"But there is a reason Ayn Rand is considered a gateway drug to the right and [Adam] Smith isn’t..."

"... the 'greed is good' ethos, whatever else may be wrong with it, is much sexier, more rebellious, and thus more appealing than staid bourgeois morality. But more to the point, it’s interesting that both [The Daily Caller's Matt] Lewis and [Andrew] Sullivan consider Smith the fons et origo of fiscal conservatism, as defined by support for capitalism. I find it interesting because it’s mistaken, albeit a mistaken belief that is held almost universally."

Mytheos Holt, writing in The American Conservative, would like you to pay more attention to Bernard Mandeville and "The Fable of the Bees."

Juan Williams thinks he's defending Obamacare by observing that it has no effect on him and the other members of the Sunday talk show pundit panel.

This is the sort of thing that a Republican would be pilloried for saying. It was yesterday's "Fox News Sunday," and the moderator Chris Wallace had just read a question tweeted by some guy named Skip. The question was "other than hope, what substantive argument do the ACA, Affordable Care Act, supporters have that the law will work as intended?" Juan Williams threw out a big word storm, but one line jumped out at me, and I will boldface it:

Well, Skip, I think you're deserving a straight answer. There's such a snowstorm of partisan politics around the ObamaCare thing right now. 

When I wrote "big word storm," above, I'd forgotten that he'd said "such a snowstorm." Normally, I'd rewrite to eliminate a clumsy repetition, but I'm leaving this one for effect.  And I'm also amused by that first sentence. To say that Skip is "deserving" of "a straight answer" is not to promise you're about to give one. I'm reminded of the way we used to laugh when Nixon said "let me make one thing perfectly clear." And I'm reminded of the way Obama et al. keep blaming others for hearing promises when, technically, there were none.

All Williams said is that Skip deserves — or, oddly, is deserving — a straight answer. He never said he was going to give Skip a straight answer, and if Skip somehow gets the impression that a straight answer is forthcoming, well, then Skip ought to sharpen his critical listening skills. And when Williams said "There's such a snowstorm," he did not say: And I'm here to guide you through the storm, Skip. The passive voice preserves the possibility that Williams himself is part of the snowstorm. Why wouldn't he be?

Back to the text:

So I'd say the number one thing I would say is....

What a locution! Why not just say what you have to say? When you say that you're going to say what you would say, it sounds as though you are dissembling.

... just look at this week. A million people went to the website as it was working. So there's obviously an appetite, a real need. 

A need?! People are required to buy insurance. The need is to comply with government force. How is that evidence of appetite? (I picture a parent saying "You're going to eat it and you're going to like it.")

30 million people uninsured. Millions more inadequately insured who can avoid bankruptcy and illnesses as a result. Number two, I think it the reason [sic] I think this is going to work is it doesn't disrupt the market for most people. Nobody on this panel is going to have their health care affected, impacted, by what's taking place. 

There it is! He looks around at George Will and Brit Hume and the AP's Julie Pace and says, hey, we're all doing fine. So what's the big deal? People like us aren't hurting! 

ADDED: Williams shouldn't get away with that callousness. Where's the empathy? And now I want to take a shot at George Will. Just before Williams got his question, Will said something that also struck me as distanced and out of touch in a way that maintains the aversion many people have to conservatives:

The education of this president is a protracted and often amusing process as it was this week. 

Oh? You were amused? Is that what this is, entertainment for you, old man, as you sit back and — whatever you do — puff on your pipe and sip your Scotch? Real people are really struggling with this. It's not funny.

As he continues to alight upon the obvious with a sense of profound and original discovery. He's alighting on what is obvious to governors. This is really why we should have governors more often than senators as president. The president is saying the trouble with big government is it's so darn big. And like a lot of big organisms, dinosaurs spring to mind. It has a simple nervous system. It's erratic, it's governed by inertia. And it's hard to move. This from a man who's devoted his life to increasing the power of government as an instrument to the redistribution of income because government is wiser than markets. And it's, as I say, highly amusing.

There are some great points in there, but why does he have to begin and end with his own amusement? I understand the temptation to sit back and find amusement in the foibles of humanity, but it's not very attractive. If people are struggling, you might want to shut up about how funny it seems to you, that is, if you want to win favor with those people and not, you know, enrage them.

