AFF Doublethink Online

The Bushies Strike Back

John McCormack — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 23:16:50 +0000

By all accounts, the first meeting of the Bush-Cheney Alumni Association was a cheerful one. “There’s no VIP section, with Harriet Miers, Ken Mehlman, and Andy Card milling about like the rest of us!,” a source told Politico of the February 26 breakfast at a Washington hotel. George W. Bush informed the 700 alumni gathered there that he’s not doing too badly for himself these days. In addition to delivering speeches for $150,000 a pop and spending more time with Laura (and Barney), the former president has found time to write a book, due out November 8. “This is going to come as quite a shock to people up here that I can write a book, much less read one,” Bush joked. True to Bushie form, no press were allowed inside the Marriott ballroom, and some attendees were furious when even this harmless quote was leaked to Politico’s Mike Allen.

But Bush-Cheney alumni really don’t have much to complain about these days. Not only is their ex-boss being vindicated for the most consequential decision of his presidency—the Iraq war—by some unlikely friends, including Newsweek and Vice President Joseph Biden, Bush-Cheney alums are doing quite well for themselves in their post-executive branch careers.

Former administration officials have become some of the most prominent and effective critics of the current administration. Just turn on the TV or open up a newspaper. The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post each have two former Bush officials as columnists: speechwriters Michael Gerson and Marc Thiessen at the Post and speechwriter Bill McGurn and deputy chief of staff Karl Rove at the Journal. Though he endures the occasional attempt by Code Pink anti-war protesters to conduct a “citizen’s arrest” of him at his book signings, Rove is now a bestselling author. Like Bush administration officials Dana Perino and Liz Cheney, Rove is also a Fox News contributor.

Though they didn’t win the legislative fight on Capitol Hill, domestic policy wonks like Yuval Levin, Keith Hennessey, James Capretta, and Tevi Troy dissected the Democrats’ health care bill and helped turn public opinion against it. The work of many of these former officials is helpfully compiled at rooseveltroom.net, a blog founded by Tony Fratto, former deputy press secretary and now president of the alumni association.

Some erstwhile Bush officials have even met success in electoral politics. Following the election of former agriculture secretary Mike Johanns of Nebraska to the Senate in 2008, Bush trade representative and OMB director Rob Portman of Ohio hopes to become the second Bushie to hold a seat in Congress’s upper chamber. Though a Democratic opponent warns Ohioans, “We need to rein in the reckless policies of the Bush-Portman administration,” Portman is making headway. His predecessor at OMB, Mitch Daniels, cruised to reelection as Indiana governor in 2008 with an 18-point victory, even as Obama carried the state, the first Democratic presidential candidate to do so since 1964. Daniels is now many conservatives’ favorite dark horse to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.

It’s not unusual for former administration officials to have productive post-executive branch careers. Talking heads James Carville and Paul Begala emerged from the Clinton administration, as did George Stephanopoulos, the host of ABC’s “This Week.” Clinton chief of staff John Podesta created an administration-in-exile at the Center for American Progress, which did its part to tear down the Bush administration and pave the way for Obama’s election. Al Gore reenergized the “climate change” campaign.

But that road was smoother for Clinton officials, who were part of an administration that had a 66% approval rating at its conclusion. What’s remarkable about the Bushies is that they went on to successful careers after George W. Bush left office with a Nixon-like 34% approve-61% disapprove rating. A year ago, some administration critics would have thought it more likely that the Bush-Cheney alumni reunion would be held at a low-security federal prison than the J.W. Marriott.

Nowhere has this change in fortunes for Bush administration officials been more evident than among national security hawks like John Yoo. A year ago, Attorney General Eric Holder decided to press forward with an investigation of Yoo and federal judge Jay Bybee for writing legal memos at the Justice Department distinguishing which interrogation methods could be used on al Qaeda terrorists. By that point, Yoo had been vilified as a war criminal by opponents and endured a number of protests at Berkeley, where he resumed teaching law in 2004.

But in the past few months the tables have turned. Yoo was formally cleared of charges on Feb. 19. By then he had already done much to clear his name in the court of public opinion, most notably in an incredibly disarming appearance on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show.” Yoo was good-natured and spoke calmly. He “skillfully deflected most of Stewart’s assaults,” as the liberal Washington Independent acknowledged. Stewart described the interview as “pretty unsatisfying.”

“I thought rather than repeat the same talking points, I would just try to treat it like a conversation and respond to what he was saying and tell my own jokes if that opportunity arose,” Yoo told me in an interview. “It wasn’t much different than teaching class. Here you’ve got this smart guy, very witty, but [he] hasn’t really prepared for class.” It’s safe to say that Professor Yoo schooled Stewart.

“How frustrating is it to talk with me?” Stewart asked Yoo at one point. The question itself was a concession that the issues Yoo dealt with were much more complicated than the black-and-white approach of many of his critics.

“First of all, let me say I don’t find talking with you frustrating, I find it many things, but not frustrating,” Yoo deadpanned.

In retrospect, how do the interrogation styles of Jon Stewart and John Conyers compare? “Well one person is clearly smarter and funnier,” Yoo says. “I’ll leave you guessing as to which one that is.”

Ironically, what enabled Yoo to resuscitate his reputation was the Obama administration’s investigation. The decision to “declassify things that were probably better kept secret,” Yoo says, gave him “a lot of freedom to speak out.” And Yoo isn’t just speaking out to defend his work at the Department of Justice. In the Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer, and other publications, Yoo has taken aim at the detention and interrogation policies of Barack Obama and Eric Holder. “I’m not surprised,” Yoo says of a recent report that Holder failed to disclose a brief he filed on behalf of terrorist Jose Padilla. “I knew he and others in the Department wanted to treat al Qaeda as criminals.”

“The thing that’s surprising,” says Yoo, “is that these guys in the department take these extreme positions on terrorism and they seem to get constantly flustered when they find out most people don’t agree with them.”

Like the decision to investigate Yoo, it certainly seems like the Obama administration’s decision to pick a fight with Dick Cheney over national security has backfired. The White House specifically scheduled President Obama’s May 21, 2009 speech on Guantánamo detainees, so that Cheney’s speech at the American Enterprise Institute would immediately follow. While the White House may have enjoyed the optics of a young, charismatic, and (then) popular president versus an old, bald, and very unpopular former vice president, Obama didn’t win the argument. Just before his inauguration, a CNN poll Americans supported closing Gitmo by a 4-point margin (51% to 47%); at the end of this March, Americans opposed closing Gitmo by a 21-point margin (60% to 39%).

Dick Cheney, along with his daughter Liz, a former State Department official, have done for national security hawks during the Obama administration what Al Gore did for environmentalists during the Bush administration, though it’s fair to say that you probably won’t see Dick or Liz Cheney star in an Academy Award-winning film any time soon.

As chair of Keep America Safe, Liz Cheney has done as much as her father to drive public opinion against the Obama administration’s controversial national security policies, such as Mirandizing al Qaeda terrorists and trying 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court in Manhattan. Keep America Safe, which Cheney founded along with the sister of a 9/11 victim Debra Burlingame and Weekly Standard editor (and my boss) Bill Kristol, has run TV and online ads hammering the Obama administration on national security issues and organized rallies to oppose civilian trials for al Qaeda terrorists.

That isn’t to say that the work of former Bush administration officials has been defined entirely by opposition to Obama’s policies. As the president deliberated how to proceed in Afghanistan, a number of former administration officials stepped forward to offer their support if Obama opted to send more troops. A number of conservatives and former administration officials—like Paul Bremer, Karl Rove, Peter Wehner, Stephen Rademaker, and David Frum—signed a letter drafted by the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) in September 2009 stating their support for Obama if he continued to pursue the strategy he had endorsed at the outset of his presidency.

“From our initial launch in March of 2009, we made clear that we supported what the administration was doing in Afghanistan,” says Jamie Fly, former Bush Defense Department and NSC staffer and now executive director of FPI. “Our first conference was on Afghanistan and planning for success” and featured Democrats like Jane Harman of California and others who supported a surge in Afghanistan. FPI’s board of directors includes foreign policy expert Bob Kagan, former spokesman for the Coalitional Provisional Authority in Iraq Dan Senor, and Bill Kristol (he’s a busy guy).

The message to the Obama administration, says Fly, is that there was and would be “broad bipartisan support if they were committed to providing these necessary resources” to win the war in Afghanistan. Fly notes that FPI has praised Obama on Iraq for extending his withdrawal timeline for 16 to 19 months. Though there’s still plenty of room for criticism. “We’ve been very critical of their apparent lack of interest in the promotion of democracy and human rights,” he says. “We’ve been critical of their Russia policy. We’ve been somewhat critical on Iran, especially their unwillingness to speak out in support of the opposition.”

Though it supports the administration on key foreign policy matters, FPI has drawn fire from the left. At its launch, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow branded FPI as the descendent of the Project for the New American Century, the defunct think tank 9/11 Truthers believe to have plotted the World Trade Center attack. Maddow’s report led to a number of nasty emails and voicemails. “Why don’t you all just go die?” is Fly’s favorite Maddow-inspired voicemail.

But despite the occasional insults of “war criminal!” hurled their way, Bush officials have been effective in influencing political debates since Obama’s inauguration. It’s pretty good to be a Bushie these days.

John McCormack is the online editor of The Weekly Standard.

Issue No. 2010-1,2

admin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Learning Channel (“a place for learning minds”) was originally conceived as PBS but with better production values, a station devoted to such high-minded fare as documentaries on animal mating behavior, the rise and fall of ancient civilizations, and the inner workings of satellites. Since the mid ’90s, however, its mission has devolved, and the new focus is on the less edifying, but decidedly more lucrative world of reality TV. The current crop of shows on TLC—now a meaningless acronym just like the SAT—runs the gamut from the horror-inducing (Toddlers and Tiaras) to the excruciatingly boring (Say Yes to the Dress, in which brides-to-be try on an endless series of expensive wedding dresses). But where they’ve hooked me (and millions of others) is in showcasing the fertile glory of large families, premiering with the tabloid fodder, Jon and Kate Plus Eight in 2007, and adding a new show roughly every year: Table for 12, Kids by the Dozen, and, my favorite, 19 and Counting. (In keeping with the directive of its title, the show has previously been called 18 and Counting and 17 and Counting.)

19 and Counting follows the lives of Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar, who are raising their 19 children on 20 acres of land in rural northwest Arkansas. A typical episode might feature the eldest Duggar son—Joshua, age 22—getting an at-home haircut from his new wife. Along the way, the family might go on a hunt for a missing pair of scissors or discuss the merits of using a trash bag as a cover-up rather than a salon cape. The most exciting part of any given episode will be getting dinner on the table. The question can’t help but spring to mind: Why is anyone watching this?

The New York Times magazine recently proposed one theory with its feature on the making of OctoMom: Me & My Fourteen Kids, a British documentary focused on the quotidian struggles of Nadya Suleman and her huge brood. Observing the family, John Bowe writes:

Suleman has boosted herself into the pantheon of multi-child, over-the-top television families so dysfunctional and pathologically exposed that they serve as a form of cathartic geek show for the rest of us…all of them willing to serve their own failings as a kind of pride-relief for the rest of us as we try, lamely, stumblingly, to raise families, pay taxes, make house payments.

This captures, in part, the strange popularity of large-family reality TV. There is certainly more than an element of the grotesque in Suleman’s story, with her sordid history of welfare dependence, plastic surgery, and mental instability. Likewise for Jon and Kate, who have shot to tabloid fame with their recent divorce and custody battles. But the happy-go-lucky Duggars, however unusual they are, don’t quite conform to this type.

Most of TLC’s “Life Surprises” shows feature families dealing with circumstances beyond their control and trying their best to live their lives as “normally” as possible. The Roloffs of Little People, Big World or the Arnolds of The Little Couple didn’t choose to be born under four feet tall, nor did Jon and Kate plan to have two sets of multiples, the latter of which turned out to be six bouncing bundles of joy. The Coles family of One Big Happy Family is desperately trying to diminish the morbid obesity that distinguishes them from the average American family. The fascination of these shows is in watching the protagonists struggle their way to some semblance of ordinary life. But the Duggars aren’t “making the best” of a weird situation—they created their circumstances, and clearly enjoy every minute of their intensely wholesome life of home-schooling, church-going, and delivering children. There is a satisfaction in watching a family who has completely figured out their particular way of life, and is proceeding, calmly and surely, to domestic bliss.

That’s not to say mundane tasks like laundry and cooking dinner don’t become fascinating when done for 20 people on a daily basis. Just to get the whole family from one place to another requires a 21-passenger bus. Clearly, the Duggars differ from the average American family with its 2.1 children, but the show’s appeal extends beyond just gee-whiz novelty. By offering their family life up to the national stage that is cable television, the Duggars have provided their viewers with an excellent tableau for almost every current debate on modern American home and family life and a gauge by which to judge our own lives, without quite allowing us to pat ourselves on the back for our superior choices.

Watching the level of coordination and sophisticated time- and resource-management that is required to execute the Duggars’ demanding daily schedule is so compelling office managers should be taking notes. How exactly does one wash and sort all those clothes and have time to do anything else? In one episode, Michelle Duggar took viewers on a tour of her laundry room and I watched, appalled, as baskets and baskets of clothes came into view, sorted mostly by size and function rather than ownership. The clothes likely never see the inside of a drawer, but instead rotate from child to washer to basket to washer and back to child again. As a young single working professional, I do one load of laundry, once a week. Every item belongs to me when I load the washer, and every item, aside from a stray sock or two, belongs to me when I unload the dryer. What for Michelle Duggar is simple household management is totally outside the bounds of my reality.

That the Duggars’ life would differ from urban singledom is hardly surprising. It is that it so immensely differs from even my childhood family life that causes such amazement. My family tallies under the average 2.1 children, but I doubt my experience deviated too much from the norm. In our house, the TV was available whenever I wanted and could be set to my desired channel, and there was definitely no one screaming, unless I was.

More so than any Martha Stewart or Nigella Lawson special—with their delectable cakes and perfect Christmas decorations—19 and Counting is domestic porn: all those people, all related to one another, all in one house, all happily interacting with each other, or having to exert considerable effort to do otherwise. The show makes you imagine the person you might have been had your family been different, had there been more people to contend with, more birthdays to celebrate, more milestones to witness, more life being constantly experienced around you. I share a close familial relationship with a very small circle of people. To extend that circle to include 18 other siblings sounds like an intensely emotional and overwhelming experience. But the Duggar children manage to remain cheerful, calm, and, most importantly, willing to share a bathroom. One can’t help but wonder: Might that person with a bigger family be a better version of yourself, in which you are patient and magnanimous to your many siblings just like the Duggars?

But it’s not only size that distinguishes the Duggar family from the mainstream, it’s also their conservatism and their religiosity. The children are home-schooled by their mother, and don’t participate in any activities that are unrelated to their family or their church. The girls wear their hair and skirts long. Their conservative brand of Baptist teaching does not allow for any physical contact between the sexes until marriage. Their oldest son Josh and his new bride Anna first kissed on their wedding day. They are now the proud parents of little Mackenzie, who is already older than at least one of her aunts and uncles.

Although Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar were always religious, and in fact met through their church, they did not always practice this more extreme form of “let go and let God.” They were married for four years before they had their first child. They then resumed using birth control, but the next time they tried to conceive, Michelle miscarried. The Duggars determined that birth control was the cause of their misfortune, and decided, as pro-life Christians, they would allow God to choose the number of children they would have. Since then, Michelle has given birth about every year and a half.

While the Duggars’ religious beliefs may be foreign to the majority of American television viewers, the show nonetheless presents a church- and family-centric way of living that appeals to even secular viewers. The Duggars don’t engage in taboo practices such as polygamy or marrying off their daughters at the age of 14. Nor are they vulgar trailer trash (despite the patriarch’s redneck name) or members of some exotic sect of Luddites—the kinds of people we popularly associate with large broods and can reject in principle. Their clothes, while plain and buttoned-up, do not look homemade but rather like they were bought in bulk at Old Navy. They don’t reject modern technology or conveniences like TV and store-bought butter. Not only do they live in a 7,000-square-foot house with nine bathrooms, they are the proud owners of a state-of-the-art industrial style kitchen with six ovens, four refrigerators, and four deep freezers. As commercial real estate owners, the Duggars had a healthy cash flow even before they became reality TV stars. Their goal may be the glorious afterlife, but they seem to be having a pretty good time during their terrestrial years as well, and in such mainstream ways that the Duggars complicate the ability of critics to get a hold of them.

19 and Counting is a favorite of online gossip sites, where the family seems to have its share of supporters and detractors in equal proportion. Many in the media have certainly found the family to be an easy whipping post, criticizing them for being nut-jobs, negligent, and too “Jesusy.” A recent blog post on the show’s TLC website updated viewers on the status of Baby 19, Josie Duggar, who was born four months premature after an emergency c-section. So far, it has over 9,600 comments. They range from adulation, with heartfelt tales of commenters’ own preemies, to outrage that Michelle would even consider having more children. (“A mother’s job is to protect her child, born or unborn,” cried on censorious commenter. “She knew very well she [was] putting her baby at risk yet she chose to do it and DO IT AGAIN! This is abuse and neglect of her parental job, it is a CRIME!!!”) The debates inspired by this portrayal of a fantasy that is by now mostly a historical throwback—the gigantic, traditional, and harmonious family—mirror in many ways the conundrums that the mainstream American family finds itself in, as domestic life gives way to two-income parents, and family time means organic take-out from Whole Foods after soccer practice.

Yet condemning the Duggars is not easy, even for their natural enemies. Feminists who would oppose the patriarchal stranglehold of raising so many children still concede, like Newsweek’s Kathryn Joyce, that Michelle Duggar appears quite satisfied with her lot in life. Still, based on the online comments, many women watch the show fairly limp with relief that they can choose not to have 19 children. Others seem to enjoy the show more for the opportunity of venting their indignation at the very idea of any woman having 19 children. One commenter describes the family as a cult who would “take women’s rights back 100 years…They are groomed to obey a man and into arranged marriages.” Women have fought hard to be viewed as more than a vessel for baby-making, to exercise agency in deciding what their reproductive limits are. For many, the headaches that result from negotiations with bosses and babysitters are worth the right to come home from work in the evening to their 2.1 children and watch the Duggars (conveniently aired at 9 p.m. on a weeknight). This affirms a lifestyle choice, but also allows one to indulge the fantasy of never again missing a parent-teacher conference because a client meeting ran overtime.

A similar dilemma faces “equal marriage” proponents, who argue that husbands and wives should make an identical investment in their work and home responsibilities. The Duggars have clearly rejected this ideal, and yet, none of the discord, bitterness, and dysfunction that equal marriage advocates predict in unbalanced couples has plagued them. Michelle, impossibly sweet and good-natured, is all deference to her husband, the family breadwinner. Michelle exercises her authority instead in scheduling household chores and educating the children. There are no power struggles because each has clearly delineated areas of responsibility. These are derived from Biblical teachings, which, when interpreted strictly, don’t leave a lot of room for discussion. Jim Bob’s role is to be the moral authority of the household and provide resources for his ever-growing family. Michelle’s role is to be the vehicle to grow the family and provide the loving support that keeps it functioning. Those who would find this maddening, myself included, can still marvel at the peaceful household dynamic it engenders.

Perhaps the most interesting debate to spring from the large-family show phenomenon is the question of a “proper” environment for children. Is it possible that all those children are able to receive the amount of love and attention from their parents they need to be happy? This pop-psychology route provides the easiest path to publicly censuring the family—it avoids the touchy subjects of their religious faith or their decision to procreate, but claims instead that theirs is a “scientifically” unhealthy situation for children. Child psychologists are asked to offer their expert opinions that there simply are too many Duggar children. A doctor recently told People magazine that, “I think that’s too many kids. From a family resource perspective, there is no way you can give the emotional and financial resources you would need to support that may children.” Much has been made of the 15-minute sign-up sheet posted in the kitchen, for use when one of the kids wants one-on-one time with their parents. Many of the interviews also question the “buddy system” the family uses, in which each older sibling is responsible for helping a younger sibling with their school lessons and generally making it through the day. Children, it is said, should not be raising children.

But even this line of attack can’t quite undermine the Duggars’ appeal. It’s true that if most contemporary families—those who struggle to find enough time for each other between school, work, and social life—had 19 children, they would not be able to properly care for them. The Duggar children, however, are home-schooled, they don’t hang out at friends’ houses, they don’t have to come home at 7 p.m. after a grueling football practice to do four hours of AP Calculus homework, and they aren’t sent away to summer camp. They may be missing out on many aspects of a typical American childhood, but they certainly spend a lot of time with their parents. One can’t help but be amazed at Michelle’s calm and good-natured parenting style. She characterizes the attitude of her home as “serene chaos,” and anyone who doubts this should tune in. Her kids are appallingly well-behaved, well-adjusted, and well-mannered.

There is a paradox when one is not allowed to watch cable TV, but lives one’s life on it. It may be true that the Duggars have sold their privacy and foregone their children’s best interests by putting them on display. Any of the growing number of families that sell their day-to-day domestic interaction as entertainment has to grapple with the heady ramifications of exposing their intimate lives for public scrutiny and evaluation.

The easiest way to doubt someone’s sincerity is to introduce money into the equation. How can we tell what’s real and what the producers decided would sell best? Can one ever have justifiable motives for appearing on a reality show? Cynicism makes us look for and hope to find elements of the “dysfunctional and pathologically exposed.” As sympathetic as I am to the Duggar family, I must admit that I am a little curious about what would happen if one of the kids decided to exercise their teenage inclination to rebel. (My money’s on 16-year-old Jinger Duggar to run away to an East Coast college, cut her hair, and become an environmentalist.)

Barring some kind of torrid Jon and Kate implosion in the near-future, time may be the only ally that large-family critics have. Maybe 20 years from now, the Duggar children will be drug-addicts and porn stars, and the costs in well-being of having too many children and inegalitarian parental roles will become clear. But maybe they’ll go on to do no worse than the average product of the secular 2.1-child household, and the Duggars, in some less public, less extreme form, will continue to pose a permanent alternative to elite fashion, seeming economic imperative, and the advice of experts.

Alexandra Squitieri is a writer living in Washington, DC.

Hunter “Doc” Hayes

Maggie Donovan and Kate Merrill — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 02:18:40 +0000

It’s 11 p.m., and Hunter “Doc” Hayes is still at work. Not that this is an unusually hectic day for him. At the age of 27, this Texas native has already accomplished more than most. At Generation America, the new coalition for people over 50 he helped launch, he spends his days in legislative battles with the Obama administration over health care, Social Security, and taxes. And while most college students spend their summers interning, partying, and playing video games, Hayes spent his as a combat medic with the U.S. Marines in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

After dreaming for years of joining the military, Hayes enlisted with the U.S. Navy just days before the 9/11 attacks. Following boot camp, he enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a pre-med studying history while regularly training for deployment. In August 2004, he was deployed to Iraq with the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines.

“I witnessed a little bit of everything,” Hayes recalls. His battalion was hit with indirect fire and mortar rounds day and night, so Hayes was constantly on edge. As a corpsman, he witnessed many of the horrors of the war first-hand tending to fellow soldiers and Iraqi civilians who had been wounded by mortars or IEDs. During one particularly tense operation, Hayes and his medical team performed life-saving surgery on a 22-year-old Iraqi woman who had been hit with shrapnel.

Yet when Hayes is asked to sum up his experience in Iraq, he immediately says it was “the compassion and care…exchanged” that made the most “lasting impact.” With his battalion, Hayes helped rebuild schools and construct water filtration systems to provide clean water for drinking and cooking. “The things we easily take for granted were often life-changing for the Iraqi people,” he says. Hayes remains optimistic about the mission in Iraq. “The U.S. has made incredible progress in Iraq,” he says, “and it is critical that we continue to do so. I can only hope that what we’ve done remains.”

Following his eight-month tour of duty, Hayes returned to Austin, graduated, and became actively involved with Vets for Freedom, a national organization of combat veterans from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. He also drifted away from his premed work, after deciding that the “health care profession wasn’t worth it.” Doctors, he says, are “demoniz[ed] for making money and wanting to do better for themselves and their families.” Instead, Hayes campaigned for 2008 presidential candidate John McCain, alongside his fellow Vets for Freedom, speaking at rallies in Texas and Washington, D.C.

In 2008, Hayes was introduced through the College Republicans to Michael Young, a retired Austin entrepreneur. Young was looking to create a conservative counter-weight to the AARP, advocating for a free-market solution to the health care crisis. And he wanted Hayes to come aboard as his new director of membership and communications.

Hayes agreed, and Generation America (Gen A) was launched in November 2009. Already, the group has tens of thousands of members. For $19 a year, Gen A, like the AARP, offers an array of benefits to its members with discounts at major retailers like WalMart and Apple, and travel deals from companies like Marriott and Hotwire. Like the AARP, Gen A will soon offer its own insurance plans. Where it differs is in the direction of its advocacy, especially on the health care bill.

For Hayes, that fight is personal. In 2001, he watched his grandfather’s health slowly deteriorate after a heart operation. A blood clot operation left a “tremendous wound” on his grandfather’s right leg, requiring the constant care of a nurse. But the family was adamant about keeping him out of a nursing home, and through sheer determination and the help of his grandfather’s at-home nurses, they did. Hayes says the support of his grandfather’s home health care providers was invaluable. “They were always willing to go the extra mile,” he says, despite being understaffed. Hayes notes that the Democrats’ bill severely cuts payments to these providers, even as it forces them to take on a much larger workload. He fears that such efforts to control costs will end in rationing, and advocates instead for consumer-driven health care. Free markets—not more government intervention—he says, are “the solution to our nation’s problems.”

If Gen A’s mailbag is any indicator, the health care battle is far from over. Many members, Hayes says, mail in their torn-up AARP cards along with their Gen A applications in protest of the AARP’s support of the bill. He was recently besieged with letters and emails from “disgruntled” former AARP members after Gen A was featured on the Fox News morning show FOX and Friends. One member told Hayes that she was joining because she was “scared to death by what our government is doing.” Another told him that the bill was “little more than rationing in disguise,” and he was ready to join “a real older person’s outfit.”

So Gen A is gearing up for round two of the fight, which probably means a lot more late nights for Hayes. Does he mind? “It’s a 24-hour a day, seven-days-a-week gig,” Hayes says. “I am passionate about the work I do.”

Maggie Donovan is an intern for the America’s Future Foundation. Kate Merrill is an AFFer in Washington, DC.

An Investment Piece

Phoebe Maltz — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 02:17:56 +0000

Ladies, do you really need another handbag? Of course you do. Just be sure and get the priciest one. Examine the stitching and the hardware. Think quality over quantity. Consider it an investment. Sure, it’s $7,000, but it’s a classic! You’ll wear it for years.

Frugality advice is, and perhaps always was, aimed at women. During the Golden Age, thrift, culinary and otherwise, was left up to housewives. Men may also have occasion to trade cash for stuff, but when we think “shopping,” we picture a woman in search of a cute new outfit.

With the recession, consumers now fall into two categories: those who can’t afford what they once could, and those who can but are ashamed to admit it. The New Frugality is thus in part what frugality has always been: the search for a good deal. But it has also become a trend, thrift-chic for appearance’s sake. Shoppers from both worlds are thus receptive to marketers who emphasize the value of what they’re selling. Since our primary way of judging value is price, every product must seem to have once cost far more than what its current tag demands.

Perhaps because of its feminine associations, pro-frugality writing resembles diet advice. And like the diet industry—eat whatever you want and still shed pounds with our new miracle diet! or eat nothing at all!—the frugality movement thrives on extremes. The latest shopping diet trend promises to abolish the need for sacrifice. Yes, you can have it all! Paying more for each item is, for this set, the route to saving big and saving the environment and the children. Holding your nose at mass-produced junk is the only decent thing to do.

The pay-more-to-save line satisfies marketers and consumers alike. Just as eco-friendly marketing consists of the same products as before (now dyed green!), the “new thrift” simply means the same full-priced merchandise now presented as a good deal. Luxury goods are now called “investments.” Even some journalists, perhaps better-paid than myself, are swayed, including one Slate blogger who denounced a designer collaboration with Target, suggesting that handmade and for the few is inherently nobler than affordable and mass-oriented.

Meanwhile, for shoppers, the recession has hardly destroyed the urge to buy. It has, however, changed the excuses shoppers provide—for themselves or others—for purchasing non-necessities. The classic—‘it was on sale’—is still with us, but ‘I’ll wear it for years’ is poised to take over. Rather than feeling bad about that five-figure accessory, women can now say they are sticking it to the low-end chains by making a purchase they can pass on to their great-granddaughters.

A more self-oriented way to justify the “investment” is the concept of cost-per-wear, or defining the cost of a garment not by its price tag, but as that amount divided by the times the garment made it out of the closet. This way, a dress can be seen not as $400 down the drain, but rather as a sensible $4 a day. Because, of course, a dress like that—a classic! —will make at least 100 trips outside. If it makes you feel better, think of it as 50 cents, because you never know.

Cheapskates might notice that this is the reverse of a favorite truism: Small purchases add up. If we’re supposed to eliminate the daily latte because of its cost over time, how does it help to think of a dress as 100 lattes all in one go?

Moreover, cost-per-wear is an all-but-impossible assessment to make except after-the-fact. At best, it’s a helpful way of ruling out purchases that are obviously bad ideas. But it’s easy enough, without resorting to division, to see why those snakeskin-print harem pants won’t work out. Most of what we buy, we imagine we’ll wear often enough to make the purchase worthwhile. There is no general rule for what gets worn daily and what migrates to the back of the closet. There are no ‘timeless classics.’ The jeans bought to last forever end up ignored, irreparably stained, noticeably dated, or the wrong size before the year is done. If higher-priced goods sometimes last longer, this is far more about the guilt we feel at having spent that on a sweater than on anything specific to the garment’s construction.

A thread of snobbery runs through the anti-chain movement. After all, only those who can afford Prada treat H&M handbags as trashcan liners. And it’s thanks to H&M and the like that women who are not well-off can look stylish without much effort. By invoking concerns about carbon footprints and labor, the better-off can feel rich and virtuous while choosing higher-end items, just as they do with local and organic food.

The rampant materialism all right-thinking educated types hope to shield their children from is understood, paradoxically, as best avoided by buying one-of-a-kind items that have meaning. As though, if you really love your Birkin bag, that’s somehow evidence that you’re not one for stuff.

Technically, clothing is not an investment in the sense of increasing in value over time. But if the only result of luxury-as-investment marketing were to confirm heiresses in the purchasing decisions they would make anyway, why should we care?

The problem is that luxury-as-the-only-moral-choice is being marketed across the board. All women are being urged to see chain stores as wasteful: the junk food version of clothing. Women without infinite means who were already overspending can now feel good about themselves for spending more on individual items.

“Fast fashion”—a term used to describe stores like H&M and Forever 21 that sell cheap, hyper-trendy designer knock-offs—conflates the approach of some with that of all shoppers. If on the whole, cheap impulse buys are turning our landfills into giant heaps of jeggings, nothing forces the individual to use scarves like paper towels. And there are some of us out there who consider it fabulous that corduroys are $30—not because this leaves an implicit $30 to spend on a second pair, but because it means less money wasted on pants. That clothing and food are so cheap these days may facilitate over-consumption, but it could just as well allow us to put more of our money towards things that aren’t clothes or food. Savings, even.

***

At its other, ascetic extreme, today’s thrift models itself once again on our society’s hopeless approach to food. If to some dieters, every calorie is cause for alarm, to some would-be savers, every penny spent demands self-flagellation.

The Great American Apparel Diet—unrelated to the clothing store whose name is conspicuously wedged in the middle—takes the thrift-as-diet metaphor all kinds of interesting places. The GAAD is a much publicized collective vow not to buy new clothes for a year. The participants? Women (and a token man) who find spending an entire afternoon not shopping for clothes a great sacrifice. Their only option is to go cold turkey.

So it’s no surprise when one by one, the participants slip up, and confess to having bought a little something. There are excuses. One woman simply couldn’t resist a coat listed at 39 percent off its original price. Another went on a spree, which she recounts in a post titled, all-caps in the original, “Bless me Father for I have sinned!” But rest assured, she’ll be wearing these acquisitions for years: “All of [my new] items can be worn dressed up, down, inside out—you get the point. Wear the jacket with jeans, black pants, white jeans, etc.”

For these women, shopping is the apple in the Garden—both temptation and sin. Already accustomed to thinking of food in terms of decadence, they adopt the same terminology and fervor to Old Navy tank tops. They cheat, they confess, and all that’s at stake are some lousy t-shirts.

Which is not to say that food’s only influence on the GAAD is analogical. If, as Mary Eberstadt writes, the new morality about nutrition has taken the form of more traditional religious taboos, the shopping diet adopts the same logic, not only rhetorically but in practice as well. One ambitious dieter takes it to the meta level, combining apparel and food diets with observing Lent. For this set, the popular dieting tip to splurge on something other than food won’t do.

Aside from the proven futility of its model, shopping-as-dieting grates because of its gender-specificity. Men, too, overeat, but The Dieter remains thigh-obsessed, chocolate-craving, and female. If we as a society can’t resist Doritos, it’s because feminism taught women that they have better things to do than cook. In the GAAD universe, as in traditional society, a woman is a creature whose main purpose in life is to resist temptation—only now instead of sex, it comes in the forms of ice cream and ready-to-wear.

Ideally, the GAAD would allow participants to forget about shopping and weight control and focus on some pursuit they consider more worthy. Occasional nods to problems greater than themselves, such as the earthquake in Haiti, hint at what might have been. Instead, the experiment provides a forum to discuss all the shopping they wish they were doing. Participants share their incessant apparel cravings, even dreams. And the clothes they crave are dull. One might imagine the temptations to be $200 jeans or sequined dresses. Instead, they pine for Land’s End.

Once shopping is banned, all of a sudden a trip to the mall is a forbidden pleasure, and the sale-rack Ann Taylor cardigan might as well be haute couture. GAAD leader Sally Bjornsen’s response to two “dieters” quitting is not to question the wisdom of the project, but to ask what mystical item lured them away. “Was it a sexy night gown? A kelly green, lulu lemon [sic] hoodie?”

The lust one finds on the site for chains not typically assumed to inspire such passion leads some to suspect the GAAD is a “viral marketing campaign” for these retailers. The many Google ads for apparel related to what’s discussed in each post suggest this isn’t so far off. And a true conspiracy theorist might question why the project sneaks the name of a popular label into its own. But the brand specificity at least feels natural, because the cravings are brand-specific. These women want Lululemon, not any old stretchy material.

The GAAD begins from the assumption that cheap, well-marketed clothes magically turn otherwise sensible women into shopaholics. Clearly, for some, clothes-shopping is a real problem, debt-wise, time-wise, or both. But what benefit is this project to them? Why gather to salivate collectively over their brands of choice?

Ultimately, the extreme “dieters” and the “investment purchase” adherents end up in the same place. Both, in their attempts at cheapness strategizing, make shopping for clothes seem more appealing, not less.

***

The third way, it seems, is a middle ground, something between a cycle of deprivation and binge-shopping and a capitulation to high-end. In Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture (Penguin Press, 2009), Ellen Ruppel Shell points out the lack of moderately priced, well-made goods, particularly when it comes to clothes. Why are our only options discount and luxury? Perhaps if a sensible mid-range existed, clothes-related neurosis could end once and for all, binging and purging alike.

Shell makes a convincing case that bargain shopping has, to the detriment of frugality, become our national pastime, and to her credit, she acknowledges that if we care for pricier items better, they will last longer, regardless of construction. Yet she also believes we should care that they don’t make things like they used to. If her argument is in part about the morality of knowing the conditions of tank-top production, it’s also about urging us to notice that the stripes on that H&M shirt don’t line up right. I’ve noticed, but I remain unconvinced that I should care. Unlike the quality of the food we put into our bodies, the way our clothes are stitched together only impacts our well-being if we choose to agonize over about such details.

Although she does not suggest we’re all fools for shunning haute couture, it’s easy to see how some would read Cheap as legitimizing the spend-more-to-save approach. If sales and outlets are a myth, the only noble thing to do before the mid-range reappears is, what, to shop full-price?

Shell alludes in her book to Emile Zola’s 1883 novel Ladies’ Paradise, which vividly describes the manipulations big stores use to move merchandise. Zola’s novel offers an ambiguous message about department stores and the small stores they run out of business, favoring economic progress, so long as conditions for workers are decent and as we acknowledge that some women—yes, even in the 19^th century—are bound to go into debt buying frivolous nonsense. Shell, however, is part of a wave of nostalgia for the small shop manned by an artisan.

