Once a voice of restraint and reason, Sullivan now specializes in shrill panic: mercurial ranting full nof operatic arguments, steeped in bad faith, aimed at people he once praised (including yours truly). Agreement with Sullivan bespeaks courageous enlightenment, disagreement advertises that you are a knave or ideological lickspittle.

As for the main argument of the book, Goldberg has two main beefs. The first is that “evil is rarely defeated by people who are unsure they are right,” which Goldberg takes to mean that a “conservatism of doubt” will be too anemic to combat the enemies of liberal modernity: He mocks the idea of a “serious political movement” founded on the slogan “We’re not sure!” But I think this misapprehends one paradoxical aspect of the relationship between doubt and confidence. I know, for example, that science proceeds haltingly, that its conclusions are always open to revision, and indeed, many of the scientific beliefs of the past have been either rejected or developed to accomodate new facts. And this is precisely why I can be so confident in the scientific enterprise in the aggregate: Because I know there are scores of intelligent and skeptical researchers constantly testing and refining its conclusions. I can be fanatical in my defense of liberal societies, not because (like Islamists) I’m sure they have discovered the One Best Way of Life, but because they embody a process that allows fallible people to seek continual improvement.

Second, Jonah takes issue with Andrew’s “divinization of conscience,” which he casts as an arrogant rejection of tradition. And this brings us back to what I regard as the misreading of Hayek that keps Jonah in the conservative camp—a point that Nick Gillespie tried to make when they debated a few months back, but I don’t think Jonah fully grokked. First, to say we should “rely on tradition” doesn’t actually relieve us of the responsibility for making our own moral judgments, for much the same reason the argument that the argument that we need religious texts as a guide to morality doesn’t go through. There are multiple traditions to choose from, and multiple strains within each tradition, an apparent “deference to tradition” always still involves the exercise of one’s own judgment. (In the same way that you may outsource your health decisions to a doctor, but you’re still responsible for finding a wise doctor.) Moreover, recall that Hayek’s argument is meant to show why tradition’s evolved rules are likely to produce better results than a wholesale constructivist rationalism. But this argument actually depends on people making use of critical reason, which is quite different. In effect, Jonah wants to say: Look what cultural evolution has produced—great, freeze it! But evolution works because of mutation, variation, and selection, and it’s still going on. A tradition that can’t accomodate that kind of variation is unlikely to stay adaptive for long.

Dear Senator Obama,
I’m a student here at Harvard and my mama tells me there ain’t no way a person of color be treated fair in Amerika even if they go to Harvard and [stuff]. You cool with that?
Franklin
Cambridge, Massachusetts

I’ll confess, as someone who spent the early 80s as a toddler, when I came across the term “Atari Democrats” in the second graf of this American Prospect piece by Jim McNeill, I thought it was a new coinage:

The world headquarters of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. is still in Akron, Ohio, but all they make there now are decisions. Except for a few specialty racing tires, Goodyear hasn’t made tires in Akron in years. Industry here is dead, dead, dead, and there is nothing we can do to revive it.

Apparently, Sherrod Brown never got that memo from the Atari Democrats. Twenty-five years after the cutting-edge members of his party gave up on quaint ideas like manufacturing and collective bargaining, Brown, a seven-term congressman from northeast Ohio, is running a campaign for Senate that breaks every rule in the New Democrat playbook.

Frankly, I like mine better; it’d be handy to have a term for someone who uses the idea of “no other option” as cover for supporting an unpopular position. That’s a week-kneed approach, but would be a step up from the rank populism the Prospect is so delighted to see Brown indulging in. I’m just hoping it’s only a cynical play to the hoi polloi. I think it typically is when Dems feel compelled to bash trade—I’m pretty sure that John Kerry, whatever his other faults, was smarter than his jeremiads against “Benedict Arnold CEOs.” It’s more disturbing if a guy who’s likely to be a Senator actually believes this gibberish about contemporary globalization not involving “comparative advantage” or whatever nonsense is the fashionable smokescreen for protectionism now.

I mention this because a review in the new Weekly Standard of the new book Neoconservatism: Why We Need It devotes both its title and a significant chunk of the review itself to inveighing “Against Relativism.” As I’ve probably said in this space before, this is a somewhat befuddling straw man for conservatives to take up precisely because it’s so rare on the ground. In fact, because it’s arguably a self-undermining doctrine, even the relatively few folks who self-describe as relativists usually aren’t. The more common sort, I think, really just believe in an excessively strong meta-principle of extreme toleration, such that a variety of conflicting local norms should all be accepted. Everyone is this sort of relativist in at least some areas. Most of us think, for example, that it’s right to punish someone for driving on the left side of the road in the United States, but not in Britain, because each local norm in context satisfies the higher-order norm “minimize unnecessary fatalities.” After all, “tolerate differences in norms,” at least up to a point, is itself a norm being offered up as universally desirable. The other sort of self-described “relativist” is actually just a moral skeptic, who doesn’t so much think all moral codes are “equally valid,” but rather just denies that there are any genuinely moral codes: There are only just local taboos. Describing these as “equally valid” would be a kind of category error, like describing turnips as “equally true” or sonatas as “equally viscous.” This sort of view is held by a tiny, tiny minority of highly educated people, and sociopaths.

