Is contemporary liberalism (in its lowercase-L sense) an exhausted project, or simply in need of rejuvenation? Wilfred M. McClay, Yuval Levin and James R. Rogers address this weighty subject in the May 2012 issue of First Things. While the entire exchange — a lead essay by McClay, followed up with two shorter responses by Levin and Rogers — is well worth the read, one significant point from Rogers really hit home.
Responding to McClay’s reference to Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument “that emotivist propositions have replaced rational argument over objective moral ends,” Rogers advances the claim that “liberals believe that the emotivistic move reduces conflict and opens venues for conversation rather than conflict….” Why avoid conflict? Rogers suggests that the “residual horror at the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, underlined by the English Civil Wars, still prompts a visceral reaction by many to any hint of religion in the public square,” and thus by extension, contemporary politics must answer “whether religious belief is intrinsically dangerous and whether claims of absolute truth are consistent with forms of toleration sufficiently robust to offer credible assurance that devastatingly religious conflict will not be repeated.”
Put more simply: Contemporary liberals favor language and arguments that privilege individual feelings or perspectives, because doing so provides a partial block against abstract arguments sourced from absolute truth statements that, if left unchecked, could engender wide-scale social conflict. Hence the concern about Rick Santorum establishing a “theocracy” or the fear that conservative political ends constitute a “war on [insert demographic group here]” even when dispassionate observers believe the fears rhetorically disingenuous.
Take, for example, the gay marriage debate. Proponents on the left usually stake their arguments in a broad reading of human autonomy. Liberals rarely discuss marriage as a socioeconomic institution or a sacramental event and frequently dismiss communitarian objections to gay or plural marriage as inherently discriminatory. Instead, they talk about “marriage equality” or “the right to love whomever you wish” — language that elevates a person’s experiences and his emotional response thereto as an intrinsic good. When you pit a self-referential, emotional plea against an argument that prevents someone from allegedly being true to himself because of inflexible, “uncaring” institutional rules, the progressive will typically favor the former no matter how the latter’s logic unfolds. Why? Because if dispassionate social norms may be brandished to allegedly prevent a person from enjoying the fullness of a loving relationship, what other sociocultural violence may these norms inflict? Thus, the norm itself must be challenged to protect not just gays but everyone from the risk that those rules may be used as weapons against other people in other contexts.
In short: Progressives believe that sociocultural principles founded on abstract or religious truth-claims, by their very nature, increase the risk of theoretical social violence because they infringe on the self-actualization of people who don’t support those norms. So, hey hey ho ho, your abstract norms have got to go!
Rogers’ insight illuminates in a different way the reasons that the progressive left disdains cultural authority and religion and privileges personal authenticity and a person’s emotional response. Yet it doesn’t answer the Lenin Question: What is to be done?
Commentators decry the polarization in the American electorate, yet the lion’s share of the reason has nothing to do with partisan affiliation but rather with the latent worldview differences between contemporary progressives and everyone else. No matter how you construct the arguments about the proper size and scope of government or fair tax rates or regulatory reform, you cannot escape epistemology. If a progressive by default will often reject “common good” or “historical practice” arguments because they conflict with an emotivist rebuttal, there’s no real chance for a meeting of the minds to resolve pressing political problems. You cannot negotiate or debate in good faith when the discussants haven’t resolved the stark differences in their logic models and value systems.
The central insight into the entire question raised by McClay is that contemporary liberalism faces an existential crisis; from a purely intellectual standpoint, the progressive inheritance is largely spent, with no clear path forward for the dominant political philosophy of the Western world. The question, though, is what happens next. Can liberalism adapt and reform? Will it be supplanted by something different? Will it collapse and some other value system fill the gap (as seems to be happening with the increasingly Islamization of parts of Europe)?
As a conservative in the contemporary American ideological sense, I have a vested interest in seeing liberalism as a political system rehabilitated and strengthened. Alas, it seems that the “fix” has to occur from within, but it’s not clear that anything short of crisis will help today’s progressives to re-evaluate the long-term self-destructive ends that their worldview logically entails.
Meaningful Health Reform: Emphasize Cost Reductions First!
Recent debate about the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — better known as Obamacare — spins along an interesting but ultimately incoherent central axis: Namely, that access to insurance marks the most significant problem requiring federal intervention within the health care sector.
You hear the lament from President Obama himself. In comments delivered last week in the Rose Garden, he said: “People’s lives are affected by the lack of availability of health care, the unaffordability of health care, or their inability to get health care because of pre-existing conditions.”
Read that again. Now pay attention to several rhetorical sleights-of-hand that too often pass unremarked:
- “…the lack of availability of health care…” — except, what Obama really means is the lack of affordability of health insurance. Health care is generally plentiful; in fact, access to it through emergency rooms is enshrined under EMTALA, and communities across the country sponsor government- or church-run free or low-cost clinics. The only places with a lack of specific services result from local problems — e.g., communities with runaway tort awards that makes malpractice insurance for specialties like OB/GYN cost prohibitive for practitioners.
- “…their inability to get health care because of pre-existing conditions.” Well, no. Again, it’s insurance and not access that’s really under discussion. In any case, people forget that insurance is a financial hedge against a potential future problem. When that problem materializes, ongoing insurance no longer makes sense, as the risk you’re insuring against isn’t theoretical any more. (Hint: That’s why some insurance companies didn’t “insure” against pre-existing conditions, which is much like trying to buy collision insurance the day after you wreck your car.)
In fact, the major problem with the whole debate is the focus on insurance coverage instead of cost reduction. It’s not entirely clear why employer-provided health insurance should be the primary mechanism by which individual citizens gain entry into the high-cost health services market. Nor is it clear why it’s constitutional for the government to require insurance companies to engage in specific behaviors that creates a regulatory regime that later justifies massive market intervention. Justice Kennedy had it right when he asked whether it makes any sense to create commerce just to regulate it. Treating “health reform” as simply expanding the insurance pool fundamentally misunderstands the real problem with health care costs today.
Which is this: As a distressingly large number of patients remain almost entirely disconnected from the actual costs of the services they consume and because they services are covered by third-party payers, the tendency is for prices to increase well above the rate of inflation. This trend makes a degree of sense; if you are sick and directly pay for little or nothing for the care you receive, then of course you want every test, every procedure, every intervention. And why not? Not your dime, after all. Rhetorical emanations from the Progressive Left elevate medical care to the level of a civil right that shouldn’t require anyone to pay out-of-pocket for anything. In a climate where the average person pays little and some activists demand that they pay nothing, it’s not a surprise that most people don’t put a lot of thought into the real cost of the services they consume. And as any marketer will tell you, people want more when they’re not thinking about price — which is basically the same economic model as the iTunes app store and Redbox kiosks.
Funny thing about health care. Contra Obama, you don’t need insurance to access health services. You can pay out of pocket. Doctors and hospitals don’t require insurance before delivering care — you can simply write a check, swipe a credit card or even negotiate a payment plan. Indeed, routine care isn’t really that expensive. An annual physical for someone in good health may cost less than $250 with labs in many markets. And before the wage-and-price controls of World War II, employer-provided health insurance was unheard of. We survived before benefits packages; we can survive when those packages are de-emphasized.
To really get health spending under control, we need to get consumers actively engaged in what health services they receive. The first step involves tort reform — physicians need to be free to recommend the various tests and procedures that are medically indicated without worrying about the lawsuits that lead to expensive “defensive medicine.” A regime that pre-screens medical malpractice claims against a board of physician advisers may well cut off the spigot of dollars flowing from the largess of a medically unskilled jury.
The second step requires patients to have financial skin in the game. Instead of taking refuge in free-lunch insurance programs, health insurance should more accurately reflect the original concept of risk mitigation that undergirds insurance programs as a whole. The best solution — and one that seems to work in hospitals across the country — lets consumers elect high-deductible plans that cover catastrophic illnesses but require patients to front the money for most low-dollar costs up to a specific threshold. These plans generally cost less and make patients think twice about demanding unnecessary care when the funds come directly from their own pockets.
