The New York Times reports that a bunch of ex-military on-air “analysts” are in bed with both military contractors and the Bush administration:

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

This is what governments do. Republican governments. Democratic governments. They spend their subjects’ money shaping their subjects’ opinions, so that they can spend more of their subjects’ money.

No doubt most of the talking head generals and colonels believe sincerely that they were acting in the best interests of the people they have devoted their lives to serving. It is simply that we “civilians” do not really know what we need to know in order to decide wisely for ourselves, and so public opinion needs to be massaged a bit to generate political support for policies that truly do protect us. If the well-meaning soft paternalism of concerted propaganda and financial self-interest happen to coincide, then all the better. Our guardians will only be better motivated to guard us! (And, really, after a lifetime of service, don’t they deserve to get theirs?) Crucially, no one here is forcing anyone to support the administration’s policies. It’s just a bit of a nudge, from people who know better.

David Park has data … data! on where bitter, god- and gun-clinging poor rural voters turn:

Park writes:

We can see a steady decline of Republican support among rural poor voters starting in 1972. Even with a big jump in 2000, support for the Republican presidential candidate was less than 50 percent. So, Obama, it looks like poor rural Americans have no problem voting for Democrats.

Guns, religion … and government transfers?

Andrew Gelman posts these fascinating graphs showing the trend in Republican voting in several occupational categories compared to the national average.

Clearly, running a business makes you a Republican. What if everyone had to do quarterly estimated taxes? But Republicans have made big gains with both skilled and non-skilled wage-earners too. But nothing compares to the professionals — doctors, lawyers, etc. — rush to the Democrats. What explains that?

What’s interesting is that there has been such a big difference in the trend for different kinds of relatively wealthy people. I suspect it has something to do with differences in which compensation, regulation and taxation are experienced. (Do doctors, lawyers, etc. feel more like they’re collecting rents at levels relatively detached from the application of effort?) Or maybe some kind of personality variable that predicts conservatism vs. liberalism is increasingly predicting occupational choice. Can we learn more about this, please?

Googling around it looks to me that this paper by Ed Glaeser and Bryce Ward, “Myths and Realities of American Political Geography,” got only cursory attention on the blogs, which is really too bad, because it’s just terrifically illuminating. If you’ve been following this type of thing, you know interesting tidbits like: church attendance predicts voting Republican better than income these days; rich people in rich states tend to vote Democratic and rich people in poor states tend to vote Republican. But I did not know this:

Industrialization 85 years ago is an astonishingly good predictor of social and cultural attitudes today across states and a good predictor of support for the Democratic Party at both the state and county levels. As the share of the workforce in 1920 in manufacturing increases by one percentage point, the share of respondents today believing that AIDS is punishment declines by .28 percentage points, the share believing that military strength is the best way to peace declines by .16 percentage points, and the share supporting John Kerry at the state level increased by .42 percentage points.

Religious and political attitudes are better predicted by industrialization and immigration 100 years ago, than by the history of slavery and religion.

Glaeser and Ward hypothesize that the ethnic and religious heterogeneity of a largely immigrant workforce packed into densely-populated urban manufacturing centers created a strong incentive for the emergence of ideologies that minimized conflict by creating a climate of tolerance.

[I]f different religious or ethnic groups are prevented from using the power of the state to disenfranchise, enslave or kill each other, and if there exists a powerful group that benefits from eliminating conflict [i.e, the capitalists employing immigrant labor], then diversity can eventually lead to a watering down of core religious tenets or ethnic animosities.

That’s right. Industrial capitalism civilized religion, moderated tribalism, and created a moral and political culture in which Democratic politics thrives. Places far from manufacturing centers, or places that industrialized later, are more likely to now be home to more socially conservative evangelical Christians and Republicans. Glaeser and Ward argue that the middle of the 20th Century, in which economic issues took precedence over social issues in determining party affiliation, was an anomaly and we have lately returned to form.

Glaeser, together with Jesse Shapiro and Giacomo Ponzetto, has come up with a theory for predicting when we’ll see median-voter defying political extremism. Basically, if you can signal to a large constituency relatively radical intentions you can excite them and get an advantage in turnout. But you need to be sure that you’re inspiring your base more than arousing the opposition, so your communication needs a way to be narrowcast to the target group. If such a group is large enough (but less than half the population), its views can largely determine the main divide in electoral politics. Evangelical churches seem to serve this function for Republicans. And Glaeser and Ward suggest labor unions may have once done the same for Democrats, which may have pushed issues of economic distribution to the forefront of electoral politics. But as union membership has receded, so too have the electoral rewards of narrowcasting relatively extreme economically left-wing views to them.

This theory then provides us with two hypotheses for the changing importance of economic and social issues in American politics and for the realignments throughout the 20th century. One candidate is the rise and fall of unionization in America. At the beginning of the century, unions were a small part of the population. Only in small areas of the population did they provide an opportunity for targeting a significant fraction of the population. In mid-century, they rose to over 30 percent of all workers and today they are back down to 12 percent (Troy 1965, www.laborresearch.org).

The rise and fall of unionization corresponds reasonably with the connection between income and Republicanism shown in Figure 10. The middle decades of the 20th century were the high point of unionism and they were also the high point of the correlation between income and Republicanism. During this time period, the Democratic Party had access to the labor unions and this created an incentive for Democrats to move to the left on economic issues to get support in this important base. The rise and decline of unions provides at least one possible reason why economic issues rose and then fell in importance.

So de-unionization may play a role in explaining why rich people, especially those living in the tolerant milieu of the historical seats of heavy industry, are increasingly Democrat-leaning these days.

This is truly fascinating. All I can say about it is that Paul Krugman says something a lot different, so this must be wrong.

NYT Poll:

Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they would support raising taxes on households making more than $250,000 to pay for tax cuts or government programs for people making less than that amount. Only 38 percent called it a bad idea. Both Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidates, have made proposals along these lines.

More broadly, 43 percent of those surveyed said they would prefer a larger government that provided more services, which is tied for the highest such number since The Times and CBS News began asking the question in 1991. But an identical 43 percent said they wanted a smaller government that provided fewer services.

Some comments… I’m sure a good number of Democrats are feeling pretty hopeful. What I’m seeing is that Bushes destroy support for smaller government, and that enthusiasm for bigger and smaller government waxes and wanes. As Matt notes “of course you can be riding high in 1991 and then the mood shifts by 1993.”