Yesterday, we were looking at an article in USA Today about how healthcare.gov was incorrectly putting people into Medicaid and depriving them of the chance to buy the insurance they're supposed to buy. A commenter, David, snarking "Customer service, government style," quoted the line:

"If the Medicaid determination is wrong, consumers should file an appeal with the federal marketplace, says Department of Health and Human Services spokeswoman Joanne Peters, but she says she does not have an estimate on how long that would take."

And I said:

So people who thought they'd get the subsidy — which seemed sort of friendly like a low tax rate in a system of progressive taxation — find themselves shunted into welfare, which has to feel insulting or at least surprising, and then if they realize they aren't supposed to be there, how do they get to the subsidy they actually deserve?

This is causing so many people to feel so much anguish. I can't imagine how upset I would be trying to get this straightened out or even trying to understand if something is wrong.

And that's with no health problems. What if you had to deal with this while hurting from a physical (or mental) problem and on top of the actual malady, you had to worry about losing the ability to pay for your treatments?

There is so much suffering here. I assume it's a huge snowballing mass of problems that we are only seeing the very beginning of.

I think the Republican message should be: How dare you create such an uncontrollable machinery of suffering? How could you be so arrogant and reckless? And how dare you hide the damage that you knew was coming? What are you still hiding?

I wrote that before listening to George Will, and then when I heard him, I thought: No! That's exactly what conservatives should not say! This is the time to show empathy — if you can scrape it together somehow — to forefront the suffering, and George Will is passively chuckling over how amusing it is to see Obama stumbling and bumbling. Republicans are doomed to lose over and over again if they can't at least look like they care about people. They seem to care so little that they don't even notice how much it shows.

"Centrists Should Mourn the Demise of the Filibuster: Only the extremists win—and in the end, mostly the Republicans."

A Slate headline, quoted in its entirety at Instapundit, as if he's not seeing the snark.

To see the snark, examine the logic

1. After the filibuster, only the extremists will win.

2. Most of the winners will be Republicans.

3. [Unstated.] Most of the extremists are Republicans. 

What counts as "extremism"? In this context, it has to do with how we think about judges. (And executive nominees, but I'll leave them to the side for simplicity's sake.) The "extreme" should be understood as the more ideologically slanted or threateningly powerful individuals that the President would otherwise have refrained from nominating. But even with the minority party disabled by the inability to filibuster, there are political constraints.

Obama can't just nominate, say, Bill Ayers.
He won't want the criticism, and there will be pressures on members of his own party to say no. The old game of letting the minority party do the dirty work has changed. The other party will still do what it can to trash the reputation of the nominee, but the President's own party will have to vote that nominee down or take the political heat for voting for this awful character.

I suspect that the political check will be more of a constraint on Democrats, because it seems that American voters perceive conservative judicial ideology as more conventional, proper, and neutral than liberal judicial ideology. And this is essentially the insight in the Slate article (which is written by Eric Posner). And by essentially, I mean subtract the subterfuge in the part I've boldfaced:

Next time Republicans control the presidency and the Senate, they will appoint ideologically extreme judges. True, Democrats could cancel out this effect by appointing extremely liberal judges when they are in power, but recent history suggests that Democrats do not care as much as the Republicans about appointing ideologically extreme judges. Unless this changes, picture a federal appellate bench composed of numerous Antonin Scalias and Clarence Thomases, not fully offset by Elena Kagans and Stephen Breyers.

Let me restate the boldfaced part to say what I think is true:  Democrats know that the vigorous left-liberals they'd like to see on the bench would be viewed by the American people as ideologically extreme and unsuited for judicial work.

The reason the Republicans seem to get away with leaning further toward conservatism than Democrats can lean toward liberalism is that conservatism better comports with the people's idea of the role of the judiciary.

Removal of the filibuster helps conservatives not because they are more "extremist" than Republicans, but because the political check on nominating strong judges operates more forcibly on liberals. 

"The way Republicans can win those in the middle is not by abandoning their principles. To the contrary..."

