Party of 1

Attentive regular visitors to this site will notice that the overnight press reviews have been removed from the right sidebar. I am discontinuing the feature for the time being. This will enable me to enjoy more regular sleeping hours, and to devote more time to conventional blog posts.

As I mentioned in a recent post, visitors to the site will have noticed that blog posts have been less frequent, going back to late last month. I have felt compelled to pull back from my more frequent posting, at least for a few weeks. The performance of the site in terms of visitors and advertising clicks has not been proportionate to the effort I have been putting into it. Therefore, for a few weeks I will be blogging less frequently, perhaps once or twice a week. In the meantime, the site will be revamped, and I am contracting for a public-relations service that should help to bring it to the attention of more readers. Furthermore, I will be relocating operations, which will disrupt the operation of the site when the time comes.

I expect, then, to be pulling back on the frequency of blog posts for a period of 90 to 120 days. I may be able to post a couple of features and/or interviews during that time. Otherwise, there will be a reduction in posting activity on the site, but I will not be leaving it completely dormant, as I had to do from late 2008 until almost a year later.

Expect to see a revamped site with frequent daily blogging sometime in June or July. Until then, watch this space for more news….

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The size of the deficit in the most recent budget has the public spooked, and pressure is building for some sort of deficit-reduction plan, which has prompted President Obama to create a commission for this purpose, headed by Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles. The commission was created by executive order; Congressional Republicans refused to support a congressional commission, deeming it a scheme to get bipartisan support for tax increases.

Deficits and their reduction are a preoccupation of the affluent rather than those less well-off, which explains why we hear so much about the issue in a system dominated by affluent voters. Dr. Jamie Galbraith (son of John Kenneth), a faculty member at the LBJ School at the University of Texas, has a different take on the matter in the current issue of the Nation. Highlights:

“To cut current deficits without first rebuilding the economic engine of the private credit system is a sure path to stagnation, to a double-dip recession–even to a second Great Depression. To focus obsessively on cutting future deficits is also a path that will obstruct, not assist, what we need to do to re-establish strong growth and high employment….

“For ordinary people, public budget deficits, despite their bad reputation, are much better than private loans. Deficits put money in private pockets. Private households get more cash. They own that cash free and clear, and they can spend it as they like…. And this, in the simplest terms, explains the deficit phobia of Wall Street, the corporate media and the right-wing economists. Bankers don’t like budget deficits because they compete with bank loans as a source of growth. When a bank makes a loan, cash balances in private hands also go up. But now the cash is not owned free and clear. There is a contractual obligation to pay interest and to repay principal. If the enterprise defaults, there may be an asset left over–a house or factory or company–that will then become the property of the bank. It’s easy to see why bankers love private credit but hate public deficits.

“It’s true that government can spend imprudently. Too much spending, net of taxes, may lead to inflation, often via currency depreciation–though with the world in recession, that’s not an immediate risk. Wasteful spending–on unnecessary military adventures, say–burns real resources. But no government can ever be forced to default on debts in a currency it controls…. Nor is public debt a burden on future generations. It does not have to be repaid, and in practice it will never be repaid. Personal debts are generally settled during the lifetime of the debtor or at death, because one person cannot easily encumber another. But public debt does not ever have to be repaid. Governments do not die–except in war or revolution, and when that happens, their debts are generally moot anyway.

“If we could revive private lending, should we do it? Well, yes, up to a point there is good reason to have a robust private lending sector…. But right now, we don’t have functional big banks…. You don’t have to like budget deficits to realize that we must have them, on whatever scale necessary to restore growth and jobs. And we will need them not just now but for a long while, until we’ve shaped a strategic program for investment, energy and the environment, financed in part by a reformed, restored and disciplined financial sector.”

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Without doubt, everyone is getting weary from the drawn-out battle over health-care reform legislation, which by all appearances will be resolved one way or the other sometime this month or next. Here are just a couple of links to pieces that provide important talking points down the stretch.

I am far from a policy “wonk,” preferring instead to focus on broader questions of political justification. Ezra Klein, for his part, is about as adept a “wonk” as you will find, and on his Washington Post blog (going back almost a week now) you will find his take on the critique of the economics of the Democrats’ legislation offered by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), which has gotten so much attention. The takeaway: “To sum up, then, Ryan makes some good points about the true cost of the bill and realities of the federal budget. But he purposefully omits any mention of the bill’s expected savings, disingenuously attaches the price tag of a broken Republican policy onto the health-care reform bill, and selectively stops extrapolating trends when they don’t fit his points. It’s a presentation designed to make the bill look less fiscally responsible than it really is.”

