Andrew Sullivan

A Note Of Thanks

After these several high-drama political weeks, I just wanted to offer some thanks to all the new Dish subscribers who signed up in October. We have had a surge of new subs that eclipses any since March, after the tsunami of initial support in January and February. We have no marketing department except for the Dish itself, and it’s incredibly rewarding to see simple content bringing us new readers and thereby a viable future.

I also want to thank the Dish team, whose salaries and healthcare you’re paying for, who have, despite their tender years, managed to produce well over 200 posts a week, round the clock, during frantic news cycles. Chris, Patrick, Jessie, Alice, Matt, Tracy, Chas, Brian and Brendan have no more job security than I have in this new experiment in reader-supported new media. But they work with an intensity and passion and integrity you have to see to believe. They make this look easy. It isn’t. I’m just immensely grateful so many of you seem to appreciate it, and have rewarded their hard work by actually paying for it.

If you’re still reading the Dish by bypassing our leaky meter and want to subscribe along with all these new, paying Dish readers, [tinypass_offer text=”please do”]. It takes two minutes and can cost [tinypass_offer text=”less than $2 a month”]. And thanks again to all of you who have – especially our Founding Members who helped get this whole show on the road in the first place. You rock. But you knew that already.

Update from a new subscriber:

Beats me why I waited so long to get out my credit card. Perhaps it’s because of the contrarian in me that led me to your site in the first place. I recognized in you (and those who write with you) an inability to accept the status quo wisdom as the best, last word. I just didn’t want to believe I had to be like all the others who immediately plunked down their cash to read all you offered. To me, maybe they were the lemmings. And I could get the best of the Dish by picking and skimming and finagling without bumping the meter limit. I was King of the Internets.

But I was wrong. Today, after the shutdown, after the GOP refused to pay for the things we all use – and they fucking liked it – well, I realized I wasn’t being the groovy iconoclast. I was being the winger-nut getting my stuff for free. So I gave up the ghost and paid. Glad I did. Sorry it took so long to realize that all the best misfits are inside the tent – agreeing and disagreeing with your wonderful and maddening posts.

The Tea Party As A Religion, Ctd

Ed Kilgore responds to my take:

I think Andrew’s on the right track, but I’d add a complicating qualifier. It’s not just that these culturally threatened folk embrace their politics like it’s a religion. The actual religious outlook many of them espouse—whether they are conservative fundamentalist Protestants or neo-ultramontane Catholics—has imported secular political perspectives into their faith. They’ve managed to identify obedience to God with the restoration of pre-mid-twentieth-century culture and economics, and consequently, tend to look at themselves as the contemporary equivalents of the Old Testament prophets calling a wicked society to account before all hell literally breaks loose. So their politics reinforces their religion and vice-versa, and yes, the Republican Party, like the squishy mainline Protestant Churches and lenient do-gooder Catholic priests, are generally within crisis-distance of being viewed as objectively belonging to enemy ranks.

I’m grateful for Ed’s refinement of the thesis – and to Rod Dreher’s. My basic point is that underlying far right politics and religion is the fundamentalist psyche, which is, in modernity, a reaction to bewildering social change and economic stagnation. But the eddies here are manifold and mutually reinforcing. If your religious faith demands total assent to an inerrant set of doctrines, how likely are you to engage in political dialogue as if you don’t know all the answers and need input from others? If deviation from inerrant truth means damnation, then how easy is it to transition to a politics aimed at compromise? And by erasing the distinction between the religious sphere and the political – indeed insisting that it must never be erased – you can see how this entire syndrome reinforces itself and is very hard to counter with the usual democratic methods.

This is a complicated argument and if you want to absorb it at length, it’s the central critique of contemporary American “conservatism” in my book, The Conservative Soul. I think – but then I would, wouldn’t I? – that the book’s argument has held up almost too well in the years since it was published. But judge for yourself – it’s instantly available for your Kindle or iPad here. It both deconstructs today’s pseudo-conservatism and tries to reconstruct a conservatism of an older, deeper, wiser variety. To do that, it attempts to tackle religion as well as politics, to ponder the deep forces behind the current Republic crisis rather than the superficial ones.

