The Dish – Page 555

“Forgive Me”—Father

Sara Miller Llana contextualizes Pope Francis’s meetings with victims of clerical sex abuse yesterday, during which he begged their forgiveness for the church’s failure to protect them or respond to reports of abuse:

It’s taken almost a year and a half for him to meet with victims themselves, compared to his predecessor Pope Benedict, who was much less popular but met with victims on many trips around the world. This meeting – with victims from Ireland, Britain, and Germany – has also come under fire from victims’ groups in his native Argentina, who were excluded from this first encounter. And he raised a storm of criticism this year when he defended the church’s actions in general in the scandal. “The Catholic Church is maybe the only institution to have moved with transparency and responsibility,” Francis said. “No one else has done more. Yet the church is the only one to be attacked.” This is the first time a pope has received victims inside the Vatican.

Despite the criticism, Marco Politi, a veteran Vatican observer in Rome and author of the new book “Francis Among the Wolves,” says he believes the pope is continuing the work of his predecessor and forging a new, structural response. He created a commission on sexual abuse, which includes women as well as a former victim, and has taken action to back up his stated goal of zero tolerance. Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, a Polish bishop recalled from the Dominican Republic last September on claims of sexual abuse, was recently defrocked.

The apology isn’t cutting it for some survivor-activists, who claim the pope isn’t doing enough to protect kids:

Even though [Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP)], now 25 years old, is the most widely recognized global support group for clerical victims with more than 18,000 members, no one from their leadership was invited to meet with Francis. Ahead of the meeting [SNAP outreach director Barbara] Blaine, who was raped by her parish priest as a teenager, posed a number of topics she would like to discuss with Francis, if only she were given a chance. First, she says she would like to tell the pope, “Stop talking about the crisis as though it’s past tense, and stop delaying while your abuse panels discusses details. You know the right thing to do. You don’t need a report.”

She said she would also tell the pope to focus first on prevention, instead of forgiveness. “Wounded adults can heal themselves but vulnerable kids can’t protect themselves,” she says, noting that abuse and sex abuse and the consistent cover up by the Vatican is still ongoing. She also suggests that the Holy See take “tangible steps to safeguard those at risk” by doing a number of what would seem like fairly simple steps, that are acceptable responses in the secular community when it comes to battling pedophilia, sex abuse, and child rape.

Dreher is on the same page:

Pope Benedict XVI was better. He defrocked 400 abuser priests, and worked harder than John Paul II to clean up the mess. But he never removed a bishop who facilitated abuse in his role as administrator — not even Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City, the first American bishop ever convicted in the scandal (Finn, who in 2010 covered up for and shuffled around a priest who had child porn in his computer, was found guilty of not reporting the child porn to authorities.) And now Francis. Nice words, but until bishops are held accountable, they will only be words. By now, 12 years after Boston, papal statements absent actual papal governance count for nothing. We’ll know Francis is serious when bishops like Finn start losing their mitres.

I’m with Rod on this. It should never have taken this long to meet with survivors of abuse, or to hold bishops accountable for protecting child-abusers. On this subject, Francis could have provided a powerful symbolic moment of accountability and renewal – as he did in so many areas in his first year as Pope. But for some reason, he didn’t. It pains me.

Waltz With Bashar?

Josh Rogin reports on the internal debate within the Obama administration over whether we ought to reconsider our support for removing Assad:

In effect, the American government has been in a limited partnership with the Assad regime for almost a year. The U.S., Russian, and Syrian governments made a deal last September to destroy Assad’s stockpile of chemical weapons—and relied on Damascus to account for and transport those weapons, in effect legitimizing his claim to continued power. As far back as last December, top White House officials, including Deputy National Security Advisor Tony Blinken, have suggested that the rising threat of extremism was creating a “convergence of interests” between the U.S., Russia, and its allies in the Iranian and the Syrian governments to come to a political deal before the Islamists became too powerful. …

But the view that Assad can somehow be a partner of any kind is vigorously disputed by other senior U.S. officials, especially those who work or have worked on Syria policy. They say the problem of extremism in the region can only be solved by removing Assad from power. Not only is the Assad regime a magnet for terrorism, they argue, but Assad and the extremists inside Syria are working together.

Morrissey is aghast at the prospect that we might end up on the same side as a tyrant responsible for atrocities the State Department has compared to Nazi crimes:

This is what comes from having no foreign policy strategy, other than to get out of Iraq.

