Category Archives: liberalism and progressivism

Penned

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By now you’ve heard that the controversial Mark Penn is no longer the chief strategist of the Clinton campaign. It’s not clear whether Penn has left the Clinton campaign entirely, however.

The breakup, if indeed it is a breakup, occurred because Penn was caught working with Colombia on a free trade deal that the Clinton campaign opposes.

Penn has been behind one blunder or embarrassment after another in the Clinton campaign, and there have been no end of calls from Clinton supporters to get rid of Penn. Yet the Clintons won’t let him go. Why is that? Michael Tomasky has some answers:

[T]here are two people who appear ready to stand by Penn, hell or high water, and they are the two who matter: Bill and Hillary Clinton. Penn joined Bill Clinton in the mid-90s, after the early woes (gays in the military, healthcare), and he kept the president on the ideological middle ground. He did the same for Hillary while overseeing her 2000 Senate campaign. In the course of these experiences, both Clintons came to swear by Penn’s advice. They saw his gift for numbers and demographic analysis, but they failed to grasp his obvious weak point.

Pennism is a kind of Democratic politics that one could argue was right for an era of conservative dominance: take few risks, and move as far to the centre and even right as possible so you couldn’t be labelled soft on defence or wobbly on support for the free market.

But George Bush and Karl Rove have seen to it that, after Iraq and Katrina and the US attorneys scandal and now a real-life recession, we are no longer in an era of conservative dominance. We’re not in an era of liberal dominance either, of course, but we are in a place where, for the first time in a very long time, conservatism has discredited itself, and more Americans are open to progressive alternatives. This was apparent to anyone paying attention in September 2005, after the tragedy of New Orleans.

But it wasn’t apparent to Penn. And by extension we can conclude it wasn’t apparent to the Clintons either (revealing, considering Bill’s alleged political genius). Hillary’s refusal to renounce her vote in support of the Iraq war – a refusal that I have no doubt was based on Penn’s advice, on the grounds that she had to continue to show she could be “tough” on foreign policy – was a disaster for her, as was the vote itself. If, in a few weeks’ time, we’re writing Clinton campaign post-mortems, her handling of Iraq will be deservedly high on the list of errata, and it was classic Pennism.

Tomasky’s column sums up my biggest concern about Senator Clinton. If Clinton becomes president, I fear she will continue the famous “triangulation” pattern that assumes the Right still controls public opinion, and progressivism will have missed a huge opportunity. What progressives need right now is someone who can communicate our values and ideals and inspire a disenchanted America to embrace them. That person is not Senator Clinton.

Yesterday while I was looking for something else I came across an old Mahablog post from January 2006 in which I said netroots progressives would not support Hillary Clinton. Clearly I was wrong about how much support she would get, although I still find it baffling that any progressive would support her. In this I quote a post by Chris Bowers, also from January 2006, titled “Why The Blogosphere and the Netroots Do Not Like Hillary Clinton,” and one by Stirling Newberry from November 2005, no longer online, in which he said “Hillary Clinton as a disaster for progressives and ultimately for the Democratic Party.”

The Clinton campaign hasn’t shown me any reason to change my mind.

Update: See also Jonathan Chait.

Quick Comments

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The insanity among the Clintonistas continues.

See Benjamin Wallace-Wells for more on how the death of Martin Luther King devastated liberalism.

Tibetans are not the only minority group facing brutal oppression by the government of China. Charles Cummings writes on the treatment of the mostly Muslim Uighur people of Xinjiang:

Uighurs have been jailed for reading newspapers sympathetic to the cause of independence. Others have been detained merely for listening to Radio Free Asia, an English-language station funded by the US Congress. Even to discuss separatism in public is to risk a lengthy jail sentence, with no prospect of habeas corpus, effective legal representation or a fair trial. About 100 Uighurs were arrested in Khotan recently after several hundred demonstrated in the marketplace of the town, which lies on the Silk Road.

And what happens to these innocent Uighur men and women once they land up in one of Xinjiang’s notorious “black prisons”? Amnesty International has reported numerous incidents of torture, from cigarette burns on the skin to submersion in water or raw sewage. Prisoners have had toenails extracted by pliers, been attacked by dogs and burned with electric batons, even
cattle prods.