Klein and Ryan have conducted some interesting exchanges in Klein’s WaPo-sponsored blog. Click here and here, for instance.

Also worth a look is a piece from last week by Jonathan Chiat, available on the New Republic site. It’s a valuable piece because of the fashion in which it summarizes the issues at hand so concisely. Highlights:

“Health insurance, if you think about it, is a redistribution scheme. It transfers money from the winners (people who don’t need much medical care) to the losers (people who do)…. The problem with this system is that, while you can’t be certain who will win and who will lose in the medical lottery of life, you can make some educated guesses. The health insurance industry is good at making those guesses, and getting better all the time…. Left to their own devices, millions of Americans could not afford to buy health insurance, because their expected medical costs are too high–they’re the losers of the medical lottery–or their incomes are too low. Obviously, many Americans are left to their own devices, with horrifying results.”

“Republicans have long championed Health Savings Accounts, which give individuals who buy insurance a tax deduction for money they set aside for a high-deductible plan. Since tax deductions are worth more to people in higher tax brackets, and since high-deductible plans appeal more to those with lower medical expenses, the plans attract the rich and healthy, leaving the poor and sick behind…. Republicans boast that the CBO says their plan would reduce insurance premiums. This is true. The CBO predicted this would happen because the GOP plan would reduce premiums for healthy people, bringing more of them into the insurance pool, and raise premiums for sicker people, driving more of them out.”

“Liberals have reacted with astonishment to conservative accusations of socialism against Obama, whose plan relies mostly on private insurance and closely resembles proposals put forward by Senate Republicans in 1993 and Mitt Romney in 2005. It is, however, socialistic in the broad sense of spreading the risk of medical misfortune. This is a goal that Republicans increasingly abhor.”

Back during the presidential campaign, Joe the Plumber was up in arms over plans for “redistribution of wealth,” and the “tea-partiers” now are at the ready, with pitchforks and torches as it were, to the same end. The problem is that if you pursue “American exceptionalism” to its logical end, and prohibit any and all measures that smack of so-called “socialism,” you will end up with a medical system that does not treat the sick….

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More journals of opinion have come in over the electronic transom, and three of them feature cover stories on climate change — a sign, I suppose, that this issue is not going away, health care, unemployment and recession notwithstanding. For what it may be worth, both National Review and the Weekly Standard feature caricatures of Al Gore on their covers.

The Nation, for its part, features a cover story by Johann Hari of the London Independent on corporate funding and influence upon big environmental organizations, most notably the Sierra Club, Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy. “The green groups defend their behavior by saying they are improving the behavior of the corporations. But … the pressure often flows the other way: the addiction to corporate cash has changed the green groups at their core.” Of the three groups upon which he concentrates, Hari finds the Sierra Club to be the least corrupt. But even they are, in his judgment, too constrained by their estimate of what legislation can be passed through a  compromised U.S. Senate.

As an alternative, Hari favors British-style “direct action,” which he argues has helped to block airport expansion and the construction of new coal-fired power plants in that country. Maybe so, but I wonder if any such campaign is capable of a transformation of the fossil-fuel-based economy at the “macro” level. The problem is that this issue invites skepticism — and the more stridency and direct action you engage in, the more skepticism you provoke.

The reason for this is reflected in this week’s “Beat the Devil” column in the Nation by Alexander Cockburn, who has become notorious as perhaps the most prominent climate-change skeptic on the left. Cockburn’s taking-off point was not climate change, but instead a February 28 column by Frank Rich on the tea-party movement and the crashing of a private plane into an Austin, Texas office building by an individual who harbored antigovernment sentiments. Cockburn found that the Rich column to reeked of an upper-middle-class stench, a class prejudice against the “petite bourgeoisie” represented by Joe Stack, perpetrator of the Austin incident. “The lower middle class is what we’re focusing on here, the people who own auto repair shops, bakeries, bicycle shops, plant stores, dry cleaners, fish stores and all the other small businesses across America…. Today’s left no longer believes in revolutionary change but despises the petite bourgeoisie out of inherited political disposition and class outlook. Ninety-five percent of all the firms in America hire fewer than ten people. There’s your petite bourgeoisie for you: not frightening, not terrifying and in fact quite indispensable.”

