She leaves behind two little girls she loved more than anything, Katie, who turns 3 on New Year’s Eve, and Ellie, who was born June 21.

We met in August 2004 and were married on October 8, 2005. She had just turned 35 and I was a few weeks shy of 40 but neither of us had been married before. We shared religious and political worldviews but very different personalities. She was extroverted, sunny, and patient to my introverted, grumpy, and antsy. I almost certainly got the better of that bargain.

Kim was my partner, helpmate, and confidante. Her passing leaves a gaping hole in my life.

I still haven’t told Katie. She knows something unusual is going on, since the paramedics came at a little after 1 this morning and the police didn’t leave until well after 4. But she seemed pretty much herself, requesting her favorite cartoons and playing with toys until I got her back to sleep a little while ago. Sadly, neither of my little girls are likely to remember their mommy other than from photos and videos.

The next few days will be stressful, not only dealing with my grief and suddenly becoming a single parent but the throngs of people coming by to pay their respects and deal with their own grief. Kim has a large extended family that she was close to and a lot of friends.  While I prefer to deal with people in small groups and small doses, I owe it to Kim to do that for her.

Obviously, I’m still in shock at this unexpected loss. Organizing my thoughts and writing them down is how I process, well, pretty much everything.  Words fail me right now.

The Atlantic‘s Alexis Madrigal has an interesting discussion of the ebbs and flows of police violence in crowd control situations in modern American history. Under the provocative headline “Why I Feel Bad for the Pepper-Spraying Policeman, Lt. John Pike,” he argues that it’s institutions, not individuals, who should receive most of the blame.

Our police forces have enshrined a paradigm of protest policing that turns local cops into paramilitary forces. Let’s not pretend that Pike is an independent bad actor. Too many incidents around the country attest to the widespread deployment of these tactics. If we vilify Pike, we let the institutions off way too easy.

That these changes in the police force have occurred is not in dispute. They’ve been sufficiently open that academics can write long papers detailing the changes in police responses to protests from the middle of the 20th century to today. They are described in one July 2011 paper by sociologist Patrick Gillham called, “Securitizing America.” During the 1960s, police used what was called “escalated force” to stop protesters.

“Police sought to maintain law and order often trampling on protesters’ First Amendment rights, and frequently resorted to mass and unprovoked arrests and the overwhelming and indiscriminate use of force,” Gillham writes and TV footage from the time attests. This was the water cannon stage of police response to protest.

But by the 1970s, that version of crowd control had given rise to all sorts of problems and various departments went in “search for an alternative approach.” What they landed on was a paradigm called “negotiated management.” Police forces, by and large, cooperated with protesters who were willing to give major concessions on when and where they’d march or demonstrate. “Police used as little force as necessary to protect people and property and used arrests only symbolically at the request of activists or as a last resort and only against those breaking the law,” Gillham writes.

That relatively cozy relationship between police and protesters was an uneasy compromise that was often tested by small groups of “transgressive” protesters who refused to cooperate with authorities. They often used decentralized leadership structures that were difficult to infiltrate, co-opt, or even talk with. Still, they seemed like small potatoes.

Then came the massive and much-disputed 1999 WTO protests. Negotiated management was seen to have totally failed and it cost the police chief his job and helped knock the mayor from office. “It can be reasonably argued that these protests, and the experiences of the Seattle Police Department in trying to manage them, have had a more profound effect on modern policing than any other single event prior to 9/11,” former Chicago police officer and Western Illinois professor Todd Lough argued.

No one wanted to be Seattle and police departments around the country began to change. “In Chicago for example, paramilitary gear such as that worn by the Seattle Police was quickly acquired and distributed to officers,” Lough continued, “and the use of force policy was amended to allow for the pepper spraying of passive resistors under certain circumstances.” (That emphasis is mine.)

9/11 put the final nail in the coffin of the previous protest-control regime. By the time of the Free Trade of the Americas anti-globalization protests in Miami broke out eight years ago this week, an entirely new model of taking on protests had emerged. People called it the Miami model. It was heavily militarized and very forceful. The police had armored personnel carriers.

That’s a generous excerpt but there’s a lot more at the link and I encourage you to read the whole thing. But I tend to agree: Pike’s blase spraying of peaceful college students with a chemical agent is a function of his socialization and training; he’s probably not a monster at all. As a former military officer, I’m both fully aware of the process of training decent human beings into trained killers and horrified at the notion that we’re applying the same techniques to domestic law enforcement forces.

Yesterday afternoon, Glenn Greenwald asserted, “There’s a common bond b/w those supporting drones to kill without due process & pepper-spraying peaceful protesters: #Authoritarianism.” I pushed back against this quite vigorously, because I simply view domestic law enforcement and warfighting to be completely separate matters with very different rulesets. Democracies have often been quite ruthless in the use of force against wartime enemies while respecting civil liberties at home.

While I’ve got some serious concerns about our use of drone warfare in Pakistan and elsewhere, it doesn’t concern me in nearly the same way that domestic police brutality does. The nature of the state is that the duty of the government to protects its citizens is high. That means bending over backwards to protecting their rights at home. And it sometimes requires being ruthless in the pursuit of enemies abroad. I’m a staunch advocate of the laws of war and the duty to protect non-combatants in war zones. But even the most staunch proponents of humane conduct of war recognize combat as a more permissive environment for violence than the fighting of crime at home.

But Keith Boyea interjected with a salient point: “unending wars can lead to war-like tactics at home.”

The United States has seldom not been at war since roughly 1940. We were in World War II well before Pearl Harbor and once our intervention began in earnest it had a tremendous domestic impact. WWII was quickly followed by Korea and then Vietnam. Moreover, the National Security Act of 1947 and the Cold War in general meant that we had a permanent national security state. We didn’t draw down our military force and accepted a wartime footing as background noise.

After the Cold War, this abated to some extent. But America’s professional soldiers–including its large reserve component that had previously been thought of as an emergency-only force–soon began a deployment tempo that outpaced what had been the norm in the Cold War with action in the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, and elsewhere. And then 9/11 kicked us into a war with no end in sight against “terrorists with a global reach.”

The upshot of all of this has indeed been a creeping authoritarianism. Police forces have become “first responders” whose Orders Must Be Obeyed. (Hell, we’ve done the same with airline flight attendants.) We’ve accepted all manner of indignities and intrusions on our liberty in the name of fighting terrorism and keeping the public safe. We dutifully stand in line to be searched in all manner of places now, emptying our pockets and taking off our jackets and shoes. And we’re quite literally not allowed to question any of this, lest we be detained. While we’re still innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, we’re presumed guilty everywhere else and have to prove that we’re not terrorists or criminals.

UPDATE: Greenwald was apparently writing his extended analysis at the same time as I was this morning. In a posting titled “The roots of the UC-Davis pepper spraying,” he makes several salient points.

Despite all the rights of free speech and assembly flamboyantly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the reality is that punishing the exercise of those rights with police force and state violence has been the reflexive response in America for quite some time. As Franke-Ruta put it, “America has a very long history of protests that meet with excessive or violent response, most vividly recorded in the second half of the 20th century.” Digby yesterday recounted a similar though even worse incident aimed at environmental protesters.

The intent and effect of such abuse is that it renders those guaranteed freedoms meaningless. If a population becomes bullied or intimidated out of exercising rights offered on paper, those rights effectively cease to exist. Every time the citizenry watches peaceful protesters getting pepper-sprayed — or hears that an Occupy protester suffered brain damage and almost died after being shot in the skull with a rubber bullet — many become increasingly fearful of participating in this citizen movement, and also become fearful in general of exercising their rights in a way that is bothersome or threatening to those in power. That’s a natural response, and it’s exactly what the climate of fear imposed by all abusive police state actions is intended to achieve: to coerce citizens to “decide” on their own to be passive and compliant — to refrain from exercising their rights — out of fear of what will happen if they don’t.

