Month: February 2013

Neuroimmunologist Jonathan Kipnis found a possible link between a body’s immune system and intelligence. Carl Zimmer explains:

When we’re healthy, T cells keep the immune cells in the meninges from inflaming the brain. But when we get sick, the T cells loosen their hold to let the immune system attack invading pathogens. The resulting inflammation helps clear out the invaders, but it also blunts learning. When we’re sick, Kipnis proposes, it’s more important to launch a powerful immune attack than to have a sharp mind. “Everything in life is priorities,” he says.

Kipnis has recently started to investigate what happens to people’s brains when they start losing T cells. People with cancer, for example, often suffer a loss of T cells when they undergo chemotherapy. It may be no coincidence, he argues, that chemotherapy is notorious for causing “chemo brain”—a fuzzy mental state in which patients have trouble thinking clearly. Kipnis proposes that without T cells to keep inflammation in check, immune cells in the meninges pump harmful compounds into the brain.

Why this research matters:

Drugs that might be able to rework neurons inside the brain and improve mental sharpness are often too big to get past the blood-brain barrier, for example. Dopamine, a molecule crucial for signaling between neurons, cannot cross this barrier, which is why its chemical precursor, L-dopa, is used instead to treat Parkinson’s disease. But the immune system offers a new way of changing our cognition and treating illnesses affecting the brain.

Responding to Ponnuru and Wehner’s constructive, sane essay, Chait welcomes their contributions, but insists they also be willing to “identify or confront the forces within the party that prevent these reforms from succeeding”:

[W]here are the Republicans speaking in opposition to [Paul] Ryan and his allies? I haven’t seen a single one. Instead, they ignore the existing configurations altogether. Wehner had a blog post yesterday railing against “the refusal by Democrats to reform entitlement programs in general.” But Obama has been offering to reduce spending on Social Security and Medicare for two years now, in return for Republican agreement to spread the burden of the fiscal adjustment. They won’t take the deal.

Let me note once more this sentence from the State of the Union:

On Medicare, I’m prepared to enact reforms that will achieve the same amount of health care savings by the beginning of the next decade as the reforms proposed by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission.

Why was this not seized upon by the right? Another missed opportunity. Still, we finally have Conor’s wet dream. Sane conservative S E Cupp (her sanity means she has to be on MSNBC, not Fox) finally said it in last week’s cover-story for the New York Times Magazine:

“And we can’t be afraid to call out Rush Limbaugh. If we can get three Republicans on three different networks saying, ‘What Rush Limbaugh said is crazy and stupid and dangerous,’ maybe that’ll give other Republicans cover’ to feel comfortable disagreeing with him as well from time to time.”

Better still, she’s not backing down:

Some demanded I apologize. Others implied I just committed career suicide. Others still politely suggested I commit actual suicide.

I’ll end the suspense for some: There will be no apology. I make a living disagreeing with people who are far more successful, famous, wealthy and important than I am. I have spent thousands of hours on television and thousands of column inches criticizing the President of the United States. If you think I’m going to apologize for suggesting that it might be okay to disagree with a radio host sometimes, you don’t know me at all.

But I guess I’m not surprised at the rancor. For one, part of the point I was trying to make was that the impulse to defend anything and everything that a party heavyweight says — to the death — has the deleterious effect of making conservatives seem irrational and herd-like. No one is right all the time, and no one is above reproach. Limbaugh, who has frequently criticized Republicans, knows this better than anyone.

This gets a little defensive, but it still shows necessary courage:

I care deeply about the conservative movement, which is why I regularly put myself in a position to defend it in hostile territory, on liberal media outlets where I am usually outnumbered. It’s why I am my party’s biggest cheerleader when our leaders do the right thing. And it’s why I travel the country telling as many people as possible why conservative policies are better for them than liberal ones.

But it’s also why I risk friends and fans by calling out Republican elected officials, operatives like Karl Rove, the Republican National Committee, and conservative pundits when necessary. It’s no profile in courage, but merely common sense. We’ll never win credibility with new voters if we insist everything that every conservative says or does should be defended and justified.

