Lies, Damn Lies, and …

Posted on by

Rudy Giuliani is running a radio ad that is generating much comment and derision. Paul Krugman explains:

“My chance of surviving prostate cancer — and thank God I was cured of it — in the United States? Eighty-two percent,” says Rudy Giuliani in a new radio ad attacking Democratic plans for universal health care. “My chances of surviving prostate cancer in England? Only 44 percent, under socialized medicine.”

Really?

You see, the actual survival rate in Britain is 74.4 percent. That still looks a bit lower than the U.S. rate, but the difference turns out to be mainly a statistical illusion. The details are technical, but the bottom line is that a man’s chance of dying from prostate cancer is about the same in Britain as it is in America.

Defending Rudy, rightie blogger Don Surber spoke up:

The head of the National Health Service, Alan Johnson, took offense when Rudy Giuliani pointed out that the 5-year survival rate of prostate cancer is superior in the United States to places like England that offer “free” health care.

Rudy is a prostate cancer survivor. Rudy said in the U.S. the survival rate is 82%, 44% in socialized medicine countries.

Johnson waded into this and piped up that he has a 74% survival rate.

So what? It is 99.3% here.

Rudy was not misleading anyone. He was only using old data. New data shows that the billions Americans spend on cancer research is paying off.

Lancet Oncology magazine ran the numbers last month, according to Medscape.

I looked at the Medscape article Surber linked. The numbers he provides are from an analysis “headed by Arduino Verdecchia, PhD, from the National Center for Epidemiology, Health Surveillance, and Promotion, in Rome, Italy, was based on the most recent data available. It involved about 6.7 million patients from 21 countries, who were diagnosed with cancer between 2000 and 2002.” So it’s about five years old.

Medscape also says, “The United Kingdom in particular comes out badly in the tables, showing cancer survival rates that are among the worst in Europe.” So comparisons with the UK are not necessarily indicative of “socialized medicine countries.”

But what about the 99.3 percent survival rate? I spent way too much time this morning cruising around for information, and I am way confused. For example, the Center for Disease Control gives a survival rate of 97% and a mortality rate of 26.5, which to number-challenged me makes no sense. I’m sure one of you will attempt to patiently explain it to me, though.

This is from the American Cancer Society:

The 5-year relative survival rate is the percentage of patients who do not die from prostate cancer within 5 years after the cancer is found. (Men with prostate cancer who die of other causes are not counted.) Of course, patients might live more than 5 years after diagnosis. These 5-year survival rates are based on men with prostate cancer first treated more than 5 years ago.

Overall, 99% of men diagnosed with prostate cancer survive at least 5 years. Ninety one percent of all prostate cancers are found while they are still within the prostate or only in nearby areas. The 5-year relative survival rate for these men is nearly 100%. For the men whose cancer has already spread to distant parts of the body when it is found, about 32% will survive at least 5 years.

There are relative survival rates and age-adjusted survival rates and all kinds of other rates, plus mortality rates that make it seem people are surviving and dying at the same time, and the numbers are all over the map. I hypothesize that all these different sources are basing their numbers on diverse criteria, and comparing one set of stats with another is likely comparing apples to oranges. And I have a headache.

Eugene Robinson:

As several truth-squading journalists — notably, The Post’s Michael Dobbs— have pointed out, mortality rates from prostate cancer in Britain and the United States are roughly the same: About 25 men out of 100,000 die of prostate cancer each year in both countries. (That’s the standard way of reporting mortality rates, deaths per 100,000 individuals.)

From there I finally got to Michael Dobbs’s explanation, and it’s very clear and good, and there is a line graph to help those of us who need visuals. The line graph reveals that African American men are way more likely to die from prostate cancer than either white Americans or Brits, which ought to be a concern.

The other point Dobbs explains is that prostate cancer tends to develop very slowly. I gather that nearly everyone survives at least five years from the onset of the disease, with or without treatment. So, because patients in the U.S. are diagnosed much sooner, our diagnosis-to-death stats are much better than Britain’s, even though the actual outcomes aren’t much different from Britain’s.

Back to Krugman:

So Mr. Giuliani’s supposed killer statistic about the defects of “socialized medicine” is entirely false. In fact, there’s very little evidence that Americans get better health care than the British, which is amazing given the fact that Britain spends only 41 percent as much on health care per person as we do.

The 41 percent is a step up; it was a lot less than that in the 1990s.

The figure shows spending for health care per capita in various nations, in 1998. I added “USA” and “UK.” In 1998, the U.S. was spending $4,178 per capita and the UK was spending $1,461 per capita. (From the University of Maine’s “The U.S. Health Care System: The Best in the World, or Just the Most Expensive?” [PDF]). There’s no question that the British NHS has problems, but my understanding is that most of those problem stem from gross underfunding rather than the nature of the system itself.

Krugman, again:

Anyway, comparisons with Britain have absolutely nothing to do with what the Democrats are proposing. In Britain, doctors are government employees; despite what Mr. Giuliani is suggesting, none of the Democratic candidates have proposed to make American doctors work for the government.

To righties, all universal health care proposals are the same. They’re all “socialized medicine” or “Hillarycare.” Since what Senator Clinton proposes now bears little resemblance to what she proposed as First Lady in 1993, it can be argued that even Hillary isn’t pushing “Hillarycare.” But what this shows us is that righties aren’t even looking at the arguments or proposals. Their reactions are pure knee-jerk groupthink, and their opinions are based more on irrational fears and emotions than on facts.

