Bianca Steele

In This Week's Papers: Copley, March, Mehanna, Bellafante, and Roiphe

My daughter now has a tricycle, a helmet, and summer clothes that will still fit her in September.  She also has a promise that we will plant some flowers in front of the house, something I’ve never actually tried to do (I did plant some bulbs about ten years ago, but only some of them came up).  And being between landscapers, I’ve pruned one of a small number of flowering shrubs (a PJM rhododendron, which grows well in this climate, setting its buds before winter and blooming just after the forsythias do, but which isn’t in the standard plant books).  I have all the tools now, from the little snippers through the lopper and the saw, and I’ve almost become comfortable enough with the pruning to no longer fear I’m going to kill the thing, but not quite.  So finding the flowers will be next.

Copley as a British Painter

This article about John Singleton Copley in the Boston Globe is interesting, because it argues that Copley—who has numerous sites around Boston named for him, as a Revolutionary-era hero, and whose paintings, along with those of Gilbert Stuart, form the backbone of the Boston MFA’s eighteenth-century American collection (which is well worth seeing)—didn’t see himself as “American” at all.  He sided with the British Tories, the Loyalists; hated and feared the revolutionary movement; and moved to England to escape the war, spending the rest of his life painting portraits of members English aristocracy and royalty.

His American paintings, though, have an explicitly (little-r) republican, even a Puritan, air to them.  The backgrounds are simple, usually dark brown.  The men depicted wear plain clothes, the costumes of their everyday working life, and hold the implements of their work (often pens and books).  The women’s dress is also relatively plain, compared with European subjects (especially the English princesses who sat for the painters late works), and behind them Copley painted the branches of flowering trees.

It would be easy to conclude that the artist admired such simplicity.  He could have painted his subjects in the traditional style, in a more ornate fashion that might appeal to the art collectors of Europe.  Benjamin Rush—himself a solid advocate of independence and self-governance, along with the education of women—did, in fact, paint in that style, as when he depicted his wife and child using the form of a Madonna by Raphael.  The simplicity, even drabness, of Copley’s American portraits looks like a statement, but it may have only been a matter of the sitters’ own preferences.

Freedom of Speech and the Study of Other Cultures

A professor of political science at Yale, Andrew March, has an op-ed about the Tarek Mehanna case in today’s New York Times.  Mehanna was sentenced earlier this month for materially supporting a terrorist group, mostly on the basis of his online activities publishing translations of Al Qaeda propaganda and defending Al Qaeda online.  There’s no question, as this article about Mehanna’s behavior at his sentencing hearing shows, that he did intend to give Al Qaeda material support and that he did intend to support their self-declared “war” against the United States.

What concerns March is that there seems to be little difference between what he does professionally and what in Mehanna’s case is considered a crime.  Both engaged in discussion to further the knowledge of a group that the US government has declared a terrorist organization.  There is the matter of intention: March’s for pure knowledge, Mehanna’s for proselytization—and presumably the latter was more intent on insistently promoting sympathetic understanding among his correspondents than March insists on.  However, it remains the case that the case involves an unprecedented criminalization of speech.  In fact, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, in another case, himself held that material support did not encompass speech, unless there were explicit coordination from the group supported, which did not exist in Mehanna’s case.  March seems to worry that studying certain topics might become too dangerous for anyone without a kind of license to do so, in the form of a university post or similar professional position.

Even worse, however, in March’s opinion, is that the prosecutors used even Mehanna’s penchant for hiking as an example of his engaging in terrorist activities.  He had translated an Arabic text describing physical fitness as an alternate means of participating in jihad.  March argues that the intention behind the text is to deflect would be terrorists into peaceful community-building.  Yet the list of activities gave prosecutors an opening to describe Mehanna as spending nearly all his time on “jihad,” even when he was apparently innocently working out or talking about working out.  Imagining that this could happen to you—that somebody could twist all your actions around in order to cast an evil light on them, simply on the basis of an unrelated statement—would be infuriating for anyone.  But in the context of the court case, it doesn’t strike me as so worrying.  Prosecutors most likely engage in overstatement all the time.  Their job is to persuade a jury to vote to convict—not to find ultimate truth or be fair to everybody who might someday exercise.  Nobody’s criminalizing hiking.

Is Katie Roiphe Searching for a Female Midlife Judd Apatow?

There’s a new sexy novel for housewives out, by a woman in England, that is the new hot topic of conversation among feminist journalists and bloggers (or was, before Girls went on the air).  One of these, inevitably, was the ubiquitous Katie Roiphe—as Ginia Bellafante points out in the Sunday New York Times.  There’s always something to criticize in Roiphe’s “what’s the matter with women today?” pieces, and what Bellafante points out in this one is that Roiphe—once again—“suggests that career women . . . long to be sexually dominated” and to break out of the feminism-driven self-controlled, competent lives they’ve come to lead.

What I thought was interesting, and what Bellafante doesn’t ask, is, “why sex?”  She interprets Roiphe as wrongly believing that career women still (as they did in the 1990s) fear associating themselves with the label “feminism,” and she interprets sex fantasies like these as stemming from a feeling that “sexual abjection [is] the penalty the culture exacts on the average-looking woman for the offense of her averageness.”  But the novelist herself thinks the book is popular because most women actually don’t look for ultra-masculine, dominating behavior from a potential husband or boyfriend; they want someone who will help do the dishes, who will pull his own weight around the house.  She is English, of course, and they do things differently over there, but she does have a point.  As much as twelve year olds love Twilight, most twenty- and thirty-somethings are not in mourning for those fantasies, nor even for the fact that they’ve given them up.

So why does Roiphe keep returning to the subject, as Ginia Bellafante complains?  She seems to want to insert sex into every situation.  To me, this seems strange.  True, there is a cultural obsession with sexlessness and with the idea that for certain groups of people, in order to be fully adult, sexlessness is something they have to get over.  So we have bromances and we have movies by Judd Apatow—for teenage boys who apparently wouldn’t know marriage existed unless a movie showed them the world beyond the Playstation, and therefore would necessarily remain eternal children on their parents’ couch, with no interests beyond the Fritos bag and no interest in getting a job.  But why would we expect to see a parallel narrative for women?  Much less for middle-aged women near the peak of their professional careers?

