A NEEDED RESTRAINT ON RUNAWAY JUDICIAL REVIEW
The controversy of the moment is President Bush's endorsement of a Constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. For a desperate last stand against this move by an up till now fairly stalwart defender of Bush, read Andrew Sullivan's blog. For me, the main issue is judicial review.

The Founding Fathers were keenly aware of the human tendency to abuse power, and designed a constitution of "checks and balances" to prevent it. There were three branches of government, with separate powers: judicial, legislative and executive. The executive could not pass laws, and for many decisions he required the authorization of Congress or the advice and consent of the Senate. The legislature was divided into two houses, so that one wouldn't become tyrannical, and the legislature was also held in check by the courts. And the courts-- what were they held in check by?

Nothing. The courts are the Constitution's Achilles heel, the weak link in its web of checks and balances. Liberals got a nasty taste of this in the case of Bush vs. Gore in 2000, when the Supreme Court ruled against their candidate and there was nothing to do but swallow it. They thought it was unfair, a mockery of legal procedure, but there was no recourse. Conservatives are used to that. All the nation's children are sent to schools year after year where they get taught a secular humanist curriculum which, through its studied silence on what matters most, makes an eloquent and endless case against their most cherished beliefs-- and, to add insult to injury, this discrimination is carried out in the name of religious neutrality! But what can you do? You just submit. We have a vast military to protect us against foreign threats to freedom and democracy; but against the judges, we are as helpless as children before a man with a gun.

In this respect, we are formally similar to Iran. Iran is a country ruled by an elected parliament, with universal suffrage; it's democratic except for one thing: judicial activism. There as here, judges can overrule the will of the people. In Iran, the result is that the democratic element in the constitution is a complete fraud. Here, fortunately, judges have happened to live by a more enlightened belief system and have been more restrained and at least somewhat more deferential to the will of the people, with a few signal exceptions such as education. I should add, by the way, that we need courts to protect our rights against tyranny of the majority; but in the process we become helpless against the usurpation of legislative authority by judges. Democracy's relationship to judicial review is something like the U2 song--

With or without you,
With or without you, oh-oh
I can't live
With or without you.

There is always the risk that the courts will decide to disregard the law and just impose their will, the only (trivial) constraint being that they have to mask their usurpation by some sort of manipulation of legal texts already in existence. This has been happening for a long time already. But how far can it be allowed to go, and how long can we continue to call our policy a democracy when law is made by unelected judges? Those are hard, subtle, perennial questions, but sometimes the answer becomes clearer. The idea that a right to gay marriage is somehow "in the constitution," unbeknownst to, and contrary to the opinions of, those who authored it and generations of people who lived under it, is lunacy.

If gay marriage were legalized through the democratic process, my reaction would be very different. Ultimately, I don't believe that marriage is just a socal contract, I think it's a reality, and a same-sex relationship just isn't a marriage, whether we want it to be or not; but I realize there are a lot of problems for that view, so let's leave that to one side for now. What is in prospect is the judicial imposition of gay marriage, which in my opinion would frankly compromise the democratic character of our polity. This seems to be more or less Bush's line:

"After more than two centuries of American jurisprudence and millennia of human experience, a few judges and local authorities are presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization," Bush said. "Their actions have created confusion on an issue that requires clarity."

Eminently reasonable. I wouldn't be especially pleased to see FMA pass, but I think the threat of a consttutional amendment is useful even if it never passes. By telling the courts that further escalation will cause Republicans to resort to amending the constitution, we encourage them to stand down and let the people rule.

ANOTHER FAILED ARGUMENT AGAINST THE ADMINISTRATION'S CASE FOR WAR
Here's how Slavoj Zizek dismisses the administration's case for war:

To illustrate the weird logic of dreams, Sigmund Freud used to evoke a story about a borrowed kettle: When a friend accuses you of returning a borrowed kettle broken, your reply is, first, that you never borrowed the kettle; second, that you returned it unbroken; and third, that the kettle was already broken when you borrowed it. Such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments, of course, confirms precisely what it endeavors to deny: that you, in fact, did borrow and break the kettle.

A similar string of inconsistencies characterized the Bush administration's public justifications for the U.S. attack on Iraq in early 2003. First, the administration claimed that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which posed a “real and present danger” to his neighbors, to Israel, and to all democratic Western states. So far, no such weapons have been found (after more than 1,000 U.S. specialists have spent months looking for them). Then, the administration argued that even if Saddam does not have any WMD, he was involved with al Qaeda in the September 11 attacks and therefore should be punished and prevented from launching future assaults. But even U.S. President George W. Bush had to concede in September 2003 that the United States “had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th.” Finally, there was the third level of justification, that even if there was no proof of a link with al Qaeda, Saddam's ruthless dictatorship was a threat to its neighbors and a catastrophe to its own people, and these facts were reason enough to topple it. True, but why topple Iraq and not other evil regimes, starting with Iran and North Korea, the two other members of Bush's infamous “axis of evil”?

So, if these reasons don't hold up to serious scrutiny and merely seem to suggest that the administration was misguided to do what it did, what, then, were the real underlying reasons for the attack? Effectively, there were three: first, a sincere ideological belief that the destiny of the United States is to bring democracy and prosperity to other nations; second, the urge to brutally assert and signal unconditional U.S. hegemony; and third, the need to control Iraqi oil reserves.

All right, my rebuttal: the Saddam-9/11 link is a complete canard, no one ever claimed it was there. But there was the danger that Saddam would cooperate with terrorists, particularly if he had, or acquired later, WMDs. We were wrong about WMDs (probably) but we had very good reasons to think they were there, and everyone else thought so too, and you can never be certain about these things. Our mistake was justified. Anyway, that doesn't affect the legal case for war: Saddam may have been stubborn with the inspectors for no reason, but he still broke his promises to the UN and had it coming to him. Moreover, the means that were (unbeknownst to us) effective in keeping him WMD-free were also disgustingly inhumane, killing hundreds of thousands of children (if you believe what the left was saying, and, in the absence of any counter-evidence, I do). And although Zizek asks "why topple Iraq and not other evil regimes, starting with Iran and North Korea, the two other members of Bush's infamous 'axis of evil'?" as a rhetorical question, it is a serious question with a perfectly good answer: North Korea has nukes and toppling them might have resulted in a nuclear holocaust, while in Iran the regime is a bit more resilient (so regime change would have been more difficult and bloodier) and there is a strong chance there of a "velvet revolution," which is a much better way for the regime to fall. Anyway, even the power of the US is limited. We can't take out all the nasty regimes in the world. One is better than none.

The persistent badness of the arguments against the war can get frustrating. I've found that most antiwar types don't have any very good arguments, so much that it feels almost unfair to argue against them since you're in such an advantageous position. Like playing chess with a child. One exception to this rule is Andrew Beath, who opposes the war because he thinks the ethnic/religious divisions in Iraq are so problematic that we will probably end up with a civil war there. All right, that's a pretty good argument-- unless it gets refuted by a successful and peaceful transition to Iraqi self-rule of some kind (a fortiori if Iraq becomes a democracy). At least Andrew stakes out a position for himself which has some basis in cost-benefit analysis and events. Zizek's flippant dismissal of the administration's case for war without engaging the reality of that case is, unfortunately, more typical.

Christopher Hitchens makes the case for war with brilliant lucidity in his book A Long Short War. I beg the antiwar crowd to read it, and if you still think there are tenable arguments against the war, please, let me know what they are.

ELEVATE YOUR TONE, YOUNG MAN
An exchange between John Kerry and Mark Racicot of the RNC:

Responding Sunday to a letter in which Kerry accused Bush of using surrogates to attack his military service in Vietnam and his subsequent opposition to the war, Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign chairman Marc Racicot told Kerry that the campaign “does not condone” any effort to impugn his patriotism but considers his voting record on national security and defense issues as a valid target of political scrutiny.

“I ask you to elevate the remarkably negative tone of your campaign and your party over the past year,” Racicot said.

Amen to that.

However, the headlines about Bush's speech-- "Bush attacks Kerry"-- may undermine the claims to be the more elevated of the two parties. Reading the speech, I felt a sinking feeling that Bush was turning negative and would hurt himself by lowering himself to Kerry's level.

And then I realized the problem the Bush campaign has: it's hard not to sound negative when talking about Kerry. All Bush did was describe Kerry's voting record, and that sounds pretty negative. It's hard to keep the campaign positive when one's opponent has so few positive attributes. Meanwhile, Kerry's only defense is to complain, for no reason, about attacks on his patriotism. Will the Democrats please see through this guy and give us a real nominee?

SAMUEL HUNTINGDON, WRONG AGAIN
What is it that makes Samuel Huntingdon tick? He can come up with very catchy theses, which work their way into the headlines and make him famous. I think the "clash of civilizations" argument was pretty thoroughly wrong; the last time he got it right, I think, was when he identified the "third wave of democratization." Robert Kaplan once told Huntingdon he was a "conservative Democrat" (the kind that doesn't exist anymore) and Huntingdon agreed to the characterization.

Anyway, he's gotten it wrong again about Hispanics. I just skimmed this; better to read David Brooks' refutation. I'm proud to say that on the pole opposite Huntingdon stands Bush, who believes neither in the clash of civilizations-- he thinks Muslims can make good Democrats if we just give them a chance-- nor in the Hispanic threat-- he sees Hispanics as honest, hard-working, and welcome.

