Month: April 2007

[Reihan] Ross’s post on The Onion‘s This American Life gag got me to thinking.  This is so rare for me that I figured I’d celebrate this special occasion with a rambling post!

People (mainly obtuse people) forget that Bobos in Paradise, written by my friend and former boss, was written from an insider’s perspective. The book was funny and fun, but it was also an incisive critique that was in part a self-critique. Now, this is pretty hard for some people to understand. How can David Brooks be criticizing Bobos and identifying with them at the same time?  Surely this is some kind of tactic designed to lull you into a false sense of security before he sneakily discredits namby-pamby liberals! Well, no. Sometimes a cigar is a cigar.  Like most thoughtful people, Brooks is large: he contains multitudes. So when David Brooks railed (with tongue firmly in cheek) against "hipster parents," he wasn’t bashing liberals (as some people assumed). Rather, he was using humor (gasp!) to make a pretty simple point: your kids shouldn’t be your billboards.  Narcissism has its limits. I mean, the kid featured in this article wasn’t born this way.

I expected the food to be like Campbell’s soup, but it’s not at all. It’s pretty good, but not for a guy like me. I prefer Citarella or Dean & DeLuca. I treasure things like an aged balsamic vinegar and truffles—the mushrooms, not the chocolate. —Jake

Jake is a boy. A boy at grave risk of growing up to become an insufferable man.  (By the way, it’s at least as likely that Jake is the song of a right-leaning financier as a left-leaning screenwriter.) As the parent of young children, and indeed as a Bobo parent of young children, Brooks is exposed to this phenomenon on a regular basis.  Brooks isn’t point-scoring against liberals: he’s expressing compassion for young people.

But there are some conservatives who do spend much of their time performing anti-Bobo rage.  It’s not about the children.  It’s not even about moral turpitude.  It’s affect about affect, and it’s pretty much all that’s left when you’ve run out of ideas. As someone who cares about conservative ideas, this bums me out. But I actually think post-Bush conservatives have a decent shot at getting past this.

[Ross] Earlier today, Andrew mentioned the encouraging fact that Iran generates more traffic for this blog than any country except the U.S. and Britain. But not every Iranian visitor is the kind of visitor you want.

[Megan] Where did Dinesh D’Souza acquire this remarkable talent for opening his mouth wide enough to fit his entire foot in clear down to the small intestine?  I’m appalled enough to see the gun controllers, immigration nuts, and so forth crawling out of the woodwork to hawk their pet causes atop the still-warm corpses of the Virginia Tech victims.  But at least there was some vaguely arguable relevance.  Using it as an excuse to bash atheists . . . well cut off my legs and call me shorty, the discourse just hit a previously unsuspected new low.

[Reihan] Julian Sanchez has an excellent post on the virtues of unilateral divorce, drawing on a column by one of my favorite bloggers.

Cowen doesn’t get into this, but the study also finds a class gap in marriage and divorce patterns—albeit one far less dramatic than the one seen for single childbearing. The marriages of college grads—both first marriages and remarriages—are significantly less likely to end in divorce—presumably at least in part because they tend to marry somewhat later. (Though I note we just get an average age for this—I’d love to see the shape of the distribution.) This—if I can flog an old hobbyhorse for a second—seems out of line with the narrative that has the values of latte-sipping elites driving changes in American family structure.

But is this really so "out of line"? Last year I wrote a short review of the stoner-comedy Grandma’s Boy in which I made a brief reference to one of my favorite Houellebecqisms,

In a totally liberal economic system, certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system, certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.

Sexual laissez-faire is particularly attractive to the most privileged among us. Why? Well, the upside potential is massive (a wide range of sexual partners, and the understanding that "trading up" is always an option) and the downside risks are manageable (the affluent and educated have much to lose from divorce and other forms of family disruption, to be sure, but far less than those who are economically dependent on their partners). A decent case can be made that something like the opposite obtains for the less privileged. 

