Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Jamelle has a good rejoinder to John McWhorter’s TNR piece eulogizing liberal as a descriptive for mainstream, left-wing American politics. For McWhorter, the Right has so effectively turned the phrase into a signifier for excesses of the New Left and/or the unpopular liberalism of the 70s and 80s that we can no longer rescue it. 

Jamelle makes two good points in response. For one, progressive, which is everyone’s favorite replacement term, has all sorts of nasty (and illiberal) historical associations with eugenics, scientism, racism and the like. From an intellectual standpoint, Jamelle is right: I’d much rather associate with liberals (FDR, JFK, Civil Right Movement, New Deal etc) than progressives (Teddy Roosevelt’ss wacko imperialism, eugenics, etc), but arguing over the real history of the term seems kinda pointless. Most people don’t know about or care what a certain political group was doing between 1900 and 1920 and so they don’t make the association that, say, Jamelle or I would make with the term progressive. Liberal, so says McWhorter is a different story.

But I still think we should stick with liberal for a few reasons. One, we really shouldn’t let conservatives redefine out terms for us! That’s weak, that’s bad and it just lets the conservative movement control our own self perceptions. Second, we’re stuck with it. Media outlets will always describe left of center politicians (and especially left of the center-left politicians) as liberals, so we might as well make do with what we have.

Third, I think in the time of Obama, we really could reclaim liberalism as a positive descriptor for left-wing politics. Jamelle points to a monologue from the West Wing where Jimmy Smits righteously goes through the glorious history of liberalism. The victories he lists off can be broken up into three categories. 

1. Civil and Political Equality — Women’s right to vote, Votings Rights Act, Civil Rights Movement
2. Economic equality/equal opportunity — New Deal, Social Security, Medicare
3. The Environment – Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, EPA etc

In the Age of Obama, we have, for the first time since Lyndon Johnson, a popular liberal Democrat with a mandate to implement major new policies. Now, there probably isn’t any popular Civil Rights type stuff that Obama could enact that would make liberals popular for a generation, but as far as categories two and three go, Obama has a once-in-a-lifetime confluence of opportunity, necessity, feasibility and popularity. Obama has the chance to refurbish the social safety net with universal health care and to pass major legislation on climate change. If Obama could get universal health care, then liberalism and liberals would be revived in the national consciousness (which is why conservatives fear the prospect so much). 

So, best case scenario, a successful Obama presidency does for liberalism what Reagan did for conservatism.

I have a longer post remembering the little-conversative-Slate-that-could up at Pushback, but I’ll add another reason why I’m sad their gone. 

There is no shortage of political commentary (or really any commentary) out there right now. So why did I like Culture 11, a conservative site, so much?

Two reasons. One, their editors — especially Conor Friedersdorf — were exceptionally fair minded and charitable. I don’t want to be yet another concern troll going on and on about the incivility of internet discourse, but Conor’s instinctive and never failing intellectual charity was incredibly refreshing. The way this intellectual charity played out on the site was that the contributors, especially on their blogs, would constantly get into debates with each other. Now, internet debates tend to play out in two ways. Either, they’re among friends who like each other too much or are too ideologically similar to really produce anything interesting, or they’re among bitter ideologicall enemies who generally just talk past each other. Debates at C11 always seemed to find the right balance of genuine disagreement with respect and comity. Now, I don’t think that’s necessarily a model everyone who finds themselves arguing over the internet should follow, but it’s one that ought to be foundin more places.

The second reason I loved C11 — which Joe Carter elaborates on here – was their willingness to find young and previously unheard of talent. Sometimes this willingness to publish the young and inexperienced lead the site into publishing stuff like this, but more often than not, it meant that this scrappy little conservative site had some of the most interesting commentary, analysis and reportage on the web. 

I have no doubt that my favorite contributors (and some of my not-so-favorite ones) will pop up elsewhere on the internet and go on to as sucessful careers as young journalists can hope to have.

I’m happy that my kinda-sorta homestate governor is now gone from office, but I’m still pretty peeved that the Illinois legislature didn’t get their act together more quickly. It’s hardly been good for the people of Illinois to have had a lame duck governor since Fitzgerald’s press conference. A real example of how badly the legislature has performed is the entire Roland Burris fiasco. Because they couldn’t impeach fast enough, we now have a bizarrely self-aggrandizing, lame duck senator who no one takes seriously.