Its main conclusion is that I do not believe we can have a political resolution in this country without first reforming Christianity, and distinguishing it from Christianist ideology. This is not easy, but the struggle to achieve this is winning some key reinforcements: Pope Francis and the next generation of evangelicals key among them. If some political Dishheads disdain our coverage of religion as gobbledygook – which is your right – then I hope you’ll see that the effort to reform Christianity is indirectly also a political project. It’s about saving conservatism from itself and making it humane again.

(Chart: The religious affiliations of Tea Partiers from “Religion and the Tea Party in the 2010 Election”(pdf))

The Utter Disaster Of Healthcare.gov, Ctd

Yuval Levin talked with sources in the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency in charge of the federal health insurance exchanges. A key section of his post, which is worth reading in full:

If the problems now plaguing the system are not resolved by mid-November and the flow of enrollments at that point looks like it does now, the prospects for the first year of the exchanges will be in very grave jeopardy. Some large advertising and outreach campaigns are also geared to that crucial six-week period around Thanksgiving and Christmas, so if the sites are not functional, all of that might not happen—or else might be wasted. If that’s what the late fall looks like, the administration might need to consider what one of the people I spoke with described as “unthinkable options” regarding the first year of the exchanges.

All of the CMS people I spoke with thought the state-run exchanges are in far better shape than the federal system under their purview. But the insurers do not seem that much happier with many of those state exchanges.

Back-end data issues seem to be a problem everywhere, and some of the early enrollment figures being released by the states are not matching up with insurance company data about enrollments in those states, which suggests a breakdown in communication that is only beginning to be understood. The insurers believe that only Nevada, Colorado, Washington state, and Kentucky have what could reasonably be described as working systems at this point. Still, there is no question that on the whole the states with state-run exchanges are in better shape than those with federal ones.

Jonathan Cohn tries to look on the bright side:

[I]f these past two weeks appear to reflect poorly on the federal bureaucracy and the Administration managing it, they shouldn’t reflect poorly on health care reform itself—which, after all, has worked in Massachusetts and seems to be working in the states running their own operations. The success of states like Kentucky and New York and Connecticut and California are important for their own sake: By my count, they constitute about a fourth of the national population. But they are also important for what they show about how the law can work, once the technology piece is in place.

The Backlash Against Modern-Day America

Jelani Cobb outlines the GOP’s “Dixiecrat problem”:

Today’s Republican Party, like the Democrats six decades ago, has had to come to terms with a demographic shift—one in which Hispanic voters are a crucial new element. We would be naïve to believe that the opposition to comprehensive immigration reform that features so prominently in current Tea Party politics is incidental to its appeal. (A 2010 survey of Tea Party supporters conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute found that fifty-eight per cent believed the government “paid too much attention to the problems of blacks and minorities”; sixty-four percent said immigrants were “a burden” on the country.) The Tea Party–inspired eruptions that have recurred throughout Obama’s Presidency represent something more complicated than a reactionary backlash to the sight of a black President; they are a product of the way he so tidily represents the disparate strands of social history that brought us to this impasse. The problem isn’t that there’s a black President; it’s that the country has changed in ways that made Obama’s election possible.

What If Obama Needs To Delay Obamacare?

Philip Klein wonders:

Obama, no doubt, wants to avoid the political embarrassment of a delay — or even the mere suggestion of one. But what happens if it’s the middle of December and enrollments are nowhere near where they need to be to make the system viable? What if, by necessity, he has to seek a delay?

The operating assumption would be that Republicans would jump at the chance to delay it. But after the past few weeks, can we really be sure that this would be the case?

It’s perfectly conceivable that if such a scenario played out, the position of the Tea Party activists and their allies in Congress would be that delaying the law for a year would be tantamount to a bailout of Obamacare.

Should Healthcare.gov fail to improve, Chait concedes that delaying the individual mandate may be necessary:

Here … is the kind of individual-mandate delay that would make sense. It would apply only to those states lacking a functioning website. (States that established their own exchanges are, in general, experiencing much better functionality than the states that boycotted their exchange and relied on the federal government to set up a site for them.) The delay would be tied to the workability of that state’s website — no reason to delay California’s individual mandate just because people in New Jersey can’t log on. And the process for making this determination would have to rest with the Department of Health and Human Services, or some other body that is trying to make the law succeed, not one that’s trying to destroy it.

