Author: Andrew Sullivan

Dear Aunt Ayn, Ctd

A reader grumbles:

The reader responses you posted to Ayn Rand’s letter miss the point.  I don’t think anyone is arguing against responsibility, maturity, etc.  The point is that Rand is the ultimate stick in the mud.  She’s the little girl from Miracle on 34th Street who doesn’t believe in Santa Claus, except she grows up and never got to the end of the movie.  The point the commenters are missing is that her niece asked for twenty five dollars, not a fucking lecture about moral responsibility, the plight of man, or any of the other bullshit that Rand used to fill her intolerable books with.

Another sighs:

I guess it’s a hazard of the way we read blogs and links. The comments from your readers who didn’t like the way you presented Ayn Rand’s letter are in fact quite consistent with Mallory Ortberg’s presentation of the letter in her own piece:

This letter so perfectly encapsulates everything I find deeply endearing about this bloviating monster. It is 30% very good advice, 50% unnecessary yelling, and 20% nonsense.

Another notes:

A couple of your readers contextualize Ayn Rand’s apparently stringent conditions for the repayment a loan of $25, but the context widens further still. In old age, when she was already quite rich, Rand accepted both Social Security and Medicare. It cannot be fully excused by saying (as some libertarian apologists have done) that she had paid into them and therefore could feel free to draw benefits as a return on her contribution – like the return, say, of a $25 loan – because she drew much more than she paid in. The Medicare, for example, was for the treatment of lung cancer – and Rand was always a strong proponent of smoking, her heroes did it ceaselessly, and she herself scoffed at reports that it causes lung cancer. Moreover, Rand was one of three female founders of the Cato Institute, and the other two – Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel “Pat” Paterson – both refused to accept Social Security. On principle.

The Mind Of Edgar Allan Poe

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Marilynne Robinson praises his idiosyncratic brilliance, claiming the long prose poem about cosmology he wrote in the last year of his life, Eureka, was “so full of intuitive insight that neither his contemporaries nor subsequent generations, at least until the late twentieth century, could make any sense of it”:

Its very brilliance made it an object of ridicule, an instance of affectation and delusion, and so it is regarded to this day among readers and critics who are not at all abreast of contemporary physics. Eureka describes the origins of the universe in a single particle, from which “radiated” the atoms of which all matter is made. Minute dissimilarities of size and distribution among these atoms meant that the effects of gravity caused them to accumulate as matter, forming the physical universe.

This by itself would be a startling anticipation of modern cosmology, if Poe had not also drawn striking conclusions from it, for example that space and “duration” are one thing, that there might be stars that emit no light, that there is a repulsive force that in some degree counteracts the force of gravity, that there could be any number of universes with different laws simultaneous with ours, that our universe might collapse to its original state and another universe erupt from the particle it would have become, that our present universe may be one in a series.

All this is perfectly sound as observation, hypothesis, or speculation by the lights of science in the twenty-first century. And of course Poe had neither evidence nor authority for any of it. It was the product, he said, of a kind of aesthetic reasoning—therefore, he insisted, a poem. He was absolutely sincere about the truth of the account he had made of cosmic origins, and he was ridiculed for his sincerity. Eureka is important because it indicates the scale and the seriousness of Poe’s thinking, and its remarkable integrity. It demonstrates his use of his aesthetic sense as a particularly rigorous method of inquiry.

Previous Dish on Poe’s Eureka here.

(Photo by Flickr user irisb477)

Are Open Borders In Our Future?

Wondering what the world will look like in 2030, Politico asked “asked 15 of the smartest people we know for their most out-there predictions.” Charles Kenny expects that “the social change to come that will have the biggest impact on the global quality of life is a dramatic decline of discrimination by place of birth”:

At a time when the United States can’t pass immigration reform and Europe is seeing the rise of far-right parties, it might seem ridiculous to suggest that legal and social discrimination against those born in other countries could rapidly decline, but there are a bunch of forces working in favor of such an outcome. Economic convergence is reducing the income gap between rich and poor countries, while global values across a range of issues, from the importance of democracy and the environment to women’s rights, are converging as well. The West is rapidly aging as populations begin to decline, which will create considerable demand for imported labor from the rest of the world.

Globalization continues apace, and global problems, from climate change to the emergence of infectious diseases, are making it increasingly clear that we’re all in the same boat. The generation born in the new millennium is already far more global in outlook than those that came before, and the next generation will doubtless see themselves even more as world citizens.

It might be too much to hope that discrimination against place of birth will collapse as rapidly as discrimination against sexual orientation at birth has weakened in the United States, but if the change is only half as rapid, the world will be a far richer, healthier, secure and sustainable place in 30 years. As my Center for Global Development colleague Michael Clemens has amply demonstrated, opening borders is a trillion-dollar opportunity waiting to be grasped—and the next generation could be the one to grasp it.

Replacing Obamacare Would Be Tough

Dougherty urges the GOP to come up with a real Obamacare alternative:

If Republicans want to avoid the fate of other center-right parties in Europe that become mere budget-fixers on national health systems, they have to be much more united on their strategy than they are now. A gigantic GOP-led reform could lead to the same electoral disasters that befell Democrats after they passed the ACA, and fear of losing power could easily translate into a drift towards single-payer. ObamaCare required the incredible courage of President Obama, as well as many of his more awkward and embarrassing legislative buyouts, like the Cornhusker Kickback and Louisiana Purchase. Republicans are going to need a president and legislative leadership with at least as much mettle as he had.

