On pandemics and hippies

A good point by Matt K. Lewis — I hadn't thought of this connection between the current pandemic, past crises, and the '60s backlash against hippies, but it makes sense:

Let’s suppose you were born in 1911, as were two of my grandparents. You survived the Great Influenza, the Great Depression, and World War II—all by the time you hit your early 30s.

Think this might influence your political worldview for… oh, I don’t know, THE REST OF YOUR LIFE?

This realization has only hit me, recently, as I contemplate how COVID-19 might influence our politics, going forward.

Some of my grandparents’ traditions and hang-ups were, no doubt, the result of a lack of education. But many of the things they believed were the very logical conclusions almost anyone might arrive at, had they lived through a pandemic, a Great Depression, and two world wars.

You might be more fearful of disease. This might lead you to be very skeptical of foreigners. You might be worried that a new depression is around every corner. These experiences might lead to both positive and negative externalities. But one thing’s for sure: they would definitively inform your lifestyle, customs, and politics.

Growing up, I was always curious about why their generation paid so much attention to the grooming habits of “dirty, long-haired hippies.” This always struck me as weird and overcritical. Didn’t they worship a dude with long hair and sandals? Now, in post COVID-19 world, I think I better understand their emphasis on cleanliness.

Of course, not everyone who came out of that experience embraced a cautious, conservative lifestyle. Experience informs our worldview, but it turns out that some of this is hardwired. A pretty famous Cornell University study suggests conservatives are more sensitive to images they perceive to be gross or disgusting than are progressives.

In a recent column for Vox, Ezra Klein contrasted the two political camps:

Some people are innately more suspicious of change, of outsiders, of novelty. That base orientation will nudge them toward living in the town where they grew up, eating the foods they know and love, worshipping in the church their parents attended. It will also nudge them toward political conservatism.

The reverse is true, too. Some people are naturally more oriented toward newness, toward diversity, toward disruption. That base orientation will push them to live in big cities, try exotic foods, travel widely, appreciate weird art, sample different spiritualities. It will also nudge them toward political liberalism.

This view strikes me as plausible, which is why our current political debate is so disconcerting.

If you want to be reminded of how powerful a drug partisanship is, consider that it is, ostensibly, conservatives who think fears about COVID-19 are overblown.

On the basis of these descriptions, today’s conservatives and progressives appear to have pulled a Freaky Friday and reversed their roles. Conservatives should be the ones panicking about COVID-19, while progressives should be placating the masses and saying that the concern is overblown.…

Celebrity shocks nation by winning presidency

A celebrity who's a "household name" in Guatemala and used to have a TV show, but has never held office, and was initially considered a long-shot contender who didn't offer enough policy specifics to back up his conservative platform, went on to shock many people by winning the presidential election as a result of "widespread discontent with Guatemala's political class." Fortunately, that could never happen here . . .

Have moderate Republicans been losing the presidency because conservative voters stayed home in protest?

Ramesh Ponnuru says no:

Conservatives sometimes argue that Republicans lost the last two presidential elections because they nominated moderates who did not inspire conservatives to vote. On NRO today, Bernard Goldberg places blame on those conservatives who stayed home. He writes that “millions of the ideologically pure — who normally would vote Republican — did in fact sit home, if not handing the elections to Barack Obama, at least making it a lot easier for him to win.”

The premise of both arguments–Republicans shouldn’t have nominated moderates because they can’t turn out conservatives, and conservatives shouldn’t have sat out the elections–does not appear to be correct, based on the exit polls. There was no drop-off in conservative turnout in either 2008 or 2012. Conservatives were 34 percent of the electorate in 2004, 34 percent in 2008, and 35 percent in 2012. They voted Republican at a normal rate in 2012 too: Romney got 82 percent of them, a bit lower than George W. Bush’s 84 percent in 2004 but higher than his 81 percent in 2000. (McCain did a bit worse in 2008, with 78 percent.) Goldberg’s argument could end up being true about 2016, but it has not been true in the last two elections.

The US Department of Justice report on the Ferguson Police Department

Conor Friedersdorf challenges conservatives to take it seriously:

Conservatives fancy themselves zealous protectors of constitutional rights. They are suspicious of government power. They are hostile to bureaucratic corruption, however petty. And they oppose the confiscation of wealth without compelling reasons. The Ferguson report gives them much to object to in every one of these categories. It is remarkable that many on the right have instead dismissed the report without even reading it—as if psychologizing Eric Holder or cross-referencing generic arguments about disparate impact and crime rates obviated the need to reckon with the Justice Department’s specific findings. It seems to me that a kind of team-sport mentality has prevailed. Conservatives do not like sweeping denunciations of the entire criminal-justice system as racist, and they especially do not like violent protests, looting, and attacks on policemen—all very rightly.