Different rationales can fuel a yearning for craftsmanship. For some writers, like Shell, it’s about ethics and aesthetics. Other arguments bear a xenophobic tinge, albeit one that’s tough to prove. What does it mean to boycott Chinese goods but celebrate the purchase of Danish ones? Is the comparison shorthand for quality, labor, or environmental concerns, or part of a collective American fantasy about Nice Things coming from Europe and being produced by (native) Europeans?

The anti-bargain movement has a dark history, one Lauren Weber discusses in her book, In Cheap We Trust (Little, Brown, and Company, 2009). Discount shopping was long associated with foreigners and, in particular, Asians and Jews. Praise of small shops has, historically, been code for nativism, in the U.S. and beyond.

Racism, conscious or otherwise, may motivate some to pick Swedish goods over Chinese, or to see a shtetl peddler in the manager at Filenes. But I suspect that more still reject mass-produced out of a desire to own something expensive. Just as there’s a rapt audience for every lecture urging us to spend twice what we currently do on food in order to get only the most locally, sustainably, lovingly harvested bounty, so too will many delight in the chance to not only pay more for clothes, but to feel good about it.

Phoebe Maltz is a cheapskate living in New York.

Lessons from Right to Left

Emily Smith — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 02:17:23 +0000

In the late 1970s, conservatives found themselves seemingly cornered. The economy was in the hands of Keynesians; the radical social ideas of the previous decade had insinuated themselves into the mainstream; right-leaning scholars found themselves increasingly marginalized in the academy; and the Republican party had been disgraced by the Watergate scandal. Seeking new ideas and a road back into power, conservatives formed an innovative network of Washington-based think tanks that stood outside of the government but fed politicos, policy analysts, and ideas into it.

The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973, and the CATO Institute, founded in 1977, joined the American Enterprise Institute (founded in 1943) to provide bases from which to organize and develop conservative ideas and manpower. The results of this effort were soon to be found in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, in the halls of Congress, and finally, on the presidential campaign trail in 1980. The conservatives made a comeback.

And the effect was not merely temporary. In order to sustain the movement, they turned to the rising generation as potential leaders, establishing myriad programs to mentor and educate college students in the philosophy of conservatism. The Young America’s Foundation, which was founded in 1969 when a small group of students banded together on the campus of Vanderbilt University to study conservative ideas, grew, moved to Washington, and began sponsoring lectures on college campuses, conferences for students, and other youth outreach efforts. Heritage established its famous internship program in 1979, where interns not only perform policy research, but also learn the ins and outs of the free market, discuss figures like F.A. Hayek and Russell Kirk, and network with leading conservative figures.

In Wilmington, Delaware, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which had long sponsored promising, right-leaning students, launched the Collegiate Network (CN) in 1979 to financially support fledgling conservative publications on college campuses around the nation. As the program grew, CN began connecting their writers to national publications like Roll Call, the Weekly Standard, and National Review.

All this was instructive for liberals in the early part of this decade. Faced with a similar dilemma under the Bush Administration, they turned to the conservative movement for ideas. Where once, progressives focused on mobilizing the decentralized grassroots, they have begun to organize their policy research efforts and tap into the well of progressive youth. Organizations like the Center for American Progress (CAP), the Truman National Security Project, and others have begun to do what conservatives did back in the 1970s. They are training a young army of progressives, ready to jump into careers in the media, government, academia, and elsewhere and have their say in the political debates of this country.

Modeled partly after Heritage and ISI, the CAP was founded in 2003 by Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, John Podesta. This “think tank on steroids,” as Podesta dubbed it at the time, aimed to rethink the foundations of modern liberalism. Inspired by progressive heroes like Teddy Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr., CAP sought to champion the common good over narrow self-interest” and form policy on issues like energy, immigration, education, and health care, to quote from its website.

But it had a practical goal as well: power. As Podesta explained to the New York Times, conservatives had “built up institutions with a lot of influence, a lot of ideas. And they generated a lot of money to get out those ideas. It didn’t happen by accident. And I think it’s had a substantial effect on why we have a conservative party that controls the White House and the Congress and is making substantial efforts to control the judiciary.”

CAP alone was not able to shift the nation’s priorities, and after John Kerry’s loss in 2004, liberals saw the necessity of combating the left’s reputation for being soft on foreign policy. In the early 2000s, two American graduate students at Oxford, Matthew Spence and Rachel Kleinfeld, began wondering how liberals could re-brand themselves on foreign policy. As part of her graduate research on international security issues, Kleinfeld, who grew up in Alaska, had traveled to Indonesia, Albania, and Eastern Europe. “It became clear to me…that we faced a very significant new threat from terrorism,” she recalls. Kleinfeld concluded that there was “a whole set of [international] challenges and threats that neither side of [the] political spectrum had answers to.”

In 2005, the Truman National Security Project was founded to address those challenges and threats, but in a way that put progressive values and ideas at the forefront. “The Kerry campaign never got its wheels on national security and they really suffered for it,” says Frankie Strum, the Project’s communications director. ”There was a big gap in the Democratic Party that needed to be filled when it came to national security.”

But starting up think tanks is only one aspect of organizing the left’s political efforts. Another is training young activists. Writing in Dissent magazine in 2007, former Washington intern Ben Waxman lamented the left’s serious organizational and financial disadvantage in this area:

Although it may not be surprising that conservatives also spend more money on recruiting young people, I was shocked to discover the actual size of the discrepancy. Conservative organizations spend about five times as much as their left-liberal counterparts…But money isn’t the only problem with how internships are structured in the liberal-left community…The conservative movement is very serious about developing the intellectual foundation of its summer employees. Instead of simply assigning their interns grunt work, the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups organize an endless stream of books, pamphlets, and guest lectures to provide students with ideological resources.

Responding to this gap, the Truman Project launched its one-year fellowship program, the Truman Security Fellowship, which offers hands-on training to future progressive leaders—national security experts, veterans, policy wonks, journalists, and political staffers. “We take these fellows and their expertise and put them in the media,” says Strum. “We put them in training programs on the military or how to talk about national security in a persuasive way.”

The Project also reaches out to younger activists, bringing speakers and training programs to college campuses and holding events for student interns in D.C. during the summer. One big focus is the military. “Military 101” is a presentation given at campuses by veterans on the military’s structures, demographics, and values. One of the Project’s philosophical pillars is having a strong military to defend the country—a conviction that still leaves a sour taste in the mouths of many progressives. As Strum notes, “During and after the 1960s, when ROTCs were thrown off campuses, there grew a divide between the military and campuses and that doesn’t do anything for people. We want to bridge that gap.”

CAP also began giving thought to its youth outreach effort in 2004. In February 2005, CAP launched Campus Progress. According to David Halperin, the director of the program, progressives thought that “conservatives did a really good job in some respects in reaching out to young people, although there are a smaller number of young people who are conservative.” Still, conservatives were able to identify, train, and support them. It was high time that liberals, who had more young people at their disposal, did the same thing. Some notable Campus Progress graduates include blogger Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, author and activist Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza, and Tony Anderson, who founded the Let’s Raise a Million! clean energy campaign.

In addition to its promotion of campus activism, Campus Progress publishes an online magazine run by young journalists and headed by blogger Kay Steiger, to help budding writers get their first clips. Writing for CampusProgress.org has served as a “pipeline for getting into professional journalism jobs,” says Halperin, with former writers going on to Newsweek, Politico, and the Daily Beast. For instance, Ben Adler went on to write for Politico and is now at Newsweek; Dana Goldstein spent some time at the American Prospect before settling in at the Daily Beast and Jesse Singal currently writes for the Boston Globe. All three were former editors of CampusProgress.org.

Campus Progress provides support, too, for student-run papers, awarding grants of upwards to $3,000 to help students found and publish left-wing school papers. Like its college paper rival, CN, Campus Progress mentors student journalists, offers them networking opportunities, and teaches them the importance of reporting, as opposed to pontificating, on the issues.

In D.C., Campus Progress hosts networking and career socials, film festivals, and a national conference with big-ticket speakers, like Bill Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. “Progressivism on Tap,” a lecture series co-directed by CAP fellows John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira, provide interns and young liberal professionals with opportunities to discuss and debate progressive values and ideas.

“We are pretty optimistic that this kind of program will have an impact short term and long term,” Halperin says. Though it’s still early to tell whether these organizations will be as successful as their conservative counterparts, the fact that they are up and running is a good sign in itself for young liberals looking for institutional and financial support—and to become leaders in their political movement.

Emily Smith is a Collegiate Network Journalism Fellow at the Weekly Standard.

Full House

Alexandra Squitieri — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 02:16:11 +0000

Suleman has boosted herself into the pantheon of multi-child, over-the-top television families so dysfunctional and pathologically exposed that they serve as a form of cathartic geek show for the rest of us…all of them willing to serve their own failings as a kind of pride-relief for the rest of us as we try, lamely, stumblingly, to raise families, pay taxes, make house payments.

Alexandra Squitieri is a writer living in Washington, DC.

Game Over

Elizabeth Nolan Brown — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 02:12:40 +0000

Pickup artists (PUAs, in parlance) were first launched into mass social consciousness by Rolling Stone reporter Neil Strauss’s 2005 book, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. They reached the less literary-minded in the form of a 2007 VH1 reality series, “The Pickup Artist,” which enrolled eight male schlubs in a school of seduction taught by the “world’s greatest pickup artist,” and a star player in Strauss’s book, Erick von Markovik, better known by his nom de guerre, “Mystery.” The show ended after two seasons, but like other cultural artifacts whose symbolic properties seem to outweigh their actual content or shelf lives—Sex and the City, Studio 54, Cosmo under Helen Gurley Brown—the type is still being bandied about by cultural commentators eager to appear au courant about that evasive and tantalizing epitome of cool: youth sex culture.

The point of the “Game”—as promulgated by Mystery and his army of PUA bloggers—is simple: to bed as many nubile women as possible. Its most vocal practitioners include the bloggers “Roissy” (a.k.a. James Wiedmann) and “Roosh Vörek” (a.k.a. Daryush Valizadeh)—chroniclers of conquest, proprietors of “the neg” (a seduction technique that involves criticizing a girl you meet at a bar in order to pique her interest, knock her off her pedestal, or make her feel more vulnerable in order to up her likelihood to sleep with you), and armchair evolutionary psychologists, pontificating about “alpha male” dominance over “betas.” While there are some among them who claim the whole object of the Game is to teach men confidence so they can attract women to date or possibly marry, it’s hard to believe professional PUAs have much respect for dating, marriage, or women in general (sample Roissy maxim: “Half the battle of game is stripping a woman of her inborn self-entitlement complex”).

Given all this, one would think that socially conservative writers—particularly socially conservative women writers, those types who frequent the pages of City Journal and the hallways of the Independent Women’s Forum—would cast aspersion on this life philosophy. But traditionalists have largely lent the PUAs a sympathetic ear.

Take Manhattan Institute fellow Kay Hymowitz, writing in City Journal in 2008:

[T]he SYM (single young male) is putting off traditional markers of adulthood—one wife, two kids, three bathrooms—not because he’s immature but because he’s angry. He’s angry because he thinks that young women are dishonest, self-involved, slutty, manipulative, shallow, controlling, and gold-digging. He’s angry because he thinks that the culture disses all things male. He’s angry because he thinks that marriage these days is a raw deal for men.

It’s not that all of this isn’t a sign of impending social collapse, mind you (another tacit PUA approver, Charlotte Allen sees in Wiedmann’s blog, “a sense of impending social meltdown as the family crumbles and beta men are increasingly denied access to women”). It’s just that, well, can you blame them? Who would marry a modern woman? If today’s bright young lasses are giving it away like insert-your-favorite-metaphor here, aren’t trickery, caddishness, and moral disdain the proper response from young men? You reap what you sow, why buy the cow, etc. Besides, we can all agree it’s the fault of the feminists, and you know what they say about the enemy of your enemy.

Hymowitz goes on to lament the “post-feminist” era in which “the dating and mating scene is in chaos” due to the absence of accepted social scripts for young men and women to follow. Some women want men to ask them out on dates, others want to do the asking; some women want a man to pick up the check, others don’t. Some women are looking for a hook-up, while others are looking for “a husband, a co-parent, a sperm donor, a relationship, a threesome or a temporary place to live.” It’s almost as if any particular man interested in any particular woman would have to actually talk to her to figure out which she had in mind! Quelle horreur, of course; viva la Menaissance:

By far the most important philosopher of the Menaissance is Charles Darwin. The theory that human sexual preferences evolved from the time that hominids successfully reproduced in the primeval African grasslands can explain the mystery of women’s preference for macho—or alpha—males. At the same time, evolutionary theory gives the former wuss permission to pursue massive amounts of sex with an endless assortment of women. Finally, the emphasis that Darwinism places on natural selection encourages him to adapt to the brutal current sexual ecosystem.

Or, as Philip Weiss most reductively puts it in this New York Magazine article: “Men’s genes program them to seek many mates and try to monopolize the reproductive lives of those mates.”

What does this have to do with our PUA, you’re wondering? Everything. Sexual Darwinism and converting “beta” into “alpha males” are the rallying cry and raison’d’être of the so-called “Seduction Community.” Here’s PUAlingo.com on one alpha male technique:

Peacocking is a technique developed to get attention in busy, distraction filled environments such as night clubs. By wearing something showy like a cowboy hat or a glowing necklace, a PUA is able to differentiate himself from his competition in the club. This is a term derived from the biological behavior or peacocks and from Darwinism.

Or as Allen, in her Weekly Standard piece, writes: “Welcome to the New Paleolithic, where tens of thousands of years of human mating practices have swirled into oblivion … and Cro-Magnons once again drag women by the hair into their caves—and the women love every minute of it.”

To say that we’ve reverted, however, wouldn’t quite be a correct interpretation of the “science” behind Sexual Darwinism and the Game. The qualities that make PUAs so successful (and their women targets so willing) are not a reversion, proponents say, but an adaptation, a part of the evolutionary process.

At the core of all this alpha- and beta-speak is, supposedly, biology. The alpha is a biological term for the highest-ranking member of a community of social animals. Alpha animals are the first to eat and mate, and in some species the only ones allowed to mate. Beta or omega members who break these rules are killed or ousted.

But the ideas of “alpha” and “beta” have no real impact on human behavior post-Pleistocene. Women tend to still like attractive, intelligent, and wealthy men, but they’ll hardly starve to death or be eaten by megafauna if they choose mates possessed of other qualities, like respect for women. The survival pressure that animates the lives of orangutans, for better or worse, doesn’t determine ours. Despite drawing from the respected well of evolutionary jargon, the terms are the equivalent of Malcolm Gladwell’s “thin-slicing” or “social connectors” —descriptors steeped in scientific research but lacking any agreed-upon meaning.

Are they an apt analogy for the young single dating scene? Perhaps. But among Game enthusiasts (and the writers reporting thereupon), one finds these terms imbued with an authority suggesting concrete scientific principle. The trouble seems to begin when talk (by conservative writers and PUAs alike) about alphas, betas, and primates shifts from convenient dating analogy to prescriptive behavior.

The PUA’s trump card, to which they return to justify every assertion, is the supposed iron law of evolutionary psychology. Our behavior is driven by our genes, they explain, and our genes have programmed us for propagation at any cost. Only the deluded Pollyannas (or the axe-grinding feminists) refuse to accept this. As the song lyrics go, “You and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals/So let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.” The only sane response to this is a big So What? Wiedmann may desire be nothing more than a mammal, but the rest of us might prefer guides to human action more appropriate than the Discovery Channel. This becomes blindingly obvious when the laws of evo-psych are applied to other realms of human misbehavior, say aggravated robbery or pedophilia—both practiced, without compunction, by members of the animal kingdom and our distant forbears during the Pleistocene.

The inability of social conservatives to grasp this is regrettable. In their eagerness to bolster their worldview with the hard findings of science, they have jettisoned the very moral basis of that worldview in favor of deterministic “just-so” stories about cavemen. Hence, you get such silliness from Allen as this:

[E]volutionary psychology offers a persuasive explanation for many things that we are supposed to pretend are culturally conditioned: that the natures of men and women are fundamentally different and that, pace Naomi Wolf and the cougar-empowerment movement, women don’t get sexier as they get older, at least not on the eyes of the man sitting on the next barstool. Youth and beauty are markers of fertility. [...] Evolutionary psychology also provides support for a truth universally denied: Women crave dominant men. And it seems that where men are forbidden to dominate in a socially beneficial way—as husbands and fathers, for example—women will seek out assertive, self-confident men whose displays of power aren’t so socially beneficial.

And so it goes: traditional familial and economic arrangements are best because of our biological predisposition to them; women are better grocery shoppers because they used to be gatherers, etc. Only something as ideologically malleable as evolutionary psychology could move conservatives from lamenting “Girls Gone Wild” culture to empathizing with Tucker Max.

But PUAs and traditionalists share a common enemy, and a common justification. With kismet like this, who needs a common goal?

For Game bloggers and entrepreneurs, being analyzed and written about in serious magazines lends them a welcome legitimacy, though one at which they’ll publicly scoff (only a beta male would care about the approval of a bunch of old ladies). Here’s Wiedmann’s response to Allen’s piece:

I was asked via email by Allen to do an interview, but I had decided against it. I figure whatever I have to say about blood, sugar, sex, magik I’ll say here. Although Allen’s article turned out to be reasonable (the exception to the rule when dealing with journalists covering the topic of sex relations), most reporters will twist an interviewee’s quotes out of context according to their ideological whim or emotional vendetta. Whatever ethical strictures used to govern journalism have long since faded away in a miasma of rank partisanship and propagandistic hackery.

For a real treat, scroll down a bit into the comments and see Allen’s response, where she tries to curry favor with the Roissysphere by speaking the kids’ language, admitting her nonexistent “value on the sexual marketplace” as a woman of advanced age, and mocking her inability to do basic math. (In return, Wiedmann’s commenters scorn her for being “ugly as hell” and an “old hag.”)

For socially conservative writers, PUAs provide a way to vindicate their otherwise past-oriented views about marriage, sex, and cultural decline by squeezing them (never quite comfortably) into the framework of the cutting-edge. It’s relevance by any means necessary. And so Game devotees are transformed from an assortment of bitter and manipulative losers, deviants, and wimps into the logical response to a “feminized” culture. They are a tribute to our biological imperatives, which will surface irrepressibly from under the tight lid of political correctness and feminism. They are what the sexual revolution has produced, and their attitudes and antics will become “the new normal” if we don’t just, you know, declining marriage rates birth control no fault divorce single mothers ready abortion sex ed.

In the end, it all seems to turn (for both PUAs and certain social cons) on a paranoid conviction that, because of some heretofore unseen combination of cultural and biological circumstances, a large subset of marriageable men will be “denied access” to the wives owed them; women will either choose to go the child-rearing route alone, climb from hypergamous match to hypergamous match, or be part of an alpha males’ harem of offspring-producing females; and nuclear family life as we know it will cease to exist (this last one might not be much of a concern to the PUAs). Hymowitz has written one book already on the “marriage crisis” in America, and is working on another about the “singles crisis.” Allen cites approvingly from Occidental Quarterly contributor F. Roger Devlin, who she says “uses theories of evolutionary psychology to argue that the sexual revolution was essentially aimed at restoring primate-style hypergamy to human females and freeing women to try to capture the attention of and mate with the alpha males of their choosing instead of remaining chaste until their early marriage to a decent and hard-working beta.”

But it’s a fear that has little basis in reality. It has come to be the requisite point in every article of this nature to point out that the educated classes these days get married at roughly 1950s rates, get divorced less than their uneducated counterparts, and raise better-adjusted and more intelligent children. Hymowitz herself notes that, “The old-fashioned married-couple-with-children model is doing quite well among college-educated women. It is primarily among lower-income women with only a high school education that it is in poor health.” But most Americans will eventually marry, and the total number of married couples is higher than ever.

Commenting on the Postmodern Conservative blog, Samuel Goldman writes:

Women are attracted to the men they’re attracted to, and not attracted to those they aren’t… So what’s left in the end is the old argument that people don’t get married the way they used to. Which is true, and serious, and has almost nothing to do with Tucker Max.

I think that about sums it up.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown is a writer living in Brooklyn. She blogs at elizabethnolanbrown.com and brooklynhomecompanion.com.

All Camped Out

Rita Koganzon — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:35:42 +0000

“Glee,” Fox’s hot new musical comedy, is set in a small town in western Ohio, and that is the source of everyone’s woes. Viewers should, of course, know better than to ask what specifically is wrong with small towns in western Ohio. What isn’t wrong with them? They’re bleak, boring, intolerant dead-end streets. The inhabitants of such places love football, marry their high school sweethearts, carry their teenage pregnancies to term, and while away their adult lives as assistant managers at “Sheets ’N Things,” or, worse yet, as high school Spanish teachers. The only thing for thinking people to look forward to in these prisons is finally escaping them for someplace where their talents will finally be appreciated and Glenn Beck won’t be blaring from the living room. And such thinking people, sometimes embodied as TV critics, have found in “Glee”’s cloying combination of underdog elitism and progressive cynicism a ballad that speaks right to their hearts.

These are the tired and tiresome tropes on which “Glee” is built, and the show reveals its elitism early on. In the pilot episode, Finn (Cory Monteith), the popular captain of the football team with a secret singing talent, joins the Glee Club, much to the derision of his teammates. When they demand that he stop hanging out with the club’s loser members, he retorts, “We’re all losers! Everyone in this school. Everyone in this town. Out of all the kids who graduate, maybe half will go to college, and maybe two will leave the state to do it.” Going out of state for college—that is the kind of success that “Glee” affirms. One might recall that Ohio is home to at least a dozen respectable colleges, but that would be completely beside the point. College here is not about education—it’s about status. The narrow, dull, cowardly person—the “loser”—stays home for school, but the person who rejects parochial attachments and renounces the small-mindedness of his neighbors in order to pursue prestige far and wide, this is the kind of person who is an example to us all.

The only problem with this view is that small-town Ohio seems, despite the repeated insistence of “Glee”’s characters, like a pretty exciting place. The school’s arts program is incredible even by wealthy suburban standards; it can apparently afford a full band and multiple costume changes for each of the club’s performances; a short-lived male a capella group becomes an improbable hit; and it takes hardly any convincing to get that popular archetype of hypermasculinity, the football team, to recruit a flamboyantly gay kicker and perform a dance to “Single Ladies” on the field—to the wild applause of the entire town.

“Glee” is not the only show that has found itself trapped between the conflicting imperatives of deriding the narrowness of small towns, and creating an interesting plot within its self-imposed constraints. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” also featured a miraculously expanding small town whose only landmark was a single all-ages club in the show’s first season, but was discovered to be home to an entire University of California campus by its fourth.

But “Buffy” took a different view of its setting—its stifling narrowness was only a matter of perception. The show’s antsy adolescent cast felt it more acutely at the beginning, but the real culprit was their own teenage ennui and the oppressiveness of high school social life, which would have pained them in equal measure had they grown up in nearby Los Angeles. In reality, Sunnydale was very nearly the center of the world, located as it was over the Hellmouth, out of which regularly emerged demons who threatened apocalypse, and the town seemed to grow as the characters discovered their place in it. Everyone in “Buffy” thought they wanted nothing more than to get out of Sunnydale, but all of them ended up staying out of a sense of obligation and attachment (and, obviously, the exigencies of plot continuity).

Such charity towards rootedness is hardly to be found in “Glee,” at least so far. Western Ohio is not only suffocating to the teenage members of the Glee Club, but also to the adults around them, who are, except for their age, almost indistinguishable from the students. They are all damaged people who have made Bad Life Decisions—the club’s coach Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) impetuously married his high school sweetheart before realizing she’s a manipulative harpy (Jessalyn Gilsig); the OCD guidance counselor (Jayma Mays) agrees to marry the fungus-infested football coach in an effort to forget her crush on the married Mr. Schuester, the cheerleading coach (Jane Lynch) uses her fiendishness to mask the pain of romantic rejection. For adults, this is a satire on soap opera, but what is soap opera for adults is didactic after-school special for its younger audience. (The show’s popularity among kids is attested by its three nominations this year for the Teen Choice Awards.)

Indeed, one episode features the high school re-enrollment of a washed-up alcoholic former Glee Club star (Kristin Chenoweth) who behaves even more childishly than the students, plying them with alcohol and pornography. The premise is uncannily reminiscent of Amy Sedaris’s old late-night show, “Strangers with Candy,” which was straightforwardly and unapologetically camp. “Glee” is in large part camp as well, which is what underwrites its mockery of “small town values,” its stylized, overdrawn characters (the cheerleaders and athletes spend so much time in their uniforms that they become their uniforms, a throwback to MTV’s excellent ’90s caricature of adolescence, “Daria”), and its over-the-top flamboyance. But it is a confused brand of camp, trying at once to send sincere messages to kids and to wink at adults.

The show’s main contradictions grow out of the pregnancy of the head cheerleader, Quinn (Dianna Agron), girlfriend of—you guessed it—the quarterback of the football team, Finn. The catch is that this is Small Town America, so the school’s most popular couple is also its biggest proponent of chastity, and heads up the most popular club—the celibacy club. In the second episode, we get a glimpse of a club meeting in which the whole ruse is exposed as a female conspiracy to sexually manipulate and shame the males—“It’s all about the teasing, not about the pleasing” is the girls’ motto.

It’s all good campy fun until Rachel (Lea Michele), the self-important Glee Club diva and speechifying representative of Real Adolescence, turns to the celibates and offers this bizarrely-placed PSA: “Did you know that most studies have demonstrated that celibacy doesn’t work in high school? Our hormones are driving us too crazy to abstain…The only way to deal with teen sexuality is to be prepared!” Ostensibly this is aimed at the youthful audience, who are presumed to have missed the writers’ comic wink about the real motives behind abstinence education because they still need to be told the facts of life. But the facts of life according to the writers are preposterous—sex is likened to an unprovoked natural disaster, say, an asteroid falling straight out of the sky. If the ideal of television sophistication is to tell two different stories in the same show—the sincere, PC kids’ tale of peer pressure and puberty, and the devilish adult mockery of such high school tropes—“Glee” manages only to find the untenable middle ground between the two—the sincere mockery of high school loserdom. And so we learn that the purpose of contraception is to thwart the evil schemes of women, who are always looking to impute paternity to the nearest patsy.

Since “Glee” wants to show up abstinence, Quinn must fall victim to that ubiquitous scourge of ’80s after-school specials—the unplanned teen pregnancy. She tells Finn he’s the father although they’ve never had “complete sex” because she prefers him to the real father, Finn’s good-for-nothing best friend and teammate, Puck (Mark Salling). The last stand of Small Town Values comes when Quinn refuses to consider an abortion, a decision we’re supposed to believe is not only disadvantageous, but positively immoral. “I don’t agree with the choice you’re making, but you’re gonna need Glee. You have seven months of your youth left; you should enjoy it,” Rachel tells her.

But here camp gets in over its head. Susan Sontag, in her classic essay on the genre, wrote that, “It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical.” Camp can fuse the wife-swapping soap opera and preachy after-school special into a playful stylized musical, but it can’t also presume to teach anything about love or childbearing, or even sex ed. It can’t skewer touchy issues like disability (the cheerleading coach counts up the Glee Club’s members as “five and a half—one’s a cripple”) and then subject its audience to straight-faced treacle in a Very Special Episode informing us that disabled people have feelings too.

For adults, “Glee” is a classic campy satire (set to music) about manipulative women who use the strictures of monogamous relationships, lies, sex, and babies to keep men under their thumbs. But it intends a different, more sincere message for its younger viewers, and it can’t quite keep the two aims distinct. The result is condescension and muddle. The New York Post’s Robert George has criticized the show’s portrayal of women, claiming it sends “the message that the devious gender will use every trick to lure and trap its mate.” George is wrong to think the show is serious, but he’s hardly to blame for confusing the sincere and satirical, the moralizing and the cynical.

Perhaps the most emblematic moment of “Glee”’s identity confusion came after the touchy-feely disability episode aired, when the show’s co-creator Ryan Murphy told the Los Angeles Times that, “This episode is the turning point for the show…Writing this made me feel the responsibility of showing the truth of the pain that outcasts go through… If anything else, I hope kids who are that age can see that episode and maybe realize how hard it is for some people that they make fun of or tease.” And, with that, Wednesday evenings on Fox have become home to reruns of “The Facts of Life” with a few snappy musical numbers.

Rita Koganzon is associate editor of Doublethink.

Issue No. 2009-4

admin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Christopher Caldwell begins and ends his Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West by evoking Enoch Powell. In 1968, Powell, a British Tory parliamentarian, warned that his nation might be “busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre” by permitting, indeed encouraging, an excess of immigration, particularly Muslim immigration.

Powell’s story captures the dilemma faced by anyone who expresses concern about the growth of Muslim immigration in Europe. His demographic projections have proven spectacularly accurate: Powell predicted that Britain’s non-white population would grow from the 1968 figure of about 1 million to 4.5 million by 2002; the actual figure for the latter year was 4.6 million. But while he may not have been in the wrong factually, there was bigotry in his speech, and he paid for it, forced to resign his position in the Tory leadership.

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West By Christopher Caldwell Doubleday, 432 pp., $30.00By writing on this topic, Caldwell himself runs the risk of being remembered, like Powell, as at best a clever bigot. Sure enough, one of his first reviewers, writing in the New Humanist, begins his essay with a comparison of Caldwell to Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, a racialist, anti-immigration advocate prominent in the 1920s and ’30s.

But Caldwell is no provincial, xenophobic Cassandra. Rather, he is, undeniably, a kind of cosmopolitan. Caldwell lives in America, but writes for perhaps the most influential newspaper in Europe, the Financial Times. In his book, he moves seamlessly through sources in French, Spanish, German, and Dutch. He meditates on Homeric hospitality, the bleak picture of European moeurs drawn by French novelist Michel Houellebecq, and offers a careful and extended reading of the writings of Tariq Ramadan, Islam’s foremost spokesman on the continent. Caldwell’s work testifies to a cosmopolitanism bred by rich knowledge of particulars rather than the easy generalizations that assure us all globalization is to the good.

Too often, garden-variety cosmopolitanism is simply patriotism inverted—an unthinking preference for all things foreign or global, born of the desire to fancy oneself a morally superior citizen of the world. Caldwell, however, evinces a deep appreciation of the particular, competing goods honored and cultivated on the two sides of the Atlantic, and is animated by the desire to identify and preserve the best aspects of both of these forms of Western culture. This makes Caldwell’s cosmopolitanism distinctive: It is a conservative cosmopolitanism.

In cultivating this perspective of conservative cosmopolitanism or enlightened patriotism, Caldwell follows in the footsteps of the greatest of all transatlantic observers, Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville partook of the cosmopolitanism that liberates from national prejudices without ever allowing cosmopolitanism to become a prejudice of its own, showing a deep appreciation for the virtues of American democracy without ever compromising his basic, French loyalties.

One sees a similar attitude manifested in Caldwell’s discriminating appreciation of the American and European versions of Western universalism. As societies informed by the Western philosophic tradition, both America and Europe are oriented around standards that claim to be universal or natural. But their relation to these standards is decidedly different. Universalistic, natural-rights philosophy has become a concrete way of life in America; not perfectly, to be sure, but to the degree that a Hawaiian-born son of an African man and a Kansan woman can become our president. For Americans, reverence for the rights-based creed articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is what Abraham Lincoln called “the electric cord” that replaces blood and ancestry to bind Americans together.

The European nations all have their modern professions of faith, more or less similar to our own, but those statements of universalistic principle are far less definitive of their national identities. European national identities are formed as much by history, religion, language, and race as they are by declarations of rights. As Caldwell points out, “Three-quarters of the ancestors of contemporary Britons and Irish were already present in the British Isles 7,500 years ago.” Rather than forming a people defined by shared allegiance to universalistic principles, Europe has remained a continent of particular peoples open to the universal, but never willing to adopt one particular interpretation of it as the center of their identities. In America, the universal is a creed; in Europe, it remains, to a large extent, a question.

Caldwell’s close acquaintance with and clear affection for Europe gives his book an acute sense that there is something worth conserving, something that is on the verge of being lost in the present waves of immigration. “The rest of this book will ask whether you can have the same Europe with different people,” he writes. “The answer is no.” But to conserve is not simply to defend the status quo; indeed, preserving current immigration policies will only exacerbate the problem. Europe will have to change if it is to conserve. To preserve its identity as a Western society, open to the universal, it will have to move toward an American interpretation of Western openness.

One of the advantages of American society is that it offers a clear answer to the problem of immigration. For an immigrant, it is obviously easier to assimilate to American society, which has been defined for 400 years by the ways of immigrants and the children of immigrants, living out the American creed in the mobile rough-and-tumble of a commercial democracy. Europe is a tougher nut to crack: How does one assimilate in a country where many of the natives can trace their ancestry back 7,500 years?

Thus, for European societies to become more successful at assimilating immigrants, they will have to become more like America. As Caldwell observes, for Europeans, “Immigration is Americanization.” Caldwell thus puts his finger on an important difference in perspective: For a Frenchman, transnational forces such as immigration, NATO, Anglo-Saxon liberalism, and the European Union work in concert to dissolve the sovereignty of his ancient nation, and America is frequently seen as the symbolic head of these forces. Thus, while American observers, particularly conservatives, tend to think we have more in common with the traditional nation-states than with the internationalizing E.U., to the French, the E.U. is an Americanizing institution. It’s no accident that many of the E.U.’s strongest proponents, such as Guy Verhofstadt and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, argue for a “United States of Europe.” To make assimilation more possible requires Europeans to choose their trans-cultural Europeanism—which seems to many a step in the American direction—over their historic national identities.

* * *

To become more American, however, is not simply to become more open. It is also to wholeheartedly embrace a modern liberal creed, presenting new arrivals with a stark choice between assimilation and exclusion. As Caldwell points out, “America may be open in theory, but in practice it exerts Procrustean pressures on its immigrants to conform.” One aspect of this is our penal system, which currently holds a full fourth of the world’s prison population, of which about 25 percent are non-U.S. citizens. According to Caldwell, the evolution in our penal code since the 1970s, which has made offenses more numerous and penalties more severe, ensures that those immigrants most recalcitrant to assimilation do their assimilating behind bars.

At present, Europe has the opposite problem. In France, entire neighborhoods have become zones de non-droit, “lawless zones,” where the police simply do not go. Rather than demanding that immigrants conform or go home, Caldwell suggests, Europe has allowed the development of “spaces of Sharia.” There are signs, however, that things are changing, as right-leaning, tough-on-immigration political figures rise all over the continent. Here, Caldwell offers an instructive comparison between the murdered Dutch politician, Pim Fortuyn, and his French counterpart, President Nicolas Sarkozy. Fortuyn’s politics were a strange brand of European conservatism, “a kind of tribalism, expressed in the language of diversity.” He sought to conserve “the attainments of postwar tolerance” for those who now enjoy them against the encroachments of Muslim newcomers who demand tolerance from others but are often intolerant themselves. Caldwell calls Fortuyn’s politics “tribalism” because Fortuyn spoke for the tribe of the decadent against the tribe of the fanatical: He did not speak the language of abstract principle and equality before the law.

Sarkozy, by contrast, has much in common with American conservatives. He is an ardent believer in the French Republic, and insists that “the Republic and democracy are much stronger than we realize.” The French veil law, which bans all religious symbols from schools, although not directly his work, typifies his approach: It is a policy clearly aimed at the veil, but, because it comes in a legally neutral form, it forces all of French society to change so as to compel immigrants to assimilate. Sarkozy believes in the “values of the Republic” and insists that Muslims adopt them. “At the same time,” Caldwell writes, “Sarkozy warned the French that their problems with immigration and the new, multiethnic society would abate only if they accepted that the newcomers who had come were in France to stay.” His is a modern, democratic—and American—approach.

Indeed, the French sometimes call Sarkozy “l’Americain.” Like Americans, he is hopeful, forward-looking, and energetic. He jogs. France, and Europe generally, could use such an injection of American energy and hopefulness. As Caldwell writes, among Europeans, “there is a sort of sad sack, hang dog attitude towards European culture, a kind of loss of confidence.” This attitude is understandable: How could one live in the land of Molière and Louis XIV and not believe that his country’s greatest glories were in the past? At the same time, declinist fatalism is enervating, as Europe’s low birth rates attest.

Caldwell, in good American spirit, is no fatalist. Europe’s immigration problem is “a problem of will,” and as such, it can be fixed. On his account, “the only proven solution” is “to become more like America.” Europe should both accept its fate as a multicultural society and muster the will to regulate immigration effectively; it should articulate a definite, pan-European creed to facilitate assimilation; it should summon up a bit of American can-do spirit so as to secure its future, rather than indulging in backward-looking guilt and nostalgia.