Now, I think this goes overstates the situation. Rather than a grand scheme to discourage protest, I see it mostly as a police force which sees themselves as warriors and “civilians” as the enemy, who must be bullied into submission. This comes from a variety of sources and is at least understandable, if still impermissible, for police accustomed to dealing with gang violence and a confronted by organized criminal activity hardly distinguishable from an insurgency from a fight-or-flight standpoint.

But there are far too many Americans, as illustrated by some of the comments below, who are under the impression that any infraction of any law–even misdemeanor disturbing the peace or trespass ordinances–can reasonably be met with police violence. This is an authoritarian mindset bordering on Fascism: if you’re not doing anything wrong, why, you have nothing to fear.

Pervasive police abuses and intimidation tactics applied to peaceful protesters — pepper-spray, assault rifles, tasers, tear gas and the rest — not only harm their victims but also the relationship of the citizenry to the government and the set of core political rights. Implanting fear of authorities in the heart of the citizenry is a far more effective means of tyranny than overtly denying rights.

Again, I don’t see this as part of a coordinated scheme in the way Greenwald seems to. But we’re in agreement that the primary harm here is the long lasting damage to society and the citizens’ relationship to its government than the incidental harm to individual protestors.

Where we depart most seriously, though, is in this conclusion:

This is the most important effect of the Occupy movement: acts of defiance, courage and conscience are contagious. Just as the Arab Spring clearly played some significant role in spawning, sustaining and growing the American Occupy movement, so too have the Occupy protesters emboldened one another and their fellow citizens. The protest movement is driving the proliferation of new forms of activism, citizen passion and courage, and — most important of all — a sense of possibility. For the first time in a long time, the use of force and other forms of state intimidation are not achieving their intended outcome of deterring meaningful (i.e., unsanctioned and unwanted) citizen activism, but are, instead, spurring it even more. The reaction to these protests are both highlighting pervasive abuses of power and generating the antidote: citizen resolve to no longer accept and tolerate it. This is why I hope to see the Occupy movement — even if it adopts specific demands — remain an outsider force rather than reduce itself into garden-variety partisan electioneering: in its current form, it is demanding and re-establishing the indispensable right of dissent, defiance of unjust authority, and sustained protest.

I truly hope Occupy doesn’t devolve into rioting. We’ve got real problems in this country with the scope of government power but this isn’t Mubarak’s Egypt. Here “authoritarian” is a tendency that we need to combat and that people like Greenwald and I can openly and forthrightly discuss without fear of reprisal and stronger than stupid comments from Internet trolls. Organized interests, particularly monied ones, have outsized influence in our system precisely because they care whereas most of us are apathetic most of the time. But there are still nonviolent political tools at our disposal and protests must be peaceful and, for the most part, law abiding.

There are times when civil disobedience is permissible, even necessary. The movement to end Jim Crow is a classic example. In that case, the laws themselves were unjust. Massive breaking of those laws–in a nonviolent manner–was necessary to bring attention to that injustice. Throngs of people being arrested for doing nothing more than sitting at the front of a public bus or trying to order lunch in a restaurant created a powerful image. That police often used violence against these peaceful protests only made the message more powerful.

It’s hard to make the same case about the right to set up permanent campsites in urban parks or the right to block access to buildings on a college campus. One can question the wisdom of breaking them up with police action; the authorities in Washington, DC have wisely, I think, looked the other way against technical violations of the law to avoid an unseemly conflict with demonstrators. But authorities have a right to demand that the law be enforced and police have a duty to professionally enforce it.

Cynthia Tucker, the longtime editorial page editor for the AJC, has issued a retraction.

I won’t procrastinate. I’ll get the most difficult part of this column over right now: I was wrong. I was shortsighted, naïve and narrow-minded to endorse the concept of drawing Congressional districts to take racial demographics into account.

In 1982, the Voting Rights Act,  with its emphasis on Southern states, was amended to encourage the creation of awkwardly named “majority-minority” districts in order to give black voters the strength of a bloc. I believed that drawing such districts was a progressive political tactic, a benign form of affirmative action that would usher more black members into a Congress that had admitted only a handful.

The tactic worked. In 1980, there were only 18 blacks in the U.S. House of Representatives. Now, there are 44, many of them elected from districts drawn to meet the mandates of the Voting Rights Act.

Unfortunately — like so many measures designed to provide redress for historic wrongs — those racially gerrymandered districts also come with a significant downside: They discourage moderation. Politicians seeking office in majority-black or -brown districts found that they could indulge in crude racial gamesmanship and left-wing histrionics.

While black-packed districts yielded some quite respectable pols — including U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and U.S. Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the third-highest ranking Democrat in the House — they also launched the Congressional careers of clownish legislators such as former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, last heard cozying up to the savage dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

Hemming most black voters into a few districts also had a deleterious effect on surrounding areas, now “bleached” of voters whose interests tend toward equality of opportunity. Their absence encourages pols in districts left overwhelmingly white to use the “Southern strategy” of playing to the resentments of white voters still uncomfortable with decades of social change.

As Richard Harpootlian (cq), chairman of the South Carolina Democratic party, told me: “When the only issue is race, idiots win, black and white.”

Much of this was not only predictable but predicted.

I lived in Alabama’s 7th Congressional District when it redrawn in 1992 as a majority-minority district, encompassing the counties in the state’s Black Belt and the predominantly black parts of Birmingham and Tuscaloosa. Quite literally, I was on the wrong side of the street, with the poor and black parts of Tuscaloosa cleaved off from the affluent areas. The same was done in Birmingham.

The results were predictable and predicted: The 7th became a safe black seat and far and away the most liberal district–indeed, the only liberal district–in the state while the 6th became the whitest and most conservative. Oh, and something else: Stark differences in poverty.

Food hardship in Alabama’s congressional districts, 2010:

• 7th Congressional district – 29.3 percent
• 4th Congressional district – 27 percent
• 3rd Congressional district – 25.8 percent
• 1st Congressional district – 25.1 percent
• 2nd Congressional district – 24.8 percent
• 5th Congressional district – 21.2 percent
• 6th Congressional district – 18.3 percent

But, strangely, the elections in the 7th — which, for all practical purposes, means the Democratic primary contests — weren’t over the best way to help the poor but over which candidate was the blackest. Oh, they were all African American. But, for example, the original holder of the seat, Earl Hilliard, successfully warded off his first challenge from his eventual successor, Artur Davis, by arguing that all his opponent, a US Attorney, had ever done for black folks was put them in jail. Davis tried to make the campaign over Hilliard defying sanctions against Libya and taking a junket there.  These were highly accomplished men, graduates from Howard and Harvard Law School, respectively.

While artificially created majority-minority districts have tended to produce that sort of bizarre politics, the “bleaching” effect on neighboring districts has created something almost as bad: fighting over who loves Jesus more, how big the monuments to the 10 Commandments should be, and the like.

Of course, racial gerrymandering isn’t the sole cause of this. Old fashioned gerrymandering along party lines to carve out safe seats for incumbents and/or to benefit the party that controls the state legislature the cycle after the Census can do the same thing. By removing the need to appeal to a wide range of views, politics devolves into battles over personality and minor issues, since there’s no real policy disagreement among the candidates. Either way, idiots win.