I hate to criticize my more sucessful East Coast doppelganger, but I’m a little confused by his proposal for a global film actors union, an SAG for the world. He points to the sad story of two child stars in Slumdog Millionaire who still live in slums and got paid very little for their very good work.

I don’t really see how their story relates to the struggles of actors all over the world. In India, they already have a film actors union. Would a worldwide SAG have impressed upon Boyle to hire their Indian actors at their rates?Anyway, a more feasible idea would be for the SAG to make it a condition of their next contract that studios who hire SAG actors can only hire Indian actors in the Bollywood union. This would strike me as a better idea, because there would be all sorts of logistical hassles with actually creating one, worldwide union that could adversely affect the relationships between Indian actors and their union. A good example of these sorts of problems would be setting the payscale. Obviously, Indian actors in India probably should get paid much less than actors in America. If the SAG didn’t realize this and set their worldwide payscale too high, that wouldn’t benefit anyone.

Dylan points to the possibility that without a worldwide union, actors in, say, Laos could get paid very little. Well, this is true, but until there is real evidence of a large number of Laotian actors actually getting exploited, I don’t think this hypothetical counts as evidence for the creation of a global labor behemoth.

Alex Massie is, in the true sense, a friend of the blog. Not only does he link here on a somewhat regular (or as much as anyone does these days), but he’s always quick to send me the kind facebook message or email to clarify a point, or more usually, to make an insightful and humorous observation. So, it’s only fair that I send some love over to his week-or-so-old blog at the Spectator. The content remains excellent, but the aesthetics have been much improved. So, spectate, damn it, spectate!

And please, don’t hold the fact that Melanie Phillips (who generously quotes a Front Page piece calling Avrum Burg, the former speaker of the Kenesset and former Israeli paratrooper, a anti-semite) has a blog on the Spectator’s web site against him — they also have Clive Davis.

Last night, I read Richard Cohen’s Washington Post column arguing against the prosecution of Bush administration officials responsible for approving torture and thought that I should write a post responding to it. But then I realized that I had written a column for North by Northwestern arguing that proseuctions were a good idea. As it happens, the article emerged from the editing process tonight, and here it is.

Not only was he an amazing author, but unlike some of his contemporaries, he made a great all around contribution to American letters by being a fully fledged member of the critical community. I’m sure there will be some great literary obituaries of him appearing soon, but for now, it’s worth noting that he was a genuine cultural and literary superstar whose influence will live on for a very long time.

Also, the Nobel committee is probably kicking itself. Or, if they aren’t, they certainly should be.

Sure, I’ve been linked to by the websites of the Economist, Atlantic and New York Times*, but this has to be beat them all.

Also, check out the comment thread for my original post on the Reptilians. It’s good stuff

*Lest I sound like I’m tooting my horn too much, let me note that most of those links were in the phase of my blogging career where I was A. more prolific and B. younger, now that I’m legally an adult, a college student and am barely blogging anymore, any novelty associated with me has quickly faded

Abe Foxman sounded pretty silly (as he is wont to do) when he criticized George Mitchell for his general demeanor of even handedness. After all, when you’re trying to get two sides who don’t trust each other and will pay a political price for conceding anything in an effort to forge an agreement, having both sides trust the mediator or special envoy is important, right? Jon Chait had a good response, showing that, in general, even handedness isn’t always what’s called for in these situations:

My point isn’t so much to defend this point as view as to explain that it isn’t inherently ridiculous to oppose an “even-handed” posture in the Middle East. You can look at the facts in a fair and even-handed way and arrive at a pro-Israel position — which, again, does not necessarily require support for everything the Israeli government does.

Now, opponents of the pro-Israel posture argue that the United States can’t broker peace unless it takes an even-handed posture. But that’s only true if you assume that both sides are equally at fault. In a situation where Party A recognizes Party B’s right to exist, but Party B does not reciprocate, sometimes the best way to achieve peace is to convince Party B that its goal of destroying Party A is hopeless. The United States brokered peace in the Balkans by employing an approach that was anything but even-handed. Now, the Arab-Israeli conflict is not as morally clear cut as the Serbian-Bosnian-Kosovar conflicts, but I’m illustrating a basic principle: Being “even-handed” isn’t always correct or always the best way to make peace.