But from there, too many conservatives have come to see any criticism of police conduct, or any allegation of racism, as if it were a play by the opposing team. They duly boo. Instead, they should reflect that all that is correct in their defense of the police is compromised by the extension of that defense to anything unworthy of it. . . .

Many conservatives I have spoken to are of the opinion that the FPD is no worse than any other police department and that they oppose the FPD being targeted simply because of the Michael Brown incident. I suppose this is probably true, but what I don’t understand is why that is seen as a feature, not a bug. The information I am going to describe below is appalling and breathtaking. If Ferguson is no worse than other cities, then why don’t we say that the problem is that all cities need to look very hard at fixing their municipal police departments, rather than that the Ferguson PD should be excused?

Why anti-vaxxers are liberal and conservative

Michael Gerson writes in WaPo:

[A] significant minority of parents — often well-educated parents — are opting out of vaccination. Many states (including California) make it relatively easy to refuse vaccination for “philosophic” reasons. This does not, I suspect, mean that people are reading Immanuel Kant or John Stuart Mill; it means they are consuming dodgy sources on the ­Internet.

Resistance to vaccination on the left often reflects an obsession with purity. Vaccines are placed in the same mental category as genetically modified organisms (GMOs), DDT and gluten. But the problem with organic health care is that the “natural” rate of child mortality is unacceptably high. Organically raised children can get some very nasty ­diseases.

Opposition to vaccination on the right often reflects an obsession with liberty — in this case, freedom from intrusive state mandates. It has always struck me as odd that a parent would defend his or her children with a gun but leave them vulnerable to a microbe. Some conservatives get especially exercised when vaccination has anything to do with sex — as with the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine — on the questionable theory that teenagers are more likely to fornicate if they have a medical permission slip (or less likely to without it).

Whether hipsters or home-schoolers, parents who don’t vaccinate are free riders. Their children benefit from herd immunity without assuming the very small risk of adverse reaction to vaccination. It is a game that works — until too many play it.

Herd immunity requires about 90 percent vaccine coverage. Some children with highly vulnerable immune systems — say, those being treated for leukemia — can’t be vaccinated for medical reasons. When the number of non-medical exemptions from vaccination gets large enough, the child with leukemia becomes the most vulnerable to the spread of disease.

The government (in this case, state governments) has the responsibility to keep vaccination rates above 90 percent, which benefits everyone. This requires burdening the freedom of parents in a variety of ways — not putting them in jail if they refuse to vaccinate but instead denying them some public good (such as public education) and subjecting them to stigma (which they generally deserve). As the rate of vaccination goes lower, the level of coercion must increase — making exemptions more difficult and burdensome to secure (as California needs to do).

Why conservatives shouldn't support Newt Gingrich, and libertarians shouldn't support Ron Paul

1. The Wall Street Journal, in a piece on Gingrich's unconvincing defense against the attacks over his work for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (see my live-blog of the last debate at "9:31"), perfectly sums up the lack of principle at the core of his candidacy:

The real history lesson here may be what the Freddie episode reveals about Mr. Gingrich's political philosophy. To wit, he has a soft spot for big government when he can use it for his own political ends. He also supported the individual mandate in health care in the 1990s, and we recall when he lobbied us to endorse the prescription drug benefit with only token Medicare reform in 2003. . . .

If Americans elect a Republican in 2012, it will be someone who can make the case for reviving economic growth, but also for restraining and reforming government so it doesn't bankrupt the country. If Americans want more "bold" government experiments, they'll re-elect Barack Obama.

That sentence I put in bold seems like the key to understanding Gingrich's approach to government. And needless to say, anyone who becomes president has many, many opportunities to use government to their own political ends! So I can't understand why conservatives would view him as the serious conservative candidate in this race. Frankly, I can't understand why Republicans would nominate him at all. He's far from the most electable or the most conservative candidate.


2. Libertarian blogger Alex Knepper makes the case against Ron Paul:

Ramesh Ponnuru makes the conservative case for Mitt Romney.

In a long endorsement of Romney in National Review (which endorsed Romney in 2008), Ponnuru argues:

Governor Romney’s political career may not reflect the ideal balance between conviction and calculation. But a presidential primary offers a choice among imperfect alternatives, not embodied ideals. Weighed against the available alternatives, Romney comes out ahead — way ahead — because he is the only one of the primary candidates with a good shot at achieving a prerequisite for advancing a conservative agenda as president: namely, actually becoming president.

Huntsman is highly unlikely to win the nomination because Republican voters divine in him a disdain for them, and return it. The others, even if they got the nomination, would be almost-certain losers in a general election. They are either too out of sync with the electorate, too personally erratic, or both.