Nothing has been more harmful for conservatism these last few years than its ruthless pursuit of heresy, its relentless policing of dissent, and its surrender to the most insular, extremist nutballs on talk radio and Fox. Maybe even Roger Ailes is beginning to realize this. But let us honor and remember Cupp for saying what needs to be said. Until Limbaugh – and all the cynical, money-grubbing, racist demagoguery he represents – is disowned publicly by major Republicans, the party will have a trivial chance of recovery. He is their Sistah Soldja. And the GOP awaits its Bill Clinton.

A few years ago, I taped a long conversation into the night with the late Christopher Hitchens. We’ve been running excerpts this month and you can read all of it from the beginning here. Here’s the latest new installment:

H: [Jihadism] is motivated by a hatred for not just America’s hedonism, but for its existence, not for its policy but for its existence in the world.

Now at that stage, I began to realize that many of the criticisms I had myself made of the United States — none of which I would take back — or of its policies or many of its statesmen, were no less valid than they have been but were to be considered in this light. And I think that’s the lesson, successively, of what happened in the Balkans, in the Gulf, in the Hindu Kush and beyond. Because these ideologies, especially the latter one, are potentially toxic everywhere. I mean by that the Islamic Jihad ideology. It doesn’t exist in absolutely every country in the world, but it is a threat in a large number of countries beyond the zone of historical Islam itself. Including in our country of birth.

A: Yes. More so, it seems, almost. I read this Pew poll about the attitudes of Muslims in Europe and in Britain; they seem to be more hostile to Western pluralism in Britain than they were even in Germany or France.

H: Yeah, I believe I have an explanation for that, too, though I could well be wrong. There’s a wonderful essay by Sigmund Freud called, “The Narcissism of the Small Difference,” and it has to do with they way in which divisions that are invisible to the outsider — as between, say Sinhala and Tamil in Sri Lanka, or Protestant and Catholic in Northern Ireland — are everything to the people who live there. The least thing is the one that divides them. If you were a Zulu, say, or Han Chinese and you go to Belfast…”what are they fighting about? This seems preposterous!” But to them it’s everything, in many ways it’s all they know, it’s what gives them identity.

A: Right, it’s like when someone asks me, “Why don’t you become an Episcopalian?” and I say, “You have no idea.”

H: (Laughs.)

A: “I could sooner become a Muslim.”

H: Yes, and this translates, I think — I’m only translating fairly roughly in the present state — that those who are far from the action, as say is a Muslim in Belgium or Norway…

A: Or Coventry.

H: Or Coventry. He feels he has a great deal more to prove. He doesn’t live in Chechnya, he only reads about it. He doesn’t live in Kashmir. He has to be more affirmative the further he is from the field.

A: There is a dynamic between modernity itself and the primordial resistance too it, right? I mean, some of what we’re talking about in terms of this religious fundamentalism and its political ambitions seems to have intensified in modernity. The hijackers were — it’s not as if bin Laden had no knowledge of the United States, it’s not as if Mohammad Atta was not aware of what this was like. The closer they get to it, the more they’re repelled, the more they have to force it out of their consciousness and destroy it.

H: This is famously true of Sayyid Qutb, one of the founders, who appears to have been, it’s actually very fascinating, drawn to the United States precisely by the magnetic elements that draw everybody to it. But when he got there he was appalled by its immorality, and its amorality as well, and its hedonism. And when you look up the events he attended and the scenes that he witnessed you find that it’s some university in the Midwest, I forget where it was: he was invited to a party where women mingled openly and I think perhaps smoked cigarettes and wore what he thought was provocative apparel.

When one goes back to check what that party was like…it was a sort of mixer on some rather dull campus where I don’t believe anyone was showing any cleavage and there was no alcohol served, even! It was one of those, sort of fruit juice, “maybe we’ll be really daring and put a disc-sized record on a gramophone and maybe someone will dance” — a pretty deadly evening. For him, profanity to the utmost extent.

