You start a conversation, you can’t even finish it

Unspoken communal understandings can lead to a lot of years-long unnecessary social taboos and prejudice. I think immigrants feel this brunt especially hard. This article indicates how bad it can be: http://lawblog.legalmatch.com/2009/05/14/most-removed-immigrants-not-criminals-data-shows/

You don’t realize what you’re not saying.

the “people gravitate toward positions that seem to best preserve unspoken communal understandings” argument is just lazy and bad and also wrong.

It’s also Conservative wishful thinking: that the majority have taken time to think about the issue and decided out of purely rational self interest, that they aren’t comfortable with all this modern progress like gay marriage (and a socially democratic safety net) and express this purely through the medium of voting for the old white man with the most homespun image. It assumes that there’s 1) a concerted effort of reflection being performed and 2) that the majority of Americans, upon performing step 1, decide that WASPy values circa 1955 are the best possible values to halt the heedless progressive agenda.

Anyway, the point remains that the “people gravitate toward positions that seem to best preserve unspoken communal understandings” argument is just lazy and bad and also wrong.

I suspect the point is right. *However*, what people understand the communal understanding to be can change quite a bit (and be manipulated, if you’re careful).

My example is drunk driving. When I was a kid, the government had just started to come down hard on drunk driving. The general feeling seemed to be that the courts were being unduly harsh and failing to understand social norms. However, for the middle class, another norm is that the courts are usually about right. Over time, in the eyes of many people, the fact that the punishment for this offense was draconian made the crime a terrible one in their minds.

What’s interesting is the people didn’t feel their attitudes changing. You ask people did they change, and the answer is generally no, because they’re measuring it relative to the social norm rather than in absolute terms.

So, Brooks can be right about this, and wrong about the long term stability of social norms.

“people gravitate toward positions that seem to best preserve unspoken communal understandings”

That’s the way the founding fathers did it, by gum.

Yo, Bubba! And Scalia reminds us that he interprets a “dead constitution.”

Saw a fleeting reference not long ago about Prop. 8 opponents who wanted the California Supremes to have it resubmitted to the public rewritten along the lines of: “Resolved, citizens with a particular sexual orientation shall be deprived of certain civil rights enjoyed by all other citizens.” Or something like that. Tell people in no uncertain terms what they are voting to do. Would it have made a difference?

Shorter Brooks: “times change, values don’t”–the language of a car commercial from a while back, which, I think, is just right, as Brooks’ job is to sell a fantasy America……

As for David Brooks’ America, I wouldn’t live there if you paid me to.

Actually, Iowa for instance isn’t such a bad place to live. A bit boring and barren, granted, but that has it’s own charm and the people are pretty nice and tolerant.

the “people gravitate toward positions that seem to best preserve unspoken communal understandings” argument is just lazy and bad and also wrong.

It’s also Conservative wishful thinking: that the majority have taken time to think about the issue and decided out of purely rational self interest, that they aren’t comfortable with all this modern progress like gay marriage (and a socially democratic safety net) and express this purely through the medium of voting for the old white man with the most homespun image. It assumes that there’s 1) a concerted effort of reflection being performed and 2) that the majority of Americans, upon performing step 1, decide that WASPy values circa 1955 are the best possible values to halt the heedless progressive agenda.

I don’t think Brooks thinks people think that. I think he thinks that, precisely, they don’t think, and I think he thinks that it’s better that they not think. At least I think that’s what he thinks.

I forgot:

Karl Rove — got to guy on what an unprincipled right-wing political operator like Karl Rove would think about things.

But is it possible that the trajectory from Loving and the apparent trajectory on gay rights, but the lack of trajectory on abortion might mean that progressives aren’t as right on abortion as they were in the other cases?

regarding the US at least:

Has anyone investigated the possibility that folks collectively felt a little sheepish after (1) thousands of brave-as-hell homosexuals publicly announced their orientation and demanded recognition, and (2) the “being gay causes AIDS” frenzy washed out of the mainstream and the HI virus was causally isolated?

I still see “AIDS information” stickers all over the place in university bathrooms etc, patiently explaining that no, AIDS is not a curse levied on the homosexuals, and no, you won’t get AIDS by looking at them or being touched by them. Apparently there was something of a psychic crisis in the United States, somewhat recently in the past, over this virus and its means of transmission? Perhaps the fallout from that induced some sympathy?

Or it could be the religious right’s decades-long full-court press against Roe v. Wade. When I taught high school, a preacher would come in during lunch time, weekly, and have a Bible study session. The topics? (1) abortion is murder, and (2) intelligent design is being suppressed because it so obviously devastates conventional science with its Logic.

