This morning’s Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece by Mary Ann Glendon about the Catholic bishops’ defense of religious liberty. They have “filed 12 lawsuits on behalf of a diverse group of 43 Catholic entities that are challenging the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) sterilization, abortifacient and birth-control insurance mandate.”
We all have a right to be outraged by the overreach of that mandate. Surely, any American even the non-religious, see an obligation to stand with the Catholics to defend our liberties of conscience. We might argue about her statement, “The main goal of the mandate is not, as HHS claimed, to protect women’s health. It is rather a move to conscript religious organizations into a political agenda, forcing them to facilitate and fund services that violate their beliefs, within their own institutions.” I am not sure that is right, but would be happy to argue about it. As far as I can tell, Kathleen Sebelius, et. al., think that any religion or stand based on conscience that they do not agree with is not one worth having. A right to conscience in favor of abortion has standing, but if your conscience finds abortion a moral horror, you have no right to conscience about that. That’s why the argument is framed in terms of “women’s right to health”.
I would like to look at that last idea for a moment. How does health become a right? We will have to wrest that right to health from Nature, which is clearly unfair in how it bestows that right. This woman has perfect health and that woman does not. As both age, they find their right to health eroding; maladies from arthritis to cancer attack them and medicine merely offers a holding action against death. What does a national health care system do about that, which a private health care system does not? Health is not a politically defensible right.
Conscience is a political right. I might abandon my conscience, but what, aside from my government, can force me to abandon my conscientious stand? Nature might challenge me; do I believe that an unborn infant has a right to life if that life puts the mother’s life at risk? Fortunately, the hard questions do not arise often. How do I protect my conscience from the challenges of the state? As Glendon says, “At the deepest level, we are witnessing an attack on the institutions of civil society that are essential to limited government and are important buffers between the citizen and the all-powerful state.”
Therefore, if we wish to retain religion and the right to express it among our rights of conscience, we have to stand with the Catholics in this very political fight. The fight will not merely be in the courts. The next election will have an effect on this fundamental argument. I hope this becomes a major campaign issue; it speaks so clearly about the political choices before us.
I’m less sure than Carl that the revelation of seemingly false claims of Native American heritage by both Warren and her employer and Warren’s plagiarizing of “traditional” Cherokee recipes from the New York Times are fatal to her candidacy. The Warren phony Native American story is huge in the Massachusetts center-right media. It is all over the Boston Herald, and the most popular local conservative talk show is wall-to-wall on Warren’s silly and feeble defenses of her conduct. If you are inclined to consume right-leaning media, you could marinate in this stuff. But what does it look like to the swing-voters who don’t pay an enormous amount of attention to politics, don’t patronize the explicitly conservative media, and don’t strongly affiliate with either party?
The conservative media has pushed the nonconservative media to cover the issue. And it took some real pushing. Scott Brown felt that he had to comment on the matter. You’ll notice that Obama didn’t feel any need to comment on the Romney high school “bullying” story from last week to get the media to cover it. The local television channels have covered it some. The influential Boston Globe first tried to defend Warren, but then backed off (though if all you know about the Warren flap is what you read in the Globe, you don’t know much.) Our notional swing-voters will have some idea that Warren falsely claimed Native American heritage and might or might not have gained some professional benefit from the claim. They will also know that this wasn’t just some “news” story. It was a story uncovered and pushed by Warren’s political enemies. Our swing-voters will also hear other things about Warren. The will know about the scourge of Wall Street stuff. The phony Native American story will be part – but only part -of the Warren picture. That is probably as it should be.
But what would have happened if Warren had been a Senate candidate identified with the Tea Party rather than Occupy Wall Street? The local nonconservative media would have picked up on it a lot faster. The national Sunday talk shows would have booked chin stroking sessions where panelists wondered whether Tea Party Warren was a liar, a lunatic, a racist or some combination. There would have been feature stories with aggrieved Americans of genuine Cherokee background explaining how much they were hurt. The Tea Party Warren story would have crossed over into pop culture with SNL skits and jokes from the late night comedians. If Warren had been a Tea Party-affiliated candidate, the phony Native American stuff wouldn’t have been something swing-voters knew about her. If Warren had been Michelle Bachmann, the phony Native American stuff would be the first fifteen things swing-voters heard about her and nothing else they heard would matter. It is the difference between being wounded and being incinerated.
I’m only sort of complaining. The asymmetry between conservative and liberal media power is something that the center-right can overcome, but it does change how things play out. Warren has been hurt by this. Scott Brown has a better chance of being reelected because Warren was some combination of careless and dishonest. But I don’t think she is finished. I hope Carl is right and I’m wrong.
