Henry

Harry’s mention “below”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/01/25/look-and-learn/ of finding a comic strip from his youth on the internets made me think about the cultural ephemera that the Internet does and doesn’t preserve. Lots of stuff out there that people have scanned or Youtubed that I was delighted to find again decades after first seeing it. Lots of stuff, however, that isn’t available at all. Two of my favourite things that seem to have slipped down the memory hole (if I’m wrong, of course I would love to be told so, and more to the point, given the URLs).

(1) The famous ‘mothers of prevention’ confrontation between Jello Biafra and Tipper Gore when the latter was on her rampage against naughty rock lyrics and bad thoughts in teenagers. I remember this as having been a gloriously entertaining demolition job by Biafra (but the best part of two decades afterwards, my memory may be faulty or my standards of judgment may have shifted).

(2) Kevin McAleer’s sketches about the old days. These were broadcast on the comedy show ‘Nighthawks,’ which used to be on late at night on RTE, Ireland’s national TV station in the early 1990s. I suspect that you’d have to be Irish to really have gotten the humour – but the soft accent, the gentle, pixillated stare with which he’d not-quite-fix the camera, and the rapid degeneration of anecdotes purveying rural nostalgia into the most demented surrealism were pretty wonderful.

Neither seem to be available (although there are indications that the Biafra-Gore match was once to be found). Further suggestions of pieces of popular culture that ought to be, but aren’t preserved on the nets are welcome in comments, of course.

“The Monkey Cage”:http://www.themonkeycage.org writes about an experiment on people’s perceptions of photos of a young woman wearing a headscarf and without one. I don’t see any information on how careful the surveyors were to ensure randomness, whether they carried out statistical tests of significance etc etc (this appears to have been put together by a general social research firm, rather than academics). Still, if the results don’t have major problems, then they make for interesting reading. Not all the inferences that people make about the veiled, as opposed to the unveiled woman, seem unreasonable. Unsurprisingly, more people consider the woman to be more conservative when they see the headscarf photo (this seems to me to be not an unreasonable inference; people who display overt symbols of religiosity often are more conservative). But there are some other judgements that are a little bit less pleasant.

Subjects displayed considerably more aversion to the covered woman. Specifically, they were less likely to want to live near her. While 89% said that they would like the uncovered woman as their next-door neighbor or in their neighborhood, only 62% said that about the covered woman. One-fifth (19%) actually said they wanted her to live “outside of the US.”

More “here”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2008/01/headscarves.html.

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So I did a “bloggingheads”:http://www.bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/8080 a few days ago with Dan Drezner, where we discussed the Jonah Goldberg liberofascism book, and whether or not it was fair to dismiss it without having read it (my answer was emphatically yes: when the dude stops “pretending to do research”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/10/off_in_bizarrow.html perhaps I’ll start pretending to take him seriously; then again, given his past form, my limited time resources etc, perhaps not). But in retrospect, maybe this was the wrong question to debate. I’m intrigued by the question of precisely why Goldberg apparently expects this book to be given sober consideration as an important intellectual contribution to debate between the left and the right etc. [click to continue…]

“Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/01/do-the-cossacks.html disagrees with “Timothy Burke”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=486 on the practical consequences of the inscrutability of motivations among key figures in the Bush administration. Not only do I think Brad is right on this, but his arguments (with the addition of a healthy dollop of economic sociology) help elucidate what’s happening in this “post”:http://balkin.blogspot.com/2008/01/real-cia-tapes-scandal-that-everyone-is.html by Marty Lederman. [click to continue…]

I started to write a snarky post about this “Richard Cohen”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/14/AR2008011402083.html?hpid=opinionsbox1 article and then gave up. It’s too bad a piece to warrant flipness. Cohen finds out (he doesn’t say how, but this has been circulating around the “nastier right wing websites”:http://www.newsmax.com/kessler/obama_wright_farrakhan/2008/01/14/64332.html for a little while) that a magazine associated with Barack Obama’s church in Chicago, and run by his pastor, honoured Louis Farrakhan last year. He then insists that Barack Obama immediately express his outrage. [click to continue…]

My mate “Jim Johnson”:http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com/2008/01/against-bi-partisanship.html has a very nice post on the problems with bipartisanship.

