Cafeteria Conservatives

David Brooks writes,

So I guess we’re all bailout artists now?

We do seem to have reached some Bernanke-era consensus. In normal times, the free market works well. But in a crisis like this one, few are willing to sit back and let the market find its own equilibrium.

This is consistent with many, probably most, modern "conservatives" - free markets are great when an individual is having a house foreclosed, is drowning in credit card debt, or is bankrupted by medical costs. They're horrible when a large business may fail, and the government had best be fast with a handout.

It's pretty standard for the "there are two types of people" crowd - they latch on to an ideology that purportedly makes them superior to those they oppose ("Conservatives favor free markets; liberals favor handouts"), but make little to no effort to consistently apply those principles. When multi-billion dollar subsidies are handed out to energy companies, even as those companies enjoy record profits, well, that can be ignored. When the markets catch up with a poorly managed company, the market principles that they supposedly embrace can suddenly be ignored because "this is different".

You know what? It goes both ways. I call myself "cheap", my wife says I'm "frugal". But I'm fiscally conservative, in a small "c" sense. I don't like to hand out my money to anyone. I am much more willing to offer people help when they are in a fix that is not of their own making. So I'm much more sympathetic to the financial plight of somebody who is drowning in medical debt than somebody who is drowning in credit card debt arising from self-indulgent spending. I'm not at all sympathetic to the idea that people who are at the top of the economic pyramid need government handouts. Yet that's the Republican approach to energy companies, and corporate welfare in general.

I see the current crisis among financial institutions as analogous to that self-indulgent credit card debt - and view it as unfortunate that the incompetence and corruption involved is on such a large scale that we can't just "let the market take its course." But I see few signs that the Republican Party or the supposedly pro-market leaders of those institutions share my sentiments - at least when their millions are on the line. Citi Group was no doubt lobbying hard for the Bankruptcy Reform Act, to keep people from discharging credit card debt - but it would no doubt leap at its first opportunity to have the government subsidize its debts and nationalize its losses. What would a self-professed "free-market conservative" call such a bailout? Probably something like "bipartisan stimulation".

"My Favorite Philosopher Is Thomas Sowell"

A number of years ago I wrote an entry, "My Favorite Philosopher Is Jesus", that took a jaundiced view of Thomas Sowell's In A Conflict of Visions, an effort to categorize political philosophies into two categories, "constrained" and "unconstrained". As is typical of this type of work, that really translates into "people like me," and "everybody else", with "everybody else" being wrong. Oh, I know, Sowell's proponents argue that he avoids saying, "all those who adhere to an 'unconstrained vision' are wrong," but how dumb would you actually have to be not to discern that message?

The title to that post is, of course, alluding to the conservative's conservative, George W. Bush, describing Jesus as his "favorite philosopher". If G.W. reflects the "constrained vision" to which Sowell would have us aspire, may his favorite philosopher help us.

The other day when I was browsing weblogs, I saw a post on Talking Points Memo,

David Mamet: Why I am no longer a 'brain-dead liberal.'

Okay, I thought, I'll bite.¹ And at the other end of the link I found an intriguing essay written by a man who, although unquestionably bright, has spent sixty years on the planet without spending any discernible time contemplating politics. It's an analysis I might expect from an undergraduate student, who for the first time has come to realize that there is a lot of nuance in the world around him (but better written).

None of the other weblogs I read mentioned this essay. That's perhaps not surprising, given that there's really not much to it. So I did a blog search to find out what others were saying. The first thing I learned was that the essay was given prominent treatment by the Drudge Report - that explains the original link, and also explains the second thing I learned. It's all over the right-leaning blogosphere, with typical expressions being that it is a "brilliant piece of writing", "welcome to the real world", and "liberals are going to hate you for this."² And thus David Mamet is welcomed into the world of shallow politics, a world in which he presently belongs.

