This is, in a silly way, a footnote to my previous Kevin Williamson post, but, more seriously, to my contribution to our Erik Olin Wright event. In my post on Wright I remarked that, in a sense, he’s pushing against an open door: he wants Americans, who think ‘socialism’ is a dirty word, to be more open to utopian thinking. The problem, I pointed out, is that thinking ‘socialism’ is a dirty word is positively, not negatively, correlated with utopianism, because conservatives are, typically, very utopian, especially in their rhetoric – more so than socialists these days; certainly more so than liberals. Wright responded that his project “is not mainly directed at ideologically committed Conservatives whose core values support the power and privilege of dominant classes. The core audience is people who are loosely sympathetic to some mix of liberal egalitarian, radical democratic and communitarian ideals.” [click to continue…]
From the category archives:
US Politics
I know, I know, it’s just another of those ‘How many of you know that Saruman used to walk in the forest, a friend of the trees!’ posts by Kevin Williamson. (See also: Rand Paul at Howard.) But it’s the comments that get me, and make me sorry for all the times I’ve said, ‘A-ha! so there are two Confusatrons!’ rather than saving that line for a more special occasion.
To put it another way: the inability of conservatives to keep their alternative reality stories straight is inducing a kind of minority outreach-as-Crisis On Infinite Earths continuity collapse. There’s our world – call it Earth-1, or Nixonworld – in which Dems got better on civil rights in the 60’s, and Republicans got worse. The Southern Strategy. Then there’s Williamson’s World – sort of like Earth-3, a reverse earth. [click to continue…]
“Clive Crook”:http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-30/paul-krugman-s-proud-war-on-fools-knaves-and-lunatics.html tells us again that Paul Krugman is shrill and angry.
bq. [Krugman] is wrong about many of the people who disagree with him and about the best way to guide opinion. He’s enormously influential with those who need no persuading, which is to say not very influential at all. He would have more influence where it would actually make a difference if he developed — or at least could feign — some respect for those who aren’t his disciples. … Krugman says his opponents are motivated by politics. …. Talk about lack of self-awareness. Does Krugman imagine that he isn’t motivated by politics? A line has been crossed when the principal spokesmen for contending opinions have no curiosity whatsoever about their opponents’ ideas and radiate cold, steady contempt for each other. … Meanwhile, for the side that thinks it has the better arguments, naked contempt for dissenters is plain bad tactics. That isn’t how you change people’s minds.
Clive Crook previously on self-awareness of one’s own political motivations.
bq. “We floating voters”:http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2ca5e1e4-b112-11de-b06b-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2S44pbbZy see things differently. We approve of consensual politics, thinking that it delivers better policies. And we believe this for two main reasons. First, good policy involves trade-offs. … Second, good policy requires stability
bq. “the message”:http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2ca5e1e4-b112-11de-b06b-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2S44pbbZy to the electoral centre was consistent: Mr Obama would have let the left have its way if he could. What he should have done – and what he ought to do from now on – is simple. Instead of blessing leftist solutions, then retreating feebly to more centrist positions under pressure, he should have identified the centrist policies the country could accept and advocated those policies. … The left will tear its hair over another surrender and the centre will note where the president’s sympathies actually lay.
bq. “He should have chosen centrism unreservedly”:http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/95af8f36-9295-11df-9142-00144feab49a.html#axzz2S44pbbZy – as many voters believed he had promised during his election campaign. Then he could have championed, as opposed to meekly accepting, centrist bills that maintained the role of private insurance in healthcare and a stimulus that included big tax cuts. … Had he owned and campaigned for those centrist outcomes, the left would have been no angrier than it is anyway. The anger of the left, like the anger of the right, is always simply on or off: it cannot be modulated. But this fury could then have been co-opted as Mr Obama’s and the Democrats’ best asset going into November – proof to centrists and independents that the president was on their side.
Clive Crook previously on how one should be curious about the ideas of dissenters, rather than treating them with naked contempt.
bq. “The Democratic party’s civil libertarians”:http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/55522abc-4894-11de-8870-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2S44pbbZy seem to believe that several medium-sized US cities would be a reasonable price to pay for insisting on ordinary criminal trials for terrorist suspects.
bq. “Nothing short”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bef99b4c-c9af-11df-b3d6-00144feab49a.html of the Scandinavian model (plus stronger unions, minus the commitment to liberal trade) will ever satisfy the Democratic left. Its role, its whole purpose, is to be betrayed. So betray it, Mr President, and start leading from the centre.
I think it would be fair to say on the evidence that Clive Crook fancies himself as a centrist only interested in the pure and disinterested exercise of good policy judgment, but is in fact strongly (and even irrationally) motivated by his partisan animus against the left. I think it would also be fair to say that he’s at the ‘naked contempt towards dissenters’ end of the spectrum himself when those dissenters have the poor judgment to be leftwing.
