The Elections: 1932 or 1976?

The potential for a realignment in American politics is getting a lot of press. The lead editorial in The Economist last week asks "Is America Turning Left?," and the lead story on the US, Under The Weather," concludes that the Karl Rovian vision of a permanent Republican majority, forged out of a combination of libertarians, business interests and evangelicals is, if not dead, then in intensive care.

Given its politics, it is not all that surprising that The Economist takes solace in the truism that "[t]he Democrats' good fortune is much more the result of a Republican collapse than a Democratic revival," and it concludes that the ascendancy of the Left is most likely to be temporary: more akin to the post-Watergate election of Jimmy Carter in 1976 than the post-Depression election FDR in 1932.

Ross Douthat of The Atlantic is not so sure. He begins an article entitled " Blue Period" with what is probably his wildest dream:

The last enduring Democratic majority began with a midterm sweep. After being routed by Herbert Hoover’s Republicans in the 1928 election, the Democrats stormed back to pick up 56 seats in the House and eight in the Senate, leaving both chambers roughly split between the two parties when the 72nd Congress convened in December 1931. The victory, coming on the heels of the 1929 stock-market crash, set the stage for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s triumph in 1932, which ultimately left the Democrats with 60 seats in the Senate and 313 in the House, and established Roosevelt’s party as the dominant political force in American life for a generation.

He briefly comes back to earth and denies that "even the most optimistic Democratic strategist dares to dream that the Democrats’ midterm sweep in ’06 will presage a Roosevelt-style landslide in ’08. " Yet he then spends the rest of the article citing reasons why he thinks "Democrats . . . suddenly and unexpectedly have the makings of a durable majority of their own within their grasp."

Perhaps my own politics are showing when I say that I think the Economist has the better of this argument, but there it is. Douthat's reasons for hope strike me as grasping at straws. In the near term, he sees the differences within the Left resolving themselves. Really? It's hard for me to see the likes of Dennis Kucinich and MoveOn.org agreeing to compromise with the centrists that brought us NAFTA and acknowledged that "the era of big government is over." But it is when he moves beyond the near-term prospects and explains why the tide of history is on the Democrats' side that wishful thinking edges into something close to delusion:

[I]n the long term, a new-model populism’s prospects look brighter still. The Republicans are to a large extent the party of married couples with children, while the Democrats are the party of unmarried voters, who tend to be more sensitive to economic risk, and thus more supportive of welfare spending, than members of intact nuclear families. But the nuclear family has been in steady decline for years, pushed along by falling marriage rates and rising out-of-wedlock births, trends that are likely to create an ever-larger base for a left-populist majority.

The pressure of continued outsourcing may also increase the public’s appetite for a smart left populism, as even well-educated workers—in fields from financial services to health care—begin to face stiff competition from overseas. In this landscape, it’s easy to imagine the middle-class anxiety that the political scientist Jacob Hacker termed “office-park populism” defining the domestic debate over the next 20 years, and easy to imagine a Democratic majority that capitalizes on the opportunity.

But Dothout himself provides what I believe is the real reason 2008 will be much more like 1976 than 1932:

Long-term trends make new majorities possible, and traumatic events (such as 9/11 and the Iraq War) can help catalyze their formation, but without effective leadership, the opportunities are easily squandered, whether on the campaign trail or in the White House. Just ask Karl Rove and George W. Bush.

This is, I think, the Democrat's biggest problem. I see no one among the gaggle of Democratic presidential candidates who seems capable of leading the country anywhere because none has any unifying vision that can attract the allegiance of anything like a majority of the electorate. The plans and programs of each candidate are idiosyncrasies generated either by what the candidate came to believe in the 60's in college or by what the latest focus group tells him (or her) the electorate wants this week. It is a party of issues not principles. And, to the extent it does have unifying principles, those are not the principles that win elections today.