Representative Bachmann says that President Obama is certain to lose reelection, so Republicans should feel free to nominate the candidate of their dreams, without regard to electability. The president certainly looks beatable. But writing him off is unwise. His approval numbers are weak but not disastrous, the Republican party remains unpopular, incumbency almost always carries advantages, and the composition of the electorate is likely to be much more Democratic than it was in 2010. If the bottom drops out of the economy, perhaps as a result of Europe’s disorders, then maybe even Gingrich or Perry could win the race. But the stakes are too high for that kind of gamble.

Even if one of them did win the White House, what we have seen of their campaigns suggests that his presidency would be a bumpy ride. In Perry’s case, the problem would be an apparent unfamiliarity with national issues that looks good only in comparison with Herman Cain’s proud ignorance. Gingrich, meanwhile, is a constant reminder that political leaders can have too much, as well as too little, imagination. His recent proposals on immigration are classic Gingrich: innovative-sounding, accompanied by high-tech gadgetry, and wholly absurd. Local community boards will decide which illegal immigrants to expel! We will be “humane,” while denying temporary workers the vote and stripping their children of citizenship!

The last time Gingrich held office, he reached a depth of unpopularity that suggested that the public did not merely disagree with his policies but disliked him as a person. . . .

There is another issue with Gingrich, the broaching of which risks cruelty but cannot be avoided in the cold analysis Republicans have to perform. We don’t know whether Gingrich’s marital history will weigh heavily on voters, but we know it won’t help. The contrast to President Obama’s family will tell against him. Gingrich’s election would represent several firsts. He would be the first president with multiple ex-wives, and the first president with any ex-wives who speak negatively about him on the record. He would bring with him the first first lady who could be labeled a “home wrecker.” . . .

[Romney is] reasonable, articulate — phenomenally articulate, by the standards of recent Republican presidential candidates — and reassuring.

Does it make sense for conservatives to complain about almost half of Americans paying no federal income taxes?

Nope, says National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru.

One especially clever point by Ponnuru, in response to the argument often made by conservatives that "the more people fall off the income-tax rolls, the more will support federal activism":

The story . . . relies on implausible psychological assumptions. It assumes that people who pay payroll taxes but not income taxes make a sharp distinction between the two. But what if they, or many of them, simply think that they have paid taxes? It assumes, further, that immediate circumstances matter more than long-term ones. When conservatives argue for tax cuts for high-income voters, or against tax increases for them, we often point out that some people who are “rich” today will not be in ten years, and vice versa. We argue, further, that high taxes reduce the incentive to work, save, and invest, which presupposes that people can anticipate the taxes they will pay if they gain income. But if they can anticipate future taxes, then the fact that they do not happen to pay income taxes at the moment should not matter.

That point has special relevance for parents who are paying no taxes because of the child tax credit. That credit will not be available to them when their children have become adults. Parents are almost by definition more oriented to the long term, on average, than other voters. They ought to be able to see that their taxes are going to go up when their children grow up, and that if they vote for big government now they will have to pay the bill later. . . .

To seek to raise taxes on poor and middle-class people would be a terrible mistake. The idea is bound to be unpopular. And it would alter the character of conservatism for the worse . . . [by] becom[ing] a creed openly focused on helping one group at the expense of another, a kind of mirror image of egalitarian liberalism.

Newt Gingrich supported an individual mandate to buy health insurance as late as 2005.

TalkingPointsMemo reports:

Newt Gingrich has attacked Mitt Romney on the issue of the individual health insurance mandate, while chalking up his own past support for the idea as an indiscretion in the 1990’s. But as it turns out, those 1990’s stretch all the way to 2005 — and beyond, to 2008 — when Gingrich gave as passionate an explanation of the mandate idea as any current supporter could ever muster. . . .

At a forum in 2005, alongside then-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and former Sen. John Breaux (D-LA), Gingrich explained the tradeoffs that both the right and the left would have to make in health care: For the right, some transfer of wealth is involved in providing health care for the working poor, the disabled, and other groups. And for the left, individuals should still have control over their health care, rather than total government management.

“I mean, I am very opposed to a single-payer system — but I’m actually in favor of a 300 million-payer system. Because one of my conclusions in the last six years, and founding the Center for Health Transformation, and looking at the whole system is, unless you have a hundred percent coverage, you can’t have the right preventive care, and you can’t have a rational system, because the cost-shifts are so irrational, and create second-order problems.”

This led Gingrich to a few conclusions of how to implement such a system: Convert Medicaid into a health insurance voucher system as it applies to the working poor (on the rationale that the creation of food-stamps do not involve the government running its own grocery stores); Create very large risk pools for individuals to purchase insurance (i.e., exchanges); and minimize insurance companies from cherry-picking customers.