Crook closes the column by suggesting:
bq. if Krugman got out of his bubble a bit more, he’d find that the other half of the country contains no more than its fair share of knaves, fools and lunatics — and a lot of thoughtful, public-spirited Americans whose views on the proper scale and scope of government are different from his, yet worthy of respect.
Perhaps Crook might consider taking this advice himself. I’d actually be willing to help set it up for him in the unlikely event that he did.
A couple weeks back the Mercatus Freedom In The 50 States Index came out and there was much bemusement to be had by most. Matthew Yglesias may be wrong on dragons but he was right, I think, that the exercise holds promise chiefly as a solution to a coalition-building problem: how to “simultaneously preserve libertarianism as a distinct brand and also preserve libertarianism’s strong alliance with social conservatism.” Regular old freedom-loving folk, by contrast, will tend to be left cold.
I thought I would add a footnote to this, and give the CT commentariat an opportunity to weigh in. It might seem that the footnote to add is one of the woolly ones, from Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty”: [click to continue…]
It’s now been exactly a decade since Charles Krauthammer “told us that”:http://www.aei.org/events/2003/04/22/iraq-what-lies-ahead-event-3/
Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.
Charles Krauthammer has not only had that five month period, but twenty-three other five month periods after that first one, for weapons of mass destruction to be found. It’s news to no-one that no weapons have been found. It’s news to no-one that the reason they haven’t been found is because they weren’t there in the first place. It’s news to no-one that Charles Krauthammer is still a columnist at the Washington Post, a syndicated columnist across the US, and a regular talking head on TV. It’s news to no-one that Fred Hiatt, his then-boss and fellow Iraq bullshit artist is still the editor of the Washington Post‘s editorial page. Or that Jackson Diehl, who I heard at the time from Washington Post people was even worse than Hiatt, is still there too.
In short, it’s news to no-one that Iraq War related “credibility problems” aren’t really so much of a problem if you’re Charles Krauthammer. Or Fred Hiatt. Or any of the multitudes of journalists or pundits who flagrantly pimped for this disastrous war and hasn’t even gestured towards publicly admitting that they committed a gross dereliction of duty. I think it’s worth remembering Krauthammer day on this blog as long as Krauthammer and the people around him continue to pollute public discourse. I can’t imagine that it’s particularly efficacious, but the alternative of succumbing to the general amnesia seems even less attractive.
In the recent TLS I have an essay on Benn Steil’s new book on Bretton Woods. Unlike some notices, mine is critical. You can read mine here. If you’re interested in the theory, put forward in Steil’s book, that Harry Dexter White caused US intervention in World War II, read below the fold. If you’re more interested in the late Baroness Thatcher, please carry on down to the other posts for today.
I think they really buried the main story at Boing Boing, linking to this LA Times article about Dapper Day at Disneyland.
The two white guys are obviously enormous secret service agents – easily 7 feet tall – and the two white women (just wait until the right wing blogs find out about this!) are pretty big, too.
Not that we need another one. The old ones still work fine. But it seems to me there is one that hasn’t been offered, and isn’t half bad.
Defenders of ‘traditional marriage’ insist 1) that their position is, well … traditional; wisdom of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the history of Western Civilization, etc. etc.; 2) they are not bigots. They are tolerant of homosexuality, and the rights of homosexuals, etc. etc. Maybe they watch the occasional episode of “Will and Grace”, in syndication (even if they didn’t watch it back when it started.) They are careful to distance themselves from those Westboro Baptist Church lunatics, for example.
It’s gotten to the point where one of the main, mainstream arguments against same-sex marriage is that legalizing it would amount to implying that those opposing it are bigots. Since they are not just bigots (see above), anything that would make them seem like bigots must be wrong. Ergo, approving same-sex marriage would be a mistake. Certainly striking down opposition to it as ‘lacking a rational basis’ would be a gross moral insult to non-bigoted opponents of same-same marriage.
This ‘anything that implies we are bigots must be wrong’ argument has problems. But that’s old news. Here’s the new argument. Grant, for argument’s sake, that contemporary arguments against same-sex marriage have been scrubbed free of bigotry. Doesn’t it follow that these arguments must not be traditional but, somehow, quite new? [click to continue…]
This is a follow-up to Corey’s post, I suppose.
Given that concerns about the character of the new Pope are immediately being raised regarding his conduct during the Dirty War and its aftermath, in Argentina, it says something that the National Review editors are attempting a bit of preemptive damage control on a different front. “His counting poverty as a social ill should not be misconstrued as …”
Really? The new Pope is against poverty? The editors looked at what this new Pope is known for; looked down the list of concerns and doubts people might have, upon skimming the first set of news stories, and this jumped out as the thing we need to be reassured isn’t as bad as it might look, because there’s two sides to the story? (It turns out to be ok because he’s not in favor of ‘statist solutions’ to the problem.)
I mean: I could understand if the editors decided to write a pure celebratory piece that didn’t mar the occasion by drawing attention to anything any critics are already saying. But that they decided to let a touch of concern show through, and this showed through – of all things.
And Republicans wonder why people think Republicans don’t care about the poor.
