James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government
Dartmouth College
Via Matthew Yglesias, the great thinker Jonah Goldberg has published the “book” that I mocked a couple of years ago: Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Its jacket features this immortal line about my alma mater (also in the Amazon summary text):
Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a “friendlier,” more liberal form. The modern heirs of this “friendly fascist” tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn’t an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.
Who needs Ann Coulter when you have Jonah Goldberg?
But the best part, as I noted back in 2005, is that Goldberg has a long history of denouncing Nazi analogies:
1/5/01: “Nazism and the Holocaust are hardly joking matters. So let me be very careful in how I talk about this.
“If you honestly think John Ashcroft or elected Republicans in general are Nazis, then you are either a moron of ground-shaking proportions or you are so daft that you shouldn’t be allowed to play with grown-up scissors.”
…”Calling someone a Nazi is as bad as calling them a “nigger” or a “kike” or anything
else you can think of. It’s not cute. It’s not funny. And it’s certainly
not clever. If you’re too stupid to understand that a philosophy that
favors a federally structured republic, with numerous restraints on the
scope and power of government to interfere with individual rights or the
free market, is a lot different from an ethnic-nationalist, atheistic,
and socialist program of genocide and international aggression, you should
use this rule of thumb: If someone isn’t advocating the murder of millions
of people in gas chambers and a global Reich for the White Man you shouldn’t
assume he’s a Nazi and you should know it’s pretty damn evil to call him
one.”
6/19/02: “[T]he use and
abuse of Nazi analogies has been a major peeve of mine for quite some
time.”
9/4/03: “Suffice
it to say that the Nazis weren’t simply generically bad, they were uniquely
and monumentally evil, not just in their hearts but also in literally
billions of intentional, well-planned, and bureaucratized decisions they
made every day.“And yet, in polite
and supposedly sophisticated circles in America today it is acceptable
to say George Bush is akin to a Nazi and that America is becoming Nazi-like.
Indeed, in certain corners of the globe to disagree with this assertion
is the more outlandish position than to agree with it.”…”When you say that anything
George Bush has done is akin to what Hitler did, you make the Holocaust
into nothing more than an example of partisan excess. Tax cuts are not
genocide, as so many Democrats have suggested over the years…“Darn those
Republicans” does not equal “Darn those Nazis.” The Patriot
Act is not the final solution. The handful of men in Guantanamo may not
all be guilty of terrorism, but it’s more than reasonable to assume they
are. And no matter how you try to contort it, Gitmo is not the same thing
as Auschwitz or Dachau. There are no children there. You don’t get carted
off to Cuba and gassed if you criticize the president or if you are one-quarter
Muslim. And, inversely, there was no reasonable justification for throwing
the Jews and the Gypsies and all the others into the death camps. The
Jews weren’t terrorists or members of a terrorist organization. To say
that the men in Guantanamo — or any of the Muslims being politely
interviewed by appointment — are akin to the Jews of Germany is to
trivialize the experiences of the millions who were slaughtered. Even
if you think Muslims are being unfairly inconvenienced, when you say they
are the Jews of Nazified America you are in essence saying the worst crime
of the Holocaust was to unfairly inconvenience the Jews.
Update 12/18 1:13 PM: Matthew Yglesias says it’s not an analogy for Goldberg — he’s literally saying liberals are fascists:
Brendan Nyhan thinks he’s got Jonah Goldberg nailed as some kind of hypocrite, citing such past Goldbergisms as “the use and abuse of Nazi analogies has been a major peeve of mine for quite some time” and “Suffice it to say that the Nazis weren’t simply generically bad, they were uniquely and monumentally evil, not just in their hearts but also in literally billions of intentional, well-planned, and bureaucratized decisions they made every day”.
As I understand it, though, the difference here is that in Liberal Fascism Goldberg isn’t drawing an analogy. He’s saying that “the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood” just are the “modern heirs” to the American tradition of fascism “an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries.” Contemporary American liberalism, in short, doesn’t resemble Nazism. Rather, according to Goldberg it’s a variety of fascism, albeit a “friendly” one.
While that’s certainly what it appears from the book jacket text, we don’t know yet. But in any case the hypocrisy charge stands — how can Goldberg possibly square what he wrote before with the book? I’ve emailed him to ask for an answer…
Ezra Klein follows up on the Hillary polarization post I objected to with a LA Times op-ed on the subject. Here’s the punchline:
Those numbers tell a couple of different stories. The first is that it’s probably a mistake to compare Hillary Clinton with the other presidential hopefuls. Her many years as one of the most recognizable players in national politics leave her more comparable to a president running for reelection than a newcomer scrapping for a shot at the crown. As pollster Scott Rasmussen tells me, all the other candidates are going to see their negatives go up during the course of the campaign — and if one of them ultimately wins the race, their negatives will go up even further. “The next president will get to where she is no matter who we elect,” he said. It’s not that the others are necessarily less polarizing than Clinton. It’s that they’re not as polarizing yet.