Ezra Klein writes,

Giuliani’s cancer was treated by way of a therapy called Bradychardia, which involves implanting small, rice-sized radioactive capsules into the prostate gland. The technique was developed [PDF] by a researcher from Copenhagen, Denmark. Denmark, you’ll recall, is both in Europe and has a universal healthcare system. It’s a wonder Giuliani didn’t stalk out of his hospital on principle.

Moreover, Giuliani was unlucky enough to get prostate cancer at a fairly young age. But his experience was not typical. The average age at the time of diagnosis is 70 – which means that the domestic care Giuliani is lauding is being provided under the auspices of Medicare – a federally-run, single-payer insurance system.

Ah-HAH! Take THAT, Don Surber.

Since Mr. Surber cited the Lancet Oncology journal as a source, I poked around on the Lancet site looking for more information. Most of their articles are behind a pricey subscription firewall. But I did come across one that’s available for public view, from the October 2007 issue: “Increasing inequalities in US healthcare need taming.”

Although clinics in the USA offer some of the best anticancer services in the world, the proportion of Americans who cannot access these services is shocking. According to the US Census Bureau, in 2005 46·6 million Americans (including 8·3 million children) were without health insurance, with certain subgroups of the population faring especially poorly. For example, a quarter of people whose household income was less than $25 000 were uninsured—this is not surprising, however, given that the average cost of a single adult insurance policy is $2268. Texas had the highest percentage of uninsured people with 30% of adults aged under 65 years without insurance. From an oncology perspective, uninsured people are less likely to have access to screening or early-detection facilities; are more likely to be diagnosed late with more advanced tumours; are less likely to receive appropriate treatment; and are more likely to die from their cancer. Clearly, to make progress in the war on cancer, access to healthcare is a fundamental requirement that precedes any concerns about specific treatments.

Even for those with insurance, coverage is often less than optimum. A 2006 survey by USA Today, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard School of Public Health, of 930 adults who had cancer or who had a family member in their household with cancer, showed that insurance plans for nearly a quarter of patients paid less than actually needed; one in ten patients reached the limit of what their insurance would pay for cancer treatment; one in 12 were unable to get a specific type of treatment because of insurance limitations; and one in 14 were unable to pay for basic necessities such as food, heating, or housing because of financial burdens encountered in paying for their treatments. Furthermore, 6% of patients lost their health insurance as a result of having cancer. More than 17 million US adults are underinsured, yet current legislation to ensure appropriate provision is inadequate. For example, although many US states recently mandated that insurers cover screening for cancers of the breast, cervix, prostate, and colon, several states have since passed exceptions to these mandates, thereby allowing health insurance companies a licence to underinsure. …

… Currently, about 2·5 million people are diagnosed with cancer in the USA each year, of which about one in six have no health insurance and will receive inadequate care. Given the wealth of the USA, these figures are frankly unacceptable. In the run up to the 2008 US presidential elections, the time is right to highlight these issues to make them a high political priority, and to finally eliminate this appalling inequality of care.

See also Joe Conason [Update] and The Carpetbagger.

Bob Altemeyer Interview

Posted on by

Check out a Bob Altemeyer interview, podcasted here. If you don’t know who Altemeyer is, learn about him here. The interview takes a few minutes to get past the introductory material, but for connoisseurs of right wing psychology, it’s well worth the wait, to hear one of the world’s experts. Altemeyer covers a fair amount of ground in this 102 minute interview, but of interest to me were his thoughts on authoritarian followers (as opposed to leaders). Some takeaways:

Authoritarian followers:

  1. Lack critical thinking skills. If they like an argument’s conclusion, it doesn’t matter how stupid or flawed the reasoning was to arrive at it. This is also why logic doesn’t work with them.
  2. Have highly compartimentalized thinking. This means they often hold opposite or inconsistent views. For example, they may support democracy and freedom of speech, but also believe that rabble rousing leftists should be locked up. They will pull out whatever argument is needed given the current circumstance, seemingly unaware that they expressed the opposite position only minutes ago. They are easily prone to hypocrisy because of this. This comes through as a marked lack of fairness.

Altemeyer claims that his surveys of authoritarianism among college students show that it varies according to the times. Students scored low in the early 1970s, and high in the mid 1980s. The average score has been at a midpoint between these extremes for the last five or ten years. In students, the level of authoritarianism diminishes a bit as the student is exposed to the broader world. By contrast, parenting can increase a person’s level of authoritarianism.

It’s interesting to me, that most right wingers I know, have little interest in traveling outside the United States, desiring the least amount of exposure to people who are different than them. The converse is true for the most liberal people I know – they love foreign travel. And this is precisely what helps an authoritarian become less so.

Shaming Ann Coulter

Posted on by

I didn’t think it was possible, but Rick Jacobs at the Huffington Post did the impossible. He spotted AC at a gay-owned restaurant, in LA’s pre-eminent gay district, West Hollywood. Not only that, he tried to talk with her:

…Clearly, Ann Coulter was caught in a lie. There she was, burbling like a fountain about her interview on Donny Deutsch’s show in which she says Jews should be Christians, completely at ease in the heart of the gayest city on the planet. She was a natural with the gay men who surrounded her. She enjoyed the fawning attention by her two not so masculine male escorts, clearly in her milieu.

I was therefore shocked that when we tried to engage her in conversation, she became embarrassed, turned away, nestling her head inside her long, blond hair, much as would an embarrassed school girl caught stealing the answers to an exam.

