An ongoing review of politics and culture

One Lesson from MoveOn

Reihan Salam points to a great portrait of MoveOn by The Nation editor Chris Hayes on the occasion if its tenth anniversary. (Especially) those who disagree with MoveOn’s political objectives should read it. Being in opposition obviously tends to enable the success of non-government forms of political organization, but why was this specific entity able to capture discontent? I’m sure the personalities of those involved and the many local accidents of circumstance mattered, but MoveOn also has a structure that mattered.

They are the Richard Viguerie of the contemporary era. What distinguishes MoveOn from a just a great email list? Interactivity. Hayes’s article reminded me of nothing more than a profile of a successful Internet start-up. Leading consumer web businesses have, as a general rule, figured out that the new medium allows interactivity, and hence community-building, and hence barriers to entry. Eventually, though they usually don’t say this out loud, this also allows the capture of new types of data about consumer behavior that permit far better message development and targeting.

Important new technologies tend to create new organizational forms built around them. These new organizational forms tend to appear first in the industries that create the new technologies, and then diffuse into the broader economy. Conservative activists should study this organization closely.

Chris Hayes on MoveOn

Chris Hayes has written the definitive profile of MoveOn on its tenth anniversary, drawing, in classic Hayesian fashion, on grizzled left-wing organizers and tech guru Clay Shirky. Rather than read about the daily ebb and flow of the campaign, you’d be shrewd to spend some quality time with this article as it vividly describes the future of organizing.

In many ways MoveOn’s relationship to its members looks a lot like a business’s relationship to its customers. If a product isn’t selling, they take it off the shelves. For activists rooted in an earlier generation of social movements, which tended to prize long, disputatious meetings and the unwieldy process of forming bottom-up consensus, this approach is at best alien, at worst insidious. Customers, after all, aren’t part of the creation of the product: they’re not running the meetings where new packaging is designed; their input is limited to the final result and expressed through the transaction of purchase. And the role of customer imposes no obligations. You are free to buy or not buy, or in MoveOn’s case, sign the petition or not sign the petition. Oscar Wilde once complained that the trouble with socialism was that it took “too many evenings.” MoveOn holds out the promise of progressive change without the evenings.

I was most impressed by how MoveOn’s leadership is attuned to the overromanticization of deliberative democracy.

The organizing model that requires long meetings and vigorous debate can lead to organizations being driven by, in MoveOn spokeswoman Ilyse Hogue’s words, “the loudest person in the room,” something that cuts against MoveOn’s non-shouter ethos.

Having experienced this “democratic” dynamic firsthand, I really appreciate Hogue’s canny realism. But I do have some other points, which you’ll find below.

Rovian Cameron?

From The Economist‘s survey of the Cameron Conservatives:

The strain of Conservatism that Mr Cameron embodies has thus become unfamiliar. It is pragmatic, incremental, willing to adapt to win and keep office. This is the flexible Conservatism of Benjamin Disraeli, a 19th-century prime minister, combining his awareness of the needs and votes of the lower classes with the gradualism of Edmund Burke, who articulated Tory alarm at the French Revolution. It is a Conservatism that is sceptical of state power and favours market solutions, sound money and patriotism—but all in moderation. This is perhaps the real contrast between Mr Cameron and David Davis, who left the shadow cabinet last month to dramatise his disgust with Labour’s erosion of civil liberties. Both believe in the principle he wants to defend, but Mr Davis really believes in it.

My sense is that there is nothing wrong with an “awareness of the needs and votes of the lower classes.”

Also:

Mr Cameron also talks about establishing new “social norms”—using signals from government to establish healthy models of behaviour. He cites the success of previous campaigns against drunk driving as a precedent. In Glasgow on July 7th, Mr Cameron talked with new stridency about personal responsibility and “moral choice”.

Whether intractable social problems can be solved quite so magically is open to doubt. But a future Tory government would probably lack the cash for costlier solutions.

This is worth keeping in mind, particularly when people like me complain about the failures of the Bush Administration. Liberals often point to the vast sums spent fighting the Iraq War. As someone who believes that the Iraq War is worth fighting, I keenly sense that it has constrained our options on the domestic front, certainly in the short term.

George Osborne Gets It

This is a truly extraordinary document.

Sullivan and Wilkinson on Analytical Nationalism

Andrew writes,

I fear that many of the decent ideas in the book are undermined by a Rovian agenda to bribe a demographic to vote Republican.