The first year of the poll, 1991, is the only year recorded in which support for bigger government, 43 percent, is stronger than for smaller government, 42 percent. This would be during George H.W. Bush’s term. Then what happened? Voters elected a moderate Democrat in 1992. The poll skips five years and then we see support for smaller government at 60 percent and support for bigger at 30 percent. That imbalance collapses, then surges again just before voters elect the second Bush and then more or less steadily withers away through George W. Bush’s two terms, which puts us more or less right where public opinion was toward the end of his Dad’s presidency. Democrats should be pretty wary, and not take this as a sign that the ground is ready for some kind of huge new government initiative. Unless something fundamental has changed in the determinants of public opinion, we ought to expect a resurgence in small government sentiment, and for all we know, Democratic overreaching is what primes it. Support for bigger government is as high as it gets, and support for smaller government is at it’s nadir.

An aside about the tax question… The language of “paying” for tax cuts with tax increases has got to be George Lakoff’s wet dream. What does this framing imply? That the size of the budget is some kind of axiomatic, immutable fact, and so there is no conceptual distinction between the two sides of the fiscal account. A reduction in inlays is indistinguishable from an increase in outlays. So tax cuts are just another kind of spending — just another kind of government benefit we’ve got to finance. Income thus becomes a political decision about who pays the government and who gets paid by the government. But I’m probably just banging my head against the wall.

The kerfuffle over Barack Obama’s pastor is in large part about whether the man is patriotic enough. Other data: he doesn’t wear a Stars & Stripes lapel pin; his wife found herself proud of America for the first time a little too recently. This sort of thing may well be deadly to his candidacy. He may be obliterated by John “No Glory but Service to the State” McCain’s thorough and unimpeachable Americanism, a cult of fake history, hubristic exceptionalism, tacky iconography, and aggression. But Obama’s inferior patriotism makes me like him more rather than less because I agree with George Kateb that patriotism is hardly worth the blood it is designed to spill.

Kateb’s reply today in Cato Unbound to Walter Berns’ and Bill Galston’s sophisticated civics class apologies for patriotism is strong. He is completely dogged in his insistence that patriotism is good for little more than readying people to kill and die for the state. He implies something that I believe to be correct: the proud and enthusiastic patriotism of Americans bears a large measure of responsibility for the immoral and failed war in Iraq. This administration’s war would have been impossible had our mindless love of country not made the public rather too ready. As Kateb writes:

I am not writing from a pacifist basis. I believe in the right of self-defense, by violence if need be. The trouble is that most democratic wars are not fought to preserve the lives, liberties, and goods of the people, but are fought, instead, for grandiose and often insincere ideals and for limitless augmentation. If patriotism — devotion to the country and obedience to its state for the wrong reasons — has to exist, it should be defensive in temperament and parsimonious in the expenditure of life, including the lives of its enemies, and not mobilize the energies of self-defense and transmute them into the energies of expansion and imperialism. In truth, if strict self-defense were ever at stake, patriotism would be unnecessary: people would not require any inflated passion to defend what was not an inflated purpose.

Barack Obama should be proud that he is no great patriot. Of course, in America it is political suicide to appear to be anything less than besotted with the purple mountains’ majesty, so of course he gives his speech explaining the meaning of “god damn America” in front of a de rigeur rank of flags, which testify silently, garishly, to his devotion to true religion.

In this week’s episode of Free Will over at Bloggingheads TV, Reason chief Matt Welch and I discuss his rollicking, revealing book, McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, and the real man behind the myth. Sadly McCain’s looking like a GOP lock coming into Super Tuesday, and he polls strong nationally against both Clinton and Obama. The man could well become our next president, to the joy of arms manufacturers and the dismay of those of us who do not think a life not devoted to the service of the American state is devoid of purpose. Is that a triple negative? I guess that  goes to show how sour I am on John Sidney McCain III! 

Yes, I know the political history of the Bauhaus and the International School, thank you very much. (That major in the history and philosophy of art is not worth nothing!) And I admit it does put a strain on my not-very-well-thought-out analogy, if that’s the modernism you had in mind. Of course, I had in mind houses that actually are very lovely and quite nice to live in. How about Frank Lloyd Wright (everybody loves him, right?) or Richard Neutra?

Perhaps the difference in mentality I had in mind is better captured by the difference between the person who is able to grasp why Mark Rothko, say, is a much greater painter than Bouguereau. If you don’t get it, well, then that just proves my point, doesn’t it?

Anyway, semi-silly aesthetic analogies aside, the point is that people’s natural tastes for social structure runs toward the tribal and teleological, but this isn’t actually that good for people. Market liberalism, which is too abstract or “thin” to seem really satisfying or meaningful, since there is no single common goal that transcends the goals individuals happen to have, actually leaves people better off than all the alternatives, and measurably so. It’s not hard to understand why people are so attracted to National Greatness, or to Bouguereau. But with a little inspection of the evidence, or a little development of taste, one can see why this is a mistake… is what I was getting at.

It’s not just that you should be ashamed of your vulgarity if you thrill to the idea of America uber alles, though of course you should, but rather that you should be ashamed of preferring a morally worse state affairs over a better one. People who thunder on about virtue like to complain about the immaturity and self-indulgence of individuals in commercial societies, but those people are very often the ones seeking to indulge atavistic social instincts that our moral culture has begun to mature past.

I don’t have a beef against virtue. Far from it; I’m a big fan of the attempt to study character strengths scientifically. But virtues, if they are worth caring about, are instrumental to well-being and relative to social and economic structure. McCain’s brand of military virtue isn’t admirable in a politician. It’s dangerous. And it does not seem to me that McCain has any worthwhile virtues that, say, Mitt Romney lacks. Indeed, I suspect that my man Mitt has modern managerial and leadership virtues that all the other candidates lack. If Romney is the candidate of virtue, it’s because he’s a first-rate capitalist, not an abstemious Mormon family man. And, as far as I can tell, Barack Obama has a much more inspiring capacity for leadership than does McCain, if that’s the sort of thing you like. The only reason a virtue-thumper would be touting McCain in particular is an infatuation with the virtues of war.

I’m more than a bit baffled by this idea:

Despite the fact that Ron Paul, through his profitable, base-building newsletters, has actively spread and reinforced racist ideas, the really important thing here is that an end to the war on drugs would do more good for African American men than anything else. And since Ron Paul would, if elected president of the United States, end the drug war, anyone concerned for the welfare of African American men really ought to be in his corner, whether or not he has cultivated financial and political support through racist agitprop.

