Persuasion

What's right? And what works?

These two questions periodically bother me because their answers are so frequently different, even incompatible.

Right now, there's something dismal (and familiar) going on in the Sonia Sotomayor pre-confirmation-hearing chatter: Conservatives, united in purpose, are fighting among themselves over the second question.

Sonia Sotomayor has said some pretty astonishing things about the essence of race--I can't count the number of times I've seen this quote in recent days:

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.

It's pretty hard not to cry foul about such things, really (and before I get email about how I'm reading out of context, I even read Kos on this one). As others have said, this is a concrete example ofObama's "empathy" standard, and it reeks of partiality in a place where partiality is supposed to be unconscionable--it's why portrayals of Justice in art figure a blindfolded woman with a scale in one hand and a sword in the other.

Cue Rush Limbaugh. "Racist" is what he calls Sotomayor's approach. (I prefer the term "racialist" because it's a larger concept involving the positive as well as negative considerations of race--but that's a relatively small matter.) It's not hard to say that, but it doesn't usually carry the day when Conservatives use the term. There are reasons for this, and none of them are fair. But they're real all the same. (Rich Lowry makes that point here.)

Krauthammer argues sensibly: "Use the upcoming hearings not to deny her the seat, but to illuminate her views." Well, of course. She's going to be confirmed anyway, because Republicans don't have the votes; Republicans just need to get very energetic about making Sotomayor's jurisprudential ideas the stuff of dinner-table conversation.

Mark Krikorian adds something that Krauthammer left to the imagination: "Gingrich, Limbaugh, and Tancredo crying "racist" isn't going to help at all." Of course, Rush is offended (I got quite an earful on his show today in just the first hour), and not without cause. It's hard not to be offended when you're being told not to say what is true and evident on the grounds that it won't help.

I think the clash here is relatively minor, and I think that the Republican Party will be no more prone to the charge of racism after opposing Sotomayor than it was before. But it's going to be rough for a patch here, and the Democrats are eager to scatter the Conservatives any way they can. Obama is clearly setting a trap to consolidate already well-recognized Democratic gains in the Hispanic population. But as Michael Gerson explains,

Republicans must still enter the trap -- with open eyes and no expectation of gain -- not to defeat a nominee but to maintain a principle.
The principle is simple: A court should be a place where all are judged impartially, as individuals. The Obama/Sotomayor doctrine of empathy challenges this long-established belief. It is not a minor matter.

And I think Rush jumps to the end of the argument. Really, that's the only mistake he makes. What we've got here is a lot of conditioned thinking (constructed in part by historical events located mostly in the 1960s, but more recently by malicious political race-baiting). Conservatives have to go back to the beginning and argue the things they know so well that it bores them now. The goal, of course, is to adjust the popular stereotypes about race toward something that actually resembles the truth. For instance:

-All people are unique and have capabilities that differ as much with personality as they do with circumstance.
-The essence of economic and political freedom is the ability to alter one's circumstances by dent of creative and motivated effort (or, to state the negative side of that, by dent of destructive activity and indolence).
-The examples of creativity and rising out of adversity that we remember and love are inspirational precisely because we would like to think of ourselves as having within ourselves (our unitary selves) the power to produce something valuable. Think of a child--aged two or three--pushing aside the willing assistance of a mother or older sibling with the words "I can do it by myself!" There's pride and dignity there, and it's beautiful.

Such points are important to make over and over again. There's another level:
-It's cheating to take proxies for individuals for the sake of economy in policy or argument--it diminishes the value of the individual even as it makes statistical analysis easier.
-Pop culture occasionally provides an interesting perspective. Think about this deadly serious set of instructions from a kid's movie (The Incredibles): "Put these [masks] on. Your identity is your most valuable possession. Protect it. And if anything goes wrong, use your powers." The use of anonymity can augment personal strength by aiding, among other things, mobility. But that's the point: it should augment, not diminish, personal power. Becoming little more than a statistic in a racial or socio-economic breakdown of society is hardly the kind of anonymity that boosts individual power.