Put differently: If get a nasty head cold, do you tough it out or do you make a trip to the doctor and demand antibiotics (even though antibiotics don’t work on viruses)? With free-lunch insurance, you’ll visit the doctor, get your scrip, maybe offer a token amount as a co-pay, and move on. If you knew you had to pay for the office visit and the drugs, would you bother? Probably not. You would only seek medical services when you believed you really needed them. The Washington Post recently addressed the trend of higher-deductible plans. Although the story may be faulted for assuming that it’s an outrage that people should actually pay for what they use, otherwise the account presents a fairly well-balanced summary of the trend away from gold-plated coverage and more toward consumer-driven health care.
The researchers at RAND Corporation’s health unit have complied extensive and diverse statistics about the long-term trends in health services; the publication is well worth perusing. The reasons for today’s exploding cost model are many, but some of the major contributors include:
- Increased regulatory burden by governments that drives up costs by as much as 25 percent of the entire sector
- Increased cost of ancillary services unrelated to the provision of care (e.g., marketing departments, education teams, etc.) — a 2003 New England Journal of Medicine study suggested that administration alone costs more than $700 for every inpatient visit
- Increased utilization of expensive services like MRIs that may not be clinically warranted but protect the ordering physician from malpractice claims if the patient isn’t happy with his treatment, may raise costs by 5 to 9 percent
- Cost-shifting from protected patients to non-protected patients — case in point: because Medicare or Medicaid reimburse at less than actual costs, the “gap” is made up in higher prices for everyone else, to the tune of more than $6 billion per year
- Fixed infrastructure costs — primarily IT — drive up institutional expenses, which are then passed along to patients
- HMOs and other insurers negotiate separate contracts with providers, and if one insurer gets a sweeter deal patients covered by a different provider may make up for it with higher prices
Health reimbursement theorists look at medical care as a three-legged stool of costs, quality and access. There’s a relationship among these variables: As costs increase, access declines. As quality increases, costs increase. Radically increasing access will make costs skyrocket.
That’s the fundamental problem with Obamacare — it emphasizes increasing access to free- or low-cost medical care, but as costs increase, there’s no obvious payer. Hence the “individual mandate.” If everyone pays into the system, then free-lunch coverage for everyone becomes a more viable option. Without a mandate, there just isn’t enough money to fund all the services that will be demanded at free-lunch prices by the U.S. population. And a single-payer solution won’t fix the problem. The dollars have to come from somewhere, and if individual consumers of health services have zero personal incentive to responsibly align their utilization against their genuine medical need, the system as a whole will suffer from significant and costly inefficiencies that make the entire infrastructure unworkable in the long run.
To really fix the problems with today’s health care market, we should focus on cost reduction. If costs go down, premiums will go down and access will naturally increase. And while we’re at it, we should scrap the antiquated WWII-era model of financing health services through “insurance” and instead open the market to actual costs borne by actual people.
Disclaimer: The writer is an experienced revenue-cycle analyst for a large Midwestern health system. The opinions expressed in this blog post reflect only the writer’s opinions and do not speak for, imply or endorse any position on behalf of the health system.
Observations re: Obamacare at SCOTUS, Contraception, Trayvon Martin, the Ryan Budget, Etch-a-Sketches & Science
UPDATE: This post reflects an earlier draft, not the final one. Seems WordPress ate the final edit when the coffee shop suffered a Wi-Fi blip. Please forgive typos, grammar problems, and missing hyperlinks. Ill try to re-edit tonight. JEG 4/2/12.
UPDATE 2: Lightly revised. JEG 4/8/12.
Bear with me; there’s a lot on the docket (so to speak).
N.B. — This post clocks in at roughly 2,300 words. I’ve bolded the various sections so you can read only the content that interests you.
Obamacare and the High Court
So picture it: The District of Columbia, 2012. The federal capital seized up in gyrations of agony and ecstasy as our black-robed overlords grace us with the gift of their public hearings on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Conservatives delighted in both the slap-down delivered to Solicitor General Donald Verrilli and the paroxysms of rage the SG’s performance induced among the progressive commentariat. Some liberals took solace in their Kennedyology, trying to predict how the “swing justice” will rule by divining hints from questions posed by the learned jurist (augmented, no doubt, by a careful reading of the cracks upon heated chicken bones) and suggesting that the court could uphold the law 6-3.
Well.
The Court will do as the Court will do. More intriguing was the general sense among the Left that Obamacare’s constitutionality is a slam-dunk. Across the board, from Verrilli to the lowest FDL blogger, the progressive movement as a whole doesn’t seem to have seriously considered the conservative counter-argument. Verrilli was caught unprepared for questions that conservatives have been asking, loudly, for two years. If you thought Speaker Pelosi’s “Are you serious?” stammering about the constitutional authority of the statute was just Nancy being Nancy, think again. It’s not for nothing that most of the left-wing legal commentators made a point of referring to justices by ideological label as they summarized the questioning, and it’s an excellent case study in the politics of ideological echo chambers that CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin went from a “strong uphold” to a “OMG, all is lost” based solely on two hours of questioning.
I won’t predict what the Court will do. I will hazard a guess, though, that if the Supremes strike down the mandate (or even the entire PPACA) then we will endure long and loud laments about the Court is too right-wing or that it’s engaging in judicial over-reach or that it’s no longer a legitimate reflector of American virtues and requires radical reform. The Left loves the judiciary until the judiciary proves non-compliant; then the judges become black-robed tyrants. Yawn-worthy in its predictability.
I hope the entire law gets voided. We need to hit the “reset button” on health reform. As a person whose day job lives within a hospital revenue cycle, I can tell you that the real financial crisis for health care isn’t access to insurance, but in the lack of meaningful patient financial participation in the system. It’s as if you’ve got insurance, so you don’t care about pricing or service utilization. To effect a real “bending of the cost curve,” we need to cut out unnecessary tests and procedures (read: tort reform) and give patients meaningful skin in the game about what their treatments really cost. Consumer-driven health care, with high-deductible plans and HSAs to bridge the gap, makes more sense than mandatory free-lunch coverage. Until you change behaviors and attitudes, no amount of tinkering with the reimbursement model will prove viable in the long run.
[Note: My opinions on health reform are my own and don’t reflect my hospital’s position on this subject.]
Contraception — The Bishops and the Flake
What’s not to love about a good public row about contraception?
This sordid tale of social discontent started during the final votes on Obamacare. To secure passage, the administration had to promise a gaggle of Congresscritters, led by former Rep. Bart Stupak, that the feds wouldn’t upset the abortion apple cart. Obama agreed, providing a wholly insubstantial fig leaf that conservatives decried but let Pelosi and Hoyer get the Senate’s astonishingly incoherent bill to the President’s desk.
Fast forward to 2012: HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announces regulations that force pretty much everyone to cover abortion and contraception services as part of their employer-provided health insurance (so much for that Executive Order, eh Bart?). A storm of protest follows, led by the Catholic bishops. Who, may I proudly add, finally figured out that they really do have spines.
The administration made another make-believe deal but the USCCB rejected it, as did many other conservative and evangelical groups. The drama continues to unfold. But when the House of Representatives got involved, the story took a different turn. Denied the chance to present witnesses for timing reasons at one of Issa’s hearings, the Democrats made Georgetown law student Sandra Flake their poster girl for contraception. That this 30-something grad student at Georgetown should be considered an ideal role model, I find baffling. But there you have it.
The Democrats announced a Republican “war on women.” Republicans were not amused, but then Rush Limbaugh intervened with his infamous “slut” screed and soon the issue blew far out of proportion. Media Matters tried (and woefully failed) to attack Limbaugh. Bill Maher and Louis C.K. earned targets. Hypocrisy raged in typical MSM/Washington style.
Here’s the thing, though:
- Contraception in the form of condoms isn’t hard to find. Most bars and health centers have them. If you can’t find a free condom, then something’s seriously wrong with you. Especially if you live in a metro area. Like, ummm … THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. Heck, you can grab free condoms by the handful from any fishbowl at any self-respecting gay bar. That a grad student at one of America’s leading universities should insist that her school pay for her birth control instead of just dealing with it marks an astonishing sense of entitlement and a thought-provoking example of what’s wrong with higher education.