Such a path might indeed give Europe a much-needed revivification, and allow it to retain its character as an open, Western society. But it would be a path with real cost—for native Europeans, for Muslim immigrants, and for Americans who love Europe. The French philosopher Pierre Manent has argued that “the competition of a limited number of comparable political bodies in the same zone of civilization,” such as that found in the long reign of the European nation-states, “is particularly propitious for historical creation.” As Manent acknowledges, the competition between Europe’s nation-states included its wars and its hatreds, but that rivalry also gave us the remarkable achievements of everything from French and German philosophy to English and Dutch republicanism. No European had to go far to encounter other human beings neither incomprehensibly different nor cloyingly similar to himself, in the light of whose ways he might better appreciate the benefits and defects of his own ways. The smallest of the continents was therefore the most intensely cosmopolitan.

From a greater distance, Americans have also enjoyed the privilege of intra-Western rivalry and friendship. Generations have discovered, in crossing the Atlantic and visiting these ancient societies, both the benefits of American mobility and the costs of American rootlessness. Americanization would probably be good for Europe, particularly if the alternative is, as Bernard Lewis wryly suggested, that the Europe of the year 2104 “will be part of the Arabic west, of the Maghreb”—a prospect that one may find distasteful without bigotry, just as one may love America but be distressed by the sight of a McDonald’s in Paris or Kyoto. Be that as it may, making Europe more American will leave us with a less rich west, a prospect no one—American, European, or Muslim—should relish.

Perhaps that is why Caldwell’s book, for all the wit and liveliness of its prose, makes for a melancholy read. If genuine cosmopolitanism entails awareness of the real and competing goods available in political life, one would rarely view fundamental political change as unqualified improvement. Awareness of competing goods, however, need not be a recipe for passivity. The conservative, Burkean prudence evoked by Caldwell’s title combines “a disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve,” categories that become less exclusive in the face of acute political problems, when innovation becomes the only means of conserving the best of the old order. Reflections on the Revolution in Europe leaves one hoping that Europe will rouse itself to meet its demographic challenges, but aware that the changes it will have to make will not be all to the good.

Benjamin Storey is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Furman University in Greenville, SC.

What’s Your Story? Matt Continetti

Emily Smith — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:14:05 +0000

Matthew Continetti is not afraid of controversy. He gave Republicans indigestion in 2006 when he took aim at the incestuous relationship between lobbyists and the GOP in The K Street Gang (Doubleday, 2006). And now three years later, he’s got another hot story on his hands, The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star (Sentinel HC, 2009).

So he isn’t a little concerned about the coming reactions to Persecution, a full-throated defense of perhaps the most polarizing politician on today’s political stage? Continetti shrugs. “I don’t read reviews. I don’t watch myself on TV. I don’t Google myself,” he says. “I’m really not interested in what people’s reactions are to me. Some people will like it, some will hate it.”

With his argyle sweater and black-frame hipster glasses, Continetti doesn’t seem like the type to ruffle feathers. Sitting in a coffee shop, this 28-year-old associate editor of the Weekly Standard explains that despite the highly politicized subjects of his books and articles, writing—not politics—is his real passion. Political journalism was simply “a way to get paid writing.”

As a precocious 12-year-old in Springfield, Virginia, Continetti spent his Saturday nights “watching ‘The McLaughlin Group’” with his parents. He was well on his way to becoming a full-on news junkie, devouring Slate, the Atlantic, and Andrew Sullivan.com. At Columbia University, where he majored in history, he discovered National Review—“Jonah Goldberg: he’s really crucial to me”—and his future employer, the Standard.

But Continetti didn’t consider himself a conservative yet. That didn’t stop him from writing his first op-ed—about a series of campus suicides in fall 2000—with a distinctly conservative theme. In the pages of the Columbia Spectator, he argued that “Columbia’s rejection of the in loco parentis philosophy” could have something to do with the campus’s high suicide rates. Unhappy college students, thrown into a city not exactly known as nurturing, had virtually no source of authority or community to help them find their way.

The September 11 attacks cemented his move rightward. Seeing the “moral equivalence on the part of the left—people making arguments that the attacks were a result of blowback and that saying it’s understandable why these terrorists hate us,” he says, “sealed the deal.”

“I’d stumble home from the bars after going out, and the first thing I would do before going to bed was visit the [Standard’s] website to see what the new story was. I really wanted to work there.” And sure enough, on the night of George W. Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address, Continetti was offered a year-long Collegiate Network journalism fellowship at the Standard, which became a full-time job.

Looking back, he says, “I wanted to be David Brooks,” who was a senior editor at the time. Like Brooks, he saw himself primarily as a reporter-essayist. “It’s one of the reasons I wanted to work at the Standard: He was there. Then I showed up, and he left three weeks later.”

But Continetti couldn’t be too disappointed. He got assigned his first piece for the magazine—a profile of General Wesley Clark during the 2003 presidential primaries—when the editor who had previously covered the general “didn’t feel like writing about him again.” And the contract for The K Street Gang fell into his lap after another Standard writer, Andrew Ferguson, passed it up: “Andy had already signed papers to write his book on Lincoln [Land of Lincoln]…At that point, I was 23, and again, had no clue what I was doing.”

The K Street Gang was a mixed success for Continetti. While reviews were generally positive, the Wall Street Journal thumped the book for its lack of “skillful reporting.” “If Mr. Continetti interviewed a single human being in the course of writing The K Street Gang,” the reviewer wrote, “there is no evidence of it…Mr. Continetti may have produced the first example of a new journalistic genre: the Nexposé.” A review in the Washington Post, though more admiring, echoed the Journal’s complaint. Continetti was largely unfazed by the criticism: “I was simply pleased that the book came out period.”

The K Street Gang certainly raised his profile as an up-and-coming conservative pundit. His byline began appearing in the pages of mainstream outlets like the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times; the New York Times featured him a 2008 campaign blogger alongside his hero Brooks; and NPR tapped him as a political analyst.

As he followed the twists and turns of the ’08 campaign, Sarah Palin, then-governor of Alaska, naturally came to his attention. In Persecution, Continetti describes her as the standard-bearer for the “new populism,” the revolt against the coastal establishment elite. “Palin represents everything liberals dislike about a certain form of American and a certain way of living in America,” he explains. “[She] cuts against what most people in D.C. and New York think is acceptable.”

While Continetti is hesitant to forecast Palin’s political future, he has no doubt she will give her opponents a run for their money. “She has graduated to an interesting form of political power, the power of celebrity,” he notes. Her new book, Going Rogue, “was a number one bestseller weeks before it was published. She changed the direction of the national healthcare debate by a mere mention of death panels. She’s the most popular politician on Facebook after Obama.”

And even in the media, Continetti detects a slight shift in Palin’s favor. “The reaction to her resignation was not monolithically bad,” he says. “Once people who are exposed to her…actually talk to her, become familiar with her accomplishments and realize that she’s not a Bible-thumping dogmatic ideologue, they begin to respect her.”

Continetti is already thinking about his next book, but has “no firm plans” yet as to its subject. Perhaps the 2012 elections will give him more fodder. Continetti is fond of quoting an old adage in British politics: “Oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose elections.” The main challenge for conservatives, he says, is stopping Obama. “I don’t want this country to look like New York or New Jersey or California,” he says. How about Alaska? As early as 2012, Continetti thinks a certain firebomb from Wasilla will make a bid for the presidential ticket. Her chances? “Better than you think.”

Emily Smith is a Collegiate Network Journalism Fellow. Photos by Katherine Ruddy.

Conservative Cosmopolitan

Benjamin Storey — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:06:18 +0000

* * *

Benjamin Storey is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Furman University in Greenville, SC.

Average Janes

Helen Rittelmeyer — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:05:36 +0000

Blame Edward Bok. When he acquired Ladies’ Home Journal in 1889, it was a modest little rag of household tips and advice to the lovelorn. Bok smartened things up by publishing Jane Addams on Hull House, Bernard Baruch on wartime thrift, and the first celebrity profiles of the day: playing tennis with Sarah Bernhardt, say, or dinner at Herbert and Lou Hoover’s house. Bok got the better class of readers (and, more important, advertisers) he was aiming for, and in 1903, Ladies’ Home Journal became the first magazine to have more than a million subscribers.

Bok was a man of ambition, but his ambition was not literary. LHJ’s more serious pieces were never a patch on the Atlantic or McClure’s—both of which, let it be said, published women writers. The magazine’s literary style was patronizing, so much so that real women of letters wouldn’t touch it. Elizabeth Bancroft Schlesinger, after whom the women’s history library at Harvard is named, registered her contempt in the New Republic: “That they [women’s magazines] are popular no one can deny, and therefore one’s surprise is all the greater at the triviality of their contents.” Mary Ritter Beard, accomplished wife of Charles A., summarized the content of women’s magazines thus: “Fashion plates, fashion articles, society gossip, tepid fiction, bloodless sentimentality, Cinderellas, Fairy Princes, directions for the use of cosmetics.”

As for politics, Bok’s were progressive, certainly, but in the most tedious way—see his campaign against the use of heron feathers in ladies’ hats. When he wrote articles on sex (“Seven years ago, the idea of sex education was a tabooed subject . . .”), he wasn’t even trying to peddle transgression. For him, it was just one more household tip.

By the time Bok retired from LHJ, the women’s magazine had come to stand for suburban boosterism, bourgeois sentimentalism, and the middlebrow sensibilities of women who were smart enough to want opinions but not smart enough to have ideas.

Women’s websites have replaced women’s magazines, but, otherwise, not much has changed.

* * *

When Salon started a “cheeky new women’s blog” in October 2005, it promised that “Broadsheet will be taking the ladies seriously.” Slate’s XX Factor blog, launched two years later, spawned the grander women’s site DoubleX (since reduced to a mere section of Slate), which likewise claimed to have “an approach that’s unabashedly intellectual.”

Well, maybe. Each of the two sites publishes good work on occasion, but, for the most part, these fem-blogs are by turns chatty, unserious, hysterical, and saccharine—all the stereotypes about women writers that, in a perfect world, they’d be trying to undermine. To give two examples from the summer of 2009, consider first this Broadsheet post by Kate Harding about food guru Michael Pollan and Julia Child:

Child, argues Pollan, demonstrated that “cooking approached in the proper spirit offered a kind of fulfillment and deserved an intelligent woman’s attention. (A man’s, too.)” And even Simone de Beauvoir said whipping up pastries could involve “revelation and creation”—a statement Pollan characterizes as “a bit of wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen.” Oh, those thoughtless feminists! I wasn’t around in the ’60s, but I’m guessing they made ridiculous, man-hating arguments like, “Dude, Julia Child gets paid to cook.” . . . And in most homes, housewives weren’t mastering the sensual, meditative art of French cooking but making the same few starchy, fatty, labor-intensive dishes over and over for no pay, to the exclusion of being able to consider whether they might prefer some other form of fulfillment befitting an intelligent woman.

It’s all there in this short excerpt—the cheap sarcasm (“Oh, those thoughtless feminists!”), the adolescent vocabulary (“Dude, Julia Child gets paid to cook”), the intellectual laziness (cooking is repetitive, not very stimulating, and only an outlet for creativity if you make it one—like most jobs). The headline for the post was a cheap shot, too: “Michael Pollan Wants You Back in the Kitchen.”

On the more sentimental side, there’s this post from XX Factor’s Bonnie Goldstein on naming her late-in-life baby:

I told my husband that we should split this decision: he could choose his son’s first name, provided I could choose the last—mine. He looked so crestfallen I immediately took it back. Our son became Nathan Howard Grady and I can’t imagine him being called anything else. It turns out how we arrive at what we call ourselves, has a lot to do with who we are.

As one final piece of evidence, here is a list of the two blogs’ posts on a single day this summer, July 30. Broadsheet’s five posts were about polyamory, feminist porn, celebrity look-alike sperm donors, a Facebook-style site for female writers called SheWrites, and a study showing that women are more likely than men to die of complications from heart surgery. XX Factor looked at “fat acceptance,” misogyny in sports journalism, a T-shirt with lesbian moms on it, shoe-throwing protesters, and why texting is okay when you’re driving alone but not when your kids are in the car. The shoe-throwing, at least, was news.

Where is the “unabashedly intellectual” approach here? Is this what Broadsheet means by “taking the ladies seriously?”

* * *

These lists, and the two representative posts, are all good for a laugh—polyamory, feminist porn, and fat acceptance in a single day?—but they don’t capture the real problem with women’s blogging as a genre. It’s possible to write interestingly about body image, sperm donation, or your foibles as a mother. Caitlin Flanagan and Virginia Postrel have done it, and one of these days Sandra Tsing-Loh might.

Indeed, the chance to offer a fresh take on these topics is probably what an author has in mind when she joins a women’s blog in the first place. Men have written great prose about fast cars. They have turned boxing, which is pretty dumb, into a metaphor for the human condition. It’s a stretch to take baseball as seriously as some writers do, and yet Bart Giamatti pulled it off beautifully. Why shouldn’t we give the same credit to women’s more mindless pursuits—even fashion and celebrity gossip?

No reason at all, yet women’s blogs never seem to pull it off. There are women who blog well—Megan McArdle, Ann Althouse, and, oddly enough, Edward Bok’s great-granddaughter, Hilary Bok—but something about women’s group blogs makes them inevitably become Ladies’ Home Journal with a liberal dash of feminist outrage. Why do they always end up looking like amateur hour in an amateur’s medium?

Not because women can’t write. However, some women can’t write, and women’s blogs certainly do have contributors who probably couldn’t hack it in the blogosphere without a leg-up from their gender and the automatic insight it is thought to lend examinations of the female condition. While that’s a plausible belief, the inevitable result is a forum that focuses—nay, obsesses over—“women’s issues” as articulated by rather pedestrian women writers. If a woman is smart enough to make it as a writer outside the women’s blog ghetto, she very often does, particularly if she can write well about topics of interest to a general audience—as McArdle, Althouse, and Bok all have.

Still, even if some of these women are affirmative-action hires, most of them aren’t. Hanna Rosin is a serious journalist. Meghan O’Rourke, founding editor of DoubleX, is also poetry co-editor of the Paris Review. Kerry Howley is a contributing editor at Reason.

But even smart women sound stupid when they don’t know what they’re doing, and that’s the real problem: The women who write for these blogs don’t have a clear idea of what the mission of a women’s blog ought to be.

Is it supposed to be about writing in a feminine style, providing a safe space for writers to employ all the distinctive quirks that male editors, in their ignorance, won’t let women writers get away with? That quickly turns into an excuse for sloppy and unprofessional writing. To name one bad habit, women’s blogs are full of chatty parentheticals like “double standard much?” and “misogyny alert!” There’s also quite a bit of “I think” and “I feel,” and not enough old-fashioned declarative statements.

Is it about highlighting topics important to women but not men? That seems to have resulted in rehashing the same tired subjects over and over—an eternal lament about body image, breastfeeding, and birth control. When general interest magazines like the Atlantic take up these topics, as they frequently do, they usually insist that their writers have something original or provocative to say about them. Women’s bloggers, on the other hand, rarely do anything more than affirm conventional wisdom, perhaps because they think that, simply by talking about women’s issues, by “raising awareness,” they’ve fulfilled their mission statements. A recent XX Factor post, for example, decries the great “human rights” violation afflicting Third World women who lack access to tampons and sanitary pads. Isn’t it self-evidently terrible that our sisters in poor countries have to undergo the inconvenience of menstruation when a simple innovation could liberate them?

Is it the role of women’s blogs to offer a feminine perspective on the news of the day? It’s not clear that this is their intention, either. For one thing, liberal feminists like Kerry Howley, Amanda Marcotte, and Tracy Clark-Flory are gender skeptics who don’t believe that a “feminine perspective” exists. (Which raises the question: If their brand of feminism is right and gender differences are really as superficial as eye color, why have a gendered blog?) Even for those who believe in a feminine perspective on at least some things, it’s hardly obvious that the public sphere is not a co-ed space. If anything is politically important, it will, by definition, be important to both sexes. Abortion is the classic “women’s issue” for politicians mining votes, but men have demonstrated no lack of interest in the controversy.

For another thing, the women on these sites who do believe in a female perspective on the news seem to have a very limited understanding of what that means. When Herta Müller won the Nobel Prize for literature, Hanna Rosin gave the story a feminine twist by observing that Müller looks like Louise Black from Project Runway. When Jessica Grose wrote for DoubleX about Cheerful Money, the new memoir of New Yorker writer Tad Friend, she reduced a wide-ranging meditation on class and WASP-hood in America to a study of “the loneliness in the space between parents and children.” Does she think that the only way to get women to read a book is to assure them it’s really all about parenting? Here is one of the omnipresent pitfalls of women’s journalism—the tendency to domesticate big questions that could easily be subjects of serious debate by turning them instead into tame advice: how to raise children, negotiate with one’s husband, and, in Mary Beard’s words, “apply cosmetics.”

A women’s blog has to be more than a blog that happens to have a stable of female writers, but neither Broadsheet nor DoubleX seems to have a clear idea of what that is. Until these sites figure out what’s supposed to be feminine about women’s blogs, they will never be more than Redbook in pixels. (Indeed, DoubleX has already found the identity conflict too much to handle and “returned to the womb” of Slate’s main site, where the presence of a male readership may at least keep them serious.) There’s nothing wrong with middlebrow sites—chattiness, cheap sentimentalism, and predictability are not moral offenses—but why establish a connection between femininity and ordinariness? Sadly, that’s what happens when all women’s blogs, no matter their aspirations, end up settling into a comfy middlebrow rut.

DoubleX had a symposium on “Feminism’s Dilemmas” earlier this summer. They put together a formidable roster, including Linda Hirshman, Virginia Postrel, Stephanie Coontz, and Katha Pollitt. Alas, even those essays that made provocative points about the present state of feminism were frustratingly vague about its future. “It’s time to stop talking about feminism and start doing it.” “Why should my flourishing be incompatible with my equality?” “More than anything, more than any book in the canon or slogan on a T-shirt, modern feminism is a state of mind.” Those sentences could mean almost anything, so I’ll make my own suggestion concrete: To save feminism, get rid of the lady blogs.

Helen Rittelmeyer is a writer living in Washington, DC.

The Rise of the Muckraking Right

Jacob Laksin — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:04:45 +0000

Mike Flynn thought it was a crazy idea. When James O’Keefe, a 25-year-old, self-styled investigative journalist, first approached him last August about promoting a series of candid-camera style videos on the community organizing group ACORN, Flynn, an old Washington hand and editor of the new libertarian-themed website Big Government, initially dismissed the project as far-fetched.

It didn’t temper his skepticism that the videos in question featured O’Keefe visiting ACORN offices in a pimp costume, along with a friend, Hannah Giles, dressed as a prostitute, and asking for advice on how to buy a house to run as a brothel for underage Latin American prostitutes. “If James and Hannah had told me ahead of time that they were going to do this, I would have told them, ‘There is no way in hell this is going to work,’” Flynn recalls.

Then he saw the videos. Even with the outrageous get-up—O’Keefe in his grandmother’s faded chinchilla fur coat, red-banded fedora, and dollar-store walking cane, Giles in a tight-fitting leather top and hoop earrings—the pair somehow produced a trove of phenomenally rich material. As they secretly videotaped, ACORN staffers in Washington, Brooklyn, San Diego, and Baltimore offered them instructions on how to evade taxes, skirt legal restrictions, and misrepresent their business to get their fictional whorehouse up and running. In their decidedly unorthodox way, O’Keefe and Giles had landed a major scoop. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe this worked,’” Flynn says.

If the videos were proof positive of O’Keefe and Giles’s journalistic instincts, their eventual success, fueled by mass media exposure, was a testament to the growing sophistication of the conservative media. Suspecting, rightly as it turned out, that mainstream media outlets would initially ignore the ACORN videos, Flynn devised a strategy to market them for maximum impact with his friend, the web entrepreneur and Drudge Report veteran Andrew Breitbart. They decided to release the videos, one by one, to politically friendly Fox News. At the same time, they moved up the launch of Big Government and posted transcripts, lest critics claim that the videos had been doctored.

Their strategy worked to perfection. With Fox bringing the videos to national attention, and with Big Government and other conservative sites stoking the embers of the controversy, the ACORN story became a sensation even as the mainstream press looked the other way. By the time the ensuing storm died down, ACORN Chief Organizer Bertha Lewis had announced an independent review of the group’s operations; some of the employees captured on video had been fired; Congress voted to cut off federal funding to ACORN; and the Census Bureau severed ties with the organization. The conservative commentariat had scored a major political victory. And they had done so using the tactics—investigative reporting and savvy editorial marketing—of the mainstream media they had long reviled.

The ACORN story is just one recent example of the rise of the muckraking right. If the Bush years marked a heyday for liberal sites like Talking Points Memo and the Daily Kos, which combined independent reporting, punditry, and grassroots activism, the Obama era has seen the right embrace muckraking with similar success.

Just ask Anthony “Van” Jones. A onetime Bay Area Marxist known for his inflammatory rhetoric, Jones was appointed the Obama administration’s special advisor on green jobs. In early September, however, Jones resigned his post in the wake of revelations that he had signed a “Truther” petition suggesting that the Bush administration had deliberately allowed the 9/11 attacks to provide a pretext for the Iraq war. Jones disavowed the petition, but the backlash was too intense.

That part of the story is by now well known. Less appreciated is that the scoop that brought down Jones started with a lone conservative blogger in Missouri.

Jim Hoft, a St. Louis native who works in human resources and runs the blog Gateway Pundit, was the first to bring attention to the 2004 petition , which he found on the “Truther” website 911Truth.org. The revelation prompted Jones to apologize, though he insisted that the petition did not “reflect my views now or ever.” But that defense collapsed the next day, when Hoft uncovered a 2002 press release on the online conspiracy hub Rense.com announcing a march to California Senator Diane Feinstein’s office to demand an investigation into 9/11. Among the questions the marchers wanted answered: “Why is the evidence being destroyed when an investigation of the World Trade Center collapse is needed?” But the truly explosive finding was one of the names on the march’s “organizing committee”: Van Jones.

Hoft’s spadework would prove crucial. Liberal groups had originally insisted that the embattled Van Jones was the victim of right-wing character assassination, and the Obama administration disregarded criticism of its controversial staffer. But the administration’s hand was forced when Hoft exposed Jones as a declared 9/11 skeptic. “Turned out this was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Hoft says.

There was, of course, nothing groundbreaking about Hoft’s approach. It was the kind of driven digging that any professional reporter would recognize. But Hoft’s scoop became an internet sensation because he was covering a story many larger media organizations wouldn’t touch. “The [New York] Times not only ignored the controversy, but the first time people read [the story], it was 36 hours after he had resigned,” Hoft recalls. “I am just a guy in flyover country; I’m not a media organization. But there’s an opening for me because I can cover stories that the mainstream media will not. I can add facts to the debate that can change people’s minds. There’s a great opportunity there.”

Hoft is not the only blogger on the right to recognize it. “The right has never really gotten investigative journalism,” says Erick Erickson, managing editor of the popular conservative group blog Red State. “By and large, the right is still fixated on punditry. It is what we know.”

Erickson is trying to change that. Although Red State still traffics mostly in punditry, the site has begun to break stories. In late September, Red State got hold of Bertha Lewis’s rolodex and reported her close ties to Patrick Gaspard, the White House Director of Political Affairs—a revelation particularly problematic for the Obama administration as it sought to distance itself from ACORN. Red State has also become the go-to source for news about prominent GOPers. When Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty became the first sitting Republican governor to endorse conservative candidate Doug Hoffman in New York’s much-watched 23^rd district congressional race, Red State was the first site to report the news.

Erickson allows that Red State lags behind its liberal counterparts in some important ways. Left-wing sites like the Huffington Post, firedoglake, Talking Points Memo are more influential, he argues, because they have more inside connections to mainstream media outlets. He points to the example of Greg Sargent, a blogger for Talking Points Memo who was hired by the Post last January. Erickson sees this revolving-door trajectory as evidence that liberal sites have a “greater apparatus” to get out their agenda.

But Erickson is not discouraged. If the left is better connected, he figures, then the right should compete by producing better journalism. But to do that, the right will have to wean itself off the opinion-driven format that created conservative superstars like Rush Limbaugh. “The right is going to have to step up to the plate,” Erickson says. “It needs to let Rush be Rush and stop putting others up to be Rush online. This is a fight. I aim to help us win it.”

Some activists argue that this fight is not a new one for the right. “I think we’ve had that kind of reporting on the right for several years,” says Ed Morrissey, who began writing in 2003 for the now-defunct blog, Captain’s Quarters, before joining Hot Air, the video and blogging website founded by columnist Michelle Malkin.

Perhaps the most famous example is the 2004 media scandal now known as “Rathergate,” in which CBS anchor Dan Rather relied on forged documents to cast doubt on President George W. Bush’s military service during the Vietnam War. When the forgeries were exposed by right-leaning bloggers like Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, CBS was embarrassed and Rather forced to apologize. For many on the right, Rathergate was a classic battle between the upstart blogs and webzines against the more prominent cable networks and legacy newspapers. Ever since, conservative commentators have been writing gleeful obituaries for the “old media.”

Triumphalism aside, it’s clear that the media landscape has changed in recent years. The blog search engine Technorati ranks conservative blogs like Hot Air, National Review’s The Corner, News Busters, Michelle Malkin and Big Hollywood among the 25 most popular blogs in the country. On political aggregator sites like Memeorandum, posts from conservative blogs and web magazines like Powerline and Pajamas Media jostle for space alongside stories from the Times and the Boston Globe. In some markets, conservative blogs are even becoming serious rivals to resident media institutions. With 1.5 million unique visitors each month, for instance, Jim Hoft’s Gateway Pundit ranks second behind the big local paper, the editorially liberal St. Louis Post Dispatch. “They keep snubbing me,” Hoft acknowledges. “But it’s like Frank Sinatra says, the best revenge is massive success.”

With success comes responsibility, and it is on that count, some critics say, that conservative journalism still falls short. Unlike traditional media, the argument goes, political blogs and websites are not held to account for their content. They may act like traditional media, but they are not answerable to the public in the way that newspapers, with their editors and reader representatives, have always been. “Accountability, means that one must answer for what one says and does,” observes Robert Berkman, who teaches a course on new media ethics at the New School.

Conservative bloggers insist they have their own forms of quality control. “I link to everything I put up,” says Hoft. “If you’re putting out crappy posts, people won’t come back. You’re held accountable by other blogs, and readers, and you are forced to make corrections. That helps weed out that the toxic, over-the-top sites, and I have to admit that they’re on both the left and the right.”

Then, there’s the more complicated issue of how much of the conservative muckraking trend is really rooted in the values of traditional journalism. Wlady Pleszczynski, the longtime editorial director of the American Spectator, presided over the magazine’s hard-hitting investigative coverage of the Clinton administration in 1990s, but he sees clear differences between the Spectator’s reporting and what right-wing bloggers are doing now.

Take the magazine’s most famous series on “Trooperagte,” in which reporter David Brock (now the politically converted CEO of Media Matters) got Arkansas state troopers on the record about President Clinton’s sexual indiscretions. Investigative journalism with a decidedly partisan bent, Brock’s coverage might be seen as a precursor to today’s conservative blogging, but Pleszczynski isn’t so sure. “Brock was a traditional reporter, albeit one with a certain point of view. He wasn’t acting as a political activist,” Pleszczynski says. “What you see today is more like guerilla theater.”

Pleszczynski is quick to note that this is not necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, he sees it as a testament to the more democratic character of the new media. “My sense is that the masses are now involved on a much larger scale. That’s what freedom is all about.” That may offend more traditional journalistic sensibilities, Pleszczynski concedes, but “if you’re playing politics you can’t be horrified by the fact that people are playing politics. What you see is that, on issue after issue, the right has made its presence known.”

Unsurprisingly, that has not pleased some on the left. Alan Rosenblatt, the associate director of online advocacy at the liberal Center for American Progress and a blogger at the Huffington Post, gives the right credit for its scoops, but he thinks that the aggressively partisan tone of the coverage lacks balance and hurts their stories. “The ACORN case was a classic investigative journalism model,” Rosenblatt says. “What they caught ACORN doing is illegal. That’s not something that should be swept under the rug. That said, that was just one example. There are a large number of things that ACORN does that are of great benefit in many communities and what they found was just a drop in the bucket. So, in that sense, what they did is really sleazy—using one thing to discredit everything that the organization has done.” Rosenblatt is similarly unimpressed by the right’s reporting on Van Jones. “Instead of saying that the green jobs program is bad, they discredited the guy who was in charge of the green jobs program. It was an intellectually dishonest smear campaign,” he says.

Agree or disagree with that assessment, it is true that conservative coverage is, almost by definition, neither fair nor balanced. At its most partisan, that can result in what University of Chicago professor Cass Sunstein and others see as an “echo-chamber” effect of the ideologically likeminded talking among themselves. Yet even among partisans, journalistic instincts can trump ideological sympathies. One of the more sensational conservative “scoops” of the past year—the supposed fraudulence of President Obama’s birth certificate—was relegated to the fringes of conservative conversation even as it inflamed a certain type of anti-Obama activist. On Red State, the “birthers” were dismissed as a “bunch of jackass clowns” who were distracting attention from substantive issues like the administration’s health care proposals. The conservative author and activist David Horowitz called the birthers “embarrassing and destructive.” Ultimately, the birther story suffered the journalistic equivalent of dying in committee: It riled up a few zealots, but the allegations had almost no impact on Obama’s election or his subsequent policies. Even those stories that meet the approval of one side’s partisans must still win over the public at large before they can have political ramifications as serious as the ACORN videos, which got liberal stalwarts like Jon Stewart to admit that the organization was fraudulent.

As even Rosenblatt concedes, the full picture is much more nuanced. On both the left and the right, there is a “full range of opinion, from zealots to moderates who let evidence be their guide.” It might be added that the decline of journalistic standards attributed to the alternative media is not as steep as some suggest. “There has been some dumbing down of standards,” Wlady Pleszczynski says, “but overall the traditional requirements are still the same: how to do good political reporting, how to present material in a clear way.” Inevitably, partisanship, even strident partisanship, abounds, and civil, respectful debate is not as plentiful as some might wish. But in the high-stakes world of political debate, there may be no changing that.

Still, some things have changed. Where conservatives once saw themselves as outcasts in the media world, today they increasingly see themselves as participants, shapers of news as much as consumers of it. The recent run of media successes, from ACORN to Van Jones, has only strengthened that view. “It proves that journalism is a process and not an exclusive domain of mainstream news outlets,” says Ed Morrissey. Mike Flynn agrees. “I’ve been in D.C. a long time, and it is stunning to think of a political action taking place without the media playing a role. We used to live in a world where, if the media wouldn’t pay attention, the story would not be covered. Now it doesn’t matter.”

That may be overstating the case. Conservative blogs still rely on the mainstream media to reach a broader audience. But if it’s not quite accurate that conservatives can ignore the mainstream media, the more significant development is that the opposite also no longer holds true.

Indeed, no less a right-wing bugbear than the New York Times has started taking the conservative media seriously. After the Times was criticized for its delayed coverage of the ACORN story, the paper’s managing editor, Jill Abramson, admitted that it was “slow off the mark,” and blamed the lapse on the paper’s “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” In response, the Times assigned an editor to monitor opinion media and to brief the editors about emerging controversies. It’s doubtful that conservative muckrakers would put it quite this way, but perhaps the best compliment to their success is that the Times is now reading their coverage.

Jacob Laksin is managing editor of Front Page magazine.

Open Source Democracy

John McCormack — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:03:56 +0000

If Barack Obama wants to save the government a few million dollars and spare himself a headache or two, he’d be wise to hire Jerry Brito. With the help of web developers Peter Snyder and Kevin Dwyer, Brito created and now runs StimulusWatch.org, an interactive website that allows users to track tens of thousands of stimulus projects across the nation.

The site costs Brito, a 33-year-old senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Washington University, about $40 a year to host (Snyder and Dwyer work pro bono). That’s quite a deal compared to the $18 million price tag for the federal government’s Recovery.gov, which recently received a much-deserved thumping for over-reporting the number of jobs “saved or created” by the stimulus. (It even reported on jobs in congressional districts that don’t exist.) In an era of billion dollar health care and stimulus bills, $18 million is admittedly a drop in the vast ocean of federal debt, but then investing so much money on one malfunctioning website doesn’t exactly inspire one’s confidence in the government’s economic stewardship.

Brito, Snyder, and Dwyer began collaborating after Brito posted an appeal for coding help on the Technology Liberation Front last December. Brito had recently attended a press conference for the U.S. Conference of Mayors and wanted to create a database tracking the over 11,000 “shovel-ready” projects eligible for stimulus funds. “Let’s help President-Elect Obama do what he is promising,” Brito wrote. “Let’s help him ‘prioritize’ so the projects so that we ‘get the most bang for the buck’ and identify those that are old school ‘pork coming out of Congress.’” Although Brito, Snyder, and Dwyer had never met before teaming up, they launched StimulusWatch a mere two months after Brito’s initial post.

StimulusWatch uses the power of “crowdsourcing” to keep tabs on the federal government. Users are invited to vote on whether projects in their neighborhoods are critical, add context to particular projects on their Wiki page, and debate the value of the plans. The proposals are then ranked from most to least critical, from most to least expensive, and by zip code. “The beauty is that you have more knowledge about [a local] project than anybody else,” explains Brito. His hope is that cities applying for funding will consider their constituents’ suggestions before finalizing a project. And now, with the recent launch of StimulusWatch 2.0, citizens can track and provide feedback on a project’s progress, budget, and its actual results.

In its first two months online, StimulusWatch received over 3 million visitors. The New York Times raved that StimulusWatch “easily outclasses Recovery.gov,” and reporters across the country jumped on the treasure trove of data Brito and company had unearthed. A local TV station in Minnesota did a spot on the city of Roseville’s request for $1.5 million to build a golf course clubhouse and maintenance facility, while a project to spend $100,000 to install doorbells in public housing in Mississippi became national news. The site hasn’t produced any bombshell stories of graft and corruption—at least, not yet. But Brito’s pro-bono project has enabled citizens to take a closer look at how their government actually operates and hold their elected officials accountable.

“The only folks against [transparency] are the folks that are in power,” says Brito. “But they can’t say that because it would be tantamount to saying, ‘We’re for secrecy.’” For those who would argue that Brito, a libertarian, has a partisan axe to grind, he points out that stimulus supporters can use StimulusWatch to detail all the worthy projects—roads, bridges, and schools—being funded in their neck of the woods. But, by the same token, stimulus opponents can search for the “least critical” projects, uncovering a bevy of six- and seven-figure bike paths and dog parks.

* * *

Brito and his colleagues are leading a new effort to put formerly social Web 2.0 technologies in the service of politics and power a data-driven democracy. As more and more information has become available online, a number of private citizens have taken it upon themselves to collect that data and make it more useful. In 1994, at the height of the Republican Revolution, Newt Gingrich pledged that government information “will be available to any citizen in the country at the same moment that it is available to the highest paid Washington lobbyist,” but it’s largely been privately-run websites—created by a cadre of transparency enthusiasts and tech geeks—that have made that promise a reality.

Looking for a committee report or a senator’s complete 2009 voting record? You’d do better to check WashingtonWatch.com (launched in 2001) or GovTrack.us (launched in 2004), just two of the more user-friendly and interactive alternatives to the Library of Congress’s cumbersome THOMAS system. On WashingtonWatch or GovTrack, you can bookmark and email pages, track statistical trends for members, and sign up for alerts on a particular bill. Need a video of a committee hearing that has long since disappeared from the Senate’s website? Try Metavid, which archives all live video feeds from Congress. (Metavid has even made its videos searchable by keyword using closed-caption transcripts from TV broadcasts.) And while the Federal Register has been online since 2003 at Regulations.gov, web surfers were too often left sifting through the hundreds of new federal regulations released each day to find the particular one they needed. Thanks to Brito’s OpenRegs.com, started in 2009, users can track their particular area of interest—be it environmental regulations or NASA—through category-specific RSS feeds. And they can do it all on their iPhones.

“We’re liberating some documents that aren’t otherwise widely available,” says Timothy Lee, a doctoral student in computer science and affiliate of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. Lee is the developer of RECAP, an add-on to the Firefox web browser that makes court records more accessible to the public. Currently, court documents are available only through the unwieldy government website PACER at a pricey eight cents per page. Now, users can download documents from PACER and then share them publicly through RECAP (PACER, in a nice, subversive touch, spelled backwards).

The government hasn’t gone after RECAP the way the recording industry went after music-sharing sites like Napster and Kazaa. “We’ve had a friendlier reception [from PACER] than I expected,” says Lee. The government’s current position is that government employees and those with fee waivers are not allowed to use RECAP. Reading between the lines, Lee believes that means everyone else is free to continue “liberating” court documents—giving individuals access to files that were previously available only to law firms, the government, and those with funds enough to foot PACER’s costly bill.