In Typhoon, I relate the terrifying true story of a prisoner in Xinjiang who had horse hair inserted into the tip of his penis. Throughout this diabolical torture, the victim was forced to wear a metal helmet on his head. Why? Because a previous inmate had been so traumatised by his treatment in the prison that he had beaten his own head against a radiator in an attempt to take his own life.

This is the reality of life in modern Xinjiang. Quite what the Chinese hope to gain from their inhumane behaviour remains unclear. According to Corinna-Barbara Francis, a researcher with Amnesty’s East Asia team, “the intensified repression of Uighurs by the Chinese authorities is in danger of contributing to the very outcome that China claims it is warding against – the radicalisation of the population and the adoption of violent responses to the repression.”

The government of China commits hideous atrocities on anyone it decides it doesn’t like. Of course, we’re hardly in a position to claim the moral high ground any more.

But ethnic minorities in China’s outlying areas, like the Uighurs and the Tibetans, are treated particularly harshly. As I said in “Rebellion in Tibet,” the Chinese are making every mistake every imperial power ever made.

That’s why it stuns me when some online publication that claims to be for “peace and social justice” publishes apologies for China such as this. Unbelievable.

Forty Years

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Today is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, and the web is brimming over with retrospectives. See, for example, Eugene Robinson.

I want to point in particular to E.J. Dionne’s column, however, because he plays one of my own recurring themes — the way the Right exploited racism to take over America. The column begins:

Forty years ago, American liberalism suffered a blow from which it has still not recovered. On April 4, 1968, a relatively brief but extraordinary moment of progressive reform ended, and a long period of conservative ascendancy began.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the ensuing riots that engulfed the nation’s capital and big cities across the country signaled the collapse of liberal hopes in a smoky haze of self-doubt and despair. Conservatives, on the run for much of the decade, found a broad new audience for their warnings against the disorders and disruptions bred by reform.

It wasn’t just the riots. Much of white America was still simmering with resentment over court-ordered school desegregation. Also, Lyndon Johnson had initiated New Deal-style programs aimed primarily at relieving poverty among African Americans. Suddenly, whites who had had no problem with “entitlements” before — when benefits went mostly to whites — discovered the virtues of “self-reliance.”

It is easy to forget that the core themes of contemporary conservatism were born in response to the events of 1968. The attacks on “big government,” the defense of states’ rights, and the scorn for “liberal judicial activism,” “liberal do-gooders,” “liberal elitists,” “liberal guilt” and “liberal permissiveness” were rooted in the reaction that gathered force as liberal optimism receded.

Richard Nixon did a masterful job of exploiting fear and prejudice to lure white working-class voters away from the Democrats. And, of course, whites in the Deep South switched their allegiance from the Dems to the Republicans en masse.

The Right-Wing Narrative says that Democrats lost power because George McGovern opposed the Vietnam War, and the Dem Party was overrun by “peaceniks.” But this view of history doesn’t square with what really happened. McGovern’s stand on the Vietnam War was the least of the reasons he lost to Nixon in 1972.

And check out the acceptance speech Nixon gave at the 1972 Republican convention. The first half of the speech was all about race. It was in code, of course, but no adult alive at the time could have mistaken his meaning when he spoke of quotas and tied paying high taxes to the costs of “welfare.” And Republicans are still running on those themes today.

Just the other day, someone argued in the comments that the next Dem president would be punished for “losing Iraq” the way the Democrats were punished for “losing Vietnam.” Except that I don’t see how the Dems were punished for losing Vietnam. Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975; in 1976, America elected Jimmy Carter as president and gave the Dems a small increase in Congress, expanding the large increase the Dems had enjoyed in the 1974 post-Watergate midterms.

The fact is, once combat troops were withdrawn from Vietnam and the POWs came home, America lost interest in Vietnam. The whole bleeping country developed amnesia over Vietnam (except for the extreme Right, a group of people who are never so happy as when they are nursing resentments). As I remember it, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the Narrative emerged about Dems losing elections because of Vietnam. But this was an important narrative for the Right, because it helped them paper over the real primary reason the Right gained and the Left lost in those years. And that primary reason was racism. There were other issues, too, but racism was the foundational issue upon which other right-wing issues would be built.