- Contraception in the form of birth-control pills aren’t expensive. Flake suggested it would cost her more than $3k per year unless her Catholic school (to which she voluntarily enrolled, knowing its character) paid the bill. Seriously? Is she buying them in platinum bottles? You could get a copper-T IUD for $647 in 2008 or now you can pay $240 per year for The Pill from Planned Parenthood clinics.
- If you can’t afford birth control, you always have the right to reduce your “risk” of pregnancy by curtailing your sexual activity. Seriously. Abstinence works, as does non-vaginal sexual behavior. Point is, no person has a right to force other people to subsidize his or her sexual behavior.
But, hey. How ’bout that war on women? Apparently the politics of demonization is a heck of a lot easier than encouraging responsible behavior among people who really ought to know better.
Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman and Gun Control
No question, it’s a bad situation. A black Florida teen, Trayvon Martin, was shot and killed by a “white Hispanic” (whatever that is) slightly nutty neighborhood watch patroller named George Zimmerman while the youth was cutting through a gated neighborhood. The facts in this case aren’t clear despite quite a bit of grandstanding; the evidence and witness testimony suggests that both Martin and Zimmerman made repeated, significant and avoidable errors in judgment.
Three observations:
- This isn’t a slam-dunk case, either for or against prosecuting Zimmerman. As such, the March of the Race Brigade, led by Sharpton and Jackson, probably does more harm than good. No matter how you slice it, this isn’t a case of institutional racism. Of bad judgment? Sure. Of a police department and prosecutor’s office that may or may not be correctly interpreting Florida law? Perhaps. But this isn’t a flash point in a racial war, and every time the usual suspects come out with their manufactured outrage and their political opportunism — including yet more unnecessary meddling in local law enforcement from Barack Obama — justice for both Martin and Zimmerman fades and cynicism about race relations spikes up.
- I’ve heard people suggest that the real problem here is Florida’s “stand your ground” statute. Florida is one of 30 states with this type of law; it’s the converse of “duty to retreat” statutes. In Florida, if you’re attacked, you’re authorized to hold your position and fight back when confronted. The argument I’ve heard is that “stand your ground” allows too much of an escalation path for hard cases, and that less violence would result under a “duty to retreat” regime. Maybe. But it seems like rewarding violence and aggression by privileging it under the law empowers the criminals at the expense of the law-abiding.
- The million-dollar question — and one not really subsumed under the Martin incident — is the extent to which a person is legally entitled to defend himself against aggression. Concealed-carry, castle and stand-your-ground laws represent a swing back from the over-reliance on spotty police protection. Even now, liberals are torn; on one hand, they often excoriate police departments for being hotbeds of brutality, racism and misogyny — but these same departments are the gold standard of community policing, whose mere presence justifies any opposition to more relaxed self-defense statutes. Which is it? Are the cops ignorant buffoons, or Teh Awesomz? Pick one position and stick with it, please. In any case, the presumption that civilians are incapable of exercising good judgement while police officers remain beyond reproach is blown out the water by the fact that a police officer is 11 times more likely to engage in wrongful shooting than a validly licensed citizen. (Read the link; it’s a Cato study that outlines the history of gun-control laws and reveals just how much of an innovation they really are in U.S. history.)
The Ryan Budget
Paul Ryan released a kick-ass budget that just passed the House comfortably. It reduces the deficit, moves to a premium-support model for Medicare and protects defense spending. In short: The gentleman from Wisconsin seems to be the only serious adult in Washington when it comes to spending and entitlement reform. Not only has Ryan submitted a workable model, he’s succeeded in changing the entire intellectual dynamic about taxing, spending and reform in Washington. He’s put Obama on defense.
[Read the passage story about the Ryan budget, including a summary of its major points, from WaPo, then digest commentary from Doug Schoen in Forbes.]
Three cheers for Paul Ryan.
Political Etch-a-Sketches
Eric Fehrnstrom’s comments about Romney and the political Etch-a-Sketch seem overblown. Every politician emphasizes some things in a primary race and other things in a general race. To the extent that the election in its final 12 weeks will look radically dissimilar to the GOP nomination fight, the proper reaction to Fehrnstrom’s statement is … duh.
I can understand liberals trying to make hay from his comments, but for conservatives to keep swiping at Romney — well, it feels like an ongoing tantrum. Look, guys, Romney’s our man in 2012 whether you like it or not. We’re not going to have a brokered convention. Paul won’t win the nomination. Gingrich has no path to victory and increasingly looks like a bad-faith candidate. Santrorum lacks organization and money and his negatives (even apart from his self-inflicted gaffes) make an Obama re-election seem more likely than not. At this point, whether you like it or not, the time has come to circle around Romney and focus on sending Obama back to Chicago for good.
Conservatives and Science
One of the big news stories of last week flowed from a survey that suggests that conservatives have little faith in science. Plenty of stories abound about the study; Ars Technica did a decent job of summarizing the key points.
I think the focus is a bit off. I don’t believe that conservatives distrust science per se; you don’t see many Republicans pretending like organic chemistry is a hoax or that the moon landing was staged or that the laws of physics are a left-wing conspiracy to increase taxes by denying people the ability to fly through the air like Superman. What you see, rather, is conservative distrust in what seems like increasingly obvious alignment between “scientific results” and progressive policy preferences. Like scientists, conservatives are also capable of conducting linear regressions to arrive at reasonable conclusions.
Consider:
- The theory of anthropogenic global warming is based on science that pretty much everyone acknowledges requires refinement. Climate scientists have done an excellent job of trying to piece together historical evidence of climate change. Much of it is compelling. When they’re up-front about known problems with the data, I trust their conclusions even more. But there’s a world of difference between saying, “here’s the trend over the last 2,000 years” versus “observation X is definitively caused by human behavior, and therefore we scientists must now dictate to you the specific sociopolitical reforms you must immediately execute to avoid Armageddon, conveniently written up for you by your friends from Greenpeace, so STFU and bow to the consensus we’ve manufactured by suppressing contradictory findings.” Climate science can tell — imperfectly, so far — what’s happening. It can speculate as to why. The leap from observation to political change isn’t the realm of science, however. It’s the realm of politics. When scientists insist that disaster is upon us because of our behavior, when their leaked emails note to the contrary, is it any wonder that people lose confidence in those scientists?
- Watch the Discovery Channel or read some of the scientist profiles in higher-brow popular science magazines. One thing will strike you: No matter the discipline — and, surprisingly, one of the most susceptible seems to be theoretical physics — the group think and polarization is so high that plausible theories don’t get a hearing because senior researchers and theoreticians get an almost partisan adherence to their preferred perspective and won’t listen to countervailing ideas. Study the development of string theory for a case study. Anyone who says “science” isn’t political has never tried to advance a complex theoretical argument lately.
- Scientists are human beings. Human beings tend to be ideological. Why, oh why, must people assume that scientists are immune to ideology? The jig is up, I think, when scientists sign on to a great number of things (the nuclear freeze, global warming scaremongering, etc.) that almost always fall on the left side of the spectrum. Gee. Can you blame conservatives for being skeptical?
All for now.
Observations re: Obamacare at SCOTUS, Contraception, Trayvon Martin, the Ryan Budget, Etch-a-Sketches & Science
UPDATE: This post reflects an earlier draft, not the final one. Seems WordPress ate the final edit when the coffee shop suffered a Wi-Fi blip. Please forgive typos, grammar problems, and missing hyperlinks. Ill try to re-edit tonight. JEG 4/2/12.
UPDATE 2: Lightly revised. JEG 4/8/12.
Bear with me; there’s a lot on the docket (so to speak).
N.B. — This post clocks in at roughly 2,300 words. I’ve bolded the various sections so you can read only the content that interests you.