* * *

While Lee is busy dismantling the judicial paywall, Jim Harper is monitoring every piece of legislation moving through Congress on his website, WashingtonWatch. Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, was inspired to create the site after listening to his friends “at cool dot-com companies” boast about their latest cutting-edge projects. “When do these cool changes come to government?” he wondered.

WashingtonWatch not only allows users to read legislation and comment on it, it breaks down the Congressional Budget Office’s cost predictions into cost per person and per family. (The cost of the bailout? $2,000 per person.) Thanks to the efforts of crowdsourcers, Harper says, people can now think “about legislation the way they think about leather jackets, boxes of cereal, and cars: ‘How much do I have to put in the bank to pay for this?’”

But the group that has really driven the “Information Is Power” credo to prominence this year is the Sunlight Foundation. “It’s the only organization whose complete brief is to promote transparency, and they’re very well-funded,” says Brito. Founded in April 2006 in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal, the Sunlight Foundation has created and funded numerous websites to keep a watchful eye on government. One Sunlight application, Legistalker, follows members of congress with the ferocity and dedication of a TMZ blogger hot on the trail of Megan Fox, pulling together all the recent news items, votes, YouTube channels, and Twitter feeds related to a legislator on one page. Another site, politicalpartytime.org, tracks which lucky pol has had the most parties thrown for him or her, which lobbyists funded them, and how much money each pulled in.

Sunlight bills itself as nonpartisan, though Brito says, “I don’t think that they would object to me saying that the folks there tend to be left-leaning.” Yet, as a familiar bromide would have it (politics, strange bedfellows), left-wing Sunlight has found itself united with opponents of cap-and-trade and health care legislation in asking members of Congress: If you’re going to overhaul the energy and health care industries, is it too much to ask that you read the legislation (and allow Americans to read it) before you vote on it?

Yes, it is, came the reply from a number of leading congressional Democrats. Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) scoffed at the notion of reading the entire cap-and-trade bill in May. “I certainly don’t claim to know everything that’s in this bill,” he explained at a committee hearing. “We relied very heavily on the scientists.” House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) echoed that thinking in July when he told the National Press Club: “What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”

It’s odd that congressional Democrats, who do in fact have a couple of lawyers to explain the more difficult legislative language, can’t be bothered to read through their two major domestic policy initiatives, while an online army of unpaid bloggers and average citizens are eager to dissect the legislation. There’s no question that the corruption exposed by groups like the Sunlight Foundation helped bring down Dennis Hastert and the congressional Republicans in 2006. And if the bets made by Brito, Lee, and Harper prove right, then congressional Democrats may very well learn in 2010 and 2012 what it feels like to get hacked and mashed should they too ignore the power of the grassroots transparency movement.

John McCormack is a deputy online editor at the Weekly Standard. Photos by Katherine Ruddy.

Obama’s European Honeymoon

Alex Massie — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:51:39 +0000

This is the fourth in a series of four articles trying to come to terms with Obama’s foreign policy. Click here to read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

It turns out that there is an Obama Effect—or at least there is one in France. After a particularly bleak couple of years, the approval rating of the United States has soared to dizzying heights.

In 2000, a State Department poll found that 62 percent of French citizens surveyed had a favorable impression of the U.S. But with the election of George W. Bush, “Old” Europe was out, and “New” Europe was in. What did it matter what the French or the Germans thought when there were pro-American countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic who wanted to help the U.S.? French fries were rechristened “Freedom Fries” on Capitol Hill, and John Kerry’s ability to speak French was taken to mean that he thought in French too. So it was not very surprising that the U.S.’s approval rating in France fell to 42 percent last year.

Then Barack Obama was elected. By July 2009, when the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project released its latest annual report, 75 percent of French voters polled had a favorable opinion of the U.S. The Pew survey reported similar, if less dramatic, leaps in U.S. “favorability” in Britain and Germany. A second set of figures was, if anything, even more remarkable. Asked if they think, “America will do the right thing in world affairs,” a full 93 percent of Germans, 91 percent of French respondents, and 86 percent of Britons replied that they were confident it will. The figures for 2008 were 14 percent, 13 percent, and 16 percent, respectively.

Cue much hopeful commentary echoing Sally Field’s notorious 1985 Academy Awards outburst: “They like us, they really like us!” It’s tempting to believe this. Other than graduates of the Dick Cheney School of Diplomacy, few people revel in being disliked by those they considered their friends. But is it true?

The Pew Report is significant because it reveals a serious ambivalence at the heart of the European response to the new American president. In a variation of the “trust but verify” adage, Europeans are taking a “hope but check” approach to the new administration in Washington. Since only 69 percent of Britons and 64 percent of Germans have a favorable view of the U.S., there must be some Europeans who take a dim view of the U.S. while still being confident it will “do the right thing.” In other words, they would like to trust that the U.S. will act in ways they approve of, but deep down are not so confident it will—at least not right away. The promise of the Obama years does not quite cancel out the miserable memories of the Bush years. Indeed, U.S. favorability ratings in Britain and Germany were higher in 1999 than they are now.

With this cautious approach in mind, Europeans have closely studied the Obama administration’s course in the Middle East for the past few months, and have been largely pleased with what they’ve seen. Obama’s determination to pursue a policy of engagement with Iran—considered the height of starry-eyed idealism in Washington—was received in Europe as a refreshing dose of realism. His willingness to talk about illegal Israeli settlements is also popular with the European public, even if it remains difficult to see how a meaningful or lasting peace agreement can be forged. As the new president discovered on his trip to Saudi Arabia, there are limits to what freshness and goodwill can achieve.

In part, the European preference for diplomacy reflects lessons learnt from the history and development of the European Union: Jaw-jaw is preferable to war-war and, with patience, even difficult compromises can be made. But as Robert Kagan has argued, while talk may be sufficient in building a common market, it might prove too optimistic a view when applied to certain intractable foreign policy questions.

Nonetheless, the experience of the Bush years has hardly bolstered the idea that isolating rogue regimes is enough to bring them to heel. Indeed, Bush’s second term acknowledged that failure. If the threat of military action against Iran remained a possibility, diplomacy was given a chance to work first, just as it was with North Korea. For the general public, however, such nuances were immaterial. Bush was Bush and would always be Bush. He would never get credit for recognizing and learning from the mistakes of his first term.

Obama, by contrast, receives the benefit of the doubt even while pursuing policies inherited from his predecessor, which has helped solidify, at least in the eyes of the European public, his commitment to diplomatic engagement and multilateralism. His move to close Guantánamo, for example, bought the new administration enormous goodwill in Europe. It is unthinkable that Ireland would have agreed to take in even a pair of Guantánamo inmates had George W. Bush still been president.

Although Obama’s bottom line on Iran—a nuclear Tehran is intolerable—is little different from Bush’s, it has gone largely unmentioned in Europe. Obama’s chief departure on the Persian question has been mainly a stylistic shift towards realism: Instead of the empty threats and bellicose bluff of the Bush years, there is a realization that the West must deal with the Iran we have, not the Iran we might prefer. But in reality—with the admittedly notable exception of the Iraq war—Obama’s foreign policy instincts are conventionally hawkish, even if his language is more moderate.

It’s perhaps this very ideological ambiguity that is driving the skeptical tone of the Pew results. It also explains the sense of palpable relief with which Obama’s cautious approach to the disputed Iranian elections was met in Europe. In Britain, the neoconservative wing of the commentariat predictably took its cues from the neoconservatives who dominate the Washington Post’s op-ed page and howled that Obama was betraying “democracy” and “American idealism.” That was a minority view, however. Faced with a fast-moving, fluid situation (one that remains far from resolved at the time of writing), Obama’s restraint and appreciation of the political consequences of previous western interventions in Persia demonstrated a reflective style that brought to mind another President Bush entirely.

Obama’s Iran policy has seemed reminiscent in style, if not in substance, to George H.W. Bush’s: cautious, pragmatic, unlikely to try and reinvent the wheel, and, perhaps above all, suspicious of doctrines named after grandstanding presidents. Problems must be managed before they can be solved; solutions can rarely be imposed, more often they must be negotiated. Process matters and so does collective action, even if that muddies the waters or delays plotting a course the U.S. and its partners can agree on. In other words, it’s an attempt to see the world as it is, rather than as the U.S. would like it to be.

Realism became a dirty word in Washington after 9/11, but it was the doctrine George W. Bush began his presidency espousing. Something necessarily had to give after the fall of the Twin Towers, but the speed with which Washington rewrote the rulebook surprised everyone. In Britain, this led to a desperate race to “get close” to the administration in order to work out what the Americans would do, to see if Britain could influence them, and perhaps even to encourage some restraint. Britain’s efforts, sadly, didn’t amount to much. But if Obama’s handling of the Iran election crisis turns out to be indicative of his broader approach to the world, the post-9/11 period may yet prove to be the exception.

For decades, Europeans have come to expect a certain lofty, idealistic rhetoric from Washington, but one that was nonetheless undergirded by a flinty realism. What Europeans found deeply troubling about neoconservatism was its willingness to take its own rhetoric deadly seriously. The familiarity of the tone and feel of Obama’s foreign policy reassures Europe. There will, as always, be arguments and compromises. But while America will lead—and expect its allies to be helpful—there’s a more gracious, sensitive manner in which Washington speaks that impresses. The adults are back in charge.

As President Obama says, “We’re not always going to be right . . . other people may have good ideas . . . in order for us to work collectively, all parties have to compromise, and that includes us.” This humility hardly reflects any lesser commitment to the idea of American hegemony, but it recognizes that international public opinion matters. Indeed, the challenge for the new administration may well be to provide the leadership other governments seek—for almost no international dilemma can be solved absent American involvement—while avoiding giving the impression that the U.S. is bullying its friends or holding them to ransom.

Even so, there is a sense that difficult questions have not been answered so much as postponed. What happens if Iran does acquire a nuclear capability? What is NATO’s role in the modern world? How long can the U.S. expect its allies to commit to Afghanistan? What happens when oil prices rise and Russia flexes its muscles once again? At some point, Obama’s European honeymoon will end, and the longer-term issues of American hegemony will be back on the table. Good will and good intentions are not always enough, and it must be merely a matter of time before the 44th president discovers that for himself.

-Alex Massie is a former Washington Correspondent for The Scotsman. He writes a blog for The Spectator.

Obama’s Illusory Realism

Daniel Larison — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:53:58 +0000

This is the fourth in a series of four articles trying to come to terms with Obama’s foreign policy. Click here to read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 4.

Few things have been more poorly understood about the Obama administration than its foreign policy. Partisan and ideological blinders have tended to obscure and distort how critics and supporters have interpreted his policy decisions and his reactions to events around the world. More hawkish interventionists have fixated on Obama’s diplomatic overtures to authoritarian states, his condemnation of Manuel Zelaya’s deposition, and his slightly firmer line on Israeli settlements as proof of weakness and perfidy, while realists and liberals have great confidence that the same represents a significant positive departure from past policy, but both are finding more in these moves than is really there. This has led to a number of misconceptions about how to classify the Obama administration’s foreign policy inclinations, and it has created confusion in how we should judge the administration’s performance in improving relations with much of the rest of the world.

What continues to confuse observers on both sides is the remarkable—or perhaps depressing—continuity between the Obama and Bush administrations in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, which is usually acknowledged only when it suits the rhetorical purposes of an argument. Critics and supporters alike would rather emphasize a dialectical relationship between the two administrations in which Obama is the antithesis of Bush for good or ill, which permits discredited neoconservative interventionists to describe any Obama failures as the repudiation of realism, their traditional bête noire, and allows realists and liberals to rediscover the virtues of U.S. hegemony by confusing change in management with change in policy.

This continuity necessarily thwarts any attempt to find a consistent theme or pattern to the administration’s actions, and it renders criticisms of a lack of consistency moot. That has not stopped critics from trying to find grand, unifying explanations of Obama’s actions, such as perceiving a “pro-dictator,” “anti-democratic,” or “anti-American” pattern in Obama’s responses to the Honduran constitutional crisis and Iranian elections, but these are unsupported claims. No administration will ever pursue any policy with anything like perfect consistency, and Obama’s predecessor was no exception, so we should expect the same consistency or lack thereof from an administration that has largely followed in its predecessor’s footsteps. Indeed, the difficulty of pursuing a policy consistently draws more attention to the flaws of the policy than to an undesirable lack of consistency.

No matter how idealistic and ideological an administration may be, there are structures and interests that limit how any administration can act: Every ‘freedom agenda’ must have its exceptions for Arab dictators and anti-Russian demagogues, every non-proliferation regime must have its exceptions for allied nuclear states outside of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and every ‘war on terror’ must make room for or at least overlook the sponsorship of terrorism by allied governments. For that matter, there may also be longtime allies that find themselves at odds with major multilateral organizations, as the Honduran transitional government recently has, in which case Washington may end up siding with the latter as part of its regional or global “leadership” role. So a lack of consistency in administration policy by itself is neither praiseworthy nor damning—it is what the reality of international affairs imposes on even the most zealous ideologue.

Inasmuch as Wilsonian idealism has permeated both parties especially since the end of the Cold War, the criticisms that partisan opponents level at a given administration will typically be framed in terms of the administration’s failures or disinterest in promoting democracy, and the administration’s defenders will stress its overriding democratist goals. Once again, we have debates over means rather than ends. We have seen this nowhere more clearly than in the domestic reactions to Obama’s handling of the Iranian elections. Whether or not Obama’s domestic critics were genuinely interested in the plight of Iran’s reformers, whom many hawkish interventionists had previously derided as fundamentally no different from their hard-line rivals, they took up the cause of the Iranian protesters and demanded more forceful rhetoric and action from the president, who resisted calls to insert himself into what was an entirely internal Iranian matter.

When Obama did not heed their calls, hawkish critics were furious about the “betrayal of democracy” that this represented. However, even as he said little and did less in response to Tehran’s crackdown, Obama wanted to emphasize that his restraint was the best means of aiding Iranian dissidents. This may be true, given past U.S. interference in domestic Iranian politics and the regime’s mockery of the protests as a phony U.S.-backed “color” revolution, but the crucial point is that Obama felt compelled to explain his restraint in these terms. More than that, his aides reportedly wanted to credit the president’s earlier speech in Cairo with sparking the apparent late surge for Moussavi as a way of emphasizing the importance of soft power in shaping public opinion. In other words, the new administration wanted it known that regime change in Tehran and democracy promotion in Muslim countries, two ideas for which the previous administration was quite properly criticized as overly ideological and detached from reality, were still very much a part of U.S. policy despite any apparent changes to the contrary.

Classifications of foreign policy schools or inclinations are never precise, whether they are applied to the thinking of individuals or entire administrations, as most policymakers combine elements from different schools and will tend to adapt their use of diplomatic, political, and military tools to changing circumstances. As we recall from the preparation for the Iraq war and the slight shifts made during the second Bush term, even inside the Bush administration one would find conflicting views and changes in the president’s own thinking over time. It is also important to bear in mind that these classifications tend to bleed into one another in practice, which is a function of the broad bipartisan consensus about the legitimacy and necessity of the projection of American power around the world, the preservation of U.S. military and political supremacy, the promotion of liberal democratic values, and the inevitability of American global leadership. Most foreign policy debates take place within these fairly narrow boundaries, and the points of contention are questions of means rather than ends.

This practical blurring of lines between foreign policy schools is also the result of widely shared cultural-political convictions that Andrew Bacevich has called the “ideology of national security,” which is the belief that expanding freedom (however vaguely or loosely defined) is the purpose of history and the mission of the U.S., that American actions abroad serve this purpose, and that both American freedom and security are bound up in ensuring universal freedom. While such ideas are normally associated today with neoconservatives or “hard Wilsonian” idealists, it is fair to say that this ideology is the foundation of the bipartisan consensus just described, and most internationalists—which is to say most Americans who spend any time thinking about foreign policy—partake of it to some extent.

Obama sympathizers have fixated on superficial changes in style and tone in the hopes that they represent some significant shift in policy, and enemies have discovered proof of sinister plots in the same ultimately trivial gestures. Thus Obama’s ‘recognition’ of the Iranian government by using its formal title of Islamic Republic, or the initial gestures connected with “resetting” the relationship with Russia, or even something as unremarkable as acknowledging the American role in the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953 are taken as powerful signals one way or the other: as exciting openings to rapprochement or pathetic instances of weakness and capitulation. As it happens, the truth is far simpler than either of these interpretations allows.

For all of the praise—and abuse—the administration has received for its greater realism, it clearly remains committed to halting Iran’s nuclear program by any means available and to unnecessary, provocative NATO expansion into former Soviet space, even though both policies expose the U.S. to many more costs and risks rather than fewer. For all of the talk of engagement and “reset,” the substance of our Iran and Russia policies has not changed under the new administration, and it never was going to change greatly. The administration believed that it could extract concessions and aid from these states through negotiations, but it never intended to alter its behavior toward them. The president still presumes to dictate the security and energy policies of other states, and he still insists on extending our sphere of influence to Russia’s borders in the name of eliminating spheres of influence. Whichever name one wants to give to this sort of foreign policy, it remains inexplicably aggressive, hegemonic, and dangerous to U.S. interests, and it is all the more so because it comes wrapped in a veil of diplomatic gestures and the pretense of repairing damaged relations.

Daniel Larison is contributing editor at The American Conservative, where he blogs at Eunomia, and an online columnist for The Week. He has recently completed a Ph.D. in Byzantine history at the University of Chicago.

Misguided Realpolitik

James Kirchick — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:16:11 +0000

This is the second in a series of four articles trying to come to terms with Obama’s foreign policy. Click here to read Part 1, Part 3 and Part 4..

Less than a year into President Barack Obama’s administration, the fundamental assumption on which his foreign policy hinged has already been challenged and proven erroneous. That assumption – that the United States would be able to talk its way out of the various and sundry messes which the Bush administration allegedly left it – died on the streets of Tehran this June, along with scores of Iranian citizens protesting the regime’s blatant rigging of the country’s presidential election.

To the amazement of many in Washington – even those who had been counseling “engagement” with the Mullahs – the administration has continued to offer up the olive branch of normalized relations in exchange for an agreement on the part of the Iranian government to desist any nuclear weapons program, all while that regime has imprisoned, tortured and murdered its domestic critics. This diplomatic posture sent the unmistakable message to Iran that it could respond as brutally as it wanted, and the regime naturally has acted with utter impunity. President Obama has ignored his own well-put aphorism, holding out his hand even while the regime clenches its fist ever more tightly.

As the riots in Iran continued and the clampdown increased in intensity, it became woefully clear that the administration viewed these dramatic events as something of a bothersome sideshow in its quest to strike a “grand bargain” with the regime. This Holy Grail, which the President and his “realist” supporters have long believed to be attainable, proved elusive for the Bush administration, whose alleged belligerence and stubborn refusal to “talk” with America’s adversaries prevented the attainment of such a rapprochement. The cruel absurdity of the administration’s obsession was made apparent when White House spokesman Robert Gibbs asserted that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the “elected leader” of Iran, a statement he did not retract until the following day, and something that could have only dampened the spirits of the millions of Iranians who valiantly asked, “Where is My Vote?”

The contrast between the “hardheadedness” of the Bush administration and the fresh look approach of Obama is predicated on the claim that the former twiddled its thumbs while Rome burned; that out of pride or pique, it refused to roll up its sleeves and delve into the necessary diplomacy that could have averted the crisis we’ve found ourselves in today. This is perhaps one of the greatest misconceptions about Bush’s foreign policy. That the Bush administration “did not talk” with the Iranian government – one of the most frequent criticisms one hears about its policies– is a lie. According to the Middle East Forum, there were more than 28 meetings between Iranian officials and American diplomats of Ambassadorial rank. The first of these meetings occurred in November of 2001, as the United States was waging a war against the Afghani Taliban, which had long been an enemy of the Iranian regime. The United States government made numerous approaches towards Iranian interlocutors with a view towards discussing Tehran’s nuclear program, but was constantly rebuffed.

That President Obama has had no more luck than the man who preceded him has not diminished the hopes of the “realists.” If anything, it has made their calls for a lessening of tensions and the increase of inducements all the more self-assured. Their faith seems to be invested in a conception of this president as a man uniquely qualified to improve America’s relations with regimes that are historically and inherently antagonistic to our own.

But there’s no reason to believe that the president will be luckier than he already has. Various Iranian officials have made it abundantly clear – both before and after the fraudulent June 12 election – that they have no intention whatsoever of forgoing the country’s nuclear program, and, furthermore, that talks about the future of such a program are not even an option. The insurrection which brought the regime to power 30 years ago was predicated upon a revolutionary anti-Americanism, and that is the only crutch on which the regime can prop itself. Every rationale that the government in Tehran has offered for its continued existence has been shown up as deficient, and a paranoid fixation on the machinations of evil outsiders is all it has left. And thus it must be noted that the Second Iranian Revolution – a repudiation of the first – died on this president’s watch.

President Obama has disappointed on other fronts and in other regions, in ways both large and small. His reaction to the “coup” in Honduras – in which the country’s military ousted the president on the orders of the Supreme Court, Attorney General and Congress – was a sign of his inclination to be led rather than lead. In this case, Obama did not side with the democratic forces in Honduras resisting the attempts of their leader to follow in the footsteps of Hugo Chavez; rather, Obama parroted the same position on the matter as Chavez and Raul Castro.

The administration’s early announcement that it would press a “reset” button with Russia, as if something so complex as the relations between two nations could be fundamentally changed with the entrance of a new president in Washington, might have been intentionally gimmicky, but it does represent a sort of wishful thinking about international affairs. The thinking here, like nearly everywhere else, seems to be that the United States is at least equally culpable for the frayed relationship, due to our needless provocation and lack of sensitivity to Russia’s sense of itself as a major world power.¹ Yet Russia’s continuing attempts to threaten European oil supplies and meddle in the affairs of its independent neighbors – whose independence it neither really recognizes nor respects – will bring some of the administration’s lofty expectations down to earth.

In its dogged pursuance of a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Obama administration is very much like its predecessors, who all – with the sometime exception of George W. Bush – saw the resolution of the decades-long dispute as within their reach. If only the Palestinians were to have their state – the conventional wisdom goes – many, if not most, of the difficulties we face in the region and the world, for that matter, would wither away. That the Palestinians are currently neither interested nor capable of peacefully running their own state alongside Israel has no effect on this overly sanguine line of thinking. But where this White House differs is in the degree of pressure it is exerting on Israel, making demands of it that are not equal to those being asked of the Arabs, who have always been the more recalcitrant side in this dispute.

The president must be commended for his responsible handling of America’s commitments to Iraq and Afghanistan. That these policies, more so in Iraq than Afghanistan, stand in contradiction to his campaign rhetoric does not make them any less welcome. A clear-eyed assessment of the consequences of withdrawal persuaded Obama to ignore the calls from the left of his party to abandon the democracy-building project in Iraq; the test now is whether he will see the endeavor through to success, especially if conditions on the ground worsen.

It’s a cliché that governing is different from campaigning, and the President and his most hopeful supporters must surely realize the magnitude of resistance that is building against many of his domestic initiatives. Most Americans seem not to be paying as much attention to foreign affairs, which is in part attributable to the president’s decision to manage – rather than transform – the world. He has focused his transformative passions at home. This passivity towards challenges overseas is the most striking difference between this president and his predecessor, and it remains to be seen what will become of the new American indifference.

James Kirchick is an assistant editor of The New Republic and a Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellow.

¹ In one of his more candid moments (and there have been many), Joe Biden ridiculed these pretensions, one of many statements that the White House had to later clarify. By the end of the first term, it is almost guaranteed that a small war will break out in some misbegotten locale due to the verbal snafus of our vice president.

Issue No. 2009-3

admin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

“Women and fiction,” Virginia Woolf wrote in 1929, “remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.” Eighty years later, women and fiction no longer seem so problematic. Indeed, they are now so closely entwined—both in production and consumption—that it is difficult to imagine one without the other. This is a 21st-century assumption, however, and as Elaine Showalter demonstrates in her literary history, A Jury of Her Peers (Knopf, 2009), the history of women and fiction has certainly been fraught. Indeed, up until very recently, few people would have admonished Nathaniel Hawthorne for his opinion that, “ink-stained women, are, without a single exception, detestable.”

A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, by Elaine Showalter, Knopf, 608 pp., $30.00

The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys, by Lilian Pizzichini, W.W. Norton & Co., 306 pp., $29.95

Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, by Brad Gooch, Little, Brown and Company, 464 pp., $30.00

Women writers of his era would have at least partially agreed with him—if not detestable, they would have described themselves as unnatural. Literary women were mostly in despair over themselves: Torn between the ideals of demure femininity and the reality of literary production and competition, they were plagued by self-loathing and doubt. “Sometimes I think I am a monster,” the 19th-century novelist Mary Wilkins Freeman wrote, “and the worst of it is, I certainly take pleasure in it.” As late as the 1950s, Dorothy Parker prayed to be other than she was: “Dear God, please make me stop writing like a woman. For Jesus Christ’s sake, amen.” Women writers considered themselves mutants, perversely bred for unhappiness and doomed to find satisfaction only in unwomanly things, like writing fiction.

Augusta Jane Evans, another 19th-century novelist, summed up the experience best when she admitted that, “Literary women as a class are not as happy, as women who have husbands and children to engage their attention and monopolize their affections; yet…they experience a deep peace and satisfaction, and are crowned with a glory such as marriage never gave.” The tension Evans points to is between happiness and glory, between private satisfaction and public recognition. Showalter too frames the history of women’s writing in these terms; the tradition of American women’s writing has, Showalter says, come “from pressures on women to lead private rather than public lives, and to conform to cultural norms and expectations.” The lives of Jean Rhys and Flannery O’Connor, while irrevocably different, only serve to confirm the influence of these pressures.

Rhys (1890-1979) and O’Connor (1925-1964) could not have been more dissimilar, and had they ever met, they probably would have despised each other. Rhys, who was born on the Caribbean island of Dominica and relocated to London in her teens, was a consummate hedonist. Her life story reads like a novel, and a new biography of Rhys, The Blue Hour by Lilian Pizzichini (W.W. Norton, 2009), recounts the tale with relish. The daughter of a Welsh doctor and a Dominican Creole, Rhys grew up to be a beautiful and unstable alcoholic. She collected a bevy of lovers and married three times (first a conman and later an inveterate gambler), and was the kind of girl who fell in love with a man because he could whistle the love duet from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, never mind that he was whistling the tune to another woman. Rhys’s family largely ignored her, and after her father’s death in 1910, she worked as a chorus girl, manicurist, artist’s model, and governess, never quite managing to rise above poverty. In her thirties, she moved to Paris and became the mistress of Ford Madox Ford, who helped her discover her talent for writing confessional fiction. But it wasn’t until 1966 that Rhys found widespread critical acclaim with the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, a modernist prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

O’Connor, on the other hand, was a life-long ascetic and a resolutely professional writer. Very little has been written about her life, and a new biography by Brad Gooch, Flannery (Little, Brown and Co, 2009), is one of the first to be published. Born and raised in Georgia, O’Connor, a self-described “13th-century Catholic” and “hermit novelist,” was trained at the prestigious writers’ workshop at the University of Iowa. Described by her college composition teacher as “warped, but brilliant all the same,” O’Connor was very precocious. At 24, after having her short fiction published in the Partisan Review, Sewanee Review, and Mademoiselle, she was diagnosed with lupus, and returned to Milledgeville, Georgia, to live with her mother. Despite her illness, O’Connor wrote two novels and two short story collections, while maintaining long-distance correspondence with literary intellectuals like Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Giroux. She died, at 39, having won two O. Henry awards.

Few contemporaneous writers would appear to be less similar, but as women novelists, Jean Rhys and Flannery O’Connor have quite a few things in common. Both were frankly ambitious from an early age—Rhys initially pursued fame on the stage before she started writing fiction, and O’Connor went to Iowa, to the displeasure of her mother, to find literary recognition. Raising children, the most important female accomplishment of their era, was also never much of a concern for either of them—O’Connor was determined to remain single even before her lupus diagnosis, and Rhys, after one abortion, left her only daughter to the care of friends, and then her first husband after he was released from jail. Confronted with pressure to get married and have children, they traveled in opposite, but similarly radical, directions. O’Connor traveled inward, living as a monastic intellectual and writing esoteric, allegorical fiction, while Rhys traveled outward, marrying often, drinking excessively, and writing, in large part, autobiographically. For both women, what Augusta Jane Evans referred to as “public recognition” decidedly trumped conventional “private happiness.”

Rhys and O’Connor represent two extremes; many women writers were better able or more inclined to compromise in the face of competing social pressures. Few have achieved as much success as Rhys and O’Connor, however, and there were none that didn’t face a choice between family life and literature at some point. Writing requires time, and more importantly, solitude—neither of which married women with children could reliably achieve until the late 20th century. Catherine Dickens, the wife of Charles, gave birth to ten children while her husband was writing novels; had Charles been saddled with the housework, it’s fair to assume none of those novels would ever have seen the light of day. Solitude and space are not, of course, the only things necessary for a successful literary career, but to write a brilliant novel without them is exceptionally difficult. It isn’t a simple coincidence that many of the most successful female writers—Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather—have been childless, and often unmarried.

Aside from the personal choice to remain single or childless, women authors also had to make difficult decisions about how to reconcile their private femininity with their public fiction. “How did you ever dare write a portrait of a lady?” Constance Fenimore Cooper asked her friend Henry James in 1882. “Fancy any woman’s attempting a portrait of a gentleman! Wouldn’t there be a storm of ridicule!” The idea that even for a prominent male writer to write in a woman’s voice on intimate matters was risqué suggests that at least there was a kind of gender parity in Victorian prudishness. Nonetheless, women writers attempted to skirt the storm by writing almost exclusively on feminine subjects, and the private lives of their own sex. Novels by women were most often set in drawing rooms and kitchens, rather than battlefields or factory buildings. While these novels could be both brilliant and commercially successful, for many ambitious writers, being confined to women’s subjects chafed badly. “I have not much faith in women in fiction,” Willa Cather wrote, despite being one of the first American women to write frequently from the male perspective. “They have a sort of sex consciousness,” she went on, “that is abominable.” Cather’s contemporary, Edith Wharton, who also dared to write from a male perspective, felt similarly, and objected strongly to the label of “woman writer.” Though sex consciousness could be an asset, allowing women to write about the female psyche and experience in ways men couldn’t, even brilliant writers like Cather and Wharton could be disdainful of femininity in fiction. The tension between public work and private concerns influenced a woman’s writing as much as her personal life.

Despite the lack of faith displayed by Cather and others, Showalter argues that the history of women’s writing has been truly progressive. Each generation of women writers has achieved more and set their goals higher than the last. Showalter divides her history into four phases, and in the final phase, “free,” which begins in the 1990s, she concludes that there is no longer a need for “women’s writing as a separate literary tradition,” because women are “no longer constrained by their femininity” and are free to define and express themselves however they wish. The assumption is that women no longer have to choose between literature and family, that it is now possible to acquire private happiness and public recognition. This may be true for some, but such a neat conclusion to such a fraught history is unlikely. The situation of women has improved, but surely there are still some loose ends?

Do contemporary ideals of femininity no longer clash with literary ambition, as Showalter suggests? Have the tensions between professional success and motherhood been totally resolved? Are there no longer women who pray, as Dorothy Parker did, for the ability to write like a man? The answers to these questions are not obvious. Women’s writing is no longer separate from the mainstream literary tradition, but many of the questions and challenges associated with being a woman writer remain.

Femininity may no longer be a constraint, as Showalter argues, but it is certainly still a subject of debate. A 2005 New York Times article and subsequent book by the novelist Ayelet Waldman, where she admitted to loving her husband, novelist Michael Chabon, more than her children, set off an intense round of discussion; a more recent Washington Post article by Charlotte Allen about how women are “kind of dim,” and naturally predisposed to be caretakers, was even more controversial. Women have even, paradoxically, made careers by writing about being housewives and mothers—Caitlin Flanagan, a columnist at the Atlantic, is a prime example. For the vast majority of American women writers, the choice between fame and family is no longer absolute, as it was in previous centuries, but private happiness and public recognition are still, in some ways, competing desires, and women are still writing about them and learning how to reconcile them. To suggest otherwise is misleading.

Equally misleading is the suggestion that these unresolved questions must, or will, be definitively answered. The 21st-century is a wonderful time to be a woman in the Western world; the freedom and equality is unprecedented. But equality does not eliminate the tensions between public and private life for either men or women. It isn’t necessary to declare women “free” and close the book; women are not men and never will be, and while the difference between genders may spark debate, it does not preclude equality. We have not yet achieved a post-gender world, nor is it clear that we should, but in an age of gender parity, admitting this should not be difficult.

Men and women may be equals, despite lingering questions, but what of women and fiction? Would Jean Rhys and Flannery O’Connor have attained a better balance between their public work and private lives, had they been born in the last few decades? It is impossible to know, of course, but Showalter suggests that the coveted bourgeois prize— “work-life balance”—may have been within their reach today. Yet it is Mary Wilkins Freeman’s contradiction—taking pleasure in one’s “monstrosity”—that best captures the extent to which many women writers, including many of the greatest, sought out and even enjoyed life as pariahs. If the biographies of Rhys and O’Connor demonstrate anything, it is that brilliance is never predictable or conventional. These women were ambitious, talented, and uncompromising, and it’s doubtful that they would have been more willing to conform to social expectation today than they were in their own time. The challenges associated with attaining a balance between public recognition and private happiness are even greater when literary talent, a rarity regardless of gender, is included in the equation. What works even tenuously for most women writers will rarely apply to women like O’Connor and Rhys, Cather and Wharton, or Eliot and Austen, who would probably never fit into any mold.

As the lives of Rhys and O’Connor demonstrate, women and fiction have had a contentious, if productive, relationship—but do they remain, to use Woolf’s phrase, unsolved problems? Showalter would likely argue that a solution has been found, but it seems that, insofar as gender and art remain problematic, so too will women and fiction.

Julia Schwarz is a writer living in Washington, DC. Illustrations by Katherine Eastland.

What’s Your Story?: Joanna Robinson

Elizabeth Nolan Brown — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:12:47 +0000

“Shed your stress, not your clothes.”

That’s the slogan for Lunar Massage, the studio opened by 28-year-old entrepreneur Joanna Robinson this past spring.

Tucked into the first floor of a rowhouse just a few blocks from the D.C. Convention Center, Lunar Massage offers no-frills massage in a relaxing but minimalist atmosphere. The lights are dim, the music is of the Enya school, but there are no oils, no scented sheets, and customers remain fully clothed.

This is all part of Robinson’s vision. Lunar Massage was started, in part, to appeal to D.C.’s busy, young, professional class, with services like “the twentysomething massage” (20 minutes for $26) and “the crackberry massage” (a hand-and-arm massage for those with BBM fatigue).

“I was trying to hit the sweet spot between $120 for a massage at a cheesy spa or some guy pounding on you at the mall,” she says. “D.C. has a really unique demographic of 20-something young professionals coming from college, working their asses off in front of their computers all day. I thought, why not make it more affordable and accessible for that crowd?”

When Robinson talks about the benefits of massage, she is animated and emphatic. It’s a convert’s zeal. In early 2004, she quit her job at a wealth management firm in Dallas, packed up her car, and came to D.C. with just a few job leads. She ended up falling into the libertarian policy network which led to fundraising and marketing gigs for various libertarian causes (including America’s Future Foundation, where she was membership director for two years). But Robinson always had an itch to strike out on her own.

“I really wanted to start my own business, but I didn’t have any particular widget I was burning to produce,” she explains. So Robinson began looking into franchises, and noticed an uptick in massage and spa franchising. “I’m generally interested in health and wellness,” she says, “and I found that massage was a big growth industry.” But she wasn’t satisfied with any of the brand models out there. “I realized what I could actually contribute to a business would be creating a product that would be just a little bit different than what people are used to,” she says.

Robinson began working on the business plan for Lunar Massage last October, eventually downgrading and accelerating the process because of the economic crash. She scrapped plans for private massage rooms (Lunar masseuses operate in a one-room, partitioned-off area), and cut back on decor. With a little money and collateral, she soon secured financing.

“The secret story is that, at the beginning of the crisis, people were pulling out of the stock market and liquidating all their money, pulling out of the big national banks and putting their money into smaller banks. So a lot of local banks became flush with money,” Robinson says. “My bank, BB&T, was more than happy to work with me because they needed to be putting this money to work.”

Lunar Massage officially opened in April and broke even on operating expenses within its first month. Thus far, business has “totally exceeded my expectations,” Robinson says.

Part of this success came from a lucky advertising break. Four days after the online group discount service Groupon launched in D.C., it featured a deal for Lunar Massage.