That sort of thinking apparently is what drives Cockburn’s reaction to the climate issue. “And the petit bourgeois are legitimately pissed off…. They’re three or four payrolls away from the edge of the cliff, and when they read about trillions in handouts for bankers, trillions in impending deficits, blueprints for green energy regs that will put them out of business, what they hear is the ocean surge pounding away at the bottom of that same cliff.” Cockburn objects to the atmospherics of a left movement dominated by “eggheads,” and, up to a point, I suppose his point is well taken. Such people are sure to dominate any “direct action” movement on climate change, and their foibles have been well-documented, along with their propensity to drive away individuals of lesser income and educational attainment. I just wonder whether this obviates further discussion of the climate issue on the merits. I suppose Cockburn’s larger point is that people like Johann Hari and James Hansen will not be able to get everything they want on climate — because a progressive movement dominated by upper-middle-class professionals is overextended on that issue and umpteen others. Its base is far short of the broad middle-class support  needed for political success in a competitive system, especially one with the characteristics of the United States.

Looking at the right-of-center journals, it looks like there is some good reporting in the National Review cover story by staff reporter Stephen Spruiell, on Al Gore’s conflicts of interest. As far as I know, an environmental activist like Johann Hari would be happy to concede the point, as far as it goes. Gore is involved with venture-capital fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which has investments in such “green-tech” firms as ethanol manufacturers Mascoma Corporation and Amyris Biotechnologies. There may be some place for biofuels, but it has been reported widely that Brazilian sugarcane and switchgrass would be a more economical source of ethanol than American corn. Ethanol is subsidized to the extent that it is, largely because the quadrennial American presidential campaigns begin in Iowa.

Less impressive in my judgment is the cover story by Steven Hayward in the latest issue of the Weekly Standard, which doesn’t appear to contain much new — just a summary of the points made in the public-relations campaign ongoing in right-of-center media for the past 90 to 120 days, ever since the “Climategate” revelations. There is, however, one sentence in the Hayward article to which I would like to call attention: “Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Guardian that climate skeptics are akin to tobacco scientists—some of the same people, in fact, though he gave no names and offered no facts to establish such a claim.”

No names? I wonder whether he saw the piece in the December Foreign Policy by Annie Lowery, to which I have linked frequently. Lowery discussed briefly the case of the late physicist Frederick Seitz, who just before his death wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal impugning climate researchers associated with the IPCC. Lowery: “Other scientists discredited Seitz by revealing he was on the payroll of tobacco companies while arguing against the carcinogenic effects of second-hand smoke.”

Climate-skeptical polemicists want to belittle the parallel between tobacco and climate, although I don’t know how it could be much clearer: In both cases, a PR campaign was waged with corporate funding, by individuals who by all appearances were at best indifferent to the facts at hand. Hayward calls it an “ad hominem argument” and a “sign of desperation” — which at least affords an opportunity for a brief discussion of the concept of ad hominem or “argument against the man.” You can learn in an undergraduate course in logic that an ad hominem argument is not necessarily invalid. It can, of course, amount to nothing but the swinging of a rhetorical brickbat — but it can also represent a legitimate appeal to a consideration of the character, temperament and motivations of the opponent. The most revealing thing about argument can be the character of the individuals to which it appeals….

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Here’s the “Party of 1″ joke of the day: If you count yourself as a diehard American conservative and defender of “American exceptionalism,” try climbing to the top of an American skyscraper and jumping out the window — and see if you can make yourself an exception to the law of gravity.

That might seem harsh, but I offer it up with reference to the lead article in the March 8 issue of National Review, which came over the electronic transom a few days ago. The piece by Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru is entitled “An Exceptional Debate” — and those familiar with the concept of “American exceptionalism” can anticipate the argument.  The two worthies are concerned to demonstrate that Barack Obama is a threat to this vaunted “exceptionalism.” More broadly, the polemical pressure is in the direction of the view that fealty to “American exceptionalism” absolutely prohibits any social-democratic measures. “Lowry and Ponnuru aim for comprehensiveness, and they maintain a measured, thoughtful tone throughout their essay, marshalling a wide range of historical evidence for their thesis and making well-timed concessions to contrary arguments,” concedes Damon Linker of the University of Pennsylvania in a reply on the New Republic website (I note that Linker formerly was associated with Richard John Neuhaus’s publication, First Things). Readers can try the above links  and peruse both articles for themselves. For the moment, I am going to concern myself in the main with Linker’s reply.