The other day, John Hinderaker, on the Powerline blog, wrote in “George Zimmerman, Not Guilty” about the mounting evidence apparently exonerating Mr. Zimmerman. I wrote a comment that generated a positive response. I am still trying to figure out what Postmodernism is and so wonder what the postmodern response to the Trayvon Martin/ George Zimmerman case is. Are we allowed to choose our own victim, as in decide for ourselves who the true victim is in the case?
I wrote this:
Is Mr. Zimmerman ever going to be able to live a normal, unprotected life? Even if he is found innocent in a court of law, the prejudice against him, by the kind of people who are beating white folks on the street in the name of justice for Trayvon argues that some members of the public are not going to be mollified or convinced and his life is forfeit. He was declared guilty by the press. It was on TV. It has been a Tweet-fest for weeks. “Everyone knows” and a 12 person jury who finds Zimmerman innocent will also be individually at risk. Mob justice is terrifying. We have always had mobs, but seeing what modern media can do with a mob is horrifying.
I could be wrong. I despaired of Chen Guangcheng ever leaving China and here he is, in the good old U.S.A..
Let’s start off soberly, even on a note of august regret. One of the things Thomas Jefferson and John Adams agreed upon was that the primary point of republican popular suffrage was to elect a natural aristocracy. The same hope and intention gets expressed, albeit in a more guardedly specified manner, in a number of Federalist Papers. Fine men, those founders, as was Alexis de Tocqueville, who unfortunately could not but reveal that by the 1830s, the American hope of natural aristocracy emerging out of democratic suffrage had been utterly dashed. Most democratically-elected representatives and office-holders were mediocre men at best, downright scoundrels at worst. Nor was the latter type rare. The only apparent exception to this rule, the U.S. Senate, actually proved it, as its members were elected indirectly, by the state legislatures.
Yes, the silver lining was that democratic suffrage also encouraged the scoundrel-types to check one another’s penchants for outright villainy, but still, one would have wanted to hope, with Jefferson, Adams, Publius, and maybe Aristotle also, for better than this.
And Tocqueville may have actually been too pessimistic. In our day, we have some pretty solid political science, found especially in a Joseph Bessette essay ( here and here),that indicates that while “serious legislators” might at times be outnumbered by those who largely pander, posture, and pork-barrel, they are the ones who more often than not wind up in the leading roles in framing and passing legislation. A serious legislator does not exactly a natural aristocrat make, but it’s a relief to know that Tocqueville’s report doesn’t entirely apply.
Bessette’s argument, of course, is that this outcome is due to the founders intentionally mixing the democratic aspect of our system with features that drive it in a more deliberative direction. That means that in terms of what raw democratic suffrage gives you, Tocqueville’s report remains correct. And the actual operation of competing for this suffrage, i.e., the modern campaign, has very little about it that is august, naturally aristocratic, or even deliberative. Democracy in the raw is often ugly, low-down. You know this. I don’t have to pull out the Robert Penn Warren or Shakespeare’s Coriolanus to convince you.
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But I must say, this season I am loving one of the lowest-down aspects of democratic elections, let us call it the Pillory Possibility, wherein campaign dynamics sometimes uncover the dishonest means whereby a person has, for her whole life, obtained their success and respectability.
You know those moments that occur in many of Plato’s dialogues, where Socrates has already bested his opponent with respect to the main argument, but proceeds to take us through five more pages of “cross-examination,” bringing out each and every preposterous implication and contradiction that was present in his interlocutor’s position, dialectically dragging him back and forth over the coals until completely made a fool of?
Something like that is now happening to Elizabeth Warren, not at the hands of any Socrates, but by a pack of bloggers and journalists. The subject is not a philosophical one, but the fraudulent character of her life. Having stumbled upon her gaming of academia’s diversity incentives in hiring by claiming to be a (er…1/32nd part) Native American, the democratic pack is now uncovering one fraud after another: a) the genealogical claim cannot be squared with the legally-binding Cherokee definition of what constitutes Cherokee background, b) that claim is itself false, causing ripples of concern in genealogical circles about the New England Historic Genealogical Society’s integrity, c) her scholarship is sub-standard, as it received scathing peer-reviews and often crudely served partisan talking points (although it has emerged that her teaching was probably pretty good, and appreciated by both liberal and conservative students), d) her various university employers did use her box-check as evidence of diversity, and e) Harvard’s decision to hire her appears, all denials aside, quite likely related her box-check (Harvard should be ashamed of itself, and should apply some institutional discipline to those who made that hiring decision, but of course it won’t).
