Month: September 2010

by Conor Friedersdorf

On the six week road trip I took when I left DC and moved backed to California, a highlight was having drinks with E.D. Kain in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he lives with his wife and child, works a day job to pay the bills, and manages to produce lots of enjoyable blogging. He wrote a post a couple days ago that's handily summed up by this line: "I no longer have any desire to be considered a conservative – and no longer consider myself one."

Unlike me, but like a lot of politically active people, Mr. Kain finds value in associating himself with a political/ideological team. It ought to trouble movement conservatives that they're losing a married father in a red state who champions localism, decentralized power, checks and balances, and not placing too much faith in the state, and especially that in his judgment, "these are positions that are perfectly acceptable on the left in ways that my belief in gay marriage or higher taxes or non-interventionist foreign policy are simply not acceptable on the right." 

There are many on the right, however, who'd celebrate his repudiation of the conservative label, because he says things like this:

I would have voted for the HCR bill. The Democratic Party has its flaws but at least it cares about governance, at least Democrats try to make the world a less harsh, more egalitarian place even when sometimes their policies backfire or are simply wrong to begin with. And liberalism generally is just more serious an endeavor than conservatism is. More wonky, more beholden to, you know, data and facts.

Mr. Kain is conflating the conservative movement, a deeply unserious and corrupt political coalition, with the political philosophy of conservatism, which is every bit as serious as liberalism, and isn't inherently less wonky either.

I disagree with Mr. Kain on health care reform too. I opposed it, and would've much preferred something like the plan articulated here. But do I understand why he's concluded that movement conservatism is to be abandoned? Yes, I understand, and much as I'd encourage him to vote for divided government this November, and to keep trying to reform the right, the more important message is directed at those who prefer a pure, narrow coalition of hard core conservatives to an inclusive one: Mr. Kain fits into neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party, but you've driven him toward the latter's coalition by assessing his particular mix of beliefs and asserting that he is a statist on the side of tyranny.

Over at The Moderate Voice, Dennis Sanders observes all this, and remarks:

You take a guy who was a conservative that starts to see some of the problems. They start to see them grow bigger and bigger and start to take on a crusade to reform conservatism. However, they continue to focus on the issues plaguing the movement, until the problems are all they see. At some point, they write a post renouncing their ties to conservatism and citing how awful the movement is. They either choose to become independent or go over to the liberal side of the political spectrum. On the surface, one can look at this as proof about how messed up conservatives are. I don’t doubt that. The current state of conservatism has caused many to pull up stakes and move towards greener pastures. But I am also bothered by another concern and that is: why are there so few folks committed to reforming conservatism?

That isn't quite accurate. In my estimation there are a lot of people who are committed to reforming conservatism, and who've pursued a different path. Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat co-wrote a book laying out a policy agenda a reformed right might embrace going forward. The Tea Party is earnest about repudiating the K Street style conservatism that prevailed for much of the Bush Administration, as are writers like Tim Carney and Matt Continetti, who disappointed me with his over-wrought defenses of Sarah Palin, but did great work prior to it, and has since penned an excellent critique of Glenn Beck's oevre.

The American Conservative, George Will, and even Ann Coulter are among the voices calling for the conservative movement to renounce its imprudent forays into nation building. Gene Healy is still working on the cult of the presidency. Yuval Levin, Jim Manzi, Ron Paul, Paul Ryan, David Frum, and Andrew Sullivan are just some of the people who've explicitly set out to reform the right or infuse it with new ideas, many are working more quietly, and you'd be surprised by some of the e-mail I get from staffers at places like National Review and even Human Events encouraging me to persist in my own quixotic campaigns, whether against conservative entertainers or intra-movement writing that isn't defensible. (Sometimes I suspect that talk radio hosts are about as powerful as East German leaders in the months before the wall came down, but no one has realized it yet.)

Naturally, I'd like to see more conservatives call out popular talk radio hosts and powerful movement writers when they say things that are factually inaccurate, especially intemperate, or analytically indefensible. It's a project I've taken up, so naturally I think it's important. Some people disagree. Others think I'm right, but understandably deem my crusade to be less important than working on their own projects, which would be jeopardized by alienating powerful conservatives and the institutions they run.

It's a problem itself that some figures inside conservatism are deemed untouchables who ought never be forcefully criticized. Still, I'd be shocked if many of the people I've mentioned above don't accomplish far more than I ever do to reform the conservative movement. They're certainly a lot more invested in that end than I am. As an outsider, I am able to say things that some of them aren't, and it's important to call out talk radio hosts and subpar journalism for reasons bigger than the fate of the conservative movement.