The problems with the available candidates is not confined to the Democrats, of course: can you imagine a party so completely devoid of talent that its leading candidate for President is Rudy Giuliani? But for all their faults and hubris, the Republicans have an articulable vision, both domestically and in foreign policy. And it is a vision that has the support of a very significant majority of the electorate. In 2008, the Republicans are going to pay the price, not for a failure of vision, but for a failure of execution. The neoconservative vision has much to recommend it, but Bush ran it aground in Iraq. The advocates of smaller government are so popular as to claim even Bill Clinton as a convert. Yet they were betrayed by the biggest increase in federal entitlements since the '60s -- not to mention the embarrassment of runaway "earmarks." Civil rights and liberties are part of the American political bedrock; yet Bush betrayed those principles with far more intrusive government, electronic surveillance, renditions, Guantanamo, and the greatest assault on civil rights and liberties since at least the Second World War, if not the Civil War. Tolerance and the separation of Church and State are two other great bedrock principles that were trashed by the Bush administration. By seeking to relentlessly pander to every constituency of his coalition, Bush ended up betraying all of them. The result is that, barring some kind of deus ex machina, the Republicans are going to get beat badly in 2008.

Yet, looking at their situation long term, I think the Republicans have a far, far better chance of staging a comeback than the Democrats do of sustaining the gains George has dropped in their laps. Why? Because they, unlike the Democrats, have a coherent political theory that underlies their rhetoric.

Again, I am probably projecting my own political desires on the country, but I tend to think that the country still wants what Bush promised: a compassionate conservatism. They want a conservatism that, first of all, cares about people but refuses to adopt them. Government should -- must -- help the needy. But it must do so without making them wards of the state or so far insulating them from risk that they cease to have any incentive to strive.

They want a government that leaves people alone, except as necessary to protect the weak from those who would prey upon them, the law-abiding from those who are not, and the different among us from those who hate difference.

They want a government that is more concerned about expanding the economic pie than it is in generating conflict over who has the biggest pieces.

And, most of all, they want a government that recognizes its own limitations; that realizes that it's efforts, however well intentioned, will frequently do at least as much harm as good; that sees itself as the provider of last resort tackling problems reluctantly and only after it becomes clear both that the problem is serious enough to preclude doing nothing and that there is a plan for addressing that problem that has some reasonable chance of producing near and long-term outcomes materially better than doing nothing.

At this point, the Republicans seem far more likely to be able to persuade people that they can deliver these things than the Democrats. Which leads me to believe that we are likely to elect a one-term Democrat in 2008: a Jimmy Carter rather than Franklin Roosevelt.

Democrats And The War

Notwithstanding my concerns about billy bob and my continuing skepticism that we are doing any good in Iraq, I was pleased that the "Senate Reject[ed] Democrats’ Call to Pull Troops" yesterday.

For one thing, I am very cynical about the Democrats' motives in this. They have always known there was no chance such a resolution would ever actually go into effect, since it has always been clear that there is not enough support to overcome a filibuster much less a veto. Moreover, even if by some chance it did become effective, it would spark a Constitutional crisis of historic proportions, for there is no question Bush would ignore it. So what is the point?

Perhaps one could argue that even if the effort was obviously futile from the outset, it is important to make a statement as to one's beliefs. Well, maybe. But I am hard pressed to see why votes are required for this purpose. Coming on top of the non-binding resolution passed by House last month, one can't help but feel that the Democrats' real purpose has less to do with matters of conscience than it does with forcing the Republicans (as well as some Democrats) to again and again cast votes that the Democrats will be able to portray as "pro-war" two years from now.

These tactics no doubt serve to fire-up the bases on both sides. But elections are won and lost in the middle. And if I am any indication of how that middle feels about these antics, the Democrats are making a huge mistake playing politics with this war.

No one sensate is in favor of this war. The question is what to do about it. Like it or not, so long as Bush is President, the answer to that question is up to Bush. As an institution at least, Congress' choices come down to this: sit down shut up for the next two years and hope for the best or take responsibility and either cut off funding or impeach Bush.

Judge Friendly On Abortion

The WSJ's online "Opinion Journal" has a side-bar on it with links to other articles that bear (at least in the editors' minds) some relationship to the subject matter of the essay to which it is attached. In today's "Opinion Journal" was a review of two new books about the Supreme Court. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the sidebar contained, among others, a link to this: Before Roe v. Wade: Judge Friendly's Draft Abortion Opinion.

Judge Friendly is one of the two or three most famous American jurist never to sit on the Supreme Court and the idea that he had written an abortion decision prior to Roe v. Wade was both surprising and of considerable interest.

