The Tiller murder

The New Neo Posted on by

Controversial abortion doctor George Tiller was shot and killed in church yesterday, and a firestorm of argument has erupted in response.

Some on the pro-choice side blame the entire pro-life movement, especially people such as TV talk show personality Bill O’Reilly, who referred to the doctor over the years as “Tiller the Killer,” as well as groups that publish names and addresses of abortion doctors in order to intimidate them and facilitate protests and reprisals against them.

My opinion? I hold each person responsible for his or her actions, and ultimately the Tiller murderer is fully responsible for what he did. The rest are examples of freedom of speech, which is (and should be) protected.

Almost all of the pro-life groups have condemned Tiller’s murder, although some on the other side claim that this is mere sanctimonious hypocrisy for public consumption, and that all those who criticized Tiller have his blood on their hands. But although anti-abortion forces are passionate about their cause, very few are killers or would promote such killing; among devout Christians, especially, it is antithetical to their pro-life stance. They believe that the proper avenue is to change public opinion through peaceful means, protests, and education.

Any and every group in which members feel strongly about their cause (including, for example, environmentalists) runs the risk of encouraging the extremists and killers in its midst. In this respect, the pro-life forces are hardly unique. Abortion is an issue that raises such powerful feelings that I’m surprised that more killings of this sort don’t occur, although every single one is a crime to be condemned.

Tiller became a lightning rod for the controversy because he was no ordinary abortionist. He operated one of only three clinics in America that perform late-term abortions on fetuses deemed to be viable, or probably viable, or possibly viable. These abortions were performed even on healthy fetuses, allegedly to preserve the mother’s health when other abortion procedures that could have preserved the life of the fetus were rejected as more likely to compromise the mother’s well-being.

This is by far the most controversial type of abortion procedure, one that even many pro-choice advocates condemn (in these situations the term “unborn child” instead of “fetus” seems especially apropos). It is certainly a practice that I consider very very troubling (you can read about some of the complex legal and medical issues involved here). So those who called Tiller a killer had a fairly strong case.

I unequivocally reiterate that this does not in any way excuse his murder. But it certainly does explain why he might have been a focus for criticism. To supress such criticism would be to suppress freedom of speech in an important arena.

Tiller himself certainly knew that he was a target; he’d been shot in both arms by an anti-abortion assailant in 1993. He maintained recently in a successfully-defended lawsuit that all of his abortions, even the late-term ones on healthy fetuses, were in compliance with Kansas law that:

…allows abortions after a fetus can survive outside the womb only if two independent doctors agree that it is necessary to save a women’s life or prevent “substantial and irreversible” harm to “a major bodily function,” a phrase that has been interpreted to include mental health.

That’s the law. The court ruled that Tiller was innocent of charges that he had not followed it, and acquitted him. The killer wrongly took the law into his own hands, and that is murder. And those who would use this murder for political ends are guilty of something, although I’m not sure what to call it.

Mr. President goes to New York…

The New Neo Posted on by

…to take in dinner and a Broadway play.

The Democrats counter the resultant criticism by saying that all presidents take vacations, especially Mr. Obama’s predecessor George Bush, so what’s the big brouhaha about?

It is certainly true that most presidents vacation quite a bit. They need to. They also need to relax, enjoy themselves, and get out on the town now and then in more short-term ways—take in a play or a movie (or play golf, as Eisenhower was often criticized for doing).

Obama is no different. But most vacations are longer trips, working vacations where the president has a change of scenery and keeps working in a more relaxed and rural setting than the White House. Camp David, for example, exists for that purpose. Or if presidents prefer, they either go home (the ranch for Bush and Reagan, the peanut farm for Carter) or, if they don’t own that sort of convenient retreat, they go to estates kindly offered by friends and supporters (the Clintons on the Vineyard, for example).

I have no problem with this at all, and I’ve always assumed that, be they Republican or be they Democrat, Presidents mostly work very hard while at these “vacation” places. Getting there involves flying and expense and all that. But this sort of getting away from it all and yet continuing to work seems necessary for presidents’ mental and physical health, and not wasteful because they usually are away for quite a while.

