Via Megan, Henry Farrell scoffs at the kind of "don't let America turn into France" anxieties gestured at in my previous post:There is something very, very strange in my eyes about this kind of argument. On the one hand. a notion of a healthy American culture of can-do entrepreneurialism, which has survived for centuries and caused America to prosper. On the other, the claim that the combination of broader-if-not-quite-universal healthcare, a slightly easier time… More »
That was the subject, broadly speaking, of Charles Murray's address at the annual AEI dinner, and like Jonah Goldberg and John Miller I found a lot to like in the speech, but some things to raise an eyebrow at as well. At bottom, I think the argument suffers from a problem that's common to both sides in the debates over the desirability of European-style social democracy - namely, the hope that what's ultimately a philosophical and moral controversy can have a tidy… More »
I think Marc's analysis - both of where Michael Steele has gone wrong, and what he needs to do to right himself - has things just about right. The tragedy of Steele's RNC chairmanship to date is that he's been lousy at precisely the thing he was supposed to be good at - namely, giving the Republican Party a successful public-relations makeover - without demonstrating any obvious aptitude for the things (organization, etc.) that various Republicans worried he wouldn… More »
Blogging may be sparse at the moment, but I'll be writing in this space for another month, so I hope you'll keep checking in. For now, though, I'll send you off to other places: To the latest issue of the Atlantic, where you'll find a provocative excerpt from Robert Wright's next book (thick with claims I hope to argue with at some point), as well as Hanna Rosin on breast-feeding, T.C. Boyle on California wildfires, Josh Green on the Harvard of pot schools, James… More »
As Marc is reporting (amid many undeserved compliments), I'll be leaving the Atlantic to join the New York Times next month. I'll have more to say on this front soon, but for now the only thing to say is thanks - to the Atlantic, for everything and then some; to my readers for, well, reading me; and to the Times, for taking an awfully big chance. More »
This big religious-identification study is getting a lot of attention, and justly so, for showing the rise of freelance religiosity on the one hand, and straightforward secularism on the other. (The two trends blur into one another, obviously.) If I may take the liberty of dipping into my own archives, I think this piece from 2007 on a similar theme - I focused on the parallel rise of European-style secularism in the U.S. and American-style culture war skirmishes… More »
Michael Kinsley, writing in praise of the Obama Administration's inevitable decision to get the government into the business of embryo-killing:... let's be clear: There is NO "medical ethical quandary" involved in the decade-long dispute over stem cells. There is only the appearance of an ethical quandary, created by people who either don't understand or willfully misrepresent the facts. "Quandary" is a particularly insidious word. Compare it to "controversy."… More »
There was a brief period during the Presidential transition when conservatives became--well, excited isn't quite the right word, but certainly encouraged by the names associated with the new administration. From Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates to the Rubinites charged with matters economic, there seemed to be good reason to think that personnel might be policy, and Obama's administration would prove more Clintonite and centrist that most people on the Right had… More »
There was a brief period during the Presidential transition when conservatives became - well, excited isn't quite the right word, but certainly encouraged by the names associated with the new administration. From Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates to the Rubinites charged with matters economic, there seemed to be good reason to think that personnel might be policy, and Obama's administration would prove more Clintonite and centrist that most people on the Right had… More »
Will Saletan has a thoughtful response to my latest critique of his abortion-reduction proposals. You should read the whole thing, but here's the heart of the matter:I don't have a brilliant program in mind. All I have is process of elimination: If most people in this country, including me, aren't willing to ban abortions (check), and if you can't stop people from having sex (check), and if contraception is the only other way to prevent pregnancy (check), and if… More »
Speaking of Aynworld, I enjoyed this Will Wilkinson riff:By the way, Atlas buffs, the point of Atlas Shrugged is not that you are John Galt. The point is that you are not John Galt. The point is that you are, at your best, Eddie Willers. You're smart, hardworking, productive, and true. But you're no creative genius and you take innovation -- John Galt -- for granted. You don't even know who he is! And this eventually leaves you weeping on abandoned train tracks. I… More »
Ruffini writes:My overall sense is that the Frums and the Douthats of the world would be well served by staying away from this argument. As Ross himself has written, the grassroots needs elites -- and the elites need the grassroots. By trying to isolate Rush, the elites break down this elegant separation and veer into micromanaging the grassroots -- a losing proposition, particularly against a brand as sticky as Rush.I take the point: I originally only meant to… More »
In my original post on Obama and starve-the-beast, I referenced this Yglesias item from a week or so ago - which offered, I think, an illuminating look at the roots of progressive thinking about taxation and income inequality. Drawing on this Lane Kenworthy post from last year, which considered the relationship between taxation, spending, and income inequality in developed countries, Yglesias wrote:... if you look around the one at what it is countries do to… More »
I liked this post, from Megan:... I look to Atlas Shrugged more for conveniently totable beach reading than an economic blueprint. What's interesting to me, though, is how many details Rand did get right--like the markets in "unfreezing" Ukrainian bank deposits, so similar to the frozen railroad bonds of Atlas Shrugged. Or the cascading and unanticipated failures, with government officials racing to slap another fix on to fix the last failing solution. If only the… More »
Jon Chait takes exception to my suggestion that the Obama budget lays out a kind of starve-the-beast in reverse:In the most important sense, this is completely wrong. Obama's budget is not a net spender. It would reduce the deficit by some $2 trillion over the next decade (big PDF link; see page 115) compared to continuing current policy. (You can quibble about the "current policy" baseline -- some of the Iraq expenditures would probably have declined under even a… More »
I don't have much to add to the interesting interesting discussion about Barack Obama's remarkable gains among traditionalist Catholics; I think all of the theories being floated - from the impact of the Iraq War to the possibility that pro-life Catholics might have been more willing to vote for a pro-choice Protestant like Obama than for a pro-choice Catholic like John Kerry - probably contain some element of truth. As an inveterate Doug Kmiec critic, though, I'd… More »
Jon Chait takes exception to my suggestion that the Obama budget lays out a kind of starve-the-beast in reverse:In the most important sense, this is completely wrong. Obama's budget is not a net spender. It would reduce the deficit by some $2 trillion over the next decade (big PDF link; see page 115) compared to continuing current policy. (You can quibble about the "current policy" baseline -- some of the Iraq expenditures would probably have declined under even a… More »
Now this is my kind of reader:Further to your post, I wonder if you've ever read any of Tolkien's later philosophical musings about his mythology, in particular the essays and drafts collected in the volume Morgoth's Ring. Tolkien says that Morgoth -- the original Satanic figure responsible for the fall of the elves and (implicitly and off camera) the fall of humans -- imbued the physical world with a large part of his evil essence: "Just as Sauron concentrated his… More »
Barack Obama won the 2008 Presidential election on an agenda that tilted him further leftward than most recent Democratic nominees on nearly every issue. The one big exception was taxes, where he ran to the center, offering what was arguably a larger middle-class tax cut than the Republican candidate, and promising that the only tax increase he contemplated would fall on the richest Americans, and merely return tax rates to the levels of the Clinton years. This… More »
Barack Obama won the 2008 Presidential election on an agenda that tilted him further leftward than most recent Democratic nominees on nearly every issue. The one big exception was taxes, where he ran to the center, offering what was arguably a larger middle-class tax cut than the Republican candidate, and promising that the only tax increase he contemplated would fall on the richest Americans, and merely return tax rates to the levels of the Clinton years. This… More »