Angels with Dirty Faces

In an episode last Tuesday, titled “Occupy Hollywood,” critic Garen Daley was interviewed by Callie Crossley on NPR about “the history of social movements through American cinema.”  I’d like to listen to the episode again, but I wonder about some of his choices.  Talking about Angels with Dirty Faces, which at one time was my absolute favorite old-time movie, Daley claims that what made the story acceptable to an audience, as a film with a good message, was the happy ending.  My recollection is that the final scene of Angels with Dirty Faces has James Cagney being executed, in the electric chair.  That doesn’t seem like a happy ending.  I suppose what he has in mind is the fact that Cagney goes out, not defying death and Society, but crying for his mother and asking whoever’s out there listening for forgiveness—not because he really repented, arguably, but because he wants the Dead End Kids listening, who look up to him, to abandon their own lives of crime.  That moment is, assuredly, a heartwarming one, which affirms the meaning of the film for the audience leaving the theater.  But to call it, not even tragic, but “happy,” to me seems peculiar.

Is Changing Rules by "Nudging" People Undemocratic?

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler wrote a well known book called Nudge (not “noodge”), arguing that various social policy should be set up in a way that “nudges” people towards doing things that policymakers thing they should do.  For example, if policymakers think more people should invest in 401K plans, employers should be required to make 401K contributions a default.  People would have to opt out of their employer’s 401K plan if they didn’t want to make contributions, rather than (as now) having to opt in if they did want it.  It does make sense to arrange defaults appropriately, both to decrease the amount of work people have to do (human resources workers as well as employees), and to encourage or discourage certain actions (modifying a thermostat to encourage energy savings, might be another example, or setting printer defaults to minimize paper use).

On the other hand, the way Sunstein and Thaler discuss “nudging” can sound a bit nanny-state-ish.  Henry Farrell, a political science professor, and Cosma Shalizi, a professor of statistics, have written an article in the New Scientist (via Crooked Timber) criticizing their views.  I agree with their argument, but there is, I think, a problem with the “nudge” theory that I have never seen addressed.  Farrell and Shalizi write:

…[T]he key problem with “nudge” style paternalism [is] presuming that technocrats understand what ordinary people want better than the people themselves. There is no reason to think technocrats know better, especially since Thaler and Sunstein offer no means for ordinary people to comment on, let alone correct, the technocrats’ prescriptions.

Nor will they ever be able to.  “Nudging” is nonverbal.  It doesn’t give people the ability to understand their situation better.  It doesn’t give people the ability to discuss their situation better.  It doesn’t give people the ability to provide the nudgers with extra feedback.

Worse, it lessens people’s ability to deal with the real world.  Before the nudge was implemented, people were at least somewhat able to discuss policies, like compensation, on their merits.  Afterwards, everything ordinary people suggest will mess up the nudging part of the policy.

Anyone who’s worked in a reasonably large organization will recognize what’s likely to happen next: any suggestion for improvement will be met with objections along the lines of: that’s not what’s really at stake here.  But it is what’s really at stake!

It would become impossible to discuss or decide anything except at the topmost levels.  There, presumably, are personnel who know how to discuss both aspects of policy and can take account of nudging as well as ordinary practices.  But before the nudge, those people delegated a lot of that work to lower-level personnel, who afterward will have slipped out of the loop.  And the nudge, in the first place, was implemented by people outside the organization, not those within it.  So how this could possibly work is far from clear.  What’s more likely is total sclerosis, as nothing changes significantly at a policy level, and things either fall apart or rules are modified surreptitiously and unofficially, day to day.

The idea of the “nudge” seems, on paper, to presuppose that organizations work by choosing (or falling into) a set of rules that define every decision ahead of time, at a very detailed level.  If this were literally true, then, we would expect to find a group of architects, highly educated, well aware of everything that needs to be known (practically, theoretically, politically, strategically), who think about policy; and also a group of workers who don’t think about any of this at all.  For the latter group of people, presumably, it would be an exaggeration to say that they do what they’re told or that they make decisions by applying rules; they would have to make decisions unconsciously on the basis of rules they’ve somehow internalized but can’t actually articulate.  Yet their rules could be changed—by the nudge—on a fairly short timescale.  But that isn’t much like what really happens, and isn’t especially plausible.

Most people, most of the time, are a combination of the former and latter groups.  “Nudging,” as Farrell and Shalizi show, is undemocratic because it makes it more difficult for them to carry out the former functions.  But more than that, it seems to assume an extremely implausible picture of society.

(Now if I could only nudge my three year old to sleep past 6:30 AM now that we’ve moved the clocks back an hour.)

Rebecca Traister: "Ladies, We Have a Problem"

In a piece in today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine, Salon regular Rebecca Traister considers the wisdom of the SlutWalk movement in the context of recent rape scandals like those involving Lara Logan and Dominique Strauss-Kahn.  She begins by attacking the triviality, the futility, and the vulgarity, of “stripping down to skivvies and calling ourselves sluts,” as a means to changing the terms of the political discourse concerning rape—given how much of the culture does still, twenty years after Anita Hill testified before Congress, blame victims for provoking their attacks by dressing or behaving improperly.

The style Traister disparages is a style that was more prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s than it is now.  Then, during marches protesters often adopted a provocative appearance, particularly an appearance that was personally—as opposed to politically—provocative.  Groups like ACT UP were criticized by outsiders to the movement, and also from those within the movement who preferred to remain socially respectable.  The movement’s successes, however, which include increasing numbers of states legalizing same-sex marriage, and the end of the military’s policy prohibiting service by homosexuals, arguably was the work of the activist groups more than that of conservatives who distanced themselves from the movement because they couldn’t abide the nonconformism of some of its members.

I don’t think “slut” is a word that can be reappropriated by feminists the way “queer” was reappropriated in past decades by activists in some LGBT movements.  For this to work, for me, “slut” would have to be a word that was regularly applied to a much larger range of styles and behavior than I think it is.  But maybe there are women who feel otherwise.  Maybe they feel comfortable calling themselves “sluts,” maybe even when they are dressed in ways I (and probably Traister) would consider totally appropriate.  I don’t see any reason to think that’s the case here, though.  The point of the protest is not to encourage young girls to see themselves as “sluts.”  The point is to show up people who overuse the word “slut” as ridiculous.

Rebecca Traister does not think women should parade around in public in their underwear.  She is happy to agree that a woman who dresses like that looks like a slut.  She does admit, at the end of her essay, that extreme measures might be necessary if we want to “upend” the assumptions so frequently implicit in press accounts of rapes like those she cites.  The essay does end with four paragraphs—beginning, “None of us can know the veracity of any of these women’s claims.  But the standard response . . . is still [as David Brock wrote of Anita Hill] that she is a little but nutty and a little bit slutty”—in which the author wonders whether her own argument will be convincing.