Right-wing politicians had employed Red-baiting with some success since the late 1940s. But the excesses of McCarthyism had turned off moderates, and the Kennedy Administration had ushered in a liberal resurgence. Eventually, racism would succeed where Red-baiting had faltered.

The success of the racism strategy in the 1960s and 1970s taught at least a couple of generations of right-wing politicians about the importance of wedge issues. As new issues came up — feminism, abortion, gay rights — right-wing politicians embraced them and followed the old racism scenario to exploit them. Meanwhile, the Left crumbled into confusion and single-issue activism.

And as right-wingers gained more and more power over the federal government, the federal government became less and less functional. Because wedge issues may win elections, but they don’t govern a nation.

E.J. Dionne continues,

Forty years later, is it possible to recapture the hope and energy of the days and years before that April 4? Has liberalism spent enough time in purgatory for the country to revisit how much was accomplished in its name and to acknowledge that the nation is better off for what the liberals did?

In “The Liberal Hour,” an important new history of the ’60s that will be published in July, Colby College scholars G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert S. Weisbrot note that for all its deficiencies, the period of liberal sway “demonstrated what democratic politics can produce when public consensus crescendos, when coherent majorities prevail, and when skilled leaders provide direction, inspiration, and relentless energy.”

In the U.S., public consensus, coherent majorities, and skilled leaders providing direction in a positive, not a destructive, way are things only us geezers dimly remember and the young folks have never seen.

And after a few years of near-total dominance by right-wingers of the federal government, 81 percent of Americans say the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction.

It’s 40 years since 1968. Now a black man and a white woman are competing with each other for the Dem nomination. They both face nasty bigotry barriers, and it would be a breakthrough if either were elected. Yet only one of these candidates has shown a real talent for building public consensus. The other one is running an increasingly bitter, and angry, wedge-issue style campaign. I think 40 years of that crap is quite enough.

Update: Wingnut priorities.

Catching Up

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The problem with getting behind in my blogging is that, when I do get back to the blog, so much stuff has happened that I don’t know where to start. And, unfortunately, I have a huge amount of Other work to do today and cannot linger here writing something artful. So I’m just going to sort of free associate for a bit and run through some current items.

Leila Fadel and Nancy A. Youssef write for McClatchy Newspapers, “Is ‘success’ of U.S. surge in Iraq about to unravel?” I knew the surge — as a public relations tool, anyway — was in trouble last night, when I was half listening to Hardball. I heard Tweety ask something along the lines of “Is the surge working?” When Tweety’s catching on to something, you know it’s pretty damn obvious. See also Fester at Newshoggers.

The bobbleheads are beginning to write off the Clinton campaign again, for at least the third time. The Vegetable has her chances of winning the nomination at 5 percent, which makes it a near certainty she’s about shoot up in the polls.

Journalist and brother blogger Will Bunch scored a major coup yesterday with this story. (Senator Clinton is exaggerating? Who knew?) See also “Clinton: Pledged delegates are ‘like superdelegates.’ ”

I have to disagree with E.J. Dionne. He writes,

What’s the matter with conservatism?

Its problems start with the failure of George W. Bush’s presidency …

The problems of conservatism are intrinsic to conservatism. Bush’s failed presidency is just a manifestation of the internal failures of conservatism.

I don’t have any problems with what used to be moderately conservative positions, such as being cautious about raising taxes, spending the people’s money, and getting entangled in foreign problems we would do well to leave alone. A moderately conservative perspective needs to be represented in government as a counterweight to some of the flightier impulses of progressivism. By the same token, conservatism needs progressivism and its flightier impulses to keep it from being utterly stuck in the mud. And democratic government itself can only survive when it respects the values of liberalism.

The problem with conservatism is that, when taken to extremes and logical outcomes, it turns into a nasty, brutish thing that destroys everything it touches. And the problem with the Republican Party is that, in the 1970s, it was infiltrated and taken over by hard-core ideologues who were determined to take the GOP and the rest of the country to those extremes and logical outcomes.

And once the extremists had complete control of all branches of government, with no effective counterweights, they proceeded to destroy everything they touched.

