The Truth Hurts

Fernando Teson blogs on his new book, RATIONAL CHOICE AND POLITICAL DELIBERATION: A THEORY OF DISCOURSE FAILURE (Cambridge U.P., August 2006). It's one of those things that makes me sick--not because I think it's wrong, but because I fear it's right. Professor Teson explains the thesis about why encouraging deliberation won't create better political outcomes:

The public will not deliberate in accordance with truth-sensitive principles; on the contrary, the public will err in accordance with definite patterns. The idea is that acquiring reliable knowledge about social theory (economics, pol sci, etc) is very costly to the average citizen, so he will rely on theories by default that are mostly false (for example: "we need to protect our industry against foreign competition", "higher crime results from lenient courts", etc, etc). The public, in short, is rationally ignorant. Reliable social science is hard because it is opaque and complex. Folk knowledge is easy to apprehend because it is vivid. Knowing this, politicians and others use, for electoral purposes, a rhetoric that feeds into these false theories. As a result, public deliberation does not bring us closer to the truth. On the contrary, deliberation increases error. We call this phenomenon discourse failure.

In comments, PrawfsBlawg's "resident deliberativist", Ethan Leib, argues that this is a rehash of the old "the people are too incompetent to govern" argument. I think that he's right that this problem may be partially rectifiable at an institutional level (or at least that we have to try), but in general I'm not optimistic.

I've hit on these themes before, most notably in my post attacking the concept of "persuasiveness" equaling "strong rhetoric" in debate, or my post of no-confidence in democracy. In general, I like the idea of "deliberative democracy," as long as "deliberative" has some depth to it--where "rational ignorance" no longer counts as deliberation. Engagement is the key. Unfortunately, I don't see much hope for salvation, and Professor Teson's argument about "rational ignorance" helps explain why.

The Woman Behind The Scenes

In a discussion on why there are comparitively fewer female Supreme Court law clerks, Ann Althouse queries the following:

On the behaviorial point, which we're discussing in the comments, let me speculate about why women might act and feel very different about being a law clerk. I'm much older than those who are doing clerkships now, but for me, being a clerk is too much like being a secretary. A guy may like the feeling of being someone's right hand man. You can say right hand woman, but it's not a normal phrase. Being a close, subordinate assistant resonates with a long line of inferior positions offered to women.

So that's my speculation: clerking doesn't seem so strikingly advantageous to a woman the way it does to a man. We may want do it because we've been told this is the best path to start your career, but something inside says I don't like the look of myself in that position.

I have no striking insight to add. The only reason this grabbed me, though, is because of my current position as President/Coach of the Carleton debate team. I have zero organizational skills whatsoever, so I said out the outset that my role would be limited to actually coaching--as in, this case is good or this rebuttal needs work. The administrative stuff is being run by a friend of mine. She's responsible for, among other things, getting people registered for tournaments, planning trips, making sure people meet on time, that sort of thing. Her official title is "administrator" or something like that, but in casual parlance I like to refer to her as my "second-in-command," "lieutenant," or "whip." Are those acceptable gender-neutral substitutes for "right-hand man" (which, as a lefty, I don't like anyway)?

Wait For It

Consider me on the record that I think the Democrats will take back neither the House nor the Senate in 2006. There is just too much ground to make up. I think they will make significant gains, to be sure, but I think they will end up just short in both.

However, it's 2008 where they really stand a chance to clean up. Kos has the run-down of races in 2006 and 2008, and the latter looks really good for the boys in blue. For 2006:

Tier one

1. Pennsylvania
2. Montana
3. Missouri
4. Ohio
5. Rhode Island

Tier two

6. Virginia
7. Tennessee

Tier three

8. Arizona
9. Nevada

We'd need to sweep the Tier ones and pick something else up to take back the Senate, as well as hold our vulnerable seats (Minnesota, Washington, and, I hate to say it, Maryland). I think the sweep is doable, but getting it, and holding all three and winning a tier-two or three race is pushing our luck. So I predict a 51-49 GOP lead in the Senate after 2006.

But then look at the 2008 map. 2008 is when all the senators who won in 2002 are up for re-election. '02 was a blockbuster GOP year, thanks to fear-mongoring before Iraq. But the upshot is you have a bunch of vulnerable seats (and prospective retirements) in 2008:

Alaska

Stevens (R) will be 85, and constantly threatens retirement. An open seat might be possible.

Colorado

Allard (R), who won a tight race in 2002, will face a tough challenger in Rep. Mark Udall.

