Totten interviews Berman

The New Neo Posted on by

This interview, in which Michael Totten interviews author Paul Berman about his new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, is well worth reading.

Here’s an excerpt from the description of the book at Amazon:

Twenty years ago, Ayatollah Khomeini called for the assassination of Salman Rushdie””and writers around the world instinctively rallied to Rushdie’s defense. Today, according to writer Paul Berman, “Rushdie has metastasized into an entire social class”””an ever-growing group of sharp-tongued critics of Islamist extremism, especially critics from Muslim backgrounds, who survive only because of pseudonyms and police protection. And yet, instead of being applauded, the Rushdies of today (people like Ayan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq) often find themselves dismissed as “strident” or as no better than fundamentalist themselves, and contrasted unfavorably with representatives of the Islamist movement who falsely claim to be “moderates.”

How did this happen? In THE FLIGHT OF THE INTELLECTUALS, Berman””“one of America’s leading public intellectuals” (Foreign Affairs)””conducts a searing examination into the intellectual atmosphere of the moment and shows how some of the West’s best thinkers and journalists have fumbled badly in their efforts to grapple with Islamist ideas and violence.

[NOTE: And here’s an old post of mine that’s relevant to one of the issues that came up during Totten and Berman’s wide-ranging discussion.]

[ADDENDUM: I was just remembering that, when the fatwa was first issued against Rushdie, it seemed so shocking and almost unbelievable. Now it’s like, “so, what else is new?” We have become quite accustomed to the mindset behind that sort of thinking.]

Diversity on the Supreme Court: well, there’s Harvard and Yale…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and then there’s Yale and Harvard.

David Bernstein at Volokh wonders whether this Harvard-Yale thingee isn’t a bit much:

The president went to Harvard, and barely defeated a primary opponent who went to Yale. His predecessor went to Yale and Harvard, and defeated opponents who went to Yale and Harvard, and Harvard, respectively. The previous two presidents also went to Yale, with Bush I defeating another Harvard grad for the presidency. And once Elena Kagan gets confirmed, every Supreme Court Justice will have attended Harvard or Yale law schools.

Harvard and Yale do attract a great many good students. But they also help to create and then perpetuate a certain perspective, do they not? Don’t we want diversity? Let’s hear it for diversity!

And those on the left who think Elena Kagan isn’t liberal enough might be comforted that, at least back in 1980 as an about-to-be Princeton grad, she sure was. Here’s an excerpt from a letter to the editor she wrote in 1980, after Ronald Reagan’s election (neither a Harvard nor a Yale man be he):

Looking back on last Tuesday, I can see that our gut response ”” our emotion-packed conclusion that the world had gone mad, that liberalism was dead and that there was no longer any place for the ideals we held or the beliefs we espoused ”” was a false one. In my more rational moments, I can now argue that the next few years will be marked by American disillusionment with conservative programs and solutions, and that a new, revitalized, perhaps more leftist left will once again come to the fore. I can say in these moments that one election year does not the death of liberalism make and that 1980 might even help the liberal camp by forcing it to come to grips with the need for organization and unity. But somehow, one week after the election, these comforting thoughts do not last long. Self-pity still sneaks up, and I wonder how all this could possibly have happened and where on earth I’ll be able to get a job next year.

We know that Kagan’s job search ultimately went rather well, although not right away (after writing the letter, she attended Oxford and then Harvard Law). And of course we should not all be judged by sentiments expressed when we were seniors in college. But since Kagan hasn’t said much about her politics in recent years, there’s been little to redress the picture presented by this missive.

As far as Kagan’s legal writing output goes, Eugene Volokh notes that, although Kagan’s production of articles as a legal scholar was somewhat light when she was a law professor, it was within the acceptable range, and in his opinion its quality was quite high. And he’s actually read it, unlike the rest of us.

[NOTE: If you’re especially interested in learning more about Kagan, there’s a lot more information in many posts at Volokh.]

Spambot of the day

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Yes, it’s Kagan for SCOTUS

The New Neo Posted on by

President Obama has announced the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.

I can’t say it surprises me in any way, nor should it—this was telegraphed for quite some time—and I don’t think that this nominaton (or any other nomination he would have offered) is in any peril of not being approved by Congress. Nor do I think there’s any chance Kagan will become anything other than a reliably liberal vote on the Court.