You can argue — hell, I’ve argued — that any ideology, taken to extremes, will implode and self-destruct. Ideology is a bit like medicine; a bigger dose is not necessarily a better dose. One pill every four hours might cure you, but four pills every one hour might kill you.

Well, Other duty calls. Gotta go.

Oh, Please

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Having endured weeks of being called a “loser” and an “Obamabot” and “brainwashed” by Clinton followers, and having at one point been trashed in the vilest language imaginable by two well-known women bloggers on a “progressive” listserv, let me say that I have not one scrap of sympathy for the “striking” Clinton Kossacks who whine they are being picked on by Obama supporters.

I hardly ever read Daily Kos, so I won’t miss them. Yes, I’m sure they feel hurt and angry. We all feel hurt and angry these days. And why is that?

M’loves, the First Rule of blogging is, if you can’t take it, don’t dish it out.

Censure Senator Feinstein

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Feinstein AshamedIf you’d like to vent your outrage over Senator Feinstein’s longstanding coddling of the Bush Administration, culminating in her support of Bush’s new Attorney General Mukasey, add your name to support a censure resolution, put forth by the progressive caucus of the California Democratic Party. They’re meeting this Friday in Anaheim, so time is a bit short. Obviously it’s more meaningful if you actually live in the Golden State, but I doubt if that’s a firm requirement.

Wild Things

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I didn’t watch the GOP debate last night, choosing instead to flip between CSI reruns and an Animal Planet show about a charmingly nutty couple and their pet hippopotamus. (Pet owners tip: Feeding your hippo too many sweet potatoes can give her diarrhea.) But judging by the Reason Magazine live blog, the GOP debate made damn fine comedy. A sample:

7:55: Sean Hannity bashes Hillary Clinton (“she’ll promise all of them a new car!”) and then asserts that Republicans “want a positive agenda.” His irony-fu is strong.

8:04: Rudy Giuliani: The real conservative, because George Will said so. As he did at the FRC conference, he mentions his war on porn in his list of conservative achievements. (An auspicious start: My server timed out and gobbled my first two debate comments.)

8:05: I suppose some people will care that Mitt Romney’s cowlick underwent structural damage right before the debate began. He’s conservative because he can bring the Republican *gutteral noise* HILLARY CLINTON HILLARY CLINTON grhgh.

8:07: Fred Thompson: Real leadership means making Ted Kennedy fat jokes. coughing and “I only got a minute here.”

Egalia of Tennessee Guerilla Women:

Wow. I’ve never seen anything like it. Eight raging hormonal white men savaging one Democratic woman.

Some Republicans might want to call this a presidential debate, I call it the eruption of a whole lot of anxious white male fear and loathing of a woman in line to take charge.

This was one rabidly he-man affair. And the seething Republican crowd was right there with them. …

… Fox News moderator Chris Wallace gave the cue for the men to beat their hairy he-man chests when he asked:

“Is she fit to be Commander-in-Chief?”

The Republican audience yelled “NO!”

The post by Paul Mirengoff of Power Tools is unintentionally hilarious; a work of brilliant if unconscious self-parody.

Thompson’s ability to slug it out with Giuliani, coupled with overall improvement in the quality of his answers, makes him one of tonight’s winners. The other major winner was John McCain. McCain brought the house down when he criticized Hillary Clinton for supporting the Woodstock memorial museum. McCain acknowledged that Woodstock must have been “a cultural and pharmaceutical event,” but noted that he couldn’t make it because he “was tied up at the time.” McCain got off another great line when asked if President Bush had been naive when it came to Vladimir Putin. McCain said he didn’t know about that, but when he (McCain) looked into Putin’s eyes (he probably meant to say soul) he saw three letters, K-G-B. In addition to the one-liners, McCain gave sensible and concise answers on a range of issues.

“Sensible and concise answers” in Rightie World means talking in complete sentences for a minute and a half while looking somber. The actual content of the talk is irrelevant. Righties only care about the red meat. More one liners! More Hillary bashing!

Despite failing to shoot down Thompson, Giuliani had another good night. Several times, he successfully tied his answers to quotes from or references to Ronald Reagan. When he’s doing that (instead of rehearsing his New York city crime fighting record), it’s a sure sign that he’s successfully defending himself on the merits as a conservative.