But she really seems not to understand why the protesters are dressing like that.  It isn’t because they think going around out of doors in only underwear should be normal.  It isn’t because they think the category “slutty” shouldn’t exist—even if they don’t like the word “slutty” itself, they recognize that some ways of dressing are sexual, and some are excessively sexual (whether just according to social, situational norms, or because they are literally too provocative).  It isn’t because they want to change people’s opinions about what it’s normal to wear.  They are being—politically—provocative.  They want to draw attention to an issue: women do not deserve to be raped no matter what they wear.  Really, this should be obvious.  When a woman is said to be dressed “like a slut,” the chances that she is wearing only Wonderbra and Spanx is pretty low.

It is unfortunate that Traister feels the need to turn this around.  She seems to be willing to approach this topic from only one point of view.  She makes sure to reassert both her belief that there are proper ways to dress, and also her willingness to condemn women who do otherwise.  She makes the centerpiece of her essay the argument that women who dress “sluttily,” in the name of feminist issues, are doing harm to their own interests.  She makes this argument from within feminism, advising the presumably younger women in these protests for their own good.  She doesn’t say where she herself would draw the line.  She does imply, though—by her focus on the term “slut” and the inadvisability of trying to reappropriate it—that there are younger women who she would say look like “sluts,” who defend their style with feminist arguments, who she thinks should behave differently.  And this has the effect of suggesting that feminists, especially, should be more concerned about obeying even rather conservative social norms than with methods of gaining political success that might require them to appear undignified.

I don’t like the practice of reading people out of a movement for being “incorrect,” or insufficiently radical, or taking the wrong position on arbitrary litmus-test concerns.  In my opinion, Rebecca Traister has the right to call herself a feminist, and to criticize other feminists, as she likes and thinks best.  But using a political movement, the ultimate goals of which she appears to support, as a hook on which to hang an argument about how women like herself (non-activists) ought to dress if they want to defend themselves from sexual and verbal violence, doesn’t seem to have the purpose of advancing the cause.

The Secret Philosophy of the Postmodern Novelist

The New Republic has given Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom, one of its first negative reviews (behind firewall, I haven’t read it or the novel, only the New Yorker excerpts).  Not that there’s any reason to give Franzen the utmost in kid-glove treatment—though I’m increasingly fond of The Corrections, it is not perfect by any means, and is often very annoying.  The interesting thing is that, a few days later, Adam Kirsch, TNR’s poetry critic, chimed in to defend neoconservatism from Franzen’s insulting portrayal.  Of course, The New Republic has long leant towards neoconservatism itself on many issues.  Not content to defend the politics of his own magazine, however, Kirsch goes on to defend the late philosopher Leo Strauss from charges, more or less, that he agreed with Plato:

“Not many of the millions of readers of Freedom will also have been readers of The Nation or the London Review of Books during the Bush years. But those who were will immediately recognize this passage as an allusion to Leo Strauss—who was alleged, in these circles, to be the secret mastermind of belligerent neoconservatism.

It was Strauss who allegedly taught that “the philosopher” had the right and duty to lie to the public in the service of a greater good, and who used Platonic myths to undermine democracy. It’s not necessary to reargue here the falsity of this understanding of Strauss—who, in fact, wrote about the way free-thinking and rationalist philosophers throughout history used occult writing to outwit the religious taboos of their time.”

Kirsch is wrong.  Strauss (like his disciple, Allan Bloom) held that philosophers have both an esoteric and an exoteric teaching.  The esoteric teaching is specifically hidden from everyone other than philosophers.  The esoteric teaching is different from the exoteric teaching, and the exoteric teaching is, in turn, deliberately intended by the writer as the message that’s to be conveyed to laypeople who read the book.  The purpose of the dual meaning is to keep most people from knowing what the philosophers are saying, because most people—not to mention the authorities—would not want the philosophers’ real beliefs to be widely shared.  (In fact, in the places and times Strauss was most interested in, the authorities might arrest a philosopher who was too clear about his message.)

Strauss wanted to insist that moral truth is always and everywhere the same, yet philosophers in different times and places have disagreed about the nature of moral truth.  To defuse relativism, Strauss developed a theory that explained away the appearance that philosophers have always been relativists (or “historicists”): “Plato and Aristotle (and their medieval followers as well) often concealed their own thought by accommodating themselves to the opinions of their contemporaries....  Thus was born Strauss’s famous doctrine of ‘esoteric teaching,’ his conviction that philosophical texts can contain hidden meanings reserved for an elite readership that knows truly how to read.” *

In other words: The contents of a philosophy text are not reliable evidence of what the author believed.  What the writer believed is, it follows, the esoteric teaching understood by the true philosopher, who has been educated in a philosophical way.  Only philosophers and scholars of philosophy understand what the texts that constitute the history of philosophy really mean.  People who have read only the primary texts—unless they are themselves philosophers, or at least scholars of philosophy—cannot know.  As Larmore says, Strauss’s aim here is to deny that we should take seriously things like Aristotle’s defense of the morality of slavery, because truth doesn’t change, and we know that slavery is wrong.

The same thing presumably applies to books published today.  That is, if a philosopher named Lenny Ostrich writes a book, he will have the intention that philosophers will use his book as evidence of the truth, and everybody else will use his book as evidence of a lie.  If this isn’t lying, I don’t know what would count.  (Obviously, other thinkers have held a similar idea.  For example, Marxism possesses a variety of theories about social and psychological mechanisms that almost make it impossible not to lie to one group of people or another.)  This is something entirely different from writing a book that is simply “difficult,” an evaluation that includes nonphilosophical works like Ezra Pound’s Cantos and Shakespeare’s King Lear, as well as Werner Heisenberg’s Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory and Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures.

This doesn’t mean that philosophers should write propaganda.**  A philosophy text is not a political act, and its intended audience is philosophers and students of philosophy.  The Straussian idea, on this view, is simply that what philosophers do is nobody’s business but their own (in a way, it’s a kind of hypertrophied zeal for academic freedom).  It isn’t that philosophers ought to have a political project in which they enlist nonphilosophers by misleading them about the nature of philosophy.  But it does include the project of misleading nonphilosophers (not least about the nature of philosophy), and the possibility of someone having a this project like this one should seem at least a little troubling now that education is so widely available (and not least to a journalist like Kirsch).  Five hundred years ago, a writer might want to mislead a few priests and university dons, who wouldn’t want even philosophers to read potentially subversive books: a few people, who had the learning and the time to study deeply, could learn the truth—the others would remain as they were.  These days, the same writer would be misleading large numbers of people (many of whom already nominally agree with him) who had been led to believe what he wrote was important, and who might mistake his untruths for useful information.