Andrew Exum, who did stints as an Army Ranger officer in both Afghanistan and Iraq, has a longish post on the Terry Jones affair. His conclusion is spot on:

We keep organized religion out of government, to protect the integrity of the government, and we keep the government out of organized worship, to protect a man’s freedom to worship God – or not worship God – as he pleases.

This is who we are as America. This is our DNA. Yesterday, I argued that we had some tough questions to ask about how much blood and treasure we should spend to promote the rights of women in Afghanistan. That’s an honest question we have to ask ourselves because our values balance against and compete with our security interests and other priorities. But with respect to Terry Jones, we have to defend his right to burn the Quran to the last one of us, no matter how foolish he is and no matter how much havoc he creates.

If opportunist clerics want to inflame a crowd in Afghanistan because one idiot out of 300+ million Americans does something grotesque and stupid, fine. In the YouTube era, there is nothing the U.S. government can do to prevent such gross provocations aside from denounce them ex post facto, and we are all, as global citizens, adjusting to this new reality where a speech act in the state of Florida can lead to a massacre in Balkh Province. But when the first U.S. soldier in Afghanistan dies because of the actions of Terry Jones, we can take comfort in that fact that he or she will not have died in vain. He or she will have died defending the very document he or she swore to protect in the first place.

We’ve had some spirited discussion on the Terry Jones affair over the last few days, with even the front page posters not agreeing with one another on the degree of Jones’ culpability in the atrocities in Afghanistan that his actions helped fuel. These are visceral issues and we’ll likely never agree.

I’m a near-absolutist on free speech, a position not uncommon in America but baffling in most of the world. Steve Hynd notes that Jones could be arrested for his actions in the UK–and Canada and much of Continental Europe, for that matter. And those are hardly totalitarian societies. In America, though, people have a legal right to express any idea they please, no matter how despicable or hurtful it may be to others. Absent very narrow sorts of incitement, the police here have a duty to protect the likes of Terry Jones or Fred Phelps from the anger of the mob.

And this is why I disagree with the recent remarks of General David Petraeus–a man who I respect and admire enormously–on this matter. He’s no doubt right that Jones’ scumbaggery makes his own job harder and compromises his mission. But his larger duty is to the Constitution of the United States, which he took a sacred oath to defend. Winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan population would be a nice thing to achieve, but we’ll get on fine regardless. The right of Americans to free expression, however, is at the core of the Republic and we can’t yield an inch of that to murdering extremists in Afghanistan–or anywhere else.

In the wake of the weekend’s shooting spree by Jared Loughner, which killed six people and critically injured Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, there has naturally been a lot of discussion about the strident tone of our recent political debate.   While rejecting this rhetoric has been a constant theme of OTB since quite literally its beginning (see “How Not to Argue” from Day 1) we’ve nonetheless rejected the notion that those who use heated rhetoric in otherwise peaceful speech are in any way responsible for Loughner’s actions.

The two beliefs are in no way contradictory.

Calling For Civility Yet Understanding Incivility

For civil society to flourish, people must be free to engage in a vigorous exchange of ideas.   People are emotional creatures in addition to rational ones, and sometimes speech will be heated.  And leaders will sometimes use colorful language to play to the crowd, especially when talking to their supporters.

At the same time, the purpose of free speech is, ultimately, persuasion.  And beginning with the premise that those who disagree with you are evil, stupid, or treasonous makes persuasion impossible.

Recognizing the former, we must tolerate some degree of excess in rhetoric, so long as it stops short of the direct incitement of violence.  Recognizing the latter, we should encourage more respectful dialog.

Rhetoric, Violence, and the Law

The Supreme Court has drawn the line as to the legal limits of free speech.  While the First Amendment’s plain reading would seem to allow no government interference whatsoever, it has long been recognized that words that directly lead to injury are not protected.  The famous case of falsely shouting Fire! in a crowded theater is the classic example.

Judge Learned Hand articulated the modern concept nearly a century ago, when he said that government may prosecute words that are “triggers to action” but not those that are mere “keys to persuasion.”

The Supreme Court formalized this in 1969 in what is known as the Direct Incitement test: “The constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”

Under this doctrine, even the actual advocacy of violent crime can not be punished, so long as said advocacy remains theoretical.  The case in question involved prosecution of the leader of a Ku Klux Klan group for “advocat[ing] . . . the duty, necessity, or propriety of crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform” and for “voluntarily assembl[ing] with any society, group, or assemblage of persons formed to teach or advocate the doctrines of criminal syndicalism.”

Rhetoric, Violence, and Social Science

Just because it’s legal for people to use inflammatory rhetoric doesn’t mean it’s a good idea, of course.    Indeed, as noted at the outset, I think it’s a bad idea if for no other reason than its corrosiveness of our national dialog.

Does using quasi-violent words and imagery, including implicit suggestions that one’s political opponents are “the enemy” who must be “targeted” and that “2nd Amendment solutions” might be necessary actually lead to violence?

The social science literature on the subject, as John Sides notes, is rather mixed.  The short answer seems to be that it doesn’t have that effect on normal people but might on people already predisposed to violence.   He cites, in particular, a paper by Nathan Kalmoe which finds that “even mild violent language increases support for political violence among citizens with aggressive predispositions, especially among young adults.”

The specific language he tested were substitutions of the more peaceful “work” for the more aggressive “fight.”

Americans today are fighting/struggling to keep their jobs and their homes. All you ever asked of government is to stand on your side and fight/stand up for your future. That’s just what I intend to do. I will fight/work hard to get our economy back on track. I will fight/work for our children’s future. And I will fight/work for justice and opportunity for all. I will always fight/work for America’s future, no matter how tough it gets. Join me in this fight/effort.

I would note that all of the significant presidential candidates in 2008 used variations on the “I will fight” theme and that none of us considered this in the least bit provocative (except, perhaps ironically, for Sarah Palin, who’s convention speech accepting the vice presidential nomination mockingly noted “There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you”).  The “dangerous rhetoric” we’re talking about in the wake of  Loughner’s crime is far more vitriolic.

And yet, while “Seeing one or both of the ‘violent’ political ads had NO overall effect on support for political violence,” Kalmoe found “Seeing violence political ads DID have an effect among those with a predisposition to aggression, as measured with a standard psychological battery. Among those with the greatest predisposition to aggression, being exposed to a violent political ad increased their support for political violence by about 20 points on a 100-point scale. Among those with the least predisposition to aggression, being exposed to a a violent ad actually decreased their support for violence.”

From this, Sides concludes that,

For information — vitriolic political discourse in this case — to influence Loughner’s attitudes and behavior, he would have had (1) to be exposed to that discourse and (2) to accept or believe what he was hearing. Was he? We do not know.

To prove that vitriol causes any particular act of violence, we cannot speak about “atmosphere.” We need to be able to demonstrate that vitriolic messages were actually heard and believed by the perpetrators of violence. That is a far harder thing to do. But absent such evidence, we are merely waving our hands at causation and preferring instead to treat the mere existence of vitriol and the mere existence of violence as implying some relationship between the two.

Rhetoric, Violence, and the Duty to Worry About Nuts

While I concur in this insofar as it goes, I would add two caveats.

First, while I advocate keeping debate civil and eschewing violent rhetoric in addressing domestic politics for all manner of reasons, the potential impact of the words on the mentally unstable is least among them.   As Doug and Steven have argued well in their posts on the matter, we are failing in our care for the mentally ill in this country, including those with violent tendencies.   But I’d stop short of saying that we have some duty to censor our speech because some unstable person might react absurdly.

Second, there are different standards for the yahoos and those who would lead them.