If you can speak reverently of Saint Ronald, you must be a real conservative.

Romney was solid, as he generally is, but didn’t say anything memorable. In response to a softball question about whether Hillary Clinton would make a good commander-in-chief, Romney talked about how he’s better than she is at running things. He thus fluffed an opportunity to attack Hillary on matters of substance.

Matters of substance, like the Woodstock memorial museum. “Better than she is at running things” sounds boring.

Near the end of the debate, he finally launched into an attack on the Clinton administration’s “vacation from history” foreign policy (“we got the dividend but not the peace”). Attacks like that are guaranteed winners in these kinds of debates, and Romney needs to make them at every opportunity.

Less boring policy wonk talk! More jokes! More chest thumping!

When they weren’t bashing Hillary Clinton to show how manly they are, the candidates squabbled over which of them was most conservative. And that takes me to a fascinating opinion piece by Michael Tomasky on the Guardian web site.

Let me offer what I think is the most important undercurrent question of next year’s election: have Americans tired of conservatism, or have they merely tired of corrupt and incompetent conservatism?

Tomasky points out that “movement conservatism” has been around since the 1950s, but not until the Bush Administration did movement conservatives have complete control of the federal government. Reagan had a Democratic Congress, and when the Republicans took over the Congress in the 1990s they had to deal with a Democratic president. Divided government moderated what the Right could achieve and provided righties with someone to blame for whatever went wrong.

Then came Bush. At first things were motoring along nicely, and Bush guru Karl Rove’s prediction that a permanent conservative majority was coalescing seemed probable. Now it has all crashed and burned for the reasons we know about. But we still don’t know what exactly is that “it”.

That is, Americans have now experienced a conservative government failing them. But what lesson will they take? That conservatism itself is exhausted and without answers to the problems that confront American and the world today? Or will they conclude that the problem hasn’t been conservatism per se, just Bush, and that a conservatism that is competent and comparatively honest will suit them just fine?

Conservatives and the Republican presidential candidates hope and argue that it’s the latter. They largely endorse and in some cases vow to expand on the Bush administration’s policies – Mitt Romney’s infamous promise to “double” the size of the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, notably. Like Bush, they vow that tax cuts, deregulation and smaller government will solve every domestic problem. Where they try to distinguish themselves from Bush is on competence. Romney talks up his corporate success, Rudy Giuliani his prowess as mayor of New York.

“Movement” conservatives have been talking up the magic powers of tax cuts and smaller government since the 1950s (before that, conservatives weren’t a “movement”). I think by now most Americans have noticed that there is no magic. There’s just talk. Bill Clinton may have been a womanizing, big-spending liberal (not really all that big spending or that liberal, of course), but by damn, the man could run a government. And Tomasky points to a fact righties want to forget: “Reagan left office with a lower approval rating than Bill Clinton did.” The “golden age” wasn’t all that golden.

In some ways liberalism/progressivism is in the same place today that conservatism was in the 1950s and 1960s. IMO the last Democratic president who pushed an unabashedly progressive domestic policy was Lyndon Johnson. Although LBJ was hugely unpopular and became the post-FDR template for big-government, tax-and-spend liberalism, I contend that much of the backlash to Johnson’s programs was less about political and economic ideology than it was about racism. In any event, a growing number of adult Americans are too young to remember what even a mildly progressive federal government was like, which makes progressivism the new new thing.

I don’t think Americans are really that averse to government programs if they can see they are getting some value from them. What they don’t like, is waste. Which brings us back to our current rule by movement conservatives — those people waste money like there’s no tomorrow. How can these whackjobs seriously think they can scare voters with the charge that Democrats will spend their tax dollars? Republicans have been burning tax dollars by the truckload on pork and an unpopular war, and there’s none left over for anything Americans want their tax dollars going to. Waste, waste, waste. I get a sense that voters are damn sick of it, especially after Katrina.

The other point of contention is taxes. A generation of Americans have been born and grown into adulthood listening to rightie propaganda that taxes must always go down. “Starve the beast,” you know. The problem is that “the beast” conservatives are starving is our country. Do read this editorial in today’s New York Times:

This country’s meager tax take puts its economic prospects at risk and leaves the government ill equipped to face the challenges from globalization.