One obvious difficulty with this line of reasoning is that Ron Paul will never be elected President of the United States, and has about as much chance of ending the drug war as I do. He is little more than a symbol for a set of ideas—ideas his complicity with racism has tainted in many people’s minds, whose prospects he may have damaged. I want to end the war on drugs, therefore I’d rather people not associate that idea with Ron Paul.

One of the embarrassments of the American libertarian movement is its failure to sufficiently acknowledge how collective bias against blacks, women, gays, immigrants etc. deprives blacks, women, gays, immigrants, etc. of their freedom. To my mind, serious forms of structural discrimination are much worse for liberty than certain kinds of coercion. Libertarians make themselves look ridiculous when they claim that everyone is fully and equally free as long as no one is coercing anyone. Now, this isn’t obvious. At least it wasn’t to me. It took me a good while to come around to this view—to see just how much structural bias does deprive people of their freedom or of the value of their freedom. But I am embarrassed that it took me as long as it did.

Here’s where I’m coming from philosophically. I am no Rothbardian or Randian. I do not understand the argument that concludes in the categorical prohibition of all coercion, but which permits some other things far more harmful to the pursuit of happiness than most ticky-tack government regulation. I agree with some aspects of the 19th century criticism of classical liberal freedom as “merely formal.” I believe that the liberty most worth caring about is positive liberty—the ability effectively to enact one’s plans, to achieve ones ends. In my judgment, a regime of strong negative rights is the best guarantee of positive liberty. Government attempts to guarantee the worth of our liberties by recognizing positive rights to a minimum income or certain services like health care often (but not always) undermine the framework of market and civil institutions most likely to enhance liberty over the long run, and should be limited. But this is really an empirical question about what really does maximize individuals’ chances of formulating and realizing meaningful projects and lives.

Within this framework, racism, sexism, etc., which strongly limit the useful exercise of liberty are clear evils. Now, I am ambivalent about whether the state ought to step in and do anything about it. Maybe I’ll get into the complexities of that question some other time. What I am not ambivalent about is that racism and sexism, etc. deprive many millions of Americans of the full value of their freedom. Insofar as Ron Paul’s racist newsletters propped up and encouraged racist norms, he has actually helped cultivate a cultural climate hostile to the prospects of “the blacks”, whether or not he would end the drug war in the miraculous event of his presidency.

In my opinion, it is the responsibility of decent people concerned with liberty to at least denounce, if not actively work to tear down, the racist beliefs and norms that enable liberty-killing structural discrimination. If you don’t think ending discrimination is the government’s job–that this is the sort of thing that should be done by persuasion, not force—then you should take this responsibility extra seriously. It’s your job to persuade. If you think the government should do nothing but stay out of the way, but you are indifferent to racism and people who publish racist newsletters for financial and political gain, then it is not unreasonable to conclude either that you don’t really care about other people’s liberty, or think racism has nothing to do with it. In either case, you would be wrong.

Brink Lindsey:

In the twentieth century, alas, American liberalism was heavily influenced by the socialist dream of supplanting markets with central planning and top-down control. That confusion begat confusion in response — namely, an antistatist movement heavily influenced by authoritarian resentment of liberal cultural values. Paul’s illiberal libertarianism is a particularly unattractive variant of this kind of “fusionism.”

With the collapse of socialism, however, American liberals have begun rediscovering the value of market competition. By my lights, many of them still have a long, long way to go. But encouraging that process – making the case that economic liberalization is of a piece with overall social liberalization — is the only way forward for those of us concerned about overweening state power. In this project, people whose values and habits of mind are deeply hostile to liberal modernity are not our allies.

Tim Lee:

Rockwell and his associates have been known to lionize dictators, belittling Rosa Parks (”While Jim Crow was abominable, I find the staged events of modern American ‘history’ [i.e. Parks’ sit-in] even more disturbing.”), endorse bigotry (”Most “bigotry” is the act of noticing the truth. Blacks are genetically intellectually inferior, always have been, always will be.”), celebrate the death of American soldiers, and endorse the stoning of homosexuals. In short, they are libertarians only in the narrowest sense of the term, and non-hateful libertarians rightfully want nothing to do with them.

One of the telling things about the Lew Rockwell crowd is that when their outrageous views are criticized, they almost never respond with a substantive defense of those views, much less an apology. No, instead we get charming responses like “Most of Palmer’s problem is that he is homosexual. He’s certainly not gay, a preposterous word to use for such a disease-ridden lifestyle.” We see the same pattern with Paul’s newsletters. They have no interest in either apologizing for or distancing themselves from the ugly sentiments in those newsletters, which no one disputes were genuine. Instead, they viciously attack the people who unearthed them as smear artists, as though it’s somehow a smear to reprint and quote from articles that were originally sent out under your own name.

While I knew that the Rockwellians were big Paul boosters, I did not realize the depth of the ties between Paul and the Mises Institute. If I had, I think I would have been more cautious about supporting the guy. They’re a blight on the libertarian movement, and anything that raises their profile is bound to be a long-term negative for liberty.

[Update: Also, Jacob Levy.]

So far, 2008 is the year of Kerry Howley. The New York Times arrived on our stoop this morning containing some op-ed page Howley goodness on why, whatever else you might think about Hillary, being the wife of an ex-President isn’t such a bad thing:

Like it or not, the road to female advancement often begins at the altar. History books are thick with examples of women who broke political barriers because their family connections afforded them the opportunity.

If you’ve ever wondered why India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Pakistan and the Philippines seem readier to elect women than does the United States, here’s your answer: Societies that value a candidate’s family affiliation, and therefore have a history of nepotistic succession, are often open to female leadership so long as it bears the right brand. Benazir Bhutto, Indira Gandhi and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, among many others, slashed through gender barriers on the strength of their family names.

In the United States, where a poll last year found that 14 percent of people still admit they would not vote for a woman, nepotistic advancement for women in politics was most common early in the 20th century. As Jo Freeman, the feminist political scientist, has pointed out, six of the first 14 women elected to Congress were widows of incumbents. Three more were the daughters of politicians.

Oh, and what Republican won Iowa? Mike Huckabee did. You say you’d like to know more about this interesting character? Well, Kerry grants your wish in the cover article of this month’s Campaigns and Elections, now called Politics.

It’s religious emotion, not language, that dooms Democrats.

Will Wilkinson

[Read the explanation of this post.]