I don't mean that as an insult of David Mamet, but it is his own admission that he spent sixty years on the planet without reconsidering political assumptions that were self-contradictory³, at odds with each other⁴, at odds with his body of work⁵, and at odds with the way he lives his life⁶. If he truly believed himself to be a "liberal" throughout those sixty years, he deserves his self-applied label. And while his "awakening" may put him on par with the right-wing bloggers who gush over his essay, I don't think you can read it without the sense that when it comes to political philosophy he is not only far from the deep waters - he is still splashing around in the kiddie pool. A high school student could shred his facile comparison of George W. Bush to J.F.K.

The line that told me exactly where Mamet is coming from was this:

I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.⁷

I doubt I would be the first to point out to him that you can have a profound understanding of economic theory and still be an unabashed liberal. Or maybe I would. But his comment on Sowell provided a context for his entire piece - he read In A Conflict of Visions and, without a second thought, swallowed the theory of "unconstrained" versus "constrained" visions.

This also gives me something of a chuckle, in terms of the warm embrace Mamet is receiving from the right-wing blogosphere. How many among them have read Sowell? How many of that tiny group would describe Sowell as "our greatest contemporary philosopher"? Sowell has written some very good stuff during his career, but his brand of (paleo-)conservativism isn't particularly fashionable. And more to the point, perhaps out of a newfound awareness of the limitations of his understanding, Mamet does not actually embrace a new political label. His conclusion, which like the endings of many of his plays leaves many questions unanswered, is,

The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler.

That is to say, he seems to be categorizing himself as some form of centrist - somebody who is now sufficiently politically aware to know that everybody else is "mooing" but not quite sure where to stand (other than by the water cooler). Perhaps after a bit more reading and a bit more thinking, he'll realize that his reluctance to join one or the other of Sowell's political camps results from the fact that Sowell has it wrong, and that political thought is a multi-dimensional spectrum.

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Footnotes

1. I was tempted to write a piece about Mamet's early work being performed the Organic Theater and, well, basically drawing as many parallels I could between Mamet's background and Jonah Goldberg's notions of a "liberal fascist." Such a piece would be entitled, "I used to be a liberal fascist, but it turns out I was a conservative the whole time." That, of course, would be intended as a poke in the eye of those who gush over both this essay and Goldberg's book, but they wouldn't get it and everybody else would be bored.

2. Would Mamet fear small audiences? Probably about as much as he fears having somebody say, "That dialog wasn't realistic." But really, he's in the Kelsey Grammer category of, "respected for his work," not in the Dennis Miller category of, "Overdone schtick that can't even survive on Fox." Either way, it's not his politics that matter.

3. Mamet admits this, "I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart?" But that's why he presents his cutesy self-appellation, "brain-dead" - he wasn't thinking.

4. A contradiction he highlights is his former belief that governments, composed of people, are the solution to our problems while businesses, composed of people, act only in self-interest. Now it's pretty much the opposite, perhaps with the qualification that he relishes his own materialism, but somehow he no longer sees the contradiction.

5. It is hard to imagine Oleanna - in which a young woman plays the sexual harassment card and destroys her professor - as advancing a liberal philosophy. Mamet's new play, November, that supposedly inspired this political awakening is about interplay "between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter" - in other words, the "liberal" is a caricature, and an easily defeated straw man. And his views on race?

Races, as Steven Pinker wrote in his refutational The Blank Slate, are just rather large families; families share genes and thus, genetic disposition. Such may influence the gene holders (or individuals) much, some, or not at all. The possibility exists, however, that a family passing down the gene for great hand-eye coordination is likely to turn out more athletes than without. The family possessing the genes for visual acuity will likely produce good hunters, whose skill will provide nourishment. The families of the good hunters will prosper and intermarry, thus strengthening the genetic disposition in visual acuity.

Bambi v Godzilla, Pantheon (February 6, 2007). The purpose of the essay is to explain the high representation of Ashkenazim (and possibly Asperger's Syndrome) among film directors; but what's the implicit statement about other races?