Mark Kleiman has a good post on a bunch of good urban and crime policies that Obama ought to pursue as president. As a general note, urban and crime policy seems to be an area—unlike, say, education —where wonks and academics have a pretty good idea of what works (or at least Mark Kleiman does) but because the electorally and politically significant symbolic overlays (i.e. black people being involved), there are some rather significant barriers to actually implementing any of these good ideas.

While most of the ideas are interesting, one stands out. Kleiman often makes the point that increasing taxes on alcohol is a pretty good idea. That’s because there is a pretty strong correlation between alcohol and violence, especially spousal abuse. To put it more concretely, “the relationship between the price of alcohol and the rate of assault, including spousal assault, is well-documented in the literature. Doubling the tax on beer (from a dime to twenty cents a can) would reduce the assault rate by at least 5%, and maybe as much as 20%.”

I have no reason to disagree with Kleiman here. Even if we didn’t use a sin tax to reduce a bad, distortionary tax in a revenue neutral fashion (like the payroll tax), the reduction in violent crime would certainly be worth it. What’s interesting—in a cute, bloggy speculative, lack of real evidence way—is how such a tax would affect college students, who have famously expansive beer drinking habits.

The usual behavioral response to an increased tax on beer would be to drink cheaper beer. That’s because we can assume that people want to drink a certain amount of beer, and with the fairly wide range in prices for booze, it’s easy to downgrade to Keystone or Busch without spending more money. The real interesting micro effects would be on those college students who are already drinking the real cheap stuff. One would think that college student beer drinking would be fairly inelastic, and that college students wouldn’t respond to a sales tax by buying less beer, they would just buy fewer of the non essential things (food, school books etc).

One real concern about high beer taxes is that, due to the aftermath of prohibition, there’s a lot of state-to-state (and even county-to-county) variation in beer prices because of the variation in sales taxes, which means you’ll have a lot of economically inefficient behavior (from the perspective of the government) just to avoid higher beer taxes (just look at Massachusetts, whose liquor stores suffer because the availability of cheap booze in New Hampshire).

An interesting way to dealing with this inefficient tax competition would be to complement sales tax increases with a federal increase in gas taxes. Since people are overly sensitive to the price of gas, a small increase in the gas tax would probably be effective in stopping people from sales-tax-shopping. And even if driving as a whole is fairly inelastic, extraneous driving to New Hampshire for cheaper beer driving is probably pretty elastic.

Of course, all of this could be avoided if we centralized more tax and economic policy, but that’s an entirely different argument.

And, one more thing, all of this stuff about college drinking is from observation of people who are over 21.

Here are my thoughts on Joe the Journalist at North By Northwestern, the world’s greatest online college publication. I should say that everyone should go out and read my piece, but, as usual, the comments are much better.

If there was ever a fantastic day for Jewish nonbelivers, today was it. Not only did both our repersentative demographic slices overwhelming support the man who was inaugurated today, but we got noteworthy shotouts during the inagurual proceedings. The first, and most surprising, was Rick Warren’s direct quotation of the most important prayer in Judaism, the Shema. And then we got Obama’s almost tacked-on shout out in his laundry list of religious believers. Sure, Jews have been mentioned in these lists before (even by Mitt Romney) but it’s rare that any politican purports to recognize the existence of nonbelievers. It’s a good start.

I’m going to be over at Twitter liveblogging the entire speech shebang.

Ericka Andersen, Culture 11’s resident female rock-ribbed conservative, has a paranoid blast against state university systems trying to implement race-based admission policies “under disguise.” Specifically, Anderson thinks that since the voters of Texas and California have said they don’t want race to be a factor in admissions, and soTexas’ program of admitting the top 9% in a UT school and California’s new policy of requiring fewer standardized tests is necessarily illegitimate, because they will inevitably increase racial diversity in the school systems.