“I was expecting to maybe sell 150, 200 massages,” Robinson says. “I had to call [Groupon] at 5 p.m. that day to tell them to cap it at 500, because we were booked. I literally tripled my client base in one day.”

The studio’s location has also turned out to be a major plus in attracting customers. Robinson estimates business from walk-by traffic is probably 50 percent, while the rest of her business comes from “the holy trinity of Google ads, Facebook ads, and Twitter.”

“You wouldn’t believe how many people every day twitter, ‘I need a massage,’” Robinson says, “and I can just @-reply them. I’m on Twitter all day so I can drop right into the conversation. People on Twitter are my demographic.”

This kind of convenience and access is what today’s young professionals have come to expect, and reaching them on their turf can pay off. The massage industry is “years behind in technology,” Robinson notes. “People think I’m some kind of tech genius because I have a decent Web site and customers can do online scheduling.”

But a little tech savvy can only solve so many problems. One of Robinson’s biggest frustrations has been D.C.’s licensing requirements for massage therapists.

“I’m constrained to people who have a D.C. license, which really brings down the talent pool,” she says. “My best therapists have been trained overseas. And they have, unfortunately, had to invest thousands of dollars and months of their time to go through training all over again in America.”

Working through problems like this has dispelled any doubts Robinson had about whether running a business would be sufficiently intellectually satisfying.

“It actually is much more intellectually challenging than I thought it would be, because all I do all day long is problem-solve,” she says. “I’m constantly thinking creatively. By the end of the day, I’m physically and mentally exhausted.”

All in all, Robinson has found the experience “tremendously rewarding,” though she cautions other would-be young entrepreneurs that opening and running a business is an incredibly difficult, daunting, and time-consuming process.

“I envy the point where you’ve got the thing moving and all you’re doing is making sure it works well,” says Robinson, who hopes to open multiple Lunar Massage locations around town.

“I didn’t do this just to create a job for myself,” she says. “I am building an asset so I want it to be something that somebody else could manage and grow. I want to invest in other ventures, to use capital in the Randian way—where it creates value and enhances people’s lives and helps them be excellent.”

Elizabeth Nolan Brown is a writer and web editor currently bouncing between D.C., Ohio, and New York. She blogs at http://elizabethnolanbrown.com/. Katherine Ruddy is a freelance photographer living in Washington, DC. See more of her photos on flickr.com.

Hermits and Harlots

Julia Schwarz — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:39:38 +0000

A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, by Elaine Showalter, Knopf, 608 pp., $30.00

The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys, by Lilian Pizzichini, W.W. Norton & Co., 306 pp., $29.95

Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, by Brad Gooch, Little, Brown and Company, 464 pp., $30.00

Julia Schwarz is a writer living in Washington, DC. Illustrations by Katherine Eastland.

At the Gates of the Fourth Estate

Conor Friedersdorf — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:38:14 +0000

On a pleasant evening in March, dozens of tanned, well-coiffed conservatives mingled outdoors at a posh Beverly Hills hotel. The open bar served organic beer, top shelf cocktails, and mineral water. Waiters brought fancy hors d’oeuvres aplenty.

The spread was the work of GenNext, an ambitious right-of-center social networking organization, and its members, who pay $10,000 a year for the privilege of belonging. They gathered for a panel discussion titled “Is Capitalism Dead?” The event, co-hosted by the America’s Future Foundation (which publishes Doublethink), was slightly delayed by the late arrival of its star panelist, Web impresario Andrew Breitbart, who strode to the bar, ordered a margarita, and saw my nametag. “Oh, you’re on the panel too,” he said. “Did you prepare anything? I’m going to say that politics is less important than opposing the left’s cultural Marxism. It’s unbelievable what they do. Liberals are totalitarians.”

Was he being serious? I mumbled something non-committal and turned to the bartender. The jeremiad would’ve confused me less if I’d seen Breitbart’s latest appearance on Fox News. “Look at how they go after Rush Limbaugh,” the Big Hollywood proprietor told Sean Hannity earlier that afternoon. “And compare that to how they treat our real enemies. They coddle them. They treat them with the kindest of words possible.” In other words, Breitbart was arguing that the left is tougher on conservative pundits than it is on Al Qaeda terrorists. “This is tyranny,” he said. “This is Animal Farm, and this is George Orwell.”

Of course, Breitbart isn’t really afraid of liberal “totalitarians.” After all, he chooses to live as an unabashed conservative in West Los Angeles, and sends his children to a school whose liberalism he often remarks upon. This is the man who helped Arianna Huffington found the Huffington Post! Breitbart’s own life is evidence enough of the gulf between his inflammatory rhetoric and reality.

This approach isn’t merely misleading—it is counterproductive. Above all else, Breitbart aims to challenge the left’s influence on American culture. He believes that control over the arts and media are bigger prizes than Congress, the White House, or the Supreme Court, that they shape the nation’s future irrespective of what happens in Washington. Hence his ambition to wrest control of these institutions from the left—a project whose success requires that many more ambitious young conservatives enter creative fields. Will they?

It can’t help that Breitbart insists every conservative working in Hollywood or the media is subject to constant ridicule by the ruthless modern-day “Marxists” who dominate these fields. How many would willingly enter a profession alongside malicious colleagues and beneath ideologue bosses bent on destroying them?

The message delivered by Breitbart, Sean Hannity and other conservative commentators doesn’t merely misinform—it feeds a victim mentality on the right. In the talk radio telling, the liberal cultural elite isn’t merely wrong—it is nefarious, and it hates “real Americans.” That Breitbart calls the cultural left “totalitarians” is instructive. The word implies that the left is supreme, ruthless, and all-powerful. Pushing back from within existing cultural institutions is futile; conservatives might as well withdraw into an ideologically safe dugout, nurse their resentments, and pretend that the height of courage is picking off the least careful leftists with the rhetorical equivalent of sniper fire.

This needless retreat is among the biggest obstacles the right faces as it attempts to engage American culture on a more equal footing. Reversing its course depends on providing young conservatives with a less hysterical, more accurate assessment of their prospects: Ignore Andrew Breitbart! Should you pursue your living in entertainment or the press, you will be outnumbered ideologically. But so long as you conduct yourself professionally, possess talent commensurate with your peers, and produce good work—behaving as a professional, not a propagandist—you’ll go far whatever your personal politics. You’ll also meet a lot of nice people, many of them liberals, who’ll help you along the way.

* * *

Andrew Klavan is a talented novelist and screenwriter whose credits include True Crime (1999) and Don’t Say a Word (2001). Being outspoken about politics has cost him some work over the years, he admits, especially because he is unwilling to keep quiet when confronted with political beliefs with which he disagrees.

As a genre writer, the stories Klavan tells aren’t political, though depicting human life accurately sometimes requires transgressing against prevailing Hollywood mores. “The radicalization of the arts has become so blatant that you get shot down quickly for stepping outside the orthodoxy—that’s true in business offices when trying to sell your work, and it’s true in the press where your work is reviewed,” he says. “My way of thinking is that the very heart of being an artist is authenticity. My advice would be to go at them directly. If it means you’re in defiance or you have to work as an outsider, so be it. I think quality will win out over time.”

Klavan disagrees that conservatives in Hollywood should keep their heads down until they’ve accrued sufficient power, per Breitbart’s counsels. Still, he doesn’t believe his fellow conservative means to scare young people away from the industry. “What he is trying to do is make certain thoughts that are unacceptable in Hollywood acceptable and speakable,” Klavan says. “We are the radicals today. And we can’t take over except through revolution, which can’t come quietly.”

Another “out” conservative, Lionel Chetwynd, claims a lengthy list of credits, including films on the Hanoi Hilton, the building of the Vietnam Memorial, and 9/11. “There isn’t one thing on my IMBD page that a conservative wouldn’t be proud to show his grandkids,” he says, although he insists that movies aren’t primarily about politics. “I am against confronting the liberals in an all-out war to the death. All I’m seeking is an equal share at the table,” he says. “I want this to be a two-party town where it’s as legitimate for me to have our point of view as [it is] for them to have theirs. And to the extent that’s denied, it’s amazing how many people will stand up for you, including some liberals.”

Chetwynd says he endured “outright blacklisting” in the 1980s, but this kind of blatant discrimination is a thing of the past: “It’s much better for us today. People with a conservative view in Hollywood aren’t quite the oddity they were.” Nowadays, it isn’t a matter of losing work so much as getting berated about political matters in a card game, or having people muse on how such a nice guy can have such political views. “They treat you as some sort of idiot savant, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to employ you,” he says. “They’re not all totalitarians.”

And what advice would he offer a young conservative hoping to break into the industry? “You will go as far as your tenacity and your courage will take you. But if the first thing you want to tell me about yourself is that you’re a conservative, perhaps you’re in the wrong town—you should be in Sacramento or Washington. You’ve got to go out and make good movies.”

It is naturally more difficult to get the impressions of conservatives who remain “in the closet” (and by definition impossible to get on the record). I spoke to five people in that category, all 35 or younger. Their consensus was that it would be difficult for a vocal right-winger to excel in the same way that Tim Robbins or Susan Sarandon does, despite their very public far-left politics.

One source, in his late twenties, came to Hollywood after graduating from a conservative college in 2001 and has been working in production for eight years. “I’m always the most conservative guy in the room,” he says, “and I imagine it makes a few people less disposed to be kind to you, but there are far more tolerant people than not. Some of the most powerful agents in Hollywood are conservatives, and it’s certainly not something where people are so vindictive that you’d lose work over your politics. The area where it may hurt you is networking opportunities, though even that can be handled. This one time I went to a Barbara Boxer fundraiser just because I knew I’d meet useful people there professionally. But I didn’t have to donate. It was more a matter of swallowing my pride and going, and it ended up being fine.”

Another behind-the-scenes technician agrees, “I get the sense that the old guard had it rougher. They’re far more jaded. It’s live and let live now, especially if you’re a fiscal conservative or a libertarian. Hardcore social conservatives might find things a bit tougher, but only if they’re pretty outspoken, and even then it’s not bad enough that they shouldn’t come work here.”

* * *

In August 2007, veteran conservative journalist Robert Novak appeared on the Diane Rehm Show, where he advised young, right-leaning aspirants in his field to “go into the closet” if they want to succeed. “Don’t tell anybody you’re a conservative, because you’re not going to get the job,” he said, “and you’re not going to get the advance.”

Better advice is offered by Dr. Stephen Bird, academic director for the National Journalism Center, a nonprofit that places mostly conservative journalists in numerous mainstream media internships every year, hoping to bring more depth and balance to American reporting. “Here’s what I tell interns going into the media,” he says. “Pursue excellence in everything. Everyone admires excellence and gravitates toward it.”

Bird notes that though the proportion of conservatives among journalists is incrementally higher relative to the early 1980s, the right remains outnumbered. “I would think it would make them more marketable—any time you’re in the minority you become more desirable in the marketplace,” he says. “I just think that’s a true statement. I’ve told them that at different times, just as I’ve told people of different minority groups that they have a better marketing position. They need to know that when it comes time to negotiate a salary.”

J.P. Freire, an editor at the Washington Examiner, is one young conservative journalist for whom this rings true. “I think it’s kind of an ace in the hole,” he says. “As a conservative in a liberal field, you come up with angles other people don’t consider, get stories no one else thinks of doing.” Freire wrote for a movement publication in college, worked as managing editor of the American Spectator (where he is now a contributing editor), and before that at the New York Times, where he served as an assistant to former op-ed columnist John Tierney. Later, he was offered a job heading up the team of Times newsroom assistants, which he’s long regretted having turned down. “I liked the environment. I thought everyone was fine, and I was openly conservative,” he says. “The reporters I talked to seemed very fair. I think most of them knew they were to the left and tried to control for it.”

Eddie Barrera has had a slightly different experience. He’s an editor at Adotas, a Web magazine devoted to media and technology. A onetime New York Post reporter who later worked for The Los Angeles Newspaper Group, rising from staff reporter to desk editor, Barrera says that though it may have once been true that conservatives had a tough time getting a fair shake, it’s no longer the case. “As far as the bosses I’ve had, I’ve been treated very well in my career,” he says. “I’m pretty outspoken, and I haven’t always been treated well by all of my colleagues. But it hasn’t hurt my advancement.” Asked how he’d advise a young person starting out in the field, Barrera says that one rises in accordance with one’s talent and work ethic.

That’s been my experience in journalism, though I was warned against entering the field as student at Pomona College. I remember attending a lecture-dinner at Claremont McKenna College where talk at my table turned to the Los Angeles riots. A fellow student argued that inner-city blacks were justified in lashing out at police, given the prejudice they endure. A conservative dining companion was vehement in his rebuttal. Even a black person treated unfairly by a white cop hasn’t any right to lash out against other people, he insisted. As for improving minority success in the job market, he argued that anyone who finished school and worked hard would be a valued employee, excel regardless of societal racism, and find himself better off. But when I made an offhand comment about pursuing journalism after graduation, the same conservative student was aghast. “Why go into that liberal media?” he asked.

He insisted that I’d be foolish to enter a field where my fate would be controlled by leftists who’d treat me unfairly, even if only behind my back. “It may be just one liberal boss who messes with you,” he said, “but you won’t have anyone on your side to back you up. Little things can make a big difference in your career. And if you want to rise to the top know they’ll never let a conservative get there. The New York Times will always be edited by a liberal.” So much for working hard and assuming I’d be treated fairly absent clear contrary evidence.

Fortunately, I ignored his advice. I took a job at a major newspaper chain, where ideology never once impeded my rise, though I never concealed my beliefs and vocally supported the recall of Democratic California Governor Gray Davis. When I left that newspaper, I was offered a scholarship to a graduate program in journalism, where my professors were almost entirely left of center. As it turned out, they weren’t merely fair instructors, but exceptional ones who were willing to help me improve whatever writing I submitted, even if they disagreed with the arguments therein. Theirs was a pedagogical and journalistic project, not a political one. They’d treat anyone fairly who was also there to do good journalism, and editors at most publications employ the same litmus test in my experience.

* * *

Why is the reality of being a conservative in a cultural field so disconnected from the rhetoric of right-wing pundits? Several factors explain the gulf.

Being outnumbered ideologically can be difficult, regardless of your profession, and instances of inexcusable prejudice directed at conservatives afford a grain of truth to exaggerated falsehoods.
The left so dominates cultural fields that it is tempting and comforting for the right to believe that foul play explains their ongoing rout.
Just as Al Sharpton grows in power every time he claims to speak on behalf of people cast as victimized blacks, right-wing commentators like Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Andrew Breitbart benefit by speaking on behalf of supposedly victimized conservatives. They garner attention; the base rallies to the side of a vocal defender; and the claimed injustices imply the need for a leader of sufficient stature to push back.
People of every ideology assume that their political adversaries are not only wrong, but malicious.
People mistakenly believe that the proper way to judge the left is by the least defensible rhetoric of its most extreme members, and that the best way to defeat the left is to match the rhetorically maximalist nonsense of these extremists.

Constant focus on how bad conservatives have it occasionally yields an accurate description of reality. And even when a particular complaint doesn’t pass factual muster, it can confer a short-term political benefit during certain debates, whether by rallying the base or giving conservative pundits the opportunity to “play ref” in the subset of media organizations making a good faith effort to be fair if not balanced.

But exaggerating the difficulty of being a conservative in a cultural field acts as a cancer on the movement—undermining its credibility, inculcating a destructive victim mentality, and discouraging young people on the right from entering the very cultural institutions that most need their presence.

What should the young conservative take away? Courage to enter any field where the work inspires him, a healthy distrust of commentators who would treat him like a victim, and a realization that despite the impression one gets from listening to certain pundits, the average person in every field aside from politics itself is relatively apolitical. Carry yourself like a professional, and you’ll see that the vast majority of people on the left aren’t out to get you.

And you’ll come to suspect that the pundits who imagine conservatives as eternally put-upon victims are interpreting the vitriol they attract as an attack on their ideology, whereas actually their maximalist rhetoric, hair-trigger sensitivity and bombastic demeanor just makes them unpleasant to be around.

Conor Friedersdorf is a freelance writer whose work regularly appears at the Daily Beast and The American Scene.

Learning for a Living

Liam Julian — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:37:14 +0000

Frankford High School is in a rough neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia. Forty percent of its students drop out before making it to their senior year. Its test scores are low, and 75 percent of its pupils are eligible for free or reduced lunch. So it seemed predestined that a new documentary, Pressure Cooker, filmed during the 2006–2007 school year, would focus on these and similar shortcomings, pegging Frankford as yet another sad example of that much-lamented establishment: the gasping inner-city high school.

But the documentarians took another route, and Pressure Cooker, which opened this July, is not about Frankford’s failures but about one of its brightest successes: its culinary arts class, run in conjunction with the national nonprofit Careers through Culinary Arts Program. The teacher, Wilma Stephenson, believes her course offers Frankford students a unique and valuable opportunity to escape the worst aspects of life in Northeast Philadelphia; we see her in the documentary telling her new pupils that 11 members of the previous year’s class earned over $750,000 in scholarships. The point is that for those past winners, and possibly for some of the students Pressure Cooker follows, Mrs. Stephenson’s class is not merely a means to a wicked chiffonade. Rather, it can be a means to a better life.

Yet for all their successes, programs like Frankford’s culinary arts class are typically left out of the larger conversation about K-12 education reform. When people talk about educational choice, they generally talk about vouchers or charter schools—both of which concern where students attend class. Far less often is educational choice discussed in the context of what it is—sociology? sauté?—that students learn once classes begin.

Curricular debates certainly occur, but they almost always take place solely within a college-prep paradigm. Thus, the educational purveyors multiply, but most offer the same academic meal. Young diners may supplement their pedagogical prix fixe with a bit of à la carte—by signing up for a software elective course, say, or by attending the district’s “math and science intensive” institution. Such options, though, are mere accompaniments to the basic and enduring college-prep curriculum. Why?

Begin with what is perhaps the sturdiest consensus in education: that too few students attend college. To reject this consensus is to invite derision because the advantages of a college education are so plain. College is remunerative: Its graduates can expect to earn $20,000 more each year than those for whom high school is the educational terminus. And college is chicken soup for the soul: 42 percent of college graduates claim to be “very happy,” but only 30 percent without a university degree say the same. College graduates are also more likely than their non-grad peers to have strong marriages, save money, be personally and professionally mobile, make better consumer decisions, vote and volunteer, and have better health. What kind of public-policy grinch, the consensus crowd asks, would dare deny these benefits to any student?

But just as policymakers should not (and do not) deny college to well-qualified pupils, neither should they discourage education that does not culminate in a four-year college degree. Yet, this is precisely what they’ve done. The major error of postsecondary education’s apostles has been to assume that all students want to attend college and will, with appropriate academic preparation, flourish there. Their error has had practical consequences. In too many high schools, pupils either submit to passage along a purportedly college-prep track—a track which in many places is too remedial to prepare them adequately for any decent college—or they drop out.

No Child Left Behind and the golden calf of standardized testing have only fortified this design. The Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act—the major federal funding stream for classes once cataloged as vocational education or, as it’s now called, career and technical education (CTE)—came under sustained attack by the George W. Bush administration. President Bush aggressively pushed his own college prep-based education philosophy and sought to eliminate Perkins grants altogether (Congress intervened to keep the legislation alive). Since 2002, Perkins has lost $42 million in funding; it now receives approximately $1.3 billion per year. The Obama administration, despite its talk about vocational training, has not signaled that it will increase this allotment.

Imagine a 17-year-old who does not want to attend college (or at least not right away); who finds parsing Macbeth maddeningly immaterial; who yearns to learn a practical skill and put it to use; who feels his personal strengths are being ignored and wasted; who is annoyed by his school’s lackluster teachers, classroom chaos, and general atmosphere of indifference. Too often, such a pupil has no other options. He has no educational choice.

No surprise, then, that a recent Civic Enterprises survey found that 77 percent of high-school dropouts quit school because they were bored. Past surveys have reported similar findings. According to a 2006 Gates Foundation study, for example, 88 percent of dropouts had passing grades—i.e., they didn’t abandon school because they couldn’t do the work; they abandoned school because they thought the work was unchallenging and pointless. (And yet Civic Enterprises found that “only 20 percent of teachers and 21 percent of principals felt boredom was a factor in most cases of high school dropout.”)

Despite these data, policy thinking about the content of high school curricula remains dominated by the college-prep model and by the insistence that college enrollment is the best and only outcome of a successful secondary education. But an educational system that effectively offers only two options—college or dropping out—is a lousy system. Among its many ills is its implicit disregard for students who have no interest in an academic bachelor’s degree and would prefer to study a trade, such as cooking, plumbing, electrical wiring, or auto mechanics. This slight stems from yet another disregard—that which policymakers (almost all of whom attended college) have for the trades themselves. As Hans Meder, a former deputy assistant secretary of education in the Bush administration, said earlier this year, “For the people who have driven education policy, a four-year degree is all they’ve ever known. . . There’s this kind of perception that that’s the one road to success.” Matthew Crawford elucidates this view in his incisive book, Shop Class as Soulcraft (Penguin, 2009):

Today, in our schools, the manual trades are given little honor. The egalitarian worry that has always attended tracking students into “college prep” and “vocational ed” is overlaid with another: the fear that acquiring a specific skill set means that one’s life is determined.

The worry that a plumber’s life is determined by early manual training arises from the popular but skewed 21st-century dogma that the ideal worker must be able and willing to hop from job to job and industry to industry—that “knowledge workers,” as they’re called, must be highly adaptable, mobile generalists. But the current recession has illuminated the expendability of precisely this type of white-collar worker. Those who work in the skilled trades (the kind taught in today’s CTE classes) are far less dispensable: The New York Times reports that although unemployment is at 9.4 percent, certain “skilled trades like welding and pipefitting are in high demand now, among the jobs that cannot be filled with unskilled labor or outsourced overseas.” The plumber can be content knowing that sinks will always leak, and people who fix them will always be in demand. The plumber’s job cannot be outsourced nor will it evaporate in the mists of a corporate merger. In this case, “determined” is merely a pejorative synonym for “secure.”

The other worry—that directing students into either a vocational or academic track is anti-egalitarian—is more serious, but it patronizes the very students it attempts to rescue by assuming that teenagers aren’t capable of selecting a career that suits them and directing their studies around it. More basically, it presupposes that the two tracks must be separate: that the division between thinking and doing is fundamental—that plumbing, for example, is “stupid work.” That’s untrue. The distinction between thinking and doing is artificial but nonetheless persists, sometimes even within CTE programs themselves. For the most part, though, today’s trade-based CTE has jettisoned this imprudent approach.

CTE is about a hundred years old. Around the start of the 20th century, keeping children enrolled in school beyond the eighth grade became, for the first time, economically feasible for large numbers of middle-class American parents, and high schools swelled with students. Previously, high schools had taught mostly the children of wealthier households, and their curriculum—the classics, mathematics, history—was designed to prepare pupils for college. The new arrivals didn’t take to this classical education, though, finding it to be boring and economically useless. High schools assuaged them by offering a new, alternative course of study: vocational education.

Vocational education was born out of pedagogical disagreement, and its birth only provoked more of the same. At the time, educational theorist John Dewey expressed many of the misgivings about vocational education that are commonly expressed today. For example, he wrote in Democracy and Education (1916) that vocational schooling “is likely to assume and to perpetuate [the industrial regime’s] divisions and weaknesses, and thus to become an instrument in accomplishing the feudal dogma of social predestination.” He continued:

Such a vocational education inevitably discounts the scientific and historic human connections of the materials and processes dealt with. To include such things in narrow trade education would be to waste time; concern for them would not be “practical.” They are reserved for those who have leisure at command—the leisure due to superior economic resources.

Dewey opposed systems of teaching that would rigidly segregate the work of the mind from the work of the hands, as early vocational education did. But he did favor including classroom instruction in what he called “occupation” (“a mode of activity on the part of the child which reproduces, or runs parallel to, some form of work carried on in social life”). Pupils at his experimental elementary school at the University of Chicago studied, among other trades, shop work, cooking, and sewing as part of their broad intellectual exploration.

Today’s trade-based CTE is, ever more, rejecting its dual-track roots and adopting an integrative approach, too. It is, in other words, rejecting concocted divisions between thinking and doing. The widespread “Math in CTE” curriculum, for example, helps instructors identify the math concepts already inherent in CTE courses (carpentry, for example) and create lesson plans to make that content more explicit to their pupils. CTE classes now teach skilled trades at an advanced level of detail, which usually requires that they teach the pertinent traditional subjects, like math or science, at a similarly advanced level.

It seems likely that a curriculum that combines thinking and doing would help many students feel a greater sense of usefulness, and impart to them what Crawford calls “the satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence.” Perhaps it is just such satisfactions that explain why teenagers enrolled in CTE programs are less likely to drop out—especially so-called “at-risk” students, whose test scores and GPAs are one standard deviation below the mean. A 2008 report by the Center for an Urban Future is only one of many studies to illustrate CTE’s retentive effects. It found that 64 percent of New York City pupils who began CTE in 2002 had graduated by 2007, while only 50 percent of their non-CTE peers did the same. An earlier study, conducted in 1998 by the University of Michigan, discovered that at-risk students are eight to ten times less likely to drop out if they’re enrolled in CTE.

CTE has other salutary effects, too. For instance, of those high schoolers who enter the workforce directly after graduation, CTE students can expect to earn the highest wages and experience the least unemployment. Many pupils can integrate their CTE training with a college-prep curriculum, and some 60 percent of CTE “concentrators” now go on to college after finishing high school (80 percent of CTE students complete the same number of math and science credits as their college-prep peers). As a result, CTE enrollment is rising precipitously. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of CTE students jumped almost 55 percent—this despite the disdain many policymakers have for it and losses in federal funding.

Clearly, American students want the option of a curriculum that doesn’t underrate the importance of learning to make and fix things—one that doesn’t ignore the skilled trades. For some, like those in Pressure Cooker, CTE offers an alternative to the uninspired educational drudgery they encounter each day. Students deserve more control over what they learn. It’s time for proponents of educational choice to broaden their advocacy beyond vouchers and charter schools.

Liam Julian is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and managing editor of Policy Review.

Whither Realism?

David Adesnik — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:26:30 +0000

This is the first in a series of four articles trying to come to terms with Obama’s foreign policy. Click here to read Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

Is compromise possible between realists and neoconservatives? Are the ideas that animate realism and neoconservatism fundamentally incompatible? Or is there a way forward that can restore the peace within both the Republican party and the conservative movement?

The conflict within the GOP has not been this sharp since 1976, when Gov. Ronald Reagan attempted to wrest the party’s nomination away from President Gerald Ford. Reagan denounced Ford’s commitment to détente as timid and naïve, and argued for pursuing victory in the Cold War. Yet, even had Reagan prevailed, the defection of realists to the Democratic column would have been unthinkable. For its liberal critics, realism was the cynical doctrine that prolonged the war in Vietnam and ignored growing concern for human rights.

Today, liberal and moderate Democrats think of realism as the kinder, gentler doctrine of George H.W. Bush, whose commitment to consensus-building, diplomacy, alliances, and multilateralism were lost on the younger President Bush. During George W. Bush’s final months in office, Leslie Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, invited despondent realists to recognize that their “natural allies” were the tough-minded Harry Truman Democrats, not the neoconservatives or the “latent isolationists” of the conservative right. After eight years of George W. Bush, might one or more realist titans—Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, or even Henry Kissinger—be tempted to declare that realism is no longer at home in the GOP?

Realists themselves have suggested that realism is homeless by nature, a perpetual orphan in the jarringly idealistic landscape of American politics. They arrived at this understanding long before the Bush presidency, the war in Iraq, and the rise of neoconservatism. To understand the conflict between realism and its adversaries on the right, one must return to the founding texts of the realist tradition. At the heart of these texts is a reading of American history that identifies a dangerous excess of idealism as the greatest threat to our national interest.

Determined to confront this excess, realists have devoted much less attention to the subject of whether and how American values can play a positive role in the making of American foreign policy. Nonetheless, there is a striking but underappreciated continuity within the realist tradition on the subject of morality and its proper role in foreign relations. Whether confronted by the threat of communism during the Cold War or Islamic extremism today, the United States has found it necessary to provide an ideological alternative to what its adversaries offer. Whereas neoconservatives emphasize the role of freedom as the moral ballast of American foreign policy, realists have consistently favored an appeal to the material aspirations of those who might otherwise fall prey to enemy ideologies. For more than half a century, realists have warned that an aggressive commitment to democracy promotion will provoke a backlash against American interventionism. This stark contrast between the realist and neoconservative positions will be no less salient during the Obama presidency because it derives from a clash of principles at the very core of these two schools of thought.

What Is Realism?

“As the label implies, realists believe foreign policy must deal with the world as it really is.” This is the first principle of realism according to Stephen Walt of Harvard, defending realism in a recent debate. Labels aside, realists have long recognized that their interest in objective truth does not distinguish them from other schools of thought. In Man, the State and War, the 1959 book that established Kenneth Waltz as the pre-eminent realist of his generation, Waltz tartly observed that “everyone, of course, thinks his own theories [are] realistic.” Furthermore, Waltz challenged the assertion that realism could be defined by its commitment to the national interest. “Everyone is for ‘the national interest’,” he remarked. “No policy is advanced with the plea that, although this will hurt my country, it will help others.”

The essence of realism is elusive. There is no definition of realism that would satisfy all of its leading exponents, let alone its critics. Nonetheless, realism is a coherent intellectual tradition, marked by persistent emphases and concerns that are as immediate for realists today as they were 60 years ago. In their role as public intellectuals, realists have consistently advised American statesmen to strike a careful balance between a reliance on power and a reliance on diplomacy. In the words of Hans Morgenthau, the most influential theorist of international relations in the years after World War II, successful leaders understand “the two fundamental propositions that diplomacy without strength is futile and that strength without diplomacy can be provocative.” By itself, this statement may seem like a platitude. What makes it distinctive is the complementary argument that there are two specific kinds of idealism whose excesses tend to disrupt the balance between power and diplomacy in American statecraft.

Passive idealism tends to reject power as a legitimate tool of statecraft. Rather, passive idealists insist that the actions of the state must have the sanction of international law or of a multilateral organization. Aggressive idealism is too quick to reject diplomacy as a necessary tool of statecraft. Confident in the justice of their cause, aggressive idealists refuse to engage diplomatically with immoral adversaries. From a realist perspective, this bellicose self-righteousness is the fatal flaw of neoconservatism. In a recent interview, Brent Scowcroft regretted the influence of neoconservatives in the Bush administration: “They contended we did not have time to reach out to our friends and our allies—such an approach would only slow us down. America knew what had to be done…transform the world. We should do so starting with the Middle East; it needed to be turned into a bastion of democracy. This was…idealism with a sword.”

Scowcroft’s observations might have been lifted directly from the most influential texts of modern realism. The realist diplomat and scholar George F. Kennan once called Reinhold Niebuhr “the father of us all, ” and indeed, Niebuhr’s 1952 monograph, The Irony of American History, could easily be mistaken for a realist critique of the Bush administration. “Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem,” Niebuhr observed, “are insufferable in their human contacts.” Approvingly, Niebuhr quoted a European diplomat who suggested that “American power in the service of American idealism could create a situation in which we would be too impotent to correct you when you are wrong and you would be too idealistic to correct yourself.” Niebuhr also identified fear as a dangerous accelerant of rigid idealism. He wrote, “In the present situation even the sanest of our statesmen have found it convenient to conform their policies to the public temper of fear and hatred which the most vulgar of our politicians have generated or exploited. Our foreign policy is thus threatened with a kind of apoplectic rigidity and inflexibility.”

Today, it is hard to imagine that the U.S. ever suffered from the sort of idealism that considered power itself, or even the concept of a national interest, to be illegitimate. Yet realism owes it origin just as much to its opposition to this species of idealism as it does to the aggressive variety denounced by Morgenthau, Niebuhr, and Scowcroft. In 1917, before the U.S. declared war on Germany, Woodrow Wilson delivered an address to the Senate entitled “A World League for Peace.” In it, the president asked, “Is the present war [in Europe] a struggle for a just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of power?…Only a tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe. There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.” For realists, Wilson’s position represents the height of naïveté. Whereas the balance of power kept the peace in Europe for almost a century after the fall of Napoleon, Wilson’s League of Nations just barely preserved the peace for two decades, before giving way to the most catastrophic war in history.

At the moment, it may not seem that any party or movement in American politics is inclined to dismiss power as illegitimate. In The Post-American World (2008), Fareed Zakaria says of the Democrats that “the party remains consumed by the fear that it will not come across as tough. Its presidential candidates vie with one another to prove that they are going to be just as macho and militant as the fiercest Republican.” Yet just eight years ago, Henry Kissinger expressed the grave concern, shared by many realists, that the Vietnam generation—brought to the White House by Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992—shared Woodrow Wilson’s aversion to power politics. In Does American Need a Foreign Policy? (2001), Kissinger wrote that Clinton and his cohort “recoiled from the concept of national interest and distrusted the use of power unless it could be presented as being in the service of some ‘unselfish’ cause.” The former Secretary of State warned that Clinton’s reluctance to recognize the relationship between power and security led him to concentrate on ethnic conflict in the Balkans at the expense of the very real threat of Iraq. Kissinger continued, “The hesitant American response to [Saddam’s] challenge was motivated by two psychological legacies of the Vietnam protest: the enormous reluctance to use power, and the insistence on justifying any threat of force by enlisting the widest multilateral backing.” Of course, when George W. Bush displayed a greater willingness to use power and less of a concern for multilateral coalition building, Scowcroft—Kissinger’s deputy and successor at the National Security Council—condemned Bush for a different sort of excess idealism. In practice, the golden mean between power and diplomacy is a hard thing to achieve. When presidents fail to do so, realists are inclined to suggest that excessive idealism, of either the passive or aggressive sort, is the most probable culprit.

Realism and American Politics

It isn’t easy being a realist in America. In the words of John Mearsheimer, “Americans who think seriously about foreign policy issues tend to dislike realism intensely, mainly because it clashes with their basic values…America has a rich history of thumbing its nose at realism…Realism is largely alien to American culture.”

Mearsheimer penned those words almost 15 years ago, long before the publication of his controversial 2007 book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Some critics found it surprising that Mearsheimer would attribute so much influence to a domestic pressure group, given that his influential work as a scholar has consistently emphasized how “the keys to war and peace lie more in the structure of the international system than in the nature of individual states.” What this criticism fails to appreciate is the deep suspicion with which realists have treated the disruptive influence of American history, culture, and domestic politics on the making of American foreign policy. Realists maintain that these forces have generated a distinctive brand of idealism that is extremely vulnerable to self-destructive excesses.

The realist diagnosis of American idealism begins with geography. America never had to pay much in blood for its expansion from a cluster of colonies to a superpower of continental proportions. This experience resulted in a naïve belief, in Morgenthau’s words, “that nations have a choice between power politics and another kind of foreign policy conforming to moral principles and not tainted by the desire for power.” By extension, Americans believe that conflict arises not from a clash of interests, but rather from misunderstandings or malevolent intentions, often on the part of dictatorships. Thus, Morgenthau warned of the American habit of mind, whereby “conflicts between democratic and non-democratic nations must be primarily conceived not as struggles for mutual advantage in terms of power but as fights between good and evil, which can only end with the complete triumph of good, and with evil wiped off the face of the earth.” Written more than five decades ago, Morgenthau’s words anticipate the realist critique of neoconservatism today.

Woodrow Wilson is the pivotal figure in the realist history of American foreign relations, responsible for marching the U.S. into the modern era under a banner of unabashed idealism. Kissinger writes that “Wilson’s ideas prevailed because, however radical and daring they sounded to foreign ears, they represented a global application of verities burnished during a century of American isolation.” Realists often consider Wilson’s greatest sin to be his years of delay in bringing the U.S. into the Great War against Germany. Had Wilson exhibited an appropriate concern for the balance of power in Europe, the U.S. may well have been able to end the war before it devastated the Continent and sowed the bitterness that would culminate in the horrors of World War II. While holding Wilson responsible for this error, realists recognize that domestic political constraints limited his options. Yet, George Kennan writes, “History doest not forgive us our national mistakes because they are explicable in terms of our domestic politics…A nation which excuses its own failures by the sacred untouchableness of its own habits can excuse itself into complete disaster.”

Turning their gaze from history to contemporary politics, realists emphasize three causes of poor statesmanship: popular ignorance, congressional meddling, and special interests. Zbigniew Brzezinski writes, “The citizens of the world’s only superpower, which ultimately makes it decisions on the basis of the popular will, are abysmally ignorant about the world.” Earlier, George Kennan condemned Americans’ denial of “the legitimacy of the real interests and aspirations of other peoples.” Echoing Kennan’s words, Fareed Zakaria recently lashed out at “a Washington establishment that has gotten comfortable with the exercise of American hegemony and treats compromise as treason and negotiations as appeasement. Other countries can have no legitimate interests of their own.” Zakaria also remarked, “Americans speak few languages, know little about foreign cultures, and remain unconvinced they need to rectify this.”

