesting, do not cut to the quick of what people are really interested in here.)

Does this point apply to Douthat’s column? Yes. Ostensibly, he is worried about “a darker American future, in which our voluntary communities wither away and government becomes the only word we have for the things we do together.” But if that were truly his concern, he would be urging the Catholic groups that say they are going to dissolve, rather than go along, to go along. Think about it. Suppose someone asked the barn-raisers: why are you troubled by the prospect of a woman taking the pill and getting her barn raised? Suppose they reply: we are worried that situations like this will undermine our willingness to raise barns, voluntarily. Could any problem be more easily solved by the barn-raisers themselves? Unless, of course, the sticking point is something else. The pill, to pick a likely suspect.

Douthat might object that it takes two to tango, not raising a barn-wise. The woman could pitch in from her side by agreeing not to take the pill, the better to stop others from not raising the barn. But the oddly negative quality of this suggestion really does indicate the problem with it. If the threat is a looming lack of voluntaristic community action, the barn-raisers should meet it head-on: stop stopping and start starting.

So Douthat will probably not focus on the woman but rather on the man from the government.

Douthat will probably say that the barn-raising metaphor is wrong, or should go more like this: the man from the government comes and says that, if you are going to raise a barn, you have to have a Planned Parenthood-raising, too, and everyone has to pitch in to whip up a batch of morning after pills. So the sticking point is this: being required positively to do something that you think is morally repugnant.

But this isn’t right. Barn-raising is volunteer charity, and it is reasonable not to expect anyone to do charity work they find directly morally repugnant. But employer-provided health insurance is a form of compensation for work, like plain old cash pay. If I disapprove of drinking, but one of my employees takes the money I pay him and spends it on beer, I have not, in any sense, been forced to buy him drinks. Obviously if I were forced to pay my employees in ‘beer dollars’, or literally in beer, the situation would be different. But medical insurance is not like paying people in ‘contraception dollars’. Being covered for getting your leg broken does not mean being obliged to break a leg, then get it treated. No one is proposing that anyone be forced to take any pill, just because they are covered for it.

Let’s make the case much weirder, but only by way of being very down-to-earth about actual motive – about what Douthat obviously actually thinks and feels. If you think it makes sense for Catholic employers to refuse to provide insurance for contraception, then you should think it makes sense for Catholic employers to refuse to allow their employees to spend their cash on contraception. And there is nothing special about Catholics. Every employer should be able to restrict pay by restricting what employees can spend it on. (If they don’t like it, they don’t have to take the job.)

Does this sound like a great idea? No. First of all, it sounds impractical. But that’s not the issue. It sounds like a bad idea. If there were some super-nosy technical means whereby employers could wield ultra micro-managemental moral authority over every aspect of their employees’ lives, by nixing any disapproved acts of consumption, on the ground that they don’t want ‘their money’ spent on that? Obviously that would just make the dystopian quality of the scenario more vivid. Exactly how bad it would get, in practice, is not clear. Most employers wouldn’t bother, and most employees would object and walk. That’s the best case. The point is this: the world would not get ‘freer’ or more ‘communitarian’, the more that employers exercised these coercive options, and the more workers found themselves unable to walk away, in practice.

But Douthat isn’t proposing anything so comprehensive. So what’s the relevance? Is this supposed to be a slippery slope? No, the point is closer to the opposite: this slope is obviously non-slippery. But it ought to be slippery, since the general principle about employer privilege really ought to apply broadly, if at all. (It really ought to take us nearly all the way to Louis de Bonald, sounds like.)

Douthat, being a much kinder, gentler De Bonald, would only apply the principle in small ways, to certain traditional sex roles and social hierarchies. He thinks a semi-subordinate status for women, where reproductive stuff is concerned, seems right. But he wouldn’t want to put it that way, because it sounds bad. There should be some way of making out how really the issue is freedom and community. That is to say, Robin is basically right about the way Douthat thinks and argues. This isn’t a big-deal false consciousness thesis or anything, be it noted. I’m just arguing that, surely, Douthat doesn’t defend what he really wants to defend here, and doesn’t really think the thing he says is the issue is the real issue. This sort of thing happens all the time. Happens to liberals. Happens to everyone. You take the low road. Robin’s thesis – namely, that modern conservatism only ever consists of this low road – is a bit more contentious.

Here’s a quote from Robin that I’ve seen mocked by some conservatives and libertarians as obviously preposterous.

