An ongoing review of politics and culture

"The Conservative Gene" by Robin A. Dembroff

The writer is aggrieved. She is regularly engaged in good conversations that turn sour. Take a friendly dialogue she was having about the appropriate sex education curriculum in public schools. Everyone was behaving admirably, she says, until her interlocutors became privy to her secret: she never attended public school. “If I was home-schooled,” she writes, “I probably had conservative parents, so surely I grew up indoctrinated with Republican propaganda. Upon that logic, my opinion was flagged as the incurably biased but inevitable result of my upbringing.”

She goes on to acknowledge that her opinions were shaped by what she was taught growing up and closely resemble the opinions of her parents. “But if a belief were true, a discriminating person would maintain it,” she argues. In principle, she is absolutely right: It’s problematic to stereotype people based on the circumstances of their upbringing. And being raised with a belief or conviction doesn’t itself make it any less valid.

This is, however, a ten page essay, and certain of its assumptions kept raising my eyebrows. The author writes as if being prejudged, stereotyped, and treated dismissively in political sparring matches are unpleasant experiences that afflict conservatives alone, whereas actually they’re known to every American who ventures outside his or her own subculture. As a reader, I kept wanting to tell her, “Take heart, you aren’t nearly as put upon as you imagine!” Perhaps post-collegiate life will better expose her to this lesson. I am not sure whether she’ll feel better or worse when she discovers that whoever you are, political discourse in the United States is largely an endeavor where people with whom you disagree try to discredit your opinion by flagging it as incurably biased.

Innocence on that point is a great scourge of young conservative writers. Never in human history has a group so advantaged gone so far to cast itself as victim. Ms. Dembroff has a minor and entirely curable case of this affliction, or so it seems from the stories we’re offered — in personal essays, there is always the possibility that a false note is a problem of style rather than substance. Let us begin with her description of the environment where she was home-schooled.

It is said that some people are born with a silver spoon in their mouth; I was born with Rush Limbaugh in my ear. I have conservative Christian parents, grew up in a conservative Christian town, and now attend a conservative Christian university.

My sister, Ellen, and I were home-schooled for almost the entirety of K-12. During that time, we followed curriculum that included Bible and—oh, the scandal!—creation science. To my retrospective amusement, we studied these subjects in a room where a framed photograph of Ronald Reagan hung on the wall… when Reagan wasn’t in office. Pro-life literature, World magazine, and Limbaugh’s bestsellers stood prominently on the shelves, and I even recall enjoying a children’s book titled Ump’s Fwat, which I now realize was an allegorical lesson in the values of free-market capitalism.

I have memories of my mother crying when Clinton was elected (both times)… Both of them seriously considered stocking up on canned goods and toilet paper when Obama clinched the presidency in 2008.

On reading that, I thought, If that’s how she describes home-schooling to people, no wonder they suspect that she’s been indoctrinated by the political beliefs of her parents! Isn’t it rational to mistrust an educational environment if all the information you’re given about it is ideological? And that its teacher cried over a presidential election? I’d ask the author to imagine meeting a 22 year old who described his home-schooling experience in Berkeley, California. If told only that his family’s bookshelves held The Communist Manifesto, The People’s History of the United States, pro-choice literature, The Nation magazine, an allegorical children’s book that taught socialism, and a framed Trotsky portrait — and that the teacher cried the day Ralph Nader lost in 2000 — would she wonder if the student emerged with an incomplete perspective?

Other times I wondered whether the author’s peers were even as antagonistic to home schooling as she believed them to be. Consider another scene. Dembroff is at a local community college, where she gets into a conversation about whether marijuana should be legalized. “You wouldn’t want the cops crashing your parties,” a fellow student said.

She replied that she didn’t care much, never having thrown or attended those kinds of parties.

“But you’ve smoked pot, right?” he demanded. “There’s no way you got through high school without trying pot.”

“I’m still in high school,” she said. “I’m home schooled — I’m taking community college classes for high school credit.”

She writes, “His tone had been tight and defensive, nearing an exasperated squeak. It instantly relaxed. ‘Oh.’ In that one sound echoed a lengthy verdict: Well it all makes sense now. You’re homeschooled. You don’t know how things are, and you probably parrot anything your parents tell you.”

I wasn’t there. Maybe I’m wrong. But I can’t help but wonder if just maybe the ‘oh’ had a different subtext, maybe something like, “Oh, you’re in high school! You’re younger than I thought. And I’m in college. Though I was in high school just a couple years ago myself, ever since I arrived here, I’ve felt so much older and more experienced than those high school kids. Funny how quickly we college kids feel superior, isn’t it? No wonder you don’t worry about your parties getting busted for weed. You still live with your parents!”

Of course, this example is also faulty on the merits. Much as home-schooled high school students from conservative religious families are entitled to their opinion of marijuana legalization, having smoked the substance oneself — or even being around a lot of other people doing so — is arguably relevant to the debate. Put on the show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, I’d definitely call a home-schooler for help on a question about Greek philosophy.

But a question about the social effects of smoking marijuana? I’ll take an audience full of secular public high school graduates, thanks!