I mention it for two reasons:

1) anecdotally I think it’s very important, 2) it shows that there isn’t a way of being that one could adopt that would be less provocative. Many are saying “we are offending them, we’ve upset them, we disrespected them,” and so on. Well, exactly what would you have to do to not to incur their wrath? This man, Sayyid Qutb, was no mild critic of the United States; he came back having seen this profane campus mixer, that neither of us would’ve bothered to go to, determined to destroy the United States and as far as he could the whole concept of “Western civilization” as we know it, whatever cliché you like.

It was no mild critique he was making of this Babylon. What I object to the most I think, at present, in our culture is the masochism of people who say, “well if only we hadn’t upset them.” They have no idea of how strenuous a condition this is.

A: No, no, well they don’t understand the fundamentalist psyche. Well, the fundamentalist psyche is rather like the totalitarian psyche; it cannot tolerate any deviation at all. And therefore the very concept of a society that’s constructed upon a constitution and the pursuit of happiness as its declared object, is itself anathema, right?

H: Well of course it is, because who doesn’t know that happiness is available to you by opening one book, The Recitation, the Qu’ran? Who doesn’t know that? Isn’t it obvious that all you need is one book? One book itself is there to tell you it’s the only book you need. And that it’s the literal word of God, and not only that — because there’ve been other books that claim to be that — but the final, unalterable word of God. With this book, inquiry and anxiety end, you have everything you need. How could anyone be so wretched and so ungrateful as to reject this gift? It’s like adding to the misery of Calvary –

A: It is translating neutrality towards it as hostility towards it, which is what I mean by the fundamentalist-totalitarian link. It was impossible under Stalin to be neutral, you know?

H: Hannah Arendt made a brilliant remark about Stalinism and she said that its great success among the intellectuals — and not just the Russian ones, I mean, among its intellectual adherents around the world — was that it had replaced all questions of validity or testability or objectivity with the question of motive. In other words, “comrade x has written this attack on our collectivization policy and says it’s not working—“

A: “Why would he do such a thing?”

H: “And why now? Why would he do it, and who put him up to it?” And that mentality you can find still strongly exemplified.

A: And what is the origin of that mentality?

H: The origin of that mentality is religious.

A: Yes, so what is religion, in your view — ?

H: That’s the inquisitional mentality: if you can’t find heresy, you must go and look for it.

A: Right. But what — leaving me out of this for a minute — in your view, is the human need that mentality is fulfilling that you seem to have no use for?

H: The need for certainty. And therefore security.

A: Which means that they are insecure. Which means that they are afraid. I mean I do think there is a connection between a sense of dislocation, a sense of beleaguerment, a sense of loss, and an attempt to repair it with absolute certainty. I think there is a relationship between those two things.

H: Common to all such systems, including the secular ones — I would exempt fascism because it had no canonical texts, besides the turgid garbage of Mein Kampf —

A: Right. Or some crazy 19th century racial eugenics.

H: Or with Gobineau, Rosenberg, ethnic theorists and crackpots, people measuring bumps in people’s skulls. Phrenologists. Crackpots. I mean, fascism is unbelievable intellectual degradation. But certainly with communism, with the Catholic Church — well, the Christian Church to begin with, before the schism — any revisiting of the canonical texts makes people extremely nervous. Great attempts are made to either bury things in libraries or to burn them.

A: Except I think you are ignoring large sections of — I’ll speak about Christians — in which this is not: for example, the monastic life, in which one can see people having no interest in controlling the world whatsoever, and in withdrawing from the world to pursue what they think is God’s will. Or, a figure like St. Francis, who one cannot even begin to accuse of seeking power, or even to control anybody else’s life. And, similarly, Jesus, I mean, you have to concede there are two forces. I completely agree with you that this element in religion is integral to it, it’s part of it, it’s a constant — but I don’t think it exhausts the entire arsenal of religious activity or thought.

H: I’ve no knowledge of the real existence either of Jesus of Nazareth or of St. Francis of Assisi, who may very well have been a great avian demagogue —

A: (Laughs.)

H: But I do know that it would be quite false to say that the Franciscan order sought no influence over the world, along with all the other orders: First, in the accumulation of property, second in the administration of local government and third in the promulgation and proselytization of the faith. I don’t think they at all renounced the world. I believe it may have been their ambition, but in point of fact, the world cannot be renounced. The world is as it is.