Note that the individual mandate in 2014 is only a token $95 annual tax. Its main purpose is as a signaling device that everybody should get covered.

Chait is wrong about that last point:

The individual mandate’s penalty is not $95 in year one. It’s $95 or 1 percent of your taxable income, whichever is greater. So if you make $80,000 in taxable income, the penalty is $800.

Stephen Colbert Kills

Do yourself a favor and check out this clip of his remarks from last night’s Al Smith Dinner, a ghastly Catholic elite version of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. But some choice gags:

I have great respect for Cardinal Dolan, though I do have to say, sir, it is not easy when you are wearing that outfit. In that cape and red sash, you look like a matador who’s really let himself go. Did you not see the invite? It said white-tie, not ‘Flamboyant Zorro.’

On Bloomberg:

Tiny, tiny man. The real reason he doesn’t want drink cups larger than 16 ounces is because he’s afraid he might drown in one.

On Christine Quinn:

New York City is the only place in the world where the lesbian candidate is too conservative.

Tip your waiter.

Sean Hannity Lies

A pretty definitive exposure of the mendacious agit-prop being deployed to undermine the Affordable Healthcare Act. At this point, Fox News doesn’t just have to invent their own reality, they really have to invent the people affected by it. One thing you can be sure of: there will be no response from Hannity. Because the only response would be to admit error, and, as we know, that’s a cardinal sin on the far right.

The World’s Biggest Democracy Has The Most Slaves

New research indicates that 29 million people are enslaved worldwide:

The [Global Slavery Index], published by the Walk Free Foundation on Thursday, ranks 162 countries and identifies risk factors for enslavement and the government responses. The research found that around 10 countries hold about 70 percent of the world’s slaves. India has the highest number of people enslaved in absolute terms, approximately 14 million, almost half the total worldwide.

Amar Toor adds that “India’s problems [are based] on an inefficient legal system and a tradition of ‘servile marriage’.” Getting an accurate picture of the problem can be very difficult:

Dark figures are calculated on the basis of random sample surveys such as the British crime survey. By asking a sample of the population if they have experienced a list of crimes in the last year, the crimes the public reports can be compared to the official records of crimes known to the police. … The frightening fact is how many slavery crimes we are failing to detect: over 90 percent in most countries.

(Chart from The Economist)

The Abatement Of Cruelty, Ctd

Remaining thoughts on the popular thread:

In response to your Aussie reader suggesting kangaroo meat, there’s another very good option in the US, if a bit expensive and hard to find. I’ve almost completely cut pork out of my diet for all of the reasons discussed, but being from North Carolina, giving up pulled pork permanently would be tantamount to treason. It’s not common yet, but there is an alternative.

Wild boar have been exploding in numbers, particularly in Texas, for reasons that aren’t fully determined (more on that caveat to eating boar in a minute). They’re aggressive, dangerous, very damaging to local flora and wildlife, and incredibly delicious. They’re also incredibly difficult to hunt, being fairly intelligent and swift of foot, which to me is a healthy challenge to our increasingly complacent collective backsides. Eating boar means you’re eating a gamier pork that needs to be reduced in numbers, and at the very least has lived its life in a natural environment. I’ve had wild boar sausage, and it was amazing.

The caveat, of course, is that there most certainly are boar that are intentionally released for hunts and which contribute to the problem. We definitely need some way of distinguishing boar that’s killed in wildlife control and boar that’s killed after being intentionally released for sport, which turns the moral equation upside down.

Another zooms out:

I’ve been following your thread about how we can be more humane in killing the animals we eat. It is fine for those of us who live in a place where we can actually get to a farmer’s market and find grass-fed beef that is killed humanely; however, I think there is a huge disconnect about how we feed the people who live in the United States who barely have access to a grocery store in their neighborhood much less barnyard raised chickens … and even if there were such a thing, they would never be able to afford to buy it.