Note how the valence changes when we change “Rovian” to, say, “Disraelian.” Not that Disraelian is more appropriate in this instance. But the idea of expanding a political coalition through the embrace of substantive and not merely rhetorical policy shifts has a pretty long and storied history. And of course the shifts that we identify with Rove are generally fairly narrow, e.g., steel tariffs to secure votes in a particular region, rather than, “Let’s create a freer healthcare market through a combination of deregulation and transparency, and include redistribute to the relatively poor rather than the relatively affluent.” I mean, if that were Rovian, I’d certainly think better of things Rovian.

Briefly, I’ll add that Will Wilkinson makes some excellent points in this characteristically smart post. His harsh critique of analytical nationalism and conventional political categories, a reflection of his deeply-held radicalism idealism, is worth your time.

So, when Sullivan says I “tear into GNP,” I was in fact tearing into the whole genre of partisan political books, which is obviously a banging-head-against-wall sort of thing to do. The bit he quotes was a coda to a post that defended Grand New Party against the charge that it is irrelevant because the authors are too naive to see that the Republican Party is the sworn enemy of anyone without a yacht. Just so you know.

I have to assume that Will would have serious reservations about Michael Oakeshott’s important, decidedly idiosyncratic framework. I’d love to see him engage the Sullivanian worldview. Arguments from skepticism — a reflection of liberalism at his best, which Andrew has called the conservatism of doubt — clearly resonate with “conservative theory of incremental social change.” Yet there are many other aspects of the nationalist conservatism of the Thatcherite right, and even of present-day Obamacons, that I’m guessing Will would find objectionable, if not toxic. And if there is no real daylight between Sullivan and Wilkinson, I wonder what the former would make of the latter’s forceful critique of Ron Paul’s constitutional nationalism and the cult of national identity, etc.

Will Wilkinson, someone I like and admire very much, is a strong tonic!

Andrew Sullivan on GNP

One thing I greatly appreciate about Andrew — though he disagrees with Grand New Party on a lot of fundamental questions, he is extremely gracious and kind. One prime example is his column on the new Atlantic right. There is a sense in which everything I write is in dialogue with Andrew’s skeptical vision, which has definitely informed my own politics in a lot of ways that aren’t always easy to disentangle. He ends the column on an important note.

Conservatism, after all, has always been a strange mixture of dismay at social loss and pragmatism in helping to ameliorate it. It is not an ideology; it’s a flexible, pragmatic, modest approach to the necessary evil of government. In one era, big tax cuts, deregulation and a much smaller state may be appropriate. In another time, a different emphasis may be more fitting. This is the Tory genius – and it’s encouraging to see conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic grope gradually towards reinvention.

This is in striking contrast to Corey Robin’s view, of conservatism as a defense of hierarchy and privilege. It comes as no surprise that Andrew’s characterizations sounds right to my ears and Robin’s does not. But I wonder what Andrew would make of Robin’s argument.

I’m interested in the complex ways in which inequality and hierarchy are related, but also in the ways they cut against each or are orthogonal to each other. Will Wilkinson and Clay Shirky have written about this in their own ways, and so has Daniel A. Bell in the context of “the new Confucianism.” I hope to write more about this soon.

Andrew Sullivan and the State

I neglected to respond to this post by Andrew last week.

Reihan puts it less cautiously:

If Cameron embraced an agenda like the one outlined in Grand New Party, he would likely be accused of being a libertarian radical hellbent on destroying the most cherished parts of Britain’s welfare state.

But this is largely a function of where Cameron starts from in a much more collectivist Britain, especially in healthcare and education, as Reihan concedes.

Actually, I don’t think I was conceding anything, though it’s possible that I was unclear. As I understand it, Andrew was saying:

I’m struck, in contrast to R&R, how restrained Cameron is. His policy prescriptions – more autonomy at the bottom of public services, more accountability within the public sector, a gentle tax incentive for marriage – are more in line with traditional conservatism than wage subsidies, for example.

That is, my understanding is that Andrew was describing Cameron as more restrained than the agenda outlined in Grand New Party, and suggesting that this meant that Cameronism was somehow preferable. (I could be wrong about this.) My argument is that it was natural for Cameron to be more restrained given that the British state is far larger. Implicit — actually, explicit — in this is the notion that in Britain, a Grand New Party agenda would be far less statist than Cameronism. It would involve, for example, radically paring back the National Health Service, shrinking employment in the state sector, decentralizing British government. So I’m a little confused as to how my observation is a concession. Similarly, I believe the state ought to be much bigger in Somalia because right now we have a very, some would say pathologically, un-collectivist Somalia. Too un-collectivist, I would submit.