And worse: Strauss was a scholar of political philosophy, and his neoconservative disciples have not been scholars but rather practitioners of politics.  They seem to have taken the lesson that philosophy hides, specifically, truths about the world of government and politics.  Moreover, they mostly seem committed to the idea that they themselves belong to the elite that knows all the secrets about this world (if not that they themselves are “philosophers”).  Such a person might well conclude that part of their job is to lie to everybody else about what’s “really going on” behind the scenes.  (Admittedly, their beliefs may have no effect on their actions; most liars don’t need a fancy theory to tell them it’s all right to lie.)

It’s not an uninteresting theory.  And if true, it would make some of TNR’s own writers quite a bit more interesting than they would ordinarily be.  It might even be helpful for interpreting the postmodern novel.

* My quotation is from Charles Larmore’s 1989 essay on Strauss, which was published in The New Republic and reprinted in The Morals of Modernity.

** And it obviously doesn’t turn propagandists into philosophers, either.

Marketing: These Kids Today With Their Happy Meals and Their Fancy Shoes

Joanna Weiss’s Boston Globe op-ed today relates an interesting anecdote about college classroom interactions.  “Notre Dame University marketing professor Carol Phillips says that when her students brag that they aren’t susceptible to advertising, she points to their shoes, their hats, and their computers.  And she tells them that marketing isn’t limited to ads; it’s packaging, store placement, associations.”  Presumably, Phillips asks them to reflect on how many of them are wearing fashionable and pricey consumer products.  It is helpful to have pointed out that advertising and marketing are much broader than just the obvious persuasive rhetoric of commercials and magazine advertisements (which kids, in increasing numbers, learn to deflate in English composition and consumer education classes).  Marketing encompasses the entire range of activities that go to produce everything that sits between consumers and manufacturers, giving the former an idea of what is being sold and how the seller would like it to be envisioned.  This is important information about how our economy works, and kids are too often resistant to new information because they feel that it violates some core belief or some core emotional aspect of their identity.  But if Phillips means to imply that there is no difference between the persuasive, deceptive nature of advertising rhetoric and the fact that commercial marketing information is the discursive ocean we swim in—or that the kids’ feeling that they have learned to discount the former is false—she is incorrect.  They are young and inexperienced, and they need to learn what she is teaching them about the nature of our society, but there is a core of truth to their sense that they have been made immune to advertising.

There is also, it seems, an unfortunate consequence to thinking this way.  Joanna Weiss illustrates this with a quotation from a group that is agitating against including toys in children’s meals at fast food restaurants.  Weiss writes, “One anti-Ronald McDonald polemic, issued by a group called Corporate Accountability International, says McDonald’s ‘undermines parental values’ and creates ‘a fundamental restructuring of the family dynamic.’ The evidence: ‘Every time a parent has to say no to a child, it’s another let down, another way that a parent has to feel bad about not making that child happy.’”  They seem to believe the restaurant chain has a responsibility to create children’s desires, to arrange our culture so that parents won’t have to make their children feel bad by telling them no.  I really don’t understand this at all.  If parents’ values include children’s not eating cheeseburgers every day, they won’t buy the product the fast food chains sell.  Trying to persuade the chains that consumerism is bad—which is what the complaint about McDonald's influence on “parental values” and “the family dynamic” amounts to—seems like a waste of time.  I don't think it's unreasonable to wonder whether apparently futile campaigns like this one are fueled by overly grandiose claims about the capacity of marketing to structure society more than in its most obviously consumer-oriented aspects.

It's 1900, and Our Future's So Bright, We Gotta Wear Shades

On the second page of his history of the first five decades of the twentieth century (The Big Change), Frederick Lewis Allen quotes from a biography of J.P. Morgan written by his son-in-law, Herbert Livingston Satterlee, presumably lamenting the end of the age of “good society”: on the first day of 1900, “New York was still a friendly, neighborly city and was a pleasant place in which to live.”

As Allen points out, the biographer’s definition of “people” must have included only the very well off, people like him, people with whom he and his family might have socialized.  He does not include the poor, for whom life in New York City was not especially “pleasant” at all: whose children might die without “society” ever noticing.  Allen explains why.  The publishing world of the time, including the higher class of magazines (by which Allen himself had been employed for about forty years by the time he wrote this book), was interested only in the doings of the very, very rich—men like J.P. Morgan—and in a culture suited to them.  A leftish or postmodern English professor might tell you that has always been the case, equally in 1900, in 1950, and 2010.  Publishing, like any cultural entity in a society, serves the interests of the ruling class: in other words, the rich (in Allen’s words, “the elect”): an extreme oversimplification that needs many caveats and special cases in order to be accurate, but a useful overarching theory for many critical purposes.  The age was, in Allen’s words, “complacent,” so its literature and its journalism followed rules designed to ensure they would appeal to a complacent audience.

But it would not be fair to describe those poor immigrants (doubly victimized by “European tyranny” and “American indifference,” Van Wyck Brooks wrote in The Confident Years, which Allen quotes further down on the same page) whose children accidentally drowned in the ditch behind their tenement as themselves “complacent.”  The failure of the Populist and farmers’ movements did not reflect on them in any way.  No more could the word be used in an accurate description of the muckraking journalists and naturalist novelists who were beginning to do their work around the same time.  Or of a union activist like Eugene Debs (“[a] friendly and merciful man with an insecure grasp of logic”), whom Allen describes next.  Elaborating on these counterexamples to his own argument, Allen sticks to those very same rules, restricting journalistic interest in “humanity” to the upper class, except when enumerating the results of that class’s failures of compassion.

(The pattern is continued in succeeding chapters.  We learn that the big cities as well as the tiny villages were smaller in 1900 than they would be about fifty years later, and we learn that Los Angeles then had a population of about 100,000, Dallas and Houston both less than 45,000.  We learn that the tallest building in Manhattan had a total of twenty-nine stories.  But no data is given for any smaller towns, which indeed did change in size during the period—though in a way that would be difficult to characterize without statistical analysis and a fair degree of work.  Chelmsford, Massachusetts, for example, a small town outside of Lowell—and probably very much the kind of place Allen had in mind when he promised his readers an explanation the changes in “the American way of life” that had occurred since their childhoods—had a population of less than 4000 in 1900, of just under 10,000 in 1950, and of about 34,000 in 2000.  The change that had already taken place in towns like Chelmsford would have affected many more readers of a book like this than the building of the Empire State Building or the change in character of the big western cities.  But the picture Allen paints of then-present day 1952 is as idealized and lacking in important detail as the image of 1900 he takes to be the starting point of the majority of his readers.)

Yet, by “complacent,” Frederick Lewis Allen means to imply that nobody at all anticipated what the United States would look like fifty years later, and this is certainly correct.  Both Debs, contemplating his presidential run, or Morgan, actually not yet contemplating the formation of U.S. Steel, would have been shocked and astonished by the America actually brought into being by “a combination of varied and often warring forces” neither was able to anticipate.  Morgan “contemplated . . . a bright future” with the rest of “the well born and well endowed”; Debs contemplated something different; yet both (in this respect) were wrong—presumably, because both failed to see something that would turn out to have been important.