The Berkeley linguist George Lakoff was a semi-famous academic when he walked into a retreat of Democratic senators in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in May 2003. He walked out as one of the most popular gurus in politics. Hillary Clinton wanted to do lunch. Tom Daschle invited Lakoff to come to D.C. for further schooling. By 2004 he had Howard Dean, noted screamer and future head of the Democratic Party, penning an enthusiastic forward to his pre-election manifesto, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. Lakoff’s claim? Reagan-loving pols win because of their masterful manipulation of language, not their substantive appeal; with supercharged “framing” Democrats can win, too.

Despite Lakoff’s sage instruction, Bush won a second term, and the GOP picked up seats in the House and Senate. The post-mortem to the 2004 presidential election showed that “moral values” were the “most important issue” for a plurality of voters, and that of those most moved by moral values, a whopping 80 percent punched their ticket for George W. Bush. That would seem to be more a matter of substance than style and a point against the idea that Republicans are winning simply because the mind of the hoi polloi has become a plaything of spellbinding word wizards like the Lakoffians’ demon of choice, the Republican pollster Frank Luntz. A small but vehement anti-Lakoff movement has arisen among Democratic commentators, with scathing critiques last year by Kenneth Baer in The Washington Monthly, Marc Cooper and Joshua Green (separately) in The Atlantic, and Matt Bai’s damning New York Times Magazine profile, which noted that Don’t Think of an Elephant had become “as ubiquitous among Democrats in the Capitol as Mao’s Little Red Book once was in the Forbidden City.” But despite the licking, Lakoff’s linguistic false consciousness doctrine keeps on ticking.

However, as Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker argues in another Lakoff takedown in that appeared in the New Republic, Lakoff’s theories are both bad psychology and bad politics, and the one plays into the other. A better diagnosis of the Dem’s trouble with “moral values” voters might help them claim future victories based on more than Bush fatigue and scandalous instant messages to teenage pages. And better ideas are out there: if liberals take a good hard look at what separates them emotionally from most flag-waving, churchgoing Americans, they can better address their weaknesses.

In his new book, Whose Freedom: The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea, Lakoff dusts off his greatest hits and argues that “The conservative dominance of political discourse has been changing what Americans mean by common sense.” According to Lakoff, the post–Great Society welfare state embodies to near-perfection the “traditional” American conception of freedom. Right-wing newspeak threatens to destroy the real freedom we proud Americans cherish, or would cherish, if only our minds had not been colonized by right-wing newspeak.

Lakoff gets reinforcement from fellow Berkeley linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, author of the maximally subtitled Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freakshow. Though Nunberg, to his credit, rejects Lakoff’s poorly supported theory that all thinking is based in metaphor, they agree on the root cause of the Democrats’ slump. “[T]he left has lost the battle for language itself,” Nunberg writes. “When we talk about politics nowadays…we can’t help using language that embodies the worldview of the right.” If “values voters” tilt right, that’s just because the word “values” has itself become loaded with conservative connotations.

Disappointed Marxists used the idea of “false consciousness” to explain why the oppressed workingman failed to rise in revolt with outrage at his exploitation; his mind had been hijacked by enemy propaganda. False consciousness explanations are powerful—so powerful that anyone can trot one out in a pinch to explain why people who don’t seem hypnotized would nevertheless affirm what the sane and upright despise. Fox News and conservative talk radio would go dead if they couldn’t wheel out the alleged leftist death-grip on academia, Hollywood, and the mainstream media to explain the otherwise inconceivable existence of anti-war protesters, practicing homosexuals, and legal fetus-killing. Nunberg and Lakoff’s tricked-out linguistic versions of false consciousness are barely better. Democrats interested in winning must surrender this disreputable redoubt of desperation and aim at an account of their woes that is more “reality-based.”

Even doggedly ill-informed voters sometimes notice bad results, and the Democrats may be able ride Republican incompetence and corruption to power. But in case the entire GOP doesn’t pull a Ralph Reed, Democrats should face up to the likely possibility that voters are rejecting the content of their message, not just the style. Maybe heavy unionization, comprehensive regulation, high taxes, free-flowing welfare, lax policing, and a passive military posture would have been unpopular in Topeka with or without linguistic shenanigans.

More than just helping Democrats escape the hard truth about unpopular positions, the linguistic mindwarp thesis also blinds the Democrats to their problem relating to voters on crucial non-linguistic frequencies. If they’ve got to have a guru, Democrats should enlist Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who specializes in the moral emotions, and whose innovative research offers liberals—and libertarians, too—a better picture of their problems.

Working in the emotion-centered tradition of David Hume and Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, Haidt’s research leads him to posit five psychological foundations of human moral sentiment, each with a distinct evolutionary history and function, which he labels harm, reciprocity, ingroup, hierarchy, and purity. While the five foundations are universal, cultures build upon each to varying degrees. Imagine five adjustable slides on a stereo equalizer that can be turned up or down to produce different balances of sound. An equalizer preset like “Show Tunes” will turn down the bass and “Hip Hop” will turn it up, but neither turn it off. Similarly, societies modulate the dimension of moral emotions differently, creating a distinctive cultural profile of moral feeling, judgment, and justification. If you’re a sharia devotee ready to stone adulterers and slaughter infidels, you have purity and ingroup pushed up to eleven. PETA members, who vibrate to the pain of other species, have turned ingroup way down and harm way up.

Denizens of liberal democracies tend to be relatively tuned in to harm and reciprocity—concerned with suffering, violations of autonomy, fairness, and justice—while less sensitive to the tribalism and xenophobia of ingroup, the class-bound inequality of hierarchy, and the sense of the sacred and profane wrapped up in purity. That this pattern of sentiment is broadly shared is largely what it means for a society to be liberal.

Haidt’s studies, which involve confronting subjects with often bizarre moral scenarios (there is plenty of material about incest and dead animals) and evaluating their responses, suggest that while Democrat-leaning liberals draw almost exclusively from harm and reciprocity, Republican-leaning conservatives draw more from the whole range of moral emotion. “Conservatives have many moral concerns that liberals simply do not recognize as moral concerns,” Haidt and collaborator Jesse Graham write in a forthcoming paper for Social Justice Research. “When conservatives talk about virtues and policies based on the ingroup, hierarchy, and purity foundations, liberals hear talk about theta waves,” Haidt and Graham’s term for imaginary transmissions from space.