The article -- it reads more like a speech -- is by Judge Raymond Randolph who is now a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals but who, in 1970, was a clerk for Judge Friendly. Apparently, Judge Friendly was a member of a three judge panel that considered a challenge to the New York abortion law three years before Roe v. Wade. Judge Friendly wrote a draft opinion, but it was never published because the case was dismissed as moot when the New York legislature repealed the statute being challenged.

Judge Friendly concluded (at least in his draft opinion) that abortion was not a constitutional right, and Randolph uses this and Judge Friendly's reasoning, as a kick-off to a much longer argument of his own as to why much of the Supreme Cort's "privacy" decisions over the last 40 years have been fundamentally misguided.

Randolph gets carried away in the end, I think, but Friendly's opinion is a thoughtful -- and thought provoking -- essay on the respective roles of courts and legislatures and on the tensions between the interests of individuals in personal liberty/autonomy/freedom of action and the interests of the State in legislating against matters considered by the majority to be immoral.

This tension is a matter of considerable interest to me (witness THIS, and THIS, and THIS for example), and I want to eventually write more about it. But for the moment, I will leave you with Judge Friendly's thoughts:

[The heart of the plaintiffs' argument is]that a person has a constitutionally protected right to do as he pleases with his--in this instance, her--own body so long as no harm is done to others. . . . [This] principle would have a disturbing sweep. Seemingly it would invalidate a great variety of criminal statutes which existed generally when the 14th Amendment was adopted and the validity of which has long been assumed, whatever debate there has been about their wisdom. Examples are statutes against attempted suicide, homosexual conduct ..., bestiality, and drunkenness unaccompanied by threatened breach of the peace. Much legislation against the use of drugs might also come under the ban.

Plaintiffs' position is quite reminiscent of the famous statement of J. S. Mill. This has given rise to a spirited debate in England in recent years. We are not required to umpire that dispute, which concerns what a legislature should do--not what it may do." . . . [Y]ears ago, when courts with considerable freedom struck down statutes that they strongly disapproved, Mr. Justice Holmes declared in a celebrated dissent that the Fourteenth Amendment did not enact Herbert Spencer's Social Statics. No more did it enact J. S. Mill's views on the proper limits of law-making.

[The evidence in the case dealt with] the hardship to a woman who is carrying and ultimately bearing an unwanted child ... [,] the plight of the unmarried mother, the problems of poverty, fear of abnormality of the child, the horror of conception resulting from incest or rape. These and other factors may transform a hardship into austere tragedy. Yet, even if we were to take plaintiffs' legal position that the legislature cannot constitutionally interfere with a woman's right to do as she will with her own body so long as no harm is done to others, the argument does not support the conclusion plaintiffs would have us draw from it. For we cannot say the New York legislature lacked a rational basis for considering that abortion causes such harm. Even if we should put aside the interests of the father, negligible indeed in the many cases when he has abandoned the prospective mother but not in all, the legislature could permissibly consider the fetus itself to deserve protection. Historically such concern may have rested on theological grounds, and there was much discussion concerning when 'animation' occurred. We shall not take part in that debate or attempt to determine just when a fetus becomes a 'human being.' It is enough that the legislature was not required to accept plaintiffs' demeaning characterizations of it. Modern biology instructs that the genetic code that will dictate the entire future of the fetus is formed as early as the--day after conception; the fetus is thus something more than inert matter. The rules of property and of tort have come increasingly to recognize its rights. While we are a long way from saying that such decisions compel the legislature to extend to the fetus the same protection against destruction that it does after birth, it would be incongruous ... for us to hold that a legislature went beyond constitutional bounds in protecting the fetus, as New York has done, save when its continued existence endangered the life of the mother. . . .

We would not wish our refusal to declare New York's abortion law unconstitutional as in any way approving or 'legitimating' it. The arguments for repeal are strong; those for substantial modification are stronger still.... But the decision what to do about abortion is for the elected representatives of the people, not for three, or even nine, appointed judges.