6. "The observed rule in Hollywood is ‘feel free to treat everyone like scum." Did he believe that the peons who fetch him his lattes every morning do so because of their "inherent goodness"? "I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as 'a brain-dead liberal,' and to NPR as 'National Palestinian Radio.'" If he truly believed those expressions to be charming (or clever), I'm at a loss for words.

7. Mamet later elaborates, "I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow." Mamet is an unabashed Zionist. It shouldn't take him very long to think of one good thing that resulted from government intervention. But should I assume that he believes environmental laws, child labor laws, Medicare, Social Security, food inspection, drug inspection, public highways, etc., all stand in the way of great filmmaking, and are thus social detriments? More to the point, he's a playwright - a profession that could scarcely exist but for government grants, publicly funded education, charitable donations and tax exemptions.

Let's Not Overrate Bipartisanship

David Ignatius is much more comfortable with McCain's record on "biparisanship" than with Obama's:

The Obama campaign sent me an eight-page summary of his "bipartisan accomplishments," and it includes some encouraging examples of working across the aisle on issues such as nuclear proliferation, energy, veterans affairs, budget earmarks and ethics reforms. So the cupboard isn't bare. It's just that, unlike McCain, Obama bears no obvious political scars for fighting bipartisan battles that were unpopular with his party's base.

A couple of reactions....

Bipartisanship is a great concept when your party doesn't control the government. "They may have the power and control, but wouldn't it be better if they tossed us a bone from time to time?" It's necessary when no party is in control, as otherwise you can have gridlock. But if you do have control, what's your incentive for tossing the other side that bone? The vain hope that in the future, when they regain control, they'll return the favor? (What does the Republican legislative history from 2001 - 2006 tell us about that hope?)

Also, I don't believe for a second that McCain plans to run a bipartisan government, except as necessary to advance his agenda. He may be more willing to break with the Republican Party than his recent predecessors, just as they will be more likely to break with him, but that's not about "bipartisanship" - that's about their each advancing their own agendas. The spittle directed at McCain by right-wing nutters like Limbaugh and Coulter is a reflection of that reality - the problem is not that McCain is a "liberal" as some pretend, or that he belives in "bipartisanship". It's that he'll build coalitions to do what he wants.

It doesn't worry me that Obama doesn't have a long history of reaching across the aisle. He hasn't been in national office long enough to have a long history of anything, and for the first six years of the Bush Administration "reaching across the aisle" has largely meant getting a sufficient number of Democrats to acquiesce to an item on the Republican agenda. It would worry me more if he had the opportunity to advance significant legislation without compromise, but nonetheless decided to gut it in the name of "bipartisanship". (But I don't think he'll do that.)

Ronald Reagan taught the country something about the ability of a world-class communicator to create such a new political space that defies the previous categories.

I thought we were talking about bipartisanship, so why does Ignatius evoke Reagan? At present, to be transformative, McCain would have to do a lot of reaching across the aisle. Obama, not so much.

Is This How The Bush White House Thinks Of Conservatives?

David Frum has a column in today's Times, in which he presents his versions of the three "types" of Conservatives - social, fiscal and foreign policy. His caricatures are a bit, well, self-serving, particularly the last (foreign policy):

Have you people gone crazy? Have you forgotten there’s a war on? And that we’re in real danger of losing? Don’t you have any sense of priorities?

You tax guys insisted on fighting this war on the cheap. So we didn’t expand the armed forces after 9/11 — and fought Iraq with half the troops the generals told us we’d need. You social conservatives are happy to talk about putting tariffs on Chinese toys. But the real issue is that the Chinese are underwriting Iranian energy development — and the North Korean weapons program. Can we do something about that, please?

If we’re going to fight terrorism, we need to get off oil. But that means accepting higher energy prices, including energy-tax increases, and you economic conservatives always reject those.

And is it too much to ask you social conservatives to support a presidential candidate with some kind of background in foreign affairs, maybe one who can find Pakistan on a map? Christian leadership is all very well, but this is no moment to turn the other cheek.