OUTSOURCING IS GOOD
Since I've endorsed Edwards, I have to make one thing clear in order to avoid being implicated in the least enlightened of Edwards' positions: protectionism. The Economist does a good job adapting the eternal economics lessons to the contemporary context; William Safire also puts it quite well. This is one of the oldest and truest insights of economics: comparative advantage.

It's worth mentioning that there have been some developments in trade theory of late that inspired Paul Krugman (still lucid at that time) to write an article entitled "Is Free Trade Passe?" For decades the trend in global economic policy has been towards openness, but economists are divided on its benefits, with one strand, of which Jeff Sachs is a leading example, seeing openness as salvation, while others, such as Dani Rodrik, are more skeptical, seeing shrewdly deployed protectionist policies as sometimes beneficial because (in essence) they give governments another tool of macroeconomic managements. But here's the key point: even the "heterodox" economists know better than to buy into the clumsy protectionist rhetoric that the Democratic candidates are moving towards. Rodrik likes to use the example of East Asian countries as counter-examples to the openness dogma, because they would "pick winners" and used trade policy to protect them, and they did well that way. But they were champion outsourcers! There was a whole "flying geese" model in Asia where countries would systematically move out of industries where they had lost competitiveness, and the countries where they invested would proceed to "take off," climbing the ladder from less to more skill- and capital-intensive industries as they got richer, and all the while the government was intervening and directing national development strategies. It's as if Treasury Secretary John Snow called together all the CEOs of major corporations and told them, "Look, this country is getting out of the code-writing and call-center industries. That stuff can be done more cheaply in India now. We need to free up labor and capital for industries in which we have potential for comparative advantage."

That may work for Asians, but we couldn't and shouldn't try to run our economy that way. We have a different kind of society. The protectionism Edwards and Kerry are arguing for is not about picking winners, but picking losers, saving jobs that we're not competitive in, and making everybody poorer in the process. This is the Flat Earth Society of economic policy. Pardon the colorful language, but this kind of hinking MUST BE SMASHED.

Usually policy is a game of trade-offs. Somebody wins, somebody loses, and you have to do cost-benefit analyses and balance interest groups against each other. Free trade is about as close as policy gets to a win-win situation. What it really is is a win-win-win-win-lose-win situation. Consumers (the vast majority of us) win by being able to purchase products where they're made most cheaply. Capitalists (and that's you, if you have a retirement account or a savings account, or own stocks, or attend an endowed university, or an endowed church) win because they can increase the rate of return on their investments. Foreign workers in the affected industries win, and in many cases these are poor people in poor countries who need the help badly. Trade is more effective than aid in helping poor countries emerge from poverty, as even left-leaning groups like Oxfam now recognize. The country wins diplomatically because the chance to export to American markets is a good way to build ties and create good will, and to give other countries a stake in our prosperity. A few domestic workers (a tiny proportion) lose in the short run, when their jobs go overseas. But they win in the long run because they find new jobs.

Outsouring is a big part of the reason that we are free from inflation. If we had to produce the things that we're outsourcing in America, they would cost more. This would mean higher inflation. When inflation is high, the Fed has to raise interest rates, and deliberately kill economic growth. In the 1970s, unemployment was higher than now, and we also had high inflation. Not anymore. Now inflation and interest rates are simultaneously near zero, and unemployment is not especially high either. The processes which make this possible involve the destruction of jobs in industries that are technologically obsolescent, or in which we have lost comparative advantage.

So don't believe any of the nonsense you hear about "Benedict Arnold CEOs," and resist Edwards' sob stories. Free trade is good. We should all write it on the blackboard a hundred times.

INTRODUCING COMMENTS FEATURE
I tried to. Let's see if it works.

KERRY, THE FACE IN THE MIRROR
Why are the Democrats voting for phony, joyless, rich-boy Kerry? I was struggling to understand it, when a horrible idea began taking shape in my head: they want to win, they have seen Bush's political successes, and nominating Kerry has an element of taking (what they perceive as) Bush's strategy and copying it. It's as if they said to themselves, "Bush is a vain, cocky braggart, a spoiled son of privilege, vague and inconsistent and phony, unscrupulous and power-hungry and opportunist, who rides on the reputation of the military for an alpha-male type appeal, a bitter man who nurses and avenges old wounds. And Americans seem to like him. So, who in our party best fits that description?" John Kerry!

How else to interpret Kerry's cryptic campaign slogan-- "The Real Deal," which refers to him? You wanted a strongman, a gutsy, tough-guy commander-in-chief, a macho president, who's in charge of the strongest military on earth and makes sure everybody knows it? Well, Bush is just play-acting. Our guy is the Real Deal.

It reminds me a lot of the way Hitler was a response to the British Empire. Hitler saw the British Empire as a huge world power, straddling the globe, dominated by a white "master race" which ruled over and exploited many other "inferior peoples;" and he wanted one of his own. Yet that was only one aspect of the British Empire. It also, a bit patchily, someimes hypocritically or for selfish reasons, yet nevertheless genuinely, was committed to liberty and fair play, and wanted to provide over what was then called civilization, and now would be called development. And yet the expediencies that corrupted the British Empire in small ways were woven into the rationalizations by which Hitler seduced Germany into the horrible crimes of the Nazi empire. The British largely redeemed themselves in the sacrifices they made to stop Hitler, but they had a haunting sense that something was deeply wrong not only with Germany, but with the Western civilization of which the Nazis were among the progeny, and of which the British had been the leaders. Hitler was the British face in the mirror.

I'm not comparing Kerry to Hitler, of course, but the phenomenon in this election is eerily similar. The Democrats, in their envy, formed a nasty view of Bush and then seem to be picking a candidate who matches that caricature. Tonight Bush said that we have the terrorists on the run. Kerry said that they had Bush on the run. Bush called for a regime change against Saddam; Kerry called for regime change in the US. Bush can be a bit arrogant, even vain, a bit vague and incoherent, a bit opportunist. The spectacle of Kerry should provoke a bit of introspection in Republicans. The political arena in which the rise of John Kerry was possible is one which Republicans played a role in shaping.

Sorry for the long blog break. This blog may be coming to an end when I leave for Africa on Friday; after that I hope to start a new one in a completely different style, a travelogue blog describing my impressions of Malawi. Maybe with pictures. But I don't know yet.

A STRANGE ENDORSEMENT OF EDWARDS
I'm hoping very strongly that Edwards beats Kerry in the primaries. In a Bush v. Kerry contest, I would strongly support Bush. An Edwards v. Bush contest would be more pleasant, in that I would like both candidates and wouldn't have to fear a Bush defeat.

In fact, I find myself thinking that I might even vote for Edwards over Bush. This is odd because I like Bush, on some issues even pretty fervently. And none of Edwards' "issues" particularly appeal to me, and his populism seems fairly sincere but naive. And his position on trade is absolutely wrong, by the way. So why do I like the idea of President John Edwards?

I think the reason is: to make the Democrats feel better. Let me explain. Things are basically going well in this country. The achievements of our military in Iraq and Afghanistan were phenomenal in military terms and Iraq in particular was a great stride forward for liberty, and a brilliant setback for totalitarianism. The economy has not fared as well as in the 1990s, but we always knew that the late 1990s was a bubble economy, and the question on everyone's minds then was how it would pop. Now we're over the rough patches. A strong recovery is underway, and we're breaking 20-year-old records for economic growth. We're not doing badly diplomatically either, if the truth be told. Bush has got us on good terms with China, has had a constructive policy towards Africa, our relationship with India is expanding, US-Russian relations have been closer since 9/11, and in the Middle East hopeful signs of change are stirring, reflecting the impact of the spectacle of Iraq. All the same, there's a lot of gloom and doom going around; read some people and you get the sense we're falling apart, we're in the midst of some kind of dark age. Even if you don't believe it, to have all that talk going around is depressing.

Thus the appeal of Edwards. If there were a Democrat in the White House, the intelligentsia and the press wouldn't be so grumpy, they would stop spoiling the party, and we would all have a much better time. I don't think a Democratic president, not even if it were Howard Dean, would be able to reverse the achievements of the Bush Administration. (Kerry might try. I have no idea what he would do, since the positions he takes are opportunist and changeable and he wants to be president just for the sake of being president.) But the intellectuals and the journalists would see Edwards as their man, so for any given course of events, they would narrate it more cheerfully, and we could all rest easier without the uncomfortable knowledge that there are a lot of obsessive people out there hating the president.

I'm afraid I can't extend the same support to Kerry. Kerry is phony and bitter, his attempt to be a populist is obscene, and every time I hear that a state voted for him I feel sick. What really turns me off is how vulgar the whole premise of his candidacy is, the grim determination to be more "alpha male" than Bush, to make the election of a contest of machismo. Yuck. It will be a morbid year: I'll have to follow the election out of a sort of brooding panic that Kerry might become president, and how personally humiliated I would feel by that outcome; so I'll watch, but it will be an unedifying spectacle.

Maybe that's the real reason that I would vote for Edwards: I'll be so grateful to the Democrats for sparing us from a President Kerry that I'll want to give them a President Edwards as a reward.