An undertone of plaintiffs' argument is that legislative reform is hopeless, because of the determined opposition of one of the country's great religious faiths. Experience elsewhere, notably Hawaii's recent repeal of its abortion law, [30] would argue otherwise. But even if plaintiffs' premise were correct, the conclusion would not follow. The contest on this, as on other issues where there is determined opposition, must be fought out through the democratic process, not by utilizing the courts as a way of overcoming the opposition[,] ... clearing the decks, [and] thereby enabl[ing] legislators to evade their proper responsibilities. Judicial assumption of any such role, however popular at the moment with many high-minded people, would ultimately bring the courts into the deserved disfavor to which they came dangerously near in the 1920's and 1930's. However we might feel as legislators, we simply cannot find in the vague contours of the Fourteenth Amendment anything to prohibit New York from doing what it has done here."

In a note to his clerk attached to the draft opinion, Judge Friendly suggested, presciently, that the arguments supporting a constitutional right to abortion would if accepted make it difficult to deny a right as well to assisted suicide:

If a woman has an absolute right to the destruction of a fetus, incapable of making a decision for itself it would be hard to see why a man or woman does not have an absolute right to have his body destroyed. The discomfort of pregnancy and the pain of childbirth are surely not [more] than what often attends years of invalidism without hope of cure. The economic burden of an added child--readily avoidable if the parents wish--are not of the same order or magnitude as the costs of many 'terminal' illnesses, which may consume or exceed the savings of a lifetime and entail misery for a surviving spouse.

The irony in all of this, of course, is that Friendly's rejection of Spencer and Mill is gratuitous. As Judge Friendly himself noted, in abortion cases there is "another" that is being harmed, thus providing a basis for distinguishing abortion from all of the other examples Friendly cites. And therein lies my greatest frustration with this body of law: Of all the awful things that have flowed from the abortion decision, one of the worst is that it has given libertarianism a bad name.

An Embarassment in Congress

What is this farce that is going on in the House of Representatives? 2,175 minutes of debate on a non-binding resolution that says little and means less? What is it's point? Who does it benefit? Why are they doing it? Is there anyone other than the most pathological Bush hater that is not thoroughly chagrined by this cheap piece of political theater?

I find it not just embarrassing, though. I find it offensive. Pelosi came to power on a wave of genuine anguish about a war that seemed to be going nowhere and to have no foreseeable end. Actually grappling with that issue is difficult, though. So they decided to use the power given them to embarrass Bush. The charade now going on in the House has no other purpose. But, like all such empty and obvious political hatchet jobs, the result is to embarrass the Congress and, to a degree at least, rehabilitate Bush.

If I am any indicator, the Democrats are doing themselves enormous damage by trivializing the public's anguish over this war.

Snow Day!

We had our first real snowfall of the winter over the last 36 hours -- about 8 inches or so -- and the City has taken the opportunity to declare a holiday. All the schools are closed of course, afraid as they must be at this point that they will end up holding the bag on their snow days for the year. And the County declared a Level 3 snow emergency, which provides everyone with a nearly ironclad excuse not to go to work. Technically, a Level 3 Emergency" means "all roadways are closed to non-emergency personnel," and "anyone caught driving during a Level 3 without a good reason might be subject to arrest."

My Minnesota relatives (to say nothing of the poor sods in the Redfield, NY) would doubtless find such a reaction to less than a foot of snow to be both preposterous and an occasion for ridicule, but I suspect they are just jealous. Be that as it may, though, the citizens of Lucas County are a law abiding bunch, and never more so than when the Sheriff tells them to take the day off.

I myself have succumbed to the temptation. I didn't stay home; the wife shooed me out of the house. But I didn't get far. I'm at a coffee shop about a mile from my house that has free hi-speed wireless and free coffee refills.

Given that this is the information age and that I work in an information business, it is not the total day off it would have been even 10 years ago. Truth be told, I can do what I do anywhere that has cell phone coverage and hi-speed internet connection. So, I have spent a couple hours actually working. But the lure of the blog has been calling, so I intend to play a little hookie between e-mails.

There is certainly enough going on!

Update: After I posted this, I went back and read more of the article linked above about Redfield, NY. This is just mind-boggling: Redfiled has gotten 12 feet of snow over the last 10 days or so. That is 144+ inches. But this year is nowhere close to a record. In 1996-97, they got a total of 420 inches. That's 35 feet, which I am pretty sure is taller than the peak of my house.

Gene Patents? Can This Possibly Be Right?