While I’ve decried the poisonous atmosphere of some of the Tea Party rallies and the shoutfests at some town hall meetings, I’m not overly concerned about the yahoos who hold up “We came unarmed (this time)” signs at rallies.  I honestly think that they’re mostly decent citizens, frustrated with their government, and emboldened in their speech by the safety of a likeminded mob.   While not exactly helpful in persuading those who disagree with them as to the wisdom of their position, it’s just false bravado and cathartic venting.

Conversely, while I in no more blame Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, and Sharron Angle for Jared Loughner than I do Al Gore and Ralph Nader for Ted Kaczynski, I do think they have a duty to be more responsible in their choice of words.  Not so much because ratcheting up the rhetoric might set off some nutcase but because it’s an unmitigated negative for our body politic.

Conservatives have long complained about liberal media bias.  But conservative media bias seems to be much worse.

In a brief “Note to the Right,” Kevin Drum observes:

Matt Yglesias, noting that even Ann Althouse has called the Daily Caller‘s releases on the JournoList brouhaha “weak” and “pretty mild stuff,” is even more to the point:

At some point conservatives need to ask themselves about the larger meaning of this kind of conduct—and Andrew Breitbart’s—for their movement. Beyond the ethics of lying and smear one’s opponents, I would think conservatives would worry about the fact that a large portion of conservative media is dedicated to lying to conservatives. They regard their audience as marks to be misled and exploited, not as customers to be served with useful information.

As I’ve noted many times, I largely stopped watching and listening to broadcast news and political talk years ago.  Not only do I get almost all my news and commentary online these days, I’ve almost completely abandoned sources that I consider too polemical or predictable.   So, I mostly judge those other sources based on what bubbles up into the blogospheric discussion, which may not be representative of the whole.

But both Drum and Yglesias make excellent points.  Far too much of conservative media seems to be a nakedly propagandistic exercise, designed to manufacture outrage.   To be sure,  the general direction of media, period — see Politico and HuffPo, for example — is to do whatever’s necessary to generate traffic or ratings.   But outright manipulation and distortion is qualitatively different from mere hype.

In fairness, OTB covered all the stories Drum mentioned and quickly identified them as bunk.   But that’s almost our stock in trade here:  Most of the Outrage of the Day stories on the left and the right are based on some combination of assuming the worst of opponents and not understanding how the system works.   We occasionally fall into the same trap others do, but our default position on almost all those stories is “Meh.”

And Yglesias’ point that conservative media outlets are, at the end of the day, in the business of lying to conservatives is worth underscoring.

Tucker Carlson, who’s trying to create a conservative HuffPo with his upstart Daily Caller, has always struck me as harmless enough and rather close to me politically, hovering somewhere in the centrist conservative – mild libertarian territory.  My sense is that he’s just trying too hard to make a splash with this JournoList story and banging the drum too loudly.   To the extent there’s an outrage there, it’s the one Andrew Sullivan has been pointing too — the clubbishness of media elites — rather than some conspiracy to set the news agenda.  Certainly, it’s not that a bunch of liberal journos were excited that Obama won the election.

Andrew Breitbart, on the other hand, become well known as a result of the fraudulent ACORN sting operation and has been trying to replicate that on a regular basis.   There’s simply no reason to give him the benefit of the doubt at this point.

My advice remains what it was more than a decade ago — before the modern Yellow Journalism era –when I was teaching Media and Politics courses to undergraduates:  Consume a wide variety of news sources, especially those that challenge your own biases.

Markos Moulitsas announced today that he will be suing Research 2000, the polling firm that he had been partnered with up until only a few months ago:

I have just published a report by three statistics wizards showing, quite convincingly, that the weekly Research 2000 State of the Nation poll we ran the past year and a half was likely bunk.

Since the moment Mark Grebner, Michael Weissman, and Jonathan Weissman approached me, I took their concerns seriously and cooperated fully with their investigation. I also offered to run the results on Daily Kos provided that they 1) fully documented each claim in detail, 2) got that documentation peer reviewed by disinterested third parties, and 3) gave Research 2000 an opportunity to respond. By the end of last week, they had accomplished the first two items on that list. I held publication of the report until today, because I didn’t want to partake in a cliche Friday Bad News Dump. This is serious business, and I wasn’t going to bury it over a weekend.

We contracted with Research 2000 to conduct polling and to provide us with the results of their surveys. Based on the report of the statisticians, it’s clear that we did not get what we paid for. We were defrauded by Research 2000, and while we don’t know if some or all of the data was fabricated or manipulated beyond recognition, we know we can’t trust it. Meanwhile, Research 2000 has refused to offer any explanation. Early in this process, I asked for and they offered to provide us with their raw data for independent analysis — which could potentially exculpate them. That was two weeks ago, and despite repeated promises to provide us that data, Research 2000 ultimately refused to do so. At one point, they claimed they couldn’t deliver them because their computers were down and they had to work out of a Kinkos office. Research 2000 was delivered a copy of the report early Monday morning, and though they quickly responded and promised a full response, once again the authors of the report heard nothing more.

While the investigation didn’t look at all of Research 2000 polling conducted for us, fact is I no longer have any confidence in any of it, and neither should anyone else. I ask that all poll tracking sites remove any Research 2000 polls commissioned by us from their databases. I hereby renounce any post we’ve written based exclusively on Research 2000 polling.

This announcement comes less than a month after Kos announced that it was ending it’s relationship with the polling company based, in part, on Nate Silver’s just-released pollster rankings, which didn’t give Research 2000 a very good review.

The report itself is fairly extensive and seems to suggest that Research 2000 was knowingly cooking the books on the numbers it was providing to clients, although I’ll admit that much of the statistical analysis discussion went over my head so that could be an incorrect interpretation. Although that seems to be exactly the fraud that Kos is referring to in his post when he says:

I want to feel stupid for being defrauded, but fact is Research 2000 had a good reputation in political circles. Among its clients the last two years have been KCCI-TV in Iowa, WCAX-TV in Vermont, WISC-TV in Wisconsin, WKYT-TV in Kentucky, Lee Enterprises, the Concord Monitor, The Florida Times-Union, WSBT-TV/WISH-TV/WANE-TV in Indiana, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Bergen Record, and the Reno Gazette-Journal. In fact, just last week, in an email debate about robo-pollsters, I had a senior editor at a top DC-based political publication tell me that he’d “obviously” trust Research 2000 more than any automated pollsters, such as SurveyUSA. I didn’t trust Research 2000 more than I trusted SUSA (given their solid track record), but I did trust them. I got burned, and got burned bad.

There were many on the right who were skeptical of the Daily Kos/Research 2000 polling numbers simply because of the entity commissioning the polls. At it turns out, there was reason to be skeptical, but it had nothing to do with ideology.

One of the more unfortunate trends on contemporary social science has been a growing “cult of irrelevance,” a set of implicit standards that encourages smart young scholars to write more and more about less and less for fewer and fewer readers. The principle of academic freedom and the granting of lifetime tenure are supposed to free academics to tackle controversial subjects or ambitious research projects, but all-too-many social scientists choose to devote their efforts to meaningless displays of methodological firepower and to attack questions that are only of interest to a small group of like-minded scholars. Even when they do stumble on to a topic that is of general interest, they will present their results in a manner designed to make it incomprehensible to even a well-educated educated lay-person.

The road to prestige in social science has long been publishing articles in very specialized journals — which generally requires long reviews of the literature, pedantic outlining of methodology, and the use of statistical modeling — and selection for large grants.  Alex Tabarrok points to some evidence that “great teaching” is now being heavily rewarded in some circles, too, which is a surprising and welcome trend.