"... the courage to stand on principle is what these voters respect. The way to win the center is to lead." Writes Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

Republicans need to do more than simply say no to Mr. Obama and his party's big-government agenda. They can offer Americans positive solutions for the nation's challenges—to reduce dependency, and create hope, opportunity, and upward mobility for all citizens. They need to make not just the economic case for conservative reforms but the moral case as well—showing how conservative policies and ideas will make America not only a more prosperous society but a more just and fair one as well.

When I faced the need to reform collective bargaining in the government, I wanted to win, but I wasn't afraid to lose and didn't worry about getting re-elected. That was profoundly liberating.

Too many people in politics today spend their time trying not to lose instead of trying to do the right thing....

Here's Walker's new book, "Unintimidated," which Meade and I have been reading out loud to each other... and not just because we like to think Scott and Tonette read this blog out loud to each other. The editorial corresponds to Chapter 25: "The Lessons of Wisconsin Can Be Used in the Battle for America." The first of 14 lessons is: "Change the polls, not your principles."

If you know you are doing the right thing, and the polls say voters disagree, change the polls, not your principles. President Reagan used to look at polls not to determine his positions, but to see where he needed to do more to persuade the public. That’s a sign of true leadership.

If I had listened to the polls during the fight over Act 10, I would have backed off of our plan. One poll found that if the gubernatorial election were held again, I would have lost to my opponent by seven points. My approval dropped to 37 percent. But I was so confident our reforms would work that I pressed forward into the political headwinds. And my confidence was vindicated. Our reforms did work. And voters stood with me in the recall election.

I wanted to win, but I also wasn’t afraid to lose. I cared more about getting things done than getting reelected. That liberated me to take bold actions I might never have taken if my first priority had been political survival. Too many people in politics today spend their time trying not to lose instead of trying to do the right thing. I often say that politicians need to spend more time worrying about the next generation than the next election. The irony is that politicians who spend more time worrying about the next generation than the next election often tend to win the next election because voters are starved for leadership.

Really worth reading.

"Democrats, who filibustered their own share of Republican judicial nominees before they took control of the Senate..."

"... have said that what the minority party has done is to effectively rewrite the law by requiring a 60-vote supermajority threshold for high-level presidential appointments. Once rare, filibusters of high-level nominees are now routine."

Harry Reid moves to end the filibuster for judicial nominees. [UPDATE: They did it!]

Short term: What a flood of new judges we will have! Long term: The American people will see what sort of judges Obama and the Senate majority installs, the GOP will highlight their "left-wing activism" (or whatever it might be called), the American people will respond (perhaps becoming alarmed), a Republican President will (sooner or later) be elected, he or she will feel fully empowered to pick excitingly conservative judges (the Bork kind, not the bland kind), Democrats will rail against their "right-wing activism," the American people will respond (taking sides between the conservative and liberal activist judges and the role of the judiciary in our democracy), and who knows what will happen in the next presidential election and the one after that and after that?

Think about how that long-term game will play out and answer this poll:

Long term, what will be the effect on the American political mind?
	Aversion to right-wing activism will lead to a preference for more liberal judges.
	Aversion to left-wing activism will lead to a preference for more conservative judges.
	Aversion to judicial activism will lead to a preference for blander, more restrained judges.
	Enthusiasm for exciting judges will lead to a preference for better, more interesting judges.
	Enthusiasm for exciting liberal judges will lead to a preference for more of them.
	Enthusiasm for exciting conservative judges will lead to a preference for more of them.
pollcode.com free polls

"He came in with his right hand raised and basically kept it raised the entire semester," said Alan Dershowitz about Ted Cruz.

"Every year you see two or three [Harvard Law] students who you know are natural leaders. Everybody saw that with Barack Obama . . . Everybody saw that with Elena Kagan. There are students who come in with charismatic qualities who other people follow. He was one of them."

But how much easier to be the leader at Harvard when you are voicing liberal opinions!

He... enjoyed antagonizing liberal classmates. Late nights at the Law Review were the scene of fierce debates....

“Some topic would come up and it was a free for all,” said Dean Newton, a fellow conservative on the Law Review. “All you’d have to do is say something remotely conservative and it would catch people’s hair on fire. It was fun to goad them.”