The next example of anti-conservative animus occurs as the author attends an anti-abortion rally on a college campus. “Have you ever had sex?” a counter-protester asks. “After you’ve been a single mother on the street you can come back with your right wing religious trash.” On substance, I agree with the author: this is an unkind, wrongheaded thing to say. But come on. Abortion is the most fraught issue in American life. Few people on either side of the debate are cool-headed and rational when it’s being discussed. The sort of guy who picks abortion arguments with people protesting on the street is still less likely to engage in rational conversation. This doesn’t say something larger about prejudice against conservatives or religious people or pro-lifers or home schoolers. The lesson to take away here is about the contentious nature of the abortion debate.

In some circles, being a conservative has a stigma, as does being religious. I’ve heard people scoff at home-schooling too. It’s a shame. I’m against this sort of prejudging.
The author says that in her hometown, Visalia, California, there are more churches than cars (this is not literally true) and there are residents “who think that any Californian south of Bakersfield is a Los Angeles liberal, and anyone north of Fresno is a Bay Area hippie.” She attends a college whose Web site affirms that “all faculty, staff and students are professing Christians.” I happen to have visited Visalia, and I know several people whose alma mater is Biola. Like every other subculture in America, the people within them — many are conservative and Christian — prejudge people unlike them, and too easily dismiss political arguments contrary to their own.

I’d be very sympathetic to an essay complaining about these pathologies generally. I do not understand why such an essay should instead focus on the plight of home-schoolers from the right side of the ideological spectrum, especially if Dembroff’s victimhood is nothing more than what is described in the essay’s anecdotes.

"Pursuing Happiness" By Joseph Ashby

In modest enough fashion, Joseph Ashby recounts the ordinary but nevertheless impressive story of how he and his wife worked full time while putting themselves through college during the first year of their marriage. Despite all that, they were “resolved not to let schooling keep us from starting a family,” he remembers, so aside from classes he worked as a landscaper, she answered phones at a customer service center, and they conceived a child. “Our plan was simple: put in the heavy work hours while we could, pay off the car, set aside money for the pending baby, and save as much as we could after that,” he writes, so they got rid of their cell phones, washed clothing in the tub to save trips to the laundromat, studied rather than getting a full night’s sleep, spent long Saturdays mowing lawns, and otherwise lived as ascetic an existence as they could.

Baby arrived! Sleep declined. Then tax time came, and “we felt like something had to be wrong. Our tax liability (mostly payroll) was more than we had paid in rent over the entire year…” The experience caused the author to set out on a quest “to answer certain fundamental questions about government.” This being a book of essays about conservatism, you can imagine his conclusion: the tax burden is too high. It’s a perfectly defensible conclusion. But the faulty logic that Ashby employs to get there is problematic, especially if he hopes to persuade an educated audience of non-conservatives that he is right.

The essay’s personal narrative is weakened by the fact that a married couple with a child and both husband and wife qualifying as full-time students don’t actually face a particularly high tax burden, especially if they are making a typical customer service and landscaping wage. Later in the essay, the author includes something he would regard as explaining away this objection. “Once the taxes were collected, we faced the demoralizing option of returning to the government to beg for the money back through Pell Grants, Earned Income Credit, food stamps, Medicaid, or other programs,” he writes. “Our sustenance and prosperity were de-linked from our own faculties and effort and tied to a bureaucrat’s actuarial table.” Given the social stigma associated with food stamps, I understand how the prospect of applying for them might demoralize someone (though again, if you’re eligible for food stamps your tax burden is relatively low). What I find hard to accept is that it’s demoralizing to apply for a Pell Grant or to file for the earned income tax credit, or that doing so is tantamount to begging. It struck me as particularly weird that the author would feel like a beggar simply for seeking the return of assets that, by his logic, were illegitimately taken.

Here we arrive at the weakness in the author’s principled argument. In his telling, he delved into various works of political philosophy, and “two principal worldviews emerged in every case: According to the first philosophy, a just society could only exist if its members had the right to do what they wished with what they earned. The second philosophy dictated that for a just society to exist, some of what people earned must be taken so that all could be maintained in relative economic equality.”

I submit that this binary isn’t very useful.

The first philosophy would seem to prohibit taxation entirely in a just society. The second philosophy is too vague to be usefully descriptive — what exactly is relative economic equality? — but however defined, neither worldview describes very well the philosophy that is the reigning consensus among many Americans: put roughly, some redistribution is justified to care for the least well off, but beyond that debt to society people are by and large free to keep what they earn and spend money on what they wish. The devil is in the details, and there are intense disagreements about degree, but it’s a glaring omission when you don’t include a middle ground so big it encompasses John F. Kennedy and Milton Friedman.

Articulating his own philosophy, the author seems to reject the social safety net and all redistributive welfare spending on principle. “The money we earned wasn’t just ours, it was us; an extension of who we were no less than fingers are an extension of a hand,” he writes. “The vision described by President Roosevelt relied upon taking the sweat of one man’s brow and giving it to another as his own. Cries of necessity merely served as a smokescreen, covering up the true nature of a redistributive system.” This is evasive nonsense. Read any semi-complete history of the Great Depression. The “cries of necessity” weren’t mere smokescreen! And redistributive policies passed by Congress in that era not because people were evading the true nature of redistribution, but because they directly confronted what the United States would be like absent any of it.