Georgia

Chambliss (R) won in 2002 by morphing war hero Max Cleland into Osama Bin Laden. People want revenge.

Kansas

Roberts (R) should be safe, if he doesn't retire, but massive rifts in the Kansas GOP have given new blood to the state's Democratic Party. Will bear watching.

Kentucky

McConnel (R) has an iron grip on his state's Republican Party. Of course, that party is now mired in myriad scandals and faces serious losses in 2007. Will that stench hurt McConnel?

Minnesota

Coleman (R) will get challenged by local-boy-done-good Al Franken.

Mississippi

There's lots of talk that Cochran (R) will retire, setting off a battle between Rep. Pickering (R) and former Attorney General Moore (D). And the smart money in that showdown would be with Moore.

New Hampshire

Freshman Sen. Sununu (R) will be looking for reelection in a state that is trending heavily into the Blue column.

New Mexico

Domenici (R), 76, will have to run in this trending Blue state.

North Carolina

Freshman Sen. Liddy Dole (R) will face her first reelection. North Carolina Dems are on the rise with the insane growth of the liberal-leaning Research Triangle. The state's changing demographics are in our favor.

Oregon

Smith (R) is increasingly out of touch with his ever bluer state.

South Dakota

Johnson (D) will likely be the GOP's top and only serious target.

West Virginia

If Rockefeller (D) runs for reelection, this will be a safe seat. If not, then it'll be a tough hold.

Virginia

Warner (R) will be 81, and there's lots of talk that he will retire.

I think we can flip Colorado, Minnesota, Mississippi, and Oregon, with South Dakota being the toughest hold (I think Rockefeller will run for re-election). Depending on how Webb does this cycle, Virginia could be an outside shot, and Alaska, Georgia, and New Mexico all could go if there are sufficient Democratic coat-tails at the top of the ticket. Assuming both that my 2006 predictions are right and that none of the 2008 long-shot scenarios plays out and that West Virginia goes GOP, that's still enough to put the Democrats on top in the Senate, 51-49. And they could do significantly better.

Elsewhere, Kos does raise a legitimate point when he asks why the primary challenge to Chafee by Laffey in Rhode Island isn't getting the same press attention, talk about a small-tent party, and otherwise tsk-ing from the center as the Lamont/Lieberman race.

There Can Be Only One!

Over a year ago, I wrote a post defending multiple meanings of marriage from a post-modern perspective. I noted that a multiple-meaning paradigm allows us to recognize as "marriage" types of ceremonies that we ourselves wouldn't or can't participate in. That might sound dangerous, but in reality it's essential: Jews should be able to recognize a "union of two people under Christ" as a marriage, and Christians should be able to recognize a "union of two people under a Ketubah" as a marriage, even though both experiences are beyond each groups respective personal horizons. Marriage would lose a lot of its transcendental character if we couldn't make such leaps, or if we blithely argued that recognizing Christian marriages somehow "degraded" Jewish ones, or vice versa.

Anyway, Eugene Volokh today has a great post analyzing and refuting the idea that their can be only one true "meaning" or "purpose" of a given act or institution, be it sex or marriage. As usual, he says it better than I ever could, so go forth and read.

Drunken Party in Alabama!

Dan Filler has two interesting posts up about a proposed law in an Alabama city targeting "open house parties", defined as a party in which two or more underaged youth consume alcohol. The law would impose "strict liability" on the homeowners (i.e., parents) of the house, that is, they would still be punished even if they knew nothing about the party and took all reasonable steps one could be expected to take to prevent it.

Filler thinks that whether strict liability is justified constitutes a "tough" question. I don't--I think it's a troublesome theory in most cases and particularly bad here, where the steps beyond "reasonable" parents would presumably be incentivized to take could very easily cross-over into abuse.

Another question off of this law is what it means for a family which lets their two kids drink wine at dinner. Technically, they'd be liable under this law. When asked about that possibility, the local police chief said that it wouldn't be a problem because there would be virtually no circumstance in which the police would get a call to search the house for such an "offense." But as Filler points out, it's probably bad to write poor legislation and then count on the constitution to bail you out of enforcing the troublesome parts. At the very least, the risk of targeted prosecution is a problem, but it also encourages weak and overly broad legislation.

Anyway, since I don't turn 21 until February, this still has some relevancy to me. Not much, since I live in Maryland, go to school in Minnesota, don't drink, and don't know anybody from Alabama, but still, some.

Nice Ride

I ordered delivery for dinner tonight. When the food got here, I looked out onto my drive-way to see two cars: A grey '99 Ford Taurus Station wagon, and a silver convertible. The delivery boy had the convertible. The Taurus was mine.