This view strikes me as relatively abhorrent. Anderson seems to think that the status quo admission system, which puts a relatively large weight on standardized tests, is the only legitimate system and any deviation from the results the current system is ipso facto an attempt to impose a racial standard on the make-up of the student body.

The bundle of ugly assumptions in her post is pretty shocking. Anderson seems to think that the only purpose of the public university system is to reward those who meet a certain standard of academic excellence. She appears to think that the SAT, or a system that gives the SAT more weight than class rank or GPA, is the only reasonable way to evaluate students. Public universities don’t seem to be a way to promote social advancement and equality of opportunity, but instead a way to entrench status quo differences in parents education, social class and income (which, of course, is an effect of weighting standardized tests heavily). 

Many conservatives who oppose race-based affirmative action say they support class-based affirmative action. This strategy (and it may very well be an honest conviction) allows conservative to outflank affirmative-action supporting liberals by letting them say that they support poor people, as opposed to the middle class and upper-middle class black benficiaries of affirmative action. But Anderson doesn’t appear to be making that play. Instead, she seems to think that any increase in the diversity of a student body is illegitimately subverting the will of the voters (in California and Texas, at least). This doesn’t leave her room to allow preferences for the poor, who are disproportionally non-white.

Also, the fact that the class-rank standard in Texas and California is implemented in a color-blind fashion seems to have no effect on Anderson’s thinking. 

Oh yeah, isn’t something happening tomorrow?

For the few dear souls who check this blog every day (or, in the case of the google reader subscribers, every time I write), I’m sorry for not writing anything. My complaints about how being a college student leaves little time to opine on the issues of the day should fall on deaf ears – the Pushback gang is doing OK, and Jamelle is churning out posts like the fearsome blogging machine he is. All that being said, 5 classes + writing for NBN + editing for NBN + fraternity rushing/pledging really does leave me little time for to focus and actually write anything. 

As far as politics goes, I’ll just say that I think the Obama stimulus package is too small, no one should care about Tim Geithner’s taxes, Israel shouldn’t have banned Arab political parties, the Gaza incursion will be remembered mostly as a strategic folly – not as a violation of international law or the laws of war, and finally, Hillary Clinton gets mad props for focusing her mentions of terrorism to Al Qaeda and its associates, not to some poorly defined and expansive group of terrorists. 

For sports, Utah, Florida, USC and Texas all have a legitimate claim to being the best football team in the country right now. Only Florida can be called national champion. That’s because being the best team and winning whatever postseason are different things in football. In baseball and basketball, the winner of the World Series or the Championship can claim to be the best and the champion. That’s because they have to win series of games – the “any given sunday” effect is greatly minimized. In football, however, there’s a whole lot of contingency. Does anyone think the 1998 Vikings, who went 15-1 in the regular season, would lose a three game series to the Falcons? Or how about last year’s Patriots. This isn’t to say that the NCAA shouldn’t adopt a playoff – they clearly should. I just want to reiterate that football is weird in that the “best team” and the winner in the postseason are much more loosly correlated than in other major sports.

Ricky Henderson is one of the greatest offensive players of all time. The best base stealer, the best at working the pitch count and the best lead off hitter. I bet if you polled all baseball writers, they’d unanimously say that he deserves to be in the Hall. Then how come he only got 94.8% of the vote. I understand that there’s some a special attachment to being a unanimous selection, but it’s stupid. If a writer thinks Ricky should be in the hall, he should vote for him – the first time. Ricky isn’t a boundary case or anything, he’s probably the most obvious hall of famer since Willie Mays retired. This would have been a good time to reform the voting traditions.

And lastly, the entire fraternity system provides lots of good evidence – by analogy – in the debate between Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty’s debate on cosmopolitanism (or just the debate – among liberals – about cosmopolitanism in general). To get a tad more specific, a fraternity is kind of like the European Social Democracy as explained by Sherri Berman. The social and economic egalitarianism rests on a fundamental parochialism or exclusion. In Sweden, it’s the ethnic homogenity that allows for large income transfers, in a fraternity, it’s the exclusive rush process and subsequent pledging process which allows for the rather appealing social egalitarianism that marks a good fraternity. I might expand on this more as I the pledge process continues, but I think I pretty clearly laid out the basics.