Most intriguing is the possibility of systematic left-right differences on the purity dimension, which Haidt pegs as the source of religious emotion. In a fascinating chapter in his illuminating recent book, The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt explains how a primal biological system—the disgust system—designed to keep us clear of rotten meat, expanded over our evolutionary history to encompass sexual norms, physical deformations, and much more. Haidt asks us to “Imagine visiting a town where people wear no clothes, never bathe, have sex ‘doggy-style’ in public, and eat raw meat by biting off pieces directly from the carcass.” Disgusting? No doubt. Immoral? If your thought is, “Well, they’re not violating anyone’s rights,” then, Haidt predicts, you probably didn’t vote for Bush.

The flipside of disgust is the emotion Haidt calls “elevation,” based in a sense of purification and transcendence of our animal incarnation. Cultures the world over picture humanity as midway on a ladder of being between the demonically disgusting and the divinely pure. Most world religions express it through taboos of food, body, and sex, and in rituals of de-animalizing purification and sacralization. The warm, open sense of elevation and the shivering nausea of disgust are high and low notes in the same emotional key.

Haidt’s suggestion is partly that morally broad-band conservatives are better able to exploit the emotional logic of religiosity by deploying rhetoric and imagery that calls on powerful sentiments of elevation and disgust. A bit deaf to the divine, narrow-band liberals are at a disadvantage to stir religious Americans. And there are a lot of religious Americans out there.

According to the University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart and Harvard political scientist Pippa Norris, Americans are more religious than citizens of every liberal democracy except Ireland. A recent study by three University of Minnesota sociologists, Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerteis, and Douglas Hartmann, found that Americans trust spiritually insensate atheists less than Muslims, immigrants, lesbians, and probably even the French when it comes to “sharing their vision of American society.” Pew Research Center surveys show that church attendance now predicts Republican and Democratic voting patterns better than income or education. And some of us, like presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, the miraculous Mormon Republican former governor of Massachusetts, grew up believing that Zion is just east of Kansas City. Legions of Americans have the sense that Jesus smiles upon the Constitution, that tiny unborn babies breathe the breath of God, and that the body is a temple drugs defile. Few religious Americans hesitate to speak of America as God’s own land, even if they don’t think the New Jerusalem is in Missouri.

The much-vaunted “values-voters” were casting their ballot for a man with a broad-band religious morality, like theirs. When George Bush says “Our nation is chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model to the world,” people who feel this to be true know he’s tuned in, too. But when Al Gore says, “I believe that God’s hand has touched the United States of America,” they hear Al Gore expediently aiming to prove his spiritual qualifications for the presidency. That’s a real, deep problem that has nothing much to do with language. The liberal pundit Matthew Yglesias gets to the heart of the matter when he advises that “Democrats who don’t believe marriage is between a man and a woman but who feel they ought to pretend to believe this in order to win elections…need to do a better job of pretending.” But they’d be better off if they didn’t need to fake it in the first place. When it comes to the emotional politics of divinity, narrow-band Democrats are outgunned. Opportunistic fag-bashing and strategic God-talk won’t cut it.

Is the narrower morality of liberalism a form of moral retardation or enlightenment? That’s a question that also breaks along ideological lines. “Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder,” says the conservative Leon Kass, former head of President Bush’s Council on Bioethics, in defense of what he calls “the wisdom of repugnance”—the moral authority of the digust-purity dimension of feeling. But the liberal philosopher Martha Nussbaum, in her book Hiding from Humanity, argues that though emotions such as anger or fear sometimes embody reasons we can offer to others as legitimate justification for action, disgust is uniquely inarticulate, implying no real reason beyond itself, and so is unfit as a basis for persuasion and policy in an open, pluralistic society.

Tens of millions of Americans are viscerally disgusted by gay sex and therefore see the marriage of Adam and Steve as the debasement of a sacred rite. Nussbaum, and others who share her characteristically liberal style of feeling and justification, wouldn’t count that reaction as an argument at all. But that doesn’t stop tens of millions who dwell within the emotional reality of the sacred and profane from being completely persuaded by it. As Nussbaum notes, there is little hope of reasoning them out of it. An America less fueled by religious feeling—one that tuned down the purity dimension to Danish levels—might be a more just America. But you don’t start with the voters you’d like to have.

What, then, are Democrats to do? (And what about libertarians, who tend to have even more tolerance than the average Democrat for godless debasement?) Democrats can try to appeal to religious American voters by giving some ground in the culture wars. But it seems unlikely they will find an effective balance. There is no point conceding stuff too trivial to really matter, such as school prayer, and comically pretending to be moved by the pure and the foul. And there is even less point in nominating religiously convincing candidates who really do believe embryos have the spark of divinity, that gay is gross, etc. Socialized health care isn’t worth it.

Democrats should play to their own moral-emotional strengths, not apologize for not having different ones. Haidt’s early research on moralized disgust shows that its cultural manifestations vary. The Japanese apparently find it disgusting to fail their station and its duties. And here at home, formerly “repulsive” practices, such as interracial marriage, have become mere curiosities.

Despite its political salience, American religiosity is eroding. Inglehart’s and Norris’ research indicates that America, like Europe, is becoming more secular over time, “although this trend has been partly masked by massive immigration of people with relatively traditional worldviews, and high fertility rates, from Hispanic countries.” We may be stuck with our voters, but not with the configuration of their moral sensibilities. And despite all those Republican majorities, the margins are thin; if swing voters were that keenly attuned to their religious sentiments, they’d be Mel Gibson fans, not swing voters.

Democrats shouldn’t cater to and reinforce sensibilities that both hurt people and hurt the Democrats’ prospects. Religious doctrine and religious feeling can and have been trimmed and shaped over time to accommodate the full plurality of liberal society. Illiberal patterns of feeling bolstered by religious sentiments, like disgust for homosexuality, can be broken through slow desensitization, or a shift in the way the culture recruits that dimension of the moral sense. In dynamic commercial societies, this happens whether we want it to or not. But we have something to say about how it happens. The culture war is worth fighting, one episode of Will & Grace at a time, if that’s what it takes.

Liberals must understand the profundity to others of feelings that are weak in them, but shouldn’t pretend to feel what they don’t. They can lead as well as follow. And it remains true that all Americans, conservative and liberal alike, are wide awake to the liberal emotional dimensions of harm and reciprocity. The American culture war is about how thoroughly the liberal sentiments will be allowed to dominate. If a thoroughly liberal society is worth having, liberals will have to spot the points of conflict between the liberal and illiberal dimensions of the moral sense, drive in the wedge, and pull out all the rhetorical stops—including playing on feelings of quasi-religious elevation and indignant moral disgust—to make Americans feel the moral primacy of harm, autonomy, and rights. When the pattern of feeling is in place, the argument is easy to accept.