My surreal moment of the day.

Crying Victim

One of the favored conservative attacks on liberal anti-discrimination proposals is that it's just people "playing the victim." "Culture of victimization" is a commonly heard phrase in these circles. But is it true? Are members of minority groups ready to cry victim at the slightest provocation? Recent research suggest the answer is no.

I just read of a study by Karen M. Ruggiero and Donald M. Taylor regarding how minorities react to ambigious cases of discrimination. Students were given a series of written aptitude tests, then told they did poorly. They were also told that a certain (varying) percentage of the judges were biased against their social groups. Even when they were told that up to 75% of the judges were biased, respondents were still more likely to blame themselves for their results than discrimination--as likely, in fact, as when they were told only 25% of the judges were so biased. Ironically, the exceptions to this rule were Whites and males, both of whom showed little hesistation in calling out perceived discrimination [Ruggiero & Taylor, Why Minority Group Members Perceive or Do Not Perceive the Discrimination That Confronts Them: The Role of Self-Esteem and Perceived Control, 72 J. Personality & Soc. Psychol. 373 (1997)]. It may well be that the gap between the amount of actual and perceived "crying the victim" is a function of Whites and males projecting their own predispositions onto minority groups. What are the implications of this?

[UPDATE: From the comments, it seems like there is some reason to doubt the credibility of Professor Ruggiero. The aforementioned study is on probation until further notice]

It should not surprise us that minorities are generally unwilling to claim that they are victims of discrimination--even when it is actually occuring. As Deborah Brake argues in her recent argue, Retaliation:

A disturbing body of research demonstrates a high propensity for men and white persons to dislike women and people of color when they claim discrimination, even when the claim is meritorious. The social penalty for transgressing social roles and challenging perceived inequality sets the stage for retaliation.

Social psychologists have found that women and minorities are perceived as troublemakers and hypersensitive when they confront discrimination....African Americans who blamed discrimination for a poor performance rating on a test were viewed more negatively than African Americans who blamed themselves. The predominantly white evaluatiors consistently rated an African-American student more negatively--as a complainer, a troublemaker, hypersenstive, emotional, argumentative, and irritating--when he attributed his poor test performance to his discrimination rather than to his own ability, regardless of the objective likelihood that the student actaully experienced discrimination [Deborah L. Brake, Retaliation, 90 Minn. L. Rev. 18, 32-33 (2005) (emphasis added)]

So, if the data implies that discrimination tends to go under-reported, and that people who do report even just claims of discrimination tend to be stigmatized, that should be powerful evidence that something has gone awry with how we treat victims of real discrimination.

Right?

Greatest Story Ever Told

I'm not Christian, so I'm going to put a word in for the story of the Entebbe rescue. Arguably the most daring large-scale rescue mission in the modern era, a small attachment of Israeli commandos flew to Entebbe, Uganda, where the Jewish passengers of a hijacked Air France flight were being held under guard by Ugandan soldiers and Palestinian terrorists.

The Jerusale Post has two wonderful articles about the operation, which I highly recommend to anyone. As one of the Israeli commandos said:

"Believe me, even James Bond didn't do such a job."

H/T: Powerline

Happy 4th!

No posts today. I just want to wish my readers a Happy 4th, and hope it was a wonderful spent with friends and family.

As for me, I had a delicious hot dog. I really don't like it when the patriotism of dissenters is questioned, but anyone who has something besides a Hamburger or Hot Dog on Independence Day has questionable Americanism at heart.

(And if the Hot Dog isn't Kosher, well, you're only hurting yourself).

Explaining Interest-Convergence

In this post, I mentioned what's known as the "Interest-Convergence Theory" (pioneered by Derrick Bell) to explain why Brown v. Board of Education came out the way it did. In retrospect, not everyone knows about this hypothesis, so I thought I'd lay out the bare-bones of it.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund had been courageously and tenaciously litigating school desegregation cases for many years, usually losing or, at best, winning narrow victories.

In 1954, however, the Supreme Court unexpectedly gave them everything they wanted. Why just then? ....

During that period...the United States was locked in the Cold War, a titantic struggle with the forces of international communism for the loyalties of the uncommitted Third World, much of which was black, brown, or Asian. It would ill serve the U.S. interest if the world press continued to carry stories of lynchings, racist sheriffs, or murders like that of Emmett Till. It was time for the United States to soften its stance toward domestic minorities. The interests of whites and blacks, for a brief moment, converged.