Michael Crichton, the sci-fi author who brought you such science-gone-wild pot boilers as Coma and Jurassic Park had an op-ed piece in today's NYT entitled "Patenting Life. If the article is to be believed, it is possible for compnaies, universities, etc. to obtain patents on genes. In fact, not only is it possible, Crichton claims that some 20% of the genes in human DNA have already been patented.

The fact that it is Michael Crichton writing this makes me skeptical. But if he's right, I would really like to understand what possible bases there could be for granting patents on human genes.

"An Inconvenient Truth" About Al Gore's Movie

John Tierney is fast becoming one of my favorite journalists. He's the op-ed columnist for the NY Times who represents the non-ideological pragmatist point of view. He also periodically writes a sort of "myth-buster" column called "Findings" in the "Science Times" supplement each Tuesday.

Today he takes on "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's movie and book about global warming. The hook for the piece was the fact that Al Gore was sitting beside Virgin Airlines founder Richard Branson when Branson announced that he is offering a $25 million dollar prize to anyone who can figure out how to remove a couple billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year. Tierney uses the prize idea as bookends between which he contrasts the hysteria of Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" with the reality of the recently released findings of the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change. Here is one example:

Whatever happens, you can stop fretting about the Gulf Stream scenario in Mr. Gore’s movie and that full-fledged Hollywood disaster film "The Day After Tomorrow." Mr. Gore’s companion book has a fold-out diagram of the Gulf Stream and warns that "some scientists are now seriously worried" about it shutting down and sending Europe into an ice age, but he must have been talking to the wrong scientists.

There wouldn’t be glaciers in the English shires even if the Gulf Stream did shut down. To understand why, you need to disregard not only the horror movies but also what you learned in grade school: that the Gulf Stream is responsible for keeping London so much warmer than New York even though England is farther north than Newfoundland.

This theory, originated by a 19th-century oceanographer, is “the earth-science equivalent of an urban legend,” in the words of Richard Seager, a climate modeler at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. He and other researchers have calculated that the Gulf Stream’s influence typically raises land temperatures in the north by only five degrees Fahrenheit, hardly enough to explain England’s mild winters, much less its lack of glaciers.

Moreover, as the Gulf Stream meanders northward, it delivers just about as much heat to the eastern United States and Canada as to Europe, so it can’t account for the difference between New York and London. Dr. Seager gives the credit to the prevailing westerly winds — and the Rocky Mountains.

When these winds out of the west hit the Rockies, they’re diverted south, bringing air from the Arctic down on New York (as in last week’s cold spell). After their southern detour, the westerlies swing back north, carrying subtropical heat toward London. This Rocky Mountain detour accounts for about half the difference between New York and London weather, according to Dr. Seager.

The other half is caused by to the simple fact that London sits on the east side of an ocean — just like Seattle, which has a much milder climate than Siberia, the parallel land across the Pacific. Since ocean water doesn’t cool as quickly as land in winter, or heat up as much in summer, the westerly winds blowing over the ocean moderate the winter and summer temperatures in both Seattle and London.

So unless the westerlies reverse direction or the Rockies crumble, London and the rest of Western Europe will remain relatively mild.

Tierney is not a global warming denier. He accepts, or at least appears to accept, the findings of the IPCC. But what I find refreshing is that he recognizes the realities as well:

The I.P.C.C. considers options for reducing greenhouse emissions, but projects that even the most radical (and politically painful) policies wouldn’t make much difference the first two or three decades. To politicians worried about the next election, especially in poor countries, 2030 sounds like eternity.

It’s always possible that something will galvanize people around the world into taking short-term pain for long-term gain. But I suspect there’s a better chance of someone claiming that $25 million prize. Whether it’s carbon-dioxide-gobbling nanobots or something else, it’d be good to have a backup plan when 2030 rolls around.

Opposing The War But Supporting The Troops?

William Arkin, a national security/military affairs blogger for the Washington Post kicked of a regular firestorm with a January 31 column taking American soldiers to task for complaining about domestic opposition to the Iraq war. After quoting three soldiers who in various ways argued that you can not oppose the war and still claim to support the troops, Arkin unloaded:

These soldiers should be grateful that the American public, which by all polls overwhelmingly disapproves of the Iraq war and the President's handling of it, do still offer their support to them, and their respect.

