Letters to the EditorRoss Douthat replies: John Ranta is correct that George W. Bush has often made targeted appeals to the GOP’s base, in the hope of turning out conservatives in record numbers. However, Bush also won far more self-described “moderate” voters in 2000 and ’04 than, say, Bob Dole did in 1996. Rob Lewis may be correct to chalk up this achievement to a mix of luck, brass-knuckle politics, and ballot-box chicanery, but Bush’s willingness to deviate from conservative orthodoxy on issues from campaign-finance reform to education likely had something to do with it as well. Lewis argues that Bush has been a friend of corporate America, which no one would dispute, but it’s possible for a politician to show favoritism toward corporations and woo working- and middle-class voters with new spending initiatives. (These are the kind of political complexities that Democrats will rediscover, I suspect, now that their party holds power once again.) The prescription-drug benefit, for instance, may have been “a massive handout to Big Pharma,” but it was also a massive handout to retirees, and they rewarded the president at the polls—a lesson that future Republican candidates are unlikely to forget. As for Ranta’s theory that the neoconservatives have been consigned to the political wilderness, I think that it underestimates the extent to which neoconservatism remains ascendant within the institutional GOP, and the extent to which the form of President Bush’s foreign policy (if not the substance of the fiasco in Iraq) retains the support of the GOP base. The real question is not whether neoconservatives will remain influential within the Republican Party—they will—but whether a neoconservative-influenced party can regain the trust of the broader electorate. The Eye of the Beholder
I enjoyed many parts of Virginia Postrel’s “The Truth About Beauty” (March Atlantic), but some of her conclusions rest on shaky ground. She writes, for example: “Beauty is not just a social construct, and not every girl is beautiful just the way she is.” Well, beauty may or may not be a social construct, but its relative value is—and our culture (and beauty advertising in particular) teaches girls that their value lies in their appearance. Because Dove dares to claim instead that “Every girl deserves to feel good about herself and see how beautiful she really is,” Postrel accuses the company of “encouraging the myth that physical beauty is a false concept.” But the Dove campaign isn’t going to delude any woman into thinking she missed her calling as a supermodel. On the contrary, by telling girls they are fine the way they are, Dove is encouraging self-esteem independent of appearance. Susan Carney Virginia Postrel replies: Far from suggesting that beauty is just one value among many, Dove’s campaign encourages girls (and to a lesser degree women) to equate how they feel about their looks with how they feel about themselves in general. It does not tell girls that they are “fine” the way they are but that they are “beautiful.” The ads focus entirely on appearance, not achievement or character. Echoing a lot of sloppy thinking in our culture, Dove is saying simultaneously that beauty is not a legitimate value and that beauty is an all-encompassing value—a synonym for worth.
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