Obamacare and the High Court
So picture it: The District of Columbia, 2012. The federal capital seized up in gyrations of agony and ecstasy as our black-robed overlords grace us with the gift of their public hearings on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Conservatives delighted in both the slap-down delivered to Solicitor General Donald Verrilli and the paroxysms of rage the SG’s performance induced among the progressive commentariat. Some liberals took solace in their Kennedyology, trying to predict how the “swing justice” will rule by divining hints from questions posed by the learned jurist (augmented, no doubt, by a careful reading of the cracks upon heated chicken bones) and suggesting that the court could uphold the law 6-3.
Well.
The Court will do as the Court will do. More intriguing was the general sense among the Left that Obamacare’s constitutionality is a slam-dunk. Across the board, from Verrilli to the lowest FDL blogger, the progressive movement as a whole doesn’t seem to have seriously considered the conservative counter-argument. Verrilli was caught unprepared for questions that conservatives have been asking, loudly, for two years. If you thought Speaker Pelosi’s “Are you serious?” stammering about the constitutional authority of the statute was just Nancy being Nancy, think again. It’s not for nothing that most of the left-wing legal commentators made a point of referring to justices by ideological label as they summarized the questioning, and it’s an excellent case study in the politics of ideological echo chambers that CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin went from a “strong uphold” to a “OMG, all is lost” based solely on two hours of questioning.
I won’t predict what the Court will do. I will hazard a guess, though, that if the Supremes strike down the mandate (or even the entire PPACA) then we will endure long and loud laments about the Court is too right-wing or that it’s engaging in judicial over-reach or that it’s no longer a legitimate reflector of American virtues and requires radical reform. The Left loves the judiciary until the judiciary proves non-compliant; then the judges become black-robed tyrants. Yawn-worthy in its predictability.
I hope the entire law gets voided. We need to hit the “reset button” on health reform. As a person whose day job lives within a hospital revenue cycle, I can tell you that the real financial crisis for health care isn’t access to insurance, but in the lack of meaningful patient financial participation in the system. It’s as if you’ve got insurance, so you don’t care about pricing or service utilization. To effect a real “bending of the cost curve,” we need to cut out unnecessary tests and procedures (read: tort reform) and give patients meaningful skin in the game about what their treatments really cost. Consumer-driven health care, with high-deductible plans and HSAs to bridge the gap, makes more sense than mandatory free-lunch coverage. Until you change behaviors and attitudes, no amount of tinkering with the reimbursement model will prove viable in the long run.
[Note: My opinions on health reform are my own and don’t reflect my hospital’s position on this subject.]
Contraception — The Bishops and the Flake
What’s not to love about a good public row about contraception?
This sordid tale of social discontent started during the final votes on Obamacare. To secure passage, the administration had to promise a gaggle of Congresscritters, led by former Rep. Bart Stupak, that the feds wouldn’t upset the abortion apple cart. Obama agreed, providing a wholly insubstantial fig leaf that conservatives decried but let Pelosi and Hoyer get the Senate’s astonishingly incoherent bill to the President’s desk.
Fast forward to 2012: HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announces regulations that force pretty much everyone to cover abortion and contraception services as part of their employer-provided health insurance (so much for that Executive Order, eh Bart?). A storm of protest follows, led by the Catholic bishops. Who, may I proudly add, finally figured out that they really do have spines.
The administration made another make-believe deal but the USCCB rejected it, as did many other conservative and evangelical groups. The drama continues to unfold. But when the House of Representatives got involved, the story took a different turn. Denied the chance to present witnesses for timing reasons at one of Issa’s hearings, the Democrats made Georgetown law student Sandra Flake their poster girl for contraception. That this 30-something grad student at Georgetown should be considered an ideal role model, I find baffling. But there you have it.
The Democrats announced a Republican “war on women.” Republicans were not amused, but then Rush Limbaugh intervened with his infamous “slut” screed and soon the issue blew far out of proportion. Media Matters tried (and woefully failed) to attack Limbaugh. Bill Maher and Louis C.K. earned targets. Hypocrisy raged in typical MSM/Washington style.
Here’s the thing, though:
- Contraception in the form of condoms isn’t hard to find. Most bars and health centers have them. If you can’t find a free condom, then something’s seriously wrong with you. Especially if you live in a metro area. Like, ummm … THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. Heck, you can grab free condoms by the handful from any fishbowl at any self-respecting gay bar. That a grad student at one of America’s leading universities should insist that her school pay for her birth control instead of just dealing with it marks an astonishing sense of entitlement and a thought-provoking example of what’s wrong with higher education.
- Contraception in the form of birth-control pills aren’t expensive. Flake suggested it would cost her more than $3k per year unless her Catholic school (to which she voluntarily enrolled, knowing its character) paid the bill. Seriously? Is she buying them in platinum bottles? You could get a copper-T IUD for $647 in 2008 or now you can pay $240 per year for The Pill from Planned Parenthood clinics.
- If you can’t afford birth control, you always have the right to reduce your “risk” of pregnancy by curtailing your sexual activity. Seriously. Abstinence works, as does non-vaginal sexual behavior. Point is, no person has a right to force other people to subsidize his or her sexual behavior.
But, hey. How ’bout that war on women? Apparently the politics of demonization is a heck of a lot easier than encouraging responsible behavior among people who really ought to know better.
Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman and Gun Control
No question, it’s a bad situation. A black Florida teen, Trayvon Martin, was shot and killed by a “white Hispanic” (whatever that is) slightly nutty neighborhood watch patroller named George Zimmerman while the youth was cutting through a gated neighborhood. The facts in this case aren’t clear despite quite a bit of grandstanding; the evidence and witness testimony suggests that both Martin and Zimmerman made repeated, significant and avoidable errors in judgment.
Three observations:
- This isn’t a slam-dunk case, either for or against prosecuting Zimmerman. As such, the March of the Race Brigade, led by Sharpton and Jackson, probably does more harm than good. No matter how you slice it, this isn’t a case of institutional racism. Of bad judgment? Sure. Of a police department and prosecutor’s office that may or may not be correctly interpreting Florida law? Perhaps. But this isn’t a flash point in a racial war, and every time the usual suspects come out with their manufactured outrage and their political opportunism — including yet more unnecessary meddling in local law enforcement from Barack Obama — justice for both Martin and Zimmerman fades and cynicism about race relations spikes up.
- I’ve heard people suggest that the real problem here is Florida’s “stand your ground” statute. Florida is one of 30 states with this type of law; it’s the converse of “duty to retreat” statutes. In Florida, if you’re attacked, you’re authorized to hold your position and fight back when confronted. The argument I’ve heard is that “stand your ground” allows too much of an escalation path for hard cases, and that less violence would result under a “duty to retreat” regime. Maybe. But it seems like rewarding violence and aggression by privileging it under the law empowers the criminals at the expense of the law-abiding.
- The million-dollar question — and one not really subsumed under the Martin incident — is the extent to which a person is legally entitled to defend himself against aggression. Concealed-carry, castle and stand-your-ground laws represent a swing back from the over-reliance on spotty police protection. Even now, liberals are torn; on one hand, they often excoriate police departments for being hotbeds of brutality, racism and misogyny — but these same departments are the gold standard of community policing, whose mere presence justifies any opposition to more relaxed self-defense statutes. Which is it? Are the cops ignorant buffoons, or Teh Awesomz? Pick one position and stick with it, please. In any case, the presumption that civilians are incapable of exercising good judgement while police officers remain beyond reproach is blown out the water by the fact that a police officer is 11 times more likely to engage in wrongful shooting than a validly licensed citizen. (Read the link; it’s a Cato study that outlines the history of gun-control laws and reveals just how much of an innovation they really are in U.S. history.)
The Ryan Budget
Paul Ryan released a kick-ass budget that just passed the House comfortably. It reduces the deficit, moves to a premium-support model for Medicare and protects defense spending. In short: The gentleman from Wisconsin seems to be the only serious adult in Washington when it comes to spending and entitlement reform. Not only has Ryan submitted a workable model, he’s succeeded in changing the entire intellectual dynamic about taxing, spending and reform in Washington. He’s put Obama on defense.