Are Political Independents as Mythical as the Unicorn?

Henry Farrell at The Monkey Cage (via LFC and a few clicks) links to an article at Columbia Journalism Review that refers to The Monkey Cage, and to a months-old controversy over whether political journalists disrespect political scientists, but that’s not important right now.  The CJR article also links to a post at Jonathan Bernstein’s A Plain Blog about Politics, in which Bernstein links back to The Monkey Cage and an old post there, “Three Myths about Political Independents.”  The nub of the argument is that many widely shared beliefs about independent voters (John Sides at The Monkey Cage cites David Brooks and Charles Blow, both at the New York Times) actually are not true.  Sides says, “This has been known in political science since 1992, with the publication of The Myth of the Independent Voter.”

Political scientists look at polls (among other things).  Sides says people who poll as independent actually say they are not independent if you ask them a follow-up question.  If pollsters ask the follow-up question, and remove those who identify themselves as either partisans of one of the major parties, or leaning towards one of the major parties, the percentage of voters who are “independents” drops from about 35% to about 10%.

I don’t take polls of my friends and acquaintances.  However, I do know people who say they are independents.  I don’t usually pester them with “follow-up questions,” but often they follow up themselves.  They may go on to say that, for example, they could conceivably be persuaded to vote for either candidate—it’s just that at the moment they think there are strong reasons not to vote for, say, the Democrat.  They may say that they think there needs to be health care reform—it’s just that they happen to know lots of small business owners, and their friends invariably say that every health care reform law ever passed has either hurt their business or virtually compelled them to hurt their employees.  I also know people who call themselves independents and almost always find reasons to vote for the Democrat.  In either case, they seem very seriously to be willing to consider both sides of the issues, they seem very seriously to be willing to reject even the party they lean to strongly if the issues fell out that way, and it may well be that their sense of an “independent” view of the issues just happens to fall pretty far from what other people might consider the center.

It seems easy to say that people are independents, or only weakly partisan, because they are “low-information voters.”  (Matt Yglesias seems to harp on this idea a lot, though I may have got his version of it wrong here.)  But “low-information” doesn’t seem to describe these people well.  They care enough to be informed on the issues and to try to inform other people.  (In a sense, they can be categorized as Gladwell’s “Mavens.”)  They care enough not to settle for a position just because some organization tells them to.  In other words, they are actually high-information voters: in fact, they tend to be among the highest-information voters in the group, if my subjective observations (of an admittedly smallish number of anecdotal situations) are to be trusted.  Now, polls or smaller scale studies might show that they are actually lower-information than they appear, and thus that my subjective observations are wrong (but on the other hand, I don’t think polls would usually make observations at a level of granularity that would enable political scientists to compare voters perceived as high-information in specific environments with voters who actually are high-information in precisely the same environments).

So there is one disconnect.

And, then, how should we define “high information”?  How about with reference to these “myths about independent voters” themselves?  Sides’s old post says, “This has been known . . . since 1992.”  Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that the information has been available since 1992?  I’d guess that at John Sides’s department, his results are accepted, and nobody would be allowed to get away with an argument that ignored those results.  Sides’s post gives me some good reasons to accept those results if I want to make an argument Sides will take seriously, but not necessarily if the people I need to take my argument seriously are in a different department or in at some newsroom’s editor’s desk.  Maybe Bruce Keith’s work was accepted even more quickly than Albert Einstein’s was, but based on my (admittedly limited) knowledge of academia, I would be very surprised if there were no significant critiques (or even attacks) on Keith’s work published in the past twenty years.  Not enough time seems to have passed for the contents of a groundbreaking academic monograph to have become the basis of all the work being done in the field everywhere in the world.  The likelihood that there is some other research out there, which I will not be able to dismiss out of hand, contradicting the work Sides relies on, makes me reluctant simply to accept Sides’s assertion that this has been known since 1992.  I would lean towards accepting his word, but I’m not sure (as a non-expert) about repeating it as gospel truth.

For example, it makes me uncomfortable to say that a layperson is simply wrong who happens to think that there are more voters in the US who identify themselves as independents than identify themselves as Democrats or Republicans, who does not know that this, though superficially plausible on a naïve reading of the evidence, has been shown to be a myth.  On a purely empirical level, I can read a graph as well as anybody else, and the chart clearly shows that the “myth” is actually an accurate representation of the polling data.  I’m reluctant to say that somebody who has gone to the trouble of reading the graph, of reading John Sides’s argument, and of concluding that they will continue to use “independent” in a sense that agrees with the myth and with common usage, is “lower information” than someone who doesn’t read The Monkey Cage but heard about the myth over lunch one day at work.  I’m also reluctant to say that someone who may have asked an actual academic at a different department from the one Sides teaches at, and was told the “myth” is true, is ignorant from an academic perspective.  What if this latter person is a journalist?  His blogger friend accepts the authority of Sides and his 1992 book, but the journalist’s own source tells him Sides is wrong.  The journalist publishes what his source has told him.  In what sense, then has “[T]his . . . been known since 1992,” when newspapers say otherwise?  At best, surely, the idea is contentious.

Sides probably takes it for granted that a certain amount of an academic’s argument rests on, well, his authority as an academic (his placement in a network of other academics, his publication history, and so forth), but not everybody will.  I’m actually less concerned about people who dismiss everything academics say (if they exist) than with people who feel vaguely that everything published has gone through some thoroughly rigorous vetting process that prevents untruths from getting through.

The same issue comes up in a letter to the editor of the New York Times Sunday Book Review this week, responding to Alan Wolfe’s review of Diane Ravitch’s new book, in which she repudiates the positions she has been defending for nearly thirty years.  Ravitch—who, in spite of her taking a position in the second Bush administration, derives much of her authority from her reputation as an open-minded liberal—for years has supported education policies pushed mostly by the right (for example, by the National Review).  Now she is convinced that the data shows those policies are wrong.  But, the letter writer points out, the empirical data has been available for twenty years already.  Yet they did not determine Ravitch’s position when they first became available.  She waited for some time, it seems, before allowing new research to influence the position she ought to take.  So, unless I’m missing something, I don’t see how it can be the case that groundbreaking academic publications mark the time from which something ought to be considered “known.”