The other message of the Gallup numbers on Bill Clinton and George W. Bush is that voters can change. Hillary Clinton’s detractors like to argue that she can’t win because her negatives are hard rather than soft — meaning that people have already made up their minds about her and are not movable on the subject. But history suggests that opinions are rarely set in stone. Between 1992 and 1996, for instance, Bill Clinton flipped from a net favorable rating (the percentage favorable minus the percentage unfavorable) of negative 7% to positive 11% — that’s a shift of 18%, all of it upward. In November 2000, 60% of voters reported favorable feelings toward Bush, while a mere 34% disapproved. In November 2007, only 40% approve, while 55% can’t find a kind word — a net shift of 41%, downward. True, those flips happened over significantly longer spans of time than a single campaign, but the point remains: Voters are rarely unwilling to change their minds.
However, though Klein linked to my post, he failed to address the points that I made in his op-ed. Here’s the first:
While any politician will of course become more polarizing as they rise in prominence, it doesn’t follow that all of them will converge to some equilibrium level of polarization. The good politicians who endure, survive, and win usually do so by retaining some appeal to independents and moderates in the other party.
In other words, Hillary has become more polarizing than your average national political figure and Obama or Edwards might not be viewed as negatively. He implicitly dismisses this possibility.
The second point is even more important:
[E]ven if we concede that Obama or Edwards would eventually become as polarizing as Hillary, Klein’s point still doesn’t hold. Surely it’s harder to win a general election when your opponents start out energized against you and almost half the electorate starts out with an unfavorable impression of you. Why would we think otherwise?
And while it’s true that perceptions of a politician can change over time, does Klein have an example in which someone’s favorables improved during a presidential campaign? The change in Bill Clinton’s favorables from 1992-1996 is not a useful comparison because he was an incumbent benefiting from a favorable economy.
Right now, the nation’s media is faced with a key challenge: explaining the rise of Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama in their respective party’s primaries. But rather than study the polling data, most journalists will focus on what they do best — making up stories after the fact based on campaign events to “explain” something that already happened out in the electorate. (See also the “Dean scream,” most accounts of presidential debates making any difference, etc.)
The worst example I’ve seen thus far comes from the NYT television columnist Alessandra Stanley, who was tasked with writing a story about this year’s primary debates, which didn’t really have many so-called “moments” and weren’t watched by many voters. So she came up with this bizarre claim about Mike Huckabee’s rise in the polls:
Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, rose from the second tier, in part because of a few deft moments during the Republicans’ CNN/YouTube debate in late November. (When asked by a voter whether Jesus would have supported the death penalty, Mr. Huckabee replied, “Jesus was too smart to ever run for public office.”)
Does anyone think that Huckabee “rose from the second tier” because of his “deft moments” during that debate?
Meanwhile, Obama’s surge in the polls has led to the inevitable stories portraying his campaigning in a positive light:
The campaign of Mr. Obama, which slogged uncertainly through a period in the late summer and fall, alarming contributors who feared that he might have missed his moment, is now brimming with confidence as he delivers a closing argument to Iowa voters. His speeches are noticeably crisper, his poise is more consistent and many supporters say they no longer must rely upon a leap of faith to envision him winning the nomination.
The process stories about Hillary Clinton’s campaign being in disarray are of course starting to show up as well. It’s all too predictable.
Vanderbilt’s John Geer and Brett Benson and Claremont Graduate University’s Jennifer Merolla have released a new study on the extent of anti-Mormon bias among the public and the best ways to counter it:
Bias against Mormons is significantly more intense among the public than bias against either African Americans or women, according to a new scientific poll by three professors from Vanderbilt and Claremont Graduate universities.
The survey was designed to assess bias against Mormons, how best to combat it and its potential impact on the nomination process and general election campaign.
…A national representative sample of 1,200 people participated along with an additional over-sample of another 600 “born-again” Southerners. The over-sample was designed to measure the concerns that people have expressed about Romney’s religion among the evangelical base of the Republican Party.
…Key findings of the study include:
* Bias against Mormons is significantly more intense among the public compared to bias against women and blacks. The bias against Mormons is even more pronounced among conservative Evangelicals. Their bias against Mormons rivals their bias against atheists.
* Only about half the nation claims to even know a Mormon or to know that Romney is Mormon.
* The extent of the bias against Romney is moderated if the individual already knows that he is Mormon. That information seems to demystify the Mormon religion, making people more tolerant of the religion. Those who do not know Romney is Mormon exhibit much greater bias upon learning of his religion.