A: Yes, but insofar as it can be, many have tried. And to dismiss them as not religious, or to conflate all of them with the Grand Inquisitor seems to me to miss a very large swath of religious experience.

H: I don’t conflate all of them with the Grand Inquisitor but if Christianity wants to be identified with St. Simeon of Stylite — the site of whose supposed pillar I once visited in the original territories of early Christianity, eastern Christianity, which is the real original one, in northern Syria — who decided to mortify himself and withdraw from the world by standing on top of a pillar for forty years … It doesn’t bother me, it seems like a waste of life and a waste of mind and a terrible waste of energy.

A: But why would you care? Why would you even go that far?

H: Well, exactly. If that’s what it was, it’s fine, let him go do that just as I don’t mind if some hippie goes off to start some commune and live entirely on nature and have his wife have the baby on a wooden table. It doesn’t bother me at all. But Christianity does not give me that option! It wants to save my soul; it wants to tell me that my children must be taught garbage in the schools in the 21st century, in the United States; it wants to tell people that condoms are worse than AIDS —

A: Some of them do. Not all of them.

H: I’m sorry, the authoritative ones do, the leadership does. The others who’ve become, I have to say, I’ll agree with you — Church of England, for example, has become more or less a humanist, bleating organization that stands for nothing. Fine!

A: No I think that’s way too dismissive.

H: I think it’s way too lenient.

A: It’s perfectly possible to say that one believes in the teachings of Jesus; that one attempts to inculcate them in oneself; that one appreciates and has come to terms with the mystery of his incarnation; one wishes to commemorate it through the sacraments…

H: I’m not hearing this for the first time.

A: I’m sure you’re not — without attempting to control anybody else, without attempting to impose it on a single other soul, and without even…I mean, for example, I think of many of my lay-Catholic peers or friends or family and I do not think that the fact they’re not running around trying to convert every single human being they meet — and they’re not, Christopher, they’re just not — to them, their faith is for themselves and the people they love, and for them it is the truth, but it’s held with much less certainty and much less intolerance than some other people.

Now, I think that comes, to some extent, from being able to live with doubt. The psychological and spiritual reserves that allow one to live in the middle of confusion, and yet not to abandon faith. It is a sign of weakness that one has to translate religious experience into a set of inviolable doctrines which must, by necessity — and I understand the point you’re making, by logic — be required to be applied to everybody else with whom one comes into contact. But it’s not the only form of Christianity. It’s not the only form of faith.

H: But just to respond to those in reverse order: It would very surprising if Christians were not assailed with constant doubt because the worldview of their church has been repeatedly challenged and overthrown ever since Galileo and extending to our own day with Stephen Hawking. And including—

A: And of course, Darwin.

H: To say nothing of Darwin—and including matters that are not to do with the magisterium of the spiritual at all, that are to do with actual questions, such as whether the sun goes round the Earth or not, whether we live in a man-centered or an Earth-centered universe. These things have been decided. Christianity could not now, I think, be invented. So, that they’re doubtful is to their credit, and furthermore, their attempts to evangelize their world have failed, I think rightly and I also think inevitably. They were cruel, most of them, and additionally ineffective.

A: They’re succeeding very well right now in Africa as we speak.

H: The attempt will never stop, but I thought you said that one should consider Christianity as a skeptical movement, you can’t have that both ways.

A: No, I’m not having that both ways.

H: Of course they’re never going to give it up because there’s no point to them if they do, but just to finish my reverse: the other reason without which we would’ve never heard about Christianity is that it happened to be adopted as the official state ideology of the Roman Empire in a rather great stroke of luck.

A: Right.

H: Which made it semi-compulsory for people, well, entirely compulsory for many. Going back to your view about the transcendent refulgence of the Nazarene: I don’t believe a word of that. He quite plainly though the world was going to end quite soon, rather looked forward to the prospect, thought that he would be a big feature of that event, and inculcated this belief in other people. That is…

A: No, we do not know that. Christopher, we know that the people who wrote the Gospels attributed that to him.