To sum up: Britain, too collectivist. Somalia, not collectivist enough. America, somewhere in between, but much closer to Britain than Somalia. I should hope that conservatives in Somalia wouldn’t be pursuing, say, a Cameronian agenda, as it wouldn’t be very salient to the challenges that country faces. And I sense that a Grand New Party agenda would also be misplaced. Alexander Hamilton is a hero to many American conservatives. Yet he was a champion of centralization and a strong state. Of course, one assumes he would have stopped being a champion of centralization and the strong state once a state reached Soviet levels of power, or even Belgian levels.

For me, the Tory revival has been a tremendous source of ideas and inspiration. Oliver Letwin’s speech on the conveyor belt to crime had a big influence on me. The same goes for David Willetts, in particular his work on the family, Tim Montgomerie and Iain Duncan-Smith, and Danny Kruger, among others. Their ideas definitely shaped Grand New Party. Yet it was obvious to me that America needs different institutional reforms from contemporary Britain. Monica Prasad’s The Politics of Free Markets, a book I mention a lot, argues that though Reagan and Thatcher both drew on Hayek and Friedman, they governed very differently — they governed in response to very different circumstances, and at times pursued the opposite policies, e.g., tax cuts in the U.S., tax hikes in Britain, etc. That is to be expected.

Little Pitchers

Some days ago, my son (who turns six in September) noticed a picture of a soldier in the newspaper, and prepared to cut it out. (He cuts out pictures from the newspaper all the time. With all the newsprint on the floor of his room, you’d think he was a parrot.) And he asked why there was a picture of a soldier, and, told that he was fighting in Iraq, and reminded him of the conversations we’d had in the past about the war. And as usual, he asked whether we were winning.

My standard answer to him is, “it’s hard to say” which has the virtue of being honest. But one of these days that’s not going to be adequate, and one of these days he’s going to deserve a more serious discussion of the war than we’ve had to-date. Let’s say my son was nine years old – old enough to comprehend more than good guys versus bad guys. How, in narrative terms, would you explain the Iraq war? On the assumption that you didn’t want to say either that, “Iraq is only one front in World War IV, the global struggle against Islamofascism” or “we went to war so the President could get back at the guy who tried to kill his dad, make money for his buddies in the oil business, and protect Israel.”

Suggestions?

The Education of a Would-Be Obamacon

It probably hasn’t escaped any regular readers of this blog that I’ve been flirting on and off with the question of whether I am an “Obamacon” – someone who generally considers himself conservative but nonetheless had lent his support to liberal Democrat Barack Obama in his quest for the Presidency. See, for example, here, where I don’t fret about Obama’s Wright “problem;” here, where I wonder whether Obama might “advance the argument” and lead to a better liberalism and, subsequently, a better conservatism; here, where I basically minimize the importance of the surge’s success in evaluating the two Presidential candidates; here, where I try to convince myself that an Obama judiciary won’t be terrible; and here where I compare Barack Obama to Kermit the Frog (and I can think of no higher possible praise). I don’t want to take this too far – I don’t think I’ve written anything especially gushing about Obama, nor have I written anything especially scathing about McCain. But I don’t think I’m revealing anything that wasn’t already obvious by saying that I find the Obama candidacy interesting, both because of his particular characteristics and because of the particular characteristics of this moment in history.

But his recent comments on how “your children need to learn Spanish” are just so monumentally wrong that I feel like I’ve taken a much-needed cold shower.

How wrong? Let me count the ways:

the anguish of the Christian libertarian

This is a long post about Christianity, libertarianism, and environmentalism. You’ve been warned.

Reflections on Grand New Party

Personally, I was most interested in the policy proposals that pepper the book’s second half. But I predict that the single most influential piece of the book, over the long haul, will be the elegant answer it provides to Thomas Frank’s famous puzzlement about the behavior of Kansans.

Dept. of You Can't Make This Up

Headline from a press release:

Sen. Hillary Clinton and Cheech Marin Guests of Honor at Presidential Banquet

Incredible.

(Also, the guy who did this — be warned, the clip is pretty vulgar — is going to be honored at the same dinner as a feminist political icon?)