* When participants in the survey are provided information that stereotypes Mormons, such as ‘Mormons are part of a non-Christian cult” or “Mormons are polygamists,” they react negatively to Romney’s candidacy.
* Participants react favorably to messages that dispel the negative stereotypes about Mormons. Examples would be “about a hundred years ago the Mormon Church banned polygamy,” or “the Church of Jesus Chris of Latter-day Saints stresses traditional family values.” However, simple appeals for religious tolerance do not win over support for Romney from the respondents.
Unfortunately, as Geer pointed out in an interview about the study with Newsweek.com, Romney’s speech on faith in America took exactly the wrong approach:
NEWSWEEK: Let’s talk about the address specifically. According to the Los Angeles Times, “Romney said Monday that he would not focus on his Mormon beliefs in a major speech on religion this week and instead would discuss his concern that “faith has disappeared from the public square.” Based on your data, is this the right approach?
GEER: The data we have suggests it’s probably not a good idea. How much he wants to talk about his faith and the Mormon religion is not entirely clear based on our evidence. But we have pretty compelling results that suggest that if people learn more about the Mormon religion–in a sense checking the kind of bias that exists out there, that Mormons believe in polygamy, that Mormons represent a cult, etc.–that if you check that information with counter-information, such as letting people know that the Mormon church banned polygamy a hundred years ago, and you provide that kind of context, that people become a little bit more tolerant and show less bias. Our data are pretty clear. There is bias against Mormons–but it dwindles once people learn more.
NEWSWEEK: What about a plea for tolerance, like Kennedy made in 1960?
GEER: We gave people the biased information against Mormons and try to counter it with various scenarios, information being one of them–like “the LDS church is big on family and traditional values.” Then we just did a plea for tolerance, literally clipping from Kennedy’s Houston ministers speech one of the passages where he talks about the need to have tolerance. The tolerance doesn’t work. It’s the information that checks the bias. When people who are not aware that Romney is Mormon are given the classic caricature of Mormons, that drives down Romney’s ratings. But the thing is, you can only bring back the ratings of Romney with new information. A plea to tolerance does not work. Sure, it’s a good thing. But you first have to let people know what you’re asking people to be tolerant of. That’s the key takeaway.
[Disclosure: Benson and Merolla are former graduate students here at Duke.]
My friend Ben Fritz noted an interesting contradiction.
Here’s New York Times editor Bill Keller in a public memo on June 23, 2005 (PDF):
Our policy on anonymous sources is a good one, and bears repeating. It begins: “We
resist granting anonymity except as a last resort to obtain information that we
believe to be newsworthy and reliable.” The information should be of compelling
interest, and unobtainable by other means. We resist granting anonymity for opinion,
speculation or personal attacks.
A quote in an article on “Jackass 2.5” published Thursday by NYT reporter David M. Halbfinger:
“There’s more vomiting, nudity and defecation,” one executive said, speaking more candidly than the companies involved had agreed to and on condition of anonymity. “The stuff that consumers really want.”
If that isn’t “newsworthy,” “of compelling interest,” and “unobtainable by other means,” I don’t know what is!
Andrew Sullivan asks why Rich Lowry and Charles Krauthammer are suddenly up in arms about the increasingly dogmatic strain of religious conservatism in the Republican Party:
It’s amazing to me to watch Rich Lowry and Charles Krauthammer begin to panic at the signs of Christianism taking over the Republican party. Where, one wonders, have they been for the past decade? They have long pooh-poohed those of us who have been warning about this for a long time, while cozying up to Christianists for cynical or instrumental reasons. But now they want to draw the line. Alas, it’s too late, I think, for Charles to urge an openness toward atheism or non-religion in a party remade on explicitly religious grounds by Bush and Rove. Who was it, after all, who cited Jesus Christ as the most influential "philosopher" in his life as part of his electoral strategy? Who reorganized his party to base it on churches? The man whom Krauthammer eagerly supported in two consecutive elections.
I don’t know about Lowry and Krauthammer, but isn’t the general explanation that conservative pundits tend to hold back on criticizing the GOP except when there’s a competitive presidential primary? For instance, as Matt Welch reminds us in McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol and David Brooks backed John McCain in 1999-2000, but when he lost, they fell in line behind Bush and have been there ever since. I’d expect Lowry and Krauthammer to do the same thing.
Also, it’s particularly safe to use Huckabee as the vehicle for criticizing the GOP’s religious turn because a backlash is underway and he has little elite support on the right.