I'm interested not just in the fact that Gingrich took these positions, but in the way he argued for them. Even while supporting a supposedly liberal policy, he used self-consciously tough language:

But my point to conservatives is, it’s a model of responsibility. If I see somebody who’s earning over $50,000 a year, who has made the calculated decision not to buy health insurance, I’m looking at somebody who is absolutely as irresponsible as anybody who was ever on welfare. Because what they’ve said is, a) I’m gambling that I won’t get sick, and b) I’m gambling that if I do get sick, I can cheat all my neighbors.

Now when you talk to hospitals, a very significant part of their non-collectables are people who have money, but have calculated that it’s not worth the cost to collect it.

And so I’m actually in favor of finding a way to say, if you’re above whatever — whatever the appropriate income level is, you oughtta have either health insurance, or you oughtta post a bond. But we have no right, we have no right in this society, to have a free-rider approach if you’re well off economically, to say we’ll cheat our neighbors.

You can see him make those remarks starting around 3:45 in this video. He starts out by admitting it might sound "un-conservative," but arguing that it's analogous to welfare reform:



Gingrich's argument is a good example of what I see as the fundamental divide in how liberals and conservatives think of themselves, or at least how they hold themselves out to the public. Liberals present themselves as caring. Conservatives present themselves as tough. I don't know of any other unifying theory that explains why conservatives/Republicans disagree with liberals/Democrats on so many disparate issues — economic, social, foreign policy.

Since Gingrich is committed to his image as a conservative, even if he takes a seemingly liberal or moderate position on health care, he isn't going to frame it as being concerned for those who lack health insurance. It's about cracking down on people who abuse the system. That's how conservatives like to talk, so I'm sure at the time he thought he was making a brilliant point that was consistent with conservatism. But for conservative Republican primary voters who are driven by opposition to Obama's health-care reform, I'm not seeing any reason to choose Gingrich over Romney.

UPDATE: Politico has a similar article:

If Republicans are flocking to Newt Gingrich to get away from Mitt Romney’s health care problems, they could end up with a nominee with … awfully similar health care problems.

Or maybe worse: While Romney signed a state mandate into law, Gingrich once went a step further and advocated a federal one.

Conservatives criticize Republicans' "growth"-based economic policy.

Kevin Williamson writes in the National Review:

If we had the ability to know in advance how much growth particular economic policies would produce — or even whether they would produce growth at all — then we would never have a recession. We would always be at the sweet spot of maximum real growth. But we are limited and fallible creatures, and right-wing political macroeconomic management is no more reliable, or predictable in its outcomes, than is Keynesian political macroeconomic management. The economy is not a machine, and any time a politician says, “If we will adopt Policy X, we are sure to achieve Statistical Abstraction Y,” he is talking through his hat. . . .

We probably credit politicians too much for good economic outcomes and blame them too much for bad economic outcomes. The economy is big and complex; public finances are less so, and we could, right now, enact policies that would address the imbalances in those public finances, and do so in an orderly and largely predictable way. But that means making very unpleasant choices of the sort that are bound to be keenly unpopular with voters in New Hampshire, Iowa, Florida, etc. . . .

It is important to work toward growth, of course, and to adopt good economic and monetary policies that we think will encourage it. . . . But counting on optimistic assumptions about growth beyond current projections is, for the most part, a way to evade the very difficult business of reconciling our public income with our public spending. We have to work with what we have, with the reality before us.

Ross Douthat, the New York Times' house conservative, links to Williamson's piece and adds that Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty has been engaging in

magical thinking, in which cutting taxes on business, investment and high-earners leads to 5 percent growth every year for a decade — something that neither the Reagan nor the Clinton booms came close to achieving — which in turn goes a long way toward closing the budget deficit, happily, before we have to start in on painful cuts.

Ramesh Ponnuru (who writes for the National Review) has more thoughts on how Republicans "don't appear to be trying very hard" to come up with a realistic economic agenda. "[H]alf-remembered bits of Reaganism aren’t a sufficient conservative agenda for today."

When conservatives are so consistently attacking Republican policy — not for being too squishy or compromising with Democrats, but for being too rigidly, ideologically extreme — those conservatives are worth taking seriously.

America's tax rates would be similar to Europe's if health-care costs counted as taxes.

Bruce Bartlett explains:

When Americans see these data they are usually incredulous that Europeans submit to such seemingly oppressive tax levels. Conservatives, in particular, tend to view freedom as a fixed sum: the bigger government is as a share of G.D.P., the less freedom there is for the people (if government consumes, say, 40 percent of G.D.P., then people are only 60 percent free).

The late Milton Friedman popularized this idea, but even he thought that freedom would not be seriously threatened in Western democracies until government spending reached 60 percent of G.D.P. We are far away from that “tipping point,” as he called it; in 2010, total federal, state and local government spending amounted to 36 percent of G.D.P.