Only after covering such concepts can you ascend to 30,000 feet and look down at the state of things far below and observe thoughtfully: "Gee, that's interesting. When we go around treating whole groups of people "specially" and "differently" based on their racial classification, isn't that strangely similar to that great evil thing we worked so hard to destroy called 'racism'?"

Rush says all of these things, but he's remembered best for his broad conclusions. We have a whole society to persuade, so why don't we dwell on the steps toward the broad conclusion, even as a justice with repugnant racialist views waltzes onto the nation's highest court. There really is a lot to say, and it won't all fit into a single word.

This is how an out-of-power party starts swinging a nation toward what is good and right and true, even as the government is growing and consolidating its power at the expense of individuals.

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Delicious

Horrors! A woman-of-color eats the heart of a seal!

Jay's right--it's beautiful to see clashes of "liberal pieties". Here's his corner post, and here's his column. Reading JayNord is good for your soul...and your sanity. Besides seal meat, he's got some very timely thoughts on the Sotomayor nomination and what it means to be gracious. Read seriously, and read for fun.

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UPDATE

Nordlinger's post for today is delicious too. I especially liked this bit:

Get this, folks (although it will be hard to stomach): “Fidel Castro criticized former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney for defending American interrogation methods against terror suspects, saying in comments published Wednesday that torture should never be used to extract information.” That is the opening of this AP story. You can see Castro’s point, too: He has always tortured people, not to extract information, but for the sheer sadistic pleasure of it.

Bastard.

Yeah. What he said.

Legal Perversity

Massachusetts contemplates an epic divorce of meaning: If this bill passes, "sorry" won't mean "sorry" any more.

It's just another in a long string of evidences that our society is outrageously litigious--which is to say unwilling merely to adapt to adversity and mishap.

Doctors, surgeons, and other medical professionals will make mistakes that they could have avoided--they're human, after all. And what's more, they're no less prone to error than a police officer, accountant, politician, or taxi driver. It just so happens that the stakes are somewhat higher than for most working folks: their small errors can have big effects on people's lives (even end them), and people get desperate and vindictive when they're hurt... just like wild animals.

So much for progress in civilization, eh?
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***UPDATE***
A reader makes an important point:

I fully understand why they're doing it. A doctor is a human being...I daresay most doctors would like to express sorrow for someone's loss. But even if they did nothing wrong, if they express sorrow in the sense of "I'm sorry for your loss" they risk being sued for it.

Of course that's the reason for the bill being proposed. But wouldn't it be better if people saw a human being (rather like themselves) under the labcoat? Is there a way to discourage the view that doctors work miracles, perhaps by doctors themselves actively working against such a view? And can we not make the bringing of frivolous suits more costly (and rare)--by requiring the loser to pay all court costs (and perhaps a frivolous suit fee)? Perhaps such measures would make gramatical engineering less urgent.

Making Real Progress

Since a buddy of mine first showed me the Bugatti Veyron in a Youtube video of Top Gear, I've been an admirer of Jeremy Clarkson, whose opinion is at once delightfully expressed in the mechanical idiom and wonderfully commonsense. To wit, his column of May 17.

Clarkson makes several good points. First, a very concise criticism of greenhouse gas hysteria:

While I have yet to be convinced that man’s 3% contribution to the planet’s greenhouse gases affects the climate,...

And then an equally concise statement of the most important concern:

...I do recognise that oil is a finite resource and that as it becomes more scarce, the political ramifications could well be dire. I therefore absolutely accept the urgent need for alternative fuels.

Then Clarkson sums up some important technological history:

Since about 1917 the car industry has not had a technological revolution — unlike, say, the world of communications or film. There has never been a 3G moment at Peugeot nor a need to embrace DVD at Nissan. There has been no VHS/Betamax battle between Fiat and Renault.