[Read the passage story about the Ryan budget, including a summary of its major points, from WaPo, then digest commentary from Doug Schoen in Forbes.]
Three cheers for Paul Ryan.
Political Etch-a-Sketches
Eric Fehrnstrom’s comments about Romney and the political Etch-a-Sketch seem overblown. Every politician emphasizes some things in a primary race and other things in a general race. To the extent that the election in its final 12 weeks will look radically dissimilar to the GOP nomination fight, the proper reaction to Fehrnstrom’s statement is … duh.
I can understand liberals trying to make hay from his comments, but for conservatives to keep swiping at Romney — well, it feels like an ongoing tantrum. Look, guys, Romney’s our man in 2012 whether you like it or not. We’re not going to have a brokered convention. Paul won’t win the nomination. Gingrich has no path to victory and increasingly looks like a bad-faith candidate. Santrorum lacks organization and money and his negatives (even apart from his self-inflicted gaffes) make an Obama re-election seem more likely than not. At this point, whether you like it or not, the time has come to circle around Romney and focus on sending Obama back to Chicago for good.
Conservatives and Science
One of the big news stories of last week flowed from a survey that suggests that conservatives have little faith in science. Plenty of stories abound about the study; Ars Technica did a decent job of summarizing the key points.
I think the focus is a bit off. I don’t believe that conservatives distrust science per se; you don’t see many Republicans pretending like organic chemistry is a hoax or that the moon landing was staged or that the laws of physics are a left-wing conspiracy to increase taxes by denying people the ability to fly through the air like Superman. What you see, rather, is conservative distrust in what seems like increasingly obvious alignment between “scientific results” and progressive policy preferences. Like scientists, conservatives are also capable of conducting linear regressions to arrive at reasonable conclusions.
Consider:
- The theory of anthropogenic global warming is based on science that pretty much everyone acknowledges requires refinement. Climate scientists have done an excellent job of trying to piece together historical evidence of climate change. Much of it is compelling. When they’re up-front about known problems with the data, I trust their conclusions even more. But there’s a world of difference between saying, “here’s the trend over the last 2,000 years” versus “observation X is definitively caused by human behavior, and therefore we scientists must now dictate to you the specific sociopolitical reforms you must immediately execute to avoid Armageddon, conveniently written up for you by your friends from Greenpeace, so STFU and bow to the consensus we’ve manufactured by suppressing contradictory findings.” Climate science can tell — imperfectly, so far — what’s happening. It can speculate as to why. The leap from observation to political change isn’t the realm of science, however. It’s the realm of politics. When scientists insist that disaster is upon us because of our behavior, when their leaked emails note to the contrary, is it any wonder that people lose confidence in those scientists?
- Watch the Discovery Channel or read some of the scientist profiles in higher-brow popular science magazines. One thing will strike you: No matter the discipline — and, surprisingly, one of the most susceptible seems to be theoretical physics — the group think and polarization is so high that plausible theories don’t get a hearing because senior researchers and theoreticians get an almost partisan adherence to their preferred perspective and won’t listen to countervailing ideas. Study the development of string theory for a case study. Anyone who says “science” isn’t political has never tried to advance a complex theoretical argument lately.
- Scientists are human beings. Human beings tend to be ideological. Why, oh why, must people assume that scientists are immune to ideology? The jig is up, I think, when scientists sign on to a great number of things (the nuclear freeze, global warming scaremongering, etc.) that almost always fall on the left side of the spectrum. Gee. Can you blame conservatives for being skeptical?
All for now.
Saul Alinsky, Reconsidered
My friend Duane loves it when people attribute political ruthlessness and dishonesty to Machiavelli. The Prince is one of those books that all the literati think they understand but never bothered to read; Machiavelli’s actual writings were much more pragmatic, with a strong ethical undercurrent, than the popular misconceptions would credit.
Apparently, the same phenomenon holds for Saul Alinsky. As a red-meat-eating, cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking, dyed-in-the-wool Republican, I’ve listened to the anti-Alinsky propaganda for years. You know the type: Obama is an Alinskyite, and we all know those Alinskyites are pinko commie bastards who want a Soviet-style Revolution that elevates the brain-washed union workers and tears down the mighty citadel of Capital.
But … not so much, it seems, if you look at what the man actually says.
A few days ago, I purchased Rules for Radicals; I began reading it last night. I’m not too far in — I’ve covered the prologue and the first chapter, “The Purpose.” What I’ve read reveals a man and a mission that don’t quite mesh with the dehumanization of the mad activist as caricatured by the far right. Although I reserve the right to be horrified by the chapters yet to come, so far Alinsky seems far more reasonable — in principle, anyway — than the angry diatribes from Limbaugh and Hannity would have led me to believe.
A few salient points:
- Alinsky, writing in 1971, seems to think the radical student movement with its violence and nihilism was a Very Bad Idea (here, we agree). He professes a deep respect for democratic institutions and the rule of law. Indeed, what I know of his history suggests that this isn’t merely lip service. Alinsky sometimes played dirty, but he generally didn’t advocate operating outside of the law.
- He apparently has no love for communism, arguing strongly in favor of American patriotism and against the murderous collectivism of Russia, China and Cuba. For example, he thinks that the 1968 radicals were idiots for burning the American flag, because the alternative isn’t communitarian utopia but totalitarianism. Alinsky doesn’t appear to hold any illusions about the virtues of the very far left, which he argues becomes indistinguishable from the very far right.
- He views the world dualistically; there are good/evil, rich/poor, etc., etc., dichotomies. Not much appreciation for shades of grey, except insofar as he points (correctly, I think) to the push/pull relationship of the middle class relative to the very rich and very poor. I’m not sure I like this framework — it seems dangerously simplistic — but it explains much about the why of some his theory. His whole intellectual apparatus appears colored by a contemporary Manichaeism.
- He seems to respect one of Tocqueville’s core theses — that America works best when there’s a healthy mediating layer of civil society that buffers and guides the nation in its relationship between a single person and government. To the extent that his professed goal is to empower individuals to live happy, healthy and free lives, he recognizes that part of the radicals’ struggle is to keep those mediating institutions on the level.
Don’t misunderstand; I’m not an Alinskyite and will not become one. As much as Alinsky claims to be non-ideological, only the Progressive Left seems attracted to his modus vivendi, and as long as the sort of “radical change” he articulates effectively works like a leftward-twisting ratchet, then Alinsky’s approach is functionally ideological — even, were one to be charitable about it, if the ideology is a manifestation of later misappropriation instead of being inherent to the system as he defined it.
More to the point: Radical change of any kind requires polarization to get people to accept strategies that fall outside the centrist norm. He apparently defines strategies to effect this polarization later in the book, but the general principle is this: You identify a problem; you mobilize support by presenting positive arguments while simultaneously isolating/demonizing your opposition; you keep it up until you can score a success at the ballot box; you declare victory and move on to the next target. This strategy requires the manipulation of voters through tactics both thuggish and outlandish. In the end, the idea unspoken premise is that the average voter is a dolt who needs to be “guided” to the preferred position of the activists at the ballot box, whence the activists derive their claim to moral authority.
I don’t favor the broad outlines of Alinsky’s approach, for three reasons:
- I don’t like activists. At all. Of any stripe. (Hey, I’m a conservative by dispositon.) Activists work outside the system to pressure people to engage in specific behaviors that they otherwise wouldn’t countenance: Think, for example, of the Occupy movement. If something needs to be changed, then change it. From the inside — Win elections. Write laws. Persuade voters to adopt them. Don’t play the outside pressure game to short-circuit the process. And for the record, I don’t even care much for “my” activists; you won’t see me standing at a Life Chain, for example.
- Alinsky’s formula for radical change, rooted as it is in a pseudo-Manichaeist worldview, requires a black-and-white split of virtue to remain tenable. Activists are good people; people who oppose the activists are bad people who must be shamed and punished for their bad attitudes. The political struggle therefore becomes one of good versus evil, with the opportunity for finding a middle way eroding with every passing epithet. Wonder why Congress is polarized? It’s practically a case study in Alinskyism at work. More to the point, solutions that hail from a distinct ideology are rarely a good idea; better that people of varying perspectives gather around a complex problem and negotiate a solution than to push for an all-or-nothing resolution.