American conservatives tend to ignore the composition of spending; to them, just about all spending is equally bad. . . .

Average American workers must pay for health care out of their pockets, or through their employers in the form of lower wages. Europeans prefer to pay higher taxes and get government health care for every resident in return.

Conservatives universally believe that whenever the government provides a service it will be vastly more costly than if the private sector does so. This is why they support the plan offered by Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the House Budget Committee, to essentially privatize Medicare. Conservatives believe competition will drive down health costs for the elderly.

But O.E.C.D. data show that Americans pay vastly more for health care than the residents of any other major country. . . .

[I]f we had a health care system like those in most developed countries, we could, in effect, give every American an increase in their disposable income of 8 percent of G.D.P. – about what they pay in federal income taxes – and have health care no worse than they have in Britain or Japan. It would be like abolishing the federal income tax in terms of allowing people to spend more of their income on something other than health care.

Because most people have little more choice about medical spending than they do about the taxes they pay, one can think of the two as being similar in nature. . . .

Looking at taxes alone, the burden in the United States is 25 percent below the O.E.C.D. average, but including the additional health costs Americans pay, the United States is just 4.7 percent below average.

Are conservatives in academia victims of discrimination and deserving of affirmative action?

This New York Times article has gotten a lot of attention for raising that question (by focusing on Jonathan Haidt, who's concerned about the underrepresentation of conservatives even though he himself is a liberal).

But the really odd thing is, as Megan McArdle points out: every time this topic comes up, liberals and conservatives both seem to do a 180 on their usual talking points about discrimination and diversity. Specifically:

Conservatives are usually reluctant to agree that women and minorities are still often victims of structural or personal bias--despite numerical underrepresentation and some fairly compelling studies showing that hiring is not race or gender blind. Yet when it comes to conservatives in academia, they suddenly sound like sociologists, discussing hostile work environment, the role of affinity networks in excluding out groups, unconscious bias, and the compelling evidence from statistical underrepresentation.

Meanwhile, liberals, who are usually quick to assume that underrepresentation represents some form of discrimination--structural or personal--suddenly become, as Haidt notes, fierce critics of the notion that numerical representation means anything. Moreover, they start generating explanations for the disparity that sound suspiciously like some old reactionary explaining that blacks don't really want to go into management because they're much happier without all the responsibility. Conservatives are too stupid to become academics; they aren't open new ideas; they're too aggressive and hierarchical; they don't care about ideas, just money. In other words, it's not our fault that they're not worthy.

Besides, liberals suddenly argue, we shouldn't look for every sub-population to mirror the composition of the population at large; just as Greeks gravitated towards diners in 1980s New York, and the small market business was dominated by Koreans, liberals are attracted to academia, and conservatives to, well, some other profession.

Part of what's going on here is that everyone wants to point out the hypocrisy of people who are on the other side from them. But hypocrisy often cuts both ways: if your opponents are taking positions that directly contradict each other, and both of them are the exact opposite of what you believe, then doesn't that imply that you're also taking contradictory positions?

McArdle quotes Paul Krugman's defense of liberals on this issue:

Every once in a while you get stories like this one, about the underrepresentation of conservatives in academics, that treat ideological divides as being somehow equivalent to racial differences. This is a really, really bad analogy.

And it's not just the fact that you can choose your ideology, but not your race. Ideologies have a real effect on overall life outlook, which has a direct impact on job choices.

McArdle has an apt response:

I have no idea what distinction one is supposed to make between beliefs and something you "can't change". Could Paul Krugman become a devout Baptist and a supply sider tomorrow, if the financial incentives were right? I devoutly hope not. I presume that Paul Krugman . . . could no more change his beliefs than he could change his native language. It is easier (in most cases) to pretend different ideas than a different race--but we rightly think that it was horrific to force blacks to "pass" as a condition of being treated like a full human being.

But what about Krugman's other point that's supposed to show how ideology-based discrimination is nothing like race-based discrimination? "Ideologies have a real effect on overall life outlook, which has a direct impact on job choices." Oh. But wait a minute . . . how exactly does that show that there's no analogy between ideology and race/gender? Is Krugman trying to say that that gender and race have no correlation to job choices? I don't see why he'd assume that. As for gender, well, men and women are different in many ways; you'd have to be pretty naive to be shocked at the possibility that certain jobs are more appealing to men while others are more appealing to women. Race may be trickier, but should we really assume that race isn't correlated with job choices?

Krugman (a Nobel Prize-winning economist) seems to be doing some awfully sloppy thinking here, and McArdle is right about the shameless hypocrisy on both sides.

I also wonder if Krugman considered that the fact that ideology does have to do with different outlooks on life (as he says) makes ideological discrimination a particularly bad thing. If academics tend to dogmatically shut out certain outlooks and privilege others, so much the worse for academia.