Chance and Necessity

A few weeks ago I wrote an article for NRO, in which I said:

[M]any educated people have invested scientists — and more often, popularizers of science — with the right to be taken seriously as they pontificate about morality and public policy. The argument tends to take this form: Scientific finding X implies liberal political or moral conclusion Y. Important contemporary examples include the assertions that evolution implies atheism, and the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas implies that we must reduce carbon emissions rapidly and aggressively.

Conservatives, for their part — especially those with access to the biggest megaphones — have recently developed the habit of responding to this by challenging scientific finding X. The standard sorry spectacle, and the resulting alienation of those who takes science seriously, ensues.

In general, it would be far wiser to accept X, but to challenge the assertion that X implies Y. Scientific findings almost never entail specific moral or political conclusions, because the scope of application of science is rarely sufficient to do so.

John G. West of the Discovery Institute has written and article for NRO defending the recent Louisiana Science Education Act. I assume that his reasoning in it is at least in part a response to my article. He says that:

Fearful of being branded “anti-science,” some conservatives are skittish about such efforts to allow challenges to the consensus view of science. They insist that conservatives should not question currently accepted “facts” of science, only the supposedly misguided application of those facts by scientists to politics, morality, and religion. Such conservatives assume that we can safely cede to scientists the authority to determine the “facts,” so long as we retain the right to challenge their application of the facts to the rest of culture.

He then immediately proceeds to say:

First, the idea that a firewall exists between scientific “facts” and their implications for society is not sustainable. Facts have implications. If it really is a “fact” that the evolution of life was an unplanned process of chance and necessity (as Neo-Darwinism asserts), then that fact has consequences for how we view life. It does not lead necessarily to Richard Dawkins’s militant atheism, but it certainly makes less plausible the idea of a God who intentionally directs the development of life toward a specific end. In a Darwinian worldview, even God himself cannot know how evolution will turn out — which is why theistic evolutionist Kenneth Miller argues that human beings are a mere “happenstance” of evolutionary history, and that if evolution played over again it might produce thinking mollusks rather than us.

But this is a perfect example (in my view) of asserting that science says something that it does not. Mr. West claims that Neo-Darwinism asserts “that the evolution of life was an unplanned process of chance and necessity.” While some scientists may say that, there is no such scientific finding. It is true that any hypothesized teleology in the development of humans would be so difficult to determine through current methods that scientists appropriately proceed as if this were true when conducting operational science; but that it is a very far cry from saying that it is scientifically proven to be true.

Here is a long excerpt from an NR article I wrote last year on exactly this topic:

The Social Topography of David Brooks' Work-Culture War: a Warning to Ross and Reihan

I’ve been mordantly ruminating over David Brooks’ July 1 column. Why?

Over the past several years, the highly educated coastal rich have been engaged in a little culture war with the inland corporate rich. This is a war over values, leadership styles and social networks.

The deeper you go into this observation the more dizzying it becomes. What follows is a long consideration of how it intersects with — or collides with! — Ross’ and Reihan’s main contention about the future of conservatism in America.

Mission First, Troops Always

Ray Kimball is one of the founders of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, and he’s also an insightful observer of the political scene. Conspicuously nonpartisan, befitting a serving member of the armed forces, Kimball has also been pretty critical of many aspects of U.S. national security strategy. He writes on occasion for the Huffington Post, and I’ve just come across his latest post in which he argues, in an Eisenhowerian vein, that the military is in danger of becoming a self-licking ice cream cone.

On McCain's Contradictions

Robert Gordon is one of my favorite center-left thinkers, so it should come as no surprise that he landed many blows in TNR essay he’s co-authored with James Kvaal on McCain’s contradictions. I support John McCain, and I recognize that he’s facing a very tough political environment. That’s why he is often forced to embrace positions that are very much in tension with each other. My suspicion is that if McCain were running far ahead of the competition, if he faced a less polarized political environment, you’d see him embrace a different, more coherent set of policies. But campaign politics is about targets of opportunity, and for Republicans at this very fraught moment it is about papering over major fractures within the base. McCain’s contradictions are, as Gordon and Kvaal fully understand, rooted in these fractures — keeping the Bush bundlers on side while also reaching out to working class voters, etc. I don’t envy them their task.