H: Well, look, you’re not gonna trap me into saying the Gospels are true. I don’t think they’re true at all, I don’t think there’s a word of truth in them.

A: You think it was entirely made up. He didn’t even exist.

H: I think the entire thing—the Gospel account of his life is of course an absolute fiction—

A: Absolute?

(Photo: Sayyid Qutb, 1965, via Wiki.)

Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellarman deconstruct common myths about grammar:

[P]erhaps the biggest grammar myth of all is the infamous taboo against splitting an infinitive, as in “to boldly go.” The truth is that you can’t split an infinitive: Since “to” isn’t part of the infinitive, there’s nothing to split. Great writers—including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne and Wordsworth—have been inserting adverbs between “to” and infinitives since the 1200s.

Where these supposed rules come from:

For some of them, we can blame misguided Latinists who tried to impose the rules of their favorite language on English. Anglican bishop Robert Lowth popularized the prohibition against ending a sentence with a preposition in his 1762 book, A Short Introduction to English Grammar; while Henry Alford, a dean of Canterbury Cathedral, was principally responsible for the infinitive taboo, with his publication of A Plea for the Queen’s English in 1864.

In Latin, sentences don’t end in prepositions, and an infinitive is one word that can’t be divided. But in a Germanic language like English, as linguists have pointed out, it’s perfectly normal to end a sentence with a preposition and has been since Anglo-Saxon times. And in English, an infinitive is also one word. The “to” is merely a prepositional marker. That’s why it’s so natural to let English adverbs fall where they may, sometimes between “to” and a verb.

There’s been a huge fooferaw in Britain about a recent Hilary Mantel speech that contemplated what monarchy and public institutions like it do to actual human beings. Some Brits are up in arms about some phrases used by Mantel – in what is, in my view, a simply brilliant, must-read piece about all institutional humans (from presidents to popes and kings and queens) and their bodies. The outrage requires ignorance of the actual speech, because it’s spoken from a rather inspired version of empathy, not scorn, as Massie notes here.

Mantel has been writing some staggeringly good books about the Tudor period, so she knows the full history of monarchy, its quirks and details and foibles. And she points out something very obvious, though usually forgotten: the constant public viewing of a royal has to be a dehumanizing, even depleting, experience from the other side of the looking glass. It becomes both the most extreme form of celebrity, but still has to be scandal-free to survive. Those dead eyes in the new and genuinely awful portrait of Middleton (see above) are dead for a reason: self-protection. In one passage, Mantel recalls what Diana did for Britain and what Britain and the entire world did to the human being who was once Diana Spencer:

Diana was more royal than the family she joined. That had nothing to do with family trees. Something in her personality, her receptivity, her passivity, fitted her to be the carrier of myth. She came near to claiming that she had a healing touch, the ancient attribute of royal persons. The healing touch can’t be felt through white gloves. Diana walked bare-handed among the multitude, and unarmed: unfortified by irony, uninformed by history. Her tragedy was located in the gap between her human capacities and the demands of the superhuman role she was required to fulfil. When I think of Diana, I remember Stevie Smith’s poem about the Lorelei:

There, on a rock majestical,
A girl with smile equivocal,
Painted, young and damned and fair,
Sits and combs her yellow hair.

Soon Diana’s hairstyles were as consequential as Marie Antoinette’s, and a great deal cheaper to copy.

But this exposure – from that first picture with sunlight behind her dress revealing one hell of a pair of legs – is what in the end killed her inside and then outside. How, in other words, do you remain a human being and an institution at the same time? And on that question, Mantel’s examination of the time she met the Queen is simply priceless. Mantel was invited to a social event at Buckingham Palace, which the Queen attended. As the Queen walked around, Mantel noticed people move away, shifting their gaze, trying not to engage: “The guests studied the walls, the floor, they looked everywhere except at Her Majesty.” Now imagine being the person at the center of this social embarrassment for your entire lifetime. You are so alone; you are so necessarily aloof; your humanity has to be contained for the enigma of the monarchy to remain. The alternative is a car wreck in an underpass in Paris. And then Hilary actually catches Her Majesty’s eye and we see the human cost:

I am ashamed now to say it but I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones. I felt that such was the force of my devouring curiosity that the party had dematerialised and the walls melted and there were only two of us in the vast room, and such was the hard power of my stare that Her Majesty turned and looked back at me, as if she had been jabbed in the shoulder; and for a split second her face expressed not anger but hurt bewilderment. She looked young: for a moment she had turned back from a figurehead into the young woman she was, before monarchy froze her and made her a thing, a thing which only had meaning when it was exposed, a thing that existed only to be looked at.