We wondered if she was comfortable in West Hollywood, in a restaurant where a large number of the patrons are gay, and where the gay owners make money off of her dining bill. Her response (physically, because she would not speak): “I am too embarrassed to talk to you.” Had we been able to see her high cheek bones, then averted and clutched in her hands to hide her shame, we’d have seen a red-faced hypocrite, caught living a lie…

Ann Coulter loves the camera, so we snapped a few with a cell phone. Her sturdy female minder said we were “molesting” her. Ann Coulter molested by having her picture taken? I guess she’s molested every day, then. She might want to check into rehab to deal with her addiction to such molestation.

When the manager came by with our check, he said, “Look, I’m sorry she’s here, but I have to serve her.” The staff were clearly appalled when they realized who was in their midst. Did Hitler eat kosher food even as he worked out the final solution?

Sold Out

Posted on by

The Senate Judiciary Committee vote on Michael Mukasey’s attorney general nomination is scheduled for Tuesday, so let’s review where that stands.

Sidney Blumenthal writers at Salon:

When President Bush nominated Michael Mukasey as attorney general his distinguished career was offered as guarantee of his integrity and independence. … Then Mukasey was questioned about whether waterboarding — a technique of forced drowning first used in the Spanish Inquisition and by orders of the Bush administration applied to accused terrorist detainees — is torture. At great length, the nominee feigned lack of knowledge: “I think it would be irresponsible of me to discuss particular techniques with which I am not familiar when there are people who are using coercive techniques and who are being authorized to use coercive techniques. And for me to say something that is going to put their careers or freedom at risk simply because I want to be congenial, I don’t think it would be responsible of me to do that.” Questioned further, he said, “If it amounts to torture, it is not constitutional.” But he would not say whether it was torture.

All 10 Democratic senators on the committee sent Mukasey a letter asking him to clarify whether waterboarding is torture. On Oct. 30, the nominee replied in four convoluted pages. He called waterboarding “over the line” and “repugnant” on “a personal basis,” but adopted the lawyerly pose that it was merely an academic issue: “Hypotheticals are different from real life and in any legal opinion the actual facts and circumstances are critical.”

Why the obfuscation? Blumenthal continues,

Mukasey is not a free agent. He had been strictly briefed and in his testimony was following orders. He has avoided calling waterboarding torture because that is consistent with the administration’s position and past practice. Mukasey’s refusal to disavow waterboarding reveals his acceptance of his assignment to a secondary role as attorney general, an inferior agent, not a constitutional officer, to certain political appointees in the White House.

Those who are responsible for waterboarding have defined and dictated Mukasey’s evasions. His acquiescence demonstrates that no one in his position could take a contrary view to that of David Addington, Vice President Cheney’s former counsel and now chief of staff, who directed and coauthored the infamous memos by former deputy assistant director of the Office of Legal Counsel John Yoo justifying torture, and charged the current acting director of OLC, Stephen Bradbury, to issue new memos rationalizing it.

Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker:

When you get right down to it, Michael Mukasey has refused to answer the question of whether waterboarding is torture for three reasons, which he provided in his letter to Senate Democrats earlier this week. Two of those are readily disputable (not wanting to tip off “our enemies,” for example), but the key to his rationale appears to be his expressed fear that the attorney general’s public acknowledgment that waterboarding is torture would place interrogators in “personal legal jeopardy.”

By this logic, he can’t come out and say that waterboarding is torture because the consequences would be disastrous. The New York Times takes a look at that question today and reports that Mukasey is “steering clear of a potential legal quagmire for the Bush administration” by not answering the question.

Back to Blumenthal:

In his confirmation hearings, Mukasey has proved he will dance as the strings are pulled. His positions on waterboarding express precisely the relationship between the Bush White House and its Justice Department. Mukasey’s testimony telegraphs that the White House will continue to call the shots. He has already ceded the essence of his power even before assuming it. His vaunted integrity and independence have been crushed, short work for Addington.

Paul Kiel:

The Times notes that Jack Goldsmith, the former chief of the OLC, has said that the Bush Administration lives in constant fear of being prosecuted for their actions. It’s for that reason the OLC’s ability to issue “free get-out-of jail cards” made Goldsmith’s tenure such a disaster for the administration. Having worked so hard to get those cards, the administration sure wouldn’t have nominated someone who might take them back.


The New York Times:

Waterboarding is torture and was prosecuted as such as far back as 1902 by the United States military when used in a slightly different form on insurgents in the Philippines. It meets the definition of torture that existed in American law and international treaties until Mr. Bush changed those rules. Even the awful laws on the treatment of detainees that were passed in 2006 prohibited the use of waterboarding by the American military.

And yet the nominee for attorney general has no view on whether it would be legal for an employee of the United States government to subject a prisoner to that treatment? The only information Mr. Mukasey can possibly be lacking is whether Mr. Bush broke the law by authorizing the C.I.A. to use waterboarding — a judgment that the White House clearly does not want him to render in public because it could expose a host of officials to criminal accountability.

So far, three of the ten Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee — Dick Durbin (IL), Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) and Joe Biden (DE) — have said they will vote against advancing the nomination to the full Senate. The other seven Dems have not said how they will vote. The nomination has become a problem for Chuck Schumer, who had suggested Mukasey as a consensus nominee to the White House and declared two weeks ago that he should be confirmed. More recently, he has been noncommittal.

None of the Republicans on the committee, including Arlen Specter, has made any serious noise about not supporting the nomination. It will probably take the “no” votes of all ten Democrats to stop the nomination. Here are the names of the committee members. If any of these critters is your senator, be sure to let him/her know what you think.