Kagan represent several types of diversity: a woman, Jewish, and (if rumor be true—I have no idea whether it is and couldn’t care less either way) a lesbian. Whether these facts will inform her decisions (in the manner of that “wise latina,” Sotomayor) is anyone’s guess, since Kagan also would be the first Supreme Court Justice in nearly forty years with no judicial experience.

Here’s some further background on Kagan. In many ways, she sounds like a white, female Obama (or at least, Obama as he was presented to us during the campaign), albeit with somewhat better credentials. She’s known for “building consensus” and is generally pretty well-liked, although described as very strategic in her climb to the top. For a supposed legal scholar, her paper trail is almost as sparse as our president’s (and that’s saying something). She’s a Harvard Law graduate, worked as one of the Law Review’s editors (although not head honcho), and taught at the University of Chicago Law School at the same time a certain Barack Obama was there, although she was a full professor in a tenure track position (later becoming Dean of HLS). She’s been affiliated with some of the same boosters (judge Abner Mikva of Chicago in particular). And she’s even been a smoker, like Obama.

Although Kagan has kept pretty mum on politics, there are huge clues that she is very liberal. She was raised in the bosom of New York liberalism, and in one of her rare unguarded moments she divulged the following:

She had spent the summer of 1980 working to elect a liberal Democrat, Liz Holtzman, to the Senate. On Election Night, she drowned her sorrow in vodka and tonic as Ronald Reagan took the White House and Ms. Holtzman lost to “an ultraconservative machine politician,” she wrote, named Alfonse D’Amato.

“Where I grew up ”” on Manhattan’s Upper West Side ”” nobody ever admitted to voting for Republicans,” Ms. Kagan wrote, in a kind of Democrat’s lament. She described the Manhattan of her childhood, where those who won office were “real Democrats ”” not the closet Republicans that one sees so often these days but men and women committed to liberal principles and motivated by the ideal of an affirmative and compassionate government.”

No surprise whatsover there, either. Nor is it a surprise that Kagan wrote her Princeton thesis on the history of the American socialist movement from the beginning of the 20th century to the mid-thirties, under the direction of Sean Wilenz:

She titled the thesis “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933,” and used the acknowledgments to thank her brother Marc, whose “involvement in radical causes,” she wrote, “led me to explore the history of American radicalism in the hope of clarifying my own political ideas.”

In 153 pages, the paper examines why, despite the rise of the labor movement, the Socialist Party lost political traction in the United States ”” a loss that she attributed to fissures and feuding within the movement. “The story is a sad but also a chastening one for those who, more than half a century after socialism’s decline, still wish to change America,” she wrote.

If that sounds like a defense of socialism, Mr. Wilentz insists that is not the case.

“She was interested in it,” he said. “To study something is not to endorse it.”

Absolutely correct. But the rest of the quotations from Kagan on politics suggest she is indeed a woman of the left, although how far to the left is unknown. Like Obama, she has been careful to keep those politics well-hidden, and that makes it possible for the left to consider her too far to the right, and the right to consider her too far to the left. I happen to think the latter opinion will be the one that pans out as time goes on and she rules on the law as a Supreme Court Justice. But I also happen to think that anyone Obama would have nominated would have been, likewise, a person of the left.

That was a foregone conclusion from the moment of Obama’s election. In fact, it was one of the things I feared even before his election, when it looked as though he would be the winner and part of a huge Democratic wave:

That brings to mind the sort of thing I’m most concerned about this election””what Democrats (or any one party) can do with power. It’s not so much the possibility of an Obama Presidency””although that would be bad enough””but the possibility of an Obama Presidency plus a Congress so strongly Democratic that it might even be filibuster-proof. That combination could do very serious damage indeed. It’s also likely that several Supreme Court Justices will be appointed by the next President, which in the case of Obama would skew the makeup of the Court towards liberal activism for decades to come.

This is the prospect we face: all three branches dominated by the liberal side of the political coin, with no checks on their power but the ability of the people to vote them out next time in two of the branches. Even in the early years of the Bush administration when Republicans controlled all three branches of government, the conservative majority in the Court was very iffy and the breakdown in Congress was very close (at times a tie in the Senate). This time the power of the Democrats is likely to be far greater than that.