Bell's article was greeted with outrage and accusations of cynicism. Yet, ten years later, the legal historian Mary Dudziak carried out extensive archival research in the files of the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Justice. She analyzed foreign press reports, as well as letters from U.S. ambassadors abroad, all showing that Bell's intuition was correct. When the Justice Department intervened on the side of the NAACP for the first time in a school desegregation case, it was responding to a flood of secret cables and memos outlining the United States' interest in improving its image in the eyes of the Third World. [Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York: NYU Press, 2001): 18-20]

The original Bell article is Derrick A. Bell, Jr., Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma, 93 Harv. L. Rev. 518 (1980). The Dudziak article cited is Mary L. Dudziak, Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative, 41 Stan. L. Rev. 61 (1988).

The Good Guys

Paul Mirengoff has graciously penned a response to my post regarding Peter Beinart and the Democrats on terror policy. I'm a debater by trade (hence the blog's name), and Mr. Mirengoff was my first mentor in debate, so there's always the potential that these things can run around forever. But fortunately, I think that there is a lot of "agree to disagree" areas that have sprung up, so I think after this post we can let things lie.

The first area of dispute is how much domestic policies influenced our victory in the cold war. I forwarded the argument that America got significantly more aggressive in fighting for civil rights because having a Jim Crow system significantly reduced our credibility in the third world, the battle ground of the cold war. Mr. Mirengoff thinks this thesis is "overblown." I've been sufficiently persuaded by my readings of Derrick Bell, Mary Dudziak, and Richard Delgado to think that it had a considerable role. (Incidentally, for those of you scratching your heads and wondering what the hell I'm talking about, I typed up a bare bones explanation of the scholarly history behind this idea). Again, I find this evidence convincing, but if you don't agree, you don't agree.

But granting that it had some effect, Mr. Mirengoff then challenges me as follows:

Let's assume that the Justice Department intervened in Brown v. Board of Education because diplomats said it would help us defeat Communism. Let's assume that Kennedy proposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for the same reason. What's missing is evidence that these moves had anything to do with us winning the Cold War decades later during the conservative Reagan administration.

I could be really snide and agree with Paul on the grounds that Reagan's overt hostility to the civil rights movement makes it difficult to ascribe to that same movement our victory in the Cold War. But that would be mean (and counter-productive). So I'll just make two arguments here.

First, this seems incompatible with how conservatives view Reagan's contribution to ending the Cold War. Sure, they'll go on about winning the arms race and muscling the USSR under as crucial components to Reagan's strategy. But where they really wax poetic is in talking about the bold moral challenge Reagan put out to confront the Soviet Union. In other words, they do recognize the importance of drawing sharp moral contrasts between "the land of the free and the home of the brave", on the one side, and the "evil empire," on the other. Civil rights is obviously a critical part of this.

Second, Mr. Mirengoff is proposing a counter-factual scenario. We can't, of course, go back and see what the upshot of the Cold War would have been had Brown gone the other way, or the Civil Rights Act never been signed. I have serious trouble believing that we would have done as well in the Cold War had we not taken significant, tangible steps to show we were serious about protecting (non-White) rights, especially given the importance of non-White countries in prosecuting the war. Mr. Mirengoff apparently believes it would have had no effect--we could have gone completely Bull Connor and done just as well in our diplomatic efforts in Africa, South and Central America, Asia, et al. This is agree-to-disagree part number two, again, let the reader decide.

The next question is what degree liberal norms help convince wavering Muslims that democracy is in their interests. I argued that the case for democracy is seriously weakened when people see some of the worst trappings of authoritarianism (torture, detention without trial, "ghost" internment camps) still happen inside of democracy's biggest cheerleaders. Paul responds as follows:

There's no doubt that genuine human rights abuses like Abu Ghraib can create anti-Americanism. It's conceivable that they can even cause people to take up arms against us. What's far-fetched, I believe, is the view that human rights abuses by Americans will cause people who might prefer self-government over a dictatorship to decide that a dictatorship is better after all. Arabs can certainly have a democratic government without adopting specifically American policies, a point that critics of the administration are fond of making.

I have three responses here. First, even if American human rights abuses "only" cause "anti-Americanism" and "cause people to take up arms against us," those are still Really Bad Things that make it more difficult to effectively fight and win the war on terror. So I'd say that even this minimal concession is proof positive that American human rights violations are counter-productive to fighting this war, ipso facto, the party that fights against those abuses gains a unique advantage in prosecuting the war effort.