Links today are courtesy of David Lynch, who sent me a pack of quite interesting articles by way of criticism: constructive criticism at its best. It also seems that I have a reader, albeit an unconvinced and perhaps exasperated one. :)

BUSH AS PUPPET OF "SPECIAL INTERESTS"
What I get out of this Paul Krugman piece on the Bush family with oil is that the Bush family hangs out with a lot of oilmen, intelligence operatives, and corporate elites and that they are privileged and used to it. Fine. Sometimes privilege gives people a certain magnanimity, the self-confidence to seek greatness through courageous service to high ideals: thus John F. Kennedy, thus George W. Bush, fellow grandiloquent spokesmen for the cause of freedom everywhere. It also leads to a paternalistic desire to help out the less fortunate: thus Franklin D. Roosevelt, thus George W. Bush, fellow pushers of the welfare state, funders of costly entitlement programs. Krugman actually notes the parallel between the Bush family and the Kennedys and Roosevelts only to dismiss for no reason at all:

As this quote suggests, the Bush dynasty differs from other American families that have mixed wealth with political prominence. While the Kennedys and the Rockefellers may have a sense of entitlement, they also display a sense of noblesse oblige—what one might call an urge to repay, with charitable contributions and public service, their good fortune.

Earth to Krugman: Bush served in the CIA. He was vice-president, then president. His sons are state governors. There's a word for this. It's called public service. Krugman realizes his readers may be on the verge of this insight, so he uses this sleight of hand:

The Bushes don't have that problem; there are no philanthropists or reformers in the clan. They seek public office but, if anything, they seem to feel that the public is there to serve them.

No reformers? Bush has transformed foreign policy, has transformed entitlement policy. Even liberals recognize that the past three years have been radically transformative. The change in American politics places him in the league with Lyndon Johnson, FDR and Reagan! But this is not "reform" because Krugman happens to disagree with the president's policies. (Perhaps "disagree" is too gentlemanly a term for Krugman's animus against the Bush administration.)

"They seem to feel that the public is there to serve them?" They "seem" to, eh? To whom do they "seem" that way? To Paul Krugman, of course. But what about John F. Kennedy? "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country [of which I am president]." Doesn't that qualify as feeling that "the public is there to serve them?" Yes and no. John F. Kennedy, like George W. Bush, wants the public of this privileged country to feel called on to serve a less fortunate world, just as he felt his position of privilege made him called on to serve the country.

The entire essay could be (deserves to be) unraveled in this way. I must admit I didn't read the article very thoroughly. I can't read Krugman anymore. It's hard work. He's so overbearing and manipulative that reading him is like a wrestling match, and if you don't fight fight fight he will pin to the ground and crush your ability to think for yourself. I have trouble turning the pages. After almost every sentence, my inclination is not to read on but to drift off into somber reflection on man's capacity for intellectual corruption, for the self-deceit that springs from hatred. Note to those who did not encounter Krugman before his self-destruction: the stuff before 2000 is totally different. Don't let what Krugman has become deter you from discovering what Krugman was.

In 1919, the philosopher George Lukacs made a conscious decision to become a Bolshevik propagandist, knowing full well that he was abandoning the commitment to truth that had made him a philosopher. My theory of Krugman is that his intellectual collapse was not a gradual process, yielding to laziness here, prejudice there, hubris and pride leading to a sense of lese-majeste when he was not listened to, imbibing anti-Bush rancor by osmosis when he fell in with the wrong crowd at the New York Times, and being blinded by it... No: I think Krugman, like Lukacs, made a more or less conscious, even conscientious, decision to become a liar for the sake of a cause. But I have no evidence for this, so those of you who prefer to entertain a more charitable opinion of him are free to differ.

HOW ECONOMISTS GOT BITTER
Jeffery Frankel was a prof of mine, a charming, friendly guy. We had lunch once and I greatly enjoyed it. There was a certain East Coast liberal narrowness about him but still in general I'm a fan. Here's an article on how guys like him and Krugman came to be so bitter against Bush. Here's how they feel:

We worked very hard for years to repair the damage that Ronald Reagan and company had done to America's fisc. We strained every nerve and muscle to find politically-possible and popularly-palatable ways to close the deficit, and put us in a position in which we can at least begin to think about the generational long-run problems of financing the retirement of the baby-boom generation and dealing with the rapidly-rising capabilities and costs of medicine. We saw a potential fiscal train wreck far off in the future, and didn't ignore it, didn't shrug our shoulders, didn't assume that it would be someone else's problem, but rolled up our sleeves and set to work.

Then the Bush people come in. And in two and a half years they trash the place. They trash the place deliberately. They trash the place casually. They trash the place gleefully. They undo our work for no reason at all--just for the hell of it.

Well, okay. I'm actually not that far from these economists in a way: I was never a fan of the Bush tax cut either, and I think deficits are a problem. But I also recognize that there are different, valid points of view on this issue, and one of them is Bush's Keynesian approach, which resembles that of John F. Kennedy: tax cuts and big spending to stimulate the economy, and count on a growing economy to repair the deficit. And after all, there is a flip side to "the damage that Ronald Reagan and company had done to America's fisc"-- Reagan got us out of stagflation, got the economy moving again, and lowered unemployment, and the deficit ultimately proved closeable (thanks, it seems, to those nerve-straining economists!)

As for international affairs, that is certainly part of the economists' gripe with the Bush administration, but here we have no need to defer to their judgment, because this is not their area of expertise. Pardon the colorful language, but Jeffrey Frankel has blood on his hands. He worked for a Clinton administration which applied sanctions to Saddam for eight years at the expense of hundreds of thousands of children's lives (and the entrenchment of Saddam's tyranny, consigning an entire nation of millions to the deathlike embrace of a prison state) because it was too cowardly to risk the lives of (as they showed in Kosovo) a single American soldier. The Bush administration transcended these moral failings. It preferred doing the right thing to appearing to do the right thing in the eyes of the complacent.

God bless Greenspan, who has offered the real answer to the "fiscal train wreck:" cut spending on Social Security and Medicare. It works better than taxes because taxes may cramp the economy, so their effects are unpredictable. Greenspan can say this because the Federal Reserve is independent and not beholden to political pressure; if Bush said it the AARP would have his head in November. Paul Krugman could say this too, if he were a better man.

NEOCON-O-PHOBIA
I enjoy idealizing the neocons as an incarnation of modern chivalry, white knights of liberation and sacrifice. I'm aware it's a half-truth, and I suspect that if I read Richard Perle and David Frum's new book, An End to Evil, which Michael Lind savagely reviews, I would find myself in sharp and general disagreement. But what the neocons' ideas helped to achieve in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the role they played in facing down the Soviet Union and freeing eastern Europe, justify a few eulogies. Michael Lind is inexplicably dismissive of the war in Iraq:

Up until the summer of 2003, neo-conservatives proudly championed their movement against adversaries on the left and against factions on the right (realist, paleoconservative and libertarian) that questioned the wisdom of invading Iraq. That summer, however, the invasion of Iraq--planned for a decade and carried out chiefly by leading neoconservative foreign policy experts like the Bush Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith--went terribly wrong.

What the heck?! Setbacks and some soldiers' deaths (120 times fewer US killed in Iraq than Vietnam; probably 200+ times fewer Iraqis dead, from estimates I've read; and don't forget that it ends the sanctions and thereby saves Iraqi lives) should not distract us from the magnitude of the achievement: a tyranny which murdered hundreds of thousands and which made millions of people live a lie for thirty-five years is gone, the sanctions are lifted, freedom of speech is a realized fact, a more humane government is almost sure to emerge from the political transition process, and the most stupendous achievement that the war promised to bring about-- that Iraq will become the first Arab democracy-- is by no means a pipe dream, but may well actually come to pass!

The wars critics miss the forest for the trees on a grand scale.

ARUNDHATI ROY
Another interesting comment on the new imperialism from The Nation. The author: none other than the mendacious, maleficent Arundhati Roy. The opening salvo is particularly brilliant:

In January 2003 thousands of us from across the world gathered in Porto Alegre in Brazil and declared--reiterated--that "Another World Is Possible." A few thousand miles north, in Washington, George W. Bush and his aides were thinking the same thing.

Our project was the World Social Forum. Theirs--to further what many call the Project for the New American Century.

I like this juxtaposition of Bush and the World Social Forum because I think it makes a good point. Yes, Bush believes "another world is possible." The World Social Forum proclaims that "another world is possible," but anyone with half a brain can quickly figure out that the world they are envisioning-- a world free of any form of domination, where "domination" is defined to include me getting you to do a service for me in return for pay (a phenomenon the left calls "exploitation," while the rest of us call it "employment")-- is not possible. It is one with the airy socialist utopias that have floated ineffectually through the corridors of history, except when someone tries to realize them, in which case they end in the killing fields. Bush, too, is fighting certain rotten features of the Clinton world order, with a vision for a better, freer world, and he may actually have the means to bring it about, through an exercise of power, which we may describe, if we please, as a "new imperialism."

Roy compares this new imperialism to rape, with a clever (I guess it's supposed to be clever) turn of phrase which masks the absolute lack of anything resembling argument:

Debating imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?