Despite his generous concessions, Linker finds the Lowry/Ponnuru essay to be “either a string of American banalities and clichés—or an abstract of the Republican Party platform.” That’s the point, of course — to equate “Americanism” with one party’s line — and, under current conditions, I suppose you have to hew to the line or else individuals of conservative inclination will come after you with torches and pitchforks, as it were. I wonder what the future holds for political competitiveness in such a country, where the very essence of the country is equated with one side of the partisan divide. You might as well declare a dictatorship for the sake of enforcing unlimited corporate prerogative — not so different from what they have now in Singapore or even in China.

As Linker notes, the invocation of “American exceptionalism” is supposed to serve as an inoculation against any “foreign” or — for heaven’s sake — European infection. With that in mind, it’s most interesting to peruse a “Review & Outlook” feature from last week, from National Review’s fellow travelers, the Wall Street Journal editorial board. It seems that Russian politicians Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin were disappointed in their country’s performance at the recent Winter Olympics. I understand that, in the meantime, several Russian sports bureaucrats have stepped down. The editorial board notes: “This thought runs against centuries of Russian tradition, but why not try to measure Russia’s greatness by its ability to build a free and prosperous country, a good global citizen at peace with its neighbors?” Well, no one should take exception to that, as far as it goes. The board further notes: “The four leading medals winners in Vancouver are free-market democracies.”

Actually, it was five leading medals winners by the time the Games were over: Germany, Canada, Norway and Austria in addition to the United States. I would simply note that for the purposes of this commentary, it suited the editorial board to christen the three European winter-sports powers, not to mention Canada, as “free-market democracies.” But if you pointed out that the other four have more extensive social-democratic measures than the United States, it would suit the purposes of polemicists of this ilk to portray them as quasi-totalitarian. Linder: “Jane Addams, Herbert Croly, New Deal economist Stuart Chase—all of them, and many more, failed to understand and appreciate America’s exceptional character and sought to replace it with ‘the best innovations of the modern dictatorial movements taking over in Europe’ during the 1920s and ‘30s. That’s America for you: Members of the modern conservative movement squared off against the European-inspired liberal fascists, forever searching in desperation for ‘a foreign template to graft onto America.’ If only the latter could be convinced not to hate—let alone to like or love—their country. But alas….”

All those countries are, of course,  “free-market democracies.” They are marked far more by their commonalities with this country than by their differences. All are part of a larger North Atlantic civilization which had its beginnings in Britain and Europe — of which this country basically is an offshoot, and from which all the components of “American exceptionalism” come. As Linker notes, such countries are described as “sclerotic welfare states” in contemporary polemic — but all of them exhibited plenty of innovation and dynamism. That, of course, can be inhibited by social-democratic programs — but these polities arrived at the conclusion that it is indeed possible to have too much of a good thing. Just ask the residents of Flint, Youngstown, or Buffalo.

Linker: Lowry and Ponnuru seek “to relegate contrary voices in our national narrative to the periphery of our history, and perhaps even to read them out of our history altogether.” Indeed, polemic of this genre often comes down to innuendo. In that connection, the March 8 National Review makes interesting reading indeed. It includes a book review by Matthew Scully, former speechwriter for the likes of Bush, Palin, and McCain. It may be regarded as something of a quirk, given his politics, but Scully has become an outspoken opponent of animal cruelty, and his book on the matter, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, attracted  critical acclaim. Scully nevertheless found himself under attack from one Wesley J. Smith, author of the book under review, A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement. Scully apparently has been lumped in with those who “had ‘fallen for the deception’ of animal-welfare advocacy and ‘its true animal rights ideological agenda” — along with Rush Limbaugh, who, playing against type, offered some kind remarks on the radio about the activities of the Humane Society. In this polemical genre, offenses against the essential verities of Western civilization are never hard to find, and I suppose it could be a sort of just desserts for Scully, who may be  experiencing blowback from the innuendo he might have crafted on the half of the aforementioned Republican politicians. I see that the letters section of the same magazine (difficult if not impossible to find online, apparently) contains an exchange of letters from the authors of dueling books about John Dewey, whose thinking supposedly “rests upon a denial of the first principle of the American founding.”  Not that I have any beef to make on behalf of John Dewey, at least not for present purposes. From my perusal of newspaper editorial pages decades ago, I recall that Russell Kirk didn’t think much of Dewey.