I know a lot of foreign policy conservatives who view military interventionism as anathematic to conservatism. Yet Frum wants to paint all foreign policy conservatives as sharing his set of values - favoring military adventurism and continued warfare until the "job" (however ill-defined) is "done" (whatever that means). He paints Reagan as an economic conservative ("less spending, lower taxes and no more of these weird social and foreign adventures"), apparently because he is ill-informed of Reagan's military adventures in such places as Grenada and Lebanon. To the extent that Reagan is a model for conservatism, the lessons would appear to be, "Don't pick a fight unless you know you're going to win", and, "If you misjudge the fight, cut your losses and get out." Arguably these lessons were learned by both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, with the latter lesson (cut your losses) being most evident in the withdrawal from Somalia. People like George W. Bush (and David Frum) are unable to wrap their minds around either lesson.

Frum supported a President who walked away from Clinton's approach to North Korea's nuclear weapons program because he thought it wasn't a good deal, and was contemptuous of diplomacy. Years later, the same President offered North Korea a similar deal. Frum supported a President who ignored the generals and wanted to fight the Iraq war "on the cheap". Now he is suggesting that it was a mistake, but Frum omits mention of his own historic support of that mistake. As for higher energy prices, we already have those. Frum doesn't appear to notice that our higher energy prices are lining the pockets of the leaders of various totalitarian states. He simply assumes that adding a new tax on top of those higher prices will somehow lead to energy independence. He doesn't explain why we can deficit spend our way through a poorly planned war, with no end date in sight, but have to apply paygo to any program for energy independence.

And he saves the best for last. He snickers at the religious right for backing Huckabee, the candidate who thought that Afghanistan was on Pakistan's eastern border. Here's the candidate Frum backed in the 2000 election:

"Can you name the general who is in charge of Pakistan?" Hiller asked, inquiring about Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf, who seized control of the country October 12.

"Wait, wait, is this 50 questions?" asked Bush.

If given a map, I don't think Bush would have done very well in trying to attach names to any of the countries in South Asia, save possibly for India.

Perhaps Frum should consider his own role in marginalizing the class of foreign policy conservatives who eschew notions of reinventing foreign nations as democracies. Perhaps Frum should take a look at his own works in kicking at the social conservative leg of his wobbly stool, or note how he forgot to attach a "paleo-conservative" leg, and ask himself, is he truly more informed or more intelligent than the voters he ridicules?

Noteworthy Observations from Eunomia

Daniel Larison has made a couple of observations recently that, in my current state of blogging lethargy, I'll pass off as a blog post.

On conservatives who advocated for war in Iraq under the apparent or professed belief that reinventing that country as a liberal democracy would be easy:

People are mostly skeptical of social engineering efforts and jaundiced about revolutionaries who promise to herald a new dawn. Iraq has revealed what human beings do without a strong order-imposing state. ~David Brooks

Well, if by “people” Brooks means “people who didn’t buy into the crazy revolutionary rhetoric of the Second Inaugural,” this is true. If by “people” he means “everybody, especially including me, David Brooks,” I will have to disagree, and not for the first time. As we were reminded just the other day, those who were jaundiced about a promise of a new dawn in Iraq (or was that the ”birth pangs of a new Middle East”?) were accused more or less openly of various horrible moral and political evils, including racism, treason and support for despotism. How could we doubt that Iraqis could pick up in a matter of a few years political institutions and habits that took us centuries to develop? We were accused of a lack of confidence in the universality of “freedom and democracy” and were mocked for doubting the equality of man. Why? Well, we were under the funny impression that abiding cultural and religious identities would trump vague appeals to “freedom and democracy” every time and that a people’s particular history was far more relevant to its political constitution than vacuous bromides about how freedom is God’s gift to mankind. Brooks and company took the other view. Now they would like to rush back and claim the mantle of traditional conservative wisdom that they threw into the gutter and spat upon. I, for one, am sick of this.