In terms of consequences, why should we endorse bi-partisanship? That is a fundamentally _anti-democratic_ response. Here I am persuaded by argument by political theorists who, following Joseph Schumpeter (whose conception of democracy is, despite common caricatures, neither a ‘realist’ nor ‘minimalist’), insist that robust competition is crucial to a healthy democracy. For instance, Ian Shapiro* suggests that competition has two salutary effects: (i) it allows voters to throw out incumbents (known more appropriately as ‘the bastards’) and (ii) it pressures the opposition to solicit as wide a range of constituencies as they are able. Given these effects, Shapiro suggests quite pointedly:

bq. If competition for power is the lifeblood of democracy, then the search for bi-partisan consensus … is really anticompetitive collusion in restraint of democracy. Why is it that people do not challenge legislation that has bi-partisan backing, or other forms of bi-partisan agreement on these grounds? …

… Among the crucial empirical observations about partisan polarization in the U.S. is that it reflects the economic bifurcation (in terms of wealth and income mal-distribution) among the population. Because the poor participate at relatively low levels, and because many recent immigrants remain unnaturalized (hence disenfranchised), the constituency for a real alternative to right-wing policies remains politically inchoate. The solution to political polarization is to attack economic inequality, to resist anti-immigration policies, and so forth. That might, in fact, require Democrats to stop their headlong rush to mimic Republicans and prompt them to seek to forge broader and deeper alliances between constituencies that do not now see one another as allies. But that would require the Dems to be political rather than play the bi-partisan game. What we need is more robust competition.

This “piece”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3f03314e-bd3e-11dc-b7e6-0000779fd2ac.html by Stefan Theil in the _FT_ today on the biases of French and German high school economics textbooks is pretty bad, but it turns out to consist of edited extracts from an “even worse essay”:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4095 that he’s published in _Foreign Policy._ [click to continue…]

One of the commenters to my post below suggested that Mike Huckabee was unlikely to do well among Catholics. “Philip Klinkner”:http://polysigh.blogspot.com/2008/01/huckabee-and-catholics.html (who is really blogging interesting stuff on the races) has some county-level data from Iowa suggesting that this is true.

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GOP caucus results (counties won by Huckabee in blue; by Romney in red)

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Distribution of Catholics in Iowa (the redder the county, the more Catholics)

An eyeballing of the graph suggests that the parts of the state where Huckabee had most trouble were indeed, more often than not, those places where there were more Catholics. Klinkner runs a regression testing how percentage of population religious, percentage of population Catholic, percentage of population evangelical, and percentage of population rural affected voting for Huckabee, and finds that the coefficient for Catholicism is negative, high, and statistically significant.

Update see “here”:http://polysigh.blogspot.com/2008/01/huckabee-and-catholics-again.html for Klinkner’s response to some of the methodological criticisms.

Via Neil Gaiman, I see that “George MacDonald Fraser”:http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/01/mostly-mailbag.html, author of the Flashman novels, has died.

I don’t think I’ve got stick for liking Kipling’s work for a good twenty years now, and the people I got stick from back then hadn’t read Kipling — they just knew he was a Bad Thing. … Having said that, I also find the “Good old Flashman, what a great and lovable fellow he was,” tone of some of the obituaries and blogs faintly perplexing. For me, the joy of Flashman as a character is that he wasn’t a great fellow at all: he was a monster and a coward, shifty, untrustworthy, a bully and a toady and dangerous to boot. … I like the early books best, in which he does a lot of running away. In the later books, people expect him to act heroically, and, often to avoid losing face, he actually does, which I found a bit of a disappointment. It’s more fun when events conspire to make his attempts to do something petty and self-serving, or at least his attempts to save his skin or get laid, appear to be heroic.