Do you have to be the sort of person who finds it "fun" to make your peers mad to emerge as a leader when you are conservative? I'm sure others had some conservative urges but kept silence because they cared about being liked.

I suspect that this is part of a deep structural problem in conservatism today — why the GOP ends up with so many characters who rub women (and sensitive men) the wrong way.

A quote from Cruz:

“There is a depressing tendency in modern political life to disparage those who disagree with you as either stupid or evil.... They’re either too dumb to know the right answer or, even worse, they’re smart enough and yet they wish suffering on others and are just downright evil.’ The truth of the matter, most people are neither.”

"Why do you think so many American Christians identify as political conservatives?"

The American Conservative asks the novelist Marilynne Robinson, who answers:

Well, what is a Christian, after all? Can we say that most of us are defined by the belief that Jesus Christ made the most gracious gift of his life and death for our redemption? Then what does he deserve from us? He said we are to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek. Granted, these are difficult teachings. But does our most gracious Lord deserve to have his name associated with concealed weapons and stand-your-ground laws, things that fly in the face of his teaching and example? Does he say anywhere that we exist primarily to drive an economy and flourish in it? He says precisely the opposite. Surely we all know this. I suspect that the association of Christianity with positions that would not survive a glance at the Gospels or the Epistles is opportunistic, and that if the actual Christians raised these questions those whose real commitments are to money and hostility and potential violence would drop the pretense and walk away.

"Back during the campaign they lied and said that Mitt Romney cut off a woman with cancer."

"Now they’re lying about the woman with cancer that they cut off. Fraudulent, indeed. But lashing out at critics won’t stop the rot."

"Rot" is a good word. Mitt Romney himself was on TV last Sunday saying: "And whether you like the model of Obamacare or not, the fact that the president sold it on a basis that was not true has undermined the foundation of his second term. I think it's rotting it away."

Meade and I have been catching up on the old TV series "Breaking Bad," and we're somewhere in Season 2. The main character has discovered dry rot in the wood floor of his house and — attempting to fix it himself — he opens up a hole in the floor and then he's down in the crawl space under the house, finding the whole foundation rotten. The oblivious wife and son live in that house that is contaminated and slowly collapsing, while dad is down there, underneath, replacing a timber here and there. At one point, he stumbles over to their breakfast table in his hazmat suit and pulls off his respirator to chomp down a little toast, and their dependence on care from their father figure is such that they never say anything like: "Uh, Dad, if you're wearing that, shouldn't we get the hell out of this house?" They just keep eating their breakfast, like this is home and Daddy will provide. 

It's funny to see the lefties in the mindset of conservatives, attempting to shore up a rotting structure, rebuilding at the same time people are forced to keep using it. This is where we are, and Daddy is fixing it. Meanwhile, the righties are the radicals, eager to rip down the whole house even if there's no new place in move-in condition.

Ted Cruz's wife Heidi is like him in "intensity — and they’re both extremely bright" but: “Nothing in her background remotely approached Ted’s Scalia-like conservatism."

A quote from one of Heidi Cruz's academic mentors in a NYT article titled "A Wife Committed to Cruz’s Ideals, but a Study in Contrasts to Him."

"They want power to cut taxes, eliminate regulations, take government down except for what they like."

That's Bill Clinton, criticizing Republicans, and — accidentally — describing what should happen in American democracy.

Take government down sounds destructive, but when you add except for what they like, the alarmism dissipates. Why shouldn't we always, in a democracy, be figuring out what we like and withdrawing our support for everything else? Otherwise, the idea would need to be that we must always retain everything that we already have, because we already have it. That seems to be a definition of conservativism.

In context, Clinton's remark is about how difficult it is for liberals who must add new things for government to do. That's hard, he's saying, when the conservatives are trying to subtract. Then the liberals have to expend effort trying to preserve all the things government has already gotten involved in, when it would be so much nicer to talk to people about the next thing government could do.

"I mean really, besides my grandparents, who are both dead, who is watching the nightly news?"

Said Glenn Beck, when challenged about his boast that The Blaze would put traditional news out of business.

