Categories
Politics The Opinionsphere Videos War on Drugs

Our Nation’s Drug Enforcement in a Nutshell


Megan McArdle goes all “righteous fury” in response to the above video:

Have you ever had one of those arguments in a bar that start around eleven and wind up when the bartender kicks you out?  It starts off on some perfectly reasonable topic, but as the hours and the drinks mount up, the participants are forced to stake out some clear logical positions, and in doing so, crawl farther and farther out along the limb they are defending . . . until suddenly you reach a point at which one of the debaters can either abandon their initial commitment, or endorse the slaughter of 30,000 Guatemalan orphans.  And there’s this long pause, and then he says, “Look, it’s not like I want to kill those orphans . . . ”

This is our nation’s drug enforcement in a nutshell.  We started out by banning the things.  And people kept taking them.  So we made the punishments more draconian.  But people kept selling them.  So we pushed the markets deep into black market territory, and got the predictable violence . . . and then we upped our game, turning drug squads into quasi-paramilitary raiders.  Somewhere along the way, we got so focused on enforcing the law that we lost sight of the purpose of the law, which is to make life in America better.

Categories
Barack Obama Law Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

How the Supreme Court Nomination Process Rewards the Type of People Who Defer to Presidential Authority

[digg-reddit-me]David Brooks did a great job today of describing the type of individual our current Supreme Court confirmation process tends to reward (to paraphrase):

A person whose career has dovetailed with the incentives presented by the confirmation system, a system that punishes creativity and rewards caginess, and who therefore we are forced to construct arguments based on speculation because they have been too careful to let their actual positions leak out.

Brooks locates this type of individual — as is his wont (see for eg. bobos) — in a general sociological group:

About a decade ago, one began to notice a profusion of Organization Kids at elite college campuses. These were bright students who had been formed by the meritocratic system placed in front of them. They had great grades, perfect teacher recommendations, broad extracurricular interests, admirable self-confidence and winning personalities.

If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers. They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged. As one admissions director told me at the time, they were prudential rather than poetic.

Brooks sees this as a flaw in his evaluation of Elena Kagan:

Kagan has apparently wanted to be a judge or justice since adolescence (she posed in judicial robes for her high school yearbook). There was a brief period, in her early 20s, when she expressed opinions on legal and political matters. But that seems to have ended pretty quickly…

But I was struck by the similarity of David Brooks’s evaluation of Elena Kagan now and Dahlia Lithwick’s evaluation of John Roberts when he was nominated:

I knew guys like [John Roberts] in college and at law school; we all knew guys like him. These were the guys who were certain, by age 19, that they couldn’t smoke pot, or date trampy girls, or throw up off the top of the school clock tower because it would impair their confirmation chances. They would have done all these things, but for the possibility of being carved out of the history books for it…

My sense that Roberts has been preparing for next month’s confirmation hearings his whole life was shored up by a glance at the new memos released by the Library of Congress yesterday. As early as 1985, Roberts was fretting about how federal government records disclosed to Congress before confirmation hearings could tank a nomination.

Roberts was widely seen to have been very “careful” and “cautious” throughout his life — intellectually and otherwise. Yet David Brooks had a different reaction to Roberts nomination:

Roberts nomination, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

Less important than this minor bit of hypocrisy (which Bill Scher for the Huffington Post mines for all it’s worth) — or perhaps partisan blindness — on the part of David Brooks (and haven’t we all been there?) — is the substance of his critique. Brooks never quite connects the dots — but seems on the verge of making a profound point.

There seems to be a connection between the personality type of Kagan and Roberts — the type of cautious, establishment-minded personality rewarded by our current nomination process — and the tendency of this type of person to defer to the highest authority figure in the American psyche, the President of the United States. In Roberts and Alito, we have 2 of Brooks’s Organization Kids who also happen to be 2 of the most pro-presidentialist Supreme Court justices in history. Though Kagan’s views on this aren’t clear — as she has made some comments indicating an expansive view of executive power only in the context of discussing the views of others — we do know that she felt the Bush administration went too far, unlike Roberts and Alito.

Though I would have preferred a justice more wary of executive power, for me personally, this concern is not enough to give me reason to oppose Kagan’s nomination and appointment. I do want to know more about Kagan’s views on this — to see whether and to what degree she conforms to Glenn Greenwald’s fears (which are, as it should go without saying regarding Greenwald, hyperbolic). Lawrence Lessig has pushed back convincingly against Greenwald on this issue — and of course, Greenwald responded by going ad hominem.