I haven’t watched the video of Sullivan debating same-sex marriage with Douglas Wilson (no, I never heard of him either). To judge from this First Things write-up, I can expect some familiar, bad arguments from the anti- side: first and foremost, a failure to appreciate the sense in which theological arguments ‘can’t be offered’ in this sort of debate (a failure of appreciation at least semi-shared by the author of the First Things piece, Peter Leithart.)
Sullivan demanded that Wilson defend his position with secular, civil arguments, not theocratic ones, and in this demand Sullivan has the support of liberal polity.
Sullivan’s is a rigid standard for public discourse that leaves biblically-grounded Christians with little to say.
The problem isn’t that they can’t be offered – it’s a free country! say what you like! think what you like! It’s that the person offering the argument can’t reasonably expect it to be accepted. It will be – should be – weighed in the balance as a private expression of preference. But someone else’s preference as to how I should behave doesn’t, automatically, carry much weight. [click to continue…]
It’s easy to overestimate the significance of a single electoral cycle (look at the Repubs after 2010), but there really does seem to have been a big shift in US political debate. Of course, that’s from a position where centrists like (first-term) Obama were occupying the positions held by moderate Republicans 25 years ago. It’s reasonable to feel a bit ambivalent about ‘victories’ like repealing the most regressive bits of the wholly regressive Bush tax cuts. A couple of links of interest (a few weeks old, but I’m running behind on most things)
* The Hoover Institution’s Policy Review is ceasing publication, and its final issue includes a piece by longtime editor Tod Lingren who concedes defeat, at least for the moment, to what he calls Left 3.0. This is his name for the self-described “Democratic wing of the Democratic party” which has, in his view, absorbed and tamed the radical left, defeated the Clintonite New Democrats, and dominated the Republicans. Lingren is surprisingly sympathetic, essentially implying that the only thing wrong with Left 3.0 is that too much egalitarianism is bad for economic growth
* Michael Lind gives chapter and verse supporting a view that I advanced a while ago, that US politics is best understood by treating “Southern White” as an ethnicity. There’s an interesting comparison to the now-disappeared nativist movements among Northeastern Yankees in response to Irish and other European immigrants
If US politics does shift to the left, what effects will that have elsewhere? Even the most liberal Democrats would be centrist at best in most countries, and their most radical goals (single-payer health care, a progressive income tax, parental leave and so on) would be uncontroversial in most places, so there won’t be much direct effect. On the other hand, in Australia and other English speaking countries, a large slab of the right wing gets its talking points from the US Republican bubble, via the Murdoch press, and look to an idealised version of the US as a free-market model. If the Repubs are discredited at home, that will create some problems for their followers abroad.
A post by Michael Walsh, at the Corner, advocating repeal of the 19th Amendment:
And women’s suffrage … well, let’s just observe that without it Barack Obama could never have become president. Time for the ladies to take one for the team.
Who’s with me?
Not enough women, would be my back-of-the-envelope guesstimate.
Just so you know I can explain a joke as well as anyone: the form of this ‘repeal the 19th’ joke is that he knows it’s not acceptable to say so. So he says so, knowing people will realize he must be joking. But the thing is: he isn’t! On some level! Otherwise it wouldn’t be funny. But you could never get him to admit that. He’ll always have ‘it was a joke!’ deniability, due to the manifest unacceptability of his opinions. Even though it wouldn’t be a joke unless, on some level, it wasn’t a joke. That’s what makes it hilarious! Hide in plain sight! Anti-feminism ninja! I wonder why more women don’t vote GOP? They must not have a sense of humor. Bwa-ha-ha-ha! Go team! Go team! Go team! (We are so clever. What? We lost again? Dumb broads, this is all their fault.)
I read Jonah Goldberg op-eds; also Media Matters; thus, back to back, this: [click to continue…]
While I was looking at sources for my post on declining middle class access to first-tier college education, I came across this piece by Arthur Brooks, President of the American Enterprise Institute His main point is the possibility of reducing education costs through low-cost distance/online learning, on which I might say more another time[1]. What struck me, though was this passage (emphasis added)
my 10K-B.A. is what made higher education possible for me, and it changed the course of my life. More people should have this opportunity, in a society that is suffering from falling economic and social mobility.
The change on this point has been striking in a matter of a few years. When I was writing Zombie Economics in 2009 and early 2010, I spent a lot of time citing work going back to the 1980s and 1990s to show that the US has less intergenerational income mobility than most European countries. At that time, the conventional wisdom was definitely that the US was characterized by equality of opportunity – there were still plenty of hacks willing to deny that inequality of outcomes had increased, including plenty at AEI.[2]
The Occupy movement played a big role in focusing attention on the general issue of inequality, and once attention was focused, the facts pretty much spoke for themselves. At the other end of the political spectrum, the intellectual collapse of the political right became more and more evident, to the point that they were unable to put up any effective resistance. Instead we got arguments like this from Tyler Cowen, suggesting that maybe social immobility isn’t so bad after all.