“Such a view might seem miles away from the libertarian defense of the free market, with its celebration of the atomistic and autonomous individual. But it is not. When the libertarian looks out upon society, he does not see isolated individuals; he sees private, often hierarchical, groups, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees.” (16)

This statement really does need emendation. It is obviously false that libertarianism implies that you have to ‘see’ this way, or ought to ‘see’ this way. What Robin means to say – which is, admittedly, not what he says – is that, in point of actual fact, the typical conservative espouses a fair-weather libertarianism. You are exquisitely attuned to threats to liberty, where you want to see them. You want to see them when unequal social arrangements that you are unable or unwilling to defend on the positive merits are threatened. Libertarianism then becomes a kind of standard procedural block. States rights, when you don’t want to defend Jim Crow on the merits. That sort of thing.

“The Obama White House’s decision is a threat to any kind of voluntary community that doesn’t share the moral sensibilities of whichever party controls the health care bureaucracy … Once claimed, such powers tend to be used in ways that nobody quite anticipated, and the logic behind these regulations could be applied in equally punitive ways by administrations with very different values from this one.”

This is unconvincing. Of course, any power can be abused. But the principle that people should be treated equally – in the sense of enjoying the same basic rights and liberties – is only going to be used (as opposed to abused) against social groups or structures that don’t treat people equally, in that sense. Some such groups will turn out to deserve protection. But obviously, and rightly, there will be heightened scrutiny of groups that want to treat their members unequally. There’s no point feigning that it is their ‘voluntary’ or ‘community’ character that sets alarm bells ringing.

A couple of my fellow CT’ers have already discussed Robin’s book, and defended him ably enough against critics. You might want to read their posts, too.

For the record: I don’t know a thing about Louis de Bonald, besides that he said that one thing.

I think we think this isn’t a good idea because, basically, it would produce not-good results. We’d have formal democracy but functional plutocracy.

That said, it is sort of interesting to think how it might work, as a market system for buying and selling and trading policies and laws and so forth. People might end up making fairly nuanced economic decisions. Possibly nobody would end up voting for free. Sometimes they would sell their votes for a little, if they basically liked the guy. Sometimes they would only sell for a lot, if the guy seemed especially terrible. (We wouldn’t have to be unreasonable about it, insisting that, if voters are willing to sell at price x, they have to be willing to sell to any candidate at that price, first come, first served.) So candidates would still be concerned to be good candidates, in the eyes of voters. And it wouldn’t necessarily be the case that candidates would all be corrupt, i.e. only willing to spend $2 million on votes if the expected return from all the self-dealing they plan to engage in exceeded that. People could donate to candidates, to help them buy votes. You could have eminently populist vote-buying drives. Candidates would still be idealistic, at least sometimes. And sometimes they would lavish money on their own campaigns in more or less a ‘what do you get the guy who has everything? – a Senate seat!’ kind of way.

In short, it might look a lot like the real world, in its range of outcomes: the rich would mostly, but not necessarily always, win. Which goes to show that objecting to vote selling on the grounds that it would lead to some unacceptable result is not so compelling. Unless you add the premise: the system that we’ve got is unacceptable (so another system that worked no better would be, likewise, unacceptable.)

Like a lot of people – most liberals and progressives – I think it would make most sense to ‘keep the money out of politics’ to a much greater degree than is the case. Obviously this is complicated, but ideally it shouldn’t be the case that people can buy so much influence, in effect.

Suppose you think, instead, that it’s better to let people spend freely. Is there any reason not to think it would then be even better still to let people actually buy votes?

What’s attractive about the mixed position: spend all you want, but you can’t buy votes outright?

You could make a Constitutional argument. There’s no argument that US citizens’ existing rights are violated by not letting them sell their votes. Whereas the argument that free speech protects money spent on ads and so forth makes a certain amount of sense. But is there, additionally, an argument that it’s a good thing that the Constitution says this thing (if indeed it does – a matter subject to some doubt)?

You could say we want people to vote for whom they want. So it’s not right to vote for the guy who offers you $10 for your vote. Because what you really want is the $10, not the guy. But voting is always instrumental like that. You vote for the guy who is going to do what you want – in this case, give you $10. In general, we don’t require citizens to be sincere or unselfish or even unfoolish in their voting patterns. Again, if you are not forbidden from throwing away your vote, why can’t you sell it?

You could say that paying for votes is just obviously and inherently corrupt. Period. But I think that would only be clearly the case, in a non-question-begging way, if candidates used public money to buy the votes.

You could say that you think it’s just impossible to regulate campaign spending and contributions effectively and in an even minimally coherent way, that accords with people’s intuitive sense that we need ‘less money in politics’. Whereas it’s possible to forbid buying votes. But this seems like a ‘perfect is the enemy of the good’-style mistake. Probably no way of limiting money in politics is perfect. Still …

What do you think?

It’s basically a survey of forgotten British moral panics of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Predictions of the death of decency and/or fall of Western Civilization meet social reform proposals that sound (to us today) right and proper, or at least reasonable, or at least unlikely to bring about apocalypse.