I've given some thought over the years — it's one of my long-time thought experiments — to the idea of an afterlife that consisted only of being able to watch the TV news, showing what was going on back in the world of the living.

***

And here's an article about Glenn Beck's "Man in the Moon" show:

Part Tea Party rally, part Cirque du Soleil (my characterization, which Beck objected to), the show is a window into Beck’s mind — which he admits is riddled with attention-deficit disorder and a busy, buzzing energy — that is possibly more revealing than his famous chalkboard rants.

Strange!

Conservatives usually like to present themselves as appealing to the rational mind. This is not that.

Rush Limbaugh cites facts that raise the "the obvious question: How do elections happen the way they do?"

The facts:

CNN is down, the networks are down, while conservative books sell through the wazoo and end up number one on the New York Times list.

The most listened to radio talk shows are conservative.  The most watched cable news network is conservative. ... We own books; we own talk radio; we own cable news. 

His answer is:

We're nowhere in the pop culture.  We are nowhere in movies.  We're nowhere in television shows.  We are nowhere in music.  Nowhere!

On the fiction side of books, we're nowhere, in terms of what conservatism is, being cool and plot lines and that kind of thing.  We're not in the classroom, we're not in academia, we're not the professors and the presidents of universities.  We are not school superintendents.  Those are very crucial because they get people when they're young, young skulls full of mush. They get to make and form those brains and basically propagandize them and indoctrinate them however they wish.

It wasn't liberals who originated the idea that has most famously been phrased: "Give me the child for his first seven years, and I'll give you the man." That was the methodology of traditional religion. Liberals — of both the right and left — should value the autonomy of the young. They should revere it. They should perform their sacred duty to develop and guide young mind. Yet they fight for the power to indoctrinate. Shame on all of them.

The central characters in good pop culture stories tend to be free and independent, so Rush's frustration that conservatives can't get hold of the "fiction side" of things is reason for hope. Left-wingers of the big government variety should have the same problem appropriating pop culture. Even if the various stars mouth left-wing propaganda, they can't imprint that agenda in the stories, which require strongly autonomous heroes and heroines.

The conservatives' high ground on race is colorblindness, and they'd be fools to abandon it.

That's a general piece of advice I'd like to deliver, prompted by this specific headline, seen just now at Twitchy:

Slain World War II vet Delbert Belton honored at candlelight vigil [photos]

I know there are those who think there's a need to rebalance public opinion after the distortions that surrounded the George Zimmerman case, which skewed racial discourse in this country over the past year, but it's a terrible idea to go looking for incidents in where the killers are black and the victims are white and to exploit them in what seems like an effort to undo the distortions. I saw this happening earlier this week over the Christopher Lane murder, I labeled it "counter-Trayvonistic," which was a too-subtle way to say: Don't fight skewing with skewing in the opposite direction.

Conservatives have rested on the principle of colorblindness for a long time, and they've taken abuse for it. Look at how left liberals abuse Chief Justice Roberts for writing, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." They consider that kind of talk naive (at best). They push the perceived sophistication of what Justice Blackmun said back in the first affirmative action case: "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way."

Those are the 2 well-defined and socially presentable opinions in this country, and decent, sincere Americans have argued from these positions for decades. Now, we're seeing some conservatives who seem frustrated by this taking account of race that's been done on the left. They seem to think it's a good time to spotlight violence committed by black people. This is not a good idea! It's fine to mourn Shorty, but these candlelight vigils are intended to stir hearts the way hearts were stirred at the Trayvon Martin demonstrations.

Trayvon Martin — an individual human being — was used by demagogues to score points about the suffering of black people in America, but this is not a game, and it is delusion to imagine that there is a need to score points on some imagined other side. This is not a game. There is no score. And we are all on the same side.

To paraphrase the Chief Justice: The way to stop skewing public opinion based on race is to stop skewing public opinion based on race.

To stir hearts counter-Trayvonistically is to nurture feelings that white people are oppressed by black people. This alternative to colorblindness is profoundly stupid. 1. It abandons the easy to express, principled position that many people perceive as the high ground. 2. It steps into the arena of taking account of race, where the left liberals would love to take you on. And 3. It gives air to the white supremacists among us. These people have been outcasts for a long time, but they exist, perhaps not quite yet recognizing what they are.