But public intellectuals and popularizers are simply not highly regarded by the academy.  Almost by definition, their work isn’t cutting edge or “serious.”   The most cutting insult is to call a political scientist’s work “journalism.”  The fact that, as I infamously pointed out in a grad seminar years ago, that people actually read journalism is seen as a bug, not a feature.

Hat tip: Joshua Foust Image source:  Zazzle.

This view amounts to a repeal of the American founding. If the graduates of elite institutions are exclusively qualified to govern, then most citizens are thereby adjudged incapable of the self-governance which was the ideal of the Founders.

Stacy ascribes this view to Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks and the Sarah Palin controversy but it’s actually quite widespread.  See, for example, this week’s bizarre dustup between Jack Cafferty and Alec Baldwin in which the former asserts that, while Baldwin isn’t qualified to run for Congress because he’s a mere actor, Al Franken is qualified to be a United States Senator on account of “He’s Harvard educated.”   Baldwin doesn’t so much dismiss the absurdity of that argument as point out he himself went to NYU.

Regardless, Stacy notes, while many of our brightest kids go to the Ivies, many do not.

Not every kid who scores well on standardized tests decides to orient his life toward graduating at the top of his high school class and attending an elite university. Those who elect to follow that treadmill of “gifted” programs and honors classes, who grind for an all-A average and organize their extra-curricular activities with an eye toward how it will look on their applications to Harvard, can be said to differ from other children (including children of equal or greater intelligence) in terms of temperament.

The Sully-Brooks “meritocratic” theory ignores the influence of temperament in the operation of the cognitive partition system. Our public education system, after all, is not operated by geniuses. As The Bell Curve points out, education majors are, on average, the stupidest category of college graduates.

Despite the special pleading (I have it on good authority — Stacy himself — that he was less than a model student) and irony of decrying a meritocracy of IQ while engaging in a different form of it, this is certainly true.  Not every very bright kid is good at sitting quietly in a classroom in his youth.  Certainly, I wasn’t; I routinely got A’s in my academic subjects and C’s in deportment well into junior high.

Stacy is also right that many academically talented students prefer to spend their time fixing cars, playing sports, chasing girls, and otherwise diverted from doing the things necessary to get into Harvard.  This is especially true of boys, for whom academic excellence is not necessarily the path to social popularity.  The quarterback on my high school football team, for example, went from being a grade school honor student to a rather mediocre student afterwards because of an accurate assessment of the short-term rewards.  (He went on to do well enough in college — Jax State, in fact — to wind up teaching and coaching at our high school.)

This, though, is even more important:

This, of course, doesn’t even begin to confront the “meritocratic” myth that socioeconomic class no longer presents obstacles to the bright-but-poor student’s admission to elite schools. Legacy admissions afford an important advantage to the children of alumni, and there is no point in a student applying for admission to a school that he could never afford to attend. (My own daughter was offered scholarships we couldn’t afford for her to accept.)

For all the talk of “diversity” at elite schools, their student bodies are overhwelmingly composed of young people from affluent backgrounds whose adolescence was consumed by a single-minded devotion to the goal of being admitted to a top university. It is their affluence and precocious ambition, rather than intelligence per se, that distinguishes them. Having excelled in bookish ambition, members of this elite then congratulate themselves on the proof of their superiority to others: Je suis un meritocrat!

I made decisions about both college and graduate school with affordability very much near the top of the list.  Beyond that, while I understood that Harvard and Yale and Princeton and MIT were great schools and graduating from one of them was beneficial, I had no clue how much difference it made.  Nor did I have any idea the degree to which there’s a pecking order below that.  (Something that’s even more true now than it was then.  The infamous US News ranking system, for example, started in 1983, the year I was applying for college.)

My college application process, then, was limited by issues of finances and a lack of cultural awareness of what mattered.   MIT is the only big time university I considered but I didn’t bother to apply because it was expensive to take all the tests and submit the various applications required.  (In hindsight, it was just as well as my math SATs weren’t competitive; I could likely have gotten into one of the lesser Ivies but not the world’s top engineering school.)  The schools to which I applied, then, were:  West Point, Annapolis, Air Force, the Coast Guard Academy, Alabama, and Jax State.    I got accepted at West Point, Alabama, and Jax State (with full scholarships at all three) and waitlisted at USCGA.  I also had Army, Navy, and Air Force ROTC scholarships that would have paid tuition and books anywhere I got in but the costs of living were not covered.

West Point was my first choice and I eagerly accepted but, alas, I didn’t fit in for a variety of reasons.  (Long story short, it was a jock school whose students were also exceptionally bright and I adjusted to the challenges too slowly, prioritized the wrong things, and ultimately couldn’t maintain the juggling act.)   When I left after three semesters with a 2.08 GPA, my scholarships were no longer available and I wound up at my safety school where, through a combination of ROTC and the Army Reserves, I was able to pay for tuition, books and incidentals while living with my parents a few miles away.

After four years in the Army, I wanted to get my PhD and applied to exactly one school: Alabama.  I was accepted but my going was contingent on getting a graduate assistantship that paid for tuition and books and provided a monthly stipend in exchange for working 20 hours a week.  Fortunately, I got one.  The combination of that and the GI Bill allowed me to graduate debt free three years later.

Had I known what I would just a few years later, I’d have applied to more schools.  But I reasonably figured that I wasn’t going to get into one of the great schools with a degree from Jax State and a mediocre GPA (owing to having transferred in all those credits from USMA) and had no understanding at all that there was a difference in attractiveness to hiring committees between, say, Alabama and Georgia, let alone between Alabama and North Carolina or Ohio State.

Money also matters at other points in the process, especially in the elite professions.  Many jobs in media and public policy, for example, require an entry level apprenticeship in DC or New York for little or no pay.  It never seriously occurred to me to apply for any internships or to take a job making next to nothing in a big city when a real paycheck was a ready alternative.  It’s not surprising, then, that kids with wealthier parents to supplement their earnings, predominate in these jobs.  And, considering that these same kids are more likely have gone to the right schools and be attractive to the selection committees, it’s a two-fer.  (This is a fascinating subject.  See “Unpaid Internships? No Such Thing,” “The Internship Racket,” “Progressive Non-Profit Work Only for the Privileged,” “Unpaid Interns Slaves to the System,” and “Are Unpaid Internships Destroying America?” for a variety of views.)

I don’t have any complaints about any of this, really.  I’ve been more fortunate than most, have been able to do the kind of work I enjoy doing for years, and have made a pretty good living.  But it’s undeniable that growing up in an elite household confers enormous advantages in preparation, connection, and understanding of the impact various choices have on the available paths later on.

My wife went to college at Southern Connecticut State, within walking distance of Yale, and has also done quite well for herself.  But she’d no doubt have been better off with a degree from Yale, provided she maintained the same work ethic.

Our daughter is only six months old, so we’re a little ways off from worrying about what college she’ll attend.  But chances are good that she’ll be able to go to the best school she can get into and that she’ll have a pretty good idea of the implications of various choices she faces.

______________________________

*I was going to make this joke before realizing we were both actually on the Wikipedia page, which makes it funnier.  I hasten to add that hundreds of JSU graduates of whom even fewer people have heard of than Stacy and myself include physicians, nurses, teachers, and military officers who have gone on to do far more important things in quiet obscurity.

Via Twitter, James Poulos passes along an interesting piece by Conor Friedersdorf titled “Iran, Twitter, and The American Information Elite.”  Basically, he noticed over the weekend that all of his blogger/journalist friends were intensely aware of what was happening in Iran whereas other well educated people he encountered hadn’t the slightest clue.