IN THE COMMENTS: LemmusLemmus says, agreeing with that last paragraph:

One often hears the argument for affirmative action for African Americans in academia that it enriches discussion because African Americans contribute a different perspective on issues (which can be relevant at least in the social sciences and some humanities). And that's not true of conservatives? Ha!

ADDED: A commenter on Krugman's post sums up what I imagine is the real thinking behind the liberal reaction to this topic:

Besides, Paul, people who disagree with you are stupid, right?

Can't have stupid people teaching. They're too stupid!

A conservative's message to conservatives: Support President Obama on Afghanistan.

Ramesh Ponnuru says:

Conservatives fear that the president looks weak abroad; they should not reinforce the impression. They worry that the war is losing support at home; they should not make it come true. The right course for conservatives--and the one most of us are going to take--is to applaud the president for doing the right thing, hope for the best, and urge course corrections when necessary.

The most reasonable conservative I've heard in a long time

Bruce Bartlett in this Bloggingheads video (embedded at the end of this post). He's plugging his new book, The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward.

Here are a few of the points he makes in the video (paraphrased, not direct quotes). These are hardly original, but they're refreshing to hear from a conservative (he worked in the Reagan and first Bush administrations):

1. America needs to raise taxes. Conservative leaders know this will eventually be necessary, and they're being brazenly irresponsible by fighting against tax increases for now.

2. The idea that cutting taxes raises government revenue is a conservative myth. So is the idea that you can "starve the beast," i.e., cut taxes so that government spends less and deficits shrink.

3. We have the least efficient health-care system in the developed world.

4. The United States should become more like Europe.

On that last point, he calls out conservatives in a way that needs to be done more often:

We're traveling down the route of Europe. And many Americans just hate that idea. If you're in any group of conservatives, and you say, "Oh, that will take us down the route of Europe," they will say, "Oh no, we don't want to do that! That's awful!" Nobody ever explains what's so terrible about Europe.

By the way, I'm not saying I agree with everything he says here. I'm not convinced by his main idea, the value added tax. On the other hand, Matthew Yglesias makes the liberal case for it.

Abortion rights and quality of life

The other day, I blogged Richard Posner's blog post about his views on the state of conservatism. Since then, he followed up to respond to the hundreds of comments his post received. He said the comments suggest that "global warming, abortion, and guns, in approximately that order, arouse particular emotions among many passionate self-described conservatives."

He added: "About abortion, my personal position is the same as [Gary] Becker's" (referring to the other half of the Becker-Posner blog). So, what is Becker's position on abortion? He says:

[T]here is an obvious conflict between the rights of women to control their bodies and their motherhood, and the rights of fetuses that might be far enough along in their development to be considered human beings. This is a very prominent example of the general difficulty of determining where to draw the line when the rights of children conflict with the rights of their parents. I do not claim to have a definitive resolution of this conflict in the case of abortion, or in some other parent-child conflicts. But I come down on the side of women's rights to make decisions about their body, except in very late term abortions where fetuses can survive outside a woman's body, and therefore can be considered real children.

Abortions often allow women to have children at later dates when they are better prepared emotionally and in other ways to have children. In effect, abortions in these cases would allow women to substitute children who would be born later, and would be better taken care of, for the fetuses that are aborted now. That seems to me to be a tradeoff worth making. Moreover, laws banning abortion would be difficult to enforce against wealthy women since they would be able to get abortions illegally under reasonably good conditions, including by going abroad. Poor women who want abortions would suffer the most from enforcement of an anti-abortion law, as they are the ones who mainly suffer from laws against the use of drugs and many other types of laws.

"Bissage," a commenter on my mom's blog, said this on Mother's Day:

Maybe later today I’ll see a young mother out with her children and I’ll smile as I approach her and then I’ll say, "Your children are very beautiful. Thank you for not aborting them."

I responded:

Wait, how do you know the random mother you see on the street didn't have an abortion before having her child? If so, then the child wouldn't exist if not for that abortion. So, in that case, you'd need to thank her for getting an abortion.

Bissage's comment — conjuring up lovely, happy children who stroll along with their mother and brighten the day of a passerby — also reminded me of an experience my girlfriend Danielle and I had last weekend.

We were walking down Lark Street and passed by someone holding up an enormous sign with a gruesome image supposedly showing an aborted fetus, blown up to the size of an adult. (I say "supposedly" because propaganda photographs in this age of Photoshop generally shouldn't be trusted. Oh, I'm sure aborted fetuses look repulsive -- I'm sure many medical procedures look repulsive. But the photo on the sign may have been artificially bloodied up or who-knows-what.)

We talked about how much we resent the fact that this protester is trying to undermine society's most minimal standards of civility. But we have to accept his freedom of speech.