Several lines later, Abraham Lincoln is invoked, decrying men who take other men’s labor—thus slavery is implicitly equated with paying into the welfare state. This last portion of the essay is sufficiently vague that the reader is left unclear about whether the author would really embrace the full implications of his theory. If pressed, I suspect he’d concede that, even in principle, a minimal amount of social welfare spending financed by redistributive taxes is better than allowing people without food to starve to death, or handicapped orphans to die on the streets from exposure. But his stated positions don’t allow for that.

I raise these examples not to vilify Ashby, or to score a cheap debating point, but to highlight the problem with essays about taxation that go no farther than vague statements of poorly conceived first principles. The impulse is understandable: there is self-evident truth in the notion that humans have an individual right to the fruits of their labor. Once a concession is made that any redistribution is justified, the purist fears that the whole game is over — suddenly the argument is over the appropriate scope of the redistributive welfare state.

As a practical matter, however, all is lost for people like Ashby. You’ll be hard pressed to find people — even staunch conservatives — who favor an end to all redistribution by government. Perhaps this widespread consensus, which has endured for many generations, is mistaken. I certainly want to encourage writers of all people to stand on principle, even if it means mounting radical challenges to current arrangements in the society we share. But if that’s your project, have the courage to confront its full implications: impoverished Americans relying on charities that, if the whole of history is any guide, won’t meet all their needs; a wholesale re-organization of American government; massive social upheaval as the country adjusts to the new status quo; and that’s not a comprehensive list.

Ashby gives us something different — an impressive personal story of self-reliance and delayed gratification that anyone in a similar position would do well to emulate, followed by a principled argument against redistribution whose full implications he doesn’t nearly confront. As a result, I cannot help but wonder if the author has failed to grapple with the practical consequences of the ideas he espouses, seeming to reject most taxation and social welfare, but never acknowledging what it would mean to reorganize America in that fashion, because he cannot actually defend everything it would entail. If he is inclined to respond, I’d encourage him to either grapple with the most unpleasant consequences of his ideas, or else to find arguments for lowering the tax burden that he actually believes.

(Previous entries in this series are here and here.)

"The Politics Of Authenticity" by Matthew Lee Anderson

In Proud To Be Right’s opening essay, social conservative Matthew Lee Anderson shows us the 2008 GOP primary through the eyes of young, politically active social conservatives — a group that began election supporting Mitt Romney, the most electable seeming candidate, but were ultimately won over by authenticity of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. In Lee’s telling, these young voters, though ardently pro-life, are very much anti-torture, more concerned with the ethics of war than stem cell policy, and motivated by a desire to protect the human rights of immigrants more than the border and culture of the United States.

He ascribes these priorities to the prosperous economic times in which his generation grew up, and especially the travel abroad that it experienced: Once you’ve gone on a church group trip to sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America your outlook changes. What the young people of his acquaintance share with their socially conservative parents, however, is a jaded expectation that politicians will exploit their support during election season, only to betray them on issues of the utmost importance, as so many have done before.

“For most of my friends, the appearance of being ‘authentic’ was more important than the candidate’s actual policy positions,” he wrote. “We want to know whether our leaders are the ‘real deal,’ or whether they are simply pandering.”

With his folksy manner, rhetoric drawn from the bible, and long record in public office, Huckabee won over these young voters at the grassroots level, though “social conservative leaders dithered.” Being a Huckabee supporter was therefore difficult, Anderson recalls, due to the candidate’s poor treatment in conservative media, biblical rhetoric that Anderson deems better suited to a previous age of American oratory, and an inability to expand his appeal beyond the evangelical base. “Those limitations partially explain the phenomenal appeal of the light that eclipsed him, Sarah Palin,” the author writes. “Palin’s personal narrative, ease, and authenticity all made her extremely likable to most Americans, and grounded our faith and trust in her. But unlike Huckabee, Palin introduced the possibility of a conservative with traditional social values who knew how to articulate them without potentially offensive religious overtones.”

There is much to like about Lee’s essay, but what is the reader to make of this turn? Most glaring is the error of fact. Contrary to the author’s assertion, Sarah Palin is not “extremely likable to most Americans.” In fact, she has a zealous fan base that likes her extremely, but polls indicate that roughly half of the country views her unfavorably. At best, she is wildly divisive, far more so than Mike Huckabee. It is curious that an informed observer of American politics so misunderstands the stated opinions of his fellow citizens.

Anderson never completely reveals whether or not he is a fan of former Governor Palin, but his account of her supporters suggests that they’re making a grave error in judgment. If you’re upset about being perennially fooled by slick politicians who always break their promises, it is a strange response indeed to pick future candidates based mostly on an assessment of their authenticity, the very quality you’ve long been unable to correctly identify! What exactly makes these people confident that they won’t be fooled again?