On conservatives who try to depict Democrats as "the real racists":

When you grow up reading a lot of conservative commentary as I did during the ’90s, you find that the ever-so-cute and amusing attempts to show that Democrats and liberals are the “real” racists got old about ten years ago. It served the purpose of trying to hoist the race-hustlers and exploiters by their own petard, but it was, had to be, purely tactical and a way to puncture liberal claims to moral authority on these things. As of five years ago, they became really tiresome, because you began to sense that some of these people were deadly serious. “No, really, we’re the true anti-racists! I’m so not racist, you can hardly believe it!” Now I consider them an embarrassment of sorts, a kind of irrepressible tick that conservative writers feel the need to express every once in a while to get it out of their system.

Hate Versus Rage

Over at Eunomia, Daniel Larison comments on anger in politics.

While there is the real danger that inflamed political passions can be blinding and irrational (for a good example, see the near-insane hysteria of war supporters in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq), the alternative that these sages propose is one of living death in which we watch as our country, Constitution and Republic are savaged, mistreated and insulted by treacherous villains with a mild equanimity. Apparently, we must never get upset about even the most appalling crimes and wrongdoing. The irascible aspect of the soul should not go to excess, but there is something vicious and strange in the failure to get angry at gross injustice and criminal misrule. Many of the people who are angry at or even hate Mr. Bush have very good reasons, and they are not making arguments for anger but are making impassioned arguments against an abominable and awful administration.

He further comments,

Conservatives once found liberals’ habit of dismissing every legitimate defense conservatives made against the latest social or cultural outrage of the left as “hate” to be intellectually vacuous and insulting. Now some on the right would apparently like nothing more than to adopt this pose of righteous calm (righteous indignation being so very culturally destructive) at the very moment when liberal rage is likely to diminish and moderate with the Democratic takeover of Congress. There has been the tendency on the part of liberals to reduce an opponent’s entire position to being nothing than ”hate,” as if no one could oppose rampant immorality, racial preferences or intrusive government, to name just a few things, without hating other people. Alongside this, though, there was real hatred of a terrible President in Clinton, whose administration only appears relatively decent today because of the hideousness of his successor’s policies.

Clinton-hatred was frankly a major part of the glue that held conservatives together despite differences among ourselves. Oddly enough, without a Democrat in the White House to serve as a hate-figure against which all conservatives could rally, all those who call themselves conservative have (re)discovered that they haven’t had a lot in common with each other for a very long time.

I think he's addressing two different concepts of "hate". "Hate or hatred is an emotion of intense revulsion, distaste, enmity, or antipathy for a person, thing, or phenomenon; a desire to avoid, restrict, remove, or destroy its object." The first type of hatred is that which he identifies as being directed at Clinton, and encompasses the full spectrum of that definition - revulsion, distates, enmity and antipathy. The second conceptualization, the one used for example to describe the propensity of certain factions on the political right to "hate" homosexuals and minorities, focuses primarily upon antipathy, while being exemplified by the overt statements and conduct of specific individuals and groups. While certainly, those on the left who perceive right-wing antipathy toward minorities or homosexuals as being largely irrational, there is nothing within the context of hatred or antipathy which requires that the motivation for such feelings be irrational. You can intensely dislike somebody for perfectly good reasons. But perhaps more to the point when hatred reaches beyond an individual to encompass an entire group of people, experience suggests that the "perfectly good reasons" will usually be rationalizations, and perhaps entirely logically unsound.

Larison also uses a self-serving characterization of the left's targets: "rampant immorality, racial preferences or intrusive government". The political right doesn't "hate fags", it opposes "rampant immorality". What sane person wouldn't at least frown at "rampant immorality", if not adamantly oppose it? The right doesn't hate minorities - it opposes "racial preferences." It doesn't oppose preferences based upon other factors, such as those given by colleges to the children of alumni, or the benefits enjoyed by those who can exploit a "good old boys" network or nepotism, but you shouldn't infer anything from that even though those benefits inure largely to the majority, and even more directly to the wealthy.