I can’t help noticing that information elites are able to process breaking news and form political opinions about it faster than ever before (see the Feiler Faster thesis as told by Mickey Kaus); that these folks are blogging and Tweeting their policy suggestions and demands almost immediately; and that due to arguably dubious strategic political considerations, all of Congress seems to be getting on Twitter.

Are we approaching a point where political information is processed so fast that an event happens, information elites weigh in to shape the discourse surrounding it, the conventional wisdom is communicated to Congress, and elected leaders formulate reactions based on public opinion… all before most of even the formerly plugged in members of the public ever learn what on earth is going on, or have a chance to form an opinion? Is anyone who works at a company that blocks their Facebook feed going to be meaningfully disadvantaged in the political process? Egalitarian concerns aside, are the information elites going to set a course, ossify as they always do in their opinions, and influence the nation’s course too hastily? Are we on course for a kind of political singularity?

An interesting set of questions.  Having been blogging virtually daily for the past six and a half years, the way I process and consume information has changed considerably.  Things become “old news” very quickly, so the pressure to form a strong opinion in real time is the nature of the enterprise.

I tend to start the day with Gmail and Google Reader, even on the weekends, and so processed dozens of blog posts on the subject of the Iran mess over the weekend.  Because I do most of my foreign affairs blogging at the Atlantic Council these days and 1) the topic is a bit outside our baliwick,  2) the blog I’ve developed there is aimed at providing something akin to expert analysis, and 3) having a 5-month-old means less time for writing on weekend mornings, I just read and thought about things and got around to writing Monday.

Iran’s Elections: What We Know (And What We Don’t) and Iran’s Elections: What Now? are almost surely better posts than I’d have dashed off Saturday.  But Conor’s right:  The prevailing opinion that the Iranian elections had been stolen was already formed by then and it’s reasonable to presume that the early deciders will shape the opinions of those catching up later in the week.

President Barack Obama announces federal appeals court judge Sonia Sotomayor, right, as his nominee for the Supreme Court, Tuesday, May 26, 2009, in an East Room ceremony of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Kevin Drum notes that he’s already tired of the “kabuki” that has emerged in reaction to the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.

I both agree that the process is predictable and tedious and that Sotomayor would seem obviously qualified for confirmation.  I would quibble, however, with this:

Conservatives, who seem constitutionally unable of viewing any non-white nominee as anything other than identity politics run wild, have already decided she’s just a crass affirmative action hire. Out of a decade-long appelate court career, the only opinion of hers they seem to have heard of, or care about, is Ricci.  And unlike all the middle class white guys on the court, who are apparently paragons of race-blind rationality, they’re convinced that she’s just naturally going to be incapable of judging any case before her as anything other than a woman and a Hispanic.

First, that she’s Hispanic and female were undeniably major factors in elevating her to the top of the short list.

Second, liberals/progressives are cheering the First Hispanic Justice angle, with Chuck Schumer openly daring Republicans to oppose the First Hispanic Justice and risk backlash from the fastest growing voting demographic.

Third, while I don’t recall any such controversy with Sandra Day O’Connor (who, frankly, was not particularly well qualified) it was widely assumed and continues to be argued to this day that Clarence Thomas (who was objectively qualified for the Court) was a token hire.

Fourth, Sotomayor has issued public statements that, while arguably true, are racially inflammatory and that would be much more controversial still if uttered by a white judge nominated for the Supreme Court.  I just happen to agree with Daniel Larison that the solution to this double standard is to quit applying it to whites rather than start applying it to non-whites.

Fifth, it’s hard to stop the kabuki once it starts.  Its modern incarnation began with Robert Bork, an obviously brilliant but undeniably controversial and arguably kooky appointment.  It quickly became standardized and applied to all but the most tepid appointments.  It took months to confirm John Roberts and Samuel Alito, despite their stellar qualifications and moderate temperaments.

Sixth and finally, while tedious and absurd when faced with an obviously qualified appointment who will no doubt be confirmed in the end, there has been a realization in recent years of just how important these appointments are.  Supreme Court justices stay on the bench years, even decades, after the presidents who appointed them leave office and decide the most portentious political issues.  I would prefer that the scrutiny be more sober and less theatrical but scrutiny itself is quite warranted.

UPDATE: Matt Yglesias chimes in:

And then there’s Ramesh Ponnuru who dubs her Obama’s Miers. Because, I guess, the qualifications Sotomayor holds only count as qualifications if you’re a white dude.

Now, I think Sotomayor looks qualified (I frankly don’t follow the lower courts enough to have a well-formed opinion) and earned plenty of ire from my side of the aisle for arguing Miers was not.  But I’m getting really tired of diplomas earned in ones 20s being cited as evidence that middle-aged people are/are not worthy of some senior position.  Surely, there are people who graduated SMU’s fine law school who are smart enough to serve on the Supreme Court.  Just as surely, there are people who Peter Principled once on an appellate court.  And, while I don’t think Miers by any means distinguished herself in the role, the list of White House Counsels includes some damned smart lawyers.  Why, many of them went to Harvard and Yale!

There’s much truth in that.  To many Republicans, tax cutting has become something of a fetish.  But there’s a right way and a wrong way to frame the debate.

I came of political age in 1979-80 and Reagan was my first political hero.  I’m a firm believer in lower and flatter taxes but, at the same time, I recognize that:

Some progressivity is fiscally necessary and morally justified

- Government would need a lot of money even if it were only to do the things that everyone agrees it must do

- People at the bottom of the wealth scale don’t have any money, so the rich will by definition have to pay more

- Money needed to meet basic human needs is more valuable to the individual than incremental money after that point

Cutting taxes generates more revenue . . . but only up to a point

- The greater percentage of an earned dollar taken by the government, the less incentive there is to earn said dollar

- The lower percentage of all money collected as revenue, the lower the revenue collected

Once those points are conceded, as the old joke goes, we’re just haggling over price.

The top tax rate [PDF] has fluctuated wildly since the passage of the 16th amendment in 1913.  It began at 7 percent (no, that’s not a typo) on those earning $500,000 — a massive sum in those days.    It rose to 15 percent in 1916, 67 percent in 1917, 77 percent in 1918, went down numerous times before settling at 25 percent in 1925, jumped back to 63 percent in 1933, 79 percent in 1936, 81 percent in 1941, 88 percent in 1942, 94 percent in 1944.

It went down to 91 percent after the war and stayed there for years.  That’s where it was when John Kennedy took office and where it was when he was murdered.  Despite being constantly cited as a tax cutter, he left the top marginal rate alone.

Lyndon Johnson cut it to 77 percent in 1964 and 70 percent in 1965.  That’s where it stayed until Reagan cut it to 50 (1982) to 38.5 (1987) to 28 (1988).

It has gone up and down considerably over the two decades since but never back to that low after it went up to 31 percent under George H.W. Bush (1991). Nor has it gone up above the 39.6 percent we reached under Bill Clinton (1993 to 2001).* John Cole has created a graph with this data:

So, no, 39.6 isn’t some magical threshhold that catapults the nation into socialism (indeed, tax rates really have little to do with socialism).  Nor is it necessarily a road to financial ruin via the demoralization of the productive class; we’ve had boom and bust times with considerably higher and considerably lower rates.

But here’s the thing:  There are different ways of talking about tax rates and some are more useful than others.  In addition to the list above, I’d like to add in another thing the debate should recognize:

It’s our money, not the government’s

People earn money by trading in their time, labor, energy, present enjoyment, and so forth.  While it’s not universally true, those earning more money tend to work more and have made better choices than those who earn less.  One generally doesn’t get rich without getting an education and putting in much more than 40 hours a week.  Indeed, few get rich working for someone else; most have taken the enormous risk of going out on their own and starting their own companies.