Some 19th-century imperialists were guilty of rape. Far more were engaged in establishing and enforcing laws against rape, and in outlawing other practices cruel towards women, such as India's custom that widows had to burn themselves to death on their husbands' funeral pyres (sutte). Roy, of course, is using rape metaphorically, even though the manner in which her own country (she is Indian) succumbed to British rule is much more like seduction, indeed like a prolonged love-affair, Romeo-and-Juliet style with the lovers deriving from the feuding cultural families of East and West, a love affair of intense passion and mutual admiration; which had its quarrels to be sure, of the abstract and emotional kind to which great lovers are prone, and which ended in break-up, perhaps inevitably in view of cultural differences and diverging life-plans (it was always a long-distance relationship anyway); yet the parting was cordial, and mutual (by 1947, the British were quite ready to leave) and the two nations remain friendly, and each learned much from the relationship, and was changed, mostly for the better. British rule in India was certainly founded on consent, as is illustrated by one of the most astonishing statistics in history: the Indian Civil Service governed India with a mere 900 members! Certainly such a tiny company could not rule over hundreds of millions by force. Nowadays, India, like many people who go through hard times after a break-up, sometimes blames everything on the ex. And yet sometimes there is also nostalgia for the past, on both sides. At the very least, Indians in the decades after 1947 recognized that the promises of independence had been largely disappointed.

Anyway, while we're on the subject of rape, there's no need to stay in the realm of metaphor. Let's talk about real rape. And torture. Lives lived in fear. Children starved. Massive wars waged, hundreds of thousands pointlessly killed, to appease a single man's vainglory. That was what was happening in Saddam's Iraq. Who was going to stop it? The idealistic chanting of the World Social Forum? No. Only the application of military force-- imperialism, so to speak-- could. Of those two believers that "another world is possible," one of them put an end to the rape rooms, the torture chambers, the mass graves, while the other-- if we use Roy as its representative-- made a strenuous effort of obfuscation and rationalization so that it might continue.

You can fool some people sometimes, but you can't fool all the people all the time. Iraqis, for example, see the new imperialism in a much different, and generally more favorable, light than Roy. If anything, their complaint is not that it is too strong, but too weak.

THE "SPECIAL INTERESTS" FIGHT BACK
Every time I see Halliburton ads on TV it warms my heart. I always distrusted the knee-jerk assumption of the left that Halliburton's receiving contracts was some form of corruption. Just because Dick Cheney worked there, that means... what? That he's on the take? That he's just trying to help his cronies out? Or are his cronies just trying to help him out? Isn't it possible that Cheney worked at Halliburton for the same reason he later wanted to give them contracts-- because he thinks they do good work? Why do we have to have this cesspool view of human nature, that people will be corrupt at every opportunity? I think the Halliburton ads will work, that the public will see the images and get the idea of Halliburton as a basically honest, public-spirited company. I certainly did. The great thing is that it's effectively advertising for President Bush-- by dispelling the low charges of muck-minded journalists-- yet it's on a private company's dollar, in defense of their own reputation, long before the main part of the campaigns gets underway. Vague, demagogic attacks on "special interests" seemed like an easy strategy for Kerry. Maybe it will backfire.

SUPPORT THE PRESIDENT
Lee Harris offers a clever yet sober argument that the president is entitled to some mindless support, that "our system that will only work provided that most of the three hundred million people who make it up are spontaneously willing to trust in the authority of a man whom they have never met, and to obey unhesitatingly the commands of a leader that they may personally despise." The part of the article I found most interesting was his depiction of cults of personality and terror:

There are only two choices for a leader placed in this dilemma. He must rule through a cult of personality, or through terror -- or, of course, subtle combinations of these two principles.



The cult of personality is designed to convey a false sense of intimacy with the person in authority: by seeing the friendly and open face of Stalin on every other street corner, or that of Saddam Hussein waving affably from every building, we gradually become convinced that we really know what this man is like, much the way soap opera fans really believe that they know what the actors on their favorite shows must be like at home.



Yet even the most industrious cult of personality cannot make political ends meet unless it holds on to its ultimate trump card, and this is the application of terror as a method of procuring obedience to its authority. Those who do not obey willingly must be forced to obey at their own peril.

This is why a bit of mindless cheerleading is not too high of a price to pay in order to permit our own peculiar system to operate -- because it is a system that will only work provided that most of the three hundred million people who make it up are spontaneously willing to trust in the authority of a man whom they have never met, and to obey unhesitatingly the commands of a leader that they may personally despise.

In short, I have no problem with being called a Bushite cheerleader, provided that those who call me that understand that I will be just as willing to be a Kerry-ite cheerleader if the occasion should arise, and John Kerry were to become our Commander-in-Chief, or even a Hillary-ite cheerleader, if it comes down to that.

Of course, all this assumes that you think our system is beneficent and you want it to work. A lot on the left, perhaps, would like to see the whole system unravel; this column about some Catholic-left pacifists shows an example. I'm schizophrenic. On the one hand, I think America has been an "education to the world" for decades, that free intellectual inquiry, political liberty, economic progress, human rights and the high valuation of human life, exist in the world today largely thanks to us. And yet I disagree with the secular humanist philosophy which elites exploiting "separation of church and state" have installed as America's official ideology, peddled in the public schools to every child. I wonder whether economic growth makes us happier. I think immigration restrictions, a central feature of our constitution and economy, are a transgression against natural law, a crime against humanity so to speak. I can see both sides. Quietist civil disobedience I can respect. The Krugman position, combining a fairly moderate political agenda with fierce partisanship that refuses to concede even mere good intentions to the other side-- this is the untenable position.

LABELOLOGY
Instead of "liberals" and "conservatives," what we have in this country are conservationists (Democrats) and transformationists (Republicans). Democrats are conservationist with respect to the environment, the welfare state, Social Security, the Middle East and the UN and foreign affairs, the secular humanist official creed of the public schools (as opposed to allowing religious diversity), and so on. Republicans want transformation in all these areas. Will it catch on? I doubt it: too many syllables. Too bad.

Here's the second part of the article on leftism in universities I linked to the other day.

PROSPERITY IN BUSH'S AMERICA
This article about the top 25 cities to do business in America has an upbeat feel, yet somehow made me a bit sad. It's partly because I dislike cars, preferring public transit, metros and trains and the like, but it seems like the action is moving to places where the transportation economy is dominated by the car. America is so vast, so full of energy and motion, that it intimidates me to think about it.

Still, this sort of confirms my point about Republicans being the party of self-reliance, because you may note that the Midwest, Florida, Atlanta-- the booming parts of the country mostly voted for Bush. In places that are a bit more economically stagnant, where money is likely to be a bit older, sends its children to private schools and hires nannies, places where there is more social polarization, where money feels a bit guilty and lack of money feels a bit resentful-- these are the places that vote Democrat.

GEORGE W. BUSH, EX-CONSERVATIVE?
James Pinkerton explains how conservatives have betrayed their principles and become the party of big government. He makes the same point at more length in the Washington Post. Pinkerton concludes:

So far at least, Republicans and conservatives are cheering this exercise in American "greatness." But they should know that what they are cheering for isn't conservative at all. Instead, it's radical. And radicals are happy to pump up the welfare state, even as they pump up the warfare state.

Well, I agree that conservative is a misnomer for the Republicans today. The neoconservative foreign-policy agenda is certainly radical, revolutionary-- that's what I like about it. But small-government, libertarian, free-market conservatism a la Milton Friedman is also radical, in a long 18th-century tradition. What's more, even theoconservatism, which the press tends to paint as a dreary "moral conservatism," has a radical agenda too: introduce vouchers, allow people to educate their children to God, let Christianity enter the public arena rather than being brushed aside and half-suppressed in the name of "tolerance;" ban abortion, bringing more babies into the world, make divorce more difficult, keeping families together... whether you like or dislike this agenda, you have to recognize that theoconservatives are certainly radical. They want change. And don't forget that this religion they want to raise the profile of is a radically egalitarian one, the religion which preaches that "the meek shall inherit the earth." What's conservative about that?

The Democrats are the real conservatives. They want society to be much the way it was in the 1970s. They look back fondly towards the past, towards Roosevelt and Kennedy, the New Deal and the Great Society.

It's interesting how political labels become obsolete but are hard to replace. The Soviets always considered themselves the ultimate left by definition, yet in late Soviet Russia staunch defenders of the Soviet system came to be labelled the "right," while liberals came to be called the "left," much to the confusion and annoyance of Soviet true believers. Is there some way to re-label our political spectrum?

FRIEDMAN'S WISHFUL THINKING
Tom Friedman fantasizes about what Kerry would say in an interview with Tim Russert in response to a question on Iraq:

Senator Kerry: "Tim, before I answer that question, I first want to direct a message to the die-hard Baathists and Islamo-fascists who've been slaughtering Iraqis struggling to build their first democratic government. And my message to these terrorists is this: `READ MY LIPS — if I am president, I will not cut and run. I will not pull our troops out in the face of your intimidation the way Ronald Reagan fled from Lebanon.' Because that panicky retreat from Beirut in 1984 started us down this whole path, where terrorists believed if they hit us hard enough, we would run and they would get away with it. I hate how George Bush has prosecuted this war. I know I could do better. But I want every suicide bomber — from Bali to Baghdad — to understand one thing about a Kerry administration: `You can blow yourselves up from now until next Ramadan, but we'll still be in Iraq. You'll be dead, but we'll still be there. Which part of that sentence don't you understand?'