Second, I'm not sure that I do believe American human rights abuses have no role in causing anti-democratic sentiment. A Sunni in Iraq might very well conclude that having a Sunni dictator is superior to democracy, if "democracy" means that the Shi'ite controlled government is sending out death squads and slaughtering his compatriots and political leaders. One might respond that this would be an Iraqi-perpetuated rights violation, not an American one, and thus falls outside our control. But I don't think that neat division of labor is coming across--Sunnis (rightfully) expect America to do everything it can to stop the government from oppressing them, when it was the American's who promised that this democracy thing would be the cat's meow. As long as Iraq is effectively an American client state (which it is as long as we still have hundreds of thousands of troops in the nation), it is on our heads to send the message that torture is intolerable from the government we're propping up. This is why liberals like me swooned over Peter Pace when he told Donald Rumsfeld publicly, to his face, that American troops have an obligation to intervene to stop inhumane conduct by Iraqi forces. Rumsfeld thought they should just look the other way. So this view-clash is present, and it pits folks like me and Pace, who think that America does have a role to play in preventing Iraqis from torturing each other, and the Bush administration, which doesn't care at all.

Third our goals for Iraq are not encompassed merely in the phrase "democracy." We don't just want a democracy, we want a vaguely liberal democracy that respects the rights of its citizens and (among other things) doesn't discriminate on the basis of religion (in Iraq, that's the big one). So now working from the Shi'ite side of things, they might decide that a theocratic democracy is superior to a liberal one if "liberal democracy" still means Abu Gharib. This might be what Paul means when he says that Iraqis can choose their own form of democracy, and he may well be right that we should allow them this choice. But to reiterate, Iraq turning into a theocratic-leaning democracy hostile to America still represents a case of a Really Bad Thing that makes our war on terror harder. So policies which make that outcome more likely vis-a-vis a more liberal democracy are also Really Bad Things that make our job harder.

Finally, Mr. Mirengoff is just skeptical that most Democrats actually believe all of this. He cites Beinart's call to "purge" the more leftist elements from the Democratic party. I might even sign onto this, but I think it's a smaller portion of the party than Paul does. For example, he tries to group on "MoveOn" and "Michael Moore" with "the Kos crowd", but of course these groups are not the same (Moore, for example, isn't a member of the Democratic party). Again, this is kind of one of those "agree to disagree" moments. All I can say is that I'm a hawkish Democrat who goes to bleeding heart liberal college, and while I see a lot of fury at President Bush (which I share, incidentally), I have not encountered many opinions incompatible with a Beinart-like view on foreign policy. Differences at the margins and in the mechanics, of course, but the basic principles seem relatively widely held: that radical Muslim extremism is an awful thing incompatible with basic liberal norms, that America needs to fight it, that this fight needs to be conducted constrained by certain moral considerations, both because it's right and because we won't win if we don't, and that this fight will at times involve the use of American military forces. I feel comfortable ascribing these basic beliefs to the majority of Carleton Democrats, who I think themselves are mostly left of the party median.

Lieberman Willing To Go Solo

So it's official. Joe Lieberman will run as an independent if he does not win the Democratic primary.

I don't really know what to think. I've never been as much of an anti-Lieberman basher as most, although his persistent shilling for the Bush administration is supremely aggravating (and the fact that he was responsible for the inept securities laws that gave us Enron is another big strike against him). His justification for the move was also interesting:

"I am very loyal to the Democratic Party, but I have a loyalty higher than that to my party. That is to my state and my country.

Great words, but I'm not sure I really believe Lieberman is being totally honest. He's loyal to himself, not to the "country." Maybe he's loyal to the country in the egomaniacal sense of "the country needs me, whether they want me or now," but I don't know if I want to give brownie points for that.

Gay Foster Parenting Winner

Via Mirror of Justice, I am pleased to report that the Arkansas Supreme Court has unanimously upheld a lower court judgment striking down that state's prohibition on gay foster parenting. Actually, the regulation in question here went beyond prohibiting homosexuals from becoming foster parents, it extended the prohibition to any family which had an adult homosexual living in the household.

I blogged about the lower court ruling previously. It's very interesting reading, as the testimony it describes really demolishes whatever scientific basis there is for preventing homosexuals from starting families.

As for this decision, the ruling was rather narrow, focusing only on separation of powers issues and not the more meaty equal protection or privacy arguments. The Court rather simply noted that the executive agency did not have statutory authorization to make this prohibition, and that the testimony given showed pretty clearly that there was no rational basis connecting such a regulation to the best interests of the child. It said nothing about whether or not such an act would be permissible if the legislature had enacted it directly (although a concurring opinion said that it would not). Hence, this might be another case of a democracy forcing decision--not letting legislatures hide behind executive agencies to avoid going on the record voting for such a draconian violation of gay civil rights. Basing the decision on these grounds makes it harder for the right to argue that this is an "activist" decision--not that they won't try, only that it will be less coherent than normal.