There will be a longer post up later explaining my absence from this space, but for now, I just want to share some shockingly relevant lines from Yeats’s “Adam’s Curse.” I guess the reason its so appropriate is because the bizarre, insane ordeal that is Northwestern Sorority Rush has finally come to a close. Throughout the week there has been a whole lot of consternation as girls have come to realize that this incredibly important decision which majorly affects their college experience is A. being made entirely by other people and B. is being based on inscrutable, unknowable and nearly entirely subjective criteria. Or, to put it simply, if you look at the “coolest” sorority, the pledge class is incredibly good looking. 

This is from “Adam’s Curse” which was written in 1904.

Replied, “To be born woman is to know –
Although they do not talk of it at school –
That we must labour to be beautiful.”

And yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that Yeats isn’t talking about sorority rush and that my reading is rather facile, but it’s 2am and it just spoke to me.

Michael Oren has written two op-eds (with Yossi Klein Halevi) in major national newspapers explicating Israel’s rationale for the attack on Gaza and defending their actions. Now, there’s nothing odd about a hawkish, well connected, English speaking analyst of Israeli security policy writing in American newspapers when Israel goes to war, it’s just about par for the course. And there’s nothing particulalry untoward about what he’s saying in these pieces. Sure, he has a pretty strong pro-Israeli, pro-attack position, but it’s not far out of the mainstream or anything.

What’s weird is that, aside from being a think-tank fellow and a faculty member at Georgetown, Michael Oren is also a reservist in the Israeli military. And he’s not a reservist in the way that many Israelis are – he could have ended his compulsory military committment due to age But he decided to stay on. And he’s not just any random IDF reserve soldier; his explicit job description, as described in a short TNR piece , is to “reinforce Israel’s position in the media” and “explaining Israel’s war aims.”

Oren acknowledges that part of doing PR for the military is that he “will no longer have a personal opinion–not publicly, anyway–but only an army position.” All of his other responsibilities (academic, public) are now second to his unit’s mission, which “will be to afford the IDF the requisite time to achieve them by fostering a sympathetic press.”

Now, there’s nothing wrong with paid mouthpieces of a government taking to the op-ed pages, it’s something that happens all the time. It would be nice, however, if the LA Times and Wall Street Journal could let their readers know that Oren is now a paid PR hack* for the Israeli military.

*To be clear, I don’t mean PR hack in a bad way, I could have used “shill” or “propagandist” – both of which would have been perfectly accurate and not at all perjorative.

I think an error that some (on all sides) are making in discussing Israel’s strategy in Gaza is assuming that they have a coherent, consistent and realistic idea of what they’re doing. The circumstances surroudning the initial strikes (the upcoming elections) indicates that our assumption should be that Israel isn’t exactly looking at this in the most clear eyed fashion. Further evidence came in the form of shifting and totally unreasonable goals and rationales for the mission. From inane talk of “breaking the will of the Palestinians, of Hamas” to the even more absurd talk of trying to “destroy complelty Hamas” we knew that either Israeli officials didn’t know what was going on or people were totally off their rockers. Of course, you couldn’t break the will of a people who have been isolated from the world for two years, or of a government which thrives on its people’s suffering at the hands of Israel. And, if the real goal was to protect Sderot from rocket fire, was an air invasion really going to work. As far as we know, Hamas can’t exactly be “deterred” and they are well aware that Israel can, at any time, kill a bunch of their leadership. If the goal was really stopping the rockets, then only a ground invasion would suffice.

And, now, we have a ground invasion to go along with much more modest goals for the mission. It’s gone from breaking the will and completely destroying to striking “ a direct and hard blow against the Hamas while increasing the deterrent strength of the IDF, in order to bring about an improved and more stable security situation for residents of Southern Israel over the long term.” At this point, like Andrew, I have to ask whether it’s really justified – or smart – to launch a legitimate ground war in pursuit of long term security (not immediately ceasing the rocket fire) with Hamas inevitably claiming a propaganda victory (unless Israel plans to occupy Gaza…)

It just doesn’t seem like anyone is thinking very clearly about the long-term or political consequences of all this.