Every presidential candidate employs a team of image makers, speechwriters, handlers and strategists whose job is to conjure whatever qualities voters are defining as “authentic” that election cycle. That Mitt Romney can’t fool anyone despite his machinations isn’t evidence that other charlatans are as easily identified, any more than spotting a brown tree snake implies an ability to see the chameleons spread about the same trunk.

Social conservatives ought to know by now that no one is able to identify an authentic politician by the speeches they give or the various cultural cues they exude. The best bet is backing political champions based upon the public policy measures they’ve actually supported in the past, and the most specific pledges possible about their future behavior. By that measure, Sarah Palin is a wild gamble on every issue save abortion and special needs kids, whereas a multi-term governor like Mike Huckabee, perfectly trustworthy on those issues, is a more known quantity on many other matters besides.

The most peculiar thing about the affinity of social conservatives for Sarah Palin is that they despise John McCain, distrusting him as much as any other Republican in the Senate… but are completely unbothered by the fact that he was championed by Palin not only on the campaign trail in 2008, but also in his 2010 bid to be re-elected to the Senate. Fellow mavericks! Ask a Palin supporter about this. They’ll usually reply that she was just being loyal to the man who helped establish her on the national scene. Put another way, Palin acted like a typical career politician by supporting someone not based on shared convictions, but because that person helped to advance her career. In other contexts, that sort of quid pro quo is held up as representing everything that is wrong with politics.

Near the conclusion to his essay, Anderson writes of social conservatives that “our politics—of both generations—are largely determined by our implicit trust our lack thereof in our candidates.” I’d ask him this question. Given the repeated inability of socially conservative voters to accurately assess the authenticity of their candidates, why should the rest of us give any weight to the outcome of events like the Values Voter Summit? Were it a reliable gauge of how a politician would behave in office, it would at least provide valuable information. But if the social conservatives of the past have inadvertently championed faux-authentic hucksters who successfully misled them about how they’d govern — and this experience has resulted in an investment of trust in Sarah Palin because she seems authentic — why should anyone be persuaded by that endorsement?

“The politics of authenticity” isn’t just a theoretically misguided method for choosing electoral candidates to support. It has been demonstrably discredited for decades on end by politicians left and right. So long as grassroots factions on the right decide primaries based on that metric, general election voters are rational to mistrust GOP nominees, as they often do. As Sarah Palin demonstrates better than any living politician, authenticity is in the eye of the beholder.

The Future Of Conservative Journalism Isn't Tom Wolfe

Discussed In This Review:

Proud To Be Right edited by Jonah Goldberg, published by Harper Collins

In the final years of the Bush Administration, the American right began grappling with a devastating reality: after eight years in the White House, majorities for several sessions of Congress, and a Supreme Court largely composed of Republican appointees, the GOP would soon be ousted from power — and its legacy would be a significantly larger federal government, an alarming fiscal crisis, and a squandered reputation for competence in foreign policy. The American people were poised to elect the most liberal president in a generation and a friendly Congress to implement his agenda. Conservatives, libertarians, and right-leaning independents faced the prospect of a long rebuilding process.

Amid this tumult, a few established conservative voices began surveying the next generation of thought leaders on the right, much as fans of a losing sports franchise avoid depression late in the season by focusing on the rookie draft or a promising Minor League pitcher. New York Times columnist David Brooks was the first to issue a scouting report, opining in the summer of 2008 that he’d found “one bright spot” for his ideological team. “Over the past five years, a group of young and unpredictable rightward-leaning writers has emerged on the scene,” he noted in a June column. These heterodox thinkers “did not rise through the official channels of the conservative or libertarian establishments” — they established themselves as credible voices largely through blogging, and that “allowed them to create a new sort of career path and test out opinions without much adult supervision.” A veteran of The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Review and The Weekly Standard, Brooks seemed to imply that the adult supervision on offer at movement conservatism’s establishment publications was more hindrance than help.

The ten journalists he proceeded to laud in The Gray Lady were unknown to the average American, but they fed my impression that it was an exciting time to be a young, right-leaning writer in Washington, DC. Several were colleagues at The Atlantic, where I was then an intern. By spring, when former Mike Huckabee campaign staffer Joe Carter recruited me to help edit a start-up Web magazine, I played a part in publishing many of the rest. In some ways, my employers at Culture11 were engaged in another effort by established participants in movement conservatism to change its course. The Chairman of the Board at our company was Bill Bennett. Our CEO, former Bush staffer David Kuo, said he hired me on the strength of an essay I’d published arguing that what the right needed wasn’t another William F. Buckley so much as a dozen Tom Wolfes — talented narrative journalists who understood conservative insights, but whose primary aim was furthering the journalistic project rather than undermining it. Our young staff produced a Web magazine with its share of flaws. I like to think its greatest strength was captured by Charles Homans, who profiled our effort in The Washington Monthly. “Culture11’s contributors were often people who also wrote for more ideologically coherent political magazines, environments that encouraged group-think,” he wrote. “What they wrote for Culture11, which encouraged the opposite, was often much smarter.”