According to a report from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, a think tank run by the industrialized countries, the taxes collected last year by federal, state and local governments in the United States amounted to 28.2 percent of gross domestic product. That rate was one of the lowest among wealthy countries — about five percentage points of G.D.P. lower than Canada’s, and more than eight points lower than New Zealand’s. And Danes, Germans and Slovaks paid more in taxes, as a share of their economies.

Politicians on the right have continuously paraded the specter of statism to rally voters’ support for tax cuts, mainly for the rich. But the meager tax take leaves the United States ill prepared to compete. From universal health insurance to decent unemployment insurance, other rich nations provide their citizens benefits that the United States government simply cannot afford.

The consequences include some 47 million Americans without health insurance and companies like General Motors being dragged to the brink by the cost of providing workers and pensioners with medical care.

President Bush and his tax-averse friends extol the fact that the tax haul has risen over the past two years as evidence of the wisdom of his tax cuts. But if anything, the numbers underscore the economy’s weaknesses — mainly its growing inequality.

Indeed, the growth in tax revenue since 2004 is due mostly to the spectacular increase in corporate profits, which have grown at the expense of workers’ wages. Moreover, it’s proving ephemeral. As economic growth has decelerated, corporate profits are losing steam and the growth of tax revenue has begun to slow. This pretty much guarantees that the revenue will prove too low to face the challenges ahead.

I think a majority of the American people are ready to listen to an argument for progressivism. The only question I have is whether Democrats have the guts to make that argument, and if elected, will deliver a genuinely progressive government instead of a grab bag of Clintonian mini-ideas. And because of Republican mismangement we’re likely to be heading into some lean years, no matter how competent the government, and you know the rightie noise machine will blame Democrats for the mess movement conservatism made. They won’t go away anytime soon.

Meanwhile, I look forward to the next GOP debate. I hear the candidates will wear gorilla suits and burn Hillary in effigy. Could be better than Animal Planet.

Update: Hillary bites the heads off puppies?

Update 2: See also Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger.

Cognitively Challenged

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Y’all will enjoy this one — some researchers have found differences in brain activity between liberals and conservatives. Simply put, we think differently because we think differently.

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

In a simple experiment reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

The results show “there are two cognitive styles — a liberal style and a conservative style,” said UCLA neurologist Dr. Marco Iacoboni, who was not connected to the latest research. …

… Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Personality and Social Research who was not connected to the study, said the results “provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity.”

Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.

Attempting to be diplomatic, the lead author cautioned that it would be a mistake to assume one style of thinking is better than the other. The tendency of conservatives to block distracting information (e.g., “facts”) could be useful in some circumstances, he said. And I’m sure that’s true. If your survival depends on, say, catching flies with your tongue, single-minded focus on where the flies are must be a big plus.

On the other hand, if your survival depends on making intelligent decisions about, say, Middle East policy — not so much.

Update: Some more blog reaction to this story has come in. Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek (I postulate this is a “free market” blogger) points out that the definitions of “liberal” and “conservative” are hard to pin down, which puts the results in question. But I think this experiment sheds light on the phenomenon of left-right division on the blogosphere and elsewhere. In spite of the fact that it’s damn near impossible to come up with definitions of “liberal” or “conservative” that everyone agrees to, the political blogosphere has very neatly sorted itself into a Right and a Left, with relatively few blogs occupying a consistently ambiguous middle. We somehow know what side we belong to, even if we can’t articulate why. This suggests there is something other than pure linear logic going on here.

This rightie blogger is confused.

What the results showed was more emotional activity in the brains of Leftists when presented with a difficult task so I would see the results as yet another example of Leftists being more emotional — as being emotionally-driven rather than reason-driven. I suspect that most readers of this blog would see Leftists that way.

I went back and re-read the original article, and the word emotion doesn’t appear in it anywhere. The study did not show there was more “emotional activity” in the brains of Leftists when presented with a difficult task. Here’s how the article described the experiment:

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from “very liberal” to “very conservative.” They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

According to Wikipedia,

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is the frontal part of the cingulate cortex, which resembles a “collar” form around the corpus callosum, the fibrous bundle that relays neural signals between the right and left cerebral hemispheres of the brain.