And whether or not Harvard takes any action against her, she was done the very moment her box-check became public. Anyone, whether for or against affirmative action in academia, knows that it is an abuse of it to claim Indian status the way she did, an abuse even if she really had been 1/32nd-part Native American. It would be one thing if such a 1/32nd-part Indian had regularly been involved in tribal matters, or Indian scholarship—that would present a kind of moral quandary case. But to check the box when you had no daily-life connection to the Cherokees? Everyone knows that’s wrong. Universities get to claim they’re hiring Native Americans when they’re basically not. But Warren wasn’t about to pass by any remotely claim-able advantage.
And then to learn she did this without even adequately checking her ancestry? That she was responsible for presenting false information to our ongoing effort to at least accurately enumerate diversity or the lack thereof in our institutions? In my book, this is the lesser and more forgivable sin, assuming it wasn’t an outright effort of deception—it’s plausible that she was misled by “family lore.” Of course, her present efforts to defend her claim may involve outright deception, especially if it emerges that her camp put pressure upon the genealogist Chris Child to stonewall questions about the 1/32nd claim. But in any case, given the oiliness of her making the claim even if true, the additional revelation that it wasn’t dooms her election chances.
But the glorious thing has been, Elizabeth Warren doesn’t know she’s done! She keeps at it. And so yesterday, we learned that she very likely plagiarized several recipes for one Pow Wow Chow Cookbook!
[hilarious laughter ensues, several minutes worth]
Oh, YES! More, Elizabeth, MORE! Enough of reading our Tocquevile and being sadly sobered up.
If anyone remembers this sorry woman’s name fifty years from now, it will be as a trivia answer: name the politician who lost a Senate race due to plagiarizing a recipe. She’s lived a life of cutting ethical corners, risen to success after success, but with a comedy-gold contemptibility that just cried out to the heavens for exposure. It was just too damn funny for the rest of us not to know! Whether we owe such priceless entertainment more to the Good Lord’s sense of humor, or to the false god Democracy, we must be grateful.
For we don’t get aristocrats, and we are forced to put up with plenty of scoundrels, but we at least get this from time to time.
I live in Chardon, Ohio. On February 27, a local boy shot seven other kids, killing three and disabling one. You might all know about it because the news media descended on our town in a swarm and projected us everywhere. The whole community was affected, first by the shooting of those kids and what that violence meant to residents here. That can be summed in a couple of phrases: “If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere.” and “I knew ____. Who did you know?” We’ve only been a city since the last census, but you could only note the difference in some improved traffic signage directing you out of town and the transformation of the local water treatment plant, which one ever sees. Chardon feels like a small town.
A second effect, in that first week, was a secondary horror, a worry that the town actually could be changed in a serious way. One man actually said it to me, “We have to be concerned that Chardon will lose its soul.” We were talking about the news media and the kids and adults who pushed themselves in front of the cameras. Ambition? A yearning for five minutes of fame? Fortunately for us, few of the people who could have claimed the cameras for career-making purposes ever did so. We had elected people to public office who had the character to worry more about how to keep good public order, about the people affected by our tragedy, and about preserving the “soul” of our town, than about self-aggrandizement and self-promotion.
What I am writing here is really a response to John Presnall’s post, about voting in Texas. Clearly, he made me think about big questions as they relate to small places.
In Texas we have partisan elections for all state designated positions. This year a lot of constables, sheriffs, and judges—judges on the district and appellate level—were open for election. Of course, state House and Senate, Congressional House and Senate, and the Presidency were all on the ballot too.
But who can honestly keep up with all this stuff?
I think we must. We have to. We have no choice but to “keep up” or our communities lose their souls (assuming a community can have a soul). At the end of his essay, Mr. Presnall says,
That said, if you vote in the Texas Republican primary you can vote in the typical terms of national rhetoric for this or that self-proclaimed conservative Republican—they all say they are conservative and who am I to doubt? Principles matter, but they all say the same thing. Whether it is sheriff or judge or state legislator, I suppose I vote like most others do, i.e., in terms of personal connections. My dad was a friend with that guy, that woman is married to my doctor, I taught Government to that girl’s father, etc., etc. Let’s hope he or she who is personally upstanding also knows stuff, and knows it well. This is, of course, typical of “face-to-face” local politics in America.
And, of course, as our communities grow and thrive, “face-to-face” politics becomes more difficult. People often do not know who they are voting for. That might not be such a new phenomenon; didn’t Martin Van Buren say that was a benefit of party politics, that a party gave candidates identity (I paraphrase). But Mr. Presnall is right; there is not enough identity in party politic, especially in primary elections. In our community, we depend on yard signs to tell one another whose face we actually know or trust. Yes, we can vote early here, but when we do we have nothing to go on but who we know personally. The full communication of the yard sign populism has not had effect.