It’s all part of a well-organized and well-coordinated religious movement. They held annual “day of silence for the silenced” protests in school. I forget the website, but it’s a statewide thing, if not nationwide. They’d take weekend field trips to [local big city] to see screenings of movies together. The focus was 90% of the time “the abortion Holocaust” (actual phrase!) and 10% “the suppression of evidence” (for God, for ID, etc).

Is that at least worth looking at?

Yes. So is the sun. Exercising considerable discernment is necessary.

I prefer Cicero. He may have regretted the trend in values, but at least he understood that there was one.

It is surely worthwhile, if you are investigating this as an academic, to consider the cases that go backwards; the most obvious recent cases of which are ERA and abortion.

ERA was way on track until Phyllis and friends stopped it (which would seem to indicate that the consensus Brooks is so proud of may not exist, even when the chattering classes claim it does, or may be very very thin).

Abortion, as I understand it, was widely accepted by Protestant churches at the time of Roe v Wade, and that in fact it was demonized not through grass roots agitation but as part of a deliberate strategy to deflect attention away from miscellaneous sins of Protestant churches at the time and in the recent past — if anyone is interested, here are some note I wrote on this in an email to a friend, because the topic struck me as both so interesting and so far from the story we’ve all been told:
(Sorry cut and past loses the formatting that made the email easier to understand, but the gist remains if you care to read through.)

—————————

Kevin Drum posts (on the occasion of the death of Jerry Falwell

The religious right’s creation myth holds that Roe v Wade so outraged the faithful that they could no longer sit passively on their pews. As the Columbia University historian Randall Balmer has shown, this is nonsense. The Southern Baptist Convention, Falwell’s denomination, was officially pro-choice throughout the 1970s; anti-abortion activism was seen as the province of Catholics, a group then widely despised by fundamentalist Protestants. No, what really galvanized the religious right were Supreme Court rulings stripping whites-only Christian academies, like the one Falwell founded in 1966, of their tax-exempt status. Fervent opposition to abortion, which eventually cemented the alliance between conservative Protestant and Catholics, came later.
A comment follows up with

The Christian right was morally humiliated by the civil rights movement. Preachers like Falwell who’d defended segregation were painfully aware that the wider culture viewed their politics as unchristian & immoral. In response, they sought to reassert their moral status, retake the high ground, put their tormentors on the defensive, by shifting the center of public moral discourse from issues of race & poverty to those of sexuality. If not for the tremendous resentment white Southern conservatives felt in the wake of the civil rights movement, the emotional energy behind fundamentalist Protestant anti-abortion activism would have been much weaker.

A subsequent comment adds

The first IRS restrictions were laid down under the Nixon administration, but the real firestorm came later. It was becoming evident that a number of segregation academies were still benefitting from tax-exempt status in the late ’70s, so Carter’s IRS Commissioner Jerome Kurtz tightened the regulations.
And

Another conservative myth is that the Supreme Court forced something on the states that no one wanted.

They forget about the wave of states that were liberalizing their abortion laws during the late ’60s and early ’70s. These weren’t just blue states like New York and California (where Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the abortion liberalization law), but also places like North Carolina.

And

I have argued for a number of years that a large portion of the Christian right has used abortion as a code for racism because it is a more acceptable stance in the wider culture.Instead of going after the “libruls” on race, they can go after them for abortions, tolerance of different sexual preferences, “activist courts” etc. The real proof is that they have stood by the Republican party which apart from paying lipservice to anti abortion policies really has not done as much on that score as it has in keeping policies designed to help minorities in check. The real problem for the Republicans is immigration–the Christian right hates the brown people as much as the black people, but too many Republicans like to exploit the cheap labor.

Evidenced by

Why the recognition of Zimbabwe? [Someone earlier mentioned Falwell’s views on Zimbabwe]

They supported the breakaway white government of Rhodesia, on which see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unilateral_Declaration_of_Independence_(Rhodesia )

Similar to white racist support for the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Again, this reinforces the idea that anti-abortion politics for these people was driven in part by a displacement of resentment over their defeat by racial liberals. Most Southern white racists preferred to think of themselves as “just good people,” & anti-abortion moralizing represented a form of asymmetrical warfare against critics of their racism, an opportunity to reassert their sense of righteousness, which gallingly had been called into question by the civil rights movement.

And more evidence
As the anti-apartheid movement (the group of activists I came out of) was gathering steam in the 80’s, and Coca-Cola and Kodak were feeling the heat of boycotts, Falwell was advising his followers to invest in South Africa, and buy all the Krugerrands they could get their hands on.