Lowry and Ponnuru want to portray Barack Obama as a threat to “American exceptionalism.” As I have noted elsewhere on this site, such people hold it against the President that he was at one time a community organizer. Somebody who would work to remove asbestos from a housing project full of poor people, they deem a troublemaker. They hold it against him, as Lindner notes, that his allegiance is “to a hypothetical, pure country that is coming into being.” As an Aristotelian, I would say that the Stagirite would have held that all living things are “coming into being,” and that to forestall such a process would be tantamount to killing them.

Indeed, dogged pursuit of the party-line version of “American exceptionalism” may have a deadly effect, not least in the area of health-care reform, which probably occasioned the polemical exchange under consideration herein. Such a dogged pursuit is indeed something like jumping out of the top floor of a skyscraper — although contemporary affluent Americans do not see it that way, because the victims are out of sight and out of mind, in the ghetto, the barrio and the trailer park.

Limbaugh, for his part, declared that poor people do not deserve health care. By so doing, he thought he was upholding the verities of “American exceptionalism,” I suppose. The country will always be exceptional, even if it adopts more social-democratic measures — and, if it does not, we may find that its creed will come to be associated with kicking people while they are down, or rubbing their noses in the dirt. I recall that, at one of the vaunted “town hall meetings,” a senator was confronted by the sort of woman who is sometimes described as “poor white trash,” who was being ruined by her medical expenses. Essentially, his advice to her was to go around to her neighbors with a tin cup in hand. It’s the gorgon’s face of “American exceptionalism….”

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Labor issues are woefully underreported these days. Therefore, I’m happy to post my recent interview with Prof. Joe Atkins of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi, author of Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press (University Press of Mississippi, 2008). Joe Atkins brings a blue-collar sensibility to his research and reporting on the condition of working people. I think readers will enjoy the perspective he lays out in the interview, which you can read by clicking here.

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“The global warming industry, like Alexander in the famous children’s story, is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Actually, a bad three months….” So writes George Will in Sunday’s Washington Post. I’ll give him this much: the opinion-complex of which he is a part has has a good three months, with regard to the matter at hand — with a big assist from several of the climate researchers.

John Gray, whom I have cited as an influential thinker on the “About” page of this site, has written that, while global warming is a real phenomenon, not much can be done about it.  George Will could have said as much, and left it at that — but he has gone on to make assertions he is not competent to make, in a manic and brazen pursuit of unlimited corporate prerogative.

Too much has been said about this topic already.  Without commenting further about how bad global warming might or might not turn out to be, or what can or cannot be done about it, let me repeat that everything I see suggests that this will play out in much the same way as the tobacco-and-lung-cancer controversy. In the meantime, I might be willing to give George Will the time of day on this matter — were he to show some willingness to answer the criticisms offered (for instance) here, here, here, or here.

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“I like Glenn a lot and I think he has something to teach us. But not what he offered last night,” writes Bill Bennett at National Review Online about Glenn Beck’s Saturday night speech to conclude the CPAC conference.

“Analogizing his own struggles with alcohol to the problems of our polity and in our politics, he said, ‘Hello, my name is the Republican party, and I have a problem!’… Glenn has … taken to our politics a cosmologizing of his own deficiencies. This is not a baseless criticism; they are his own deficiencies that he keeps publicly redounding to and analogizing to. It is wrong and he is wrong.”

I’ll say this much for Beck: He’s moved quickly to preempt Austin plane-crasher Joseph Stack from being turned into any kind of hero or martyr.  Conspiricist Alex Jones is not happy….

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Reporter Alec MacGillis contributes a “Five Myths” column for the “Outlook” section of Sunday’s Washington Post. Today’s feature concerns myths about organized labor. “The period of highest union penetration, from the 1940s to the ’70s, was also a period of sustained economic growth…. at least for now, the most heavily unionized regions — the Northeast, the Midwest, the Northwest and California — still hold most of the country’s wealthiest states and its most dynamic metro areas.”