San Francisco Symbolism

Tom Elia points to two cases where (presumably liberal) commentators said there were hidden motives behind conservative notations of a place. Specifically:

New York = Jew

San Francisco = Homosexual

Elia thinks both are ridiculous. I'll agree with the former, but he's delusional if he thinks the latter isn't in play. Totally coincidentally, Elia doesn't even try to say what conservatives mean when they talk about "San Francisco liberals" (nor do the other blogs who commented), preferring to focus on Pelosi herself:

Nancy Pelosi = "Over-her-head, out-of-touch-millionaire, with rhetorical skills that make George Bush look like Cicero."

Well, perhaps, but that certainly isn't what springs to mind when one thinks of San Francisco. It does absolutely nothing to explain why Republicans love to harp on the fact that Pelosi is from the city of the Golden Gate. Is there something about San Francisco that makes it entirely a bunch of "out-of-touch-millionares"? Or is it famous for its poor rhetorical skills? Please. What the heartland thinks of, when it hears "San Francisco" in a political context, is its large gay community. San Francisco = pro-gay. There is no way Elia can be a serious observer of politics and not know this.

In other words, sure, there are plenty of angles of attack on Nancy Pelosi that have nothing to do with homosexuals. But they also have nothing to do with San Francisco. Once you start mentioning "San Francisco" in the ads, you have to give me a convincing reason why you'd bother bringing it up. The self-evident answer is the gay symbolism.

(Incidentally, the reason this doesn't apply to "New York Times" is that NYT is a stand-alone proper noun. If Republicans started talking about "New York liberals," then they'd have to explain the symbolism behind that, but talking about the NYT and talking about New York are not the same thing).

Kuwaiti Landmark

Powerliner Paul Mirengoff reminds me to give a congratulations to Kuwaiti women, who voted in their first election.

Mr. Mirengoff seemed sad that so few feminists seemed to be taking note of this auspicious occassion. So I took the liberty of finding some for him:

Feministe (you can't tell from the link, but it's the only above-the-fold part of this roundup)

Feminist Law Profs

Pseudo-Adrienne

Free-range Feminist

Avast! Feminist Conspiracy

And I'm proud to add myself to the number.

Step Out

E.J. Dionne praises Barack Obama's speech on faith. As a Democratic voter whose (Jewish) faith is important to him, I am at loss for an explanation for why the Democratic platform should in any way be considered incompatible with a religious life.

A few months ago, I wrote about the need to rein in the soaring expectations that have begin to engulf Senator Obama. One of the biggest risks is that media figures will get tired of writing another "golden boy" story and will turn hostile just for the new angle.

And I fear we're starting to see it already. Howard Kurtz has a piece entitled "Senator Steps In It," remarking on the reaction of some liberal bloggers to Obama's speech--namely, the part where he chides "liberals who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant." The theme of Kurtz's piece is that the ravenous and insatiable left is turning on their favorite son. But honestly, his support is thin, at best. Basically, I object to the meme that this is the paradigmatic progressive response becoming the conventional wisdom.

The two harshest attacks come from two bloggers no one has ever heard of. If "I Am Vince" will change parties if Obama gets on the Democratic presidential ticket, then I say don't let the door hit you on the way out. The only big name Kurtz musters is MYDD's Chris Bowers, who seems more upset over the likely political impact of Obama's comments than giving up hope on the Senator entirely. What all three have in common though, is that they deride the strategy of chasing after evangelicals in the first place, calling them the most conservative voters in the polity. For the life of me, I cannot figure out this attack. It seems that Obama is engaging in a classic "What's the matter with Kansas" maneuver. Evangelicals are a solid member of the right base now, for sure, but there is no reason why they have to be. It has been noted before that there is plenty of room for progressives to make inroads here, especially once one gets beyond the corrupt and plutocratic leadership and into the rank and file. Why we should automatically write off a major portion of the electorate that can be turned in our favor (just so we can continue insulting them?) eludes me.