Gaiman however doesn’t make explicit quite how much of a monster Flashman is. In the first of the books, Flashman gets turned down by a dancing girl called Narreeman. When he has the chance later, he rapes her in a quite matter-of-fact way, showing no particular compunctions or mixed feelings; he has his chance to get her alone, and he takes it. As Gaiman suggests, the later entries in the series soften Flashman’s character considerably. They depict him as a bully, a liar and a shit, but a conventional bully, liar and shit. The (I would imagine mostly male) readers of the book can enjoy his bad behaviour in these later books without having to think about it, or themselves, too much. But the rape scene in the first book breaks that illusion, making clear what the modern reader might prefer to forget; that men like Flashman in the nineteenth century wouldn’t have had many qualms at all about raping ‘native’ women.

As a result, the Flashman books have always creeped me out, even though I can recognize that they’re very well written. The author expects you to enjoy Flashman’s caddishness and identify with it, while quietly making it obvious that Flashman isn’t so much charmingly self-centered as he is an amoral and vicious thug. Which probably means that they’re better books in a sense (as Gaiman says, you learn things from books that present worldviews you disagree with, or even abominate), but also spoils the ‘fun,’ at least for me.

A sort of follow-up to my last post, which began from the assumption that Huckabee had zero chance of winning the nomination. But what if he does? NB that I’m wearing my Irresponsible Speculator hat, not my Professional Political Scientist one in saying this; I’m not the kind of political scientist who knows this stuff at all well in the first place, and I haven’t gone to the trouble of going through the relevant data and articles so as to partially educate myself. But if I were to argue against those who say that Huckabee just can’t win the Republican nomination, my case for the defence would go something like this.

(1) Part 1 of the case against Huckabee winning is that he’s self evidently clueless about international politics, and has bizarre ideas about domestic politics. But does this _really_ hurt him with a Republican base which has been primed for decades to believe that book-larning and expertise are the tools of Evil Coastal Elites. Attacks on his lack of _savoir-faire_ seem to roll off his back, or perhaps even to make his supporters more enthusiastic. Case in point: his ‘negative advertising without negative advertising’ press conference, which was widely portrayed by media elites as having cooked his goose, but which doesn’t seem to have hurt him one bit.

(2) Part 2 of the case against is that Huckabee doesn’t have any sort of real organization. His decisive win in Iowa demonstrates that he doesn’t need one, at least in states that have a strong evangelical movement. He can rely on the pastors getting out the vote for him. This is one that I’m pretty convinced of – he’s demonstrated that much of the conventional wisdom on the need for organization was wrong. Think of this as the evangelical’s revenge on mainstream Republicans. Much of Karl Rove’s success in 2004 depended on using below-the-radar forms of organization in churches etc to get the vote out. This has created an infrastructure that Huckabee seems to be taking over in the absence of any other real evangelical candidate.

(3) Part 3 of the case against is that Huckabee has little appeal beyond the evangelical movement, and that on its own can’t swing it. This seems true on the basis of Iowa – more than 80% of Huckabee voters in entrance polls were self-professed evangelicals. But while this is the strongest element of the case against Huckabee, it may not be determinative. First, if turnout for primary-type events continues to be depressed, it’s highly plausible that evangelicals (who have their candidate and their cause) are going to be more likely to turn up than other Republican voters, giving Huckabee an advantage in states where the evangelicals can plausibly swing it. Second, it doesn’t look as though Romney, McCain or Giuliani are going to pull out any time soon, splitting the non-evangelical vote three ways (or four, if Thompson stays in too) for a while. Third, as noted in an update to my previous post, “Phil Klinkner”:http://polysigh.blogspot.com/2007/12/southernization-of-gop.html argues that Huckabee has an in-built edge because the Republican convention awards lots of bonus delegates to states that support Republican candidates, meaning that the South (with its evangelicals) has disproportionate clout. This seems an _extremely_ stupid policy for a party that wants to expand its appeal, but there you go.