- The politics of shame-and-conquer rewards the outrageous and the audacious, but the virtuous and the commonsensical may thereby suffer. When voters — many of whom may lack a deep understanding of the situation — cast their ballot for the best “show,” politics descends to the level of ancient Greek juries. You know the kind: The person who won the case earned favor through theatrics rather than from having more solid legal grounds for victory. Like OJ Simpson, but I digress. The political becomes the personal, and voters are manipulated to vote for people rather than for objective, well-thought policy. This is a part of why the hard Left is much more invested in the politics of personal demonization than the hard Right. Case in point: The Matthew Shepard murder in 1989 and the James Byrd Jr. murder in 1998. Very bad people tortured and killed innocent men because of race (Byrd) or sexual orientation (Shepard). These were horrific crimes, and the perpetrators deserved severe punishment. But for the hard Left, punishment wasn’t enough; with a cast of heroes in villains conveniently supplied by each murder, radical activists pushed for bias-crime legislation to make “hate crimes” more legally offensive than other crimes. Such a position was opportunistic; lost in the torrent of outrage against the criminals was any meaningful defense of the First Amendment and the silliness of criminalizing bad opinions. But those who defended freedom of thought — even odious thought — were themselves demonized as closet racists, sexists or homophobes. In the Alinsky world, discrediting your opponents is fair game no matter how reprehensible the tactic as long as you advance the chance of a political victory.
The above notwithstanding, the more of Alinsky I read, the more I simultaneously see his theory at work in various strands of contemporary Progressive Left politics, and the more sympathetic I am to Alinsky as a political thinker. I will never be a disciple of his, but engaging his thought directly — instead of the caricature presented in the conservative media — gives me a deeper respect for the man as a noble adversary rather than a demonic bomb-thrower.
And if his tactics can be unleashed on the Progressive Left, so much the better.
Short Reflections on Recent Items of Note
The best defense against cynicism remains a wild-eyed sense of wonder that things really can get more screwed up than they need to be.
- Oh, you silly Michigan Republicans. Yes, I voted in the primary. Yes, I voted for Mitt Romney. Yes, I want to see Romney prevail in the delegate count. No, I don’t want Saul Anuzis to put his thumb on the scale. Give Santorum his stupid delegate and be done with it. Intentions aside, retroactively “interpreting” the rules to favor a favored candidate smacks of dishonesty even if such interpretation is valid and squeaky clean. The appearance of impropriety is what matters, not the actuality of impropriety.
- Speaking of the primary — time for Gingrich to exit stage right and Paul to exit stage kooky. This has turned into a two-man race. Actually, a one-man race, but Santorum hasn’t figured this out yet and he deserves time to internalize it. I’ll admit that Santorum surprised me a bit; I didn’t think his dogged insistence on fighting the culture wars of the ’90s would resonate with primary voters as much as it has, especially when serious matters — like national security and the economy — deserve pride of place this cycle. I think the Romney likability factor plays into it a bit. What are the odds Huntsman and Pawlenty regret pulling the ejection handle so quickly?
- The ongoing drama over Israel’s potential response to an Iranian nuclear weapon highlights the Obama team’s lack of seriousness about Iranian threats. Nuclear Iran presents an existential threat to Israel and will almost surely ignite a nuclear arms race in one of the most volatile regions on the planet. We need more than bluster to win the long-term peace. Although I certainly don’t want a war with Iran, I also don’t want a nuclear Iran. If the latter goal cannot be achieved peaceably — and the Persian running down of the clock suggests it won’t be — then other action must be contemplated.
- After the Holocaust, the West said, “Never again.” After half-assing it in Bosnia, we said we really meant it — next time. Then we looked the other way in Darfur and Chechnya and Tibet. And now we look the other way in Syria — because we pretend that enfeebled Russia’s protection of its sole remaining Mediterranean client remains geopolitically significant. Genocide continues, and we whine that the politics of weakness at the U.N. means that we have no more effective alternative than to lodge diplomatic protests while thousands die at the hands of a cruel despot. The technical term for this pseudolegal equivocation is “moral depravity.” On our part, as well as Assad’s.
- I’m not all that worried about $5 gas. I am worried that $5 gas means that politicians across the ideological spectrum will put on their silly hats and promote short-term policies that make no long-term sense simply to pander to voters who don’t grasp the complexities of energy policy.
- Have we reached a tipping point? The ongoing privacy black eyes from Google and Facebook may well prove decisive in finally getting politicians to draft consumer-friendly data protection laws. About damn time.
Life’s been good on the personal front, too:
- A few weeks ago, columnist Florence King of National Review penned her last “Bent Pin” column. I had been a fan of hers since I was a teenager; she used to write “The Misanthrope’s Corner,” then semi-retired, then came back. Now she’s permanently retired from regular columns and will now occasionally submit reviews. Having been duly saddened by her new retirement, I wrote her a letter. To my great delight, she replied with a lovely handwritten card. I think I’ll frame it.
- ‘Tis been lovely on the social front. Yesterday, Tony and I went to Battle Creek, to the Firekeepers casino. The original plan was to go to the smoke shop in Battle Creek, but we were delayed too much in Lansing so we detoured to the casino instead and partook of some light gambling and heaving dining. Last weekend, Tony and Jen came to town to celebrate Jen’s 30th birthday. Also attending: her brother Joe, and her friends Heidi and Pete. Tony/Joe/Jen/Jason started with dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, then we met Pete and Heidi and trudged off to Mixology at Six One Six for cocktails; we eventually ended up at Cygnus 27 for even more cocktails before the evening met its natural conclusion. And last Thursday I enjoyed cigars and Scotch with Rick and Sondra at Grand River Cigar. All these events provided a strong measure of fun and connectedness.
- Celebrated another writer’s event on Friday. These gatherings are more social than productive but it’s still nice to connect with fellow scribes. And I got to learn about Charlie the Unicorn.
- My truck was victimized by a local ne’er-do-well. Someone broke into the back window and rifled through the contents of the truck cab. As far as I can tell, the only things taken were less than $2 in coin plus my spare copies of my license, proof of insurance and registration. I filed a police report anyway. And that evening, I saw my neighbor — a G.R. police officer — but he already had been informed by the detective who reviewed my report.
- I’ve been kept full-to-brimming with contract work over the last six weeks. One of my clients invited me into a special project that has consumed a large amount of time. Happily, they’re paying above-market rates for the work I’m doing. Plus, I received a fabulous referral for some Web marketing work for a law firm in southern Michigan; contract negotiations begin next week. It’s a rare treat to make money faster than you can spend it. However, much of this work may well fund a late-summer trip to Italy. Stay tuned.
All for now.
It Goes to 11: Ideology and the Increase in Ad Hominem Political Discourse
A wise man will study the opinions from all sides of a question to improve his knowledge of the underlying dispute. Whether this scribe counts among the wise is open to debate, but modeling the behaviors of the wise is surely a start, on the theory that a journey of a thousand steps begins by letting a hundred flowers bloom. As such, although I’m a center-right conservative, I frequently read the perspectives of libertarians, liberals, socialists, anarchists, reactionaries, centrists — the rich range of contemporary political discourse. I’ve found this engagement has helped me to better define my own arguments while occasionally giving me an opportunity to correct various distortions or elisions that “my” side may perpetrate, sometimes accidentally and sometimes not. I’ve even changed opinions on some things (e.g., civil unions) based on reasoned argumentation posed from outside my tribal echo chamber.
Alas, over the last few years, it seems that the investment in this process pays ever smaller dividends.
What fascinates are two simultaneous trends, both fueled by bloggers.