But even with Bowers weighing in, it still feels like he's on the short-side of the argument. Later on, he cites two big guns in the liberal blogosphere, Nathan Newman and Matt Yglesias who both defend Obama and slam the progressives who were so quick to attack him. Newman pulls out the overriding progressive theme in Obama's speech that managed to meld traditional religious concepts with a modern liberal framework--beautifully, I might add. Echidne misses the point here: the idea isn't that religious voices are excluded from the public square, it's that a) Democrats have not found away to frame their arguments so that they are consonant with a religious worldview, when they should and b) the perception amongst some religious people is that Democrats view them as irrational pre-enlightenment hillbillies. That is not saying that one cannot make moral policy decisions based on a secular framework. It's, at root, a call for pluralism which I for one (and I'm not the only one) support.

I do think that the idea that Democrats are hostile to religious voters is a media-driven myth, but its people like Obama who are our best chance at breaking it down (and if he needs to pull a Sister Souljah moment to do it, be my guest). Folks like Captain Ed might want to label Obama a "former left-wing hero", but they're deluding themselves: the vast majority of the liberal rank and file remains firmly in his camp (incidentally, Ed, who I've had interesting conversations with, should really be worried about his comment section. The company you keep after all...).

The problem is, as The Green Knight notes, that the media spun Obama to sound far more critical of the Democrats than he was. That might reinforce the fact that this media-myth does have legs, but surely we can't blame Obama for media-created distortions. He's got the right idea, and what's more, the vast majority of the Democratic party (top to bottom) agrees.

The Good Fight

Powerline's Paul Mirengoff remarks on Peter Beinart's new book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals--and Only Liberals--Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. Paul is a good guy and I'm glad that he thinks folks in Beinart's camp (I count myself among them) are "more...allies than...adversaries." Still, he subjects Beinart's thesis to some harsh criticism, most of which I feel is off the mark.

The big area of controversy is to what extent liberal domestic policies are necessary to waging the war on terror. Paul is dismissive of the idea:

Beinart's heavy reliance of the role of the civil rights movement in the Cold War seems misplaced. Similarly, the arguments made by his fellow pro-defense liberal Martin Frost are unpersuasive. Frost argues that our efforts to promote democracy abroad are being undermined by the alleged mistreatment of detainees and supposed civil liberties abuses in the U.S. Frost offers no evidence for this proposition, and a moment's reflection is enough to conclude that it is entirely implausible. Surely Frost does not believe that the terrorists in Iraq are trying to bring down the democratically elected government because of the interrogation techniques at Gitmo. Or that the Saudi government is resisting democratic reforms due to the NSA electronic intercept program. People in other countries favor or disfavor democracy based on their perception of their own interests, not their perception of the U.S.

The argument obviously fails if it's a pure X --> Y causal relationship. But I sincerely doubt anyone is making that argument. The right question to ask is whether American human rights abuses are pushing Arab citizens away from supporting Western-style democracy. That seems altogether plausible. Indeed, the argument works under Paul's own metric of individual interests.

Imagine an average Arab male, just liberated from an oppressive Ba'athist regime. After years of living in fear of an all-powerful and unaccountable state, what is one of the biggest draws of American democracy? Put bluntly, it's the promise that in America he won't be dragged off to an isolated prison for no apparent reason, without any sort of trial, procedures, or chance to clear his name, and subjected to torture. When the promise is put on shaky ground, America loses one of its greatest advantages. And remember, it's a perception issue--all jihadists have to do is cast doubt that America-the-ideal is America-the-reality. Place a picture of the Statue of Liberty next to a picture of Abu Gharib, and that point comes off rather potently. This isn't to say that democracy has no other advantages outside of the "won't-get-dragged-off-and-shot" variety, only that this is a major one and we sacrifice it at our own peril.

Contrary to Mr. Mirengoff's insinuations, there is historical precedent for this. One of the key motivators behind the landmark Brown v. Board decision was the Justice Department intervening, for the first time, on the NAACP's side in a segregation case. Why did they do that? Well, as Derrick Bell has convincingly argued, they did it because the State Department kept on receiving cables from its diplomats screaming that they were getting mauled in the 3rd world over Jim Crow. We could not simultanously preserve such a blantant apartheid system and still claim to be defending liberty and equality on a global scale. I think that argument still applies, and the political party most able to transmit a persuasive pro-democracy message abroad will be the one that shows the greatest commitment to it at home.

What Paul is really steamed about, I think, is the implication that Republicans are ill-suited to win the war on terror. He thinks this charge is most unfair, and what's more, he thinks that few Democrats really take terror as seriously as Beinart does. I'm certainly in no position to respond--after all, I echoed Beinart's claim over a year before the book came out. But I'll merely add two things.

1) This argument is a mirror image of the Rovian assualt Republican's have made on Democrats since 9/12/01. Turn about is fair play.