Haidt can’t help Democrats with their lousy economic policy, but he can at least help them see where much of their problem lies. Democrats’ problem isn’t the Republican lock on semantics; it’s the Republican lock on illiberal sentiment. But Democrats simply will not win a contest of religious emotion, no matter how dazzling the “framing.” Their best long-term hopes rest in moving the fight to a battlefield with more favorable terrain.

Perhaps Haidt’s most significant contribution is helping liberals of all stripes see that liberalism is not a mere intellectual commitment, but a condition of the soul, a condition to be proud of—one that puts us at a far remove from tribalism, caste, and theocracy. The culture war is real. It’s a war over the calibration of our moral sentiments, and mere “messaging” won’t win it. Democrats ought to buy George Lakoff a gold watch, send him off to the home for superannuated gurus, and start boning up on the new science of moral emotion.

—

Will Wilkinson is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.

Brett Swanson points us to today’s WSJ op-ed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Lucas:

In the past 50 years, there have been two macroeconomic policy changes in the United States that have really mattered. One of these was the supply-side reduction in marginal tax rates, initiated after Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 and continued and extended during the current administration. The other was the advent of “inflation targeting,” which is the term I prefer for a monetary policy focused on inflation-control to the exclusion of other objectives. As a result of these changes, steady GDP growth, low unemployment rates and low inflation rates — once thought to be an impossible combination — have been a reality in the U.S. for more than 20 years.

When I talked to my colleague Bill Niskanen  (former acting chairman of the CEA under Reagan) about Chait’s TNR excerpt, he told me exactly the same thing Lucas is saying. It should be pretty obvious that there is nothing discreditable or crackpot about the now-common observation that the supply-side revolution has become part of a broad consensus about macroeconomic policy among economists. Progressives who insist on going on and on about crazy supply-side tax cuts sound to me a lot like certain libertarians raving about the dangers of fiat currency. It’s the insistence on revisiting a debate that already soundly concluded, largely because of the way history panned out. The argument is even weirder the second time around, once you already know what actually happened.

Anyway, as OG supply-sider Bruce Bartlett put it:

Today, hardly any economist believes what the Keynesians believed in the 1970s and most accept the basic ideas of supply-side economics — that incentives matter, that high tax rates are bad for growth, and that inflation is fundamentally a monetary phenomenon. Consequently, there is no longer any meaningful difference between supply-side economics and mainstream economics.

This really doesn’t strike me as fertile ground for successful leftwing point-scoring.

Jonathan Chait replies to my criticisms. He basically seems to me to say:

(1) Like the author of The Party of Death, I am completely confused by why anyone would think this book is a partisan hatchet job.

(2) Low taxes are actually good. I just have a hard time saying that clearly.

(3) George W. Bush’s tax policy made the system less progressive, and ran up the deficit, which is a problem for me for reasons I won’t disclose.

(4) People who wanted to privatize social security are either stupid or lying when they tell you that they would have made it more progressive. I could tell you why, but I won’t.

(5) The state really does own everything, and cutting taxes for the rich really is upward distribution. I have arguments to that effect, but I’d rather not debate it. Instead, I’d rather discuss my book in a way that takes all my wildly contentious normative premises for granted, while still pretending to be a pragmatic empiricist.

Meanwhile, I’ve added a follow-up post on why Chait’s class war thesis really is incredible.

Not surprisingly, I found Ezra’s reply to my post on the demand for populism unpersuasive. Here’s Ezra:

Notice, here, that Will uses “life satisfaction” rather than anything directly related to the economic numbers for his point. That’s because the economic numbers are very bad for his point, But as Will — who dearly loves his “alternative status hierarchies” — fully knows, economic status is not the only determinant of life satisfaction. If you don’t have health care but are really happy with your attempts to restore the heat and spark to your marriage, you may be both satisfied and a populist!

Moreover, invoking current polls is completely non-responsive to Ross’s claims. Ross — and Alan Blinder, and everyone else — expect tens of millions of white collar jobs to come under pressure from outsourcing within the next few decades. If Will doesn’t think this will upset anyone, he’s got to construct a plausible theory as to why, not note that the Harris poll says many folks are satisfied with their lot now.

And this goes across the board. Will may not like the trends, but it requires some fancy libertarian footwork to argue that continually rising health costs, substantially stagnant wages, the enduring pressures of globalization, the decline of the corporate welfare state, and all the other forces buffeting the bottom 80 percent will elicit no response in the electorate. Indeed, it’s hard to argue they’ve not already done so.

Why cite numbers on people’s satisfaction with life and their assessment of whether their “life situation” has improved or will improve? Because Ross claims that middle-class Americans in fact are and are going to continue to be highly anxious about their economic condition. If people’s alleged economic anxiety is important enough to create a powerful demand for populist policies, you would think it would have some effect on either their life satisfaction or their evaluation of their “life situation.” But the evidence is that people are increasingly satisfied, and fewer people expect their life situation to get worse. Either increasing economic anxiety is a myth, or it is not sufficient to affect people’s evaluation of their satisfaction or prospects. Either way, it is difficult to see how it is supposed to drive demand for a middle-class populism. Ezra notably fails to address the troubled Jacob Hacker thesis on volatility, which seems to have been Ross’s main piece of evidence in favor of the existence of high levels of economic society. Should I assume Ezra thinks I’m right, and that there is no good evidence for an especially politically significant level of anxiety?

Indeed, Ezra proceeds, as he often does, simply by changing the subject. So now we are talking about the future and what people will be feeling. Ezra says people will be upset by outsourcing. But I was talking about evidence for economic anxiety and the demand for populism now.

Anyway, like Alan Blinder and all sensible people, I think lots of firms will be seeking less-expensive foreign labor, that this will have a significant effect on the jobs available to Americans, but also on the price of many goods and services (down) and on the incentives to acquire new and/or improved skills (stronger). This is going to make middle-class Americans wealthier, improving their objective economic security. Many people will surely be temporarily upset when the shifting incentives of the global market upset their usual patterns of work and life, very much as people in the Rustbelt were upset by the process of deindustrialization. But these changes are going to take place incrementally over decades, not all at once. At any time during the process, huge segments of the middle-class will be seeing significant improvements in their standard of living while other, smaller segments struggle to find new niches in the labor market.