So I do it, and I hope more people join me.

But the movement to improve on conservatism is a lot bigger than the subset of people who criticize Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Glenn Beck. Yes, it's strange that calling out their least defensible rhetoric is so verbotten. That doesn't mean doing so is the most important reform work happening on the right, and I often think the attention it garners relative to the work being done by others is misplaced.

by Chris Bodenner

This footage of a razor-sharp Tea Party protester confronting Congressman Grayson over the healthcare bill is another must see:

She also brings out the best I've ever seen of Grayson, who usually comes across as a smug blowhard. You rarely see such exchanges on cable news, of course. A reader writes:

I'm not quite sure that I understand your reader's point in the Dissent of the Day. Apart from the fact that the interviewees are articulating their beliefs and opinions without being coerced or misled into saying something stupid, the allegation of what amounts to a selection bias seems improbable on the face of it. I think it would be more accurate to say that the attendees of a Glenn Beck rally are a self-selecting crowd: given that they're fans of a mendacious demagogue whose every distorted – and often entirely fabricated – statement is part of a paranoid fantasy with virtually no grounding in reality, it's very hard to imagine that one would find many "thoughtful and intelligent" people present. Whatever few might be found certainly wouldn't be representative, so I'm not sure how this video distorts the dominant character of the rally's attendees.

This would be like objecting to a video of Insane Clown Posse concertgoers on the grounds that they surely can't all be so utterly tasteless.

by Patrick Appel

Christopher Hitchens has a new dispatch on his cancer. He seems to be in good humor. Hitchens tears to shreds a religous blogger who writes that "Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer [sic] was God’s revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him." Hitch:

Almost all men get cancer of the prostate if they live long enough: it’s an undignified thing but quite evenly distributed among saints and sinners, believers and unbelievers. If you maintain that god awards the appropriate cancers, you must also account for the numbers of infants who contract leukemia. Devout persons have died young and in pain. Bertrand Russell and Voltaire, by contrast, remained spry until the end, as many psychopathic criminals and tyrants have also done. These visitations, then, seem awfully random. While my so far uncancerous throat, let me rush to assure my Christian correspondent above, is not at all the only organ with which I have blasphemed …And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it’s hello darkness my old friend. In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)

by Patrick Appel

Steinglass keeps hope alive:

[S]omething happened yesterday that, to my recollection, has never happened before, at least not with such clarity: in the midst of direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, a deadly attack took place, and rather than call off the talks, both sides resolved to keep going. In fact, they both explicitly characterised the attack as an attempt to sabotage the talks, and insisted they wouldn't be sidetracked.

FP's Middle East Channel has a number of helpful posts on talks. Said posts are summarized here.

by Patrick Appel

Brendan Nyhan argues that the media often incorrectly "concludes that candidates won or lost because of their tactical choices."

The problem is that any reasonable political tactic chosen by professionals will tend to resonate in favorable political environments and fall flat in unfavorable political environments (compare Bush in '02 to Bush '06, or Obama in '08 to Obama in '09-'10). But that doesn't mean the candidates are succeeding or failing because of the tactics they are using. While strategy certainly can matter on the margin in individual races, aggregate congressional and presidential election outcomes are largely driven by structural factors (the state of the economy, the number of seats held by the president's party, whether it's a midterm or presidential election year, etc.). Tactical success often is a reflection of those structural factors rather than an independent cause.

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

My field is Indology, the reconstruction and analysis of ancient and medieval India through the reconstruction and analysis of her texts. The first thing most people don’t understand is what the discipline even is. Many think I mean etymology, the study of bugs, and some think me to perform some kind of surgery (on humans, presumably, though for all I know on bugs, too!). For awhile, I tried the gloss “Indian philology”, but people heard “phlebotomy” or “philosophy” (perhaps both also branches of medicine, whether of body or soul, but still quite wide of the mark). Only with “Sanskritist”, have I had some success, particularly with yoga’s increasingly high profile in the west. But this isn’t exactly right either since I read Pali and Avestan, too, and it tends to incite starry-eyed to presume me “spiritually advanced” (apparently, India is only a land of mystics who wrote only words of wisdom), while the more mainstream think of a language written down at the beach (“Sandscript”). If I slip up and say “ancient Indian languages”, people think I mean Navaho and are surprised to hear they had texts (they didn’t, as far as I know), and if I just say “I study India” they presume I mean the modern world.