Obama does not want to return there even to fight ISIS, which is an offshoot of al-Qaeda, even where we have a straight-up fight militarily — and there are good reasons for that, because we probably can’t arrive in time with enough forces to do the job, thanks to the total withdrawal of 2011. He won’t commit air power to it without forcing the Iraqis to dump Maliki either, which again is not altogether unjustified. However, it leaves us with no strategic or tactical way to stop ISIS, no strategic partner in Baghdad, and no other strategic partners from NATO willing to step in and help. Assad is nothing more than a life preserver tossed into an ocean of bad circumstances, and the rationalizations already arising make it look like an even more ridiculous choice. If we want to fight ISIS, we’d be better off fighting ISIS ourselves. Propping up Assad through Iran is a complete reversal of American foreign policy of the last 35 years, in service to nothing except desperation.

If Morrissey believes that we should have stayed on in serious numbers in Iraq in order to fight yet another Sunni insurgency, he truly has learned nothing from the last decade. As for maintaining the foreign policy of the last 35 years – surely the situation in the Middle East after the Arab Spring requires some major adjustment. If our goal is to stymie ISIS, then I see no problems with tacitly relying on regional powers to do that work if necessary, and the Assad regime is one of those regional powers.

Zooming out, Jack Goldsmith asserts that the situation in Iraq and Syria upends the logic behind Obama’s foreign policy doctrine:

The “training” blueprint is not the only blueprint left in tatters by the insurgency in Iraq and Syria. So too is the broader blueprint of declaring the “war” against jihadists over. For a while now the administration has sent signals that core al Qaeda is near defeat and that the AUMF-“war” is nearly over. …

The rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the failure of U.S. trained forces in Iraq to maintain ISIS, the continuing and growing threats to the homeland from AQAP in Yemen (see this scary Ken Dilanian story), not to mention rising jihadist forces in many other places, call this hopeful picture into serious question. Set aside the legal question whether Article II suffices as a basis for needed U.S. counterterrorism operations to meet these threats after the AUMF is declared otiose (an issue I have discussed many times, most recently here.) The politics of declaring the war to be over seem fraught as well. Even if core al Qaeda is entirely defeated, AQ-associated forces like AQAP remain robust, and ISIS is now a huge problem, not just in Iraq, but also potentially in the homeland because (see here and here) thousands of westerners have joined the jihadist fight in Syria and Iraq and can return to the West, including the United States, with relative ease. Declaring the war to be “over,” even declaring the AUMF-war to be over (which I think is hard to do), will now only highlight how little has been accomplished overall in defeating the jihadist threat.

It seems to me that the issue of returning Jihadists is the most potent one. And there must be ways in which those combatants can be monitored closely in the US or barred re-entry. But the belief that all these Jihadists are focused on attacking the United States and that the fight against Islamist extremism is now back at Square One seems a huge reach. ISIS’ main agenda, as the former MI6 chief has pointed out, is the war within Islam – not the war against the West. And, in fact, the most potent way to make this fight about us is precisely to adopt the rubric of post-9/11 policies, with all the collateral damage they did to us and to the struggle against Islamist violence. I favor roughly what Obama appears to be doing – a few gestures here but essentially nada directly. Nudge the regional powers to tackle ISIS, persuade the Saudis to cut off any funding still going there, insist on a broadly-based government in Baghdad as the sine qua non of any military aid, and steer clear of the entire clusterfuck. We have no bone in the Sunni-Shi’a fight. And the last thing we should do is inject ourselves into it.

Previous Dish on Obama’s Syria plan here and here, and on Assad’s machinations in Iraq here.

The View From Your Window Contest: Winner #212

A stumped veteran player writes:

Zambia. I mean why not. You people are insane.

A happier reader:

I have no clue where this is, but I just wanted to say that I love the photo. One of my favorite VFYW photos ever. Thanks for posting. Can’t wait to learn where it was taken.

Another hazards a guess:

The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, WV. This is merely a hunch based upon the details of the balustrade along the roof line and the green ridges in the distance. Never having been there, I am unsure of where in the building the window is located.

A more confident reader:

This is a view from the state capitol in Helena, Montana. No doubt about it!

Another confident reader:

Has to be Yavin 4:

That isn’t the view we’re looking for. But that Star Wars base and the White House actually were the most popular incorrect guesses this week. Another nails the right country:

Happy Fourth of July!!!

Another:

I doubt if you will get a single wrong answer this week, so you will have to start off directly with the right answers.