+1 What magistra said.

Also, abortion is a medical procedure, not an identity trait. It’s something you have done (to you), not something you are. It doesn’t make sense to compare gay rights to the right to have an abortion in a “coming out” context: it’s not reasonable to suggest that women who have had abortions should “come out” and identify themselves; chances are the abortion is not a scorned aspect of their identity.

Off-topic, but here it is anyway:

A few years ago, when I was considering buying a used pickup truck, I thought I would decorate it with a decal of Calvin peeing on the words ‘David Brooks.’ It would have been impractical to have the truck, but almost worth it to have the sticker.

Re: 28

I’ve heard the rise of the Religious Right referred to as the Fourth Great Awakening.

More and more, I think that it actually was the Last Gasp of the Confederacy.

“…because it means “people tend to be near the social norm at any one point in history.”

Well there ya go. To actually point out change over time is antithetical to the conservative revolution…movement…noise fest. Near as I can tell, the uber-conservative, authoritarian impulse – the one that moves the movement – is to stop history. As long as “they” are the ones instituting and administering the social norm at the end point. This is “Left Behind” theology 101 and involves much death and destruction in the name of infinite peace, love and the correctly guided social norm. I digress.

Why would anyone want to save Brooks? He’s professionally disingenuous, and given to misrepresenting research. When called on it, he always claims to have been looking at the big picture.

Basically, he’s a professional apologist for the corporatist state, with an appealing manner.

Come on. There are no liberals outside of your head that are bothered by the fact that King was a minister.

Plus, I was around and a devout Protestant in the 70s, and your description of the history is completely wrong. It happened almost exactly as Maynard described.

I have long ago stopped reading Christopher Hitchins (and I don’t know if he still counts as a liberal) but doesn’t he play down King’s religious side?

I don’t know. Does he?

You know, that very sequence of events drove me to become an orthodox Maoist. I guess my commitment to the people is just a little bit greater than yours, Michael.

As I was trying to say, if you are an atheist liberal who believes that religion is wholly bad and should have no influence in politics, MLK is a serious problem for your position.

Does not follow. Was it a cabal of atheists holding him down?

Keith,

If you want to try and read all of my comment, you will note that I specifically mention that some atheists might think MLK was an exception to the general bad influence of religion on politics. The claim by Walt @40 was that no liberals were bothered by the fact that MLK was a minister. I was simply trying to point out that a few atheists, such as Christopher Hitchins were, and that this was logically consistent with his view that nothing good could ever come out of religious belief. I don’t think that is a widespread view among atheists (although I presume many think that more evil than good comes out of religion), but it is a view that exists.

I am no Atheist, more Agnostic than anything. I find religion to mirror the morals of society, rather than dictate it. In that sense it’s equivalent to an opinion really. Never absolutely coming out on any side of a debate. There are Evangelicals that feel differently about Gay Marriage albeit a minority. But some feel that religion does dictate morality and therefore is an authority on it simply because it is religion. I viscerally reject these notions. Otherwise religion is not a problem one way or another.

Salient,
I think it’s not quite that neat. Abortion/pregnancy is tied to the inescapable fact of being born a woman (and “distressed,” as E. St. V. M. put it). In that sense, since every act of sex potentially leads to one or the other, I would say we’re closer to “identity trait” than you think. An abortion may be something you have done to you (gahd, I hate that passive construction applied to female experiences) but it’s one half of the visible effect of an outcome from something women are; something that men are not. If, as magister said above, more women like me would come out about their elective abortions and the circs, maybe that would become clearer, but most women, like me, won’t come out, except on the anonymous internet, because the stigma –“murderess”–is far greater than than the stigma of, say, “pervert.” Being a pervert just got you jail in the olden days. Being a murderess, well, we know what that still gets you.

Even the burden of contraception falls harder on women than on men. Ask any college student you know what she’s paying for the pill since the last Republican Congress removed the incentive for pharmaceutical companies to supply college clinics w contraceptives at low cost–about $30+ a month whether she’s having it on or not, plus one mandatory doctor’s visit and pap per year $75. Then ask her if her boyfriend subsidizes any of this. Not likely. Then calculate the cost of a box of rubbers and no mandatory doctor expense. And if you skip the contraceptives, well it’s back to the choice: abortion or pregnancy, both emotionally and financially costly and fraught with demeaning and terrifying moments, with the whole world your judge. It’s a man’s world, friends, and that’s why gay rights had to leapfrog reproductive freedom.