But for a president to fly from DC to New York for an evening of pleasure seems to have no precedent (at least none I can recall) on either side of the political spectrum. It somehow seems excessive for a short-term treat that is available right in Washington with much less bother and expense. But instead of going to the Kennedy Center, the Obamas flew to New York complete with entourage and press for a single night’s activity that could be more or less duplicated at home in DC. And for the Obamas to do this now, with the economy as it is, seems especially tone deaf and narcissistic. It’s an indication that Obama has learned he can do whatever he wants; he is nearly immune from criticism in the mainstream media, so why not indulge whatever whim he and Michelle might have?

Obama has often been compared to Jimmy Carter. Maybe some of his policies are, but in this respect they could not be more different. Although Carter was an awful president, one good thing I must say about him is that he promised his presidency would be less imperial (he would carry his own bags, for example) and he followed through on much of that. Carter took relatively few vacations compared to other presidents: only 79 days for his four years in office, mostly at his own peanut farm. Say what you will about the man, but in this respect (unlike Obama with his calls for sacrifice only for others), he was no hypocrite.

[ADDENDUM: So much for transparency.]

Leonard Cohen comes to Boston

The New Neo Posted on by

Okay, quick: how many 74-year olds could give a three-plus-hour concert night after night and leave the audience hungry for more? Leonard Cohen, that’s who, and last night it was Boston’s turn to savor the pleasure, and my turn to sit in the audience with over 3500 other lucky Cohen aficionados.

He didn’t disappoint, not for a minute. There were no obscurities from the Cohen oeuvre last night, either—it was Greatest Hits all the way, and in this case “great” is not hyperbole, it’s understatement.

Since I knew nearly every word of every song, I was tempted to sing along as I do at home. But everyone in my proximity was spared that experience by dint of my great forbearance; I limited myself to a lot of swaying and a few happy yelps when I’d hear the opening notes of a particular favorite.

As I’ve written before, Leonard Cohen is not for everyone (although he’s certainly for me). Some find him boring, some find him droning, some find him hard to tell apart from Dustin Hoffman until he opens his mouth (although as they’ve both aged, they look a lot less alike than they used to). But I find him to be one of the most compelling and hypnotic singer-songwriters, poet-musicians—whatever sort of hyphenated descriptive term you prefer—in the world.

Cohen spent a lot of time last night with his hat on and his eyes closed and his legs bent or even in a full kneel (try doing that when you’re seventy-four), facing his backup singers or his musicians and singing to them. It sounds as though this would distance him from the audience, but it didn’t; it’s his way of reaching deep within himself to give the greatest emotional power to each song. The words are neither more nor less important than the music, and although he’s probably sung each composition hundreds or even thousands of times, he never seems to be just going through the motions.

For example, when Cohen sang “Suzanne,” one of his earliest songs, he brought thick layers of memory to those of us who had first heard it back in high school or college in the 60s, from a Leonard Cohen who seemed mature at the time but was only in his mid-thirties. How did he make it seem so fresh now, singing it as an old man? His voice is far deeper (deeper even than I’d heard it sound recently in You Tube videos from the current tour—how deep can a man’s voice get and still be heard by the human ear?) But that’s not the only thing that’s deeper; you can hear all the ache of the intervening years—the hard-won wisdom and the hard-fought pain—in his phrasing and tone, and as you listen you nod and think of all that you’ve been through in those same passing decades.

Cohen’s musicians and backup singers are all extraordinary artists as well. Each one has more than a moment in the spotlight and each one is fully up to the task. This is no small part of what is so satisfying about a Cohen concert. One is carried along not only by Cohen’s sonorous voice, his powerful presence despite his diminutive size, and the force of the songs themselves, but also by the wall of sound that accompanies them. No song ever sounds exactly the way it did on the record, nor does it sound exactly the way it did on the You Tube video of some other concert, but it is a tribute to the extraordinary musicality of Cohen and everyone else on the stage that none of the new variations is ever a disappointment no matter how deeply entrenched in one’s head a beloved original might be. Each new phrasing, each new riff, is a revelation.