MacGillis notes that “labor’s foes like to note that states in the South and the West with ‘right to work’ laws restricting unions have successfully lured companies from the North or from abroad.” But, arguably, the low-wage “sunbelt” economic strategy has created a few islands of prosperity, while leaving much of the rural South stagnant in terms of development…

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Jeffrey Rosen, in Sunday’s Washington Post, speculates that Barack Obama may be better-suited to be a Supreme Court justice than a chief executive. “It would be unusual, but not difficult, for Obama to get himself on the Supreme Court. He could nominate himself to replace John Paul Stevens, for example, or he could gamble and promise Hillary Rodham Clinton that he won’t run for reelection in 2012 in exchange for a pledge of appointment to the next vacancy…. As a senator, he voted against the confirmations of Roberts and Alito, and GOP lawmakers might hold that against him in his own confirmation hearing. Yet … Obama might get some deference as a former president, at least from senators who would rather have him on the court than in the White House.”

Accompanying Rosen’s article is an unscientific online poll asking whether Obama is best suited to be president, senator, or high-court justice.  As of this writing, with over 9000 votes cast, 80% of respondents chose — none of the above!  Is this really the Washington Post website, or has a survey from Hot Air or Red State somehow been placed on the site? Remember, it’s strictly unscientific….

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To follow up on a matter about which I have blogged recently on a couple of occasions, Sunday’s London Observer reports that a leading politician in the Sunni-oriented National Dialogue Front has called for a boycott of the upcoming March 7 Iraqi elections. The controversy stems from an effort to ban several hundred Sunni politicians from the poll — a move advertised as a “de-Baathification” measure, although it has been interpreted as a swipe at the minority Sunnis. The party “will boycott the election, but it will stay part of the political process. The call is open for other political parties to take the same stand as our front,” said spokesman Haidar al-Mullah.

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John M. Broder reports in the New York Times that the environmental movement has cooled on Barack Obama, who embraced nuclear power and “clean coal” in his recent State of the Union address. The president of the Natural Resources Defense Council subsequently blogged: “N.R.D.C. knows there is no such thing as ‘clean coal’….”

Indeed the coal and nuclear industries have their lobbyists, and there are states and regions that are dependent on coal mining economically. But if climate change is an urgent matter in the short to intermediate term, it may make sense to embrace it while investing R&D funds in the long-term problem of waste disposal.  In the meantime, the world is overwhelmingly dependent on coal, not just in the developed world but especially in the rapidly developing but poor nations of India and China.  If it is going to be burned, why not endeavor to burn it more cleanly?

We have to have a natural environment, but the way we live renders it inevitable that we will consume resources and do some environmental damage.  Environmental protection likely will be a matter of more or less, not all or nothing.  Nothing we can do will turn out to be utterly benign….

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I sometimes discuss Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times columns in the overnight press reviews, but his interests are such that his topics often stray from the breaking political news. Hank Stuever in the Washington Post reviews a new HBO documentary on Kristof’s international reporting. For better or worse, Kristof’s readership would appear to be narrow — those “who can find Darfur or Congo on a map and tell you precisely what’s been going on there.” The reporter persists nevertheless, committed as he is to “witnessing the world’s atrocities and scintillating them into stories that will call on people to act. Which is what Kristof did with his work in Darfur, Sudan: He caused people — from George Clooney on down — to do whatever they can.”

According to Stuever’s review, the documentary “asks its viewers to consider the world and all its problems, only without newspapers that will pay journalists to bear such global witness. Even the reporter himself, sitting in his office in the Times’s fabulously expensive skyscraper, can only guess at the question of his own extinction.”

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Canadian native Christopher Flavelle describes the hysterics in Saskatchewan upon the implementation of universal health care in 1962. The American Medical Association took a hand in the campaign, which at one point involved a three-week doctors’ strike. The governing left-wing CCF party (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) was denounced as “a dictatorial, power-mad, ruthless group of politicians who would rather see people die for lack of medical care than back down.” The plan, which proved to be a precursor for the remainder of the country, was implemented nevertheless.

Also of interest is the exchange of “dueling anecdotes” following the article in the comments section….

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Timothy Noah at Slate.com: “Health reforms favored by Republicans tend to accelerate the market’s natural tendency to segregate healthy people from sick people, thereby lowering insurance premiums for the healthy majority while raising them sky-high for the sick minority. That’s true of the GOP scheme to sell health insurance across state lines (which, because insurance is regulated at the state level, would cause companies to stampede to states offering the fewest protections to the sick). It’s also true of the GOP’s urge to expand choice-oriented health savings accounts (which allow healthy people to minimize contributions).”

Most of this article concerns proposals to expand state risk pools, which Noah describes as “an idiotic idea on its face. Create a special government-sponsored insurance pool consisting entirely of people who don’t qualify for a private insurance policy because they’re too likely to need medical attention. Have them share the risk, on the theory that, hey, at least they probably won’t all need medical attention at exactly the same time…. Thirty-four states operate them, serving (a relatively scant) 200,000 people….”