(4) Part 4 of the case against is that Huckabee doesn’t have much money to advertise on TV. But he may be able to raise it in short order (again, evangelicals have excellent fundraising networks), and furthermore, he may not _need_ TV advertising in the primaries as much as conventional candidates. His core voters (a) aren’t likely to change their minds about supporting him easily, and (b) are likely to turn out regardless of people saying mean things about him on the TV.

This is all, as noted above, irresponsible speculation. It may well be that the numbers make it impossible for a candidate whose main base of support is evangelicals to win the primaries. But I haven’t seen any study so far that really demonstrates this (I’d like to see one if it exists). Obviously, feel free to raise objections to any and all of the above claims in comments, or raise new issues as appropriate.

“David Brooks”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/us/politics/04elect.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin interprets Mike Huckabee’s win last night as the harbinger of a populist sea-change in the Republican party.

Some people are going to tell you that Mike Huckabee’s victory last night in Iowa represents a triumph for the creationist crusaders. Wrong. … Huckabee won because he tapped into realities that other Republicans have been slow to recognize. … First, evangelicals have changed. Huckabee is the first ironic evangelical on the national stage. … He’s funny, campy … and he’s not at war with modern culture. … Second, Huckabee understands much better than Mitt Romney that we have a crisis of authority in this country. … he sensed that conservatives do not believe their own movement is well led. He took on Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth and even President Bush. The old guard threw everything they had at him, and their diminished power is now exposed. … Third, Huckabee understands how middle-class anxiety is really lived. Democrats talk about wages. But real middle-class families have more to fear economically from divorce than from a free trade pact. … Huckabee’s victory is not a step into the past. It opens up the way for a new coalition. … A conservatism that recognizes stable families as the foundation of economic growth … A conservatism that loves capitalism but distrusts capitalists … A conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year … Huckabee probably won’t be the nominee, but starting last night in Iowa, an evangelical began the Republican Reformation.

[click to continue…]

Stuff elsewhere on the WWW that I would blog if I wasn’t catching a plane to Ireland in 4 hours …

“Mark Schmitt”:http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_theory_of_change_primary argues that Obama’s bipartisanship is actually a clever strategy for bringing change through.

“Ari Kelman”:http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2007/12/18/aha/ gives tips to job candidates who’ll be attending the _American Historical Association_ meeting.

“Andrew Gelman”:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/12/trends_in_votin.html crunches the numbers to show that while Democrats are gaining support over time from professionals, business owners are going more and more Republican.

Lots of interesting stuff from “Charles Taylor et al.”:http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/ on religion in the public sphere at the _Immanent Frame_.

What happens when a bunch of Harvard pol-sci grad students, with, in Dan Drezner’s “words”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/003646.html, too much time on their hands, decide to make their own version of ‘The Office’?

It works pretty well (a) because _there really aren’t all that many differences_ between academic politics and the office politics of a paper manufacturer, and (b) because while scholars don’t necessarily make great actors, we _do_ have that ‘not quite comfortable in our own skins and trying to make meaningful conversation but having it filled with awkward pauses’ thing down cold.

Via “Duncan Black”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2007_12_16_archive.html#8988643053421061421, Mark Halperin comes up with a “doozy of a metaphor”:http://thepage.time.com/halperins-take-on-drudge-and-the-endgame/.

Why is Drudge highlighting the McCain story, but has not touched other political hot potatoes that are swirling in the ether?

Those potatoes, turning this way and that as eddies and currents in the aether pull at them, heated to the boiling point by its luminiferous qualities. It’s almost as good as David Brooks’ famous “depiction”:http://select.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/opinion/25brooks.html?hp of the Kossacks as squadrons of rabid, venom-unleashing command-lambs. Any other nominations for the most hilariously mangled metaphors and bad political writing of 2007? Halperin sets a high standard, but there must be other competitors out there …