To their chagrin, realists have found that Congress is susceptible to precisely the same kind of parochialism and idealistic excess that denatures other agents of American foreign policy. “Congress not only legislates the tactics of foreign policy but also seeks to impose a code of conduct on other nations by a plethora of sanctions,” wrote Kissinger in 2001. Zakaria lodges the same protest. He prefaces his complaint by insisting that “the problem is not confined to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld or the Republicans.” Rather,

American politicians constantly and promiscuously demand, label, sanction and condemn whole countries for myriad failings. Over the last fifteen years, the United States has placed sanctions on half the world’s population. We are the only country in the world to issue annual report cards on every other country’s behavior. Washington, D.C. has become a bubble, smug and out of touch with the world outside.

Congressional moralism also has a more aggressive side. Brzezinski criticizes how, “Congress, the mass media, and interested lobbies have periodically embarked on propaganda campaigns to expose what might be called America’s ‘enemy of the year’. Press campaigns followed by hostile congressional resolutions and speeches have focused for example, on Libya, then Iraq, then Iran, then China.”

All of these concerns would have been familiar to earlier generations of realists. Morgenthau wrote, “Considerations of domestic politics may ultimately corrupt foreign policy altogether.” He denounced “the disproportionate influence exerted upon members of Congress by the spokesmen of special interests groups, of which in foreign affairs the China lobby and certain ethnic and religious minorities have been the most potent.” Thus, it should come as no surprise that realists are once again at the center of an explosive debate about the role of special interests, this time focused on the Israel lobby.

Realism, Ethics, and Democracy Promotion

Realism has been stalked for decades by accusations of amorality or even immorality. Realists have rejected this charge vehemently. Some have taken a hard line by asserting that the only real choice is between morality and survival. Since survival itself is the highest good, lesser concerns—such as international law, democracy, and human rights—must not be allowed to predominate.

More often, realists tend to recognize two eminently practical reasons for allowing ethics to play a significant role in the making of foreign policy. First, the American public demands it. Second, the legitimacy of American power in the eyes of others depends on that power being validated by a higher purpose. When writing about power and diplomacy, realists have the confidence that comes from being part of a proud intellectual tradition. In their discussion of ethics, realists often seem hesitant, as though unaware that their fellow realists have made forays into the same unfamiliar territory. Yet surprisingly, these explorations tend to arrive at a similar end point.

In Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, Kissinger writes, “Excessive ‘realism’ produces stagnation; excessive ‘idealism’ leads to crusades and eventual disillusionment.” The notion that realism itself can be taken too far is extremely rare in realist writing. This notion implies that idealism has a place in our pursuit of the national interest. Yet Kissinger provides only the barest hint of what it might he. He writes, “America’s ultimate challenge is to transform its power into moral consensus, promoting its values not by imposition but by their willing acceptance.”

Seventy years ago, one of the founding fathers of realism, the British scholar E.H. Carr, grappled with a similar dilemma. As Nazi power cast its shadow over Europe in the late 1930s, Carr wrote, “The exposure by realist criticism of the hollowness of the utopian edifice is the most urgent task of the moment in international thought.” Yet “it is an unreal kind of realism which ignores the element of morality in any world order,” since an effective order “cannot be based on power alone,” because “any international order presupposes a substantial measure of general consent.” In spite of recognizing this imperative, Carr’s classic treatise, The Twenty Years Crisis (1939), provides no more detail than Kissinger on the subject of how to create the necessary moral consensus. Despondently, Carr lamented, “The place of morality in international politics is the most obscure and difficult problem in the whole range of international studies.”

One author who focuses in greater depth on legitimacy is Fareed Zakaria. In The Post-American World, Zakaria writes, “As power becomes diversified and diffuse, legitimacy becomes even more important—because it is the only way to appeal to all the disparate actors on the world stage. Today, no solution, no matter how sensible, is sustainable if it is seen as the illegitimate.” But where does legitimacy come from, if not from sensible proposals that satisfy different countries’ interests? Zakaria takes a decidedly ecumenical approach, observing that “Legitimacy comes in many forms.” Other governments allowed the Clinton administration, without Security Council approval, to use force in Bosnia and Kosovo because “the rest of the world did not need assurances about its intentions.” At other times, doing the right thing is wrong without permission. Sometimes, and for some countries, legitimacy is simply out of reach. Zakaria approvingly quotes a Singaporean scholar who says, “No one in Asia wants to live in a Chinese-dominated world. There is no Chinese dream.” By contrast, the American dream “is what has made [our] immense power tolerable to the world for so long.”

Neoconservatives have a straightforward position on legitimacy. It comes from a commitment to democratic values. This commitment creates a bond of trust between democratic governments. If consistent, this commitment also advertises to the citizens of developing nations that the U.S. will help them realize their aspirations for greater freedom. Realists express profound reservations about judging foreign governments on the basis of their democratic credentials. Waltz cautioned that this sort of democratic idealism rapidly dissolves into “messianic interventionism” that “may lead to perpetual war for perpetual peace.” Kennan advised, “No people can be the judge of another’s domestic institutions and requirements.” More recently, Kissinger expressed great concern about destabilizing attacks on the principle of sovereignty, “which declared a state’s domestic conduct and institutions to be beyond the reach of other states.”

Instead of associating legitimacy with democratic values, realists have counseled American statesmen to demonstrate their concern for the economic welfare of others. With remarkable consistency, realists argue that the poor and oppressed have a much greater thirst for prosperity than they do for freedom. Niebuhr argued that the extreme poverty of post-colonial states led their citizens to think of international politics as a class struggle in which they were allied with Marxist forces. For cultural reasons, the post-colonial states had little interest in political freedom. “A democratic society,” Niebuhr wrote, “requires not only a spiritual and cultural basis that is lacking in the Orient but a socio-economic foundation which [they] cannot quickly acquire.” Realists today emphatically reject Niebuhr’s condescending appraisal of non-Western religions and cultures, yet still consider them to be a cause of disinterest in political freedom. With regard to China and India, Fareed Zakaria explains

They see themselves as developing countries and, therefore, too poor to be concerned with issues of global order, particularly those that involve enforcing standards and rights abroad. Second, they are not Protestant, proselytizing powers and thus will be less eager to spread universal values across the globe. Neither Hinduism nor Confucianism believes in universal commandments or the need to spread the faith.

The deficient culture is now ours, with its inclination toward aggressive idealism.

In spite of their positive appraisal of economic development initiatives, realists continue to evince a much greater interest in the affairs of the great power and the emerging great powers. One exception to this trend is Zbigniew Brzezinski. Although best known for his role as national security adviser to President Carter—an unabashed idealist—Brzezinski’s hawkish realism served as a counterweight to Carter’s natural inclinations. In Second Chance (2007), Brzezinski argues that the U.S. should have three priorities: to manage great power relationships, to limit or end violent conflicts, and “to address more effectively the increasingly intolerable inequalities in the human condition.” In today’s developing world, there is “a population conscious of social injustice to an unprecedented degree and resentful of its deprivations and lack of personal dignity.” The choice facing the U.S. is either to address this anger or to become its target.

In addition to Brzezinski, Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman have identified the promotion of equitable development as an essential component of American foreign policy. Lieven and Hulsman’s position is especially interesting because it grows out of their determination to place realism on a more solid ethical foundation—hence the title of their 2006 book, Ethical Realism. In spite of their profound admiration for Morgenthau and Niebuhr, Lieven and Hulsman write, “We condemn classical realism in the style of Henry Kissinger and former national security adviser Zbigniew Brezinski not only for its lack of a sense of ethics in the conduct of policy, but also for the its lack of any sense of the long-term goals of that policy.” According to Lieven and Hulsman, the preservation of today’s global order, which strongly favors American interests, depends on demonstrating that all nations have a chance to share in the benefits of that order. The neoconservative agenda of democracy promotion cannot achieve this objective, since “reasonably pro-Western democracies can only be established in the long run if the social, cultural, and institutional foundations for them are laid by successful economic development—and this is a generational process.” Lieven and Hulsman’s position strongly suggests that a heightened concern for ethics will not bring realism any closer to the neoconservative position. On the contrary, it only intensifies the realist conviction that the developing world wants to share in the prosperity of the West, but isn’t ready for democratic politics.

Realism and Neoconservatism in the Age of Obama

Will Barack Obama create a home for realism in the Democratic party? Many of his admirers consider a commitment to realism to be one of his virtues. Last summer, as Obama headed to Europe, Zakaria attributed to him a “world view that is far from that of a typical liberal, much closer to that of a traditional realist.” Zakaria correctly observed that “Obama never uses the soaring language of Bush’s freedom agenda.” Shortly after Obama’s victory in November, liberal columnist E.J. Dionne discerned, “What’s most striking about Obama’s approach to foreign policy is that he is less an idealist than a realist” in the tradition of George H.W. Bush.

This resemblance to the elder Bush may be an illusion, however. For the past eight years, liberals have compared George W. Bush unfavorably with an idealized portrait of his father. Dionne and others forget that the realism of George H.W. Bush led the 41st president to make decisions that profoundly antagonized his liberal opponents. In 1990, they denounced his impatience with diplomacy and rush to war in Iraq. In Congress, the Democratic opposition to invading Iraq was actually more united in 1990 than it was in 2003. After the Tiananmen Square massacre, Bush sought to preserve his administration’s close relationship with Beijing, a decision that Bill Clinton would use against him in the 1992 presidential race.

Rather than courting either realists or idealists, President Obama may search for the elusive middle ground between realism and idealism. His predecessors sought the same balance, although they tended to approach the middle from one side or the other. As Kissinger has suggested, successful presidents must avoid the peril of bending too much in either direction. American voters demand nothing less. Yet both candidates and experts have struggled to define a tangible and coherent middle ground. In last year’s campaign, John McCain described himself as a realistic idealist. Others have written about the need for democratic realism or idealpolitik as realpolitik. For now, we simply don’t have the words to define a middle path as anything more than a compromise between opposing principles. The challenge facing every new president is to translate this uncertain guidance into action.

David Adesnik is a policy analyst in Washington, DC. He blogs for Doublethink. In 2008, David served on the foreign policy staff of John McCain’s campaign for president. He received his doctorate in international relations from Oxford.

Issue No. 2009-2

admin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s how it goes in David Denby’s short book, Snark. First, he’ll note a snarky remark he’s preserved for your consideration. It’s mean, low-down, and colored by the crudest feelings in the crayon box. Then he bobs toward complexity by saying that, of course, there are times when this level of invective might be justified. The criterion, vague at first but soon clankingly obvious, is whether Denby agrees with the cause. Therefore: Keith Olbermann, yea; Bill O’Reilly, nay. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I snarked along the one Denby approves of. And that has made all the difference.

This double standard is more interesting than anything else in the book. It’s interesting not because it’s a tendency peculiar to Denby, but because we all feel it from time to time. “It is not easy—perhaps not even desirable—to judge other people by a consistent standard,” says a character in Anthony Powell’s novel A Question of Upbringing. “Conduct obnoxious, even unbearable, in one person may be readily tolerated in another.” When Christopher Hitchens turned, or appeared to turn, politically rightward, George Scialabba noted his own reaction and wrote: “All the someone in question has to do is begin thinking differently from me about a few important matters, and in no time I find that his qualities have subtly metamorphosed. His abundance of colorful anecdotes now looks like incessant and ingenious self-promotion. His marvelous copiousness and fluency strike me as mere mellifluous facility and mechanical prolixity.” This is the strange alchemy of bias. Scialabba should have asked, though, whether he was wrong to have appreciated those qualities before.

It’s all reminiscent of kids losing a game and accusing the other side of cheating. The beef here is with losing, but to admit that as an adult is rather uncomfortable. On this rarely acknowledged principle, face-saving intellectuals prefer to complain about their opposition’s unseemly tactics rather than the more troublesome fact that their opposition exists at all.

Because of this slippery understanding of snark, the closest that Denby is able to come to a firm definition of it is to offer this vague scenario:

The platonic ideal of snark is something like this: Two girls are sitting in a high school cafeteria putting down a third, who’s sitting on the other side of the room. What’s peculiar about this event is that the girl on the other side of the room is their best friend. In that scenario, snark is abusive or sarcastic speech that operates like poisoned arrows within a closed space.

What the analogue of “best friend” would be in the wider world of politics and ideas is unclear, and the vagueness of the bad-mouthing makes it easy to condemn. If snark is simply invective one doesn’t like, then every person with an intact personality is against snark. Snark, as it’s used outside of Denby’s book, seems to mean criticism that some party deems too caustic in tone, but anyone who condemns snark in the Denby way, it seems, has to speak as if the whole world shares his preferences for what deserves scorn and praise. This sort of criticism therefore shorts the circuit that criticism is supposed to travel, that is, to convince others of what specific things deserve scorn and praise.

It would be better to leave Denby’s convoluted book behind, and—in drawing the line between the uses and abuses of snark—look at an established classic. Here is a line from a work, which the author described as “an experiment in literary investigation”: “According to the rumors, it was all the work of ex-soldiers (recent ex-soldiers!).”

The author is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who, while advancing west with the Red Army, was arrested by his own government and imprisoned, becoming an “ex-soldier.” When prisoners in one of the camps revolted, government propaganda found it useful to describe the rebels as “ex-soldiers,” implying that they were a ragtag mob of deranged, violent men, long out of the army and lashing out against a reasonable penal system. But these were in fact “recent ex-soldiers,” having been transformed overnight from stalwart defenders of their country into condemned criminals. Ex-soldiers they certainly were—why, just a week ago they were risking their lives for the motherland, and now here they are, being tortured as “fascists”!

But I notice I’m already imitating the tone of the man I’m writing about. It’s a frenetic, contagious style—Solzhenitsyn is the only writer who likes italics and exclamation points more than the editors at Gawker—and it shares with snark the ability to stow an entire worldview between parentheses. (Compression of meaning is something snark also shares with poetry.) Many who have heard of The Gulag Archipelago (1973) but not read it are under the impression that it’s like an encyclopedia with all the light parts cut out and that only a rare surge of piety could make anyone want to read it instead of just gazing at its spine on the shelf. This is a strange reputation for one of the most entertaining books ever written about mass murder to have, but maybe that dour dust-jacket is what’s throwing them off. It couldn’t be the prose, when every other page raises the question of whether, once you’ve found yourself laughing at sarcastic descriptions of torture and brutality, you should feel bad or just go with it.

After some initial frustrations, the Soviet government manages to put down the camp rebellion. Solzhenitsyn, with horrifying specificity, describes just how the military murdered the rebels, and adds:

So busy were they with all this that no one had leisure to open Pravda that day. It had a special theme—a day in the life of our Motherland: the successes of steelworkers; more and more crops harvested by machine. The historian surveying our country as it was that day will have an easy task.

There’s nothing particularly satirical about this style—what it describes isn’t an exaggeration, which is exactly why it holds our attention. It’s sarcastic, snide, irreverent, but most of all, it makes no effort to be objective. It is grounded entirely in the presumption of disdain of the Soviet gulag system. Far from encumbering the prose, the snark illuminates the system’s absurdity. Bereft of its snark, it would read like one of those Associated Press stories that leaves you wondering whether the reporter is withholding something crucial for fear of violating objectivity.

One of the funniest (and snarkiest) passages in the whole book describes how the Tsarist justice system dealt with Lenin before the revolution. After relating, among other things, how under communism entire peasant families were executed for “hoarding” the crops they hoped to subsist on, Solzhenitsyn describes the ordeals of the young Vladimir this way:

…he was merely expelled. Such cruelty! Yes, but he was also banished….To Sakhalin? No, to the family estate of Kokushkino, where he intended to spend the summer anyway. He wanted to work, so they gave him an opportunity….To fell trees in the frozen north? No, to practice law in Samara, where he was simultaneously active in illegal political circles. After this he was allowed to take his examinations at St. Petersburg University as an external student. (With his curriculum vitae? What was the Special section thinking of?)

That dismissive “Such cruelty!” is related to what is one of his strangest rhetorical effects, namely how when describing the remorseless cruelty of the Soviet system, he seems almost, but not quite, to convey admiration for their total lack of scruples. This black humor is just one element of tone that achieves a chord-like complexity, giving the lie to the notion that snark is always simple.

Denby laments the “knowing” tone of snark, which he says implies in-group status. He’s right about that implication. But knowingness can be the appropriate antidote to authorities who insist on playing dumb. During the camp rebellion, the government deigns to negotiate with the prisoners. It offers to involve the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the MVD, but the prisoners refuse this.

“Don’t trust even the MVD?” The vice-minister was thrown into a sweat by this treasonable talk. “And who can have inspired in you such hatred for the MVD?” A riddle, if ever there was one.

The MVD’s record of abuse is well known to the prisoners, and to Solzhenitsyn’s readers. They are an “in-group” in the matter of Soviet torture and their knowing tone is fitting.

To make a great literary work, a writer has to find the best style for his subject. Given his position as a dissident writing in secret, it’s impossible that Solzhenitsyn could have been the objective historian, even if he’d wanted to. There were two remaining options. First, he could have been lachrymose, solemn, and shaken. This is the more obvious way to write about the murder of millions. The second approach would involve bitterness, cynicism, and a resolve not to be duped. By choosing the latter, Solzhenitsyn was able to be more, not less, affecting and honest. Snark stimulates the human attraction to conflict, and this accounts for its currency online. It also helps hold our attention when sympathy alone proves insufficient.

The sad fact about human attention is that it flags even, or especially, when you tell yourself that the subject at hand deserves it. When Roberto Bolano wanted to include in his final novel, 2666, a detailed description of the serial murder of Mexican women, he went about it by listing how they died, their professions, and much other data. Even the most sympathetic reviewers conceded that this was a hard section to get through. The effect was ultimately deadening instead of affecting, for the same reason you feel you know much less about the man whose thick file you’ve read than about a Shakespeare character who has just a dozen lines. Data is nothing; drama is everything.

Take, for example, Solzhenitsyn describing an apparent suicide by hanging: “The bosses were not greatly upset; they cut him down and wheeled him off to the scrap heap.” In this case, snark shows both how easy it is to become inured to cruelty, but also how ineradicable the standards of human decency are to those who haven’t been totally corrupted by the camps. Snark is the tone we adopt when we decide to laugh at something that demands our reverence, and therefore obedience. The invective may be against a puffed-up cultural figure or a totalitarian regime, but the different levels of bravery these two kinds of snark require shouldn’t blind us to their rhetorical affinities.

Some might say that, because of the conditions under which he wrote the book, a cruder, blog-like tone won out. Given a more leisurely environment, the argument goes, the irony would have been refined. But the political oppression which necessitated the tone also necessitated the book, and it becomes obvious quickly that The Gulag Archipelago and its snark are of a piece. In the gulag, subtlety wouldn’t have done the trick and would have sapped Solzhenitsyn’s rhetoric of its moral power. And the trick was shifting world consciousness.

And consciousness needed shifting. Nazism enjoyed some respect from those who were free to choose, but communism enjoyed more and for a longer time. Few intellectuals needed to be shocked into seeing the essential evil of Hitler’s regime. The death camps were able to speak for themselves. Specious stuff about omelets and eggs, though, seemed to constantly hover around the “progressive” dictatorships. The Soviet mass murder required a commentary, which Solzhenitsyn and others had to provide. But how does Solzhenitsyn’s snark compare to the kind currently sloshing around the Internet? The moral vision behind his snark certainly elevates it above the jealous sniping of Gawker and its ilk at the established media, which has as its counterintuitive end the effort to become the established media. But the fall of the Soviet Union hardly heralded the end of political double-talk or of political crimes on so massive a scale that earnestness and sorrowfulness will fail to convey their full injustice. The persistence of these features of political life leaves open a space for snark in our public discourse. One of the greatest books of the previous century was snarky, and it blasted away other apologists for the gulag who posed as “sober,” “level-headed,” and “reasonable.” (”In the USSR, at least they’re trying to forge something positive,” said A. J. Ayer to Kingsley Amis, who had brought up that annoying five million dead.) This teaches us, I think, that we should be wary of entering into any polite rhetorical arrangement when important matters are at stake. We should be wise enough to realize that, exasperating as irreverence can be, the alternative is worse. After all, a figure or institution that crumbles at the first touch of snark might deserve to be targeted. Denby would argue that we—the Correct—should be nice to each other and heap our scorn only on the Incorrect. That would nice if these categories were distinct except in retrospect (or even then). Since life is lived forwards, not backwards, only fanatics know for sure if they’re wrong or right in the present, and this necessitates skepticism and irreverence and, yes, snark.

Nicholas Desai has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New Criterion, and other publications. He lives in Virginia. Art by Katherine Eastland.

Lonegan’s Charge

Jacob Laksin — Wed, 27 May 2009 06:48:39 +0000

Steve Lonegan, the firebrand former mayor of Bogota, N.J., and current dark-horse gubernatorial candidate, is waiting in “the vault.” When he first suggested this as the location for our interview, I had assumed he was speaking figuratively. But subtlety is not the rebel Republican politician’s style, and the vault turns out to be exactly that: an empty, fortified vault in the back of what used to be a bank—that is, before it became Lonegan’s makeshift campaign headquarters here in Oradell, N.J.

It is an unusual setting to discuss Lonegan’s underdog bid to win the Republican party’s nomination for governor this June, and with it the chance to challenge Jon Corzine, the increasingly vulnerable Democratic incumbent, in this fall’s election. But the bank vault—with its thick, automatically locking metal door (Lonegan good-naturedly assures me that there is “enough oxygen to survive for 24 hours”)—is also fittingly symbolic.

This is not just because it calls to mind the current financial crisis, and Washington’s trillion-dollar response to it, which has fueled a populist backlash against government spending and energized free-market loyalists like Lonegan. It is also fitting because, running as an unapologetic “conservative Republican” in this deep-blue state, Lonegan has been written off by the local media, ignored by Corzine and his moderate Republican rival, former U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie, and snubbed by much of the state GOP establishment, giving his campaign the bunker-like feel of an insurgent underground. Politically, Lonegan is very much in the vault.

It doesn’t help that the Garden State has been hostile territory for Republicans in recent years. The last time a Republican candidate won a statewide office in New Jersey was 1997, when Governor Christine Todd Whitman won reelection. Voter rolls offer little encouragement. While 60 percent of the state’s 4.8 million registered voters are independents, they tend to vote Democratic, and Democrats still outnumber Republicans by 1.72 million to 1.04 million.

Bleaker still are the prospects for self-styled conservatives. When the GOP fielded Jersey City mayor Bret Schundler, the tax- and toll-cutting foe of abortion and gun-control, in the 2001 race, Democrats won handily. So it’s not surprising that despite some favorable signs—polls show that more than half of New Jersey voters oppose Corzine’s reelection—Republicans still see this year’s race as an uphill struggle. “If we can win here we can win anywhere,” one veteran Republican strategist says.

* * *

To understand why Lonegan thinks he can prevail against the odds, you have to go back to the beginning. Lonegan honed his political chops during the 1990s in Bogota (pronounced bo-GO-da), a solidly middle-class borough of 8,000 that he calls “a real microcosm of New Jersey.” Bogota has long been a Democratic stronghold—at least until Lonegan, a former businessman and owner of a kitchen cabinet manufacturing company, arrived on the scene.

As Lonegan tells it, Bogota was the victim of one-party politics. Taxes were among the highest in Bergen County, municipal government spending was out of control, and corruption ran rampant. “It was another example that big government and high taxes destroy economies, even on the local level,” says Lonegan, who at 53 still has the burly, square-shouldered build of the football center he was in college.

So in 1995, Lonegan ran for mayor. Outspent 2 to 1, he won anyway. “I did it by running on a solid conservative message. I said, ‘I am going to cut the size of government. I am going to lay people off.’ And I got elected on that. What’s really shocking is I did it. That’s where the trouble came in.” Indeed, listening to Lonegan recount his mayoral years is a bit like listening to a military historian: It is a tale of bitter battles fought, usually over contracts and budgeting, with the police, with the teachers’ unions, with the recreation department, among others. Still, by the time he ran for reelection in 1999, Lonegan had cut taxes, privatized municipal services, and reduced spending. He had also made a lot of enemies.

“My first reelection was brutal,” Lonegan recalls. “Everyone said, ‘This guy doesn’t have a chance. He’s too conservative.’ I remember going to the county Republicans and asking for help, and they said, ‘Listen, you’re on your own. You’ve pissed off everybody on the planet.’…[I]t seemed like every house in town had a sign that said ‘We support Bogota police,’ ‘We support Bogota workers.’ I won that reelection with 63 percent of the vote. In fact, the headline in the paper was, ‘Lonegan Leads Republican Sweep.’ I was one of the only towns in Bergen County where Republicans won up and down the ballot. Bottom line is I learned a real good lesson: When you stand up for taxpayers, they pay you back. And that’s been my philosophy of government.”

It’s also his strategy to become governor. For Lonegan, New Jersey is not so much a state as a collection of towns—specifically, the kinds of towns whose overtaxed residents will appreciate a no-nonsense fiscal conservative who promises to slash their taxes (some of the highest in the nation), weed out corruption (not for nothing is New Jersey known as the “Soprano State”), and reduce the state’s record debt ($35 billion and climbing). It’s no coincidence that Lonegan gave his 2008 political manifesto the endearingly straightforward title Putting Taxpayers First: A Blueprint for Victory in New Jersey.

In short, Lonegan sees the state as Bogota writ large. “If you look at New Jersey structurally—567 towns and cities—we have more small towns than any state in the country,” Lonegan says. “So aren’t local governments by their nature conservative? Each one of them has their own church or synagogue, a parish of some type, a lot of volunteerism. Those are my voters: all the Bogotas of New Jersey.”

* * *

It was a gray, drizzly day in Morristown, N.J., and beneath a somber sky the crowd was subdued. True, the signs were out in full-force: “Stimulate Business, Not Government,” “Obamaunisim: Trickle Up Poverty,” “Can we bankrupt the country? Yes we can!” and of course, “Taxed enough already,” the mantra of the so-called tea parties, the nationwide protests against the Obama administration’s $787 billion stimulus package, and the reason that some 500 people from across the state had braved the rain to assemble on the city’s downtown green. But there was a problem: The man that many had come to see, the man whose name was on nearly all the campaign signs being held aloft, was nowhere to be seen. Steve Lonegan was running late.

His absence was most acutely felt when the tea party’s organizers decided to hold an impromptu debate between the visiting political candidates. A diminutive fellow in a baseball cap, the lone Democrat, called for the repeal of NAFTA, earning jeers from a free-trade friendly audience. Next up was Republican Christopher Christie, the favorite of state GOP mandarins, who came closer to the going concerns but was clearly deficient in stage presence. “Are you overtaxed?” he droned. There was a faint rumbling of agreement. “I think you’re overtaxed, too,” he said. It sounded awkward, forced. A few people shuffled their feet.

Suddenly, a roar went up. And before you knew it, there was Lonegan, bounding up on the podium, somehow getting a hold of the microphone, displacing the others. “How about we freeze the size of government and take back America!” he boomed. The crowd erupted. This was what they had come for, and Lonegan was delivering, as he launched into a practiced stem-winder against “big government bureaucrats” in Washington and incompetents in the New Jersey statehouse. There was a slight slip-up—Lonegan confused the 10th Amendment, on state sovereignty, with the 14th, and was corrected by a full-throated chorus—but there was no doubting the crowd favorite.

Watching from a few feet away, Dennis Leary, a software developer from neighboring Randolph, was impressed. “Lonegan seems to be speaking my language,” he said. “A lot of guys will talk about changing things but you don’t really believe it, like with Christie. That’s the problem with Republicans, they’re spending as much as the Democrats, so there’s only one party.” Leary surveyed the Lonegan signs. “Maybe this will be the formation of a new one.”

* * *

Lonegan has certainly been a hit with the grassroots. “He was able early on to capture that network of staunchly conservative voters who don’t have a lot of people to give their money to right now,” says Brigid Harrison, a professor of political science and law at New Jersey’s Montclair State University. “They see him as a representative of an ideology that goes beyond New Jersey, and its supporters are willing to invest in it wherever it may be.”

The campaign frequently trumpets its 10,000 individual donors—4,000 of whom have never even lived in New Jersey. They are folks like Mary Barton, a 66-year-old Republican retiree from Spokane, Wash., who told the New Jersey Star Ledger that she gave two donations to Lonegan because she was “fed up with the Democratic liberals.” The amounts are small, but as Lonegan likes to say, “That’s a lot of people writing $50 to $100 checks.”

The contrast with the Christie campaign could hardly be more pronounced. A March review of fundraising reports by the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission found that Christie drew his support from large in-state donors, collecting an average contribution of $1,250, and just 10 percent of supporters came from outside New Jersey. By contrast, Lonegan’s average donation was $395, with most in the $25-dollar-or-less range and with nearly 55 percent of those coming from out of state.

This wellspring of support from the Republican rank and file represents Lonegan’s best chance to win the June 2 primary. “One of the great things is that 68 percent of primary voters are conservatives,” says Rick Shaftan, Lonegan’s longtime political strategist. “And Lonegan is beating Christie among conservatives by almost 20 points.” Christie still leads among likely GOP voters, but Shaftan contends that this lead “is based on the 17 percent who think that he’s a conservative. We’re winning everybody else.”

In this sense, the New Jersey primary race is just the latest front in the larger war within the Republican party. It is, as Lonegan says, a “classic battle between the conservative and the moderate wing of the Republican party,” but it is also more than that. As the party struggles for relevance in the age of Obama, it is faced with a choice between the back-to-basics vision of base favorites like Lonegan and the more conciliatory approach favored by establishment figures like Christie. At bottom, it’s a strategic question: Can the Republican party be conservative and competitive, or does it need to broaden its appeal to moderates and independents?

Lonegan personifies this dilemma. “Lonegan enjoys a passionately loyal group of supporters,” observes Harrison. “But in some ways that’s a double-edged sword because while he may win the primary it’s not clear that he can win a statewide office.”

* * *

Some on the Republican side are wary of precisely that. Just as his hard-edged conservative credentials have endeared Lonegan to the grassroots, they have hurt him with prominent GOP backers and party leaders who think he’s too polarizing a figure to win a general election. When I asked publishing magnate and New Jersey native Steve Forbes about Lonegan in early April, he preferred instead to talk about Christie, whom he would endorse just a week later. Although Lonegan is running on Forbes’s favored flat-tax platform, Forbes didn’t even speak his name.

New Jersey GOP leaders are also keeping their distance from Lonegan. Proof of that comes from the Republican county conventions, largely symbolic intraparty affairs that have overwhelmingly supported Christie. To be sure, Lonegan discounts the conventions, saying that he has chosen not to participate. “In order to compete, you have to sit down with the party bosses and hacks and cut your deal,” he says. “And I will not do that.” But even he must consider it a disappointment that among the delegations siding with Christie is Lonegan’s hometown Bergen County GOP, which rejected the three-term mayor’s pitch that winning in Bogota is like winning in New Jersey.

“I don’t think that’s a valid analogy,” says Bergen GOP chairman Bob Yudin. “For a Republican to win in New Jersey you have to go into these overwhelmingly Democratic districts, like New Brunswick and Newark, and at least lessen the Democratic vote for your opponent. Lonegan can’t do that.”

Tom Wilson, who as chairman of the state GOP has been on the receiving end of Lonegan’s frequent barbs against the state party leadership, offers a more charitable, if still skeptical assessment. While he doesn’t believe Lonegan is too conservative to win a general election, he does caution that Lonegan will have a hard time uniting the Republican party behind him. “It becomes a little difficult when you’re constantly talking about how awful a group is to then turn around and ask for their support. That’s a tough pill to swallow. Not many candidates have run off the line and been successful.”

Lonegan is dismissive of such warnings. “The party line in New Jersey on the Republican side does not mean a whole lot. History has proven that over and over again. People live off the line here all the time. So I built my own line and my own message.” Lonegan has even less patience for the suggestion that he should moderate his blunt-speaking image, a criticism that he interprets to mean that “Lonegan should be vague and maybe bullshit people a little bit.”

In any case, the Barry Goldwater-quoting Lonegan insists that moderation is no virtue given the grim realities of state politics. “Right now, the Republican party needs to be taken in a new direction and the Republican leadership—and I use that term loosely—has no vision for the future of the state, other than to get control of it themselves. It becomes the shirts versus the skins. One of the things I think I recognize is the need to rebuild the Republican party from the bottom up in the image of the Founders and of Ronald Reagan, and these guys aren’t going to do it.”

* * *

For all his appeals to Reaganesque purity, others see Lonegan’s strength in his resemblance to another president: Barack Obama.

Ben Dworkin, the director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University, notes that “Barack Obama has introduced to this country what I call the politics of maturity. He thinks before he speaks, he talks in complete paragraphs. As a result, people demand more from politicians than the usual talking points and political homilies. They are looking for a more detailed politician.” Lonegan benefits from that, Dworkin thinks. “He presents strong conservative views, yes, but he goes beyond slogans. He will say that he supports a flat tax, but he can also explain why.”

Improbable as it may seem, there is something to this comparison. For instance, when I ask Lonegan about the first thing he would do if elected, I expect him to invoke some version of his fiery campaign pledge to gut the state budget by 20 percent. (”I feel like a kid in a candy shop. There are so many places to cut,” Lonegan once told the Philadelphia Inquirer.) But instead he gives an unexpectedly pragmatic answer. “The first thing I would do, and the thing I am already doing, is working to recruit the brightest minds because the governor right out of the box puts into place about 180 key policy people, policy people who will run different departments, and I need those people who understand limited government, free-market principles, and how to get to that point. That’s the biggest challenge: putting the best possible team together.”

Of course, Lonegan is anything but an admirer of the 44th president. One of the reasons he wants to be governor is to resist more effectively what he calls “the assault from the Obama administration and everything that goes with it.” He wants his best and brightest to bring discipline to Republican spending priorities, pointing to what he calls the “five bills that screwed up New Jersey”—bills that included measures like card check and small business tax hikes. “Despite Democratic control in the legislature, all five of those bills could not have passed without Republican support,” he says. “So that’s exactly why the Republican party is where it is.” But in unguarded moments, the combative conservative can seem a lot like the Democratic president he so vigorously opposes.

* * *

There is a confidence about Lonegan bordering on cockiness. Asked what he will do if he loses the primary, he seems baffled. “Losing is not an alterative,” he says. “I’ve never even thought of it.” In another politician, this might come off as contrived, desperate even, but when Lonegan says it you have the distinct sense that he means it. Despite the very real possibility, he has never contemplated defeat.

Still, things look grim. Even with his support among small donors, Lonegan lags behind his opponent in fundraising. As of early May, Christie had more than doubled Lonegan’s fundraising haul, collecting a total of $4.7 million compared to Lonegan’s $2.3 million. Polls show him trailing Christie by at least nine points among likely GOP primary voters. Then there is his running feud with the GOP establishment, and a generally aloof press that treats his campaign as a sideshow. With the primary fast approaching, he is still in the vault.

As he has throughout his turbulent career, however, Lonegan believes in the taxpayers. “The Democrats have taken control of New Jersey not because of some amazing vision that they have, because their vision is one of higher taxes and massive entitlement programs. It’s because of the lack of vision of the Republican party to put forth a standard-bearer and a message to resonate with voters.” Lonegan has staked his campaign, and indeed his entire political philosophy, on that simple proposition. On June 2, he will put it to the test.

Jacob Laksin is a writer in New Jersey.

The Sex Vote

James Poulos — Wed, 27 May 2009 06:48:29 +0000

These days, one is hard-pressed not to sound like an idiot when talking about sex and what Anthony Trollope called “The Way We Live Now”—especially if one wants to be paid attention. The one sin in talking about sex is being boring—prepare yourself for hyperbole. We’re the most sex-obsessed culture of all time! Never before has sex been so commodified! Kids these days—they lust after each other (and themselves!) to a degree unprecedented in world history! No human civilization has ever reached such a pinnacle of sexual blaséness! Even assuming these are value-neutral claims—hey, onanistic blaséness might be an achievement—there’s something immensely wearying about reading anything that endeavors to prove them. Yet this is the corner into which we’ve painted ourselves. “Everyone Kinda, Not Completely, Messed Up”—that kind of headline plays at The Onion, but is poison to Respectable Journalism.