Speaking of “decades to come,” we get to one of the main reasons for the Kagan pick: her age. She’s fifty, and likely to be on the Court for a long long time. That is very much part of the Obama calculus in nominating her. The Democratic dominance of Congress may come to an end in 2010, and the presidency might change hands in 2012. But the composition of the Court is not subject to those vagaries, but only to the health of its Justices. Say what you will about John McCain; had he been elected, we would almost certainly have had a strongly conservative Court that would have lasted for decades. Now we will not, and that will be one of Obama’s lasting legacies.

Happy Mother’s Day: mothers and babies

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post.]

Okay, who are these three dark beauties?

A hint: one of them is the very first picture you’ve ever seen on this blog of neo-neocon, sans apple. Not that you’d recognize me, of course. Even my own mother might not recognize me from this photo.

My own mother, you say? Of course she would. Ah, but she’s here too, looking a bit different than she does today—Mother’s Day—at ninety-six years of age. Just a bit; maybe her own mother wouldn’t recognize her, either.

Her own mother? She’s the one who’s all dressed up, with longer hair than the rest of us.

The photo of my grandmother was taken in the 1880’s; the one of my mother in the teens of the twentieth century; and the one of me, of course, in the 1950s.

Heredity, ain’t it great? My mother and grandmother are both sitting for formal portraits at a professional photographer’s studio, but by the time I came around amateur snapshots were easy to take with a smallish Brownie camera. My mother is sitting on the knee of her own grandfather, my grandmother’s father, a dapper gentleman who was always very well-turned out. I’m next to my older brother, who’s reading a book to me but is cropped out of this photo. My grandmother sits alone in all her finery.

We all not only resemble each other greatly in our features and coloring, but in our solemnity. My mother’s and grandmother’s seriousness is probably explained by the strange and formal setting; mine is due to my concentration on the book, which was Peter Pan (my brother was only pretending to read it, since he couldn’t read yet, but I didn’t know that at the time). My mother’s resemblance to me is enhanced by our similar hairdos (or lack thereof), although hers was short because it hadn’t really grown in yet, and mine was short because she purposely kept it that way (easier to deal with).

My grandmother not only has the pretty ruffled dress and the long flowing locks, but if you look really closely you can see a tiny earring dangling from her earlobe. When I was young, she showed me her baby earrings; several miniature, delicate pairs. It astounded me that they’d actually pierced a baby’s ears (and that my grandmother had let the holes close up later on, and couldn’t wear pierced earrings any more), whereas I had to fight for the right to have mine done in my early teens.

I’m not sure what my mother’s wearing; some sort of baby smock. But I know what I have on: my brother’s hand-me-down pajamas, and I was none too happy about it, of that you can be sure.

So, a very happy Mother’s Day to you all! What would mothers be without babies…and mothers…and babies….and mothers….?

The Pill turns fifty: are we having fun yet?

The New Neo Posted on by

According to Gail Collins, tomorrow—Mother’s Day, May 9—could be considered the 50th anniversary of the birth control pill, although there are several days contending for that honor. By the time I was growing up the Pill was already a fact of life, albeit a new one. I certainly used it, and I believe that on the whole I, personally, benefited greatly from it. But that doesn’t mean it was an unmitigated plus in all respects.

Collins manages to write an entire column devoted to Margaret Sanger and her crusade for the dissemination (pun intended) of birth control information without once mentioning any of the other huge controversies that dominated Sanger’s life, such as her socialism and her advocacy of eugenics, including her drive to convince members of races she considered inferior to reproduce less, as well as the forced sterilization of the mentally feeble.

Sanger began her contraceptive-promoting activities in the early decades of the 20th century, during a time when it was against the law to teach about birth control, but later exploited an exception that was made for doctors. But even prior to that, women in all cultures have had a folklore of remedies (mostly ineffective), as well as the most drastic (and dangerous) ex-post-facto measure of all, illegal abortions—not a type of contraception, of course, but a way to prevent birth when contraception was unavailable or failed.

Collins ignores this fact in her piece, as well. But abortions were very common even when Sanger began her work; for example, I recall reading a biography of a turn-of-the-century working class woman from New York City who mentioned that the women in her neighborhood had almost all had abortions numbering in the double figures, performed by a local guy whom everyone knew was employable for a small fee for just that purpose. Abortions were also sometimes self-induced; those were free in monetary terms, although they could be costly in other ways. The consequences of either type of abortion, in those pre-antibiotic days, could easily be major infection and/or death. Of course, that was true of childbirth as well.