Both Greenwald’s and Brook’s critique ignores the structural element to this pick as neither addresses the degree to which our current confirmation process tends to reward cautious people whose public views are somewhat ambiguous but who are close enough to those in the executive branch that the President nominating them trusts them. The type of person who would meet these criteria would not tend to be the strongest supporters of the Court as a check on executive power. Even aside from the generational category of “Organization Kids,” this would tend to place people deferential to presidential authority into the Supreme Court.

—–

Also interesting: Ezra Klein posits a better analogue than John Roberts to understand the Kagan pick is Barack Obama himself:

When Obama announced Kagan’s nomination, he praised “her temperament, her openness to a broad array of viewpoints; her habit, to borrow a phrase from Justice Stevens, ‘of understanding before disagreeing’; her fair-mindedness and skill as a consensus-builder.” This sentence echoes countless assessments of Obama himself.

Obama is cool. He makes a show of processing the other side’s viewpoint. He’s more interested in the fruits of consensus than the clarification of conflict. In fact, just as Kagan is praised for giving conservative scholars a hearing at Harvard’s Law School, Obama was praised for giving conservative scholars a hearing on the Harvard Law Review. “The things that frustrate people about Obama will frustrate people about Kagan,” says one prominent Democrat who’s worked with both of them.

[Image by the Harvard Law Review licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Afghanistan National Security The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

A Sustainable Afghanistan Policy

[digg-reddit-me]Matt Yglesias makes the essential point regarding our Afghanistan policy, illustrating it with this chart:

Whatever this may or may not be creating, it’s not a sustainable and legitimate government.

There simply is no exit plan.

Yet this isn’t tarred with the same politics as the bailout of Wall Street or Greece because the populist right responds first and foremost to invocations of war and patriotism — and only secondarily to the invocation of moochers. And so the pressure to create a sustainable structure and stop the incessant bailout isn’t there. Instead, the populist right is pressuring Obama to stay until….we win…What we might win is never quite explained.

Categories
Criticism Deficit Domestic issues Fiscal Crisis Politics The Opinionsphere

Rooting for a Fiscal Catastrophe (cont.)

[digg-reddit-me]Jonathan Chait is damn near poetic in his frustration at the dogmatic refusal of the right wing or the Republican Party to address the coming fiscal crisis:

[T]he conservative movement’s quasi-religious fidelity to tax cuts made it unable to advance even its own ideological self-interest.

The upcoming fiscal summit is a good example. The basic shape of the deal is that, in order to bring revenues into line with spending, Democrats will accept some spending cuts and Republicans will accept some tax hikes. By reducing spending, this will decrease the size of government. I can see why liberals would object — they’re being asked to sacrifice the liberal goal of a more expansive government in order to achieve the non-ideological goal of preventing a fiscal meltdown. Conservatives ought to be ecstatic — they could achieve both an ideological goal (reducing the size of government by reducing spending) and a non-ideological goal (preventing the fiscal meltdown.) Tax hikes are not really a concession, since deficit spending that would occur without such a deal merely represents deferred taxation.

The conservative reaction has been to refuse to engage the premise altogether.

My only disagreement would be that it is not a liberal goal to create a more expansive government. Liberals do not want government for government’s sake. They are not in favor of adopting a state religion; they don’t want government intervening in people’s sex lives; they don’t want government enforcing christianist values; rather, liberals tend to see government as a necessary tool to address certain problems. Chait otherwise acknowledges this. But it ruins the nice construction he has created — because liberals actually could achieve one of their main goals through this deficit commission: They make government more sustainable, responsible, and effective.

The right wing has adopted a view that the government is the opposite of all these things — that it is not and cannot be sustainable, responsible, or effective; therefore to justify and prove their belief is true, they now oppose any attempts to make government sustainable, responsible, or effective. They are not Cassandras shouting about a coming catastrophe they claim to be; rather Republicans are rooting for a fiscal catastrophe and trying to do whatever they can to ensure this catastrophe occurs, in the hope that it will wipe out the programs they hate but lack the popular support or cojones to actually cut themselves.

[Image by NASA.]