We have to find out who is running for office and what they are all about. That means keeping track of what is written in the local papers, and even attending community meetings. It means asking your neighbors and friends about local politics. “Who do you know?” It is much easier to know national politicians, you just watch the news in your living room. The president is always in your living room. He’s like part of the family and either you are happy to see him or you cannot wait for him to leave. Unlike with family, when you are tired of a presence by TV in your living room, you can turn him off. That’s a benefit. How do you get to know about the guy running for local judge? Oddly, this is much harder.
But it is important. John’s right, if we vote on the basis of principle, we still don’t know what those principles mean to the person. The person might be wrapped up in the principles or the principles might be wrapped up in the person. It’s what is inside that counts, and it takes time to find out such a thing. There more petty, but larger implications, too. If we vote in a bad Republican, then all Republicans are tainted. A bad local politician of any stated principles can damage a community.
It pays to know the characters who run for office in your community. Character counts if something big happens. Who can keep up with all of the people running for local offices? I am not sure, but I know we have to do so, somehow.
One of the reasons Chardon feels like a small town is that the residents wish it to. We pursue community. Most people are involved somewhere, even if it is only through their children, in school and things like Little League. I know — there’s Tocqueville, again. He would be amused in the local coffee shops, especially the one right between the city and county offices on the square. A community can only have a soul if individuals are willing to share a little of their own souls to make a community. There is individual benefit. You get to live in a nicer place.
Early voting started a couple of days ago in Texas, and it sure makes it easy to vote for a primary election dated for May 29. Given that I will be in Rome visiting relatives on that date, it is nice to know that I can still vote early in Texas. Should I say, “Only in America?”
Not to be too proud, but I voted in the Republican primary. Ten years ago—and surely 20 years ago—I would have voted in the Democratic primary, in that all the local elections were decided in the Democratic primary. Things have changed on the Gulf Coast of Texas.
I was disappointed that Santorum bailed from his presidential bid—and it looks as if Paul has bailed too—before the Texas (let alone Pennsylvania) primary. As recent as 2008, the Texas Democratic primary mattered when it was between Hillary and Barack. But back then, the primary was held in mid-March. It is in late May because of the dispute over the redrawing of newly added Congressional districts.
In the 2008 primary the nation learned about the “Texas Two-Step” that the parties have established between counting popular votes and counting delegates to the state party convention at local precinct meetings. For all of its populism, Texas demands committed populism, i.e., if you really care, you need to go to the precinct meeting. I’m sure the local Paulistas will make the most of this.
Texas also has an open primary, so who knows who voted for which candidate in which party back in 2008. There was no such luck this time on the Republican or Democratic side.
No doubt, all the presidential names were on the ballot. I saw Michele Bachmann’s name, and I was tempted to pull the lever in her direction just to spoil the ballot, but one vote doesn’t count, even in a spoiled ballot, and especially in a losing cause.
In Texas we have partisan elections for all state designated positions. This year a lot of constables, sheriffs, and judges—judges on the district and appellate level—were open for election. Of course, state House and Senate, Congressional House and Senate, and the Presidency were all on the ballot too.
But who can honestly keep up with all this stuff? In Texas, the appellate judges generally have no challengers in the primary election, but on the district level there were several candidates. District courts deal with important criminal (felony) and important civil (high property value) cases—but who can really vote on this in an informed manner? It asks too much.
Texas comes under criticism for its popular election of judges—from the local JP to the Court of Criminal Appeals and Supreme Court. An independent judiciary, it seems, is best kept under wraps by elective office for limited terms. This political populism is good locally, and it makes one appreciate the idea of federalism vis a vis the supreme law of the land. Not to be in favor of centralization, but I wonder about the sound judgment of elected judges as much as I wonder about the US Supreme Court in its appointment for good behavior. This raises questions about the appropriate role of auxiliary precautions such as separation of powers on the partly federal–partly national general level, and popular self government on the state and local level.
For good or ill, it seems that state and local government have lost their vitality and importance in terms of small “r” republicanism. State and local government have become as administrative as anything else.
That said, if you vote in the Texas Republican primary you can vote in the typical terms of national rhetoric for this or that self-proclaimed conservative Republican—they all say they are conservative and who am I to doubt? Principles matter, but they all say the same thing. Whether it is sheriff or judge or state legislator, I suppose I vote like most others do, i.e., in terms of personal connections. My dad was a friend with that guy, that woman is married to my doctor, I taught Government to that girl’s father, etc., etc. Let’s hope he or she who is personally upstanding also knows stuff, and knows it well. This is, of course, typical of “face-to-face” local politics in America.