Alas, ours is not the most sexually transgressive age by far, though it is assuredly one of the more permissive and remissive. As Andrew Sullivan has quipped, “The culmination of the sexual revolution was at 4 a.m. in the Mineshaft in the late 1970s. It is not the civil marriage of two elderly lesbians in a town hall in California in 2008.” Even in its details, we have extremely vague sexual politics. Its commitments—typified by the triumph of awkward, legalistic mysticism known as Planned Parenthood v. Casey—are squishy in substance and procedurally circumspect. Its boundaries, limned in the turnabouts of certain states’ marriage laws, are shifting and ill-defined.

Yet, out of the contradiction and imprecision, a common point of reference, a cultural rule of thumb, has arisen. We are given to understand that there is no legitimate ground on which to criticize someone for pursuing, exploring, and expressing ‘their sexuality’—so long, of course, as they don’t ‘harm anyone else’ in doing so. Further, we believe that there is no ground, period, on which to criticize the achievement of our full capabilities ‘as sexual beings’ but for the puritanical religious ground of sin. Absent an idea that some pursuits of sexuality are sinful, we think, no conceptual framework for attacking them exists. And therefore, because the only possible ground for disapproval is illegitimate, anyone who disapproves is speaking illegitimately, whether inside politics or out of it.

* * *

This line of thinking represents a clear and convincing victory for John Stuart Mill, a man who should be proclaimed the world’s first liberaltarian. For Mill, the good life, partially but by no means completely superintended by politics, required general adherence to two rules. Mill’s first rule commanded that nobody act in any way that harmed another. This done, his second required that everybody pursue the fulfillment of their personal human capabilities to the fullest. Mill expected his liberaltarian citizens to pursue their own happiness, but he presumed that he was right about what true happiness entailed. Personal choice was a means to a particular end, or progress in a particular direction—toward greater physical health, greater scientific advancement, better knowledge and fuller peace. For Mill, liberal-tarianism was the best way to achieve the best liberal society possible. Where libertarianism would permit each individual to pursue the full experience of happiness, liberal-tarianism, using government as a tool, would guarantee that each individual could do so. In 2006, in his New Republic article on liberal-tarianism, Brink Lindsey restated the case. ”Today’s ideological turmoil,” he wrote,

has created an opening for ideological renewal—specifically, liberalism’s renewal as a vital governing philosophy. A refashioned liberalism that incorporated key libertarian concerns and insights could make possible a truly progressive politics once again—not progressive in the sense of hewing to a particular set of preexisting left-wing commitments, but rather in the sense of attuning itself to the objective dynamics of U.S. social development. In other words, a politics that joins together under one banner the causes of both cultural and economic progress.

Choosing is good, insofar as fulfilling our human capabilities is good. What else is there for we humans to aspire to do? But the liberaltarian vision of subjective choices increasing objective happiness raises questions about just how objective Mill’s two key rules happen to be. How are ‘harm’ and ‘capabilities’ to be defined? How are their definitions grounded?

In Mill’s world, which we still largely share, there may be a distant point at which we will know all harms and capabilities, but for the foreseeable future, the process of answering this question is an end in itself. We don’t know goods and bads—capabilities and harms—until we try them out and try them on. Experimentation rules the day. When the floodgates of self-directed and self-regarding human activity are opened, the expectation is progress along all fronts. Though each of us will take a different path, developing our capabilities along lines of emphasis that best reflect and accord with our unique personal potential, in the aggregate we’ll all tend to become better at everything good and worse at everything bad. In large numbers, experimentation works. Not everyone will cultivate and enjoy their own particular excellence, and some people will always harm others, but society will be apt to progress more or less steadily. From the perspective of society, we’ll become more capable citizens in political life and more capable individuals outside it.

But that’s not what’s happened. Four years after the fall of Napoleon, Benjamin Constant succinctly expressed the difference between what he called the liberty of the ancients and of the moderns. We moderns, he explained, have no good reason to measure good citizenship by ancient standards. The spread of technology and education has shown us that, today, our capabilities are best pursued and fulfilled in lives that are disproportionately non-political. Whereas the Spartans and Athenians had so few resources for actualizing their capabilities that they had to rely on political life, full of conquering and ruling, we moderns have many more resources. Thanks to our markets and our cleverness, we created a vast new range of ‘private’ desires, which revealed huge new vistas of human capabilities to pursue. Of course, these ‘private’ desires aren’t very private at all. We’re social creatures, and though we like a little privacy now and again, we love publicity. And the more time we spend fulfilling our social capacities as publicists, the less time we’ll have—or want to have—fulfilling our political capacities as citizens. At the same time, government itself becomes increasingly self-sustaining and no longer needs our active participation or vigilance.

* * *

Is it any surprise, then, that where the mass pursuit of greater citizenship ends, the mass pursuit of greater sexuality tends to begin? Though almost any product can be marketed as offering sexual satisfaction, nothing beats the reality. No amount of video gaming or Internet porn has yet satiated all our pride, envy, greed, and lust—and if it did, we’d uncomfortably feel like we’d become, in some essential way, less than human. We have diligently cleared the decks to making sexual life a central feature of the full experience of individuality today. A great sex life, exceptionally well-tuned to our personal preferences, is very nearly our vision of the highest.

As we recognized earlier, however, ours is not the age of sybaritic abandon and Caligulan excess that we might have feared in 1972. Just as a capable sexual athlete delays and controls an orgasm, ours is, taken in the aggregate, a particularly well-managed form of excess. As with citizenship, we have learned an important lesson from the sexual revolution and the AIDS epidemic: to minimize harm while maximizing pleasure. But unlike the practice of citizenship, which seems less and less significant to living the good life, the pursuit of sexuality is something we like well enough to invest extra resources into cleverly pushing the limits even as we maintain them. We curb them to enjoy them more fully. And, barring any serious harm that results, we find ourselves only somewhat uncomfortably certain that individuals can and should push those limits in whatever way appeals to them. Whereas we are increasingly resigned to the continued shrinkage of our vestigial political member (the capability of citizenship), we all seem to agree that only ‘theocrats’ want to stop the burgeoning progress in our society of sexual capability-seeking—and that this theocratic project, because it is baseless and illegitimate, must be foredoomed.

Despite seeming so obvious and inevitable, these developments have created a subtle and perplexing dilemma. Constant cautioned that even a closely supervised representative government could make part-time citizenship a tempting offer. “The danger of modern liberty,” he warned, “is that, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence, and in the pursuit of our particular interests, we should surrender our right to share in political power too easily.” Even though curbing the pursuit of our capabilities as citizens is right and proper in modern times, doing so endangers our political liberty—not least by making it seem superfluous or an impediment to the pursuit of happiness. Yet Constant made his case for the continued relevance of political liberty in a problematic way. He defended it on the Millean ground that political liberty was indispensable to the pursuit, development, and fulfillment of our unique personal capabilities. “It is not to happiness alone, it is to self-development that our destiny calls us; and political liberty is the most powerful, the most effective means of self-development that heaven has given us.” Do we still believe that today?

* * *

The evidence suggests not. Since libertarians are those presumably most opposed to the destruction of political liberty at the hands of the state, the state of libertarian opinion concerning sexual and political liberty should be especially indicative of what’s afoot in society at large. When it comes to attitudes about liberty, libertarians are our leading indicators.

As 2008 came and went, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch proclaimed “The Libertarian Moment” in Reason magazine: “the dawning not of some fabled, clichéd, and loosey-goosey Age of Aquarius but a time of increasingly hyper-individualized, hyper-expanded choice over every aspect of our lives, from 401(k)s to hot and cold running coffee drinks, from life-saving pharmaceuticals to online dating services.” Gillespie and Welch enthuse over today’s world, “where it’s more possible than ever to live your life on your own terms,” and make no bones about who, or what, is responsible for it. “Due to exponential advances in technology, broad-based increases in wealth, the ongoing networking of the world via trade and culture, and the decline of both state and private institutions of repression, never before has it been easier for more individuals to chart their own course and steer their lives by the stars as they see the sky.”

So much for libertarian politics: Fighting oppression is out, fighting repression is in. Hippies, it seems, were libertarians the way the inventor of the abacus was a computer scientist. Professional libertarians, as they happily attest, are in fact following a general cultural movement that prioritizes personal and consumer choice as the master concept in our cognitive filter.

Examples of the rise of sexuality in private and public life are hardly necessary. The readiest metaphors that we reach for today, for a joke, an insult, or for explanatory power, are sexual: predating ‘nerd porn’ are recognized indulgences ranging from the demonic (‘torture porn’) to the delectable (‘food porn’). (None of these are to be confused, of course, with ‘actual’ porn involving nerds, torture, or food.) Respectable English-language comedy has hit below the belt since Twelfth Night, but the rise of the niche sex fetish as the only-half-joking ideal type of all personal capabilities pursued breaks new ground.

Politically speaking, taking sexual progress as the template for all progress sets politics itself on a walk of shame. Though desire after desire is apparently ‘politicized’, the satisfaction of any desire is increasingly treated as something to be placed firmly beyond the reach of politics. Typical of the prevailing attitude is a working paper by Daniel Klein and Jason Briggeman of George Mason University. “Conservatives,” the authors remark, “say they are for small government and individual liberty, but a content analysis of leading conservative magazines shows that most have preponderantly failed to take pro-liberty positions on sex, gambling, and drugs.” Rather than the attitudes of those magazines toward the liberty to seek pleasures (which vary, as the authors note), the issue is the vision of politics captured in the authors’ attitude. From their libertarian perspective, being ‘pro-liberty’ does not mean politicizing sex, drugs, and gambling; it means legalizing them. Political speech is simply the necessary means to taking our personal pursuit of idiosyncratic pleasures off the political table. Though often we confuse politics and law, the libertarian attitude today reveals their latent antagonism. In the liberaltarian world of John Stuart Mill, likewise, Constant got it wrong: Rather than political liberty being the most powerful and effective means of self-development that heaven has given us, the rule of law is the most powerful and effective means that the state has. One might argue that the serial legalization of pleasures is itself an exercise of citizenship. But all too often, this appears to be promoted as the only reason to exercise it. The libertarian agenda is dominated accordingly—at political liberty’s expense.

Some libertarians do resist this rather grim view, blaming the collapse of political libertarianism on inevitable and unpredictable market fluctuations. “The ’shift to the left’ that we seem to observe on economic policy,” David Boaz admits, “is depressing to libertarians. But that’s mostly crisis-driven. When the results of more spending, more taxes, more regulation, and more money creation begin to be visible, we may see the kind of reaction that led to Proposition 13 and the election of Ronald Reagan at the end of the 1970s. Meanwhile, this cultural ’shift to the left’ is far more encouraging.” Yes, we may see such a shift—if citizenship survives the next 10 to 20 years intact. Consider how often federal power has dissipated itself over the past two centuries and ask yourselves, libertarians: Do you really believe in a snapback effect that will one day rejoin political to cultural liberty? Or is this but a dream deferred?

Though conservatives and libertarians have long agreed that government functions well when laws are clear, concise, and few, the erotic allure of a life freed even from politics distracts us badly from the possibility of a tyranny of law over political judgment. When liberal legal scholars like Ronald Dworkin talk about “Law’s Empire,” they set libertarians off on a technocratic vision of enlightened judge-economists and bureaucratic whiz kids who will give you unfettered access to the desires of the day so long as you accept national health care and comprehensive government regulation. Except on the very rich, who know the point of money is to spend it on goodies, these benign magistrates won’t even impose heavy tax burdens to achieve this bargain. Statism, yes, but with the state as cool parent.

* * *

Every political theory has its tensions and weak points. The steady replacement of civic republicanism with imperial legalism, in the name of endlessly expanding individual capacities, is a theoretical problem not just for libertarians. The same is true for modern liberals—and, insofar as they take themselves to be critics or correctors of liberalism, for conservatives too. In the world that we live in, the fracture lines in all our popular political theories tend to cluster at the places where their ideas about human dignity collide with their ideas about human nobility.

The traditional libertarian’s vision of nobility is that of the emancipated individual responsible enough to bear the costs of his or her own freely chosen actions. But libertarian nobility is threatened by its longtime frenemy in the social-progress business—liberal dignity. Liberals tend to see political liberty as hostile to human dignity in two ways. First, negatively, citizens enjoying political liberty can choose to refrain from voting dignity-enhancing social services into law. Second, citizens can cast their ballots for measures that affirmatively deny equal dignity, institutionalizing hierarchies of status and stigma. In the liberal vision, the ethics of nobility unjustly puts the onus on the individual to suffer indignities. Like Constant, libertarians tend to think that even latent political liberty is an important indicator of our ability to pursue and fulfill the development of our human capacities, including the capacity to seek and enjoy whatever pleasures we prefer with consenting counterparties. Under liberal pressure to legally guarantee and enforce universal dignity, however, the laissez-faire attitude toward political liberty may be converted into tacit consent to the rule of moralizing law—especially if many libertarians are already culturally predisposed to be fixated on securing and enjoying their erotic liberties. So long as the official morality to be enforced is one that rules erotic liberty a fundamental human right, who’s to complain?

Such is the logic of the Sex Vote—the population of practical liberaltarians for whom the exercise of erotic liberty in fulfillment of their capabilities far outweighs in importance any exercise of political liberty, so content are they with a government that delivers sexual freedom (and perhaps some minimum of attendant social services). For the Sex Vote, eliminating the day-to-day drudgery of citizenship itself counts high among social services: outsourcing the detail and difficulty of governance to distant, centralized experts is a feature, not a bug, of ‘unaccountable’ government. In its liberaltarianism, the Sex Vote would solve once and for all Wilde’s paradox (the trouble with socialism is it takes too many evenings). In the world that we live in, captivated by erotic liberty, such is the destiny of ’smart citizenship’ and representative government.

This is a predicament to which libertarianism has always been somewhat exposed. But today’s libertarians seem uniquely underprepared to face it. Conservatives, for their part, attempt to argue, with Jonah Goldberg, that liberaltarianism is doomed because its “first principles simply aren’t aligned.” It is true, as John Hood claims, that under liberal rule “the private sphere must give way as costs are socialized and power is centralized.” Or, as David Frum asserted, “It will be hard to afford much lifestyle freedom as payroll and income taxes rise to pay for the Obama administration’s hope and change.” Yet if we have learned anything from the mainstreaming of porn and the democratization of amateur celebrity, it’s that you don’t need to earn like a rock star in order to party like one—especially if the government is willing to cover the costs to keep you healthy enough to party on. Ask yourself: How many hipsters are too poor to party? The liberaltarian bargain, with the state as cool parent, does align its first principles: Erotic liberty shall expand as costs are socialized and power is centralized. No contradiction there. It is the allure of this promise, already planted wide and deep within the popular culture, that’s inspiring many of the young to grow more libertarian—but only as they grow more liberal.

* * *

But there is a deeper question raised by the emergence of the Sex Vote. Unlike the liberal, democratizing attitude toward the open-ended pursuit of erotic liberty, the traditional libertarian attitude at least recognizes that the arena of the erotic is as competitive as any other status-conferring activity and will foster the inevitable rise of a sexual elite. Indeed, in (dare we say) Randian fashion, it celebrates it as the whole point. Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe has reported in the London Times on the rise of highly professional and exclusive sex parties. In an erotocracy, much like a capitalist meritocracy, there will be winners and losers—those who are able to thrive given the basic currency of life, and those who are not able. In a society of sweeping erotic liberties, not everyone can rise to the top, but, more importantly, not everyone can cope successfully with their freedom. Some will be born at a disadvantage, too unattractive or introverted to avoid daily misery.

The poster boy of those on the losing end of the erotocratic stick is to be found in Michel Houellebecq’s 2001 novel The Elementary Particles. “Concerned only with her own pleasure,” as Adam Kirsch details in his World Affairs review, “Janine has no interest in mothering her children, literally abandoning the infant Michel in a pile of his own excrement. No wonder he grows up to be incapable of love or sexual connection; or that Bruno, similarly maltreated, becomes a loathsome pervert, obsessed with pornography and public masturbation, prevented only by his own cowardice from becoming a child molester.” Losers like this, perhaps very many of them, are inevitable in an erotically free society, just as the poor are inevitable under economic freedom and the disgruntled under political freedom. At the extremes, the self-actualized nobility of the sexual elite requires their tolerance of a perhaps large sexual underclass—not deprived in their ability to exercise erotic liberty, mind you, but in their ability to integrate it into a life worth living.

The traditional libertarian can accept this inequality of outcomes; not so the liberal. Where the unfettered “market”—in this case, the space of sexual liberty—does not correct for inequalities and externalities, they will conclude the state should step in. The state is the only institution capable of helping all citizens make responsible erotic choices, and the only one capable of making those choices both socially acceptable and individually affordable. But recourse to the benevolent tyranny of the state brings us full-circle back to the tension that has kept libertarianism and liberalism apart for the past 50 years.

Instead of a night watchman who will patrol the streets but stay out of your home, the government of the future will not only own your home but install the stripper pole in your basement! How are libertarians to turn back this uncanny vision of soft despotism? With the rise of anti-political traditionalist movements on the right and the Republican party at low ebb, it is no longer clear that conservatives will do it for them. If the attitude of PayPal founder Peter Thiel, writing in Cato Unbound, is at all representative, libertarians are in danger of abandoning political liberty altogether. “In the face of these realities,” writes Thiel, “one would despair if one limited one’s horizon to the world of politics. I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms—from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ’social democracy.’” That escape is no escape at all. It is a flight into bigger cages and longer chains. Political libertarianism—the very heart of libertarianism itself—cannot survive even an open marriage with an ideology that seeks freedom from politics above all. For we are political animals, and the only way yet devised to free ourselves from the human condition is to enlist ourselves in servitude.

James Poulos blogs at Postmodern Conservative. Art by Joe Oliva Ganoza.

The New Dominion Blues

John McCormack — Wed, 27 May 2009 06:48:19 +0000

“I certainly agree that Northern Virginia has gone more Democratic,” John McCain’s campaign aide Nancy Pfotenhauer said on MSNBC in mid-October 2008. But, she continued, Virginia was going to vote Republican in the presidential election because “the rest of the state—real Virginia if you will—will be very responsive to Senator McCain’s message.” The MSNBC anchor, recognizing Pfotenhauer’s gaffe in the making, offered her a chance to walk back her words. But she stuck to her guns, explaining that “real Virginia” is “this part of the state that’s more Southern in nature.”

In some ways, it was just another cringe-inducing bump on the road as the Straight Talk Express careened toward its November 4 collision with the Obama juggernaut. John McCain would have lost the election—and the state of Virginia—even if Pfotenhauer hadn’t suggested that Northern Virginia wasn’t as authentic as the rest of the state. But her gaffe did serve a useful purpose by underscoring a big problem for the GOP: Republicans simply can’t win statewide elections in Virginia if Democrats run up the score in the heavily-populated D.C. suburbs.

While George W. Bush narrowly won Beltway-straddling Fairfax County (pop. 1 million) in 2000, Obama defeated McCain there 60 to 39 percent in 2008. Just 20 years earlier, those numbers were flipped, with the elder George Bush defeating Michael Dukakis 61 to 38 percent. Democrats have also consolidated their gains in Arlington County: Al Gore and John Kerry won it by 26 and 36 points, respectively, while Obama thoroughly trounced McCain 72 to 26 percent. On Election Day, Virginia voted 53 to 47 percent for Obama, delivering its electoral votes to a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1964. It turns out that a “fake” Virginian’s vote counts just as much as a “real” Virginian’s.

The GOP’s problems aren’t going away anytime soon. Virginia’s demographics have skewed away from the Republican base in recent years and show no signs of reversing. Michael Barone, co-author of the Almanac of American Politics, points to the “big immigrant influx into Fairfax County and domestic outflow.” Since 2000, more than 90,000 native Northern Virginians have moved out of the county, and more than 70,000 foreign immigrants—mostly Hispanics and Asians—have moved in. And as D.C. workers continue to push farther out into Northern Virginia to start families, the youth vote has become pivotal in determining the area’s politics. Republican pollster Ed Goeas points out just how big of a problem this is for the GOP. If you look at the nationwide youth vote (18- to 30-year-olds) in presidential elections, he says, Republicans “won by one percentage point in 2000, lost by 11 points in 2004, and lost by 33 points in 2008. The electorate wasn’t different. The [share of the] youth vote was only one point higher” in 2008. According to Goeas, if McCain had performed as well as Bush did in 2000, Obama would have won by only one point instead of seven.

Can Republicans turn the state red again? Several surprising local elections in Northern Virginia this year have heartened the party as it heads into the gubernatorial contest in November, but crafting a message that will persuade the Obamaphilic professionals of D.C.’s suburbs is something it’s still trying to figure out.

* * *

“We are going to be the tip of the spear and the testing ground to see if Republicans can start moving back into the majority,” says GOP Fairfax County chairman Anthony Bedell. Bedell is a 41-year-old native Northern Virginian who took up his post following the 2008 election, and he is determined to get the GOP back in the game. “One of my philosophies is to play in every area of the county,” he says. “You go in and you decrease the Democrats’ winning margins and you increase the Republicans’ [share], and the next thing you know a Republican is winning countywide in Fairfax.” Already, the party has fielded candidates for 15 of the county’s 17 delegate races and expects to run a full slate—a marked improvement upon 2007 when Republicans ran in only 5 of those districts.

An early surprise was the close finish of Republican Joe Murray in a special election last January in traditionally blue Alexandria. Murray, a third-year law student at Catholic University and staffer for New Jersey congressman Joe Wilson, heard about the House of Delegates race from a Washington Post article. The next day, he arrived at the primary Blackberry in hand and convinced just enough people to give him a 20-to-16 vote win. He spent his winter break campaigning, going door to door every day, and lost the general election by only 16 votes out of 2,600 cast.

Simply showing up to play is the first step to regaining a foothold in the region, but many Republicans believe they need to make more dramatic moves—revamping the party’s image, if not its ideology—to win. As the Virginia GOP attempts to reach out to suburban voters, it’s backing politicians with more moderate appeal—much like Republican John Cook, who, last February, defied political trends and narrowly won a seat on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors—a district held by Democrats for over 20 years.

Cook, 45, a New York native and lawyer, moved to Northern Virginia in 1993. Since then, he’s been intensely involved in his local community. As a resident of the Kings Park area of Springfield, Cook has served on the local PTA and was elected president of his neighborhood association. So it’s no surprise that his campaign (motto: “Strengthening our neighborhoods”) focused largely on good governance issues: improving constituent services, zoning enforcement, and working with homeowners’ associations. On his campaign website, he touts such achievements as organizing the “first-ever community potluck dinner” and holding a “Neighborhood College” workshop, devoted to such goo-goo, soccer-mom agenda items as “community building techniques” and “cross-cultural understanding.”

While GOP leaders at the national level may think his platform fluffy, Cook believes that Fairfax Republicans have “struggled because we haven’t always emphasized the issues that are of most concern to the majority of voters. What works up here in Fairfax County,” he continues, is focusing on issues like “helping teachers in the classroom, neighborhoods, helping people being safe and secure in their homes, and economic growth.”

Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell is likewise focusing on what he calls “kitchen-table issues.” Among the initiatives being promoted by his campaign are an Obama-esque “green jobs” program and something called a “working mom government simplicity task force”—words unlikely to endear him to Rush Limbaugh listeners. During the lull before the 2010 congressional elections, all eyes will be on Virginia’s 2009 race to see just how successful this approach will be.

Born and raised 15 miles south of D.C. in Mt. Vernon, McDonnell likes to tout his northern Virginia roots. On an overcast Saturday morning in late March, 500 people gathered in a firehouse in Annandale to officially kick off his campaign. “Growing up in northern Virginia, I learned from [my parents] values that have lasted a lifetime,” he tells the crowd. To drive home the point, during a two-minute biographical video shown at the rally, the narrator says that McDonnell learned “his values—faith, family, hard work, honesty” in the “middle-class neighborhoods of Fairfax County and Hampton Roads.”

McDonnell’s impressive biography ought to have statewide appeal: a father of five, 21 years in the Army and Reserves, a master’s degree in business administration, executive at a Fortune 500 company, state delegate, attorney general. When he speaks, he comes across as an affable businessman—a less plastic version of Mitt Romney. With his non-regional (read: Yankee) dialect, McDonnell talks like northern Virginians—in stark contrast to former gubernatorial candidate Jerry Kilgore, whose Appalachian twang some found indecipherable. In a crisp charcoal business suit and red tie, the salt-and-pepper-haired 54-year-old looks like northern Virginians, too. He certainly doesn’t seem like the type to be caught in George Allen’s cowboy boots.

* * *

“Are you trying to be the next Bobby Jindal?”

It’s a question Amit Singh, the son of Indian immigrants and a young libertarian firebrand, heard a lot while working the phones for the Republican party. In truth, the Indian-American Louisiana governor provided little inspiration for Singh. His role model, rather, is Texas congressman Ron Paul.

While Fairfax county supervisor John Cook has tried to pull the party to the center, Singh exerts pressure in the opposite direction—leading an insurgency of limited-government purists who are fighting against what they see as the GOP’s turn towards reckless spending and intrusive federal legislation. Turned off by “big-government conservatism,” Singh and his comrades favor a back-to-basics conservatism that emphasizes smaller government and tax cuts.

In the spring of 2008, Singh, a 33-year-old defense consultant from Arlington, says he intended to volunteer for Republican congressional candidate Mark Ellmore, who was running from his Arlington district. But when he visited Ellmore’s website he was shocked at what he found.

“I was pretty much floored because his entire front banner was about increasing the size of Medicare and Medicaid and SCHIP. I was just shocked,” Singh tells me at the Mediterranean restaurant Moby Dick in Clarendon. “At this point, what’s the difference? Why would I support this guy?” By February, Singh decided to challenge Ellmore in the Republican primary.

More than a few people thought Singh’s campaign was a joke. (It didn’t help that his campaign proposals included shuttering the Department of Education and opening up trade with Iran and Cuba.) But Singh went on to raise over $60,000 in three months and gained endorsements from two top conservative Virginia blogs. His campaign was featured favorably in the likes of Reason and the American Conservative, both of which cheered on the next-generation Ron Paul Republican.

But the “rEVOLution”—as the Paulites call it—was not to be. Singh lost the primary with 43 percent of the vote. But he’s not giving up on his political activism anytime soon. “If you put yourself out there, you at least get that soapbox to talk on,” he says. “One dissenting opinion can cause a lot of effect.…If you can start showing a trend, we won’t be so quick to bail huge banks out, bail failing car companies out.” With any luck, he hopes, “the forces of big government will be somewhat checked by the people themselves.”

As a leading voice for the Campaign for Liberty—the grassroots organization that rose from the ashes of the Paul campaign—Singh has thrown his weight behind McDonnell. (Singh cites McDonnell’s promise to “reduce government regulations which are hindering free enterprise” as the basis of his support.) While some might scoff at the importance of the Ron Paul vote, every vote counts. Singh’s was just another vote Republicans couldn’t afford to lose last fall but did. For the moment though, McDonnell appears to be successfully keeping his center-right coalition intact.

* * *

In the current moment of unchecked Democratic control, McDonnell may not even need to pledge to roll back the welfare state to maintain conservative support. Simply standing athwart the more unpopular parts of the liberal Democratic agenda may convince conservatives that McDonnell is the lesser of two evils. In his kickoff speech, McDonnell touched on all the usual party shibboleths: abortion, gun rights, and offshore drilling. But the conservative talking point that got the biggest rise out of the audience was his opposition to a “card-check” bill, which would allow unionization without a secret ballot election. “All three of my opponents recently stood in union picket lines in Northern Virginia, and now will not oppose the job-killing card-check bill!” he shouted, eliciting loud boos from the crowd. “We can’t let big national unions turn Virginia into southern Michigan!”

“McDonnell wants to turn card check into the issue this year,” the Washington Post’s Anita Kumar wrote on May 27. “He talks about it everywhere he goes.” Republicans argue that a Democratic victory in 2009 would mean an end to right-to-work laws at the state level, even if a national card-check measure doesn’t pass Congress. “If you lose the House of Delegates and one of the Democrats wins the governor’s race, the right-to-work law in Virginia is gone,” says the Fairfax’s Bedell. Card check, he adds, is a “unifying issue for Republicans, and a unifying issue for businessmen and women. They’ve kind of gone away from the Republican party in Fairfax County, but they’re coming back.”

Fairfax Republicans have also made headway attacking their opponents on deficit spending and taxes. During his campaign, John Cook brought attention to the $650 million deficit in the Democrat-controlled county. Cook supported specific budget cuts—focusing particularly on the $20 million spent each year on public housing. Bedell anticipates that Democrats will soon find themselves in an unhappy bind between cutting spending or raising taxes to balance the budget. The effects of this trade-off are already beginning to materialize: The Washington Post reported that over 150,000 households will see their property taxes increase this year, some by as much as 10 percent, despite declining home values in the county.

The tax issue already appears to have claimed its first two Democratic victims on May 5, when two Alexandria city council members were defeated by Republican challenger Frank Fannon and Republican-leaning independent Alicia Hughes. “It was spending and taxes” that led to Republican victory, says Fannon, a lifelong Alexandrian and 41-year-old manager at Sun Trust mortgage. He points out that the city budget had swelled by 50 percent in the past decade, and the council all but assured his victory by raising residential real estate taxes by 6 percent the week before the election.

While Fannon’s election provides another glimmer of hope for the GOP—he will be the first Republican to sit on the council since 2003—it’s unclear whether his win foreshadows GOP prospects in statewide elections. Fannon acknowledges that had he been on the ballot last November, he would have been overwhelmed by the Obama wave in Alexandria, where he defeated McCain with 72 percent of the vote.

* * *

Michael Barone believes that Virginia might become competitive again as voter turnout falls. “A lot of the young singles vote that rallied so well for Obama are going to be hard to get out for other elections,” he explains. “[Young voters are] transient. They’re not going to vote for a board of supervisors election.” Indeed, the turnout for the Fairfax County board of supervisors election was just 100,000—only 20 percent of the 2008 presidential election turnout.

This November will test whether Republicans can make a comeback in the Old Dominion. Obama’s national popularity remains high, and accusations that the GOP no longer has room for moderates reached fever pitch after Senator Arlen Specter’s defection to the Democrats earlier this spring. But now that costly federal programs like health care are poised to place an even greater strain on recession-stressed voters than the bailouts of last winter, a candidate who promises to be tight-fisted with their money may have a chance.

But if McDonnell can’t pull off a win, it may mean that Virginia has taken a decisive turn from red to blue, and Republicans will have to take cold comfort in the knowledge that they’re winners in “real” Virginia, if not in real life.

John McCormack is a deputy online editor at the Weekly Standard.

Toward a Bioethics of Love

Helen Rittelmeyer — Wed, 27 May 2009 06:48:06 +0000

My sister’s genetic disorder is too unusual to have a name. If it seems like the person I’m talking to won’t understand a medical description—grand mal seizures, nonverbal, severe-to-profound mental retardation—the layman’s version is that she’s a 10-month-old mind trapped in a 20-year-old body.

I am not often asked whether there is a cure. When I heard the question for the first time, only a year ago, my answer, which appalled the questioner, was that my family probably wouldn’t be interested in one.

Of course, to speak of an after-the-fact cure for a genetic disorder is to liberate imagination from basic science, but consider for a moment the implications of saying that, if a cure for my sister’s condition appeared tomorrow, my family would refuse it. It may sound like a thought experiment from an introductory philosophy textbook, but the answer to this painfully undergraduate question is, in its way, an answer to those bioethical questions about disability that now seem so pressing. Should deaf parents be allowed to inflict deafness on their children by denying them cochlear implants? Can quadriplegia justify assisted suicide? Was the Americans with Disabilities Act poorly conceived? (Yes, no, and colossally.) I hope that by getting to the bottom of my intuitive unwillingness to see my sister “cured,” I can begin to offer a conservative bioethics, one that sees love, not autonomy, as the basis of human dignity.

***

Before beginning, it would be a good idea to know what to call them. Is it all right to say “the disabled?” If not, which is better, “disabled people” or “people with disabilities?” “Physically-impaired” sounds too negative, but “differently-abled” is obvious cant.

Philip Corbett, house stylist for the New York Times, prefers “person with a disability” because “a person with a disability is a person, first of all, with many characteristics beyond the disability.” I do not dispute with Corbett that they are, but his elegant point buckles under an inelegant phrase. More importantly, his idea that disability should be considered merely incidental is misleading.

For one thing, it is dangerous to write off any trait as a mere happened-to-be. Did Joan of Arc simply happen to be a woman? Would Oscar Wilde have been Oscar Wilde if he’d been straight? If we knock off every characteristic attributable to accidents of genetics and fate, can we hope to leave any mark of individuality standing?

But this point, which holds for most characteristics, goes double for disability. It contradicts decades of sloganeering to say so, but, very often, a man’s disability is the defining aspect of his life.

***

Consider the late Harriet McBryde Johnson, a disability rights activist and author of the New York Times Magazine article “Unspeakable Conversations,” one of the most famous documents in the canon of disability activism. The article tells of Johnson’s encounter with Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, who notoriously endorses elective infanticide in cases where a child’s disability sentences him to a life of extraordinary suffering. Johnson had originally been invited to oppose Singer in a public debate, but she refused the terms: “This sounds a lot like debating my life—and on my opponent’s turf, with my opponent moderating, to boot.” She made a counterproposal—a guest appearance in one of Singer’s classes and a public lecture of her own—which Princeton accepted.

Defending the value of one’s own life is, of course, insultingly superfluous. If I can summon the motivation to so much as turn up at such a forum, doesn’t that prove the point beyond question?

A simple point, but one with a hidden irony. Singer’s case for elective infanticide assumes that disability always makes life less fulfilling, and Johnson’s appearance proved the opposite before she even opened her mouth. Far from puttering away her days in some dismal nursing home, this “bedpan crip” (her words) was trading barbs with a famous Ivy League professor! Johnson’s neuromuscular disorder did not stop her from snagging such a distinguished speaking engagement. On the other hand, without her disability, would she have been invited in the first place? Disability did not stand in the way of her success; quite the opposite, disability shaped it.

Even if Johnson hadn’t put disability at the center of her professional career, she could hardly have avoided putting it at the center of her life. There is no aspect of her existence that it did not affect, no situation in which she could have set it aside or made it invisible, no system of accommodations so effortless that it could have vanished into routine. We cannot reduce a man to his disability, but neither can we look past it. Look past it to what? An imaginary version of that person minus his disability? What an insult, to insist that the only way we can deal with a man is by pretending he is someone else.

***

To base public policy on an imaginary future in which disability is irrelevant is therefore not simply futile but incoherent. If we wish to deal with disability in some kind of public way, we must approach it with some other intention than making it invisible. So, if we cannot say of disability simply that we would like to see it eradicated, what should we say about it?

“Luxury undermines empires, which is another way of saying that civilization leads to the death of civilization.” The words are Patrick Brantlinger’s, but they could just as easily have been Tocqueville’s, Gibbon’s, or Baudelaire’s. They also could have been Oswald Spengler’s, which should suffice to explain why reactionary moaning about flabbiness and decadence has never been warmly received among disability theorists: It is not hard for them to imagine where a celebration of self-discipline, virility, and athleticism leaves the wheelchair-bound, feebleminded, and incontinent. However, a strange twist of fate has made the weakest Americans the heroes of our war on idleness and indifference rather than its villains, or its victims. Love of rugged virtue is sometimes an adolescent fascination with power, the “school of virility” that Ezra Pound said “seems to imagine that man is differentiated from the lower animals by possession of a phallus.” But sometimes it is more than that. A more mature version might be: A healthy interest in happiness is good, but only when tempered by a suspicion that happiness is less an ultimate goal than a side effect. A man could live a good life by pursuing virtue, personal excellence, love, or salvation, but, if he does nothing but chase pleasure for its own sake, his life will be happy—and very, very small.

So far, so uncontroversial. The missing link between the above summary and a grand narrative of cultural decline is this: As idle pleasures become more and more alluring, they become harder and harder to resist. One need not be a paranoiac about the decline of civilization to admit that leisure is more appealing than virtue, which demands greater sacrifices and promises less straightforward rewards. As our entertainments offer greater thrills at cheaper rates, the choice between the good fight and good fun starts to look obvious.

It used to be that crotchety bellwethers of decadence would nudge our country towards self-discipline by holding up its manliest heroes and reciting Teddy Roosevelt’s paean to men who dare (which made those Americans who could not so much as go to the store without assistance begin to feel very nervous). But different ages need different heroes. Other generations had to contend with the temptations of consumerism, luxury, and ever-increasing opportunities for laziness; ours has to contend with science. The fantasy is the same: the eradication of pain, and the eventual obsolescence of all those habits that feel awful but build character. Science in our day, like leisure in others, has improved so rapidly that its champions have begun to suspect that the age of painlessness is finally at hand.

I cannot be certain that science will never discover cures for disability, but I am quite sure that such scientific triumphalism is perverse. Let me return to my sister’s story.