We weren’t the only ones offering an alternative to the stultifying confines of establishment conservative journalism. The American Conservative, a paleo-con magazine, regularly published unpredictable, well-edited feature stories, and filled an especially important niche challenging the hawkish foreign policy consensus in the Republican Party. Patrick Ruffini, Jon Henke and others were hosting frank discussions about political strategy at The Next Right. The group blogs Secular Right, Postmodern Conservative, and Front Porch Republic, among many others, were insisting that the mainstream of movement conservatism was flawed in its value system. And that autumn, Washington DC abuzz with election fever, former Bush Administration speechwriter David Frum joined the rebellion against the status quo.

Then a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a writer at National Review Online, Frum saw very early that an Obama victory was likely. In preparation for the future, he gathered in his living room one evening another group of young right-leaning writers, including Eli Lake, James Kirchick, Noah Pollack, and Mary Katherine Ham. He sought reactions to a project he intended to launch: a Web site called New Majority.Com that would begin to do the work of rebuilding the GOP into a viable governing party. He spoke about the political magazines that helped him find conservatism as a youth, his desire that some among today’s high school and college students might be similarly influenced by his Web site, and the dearth of other publications that present a face of conservatism that is appealing to young people. “I’m not relying on it to make any money, and the goals I have for the number of people it’ll reach are modest enough that they’re attainable,” Frum said. “But it’s an ambitious enough project that after the election I’ll be leaving National Review.”

That revelation captured the general mood. It wasn’t that I had anything against NR. It just didn’t speak to me or anyone else in my generation, if only because it had to serve its own largely elderly subscriber base. Aside from the always lively Reason, the occasional superb feature story in The Weekly Standard, and City Journal, a place that shares the urban outlook of my peers at its very core, there wasn’t any right-leaning publication that I looked forward to perusing as a reader (especially once the Claremont Review of Books, a place that also prizes quality, bought into the Bush Administration’s foreign policy, failing to notice that its accumulation of executive power was incompatible with the Founding vision they ostensibly champion). It felt as though you’d find the future of right-leaning journalism outside the CRB and NR—and I added Frum to the list of people wagering money on that proposition.

AS IF TO UNDERSCORE the changing guard in 2008, William F. Buckley had died at the beginning of the year, survived by a son who very publicly supported candidate Barack Obama at the end of it. Under Rich Lowry, already its longtime editor, National Review remained the conservative movement’s flagship publication: less influential in its pronouncements than Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, occasionally publishing suspect material — especially online — but rightly credited with publishing solid pieces too, and maintaining much higher standards than the right’s intellectually dishonest entertainers—not that you could call them out in the print magazine!

Even in the narrower world of conservative letters, NR wasn’t nearly as influential as it once was. Its very success birthing a conservative movement meant sharing readers with a whole right-wing media landscape that didn’t previously exist. And like all decades-old media organizations, technology had spawned innovative competition. In the age of the fax machine, William Kristol launched The Weekly Standard, sending pages to an influential Inside the Beltway audience, en route to creating a national magazine of his own. The Internet saw upstarts of lesser quality like Townhall, Newsmax and World Net Daily challenge NR for the hard right audience, along with a constellation of bloggers for whom the old flagship wasn’t ever hard-nosed enough. Another challenge came from outside the movement: unlike in prior generations, a young right-leaning writer could make a name for himself without getting punched by NR or making peace with its orthodoxies (partly because mainstream publications had become more open to dissenting voices than they once were).

As the Obama Administration began, Andrew Breitbart seized the moment to launch his answer to Gawker Media, running a series of Web sites that would skewer “Big Hollywood” and “Big Government,” just to start. In terms of accuracy, sophistication, and quality of argument, Breitbart’s sites couldn’t nearly compete with the house that Buckley built, but he could pander and provoke more shamelessly — associated only with The Drudge Report and The Huffington Post, his public brand had no reputation for quality or intellectual honesty, so fear of squandering them wasn’t ever an impediment. NR does worry about those things. When less restrained competitors with lower standards and costs attract more attention and readers per editorial dollar spent, it puts the publication in a tough spot.

Despite all this, National Review remains the premier name among conservative magazines. And there is at least one writer and editor there for whom the Web era has proved a tremendous boon: 40-year-old Jonah Goldberg, who was asked to launch National Review Online shortly after joining the magazine in 1998, and deserves much of the credit for its emergence as the single most successful online destination for conservative readers. Along with the capable Rich Lowry, who has the impossible job of publishing a magazine meant to advance a perpetually splintering ideological coalition (while keeping all its factions happy enough to keep subscribing), Goldberg was responsible for getting some brilliant voices into the NR orbit, sometimes alongside hackery that seemed as though it couldn’t have been approved by the same editorial team.

Goldberg especially appealed to younger readers, as one longtime fan in his late twenties explains. “What distinguished Goldberg from the others of his generation at NR/NRO — Lowry is the same age and Ponnuru and K-Lo are actually younger — was that he breathed the same cultural atmosphere I did and wrote about it regularly,” he said. “Perhaps I’ve missed something, but I can’t think of anything cultural the other three have written that sets them generationally apart from WFB or John O’Sullivan. Goldberg is instantly recognizable as someone who was young during the 80s and who enjoyed it.”