But apart from terminology, most people have no idea why one would even do such a thing. The reconstruction and analysis of ancient India? To what possible end? What possible use could that be to us in the modern world? My answer can only be this:

that ancient India is an exceptionally interesting subject, not an exceptionally “important” one. But what is important is that, through the disciplines of the Humanities, people  make the effort to look at other times and other places in order better to reflect upon themselves. I won’t be passé and harp that, despite the richness of our differences, we are all “basically the same”—not only because it’s kitschy, but because we are not. Whatever “core” of human nature exists (and I enjoy The Dish’s on-going exploration of this topic), I believe our humanity lies in the possibility of our differences, and it is this that makes us interesting, both as individuals and as a species. My favorite writer, Milan Kundera, explores in his essays the novel’s unique ability to comprehend, through a specific character’s development, one of the infinite possibilities for being human. But I don’t believe this to be the exclusive provenance of the novel. This is why the Humanities are called humanities, and why they encompass all form of texts: to explore the infinite possibilities of being human. And that, too, is why they have value, no matter from which continent or era they draw their inspiration.

The purpose of my field, then, is to understand something about the ways of being human in the world. And if I could find a single term to convey all that I’d be home free!

by Chris Bodenner

Gabriel Sherman suggests that Palin's upcoming Des Moines speech is a head fake:

For Palin, running for president is partly a kind of profit center. "It’s an industry to write about Sarah and put her on TV,” John Coale, the prominent Democratic lawyer and husband of Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren, told me. “We’re two years into this and people are still fascinated by her. But, if she doesn’t run, does she maintain this interest?”

In fact, in conversations in recent days with Republicans and advisers familiar with her thinking, there has been a mounting feeling that Palin probably won’t run for president — not that anyone would go so far as to predict what the Mama Grizzly-in-Chief is going to do with certainty. “They're not ramping up, and they’re not adding staff. My guess is she's not going to run,” said one Republican close to her, who, like others in Palin-world, insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.

“I don't think she's going to run for anything,” added another adviser. “My reasoning is as follows: She hated what was happening in public office. She was getting pilloried, she was going broke, she really didn't like it — it's why she left. She hated her life. She hated it. Now she has the world by the tail. She's speaking to adoring crowds. Maybe only 20 percent of the people like her, but they adore her. I would be stunned if she does it. I would give it 90 percent probability she doesn't run. … She's smart enough to know the chances of getting elected is very, very slim. And she will get pilloried in the process. She likes her life up there, now she has the money she needs. She has the best of both worlds.”

by Conor Friedersdorf

In the "teacher wars" here's where I stand: I think America's teachers should be paid more in money and prestige, that the discretion of principals is a better way to determine relative compensation than test scores, seniority, or masters degrees, that programs like Teach for America demonstrate the need for reform in the credentialing process, and that a necessary tradeoff as teachers are paid more in a merit based system is less job security.

I understand why teachers are upset about the Los Angeles Times coverage of the "value" teachers add to student test scores. Some parents are going to place too much emphasis on that single metric of evaluation. But I'd have published the story were I an editor at the newspaper. Every bit of information a newspaper publishes is going to be misused by some of its readers. That isn't any reason to deprive the rest of us.

Teachers ought to understand this better than most people since every week they read student assignments and use their fallible judgment to assign a letter grade, often based on opaque, somewhat arbitrary standards. This process culminates in a report card sent home at the end of every semester. It typically assesses achievement on an A to F scale that presumably doesn't capture every nuance of student mastery over a subject. High school teachers who give out these grades do so knowing that for many students they'll one day be scrutinized by college admissions officers, who'll admit or deny applicants largely based on the average of these somewhat arbitrary grades that don't capture every nuance of a student's academic abilities.

Despite its imperfections, I haven't many teachers eager to do away with grades, and while I've seen a lot of teachers complain about being evaluated based on test scores — a complaint with which I sympathize — I've never seen a persuasive defense of "masters degrees earned" or "years worked" as a better metric of quality. Yet teachers unions champion a status quo that relies on these very measures.

As Jack Shafer notes, "If you can't grade the graders, whom can you grade?"

But as I said, I'd prefer a system that gave broad discretion to individual principals. Would some teachers be treated unfairly by their boss under such a system? Sure, but there are lots of schools out there.