Recognizing that “the rich” have both earned their money and that they have more ability to pay, let’s debate where the tax rates should be on the needs of society and the logic of the market.  This will be an ongoing debate, as there’s no “right” answer that applies regardless of circumstance.

One thing that’s obvious from a glance at the history of the top marginal rate is that it has typically gone up — sometimes skyrocketed — during crises.  Especially wars.   We went in the opposite direction during the Bush administration (partly out of ideology, partly because we went on a wartime footing during a recession and didn’t want to raise taxes and put a further strain on the economy).  So, I’m persuadable that going up to 39.6 percent is necessary.

Here’s how not to persuade me:  Using soak the rich rhetoric.   The constant, “hey, only the top five percent are having to pay for any of this, so it’s cool” talk.  That’s class warfare.

Via Jim Henley, I see that IOZ snarks,

In general I think it safe to say that people who display no outward indications of appreciating the distinction between business income, profit, salary, and taxable income are not, whatever their claims to the contrary, occupying the lofty brackets that Obama proposes we liquidate or nationalize or blast into space or whatever as we make the final transformation into the People’s Republic.

In addition to being untrue (lots of high earners have little knowledge of economics or tax policy) this is entirely beside the point.  Whether you’ll personally have to pay more taxes shouldn’t be a major consideration at all.

It’s dangerous for a republic to operate on the basis of the lower classes voting themselves a larger share of the earnings of the upper classes.  It’s one thing to appeal to a sense of noblesse oblige and quite another to treat others’ wealth as a piggy bank to be raided at will.

Image:  Retirement Council of America

_________
*Yes, I know presidents don’t set tax policy on their own and need Congress to cooperate.

What would Reagan think of this? Wasn’t it he who warned that government is the problem?

[...]

Reagan, who spent 16 years in government, actually said this:

“In the present crisis,” referring specifically to the high taxes and high levels of federal spending that had marked the Carter administration, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” He then went on to say: “Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it’s not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work.” Government, he said, “must provide opportunity.” He was not rejecting government, he was calling — as Barack Obama did Tuesday — for better management of government, for wiser decisions.

But which Republicans are trying to do away with government?   Certainly, we didn’t see any attempt to dismantle any cabinet departments under the eight years of the Bush administration.  And the federal budget skyrocketed.   And we got the first installment of the almost-certainly-wasteful bailout boondoggle under Bush’s signature.

The Republican Party that is in such disrepute today is not the party of Reagan. It is the party of Rush Limbaugh, of Ann Coulter, of Newt Gingrich, of George W. Bush, of Karl Rove. It is not a conservative party, it is a party built on the blind and narrow pursuit of power.

Hmmm.  But I thought all Republicans cared about was making government smaller?  How do you do that while simultaneously undertaking a “blind and narrow pursuit of power”?!

And, um, Bush was twice elected president of the United States.   Promptly at the stroke of noon on January 20th, he turned over the keys to a successor from the opposition party who had pledged to undo many of Bush’s signature policies.    If that’s a “blind and narrow pursuit of power,” Republicans really suck at it.

Stacy McCain notes, too, that the faces of the party Edwards names are a disparate lot, indeed.

So, on the one hand you have two politicians and a political strategist — people directly involved in the politics and policy of the Republican Party — and on the other hand you have a radio star and an author. Between these two groups, a vast chasm exists. Much that President Bush did, with the advice of Rove, was adamantly opposed by Limbaugh and Coulter, and sometimes opposed by Gingrich as well.

Trying to lump these five very different characters into a single category is not an answer to the question, “What’s wrong with the GOP?” Rather, it is a response to the question, “Can you name five famous people hated by liberals?”

Quite.   Edwards continues:

One who listened to Barry Goldwater’s speeches in the mid-’60s, or to Reagan’s in the ’80s, might have been struck by their philosophical tone, their proposed (even if hotly contested) reformulation of the proper relationship between state and citizen. Last year’s presidential campaign, on the other hand, saw the emergence of a Republican Party that was anti-intellectual, nativist, populist (in populism’s worst sense) and prepared to send Joe the Plumber to Washington to manage the nation’s public affairs.

Umm, no, Joe the Plumber was a desperate symbol grasped by a desperate, floundering campaign to demonstrate elitist Democrats who didn’t understand how their policies would impact the little man; he was never going to be put in charge of anything and turned out to be a rather ridiculous symbol to boot.

As for Goldwater and Reagan, they were outsiders railing against the system.  And Goldwater’s philosophy was soundly defeated at the polls by a lifelong machine politico.   Because Republicans had been in the ascendancy since Reagan, they’ve been running on his fumes ever since.  (Yes, Bill Clinton won two elections but he did it as a “New Democrat” who promised that “the era of Big Government is over” and to “end welfare as we know it.”  Further, Newt Gingrich — another one of those conservative intellectuals with Big Ideas — led a resurgence in the party’s fortunes in Congress two years after Clinton’s election.)  It’s a good bet that the next Republican president will be a leader with a convincing message that speaks to the future.

My fellow Jacksonville State alumnus Stacy McCain, a Palin fan, thinks the internal debate on her role in last week’s defeat and her future as a Republican Party standard bearer is one we should have.  He objects strenuously, though, to the tone of some of her opponents.  His difference with me is that he thinks I place too much emphasis on foreign policy wonkery, both because the wonks are often wrong and because foreign policy debates are a moving target and a dicey strategy for building a winning coalition.

Domestic politics is permanent. The economy is always relevant. The ceaseless growth of the Washington bureaucracy continues to intrude into the lives of ordinary Americans. The Department of Education is still an unconstitutional travesty that ought to be abolished. Social Security is still a disastrous Ponzi scheme. The entitlement mentality is still an insult to the Tocquevillean spirit of the nation. These arguments may not be as popular in the short term as pointing at a mustachioed foreign dictator and screaming “Hitler!” but they have the basic virtue of being true.

From a center-left perspective, Kevin Drum believes more of my fellow conservatives should share these concerns about Palin but, alas, he thinks I’m clinging to an old view of Republicanism, writing, “For a movement that decided long ago that slogans and shibboleths mattered while serious policy discourse was merely a distraction, a candidate who showed no interest in domestic policy before the age of 44 is the perfect public face.”

Mark Lilla expands on that view at some length in a must-read WSJ piece, “The Perils of ‘Populist Chic.’”

For the past 40 years American conservatism has been politically ascendant, in no small part because it was also intellectually ascendant. In 1955 sociologist Daniel Bell could publish a collection of essays on “The New American Right” that treated it as a deeply anti-intellectual force, a view echoed a few years later in Richard Hofstadter’s influential “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” (1963).

But over the next decade and a half all that changed. Magazines like the Public Interest and Commentary became required reading for anyone seriously concerned about domestic and foreign affairs; conservative research institutes sprang up in Washington and on college campuses, giving a fresh perspective on public policy. Buckley, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Peter Berger, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Norman Podhoretz — agree or disagree with their views, these were people one had to take seriously.

[...]

So what happened? How, 30 years later, could younger conservative intellectuals promote a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provinciality and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against? It’s a sad tale that began in the ’80s, when leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an “adversary culture of intellectuals.” It was a phrase borrowed from the great literary critic Lionel Trilling, who used it to describe the disquiet at the heart of liberal societies. Now the idea was taken up and distorted by angry conservatives who saw adversaries everywhere and decided to cast their lot with “ordinary Americans” whom they hardly knew. In 1976 Irving Kristol publicly worried that “populist paranoia” was “subverting the very institutions and authorities that the democratic republic laboriously creates for the purpose of orderly self-government.” But by the mid-’80s, he was telling readers of this newspaper that the “common sense” of ordinary Americans on matters like crime and education had been betrayed by “our disoriented elites,” which is why “so many people — and I include myself among them — who would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism.”