Car makers, then, have had nearly a century to develop and hone the principles of suck, squeeze, bang, blow. And they have become very good at it.

And then he points out the challenge that change presents:

But now comes the need to throw away the heart of the beast, the internal combustion engine, and start again. And, critically, the first of the new cars with their new power systems must be better than the last of the old ones. Or no one will buy them. That’s a tall order.

A tall order indeed. Unlike Clarkson, however, I'm not convinced that Hydrogen holds the answer (can you imagine the explosions that would accompany high-speed collisions?), but hey, it might. In any case, I think we'd do ourselves a favor if we saw hybrid technology to be the "half-arsed halfway house for fools and madmen" that it is.

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Impressions

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is still holding out against the CIA, which has begun the process of destroying her credibility and will likely finish the job too. I'm a little surprised that Pelosi would put herself in such a perilous position. But it seems she's been taking her eye off the ball rather more than I knew. Oh, what a tangled web we weave...
Let us review a basic principle here. Bureaucracies exist for two purposes: to continue their existence and to expand their budgets. Any perceived threat will find itself targeted for neutralization. Good luck, Madam Speaker.

Niall Ferguson has a pretty common-sense piece up about the economic crisis. Here's the central argument:

The reality is that crises are more often caused by bad regulation than by deregulation.

My thoughts exactly. But I'm no expert, so nobody listens to me. So listen to him and read the whole thing.

I have occasionally reflected on the issue of "Special Interests", and it's on this topic that I found myself least inclined to take either McCain or Palin seriously back during the campaign. And the reason is that no politician will say what really needs to be said on the subject and McCain is very determined to needlessly restrict political speech (by which I mean the McCain-Feingold legislation) in order to avoid saying it. The point is that American political contests are about special interests. I have interests, you have interests, everybody has interests. We often form groups that are then known as "special interest groups" and are ipso facto "evil" in PC parlance. Which is nonsensical. If special interests are evil, then we are all evil, for it is only voluntary associations of individuals that make up the special interest groups, which are ostensibly protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution. Well, here is Daniel Henninger making the point much better than I ever could. When it comes to "earmarks," the problem is local. Stop demanding that congressmen bring home federal dollars and the earmarks will stop. Simple as that.

And here's Douthat making an interesting point: "You can have Jesus or Dan Brown. But you can’t have both." In some ways, I think this is similar to what Obama's speech to Notre Dame represents. Catholicism in America is being pulled in two directions, and Catholics are having to choose whether they will accept the authority of their bishops on matters that are at once religious, moral, and political, or whether they will make their political identity primary. Increasingly it looks like a choice between church and party, at least on the left. George Weigel has some helpful comments here. I think having to make choices like this tears people up inside--it forces them to fight an internal battle in which some of the things they believe must be rejected and others retained. How it all shakes out will not be obvious for years, even decades, I daresay.

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Just Say It

I said in a previous post that Republicans are going to have to do the best they can with what they've got for now. And if Byron York has it right, that means stating the obvious over and over and over again: healthcare reform does not equal economic recovery!

Now it doesn't seem a particularly popular thing to say, or one that 'the people' are generally worked up about, but it's true, and it ought to be thoroughly demonstrated. Every Republican within range of a microphone ought to be making the point, even if it seems amorphous and hazy to think about.

Make no mistake, it's hard to get a rhetorical handle on the proposals and arguments Obama is making. Here's York:

Republican strategists have a problem. The scale of what President Barack Obama proposes to do to the American economy is so enormous, so far-reaching and so potentially disastrous that the opposition party is having a hard time describing it.
[...]
GOP message mavens are struggling with something that academics call “insensitivity to scope.” It affects us all; we can understand something on a small scale but have a difficult time comprehending the same thing on a massive scale.