Daylight savings. Should the ban on marrying your dead wife’s sister be lifted? Should spring guns be banned? Should children be forbidden to buy gin (for their parents, not themselves) in pubs? (You might think that the panic was over a proposal to let children buy gin. But no.)

It’s in the minor nature of these cases that, 30 years on – let alone 150 years – we forget these were hot-button culture war issues. Suppose we were to rewrite Turner’s book today. What cases can you come up with? Now-forgotten moral panics in the face of social reforms enacted in, say, the last 75 years?

No-fault divorce and legalized birth control are good examples. Same-sex marriage is going to grow up to be an example, I’m reasonably sure. But the genius of Turner’s book is that his cases are so minor. Birth-control and easy divorce were big deals, socially. Opponents were right about that much. Letting men marry their dead wive’s sisters, by contrast, was never going to make a big difference. What recent examples can you think of that are more like the latter? I’m looking for cases in which politicians and pundits and and so forth really got into the game. It’s a big hand-wringing public End Is Nigh botheration. And, in retrospect, it’s not just wrong-headed but fantastically silly.

It’s more common, I suppose, to get these sorts of moral panics about some new thing the kids are up to. Dungeons and Dragons is turning children into satanists. (Ah, those were the days.) Let’s try to restrict ourselves to cases in which social reformers, not the kids, are the targets. What have you got for me?

First, two Dickens Christmas books:

“The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In” (PDF, 35 megs)

“The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain” (PDF, 11 megs)

I included the original illustrations but made them larger in two ways. First, the illustrations are mostly full-bleed. That is, they go to the edge of the page. This is not how they appeared originally and it looks a bit strange if you view the PDF on the computer screen. But it looks fine on the iPad because the device itself is a bit like a picture frame. Pictures want to go right up to the edge. On the other hand, text still needs a white border. I omitted header and footer stuff, since the device shows you page numbers and title if you tap it.

Second, you can zoom the illustrations to take in the detail. I encoded them at 600 dpi for “The Chimes”, 300 for “The Haunted Man” (that’s why the former is three times as big. Does anyone care whether eBook files are large? 34 megs is still pretty small, right?) I think the 600 dpi option is quite noticeably better. But I care about 19th Century illustrated books, so maybe it’s just me.

Also, the files have nice tables of contents, and pages listing illustrations and illustrators, with links.

Next up, an experiment that was sort of a waste of my time, honestly, but now it’s done, and I learned a thing or two. The Internet Archive has complete scans of all six volumes of a nice, Walter Crane illustrated edition of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. (Sort of an expensive set of books if you want to lay hands on paper.) Anyway, the scans are pretty good, as random scanned stuff you find on the internet tends to go. So I made a cleaned up edition of the first volume, in three parts. Part I, Part II, Part III (all PDF).

Now, the first problem here is that, frankly, it’s Edmund Spenser. For a lot of people, that’s a deal breaker. But I like the Walter Crane illustrations and I’m not going to argue with you about poetry just right now. The second problem is that the scans just weren’t quite good enough. (At least 600 dpi, people. 1200 dpi, if there’s fine detail.) It takes too much time, if you can’t do it right in the end. But I have a bunch of nice, 19th Century illustrated books sitting here beside me. I’m thinking it might be nice to make some clean, facsimile editions, optimized for iPad. Do the scanning right. Give ‘em away. Still, it’s time consuming to do this stuff (although I can listen to audiobooks while I’m doing it.)

Scanning issues aside, I think it’s still a pretty ok and basically readable iPad edition of Spenser I’ve made. Again, note how the layout is weird, if you view these pdf’s on your computer screen. I basically punched iPad screen-sized chunks out of original pages – which were, I think, 8.5” x 11” or so. Per my previous post, maybe people ought to resize material for the iPad more often, if they intend the PDF’s they make to be viewed on these devices, not printed (probably). People think PDF’s are bad for tablet readers because PDF’s aren’t formatted for them, but they easily can be.

Last but not least, just as I was building myself this whole ‘PDF’s are great for iPad!’ bandwagon, for my lonely self, I stumbled on a nice little site that lets comics creators, illustrators and such folk, sell their stuff as PDF’s: The Illustrated Section. So I re-formatted some past stuff – last year’s “Mama In Her Kerchief and I In My Madness”, and good ol’ “Squid and Owl” – for iPad and submitted it. So you can get my stuff for a couple bucks. Here are some free samples:

“Mama In Her Kerchief and I In My Madness” (PDF)

“Squid and Owl” (PDF)

I’m reading comics on my iPad these days and generally liking the experience. The slightly greater screen resolution of the iPad makes a huge difference, I find. I’m quite happy with the way my stuff looks now. I don’t expect to make much money this way, needless to say. But I hope the Illustrated Section succeeds. Or something like it.