Categories
The Web and Technology

Brief Thoughts for the Week of 2010-05-07

  • A map to demonstrate the toll that the militarization of the Drug War has taken. http://bit.ly/92Mwtq #
  • Must-Reads of the Week. http://2parse.com//?p=5127 #
  • Why Can't Right-Wingers Recognize Democratic Efforts to Tackle the Deficit? http://2parse.com//?p=5125 #
  • SWAT team v. dogs. No video this time. Just an old news story. http://bit.ly/cwLOzf #
  • By giving pros & cons, we risk people joining debate; then we lose control of a process that ONLY WE FULLY UNDERSTAND. http://bit.ly/cq2NxZ #
  • Why Terrorists Aim For Big Well-Defended Targets. http://2parse.com//?p=5122 #
  • Canadian beavers have built the world's longest dam — so big it can be seen from space! http://bit.ly/bdrKdH #
  • Republican admits: Most right-wing Congresspeople don't want to win a majority in 2010 b/c governing is too hard. http://bit.ly/ciBb5O #
  • Continuing Atlas Shrugged — I'm beginning to doubt Ayn Rand was a human being. #
  • Smoking pot ="child endangerment." Storming home w/guns, killing pets as child looks on = necessary police procedures. http://bit.ly/dzAy5z #
  • They objected to hr-long radio play w/56m of elf's manifesto & 3m for love scene b/t Santa & cold, practical Mrs Claus. http://bit.ly/c6JqGl #
  • The childhood traumas that lead to libertarianism. http://bit.ly/azZcfG #
  • My isolation index is +16, meaning that, on bell curve of all readers, my news diet is 16 % points to the RIGHT. http://bit.ly/aISIEv #
  • Some rather good advice we should all take. (If we don't already.) http://bit.ly/b6QCdR #
  • @maggiesnotebook Kindly allow a grace period for trying to make political hay out of attempted terrorism. What you're doing is ghoulish. #
  • Illegal immigration is the Prohibition debate of our day. http://bit.ly/dgtjI9 #

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Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Economics Financial Crisis Foreign Policy Israel Politics The Bush Legacy The Media The Opinionsphere

Must-Reads of the Week: The Obama 20-somethings, Graham’s Cojones, Fannie/Freddie, Naive Conspiracy Theorists, Saban, Obama=Socialism, Political Imitations, Underdogs, Lost!, and Julián Castro

This is a busy season for me — but there should be some more substantive blog posts next week…

1. The Obama 20-somethings. Ashley Parker for the New York Times Magazine profiles “all the Obama 20-somethings” in an interesting profile of the new crowd in D.C. of smart, highly educated, highly motivated, civic-minded, young Obama staffers.

2. Lindsey Graham’s Cojones. You gotta hand it to Lindsey Graham — if nothing else, he’s got guts — from Dana Milbank of the Washington Post:

The lone pro-gun lawmaker to engage in the fight was the fearless Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who rolled his eyes and shook his head when Lieberman got the NYPD’s Kelly to agree that the purchase of a gun could suggest that a terrorist “is about to go operational.”

“I’m not so sure this is the right solution,” Graham said, concerned that those on the terrorist watch list might be denied their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

“If society decides that these people are too dangerous to get on an airplane with other people, then it’s probably appropriate to look very hard before you let them buy a gun,” countered Bloomberg.

“But we’re talking about a constitutional right here,” Graham went on. He then changed the subject, pretending the discussion was about a general ban on handguns. “The NRA — ” he began, then rephrased. “Some people believe banning handguns is the right answer to the gun violence problem. I’m not in that camp.”

Graham felt the need to assure the witnesses that he isn’t soft on terrorism: “I am all into national security. . . . Please understand that I feel differently not because I care less about terrorism.”

Jonathan Chait comments:

There’s a pretty hilarious double standard here about the rights of gun owners. Remember, Graham is one of the people who wants the government to be able to take anybody it believes has committed an act of terrorism, citizen or otherwise, and whisk them away to a military detention facility where they’ll have no rights whatsoever. No potential worries for government overreach or bureaucratic error there. But if you’re on the terrorist watch list, your right to own a gun remains inviolate, lest some innocent gun owner be trapped in a hellish star chamber world in which his fun purchase is slowed by legal delays.

3. Why Isn’t Fannie/Freddie Part of FinReg? Ezra Klein explains why regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac isn’t in the financial regulation bill.

4. Naive Conspiracy Theorists. William Saletan contributes to the whole epistemic closure debate with a guide on how not to be closed-minded politically, including this bit of advice:

Sanchez goes through a list of bogus or overhyped stories that have consumed Fox and the right-wing blogosphere: ACORN, Climategate, Obama’s supposed Muslim allegiance, and whether Bill Ayers wrote Obama’s memoir. Conservatives trapped in this feedback loop, he notes, become “far too willing to entertain all sorts of outlandish new ideas—provided they come from the universe of trusted sources.” When you think you’re being suspicious, you’re at your most gullible.