But just because it's hard doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. In fact, even though it seems difficult and perhaps ineffective, it's at least policy-focused. And if its anything Republicans need to do it's get out of their own navels and start acting like a motivated opposition party. Bill Kristol made the point rather well, I thought:

...the Obama plan can be fairly charged with endangering both [quality of and access to healthcare] and may, therefore, be far more politically vulnerable than its backers think. Even if the Democrats can ram elements of Obama's health plan through Congress this summer under the budget reconciliation process, there will still be a debate, presumably in the fall and winter, on legislation needed to complete the plan.

I know it's asking a lot, but just make the arguments and keep making them.
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Crime, Fear, and Enforcement

I've been hearing fairly frequent reports of unsatisfactory treatment of British criminal behavior. It usually takes an anecdotal form--some variation on 'perp gets kidd-gloves and victim lands in the slammer'. It's enough to raise the old eyebrow at what seems a reversal in reason and good sense, but ultimately not much to go on.

But today I read an interesting and sobering analysis of British crime in City Journal by Claire Berlinski. Besides rationalizing the apparent disjuncture of officially declining crime rates and escalating public fear, Berlinski sheds some light on the statistical difficulties involved in crime rates themselves. To take just one relevant example, consider the relationship of punishment to reporting: if a criminal justice system generally metes out lenient punishments that more often than not don't include incarceration, victims will be less inclined to report the commission of crime.

Why? Because the criminal is likely to be free to bring retribution against his accuser in very short order if he is not held in prison or otherwise deterred by sufficiently serious punishment.

Berlinski concludes with a call for what worked in New York City more than a decade ago, namely "Broken Windows" policing:

The reason Broken Windows policing works is not that it is inherently important to jail every petty thug who breaks a window; it is that the window-breakers tend to be muggers, rapists, burglars, and murderers as well. If you get them off the streets, the rate of serious crime will fall.

The whole piece is worth a careful read.

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Popularity

I've never really had a constructive relationship with Popularity--I've always given it sidelong glances, and I've occasionally treated it with undisguised contempt. Maybe that makes me maladjusted, but I prefer to tell myself that there's often a disconnect between what people like and what they need. Sometimes people need to be told how awful they are. And then sometimes they like being told exactly that (can you think of another reason why Al Gore's film was so popular?). But this doesn't mean that popularity amounts to need or vice versa.

Sometimes the winds of popularity shift dramatically. It shouldn't be surprising, but it almost always is. Leaders find themselves walking at the head of a rag tag band of hangers-on where once a large crowd had frolicked happily. When the astonishment wears off, it often leaves self-doubt.

There are a few who think it's actually quite interesting to be saying unpopular things--at least there's the consolation of knowing that one is correct, that those who need to hear what one is saying will somehow hear it... But that's really quite an odd way to go about preserving what is good in the world. Incidentally, that's exactly how Albert Jay Nock thought--and he was odd in his own ways. His ideal type is expressed in this 1936 essay: Isaiah's Job.

(As an aside, Nock's reflections on the prophet's role of speaking to the "Remnant" while being completely ignorant of who they are strikes me as remarkably similar to what blogging is in practice.)

Nock's apparent contentment with failure is insupportable, but there's a less fatalistic lesson to learn from the whims of popularity: what is needed and what is popular are sometimes the same. From a conservative point of view, that is a good way to describe the Reagan Revolution. It's not as simple as that, exactly, but it's close. Reagan and co. had to make their arguments over and over and over again, but the people to whom they spoke also had to be willing to be persuaded.

Now, I'd like to apply this to the Republican Party just now. It could produce a hundred really good candidates tomorrow, complete with a steadfast commitment to conservative principles, but it would not guarantee either popularity or victory. Goldberg says essentially the same thing today (We Need a Hero), but I think he doesn't make adequate space for the peculiar and hard-to-predict movement of a people's willingness to be persuaded.

Nevertheless, his and my takeaway is the same: sometimes it's just not your day. It doesn't mean you're wrong or that America is doomed. It means that you're going to have to wait until the fickle properties of popularity shift favorably. It doesn't mean waiting idly for an election landslide to fall in your lap, but neither does it mean an existential crisis.