A bunch of right answers:

The only private residence designated a world heritage site.

Until Frank Lloyd Wright came along, this building was the purest expression of intelligence in architecture in North America.

We hold this house to be self-evident. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of fancy rotunda.

Home of my most favorite dead president evah!

Let’s just let OpenHeatMap get to the point:

One of those readers who correctly answered Charlottesville, Virginia:

I’ve never been to Monticello, but (noting the date of this particular contest) it was the first thing I googled, and – WHAMMO! – there was the window! Well, eight of them. Figuring out which one was the window in question wasn’t that difficult. I’d be very surprised if this VFYW doesn’t receive the most correct answers ever, based solely on the fact that I was able to figure it out, and normally I stink at this. Truly, truly stink.

Indeed, a whopping 587 entries came in this week, the vast majority of them correct, rivaling only VFYW #14 from Brookline as the most popular contest. One entry came from “My Piggy Bank, Hawthorn Woods, IL”:

Apparently, the interior is much more expansive than I ever would have imagined!

Another smiles:

THIS IS MY FAVORITE VFYW CONTEST EVER! I mean it was obvious that the window was from Monticello, so I had the location within five seconds of going to the contest page. But who knew that Google streetview had actually had someone walk all over the property so that we could explore the whole area from afar?! I didn’t, until today. Thanks for pointing me towards a virtual tour that I am really enjoying this morning and will continue to enjoy for at least an hour more.

How one reader came to guess the correct window:

When I saw this week’s window, the circular shape and the neoclassical details of the balustrade in the foreground reminded me right away of a window I knew high atop a building across the street from the Basilica in downtown Baltimore, near where I went to college. The story I’d always heard was that the window belonged to the apartment of the “father of American architecture,” Benjamin Latrobe, who’d designed the apartment and the window to give him a good vantage for supervising construction of the cathedral. I kind of recalled that Latrobe and Jefferson were pals, and given yesterday’s holiday all signs pointed right to Monticello.

A bit of Google-mapping and image searching later and I found the Dome Room and sorted out from the position of the balustrade and the walkway below which of its eight windows the view was taken from. The Dome Room is fantastically cool, with green floors and Mars yellow walls which you can see a little bit of in the photo. And of course all those windows.

Another features some history:

Pictures make it appear to be a beautiful room, but apparently it had limited use in Jefferson’s time. According to Monticello’s website:

During Jefferson’s lifetime, the only documented use of the dome room appears to have been as a grandson’s bedroom. Access to the room was reached after climbing steep, narrow stairs and following a low hallway along the third floor. There would seem to be a limit to the practicality of such a chamber, but certainly no argument against the aesthetic beauty of the space. Washington socialite Margaret Bayard Smith wrote, following her visit to the house in 1809, that “it is a nobel and beautiful apartment furnished and being in the attic story is not used, which I thought a great pity, as it might be made the most beautiful room in the house.”

An expert weighs in:

I attended the University of Virginia for six years, and acquired a Ph.D in the history of American architecture there, so I’ve been in the Dome Room many times. It’s a pity that Jefferson’s most inventive room turned out to be nearly useless to him. He had planned on making the room his library, but the weight of his thousands of books were too much for the structure of the house. Had he put all his books there, they would have come crashing down into the Salon below. So this glorious room because a storeroom and sometimes playroom for Jefferson’s many grandchildren. The library-in-a-dome idea had to wait until he designed the Rotunda at the University about 1819.

Another relays some speculation:

Historians aren’t 100% sure of what the room was built for, but one theory is shared in the comments on Monticello’s website:

Cinder Stanton, Monticello’s Senior Research Historian, suggests that Jefferson might have used this room as his panopticon, where with the aid of his telescope, he could keep an eye on everything, including his slaves. With Jeremy Bentham’s 18th Century book “Panopticon” in his collection and two former slaves noting his use of the telescope, it is a sinister yet plausible interpretation.

Personally, I link to think that Jefferson simply wanted a room to admire such a lovely view.

Another needs to hide his column:

Funny, I spent a couple years doing fine architectural woodwork in Virginia, and although I have never been to Monticello, I knew it in an instant: the restraint, the reason, the measuredness of it all. I could stare at that window all day without ever wanting to look through it. Thanks for posting it on a Saturday, because for me at least, this kind of architectural porn is not safe for work.