It opposes "intrusive government" and... Okay, I'm having a hard time thinking of how this one ties into hatred. Or, for that matter, reality - the various anti-gay ballot initiatives, national restrictions on abortion rights, the Defense of Marriage Act, various security-related laws both at the state and federal level... all advanced by the political right, and all leading to government being more intrusive.

And then things really get interesting:

It was Chilton Williamson, I believe, who proposed in the pages of Chronicles that an important distinction between right and left was the difference between hatred of those things that threaten and endanger what you love and an aimless, insatiable rage that simply seeks new things about which one can be enraged. The former is not only sometimes necessary but is actually the mark of sanity, whereas the latter is a consuming, demonic force that devours those who participate in it.

If he's speaking of this article, it's laughable. Larison's a bright guy, so I hope that the Chronicles piece he recalls was superior.

Now, Larison doesn't express which political group "hates" and which one "rages", although context makes that clear (as does the reference to Williamson). But the absurdity of that assertion should be evident on its face. The right hates things that threaten and endanger it, while the left acts on aimless insatiable rage? The country largely supported the invasion of Afghanistan as a response to something which threatened and endangered us. The political right then took us into a war of choice in Iraq, despite that nation's having nothing to do with 9/11 and posing no imminent (or realistic) threat to us. We are to believe that the left is "raging" at this ill-begotten war of choice? And those who led us into the war are demonstrating the mark of sanity? If all war opponents "rage", then Larison himself "rages" - he opposed, and continues to oppose, the Iraq war. If we're in fact talking about a tiny subset of people on the left - extremists if you will - then the distinction is useless, as there are frothing, raging lunatics on the political right. (Just listen to a right-wing call-in show - if the host doesn't convince you of that, the callers will.)

Obviously the assertion can be flipped on its head. The left largely supported the war in Afghanistan because it correctly identified something that threatened and endangered us. The right, in a surge of hatred, engaged in an aimless expansion of the war which has ultimately undermined both its goals and the gains we made in Afghanistan. But this depiction of "hate" and "rage" is no more accurate a depiction of the political left and right than the one favored by Larison - its simply the result of framing an argument in a manner which facilitates the smearing of your political opponent.

Moving on to the Chilton Williamson piece....

Rage and hate both are aspects of anger. They are not, however, the equivalent of one another. "I love a good hater," said Samuel Johnson. He meant that hate implies a corresponding love, which responds reactively to its threatened opposite. For a man to hate, he must first love; as he who loves, inevitably hates. Hate is a directed thing, focused like a laser beam. By comparison, rage is undirected, unfocused, generalized, indiscriminate: an adult tantrum. "Rage," Ernst von Feuchtersleben thought, "is a vulgar passion with vulgar ends." Thus it is with good reason, if poor judgment, that the Left boasts of the "rage" it nurtures in its bosom, while denouncing the "hate" it relentlessly discovers on the Right.

Ah, the soul of a poet... To hate, you must first love. So to hate African-Americans you must first love... what? Certainly not African-Americans. Perhaps white people? Hm. But he does seem to be right in terms of overt political association. How many identifiable hate groups are associated with left-wing politics, as opposed to right-wing politics? What are the odds that [a 21st Century] David Duke would ever have tried [try] to run for office as a Democrat?

Apparently because Samuel Johnson didn't comment on the matter, it logically follows that while you have to love before you can hate, you don't have to feel a thing before you experience rage. Funny, though, people who actually demonstrate rage seem to be expressing a form of anger, and the targets of that rage tend to be people they "hate". Here we can also make an interesting observation that Williamson would apparently classify the authoring of books or articles, the lobbying of government, or the expression of condemnatory words as "raging", but where a lynch mob randomly grabs somebody on the basis of sexual orientation or skin color, then beats or kills that person, it's a much superior, much preferable, love-driven expression of "hate".