"I don't say this to be macho-man, Tim. I'm not George Bush. I say this because it's the best way to save American and Iraqi lives. You see, Tim, I identify so strongly with my band of brothers and sisters wearing the American uniform in Iraq. The best way to endanger them is to suggest to the terrorists that there is daylight between me and President Bush — that if he won't run, I will. Well, there is no daylight on ends. A Kerry administration will see that Iraqis get every chance to produce their own representative government.

"But there is daylight on means. You see, Tim, if I were president, I would insist that we have a real policy of energy conservation to enlist every American in this war, by asking each of us to choke off some of the funds going to the Islamist totalitarians. I would immediately invite the leaders of the U.N., Germany, France and NATO to Camp David to rebuild the alliance that won the cold war, so we have the staying power to win this war of ideas in the Muslim world. And I would have my secretary of state out in the Middle East regularly, arguing our case, bolstering our allies and trying to bring about a secure peace for Israelis and Palestinians.

"Oh yes, Tim, my means would be very different. Unlike the Bush team, I understand that just because you have a hammer, not every problem is a nail. It takes more than force to win a war of ideas. But on ends, Tim, let no one have any illusions: a Kerry presidency will pay any price and bear any burden to try to build a decent Iraqi regime in the heart of the Arab world. My making that commitment now is the best way to prove to the terrorists that their actions are futile, and in that way save American and Iraqi lives. Failure to make that commitment would have horrific consequences for U.S. foreign policy.

Yeah, right. Here's Kerry's real record of opinion on Iraq, which some conservatives, and some liberals, claim amounts to muddle-headed and unprincipled opportunism. Tom Friedman is an interesting character: it seems like his heart is on the left, that his identity is as a Democrat, and yet his opinions put him a lot closer to the Republican camp. Here his imagination is letting him turn Kerry into something that he is not. But I shouldn't be too hard on him: somehow I wonder how much the Bush I support in my head resembles the Bush who actually inhabits the White House. I'm an odd sort of Bush supporter. I am passionately supportive of a few Bush policies that are perhaps minor in terms of the administration's own priorities-- the liberation aspect of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the immigration reform proposal, Social Security reform (so far, only words), vouchers (which Bush backed and then backed down on)-- while I am ambivalent/indifferent towards the biggest issues of this administration, the tax cut and the war on terror per se. (And firmly opposed to the Medicare "reform," though it was perhaps politically inevitable.) Friedman and I have a lot in common.

FAITH
A religious post in honor of Sunday.

Some Christian virtues are understandable and appealing enough: in particular, love. We all seek love, admire love, sing about love. Non-Christians can understand why it is appealing to believe in a loving God, and the Beatles, though more popular than Jesus, are very much in his vein when they proclaim that "all you need is love." Service and self-sacrifice, honesty and truth, an equality in which all souls are equally beloved, these are uncontroversial and easy enough to understand, in theory.

Faith is much more difficult. It is hard for me to understand what it is, and/or to approve of it, particularly when it is set up as the antagonist of reason. A caricature of the virtue of faith is that faith is the virtue of believing in a dogma in defiance of contrary evidence. But this is not a virtue, it is a vice, an offense against truth. It is the Jesuits believing that "black is white, white is black" if the Church says so. It is the modern fundamentalist's angry and insistent deafness to widespread claims that the world was not created in seven days by God, but over billions of years by a process of (materialistic) evolution. Faith is the inquisition internalized.

I believe in truth, inquiry, reason and science, freethinking; in a rather loose way, I adhere to the idea that a man only has a right to hold a belief to the extent that he has evidence for it (though I am generous, even promiscuous about what is permitted as evidence; tradition, intuition, aesthetic sensibilities are all permitted, and I tend to be satisfied with sincere and heartfelt persuasion rather than rigid, airtight proof). I consider the Jesuit gesture of granting epistemic absolutism to the Catholic Church to be sinful. I think a Christian ought to follow Descartes's path of universal doubt, and fearlessly, for if he believes in Christianity, he ought to believe that Christianity can pass that test, and if it does not pass that test, he loses nothing by abandoning it. So where does faith come in?

The question has troubled me for years and I do not claim to have a complete answer. But I have discovered the need for faith in unexpected places, as a necessary answer to philosophical problems that cannot be dealt with any other way.

David Hume offered a famous disproof of the validity of inductive reasoning. Hume argued that there is no basis in reason for our habit of inferring future events from past events. If you flip a coin twenty times and it comes up heads each time, what are the chances that it will come up heads the next time? Only 50%. This is not part of Hume's argument, but it gives you the idea. If the sun has risen every day, does that mean it will rise again tomorrow? Does it even mean it is likely to rise tomorrow? Why? Hume denies it. He does not merely deny that the sunrise is certain; he denies that we have any adequate reason to believe even that it is plausible. And an adequate answer to Hume's devastating critique has never been devised. If the sun rises so many times, that shows something about the world, namely that the world is so arranged as to make the rising of the sun likely we may say. Hume asks, "Why should we expect this trait of the world to last until tomorrow?" But this kind of reasoning works perfectly well in our everyday lives, we point out. Hume points out that only inductive reasoning allows to evaluate the practical value of inductive reasoning, so the argument is circular, and provides no proof of inductive reasoning's validity.

Hume's argument is logically sound, yet seems perfectly mad. We must rely on inductive reasoning. Science, with its reliance on experiment, is founded on inductive reasoning. So is language: we discern the meaning of words only by assuming that there is a pattern in them. This is not even a choice, it is in our nature, we cannot live for a single day without using knowledge we derived from inductive reasoning, without engaging in inductive reasoning anew. And yet inductive reasoning has no basis in logic. Inductive reasoning is the search for patterns, and it rests on a belief in patterns which it cannot itself prove, but which is an inescapable part of human nature. Here I think the idea of faith may be introduced. We have faith that the world has patterns, that there is order in the universe, so that the pattern-discerning tracks on which our minds necessarily run are valid. Faith is there at the very beginning, it precedes reason, it is the prerequisite for reason.

I found another role for faith while thinking about the reconciliation between categorical and consequentialist ethics. Categorical ethics is the idea that moral rules are independent of their consequences, that "the end does not justify the means." Even for a good cause, even when I know for a fact that the benefits of an action outweigh the costs, I must not kill, rape, torture, lie, and so on. Consequentialist ethics measure the moral value of an act in terms of its consequences. If one person's death will save many lives, I should kill that person. If a lie makes everybody happy, I should go ahead and tell it. Both present problems. Categorical ethics entail undergoing and inflicting an infinite amount of pain, if necessary, for the sake of a moral principle. If I could save all life on Earth by telling one lie, I must not do so. Such insistence seems perverse. Yet consequentialist ethics seem to open the door to all manner of cynicism. Under certain circumstances, there is no crime a thoroughgoing consequentialist would not commit.

Of the two sides, the consequentialists seem more reasonable, for they at least care about people's welfare, whereas the categorical camp seems to be ready to sacrifice anything on the altar of their abstract principles. But another problem with the consequentialists is that the results of our actions are unforeseeable. Take in a homeless orphan, love him, care for him, devote yourself to him, selflessly give him every chance to succeed, and he may still grow up to be an ax-murderer. We are powerless to discern the vast web of unintended effects spreading out from our point in time. For all I know, I may do more good by erring badly and serving as a warning to others than by acting well and eclipsing them.

Here I introduce faith again: this time, a faith not in the physical order of the universe, but in the moral order of the universe; a faith that in the grand balance of things, a good action will yield net positive results and a bad action net negative results. To be more precise, I propose a faith in the idea that ethics are both consequentialist-- because what matters is the good and evil that result from our actions-- and categorical-- because in conscience, properly developed and applied, we have a subtle sign, a compass needle pointing to which actions will lead to the "greatest happiness for the greatest number," in ways that, given the complex ripples of effects and side-effects that continue without end in the wake of our actions, we can never discern by reason alone. I have some reason from my own experience to think that by following one's conscience one is best able to make others happier. Experience, but by no means any proof.

AFRICA'S INTERNATIONAL DEBT
I've been reading some on Africa and trying to get some understanding of Africa's problems. The most obvious problem is bad governance and abuse of power. The borders are a burden left behind by colonialism: since identity is tribal rather than national, and the national borders do not correspond to tribal borders, there is a lot of ethnic violence within states, and wars that cross state boundaries. Geography is the source of some of Africa's problems: a heavy disease burden, underpopulated regions where economies of scale are scarce, and few ports and rivers that can link Africa to the world. After a couple years of studying this at Harvard though, I think the most important deep reason for development outcomes is simply culture; "institutions," Dani Rodrik's favorite pick in the horse race of various factors, are the surface manifestation of culture. These are remote causes, though, and we can't influence them much, so it's not much use talking about them. Among the proximate causes is international debt.

The World Bank is supposed to be there to help. But we make our money from loans, so we keep putting Africa further into debt. And I'm part of it. Are we doing enough good to justify adding to the debt problem? This is a question that always haunts me, and I guess a lot of people at the Bank.