Youthful compared to colleagues, a commercially successful author, an accomplished online innovator, Editor At Large at conservatism’s flagship publication after serving as its Web editor — all these qualities made Goldberg particularly suited to offer up his own dossier on the future of conservative journalism. As it turns out, he’s done exactly that.

As editor of the recently released book “Proud To Be Right,” he curated a collection of essays from young right-leaning writers that even skeptics would do well to give a look. Aside from the high quality of the best several pieces, the quality of argument and writing is uneven — more sophisticated briefs for conservatism can certainly be found elsewhere, and I imagine that Brooks, Kuo or Frum, if hired as editors on a similar project, would produce very different volumes, for better or worse.
But the right’s various dissidents seem to share a conviction that it’s now impossible to be loyal to the conservative movement — at least as loyalty is now defined by its membership — and to write wide-ranging, intellectually honest stuff without pulling punches. This makes them good at championing talented writers who don’t fit very well within rigid ideological orthodoxies, and less inclined or able to influence future purveyors of movement journalism.

In contrast, Goldberg would object to the notion that loyalty, as defined by today’s conservative movement, is a strike against a writer’s intellectual honesty. He is a movement lifer.

At his worst, that means acting as an apologist for convenient ideological allies like obvious charlatan Glenn Beck, actively “doing his part” in the spin wars — that’s how the man himself once put it — and responding to much cogent criticism of the right by insisting that liberals are even worse, as if Team Red point-scoring is an important component of his intellectual work. Put another way, Goldberg reflexively sides with ideological allies more often than any writer I completely trust—but contra his staunchest critics, he is also capable of insightful analysis that goes beyond talking points, occasionally offers mild criticism of indefensible behavior by “his own side,” and risks public debates with smart, forceful interlocutors, unlike the Rush Limbaughs of the world.

The man who edited “Proud To Be Right” is Jonah Goldberg at his best. Drawing partly though not entirely from people more loyal to conservatism than to journalism, he has managed to produce a volume of largely well-written, intellectually honest essays that do justice to some of conservatism’s strengths and reflect the diversity of its strains. It certainly includes paragraphs that would be difficult to get into the pages ofNational Review. The essays also lend insight into sides of the ideological movement that unaligned, right-leaning heretics like me regard as recurring, maddening flaws. Its primary value isn’t as a book of arguments; the reader who can most benefit is the one wondering, “What is the world view of young conservative writers in the United States of America? What assumptions under-gird it? And how did they come to their beliefs?”

Taken as a whole, the most confusing thing about the book is its intended audience. In the introduction, Goldberg applauds its contributors for their senses of humor, optimistic spirits, and grasp of human experience, writing that “this volume was intended to show—rather than tell—that, in fact, conservatives are people too.” Set aside the wisdom of that goal. The implication is that the book is meant to convert non-conservatives, or at least to instill in them a higher opinion of young people on the right. So why is the cover art red, white, and blue, the title “Proud To Be Right,” and “edited and with an introduction by… bestselling author of Liberal Fascism” the pitch on the cover? One can imagine it on the table at Barnes and Noble alongside George W. Bush’s memoir and Glenn Beck’s latest — another illustration of the tension between the imperatives of Conservative Inc. and the ideological project it’s ostensibly advancing.

If you’re among the subset of the book-buying public put off by such packaging, I’d urge you to look past it. Oh, you’ll vehemently disagree with parts of the book, and roll your eyes at several others, but it’s a paperback, and the polished essays by James Poulos, Michael Brendan Dougherty, James Kirchick and Helen Rittelmeyer alone justify the price. Almost everyone in the collection is someone I’d contact about writing for me if I were still commissioning pieces for Culture11, some with more suggestions for improvement than others. They’ve produced work worthy of serious critique and engagement, something that cannot be said for a large part of each year’s Regnery catalog. So I intend to address several of their essays in subsequent posts, offering to air their rebuttals in an update or follow-up. If commenters have the book, perhaps they can ask questions too, and push back against my assumptions and arguments.

In another essay, I could tell a long story about the evolution of my thinking about journalism and its compatibility with ideological movements. I’ve written elsewhere that The Atlantic’s motto, “Of no party or clique,” seems to me the best attitude, and it won’t surprise any regular readers that I’m a great fan of almost everyone on David Brooks’ list of heterodox conservatives, several of whom either wrote or still write here at The American Scene. I very much hope that they’re prominent in the future of opinion journalism. If we’re realistic about the limits of ideological journalism on the right, the contributors on offer in Proud To Be Right represent an optimist’s glimpse at the future of conservative journalism.

Should any of its contributors choose to accept employment within the confines of the conservative movement, I hope they’ll retain their willingness to challenge the status quo, or at least be given many chances elsewhere to do work that is smarter and more interesting. Goldberg deserves enormous credit for giving them one such opportunity.

UPDATE:

Essay 1, “The Politics of Authenticity” by Matthew Lee Anderson, is discussed here.

Essay 2, “Pursuing Happiness” by Joseph Ashby, is discussed here.