One reason I’m worrying my head about all this stuff is I’m winding up to make a fresh edition of my Plato book, which I have reserved the e-rights to, and which I would like to do up in a suitably bang-up e-way. That’s a subject for another day.

Hope some of you like Dickens and/or Spenser and own iPads and/or similar devices.

At the present time Epub (or EPUB or EPub, or however you capitalize it) and Kindle (mobipocket) are notably sucky formats. Epub 3 is rolling out, and I’m sure the future will get better and better. But for now we have these beautiful devices; yet the books I’m reading on them look plug ugly. Terrible layout. Limited fonts. In their guts, these HTML-based ebook formats are websites pretending to be books. They don’t have pages, strictly. They jostle images in thoughtless ways. The gestalt is very web circa 1997. This is by design (in a negative sort of way). You can’t be sure what size screen you are dealing with, so every appearance of every bit of every ebook on every device is its own custom-poured page, courtesy of these flow-y formats. But the results are, to repeat, bad. Suppose you had a choice between getting a basically quite nice ‘standard’ garment off the rack, or having an brain-damaged, blind tailor make you a suit – just for you! cut by the poor, mad fellow, just to your measure! on the spot! There’s a lot to be said for not the ‘bespoke’ option, in this case.

So how about: just make a PDF so it looks good on the iPad. (Until 2014, when Epub finally catches up.) Why the iPad? Because I’ve got one, so I can see what I’m doing. No, seriously: how will it look on other devices? Unless you are trying to read it on your phone – which, admittedly, some people want to do – it will look fine. Why PDF? Everything can read PDF, and will continue to be able to do so. If the screen is fatter or thinner on some Nook or Kindle or whatever next year’s flavor may be, there will either be a slightly fatter top or side margin. But slightly fat margins are minor sins compared to the barbarities routinely perpetrated, in passing, by ePub and Kindle. PDF can look great. You pick the font! The pictures are in the right place!

And will Epub catch up? Technically, I’m very ignorant. I don’t code. I sort of know HTML and barely grasp CSS. I make books with InDesign. Maybe that makes me biased in favor of (relatively) old-fashioned laying out of pages. But I have nagging doubts as whether this whole websites-pretending-to-be-books, custom-poured page business really is the future of the book. I’m concerned it is, to some degree, a solution in search of a problem. [UPDATE: gross overstatement. Obviously cross-platform compatibility is a real problem, but I wonder whether the problem isn’t being over-solved, with perfect flexibility becoming an ideal to which some good design values are being sacrificed, when modest flexibility might be better.] Consider this very admirable effort, Bibliotype, by Craig Mod, who is always worth reading on these subjects. By all means, let this sort of thing go forward. We’ll see. But consider: if you want to play Angry Birds, you orient your iPad to landscape, for maximum width (the action is left-right). If you want to play Tetris, portrait is better. Up to you, of course, how you want to play at breakfast or in bed or wherever. But the point is this: no one would say game designers should work to design games that are omni equi-playable in portrait or landscape mode, at arms’ length, one inch from your nose, so forth. Likewise, I don’t see why eBook designers should necessarily be bending over every which way to ensure that, no matter what device, and how you are holding your device, you are getting as good a reading experience as you are getting any other way you hold it. Flexibility is a virtue. But there are others. Maybe it would be better to design something that looks great one standard way, even if that means it doesn’t look so good some other way. We still have pages. They aren’t inherent in the e-nature of the eBook beast. But they are inherent in the readers we read on. The iPad is a page, even if the things on it don’t have pages. Maybe the way to go, ultimately, is back to deliberate page layout. Maybe there is no other way to get the best results.

But that’s a big maybe, and I don’t want to stand in the way of folks like Craig Mod trying whatever stuff they think might be great.

In the meantime, as things stand, PDF’s are almost never formatted for an iPad screen, so it doesn’t readily occur to us that we might look in this direction for the optimal solution. I read a lot of PDFs, academic stuff. It’s all formatted for my printer, not my iPad, so the pages are mostly too big, and if you shrink them to fit, the print is cramped. I would suggest that, going forward, folks might start sizing and shaping PDF pages for these devices. The rules are a bit different. But that’s enough for one post. I’m curious to hear what your recent ebook experiences have been. Do ugly ebooks bother you? Do you crave the ebook analog of the Protean easy chair, from Melville’s Confidence-Man?

“My Protean easy-chair is a chair so all over bejointed, behinged, and bepadded, everyway so elastic, springy, and docile to the airiest touch, that in some one of its endlessly-changeable accommodations of back, seat, footboard, and arms, the most restless body, the body most racked, nay, I had almost added the most tormented conscience must, somehow and somewhere, find rest. Believing that I owed it to suffering humanity to make known such a chair to the utmost, I scraped together my little means and off to the World’s Fair with it.”