He gets sillier:

Joe Sobran, with cutting characteristic clarity, has observed that one can't "tolerate" what one likes, but only what one dislikes. In demanding toleration for everything, the Left assumes on the Right's part a cultivated dislike for almost everything. Since, for the Left, majoritarian distaste or even want of sympathy for minorities (e.g. immigrants, homosexuals, feminists, Muslims, Jews, blacks, etc.) is always the equivalent of "hate," for Leftists hate necessarily appears as the universal reality stretching like an arid and infinite plain beyond the shining walls and towers of the New Jerusalem.

This call for tolerance seems to be what Williamson perceives as the most overt example of "rage" by the political left. Here, Williamson apparently believes that the left never targets itself when it campaigns for tolerance. That is, he seems to picture those on the left as pure souls, untouched by dislikes and even hatreds of their own, and thus motivated exclusively by the desire to restrict those on the political right from acting on their dislikes and hatreds. Further, he is simply wrong. Most on the political left will agree that there are some things which should never be tolerated. And it is implicit within his argument that he, himself, is demanding tolerance of what he believes to be a justifiable expression of intolerance, so where does that leave us?

But what really struck me about this passage was that, where Larison reframed the issues in order to avoid directly addressing racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry, Williamson dares speak their name. He doesn't hide behind words like "preferences" and "government intrustion" - he's willing to admit that the "intolerance" the left wishes to limit is that directed toward "immigrants, homosexuals, feminists, Muslims, Jews, blacks, etc".

What leftists decry as conservative "hate" is actually resentment of, and resistance to, the intrusion of the alien and the displacement of the familiar by the unfamiliar, the old by the new, the traditional by the untraditional, the proximate by the distant, the particular by the universal.

Ah, I see... So it's not so much that people like Williamson hate "immigrants, homosexuals, feminists, Muslims, Jews, [and] blacks" - they just haven't had enough time to get used to them.

As I previously mentioned, this is not so much an honest argument as it is an effort to use semantics to reframe the positions of political opponents as being lesser, unworthy, even silly. But such a weak effort....

n.b. - Don't take this as a criticism extending to Larison's other posts or his blog as a whole. Check it out.

Big Yellow Taxi as a Conservative Anthem

Now that I know how rock lyrics are supposed to be interpreted, I realize that I've been wrong all these years about Big Yellow Taxi. Let me explain. The Pretenders Song, My City Was Gone, is apparently a conservative song - the 13th most conservative rock song of all time:

Virtually every conservative knows the bass line, which supplies the theme music for Limbaugh’s radio show. But the lyrics also display a Jane Jacobs sensibility against central planning and a conservative’s dissatisfaction with rapid change: "I went back to Ohio / But my pretty countryside / Had been paved down the middle / By a government that had no pride."

Isn't that more or less the same as "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot"? Once I realized how I was supposed to interpret lyrics, I knew that I was supposed to take "They took all the trees, and put em in a tree museum / And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them" literally - Joni is endorsing capitalism, and the preservation of forests through private enterprise rather than government regulation. Go Joni!

He also makes Sweet Home Alabama the #4 most conservative song,

A tribute to the region of America that liberals love to loathe, taking a shot at Neil Young’s Canadian arrogance along the way: "A Southern man don’t need him around anyhow."

News flash? And Godzilla?

A 1977 classic about a big green monster — and more: "History shows again and again / How nature points up the folly of men."

Is there even a conservative way to interpret that passage, even if you're completely ignorant of its anti-nuclear origin?

Read the list - it's mostly wonderful self-parody.

Whiny Crybabies

I know that James Lindgren disagrees with the study which suggests that conservatives were whiny crybabies as children, even if perhaps asserting statistical arguments which are no less dubious, but his blogging colleagues are doing him no favor with their endless whiny posts about how hard it is to be a conservative.

Oh, crikey.... Just when I was thinking Ilya Somin's posts were somewhat reasonable....