So anyway, I voted today.
Kate’s wonderful maiden post was broad and deep and offered no easy answers. So I’ll take a shallow and narrowly political look at one aspect of her post. Kate writes of the New York Times, “the main worry of people quoted in the article. Older America will not accept (and pay for?) a younger America that looks different.” Keeping in mind that our older age cohorts are likely to be more white and our younger cohorts are likely to be les white, this is how I see the policies on offer from the left and right:
1. For better or worse, there seems to be a broad consensus that the benefits of the currently retired and the soon-to-be retired should not be touched.
2. Conservatives (in the form of Paul Ryan) and liberals (in the form of Obama) seem to have reached a rough consensus on the need to restrain Medicare spending and on the amount that should be spent. Both agree that Medicare spending should grow by GDP + 1%. They disagree on how spending cuts to Medicare should be structured.
3. Conservatives (in the form of Romney – and not just Romney) seem to be more open to the idea of raising the Social Security retirement age and reducing the rate of benefit increases for life time high earning retirees. Take a look at Obama’s life of Julia. Julia retires (sometime in the mid-2070s as far as I can tell) at 67 and she gets the full Social Security benefit even though the slide suggests that Julia was a life time high earner (otherwise she wouldn’t have any reason to fear reduced benefits under a Romney plan.) As a Romney plan was phased in (presumably sometime in the later 2020s), the medium-term effect would be to reduce transfers from the less white working-aged to the more white elderly. A Romney-style plan would especially reduce transfers from the (more nonwhite) working-aged to affluent retirees. Presumably the savings from these changes could either be used to pay for other government priorities (education, infrastructure) or to minimize the tax burden on working-aged parents who are trying to raise their children. The Obama plan would tax Julia’s age cohort to fund the retirements of those members of older, whiter age cohorts that need the money least.
4. The two major parties have major disagreements on the level of federal discretionary spending, but intergenerationally, this is largely a wash. Some federal discretionary spending goes to projects that are of use to the old, the young and everyone in between (like the military and transportation networks.) Some discretionary transfer programs (like Medicaid) spend much of their money on the elderly. There are transfers to families headed by working-aged adults and there is education, but those programs can only be funded primarily by taxes paid by families with working-aged adults. They are the ones making the money. To a very large extent, the discretionary budget is a matter of determining how much to tax families headed by working-aged adults to spend on programs that will benefit families headed by (sometimes the very same) working-aged adults, and then figuring out how to structure that spending. This isn’t about old whites not wanting to spend on young nonwhites. This is about how much (and how exactly) the working-aged of all races want to spend on each other. That’s not the story the left-of-center will want to tell. The New York Times story slyly implied that any cuts to discretionary spending would be the result of older whites not wanting to spend on nonwhites. Racial categories and alleged racial motivations can be bent in the direction of the preferred narrative. Is George Zimmerman part of the rising young nonwhite America, or is he the “white Hispanic” racist recipient of white privilege? It depends on when you ask the New York Times.
5. When it comes to taxing and spending on the working-aged, conservative and liberal proposals differ in two major ways. First, conservative proposals would take less from the relatively nonwhite working-aged and gives less to relatively white elderly. And Republican proposals would especially give less to the affluent retired. Republican proposals would also take less from the working-aged in the form of taxes while also spending less on them (and no doubt spending differently in some ways.) My sense is that Paul Ryan’s latest budget spends somewhat too little on discretionary domestic spending, but it also doesn’t contain a Social Security reform which would free up some spending for other priorities.
6. So since Obama-style center-left proposals would (compared to Republican proposals) tend to transfer more from working-aged nonwhites to retired whites, what does that tell us about how the politics of these issues will develop. I’ll tell you. It almost certainly tells you nothing. No political salience at all. Conservatives have neither the infrastructure nor the vocabulary to communicate with younger voters who haven’t already been socialized into the dominant conservative narrative. They hardly ever hear from conservatives, and when they do, conservatives sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher. Younger cohorts won’t hear that they are being taxed to fund the retirements of the affluent elderly. They will hear about how the Democrats are the party of free contraception and cheap college loans and that mean Republicans who only care about rich old white people are trying to take all the good free stuff away from nonwhite young people. But those same young people will also rightly complain about the high taxes, high insurance premiums, high tuitions, large student loan debts, and sluggish economy. If only someone had some ideas for what to do about those problems.
That is, when considering foreign policy on the big threats, Islamism now, communism then. The policy of the former president, while hotly criticized in the campaign, is basically retained by his successor. So Troy Senik of Ricochet says was Bush’s own prescient view, which has become Walter Russell Mead’s also.