See also Rosa Brooks, “Mukasey’s black magic on torture.”

Evil

Posted on by

At the Guardian web site, Theo Hobson writes,

I’d like to see Halloween develop a more serious aspect, alongside the kids’ stuff. I’d like more grown-up reflection on the question of evil, and on how art and religion seek to confront and banish it. We should also reflect on the serious danger involved in the artistic representation of evil – that we might start celebrating it for its own sake, rather than in the context of its overcoming. So let’s develop a Halloween for grown-ups too.

If we’re going to contemplate the nature of evil, we ought to come to some agreement as to what it is, or even if it is. There’s an urban legend easily found on the Internets that claims a young Albert Einstein told an atheist professor that just as darkness is the absence of light, evil is the absence of God, and therefore evil does not exist. Albert Einstein didn’t say this, but it’s an interesting story anyway. It argues that because darkness is the absence of light, and cold is the absence of heat, that darkness and cold light and heat do not exist. But I believe — I could be mistaken — that physicists consider darkness and cold to be phenomena, or observable features of matter and energy. Philosophers, it says here, consider phenomena to be anything that can be perceived, and this includes perceptions of the mind. Evil may not have observable matter and energy, but it can be perceived. Therefore, philosophically speaking, it is.

It’s common to objectify evil and think of it as if it had weight, substance and even fixed positions. Evil lurks. It dwells. The ever exasperating David Brooks once said (pretending to be President Bush), “Some liberals have trouble grasping evil, and always think that if we could take care of the handguns or the cruise missiles or the W.M.D., our problems would be ameliorated. But I know the problem lies in the souls of our enemies.” Some people are just bad, so it’s OK to shoot ’em.

Once you start thinking of evil as a substance or quality or attribute that some people have and others don’t, you’ve just given yourself permission to do terrible things to eliminate the evil ones. As Glenn Greenwald says,

Those who have become convinced that they are waging an epic and all-consuming existential war against Evil cannot, by the very premises of their belief system, accept any limitations — moral, pragmatic, or otherwise — on the methods adopted to triumph in this battle.

Efforts to impose limits on waging war against Evil will themselves be seen as impediments to Good, if not as an attempt to aid and abet Evil. In a Manichean worldview, there is no imperative that can compete with the mission of defeating Evil. The primacy of that mandate is unchallengeable. Hence, there are no valid reasons for declaring off-limits any weapons that can be deployed in service of the war against Evil.

Thus, evil wins again.

I argue that evil is a volitional act with harmful consequences. Evil is as evil does. I argue further that the volitional act is not necessarily a consciously malicious one. In fact, it’s very common for people to persuade themselves that the harm they do is somehow in the service of a greater good.

Los Angeles County officials announced today that the recent California fires were started by a boy playing with matches. The child may not have intended to burn 38,000 acres and destroy 21 homes, but carelessly playing with fire is a volitional act, and it sure as shootin’ had harmful consequences, so the act fits my definition of “evil.” However, I am less interested in casting blame or handing out punishment than in impressing upon people to take care. Not taking care is a volitional act.

I argue that volition is what sets evil apart from other kinds of misfortune and makes it human responsibility. A wildfire started by lightning may be horrific but not evil. On the other hand, if global climate change did play a role in the fire, then willful neglect of the planet by a great many people — arguably, all of us — was responsible.

Theo Hobson mentions artistic representation of evil and worries that we might celebrate evil for its own sake. Artists know — even if David Brooks doesn’t — that evil is seductive. It promises some kind of gratification. In novels and films, “bad” characters often are beautiful, fun, wealthy, glamorous, and powerful. Plots turn on a main character slowly discovering that the seductive Other is evil. At the climax of many a horror movie the attractive villain is unmasked and revealed to be ugly.

We want “good” things to be fresh, sweet, and lovely. We want “bad” things to be decayed, repulsive, and ugly. When Hannah Arendt saw Adolf Eichmann at trial, she observed he was not an utterly loathsome beast but an ordinary man. By describing him as he was Arendt offended readers and even lost friends. But evil has no form, sound, smell, taste, or tactile qualities. It doesn’t “dwell” anywhere, nor is it a a quality anyone possesses. When we objectify evil and identity it as someone that exists in others, we absolve ourselves of evil. And that’s a foolish thing to do, because all of us do or say things that cause harm, even if unintentionally. Yes, there are people who choose to do harmful things, which is why there is a legal system. What someone else does doesn’t relieve us of responsibility for what we do.

I’m not saying we should all go about feeling guilty. The concept of sin comes into play here and complicates matters. Our culture encourages us to think that people who go about doing evil are sinners, and sinners are bad. We speak of people as sinful, as if transgressions exist as matter. And we are supposed to feel guilty about sin. The point is not to feel guilty but to take care, pay attention, and accept responsibility. I don’t like people who talk about other people’s evil but won’t accept responsibility for their own.

WaPo‘s “On Faith” site has some commentaries on Halloween. I like especially the Rev. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite’s post. See also “The Real Meaning of Halloween.”

Let’s Make Sense!

Posted on by

I’ve been out and did not see the Dem debate. If you did and want to discuss it, feel free.

I notice the geniuses at Protein Wisdom have posted a photo of my friend Glenn Greenwald under the title, “Face of a Racist,” but the links that accompany the photo don’t lead to anything about Glenn. If you keep following links (righties have an aversion to linking directly to original sources) eventually you get to an article about a program at the University of Delaware that really does sound creepy and objectionable. But I’m not seeing a connection to Glenn.