When California Flirted With Fascism

On several occasions, I’ve recommended Kevin Starr’s multi-volume history of California. Here’s a passage that is particularly striking, from page 176 of Endangered Dreams:

In early 1935 the City of Los Angeles established a Committee on Indigent Alien Transients, which reflected the bias of the city. Astonishingly, the committee openly defined an indigent alien transient ‘as being a transient entering the state of California without visible means of support and whose legal residence is foreign to the state of California.’ Thus the Committee, for all practical purposes, took California out of the Union. The City of Los Angeles would soon attempt to seize control of the state.

Long skilled in the techniques of rousting transients out of town after jailing them on vagrancy charges, the Los Angeles Police Department played an important role on the committee, on which the deputy chief of police sat as chairman. On 4 November 1935 the Committee on Indigent Alien Transients issued a report calling for the establishment of checkpoints manned by police and health officials at every major point of entry into the state. Transients who could not prove California residence, the report recommended, should be put into camps, preferably operated by the State Relief Administration, where they would be fingerprinted and their backgrounds checked for a criminal record. The report also called for “Vagrancy Penal Camps” for transients arrested on vagrancy charges. These penal camps would serve as labor pools for work upon roads, parks, and other public projects. Police should monitor all common carriers, railroads especially, and all main arterial highways in an effort to apprehend indigent alien transients seeking to enter the state. State and local officials, meanwhile, should form a statewide committee to supervise these activities: an extra-parliamentary task force responsible for sealing off the borders of California from transient migration.

Not surprisingly, these recommendations, offered with a straight face—with their suggestion of checkpoints, of preemptive arrests of those whose only crime was being poor in the Great Depression, of fingerprinting in forced labor camps, and, worse, of Vagrancy Penal Camps where thousands might be concentrated—did not meet with universal acceptance throughout the state. As paranoid as mainstream California might have become, it was not yet ready for such an unconstitutional, police state program.

Encouraged by local oligarchs, together with the City Council and the County Board of Supervisors, Los Angeles Police Chief James Davis, a spit-and-polish officer, resplendent in shiny black riding boots and a Sam Browne belt, brushed aside any constitutional scruples, of which the chief had few, and decided to go it alone. On 3 February 1936 Chief Davis dispatched 126 LAPD officers to sixteen crucial highway and railroad entry points throughout the state with orders to turn back any and all indigent transients who could not prove California residence. Within days, the Foreign Legion of Los Angeles, as it was soon called, had established checkpoints along the Oregon border in Del Norte, Siskiyou, and Modoc counties; in the central Sierra Nevada counties of Plumas, Lassen, Nevada, and Mono; in the city of Independence in Inyo County, and across the southern desert in the counties of San Bernardino, riverside, and Imperial. To maintain a semblance of legality, Chief Davis requested that his officers be locally deputized, which the sheriff of Del Norte County refused to do.

Among other things, this passage is a reminder that the current recession isn’t actually very much like The Great Depression, and that as astonishingly bad as today’s state and local officials are they’re not nearly so stark raving mad as the LAPD of old.

Quick Election Reax

For a former politics junkie, I was less-engaged by the just-completed midterm elections than I have been in quite some time. Hence the minimal commentary in the run-up thereto. (Also, I’ve been very focused other writing.)

But here are my morning-after reactions:

- The one real disappointment for me of the night was Senator Feingold’s loss in Wisconsin. I really wish that the Democrats had lost a generic team player like Boxer or Murray and that one of the few civil libertarians in politics had managed to retain his seat.

- Leadership matters. Republicans nominated very right-wing candidates who seemed like plausible Senators in Florida and Pennsylvania. They won. They also nominated very right-wing candidates who seemed like lunatics in Nevada, Delaware and Alaska. They lost. (Well, Alaska’s not certain yet.) There is a lesson here: don’t nominate candidates who seem like lunatics. You would think this would be an easy lesson to learn.

- While I have no great expectations for the GOP-led House, a big swing is a good sign for American democracy. Personally, I think the GOP has essentially no ideas on how to fix what ails the American economy. But the Democrats have had nearly two years to convince America that they know what they are doing. They failed to convince. What should happen when the American people feel the governing party has failed is that the governing party loses a big election. They did. Good.

And, now we’ll see.

Re: The “Liberal Gene”

Jonah, Goldberg and John Derbyshire are having an interesting exchange at The Corner on whether researchers have a found a gene that, under certain environmental conditions, predisposes individuals to liberal politics.

I wrote a long piece (gated) for National Review in 2008 that described why we should be very skeptical of assertions of causality that are derived from gene association studies. The basic reason is that, while these kinds of studies have remarkable rhetorical force because their purported subject is biology, if you look under the skin at the bones of the analysis, the core method is traditional social science. The article under consideration is an almost perfect illustration of this.

Start with the point that the press release (literally titled “Researchers liberate a ‘liberal gene’”) is basically worthless, as it so frequently and carelessly elides the difference between claims of “association” (i.e., correlation) and claims of causality.