Anyway, most of the people conservatives want to describe as relativists are neither of these. It’s just that if you take the position that, say, gay people ought not to be stigmatized, people convinced they have a monopoly on morality will jump to the conclusion you reject any universal morality, when you’re actually advancing the affirmative, first-order moral proposition: “There is, in fact, nothing morally wrong with homosexuality.” In cross-cultural contexts, I think what they often mean (though here I suspect they’re more apt to be mistaken) is something like: “People should have the institutions that will, on the whole, make them happy—and these might be different for people raised in different cultures, which cultivate different psychological dispositions, varying degrees of need for autonomy or connectedness, and so on.”

So, to paraphrase Tim Curry in Clue, relativism is just a red herring. In more ways than one, come to think of it, since the harping on relativism flows out of a discussion of Leo Strauss, and the link sometimes made between his influence on neocon intellectuals and the march to war in Iraq. All the reviewer has to say on this front is that Strauss “did not promulgate a political program or advocate particular policies.” Which is true: Nowhere in Natural Right and History is there a plan for invading Iraq, nor (as far as I know) had anyone suggested as much. But this dodges the point. A lot of neocons do seem to have extracted from Strauss the doctrine that, as Irving Kristol has put it on the subject of evolution:

There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy.

One of Dawkins’ main strategies in the book is to flip the “argument from design” around against theism. He begins by agreeing that complex order in nature should be regarded as something improbable that stands in need of explanation. Fortunately, we have a reasonably good account of how the complex order of terrestrial life might have arisen over enormous spans of time by means of a simpler selection process operating on sucessively more complex entities. And he argues that just because complexity is so very improbable, this is just the kind of explanation we need to have a cogent account of how it could have come about. What’s really improbable, he argues, is to put even greater complexity at the start of the whole shebang, with no simpler antecedents and no hint of a process that could have slowly produced it. Robinson offers this reply:

[M]odern cosmologies generally suggest that time and the universe as a whole came into being together. So a creator cannot very well be thought of as having attained complexity through a process of evolution. That is to say, theists need find no anomalyina divine “complexity” over against the “simplicity” that is presumed to characterize the universe at its origin…. That God exists outside time as its creator is an ancient given of theology. The faithful are accustomed to expressions like “from everlasting to everlasting” in reference to God, language taht the positivists would surely have cinsidered nonsense but that does indeed express the intuition that time is an aspect of the created order. Again, I do not wish to abuse either theolgoy or scientific theory by implying that either can be used as evidence in support of the other; I mean only that the big bang in fact provides a metaphor that might help Dawkins understand why his grand assault on the “God Hypothesis” has failed to impress the theists.

The law takes copyright seriously. It’s one of the few rights actually enshrined in the Constitution.

But on this count, they had already been rebuffed by Congress, which, in the Family Movie Act passed in 2005, provided an explicit fair use exemption for people who wanted to edit movies in the privacy of their own homes. This right to create a “criticized” version of a movie was not, however, extended to commercial businesses.

Now, I wrote about the Family Movie Act when it passed, so this strikes me as especially odd: The FMA was passed precisely in response to commercial businesses like ClearPlay, which provide special players that automatically create filtered versions of supported movies on the fly, as they’re being played from the original DVD. And in fact, that, rather than some commercial/noncommercial distinction, is the key to why ClearPlay’s business model is legal and CleanFlicks isn’t: The former does the filtering between the player and the screen, while the latter does it on a new disc.

Now it might’ve been interesting to go into how strangely the law is now required to treat essentially identical services based on these somewhat arbitrary differences in how they function: The studios core argument was about artistic control, and ClearPlay impinges on that just as much as CleanFlicks. Similarly, Last might have mentioned (but didn’t) the First Sale doctrine argument: A business that bought up books, crossed out any profanity with a Sharpie, and resold them would unambiguously be in the clear on First Sale grounds. But as a side-effect of how digital technology works, First Sale rights essentially vanish in the digital realm: I have a clear right to give or sell you a book I’ve bought, but the only way I can “transfer” a downloaded movie to you (without selling you the whole computer, I guess) is to make a copy for you while deleting my own.