In a follow-up post [UPDATE: now posted] I’ll give out some freebie PDF eBooks I’ve optimized for the iPad, and note how slightly different rules apply. Nothing fancy. (How fancy could PDF be, after all?) But nice, I hope.

There are (at least) three foundational myths of contemporary liberalism. One is that John Kennedy’s assassination was instigated by the rank intolerance and hatred of the American people. A second is that of “upsouth”: the assertion that Northern racism was and is every bit as pervasive, if more subtle, than that of the Old South. The third is that the American popular culture of the 1950s was stifling not only in its “Donald Duck” banality but also in a subtle form of fascism that constituted a danger to the Republic. In this view, the excesses of the 1960s were a struggle to free America’s brain-damaged automatons from their captivity at the hands of the lords of mass culture.

At this AEI event, Fred Siegel will address this third myth. For all the bile directed at the 1950s, it was the high point of American popular culture, a period when many in the vast middle class hoped to elevate their tastes. The attack on mass culture, a mix of Marxant theorizing and aristocratic instincts, paved the way for a new form of status competition based on supposedly elevated consumer and cultural preferences.

Part of me likes best the faux-scrupulosity of the parenthetical “at least”, utterly undone by the second paragraph revelation that the first paragraph was two-thirds grumping around and he’s not even going to talk about the Kennedy assassination. (I have written abstracts in my time, but it has never occurred to me to start one, in effect: ‘Damn kids, get off my lawn!’ But, now that I think about it, there’s really no reason why an abstract should not be angrily digressive. Why not?) Part of me loves the idea that somewhere, someone is writing a book about how the inner life of American liberalism is, I guess, Theodor Adorno. That’s thinking outside the box, innerly-speaking. Part of me loves the image of all these liberals whispering ‘upsouth’ to each other constantly, in that knowing way.

OK, I guess he could be winding up to take a swing at Dwight Macdonald. But does Dwight Macdonald talk about Donald Duck, in particular?

That’s why it’s a values question. Even so, wouldn’t it be better to conjoin this values dog whistle with some non-dog whistle questions in the topical vicinity? I mean: obviously yes. More is better. But more specifically: it would be interesting to try to determine to what extent people actually think, practically, about their own lives and those of others, in such extreme, total voluntarist-or-fatalist terms, when not dog whistled into picking one or the other extreme. To what degree, and in what cases, do people believe themselves, and others, to be in control of the course of their lives? My empirically unsupported suspicion is that people would turn out to be pretty similar in their beliefs, across partisan lines and cross-culturally, if you took care not to blow the dog whistle.

What do you think?

“”We realized that if we incentivized things that were inherently boring,” Butterfield told me, “people would do them again and again—it showed up in the logs—but that they would secretly hate us.”

“This means that they are not enriched by their encounter with objects. Because of the lack of true work, the subject shrivels up and in his spare time he is nothing.”

I do sort of wonder what secret Titanman is hiding under that mask. But probably I won’t find out until volume 3. Which is your favorite cover?

In other internet news, I commend Will Wilkinson on his healthy drift leftwards. But he’s taking Matt Welch’s rhetorical P.J. O’Rourking about too intellectually seriously. (As someone who perpetrates similar errors on a regular basis, I know whereof I speak.) Matt Yglesias makes half the necessary point: namely, there isn’t any contradiction – or even a necessary psychological tension – between perceiving unfairness or injustice and taking personal responsibility for things. The other half goes something like this. Welch writes: “One of the best perks about being a grown-up is that you get to make your own choices, and to own the results, good and ill.” This is all well and good, in a motivational speaker sort of way, but it only works as a reproach to the OWS crowd if it implies, generally, that adults can’t ever wrong other adults (or do right by each other, for that matter). They can only wrong themselves (or do right by themselves.) It’s some kinda Harry Truman ‘buck stops infinitely here’ reverse Father Zosima from the Brothers K. thing. “All are innocent for all that happens to others, for all are infinitely responsible for all that happens to themselves.” Welch implies that somehow the OWS crowd are guilty of off-balance moral attitudinizing. “I]f you have any intention of building up a political case for bailing out your bad decisions, you might start with taking even one percent responsibility for them.” I don’t see any basis for this change. But the shoe does fit on the other foot. If you have any intention of holding people personally responsible for things, you really should make at least 1% room for some kind of theory of fairness and justice.

It’s all well and good to mock puppeteers as unemployable, I suppose. (Being John Malkovich comes to mind. And some of the early Kaufman drafts of the screenplay contained even more mockery.) But there is also such a thing as taking personal responsibility so seriously that it’s just silly.