In 1940, there were approximately 128 million people in the US and lots of family farms; now there are 308 million (probably more since that number is from the 2010 census) that we need to figure out a way to feed. My dad had a grocery store in a small town and my aunt and uncle had a farm where they raised chickens, cattle and pigs. In the fall, my dad and two uncles would slaughter a steer and a calf for meat for my dad to sell at his store. And I am sorry, but when I saw my first calf with his neck cut, bleeding and stumbling around the barnyard until he fell over, I didn’t feel like that calf was treated humanely. But I understood that that calf was going to feed a lot of people in my hometown (population 500) and at a not very expensive cost. The only expense my dad had was the slaughterhouse he took the animals to be cut up into smaller chunks so that he could store them more easily. I can still remember the smell – a mix of blood and meat – that permeated the place.

So please tell me how, without factory farming, we are going to be able to feed 310 million people at an affordable price. And please, if we all became vegetarians/vegans, don’t think that there wouldn’t be factory vegetable gardens (there already are in California and other farm states) and we would probably run out of arable land to feed everyone. And if there weren’t factory cattle farms, we would quickly run out of space for meat too.

Now what we can do is regulate the hell out of them – which of course, our deregulating Congress wants nothing to do with. Make sure that the conditions that the animals are kept in and the meat harvested are as safe as we can make it … chickens and pigs, too. Of course that would mean adding inspectors and following up to make sure, etc. etc. And how is that going to be accomplished?

I just think it’s really naïve to say that we can all just check out how our meat is harvested and not buy from certain suppliers and the market will force a change. Until everyone makes enough money to put real pressure on the ranchers, meat producers, etc. it is not going to happen.

Another notes:

I wanted to comment on the research you cited on dog fMRI from the Berns lab that argues that “dogs are people” based on the fact that dogs show emotional processing that activates the caudate nucleus. In my own work I also use fMRI, and the caudate nucleus (part of the basal ganglia) is my primary research speciality.

I think that the methods for training and scanning dogs developed by Dr. Berns and his colleagues are very exciting and will lead to much greater understanding of the mind and brain of dogs. However, I think his emphasis on the caudate nucleus is very misleading. The basal ganglia in general, and the caudate in particular, are actually conserved across all vertebrate species, to a very remarkable degree; there is nothing special about dogs having a caudate nucleus, or using it to feel emotions. Stan Grillner at the Karolinska institute is a leader in the field and has found basal ganglia homologs in axolotl, lampreys, and pretty much every vertebrate ever tested. Even more impressive is recent research that found a basal ganglia like structure in the fly (drosophila)!

A goal of many scientists has historically been to try to find the special thing about our minds and brains that makes us human. Most of these (enlarged prefrontal cortex, ability to use tools) have ultimately been shown to not be unique to our species. So the lesson here might not be that dogs, specifically, are like humans – but that we humans are more closely related to other vertebrates, and even invertebrates, to a much greater degree than we appreciate. That lesson is certainly consistent with the moral argument made by Matthew Scully.

(Photo of a wild boar from Getty)

Rent Is Too Damn High? Don’t Blame The Artists

Ben Davis argues that artists aren’t responsible for gentrification, warning that “until there’s some understanding that gentrification isn’t just about people’s individual lifestyle choices – of artists, or preppies – but a symptom of dysfunctional urban policy, everyone is going to continue to get herded in front of rising rents every few years”:

In the often-bitter narrative of neighborhood “revitalization,” much more depends on huge forces like average area incomes, social stratification, real-estate speculation, and rent policy than on the magic of art. (Even in artist-led gentrification’s relatively raw form in SoHo there were bigger city planning forces in play, including the Rockefellers’ concurrent push to renew Lower Manhattan.) … The flip side is that in places like New York, with its turbo-charged real-estate market, artists aren’t really in the driver’s seat. Even in my neighborhood, Brooklyn’s increasingly uncool and preppy Williamsburg, the spectacular transformation of the last decade has not been just some natural process of rising cachet thanks to the art scene. It’s a function of very conscious and hotly contested zoning decisions.

(Photo by NOIR Visionary Studio)