Wanting the Water Pitcher to be both broken and unbroken

Last week David Boaz had a post/article up at Reason\, pointing out that there is something odd – that would be one word for it – about deploring the erosion of American freedom without noticing that, in fact, there is pretty obviously more of the stuff than there used to be, by any reasonable measure. Boaz’ title and subtitle pretty much say it all, to the point where you wonder whether it even needs to be said at all: “Up From Slavery – There’s no such thing as a golden age of lost liberty”.

One of Boaz’ fellow libertarians, Jacob Hornberger – cited by Boaz as a case in point of this odd Golden Age-ism – made a response which made the same damn obvious mistake all over again. His post – “Up from Serfdom – How to restore lost liberties while building on the positive strides America has made since 1776” – hearkens to the good old days of the 80’s – 1880’s, that is: [click to continue…]

Apparently David Frum got fired from AEI. Bruce Bartlett sees it as a further sign of the closing of the conservative mind. But maybe there are two sides to the story. Or maybe just one side – a totally different side. At any rate, we shouldn’t just drink the kool-aid. Over at the Corner, Daniel Foster reveals that, apparently, Frum was offered a chance to keep his job at no pay, and declined. So I guess he wasn’t fired for what he wrote! (Why don’t more employers offer employees this sort of option, rather than firing them?) Nothing to see here. Next post up the page: K-Lo suggests Israel should change it’s name to ‘Iran’. “No pressure, no impolite diplomatic language, no pushing it to give up land.” Yes, it’s hard to see the downside, isn’t it? It’s not as though Israel receives U.S. aid – material or otherwise – in any way, shape or form that Iran currently does not. Thank goodness the conservative mind is still open and thinking things through in an altogether sensible sort of way.

Ramesh Ponnuru:

Understandably, Cornyn doesn’t want to touch the most popular element of Obamacare, the ban on discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. But unless it’s modified substantially, the individual mandate has to stay too — and therefore so do the subsidies and the minimum-benefits regs. Without perhaps realizing it, Cornyn has come out for tinkering at the edges of Obamacare.

This is the problem the Dems faced (well, one of them), just in reverse: namely, what you want is uncontroversial and small-seeming. But in order to ask for that one thing, you have to ask for all this other heavy-duty stuff. Now, in reverse, the Reps can’t object to the heavy-duty stuff without getting pinned to the charge that they want to do really gratuitously, pettily awful stuff.

I predict that Cornyn is ahead of the curve. Soon it will have been the common wisdom all along. Basically for the reasons Ponnuru outlines. There will never be a moment when any large number of Republicans announce they’ve changed their minds, of course. (In 1994 and even until 2006 the individual mandate was moderate – then in 2009 and especially in early 2010 it was radical from the get-go – then in late 2010 it continued on, moderate as ever.)

I hereby lay my bet as to when the flip will take place: immediately after 2010 primary season. During the primaries, Republicans will be strongly and vocally in favor of total repeal, a unified front against being primaried from the right. Then, after the primaries, all that will fade, like a dream upon waking. Blogs and the conservative commentariat will be slightly slower but will catch up before the 2010 general. By 2012 the apocalyptic rhetoric will have faded so far from memory that Mitt Romney will be able to run as a Republican, without having to run from himself. Of course someone will point this out, but it won’t matter that much. Heat of the moment stuff. Ancient history.

Of course I could be wrong. What do you think?

In <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/comments/1269/”>comments to a post</a> over at my newly-renamed Other Place, a person by the handle of FrogProf directed me to <a href=”http://suburbdad.blogspot.com/2009/04/project-based-education-response-to.html”>this discussion</a> of <a href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html?_r=2&ref=opinion”>Mark Taylor’s recent (and very strange) <i>New York Times</i> op-ed</a>.  Taylor’s essay is modestly titled “End the University as We Know It,” and the response, from (as it says on the blog banner) a veteran of cultural studies seminars in the 1990’s who has since moved into academic administration, takes apart Taylor’s proposal for replacing departments with temporary topic-clusters with seven-year sunset clauses:

<blockquote>I’m at a loss to explain where all these interdisciplinary experts will get their disciplinary expertise. Yes, a significant part of grad school involves exploring new questions. But another significant part — the part he skips — involves getting grounding in the history of a given line of inquiry. Call it a canon or a discipline or a tradition, but it’s part of the toolkit scholars bring to bear on new questions. Abandoning the toolkit in favor of, well, ad hoc autodidacticism doesn’t really solve the problem. If anything, it makes existing grads even less employable than they already are. I need to hire someone to teach Intro to Sociology. Is a graduate of a program in “Body” or “Water” capable? How the hell do I know? (And even if I think I do, can I convince an accrediting agency?) Am I taking the chance? In this market? Uh, that would be ‘no.'</blockquote>

I agree that Taylor’s proposal is unworkable, but I have a tangential-but-related point.  Challenging the departmental structure of universities (whatever you might think of that project) isn’t the same thing as doing away with <i>disciplines</i>.

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At the blog newcritics, Chuck Tryon points out something I would have missed otherwise, given the need to avoid national news magazines in the interest of anger management:

Newsweek, of all places, has a fascinating intellectual exercise in which they ask several of their film and media writers to name one popular culture text that “exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush.” Obviously, the idea of capturing the zeitgeist of eight often turbulent years with a divided electorate and a fractured media landscape is an impossibility. No single text can encompass the tragedy of September 11, the war in Iraq, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, the housing bubble and collapse, and our news media’s often vacuous response to all of these events. But the Newsweek writers offer some interesting choices, ones that collectively seem to move toward capturing some sense of Bush-era culture.

I tend to think Battlestar Galactica wins, hand’s down. (Per earlier item.) See the rest of Chuck T’s entry here.

Scott is probably too self-deprecating to point to this excellently “funny and devastating review”:http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081006/mclemee of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s latest effusion, but I’m not him, and hence have no compunctions. It’s impossible to pick out a favorite bit so I won’t.

Ramesh Ponnuru:

Hillary Clinton on McCain: “In 2008, he still thinks it’s okay when women don’t earn equal pay for equal work.” Right: Opposing the Lily Ledbetter Act means approving of unequal pay for women. What a disgusting comment.

But what’s disgusting about it, from a conservative perspective? She seems to be making a point of being scrupulously accurate. In this context, saying ‘it’s okay’ amounts to saying that the thing in question is maybe a little bad, but it doesn’t matter much, so you needn’t – therefore shouldn’t – do anything about it. As in: ‘do you need a band-aid for that?’ ‘No, it’s ok.’ A sense that unequal pay for women ‘is ok’, in this sense, is precisely the reason one would oppose the Lily Ledbetter Act. It’s an attempt to solve a non-problem. There will be costs associated with the legislation, in the form of lawsuits. And there will be no significant benefits. This does indeed seem to be the position, at least at the Corner. Reading up and down: [click to continue…]

This is a follow-up to this post from Chris B., about “wanting not to get what you want”. I want to consider the converse (inverse, whatever it is) per my title. A paragraph from the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy entry for “Punishment”:

“To seek to be punished because one likes it, is pathological, a perversion of the normal response, which is to shun or endure one’s punishment as one might other pains, burdens, deprivations, and discomforts. (Only among the Raskolnikovs of the world is one’s deserved punishment welcomed as a penance.) To try to punish another without first establishing control over the would-be punishee is doomed to failure. But the power to punish — as distinct from merely inflicting harm on others – cannot be adventitious; it must be authoritative and institutionalized under the prevailing political regime.” [click to continue…]