And I felt sorry then. I wanted to apologise. I wanted to say: it’s nothing personal, it’s monarchy I’m staring at.

You were and you were not. And this is worth thinking about as well with respect to the Papacy. Perhaps what the introverted Ratzinger feared was the kind of public spectacle that John Paul II endured, as his slowly disintegrating body was wheeled around like some kind of relic, because the institution and the person were fused. And now, there is no escape from mass media, no relief from scrutiny, no amount of frills and lace and ermine and Prada to conceal the man beneath the robes. Maybe someone genuinely committed to the Gospels simply could not face that form of endless, merciless Hell. Hilary concludes:

It may be that the whole phenomenon of monarchy is irrational, but that doesn’t mean that when we look at it we should behave like spectators at Bedlam. Cheerful curiosity can easily become cruelty. It can easily become fatal. We don’t cut off the heads of royal ladies these days, but we do sacrifice them, and we did memorably drive one to destruction a scant generation ago.

Middleton in some ways is the antidote to Diana: beautiful but safe, young but mature, alive but slowly dying under the exposure that never, ever ends. We have an institution that demands a mask for a human being to survive within. But the mask has been removed, and the flashbulbs won’t stop.

In response to Frum’s worries about gun safety, Robert VerBruggen claims “gun accidents are statistically very rare.” Frum fires back:

In 2007, the United States suffered some 15,000-19,000 accidental shootings. More than 600 of these shootings proved fatal. Is that “very rare”? The total number of Americans killed and wounded by gun accidents exceeds the total number killed or injured in fires. The number killed in gun accidents is 20% higher than the total number killed in all U.S. civil aviation accidents.

In 2011, the Consumer Product Safety Commission voted to ban drop-side baby cribs because these cribs have been blamed for “dozens” of infant deaths over the entire previous decade. The 600+ accidental gun deaths in any single year amount to 50 dozen. Back when the Centers for Disease Control were allowed to do gun research, they found that American children under age 15 were nine times more likely to die of a gun accident than children in other advanced wealthy countries.

The Centers for Disease Control reserve the term “very rare” for accidental deaths from vaccines, the number of which is zero, or close to it. If more than 600 people a year were dying from vaccines, we’d have a national uproar, if not a revolution.

Joining Ponnuru, Michael Gerson and Pete Wehner try to save the GOP from itself:

[I]t is no wonder that Republican policies can seem stale; they are very nearly identical to those offered up by the party more than 30 years ago. For Republicans to design an agenda that applies to the conditions of 1980 is as if Ronald Reagan designed his agenda for conditions that existed in the Truman years.

They ask for some intellectual honesty as a precondition of renewal:

Republicans need to express and demonstrate a commitment to the common good, a powerful and deeply conservative concept. There is an impression—exaggerated but not wholly without merit—that the GOP is hyper-individualistic. During the Republican convention, for example, we repeatedly heard about the virtues of individual liberty but almost nothing about the importance of community or social solidarity, and of the obligations and attachments we have to each other. Even Republican figures who espouse relatively moderate policy prescriptions often sound like libertarians run amok.

This is true – but it seems to me equally true that the spending recklessness of the Bush-Cheney era made that libertarian turn inevitable, vital and important, if the party is to regain any credibility on fiscal matters. The utopian ideals and dystopian means by which the last Republican president promised to end tyranny on earth also require a slightly more robust critique than this:

In every presidential election since the Nixon–Humphrey contest in 1968, Republicans began with a significant lead in this respect. With the end of the Cold War in 1989, this potent issue was largely taken off the table. Nor has the decidedly mixed legacy of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade worked to bolster the Republicans’ electoral advantage in the conduct of foreign policy; if anything, the opposite is the case.