So my recommendation for Conservatives is the old stiff-upper-lip. Popularity or the lack thereof is no cause for confidence in the rightness of a cause, but in a democratic republic like ours, some measure of popularity is a necessary precondition for the power to move the cause forward. Until such time as popularity swings again, just do the best you can with what you've got. And don't go running headlong after Popularity. It is a fickle beast and nearly impossible to predict. Those who follow it (rather than waiting for it) wind up looking silly.

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Specter, the Republican Party, and a Movie

When he switched parties, Arlen Specter said two things worthy of note. First, he claimed to be a 'Reagan Republican' of the good old 'big tent' days. Second, he claimed that the Republican Party has been moving to the right.

Now if anybody is an expert on what it meant to be a Reagan Republican, it's Reagan. And he set Specter down as faithless after he sided with Democrats in judicial nominee battles, including his vote against Judge Bork. So much for point number one--Specter is still an opportunist who will do anything to win his next election.
Peggy Noonan says that Specter shows us something important nonetheless: which side is winning. Well, yes, I suppose. That's no earth-shattering profundity--clearly the Democratic Party is worthy of description as 'ascendant'. But I doubt he has much to offer in the way of lessons for the Republicans. Jonah Goldberg says as much today: Specter's switch means almost nothing important when compared to the things Jack Kemp (may he rest in peace) believed and said during his political career.

Then there's that specious claim about the Republican Party moving to the right. It's made often enough alright, but it just isn't true. If the Republican Party has done any moving at all, it has been to the left. It hasn't gone far to the left, thankfully, but even its slow motion is apparent to those of us who are not moving leftward. It has to do with vantage point, really: if you're running as hard as you can leftwards and you look over your shoulder and see the Republican Party diminishing into the horizon, it's understandable that you might think it was running toward the right--but only if you're also denying your own leftward movement. Jay Nordlinger has a few thoughts on the subject today too--I'm especially grateful for his concise list of particulars since they reflect my own:

Bush and the Republicans spent massively, especially in Bush’s first term. We opposed that, mightily. The president’s most cherished initiative, probably, was the Faith-Based Initiative. We opposed that. Then there was his education policy: No Child Left Behind. We opposed that (mainly on grounds that it wrongly expanded the federal role). He had his new federal entitlement: a prescription-drug benefit. We of course opposed that. He imposed steel tariffs—for a season—which we opposed. He signed the McCain-Feingold law on campaign finance—which we opposed. He established a new cabinet department, the Department of Homeland Security. We opposed that. He defended race preferences in the University of Michigan Law School case; we were staunchly on the other side. He of course proposed a sweeping new immigration law, which included what amounted to amnesty. We were four-square against that.

I am talking about some things that were very dear to Bush’s heart, and central to his efforts—and self-image, as a leader. NR, the conservative arbiter, opposed those things. The Republican party, by and large, supported them—with one glaring exception: the immigration push.

Just so. I find myself saying that a lot with respect to what Nordlinger writes.

I'd like to flesh out this business of running left while insisting vociferously that you're standing still. I'm not trying to say that Democrats or lefties are delusional or even lying with malice aforethought, it's just that I object to their redefinition of things to suit themselves.
Let me start by mentioning "inertial frames." You can calculate the parabolic arc of a tossed baseball inside a moving train car as if the car were standing still (provided, of course, that the car's vector is constant). By defining the movement of the car as an inertial frame, we can simply ignore it while we calculate the baseball's motion. But to complete the mathematical description of the baseball's motion we ultimately have to account for the train's progress toward Union Station in Washington, DC. So an inertial frame is just a way of breaking down a complex problem into manageable pieces, not a denial of reality.
Politically, however, there is an inertial frame encapsulated by the word "progress". Lefties generally treat progress as if it were the natural state of things and that its movement is to be treated as constant. And when the Republican party (which, as I said, has been moving left--i.e. in a "progressive" direction) doesn't move fast enough, it's "moving right." Well, yes, I suppose. But that's in a relative (rather than objective) sense. But once we account for the inertial frame in the equation, we see the Democratic Party racing left and the Republican Party jogging left.
I'd like to see a little saunter to the right, by which I mean a shift of personal responsibility back toward the individual, the beginnings of an objective reduction in the number and scope of government responsibilities, and a decreased willingness to attempt social engineering.