First, within the conservative movement, the mainstreaming of a handful of influential bloggers has led to a sharpening of the knives — with blades directed inward. The folks at Red State are perhaps the most top-of-mind, but they’re not the only ones. Divorced from the need to actually win elections, they content themselves to play the kingmaker, with ideological purity and loyalty to a self-defined “conservative base” serving as the paramount virtues. That folks like Erick Erickson and the activists at Heritage Action believe they’re empowered to define what constitutes authentic conservatism (i.e., “what Mitt Romney isn’t”) is bad enough; that more established and more prudent voices haven’t mounted a healthy defense of a more robust and well-rounded definition of contemporary conservatism smacks of kowtowing to the barbarians at the gate without even bothering to pour flaming oil o’er the rampart to see if the ruffians will scatter.
Second, within the progressive movement, it seems like snark and invective increasingly substitute for coherent argument. Once upon a time — those far-away days of the second term of the Bush administration — I’d read the headlines from FireDogLake or Talking Points Memo; although I rarely agreed, at least on balance I’d encounter well-formed opinions to make the effort worthwhile. Nowadays, vulgar epithets reign supreme and simply asserting that someone is a Very Bad Person is considered the “QED” part of the argument. Contemporary progressive bloggers — with notable exceptions like Hamsher, Kaus and Mitchell — usually engage in more spleen-venting than discourse, and bumper-sticker sloganeering constitutes the breadth and depth of most progressive writing nowadays. Even local bloggers get in on the act; Michigan Liberal refuses to refer to Gov. Rick Snyder as anything but “benevolent overlord Rick Michigan.”
And don’t get me started on the libertarians; reading Reason sometimes enlightens, sometimes infuriates, with clear fact-based reasoning in one piece and smug condescension dripping from the next. The ultimate political box of chocolates.
So. Picture American ideology as a spectrum. It’s not black-or-white, or even a tri-color bar. Instead, it’s a sliding scale of opinion animated by value judgments that date to the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Inasmuch as some would like to identify a laundry list of personal policy preferences and ascribe them as the only authentic form of whatever -ism they favor, the average person doesn’t break into a clear, pure ideological archetype. Except, of course, for politicians who vote according to their ideology, but that’s more a matter of cynicism than belief.
In the current environment, some conservative bloggers are looking more and more like mafioso enforcers, whereas progressive bloggers are looking more and more like spoiled six-year-olds simultaneously deprived of a favorite toy and effective parenting.
Is it any wonder that people feel like contemporary political discourse is more polarized?
The parallel to institutional Catholicism is astonishing. Over the years, bishops largely stopped exercising the role of moral authority, delegating those functions to those with an agenda more politically tactical than ecclesiologically strategic. The bishops wasted their moral capital, to the point that even Barack Obama thought he could roll the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops over the recent contraception flap.
In like manner, mainline political leaders either ignored the problem of hyper-aggressive activists or pandered to them. Very few have actually stood up to them in a meaningful fashion, despite that they don’t really represent even their respective bases. Where’s WFB’s successor when we need him? Or the next Daniel Patrick Moynihan?
Instead, we have weak political leaders who respond more readily to a small sliver of their home ideology’s activist base than to the demands of responsible governance.
I’m not sure that America is substantially more polarized, recent statistics notwithstanding. I think people are more willing to fit themselves into certain canned ideological categories, but much like with ethics, no one really fits well into a single bucket. The difference is that it’s easier in the Age of the Internet for self-appointed commissars of purity to purge their ideological segment of the kulaks than for political leaders to stand up to the bullying.
Just like with the bishops in the 1960s and 1970s, but I digress.
The TL;DR version: If you’re tired of increasing ideological polarization, look no further than the unchecked ad hominems flowing from those who’ve been most successful at seizing the megaphone. Until political leaders step up and actually lead, we can look forward to more of the same.
Moral Relativism = Moral Nihilism. QED.
Irrational is the fear that impels otherwise reasonable people to shun arguments that could admit, even in the extreme, to a dreaded “slippery slope.” You know the types: The ones who invoke a rhetorically ice-strewn incline in much the same way that bomb throwers on Teh Interwebz cite Hitler as a reason that someone else is an evil idiot.
Slippery slopes aren’t inherently bad — at least, not in the non-technical sense of the phrase that most people understand. “Slippery slope” remains a loaded way of acknowledging that some arguments, primarily moral ones, almost never lead to a black-or-white conclusion; what’s “slippery” is the grey area between the moral poles. Gillikinism #1: “The rhetorical volume of one’s opinion is inversely proportional to the wisdom contained therein.” The more strident the claim to a moral absolute, or lack thereof, the less likely that the claimant understands his own argument.
But there’s a problem here.
Moral philosophy admits to several equally respectable approaches that nevertheless lead to different conclusions. A Kantian, for example, tends to favor duty over most other motivations and follows the universal maxims, like the Golden Rule, for dealing with others. Consequentialists care less about duty and more about creating the best long-term outcome for the greatest number, even if sometimes you have to crack a few eggs to get the omelet. Divine-command theorists — usually the ones who preach about God’s Will — use the Bible (or Koran) as a definitive rulebook, although it’s interesting to note in passing that relatively few ethicists accept non-religious imperatives (e.g., environmentalism or socialism or whatever) as valid sources of the “divine command” even though they should. Care ethicists strive to preserve the relationships of those involved in a dispute even if the final resolution gets creative. In all, there are roughly a dozen major ethical paradigms, each of which has a high degree of internal coherence and each of which can lead to a very different answer based on the same set of inputs.
Given this diversity of ethical opinion, some people conclude that there’s no such thing as objective moral truth. As such, a genteel pluralism ought to reign; non-judgmentalism and a well-meaning but pervasive relativism become the putative hallmarks of enlightened thought.
It’s hard to escape the relativism trap, mostly because except for the other person employing genuinely atrocious logic, the only way you can successfully fight against the ethical judgment of another is to impose your own moral framework upon his moral framework. Forcing one man’s ethical standards on another smacks of imperialism, racism, sexism, heterosexualism or whatever -ism gets your goat. To the extent that we have “shared moral values,” we’re merely acknowledging the happy accident that most ethical paradigms share certain principles. But when those principles diverge, we retreat to our own private judgments and a good relativist will refrain from arguing with the judgments of others.
Except, of course, when they won’t; it’s a hallmark of contemporary relativism that what happens in the bedroom is privileged but other things, like disbelieving in anthropogenic global warming, warrants public castigation. Ideology often trumps ethics, and the language of the ethical becomes merely a convenient weapon in what is essentially an ideological battle. Indeed, because many people don’t follow an ethical paradigm with perfect fidelity, it’s not uncommon for people to deploy duty-based principles in one context, communitarian principles in another and even to rely on religious precepts for still other contexts. When people unconsciously pick-and-choose their ethical framework depending on the circumstances of the moment, outside influences like ideology have the chance to more strongly influence the final judgment.
Relativism fails us, though, in one major respect: If we concede that what’s ethically appropriate remains in the eye of the beholder, then we cannot draw a meaningful public line over what’s permissible and what isn’t.
Contemporary debate about marriage bears this failure out. For millennia, marriage was the legal and sexual union of one man and one woman. In the late 20th century, gay-rights activists began fighting for the law to recognize marriage as including same-sex pairs. Their argument was a moral one: “Marriage equality” is a right, and people who oppose the right are homophobic bigots. And no one wants to be a bigot, right? Yet when people pushed back, public discourse slowly grow to accept the pro-gay-marriage position while castigating those who opposed it as trying to impose their religious values on gays who didn’t accept them. Which was true. And it was also true that the activists were imposting their own values on those who didn’t accept them. Two-way street.
A good relativist would say, “Well, I’m not gay and I wouldn’t marry a (wo)man, but if others really love their partners, then who am I to judge?” (Unspoken cognate: “Well, I’m gay, but I recognize that marriage has had a stable definition over thousands of years so I’ll find a way to express my love using institutions that don’t conflict with majoritarian preferences until such time that the majority sees it the same way and the transition is uncontroversial.”)
When a person retreats to relativism as a default position within a moral dispute, what we really have is moral nihilism — the denial that there’s a shared moral understanding at all, or that some judgments are intrinsically more valuable than others. Nihilism doesn’t need to be explicit to be effective; to adopt the position that we each have our private morality and there cannot be an reconciliation or accommodation without someone being the “victim” is to deny that ethics as a concept remains viable.