5. Saban. Connie Bruck in the New Yorker profiles Haim Saban, best known for bringing the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers to the United States — but who made much of his fortune licensing the rights to cartoon music internationally. As a side hobby, he tries to influence American foreign policy towards Israel. He doesn’t come off very well in the piece, but at least this one observation seems trenchant to me at first glance:

Saban pointed out that, in the late nineties, President Clinton had pushed Netanyahu very hard, but behind closed doors. “Bill Clinton somehow managed to be revered and adored by both the Palestinians and the Israelis,” he said. “Obama has managed to be looked at suspiciously by both. It’s not too late to fix that.”

6. The Obama=Socialism Canard. Jonathan Chait rather definitively deflates Jonah Goldberg’s faux-intellectual, Obama=socialism smear:

For almost all Republicans, the point of labeling Obama socialist is not to signal that he’s continuing the philosophical tradition of Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter and Clinton. The point is to signal the opposite: that Obama embodies a philosophy radically out of character with American history. Republicans have labeled Obama’s agenda as “socialism” because the term is widely conflated with Marxism, even though Goldberg concedes they are different things, and because “liberalism” is no longer a sufficiently scary term. Republicans endlessly called Bill Clinton a liberal, Al Gore a liberal — the term has lost some of its punch. So Obama must be something categorically different and vastly more frightening.

Goldberg is defending the tactic by arguing, in essence, that liberalism is a form of socialism, and Obama is a liberal, therefore he can be accurately called a socialist. But his esoteric exercise, intentionally or not, serves little function other than to dress up a smear in respectable intellectual attire. [my emphasis]

7. Imitating the Imitators of the Imitation. This Politico piece by Mike Allen and Kenneth P. Vogel explains how some elite Republicans are trying to set up a right wing equivalent of the left wing attempt to imitate the right wing’s media-think tank-political infrastructure:

Two organizers of the Republican groups even made pilgrimages earlier this year to pick the brain of John Podesta, the former Clinton White House chief of staff who, in 2003, founded the Center for American Progress and was a major proponent of Democrats developing the kind of infrastructure pioneered by Republicans.

And of course, that right wing infrastructure was meant to imitate the left wing policy-media infrastructure of the left — the Brookings-New York Times axis. The whole imitation of imitation of imitation of imitation — spawning more and more organizations — reminds me a bit of those old Mad magazine comic strips:

8. The Underdog. Daniel Engber in Slate explores the underdog effect and various scientific studies of the underdog effect, including how it affects expectations:

The mere act of labeling one side as an underdog made the students think they were more likely to win.

9. Lost! Ed Martin in the Huffington Post is concerned with how the tv show Lost will end:

Not to put too much pressure on Lindelof and Cuse, but the future of broadcast television will to some extent be influenced by what you give us over these next few weeks.

10. Julián Castro. Zev Chafets of the New York Times Magazine profiles Julián Castro, mayor of San Antonio, Texas, and one of the up-and-coming Democrats. The article entirely elided his policy ideas or and barely mentioned his political temperament — but was interesting nevertheless.

[Image by me.]

Categories
Economics Politics The Opinionsphere

Why Can’t Right-Wingers Recognize Democratic Efforts to Tackle the Deficit?

Ezra Klein defined epistemic closure as:

the conditions necessary for a political movement to fool itself into believing whatever’s convenient.

Which makes mine and Jonathan Bernstein‘s continued frustration at the blissful ignorance of the GOP towards Democratic deficit reduction measures quixotic:

Remember the mantra from Brad DeLong that I’m fond of quoting, but which I’ll paraphrase this time: in the short run, what matters is getting the economy moving.  In the middle term, PAYGO to keep things under control.  And in the long run, health care (see also this similar analysis from Ezra Klein).  Well…that sounds like the direction that the Democrats have followed for the last year, no?  Certainly, there are questions about whether they’ve doing the correct things. But it’s just wrong for deficit hawks to completely ignore an enacted plan to take a significant whack at the deficit in the second decade…

At some point though, reason must begin to seep through? Right?

Perhaps not. Opposition to the Democratic plans to reduce the deficit seem universal on the right.