It brings me back to Iraq, too, by the way. I don't want France, Germany and Russia to forgive Iraq's debt. That would send the message that the debt was legitimate, that the Iraqi people are responsible for repaying funds leant to a government that was their hated enemy, that never got any consent from them, that in no way represented them. "Debt relief" would masquerade as charity for the Iraqi people. I want to see an elected Iraqi government tell France, Germany and Russia that the debts are Saddam Hussein's alone and not the Iraqi nation's, with the backing of the US and the UK. If representatives come to ask for payments on that debt, let the Iraqis show them to Saddam's prison cell to have a talk with him. If anything, payment should go the other way: France, Germany and Russia should pay reparations to the Iraqi people for bankrolling the man who brutalized them.

This would be a revolutionary move, and would have worldwide ramifications, because it would maul the credit rating of every tyrant on the globe. We should establish the principle that only a ruler who generally enjoys the consent of the people has the right to borrow money in the name of that people. This would be a great step forward for democracy.

IMMIGRATION UPDATE
The immigration reform bill seems to be making progress. How fantastic it would be if it became law this year! This article about how Republicans are picking up some of the Hispanic vote suggests what political calculations may be helping to motivate Bush. Could the Republicans turn Hispanics into a swing constituency, or even part of their base? We'll see. Personally, I don't know whether Bush is doing this for political advantage or because he thinks is right. Of course, the two reasons are in no way mutually exclusive. If it does work to his political advantage, that might entrench the trench towards more open immigration policies. Excellent!

Here is a fairly smart column that supports more immigration but thinks the Bush plan will be "ineffectual." Being an enthusiast rather than an expert on this issue, such claims make me nervous. But after he tries to envision what a "real reform" would look like, he ends with

The point is that, for the sake of the legitimacy and coherence of social and economic policy, we could and should accept more legal immigrants and far fewer illegals.

Aha, so that's what he's worried about. A friend of mine who works for the State Department recently expressed a similar opinion to me. Strange as it may sound, I sort of disagree. I'm all for accepting more legal immigrants. But I don't want to stop the erosion of our immigration restrictions' legitimacy. On the contrary. I think about it this way. Suppose a friend of mine, a poor Mexican who could not find work to support his family at home, told me he planned to come to the United States illegally, work and send remittances home. He knows the risks, he tells me, and he's decided they're worth it. Would I advise him not to do so, because it's morally wrong? No. I would just wish him luck. And I'm quite sure that to turn him in to the police would be a bad action on my part.

By contrast, suppose an impoverished friend of mine planned to murder, rob, or embezzle in order to support his poor family. He knew the risks and thought they were worth it. In each of these cases, I would tell him what he was planning was morally wrong. If he had done it already, I would advise him to turn himself in. And if I turned him in myself, I would be confident I was doing the right thing. If my friend were selling black-market CDs, or engaging in prostitution, or doing drugs, I wouldn't turn him in, because these crimes have no obvious victim to protect, but I would certainly advise him to stop if he asked me, because I consider these things morally wrong. But crossing borders is not.

I think there's a serious problem whenever law is misaligned with conscience. Law enforcement is more difficult because it becomes a matter of pure force and fear, and does not have an ally in people's sense of right and wrong. Drugs is an example of this. A large proportion of Americans don't see anything wrong with using marijuana, for example, and even those who do feel it's wrong generally feel the case is much less clear than with stealing or murder. This makes it much easier to form spontaneous conspiracies. The population becomes less compliant with law-enforcement officers' efforts. Punishments have to be raised steeply to create a disincentive strong enough to deter "criminal" activity, since the disincentives of conscience are absence. It's the same a fortiori with immigration. A lot of us may see the casual pot-smoker as at least sort of criminal-like; but hard-working illegal immigrants trying to make ends meet working low-end jobs seem more like victims than villains.

So I want the legitimacy of anti-immigration laws to be eroded further, or completely, and I think Bush's measure is valuable not only because it will make life a bit better for illegal immigrants, and let more legal immigrants in, but because it will help lift the stigma from illegal immigration. I hope it will be an important step forward in establishing the right to migrate.

WHY THE LEFT RULES THE UNIVERSITIES
Sympathies to my mom, who is suffering through a PhD class poisoned by the more insidious dogmas of the resentful left. (American history through the lens of "all whites are evil and to blame for everything.) This link is for her. Here's a sample:

The hegemony of the Left over the universities is so overwhelming that not even Leftists deny it. Whether the institution is public or private, a community college or an Ivy League campus, you can with absolute confidence predict that the curriculum will be suffused with themes such as:


capitalism is inherently unjust, dehumanizing, and impoverishing;
socialism, whatever its practical failures, is motivated by the highest ideals and that its luminaries -- especially Marx -- have much to teach us;
globalization hurts the poor of the Third World;
natural resources are being depleted at an alarming rate and that human industrial activity is an ever-increasing threat to "the environment";
most if not all psychological and behavioral differences between men and women are "socially constructed" and that male-female differences in income, representation in various professions, and the like are mostly the result of "sexism";
the pathologies of the underclass in the United States are due to racism and that the pathologies of the Third World are due to the lingering effects of colonialism;
Western civilization is uniquely oppressive, especially to women and "people of color," and that its products are spiritually inferior to those of non-Western cultures;
traditional religious belief, especially of the Christian sort, rests on ignorance of modern scientific advances, cannot today be rationally justified, and persists on nothing more than wishful thinking;
traditional moral scruples, especially regarding sex, also rest on superstition and ignorance and have no rational justification; and so on and on.


Every single one of these claims is, in my view, false; in some cases demonstrably so. At any rate, in every case the opposite point of view can be, and has been, defended powerfully by thinkers as worthy as any the Left can muster. Yet you will, in the modern university, rarely hear these assertions seriously challenged. Each one is usually treated either as so obvious that any opposing view can be readily dismissed as motivated by ignorance or vested interest, or as so obvious that there is no opposing view worth the trouble of dismissing in the first place. The great thinkers of the past who defended such opposing views are treated as archaic museum pieces, silly caricatures of their arguments trotted out only to be ridiculed; thinkers of the present who defend them are, when not ignored entirely, also presented in cartoonish form before being consigned to the memory hole. Should you visit a modern university campus, you will encounter the "diversity" mantra so mind-numbingly often you will want to scream. What you will not encounter is a kind of diversity that matters most in the academic context: diversity of thought on the most fundamental issues of religion, morality, and politics.

Amen.

"POLITICS 101"
My friend who said that "Republicans are the party of the rich" is "Politics 101" was right in one sense at least: if Democrats could write a Politics 101 curriculum, that's the first thing they would like to teach you. This is a problem the left has faced throughout its entire history. Leftists are mostly intellectuals, opposed to the establishment, but with egalitarian ideas that they think the masses ought to support. The masses, the proletariat, become the shadow constituency of the left, from which they derive their legitimacy. Leftists have a strong need to believe that poor people are on their side, as my Democrat-leaning friends did. And they are not always completely wrong: sometimes the majority do find the odd status quo institution unjust, or want a bit of redistribution. Most of the time, though, real proletariats are much more rooted in tradition than those that proletariats imagine. In England, the Tories were able to become a mass popular party under Disraeli; in Russia in the 1860s, idealistic populists who "went to the people" were treated with suspicion by the peasantry; later in Russia, Lenin had given up on the hopelessly corruptible proletariat and consciously established the new elitism of his "revolutionary vanguard;" in France, the Revolution gave way to a pro-Catholic reaction, and so on. In 2004, the Democrats persist in imagining that they have a vast shadow constituency of people who don't vote but are presumed to have Democratic preferences. Howard Dean's campaign relied on peddling this idea. Permit me to be skeptical. I think higher voter turnout would be just as likely to tip the scales in favor of Bush.

MY SPIN ON VOTER DEMOGRAPHICS
The analysis all these numbers are based on comes from the 2000 exit polls and is reproduced below (scroll down).
Here's my spin:

Republicans are the party of the self-reliant. The "founder effect" is an important influence on the political parties. The Democrats are the party of Jefferson, an eloquent and idealistic but hypocritical patrician, who aspired to free his slaves but ran up debts his whole life so that when he died his slaves not only could not be freed but had to be sold to pay them off. Democrats remain the party of paternalism, and get the support of the paternalists-- the upper class and the knowledge class-- and the paternalized-- those who want to benefit from welfare handouts (this includes seniors) and affirmative action. Republicans were founded by Abraham Lincoln, the poor country boy, self-educated, who made his way in the world through hard work. The tradition continues: in the 20th century, the greatest Democrat-- Franklin D. Roosevelt-- was another patrician, the greatest Republican-- Ronald Reagan-- was another self-made man.

This self-reliance explains a lot of the demographics. Those with incomes under $15,000 are less likely to be proudly self-reliant. They are likely to get, and to want, help from the public and from others. The upper classes are less self-reliant for a different reason. They have stocks, bonds, properties, real estate, other sources of income than work. And even if they work, they are likely to be high up the hierarchy, entrenched, tenured, secure. But across all classes and income levels, there are people who do not feel self-reliant. People who hold low-paying entry-level jobs may feel dependent on their employers, at whose whim they can be fired. Tenured teachers and government bureaucrats with high levels of job security will feel less self-reliant than self-employed businesspeople with the same income. Men are more likely to (economically) self-reliant than women (housework is a different story-- and forgive me for what may sound like "stereotyping" but these are just facts, whether because of nature or nurture the reader may judge) so they are more likely to vote Republican. Hispanics, so many of whom came here to work hard for a living, are drifting towards the Republicans. If you wanted to test for self-reliance, you would probably ask different questions than these exit polls do. But the explanation works better than the "Republicans are the party of the rich" canard.