It includes both the ventral and dorsal areas of the cingulate cortex, and appears to play a role in a wide variety of autonomic functions, such as regulating blood pressure and heart rate, as well as rational cognitive functions, such as reward anticipation, decision-making, empathy and emotion.

Neuroscientists indicate the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is primarily related to rational cognition while the ventral is more related to emotional cognition.

The anterior cingulate cortex is active in both cognitive and emotional tasks, it says here, and also plays a role in motor tasks. Scientists think the anterior cingulate cortex may play a role in integrating mental processes with bodily systems. It has also been observed that people with lesions on their anterior cingulate cortex tend to be apathetic and unconcerned when significant events occur.

See also tristero.

Uncompromising

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An article in Newsweek about the struggle between evolution and creationism got me thinking about the recent post on religion and liberalism.

Day before yesterday I wrote about how liberalism seeks to promote domestic tranquility and individual freedom by drawing lines between the personal and the public. To quote John McGowan:

Here I just want to end by noting how “unnatural” liberalism seems. It involves self-abnegation, accepting the frustration of my will. It involves, as I will detail in my next post, compromise in almost every instance, and thus can seem akin to having no strong convictions, no principles. Yet its benefits are enormous; it provides, I am convinced, the only possible way humans can live in peace together in a pluralistic world. …

…Because liberalism aims to insure peace and prevent tyranny in pluralistic societies, it often works to establish zones of mutual indifference. Liberalism strives to place lots of individual actions outside the pale of politics, beyond interference from the state or other powers. And, culturally, it strives to promote tolerance, where tolerance is, at a minimum, indifference to the choices and actions of others and, at best, a recognition that diversity yields some social benefits….

… Except for what are generally weak claims for the benefits of diversity (weak not in the sense of being unconvincing, but weak in the sense that no very major social benefit is claimed and some costs are acknowledged), the liberal argument for non-political interference, for privacy and individual autonomy, is primarily negative. Conflict is the result of trying to tell people what to believe and what to do, so we are better off cultivating a talent for resisting our inclinations to insist that others see the world and run their lives the way I do.

Ironically, anti-liberal forces in America use the values of liberalism against liberalism. For example, creationism is argued to be an alternative view to evolution that is owed respect. Peter Slevin wrote in the Washington Post (March 14, 2005) (emphasis added):

Alabama and Georgia legislators recently introduced bills to allow teachers to challenge evolutionary theory in the classroom. Ohio, Minnesota, New Mexico and Ohio have approved new rules allowing that. And a school board member in a Tennessee county wants stickers pasted on textbooks that say evolution remains unproven. …

… Polls show that a large majority of Americans believe God alone created man or had a guiding hand. Advocates invoke the First Amendment and say the current campaigns are partly about respect for those beliefs.

“It’s an academic freedom proposal. What we would like to foment is a civil discussion about science. That falls right down the middle of the fairway of American pluralism,” said the Discovery Institute’s Stephen C. Meyer, who believes evolution alone cannot explain life’s unfurling. “We are interested in seeing that spread state by state across the country.” …

…That approach appeals to Cindy Duckett, a Wichita mother who believes public school leaves many religious children feeling shut out. Teaching doubts about evolution, she said, is “more inclusive. I think the more options, the better.”

“If students only have one thing to consider, one option, that’s really more brainwashing,” said Duckett, who sent her children to Christian schools because of her frustration. Students should be exposed to the Big Bang, evolution, intelligent design “and, beyond that, any other belief that a kid in class has. It should all be okay.”

Fox — pastor of the largest Southern Baptist church in the Midwest, drawing 6,000 worshipers a week to his Wichita church — said the compromise is an important tactic. “The strategy this time is not to go for the whole enchilada. We’re trying to be a little more subtle,” he said. …

…”If you believe God created that baby, it makes it a whole lot harder to get rid of that baby,” [Southern Baptist minister Terry] Fox said. “If you can cause enough doubt on evolution, liberalism will die.”