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Developments in Iran continue to provoke concern, due to both the regime’s nuclear ambitions and its treatment of domestic opponents like the “Green Movement.” Late last week, writing in the New York Times, Reuel Marc Gerecht waxed eloquent about the possibility of an overthrow of the clerical regime in a “democratic revolution.” Gerecht: “A democratic revolution in Tehran could well prove the most momentous Mideastern event since the fall of the Ottoman Empire….” Gerecht wrote the day before the anniversary of the 1979 revolution, which was expected to be marked by both official celebrations and opposition protests; it turned out that, on the day, the regime was able to quash any protests quite ruthlessly.

Opposed to Gerecht are Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett, proprietors of the Race for Iran website. The Leveretts describe themselves as foreign policy “realists,” and their attitude toward the clerical regime may be summarized as — “deal with it.” They insist that the Green Movement is overrated, as they are in this op-ed from last month. That commentary drew criticism (for instance, here) for being  far too indulgent of the regime.

Looking at the latest offering from the Leveretts (on their website, as of Friday), one can’t help but suspect that there’s a bit more than cold-blooded “realism” to their view. “Historically, in the 12 months preceding the departure of the Shah from Iran and the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979, Iranian security forces gunned down thousands—perhaps even tens of thousands—of anti-Shah protestors.  But, even in the face of this brutality, protestors kept coming out, and the crowds demanding the Shah’s removal kept growing until they overwhelmed the Pahlavi regime’s massive security apparatus.  That was a real revolution.” It sounds as though they regard the 1979 revolution as the legitimate expression of the Iranian people — and they would suspect someone like Gerecht of seeking no more than to install a compliant regime under American auspices. Of course, the history of that sort of thing goes all the way back to 1953.

David Ignatius always reflects the view of the American foreign-policy establishment. He wants an “all-of the above” policy — engage the regime, but also criticize human-rights violations. Ignatius: “In thinking about Iran, it’s useful to recall how Washington dealt with the empty vessel that was the Soviet Union. To encourage its eventual crackup, the United States adopted a mix of diplomacy and sanctions; it spoke out about human rights violations, but it never stopped trying to negotiate arms control agreements. Even as it engaged the Russians, it consistently criticized communist rule.”

With reporting from within Iran extremely constrained, it’s hard to know exactly what’s going on, especially with regard to the strength of the opposition. Critics of American foreign policy will be quick to point out that Gerecht’s reputation as a “neocon” precedes him. Nevertheless, to dismiss Gerecht out of hand comes across as just a little cold-blooded these days, especially in the aftermath of such incidents as the death of Neda Agha-Soltan….

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Before the first of the year I put together this post, entitled “Climate: Why Skeptics Are Viewed With Skepticism” — in large part, to draw attention to this article from the Foreign Policy website.

I’ve just stumbled upon this commentary from the website Weather Underground, which cites this very interesting book — with implications about the intersection between science and politics that go beyond the climate-change issue….

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Weather and climate have been on the minds of Washingtonians in recent days, as the city attempts to dig out from under several feet of snow. As much is reflected on the editorial pages of Sunday’s Washington Post. Looking down on the national capital from his outpost in Vermont, Bill McKibben is not backing down on the climate-change question. Referring to the “Climategate” and “Glaciergate” controversies, he writes: “Looked at dispassionately, those political attacks essentially buttress the consensus around global warming. If that much money and attention can be aimed at the data and all anyone can find is a few mistakes and a collection of nasty e-mails, it’s a pretty good sign that the science is sound (though not as good a sign as the melting Arctic)…. Looked at dispassionately, the round of snowmageddons crisscrossing the mid-Atlantic carries the same message. But it’s hard to be dispassionate when you’re wondering, six hours of shoveling later, if there’s a good chiropractor in the neighborhood and what kind of dogsled you might need to reach her.”

In the same paper, Dana Milbank observes: “As a scientific proposition, claiming that heavy snow in the mid-Atlantic debunks global warming theory is about as valid as claiming that the existence of John Edwards debunks the theory of evolution.”  Still, he argues that, with the snowstorms, “greens were hoist by their own petard.”