The best aerial view we got this week:

But this reader is no fan of Jefferson:

In the view you posted, you can see a bit of the pediments’ sloping roof, as well as one of the walkways, below. Lovely view of the countryside. Too bad it was a concentration camp (i.e., slave plantation.)

My father’s grandparents supported the renovation of Monticello in 1923, and we have two plates from the inaugural dinner (Thomas Jefferson Foundation.) I loved to look at them as a child. They are inscribed with a beautiful cadence: “All my wishes end, where I hope my days will end, at Monticello.” As I got older, and realized that not only was Monticello built on the backs of slaves, but a good deal of my ancestors’ money and social prominence as well (Maryland, Eastern Shore), I’m glad all we have left of that lucre are two stupid plates.

Another has a more balanced view:

I knew in an instant that this was Thomas Jefferson’s mansion, Monticello. When I was taken there on a family trip at age 8 it made a huge impression on me. At that time I was astonished by his genius as an inventor (such as his “polygraph” machine designed to make copies of his letters – it was two goose-quill pens latched together). Later I was astonished by the breadth of his thinking, and read scores of biographies. After that I became equally astonished at his inability to deal with the unspeakable depravity of slave owning. It’s all worth contemplating when examining how this nation is so often at cross-purposes.

GIF of the day:

For many, the view brought a flood of memories:

Many happy childhood vacations were spend riding around the US to historical sites where my father would bring to life the stories and high ideals of this America adventure. To him, I owe a debt whose payment is rendered as civic responsibility, social conviction, and a well-seasoned sense of Wonder. I was never allowed to visit the upper-floored room where this window reigns, but the picture portrays the view exactly as mustered in my vivid imagination.

Here’s to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

And here’s to clever readers:

Gah! Another one that EVERYONE will get. At first glance I thought it would be really hard. Not much to go on in the photo. But then I realized it was the Fourth of July weekend and that we were probably looking out from a historical building related to the American Revolution, perhaps one of the Founding Father’s homes. Monticello was literally the first one I searched, but even if I hadn’t, how many different famous Founding Father homes are there? I can only think of Mount Vernon and Peace Field off the top of my head. But there are probably no more than five at most?

My only hope of winning is that most people will guess the wrong window. I first thought it was one of the front-facing windows, but a careful examination of the roof railing indicates that it’s the one facing the right side of the building.

Chini chimes in:

Looking at this one on my phone during the Argentina match I was sure it would be hard. Flat forestland, no other buildings, a real nightmare. But it only took a few minutes after the match ended to discover that it was, in fact, as easy as views get. You just had to ask yourself “What view would they pick for the Fourth of July?”

Many contestants had the same question:

On that note:

What happens when 500 people get the right answer?

Another contestant has a suggestion along those lines:

I expect that so many people will get the correct window, the win will come down to extreme precision. Based on how very deeply the window is recessed into the wall and the position of the distant horizon viewed through the window, one can determine how high the camera was off the floor:

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Or it might just have been an employee who stood on the only chair in the room (just visible in photo #8) when nobody was around … or some anonymous pituitary case.

An inspired entry, but we’re still giving the prize to the player with the most previous guesses but no wins, especially if they’ve guessed difficult contests in the past. So this long-suffering veteran gets the prize this week:

I hope my many previous guesses will be enough to win the tiebreaker this time. We are looking out from the south-facing window on the top floor of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia.

From the view’s submitter:

I think it’s either going to be super-hard or super-easy: you guys are either sadists or chumps!

This shot was taken facing south, overlooking the garden and slave quarters, in the dome room at the top of Monticello. (I’ve attached a photo of the Western facade, showing the window.) The dome is not generally open to the public: it’s part of a “Behind The Scenes” tour that must be reserved in advance, with only a limited number of slots available.

Jefferson called this vista his “sea view,” and the Piedmont countryside rolling off to the horizon certainly evokes a large body of water – which just might beguile anyone who doesn’t know where the shot was taken!

(Archive: Text|Gallery)

A Waking Dream

Rachel Feltman relays the findings of “the first [psilocybin] study to attempt to relate the behavioral effects to biological changes”:

According to a study published [Thursday] in Human Brain Mapping, the mushroom compounds could be unlocking brain states usually only experienced when we dream, changes in activity that could help unlock permanent shifts in perspective. … In fact, administration of the drug just before or during sleep seemed to promote higher activity levels during Rapid Eye Movement sleep, when dreams occur. An intriguing finding, [study co-author Robin] Carhart-Harris says, given that people tend to describe their experience on psychedelic drugs as being like “a waking dream.” It seems that the brain may literally be slipping into unconscious patterns while the user is awake.