I don’t believe I bear any burden to show that this transition won’t produce demand for populist policies. The positive claim, and the burden, is on the other side. Indeed, the sometimes dramatic dislocations of America’s transformation from a primarily industrial to a primarily service economy delivered two terms of Ronald Reagan, a term of George H.W. Bush, and two terms of Bill Clinton, while leaving the U.S. with historically low rates of unemployment, a leaner, more efficient, more productive manufacturing sector, lower taxes, scores of free trade agreements, etc. Ezra should explain to us why the anxieties of deindustrialization fell so far from delivering a populist politics.

I don’t deny that there are business cycles, and that the electorate’s economic anxieties rise and fall, or that politicians can ride a cyclical wave of economic discontent to power. I was replying to Ross’s suggestion that there is a long-term or secular trend toward increased middle-class economic anxiety, and that this is likely to generate a populist politics that could dominate politics for twenty years. Neither he nor Ezra has said anything more than fantastically conjectural on the point.

Last, what is populism anyway? I think of a politics that pictures the economy as a huge zero-sum game, sets social and economic classes against each other, and promises “the people” free stuff at the expense of some other, usually richer, people. Ezra adduces evidence from the recent Pew Political Typology that shows increased support for a bigger, more domestically activist government. I certainly don’t dispute it. But what does that have to do with populism, exactly? Is this shift in opinion Ezra identifies motivated by “people vs. the powerful,” “two America’s” stuff? Where’s the evidence of that? And, more to the point, if there is any evidence of it, where’s the evidence that it is driven largely by economic anxiety? Because that’s the specific point I was rebutting.

My guess is that some intellectuals get excited about populism because they thrill to the fantasy of riding popular passions to power and harnessing them to set in place their ardently desired policies. It is a thrilling, if repulsive, dream. The best evidence the dream does exist is the habitual evidential overreach of pro-populist intellectuals. A complacent electorate is routinely met with desperately table-pounding op-eds practically begging readers to be mad as hell. Any faint sign of traction, that the fickle mood of “the people” is turning their way, is greeted with bold predictions of an all-new politics! Our politics! Hope triumphs over reason, but, inevitably, hope is dashed.

There are also ups and downs and quick reversals, if not cycles, in political opinion. As Ross mentions in his article, just a year or so ago, there were still books rolling off the presses trying to explain why the Democrats are perpetual losers. Are Republicans wizards at “framing”? Are they more fluent in the visceral emotional language of politics? Have they gerrymandered themselves permanent majorities, destroying any chance of a real American democracy? I don’t believe it is even minimally reasonable to now think the tide of public opinion has semi-permanently turned. What I think it is safe to say is that the incompetence, corruption, and disastrously failed war delivered by years of Republican rule have powerfully soured many Americans on policies they identify, rightly or wrongly, with conservatives. Anyone making projections further out than the next election is just guessing, and usually wishfully. A big majority opinion seemingly in favor of a big policy change — in favor of social security privatization or nationalized health care, for example — can collapse in a matter of months in the face of well-coordinated negative political and media campaigns. Go ahead, Ezra, dream. But brace yourself.

So, again: What is the evidence that there is in the U.S. a secular trend toward increased economic insecurity or anxiety?

I read Ross Douthat’s new Atlantic article on the electoral opportunity open to the Democrats as a chance to characterize the Democratic “threat” in a way that makes Douthat’s conservative “populist” alternative look like an attractive counter-strategy for ‘08 Republicans in the market for advisers.

The pressure of continued outsourcing may also increase the public’s appetite for a smart left populism, as even well-educated workers—in fields from financial services to health care—begin to face stiff competition from overseas. In this landscape, it’s easy to imagine the middle-class anxiety that the political scientist Jacob Hacker termed “office-park populism” defining the domestic debate over the next 20 years, and easy to imagine a Democratic majority that capitalizes on the opportunity.

The phrase “easy to imagine” has all the virtues of theft over honest toil. It is “easy to imagine” that the Kaiser won the Great War and that I’m writing in German (and a pith helmet). Likewise, it is easy to imagine Jacob Hacker’s now-largely-discredited thesis of income volatility and our current cyclical financial worries defining domestic politics in a generation, but why would we bother to imagine it? Let’s imagine instead the centrality of the coming “robot gap” in American politics.

There is good evidence that many Americans just now are worried about the economy and find it hard to pay off debt, as this Harris Poll shows. But, on the other hand, this doesn’t seem to be breeding the kind of discontent likely to push a populist to power. According to another very recent Harris Poll, the level of overall satisfaction is up since 2003, well over half of Americans say their life situation has improved over the last few years, and nearly 2/3 expect it to improve over the next five. Some of this pretty clearly has an economic component. When broken down according to generation, Gen X-ers, like me, (ages 31-42, according to Harris) were most likely to report improvement in their life situation over the past five years, and this is likely because we saw the largest wage gains in that period as many of us finished the 20s transition from entry-level to mid- and upper-level positions. By contrast the oldest cohort–either holding steady in late career, or retired–was least likely to report an gain in life satisfaction over the last half-decade. Sensibly enough, the young group Harris calls the “Echo Boomers” (aka “Gen Y” — ages 18-30), slightly edges out X-ers as most likely to expect improvement in their life situation. The level and trend of American life satisfaction looks so rosy and expectations for future improvement are so high, that it is hard for me to see how a populist politics is supposed to hit takeoff velocity, or how Democrats are supposed to capitalize on some kind of alleged trend of high anxiety that never seems to materialize in the numbers.

Economic anxiety is cyclical. Housing market aside, the current economic indicators look good. I’ll be surprised if the public isn’t pretty happy with its economic lot in a year or so–and especially when Bush is clearing brush full time. In any case, conservatives don’t need to think right-wing populism is just the thing to stave off left-wing populism, since left-wing populism built on some elusive but magically potent middle class economic anxiety is about as authentic a threat as Osama’s caliphate.

I think Obama stumbled so badly because he was trying not to utter the stupdity Edwards uttered just after him. For Edwards, I guess, death is never in vain as long as you signed up to follow orders, possibly in completely pointless wars.

“The only thing worse than a soldier dying in vain is more soldiers dying in vain.”

 And he meant it.

I don’t care what the post-debate polls say about you, Mike Gravel.

I can discern no point of the NY Times article, “Wal-Mart Finds an Ally in Conservatives” than to not-so-subtly suggest that right wing think tanks are corporate shills whose scholars nefariously omit to disclose Walton Family Foundation funding to hide the fact of their intellectual corruption. Of course, the story doesn’t say this right out, and almost, kind of, denies it. But there would seem to be no other reason to even write the story. The upshot seemed to be that there is something shady in not disclosing in op-eds and articles that your organization has received funding from an organization whose interests you are defending, even if the author has no idea who funds their organization. 