When the choice is between relativism or absolutism, relativism usually wins. And by extension, then, nihilism wins as well.
In complicated ethical disputes, the real virtue lies not in asserting or withdrawing an ethical perspective, but in engaging with another to reconcile the discrepancies between their value systems. In short, the only way to avoid nihilism is to embrace the slippery slope — to accept the shades of grey, and to never retreat into a world where one’s core convictions lose their force to guide action in the world.
Just be sure to put on your crampons.
You Go To The Polls With the Candidates You Have
Don Rumsfeld: “You go to war with the army you have.” Alas, the GOP will go to the polls with the candidates it has — but the Party of Lincoln seems to have opted to bring knives to a tank fight.
On a federal level, the nomination battles continue, although the Keystone Kops routine of these incessant televised debates benefits no one as strongly as Barack Obama. Where else can he get hundreds of hours of sound bites of various Republicans drawing blood from whoever will be the eventual nominee?
Depending on the day of the week, phase of the moon and polling outfit under contract, Mitt Romney is either the obvious front-runner or a distant second behind Newt Gingrich. Ron Paul, the Republican version of Crazy Uncle Lester, won’t go away no matter how plain the writing on the wall. Rick Santorum heckles from the wings, having performed well in Iowa but without any sort of dollars or infrastructure to perform well anywhere else in the country. Newt Gingrich seems to be in full-frontal Looney Tunes mode; one day he attacks, the next day he retracts, the day after he’s boldly reorganizing the floor plan of the House chamber to accommodate the new Congressmen from America’s pending lunar state.
Meanwhile, the pundits wage a battle for the soul of the conservative movement. Some — most prominently Erick Erickson of RedState — define conservatism as being whatever Mitt Romney’s not, irrespective of what Romney’s for. The Majarushie, Rush Limbaugh, seems almost as scattershot about the candidates as a Rick Perry debate answer. Mark Steyn is so consumed by the debt bomb that he may not have noticed that New Hampshire had a primary. George Will, Charles Krauthammer and Peggy Noonan speak as voices of reason, but in a season when National Review and The Weekly Standard are reviled as centrist organs of some nefarious “Republican Establishment,” it’s not clear that what passes for reason nowadays even deserves a voice — let alone three. Ask any two prominent public conservatives for an opinion and you’ll wind up with seven conflicting answers.
The real lesson here is that there’s a dangerously wide gulf between boots-on-the-ground activists (often, prominent bloggers) and elected officials. The former often insist on purity at all costs. The latter, frequently demonized as “establishment types,” worry more about electability and skill at governance even if you have to suck up a bad logroll at times. Conservatives used to grudgingly obey the WFB dictum that you support the most conservative candidate electable. Today, the rabid wing of the conservative movement values symbolic purity over substantive success. Look no further than the way groups like RedState and Heritage Action have targeted U.S. Rep. Fred Upton for extinction. Upton is a genuinely decent and honorable man (I met him several times while an officer in the College Republicans at Western Michigan University) who has assembled a solid career of center-right policy wins. But because he didn’t pinky swear to someone’s pledge or have a hissy fit about light bulbs, he’s persona non grata. Never mind that if Upton were to be successfully primaried, the seat would likely fall into the Democratic column. Kalamazoo and its environs aren’t exactly staunch Republican territory (MI-06 went +8 for Obama). But hey, apparently it’s better to purge the kulaks even if it kicks the GOP back into minority status.
Speaking of Michigan — Pete Hoekstra still appears to be the leading nominee to challenge Sen. Debbie Stabbenow, although the powers-that-be that usually meddle in state Republican politics have resurrected an old ally to oppose the Holland-area native. Why? Probably because Hoekstra, when he first won his seat in Congress, launched a surprise and successful primary challenge against an obviously corrupt but very well-connected Congressman, and that man’s allies still bear a grudge. Hoekstra would make an outstanding addition to the U.S. Senate — his even-handedness as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee remains particularly laudable.
“Tis the silly season of national politics. Everyone’s jockeying for influence, and the knives of partisanship slice with ruthless abandon. This year, the conservative movement seems fractured in ways I don’t recall in my lifetime. The basic problem remains the question of ideological purity, and the degree to which we’ll accept a strong and electable candidate (for any race, in any jurisdiction) in the face of a less-qualified but more ideologically driven competitor.
The stakes are high. Let’s hope that in the end, the GOP can rally around its troops and win the battle instead of fracking each other and leaving no one left to man the barricades against the Obama blitz.
Surviving the Apocalypse
We’ve seen the doomsday scenarios played out in countless novels and big-budget films: Some calamity strikes, civilization collapses, and only a few stragglers are left to survive against the odds. Their humanity and ingenuity is put to the test, but in the end, our heroes carry the day and lead us to hope that Earth 2.0 will be wiser and kinder than its ill-fated predecessor.
If a real doomsday arrives, though, the results will be less kind. Picture it: Famine. War. Rape. Disease. Wanton murder. Illiteracy. Prostitution.
What might a future look like? What must stout-hearted people do to survive, if the prophecies of those pesky Mayans prove accurate?
Assume a total global catastrophe, like a horrific virus or nuclear event or solar flare that kills 95 percent of the population and eradicates effective government. In the first few days, the struggle is simply to survive the event itself — steering clear of infected people, seeking protection from radioactive fallout, etc. Long-distance communication may well cease; electricity and water probably would stop flowing and gasoline becomes worth its weight in gold. Families would try to connect and people would seek supplies necessary for their short-term survival, even if acquiring them meant looting and pillaging or even killing.
As reality sets in over the next few weeks, though, a few things would likely happen:
- The elderly and infirm would die.
- Small children would be at elevated risk, especially if their parents died.
- More and more aggressive, Type A folks would seek to dominate the supply chain around them, forming the nexus of small chieftains that would rule over areas not already divided along tribal lines.
- Society would fragment along ethnic/tribal/familial lines in areas where those traditions still carry weight. People would have to increasingly make tough choices to survive, in the “If you want bread, give me your 15-year-old daughter for the night” vein.
In the unfolding months and years, a pseudo-medieval system of the strong controlling the weak would prevail. Most durable resources like transport, weapons and tools become prized objects, typically looted from “before the fall.” Odds are likely that a patchwork of communities would arise across the world. In places where a strong local community exists — think Africa and the Middle East — existing authority structures may well endure. In places like Europe, North America, Russia and China, civilization would fragment along much more strongly Hobbesian lines; picture survivalists with guns offering protection in return for labor, obedience and access to nubile young girls.
But what happens a century later? What happens when the tools break and there’s nothing left to loot? What happens when the bullets and gasoline run out? What happens when the antibiotics and canned food are gone? When the doctors are all dead?
In the Middle Ages, Europe adapted to climate and disease with “more of the same” — a feudal, agrarian society may not have a lot of excess resources, but it could subsist in all but the most horrific of conditions. If modern-day North America collapsed, would enough people remain with the skills necessary to re-create even a feudal level of society? Would we regress from high-tech to agriculture to hunter-gatherer mode? And even if we did farm for a while, who among us could mine or smelt iron or even copper so that we could replace our tools as they wear out and break? Who has sufficient woodworking knowledge to build large structures or sailing vessels? What would happen to literacy? If top-down oppression became the dominant mode of small-unit political organization, how would cooperative villages with a healthy division of labor spring up?
Tough questions. The best a person could do in the early days after the apocalypse is simply survive. After that, all bets are off.
So what prompts this blog post? Merely this: Social fragmentation and happy-go-lucky utopianism remain the hallmark of today’s left-wing ideologies. When push comes to shove, and Occupy fetishists have the chance to live the “we are family” mode of Rousseau-inspired communitarianism, will a post-capitalist, post-apocalyptic world be happier and more free? Or will it look like Europe in the Dark Ages?
Think about what it would be like to survive the apocalypse. Think about what your ideology says about human nature. Then try to reconcile the cognitive dissonance.