So for those at the top of the sexual and economic totem poles (not always the same people, as Will Wilkinson reminds us), the ideal is to live like a good sober bourgeois as long as that is the best you can do, and to embrace a life of bohemian adventure when you can afford it. 

But to have that escape hatch you need to have a relaxed and permissive approach to divorce, among many other things. That this relaxed and permissive approach may have sharply uneven effects on different slices of the population is, as far as the "latte-sipping elites" in question are concerned, is immaterial. Because the effects are unevenly beneficial for — you guessed it — members of the "latte-sipping elites."

(There is a parallel here to public opinion concerning free trade.)

None of this is to say that cultural permissiveness is right or wrong. But the narrative Sanchez criticizes is at the very least perfectly coherent.   

I should note that Cowen’s column is characteristically excellent, and it gives social conservatives a lot to think about.   

[Ross] Matt Yglesias tries to argue that the states can’t adjudicate abortion – that there’s either a constitutional right to life, or a constitutional right to an abortion, with no room for state-by-state lawmaking in either case:

The fetus either is or isn’t a "legal person" under the 14th amendment. If it is, then clearly abortion bans are not only constitutionally permissable, but constitutionally mandatory. If it isn’t, however, then what’s the basis for the state regulating conduct that takes place entirely inside the body of a rights-bearing citizen? It would need to be a mother-regarding health-and-safety regulation of some sort which, in the nature of things, is going to leave abortions generally legal as long as they’re being performed in a way that’s unlikely to seriously injure the mother.

But there are all sorts of laws that regulate "conduct that takes place inside the body of a right-bearing citizen" – particularly when another party (like, say, an abortionist) performs said conduct. For instance, we have laws against selling your organs, laws against prostitution, laws against assisted suicide, laws that prohibit the sale of drugs and restrict the sale of alcohol, and so on and so forth. Some of these may be bad laws, but it seems like quite a stretch to say that they’re all unconstitutional.

The smarter case for why you can’t just leave abortion to the states belongs to Will Baude, who wrote a Times op-ed a year ago arguing that "a patchwork of state abortion regulations … will lead not to compromise, but chaos," which will in turn will push the public to "demand a federal resolution to the abortion battle — again." Jeffrey Rosen made a similar point in his (subscriber-only, I’m afraid, so maybe you should subscribe) Atlantic essay on "The Day After Roe", predicting a slew of abortion battles in Congress if Roe vs. Wade ever fell, with both pro-choicers and pro-lifers attempting to ram through a national solution rather than leaving the fight to state legislatures.

Baude and Rosen may be right, though my suspicion is that there aren’t very many Senators (particularly with Rick Santorum gone!) who would relish a knock-down drag-out abortion battle, and that both national parties would have a vested interest in punting things to the states whenever possible, at least in the short term. Then again, I’m not particularly invested in whether the states or Congress make abortion law; I just the people making the laws to be subject to democratic pressures of some kind, for all the reasons Hadley Arkes lays out here:

. . . step by step, the public would get used to these cardinal notions: that the freedom to order abortions, like any other kind of freedom, may be subject to plausible restrictions; that it is legitimate for legislatures to enact those restrictions; and that it is, in fact, possible for ordinary folk, with ordinary language, to deliberate about the grounds on which abortions could be said to be justified or unjustified.

That Ezra Klein calls this description of a post-Roe world "scary for all the obvious reasons" only makes me all the more eager to see it become a reality.

[Ross] Byron York assesses Gonzales’s testimony.

[Andrew] Pakistani human rights activists shout slogans as they march against the Islamic extremism during a protest rally in Lahore, 19 April 2007. Hundreds of rights activists rallied in the Pakistani against a fundamentalist mosque which is trying to impose a Taliban-style justice system. Photo by Arif Ali/Getty. News story here.

[Ross] Arlen Specter versus Alberto Gonzales. Lindsay Graham versus Gonzales. Chuck Schumer versus Gonzales.

Also, chickens versus rabbits.

Las Vegas, Nevada, 7 am.