Carhart-Harris elaborates on his findings:

While the psychedelic state has been previously compared with dreaming, the opposite effect has been observed in the brain network from which we get our sense of “self” (called the default-mode network or ego-system). Put simply, while activity became “louder” in the emotion system, it became more disjointed and so “quieter” in the ego system.

Evidence from this study, and also preliminary data from an ongoing brain imaging study with LSD, appear to support the principle that the psychedelic state rests on disorganised activity in the ego system permitting disinhibited activity in the emotion system. And such an effect may explain why psychedelics have been considered useful facilitators of certain forms of psychotherapy.

In other words, the sense of self and selfishness that we deploy routinely in our practical and daily lives can be attenuated with psiloybin. Feelings of empathy, connectedness, and calm take their place. It’s not permanent, but merely seeing the world from this mountaintop can change your perspective in the foothills and valleys of ordinary existence. It is not for nothing that psilocybin’s effects have often been very similar to those of long-term intensive meditation and prayer. The Dish, for these reasons, has extensively covered the therapeutic and spiritual benefits of psilocybin over the years. But over at Patheos, Gene Veith looks at the new study with a jaundiced eye:

[It’s] is being hailed as revealing positive benefits. What interests me is what the scientists and the media consider to be beneficial. The active ingredient in the mushrooms makes people more emotional, puts them in a continual dream-like state, turns down their higher cognitive abilities (that is, makes them less rational), and dissolves their ego, making them less “narrow-minded.” Note that in our postmodern culture, such assaults on the mind are all considered good things!

An assault on the mind! It is rather its fuller and deeper opening up away from “the deadliness of doing.” Or, as Carhart-Harris puts it, it “increases the breadth and fluency of cognition” rather than stunting it. It is what the mind, properly understood, was made for.

(Photo: Fresh Colombian magic mushrooms. By Photofusion/Universal Images Group via Getty Images. GIF of the psilocybin compound via Wiki.)

The Revenge Doctrine

Israel bombards Gaza Strip after surge in Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli towns: http://t.co/YUhTBz43Sr pic.twitter.com/rFNzkDJFhl

— Reuters (@Reuters) July 8, 2014

The situation in Israel and Palestine continues to escalate, with Israel going all-in on its latest offensive in Gaza to quell renewed Hamas rocket fire:

The Israeli military announced the call-up of 1,500 reservists and the deployment of two infantry brigades along the Gaza Strip. Convoys of trucks carrying Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers were seen on the highway headed south Tuesday. … Over the last 24 hours, Hamas and other anti-Israel militant groups in Gaza have fired more than 100 mortar rounds and rocket shells at Israel. More than a dozen were intercepted by Israel’s U.S.-supported Iron Dome missile-defense batteries, but many others fell on Israeli soil. Most of the rockets landed in open fields, but some hit structures.

Yishai Schwartz remarks that the torture-murder of Muhammad Abu Khdeir by alleged Jewish extremists last week is a symptom of a growing pathology in Israeli society:

[I]deas have power, and it would also be a mistake to write these murders off as the insane acts of deranged lone wolves. The perpetrators were deranged, but they were not alone. The same pathologies that animated Kahane’s followers and that Wieseltier identified decades ago have not disappeared. Radical nationalism, militant millenarianism, and social resentment—often tinged with the fundamentalism of religious dogma—are all too alive in Israel’s underclass. And after years of steady Palestinian violence and rejection, too many in Israel shrug off the rhetoric of its own racists as regrettable, but understandable. …

It’s that resignation in the face of racism that scares me, and partly that’s because it comes from a place I understand. There is something beautiful about the belief that because we are Jews, racist rhetoric will never lead to brutal murder. And there is beauty to the genuine shock—not just horror, but surprise—when it does.

Do you remember when American newscasters and presidents could still honestly declare themselves “shocked” and “unsettled” by mass shootings and school violence? In retrospect, that shock was a beautiful thing. But in the United States, those days are gone. We have grown accustomed to domestic mass shooting. And I fear that a similar thing is happening here in Israel—that this will be the last time that an Israeli defense minister can seem genuinely shaken by the reality of Jewish terror.