At some point, “decidedly mixed legacy” will become “huge fucking errors”. Then we’ll see the ice really break up. But this is a vital shift among the more thoughtful and flexible of the conservative intelligentsia:

Reasonable tax rates and sound monetary policy remain important economic commitments. But America now confronts a series of challenges that have to do with globalization, stagnant wages, the loss of blue-collar jobs, exploding health-care and college costs, and the collapse of the culture of marriage.

Amen. And the defense of the free market from the corrupting concentration of wealth among the very few is a truly important building bloc for renewal. Wehner and Ponnuru are dead-on here:

Republicans could begin by becoming visible and persistent critics of corporate welfare: the vast network of subsidies and tax breaks extended by Democratic and Republican administrations alike to wealthy and well-connected corporations. Such benefits undermine free markets and undercut the public’s confidence in American capitalism. They also increase federal spending.

Conservatives should want to gut corporate welfare, simplify the tax code (because Obama can’t or won’t), and break up the banks as a champion of middle class bottom-up entrepreneurialism and growth.

Prison reform would also, in my view, not only be a vital measure, but also rebrand the GOP rather radically, by showing its concern for the entire polity, including even criminals, because the government should not be indifferent to any segment of its citizens, even the shadow nation that now lives behind bars in often horrifying conditions. On social issues, this is an endorsement of the Rauch-Blankenhorn approach:

Republicans need to make their own inner peace with working with those who both support gay marriage and are committed to strengthening the institution of marriage.

Pete and Ramesh use two historical examples of political parties reforming themselves – the Democrats under Clinton and the Labour Party under Blair. It’s odd to me that they don’t talk about the more obvious parallel: how the British Tories tried to climb their way back to relevance after becoming deeply branded as the “nasty party” in 1997. They needed a new leader who showed he backed the welfare state – using socialized medicine for a special needs child; who represented the next generation – by backing marriage equality for conservative reasons; and who signaled a new commitment to the common good by embracing the fight against climate change. Even then, his fiscal austerity in this period, which I broadly supported, has clearly failed – to reinvigorate the private sector, increase growth and reduce the debt. In retrospect, I see the milder deficit contractions under Obama to be closer to the sweet spot of growth and debt-trimming we currently need.

As I wrote yesterday, I suspect that the increasingly potent force of global capitalism will require the right to buttress the welfare state rather than dismantle it, at least in the short and medium term. The times might also suggest a slower path back to fiscal balance than I first thought was possible. In Britain, the Tories have the previous Labour government to blame for all the domestic and war spending and debt they inherited. And the public still agrees with them on blaming Labour. But here’s a sign that conservatives in America need to notice. Even when the Tories can blame the other party for the massive debt before the Great Recession (which gave the government almost no fiscal room to maneuver), the public is still souring on them badly. Labour leads the Conservatives by 42 – 31 percent in the polls, and Cameron’s move to the middle has also created an opening for the anti-Europe, anti-immigrant far right party, UKIP, which is now polling at 8 percent, just behind the Liberal Democrats at 12.

In other words, in” this present crisis,” as someone once said, government may have to be part of the solution. Finding what part that is, honing policies that can better address soaring social inequality, a corrupt tax code, the abuse of market power by the financial and healthcare industries, a chaotic, incoherent immigration system, a prison-industrial complex of often unspeakable brutality: that’s the task we need to take on. It may mean a crippling split on the right, as we’ve seen in the UK, where the Tea Party equivalent is separate from the Tories and at 8 percent. That could keep empowering the Democrats in the US as Labour’s internal splits effectively kept Thatcher in power for more than a decade (she never commanded anywhere near 50 percent in the general elections she won).

But the only way past this desert for American conservatism is through it. And Ponnuru and Wehner deserve props for saying so – and so clearly and sincerely.

(Photo: A daffodil in bloom stands in the snow near the Spittal of Glenshee on April 3, 2012 in Glenshee, Scotland. Snow has returned to parts of Scotland just a week after the country experienced record high temperatures for March. By Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images.)