Hate If You Must Helms' Old Gray Head, But Spare Your Country's Flag, She Said

Andrew, a little extremely:

Here’s a story to cheer you up:

L.F. Eason III gave up the only job he’d ever had rather than lower a flag to honor former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms. Eason, a 29-year veteran of the state Department of Agriculture, instructed his staff at a small Raleigh lab not to fly the U.S. or North Carolina flags at half-staff Monday, as called for in a directive to all state agencies by Gov. Mike Easley [my emphasis!]. When a superior ordered the lab to follow the directive, Eason decided to retire rather than pay tribute to Helms. After several hours’ delay, one of Eason’s employees hung the flags at half-staff.

Bad news: other than POTUS, only the governor of the state may order the flag to be at half staff to honor the death of a national or state figure. Indeed, Gov. Easley was simply carrying out the duties of his own office. The flag is to be flown at half staff the day, and the day after, a Senator or Representative dies. Bone up on your flag honor code here.

H/T Barbara Frietchie.

An Exercise in Pessimism

Of all the things I’d have to say about Lee Drutman’s LA Times review of Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, this is probably the most important. Consider the following piece of conventional-sounding wisdom:

The book’s ultimate doomsday scenario — of a dull and self-absorbed new generation of citizens falling prey to demagoguery and brazen power grabs — seems at once overblown (witness, for example, this election season’s youth reengagement in politics) and also yesterday’s news (haven’t we always been perilously close to this, if not already suffering from it?).

Now hark back to my whack at Broder’s unwise America and consider this: there is no inherent contradiction between young people getting reengaged in politics and political demagoguery or power grabs. Any pessimist worth the name, in fact, ought to be arguing that today little more than demagoguery and the promise of power-grabbing has energized young voters. Hope! Toughness! Sacrifice! Sacrifice! Nobody young (except Yuval Levin) is mobilized by McCain’s boring health care plan, or Obama’s debate performances.

To press the point, even the dull and self-absorbed can get a periodic kick out of frenetic national politics. Why not come out to see the Barackstar? If all we mean by ‘political engagement’ is wearing a candidate’s shirt, plastering a candidate’s stickers, and praising oneself and one’s peers for supporting one’s candidate, political engagement is even more narcissistic and superficial a trivial pursuit than cluttering up Facebook with running updates on your undefeated Scrabulous record.

Of course I’m not claiming here that every young person who’s getting involved in the Presidential race (if none other) is a dull little egotist. Undoubtedly, the number of ‘youth voters’ who are conscientious and informed and recognize that voting for President is but a tiny slice of the work of citizenship has risen in absolute numbers from what it was, say, back in the Age of Flannel. But we’ve got to entertain the prospect that the number of ‘youth voters’ who do not fit that profile has also risen absolutely, and by far more.

Last of all, and possibly worst, we must remember that even very well-informed, conscientious, and hardworking ‘youth voters’ who are also hellbent on ideological victory can still ‘fall prey to’ — or actively promote — demagogic power politics. But no one wants to hear this, least of all national greatness commentators. You have, however, been warned.

Don't Boot the Russkies

Behold, I am in complete agreement with Madeline Albright and Bill Perry:

We cannot expect help from a government we are attempting to blackball, nor would it be in our interest to push Russia further in the direction of an alliance of autocracies with such countries as China and Iran.

This is the kernel of the Clintonians’ brief against McCain’s Boot-the-Russkies-from-the-G8 plan, and it is the decisive argument. Our inappropriate and ill-fitting task of upholding, virtually alone, the West’s moral, economic, and political interests all around the world will go from moderately difficult to totally impossible with Russia as our enemy.

Only after many years, with an amount of work few want to take on, will Russian interests actually grow closer to ours on things like NATO and the missile shield. But as it stands, we need Russia. The West always has needed a Russia with one and a half feet in the West. Even when the West ruled most of the world, attending to an assertively anti-Western Russia was a full-time job with no guarantees. In the world of today, where former backwaters of power (Africa, China, the Middle East) have become fundamental problem areas for the West, pulling Russia off the bench and promoting it to the top of the crisis and antagonism list is literally about the stupidest idea I can conceive of when it comes to foreign policy.

Notice that this is true whatever you think about Iraq, Iran, or terrorism. Or global warming. Or rising food costs. All it requires of us is a stronger stomach when it comes to the ‘suffering’ of the Russian people. Emotional weakness on the suffering of strangers, here as elsewhere, has the great potential to do us more harm than good. Not a very happy lesson, but an important one.