Dershowitz remains optimistic that Israel will bring Abu Khdeir’s killers to justice:

I believe the Israeli legal system will be fair, or perhaps even bend over backwards, when it comes to the brutal murderers of Khdeir. Criminal trials in Israel do not involve juries. Accused criminals are tried by professional judges, who are in general selected on a non-partisan basis. Verdicts and sentences are less likely to be influenced by popular opinion than in the United States, where judges are either elected or politically appointed, and where jurors are supposed to reflect the views of the people.

Even if some Israelis might have more sympathy for Jews who killed a Palestinian than for Palestinians who killed Jews, that sort of public bias will have little impact on the trial of those accused of killing Khdeir. The age of the defendants, however, might. There are reports that some may be minors, and Israeli law does take account of the age of accused criminals. But older vigilantes may well be involved as well, either in planning, inciting or protecting the actual killers. The investigation is ongoing and will not stop until everyone who has played a culpable role in the murder is apprehended and brought to justice.

But Saletan has his doubts about Netanyahu’s pledge to treat Abu Khdeir’s murder the same as other acts of terrorism:

It’s not just Netanyahu who has pledged that Khdeir’s killers “will face the full weight of the law.” Naftali Bennett, Israel’s economy minister, says he and his right-wing supporters “will demand the Terrorist Law we put forward be applied to the boy’s killers.” Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon says the killers “should be treated as terrorists.” Khdeir’s parents point out that there’s a simple way to make good on these promises. “Destroy their houses just like [Israel] destroyed the houses of the suspects in Hebron,” says the boy’s father. “Demolish their houses and give them life sentences,” says his mother.

Some Israelis are already concocting excuses for not applying the policy to Jews. Almagor, a 28-year-old organization that claims to speak “for terror victims’ rights,” says in its mission statement that every victim “is entitled to justice: punishment of the criminal, the psychological closure that comes with punishment, laying down the law in its full force.” But on Monday, in a letter to the Israeli government and members of parliament, the group’s director pleaded that while “we need to deter Palestinian terrorists by destroying houses and exiling their families,” Jews don’t need to be treated this way, because they seldom kill.

The Challenge Of Reform Conservatism

This blog has long been generally supportive of the attempt by a handful of sane and intelligent conservative thinkers to brainstorm some kind of future for the American right. And who wouldn’t be? If the alternative is the brain dead 1979 redux position of someone like Kimberley Strassel, you gotta love Ross Douthat. But it strikes me there are deep challenges for this fledgling group of now Tanenhaus-blessed scholars, and they may be hard to overcome.

The first is the lack of any clear unifying theme or rallying cry that can meld policy to politics. “Reform” seems too vague and goo-goo a theme to catch on. On the core axis of more or less government, the reformicons rightly answer smaller, better government – but the “better” part always ends up a little duller than “smaller”. A child tax credit may or may not be a decent idea – but it’s very hard to fit it into the broader tradition of less government dependency. Ditto attempts to alleviate student debt, or to encourage the hiring of the long-term unemployed, or the block granting of anti-poverty funds to the states. All of them are hard to do when you demonize government itself as regularly as the Republican rank and file.

Perhaps the best scenario for a raft of such small, but potent policy proposals would be a Republican version of the Clinton administration – which bored the pants off ideologues but still connected with the tangible needs and concerns of most people. Alas, it’s hard to imagine a Clintonism of the right without a Clinton. It was Bill’s astonishing charm, loquaciousness, relentlessness and seduction that made these tedious laundry lists so popular. I do not see any such charismatic figure with such a direct and personal grasp of so many policy issues on the right. Maybe he or she will show up as a charismatic and brilliant governor. Or maybe not. If Ted Cruz is the new archetype of a Republican, never.

Within British conservatism, there are, in contrast, two competing traditions – Whig and Tory – that mitigate this problem. The Whiggish faction had its high watermark under Thatcher, a conservative who embraced market liberalism as the best foil to socialism. But the Tory faction never disappeared completely. Its rallying cry – and historical legacy – is “One Nation” Toryism, rooted in Disraeli’s conservative embrace of the working classes, and abhorrence at the vast social and economic inequalities of his time. It has no problem at all with government and its benefits. This would be a natural and identifiable tradition to embrace in Britain for a set of reformers like the Levin brigade. In America? No Disraeli ever existed – and no Bismarck either. Eisenhower may be the best analogue. And re-introducing Eisenhower to the next generation is a pretty heavy lift. The trouble with American conservatism is that it is, in essence, so new, and so wedded to a particular era, that it doesn’t have the depth and reach of a European conservatism that can provide a leader like Angela Merkel.