What sparks catch fire in that candlelight vigil for Shorty?

"Countercultural in these times means conservative."

"Fred is off the central planner’s grid; the antipode of the collective, an unroped stray escaped from the herd. Milverstedt is a freelance freedom fighter battling the steady encroachment of Bloomberg’s nanny state. From this remove, the man’s two major vices are power and speed. He expresses those vices through the language of two powerful machines: semi-automatic firearms and overpowered motorcycles. Who else would email JPEGs of his tight target grouping? Or extol the virtues of his AR-15?! That, my friends, is the difference between liberals and us conservatives. We brag on our vices; the progs apologize for theirs, then legislate reparations."

Excerpt from David Blaska's post about Fred Milverstedt, one of the co-founders of the Madison alternative newspapers, Isthmus, which I used to link to more than I do these days (now that Meade never comments there anymore). Milverstedt left Isthmus long ago, and one thing he's done since then is write a book: "One More Ride: Fred and the Craft of Motorcycle Meditations."

Sample book text:

If there ever was a time on the bike when I really thought I might need a gun, it was a day when Barbi and I were out on the Shadow on a high ridge in western Wisconsin overlooking a series of lesser hills rolling away to the south. We’d stopped, parked the bike on the shoulder and got off to admire the view.

We were on State 33, not an untraveled road but a good piece from the New York Thruway. On this stretch, there was no other traffic, no other people, no houses or barns except those dotting the valleys below.

Around the curve comes a pick-up truck, slowing as it moves into sight. It stops next to us, not on the shoulder but the middle of the road. There’s two young guys inside.

Seldom one to make snap judgments, give or take now and then, I make one here.

These guys are crackers....

"Why Conservatives Say No."

"Opposition to amnesty and same-sex marriage isn't bigotry, it's a fear of unintended consequences."

"He said I'm way over the top in referring to the Obama administration as the regime. It's over the top."

"And to say that we're in the midst of a coup d'etat, that's going too far. It's just going too far, that it's unpatriotic, and it's not conservative. I'm not conservative and I'm certainly not patriotic because I'm portraying myself and all conservatives as anti-government."

So begins a Rush Limbaugh monologue, from yesterday's show. The critic he's responding to is WaPo columnist Michael Gerson (who was a Bush speechwriter). Rush says:

It's really, really bad what the IRS is doing to the Tea Party, but that's as far as Gerson's willing to go.  He doesn't want to extrapolate it might mean anything.  But to me it does.  I don't know what he thinks about it.  I think he thinks all governments engage in excesses, and some governments have individuals who go outside the boundaries and this is par for the course....

Gerson said: "It is one thing to oppose the policies of the administration; it is another to call for resistance against a 'regime' and a 'police state.'" Rush read that and said:

Who did that?  He means armed resistance. That's what he's not saying. Nobody's doing that.

Rush doesn't like the way Gerson finds more in Rush's statements than Rush has literally said. But in order to say that, Rush must find something in Gerson's statements that Gerson has not literally said. And Rush is also going on about how President Obama is responsible for things that Obama hasn't literally said:

Herbert Meyer... the former national security official of the Reagan administration... described Hitler and Nazism, and he made the claim, 'cause his column focused on people hoping there's a smoking gun linking Obama to all of these scandals.  And Herbert Meyer said there isn't gonna be a smoking gun.  There is no memo.  Obama doesn't have to write a memo of instructions or desires 'cause everybody working for him already knows what he wants.  Everybody working for him is a miniature Obama, or a full-fledged Obama.  And as an example, Herbert Meyer used Hitler and the Nazis, and he said (paraphrasing), "Despite the fact that everybody knows that Adolf Hitler ran the Holocaust, you will not find one document where Hitler issues orders for the Holocaust to be carried out.  If we needed that to prove what Hitler was, we would never be able to prove it because it doesn't exist."