OK, John Quiggin, Here's One Thing That's Wrong with the Left

John Quiggin follows up his earlier posts, in which he argued that conservatism, particularly in the United States, relies on spreading ignorance, asking whether there are examples of the left doing something like the same thing.  As one example, he links to a bloggingheads between David Frum and Jonah Goldberg (both of them rightwing pundits), which he characterizes as the former reducing the latter “to a stammering wreck.”  The implication is that Jonah Goldberg characterizes the ignorant part of the right (almost certainly true), but that David Frum is rational, someone the left could work with.

So, here is a tendency I see on the left that bothers me (I admit that in many regards, it is something I see to my left, but I hope the fact that I am criticizing from the right will not cause my comments to be automatically dismissed): The idea that policy can be determined by neutral parties, and that it doesn't matter which party exercises power and puts policy into practice.  (Actually, I believe there are conservatives, as well as left-liberals and centrists, who hold to this theory.)  This is what seems to lie behind some Crooked Timber members’ attempts to engage with the right (but to be honest, at these times I often have no idea what they’re trying to do)—if a policy is correct, get it implemented and accepted by whatever means you can, and what does it matter who ends up taking care of it?  If the United States is a center-right country—which I don’t believe is true, especially given current definitions of “left” and “right”—but which is fairly well accepted by many—maybe even liberal academics and policy makers mostly ought to pander to the rightwing.

However, look at this post from Paul Krugman.  He cites cases where people on the right appear to be acting in ways that support this idea—that they believe the same things liberals do—when in reality they absolutely refuse to acknowledge any part of it.  They assume, definitionally, that all reason is on the right, with the GOP.  They pretend that the relation between the GOP and the left can be usefully compared to the relation between adults and children.  They assume that individuals who vote Republican and identify with rightwing, conservative policies are more competent than people who vote Democrat and identify with leftwing or progressive policies.  That is an assumption that is very hard to prove.  Most people (Democrats included) automatically assume people they dislike have beliefs they dislike, so, for example, if they have an employee who seems like a slacker, they might assume he is a leftwing Democrat who’s never stepped foot in a church or a synagogue.  But I am pretty sure there are plenty of incompetent people who are politically on the right, and personally impeccable from a moral or ethical point of view—everyone knows someone who ignores any and all criticism, because they are very certain they are very good. 

(Moreover, that “slacker” may well be a Republican who views his boss as a kind of nanny-state liberal.  And making allowances for generations, the slacker’s view may be correct.)

Theorists on the right argue constantly that culture matters.  On the left, the response is usually to concede that culture matters, taking the argument to be a natural support for multiculturalism.  The left’s response ignores what the right is actually arguing: that the left takes insufficient note of the fact that culture matters.  By conceding, and shifting the debate to specific points at which culture matters, the left largely loses its ability to defend itself.  Instead, they end up making the right’s points for them, inch by inch.  The line between the partisan and the neutral is set much, much too far over to one side (so that it includes, for example, arguments that conservative kinds of culture matter and that Enlightenment modes of thought are incapable of doing justice to these kinds of culture).  Even George Lakoff, in my opinion, for all his talk about the need for progressives to frame situations for themselves, falls into this trap.

On the CT comment thread, NomadUK complains that the facts are “forc[ing him or her] to cheer for David Frum.”  But here's one possible scenario for American politics: The Jonahs get control of the GOP, and the result is that they discredit it along with its policies.  Good for the left (in the long run). 

Here's another scenario: The support of the Davids keeps the GOP intact as is with the Jonahs in it, suppressing some of their policies but putting the rest into law.  Well, could be worse.  But in order to accomplish this, most plausibly, the Davids give the Jonahs free reign in the media.  As a result, the Jonahs feel like they've won even with regard to the policies that were supposedly suppressed.

Finally, here's yet another scenario: The GOP makes an alliance with the rightmost wing of the Democrats—an across-the-aisle alliance, not a new party—maybe even with those a little farther to the left but committed to centrist politics—in order to squeeze out the Jonahs and what Quiggin has been calling the irrationalist right.  Since David Frum's "New Majority" site actually appeared, this has looked increasingly plausible.  But then, I think, they would have to abandon their knee-jerk support for whatever calls itself "conservative" regardless of what the concept means to those they're supporting, and this seems less and less plausible as time goes on.  I worry they will hold on to whatever comes along as long as it promises “old school” thinking and all that, and if Jonah Goldberg is an example of that “whatever,” it is not promising.

None of these possibilities make me want to "cheer for David Frum."  None of them is inevitable and none of them simply describes the status quo.  They are scenarios in which the irrationalist right gains a lot more power and public influence than it has now.  And they seem fairly likely so long as the neoliberal Democrats of the center-left think that across-the-aisle alliance with the GOP is no more than what reason demands.

Recent Reading

Some weeks I don’t find a lot that interests me in the New Yorker, but that certainly isn’t true of the April 26 edition.  There is a short story by E.L. Doctorow about a suburban couple haunted by the homeless man who used to live at their address, stripped down and minimalistic in a Barthelmeesque way, and a selection of letters written by the late Saul Bellow.  The following is from a letter to Lionel Trilling in 1953, shortly after The Adventures of Augie March was published:

“It isn’t that Augie resists every function—that would make him a tramp; and while I would not hesitate to write about tramps if I were called to it, Augie is something different.  I was constantly thinking of some of the best young men I have known.  Some of the very finest and best intentioned, best endowed, found nothing better to do with themselves than Augie.  The majority, whether as chasers, parasites, bigamists, forgers and worse, lacked his fairly innocent singleness of purpose.  They had reached the place where they fixedly doubted that Society had any use for their abilities.  I think if you had been aware of their great negativism you might have taken another view of my ‘propaganda.’  To love another, genuinely to love, is the inception of a function, I wished to say.  I suppose I didn’t quite make it convincingly.”

This is beautiful.  We should have had more of Bellow’s criticism as he laid it out in these letters, the novelist talking about the novel.  Instead, unfortunately, what we got is, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?”

In the same issue, Hilton Als has a feature about Tyler Perry.  He compares Perry’s Madea films in passing to movies about white men and women in similar situations, living it up in the single life but ultimately deciding it’s better to settle down and get married.  “The heroes of Perry’s movies bear no resemblance to the young white men in search of a sense of purpose in the comedies of, say, Judd Apatow or Adam Sandler. . . .  The white-boy comedies of the past two decades are about the grating, strained emo charm of never growing up, while Perry’s films are about the necessity of growing up in a largely segregated world.”  Als might have added Kevin Smith to that list without detracting from its accuracy—or, for that matter, Craig Brewer.  Perry also seems to be a data point for Ehrenreich’s account of the prosperity gospel: “[S]peaking of his sixteen-thousand-square-foot mansion, which he named Avec Chateau, Perry said, ‘. . . I realized this house was a testament to my religious faith.”  (A video about Perry, narrated by Hilton Als, is here.)