And then the reformicons are operating at a disadvantage in a culturally polarized America. It would be great if this were not the case – but since a huge amount of both parties’ base mobilization requires intensifying the cultural conflict, and since the divide is rooted in real responses to changing mores, it will likely endure. And that kind of climate makes pragmatic conservatism again less likely to get a hearing.

So, for example, I’m perfectly open to new ideas on, say, helping working class families with kids. But some pretty basic concerns about the current GOP on cultural issues – its open hostility to my own civil marriage, its absolutism on abortion, its panic at immigration, its tone-deafness on racial injustice – push me, and many others, into leaning Democrat for a while. And it’s important to note that even the reformicons are die-hard cultural and religious conservatives in most respects. On those questions, there is no airing of the idea of reform. David Cameron’s post-Thatcher re-tooling of British conservatism took at least two major issues associated with the left-of-center – marriage equality and climate change – and embraced them fully. If the reformicons could do something like that, they would begin to gain traction outside of a few circles in DC and in the country at large. But they won’t; and, given the rigidity of the GOP base on those issues, can’t.

Then there’s the absence of any foreign policy vision. The fixation on domestic policy is welcome – but the greatest disaster in Republican government in the last decade was the Iraq War, and, more broadly, the massive over-reach of big government in trying to re-make the world into a democratic wonderland. To some extent, Rand Paul and Mike Lee have shown an ability to tackle this question – and favor a serious continuation of Obama’s de-leveraging of the US abroad, along with a further dismantling of the Cheney infrastructure for the war on terror. But the reformicons have never issued a clear rejection of Cheneyism, and indeed seem, f0r the most part, like unreconstructed neocons abroad. I can’t see any of them demanding some concessions from Israel for a two-state solution, for example, or any policy toward Iran but war. But they’re mainly silent on these questions – which also marginalizes them. The most important Republican debate, it seems to me, is about the role of the US in the world in the 21st Century. Hegemon? Democratizer? Or simply great power? On this, the reformicons are silent. Their predecessors in the debates of the 1970s weren’t.

But maybe I’m being too glum. There are always unforeseen events to alter the future. Reagan’s 1980 victory was not seen until a few weeks before the November election. It’s certainly possible, although unlikely, that a Republican could win the presidency in 2016. But what I’d look for in the meantime in the reformicon future is what contribution they could make in the last two years of the Obama presidency. If the GOP controls both Houses, the country might look to them for some legislative action that the president could sign onto. If the country sees signs of actual policy progress, affecting their actual lives, thanks to reform conservative ideas and a pragmatic liberal president, then the atmosphere could change. Alas, I see the likelihood of that, in our current context, and in the run-up to 2016, to be close to impossible. It may take another epic national defeat for the GOP to take the reformers seriously. It took three consecutive lost national elections for the Tories to find Cameron. And part of me thinks that the best hope for the reformicons in the long run will be a Hillary Clinton victory in 2016.

I wonder how many of them, as they go to sleep at night, have quietly agreed with that.

If You Can Make It There, You’re Probably Rich Or Shady, Or Both

Jim Epstein contends that New York’s “affordable housing” mostly benefits the rich:

In May, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) unveiled a plan to build 80,000 new affordable housing units, “marshaling every corner of government and the private sector,” he boasted, “in an unprecedented response” to the city’s “crisis of affordability.” De Blasio, who ran on a promise to reduce inequality, is now enabling upper middle class New Yorkers to tap into these subsidies to serve their housing needs. In a city in which one in five households lives below the poverty line, spending limited government dollars so professionals earning six figures don’t have to leave their favored neighborhoods is obscene.

Take Manhattan’s 606 West 57th Street, a 1,025-unit building to be put up by developer TF Cornerstone. In exchange for setting aside 220 of those apartments for “lower income” tenants, the developer will get a local real estate tax exemption, tax-exempt financing, Low Income Housing Tax Credits (in which banks kick in equity in exchange for a tax rebate), and permission to build a larger building than the zoning Council code would otherwise allow. The kicker is that some of these “lower income” families are wealthy by most standards. The 220 affordable apartments will be split up among households of four earning no less than $50,300 and no more than $193,000 per year – or nearly four times New York City’s median household income, which was $50,895 in 2012.