Some of those who claim that campus intolerance of conservatives and libertarians is not a significant problem argue that right of center students are themselves obnoxious, intolerant, and so forth. If there really is an overrepresentation of such people among outspoken campus right-wingers, this fact may itself be the result of PC intolerance. If speaking out in favor of un-PC viewpoints can lead to social ostracism, an obnoxious jerk is less likely to be deterred by this danger than a conservative who is generally nice and popular. After all, the jerk is probably already widely disliked, while his more popular counterpart has much more to lose from any PC backlash to his remarks.

A recent post on what to me seems like a childish grudge match leads to this:

Just wanted to drop you a line to tell you how much I enjoy your blog and also commend you for standing up to Brian Leiter. Without articulate spokesmen like yourself, upcoming conservatives wouldn't have a chance of survival in today's leftist-dominated universities. Good work.

You know, I just can't bring myself to feel sorry for tenured professors, most of whom were privileged enough to go to schools like Harvard and Yale, when they whine for decades afterward about how horribly oppressed they were in their college years. If they have a valid complaint, judging from the typical post on the subject, it seemingly should be that they managed to spend that much money on their bachelor's and graduate degrees at top colleges yet didn't develop better critical thinking skills.

Political Ideology and Racism

Over at the Volokh conspiracy, contributor James Lindgren (who is quite adept with statistical analysis software and the data at issue) contends that white Democrats are significantly more racist than are white Republicans:

Eugene,

To your list I would add that, over the last 30 years, typical white Republicans in the general public have been significantly less traditionally racist than typical white Democrats.

For example, in the 1996-2004 General Social Surveys, 11.9% of white Democrats think that differences in black/white success are due to black inborn disability, compared to only 9.1% of white Republicans. Similarly, 14.5% of white Democrats favor laws against racial intermarriage, compared to 12.2% of white Republicans.

In the two decades before 1996, these differences tend to be much stronger. Republicans have traditionally been less traditionally racist.

So, although there is a shift in traditional racism toward members of the Republican Party, members of the Democratic Party have been still more racist over the last decade--though the Republican Party may overtake it soon. Only if one uses "modern racism" measures that conflate opposition to big government with racism do Republicans usually score as significantly more racist than Democrats.

Given the tiny percentages at issue, it is astonishing that Lindgren would try to assert significant racism or lack thereof on the basis of his recited figures. But beyond that, if the data truly supports his claims, why is he the only one making these claims? Would Karl Rove truly sit on such explosive data, as the Republicans attempt to make headway among this nation's minority populations?

Although I don't have access to the same tools as Lindgren, it is possible to perform a basic reality check on his assertion through Berkeley's SDA Archive site. Using the "Frequencies or crosstabulation" tool, looking at the General Social Surveys, 1972-2004 Cumulative File, focusing on Lindgren's hallmark of racism, the question of inborn ability [RACDIF4], limiting results to white respondants [RACE(1)], and weighing results with a non-response adjustment [WT2004NR], I see the following results:



When I look at expression of admiration for blacks [ADMIRBLK], I see the following results:



By Lindgren's measure (and let me again emphasize that I disgree with his measure), if Democrats can be said to be significantly more racist than Republicans, conservatives (and moderates) would appear to be vastly more racist than liberals.

When I look at Lindgren's argument that Democrats are more likely to favor laws against interracial marriage [RACMAR], he's right - the survey indicates that strong and moderate Democrats and strong Republicans are more likely to support such laws:



But when liberal and conservative ideology is examined, it seems that strong support for such laws comes from people who describe themselves as moderate, polically conservative and strongly conservative, while political liberals are significantly less likely to support such laws:



Perhaps the difference between the two results is explained by the fact that political moderates are more likely to self-identify as Democrats than they are as Republicans:



I don't agree with Lindgren's extrapolations from the data - I don't think his data supports his claims, and I think he knows it. I know that at least one statistics guru passes by this blog on occasion - I would love to hear an expert opinion on this, as a final word on my clumsy analysis as presented above.