If anyone wants to waste time trying to make sense out of Protein Wisdom, have at it. I’ll pass.

Update: I see that my good buddy Bob Geiger is endorsing Chris Dodd for President. Bob makes a persuasive argument, I must say.

Where Next for Conservatism?

Posted on by

Gary Kamiya has an excellent article in Salon that asks if American conservatism can heal itself.

American conservatism is at once absolutist and utopian, and reactive and aggrieved. Which state came first is a chicken-and-egg question, but they reinforce each other. Psychologically, conservatives want contradictory things — both pure freedom and an unchanging Golden Age. Pragmatically, they want things that are mutually exclusive — no social contract and an organic, connected community, untrammeled individual rights and a rigid moral code. The inevitable disappointment results in resentment. The reason that the American right always behaves as if it is an angry outsider, even when it controls all three branches of government, is that it is at war not with “liberalism” but with social reality.

When you’re talking about conservatism you’re supposed to clarify whether you are talking about libertarian conservatism, social values conservatism, America First conservatism, or some other critter. In a logical world, the libertarian get government out of my business conservatism ought to clash with social we’ll make you behave or else conservatism, but it’s not at all uncommon to find righties who take a libertarian view on some issues (e.g., taxes) and an authoritarian view on other issues (e.g., abortion; warrantless wiretapping). Untrammeled individual rights for me; a rigid moral code for everyone else.

Kamiya asks if “the conservative movement is foreordained to remain in its current debased form.”

There will always be substantive issues on which conservatives and liberals will have good-faith differences. It would simply be a more mature conservatism.

The history of American conservatism does not inspire much confidence, however. In spite of its moderate roots, it has succeeded mainly via absolutist, reactionary politics. This approach has enormous emotional appeal for Americans for whom the modern world is a source of confusion, anger and fear, or who simply disdain the social contract . And the Republican Party is now entirely in thrall to it. The current crop of GOP candidates hold uniformly hard-right positions, with the exception of the libertarian, no-chance Ron Paul. The leading GOP contender, Rudy Giuliani, is even more of a maniacal hawk than Bush on the Middle East and national security. These are hardly signs that the right is moving to the center.

FYI, Ron Paul is plenty far to the right on a great many issues.

But sooner or later, conservatives will have to change course or see their movement wither away.

The issues that have been winners for conservatives are fading. White resentment of federal civil rights laws is the ur-conservative issue, the engine that drove the right’s rise. Barry Goldwater, by reluctantly voting against the Civil Rights Act, permanently realigned the South and paved the way for Nixon’s “Southern strategy.” More recently, right-wing strategists successfully mobilized resentment over “values” issues like the “three Gs” — gays, God and guns. These issues still mobilize some conservative voters, but they aren’t nearly as effective as they used to be. Studies show that the electorate, especially younger voters, are moving left on these issues.

That’s the best one-paragraph summary of the past 40 years of American politics you’re ever likely to read. White resentment of federal civil rights laws, desegregation, Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty programs, and affirmative action were like a big boulder dropped in a lake, sending waves in all directions, and movement conservatism has been riding those waves ever since. “Values” issues like prayer in school and abortion and “security” issues like the communist threat (now the “Islamofacist” threat) made waves also, but IMO white racism truly was “the engine that drove the right’s rise,” as Kamiya says.

But, although racism is still with us, I think the racist wave is dissipating, and white voters don’t respond to the dog whistles the way they used to. And I think that’s because more and more whites are one missed paycheck away from disaster and barely hanging on to middle class status by their fingernails. A person facing potential financial ruin is not so likely to sneer about “entitlements” and “government handouts.” Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.

In the end, conservatism will have to decide if it wants to be a real party of governance, moving beyond empty labels to engage with real issues, or if it wants to remain a party of reaction, in permanent rebellion against modernity, proffering emotionally satisfying but incoherent policies. Conservatism claims to be a politics of authenticity, but it is actually a politics of impulse and instinct. It is based on unmediated emotions, erupting from the individual ego — Get big government off my back! Keep those civil rights laws out of my white backyard! Lower my taxes! This is ultimately an infantile or an adolescent politics, a failure to come to terms with a world that does not do exactly what the omnipotent self demands. Does conservatism want to grow up, or stay an angry teenager forever?

Preach it, Brother Gary.

The new conservatism would not be liberal. It would still tilt toward small government and lower taxes, would reject policies aimed at equal outcomes, would oppose affirmative action and unrestricted immigration. That’s why it would be conservative (and, anticipating outrage from liberal Salon readers, why I wouldn’t support it). But it would abandon its facile government bashing and appeals to raw emotion. Above all, it would aim at working to build an America that, despite political differences, would pull together, would feel like a united country. It would take seriously that old saw about one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

It’s hard to imagine the party of Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh moving to the center. But if Americans turn away from the politics of resentment and fear, the GOP may be forced to follow them.

Just as an example of Why Conservatism Is Screwed, consider Jonah Goldberg’s column in today’s Los Angeles Times. Goldberg is an unoriginal thinker and pedestrian writer who got to be a big shot columnist promoting the virtues of taking care of oneself because he is Lucianne Goldberg’s son. Who needs government handouts when you’ve got nepotism? Anyway, today Goldberg writes,

The problem is that conservatism, even Reagan’s brand, wasn’t as popular as we often remember it. Government spending continued to increase under Reagan, albeit a bit more slowly. Today, the U.S. population is 30% larger but government spending is 84% greater (adjusting for inflation) than it was when Reagan delivered his 1981 inaugural address. That was the speech in which he declared: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” and vowed to “curb the size and influence of the federal establishment.”