UPDATE: Rather inevitably, it was objected in comments that I’m not giving libertarianism enough credit for being a philosophy of justice and fairness. Probably I should have made this clearer, but that’s precisely why I described Welch as O’Rourking about, rather than as espousing libertarianism. If you see what I mean.

The staff editorial itself is not so important. What’s important is that, once upon a time, there were debates about trade ‘liberalization’ – globalization – that used to divide neoliberals and liberals and progressives. Basically, the neoliberals were gung-ho for trade on the grounds that the alternative was protectionism that amounted to shooting your own foot, and didn’t do any good for the poor in the Third World. And the progressives saw jobs being outsourced, labor unions weakening. Liberals were those caught in the squishy middle, per usual. We’ve had some debates on Crooked Timber of late about what ‘neoliberalism’ means. I’ve not participated because, honestly, term’s more trouble than it’s worth, worrying what it means. (I have other terms that are more trouble than they’re worth to worry about that I worry about. As a philosopher, I need to limit the number of such that infest my mental life.) The thing is: in the current situation, there is not – and should not be – anything analogous to the neoliberal side of the trade debate. No one sane thinks that this whole 99/1 business might be like NAFTA, i.e. something we have to go for, in an end-justifies-the-means spirit.

This is Matt’s point. He considers himself a neoliberal and sees, correctly, I think, that anyone committed to that market-oriented outlook is more or less committed to sympathy for the core grievances expressed by the OWS protesters. Neoliberalism was always in favor of markets as means, not ends. Neoliberalism was never – or was never supposed to be – the view that being in favor of trade liberalizaton means market fundamentalism in everything. Neoliberalism says market liberalization should go hand in hand with progressive taxation and appropriate regulation so the pains that buy the gains are mitigated and borne equitably. Spread the gain, to spread the pain. If liberalization means making the 1% richer and everyone else poorer, you shouldn’t take the deal. Only (some) conservatives and (some) libertarians should be willing to take that deal.

We can now, if we like, refight old battles. Were neoliberals wrong all along, or is it the case that, like ‘pure’ communism, neoliberalism has never really been tried? (We never tried to conjoin market liberalization with appropriately fair and equitable taxation and regulation schemes, so we don’t know that it wouldn’t work.) Were progressives right to try to draw lines in the sand against liberalization, or was that picking the wrong fight, strategically or philosophically or for whatever reason? And that’s why they lost? Whatever the answers to these and other questions, here and now it’s obviously the case that everyone from a compulsively Clintonian neoliberal triangulator to an unreconstructed communist ought to agree, at least, that ‘we are the 99%’ has both its heart and its head in approximately the right place. The protesters say there is unjust inequality, and they are right. Only (some) conservatives and (some) libertarians could deny it.

I think Nobel Prize winning economist Chris Sims has a much shrewder take on this whole 99 vs. 1 business.

Honestly, almost all these defenses of the status quo make more sense than Ferguson’s alternative, ‘never trust anyone over 30’ rabble-rousing proposals. (What is this, 1968?)

I emailed to congratulate Sims and he was very modest about his prize.

UPDATE: On second thought, I take it all back. That deftly-dropped hint that Zizek grew his beard to look as as wild-and-crazy as Krugman was worth the price of admission. Karl Marx sort of had a ‘Krugman beard’, too, if you think about it. Makes you think! And that’s why they pay Ferguson the Big Bucks, I presume.

1) Explaining/justifying to the student why she got the grade she got, not the higher grade that, perhaps, she hoped for.

2) Communicating something significant that will teach the student to be a better writer/thinker.

I think graders try to do 2 but feel vaguely obliged to make 2 do double-duty as 1. And students typically expect 1, although many of them are also healthily open to 2. But 1 and 2 often come apart. It’s damned hard to provide anything that would really be sufficient to accomplish 1 in a general way. And even harder if you’re trying to do 2, too. And 2 is more important, and do-able, so basically you should just do 2. Clear your head of the vague feeling that you should be doing 1, except a bit around the edges, in the natural course of doing just 2.

Since students expect 1, you need to make it very explicit that you are doing 2 instead. ‘I’m going to pick something – your writing, your organization, your understanding of some point, something – and I’m going to spend my time and energy trying to give you a good lesson in how to do that one thing better. So if my comments consist entirely of nit-picks to the effect that your introduction is badly written, that shouldn’t be taken to imply that I didn’t read the rest of the paper, or that nothing was wrong except the introductory paragraph, or that the grade was a pure function of what went wrong in the first paragraph.’ (Obviously there’s no need to be a puritan about this. You can include a few general gestures towards 1. But don’t dissipate that precious, terribly finite quantity of time and energy, per paper, you need to accomplish 2.)