The basic methodology employed in the real paper starts by arguing that prior research has led to a theory that a specific gene ought to be implicated in a specific behavior. In this case, the hypothesized behavior is that people with a specific gene variant that is believed to predispose individuals to seek out new experiences should be more liberal if they are also embedded in a social network with a broad variety of viewpoints. The point of the study is to “test” this hypothesis by, roughly speaking, looking at a group of people who have the gene variant to see if there is an “association” (there’s that word again) between the number of friends in adolescence and likelihood of being liberal, and then to compare this degree of association to that found among a group of people without the gene variant. They discover that for the group with the gene variant, there is a meaningful association, but that there is not for those without it.

The big problem, of course, is that other things might also vary between the groups, and these other differences might be the real cause of the observed behavior difference. Here’s how I put this in the piece from the magazine:

Media outlets will often speak loosely of things such as a “happiness gene,” a “gay gene,” or a “smart gene.” The state-of-the-art method for finding such a link is something called a “genome-wide association study” (GWAS). In a GWAS, scientists use blood or saliva samples to sequence the DNA for a group of several thousand people who exhibit a trait or behavior of interest (the “case group”), and for a second group of several thousand who do not exhibit the trait or behavior (the “control group”). …

A second limitation of a GWAS is that it detects association rather than causation. Suppose we found that a case group of persons suffering from a disease had a greater incidence of some gene than did a control group, but that we failed to notice that the case group was disproportionately of Chinese ancestry. Culturally transmitted behaviors in the case group might be responsible for the disease, even if these behaviors had nothing to do with the gene in question. That is, the gene could be nothing more than a marker for Chinese ancestry, and hence for participation in behaviors that cause the disease. Geneticists call this problem “stratification,” and deal with it by carefully matching individuals in the case and control groups to ensure that the groups really are comparable. The problem is that these stratification effects can be fiendishly subtle. No matter how carefully we match cases with controls, there can always be some unobserved environmental factor correlated with, but not caused by, a genetic difference between groups, and this environmental factor might be what is actually causing the disease.

The researchers are well aware of the centrality of this problem. The crucial methodological passage in the full research paper starts with this:

Genetic association studies test whether an allele or genotype occurs more frequently within a group exhibiting a particular trait than those without the trait (e.g., is the frequency of a particular allele or genotype higher among liberals than conservatives?). Because a significant association has several possible explanations, there are two main research designs employed in association studies to isolate the effect of an allele on a trait, case-control designs and family-based designs (Carey 2002). Due to potential population stratification in our sample, we chose to employ a family-based design, which eliminates the problem of population stratification by using family members, such as parents or siblings, as controls.

That is, the researchers intelligently use family members as controls to try and optimize case-control matching. But this does not come close to eliminating the problem, as the researchers then describe:

We include individuals from the same family in the analysis, and thus the observations are not independent. Therefore, we use a generalized estimating equations approach with an independent working correlation structure for the clustered errors, to estimate the model. Only siblings that have different genotypes, in this case a different number of 7R alleles, are informative for the within-family component of variance since wij equals zero otherwise. However, families that share the same genotype are also included in our analysis for improved estimation of the between-family component. We have also included controls in the model for both age and gender, as there are numerous instances of age effects in gene-environment interactions and there are sex specific genetic influences on political preferences (Hatemi, Medland, and Eaves 2009c). [Bold added]

In other words, the researchers have built the functional equivalent of a regression model, through which they believe that they have comprehensively controlled for other effects in just the way that any political science, economics or other social science researcher would have in a paper that tried to evaluate the effect of any non-genetic purported cause of such a propensity (which makes a lot of sense, as the article was actually published in The Journal of Politics).

But as I described in my piece, this means that in spite of all the white lab coat talk about alleles and so on, we should treat this with the same skepticism that we would bring to any social science regression model:

So how is a GWAS showing an association between Gene X and aggressiveness different from a social-science study showing a correlation between watching lots of violent TV and aggressiveness? Mathematically, it’s not. In both cases we start by measuring aggressiveness for each person. We then compile for each person a list of data providing information on potential causes of aggressiveness: in one case genomic information, and in the other, sociological observations on childhood experiences, school quality, and so on. In the first case we observe that aggressive people have a higher incidence of Gene X; in the second that they watch a lot of violent TV. The reliability of GWAS studies is thus subject to the same limitations that we think of in connection with sociology or economics (as opposed to, say, chemistry). The only way around this — the only way to attain the precision of chemistry — would be actually to show the chain of biochemical processes by which a set of named genes creates the observable brain functions collectively defined as “aggressiveness.” Of course, if we could do that, we would have no need for a GWAS study.

The claims of causality that arise from such studies should accordingly be treated with the appropriately intense skepticism that we apply to sociological or econometric studies. In the middle of the 20th century, Friedrich Hayek and the libertarians he inspired faced those who asserted that that an economy could be successfully planned. The libertarian position was not that such planning could be proved impossible in theory, but that we lacked sufficient information and processing power to accomplish it. The world of economic interaction is so complex that it overwhelms our ability to render it predictable; hence the need for markets to set prices. This is the same analytical problem we face when trying to predict a mental state that depends upon a large number of genes. It is unclear whether we will ever understand how this complicated machinery and its interactions with the environment come together to create characteristics of mind. It is certain, however, that we do not have such an understanding now, and that we won’t know such a project is achievable until we achieve it.

(Cross-posted to The Corner)