On politics: Last week TPM Café’s Book Club discussed Jeff Shesol’s book on FDR’s attempt to “pack” the Supreme Court with justices who would not overturn the New Deal, by adding to the size of the court.  The spring issue of Democracy Journal has a series of responses by various liberal and progressive thinkers and writers to the question where liberalism is today, a little over a year after Barack Obama’s inauguration.  John Quiggin, an Australian professor of economics who I read at Crooked Timber, has been raising similar questions here, here, and here.  Quiggin says, “Practitioners of this kind of managerialist quasi-social democracy have found themselves unable to handle the challenge posed by the irrationalist right . . .”  By “social democracy” he means, more or less, welfare-state liberalism.  I don’t see much difference at the moment between that kind of center-left liberalism and what in America is usually called “neoliberal.”  (That is, I don’t see neoliberalism as a center-right position, or equivalent to “classical liberalism.)  We are all neoliberals now, but pretending the managerialists are the same as the irrationalist right—as I think John Quiggin might like to do—is a waste of time.

Finally, Stephen Holden reviews Stephen Sondheim’s career to date, while discussing the new revue, Sondheim on Sondheim:

“In this revue’s videotaped interviews, Mr. Sondheim goes out of his way to praise Hammerstein for teaching him the craft of writing lyrics. But if you compare the two, the inescapable fact emerges that Mr. Sondheim’s lyrics programmatically repudiate his mentor’s optimistic, inspirational ideology.

“. . .

“For all his songs’ universality, the Sondheim philosophy is specific and exclusive. Directed toward his own class — an urbane, well-educated, culturally cosmopolitan gentry — his lyrics define what might be called the Manhattan sensibility: humanist, proudly intellectual, psychologically sophisticated, hyper-articulate, liberal, Jewish and disenchanted.”

I’ve actually finished reading Bright-Sided and will post my notes slowly, as I clean them up and copy over some of them from my spiral notebook.  Non-magazine reading currently includes The Happiest Toddler on the Block.  I’ve also just gotten Michael Bérubé’s book on the campus culture wars, What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts, from interlibrary loan.  Other than the fact that the plastic-enclosed jacket is unfortunately quite shiny, unread looking, and toddler-attractive, all I can say of it so far is that Professor Bérubé’s published prose style is quite a bit more staid than his blogging style.

How do you feel about the word inspired?

My freshman year in college, my roommate and I both were prospective English majors and writers/journalists.  She had a lot more experience than me, however: more preparation for college-level study of literature, and a better idea about how to write.  One day she came back to the room and announced that, after having struggled to find a topic for an essay, she was inspired.  Sounded reasonable to me.  But, some time later, I tried the same thing on a guy who lived in the same dorm as us, down the hall.  It was the first snowfall of the year, my first snowfall in New York, and I had gone for a walk down Broadway to get a sandwich at Mama Joy’s, and was when I came back, I told him, “inspired.”  His reaction was scorn.  “Inspired?  What does that mean?”  I was tongue-tied; I didn’t know what inspired really meant, or why it was a good thing with reference to essay-writing.  Since then, I’ve been leery of the word.

John Holbo over at Crooked Timber isn’t afraid of it, though, apparently.  And he’s a philosophy professor, so he should know.  He’s also got a good post about why the conservative arguments against health care reform are silly.

Meritocrats Vs. Rockefeller Republicans

I don’t know as much about Robert McNamara as I should.  I do know he was the Lyndon Johnson adviser who was responsible for the escalation of American military involvement in Vietnam.  His recent death brings David Brooks and Gail Collins, on their New York Times blog, “The Conversation,” to discuss a question the caption writer words as, “Has our ruling class gotten better or worse over the ages?”

Brooks starts off.  He compares the bureaucratic elite of the 1950s to the elite of the 1960s (McNamara’s time), and presents McNamara’s failings as of a piece with what he as a conservative considers the decline of America generally over those two decades.  He presents a narrative in which the “wise men” of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations were great men, innovators, responsible for creating the institutions that made the America of the second half of the twentieth century what it was.  The corresponding “best and brightest” of the succeeding decade, however, were entirely different.  In their hands, everything fell apart.

In case you were wondering why, Brooks offers up a handful of possibilities: the kind of education they were given, their belief that they were in possession of scientific knowledge that could tell them exactly how to govern, their belief in their own competence, and their belief that they could improve conditions for other people at home and around the world.  Basically, they were Democrats.  The men of the 1950s, on the other hand, were wealthy industrialists (and the sons of industrialists), plutocrats with Wall Street values who believed their wealth and opportunities gave them the responsibility and the competence to participate in government.  In other words, Republicans (though probably Rockefeller Republicans, as they’d later be called, not necessarily conservatives).

Undeniably, something happened sometime between 1958 and 1974.  The difference between the bureaucrats of the immediate post-war period and those of the Vietnam era makes a nice example.  But the question remains what the causes of the difference really were.

With the data Brooks relays to us, it seems that the only way of explaining the change is by the subsequent generation’s being inexplicably dumber than its predecessor had been (not its parents: the only subsequent political Harrimans that Wikipedia lists exist in science fiction).  Or we might invent some theory of inevitable decline—where the men of the 1950s were indeed better than those of any other period in recent memory, but where the law of reversion to the mean shows that all good things must come to an end, and that they correspondingly did.  What seems certain is that, for Brooks, many other possibilities, though imaginable, are not likely.  The men of the 1950s did not leave weak or fragile institutions to their successors.  The men of the 1950s did not leave nearly insuperable problems, of their own creation, to those of the 1960s.  The men of the 1960s did not do the best they could under bad circumstances, and certainly did not lay the groundwork for improvement in the next two or three decades.  (Any of these possibilities would cast in doubt Brooks’ assertion that the 1960s were a sad falling off from a high place.)  No: what you see is what you get.

What you see is what you get.  Americans were generally happy in the 1950s, and the presidents of the 1950s were Republicans.  Americans were increasingly unhappy in the 1960s, and the presidents of that decade were Democrats.  In the 1950s there wasn’t yet much in the way of the social sciences, and bureaucrats could be only generally educated yet govern with little outside criticism.  In the 1960s many people felt a lot more was known, and at the same time problems were being identified with increasing frequency.  Conservatives like David Brooks are asking you to do the math.  He thinks you’ll be forced to draw the right conclusion.

Frames Versus the Invisible Hand

Via Will Wilkinson, Matt Yglesias says of financial firm CEOs: “surely we could agree that the executives at these institutions are primarily bad people.”  He goes on to elaborate, explaining that they are “greedy.”  This isn’t his main point, and he goes on to invoke Adam Smith and to “recognize that none of us are without sin,” but he says it more than once, and I think Wilkinson is right to point out that it’s not consistent with what Yglesias has represented his argument to be.