Just a few minutes later, walking down a different street, we saw a woman and a very young child -- probably just 3 or 4 years old — sitting on a bench. No one else seemed to be nearby, and we were far enough away that the woman might not have seen us for a while. I saw the child drop what looked like a plastic cup, and I saw his mother angrily scolding him. I didn't see what came next because I had instinctively glanced away from the unpleasant scene, but Danielle was still watching. Afterwards, she told me she saw the mother hit the child as punishment for dropping the cup.

Although only Danielle saw that particular moment, both of us saw the mother's contemptuous manner of interacting with her child. It was unmistakable just from that fleeting public incident seen from a distance; who knows how much worse it gets in private, lived up close, day after day? What are the ultimate consequences of this, not just to the boy but to society?

We were convinced that the mother didn't want her child. You can moralize all you want about how pregnant women should give up for adoption any children they don't want, but nothing you or I can say will change the reality of what's happening in that family.

Then we talked about the abortion protester, and how much he glosses over when he waves his fetus sign.

The liberal, conservative way to teach children morals

"Two views of moral education," set forth by Eric Schitzgebel in his blog about philosophy and psychology called The Splintered Mind:

(1.) The "liberal", inward-out model: Moral education should stress moral reflection, with rules and punishment playing a secondary role. ...

(2.) The "conservative", outward-in model: Moral education should stress rules and punishment, with moral reflection playing a secondary role. You can't understand and apply the rules, of course, without some sort of reflection on them, but reflection should be in the context of received norms....

Now, academically affiliated researchers on moral development almost universally prefer the first model to the second.... The common idea is that children (and the morally undeveloped in general) improve morally when they are encouraged to think for themselves and given space to discover their own reactions and values....

But he has an idea for how to blend the two together:

Suppose Sally hits Hank and a liberally-minded teacher comes up and asks her how it made her feel to hurt Hank. What child, realistically, would say, "Well, I know he didn't deserve it, but it just felt good pounding him to a pulp!"? The reality is that the child is being asked to reflect in a situation where she knows that the teacher will approve of one answer and condemn another. This isn't free reflection; and the answer the child gives may not reflect her real feelings and values. Instead, it seems, it is a kind of imposition -- and one perhaps all the more effective if the child mistakes the resulting judgment for one that is genuinely her own.

Therefore, maybe, a liberal-seeming style of moral education is effective not because we have in us all an inclination toward the good that only needs encouragement to flower, but rather because reflection in teacher-child, parent-child, and similar social contexts is really an insidious form of imposition -- and thus, perhaps, the conservative's best secret tool.

As an adult, it can be hard to put yourself back in the child's shoes, since your childhood was so long ago. But anyone who's been to a law school where they use the Socratic method has a more recent memory of what he's talking about.

NOTE: With this post, I've created a new tag, and also applied it to a few old posts: "observed morality."

Richard Posner gives a history of "the intellectual decline of conservatism" from the '60s to now.

In this blog post (which is woefully in need of paragraph breaks).

Here's his assessment of where it's ended up:

[T]he policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

Posner's post helps clarify the disconnect between (1) the fact that he's typically labeled a "conservative" and (2) what he actually says about the issues.

Joe the Plumber's hate-the-sin-love-the-sinner homophobia

Christianity Today ("A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction") has an interview of Samuel Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, which contains this nugget:

[Christianity Today:] In the last month, same-sex marriage has become legal in Iowa and Vermont. What do you think about same-sex marriage at a state level?

[Joe the Plumber:] At a state level, it's up to them. I don't want it to be a federal thing. I personally still think it's wrong. People don't understand the dictionary - it's called queer. Queer means strange and unusual. It's not like a slur, like you would call a white person a honky or something like that.

TNR chimes in:

Yes, thank goodness it's not a term used by genuine bigots, like "honky." That's a word that wounds.

Joe continues:

You know, God is pretty explicit in what we're supposed to do - what man and woman are for. Now, at the same time, we're supposed to love everybody and accept people, and preach against the sins. I've had some friends that are actually homosexual. And, I mean, they know where I stand, and they know that I wouldn't have them anywhere near my children. But at the same time, they're people, and they're going to do their thing.

Now, I know that any blog post about Joe the Plumber has to be met with "Who cares what Joe the Plumber says?" Well, I care, because he's a relatively unguarded, unvarnished spokesman for the right. Most of them have figured out how to hide their underlying views better. Joe the Plumber does us the favor of letting us see through the conservative facade.

And here, Joe has let slip the incoherence of the widespread conservative aim for a middle ground on homosexuality -- specifically, the idea that you can "hate the sin" but "love the sinner." If you're so revulsed by someone that you "wouldn't have them anywhere near [your] children" -- and not because of any concern about your children's physical health or security, but out of sheer moral condemnation -- then your claim to "love" that person rings hollow.