Milbank: “For years, climate-change activists have argued by anecdote to make their case. [Al] Gore, in his famous slide shows, ties human-caused global warming to increasing hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, drought and the spread of mosquitoes, pine beetles and disease. It’s not that Gore is wrong about these things. The problem is that his storm stories have conditioned people to expect an endless worldwide heat wave, when in fact the changes so far are subtle.”

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Sunday’s New York Times Magazine brings a rather grotesque story by Russell Shorto about the struggle over standards for the teaching of history being fought out before the Texas State Board of Education. Informed readers who recall prior battles over the teaching of biology will not have much trouble surmising what the controversy is about without my going into excruciating detail here. The author allows as that “the Christian activists have a certain amount of history on their side…. There was a religious element to the American Revolution, which was so pronounced that you could just as well view the event in religious as in political terms.”

This sort of controversy is not going to go away in the foreseeable future, even though there is no way to resolve it in a manner that will come close to pleasing all of the parties to the dispute. In my view, it is not the sort of matter that can be ignored or treated with “benign neglect,” given that so many of the people caught up in it on the conservative side are individuals of low, or at least moderate, income.

In my view, our dysfunctional polity would be in much healthier shape if the religious-versus-secular element were removed from it — and that cannot be done  by attempting to settle all controversies in favor of secular views, since the country is so overwhelmingly devout at the grassroots. American history should not be taught  as though the country and all its inhabitants have always been secularists. Furthermore, it h,as always been my view that, in a large federation, it is best to observe what Roman Catholic thought calls the “principle of subsidiarity,” and permit localized decision-making as much as possible. That would mean, for instance, that localities should be permitted to decide for themselves whether or not to implement “abstinence-based” sex education.

A country such as this has to consist more than just 300 million individuals and a national government. There have to be the intermediary institutions of so-called “civil society.” And, since people do not come into existence in a vaccum, they have to be raised and educated by parents who will carry with them particularist cultural baggage — and, in our country, much of that baggage will be religious. If we refuse to acknowledge this, it is going to make the governance of the country complicated in the extreme, unless we are going to attempt a “root and branch” elimination of religious institutions, after the fashion of the Jacobins. Such a thing is just what religious conservatives are afraid of — bizarre as that fear might strike those of a more secular bent.

Solutions will not be easy, since, over the course of the last generation, as evangelical Christianity has become more partisan, it has more and more come to take on the characteristics of the cult. In the strip-mall nondenominational churches what we are liable to find being preached is a witch’s brew of  “dispensationalism,” “premillennialism,” “end-times” doctrine of the sort found in the “Left Behind” novels, “Christian Zionism” or “Christian Identity,” and some version of “creationism” or “intelligent design,” in some combination or another.

If Christians of this sort seek to become politically dominant, they will find that the rest of the country will not stand for it. Still, their numbers are large enough that they can constitute a nearly implacable faction. More than likely, a religious-versus-secular split is going to hang over this polity For some time to come.  We won’t be able to come to even a tentative resolution until there is a change of heart on the part of both the secular and the devout….

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Generally, Daniel Henninger is one of the Wall Street Journal’s less unpleasant  op-ed columnists, but I see little point to his Thursday column, which amounts to little more than gloating over his side’s victory in the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. I don’t see much engagement with the issues raised in the case, such as the matter of the nature of the corporation — which, as far as I am concerned, was dealt with more substantively in the paper’s letters column (for instance, here and here).

Henninger notes that Justice Stevens cited a lengthy body of precedent according to which “corporations could be comprehensively regulated.” He then applauds Justice Scalia’s ridicule of Stevens’s “corporation-hating quotations.”  Henninger’s own gloss on Stevens: “Corporations themselves are anathema.”

Scalia, of course, could say anything he wanted to in his opinion; he had the votes to get his way. That doesn’t mean that his arguments hold up. It doesn’t follow that if someone holds that corporations should be susceptible to being regulated, he must hold corporations to be “anathema,” or harbors “hatred” for corporations. From the point of view of those who hold corporations to be liable to regulation, it would be silly to “hate” them, since the hatred would be directed at what is, in their view, a legal abstraction. It is, of course, possible to work up hatred, or at least anger, toward those who demand everything on their own terms, or unlimited prerogative.

Henninger: “This public-private tension is an ancient and never-ending debate in the U.S.” But nobody really knows how much of the “tension” will survive in the wake of this decision, which gives even more prerogative to entities that already were less restricted in this country than practically anywhere else in the world. Henninger and George Will want the rules of the game written on their own terms, so that their side always wins….

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