Through every Abu Ghraib and Haditha, through every rape and murder, the American public has indulged those in uniform, accepting that the incidents were the product of bad apples or even of some administration or command order. . . .

So, we pay the soldiers a decent wage, take care of their families, provide them with housing and medical care and vast social support systems and ship obscene amenities into the war zone for them, we support them in every possible way, and their attitude is that we should in addition roll over and play dead, defer to the military and the generals and let them fight their war, and give up our rights and responsibilities to speak up because they are above society?

That wasn't the worst part. The line that gained the most attention was this one:

[This complaining by the troops] is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary - oops sorry, volunteer - force that thinks it is doing the dirty work.

The response to this was swift and ugly and personal and overwhelming. After two more columns one attacking his critics and another defending himself and half apologizing, Arkin finally threw in the towel with an embarrassingly maudlin effort, in his words, "to make sense of the worldview of those who have responded."

There were well over 3,000 "comments" posted on the first three of these columns; yet this was just the tip of the iceberg of e-mail and blog reactions that the columns generated. The Post had finally had enough, as Arkin acknowledged in his final post:

On the advice of my editors, this is the last column I will post for awhile on this subject. My impulse would be to continue to fight back and answer the critics, but I see the wisdom in their observation that nothing new is being said here and the Internet frenzy is adding nothing to the debate or our understanding of our world. I also see that I cannot continue to write about humanity and difficult questions if indeed what I wish is to vanquish those who attack me.

But that was not quite enough. Yesterday, in a self-confessed effort to insulate the Post itself from the "Blast Damage" caused by Arkin, the Post's ombudsman published what amounted to a public rejection of its own columnist:

The fact that The Post and washingtonpost.com are interlocking yet separate is lost on most readers, who do not care that the two are miles apart physically and under different management. A great example is the recent firestorm over a column that never appeared in The Post -- but for which The Post was blamed. . . . Did one online column irreparably damage Post national security journalism? No. But it does show that an online column rubs off on the newspaper. . . .

What's the difference between opinion writing for the newspaper and for washingtonpost.com? The writing can be similar, but the editing is more intense at the newspaper. More experienced eyes see a story or a column before it goes into the paper; The Post has several levels of rigorous editing. There is "less of an editing process" for blogs at the more immediacy-oriented Web site, Brady said. . . .

Arkin's column did not meet Post standards, but then, newspaper editing isn't perfect, either. But "mercenary" surely is live ammo; such an incendiary word should have popped out in flames to Post editors.

I am not about to defend Arkin's language or the entirely unwarranted anger it seems to betray. But I do think there are a couple of important issues buried in all of this.

Is it possible to support the troops but oppose the mission? At one level, the answer is an obvious "yes." I can certainly oppose the war and yet have and manifest pride in our troops, their efforts, and how they go about the job they have been assigned. In fact, in some ways, the more important it is to me to support the troops, then the more urgently I need to oppose the war since it is the war that is killing them.

But at another level, I guess I can see what the "support the troops, support the mission" crowd means. These guys and girls have left family and friends, homes and jobs, comfort and safety and are over in a hell hole the scope of which we cannot even imagine, and they are fighting and in some cases dying. How can I say I "support" them if I also say that their sacrifices are meaningless if not reprehensible. I know if I were doing something that entailed that amount of risk and suffering I would have mixed emotions about people who claimed to be proud of me but who thought what I was doing was a crime or worse. If you want the troops to believe that you are proud of them, you almost have to tell them that what they are risking their lives for is worth it. I think it is worth it, for now at least, but that is a story for another time.

The other question Arkin raises is even more difficult and certainly more important. How does a democratic society relate to an all-volunteer army? Do soldiers who volunteered give up the right to bitch about how they are used? Do they give up the right to complain about those who don't cheer for them? Do they have any right to anything more than what they were promised as an inducement to sign up?

And, what do we civilians owe to such an army? Aren't they just the "the hired help?" Do we owe them any more (or less) respect, any greater pay, benefits and support, than we do policemen, or firemen, or any of the other people we have hired to protect us from what we see as dangerous? Do we owe these men and women the same type of support we gave the GIs in WWII?

I think the answer is no. But I'm not sure. And, if the answer is "no," I'm even less sure what the right answer is.