By the way, this self-reliance idea is not just another way of saying, Republicans good Democrats bad. Self-reliance is always a half-truth anyway: the truth is, we all need community, we rely on each other, and we rely on the government, too, to maintain law and order and public services, to promote the advance of science, to macro-manage the economy, to provide at least an implicit social safety net (no democracy has ever suffered a famine, as Amartya Sen has shown), to provide a currency, to do some very complicated things like protect intellectual property rights, and to provide public space, streets and parks and national forests. Still, the tax dollars to support all this come from those millions of self-reliant Republicans, and we would all be poorer if high taxes for the sake of "enlightened" spending turned people who work hard for a living into suckers. Most European countries, and we ourselves thirty years ago, did do this to some extent. And it did make us all poorer, and in many cases it was not even the rich who suffered most. The rise of the welfare state ran parallel to the growth of the underclass.

I suspect that a lot of poor people intuit that they will be better off morally and economically by achieving even a meager self-reliance than by receiving government handouts. That's why so many people in the lower income brackets-- probably a majority, I suspect, if we leave aside blacks who are influenced by the legacy of Dr. King-- vote for George W. Bush.

"REPUBLICANS ARE THE PARTY OF THE RICH" IS A MYTH
Probably both sides of our debate could claim a bit vindication from these numbers. After all, in the "vote by income" category, the proportion of voters shifts steadily in favor of Bush as income increases. In my opinion, though, these numbers offer a pretty strong case that "Republicans are the party of the rich" is a myth.

First, even if support for Bush rises with income, it doesn't rise by much. Even in the "over $100,000" category, Bush only has a 54-43 advantage: a strangely modest reward for his "upper-class tax cuts." In the lowest income category, Bush is only down 57-37. And as soon as voters hit $30K per year---hardly "the rich"---they're evenly split.

Second, the "vote by class" charts tell a little bit different story. The (self-identified) upper class supports Gore more strongly than any other group, 56-39! They prefer Gore by almost as wide a margin as under-$15,000 income earners do! Who are these people? Since it is a subjective measure, it doesn't necessarily correspond exactly to income. The question to ask is: What would make people identify themselves as upper-class? My personal guess is that people are more likely to identify themselves this way if they are members of groups that self-identify as upper-class: old money, for example, or the upper tiers of corporate America; a thriving small-town businessman would be more likely to think of himself as just a regular guy who happens to be making pretty good money.

Why would the self-identified upper class vote for Gore, when Bush was planning to refund them a lot of tax dollars? I can think of several reasons:

The environment. I can think of several reasons why the environment should be an upper-class issue. There is a trade-off between environmental protection and the economy. Regulation makes things harder for businesses and slows economic growth. Now, if you are upper class, this may be worth it. You make a lot of money anyway, and can afford to sacrifice a little bit for the sake of an abstractly noble (quasi-religious, I think) cause like the environment. If unemployment rises, you won't be the one losing your job. Non-upper-class people have more to fear if the economy is weakened by environmental regulation. Also, if we protect nature, rich people are the ones most likely to enjoy it. They can afford the property located near green space. They can afford to vacation in the mountains of Colorado, or even the Brazilian rainforest. Third, environmentalism can be thought of as an investment in highly expensive public goods, not providable by the market, for which the rich are willing to "pay" more than the poor. Consider pollution. Pollution is very democratic. Everybody walks around the city and has to breath it, rich and poor alike. Poor people, who are accustomed to squalor and have bigger problems, would probably not be willing to give up many dollars to avoid this particular nuisance. Rich people, on the other hand, eat the finest food, drive the finest cars, listen to the finest music, wear the finest clothes, and so on, all thanks to their money. Naturally they are frustrated that money doesn't allow them to breathe the finest air, and would like to see the government provide it for them at everybody's expense. So they vote for Gore.

The rentier class. Gore may have been getting the vote of the rentier class. The "upper-middle class" gets a fat paycheck and wants to keep more of it; but the "upper class" has subtler forms of wealth, an array of stocks and bonds and options and connections on Wall Street. They want things like a strong dollar and a small deficit.

Cultural elitism. In the "vote by education" chart, we can see that people who hold advanced degrees are more likely to support Gore by a 52-44 margin. This suggests that Gore's upper-class vote may really be a knowledge-class vote. My own experience is that cultural elitism is a major reason for people to support the Democrats. Among well-educated people, and certainly at universities, there is often a prevailing assumption that all intelligent people support Democrats.

Ethnicity is obviously a much stronger predictor than income, with whites leaning Republican, Asians, Hispanics and others leaning Democrat, and blacks overwhelmingly supporting the Democrats. This throws a new light on the "vote by income" profile: Gore's 57-37 advantage probably derives entirely from his support among blacks, who vote Democrat for ethnic rather than economic reasons.

ARE REPUBLICANS RICHER THAN DEMOCRATS?
We were having this debate last night after my birthday party. My friends (who lean Democrat) argued that Republicans were "the party of the rich," and that poor people tend to vote Democrat while people with higher incomes vote Republican, to protect their social position. I thought this was a myth. (This is just "Politics 101," claimed one of my interlocutors.) Well, we'll see. I looked online and evidence was harder to come by than I thought, but the exit polls from the 2000 election give a glimpse. The most relevant parts are:

Vote by Race	All	Gore	Bush	Buchanan	Nader
White	81 %	42 %	54 %	0 %	3 %
African-American	10 %	90 %	9 %	0 %	1 %
Hispanic	7 %	62 %	35 %	1 %	2 %
Asian	2 %	55 %	41 %	1 %	3 %
Other	1 %	55 %	39 %	0 %	4 %

Vote by Education	All	Gore	Bush	Buchanan	Nader
No H.S. Degree	5 %	59 %	39 %	1 %	1 %
High School Graduate	21 %	48 %	49 %	1 %	1 %
Some College	32 %	45 %	51 %	0 %	3 %
College Graduate	24 %	45 %	51 %	0 %	3 %
Post-Graduate Degree	18 %	52 %	44 %	0 %	3 %

Vote by Income	All	Gore	Bush	Buchanan	Nader
Under $15,000	7 %	57 %	37 %	1 %	4 %
$15-30,000	16 %	54 %	41 %	1 %	3 %
$30-50,000	24 %	49 %	48 %	0 %	2 %
$50-75,000	25 %	46 %	51 %	0 %	2 %
$75-100,000	13 %	45 %	52 %	0 %	2 %
Over $100,000	15 %	43 %	54 %	0 %	2 %

Vote by Class	All	Gore	Bush	Buchanan	Nader
Upper Class	4 %	56 %	39 %	0 %	3 %
Upper-Middle	27 %	43 %	54 %	0 %	3 %
Middle Class	46 %	48 %	49 %	0 %	2 %
Working Class	18 %	51 %	46 %	0 %	3 %
Lower Class	2 %	0 %	0 %	0 %	0 %

LAST NIGHT
I went to choir practice over at Mount Pleasant Baptist Church, and the piano player was gone. The guys know I play piano, so they asked me to help out. Oh yyyeahhh! It was very fun. I had to start by listening to the tapes to pick up the tunes by hear, but once we got started. A black gospel choir, singing at the top of their lungs. A bassist and a drummer. I can jam jazz-style by myself. But then I have to provide rhythm and a bass line myself. This is just about the first time that I've had somebody to do it for me. As the rehearsal went on, I started beginning to feel how much liberty that gave me to improv, to come up with my own riffs, to come in and drop out as I please, emphasize certain notes... Wow, it was fun! I'd half like to do it more often, if I became fixed in one place long enough to become a reliable member of some community.

MALAWI
I promised my family I would write about Malawi so they would have some idea where I was going. Putting my web page online took a while, though, so I don't have much time. Just a brief word. Malawi is a small country in east Africa, but with about 10 million people. On the east side of it is a huge lake called Lake Malawi. Malawi is more highland than some of the countries around it. It's very poor but it's supposed to be one of the most "laid-back" destinations in Africa. (Of course, in general Africa is a bit more on the dangerous side than the rest of the world.) It borders on Zambia, Mozambique and some others. But this was Anglophone Africa, Livingstone's country. Biologically I think it's a bit calmer than Botswana or Zaire, because of being more highland. There are some beaches which seem to be major tourist destinations (like Cape Maclean; I'm getting all of this from the Lonely Planet.) Malawi was under the dictatorial rule of Kenneth Banda for a few decades after independence; now they've shifted to democracy, a welcome development.

It's not easy for me to imagine what Africa is really like. By now I guess I've read a fair amount about it one way or another, from development rather than from history and literature (which is more how I learned about Russia before going). But it all remains abstract and unreal in my head.

And what will I be doing there? I'll be technical assistant to a public expenditure tracking study (PETS). PETS follows public funds through the various tiers of the (in this case, education) hierarchy to see where they leak, how they are targeted, whether they are efficient and correlated with improved outcomes, and so on. I've just finished writing a monograph on PETS, which I wrote based on reading a lot of other studies, but this will be my first time being really involved in one. And my first time in Africa. Plane tickets are not yet purchased, but I think my departure date will be sometime around March 7.