Stacy jokes that Jax State grads shouldn’t be siding with the elites.  Recently, Ace had a lengthy diatribe against self-anointed elites in a memorable comments thread.  But Lilla identifies the elitism with which I side:  a meritocratic, intellectual one rather than one of birthright and pedigree.  A movement built on know-nothingism — indeed, outright hostility to higher education — is bound to fail.

The Republican Party will be consigned to permanent minority status if it continues down its present course.   It is increasingly becoming a white, Southern party.  Even though I’m both white and Southern, it’s obvious to me that we have to expand our appeal beyond hard-core Evangelicals and anti-elitists that to get back Virginia, North Carolina, the Midwest, and West.

I’m not advocating turning the GOP into a centrist party.  For reasons John Hawkins identifies and others, it won’t work.  Rather, I’m calling for a return to Ronald Reagan’s vision of a Big Tent that offers enough to attract a broad coalition.   It’s not 1980.   We can’t simply dust off Reagan’s platform.   The bottom line is that, however unappealing it is to die-hards, Social Security and the Department of Education are here to stay.

Quite likely, so is legal abortion.   Roe v. Wade was seven years old when Reagan ran.  When Bill Clinton came to office after twelve years of Republican control of the White House, it was twenty years old.  George W. Bush is leaving, after eight more years of Republican control, with Roe still largely intact and 36 years old.  The younger generation, then, have grown up with abortion as a simple fact of life and have no interest in changing that.

Nor is the boogeyman of homosexuality going to do it.  Despite another string of victories last Tuesday for anti-gay marriage amendments, the fact of the matter is that for those under 50 — certainly, under 40 — homosexuality is normal.  While a majority still oppose granting gays the right to enter into an agreement with the name “marriage,” most support gay unions under a less sacred label.  A decade from now, the debate will seem silly and running on the issue will further marginalize the party.

A majority Republican Party, then, is going to have to figure out a way to keep social conservatives without abortion and gays as shibboleths and without alienating libertarian-minded right-of-center voters.  It’s inconceivable how it’s done so long as the Democrats are winning among college graduates.

A return to fiscal sanity is perhaps the best rallying cry in the short term, one that’ll be made easier in opposition.  (After all, it’ll be Democratic priorities that we can be frugal about rather than our own.)   Beyond that, though, there will need to be a lot of spade work in rebuilding an intellectual rationale for conservatism beyond cutting taxes and anti-elitism.

Note:  An outline form of this post was inadvertantly published earlier. My apologies for the confusion.

Two lawyer-bloggers who I’ve followed for years are upset with me for buying into the “Sarah Palin was in over her head” meme. Xrlq accused me of drinking “the anti-Palin Kool-Aid” for buying into claims that Palin didn’t know which countries were in NAFTA while Bill Dyer is “genuinely concerned for [my] mental health.”

As to the more “outlandish” claims, such as that Palin thought Africa was a country, I tend to share my colleague Alex Knapp‘s view:

Look, I think it’s clear that Sarah Palin didn’t evince much interest in foreign affairs or have a deep knowledge base regarding it. Which was one of my problems with her selection as a VP nominee. But c’mon. Do you really expect me to believe that she didn’t know fifth grade geography? I’m pretty sure you’d have to actually play me a clip of her making that mistake before I actually believed it.

As I noted in the comments to his post, though, having taught plenty of undergraduates who thought Africa was a country or didn’t know where Canada and Mexico were located on a map, it doesn’t strike me as absolutely implausible.   Regardless, the point of the post where I mentioned the charges — and noted that even “if true,” they “seem petty at this juncture” — was that conservatives ought to take the criticisms of more centrist Republicans to heart rather than making support for Palin some sort of litmus test.

The post that has Xrlq and Beldar so up in arms was simply to dismiss Andrew Sullivan‘s claim that the press somehow covered up concerns about Palin’s preparedness were absurd on their face.  Rather obviously, the idea that she didn’t know much about foreign policy or the broader swath of national issues grew steadily starting from Team McCain’s decision to shelter her from the press and then blossomed into full force with horrible performances in the Katie Couric and Charles Gibson interviews.

Bill’s criticism of me is much more extensive here. He believes that I am suffering from Palin Derangement Syndrome.

I was tickled to be invited to participate by telephone in his podcast immediately after the Palin announcement in late August, and I agreed with him and the other participants that Gov. Palin was an exciting choice. Some time shortly after that, however, something changed Dr. Joyner’s mind about Gov. Palin.

I invited Bill on the show (which you can listen to here) because he is and was the blogosphere’s most knowledgable Palin observer, having touted her as a VP choice long before she was on most of our radar screens.  What we agreed on was that 1) Palin was definitely causing a major buzz and seemed to have the base genuinely excited and 2) that Palin was at least nominally qualified by résumé for the job.   I stressed, though — drawing comparison with Harriet Miers (another issue where the couselor and I differed) — that her résumé was thin for the office by recent standards.  He agreed, as I recall, but argued that her personal qualities overcame any experience deficit.    We also agreed that Palin’s resume stacked up just fine with Barack Obama’s.

But, no, I was never a huge fan of the pick, as my reaction the moment I heard about the Palin selection makes clear:

Aside from being young and hot-for-a-politician, though, Palin undercuts McCain’s entire campaign theme. She’s got less political experience and less foreign policy experience than Obama.

[...]

I’d never heard of Palin before the VP buzz started on the blogs a while back. She’s supposedly an excellent campaigner. And, obviously, her youth and gender make her a bold pick. Ultimately, though, I think she doesn’t make sense. If you’re running on “the country’s security is too important to be run by neophytes,” you can’t have one as next in line.

While Joe Biden was, twice, an awful presidential candidate, he’s a plausible president. Sarah Palin is not.

[...]

She’s going to make us pine for the days of Dan Quayle, methinks.

[...]

We’ll see what the reaction turns out to be. I’m certainly not the target audience. But McCain’s first big decision is, in my mind, a truly awful one. Obama went traditional but steady in Biden. It wasn’t a bold pick but it was one that butressed his claim that he has judgment even though he lacks experience. McCain has done the opposite here.

He’s incredulous that I “now seriously purport to believe, for example, that Gov. Palin ‘couldn’t even name a newspaper she read.’”  I came to that conclusion only because Palin was unable to name a newspaper that she read in the Palin interview.

Ms Couric asks: “When it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and to understand the world?”

Mrs Palin replies: “I’ve read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.”

Ms Couric: What, specifically?

Mrs Palin: “Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.”

Ms Couric: “Can you name a few?”

Mrs Palin: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news, too. Alaska isn’t a foreign country, where it’s kind of suggested, ‘wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C., may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?’ Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.”

As with the Miers pick, Bill and I simply have a different idea of the criteria for high office should be.  He’s much more of a populist and I’m much more of an elitist in terms of credentialing and expertise.  Miers was nominally qualified to serve on the Supreme Court — and might have done a good job, for all I know — but she wasn’t a distinguished choice.  Ditto Palin as VP.

Palin must be a reasonably bright woman.  Bill’s right that it’s inconceivable that she got elected and re-elected to so many offices over the years, culminating with a state governorship, by being an airhead.  She’s obviously quite charismatic and a strong campaigner.  And I’m sure she knows Alaska issues backwards and forwards.   I saw little evidence, though, that she’s very interested in foreign policy or most issues of American domestic policy.   That doesn’t make her a bad person — she’s in the same boat as most Americans on that score — but it made her a bad choice for the vice presidency.