But these topics don’t interest Last, because hey, there’s a culture war argument to be made:

Mind you, the Hollywood contention that the lawsuit was about creative control and artistic integrity didn’t hold much water. After all, studios routinely sell significantly edited versions of their movies (and edited in the same way CleanFlicks does, to remove nudity, profanity, and gore) for broadcast on airplanes or television….It’s one thing to show a cleaned-up version of Wedding Crashers for the enjoyment of passengers on a flight from Los Angeles to Paris; but for a family in Provo to be able to watch it together is another matter entirely. One of the conservative complaints about Hollywood has always been that it’s a town where people will exploit anything for a dollar. But it seems that there are still limits: Catering to a religious audience is something the studios just won’t do.

This is, of course, stupid. The point is not control for a particular purpose (sticking it to Christians!) but control period, which is why the studios opposed the Family Movie Act too. The point is not that directors like jet setters and loathe midwesterners (true though that may be), it’s that jet setters get an edited version that the studios approve when and if the studios approve. So Last is right that the case “did open a window onto the soul of Hollyood.” Shame he’s too busy rereading his script from Culture War 29: Republicans Strike Back to look through it.

To determine what hidden weak points might work against Democratic opponent Bob Casey as the campaign unfolds, Zito goes to– wait for it– a strategist with Sanorum’s media firm, who offers this:

After 10 years in public office, we still don’t hear from Bob Casey on where he stands….He does not want people to know that he is socially conservative in southeastern Pennsylvania, and he does not want voters in western Pennsylvania to know that he is a big spending liberal.

Now, I don’t follow Pennsylvania, so maybe there’s something there: Maybe Casey really is trying to keep himself vague to avoid alienating voters who are significantly to his right economically. But soliciting a campaign-commercial soundbite from a guy whose job is telling Santorum how to make campaign commercials seems like a poor way to find out. (A flack for the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee similarly offers his professional opinion that Casey’s proclivity for speaking “in platitudes” will be a liability.)

In what may be the most ballsy waste of column inches I’ve seen this year, Zito spends a graf introducing strategist Charlie Gerow and establishing his objectivity by noting that he boldly supported Casey’s bid for state treasurer in a preordained contest against a no-name challenger whom he stomped in a landslide victory. After several lines of this, the payoff is the following pearl of wisdom:

That’s because, Gerow says, Santorum will win in November: “Eventually, Bobby Casey comes out of hiding and has to confront him.”

Maybe it’s that, having only just subscribed, my expectations are unrealistically high, but it is kind of mindboggling how piss-poor this is. Again, it’s not that I’m shocked (shocked!) that the Standard is wildly pro-Santorum, but even in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the party understood that while “2+2=5″ could be true at the party rally, two and two had to make four on the factory floor. Isn’t it a strategic disadvantage to be so mesmerized by your own guy’s talking points that you lose the ability to do anything resembling a neutral appraisal of strengths and weaknesses?

Update: “Ester” in the comments steps up to defend Salena Zito’s “insightful” piece. “Ester,” in addition to being very well informed about the specific professional responsibilities of people quoted in the article, is writing from an IP that resolves to the internal network of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, where Salena Zito works.

TRB by Peter Beinart: Beinart expresses puzzlement at the progressive repudiation of the Clinton years, arguing that it’s a mistake to blame Bill for the party’s current “crisis of faith,” since he inherited rather than created it, and did a damn good job crafting a Democratic identity and message under the circumstances. I wonder, though, whether the things Beinart credits Clinton with aren’t—from the perspective of political branding, anyway—a big part of the problem. It’s not, in other words, the ideas Clinton lacked, but the ones he (and, as importantly, the Republicans) embraced. Clinton basically endorsed the idea that more unfettered trade is good. Welfare reform accepted the idea that incentives matter and that aid to the poor should be geared at preparing them for work rather than substituting for it. At the same time, the Gingrich-era Republican passion for dramatic government cutting and wholesale elimination of programs and departments evaporated. It’s not that there aren’t, of course, pretty big differences remaining between the parties on this score, but that they’re no longer sufficiently stark. Welfare has pretty much dropped off the political radar, and with it the rhetoric of “handouts for welfare queens” and “scrooges plotting to abandon the poor.” This may be a “curse of success” situation: Ameliorating problems like homelessness and poverty (as Beinart argues clinton did) leaves you, perversely, at something of a political disadvantage if caring about those problems is at the core of your political identity. The main distinctions between the parties now involve culture wars or military and security issues, where most elected Dems have seemed scared to really distinguish themselves from the Republicans too starkly by forthrightly opposing the Iraq war (as opposed to the details of its execution) or favoring gay marriage openly (rather than opposing efforts to ban it at the constitutional level while paying lip service to the “union of one man and one woman” point). The problem there isn’t a lack of ideas, it’s an unwillingness to own up to the ones you’ve got.