But Ezra doesn’t think Republicans are up for it:

[U]pheaval in the health-care system typically makes for terrible politics. Democrats learned that the hard way with the Affordable Care Act. Republicans would likely learn it double if they made a serious effort to repeal, replace, or overhaul Obamacare. This is the central problem for conservative health reformers: because Republicans don’t care that much about health reform and because so much of what health reform demands offends conservative sensibilities or constituencies, the party doesn’t want to make the sacrifices necessary to unite behind an alternative to Obamacare, much less actually pass and implement it.

Why I’m Jittery About SCOTUS On Marriage, Ctd

A reader quotes me:

You have here a Burkean defense of federalism – something that will very much appeal to Anthony Kennedy, it seems to me. The problem, however, is that the pace of change has quickened so much after Windsor that Sutton is already out-dated. It’s now 36 states, not 19, representing 70 percent of the population, not 45. So his analogy to sodomy laws rather evaporates. If sodomy was upheld as a legitimate zone of privacy, when only 13 states retained such laws, why could not marriage for all couples be upheld as a constitutional right, when only 14 states ban it?

However, you ignore the critical qualifier in Sutton’s formulation: “Freed of federal-court intervention, thirty-one States would continue to define marriage the old-fashioned way.”  The nineteen states got to marriage equality through actions of their citizens, their legislatures, their state courts or some combination of those bodies. As for the “change after Windsor,” the 17 other states that now observe marriage equality do so because federal courts have imposed it on them by extrapolating (primarily from Windsor) to determine what they thought SCOTUS would say. Now, apparently, SCOTUS will speak for itself, and we will find out how heavily Kennedy weighs the concept of federalism in relation to the other factors involved.

Agreed. But civil marriages have already occurred in those seventeen other states, facts on the ground that will be impossible to move. That’s a tough one to suddenly reverse. Several other readers lend their commentary:

I have to chime in here and go back to first principles.

I am well aware that the cultural shift in attitudes about gay marriage is going to be a huge factor in how the Court thinks about this issue, but it really is irrelevant.  If a majority of states are already on board, it certainly makes it easier for the Court, but it’s not properly part of the analysis.  This is a straight-forward equal protection issue.

The whole idea that States have historically defined marriage and so it’s an issue that properly belongs to the States to regulate misses the entire point.  The fact is, States don’t need to be issuing marriage licenses at all.  But if a State is going to regulate marriage (and it doesn’t have to), it must do so in accordance with the Equal Protection Clause.  Full stop.

What other states are doing, how popular the issue now is, how Americans in general feel about it is all irrelevant.  When two Americans walk into a government office and ask the State to issue them a license, they must be treated the same as all others who might walk in and ask for the same license.  There are relatively few legitimate bases to make Equal Protection distinctions built on gender, and so far, no court that has actually addressed that issue has found that those distinctions are justified here.  “We’ve been doing it this way forever” is simply not a legitimate excuse. (I’m looking at you, slavery.)

I say it goes 6-3 (although it should be unanimous).  Scalia is just an intellectually dishonest fraud and always has been and won’t vote for this based on a ludicrous originalist analysis.  And Alito won’t vote for it because his personal commitment to conservative positions simply won’t allow him to exercise proper judicial independence.  And Thomas?  Pffft.  I say Kennedy and Roberts are on board, and Roberts authors it because he knows full well history will judge it as one of the most important cases to come out of the Roberts Court, if not the most important.

And if Roberts is smart, it will be a crisp 7-10 page opinion that will make Scalia’s unhinged, caterwauling, 40-page dissent look like the deranged drivel that it is. If there is anything to be worried about here, it’s the little nuggets Roberts tucks into the opinion that actually restrict Equal Protection that he and the conservatives will plan to rely on in future cases.  I fully expect some of that here.  It’s just part of the judicial backroom deal making that goes on in any appellate court.

I sure hope our reader is right. Another quote of mine:

But what about the states’ rights argument? If public opinion is moving so fast, why not let federalism take its course? That’s my worry. Could Kennedy fashion a ruling that keeps marriage equality in those states that already have it, allow the minority to retain bans, but insist that any valid civil gay marriage in one state be recognized in any other? I don’t know how constitutionally you could do this – but I don’t doubt figuring out a balance between federalism and civil rights is what Kennedy (and maybe Roberts) will be assessing. A non-Fourteenth Amendment decision that nonetheless insisted on recognition, if not celebration, of same-sex marriages in every state might be a tempting middle way.

There is ample precedent for this “middle way” (this is not an endorsement, BTW).  The different states have long had different laws concerning age of consent, degree of kinship, and amount of formality needed to enter into or dissolve marriages.  Some states permit first cousins to marry, others do not.  Some states allow minors to marry, others make you wait until you are 18.  In some states you need a blood test, others have far less paperwork, and some still recognize common-law marriages.

But once you get married in one state (assuming an opposite sex relationship), you’re considered married in all; Oregon would not tell a pair of first cousins who married in California that their marriage is no longer valid when they cross Siskiyou Pass.

Divorce has been handled in the same way.  No matter how much New York State despised divorce during the mid 20th century, they were powerless to prevent their residents from travelling to Nevada (the first state with no-fault divorce laws) and getting their marriages dissolved, and then returning to the Empire State as two single persons.

This has long been the default position with marital law, and a big reason why the Defense of Marriage Act was passed in the first place: to nullify the effect of Full Faith and Credit Clause (which Congress has the power to regulate) when it comes to same-sex marriages.  Much as Windsor threw out the other half of DOMA (barring federal recognition of same sex marriages in states where it is legal), I could see the Court striking the rest of it, even if it lets states decline to perform such marriages directly.  The Court has already held that Congress was acting with animus to gays when it passed DOMA, and the Act is pretty explicit in targeting gays, so for the Court to preserve it in the face of a direct challenge would be a big surprise.  And could be done without attacking “federalism”, any more so than the Full Faith and Credit Clause already burdens states rights.

Well, we’ll see soon enough.