The worst — either through deliberate or authentic ignorance — rail against the unprecedented deficits of Obama which are expanding government! And then easily conflate that with the out-of-control growth of entitlement spending (though they generally refuse to even acknowledge that the driving force behind the out-of-control spending growth is mandated entitlement spending, instead focusing on the ever-amorphous, “waste” — which is spending money on not-them). These people regard the cost-control measures in the health care bill — and the claims that it will reduce the deficit — as pure lies — or perhaps gimmicky accounting in which the plan taxes for 10 years and only provides benefits for 6. (In fact, the plan provides roughly the same amount of benefits as it raises in taxes/cuts each year it is in effect.)

Other more reasonable right wingers have adopted 1 of 2 alternative approaches:

(1) Acknowledging the health care plan reduces costs, but stating that these cost-cutting measures cannot happen and won’t. Given this argument, it’s hard to see why anyone should try to cut costs at all — and this leaves America apparently doomed to never reduce spending, even if it is mandated by law.

(2) Believing that Obama should be using his political capital to push for drastic cuts in spending and large tax increases to head this crisis off — and that by using some of the “low-hanging-fruit” that could easily generate revenue and reduce spending in a revenue-neutral way, Obama is making the solution harder. Donald Marron made this critique in his recent piece. However, this arguments seems mainly ignorant of political realities and doesn’t acknowledge the attempt to bend the cost-curve that health care reform represents.

The point is: Even the most reasonable commentators on the right do not acknowledge that the Democrats have a plan to tackle the deficit. For the most part, they pretend it doesn’t exist.

Why is this? Because challenging this orthodoxy gets you banished from right-wing circles and accepting the Democrats do have a plan means that Republicans need to come up with an alternative — which would undoubtedly be much less popular.

Categories
National Security Politics The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Why Terrorists Aim For Big Well-Defended Targets

Megan McArdle asks why terrorists don’t ignore high-profile targets and instead engage in lower-level terror campaigns that would be impossible to defend against — a question I’ve heard asked often:

The best answer I’ve heard is that they don’t because it doesn’t actually serve their ends.  Their purpose is only partly to instill public terror in Americans.  They also need to raise money, and recruit more terrorists.  Those people don’t want to hear that you really scared the hell out of Plano, Texas.  They want to hear that you bombed Times Square.  Their target market, in other words, is not just Americans; it’s the folks at home.

And this is also true of domestic terrorism.  You could sow a lot of fear in federal employees by randomly kidnapping them and killing them, one at a time, then leaving a note explaining what you’d done.  It’s not like the federal government could afford 24-hour surveillance on every postal worker and passport clerk in the land.

But that’s not part of the self-image that these sorts of psychopaths cultivate.  They’re trying to touch off a revolution, not scare the bejeesus out of the portfolio managers at the FHA.  And to start a revolution, you need a bona fide act of war.

Thank God for small favors.  If all they really cared about was terrorising us, we’d be terrified, because they’d be mounting the kind of undetectable, untraceable attacks that can kill hundreds, a few at a time.  Instead, they’re still trying to top 9/11 and Oklahoma City.

[Image by MCSimon licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Uncategorized

The rare off-day

Today will be the rare off-day for 2parse.

But check out the excellent blogs of Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and Jonathan Chait in the meantime.

Categories
Barack Obama Conservativism Criticism Liberalism Political Philosophy Politics The Opinionsphere

Connecting the Dots on Epistemic Closure

The epistemic closure debate has been raging around the internets these past few weeks — and it has generated some extremely sharp commentary among liberals who pay attention to conservatives and conservatives who have been drummed out of the “conservative movement.” Slate now even offers to test your web browser history to see how epistemically closed you are. Here’s some of the more insightful comments I’ve found:

Ezra Klein:

“Epistemic closure,” Julian Sanchez writes, is the toxic result of “confirmation bias plus a sufficiently large array of multimedia conservative outlets to constitute a complete media counterculture, plus an overbroad ideological justification for treating mainstream output as intrinsically suspect.” It is, in other words, the conditions necessary for a political movement to fool itself into believing whatever’s convenient. And, Sanchez says, it’s one of the serious problems facing the conservative movement right now.

Jonathan Bernstein:

[T]he real test of whether conservative (and Republican) decision-makers really believe the nonsense rhetoric that they often use will be Sarah Palin, 2012.  For there can be no question but that a lot of Republican pols act as if they are fully captured by what Andrew Spung calls the “screamosphere” — thus the endless repetition of factually incorrect assertions, such as the “10/6”  and “16K” claims about health care reform.  But of course pols of all stripes — not to mention propogandists such as those on talk radio — have never been known for being especially careful about facts.