Meanwhile, Michael Hudson, Ionuț Stănescu and Sam Adler-Bell report on questionable NYC real estate deals:

Since 2008, roughly 30 percent of condo sales in pricey Manhattan developments have been to buyers who listed an international address – most from China, Russia and Latin America—or bought in the name of a corporate entity, a maneuver often employed by foreign purchasers. Because many buyers go to great lengths to hide their interests in New York properties, it’s impossible to put a number on the proportion laundering ill-gotten gains. But according to money-laundering experts as well as court documents and secret offshore records reviewed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, New York real estate has become a magnet for dirty money.

Andrew Rice elaborates :

[W]hile New York real estate has significant drawbacks as an asset – it’s illiquid and costly to manage – it has a major selling point in its relative opacity. With a little creative corporate structuring, the ownership of a New York property can be made as untraceable as a numbered bank account. And that makes the city an island haven for those who want to stash cash in an increasingly monitored global financial system. “With everything that is going on in Switzerland in terms of transparency, people are being forced to pay taxes on their capital that they used to hold there,” says Rodrigo Nino, the president of the Prodigy Network. “Real estate is a great alternative.”

Those on the New York end of the transaction often don’t know – or don’t care to find out – the exact derivation of foreign money involved in these transactions. “Sometimes they come in with wires,” says [broker] Luigi Rosabianca. “Sometimes they come in with suitcases.” Most of the time, the motivation behind this movement of cash, and buyers’ desire for privacy, is legitimate, but sometimes it’s not. … “It’s something that is never discussed, but it’s the elephant in the room,” says Rosabianca. “Real estate is a wonderful way to cleanse money.”

Americans And Danes Agree On Welfare

In fact, their views are almost identical, a recent study suggests, as long as you tell them whether the recipient in question is “unlucky” or “lazy”:

When modern individuals – Americans and Danes alike – form opinions on who deserves welfare in mass society, they do so using the same psychology that has guided help-giving decisions for millenniums: they watch out for cheaters and seek to help reciprocators. The key question guiding our intuitions about recipient deservingness is: Is this a person who is motivated to give something back to me and society? These psychological systems designed for cheater-detection and decision-making about reciprocity crowd out cultural learning and a lifetime of exposure to different welfare state cultures. Therefore, when provided with direct information about the motivation and the circumstances of the social welfare recipients, just two sentences of information can make Danes and American become substantially and statistically indistinguishable in their social welfare opinions.

Squeaky-Clean Energy

Michael Grunwald fears that efforts to avoid another failure like Solyndra will make the government too cautious:

So far, the [clean energy] loan program has only burned through about $800 million of its $10 billion in reserves. Mitt Romney suggested during a debate with President Obama that half of its loans had failed; in fact, more than 95 percent are performing fine. That’s a record most private portfolio managers would envy, and it’s especially remarkable for a program that’s supposed to focus on innovative projects that private financiers won’t bankroll without government help. The goal was to help push promising green technologies across the so-called “Valley of Death,” and it seems to be working. Now that a bunch of huge solar projects have been built with government help, a bunch of copycat projects are under construction with purely private financing. They’ll benefit from the lessons learned in the initial round.

… it would be a shame if Solyndraphobia drove the Energy Department towards overly safe projects that don’t need government help. We don’t need an energy version of the Export-Import Bank, offering slightly cheaper financing to borrowers with no plausible risk of default. The loan program’s main goal should be facilitating disruptive projects in order to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, not avoiding failure in order to make sure taxpayers recoup every dollar. The Ex-Im Bank’s repayment rate is 99.7 percent; that means it’s very unlikely to have a Solyndra problem, and equally unlikely to accomplish anything useful.

The Guilty Gamer

New research suggests that violent videogames make players more “morally sensitive” by causing them to regret their own behaviors:

“This may, as it does in real life, provoke players to engage in voluntary behavior that benefits others,” notes lead author Matthew Grizzard [of the University of Buffalo] in a summary of the study, which is published (behind a paywall) in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking. So, the suggestion is that not only is amoral in-game activity harmless, it might also be beneficial to society.

This conclusion rests on previous findings within sociology/social psychology that when humans feel guilt about some real-world behavior (or lab-simulated real-world behavior, rather) they will convert that feeling into actual prosocial behavior. A quick survey reveals a 2003 New Mexico State University study finding that feelings of guilt could be used to push real-world cooperation, suggesting that guilt may be used as “‘information’ about the future costs of uncooperative strategy.”

Related Dish on torture in videogames here.