Yglesias’ post invokes a frame that it’s unusual to see in sophisticated economic reasoning: every problem can be blamed on a particular person, who both benefited directly from the problem in the most natural way, and committed a particular sin that necessarily would have caused that particular problem.  In this case, as the frame, and as Yglesias, would have it, the problem was not only caused by financial firms, but by the individual executives of these firms.  And it’s not just that their actions caused the problem because they made some mistake, because they were lazy, because they were incompetent, because they were out to get somebody else and lost track of what they were really supposed to be doing—they caused financial problems for other people because they were out to benefit themselves financially.  And it’s not just that their desire to get big bonuses or to drive up the price of their employers’ stock—or even their self-identification with the firm and its products, so that the firm’s gains felt like their own—led them to act in acquisitive ways, it’s that they were acting to benefit themselves instead of with the public good in mind.

There really is no other way to explain the stupidity of this kind of argument (at least I can’t think of one), than to see it as basically automatic, nearly unconscious.  It’s something you expect to hear from a guy who’s just finished yelling, “You kids get off my lawn!”

And what it misses is something important.  If we really think Adam Smith was right, it is important to have people around who will act with self-interest (their own and others’) in mind.  If we want to live in a modern society with complex institutions, it is important to have people around who are aware of the impact their actions have on the well-being of others without imagining that impact is direct.  And if we want to get anything done at all, it is also important to have people around who do not become paralyzed with fear every time it occurs to them that “none of us are without sin.”

The Definition of "Neoliberalism"

At Blographia Literaria, Andrew Seal is discussing Walter Benn Michaels’ essay “The Neoliberal Imagination,” which appeared in n+1, and he says:

Michaels accuses liberals of stooping to a politics of respect or recognition where we should be practicing a politics of redistribution. "[T]he politics of the neoliberal imagination involve respecting the poor, not getting rid of poverty—eliminating inequality without redistributing wealth." Liberals, he argues, like to treat classism as homologous to racism or sexism—as being primarily about the destructive force of prejudice, rather than the destructive force of not having enough money to pay for basic needs. "So, just as being opposed to racism is by no means to be opposed to racial difference… to be opposed to classism is by no means to oppose class difference."

But to my ear, “neoliberal” is not interchangeable with “liberal.” “Neoliberal,” as originally used in the US in the 1990s, refers to the second generation of people who were previously liberals but were moving in the direction of conservatism. The first generation said they were “liberals who had been mugged by reality,” whatever that means, and called themselves “neoconservatives.” The next clump were politicians like Joseph Lieberman, people who wanted to consider themselves liberals, still didn’t want to see Roe v. Wade overturned, etc., but who read Sullivan’s The New Republic and increasingly saw merit in conservative arguments.  These Democrats, the DLC and so on, are the ones who were in power since the early 1990s, so I think I'm using the word in pretty much the same sense Michaels is, at least in this Bookforum essay.

“Neoliberal” is a word I didn’t hear much for a while, until around the time the n+1 guys came around. I assumed they had heard it from their professors at Harvard. No idea what those guys thought it meant.

I later learned that “neoliberal” was used in Europe to refer to what’s called a “classical liberal”: someone who believes in the free market, disestablishment of religion, in other words, someone who a European reactionary would call a liberal. My understanding is that the Liberal Party in England is “liberal” in this sense. In the United States, it describes Jonah Goldberg: conservatism without the bigots.

But, as I said, I have no idea what those krazy n+1 kids mean by it.

How out of touch are conservative pundits?

Here is a quote from ex-Bush speechwriter and GOP strategist David Frum (as told to Barron YoungSmith of The New Republic). He’s talking about Sarah Palin:

Here's a candidate who embodies and epitomizes not just conservative values but a conservative style. At the same time, she's a person who inspires very little confidence in her ability to run a modern government. Which of these things is more important to you?

Frum voted for the McCain/Palin ticket, and said he thought there was nothing to choose between Palin and Obama when it came to fitness for high office.  He's the most well known of those Republicans who criticized the Palin VP pick very harshly (as did his wife, Danielle Crittenden, at the Huffington Post), and he writes genial posts on occasion about the English and American novel, but he is the farthest thing from "nonpartisan" that can be imagined.

He and others are trying to find a new direction for “conservatism,” by which they mean the Republican party. To begin to see why they are unlikely to succeed, and why David Frum is not a good ally for those who might consider themselves to be “cultural conservatives” without strong ties to either party, try to answer the following questions:

1. What are “conservative values”?
        a) Values typically possessed by the mass of people who accept things as they are
        b) Opposition to values typically possessed by those who can’t rightly be considered part of
“the mass of people who accept things as they are”
        c) Values that derive from conservative institutions, such as Christianity, the writings that constitute “Western Civilization,” and the medical professions
        d) Values that my parents, grandparents, and teachers shared

2. What best characterizes a “conservative style”?
        a) “Of the people,” practical-minded, taking cues from the past
        b) Proudly defiant and defiantly anti-intellectual
        c) Calm, staid and dignified
        d) Reminds me of the most respected members of the community in which I spent the most time as a child

3. What would “inspire confidence in [a person’s] ability to run a modern government” or other large organization?
        a) Has worked in large organizations, had management positions within them, got things done effectively and reasonably efficiently, left behind a good reputation among other people in those organizations
        b) Knows everything without having to ask or to look it up, and doesn’t take no for an answer or let anyone push him/her around
        c) Good manners, conservative moral values, requires hard work from themselves and others, makes the bottom line a priority
        d) Reminds me of the people my teachers and past employers had labeled as having “leadership qualities”

4. Which set of answers would be given by
        a) Ramesh Ponnuru?
        b) Ross Douthat?
        c) Andrew Sullivan?
        d) David Frum?
        e) Leon Wieseltier?
        f) Jim Manzi?

5. Who can the GOP most easily do without?

6. Who is most likely to stick with the GOP no matter what?

7. Why do conservatives feel that “values” and “style” are appropriate criteria for choosing a president?

8. Who or what is responsible for the fact that global warming and obesity are considered partisan issues?
        a) Human nature
        b) Capitalism
        c) Secular humanism
        d) “Arrogant libruls always telling people what to do”
        e) National Review and rightwing talk radio

9. Who or what is responsible for the fact that “modern art” was long considered a partisan issue?

10. What is the difference -- if any -- between a policy argument and a strategy argument?

Also see this analysis from a civic republican point of view by Jim Sleeper at openDemocracy.