2) Taking Kevin Drum as my guide (and I think he's a pretty good bellweather for the Democratic mainstream), the primary reaction to Beinart's argument hasn't been to decry its militarism, its been almost along the lines of "duh, that's what we've been saying for years". As Drum writes:

I think he could give the keynote address at YearlyKos and not really say much of anything the audience would disagree with. If Beinart really is the standard bearer for a new incarnation of liberal hawkishness, then we're almost all liberal hawks now.

So if Paul thinks Beinart is mostly on target, and most Democrats also think that Beinart is on target, then I think that's pretty compelling bipartisan support for the mainstream Democratic position on anti-terror policy.

UPDATE: My latest reply to Mr. Mirengoff is here.

The Cutting Edge

Fidel Castro's niece is leading the charge for gay rights in Cuba. Nothing is more aggravating to me than watching brutal totalitarian regimes outperform the US on an issue of human rights. It's bad enough that we're now in a race with Cuba to see who can stop oppressing homosexuals first; can we please at least not lose it?

Tainted Pool

Dan Filler has a great post supporting David Souter's claim--made in the Kansas v. Marsh dissent and mocked by Doug Berman--that capital cases might have higher error rates than non-capital cases.

He gives six reasons, the most interesting of which--to me, anyway--was the second:

Capital juries are likely to be less sympathetic to the defense because they are death-qualified (i.e., only people who are willing to impose death are permitted to be jurors in a capital case.) This eliminates a not insignificant portion of the population that is most attractive to the defense.

I had never thought of this before, yet now it strikes me as a significant problem--especially depending on what the exact definition of "death-qualified" is.

For example, I don't have any theoretical or philosophical objection to the death penalty. But I do think that our death penalty system is broken beyond repair, at least without a moratorium. So, as a juror, would I be willing to cast a vote for death? Maybe...but I think I'd set my standard so high that it'd be impossible to meet--it would hinge on me being absolutely certain ("beyond a scintella of a doubt") of the defendants guilt, on it meeting certain admittedly subjective criteria for severity (i.e., a rape/murder), and being convinced that there was no procedural defects apparent at trial--ranging from inadequate representation to racial bias in the DA's office. I'm not sure I'd ever be convinced of all that.

People like me, then, probably will be excluded from hearing capital cases. Which is problematic, because what makes someone like me "like me" is that we're skeptical of the state when it comes to the criminal justice sphere. I really think that given the statistics, such skepticism is warranted and those who don't have it are really demonstrating a bias towards the accused (aka, the not-yet-convicted). Even if one doesn't think that we're indisputably right in our critique, though, it still should be recognized that our presence is valuable for a balanced jury pool that will be through and complete in its deliberations.

Incidentally, this post topic dovetails nicely with Andy Leipold's findings that judges are--contra to the prevailing wisdom--less likely to convict criminal defendants than juries are. This occurs off of all cases, not just capital ones, but still, I think there may be a connection.

Political Clout

Yesterday, the good folks over at the Family Research Council got themselves in a bit of a huff over Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich (R) seeming a bit too pro-gay. Remarking on Ehrlich's appointment of an openly gay judge to a Maryland court, and his firing of a Metro board commissioner who called homosexaulity "deviant", the FRC cried:

Gov. Ehrlich's lurch to the left is deplorable. His firing of Mr. Smith is an assault on religious liberty and on freedom of speech. His election-year conversion to champion of gay issues is pandering at its worst. This once again highlights the radical impact that the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas has had on the country.

I was a bit amused to hear about "election-year...pandering" in favor of gay rights. Got to satisfy that massive gay conspiracy constituency. But hey--this is Maryland. Maybe they're right, and this is the rare state where bigotry doesn't have an election payoff. Wouldn't that be nice.

Meanwhile, James Dobson has a set of complaints about supposed media bias against the anti-gay crowd (ironically enough, published on CNN). You may remember Dobson for his bizarre claim that gay marriage "will destroy the earth." Well, he might have just topped himself:

So where does the issue go from here? Time will tell. It took William Wilberforce more than 30 years to bring about an end to Britain's slave trade in the 1800s. Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of a protracted victory.

Am I reading Dobson right that gay marriage poses a greater moral threat than slavery? That's simply stunning. Folks like Dobson use and abuse the civil rights movement for their own agendas, but seem to have very little awareness of the gravity of the wrong itself.

Hmm...maybe the way Black people could properly remember their tragedy would be to support equal rights and citizenship for their gay compatriots. The most logical descendant of Loving v. Virginia, after all, is Goodridge v. Department of Health.