One thing you rarely see in tax and budget reporting is an explicit juxtaposition of the cost of domestic discretionary spending with tax cuts. As the Washington Post reports today, President Bush is fighting fiercely over relatively small differences in domestic discretionary spending while advocating an unfunded fix of the alternative minimum tax that dwarfs the savings from limiting spending growth:
In his first six years in office, Bush accepted domestic discretionary spending increases from Republican-controlled Congresses that averaged 7 percent a year, said Brian Riedl, a conservative budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation. In his showdown with the current Democratic Congress, the president is insisting on spending growth of 4 percent at most.
But as he stood his ground, first against $22 billion in additional domestic spending, then against $11 billion, Bush steadfastly opposed Democratic efforts to raise taxes to recoup the cost of a $50 billion measure that would stave off the growth of the alternative minimum tax (AMT). The parallel tax system was created in 1969 to ensure that a few rich Americans could not avoid paying taxes altogether, but because it was not indexed to inflation, it now threatens more than 20 million upper-middle-income households.
If, as expected, Congress passes a bill without making up the lost revenue, the cost to the Treasury would swamp the savings from Bush’s spending fight.
The more general pattern here is that conservatives routinely blame government red ink on domestic discretionary spending — particularly earmarks — while advocating tax cuts that cost vastly more than any feasible reduction in domestic spending. Journalists should put these two ideas in tension with each other more often.
My friend Ben Fritz flags a disturbing story about the Bronx Family Court, where the elevators haven’t worked properly for a year:
Lines to use a working elevator can stretch around the corner. People sometimes wait for hours to get to hearings, which are held on the seventh and eighth floors. Frequently, hearings have to be postponed because clients and witnesses cannot get to them.
…In some cases, warrants have even been issued for people who are downstairs waiting for an elevator; judges know only that they are not in the courtroom, said Bill Nicholas, the assistant attorney in charge of the Legal Aid Society’s office at the court.
The judges have less trouble getting upstairs because they use a bank of elevators reserved for court personnel. The public is not allowed on those, and may not use the stairs because of security concerns. Among them, there are no cameras in the stairwells, and the narrow stairwells are impractical for small children or people pushing strollers. So they must wait.
And these delays aren’t merely a nuisance — they are fueling human tragedies:
[T]he potential loss is not simply that of time wasted, but of the quality of justice that is dispensed. Consider the case of a client of Ms. Gutfriend’s who was scheduled for a hearing in mid-November to determine whether she could get her daughter back from foster care, where the child had been for 10 months.
The hearing was set for 10 a.m., Ms. Gutfriend recalled, but it was a day when only two of the four elevators in the building were working. The lines to get on the elevator and up to the hearing rooms stretched back two city blocks. Her client phoned upstairs to let her know she was stuck in the line, but was not able to get upstairs in time.
The judge agreed to call the hearing again an hour later, but the client was still in line. So the judge, who had something like 70 other cases to try that day, rescheduled the no-shows for the next available date. For this mother, the next chance to plead her case and get her child back was in January.
As Ben wrote, “Can you imagine how quickly the elevators would get fixed if this was happening in a family courthouse in a middle class or upper class community?” It’s just tragic how poor people are treated in this country sometimes.
At what point will people realize that it is impossible to measure the carbon footprint of the food they buy? The concept of “food miles” is only a small part of the story. Consider this case of the potato chip, which is discussed in an op-ed in today’s New York Times:
And while it might seem logical that the further an item of food journeys, the more carbon emissions it generates, this turns out not to be the case. When you count the energy used by harvesting and milking equipment, farm vehicles, feedstock and chemical fertilizer manufacture, hothouses and processing factories, transportation emerges as just one piece of the carbon dioxide jigsaw puzzle.
Take the potato chip, for instance. When Walkers, a British snack manufacturer, studied the carbon footprint of a packet of its chips, distribution represented just 9 percent of the total. The greatest emissions came in storing and frying the potatoes. Farmers store potatoes in artificially humidified warehouses, which take energy to run, generating emissions. Because of the way they’re stored, the potatoes contain more water and take longer to fry, generating more emissions. And since farmers sell potatoes by weight, they have no incentive to drive off excess water. Changing the way potatoes are warehoused and sold could therefore significantly cut the carbon footprint of chips.
Obviously, calculating the carbon footprint of food is an extraordinarily tricky business. But only when we understand a food’s energy use throughout its life cycle from seed to kitchen can we make intelligent decisions on where to start on cutting the greenhouse gas it generates.
These sorts of anomalies are likely to be pervasive in the production process. As a result, “we” can’t really make intelligent decisions as consumers on cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the food production cycle — producers can, but only if they have an economic incentive to do so. That’s why we need a carbon tax. If the price of storing and frying potatoes reflects the damage it does to the environment, then producers will have an incentive to figure out a better way. Consumers won’t have to worry about “food miles” and government won’t have to try to calculate “carbon footprints” of various industries. The same principle applies to the production of any sort of commodity good.