MY WEB PAGE IS UP AND RUNNING
You can check it out at www.nathan-smith.com. At this point, it's still pretty primitive. The color scheme for the articles looks bad, much worse than this page. I'll work on it. But I've got about fifteen articles up there, mostly stuff I wrote for The Citizen. Some of my favorites are:

"Philosophy and Fundamentalism." One of my most thoughtful pieces, which examines why fundamentalism still exists in our world and why it may not be as foolish as we like to think.

"Robin Hood Imperialism" is written back in October 2002; if you want to know why I support the war, this is a pretty good place to look.

"The American Political Philosophy" is my concise and cogent responese to the elections of 2002: the argument is that Republicans "have their grip on the American political philosophy."

"The Next Welfare Reform" is my word on what to do about Social Security.

"Is Chomsky's Sophistry Useful?" An incisive little piece from my first issue of The Citizen; a fierce response to a speech by Noam Chomsky that I saw at Harvard.

Two articles on vouchers. "What Vouchers Could Do for America," never before published! is an imaginative piece, which purports to be a magazine feature story written in 2025 about the voucher revoluion in education, long after it has taken place. If someone reads it, I'd love to hear your opinion. The other article, "Why Religious Neutrality in Education Requires Vouchers," just states the (what should be) obvious in the wake of the Cleveland decision.

There is a link to the home page from the articles, by the way. Because of the incompetent way I've done the color scheme, however, it can't be seen. Apologies. I will try to come back and improve this page some time soon.

A FORECAST
I was talking about politics over lunch yesterday, and I found myself arguing a bit heatedlly about Bush's chances to win this election. And now I'm thinking, since I've gone this far out on a limb, I might as well take the chance and make my prediction, and risk looking silly if it comes out the other way. My forecast: If Karl Rove can't win this election for Bush over John Kerry, he's an idiot.

Here's what's in Bush's favor: 1) we'll be out of Iraq by then, with a sovereign Iraqi government in place, and troops coming home, and despite the absence of WMDs (it is even possible that WMDs will be found at the last minute! which would give Bush a nifty little boost, but I doubt it) the Iraq venture will look fairly successful and a good thing (to a small majority of Americans, anyway), 2) the economy will be coming out of a great year, with probably 4% growth or so, probably with job creation picking up, 3) even if the tax cut is not great fiscal policy, and the deficit is unpopular, extra money in your pocket makes you like the incumbent (as the Democrats, except Dean, are acknowledging by refusnig to advocate the repeal of the whole tax cut), 4) Bush has a good reputation by now for being strong on the national security front, 6) his Medicare and education reforms, and other "compassionate" elements of his presidency, though the Democrats refuse to acknowledge them, are real and will neutralize some of their key issues, and 6) personality: most people like Bush.

Bush is certainly vulnerable in a number of ways. People are quite upset about the deficit. Some people-- not that many, I think, but some-- are disillusioned about the justification for war because of the absence of WMDs. (Most of the people who are expressing outrage about the absence of WMDs opposed the war anyway, so the category actually swayed by that consideration is, I suspect, small, but there are some.) The left is very angry with Bush, and while Bush-hatred is certainly a minority attitude, their arguments-- that Bush is in thrall to special interests, that he is destroying our allies with his reckless unilateralism, that he is ruining the environment, that he is a "lying liar"-- may have a bit of traction with the broader public. Bush is by no means as stupid as he is stereotyped to be by the media (he has a sort of plodding intelligence and good judgment, and an ability to choose and defer to smart advisers, which gives him an effective intelligence much greater than his personal intelligence) he is also by no means brilliant. He seems to me to have a somewhat limited grasp of economics, for example. I think a certain kind of Democrat could beat. An American version of Tony Blair, to be exact.

The Democrats won't beat him, though, because Kerry is a lousy candidate, highly vulnerable on his record and on his personality. The platform he is basically running on-- his service in Vietnam, and a phony populism based on the empty rhetoric of denouncing "special interests;" Democrats' anger combined with their belief in his "electability"-- is hollow and flimsy. And Rove has a year to take it apart. It is often said that elections are a referendum on the incumbent. Is this really true? Why can't (at least some of) the voters be smart enough to say, "We're happy with the incumbent, but his opponent is even better" or "We're unhappy with the incumbent, but his opponent is even worse"? I think Bush would have fair odds of winning a "referendum on the incumbent," but fortunately for him, that's not what he's facing; he'll face a race against Kerry instead.

So why do I think Kerry is so vulnerable? He's a blue-blood, an elitist, notoriously haughty and proud, with a taste for luxury, stingy to charity. He's wooden and out of touch, yet running as a populist. Kerry will attack Bush on the deficit, of course, but since he's also propose major new spending initiatives, such as health care for all Americans, more money for education, etc., I think it will sink in on voters (with some help from Karl Rove) that Kerry's math is at least as fuzzy as Bush's ever was. (Yes, Kerry wants to repeal the Bush tax cut, but only on the wealthy, which won't generate enough revenue to cover current spending, let alone allow an expansion of discretionary spending, let alone a new entitlement like universal health care.)

Just by being a former soldier, Kerry gets a big boost on the national security issue. But can that really compensate for his voting against every major weapons system, his weird record of votes on the Iraq Wars (against in '91, for in '02, then against the $87b a year later), awkward phrases like calling for "regime change" in the US during Operation Iraqi Freedom. I think it will hurt him that he called the coalition Bush headed "fraudulent." Rove doesn't have to make voters certain that Kerry would conduct our foreign policy disastrously. He just has to make them unsure.

The underlying problem is that the best coalition to beat Bush would be a combination of "left" elements-- doves and Europhiles, socialists and Great Society liberals, a few unemployed and their sympathizers, disgruntled teachers, social liberals (pro-choicers, for example)-- with "right" elements-- fiscal conservatives, free-traders, Wall Street strong dollar types, foreign-policy isolationists, small-government libertarians. This would be a somewhat odd coalition, but I think a clever and dexterous politician (e.g. Bill Clinton) could make it coherent enough to hold together long enough to topple Bush's "big-government moral conservatism." Kerry is certainly not shrewd enough to do that.

Now I think the election will be pretty close, and a lot rests on Karl Rove to spend his $100 billion of campaign contributions wisely. And since he's certainly a better political consultant than me, I'm reluctant to suggest how, but a few hints perhaps. Soft negative advertising. Show the American public the other side of Kerry's Vietnam record, when he was helping to lead the backlash that smeared the war in Vietnam and helped to ensure that veterans returning home were stereotyped as baby-killers. Portray Kerry as a "liberal" by all means (he is), but also as inconsistent and opportunist, and simply lacking the character to be president. (To do both will be a bit tricky, but that's what clever lads like Karl Rove are for.) Play Bush's foreign policy idealism for all its worth. Have ads set in Iraq and Afghanistan, showing the loya jirga, showing the celebration in the streets of Baghdad, show the horrors of Saddam's regime and how life is improving. (Would Karl Rove have the nerve to get Republican campaign ads filmed in Iraq, so that the American public can see Iraqis themselves expressing their gratitude?) I don't want to go on, because I'm sure (I hope!) Karl Rove can do his job better than I could do it. But I think he'll pull if off (and that he'll be pretty incompetent if he doesn't).

Whew! There, I did it. No respectable pundit would ever call an election this early, but I'm not a respectable pundit, just some random guy who blogs in the mornings before work, so I have less to lose. One thing more to add, before I retire from political blogging for a while: even if Kerry wins, it won't really be a big triumph for the Democrats. First, because he'd be a lousy president and might seriously humiliate and discredit his party; second, because his selection itself was on the grounds of "electability" and was thus almost a concession to Republicans, and a defeat for the "Democratic wing of the Democratic party" represented by Howards Dean; third, because of the "ratchet-effect," the phenomenon by which one party pulls the country in one direction, and the other party merely leaves it in one place. (The "ratchet-effect" was a term developed in Britain, where it used to pull the country to the left. Nowadays, the US and some other countries are being ratcheted towards the right.) Kerry will be hamstrung by a Republican Congress, which would probably gain seats in 2006, and will not be able to pass the kind of legislation which would reverse the Bush legacy; and this failure will simply entrench it.

Well, now that I know the results, I don't have to follow politics anymore! That's a relief, because I was becoming kind of an addict, which is not a good thing. Now I can switch my interests to Africa, and try to become as well-versed as I can in that region before I go there. Expect future posts to focus more in that direction.

DO AMERICANS SUPPORT THE WAR?
We were talking about this over lunch, so I looked for the numbers. I claimed at lunch that a majority of Americans were strongly supportive of the war before, during, and after, and that the proportion who thought the war was worth it had only recently dipped below 50%, and that not by much. According to these polls, I was mistaken about the last point: a (small) majority of Americans still think the war was worth it. And that it was right. And that it was justified. Also, the proportion in favor has not varied much over time, which is good to hear: respondents to these polls are not, it seems, unduly fickle. These polls are a week old, so maybe the numbers have dipped. But I don't think there's any reason to think that Iraq will be a major factor against Bush in November.