Again, Part II by The Editors: Another “why we must intervene in Darfur” piece. The interesting thing here is the idea that while the situation supposedly won’t require a massive commitment of U.S. troops, “what it does require is American leadership” because “Europe is paralyzed.” Well… why? Neither the U.S. nor Europe have acted yet, but presumably we’re just dragging our feet, while the European powers are apparently afflicted in some way that renders them just constitutionally incapable of doing anything without George Bush leading the charge. But there’s not a lot on why their barriers to intervention are higher or more fundamental than ours, and it looks like NATO is very gradually stepping up. Maybe this kind of “paralysis” would be less common if we didn’t create the expectation that the U.S. would be at the head of these sorts of interventions, wherever they happened.

The piece also weirdly misconstrues the objection that the sort of intervention the editors advocate would effectively be an intervention on behalf of the Darfuri rebels. They parse this as a throwing-up-of-hands in a fit of moral equivalence, as though there’s no way to say whether the rebels or the Janjaweed are worse. I had taken the point to be that it’s not clear lives would be saved in the longterm if intervention provides an opportunity for rebels to rearm. TNR says the goal would rather be to “seal Darfur off from the rest of Sudan” and “create the political space for traditional tribal leaders to reasser their authority and rebuild the institutions that once guaranteed peaceful co-existence between Arab and African Darfuris.” And the goal of the Iraq War was Switzerland on the Tigris (once we forgot about those pesky WMDs); that doesn’t mean things will work out that way. If, as they say, the West “has learned nothing from previous genocides,” then TNR’s editors may not have learned enough from previous war advocacy.

Binge and Purge by Jon Chait: The growing conservative repudiation of George Bush is cast as either a cynical or delusional response to dropping poll numbers, the latter possibility rooted in the insistence that since conservatism is the most authentically American philosophy (or something), a president who proves unpopular with Americans must be insufficiently conservative. But the way Chait casts the shift seems plainly wrong. For one, it’s not as if the same people who were singing hosannas for Bush the loudest a few years ago are the same one damning him most loudly now, with a bill of indictiments that consists of policies that didn’t bother them previously. For example, here’s what Impostor author Bruce Bartlett told TNR before the 2004 election:

People are careful about how they say it and to who they say it, but, if you’re together with more than a couple of conservatives, the issue of would we be better or worse off with Kerry comes up–and it’s seriously discussed.

Also, while I think Chait is probably right that it’s a stretch to blame an effort to appeal to liberals for all Bush’s sins, it takes incredible chutzpah to cast the steel tariffs as pandering to “business interests” when, fairly clearly, it was
steelworker unions who pushed the hardest for them and hollered the loudest when they were repealed, and steel unions that Bush was pretty clearly hoping to court when he imposed them. Also, it’s not a good response to arguments about the political perils of pissing off the base to point out that the base continues to register rather amazingly high approval of Bush when you give them a thumbs-up/thumbs-down poll. Because every time you see that kind of base argument, it’s about mobilization, engagement, and turnout—that is, about the intensity of approval, rather than which side of the “pro” or “con” line people come down on, all things considered.

Political Pitch by Franklin Foer: A (God help us) “whimsical” piece on the links between different forms of government and success in soccer, in which Foer manages to produce almost three pages of copy that are utterly frivolous without actually being funny. I can only assume that this is one of those that worked better as a two-minute pitch in an editorial meeting than as an actual article, but (now that Foer’s top dog) there was nobody to spike it once it was finished.

Pop Up by Niall Ferguson and Samuel J. Abrams: The intriguing thesis here is that globalization tends to produce different forms of populism in countries at different stages of development: In poorer countries, where globalization attracts an influx of foreign capital, it takes a lefty form, while in developed countries where it means an influx of immigrants, you get a right-wing breed. The authors seem puzzled, though, that in many low-immigration countries you see higher levels of hostility ot immigrants than in countries where there’s much more immigration. It becomes much less mysterious if you flip the order of observations: In countries where people tend to be hostile to immigrants, you see less immigration. And of course, there’s a kind of historical lock-in you can imagine, where countries that have traditionally had lots of immigration are apt to think of themselves as a “nation of immigrants,” leaving them more willing to accept future immigrants.

Divining Divinity by Stanley Kauffman: Kauffman wonders whether the “explosive success” of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code (a phenomenon he plausibly describes as far more interesting than the book or movie themselves) is a sign of gnawing doubt or mere thirst for exposé. I tend to think it’s more like the mutation of religion into one more species of fanboyism, where once you’re invested in the characters, the most interesting thing is the fanfic. Sounds like the logical extension of protestantism to me.

The Thinking Thing by Charles Larmore: Review of a new book, The Idea of the Self, on the development of that idea in western philosophy. Larmore has an interesting thought about pomo rockstar theorists like Derrida and Foucault who proclaimed the “death of the subject”:

Must they not have been supposing that the only way we could count as selves or subjects is if we were–but this is impossible!–the autonomous authors of ourselves?