So maybe the Times will take its own advice, and the next time they write a front page story that approvingly quotes an Economic Policy Institute scholar on the lack of worker bargaining power, they’ll see fit to mention that EPI’s board is controlled by officials from Big Labor, and that they receive big chunks of cash annually from unions.

[ADDENDUM: Oh! And they do mention in EPI in the Wal-Mart article, noting $2.5 mil in union funding just last year. But they should have mentioned that when they were giving EPI a platform to frame the wage statistics. And, anyway, they then allow the fact that Unions are dropping money like crazy to finance attacks on Wal-Mart to be framed by an actual union shill:

In response, Chris Kofinis, communications director for WakeUpWalmart.com, an arm of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union that gives money to liberal research groups, said: "While we openly support the mission of economic justice, Wal-Mart and the Waltons put on a smiley face, hide the truth, all while supporting right-wing causes who are paid to defend Wal-Mart’s exploitative practices.”

Oh! So the money ladled out by unions is in support of economic justice, as opposed to exploitative practices. So no worries!]

Or maybe they’ll accept that money more often follows opinion than the reverse, and that the merits of an argument generally have nothing to do with the motivation behind making it. I’m currently writing something on the Chicago’s idiotic big box ordinance. That I would think this kind of thing is idiotic is not irrelevant to the fact Cato decided to hire me. Does Cato get Walton money? I have no idea, though I hope so. From Target’s foundation? I don’t know. From the people behind Home Depot? No idea! Is the Times really saying that it is better for me to know than to not know? I’d think the fact that I probably own  a piece of Wal-Mart through the mutual funds in my 401K would be more relevant. But I don’t know about that, either.    

I’m no lawyer. Not even a simple caveman lawyer. But my impression of this [pdf] is that my Cato colleague Bob Levy opened up a whole can of lawerly whoopass on this Rivkin character. And that would be the 32 oz, not the 16 oz can. Rivkin may be able to sit comfortably in another month or so.

I truly feel better knowing Bob is looking after my liberty.

[HT: Logan.]

I think right about now we should be expecting a mindblowing contrarian essay arguing that not only do we need Cheney as POTUS, but that he can win.

Obviously that’s really stupid. But I’d read it!

I was listening to “Marketplace” on NPR the other day and my god was I getting annoyed. The story was about some deal that the Department of Labor cut with Wal-Mart, which was perfectly legal, but broke internal labor rules. Anyway, the thing that really struck me was the narrative undercurrent. Wal-Mart was assumed to be an opportunistic, possibly predatory, profit-seeker. The Department of Labor was assumed to be the agent working on behalf of a widely accepted conception of the public interest, which Wal-Mart was assumed to threaten. In this case, Labor, by being lax on Wal-Mart (they were giving Wal-Mart a couple weeks of warning before inspecting the books or something), had disappointed us, the listeners of NPR’s marketplace, by failing to be as vigilant as they should.

Now, I think these two common assumptions of the media, that business is zero-sum and so profit-seeking behavior is predatory and that government is the noble agent of the public interests in fact makes the media deeply complicit in the corruption of both business and government by creating cover for the power-seeking, cronyism, and rent-extraction that is everywhere and always an essential aspect of government power. By cultivating and perpetuating a naive public perception that, other things equal, government is protecting us, the media in fact makes it much easier for the Halliburtons of the world to lock in giant no-bid contracts and for bureaucrats to revolve in and out of lobbying positions for special interests. That is, media that works on the assumption that government in fact serves the public interest makes it much easier for government to serve as an effective cover for transfers from taxpayers to the politically connected wealthy.

Journalism that understood the idea of the public interest would shift focus and report on the way that big government creates incentives that both corrupts business and government, makes it increasingly difficult for government to serve it’s genuinely necessary functions, and wastes productive private resources that would otherwise be involved in cooperative wealth creation, rather than in competitive, zero-sum political predation. As Russ Roberts put it yesterday:

Perhaps the strangest thing of all is that modern day left of center folks think that corporations run America via their influence on the government. If you believe that, why would you want government to be more powerful? If corporations control the political process, why wouldn’t you be on my side, reducing the power of government?

This point, however, seems never to penetrate, and journalists persist in the fantasy that if only the right people had state power, then they could put the world aright. All the while, the people who have a lot to gain personally from political power continue to seek it and get it under the cover of the myth of the noble public servant.

Here’s the conclusion to Matt’s entertaining Prospect piece on the incompetence of Bush appointees:

The other possibility is that Republicans are so convinced that government is inefficient and full of people who don’t know what they’re doing that it just doesn’t occur to them to do it any other way.

Nice. Naturally, Matt is implying that there is some other way to do it. But, no. The Republicans are right; that’s just how government works. The problem with the Republicans is that they, being invested with power, are insufferably opportunistic hypocrites. They’re not uniquely prone to cronyism. They’re just prone to being in power, which is the enabling condition for the cronyism to which all political types aspire. And they’re prone to the horribly annoying-to-libertarians habit of throwing libertarian-tinged rhetoric around when, obviously, they’re champion statists. Now, I know Matt’s a tough-minded realist. So I guess the point of implying that Democrats are less likely to “play politics” with political power was just to affirm his readers’ unfounded faith in their tribe’s intelligence and virtue. In that case, job well done.

This quote from DEA head Karen Tandy has me mad enough to actually blog about actual news:

Today’s arrest of Mark (sic) Scott Emery, publisher of Cannabis Culture magazine and the founder of a marijuana legalization group, is a significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S. and Canada, but also to the marijuana legalization movement.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars of Emery’s illicit profits are known to have been channeled to marijuana legalization groups active in the United States and Canada. Drug legalization lobbyists now have one less pot of money to rely on.

Radley comments:

That to me sounds like the country’s top drug cop announcing Emery’s bust was more because of his political activism than because of his law-breaking.

Sounds to me, too. And this means that, not joking, we ought to demand Karen Tandy’s head. She’s announced, straight out, that the United State government intends to use its ability to arrest people and put them in jail as a tactic for squelching political speech that conflicts with the government’s policies. It should come as a surprise to no one that the thrust of the free speech clause of the First Amendment is to ensure that government reflects the free deliberative will of the governed. The freedom to agitate for the alteration of government is a minimal condition for the legitimacy of government. Karen Tandy has not only announced that she is violating the fundamental conditions for the moral legitimacy of the power that she wields, but that she is