I have just used the word “revelation,” and it points to another characteristic of Cohen’s work: there is a religious undercurrent to it, even when he’s singing about sex (or maybe especially when he’s singing about sex). How he manages to combine the worldly and even the world-weary with the ecstatic and the numinous is a mystery, but his music is permeated with this sense.

Towards the end of the evening it became even more apparent, as he closed the night with encore after encore for the ecstatic crowd that didn’t want to let him go, and then gave them a benediction in farewell. One wonders if there will ever be another Leonard Cohen tour. But one can hope. Meanwhile, the cries of “we love you, Leonard!” rang out from the audience as it said its goodbyes.

I guess I’m not Laodicean

The New Neo Posted on by

Nor are you, if you’re reading this blog.

But I had ever heard of the word before, and certainly couldn’t spell it until I’d seen it in this article.

Fortunately for National Spelling Bee champ (and aspiring neurosurgeon, but that seems to go with the territory) Kavya Shivashankar, she could.

[NOTE: I was taking the definition of “Laodicean” from the link, by the way, where it was defined this way: lukewarm or indifferent in religion or politics.]

Research on happiness: so, what do women want?

The New Neo Posted on by

Alas and alack, and woe is us. Happiness is more elusive for women than ever, according to a recent study.

Women’s reported happiness has fallen relative to men’s happiness, and it’s done so quite consistently in industrialized countries, across class and educational and regional lines. A mere thirty-five years ago women were happier than men, but now men are happier than women.

“The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness” is the title of the study involved, which can be found in its entirety here. This is the abstract:

By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging — one with higher subjective well-being for men.

It is indeed a paradox, and a mystery. But mysteries invite speculation, and so I’ll climb aboard and guess. The explanation can’t be something obvious like divorce, or the tug between career and home for mothers; those things have been corrected for demographically in the research and found to be unrelated to the changes in reported happiness.

The declining happiness effect appears to be so pervasive and consistent that it’s not just some artifact of a particular test, either. The change seems real. There is one startling exception to the trend, however—black women are happier than they were before in the absolute sense, and their reported happiness has not changed relative to black men:

An important exception is that this phenomenon has not occurred similarly across racial groups. African-American women have become happier over this period in parallel with rising happiness among African-American men, implying little change in their gender happiness gap. This rise in African-American women’s happiness has occurred as part of an overall rise in the happiness of blacks, a rise that has eliminated two-thirds of the black-white happiness gap.

So this has occurred despite the fact that blacks in general are still less happy than whites, although gaining on them. Let’s put this finding aside for a moment and go on.

This is the pattern of the happiness decline in the other women:

The top lines show that in the 1970s women were more likely than men to report being “very happy”, while this differential began to evaporate in the 1980s. The bottom two lines show that in the 1970s men and women were roughly equally likely to report being “not too happy” and a gap emerges in the 1990s with women more likely than men to report unhappiness.

So some change began in the 1980s and continues to the present. All sorts of statistical analyses were performed by the researchers to tease out what it might be, and they can’t ascribe it to anything they can measure. The trend of decline in happiness for white women includes Hispanics (apparently even wise Latinas are susceptible), and was more or less equal across age groups, employment, marriage, education, and childbearing status.

This is fascinating, although I have no clue what it means:

Trends in male happiness mirror…trends in male earnings””men with a college degree or more have become happier over time, while men with a high school degree or less have become less happy over time. The patterns for women however are not similar: women of all education groups have become less happy over time with declines in happiness having been steepest among those with some college

In Europe it’s a bit different although similar: men and women have both had a rise in satisfaction, but a differential one so that the gap between them is similar to that in the US.

My leading theory is that perhaps certain other trends in our modern world—increased choice and increased pressure to do it all, the decline of the family, rising expectations for happiness and for achievement in all spheres of life, and the perception (correct or incorrect) of the world being a dangerous place—unite to cause an increased feeling of instability and “things fall apart, the center does not hold,” and that something about women’s particular emotional makeup causes these things to affect them somewhat more negatively than they do men (I guess it’s a good thing I’m not the President of Harvard; that kind of talk could get me fired).