Students often want 1, more than 2, because they want to feel that the process – your standards – are reasonably transparent and fair. Students also want to be able to come in and ask about grades. All this is totally reasonable. So you need to accompany this statement that you will only be doing 2 with suitable assurances that 1 is available in a wholesale way, in office hours, etc., but it just isn’t provided, retail, in individual comments on papers. You grade fairly, but you don’t provide a separate, sufficient proof that you grade fairly, on each individual paper.

This semester I’m trying something a bit different. I’m telling students that they have to ask me, specifically, for help on particular aspects of their papers. Writing problems, thinking problems, something specific. Every paper should conclude with a little self-criticism (needn’t be a lavish self-flagellation or anything like that) indicating where they think they need improvement. My comments will be directed accordingly. If they fail to provide a little self-criticism, they get skimpy comments. So far what I’ve learned is that next time I should encourage more specificity in specific self-criticisms. (I’m getting a lot of ‘dear prof., please comment on anything that you think needs work!’)

Possibly this whole do 2) not 1) business is very obvious to most of you out there who are my fellow graders. But students don’t get it, so you need to give them a little ‘how the enemy thinks’ talk, explaining why it makes sense for things to go this way. I’ve found it really helps.

But, since this is the internet, it will probably turn out that I am very, very wrong. I am probably not a competent grader at all, since I have said these outrageous things! We shall see!

It makes no sense for conservatives like Jim Geraghty to express this sort of concern about the booing of Stephen Hill at the GOP debate. (Hill is, as you probably know, the gay soldier who asked about DADT):

Rereading the transcript of last night’s debate, I am struck that Rick Santorum did not thank Stephen Hill, a gay soldier in the U.S. Army currently in Iraq, for his service. Nor did anyone else on that stage.

Whatever you think of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” or homosexuality, Hill is risking his life on behalf of his country.

And for sure it doesn’t make sense for Santorum himself to have responded to subsequent questions about the booing, like so:

I condemn the people who booed that gay soldier. That soldier is serving our country. I thank him for his service to our country. I’m sure he’s doing an excellent job; I hope he is safe and I hope he returns safely and does his mission well.

I have to admit I seriously did not hear those boos. Had I heard them, I certainly would have commented on them. But, as you know, when you’re in that sort of environment, you’re sort of focused on the question and formulating you answer, and I just didn’t hear those couple of boos that were out there. But certainly had I, I would’ve said, “Don’t do that. This man is serving our country and we are to thank him for his service.”

Why does it make no sense? Because everyone on stage, except Huntsman and Johnson (correct me if I’m wrong), is on the record as saying that DADT - or something quite like it – should be reinstated. According to Santorum, Stephen Hill should ideally be dishonorably discharged in the not-too-distant future. If you think that, it obviously makes no sense to say you are sure he is doing an excellent job and wish him a safe completion of his tour of duty. [UPDATE: As pointed out by Sebastian in comments, you didn’t technically get a DD if forced out under DADT. You got an involuntary general discharge or involuntary honorable discharge. However, unlike those discharged for mental illness, discharged gay service people didn’t get any post-discharge compensation, obviously. Now, apparently, there’s an undecided issue as to whether service people forced out under DADT can re-enlist, post-DADT. All this is significant, for accuracy’s sake, but, pace Sebastian, I don’t see that it affects the logic of the post. It doesn’t make sense for Santorum to think BOTH that the soldier should be involuntarily discharged without compensation (which I’m sure is his position) AND to believe Hill is doing an excellent job AND to hope he finished out his tour successfully. An involuntary discharge is still worse than a boo.]

Suppose Stephen Hill had confessed to any other thing that might get him a double D (again, I ain’t talking about Daniel Davies) an involuntary discharge. Suppose he said he was always drunk on duty [severely schizophrenic] and was worried that eventually he might be severely disciplined [discharged] for that, and wanted some verbal assurance from the candidates that they would see to it he wouldn’t be. Would conservatives be lining up to say, sorry, you will have to be disciplined [discharged], but we thank you for your heroic service to your country and are sure you have been doing an excellent, drunk [schiozphrenic] job? I think not.

Getting back to Geraghty’s post, it makes no sense to say that, whatever one thinks of DADT, one should be opposed to booing gay soldiers. No. Because if you are in favor of DD’ing [involuntarily discharging] gay soldiers, just for being gay, you think a few boos is too good for him.