***

I remember noticing something about her Special Ed classmates: Those whose disabilities were genetic, like Martha’s, were thought to be capable of improvement but not radical transformation. Genetic mutation cannot be cured, just managed. The autistic children, on the other hand, were more likely to be shuttled by their parents to whichever medical center had just completed a promising study. Cure-chasing did not always make these parents seem frantic and desperate, but, even at its most benign, the practice struck me as incompatible with the kind of acceptance that love is supposed to involve.

I don’t mean to suggest that unconditional love means accepting disability as a mere difference rather than a handicap. Some disability theorists have proposed a social construction model of disability, which argues, in the words of the U.N. Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, that “disability resides in the society not in the person.” I might be willing to accept that mild forms of autism—Asperger’s, for example—might be effectively “cured” by greater acceptance of their attendant quirks, but mental retardation is less ambiguous. It is a tragedy that my sister cannot put her thoughts into language, that she lives her life from moment to moment, that my parents have woken up at 5 a.m. to find the contents of Martha’s diaper smeared on her bedroom walls. But, having accepted the tragedy of Martha’s condition, it was easy for my family to embrace her without harboring any secret wish that she were someone different. Martha will probably never learn to speak, and will certainly never live independently; “All right,” we said, “let’s go from there.” To love Martha means accepting the difficulties that loving her entails.

***

An uncharitable reader might think I have just suggested that, when confronted with disability, the thing to do is to lie back and think of England. Does my attitude towards Martha’s disability amount to an indifference to suffering or, worse, an endorsement of suffering for suffering’s sake?

The idea that suffering gives life its meaning has a long and illustrious pedigree, certainly, from flagellant saints to John F. Kennedy (”. . . not because they are easy, but because they are hard”). But those difficulties were freely chosen; disability is a different sort of pain entirely, one less easily cast as a charming bit of adversity to be overcome. While there are certain kinds of disability that we should not try to erase, it is not because suffering builds character. Suffering is the ornament of humanity only when undergone for some higher purpose. There is only one way to persuade someone to accept disability in spite of its difficulties, and that is to convince him that the compensating benefits are worth it.

When the compensating benefit is love, the answer is easy. I know first-hand the problems inherent in trying to build a relationship with a disabled person while cherishing the misplaced hope that the difficulties they carry with them will one day disappear. Even the tiniest nagging doubt can be a barrier to love, as in the case of my sister’s autistic classmates. To frame the idea in a different way, we all hope for our friends’ continual self-improvement: that our favorite penny-pincher will become more charitable, that our directionless nephew will discover some driving passion, that the melancholic next door will find inner peace. But in none of these cases would we want our friend to become someone else. They should become better, but should stay recognizably themselves. When a man’s disability is fundamental to his character, then there is no difference between wishing for a cure and wishing he were someone else. As Jim Sinclair put it in 1993, “It is not possible to separate autism from the person. Therefore, when parents say, ‘I wish my child did not have autism,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘I wish the autistic child I have did not exist and I had a different (non-autistic) child instead.’”

What about less fundamental disabilities, like quadriplegia from a car accident? There is value in accepting them, too, though the compensating benefit is different. We can all agree that an individual who has lost his legs should not also have to lose his job, as long as he can still perform it, and our moral intuition tells us that accommodations should be made both for the man’s special needs and for his dignity. But what do we mean by “dignity?” Whether a wheelchair-bound man reaches his desk by way of a ramp or with the assistance of a coworker, the end result is the same: He gets to work. Some disability activists believe that the latter scenario is, if not an injustice, then at least an indignity, an involuntary kind of subordination. They think so because they believe people are fundamentally autonomous—a strange fiction. As galling as it can be to accept help, it goes with the territory of being human. There is a point at which “accommodation” ceases to be a gesture of compassion and becomes a costly reinforcement of the modern myth that strength of character is synonymous with self-sufficiency, a myth that is already dangerously popular. Enshrining the fallacy in law, or even convention, puts the weight of society behind a fallacy that makes physical weakness seem inhuman. Forcing a disabled employee to accept charity, or telling him he can only be fully human if he is fully independent: Which is more cruel?

But let’s judge the tree by its fruits: How might this love-centric bioethics be applied to an actual question of policy like, say, the debate over cochlear implants (CI)? The Left has already put forward its own defense of deaf parents who want to deny their newborn children a treatment that can effectively cure a child’s deafness. (The device does not restore hearing, but it does simulate auditory signals, and children who receive the implants early are usually able to learn spoken language.) They argue that the deaf community is a minority group entitled to preserve its own special character, which means ensuring that deaf children grow up within their parents’ community. The “cultural genocide” argument (the phrase originates with the National Association for the Deaf) may strike the conservative ear as multi-culti and relativistic. I happen to agree with it, but it does not especially matter whether any of us would accept or reject CIs for our own children. The question is whether doctors can insist on the treatment over the parents’ wishes, as they are empowered to insist on blood transfusions for the children of Jehovah’s Witnesses. We already assume that everyone prefers life to death and that to believe otherwise is inhuman and insane. If we believe that a preference for physical perfection over imperfection is similarly self-evident, then the decision to refuse cochlear implants for your child begins to look like neglect.

But I am not willing to privilege physical wholeness so quickly. It is not simply a matter of a child being capable of living a full life without his hearing. In this case, the inability to hear is the very thing that makes a full life possible; without it, the child would grow up a stranger in his own family. It is not a zero-sum choice between hearing and his parents’ love, of course, but the CI controversy does demand that the medical profession make a clear decision: Would a sane person sacrifice his child’s hearing for the sake of fuzzy and intangible benefits like the opportunity to share a language and culture with him? Scientific triumphalism would say no. I am not worried that its answer will be given the force of law anytime soon, but I worry for the culture that takes its side.

There is a strong temptation to say, very simply, that these sorts of decisions are family affairs and none of the public’s business. However, the answer is not as simple as recognizing a family’s right to privacy, as the case of elective abortion makes clear. The decision to carry a disabled child to term means something very different depending on how ordinary or extraordinary the decision is. The public’s attitude towards children with Down Syndrome is not the same when 15 percent of women choose to abort such children as when 90 percent do. (The exact figure in the United States is 91 percent.) If elective abortion continues to be the overwhelming norm, the child’s disability will come to be seen as something the mother brought upon herself rather than as something she simply accepted. The assumption will be that no normal woman would have borne the child since, after all, normal women don’t. This same shift—from seeing disability as a family’s fate to seeing it as a self-inflicted burden—will naturally follow if more quadriplegics follow the example of Daniel James, the British rugby player who ended his life at the Swiss clinic Dignitas after an injury left him paralyzed. (Dignitas has ended the lives of more than a hundred Britons since it opened ten years ago, and, in that time, not a single spouse, relative, or friend has been prosecuted for the legal crime of assisting them.) The difference between ordinary and extraordinary measures is an important moral one; it determines the moral—and therefore legal—expectations we have of our neighbors and ourselves. These private decisions have public consequences.

* * *

It is fair to ask whether casting people with disabilities as moral heroes can be meaningfully distinguished from treating them as talismans, drive-time radio stories who happen, rather inconveniently, to have their own desires apart from what we desire of them. Don’t we cringe when the local news imputes great heroism to a handicapped person simply for moving on with his life? There is very little heroism in making the best of things, and none at all in grasping desperately at anything that might ease an inconvenience. However, in this sketch of a conservative bioethics, I have asked the disabled and their families to show real heroism by accepting their suffering with some measure of grace and by swallowing their pride and accepting an unusual measure of dependence. The heroism lies in the choice, not the affliction. The hero is held up as an example, not drafted as a symbol. These differences are not slight.

Floyd Patterson, the most Catholic heavyweight champion in the history of boxing, explained his willingness to endure months of difficult training this way: “What were the requirements? Sacrifice. That’s all. To anybody who comes from the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, sacrifice comes easy.”

Love—whether it’s love for a sport, love for one’s sister, or love for humanity in all its forms, however grotesque—is the thing that makes a man say, “Sacrifice. That’s all.” Its yoke is easy, its burden light. Life with a disability involves sacrifices, some of which are merely onerous and should be eliminated, some of which cannot be eliminated without implicitly disputing love’s power to turn sacrifice into a gift.

Science has asked us to endorse its vision of a perpetually comfortable and easy world, and so we cannot help but make a firm choice, now, whether to celebrate self-discipline or to resent its necessity. If we choose the latter, we may soon find ourselves living in the world of Wall*E—painless, and pointless. If we choose the former, we may find that the prophets of our new asceticism are the deaf parents who decline cochlear implants for their newborn, the wheelchair-bound employee who finds nothing undignified about asking a co-worker for help every morning, the mother who carries a Down Syndrome baby to term—those who have had hardship thrust upon them and, nevertheless, have found some nobility in it. Science and disability law will both continue to develop, but we must be careful in choosing the goal toward which their progress is directed.

Helen Rittelmeyer is a writer living in Brooklyn, NY. She blogs at http://cigarettesmokingblog.blogspot.com. Illustration by Joe Oliva Ganoza.

Soviet Snark

Nicholas Desai — Wed, 27 May 2009 06:47:54 +0000

Because of this slippery understanding of snark, the closest that Denby is able to come to a firm definition of it is to offer this vague scenario:

The platonic ideal of snark is something like this: Two girls are sitting in a high school cafeteria putting down a third, who’s sitting on the other side of the room. What’s peculiar about this event is that the girl on the other side of the room is their best friend. In that scenario, snark is abusive or sarcastic speech that operates like poisoned arrows within a closed space.

So busy were they with all this that no one had leisure to open Pravda that day. It had a special theme—a day in the life of our Motherland: the successes of steelworkers; more and more crops harvested by machine. The historian surveying our country as it was that day will have an easy task.

…he was merely expelled. Such cruelty! Yes, but he was also banished….To Sakhalin? No, to the family estate of Kokushkino, where he intended to spend the summer anyway. He wanted to work, so they gave him an opportunity….To fell trees in the frozen north? No, to practice law in Samara, where he was simultaneously active in illegal political circles. After this he was allowed to take his examinations at St. Petersburg University as an external student. (With his curriculum vitae? What was the Special section thinking of?)

“Don’t trust even the MVD?” The vice-minister was thrown into a sweat by this treasonable talk. “And who can have inspired in you such hatred for the MVD?” A riddle, if ever there was one.

The MVD’s record of abuse is well known to the prisoners, and to Solzhenitsyn’s readers. They are an “in-group” in the matter of Soviet torture and their knowing tone is fitting.

Nicholas Desai has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New Criterion, and other publications. He lives in Virginia. Art by Katherine Eastland.

What’s Your Story? Amanda Carpenter

Phoebe Maltz — Wed, 27 May 2009 06:47:33 +0000

Amanda Carpenter has packed more than most into her 26 years. Now a daily columnist at the Washington Times, Carpenter reported on national politics for TownHall.com, blogged the ‘08 election for Glamour magazine, and maintains a constant presence on cable news, where she spars with everyone from Larry King to Chris Matthews. At the tender age of 24, she published her first book, The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy’s Dossier on Hillary Clinton (Regnery, 2006).

Not that Carpenter is slowing down. Her column for the Times, “Hot Button,” is a wide-ranging investigation of politics and media in D.C., Hollywood, and beyond, and has covered everything from the culture wars as they play out on “American Idol” to rapper Eminem’s fascination with Sarah Palin. She also produces a video series for the paper’s website, “The Back Story with Amanda Carpenter,” where she hones her already impressive on-camera skills.

Carpenter is undeniably one of the right’s great hopes, but little in her background would have suggested such an outcome. The Montrose, Michigan native had little interest in politics growing up, and her family rarely discussed such matters. “It’s definitely not the typical church-going, Republican-voting kinda family that a lot of people assume I’m from,” she says, “You know, where we all wear pearls on the weekend or something. There’s no trust fund here, unfortunately.”

Without a Buckley or Kristol pedigree, Carpenter’s path to conservative punditry was far from assured. She entered college on a softball scholarship, but her career as a pitcher—and the financial aid it brought—came to an end when she was sidelined by a shoulder injury. In 2003, she transferred from Indiana’s Tri-State (now Trine) University to Ball State, a significantly larger university in Muncie, where she became an active member of the school’s debate team. Nevertheless, she says, “I was not remotely politically active until my junior year of college.”

To pay for college, Carpenter worked stints at the Gap, 7-11, a country club, and the school library. Writing hefty tuition checks led her to wonder “what tuition dollars are funding.” So she set up a website, the now-defunct bsyou.net, where she scrutinized various administrative expenditures, including a $20,000 speaking fee paid to Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser.

Soon, the entire schools was buzzing about the site, especially after Carpenter fashioned a “Wanted” ad for a professor who had recently been arrested for trespassing. “He said that I committed a hate crime, because I allegedly made him look Arab in the photo, which was just his university photo,” she laughs. “He had a beard.” The beard, she assures, was his own and not something she Photoshopped in. Nonetheless, scandal ensued.

Soon, Ball State’s College Republicans were seeking out the hot new campus provocatrice. Carpenter never officially joined the group—”If I wasn’t at one of my jobs,” she explains, she was at home updating bsyou.net. But her investigations of the university’s spending led her to see the need for fiscal responsibility on a larger scale, which brought the formerly apolitical student to conservatism. “My number-one issue has always been spending, from college to now,” she says.

So Carpenter decided to make a career out of it. Upon graduating in 2005, she got an internship with the Arlington, Va.-based Leadership Institute, which led to a reporting job at Human Events. Not long after, Regnery, the paper’s affiliated publishing house, asked her if she wanted to write a book on Hillary Clinton. “And of course I said yes.”

While too young to have succumbed to all-out Clinton-phobia—”I didn’t live through the whole ‘We hate Hillary’ phase,” she says—Carpenter was disturbed by what she found out about the New York senator while researching her book. She brought Bill Clinton’s speaking engagements abroad, which netted him and his wife over $27 million, to the public’s attention. “All the foreign money that Bill Clinton was getting,” she says, might have funded his wife’s presidential campaign, yet “nobody was worried about this.”

Carpenter’s book won favorable press from conservative outlets such as National Review, but the book didn’t sell as well as it might have a few years back when “Hillary-hate” was at its peak. Still, Senator Clinton’s presidential campaign led to a resurgence of interest in the book: GQ reported that 1,000 copies were distributed, along with “Hillary barf bags,” at a D.C. conservative convention.

After three years in conservative media, Carpenter entered the mainstream during the 2008 campaign, when she was one of five female bloggers—and the lone conservative—contributing to Glamour magazine’s election blog, Glamocracy. “It was a little bit hard for me,” she says, “because everything had to be so women-focused.” And while she’s all for girl power, “I would never identify myself as a feminist,” she says. Inspired by the Independent Women’s Forum, she prefers the word “independent” to describe herself and other hard-charging, conservative women today.

While the outcome of the 2008 election has sparked heated debate among Republicans about a new direction for the party, Carpenter has her sights trained on government spending. “I think the vote for the stimulus is going to end up being for the Republican party what the vote for the Iraq war was for the Democrats,” she says. “Now’s the time for the moderate Republicans who supported that agenda to leave the party.” Carpenter champions a younger set of leaders, such as Bobby Jindal and Sarah Palin, who value fiscal responsibility and who will, she hopes, help “rebrand” the GOP.

Yet for all her passion for politics, Carpenter does not see herself running for office now or in the future.

“I’ve never, ever, ever been the student council type. Ever.”

Phoebe Maltz is a doctoral student and writer in New York. She blogs at whatwouldphoebedo.blogspot.com. Photography by Katherine Ruddy.

The Hipster Health Care Revolution

Elizabeth Nolan Brown — Mon, 18 May 2009 01:39:20 +0000

Dr. Jay Parkinson might seem like your typical young Brooklynite–he’s on Twitter, voted for Obama, dabbles in photography, and attends the SXSW music festival. But he’s also heading up what might be a free-market solution to America’s health care crisis–and folks far outside Williamsburg, the fabled hipster ‘hood in which Parkinson practices, are taking note.

“We’re witnessing the death of old business models,” wrote Parkinson, creator of the primary care practice Hello Health, in a blog post titled “my take on the economy.” “Monolithic, centralized, non-transparent, boomer-based, last century, industrialized, inefficient, pre-Internet, business processes. Something new and better will replace them. I’m super excited to be alive and able to witness this.”

Parkinson, of course, is no mere witness. The 33-year-old physician and entrepreneur is at the forefront of the movement to transform those old models–at least as far as health care is concerned. With Hello Health, Parkinson hopes to combine the best of 21st century technology with the localism and personalized care of the pre-HMO era.

“If you want a glimpse of what health care could look like a few years from now,” wrote Carleen Hawn in the policy journal Health Affairs, “consider Hello Health … [which] is fast becoming an emblem of modern medicine.”

Started in August 2008 in Williamsburg, Hello Health has attracted roughly 300 members. For $35 per month, members gain access to Hello Health’s website, a platform developed by Parkinson and partner Sean Khozin with the help of Canadian software company, Myca. Unlike most health IT platforms, Hello Health looks more like Flickr or Facebook than, say, Windows 95. Members can IM and email with their doctors, make appointments online, and access their digital health record, which includes blog-post style, doctor-authored summaries of each appointment.

Members are guaranteed appointments within 24 hours of scheduling, and can choose between visiting the office, receiving a house call, or, for minor illnesses or follow-up sessions, videoconferencing with a doc. Hello Heath doesn’t take insurance (though patients with coverage are free to submit bills to insurers on their own), and all appointment fees are set in advance–$100 to $200 depending on the complexity of the visit, with lab tests and generic meds included in the price.

David Auerbach, owner of the design and electronics store Dijital Fix, became a member in February, drawn in by Hello Health’s “simple branding,” its “tech-savvy operation”–and a case of the flu that needed attending to. The whole process of joining, scheduling, and seeing a doctor “was so easy,” says Auerbach. “I could do everything on my own before even entering the office. When I got there, they already knew my [medical] history…and if I had any questions after the visit–and I did–answers were a simple click away.”

Much of Hello Health’s membership comes from people like Auerbach–the freelancers, consultants, artists, and entrepreneurs who make up the so-called ‘creative class,’ and who earn enough to avoid the free clinics but not enough to afford expensive insurance policies. Parkinson says Hello Health is intended for “anyone who needs a doctor,” but the pay-per-service model works best for those already in good health. “I don’t tend to need doctors’ advice all that much,” says Auerbach, “so while $35 is not a lot to pay to have access to a doctor if I need one … visits still cost in the end, so if you don’t use the messaging service much or at all, the $35 monthly is pretty hard to justify.” Adding to the cost, Parkinson recommends that Hello Health members keep a high-deductible catastrophic care plan in case of emergencies.

Hello Health is not out to overthrow the ancien health insurance regime, which uses risk-pooling to cover the costs of catastrophic expenses–cancer treatments, hospitalizations, long-term injuries, and so forth. In order for a few such cases to be covered, many more people need to pay more money into the system than they take out in health services, so that the surplus can be shifted over to someone else’s cancer treatment or kidney dialysis. Hello Health doesn’t provide long-term or catastrophic care; its efforts are more narrowly targeted at reforming the everyday care that people use the most, and, for which, under the current system, they frequently overpay. In that respect, Hello Health is more like the Park Slope Co-Op than traditional insurance–the fees that each person pays cover exactly the care he receives, plus a small premium to keep the place spruced up.

Hello Health’s membership fees are significantly lower than other “concierge care” health practices, which can charge hundreds or thousands of dollars per year in membership fees. Part of what allows Hello Health to keep its fees low is that by choosing not to deal with insurance companies, it’s able cut down on overhead (less paperwork, no administrative staff). For Parkinson, though, opting out of the whole insurance cycle is as much a philosophical decision as it is an economic one.

“We’re trying to cater to the real customers of health care, the patients, and ignore the current customers, the insurance companies,” he says, noting the perverse incentives the current system sets up for providers.

“Fifty percent of office visits are unnecessary,” says Parkinson. Instead, many minor or follow-up issues could be taken care of via telephone, email, videoconferencing, or IM. But physicians don’t get reimbursed by insurers for these virtual visits–only when patients walk through the doors. Office visits exist “because doctors get paid for office visits,” says Parkinson. And because physicians get reimbursed based on the number of tests or procedures performed–not on the quality or totality of care–”they don’t really care about efficiency, except when it comes to decreasing the amount of time for each visit.”

It’s not just the insurance industry’s reimbursement system Parkinson objects to–he’s upset by the lack of transparency in pricing, which he says discourages competition among health care providers. “There’s no free market [in health care] at all, it’s just … three or four large groups contracting with three or four other large groups,” says Parkinson. “These groups want to keep the prices hidden, because their profits depend on keeping people in the dark.”

Parkinson adamantly rejects any health care solution that involves government-mandated insurance coverage, which he says changes the demand side without addressing supply.

“In Massachusetts, they mandated insurance, and brought 99 percent of their population into the insurance pool, but they didn’t fix how many doctors there were to deliver those visits. Now there’s a 52-day wait [to see] a doctor. Having insurance doesn’t mean you have access to a doctor.”

“The insurance people are salivating at the possibility of Obama mandating health insurance,” Parkinson adds. “They’re the next auto industry. But we can’t afford to have another 100 percent increase in premiums in the next eight years, which is what happened in the last eight years.”

For Parkinson and other health care digerati like him, mixing new technologies with free-market solutions to health care delivery problems looks like one possible way out. Some have taken to calling it “Health 2.0,” which Ted Eytan, a Washington, DC-based physician and medical director for delivery systems operations at the Permanente Foundation, defines as “participatory health care.” “Enabled by information, software, and community that we collect or create,” he writes, “we the patients can be effective partners in our own health care, and we the people can participate in reshaping the health system itself.”

The Health 2.0 revolution may be just around the corner. Hello Health will soon be opening a second location in Manhattan’s West Village, and Parkinson has stopped seeing patients to focus on managing and promoting the Hello Health brand and philosophy.

“We’ve had about 1,000 doctors so far ask to be a part of [Hello Health],” Parkinson says. But he doesn’t want to simply bring on more staff in more locations. Instead, Hello Health is selling customized versions of its software platform and planning to open the platform to other physicians and practices on a commission basis.

“We don’t really want to be a brick-and-mortar doctor’s office,” says Parkinson. “We want to be the technology that allows other doctors to do this in their practices, across the country.”

Elizabeth Nolan Brown is a writer and web producer living in Washington, D.C. She blogs at http://elizabethnolanbrown.wordpress.com. Photo © Kris Krüg, used under the creative commons license.

The Fashion Weapon

Meghan Keane — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 17:39:45 +0000

Lisa Ann does not approve of Sarah Palin’s sex appeal. Asked about the Alaska governor’s looks in March, she told the New Haven Advocate:

“It’s a distraction from politics. I hope people wouldn’t be swayed either way by sex appeal. People vote for all the wrong reasons anyway, but if we throw sex appeal into the mix we’ll have [a disaster].”

Ms. Ann, best known for her role impersonating the former vice presidential candidate in the adult film Who’s Nailin Paylin, may not agree with Ms. Palin’s politics or style of dress, but that’s not going to stop her from profiting from it.

She says of Nailin Paylin: “We attracted a new audience of fans, maybe people that were not that into porn. It’s one of those things that everybody bought just to say they have it. It might invigorate the economy and the industry a little because, you know, the economy everywhere is very slow.”

Touching, really. A successful porn spoof may not be the highlight of a political career, but it does show the kind of impact—even months after a failed political campaign—that a distinctive female aesthetic can have on the American psyche.

Female sexuality may be seen as a distraction for politicians, but it’s also a powerful tool when used correctly. And as Palin’s campaign demonstrated, women are getting much more adept at using it to their advantage.

The Republican National Committee got into trouble for spending $150,000 on a makeover for the Palin family, but until the expense went public, it was an incredibly successful endeavor. Photogenic and comfortable on television, Palin won over foreign dignitaries—the president of Pakistan declared Palin “gorgeous” during his first meeting with her. After the election, a pair of her shoes that retail for $80 were auctioned on eBay for over $2,000.

But Palin isn’t the only woman in the public eye with sex appeal. And while women in the national spotlight are under a lot more pressure to look good, they also have a lot to gain from getting their look right.

First Lady Michelle Obama was critiqued for politically charged remarks during her husband’s campaign, but she is currently winning the hearts of the American people—not with her impressive credentials, Ivy League degrees, or winning political ideas, but through her wardrobe choices. Hillary Clinton, once maligned for her dowdy clothes, has matured into a well-coifed stateswoman, while Nancy Pelosi has the Botox bills to prove that a well-maintained physique helps get out the vote.

That’s not to say that women can win political campaigns on looks alone. Palin, for instance, failed to pass the preparedness test in her first national campaign for office. But sex appeal is an unavoidable aspect of public life.

Male politicians, from Thomas Jefferson to John F. Kennedy and President Obama, have been trading on it from time immemorial. The theory of “The Halo Effect” says that attractive people are perceived as more competent, and the results of presidential elections over the past 40 years seem to prove it as well. Since Kennedy debated Nixon in the first televised presidential debate, physical attractiveness has become an undeniable factor in the election process.

But as these results show, the attractiveness of a politician often has more to do with packaging than the raw materials. For men, dressing for political success is an easier endeavor. A well cut dark suit and a tie are not hard accessories to master. Seriousness on a woman can be conveyed in many different ways: a high neckline, austere jewelry, a well-cut shirt or a sweater set. And it can also go wrong with a simple misjudgment about color, cut, or style.

But when done right, and paired with competence and political skill, female sexuality has legs in the political sphere. Clinton may not be perceived as a sex kitten by the American populace, but when she wore a v-neck sweater in 2007 that showed a slight amount of cleavage, she got the Washington Post’s Robin Givhan and much of Washington all hot and bothered about her for a week. Even the elder Margaret Thatcher was considered a sex symbol throughout her tenure as Prime Minister (despite that looking back now it looks like her tailor specialized in upholstery fabrics.) Marc Jacobs dedicated his fall 2004 line to her look, saying that “it’s all about finding Margaret Thatcher sexy.”

Many recognizable female political figures are women past menopause, but Palin celebrated her youth on the campaign trail, tapping into the large voting bloc of families with working mothers.

Her look—feminine and flirty—demonstrates how far female politicians have come since the first woman ran for vice president in 1984. Back then, Geraldine Ferraro dressed in long, loose skirts and refused to touch her running mate, Walter Mondale. She told Newsweek in the lead-up to the 2008 election: “We were the first, so we had to be careful.”

But as America becomes more comfortable with women holding important offices, those candidates have more freedom to be themselves. Palin, in contrast to Ferraro, wore shiny red heels and often hugged John McCain.

Women are still finding their way in the traditionally male realm of politics (they weren’t even allowed to wear pants in Congress until the 1990s). But while public women may get skewered in the press for seemingly innocuous fashion choices more often than men, they also profit more from making good choices. And the more comfortable we get with seeing women in the spotlight, the more that will be true.

-Meghan Keane is a writer living in New York City.

The Folly of Sin Taxation

Christopher Taylor — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:50:28 +0000

Powered by governments and self-satisfied members of the public, a trend has formed around dissuading people from unhealthy lifestyles. The strategies include gouging the public with new taxes and spending millions on advertisements to report such shocking information as “Cigarettes are bad for you!” and “Heavy heroine abuse may result in misguided priorities!” While the products and pastimes under siege tend to fall under “fun and clogging” rather than “bland and preserving” what exactly are we saving up all that health for? Without any indulgence, life is only slightly more interesting than death.

With the economy squeezing U.S. states where it hurts (legally-obligated balanced budgets) more and more are turning to “Sin” taxes—increased costs on unhealthy or immoral products and activities—in order to stay afloat. New York City is eyeing a new 18% “obesity tax” that focuses on sodas, while Washington State is moving ahead with a large sales-tax increase on explicit movies, magazines and other “sex-themed products”. Here in Ontario, Canada, such tactics are old news, as is their blatant failure to positively affect public health. Almost annually, the Ontario government has increased taxes on tobacco. As a result, 40% of the province’s smokers now buy their cigarettes tax-free from Indian reserves; not only does the province gets less revenue but people can afford to smoke more for less.

Sin-taxes are defended as saving costs in the healthcare system and improving the moral fibre of society; inflated prices supposedly discourage over-indulgence. This is a hollow argument because such taxes do not make healthy food/ habits any more affordable. Rather than creating an accessible alternative, selectively hiking prices will make everyone more irritated and even less receptive to the elitist message. The philosophy of protecting people from themselves quickly becomes wrapped up in contradictions. For example, all stores in Ontario must keep tobacco products hidden from view, to discourage purchasing. Yet tinted windows around McDonalds are not mandatory—assaulting the public with the suggestive image of citizens joyously gorging themselves.

As the proponents of these measures nudge toward complete regulation over every aspect of citizen’s lives, society has to decide where to start making examples out of people who are expensive to keep alive; most people don’t eat healthy, but what about those who are just hopelessly inactive? The only real safeguard against the millions of opportunities for unhealthy behaviour is common sense. Coincidentally, it’s the one you cannot teach, let alone legislate.

Easy to access, and satisfyingly potent, “sinful” products and pastimes represent a point of civilization that mankind has been pursuing for thousands of years. The current onslaught of bad economic news merely accentuates the special place that personal, private indulgence has in our society. Some choose to trade in their health and mental purity for fleeting moments of pleasure brought on by condensed, powerful concoctions of grease, smoke and nudity. But these products are merely efficient refinements of Mother Nature’s natural offerings; their availability demonstrates peaking levels of convenience brought about by human ingenuity. As an added bonus, the montages of overweight waists and bums in news programs about national health are becoming downright hysterical.

Around the time we master tying our shoelaces, there begins an exchange of increased responsibility for greater independence. One of the first and most important freedoms is the right to spend hard-earned money at leisure. Granted that a lot of people are blatantly irresponsible, but that’s no justification for using government influence to harm legitimate businesses.

Freedom is a messy thing; the more you take away, the cleaner things may seem, but more good will always be sacrificed than morals indoctrinated. Moreover, business-friendly strategies have greater economic benefits than trying to pile on new taxes to maintain swelling government budgets.

Booming demand for vice-industries is perpetuated by the most legitimate means possible: consumer satisfaction. If we want to eliminate the sight of an obese, chain-smoking alcoholic betting his children’s college fund on 23 black, it takes voluntary social support, not random punitive measures. We need to strive for a clear focus on individual responsibility, combined with preservation of the freedoms that make life worth living.

A recent Seattle-based poll suggests that Americans are open to the idea of increased sin taxes. Politicians are anxious to jump on any public blinking on new taxes, and expect them to take ten miles out of this inch. Yet the most logical solution to these budget woes is not to punish citizens with elitist-model taxes, but to legitimize and tap into the revenues of the biggest untapped tax market in North America—legalization of drugs would bring billions in tax revenues and saving billions more in enforcement.

Global human population growth is not slowing down in accordance with the world’s biggest economies. If we want to maintain a healthy, expanding population, it must be self-reliant. Abuseable substances and activities should be encouraged as a test of character for the next generation. If people are not forced recognize individual responsibility, civilization will crumble under the weight of all the helpless sheep expecting to be looked after.

-Christopher Taylor is a student at York University, Canada. He is a contributing writer for the Ontario Libertarian Party.

The Future of Sex

Maria Robinson — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 12:51:29 +0000

The word “onanism” has its genesis in Genesis itself, from the story of Onan, a man killed by God for “spill[ing his seed] on the ground” rather than impregnating his widowed sister-in-law according to the laws of his tribe. Originally interpreted as a warning against the practice of coitus interruptus, the story’s cautions were repurposed in the early 1700s, when the publication of an anonymous text—Onania: or the Heinous Sin of Self Pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences, in Both Sexes Considered—forged Onan’s enduring lexical link with another precipitant of non-procreative seed-spilling. Onania elucidated, in painstakingly gratuitous detail, the moral turpitude and reputed physical decay engendered by masturbation; the tract’s wildfire-like spread from England to Europe and beyond through the emerging commercialways of print publishing indubitably owed as much to its titillating prose as to the popular appeal of its exhortations contra self-titillation.

Onania marks the beginning of the strenuously anti-mastubation sentiment that pervaded Enlightenment culture (vestiges of which still remain today) and led to the invention of chastity belts and other genital-constraining devices that to the modern eye appear far more depraved than the supposedly abominable act they were aiming to curtail. In Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation, historian Thomas W. Laqueur elucidates the sudden inflammation of popular horror regarding onanistic engagement thusly:

“Beginning in the eighteenth century, solitary sex came to represent the relationship between the individual and the social world, a sort of crossroads where men and women, boys and girls could go terribly wrong, where they might, if not carefully watched and taught otherwise, choose the wrong kind of solitude, the wrong kind of pleasure, the wrong kind of imagination, the wrong kind of engagement with their inner selves.”

Yet despite the long and valiantly-waged campaign against self-stimulation, in the tug-o’-war between social order and autarkic gratification, it’s clear by now that the wankers have won. We live in a society more socially diffuse and civically disengaged than perhaps any other—just ask Robert Putnam—while vibrator manufacturers rake in billions of dollars every year and any schmo with $6500 can bring home a life-sized custom-designed silicone “love doll” with realistic features and anatomically-correct orifices. However, even those of us weaned on Internet porn and Sex for One could start to wonder whether the end is finally nigh after a glimpse of the soon-to-be-released RealTouch, a next-generation sexbot that resembles a giant polymer peanut.

From the outside, the RealTouch doesn’t look to be a mankind-killer. It’s a cumbersome-seeming gizmo, about two hands long and the same around, and its housing is velcro-sneaker sporty–white plastic with gray trim and a slightly contoured waist (presumably for easy gripping). The only entry point, a stern slit in a piece of too-pale, too-rubbery fake skin, isn’t particularly inviting. But as the old chestnut goes, it’s what’s inside that counts.

The device, purportedly designed and tested by a former NASA engineer, includes a slew of revolutionary features: a dynamic orifice that “tightens and squeezes”; dual belt drives covered in textured, flesh-esque silicone; a heating element that keeps the simulflesh warmed to 98.6°F; and an interior lube reservoir that “generates natural levels of wetness.” This volley of precision stimuli, all working in tandem to create a verisimilar sexual experience, is only backstory, though. The real hook is that the RealTouch links to a computer via USB cable and works its erotic magic in sync with specially-coded video content, such that whatever’s happening on screen is also happening in the user’s lap, perfectly matched in speed, intensity, and even “throbs” (and yes, the on-screen action is available in two flavors—gay and straight).

After a demo at the Adult Entertainment Expo in January, Gawker Media’s sci-fi arm, io9.com, heralded the RealTouch’s promise as “the most exciting sex toy ever invented for men.” The racier (and definitely NOT WORK SAFE) fleshbot.com summed up the sensation of its lifelike grip with the statement “[h]oly shit, they’ve finally made a robopussy,” while one Fleshbot commenter opined, “[i]f someone puts this inside a RealDoll, Nerds will be extinct in one generation.” Flippant or not, Fleshbot’s commentary inadvertently strikes at the secret heart of those Enlightenment-era fear-mongers’ consternation (although from a masturbatory frontier they could never have imagined), namely that social order would disintegrate if desire could be slaked without the saddle of conjugality, and moreover, that the unfettered thrills of fantasy sex could lead to a lack of interest in real, i.e. procreative, intercourse. What’s amazing (or frightening, depending upon your vantage point) about the RealTouch in this regard is that it bridges for the first time the gap between Onan’s original act and the act now synonymous with his name; that is, in addition to addressing the fantasy aspect of autoerotic desire—the video content promises to address all manner of inventive scenarios—it can also replicate the unexpected variations in speed and friction that have, until now, set the experience of partner sex apart from all other forms of self-satisfaction. According to RealTouch spokesman Jim McAnally, testers have indicated that the “experience is unquestionably ‘real’” and can even be “better than their experience with the real thing.”

The implications here are enormous with respect to men who, for whatever reason, would prefer not to engage in partner sex, but do so at least occasionally in the name of physical fulfillment. Even still, it seems absurd on its face to believe that unchecked masturbation has the power to blow out humanity’s brief candle once and for all. McAnally, for one, “[doesn't] believe that RealTouch will have any significant impact on the global population.” “Seeking sex partners and finding them is a time-honored pursuit,” he said. ”[W]e expect that most men will still want to augment RealTouch with real partners now and then.” But if conservative commentators like Stanley Kurtz are to be believed, the only-recently-trounced admonishments handed down from the Enlightenment were, in fact, enlightened. In his essay “Demographics and the Culture War,” echoes of Onania can be heard in Kurtz’s claim that current “cultural trends” of “secularism, individualism, and feminism” have put human population “on course to shrink ever more swiftly.” If he’s right, then maybe this is the way the world ends—not with a bang, but with a moist, heated, belt-driven answer to connubial bliss.

-Maria Robinson is a writer based in Northampton, MA.