The Pill plus Roe v. Wade changed all that. One would think that with the former there would hardly be any need for the latter. But if one thought that, one would be wrong. The advent of easy and extremely effective contraception has brought with it a cavalier attitude towards it. This is partly because abortion is also seen as so relatively easy, safe, and available; partly because unwed motherhood has turned into something so acceptable and is even romanticized as desirable; and partly because sex is now ubiquitous even for the very young and very irresponsible.

These things are not coincidental to the Pill—they are at least in part a direct result of what Sanger envisioned, the freeing of women to enjoy sex without its previous built-in consequences. But, as with so many things, consequences follow us around nevertheless; they are just different consequences.

Now we have to worry about rampant promiscuity among teens and even preteens, and the deep psychological and even physical damage it can cause (such as STDs). Girls who once were protected by the mores of society and their own fear of the shame of pregnancy are free to enjoy sex—but how many of them are really having all that much fun, and at what cost? How many of them have the maturity to understand what they want and with whom they might be happy? How many are giving in to the age-old pressures of popularity and the needs of teenage boys? How many boys are fathering kids early in life and bearing that burden? How many boys and men are brokenhearted at the loss of their potential child when a women unilaterally decides to abort?

There were terrible costs to the bad old pre-Pill days. But there are huge problems today as well, and they are not limited to teens—women who delayed pregnancy for so long that they find their biological clocks have run down, for example, or those who have a long series of meaningless relationships in a chase after that elusive and perfect (and non-existent) sexual partner who will fulfill their every desire. When we have more choices, we must bear the consequences of the decisions we do make

[ADDEUNDUM: Gay Patriot has some observations, including a classical one.]

[ADDENDUM II: Glenn Reynolds links me and Raquel Welch, a combination not usually seen in nature.]

Political change: Hitchens encounters Margaret Thatcher as dominatrix

The New Neo Posted on by

The inimitable Cristopher Hitchens relates an early anecdote about Margaret Thatcher that gives a somewhat different perspective than we usually get on the Iron Lady:

…[T]he Tories were having a reception in the House of Lords in order to launch a crusty old book by a crusty old peer named Lord Butler, and there was a rumor that the new female leader of the Conservative Party would be among those present for the cocktails. I had written a longish article for The New York Times Magazine, saying in effect that, if Labour could not revolutionize British society, then the task might well fall to the right. I had also written a shorter piece for the New Statesman, reporting from the Conservative Party conference and saying in passing that I thought Mrs. Thatcher was surprisingly sexy. (To this day, I have never had so much anger mail, saying, in effect, “How could you?”) I felt immune to Mrs. Thatcher in most other ways…

Almost as soon as we shook hands on immediate introduction, I felt that she knew my name and had perhaps connected it to the socialist weekly that had recently called her rather sexy. While she struggled adorably with this moment of pretty confusion, I felt obliged to seek controversy and picked a fight with her on a detail of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe policy. She took me up on it. I was (as it happened) right on the small point of fact, and she was wrong. But she maintained her wrongness with such adamantine strength that I eventually conceded the point and even bowed slightly to emphasize my acknowledgment. “No,” she said. “Bow lower!” Smiling agreeably, I bent forward a bit farther. “No, no,” she trilled. “Much lower!” By this time, a little group of interested bystanders was gathering. I again bent forward, this time much more self-consciously. Stepping around behind me, she unmasked her batteries and smote me on the rear with the parliamentary order paper that she had been rolling into a cylinder behind her back. I regained the vertical with some awkwardness. As she walked away, she looked over her shoulder and gave an almost imperceptibly slight roll of the hip while mouthing the words “Naughty boy!”

I had and have eyewitnesses to this. At the time, though, I hardly believed it myself. It is only from a later perspective, looking back on the manner in which she slaughtered and cowed all the former male leadership of her party and replaced them with pliant tools, that I appreciate the premonitory glimpse””of what someone in another context once called “the smack of firm government”””that I had been afforded. Even at the time, as I left that party, I knew I had met someone rather impressive. And the worst of “Thatcherism,” as I was beginning by degrees to discover, was the rodent slowly stirring in my viscera: the uneasy but unbanishable feeling that on some essential matters she might be right.

A mind is a difficult thing to change—and sometimes change arrives through strange pathways.

[Hat tip: commenter “will.”]