What’s going on here? Well, for sure it’s cognitive dissonance. On one level, all these conservatives are ‘operational’ liberals. Confronted with an individual, gay soldier, their instinct is to say that it doesn’t matter what his private life is like, so long as he’s doing his duty. Booing the soldier is shameful, because he’s done nothing that deserves being booed. These conservatives are ‘closet tolerants’ about homosexuality, would be another way to put it. Even Santorum. On some level. Hence his nonsensical response to Hill’s question, to the effect that re-instituting DADT would be simply a means of assuring that homosexuals don’t get special sexual rights. That is, Santorum is at pains to make it sound as though, in the eyes of the law and military regulations, homosexuality and heterosexuality must be regarded equally. (Of course, Santorum is not actually in favor of dishonorably discharging heterosexual soldiers who ‘out’ themselves as such by getting straight married, for example. Yes, he’s talking complete nonsense. But he’s doing so because he feels obliged to make certain ‘liberal’ assumptions in making his case.)

So saying Santorum is an ‘operational’ liberal is half the story at best, even operationally speaking. He – and everyone else on the stage who might have a shot at the Presidency – is perfectly prepared to take the necessary steps to ensure the ruination of Stephen Hill’s professional career. So Stephen Hill should take zero practical consolation from the thought that, personally, Santorum thinks Stephen Hill is doing an excellent job. At this point the pretzel logic moral psychology gets pretty complicated and, as a result, necessarily speculative. Trying to guess what Santorum is ‘really thinking’ will ultimately get us nowhere. I doubt Santorum knows what Santorum is ‘really thinking’ when he emits something as nonsensical as the response he gave to the soldier’s question. He probably thinks what he is saying makes sense. Would be my guess.

Let me try to outline a coherent view of the psychology here (I’m not really defending the view now, just sketching it). American conservatives tend to be ‘philosophical’ conservatives but ‘operational’ liberals. (Let’s keep in mind that all generalizations need to be modified by ‘some’. There are no exceptionless universal generalizations hereabouts. There are only general tendencies.) That is, American conservatives like conservative slogans – conservative rhetoric – but, in practice, they don’t like the implications of those slogans, if they were to be taken literally and seriously. This produces ‘get your government hands off my medicare!’ type attitudes. And candidates who do things like write books in which they imply that Social Security is unconstitutional; then, when called on the practical implications of that proposition, pull back. But there’s another dynamic, which is related but even weirder. Conservatives seem to like liberal premises – in the eyes of the law, straights and gays should be treated equally – but conservative conclusions to arguments from those premises – gays should not be treated equally. Hence Santorum’s official argument. Which pretty much consists of that one liberal premise, leading to that conservative conclusion.

It’s hard even to describe Santorum as a ‘closet tolerant’ at this point. After all, he’s publicly said that he thinks Stephen Hill is doing an excellent job and should not be booed. He’s publicly committed to the proposition that what we need is equality – no ‘special’ rights for any one sexual orientation. And yet, ‘philosophically’, he’s a conservative, so ‘ideally’, the likes of Stephen Hill should be dishonorably involuntarily discharged. Only what’s the status of this ‘ideal’, given that the actually existing Stephen Hill should not even be boo’ed, let alone DD’ed [involuntarily discharged]?

It’s a bit like the question about letting the uninsured die. Conservatives who say we should do this, in principle, would like to think that upholding this principle would lead to a world in which – due to the magic of private charity and strong economy and strong families and rugged individualistic so forth – in practice no one would die. In an ideal world, awkward cases wouldn’t arise (or so much more rarely than now that we could tolerate them.) So, for advocates of this sort of libertarian ideal, confronting the ideal picture with the awkwardness of actual world awkward cases seems to miss the attractions of the ideal. I”m not sympathetic to the specifics in this case, but I don’t think it’s an incoherent way to think about ideal political philosophy.

But this sort of thinking gets much weirder when we are thinking not about some unfortunate person lacking health insurance, but rather about a gay soldier like Stephen Hill, worrying about DADT. I think it’s probably safe to say that Santorum thinks that, in an ideal world, there wouldn’t be people like Stephen Hill. Not because we’ve killed them all. (I don’t think Santorum is a closet eliminationist, by any means.) But, somehow, in a healthy society, this sort of case would cease to arise, so embarrassingly. So therefore it doesn’t feel (to Santorum) like the sort of case that really demands that he rethink his ideals.

No doubt many of you will think I’m overthinking this. Maybe so. But I persist in thinking there’s a strong, quite stable, and really quite distinctive cognitive dissonance that has characterized American conservative thought since at least the 1960’s. I don’t think anyone – including me – has ever really pinned down it’s distinctive characteristics. It’s not right to say it’s just hypocrisy, or lying. (There is that, of course. But it’s not just that.) It’s self-serving double-think, to be sure, but its double nature is of a fairly high philosophical order. The self that is consistently served illegitimate double-portions is not just the electoral self, that wants to win or get paid, but the philosophical self, that wants to be right, in principle. It’s a status thing. An amour propre thing, in Rousseau’s sense. But I for sure don’t have time to talk about that today.