See, science is supposed to “compromise” with religion, because to deny religion equal say with science violates the liberal values of “inclusiveness” and “freedom.” And the goal is to destroy liberalism. Of course, if the creationists had the authority they’d see to it that only their version of creation is taught in public schools, because they aren’t liberals.

Here’s the latest round in the evolution wars, by Sharon Begley in the current issue of Newsweek:

There may be some battlefields where the gospel’s “blessed are the peacemakers” holds true. But despite the work of a growing number of scholars and millions of dollars in foundation funding to find harmony between science and faith, evolution still isn’t one of them. Just ask biologist Richard Colling. A professor at Olivet Nazarene University in Illinois and a lifelong member of the evangelical Church of the Nazarene, Colling wrote a 2004 book called “Random Designer” because—as he said in a letter to students and colleagues this year—”I want you to know the truth that God is bigger, far more profound and vastly more creative than you may have known.” Moreover, he said, God “cares enough about creation to harness even the forces of [Darwinian] randomness.”

For all the good it’s done him, Colling might as well have thrown a book party for Christopher Hitchens (“God Is Not Great”) and Richard Dawkins (“The God Delusion”). Anger over his work had been building for two years. When classes resumed in late August, things finally came to a head. Colling is prohibited from teaching the general biology class, a version of which he had taught since 1991, and college president John Bowling has banned professors from assigning his book. At least one local Nazarene church called for Colling to be fired and threatened to withhold financial support from the college. In a letter to Bowling, ministers in Caro, Mo., expressed “deep concern regarding the teaching of evolutionary theory as a scientifically proven fact,” calling it “a philosophy that is godless, contrary to scripture and scientifically unverifiable.” Irate parents, pastors and others complained to Bowling, while a meeting between church leaders and Colling “led to some tension and misunderstanding,” Bowling said in a letter to trustees. (Well, “misunderstanding” in the sense that the Noachian flood was a little puddle.) It’s a rude awakening to scientists who thought the Galilean gulf was closing.

So much for compromise.

Colling’s troubles come as more and more researchers are fighting the “godless” rap, emphasizing that evolution does not preclude a deity (though neither does it require one).

Science doesn’t have anything to apologize for. It’s the creationists and their “intelligent design” allies who dissemble and lie and misrepresent evolution and science in their war against liberalism.

I think it’s a mistake for science to attempt “compromise” with the religionists (and I doubt many scientists are thinking about doing so), because it wouldn’t be an honest compromise. Creationism/ID “theory” is not only based on lies; it has the intention of undermining science. Same thing for liberalism, which does not require giving in anti-liberal factions in the name of “inclusiveness.”

As John Holbo wrote, (h/t Dan S):

I would also like to request a moratorium on critiques of liberalism that consist entirely of a flourish for effect – with accompanying air of discovery – of the familiar consideration that liberalism is inconsistent with blanket, categorical tolerance of absolutely every possible act and attitude. That is, liberalism is incompatible, in practice, with any form of illiberalism that destroys liberalism. If something is inconsistent with liberalism, it is inconsistent with liberalism. Yes. Quite. We noticed.

Also, it might not be a half-bad idea to notice that liberalism is not incompatible with religion, merely with illiberal forms of religion. Just as liberalism is incompatible with illiberal forms of secularism.

Exactly. We should all print that on our T-shirts.

It is not “inclusive” to allow propagandists to hijack science classes. It is not “academic freedom” to lie to children to confuse them. Don’t forget that this controversy is not between religion and science. It’s between a faction of religious totalitarians and modern civilization. We do not have to tolerate them, compromise with them, or humor them. They must be utterly resisted in the public sphere. And this resistance is not a betrayal of liberal values, but a defense of liberal values.

Here is the line drawn between the personal and the public: That minority among the religious who find evolution incompatible with their beliefs are perfectly free to make up their own minds who and what to believe. They can disregard science, if they wish. They can do what Professor Richard Colling did and find their own middle ground. They can even build creationist “museums” with their own money. But they have no right to demand their views be respected as science, nor may they impose their views on children through public schools.

Science doesn’t owe anything to religion, or anyone else, except to be honest, ethical and diligent about the practice of science. However, neither does religion have to justify itself to science. But that’ll have to be the topic of another post.