We Win

That was quick, wasn’t it? Mike Kinsley writes about the quiet gay revolution here. Money quote:

We still argue about it, but the whole spectrum of debate has moved left. A right-wing thug like Tom DeLay or Newt Gingrich probably has more advanced views about homosexuals than dainty liberals of the past century like Adlai Stevenson or Hubert Humphrey.

My only dissent is with the concept of "left." I know, I know. The GOP has clearly been on the other side of this issue, for the most part, for years now. But the basic argument for gay equality these past two decades has not been "left". It’s been a classic integrationist argument: let us serve openly in the military; let us embrace the responsibility of family; leave us alone. In some ways, as I have quixotically been arguing for too long, the gay movement since the 1980s has been pretty conservative. (And Kinsley got me to write the first serious conservative argument for gay marriage back in 1989.) For example: Can you think what people would call a mobilization of African-Americans to tackle HIV without government assistance – a mobilization that helped arrest the HIV epidemic in a matter of years? They’d call it a paragon of self-help and individual responsibility. But we’re gay, and so we don’t qualify for conservative support, help, or encouragement, let alone what we deserve, which is admiration ad respect. One day, the conservative movement will realize what a terrible mistake they have made, and how only callousness and prejudice can explain it. One day.

Hippies and Christianists

One of the premises of Brink Lindsey’s new book, "The Age of Abundance," is that the prosperity of 1960s and 1970s spawned two genuine social movements – the rebellious spiritual counter-culture of the Summer of Love and the religious right’s attempt to put the genie of sexual and personal liberation back into the fundamentalist bottle. Brink’s thesis is that capitalism’s post-war success in creating unprecedented prosperity led to widespread spiritual yearning and the leisure to express it fully. Neither hippies nor Christianists fully won, and their forced truce helped cement modern America’s libertarian, federalist politics. Count me convinced of the case for forgoing moral certainty in politics in favor of a shallower, skeptical formalism of live-and-let-live.

The genius of America, it seems to me, is its capacity to include people of radically different worldviews within a loose, flexible and constantly adjusting constitutional system. Given the huge differences between, say, a born-again evangelical in Georgia and a pot-smoking post-boomer in Seattle, no single cultural strait-jacket can ever hold America together. That’s why we mercifully don’t have such a strait-jacket, despite the excesses of the cultural left and right. We have a constitution that allows us to live together and even learn from each other in a morass of competing life-choices. This kind of politics eschews the dictatorial uniformity of Roe vs Wade and of the Federal Marriage Amendment. Both spring from the same controlling, moralistic urge to compel coherence in a society where freedom and sheer time will always spawn glorious, always-shifting incoherence and moral doubt.

George Will gives "The Age of Abundance" a rave in the NYT:

"Americans," Lindsey writes, "have become a different kind of people," transformed by capitalism’s fecundity. Although often "derided for its superficial banality," materialism has resulted in "a flood tide of spiritual yearning." Various scolds and worrywarts have exclaimed, with Wordsworth, that "getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." To such Jeremiahs, Lindsey provides an essentially cheerful, although not altogether so, counterpoint: affluence has made America a more libertarian, and hence a nicer, place.

Brinks’ book-blog can be read here. Danny Finkelstein had some thoughts about it yesterday. I’ve only read the Reason excerpt. But it alone sold me on the book.

Dissent of the Day

A reader writes:

You stated that,

"We tried to construct a constitutional order [in Iraq] for a non-dictatorial, national political settlement."

We did what, exactly?  Here’s what we did.  We disbanded the army, throwing thousands out into the street with no pay, no pension, no way to support their families.  We shut down the state-owned industries that produced goods and services basic to the national infrastructure, throwing thousands out into the street with no pay, no pension, no way to support their families.  And then we expected investors to line up while we threw reconstruction dollars at Halliburton and KBR and other American firms under no-bid loopholes in U.S. Government Procurement Law. Worse still, we eviscerated the civil service by purging it of Baath party members (who wasn’t a member of the Baath Party?  The cleaning crew?) thus ripping out the bare bones that would have supported the construction of constitutional order.  Never mind throwing thousands out into the street with no pay, no pension, no way to support their families.  We sat back while all these constitutionally and economically disenfranchised people looted what remained, said "stuff happens" and then proudly we pointed to purple fingers and claimed victory.

We burned down the house, that’s what we did.