In 1964, two political psychologists, Lloyd A. Free and Hadley Cantril, famously asserted that Americans were ideologically conservative but operationally liberal. Americans loved Barry Goldwater’s rhetoric about yeoman individualism, but not if it meant taking away their Social Security checks or farm subsidies. “As long as Goldwater could talk ideology alone, he was high, wide and handsome,” they wrote. “But the moment he discussed issues and programs, he was finished.”

The flaw was not necessarily Goldwater’s. As Gary Kamiya wrote in the Salon article linked above,

Conservative ideals are laudable: Who is against freedom, tradition or the preservation of community? The problem is that while they’re beautiful in the abstract, it is difficult to base a coherent governmental policy on ideals alone. Once these principles enter the real world of politics, governance and society, a world that requires compromise and the curtailment of individual freedom for the common good, they are useless as guideposts. If they are taken as moral absolutes, they cancel each other out: The apotheosis of the individual leads to the destruction of community and tradition.

When Kamiya writes “a world that requires compromise and the curtailment of individual freedom for the common good” I believe he’s using the word freedom in the sense of being unrestrained, as opposed to political freedom. But on the Right the word freedom has been drained of all meaning; it is merely ceremonial. We lefties who still care about the Bill of Rights are dismissed as “civil liberties absolutists.”

Goldberg continues,

Liberals have an inherent advantage. As long as they promise incremental, “pragmatic” expansions of the government, voters generally give them a pass. And every new expansion since FDR and the New Deal has created a constituency for continued government largesse. …

… “Liberals sell the welfare state one brick at a time, deflecting inquiries about the size and cost of the palace they’re building,” writes William Voegeli in an illuminating essay, “The Trouble with Limited Government,” in the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

Committed conservatives, meanwhile, find themselves at a disadvantage: They advocate smaller government for everybody — when Americans generally (including most Republicans) want smaller government for everybody but themselves.

In Goldberg’s view, people support liberalism because they are greedy. They want largesse. They demand entitlements. But notice that Goldberg defines “smaller government” purely in terms of domestic spending. He famously supports war, war, and more war, and the government spending that goes with war. He has advocated warrantless police strip searches of children. He is OK with criminalizing abortion. “Big government” is fine when it interferes with other people’s personal lives. Goldberg just wants to keep it out of his pocket.

Under all-Republican rule, the federal government got bigger and more intrusive even as it became more corrupt and less competent. I believe that is symptomatic of the inherent incoherence of movement conservatism. Right wingers want to control because they don’t know how to manage. The Bushies in particular seem to think that if they can just get enough control and operate without public scrutiny, they can force events and the world to bend to their will. Then to prove he’s against “big government,” Bush vetoes S-CHIP.

Just call ’em “totalitarians for freedom.”

Update: See also Busy, Busy, Busy.

Nice While It Lasted

Posted on by

Tim Watkin posts at The Guardian web site:

America is out of touch and behind the times on climate change and economic reform. It is mired in a stagnant war that the rest of the west has abandoned or is abandoning. American global influence is in decline, the country having lost the respect of allies and the credibility to lead. As we’ve seen yet again in last week’s brinkmanship by Turkey, American diplomacy has all the vim and vigour of Fred Thompson. For now America remains the world leader, but it’s moving steadily from superpower to first among equals. Nowhere is this more evident than in the sciences. …

… Overseas institutions and companies are increasingly competitive, and federal and state funding for science and engineering has fallen significantly, to just 0.8% of GDP. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are sucking up federal money, with President Bush last week asking Congress to raise the war budget for 2008 to $196bn. That’s quite an opportunity cost.

As Tom Friedman put it in his New York Times column on Iraq recently: “Can we pay for it and be making the investments in infrastructure, science and education needed to propel our country into the 21st century?” The answer, judging from speakers at the TechNet summit at Berkeley earlier this month, is no.

Watkin cites a report titled “Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future,” which was authored by The Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP), a joint unit of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine.

It’s hard to ignore the scientists and business leaders who wrote the Gathering Storm report when they write, bluntly: “We are worried about the future prosperity of the United States.” As the US slides, other countries are catching up too rapidly. I think Americans will look back at the second half of the 20th century as the pinnacle of American power and influence.

The comments to this post are almost more alarming than the post. A number of American wingnuts responded, claiming that Chinese engineers can’t be compared to American engineers because Asians have no creativity, and hey, we landed on the moon.

We’re doomed.

The notion that America and Americans are intrinsically superior is so deeply ingrained on the Right that no amount of empirical evidence to the contrary is likely to flush it out. Also, American conservatives by nature will ignore and deny an impending problem until it bites their butts, and then they blame Democrats for not solving it.

You’ve probably had this experience yourselves — mention the mere possibility that the U.S. could be less economically dominant at some point in the future, and if there’s a wingnut present he will laugh at you. Nope, not possible, he says. The way things have been in my lifetime is the way they will always be, forever and ever, amen.

American economic dominance grew out of several factors. The United States was one of the few large industrial nations to emerge from World War II without massive war damage and with its manufacturing base intact and productive, for example. Mortgage subsidies helped the new married couples of the Greatest Generation to purchase homes, and the GI bill sent a large part of the population to college, and in turn those college graduates started businesses, developed new technologies, created new products. America dominated the second half of the 20th century partly by circumstance of war and geography and partly because we invested in ourselves.