A couple nights ago, I watched the movie, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex. It's a film about the Red Army Faction (RAF) in West Germany and its rather lengthy campaign of terrorism--bombings, arsons, assassinations, kidnappings, etc. during the late 1960s and through the 1970s. In it the chief of the Federal Police, Horst Herold, argues that any response to the RAF terrorists must account for their motivations, not just their actions. His explanation of their motive? A myth.
For those of us conservatives who marvel at the unflagging insistence that our friends and neighbors on the left bring to their goals of changing the world, it is instructive to remember the power of myth: it can motivate people to political action, and it can motivate them to commit monstrous crimes (fortunately this latter effect has been relatively rare and is certainly not a necessary characteristic of those who believe the myths). It is worth pointing out, I think, that a myth is not necessarily something that is not or cannot be true, though it is certainly an expression of yearning, as C.S. Lewis observed in his essay "Myth Became Fact." To yearn is to be human, so concluding (as Eric Hoffer did in his deep little book, The True Believer) that we must cease to have expectations for the future is to deprive ourselves of a part of our humanity. The point I'm trying to make is simply that we need to be honest and humble about our expectations and yearnings.
We can begin by understanding that while change is inevitable, real progress is not the necessary result of much-sought-after change. This is where conservatives come in: we understand instinctively that making genuine improvements and achieving real progress is not easy, that there are more ways to go wrong than there are to go right, and that the best intentions can result in disastrous outcomes. We think that civilizations are inherently fragile. Moreover, they are the product of small, carefully chosen changes that accumulate over time. These little things, complete with mistakes, false starts, and clear successes, comprise something larger, and more comprehensive than any myth or ideology: all these little things taken together are tradition.

And I daresay the action of tradition is progressive--really progressive. As Margaret Thatcher said, "the facts of life are conservative."

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Obama: Pragmatic Ideologue

This is my late 100-days analysis. I don't even really want to do it. There are a lot of things people are saying about his honeymoon, and I don't care to repeat all the stuff about the stimulus or his temperament or the various shenanigans surrounding his nominations to executive posts.

But there is one thing I'd like to register here, and that's my consistent dissatisfaction with the disjuncture between what Obama says and what he does. I was unhappy about this during the campaign, I was unhappy about it when he was elected, and I'm unhappy about it now. Why am I carping now? Well, it's clearly demonstrable, that's all.

Obama loves to tell us that he is not a wild-eyed ideologue: no, he's a pragmatist. Whatever is best for the situation, that's what he's for.

Question: does 'what works best' ever look like something that a modern liberal ideologue would not do? For a pragmatist, the answer is an obvious and immediate "yes".

Obama talks pragmatism, but what he does is consistently ideological. Who, in the name of helping the economy, gives a workers' union a controlling stake in an auto company (Chrysler) but an ideologue who believes that workers ought to own rather than work for their company? Who but an ideologue says that torture is never appropriate? And who but an ideologue looks for empathy for the poor and disadvantaged as a major qualification for the Federal bench (a Supreme Court seat just opened up)?

Who would do these things? A moralist, yes. An ideologue, certainly. But a pragmatist? Heavens no.

For all his cool brainyness, I really can't forgive Obama this one. Not only is he producing ruinous policy, but he's impoverishing language. No intellectual worthy of the name should be caught doing that. Intellectuals don't play shell-games with word meanings; Obama does it in sonorous tones and with a cool temperament...

He's pragmatic about how he gains power and builds his popularity, and ideological about what he does with those assets. I find that chilling.

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