The distinction between (1) a person and (2) that person's thoughts, feelings, and actions is a false one. The way a person lives their life is who that person is. If you hate the sexual orientation of my loved ones who are gay or bisexual, you don't love them. And for that matter, even though I'm straight, you don't love me.

Why conservatives should want less car dependence and more mass transit in America

This whole article from Public Discourse is worth reading, but here's a sample:

A common misperception is that the current American state of auto-dependency is a result of the free market doing its work. In fact, a variety of government interventions ensure that the transportation “market” is skewed towards car-ownership. These policy biases are too numerous to list exhaustively, but a few merit special recognition:

- If a state is interested in building a new highway, the only major regulatory obstacle is completing an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). After this, the federal government will typically pay for a large portion of the project, and leave the details of its planning and construction to the state’s Department of Transportation. If a state or municipality is interested in a transit project like a subway, a streetcar, or a bus system, however, not only must it complete an EIS, it must also clear a barrage of regulatory hurdles, including a cost-effectiveness analysis, a land-use impact analysis, and a comparison with other transit systems. None of these requirements is necessarily bad in itself (though many of these regulations were designed only to make it harder to build transit systems), but highways aren’t subject to any of them. Naturally, states therefore find it easier to channel transportation dollars into highways....

- Zoning requirements in most municipalities mandate that shops and houses must be separated. It is widely illegal to build the old small-town main street with the mix of shops, houses, and apartments that many find charming (so charming that some of these towns have been turned into tourist attractions). Furthermore, in most states it is mandatory for new schools to be built next to hundreds of acres playing fields, and thus far away from residential neighborhoods (see this report and this paper for a fuller discussion of policies that affect travel to school). These and similar regulations ensure that there are no shops or schools—that is, major household destinations—within walking distance of the average American’s home, which in turn requires the average American to own and use a car, not merely to commute to work but to perform basic tasks like picking up a gallon of milk or sending the kids off to school in the morning....

Consider how small businesses are affected by Americans’ dependency on cars. Since businesses are obliged by zoning restrictions to locate far away from residential areas, most Americans drive to every store they visit. This means that store visits are often discrete trips that must be undertaken consciously and planned out ahead of time. As a consequence, shoppers will want to visit stores that carry the most diverse inventory—Wal-Mart, Costco, et al.—and avoid shops that specialize in one particular kind of good—the local paint store or flower shop, for instance. Moreover, since small shops cannot afford to spend large sums on advertising, they can’t buy the enormous signs and billboards that direct shoppers to large retail outlets, nor gin up hype for their products with coordinated television spots. Perhaps if their potential customers could walk by their storefronts they would have a chance to notice window-displays and similar kinds of small, careful advertising....

As the market diminishes for these specialized stores, so too does opportunity for small-scale entrepreneurship. If opening a small business were a viable option in more markets, more Americans would be interested in starting them. The current situation, where only very large stores can compete in most retail environments, makes starting a business impossible for the vast majority of Americans.

RELATED: Random thing about me #14.

Judges as "workers"

Another insight from the introduction of Richard Posner's How Judges Think:

[J]udges are not moral or intellectual giants (alas), prophets, oracles, mouthpieces, or calculating machines. They are all-too-human workers, responding as other workers do to the conditions of the labor market in which they work. ...

Because behavior is motivated by desire, we must consider what judges want. I think they want the same basic goods that other people want, such as income, power, reputation, respect, self-respect, and leisure. ...

[L]egal uncertainty ... creates the open area in which the orthodox (the legalist) methods of analysis yield unsatisfactory and sometimes no conclusions, thereby allowing or even dictating that emotion, personality, policy intuitions, ideology, politics, background, and experience will determine a judge's decision.

It's ironic, then, that many conservatives will claim that conservatism is based on an understanding that human beings are imperfect, and human nature can't be changed. These same conservatives will find it outrageous that judges' decision are influenced by factors outside the narrowest definition of "the law."

Speaking of judges' fallibility, Posner makes a blatant factual error on pg. 22:

Presidents differ in their ideological intensity, and taking account of that difference can improve the accuracy of the attitudinal model. Seven of the nine current Supreme Court Justices were appointed by Republican Presidents, but it is more illuminating to note that four conservative Justices were appointed by conservative Republicans (Scalia and Kennedy by Reagan, and Roberts and Alito by the second Bush), two liberal Justices by a Democratic President (Ginsburg and Breyer, appointed by Clinton), and one liberal and two conservative Justices appointed by moderate Republicans (Stevens by Ford, Souter and Thomas by the first Bush).

Did you find it?

I count two liberals and one conservative appointed by Ford and Bush Sr.