Rush goes on to complain about the mild-mannered campaigns of John McCain and Mitt Romney, whom he portrays as unwilling to go after Obama, and he's afraid that's where conservatives will do once again, as Jeb Bush lumbers onto the stage. Rush wants some tough dissent from the Republicans, but he must know that you can go too far with that and sound like a raving lunatic, which is what I think Gerson meant to say. Here's Gerson (from the second link, above):

Questioning the legitimacy of our government is the poisoning of patriotism. It is offensive for the same reasons it was offensive when elements of the left, in the 1960s and 1970s, talked of the American “regime.” 

And in Wisconsin, in 2011, when our duly elected Governor, Scott Walker, was protested by hordes of people who chanted "This is what democracy looks like" as they tried to interfere with what they'd convinced themselves was an illegitimate regime. And you'd better believe they compared Walker to Hitler:

Drudge makes the old "our women are prettier" argument...

... in juxtaposed pictures:



The notion that conservative women are prettier than liberal women is a popular meme with conservatives. In case you've never noticed that and don't believe me, read "Hot or Not: Why Conservative Women Are 'Prettier' Than Liberal Ladies." Excerpt, examining the etiology:

American conservatism is profoundly tied up with the old-fashioned gender paradigm in which husbands are active providers and women are passive nurturers. In that paradigm, a woman's job—the core of her femininity—is to make herself as pretty as possible and then sit back and wait to be picked. That is a deeply conservative idea. You could argue that the conservative path is much friendlier to conventionally attractive women than it is to those with less "mainstream" looks....

And beyond that, the fact that it's something of a conservative mandate to be "pretty" encourages conservative women—no matter what physical hand they're dealt—to make signaling "pretty" a top priority....

And, on the flipside, I can imagine that liberalism actively attracts people who are shut out of that old-timey paradigm, because once you find yourself outside of it, it's easier to call bullshit on the whole thing....

Feel free to call bullshit on any of that. Here's a photograph that might help you think about it:

It "never ceases to amaze" Power Line "when 'mainstream' potentates" like GWU lawprof Jonathan Turley...

"... come to understand what conservatives have been saying loudly for thirty or forty years, but somehow pose as though they’ve discovered something new or are offering brilliant new insights."

"Crunchy Cons took a pretty hard line against suburban living..."

Rod Dreher, reconsiders suburbia. 

"Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots" is the name of a book he wrote, back in 2006. As the italics indicate, the quote above refers to what he said in his book, not what the people he labeled "crunchy" did — at least not directly.

In his new article, Dreher describes himself "someone who used to live in big cities, and who now lives in a small town [and therefore] more understanding of why someone with a family would choose to live in the suburbs." The same old reasons people move to the suburbs affected him and his family, so now he sees the point.

While I still believe there are serious objections to the way our suburbs are designed, and ways to design them to be more aesthetically pleasing and human-scaled, I appreciate very much Keith Miller’s critique, and how he urges us to think about whether we are not simply baptizing and moralizing aesthetic preferences. Don’t get me wrong: I do believe that the material order in some real sense reflects, or should reflect, the sacred order. Aesthetics are rarely completely divorced from metaphysics or morals. On a more practical level, though, I think we ought to all give more grace to each other. Not everybody who moves to the suburbs wants to build a gargantuan McMansion and live the full-consumerist lifestyle. Not everyone who chooses to live in the city is driven by morally pure motives; they could be refusing one kind of consumerist narcissism for the sake of embracing a more attractive version of same.

What aesthetic preferences have you tricked up as moral imperatives?

Ben Carson "Wears the Mask."

A mask he put on quite recently, says Ta-Nehisi Coates.

In the late 1980s and early ’90s, he may have been the most celebrated figure in the black communities of Baltimore. Carson responded to that adulation by regularly giving his time to talk to young people, who needed to know that there was so much more beyond the streets.

I was one of those young people. I don’t doubt that Carson was a conservative even then. I knew plenty of black people who loved their community and hated welfare. But white conservatives were never interested in them, and they were never as interested in Ben Carson as they are right now. When the presidency was an unbroken string of white men, there were no calls for him to run for the White House. And then he put on the mask.

The use of the word "mask" here is inflammatory, and it will bring traffic to this NYT op-ed, but I think it's a big distraction from the point Coates is trying to make.