These days college is prohibitively expensive. Our manufacturing base is moving overseas, and the current POTUS seems to think this is a good thing. A major American city suffers massive damage from floods, and two years later the federal government continues to show a remarkable lack of interest in setting things right. About one in six Americans lacked health insurance for all of 2005, and our elected “leaders” look the other way and talk glibly about fictional “market solutions.” Anti-government conservative ideology so dominates American politics that we can’t even have sensible discussions about using government to address our growing problems.

We’re strangling ourselves with our own stinginess to each other.

Shattered

Posted on by

This is partly an addition to moonbat’s “Evangelical Crackup” post and partly something I started to write last week and never finished.

A couple of weeks ago Paul Krugman wrote that the Republican Party is not getting the big donations from Big Corporations that it has in the past. Krugman wrote,

According to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics, in the current election cycle every one of the top 10 industries making political donations is giving more money to Democrats. Even industries that have in the past been overwhelmingly Republican, like insurance and pharmaceuticals, are now splitting their donations more or less evenly. Oil and gas is the only major industry that the G.O.P. can still call its own.

The Economist says pretty much the same thing:

With all polls predicting a Democratic sweep of House, Senate and presidency in 2008, the smart money is flowing the Democrats’ way.

A Wall Street Journal poll last month showed that only 37 percent of professionals and managers identify themselves as Republicans or leaning that way.

A YouGov/Polimetrix poll for The Economist finds that only 44 percent of those earning more than $150,000 plan to vote Republican. So it is no surprise — though historically astonishing — that the Democrats’ presidential candidates have raised substantially more than Republican ones.

Now, why would this be? The Economist continues:

There are several obvious reasons for this. The shrill voices of religious conservatives have driven away many pragmatic Republicans who feel that banning abortion and gay marriage are not the most pressing issues confronting America. The Bush administration’s incompetence, evident from Iraq to Louisiana, alienates people who know about management.

But the most damaging factor has been the Republicans’ inability to control the federal budget. By slashing taxes without cutting spending, Bush turned the budget surplus of $240 billion he inherited from Bill Clinton into a deficit that bottomed out at over $400 billion, and is still running at $160 billion….

… Belatedly (to put it mildly), the administration has realized that it has lost the mantle of sound economic management to the Democrats. On Oct. 3 Bush picked up his dusty veto pen, using it to cut back spending for the first time in his presidency.

Astonishingly, he chose the wrong issue to wield it on: a proposal to expand a highly popular scheme that subsidized health insurance for poorer children. This from a man who had let Republican pork through by the sty-load.

The Economist has hopes for some of the GOP candidates, notably Giuliani, McCain and Romney, and doesn’t think much of the Dems. However,

Taxes, trade, and health care: These are subjects Main Street wants to know more about. But the religious right does not. Rather than building a pragmatic center-right alternative to Hillary Clinton, the conservative movement is stuck with God, gays and guns.

Methinks the Reagan Coalition is heading for D-I-V-O-R-C-E. The moneyed interests supporting the GOP were happy to cater to the religious Right as long as the Christionistas were swinging elections in their favor. But if Money decides that God is a loser, watch the GOP re-discover the joys of secularism.

Money liked George W. Bush because he promised to cut their taxes. But there’s more to a culture favorable to business and profits than low taxes. I suspect Money is re-learning what some of those things are. It doesn’t need high gas prices, health insurance costs from hell, economic instability among consumers and capital tied up by record debt. The current crop of GOP candidates, for the most part, aren’t promising to do much differently from Bush. They’re promising to do the same stuff, only more competently. Money must be reviewing its options very carefully right now.

Gary Kamiya writes at Salon:

Bush’s presidency has made a shambles of real conservatism. Let’s leave aside the issues on which liberals and conservatives can be expected to disagree, like his tax cuts for the rich, expansion of Medicare or his position on immigration, and focus solely on ones that should be above partisan rancor — ones involving the Constitution and all-American values. On issue after Mom-and-apple-pie issue, from authorizing torture to approving illegal wiretapping to launching a self-destructive war, Bush has done incalculable damage to conservative principles — far more, in fact, than any recent Democratic president. And he has been supported every step of the way by Republicans in Congress, who have voted in lockstep for his radical policies. None of the major Republican candidates running for office have repudiated any of Bush’s policies. They simply promise to execute them better.

The Bush presidency has damaged American civil society in many ways, but one of the most lasting may be its destructive effect on conservatism. Even those who do not call themselves conservatives must acknowledge the power and enduring value of core conservative beliefs: belief in individual agency and responsibility, respect for American institutions and traditions, a resolute commitment to freedom, a willingness to take principled moral stands. It is a movement that draws its inspiration from towering figures: Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke. It stands for caution in foreign adventures, fiscal sobriety and a profound respect for tradition.

Or at least it used to stand for those things. Today’s conservatism is a caricature of that movement: It embraces pointless wars, runs up a vast debt, and trashes the Constitution. Selling out their principles for power, abandoning deeply seated American values and traditions simply because someone on “their side” demanded that they do so, conservatives have made a deal with the devil that has reduced their movement to an empty, ends-obsessed shell. How did the party of Lincoln end up marching under the banner of Tom DeLay and Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney and Ann Coulter?

The House That Reagan Built always was a hammered-together mess of clashing architectural styles. The wonder is that the coalition lasted as long as it has.