Bruce Bartlett:

After about half an hour I decided to start asking people what they thought of the article. Every single one gave me the same identical answer: I don’t read the New York Times. Moreover, the answers were all delivered in a tone that suggested I was either stupid for asking or that I thought they were stupid for thinking they read the Times.

I suppose this shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. After all, the people I was questioning weren’t activists from the heartland, but people who worked on Capitol Hill, at federal agencies, in think tanks and so on. They represented the intelligentsia of the conservative movement. Even if they felt they had no need for the information content of the nation’s best newspaper, one would have thought they would at least need to know what their enemies were thinking.

Matt Yglesias:

Just as conservative legislative politics isn’t really about free markets conservative judicial politics isn’t really about restraint. The rhetoric is just rhetoric, and the reality is that conservative politics is about conservatism—about entrenching the power and influence of the dominant economic and sociocultural groups.

Jonathan Chait:

Michael Brendan Dougherty writes:

[T]he Tea Party is nothing more than a Republican-managed tantrum. Send the conservative activists into the streets to vent their anger. Let Obama feel the brunt of it. And if the GOP shows a modicum of contrition, the runaways will come home. …

The Tea Party movement creates the conditions in which the activist base of the GOP can feel like it is part of the game again. They can forget Bush-era betrayals, swallow their doubts, and vote Republican this November. The next Reagan is coming, the next Contract With America will work, the next Republican nominee will be one of us. All it takes is for someone to appreciate the anger—and it doesn’t matter that she supported the bailouts that enraged them or the candidate who forsook their ideas and support.

Former GOP staffer Scott Gallupo comments, “I don’t deny the Tea Partyers’ sincerity. But anyone who doesn’t see the reality of the Dougherty scenario is simply being painfully naive.” [my emphasis]

Jonathan Bernstein:

The accusation isn’t that conservatives all reach the same conclusions about everything, nor is it that conservatives are excessively politically correct, nor is it that conservatives demand strict adherence to a set of ideas if one is to remain a conservative in good standing.  It’s rather about information, and what counts as evidence about the real world.  Sanchez’s point is that if one only gets information from a narrow set of sources that feed back into each other but do not engage beyond themselves, that one will have a closed mind (not his phrase, by the way) regardless of what one does with that information.

Ross Douthat:

It’s precisely because American conservatism represents a motley assortment of political tendencies united primarily by their opposition to liberalism that conservatives are often too quick to put their (legitimate, important and worth-debating) differences aside in the quest to slay the liberal dragon. After all, slaying liberalism is why they got together in the first place! And it’s precisely this motley, inconsistent quality, too, that encourages activists and pundits alike to stick to their single issue or issues and defer to the movement consensus on everything else. So pro-lifers handle abortion, Grover Norquist handles taxes, the neoconservatives handle foreign policy and the Competitive Enterprise Institute handles environmental regulations and nobody stops to consider if the whole constellation of policy ideas still makes sense, or matches up the electorate’s concerns, or suits the challenges of the moment. This unity-in-opposition was a great strength for the right for a long, long time, but it’s made conservatism much more brittle and less adaptable than it needs to be right now.

Daniel Larison:

The dispiriting part of all this is that hating liberals more than loving liberty is hardly a new phenomenon. Unfortunately, it has defined a large part of postwar conservative politics all along. As Prof. Lukacs wrote in his “The Problem of American Conservatism” 26 years ago: “Many American conservatives, alas, gave ample evidence that they were just conservative enough to hate liberals but not enough to love liberty.” What we have seen over the last ten years is a tendency to make loathing for liberals the thing that truly matters, and usually liberty becomes important to most conservatives only when it is useful to berate liberals. To the extent that liberals have defended constitutional liberties against anti-terrorist government intrusions, it is the latter that most conservatives have embraced. It is not just that loathing for liberals exceeds love of liberty, which might be true for members of all kinds of ideological movements, but that love of liberty becomes almost entirely contingent on whether or not it can be marshaled in opposition to liberals.

Barack Obama:

If you’re someone who only reads the editorial page of The New York Times, try glancing at the page of The Wall Street Journal once in awhile. If you’re a fan of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, try reading a few columns on the Huffington Post website. It may make your blood boil; your mind may not often be changed. But the practice of listening to opposing views is essential for effective citizenship. So too is the practice of engaging in different experiences with different kinds of people.