Jobs added, unemployment up

The New Neo Posted on by

Seems like a oxymoron, no? But not really:

Beyond government jobs, the report showed that the private sector created 231,000 jobs. Manufacturing continued to trend up, rising by 44,000. The industry, which is leading the economy’s recovery, has added 101,000 jobs since December. Construction, a sector that has been suffering, added 14,000 jobs in April…

Economists expect the unemployment rate to fall very slowly as discouraged job seekers who had stopped looking for work return to the labor force and are counted as unemployed. The size of the labor force rose by 805,000 in April, the Labor Department said.

The job increase is partly due to temporary census workers, but only partly. There’s been a real increase as well. Of course, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what’s needed—as every MSM paper on earth would be declaring in screaming headlines if it were George Bush who was president right now.

Speaking of Bush—is his reputation poised for a revival?

The ozone hole and the law of unintended consequences

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember that ozone hole and all the brouhaha it engendered? Here’s a piece about the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the hole’s opening, and the circumstances of its more-or-less closing.

The cause of the thing appeared to be the increasing use of CFCs in aerosols. The cure seemed relatively straightforward: there was a supposedly single cause and an easy fix, since adequate substitutes were available.

Ah, the good old days—a textbook case of environmental intervention that solved a thorny problem, and was done with virtually unanimous global cooperation and approval, a record that AGW activists can only envy. But in one of those twists of fate, it turns out that the fix could be contributing to global warming:

Ozone itself is a greenhouse gas. A thinner ozone layer not only reduced heat trapped over the region, it helped stir circumpolar winds, which in turn created sea spray that formed reflective, cooling clouds.

“It’s very difficult to quantify the impact on a global scale, but I think the evidence suggests filling the hole will have a regional effect on the Antarctic, possibly leading to more warming for the bulk of the Antarctic,” Shanklin said. “That could drastically change predictions about global sea level change.”

Be careful what you wish for.

As for the entire CFC-ozone hole connection itself—there are, of course, so-called “deniers;” just Google something like “ozone hole natural fluctuations” and you’ll see what I mean. Before AGW and Climategate, I wouldn’t have given them much credence, and I still have no idea whether they are just cranks or whether they are onto something. But one of the casualties of the AGW struggle has been my faith not only in the ability of scientists to understand, predict, and intervene successfully in such complex systems, but their credibility and intentions in advocating how to do so.

British election uncertainty

The New Neo Posted on by

In the US, the direct election of the president usually leads to certainty as to the winner. It’s not perfect, however, as we learned in 2000, when it took months to make the decision and required the assistance of the Supreme Court. There are many people who still don’t accept the results.

But the Brits have a system that’s even more confusing—at least to me. The majority party in Parliament gets to choose the prime minister to match, and although this often works just fine, this year we’ve got what everyone is calling a hung Parliament—the first since 1974.

The Tories (otherwise known as Conservatives—Britain’s more conservative major party; however, the entire system is skewed somewhat more to the left as compared with ours, as best I can tell) gained 92 seats, which would seem to be a strong statement of voter intent. So when Timesonline writer Peter Riddell notes that “As politician after politician said overnight, the public has spoken, but it is not clear what they have said” I disagree. I think it’s very clear what they have said, and they said it fairly loudly: a change towards a more conservative government. They just didn’t shout it at the absolute top of their lungs.

The result, as Riddell writes, is that:

Any government formed in the next few days will not be able to command a stable or overall majority in the Commons. So the new Parliament is unlikely to last more than a year or so. A second general election is probable either later this year or in the spring of 2011.

Till then, what? There’s jockeying for position as various leaders try to form workable coalitions. In the meantime, Clegg concedes that:

I have said that whichever party gets the most votes and the most seats has the first right to seek to govern, either on its own or by reaching out to other parties and I stick to that view.

That would be Cameron and the Tories. But then there’s this:

Asked if Labour would do a deal to stay in power, Lord Mandelson said: “The constitutional conventions are very clear. The rules are that if it’s a hung parliament, it’s not the party with the largest number of seats that has first go – it’s the sitting government.”

I assume Cameron will win out in the end, at least for a while, as Ian Martin indicates. But I am hardly certain, and I make no firm predictions whatsoever. How about you?

Corporations getting ready to dump health insurance?

The New Neo Posted on by

Not at all sure, but they’re certainly considering it.

And why not? Suggesting that this would be a very possible result of the HCR bill was not scaremongering, it was logic. But how many people are aware of the details? And if the president and Congressional leaders lie, and the press covers for them….but I grow weary of repeating myself.

[Hat tip: Artfldgr.]