David Frum takes some predictable potshots at the study of literature in the United States at the high school level:

Students are assigned work of very low literary quality. These works are chosen to provide sexual/racial/ethnic diversity. Or because they talk explicitly about sexuality or some other topic deemed likely to excite student attention. Or because they reflect approved attitudes on the issues of the day.

The usual result is simply to bore the students – to deaden for a lifetime any potential enthusiasm for the thing they think they are studying. But for the small minority of students whose enthusiasm for reading cannot be killed even by the academic study of literature, the effect is (if possible) even worse. For them, the study of literature has been turned into an experience of organized lying.

Some will be deceived. Some will be corrupted. And some will be made cynical. Why not treat comic books as literature? After all, that’s how we treat Alice Walker!

And yet I persist in hoping that precisely because literature touches something profound and permanent in the human spirit and human condition, that the very best will continue to find its audience. The Trial of course ranks among the very best. And it even gives us a story, a style, and a word to describe the dominant character of contemporary literary life: what is it, but Kafkaesque?

Frum is sorta right about one thing: that students are very good at discerning which books are assigned for the sole purpose of checking off boxes, and subsequently approaching the work with more cynicism than is valuable. This isn’t because high school students have been reading the New Criterion or can recite Alan Bloom passages from heart, it’s because American teens have some the most advanced bullshit detectors on earth – especially when it comes to adults either taking themselves too seriously or when they attempt to be “relevant” to teenage concerns.  But I’m still a little bit unsure if what Frum describes is actually going on, or if there really was some great time when high school students only read “great” literature and all loved it.

Frum is also granting a bit too much power to high school English classes, or specifically, high school English teachers. Plenty of students are still reading the classics of teen literature – Catch-22, the Vonnegut catalogue ( I don’t really know what the more feminie equivalents are) – without any particular guidance or encouragement from what they’ve learned in class. That’s because high school is a pretty small part of the lives of students, and an even smaller part of their cultural lives. No matter what happens in English class, some students will appreciate literature and seek it out on their own, and some will not.

With the advent of AP English and the writing section on the SAT, which is part of the general insturmentalization of the study of literature, expecting high schools to inculcate a love and genuine appreciation of literature in those students who aren’t predisposed to do so is pretty naive. The way I understand it, most English classes in high school are only partially classes whose main goals is to developed students ability to interpret, appreciate and analyze literature, per se. Instead, one of their main goals seems to be teaching students how to interpret, analyze and write, and it just so happens that literature is a useful medium with which to teach these skills.

Alan Jacobs – a real English professor – makes the point that literature, as opposed to merely fiction, has always been a minority taste and that for Frum to make the argument that things are uniquely worse now, he is going to have to cite comparitive data beyond the number of google hits for the Sopranos versus The Trial.

I guess the question I’d pose to Frum is that if high schools English classes only taught books he’d approve of, would the state of literature in America be any better? Or, to frame the question more generally, if high schools went with your approved reading list (or if they adopted your approved method for a syllabus) would literature be more healthy across the country? Would it matter? I don’t think so.

Henry Farrell has an excellent piece in TAP looking out how fashionable theories (and theorists) of civic engagement which came to prominence in the 1990s all look pretty silly considering that the massive rise in political involvement in the 2000s was explicitly partisan, which is something that Robert Putnam et al were all uncomfortable with.

What’s weird about the concurrent uptick in partisanship and civic involvement is how predictable it was. It requires a bizarrely utopian model of human (and political) nature to think that people could ever get passionate about politics without either trying to capture some sort of benefit from the political process (like union members) or without  some sort of tribal affiliation or deeply held fervor about their ideology or party (like the netroots) to motivate them. Political involvement requires that, in the short term at least, that people make a lot of sacrifices. From the obvious, like donating money to a campaign or donating campaign, to the less obvious, like the opportunity cost in terms of not pursuing other thing you like (say, gardening) when you have to watch over your Act Blue page or update your Daily Kos blog.

To make a real committment to politics, you need to have passion and be something of an ideologue, especially because the tangible results of your committment are likely to be invisible or illusory. And ideological zealotry or hardcore partisanship are basically the only ways to get large number of people to care about the political system.

Anyway, those are my amateurish thoughts, read the professor’s whole article.