The movement has always been intellectually fractured, riven by contradictory beliefs. As George Nash pointed out in his classic “The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America,” from the beginning modern American conservatism has been divided between traditionalists and libertarians. Libertarians regard individual freedom as the highest good, support the free market, and oppose coercive government policies. Traditionalists regard virtue, not freedom, as the highest good, believe in a transcendental moral order and are wary of unfettered individualism. Despite attempts to “fuse” them, the two worldviews are fundamentally incompatible — you either believe in surrendering to God and tradition or you don’t. Time and again, conservative attempts to implement policies that do justice to both the movement’s “freedom” and “virtue” wings have failed.

The relationship between the small-government, libertarian-minded conservatives and the Religious Right always seemed improbable on the surface. Even so, there was a remarkable amount of cross-pollination between the two factions. For example, the late militant Christian whackjob Rousas John Rushdoony preached that God blessed America with “biblical capitalism,” and God’s Capitalism must not be sullied by wordly government regulation. The now-fallen Rev. Ted Haggart’s explained Jesus’ plan for free market capitalism to his flock. And I’ve encountered a remarkable number of self-described libertarians who oppose reproductive rights for women.

The Economist expressed amazement that President Bush chose to be frugal with a bill for children’s health care, but that tells me The Economist doesn’t understand our righties. To them, meanness is a virtue. Whether to the poor, or gays, or women, or undocumented workers, both the small-government and social conservatives can be hard-hearted bastards. They may have diverse ideas about which groups should be kicked while they’re down, but the meanness is always there.

And so is the vainglory. Kamiya continues,

Bush’s “war on terror” is a rerun of the Cold War, with “Islamofascism” replacing communism and Dr. Strangelove at the controls. By attacking Iraq, Bush made up for all those decades of compromise and weakness, all that Neville Chamberlain-like appeasement, that groveling accommodation with evil. This time, we’re nuking the bastards!

Bush’s unprovoked war on Iraq provided a satisfying catharsis for American conservatives, an opportunity to play Winston Churchill and fight the good fight against Evil. But the satisfaction of urging on a Manichaean struggle from one’s armchair should only go so far before reality kicks in. Just as most conservatives during the Cold War realized that attacking the Soviet Union was not in America’s interests, so one would think that today’s conservatives would realize that Bush’s “war on terror” is not only unwinnable, but both unnecessary and counterproductive. By now, it’s obvious to all but myopic ideologues that attacking the Arab world to teach it a lesson was like kicking a vast wasp’s nest while wearing a Speedo. We want to win the “war on terror,” not strike heroic poses while being stung to death. No one disputes the virtue of moral clarity, but without intelligence, moral clarity is useless. Where is it written that conservatives have to be stupid?

Actually, I do dispute the virtue of “moral clarity.” “Moral clarity” all too often is just Bigotry wearing Virtue’s T-shirt.

But this takes us to another aspect of the Reagan coalition. Neocons and others wrapped up in the glory of American exceptionalism and the interests of Israel made common cause with Christian pre-millennialists who are eager to bring on Armageddon. Thus, in the early 1990s Bill Kristol and other leaders of the neocon faction of conservatism adopted the Christian Right’s views on abortion and gays. I suspect this had less to do with sincere moral sensibilities than with a desire to weaken the Democratic Party and liberalism generally. But today, David Kirkpatrick writes in “The Evangelical Crackup,” evangelical congregations are splitting over the Iraq War.

Today, the evangelical journal, has even posed the question of whether evangelicals should “repent” for their swift support of invading Iraq.

“Even in evangelical circles, we are tired of the war, tired of the body bags,” the Rev. David Welsh, who took over late last year as senior pastor of Wichita’s large Central Christian Church, told me. “I think it is to the point where they are saying: ‘O.K., we have done as much good as we can. Now let’s just get out of there.’ ”

Welsh, who favors pressed khaki pants and buttoned-up polo shirts, is a staunch conservative, a committed Republican and, personally, a politics junkie. But he told me he was wary of talking too much about politics or public affairs around the church because his congregation was so divided over the war in Iraq.

In other words, Christian conservatives and neocons are no longer reliable allies. Another aspect of the coalition has crumbled.

Finally, the men who were leaders of the religious Right during the Reagan heyday are growing old, as are their followers. Younger evangelicals don’t see the world the same way their elders did. Kirkpatrick:

Secular sociologists say evangelicals’ changing view of society reflects their changing place in it. Once trailing in education and income, evangelicals have caught up over the last 40 years. “The social-issues arguments are the first manifestation of a rural outlook transposed into a more urban or suburban setting,” John Green, of the Pew Research Center, told me. “Now having been there for a while, that kind of hard-edged politics no longer appeals to them. They still care about abortion and gay marriage, but they are also interested in other, more middle-class arguments.

I don’t believe the influence of conservative Christianity on conservative politics will ever completely disappear, because this influence has been a feature of American politics from the beginning of American politics. But it’s an influence that comes and goes. It was very strong after World War I until the Scopes Trial in 1925. In the 1930s until the 1950s mainstream protestantism, including the larger evangelical denominations, was at least mildly progressive in the context of the times. Until the Reagan years many people outside the Bible Belt saw militant right-wing Christianity as a quaint relic of the past. Now, if I’m not mistaken, the GOP is at the beginning of a shakeout that will result in many re-alignments and dis-alignments. Unless the religious Right can pull off some unexpected political victories in 2008, I believe its influence in the Republican Party will be much subdued in the future.