This still wouldn’t explain the differences for black women, but I’ll attempt to tackle that in a moment.

The researchers seem to agree that my theory is a plausible, if unproven, one:

…there may be other important socio-economic forces that have made women worse off. A number of important macro trends have been documented””decreased social cohesion (Putnam 2000), increased anxiety and neuroticism (Twenge 2000), and increased household risk (Hacker 2006). While each of these trends have impacted both men and women, it is possible for even apparently gender-neutral trends to have gender-biased impacts if men and women respond differently to these forces. For example, if women are more risk averse than men, then an increase in risk may lower women’s utility relative to that of men.

Women’s affiliative needs may in general be greater, too, and in recent decades they may have had fewer opportunities to indulge in the sort of group support they used to find almost as a matter of course. I think that may matter.

Looking at my mother’s life and the things that made her happy, I’ve observed that not only was there much more social stability then, but my mother’s world involved a great deal of social interaction, both among the women themselves during the day and in the evenings in mixed social groups. The women depended on each other and had more free time and were therefore more available to each other.

My mother was also part of a group that had for the most part known each other since childhood, since few moved away. They could count on the fact that their marriages would probably last, and they perceived their kids as growing up in a stable environment with fewer risks and temptations to go wrong. In short, my mother was part of a seemingly stable group and world—despite the upheaval of the 60s, which was small relative to what has transpired since. Whatever her milieu may have lacked in excitement and change it made up for in a sense of security, community, and shared values.

But what of today’s happier black women? It’s just a guess, but I wonder whether more black women see their lives as continuing to get better, whereas women of other races may be more likely to feel that theirs have peaked and may even be in decline. And/or perhaps black women also have more group support available to them, and are part of a larger and tighter community, whereas women of other races feel more isolated.

I admit that these explanations are fairly lame, but they’re the best I can come up with at the moment. Feel free to offer your own.

whatwant.jpg

Finding the truth behind the photo: a German spy story

The New Neo Posted on by

The wheels of justice grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine. Over forty years after the fact, documents have been unearthed that turn on its head the common understanding of a seminal event in German history:

The killing in 1967 of an unarmed demonstrator [Benno Ohnesorg] by a police officer in West Berlin set off a left-wing protest movement and put conservative West Germany on course to evolve into the progressive country it has become today.

Now a discovery in the archives of the East German secret police, known as the Stasi, has upended Germany’s perception of its postwar history. The killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, though working for the West Berlin police, was at the time also acting as a Stasi spy for East Germany.

Here’s the photo that accompanied the tragic event, one that those of us who were around during the 60s will immediately recognize as similar to the famous one of the Kent State killings that occurred during the same era, in May of 1970:

ohnesorg.jpg

I’ve discussed the power of news photos before: that they can give an extraordinary impression and shape opinion and history, but that the facts behind them are usually more complex and sometimes have to be revised.

This appears to be true of the Ohnesorg killing. As the Times article says:

It is as if the shooting deaths of four students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard had been committed by an undercover K.G.B. officer, though the reverberations in Germany seemed to have run deeper.

“It makes a hell of a difference whether John F. Kennedy was killed by just a loose cannon running around or a Secret Service agent working for the East,” said Stefan Aust, the former editor in chief of the weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel. “I would never, never, ever have thought that this could be true.”

Ten years ago, I would not have thought it to be true either. Now I am not the least bit surprised; I’ve discovered for myself the truth of the old song “A Puzzlement” from Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s “The King and I”:

There are times I almost think
I am not sure of what I absolutely know.
Very often find confusion
In conclusion I concluded long ago
In my head are many facts
That, as a student, I have studied to procure,
In my head are many facts..
Of which I wish I was more certain I was sure!

In Germany today, many people are finding themselves unsure of what they thought they absolutely knew for the last forty years, raising:

a host of uncomfortable issues that are suddenly the subject of national debate.

For the left, Mr. Kurras’s [the shooter’s] true allegiance strikes at the underpinnings of the 1968 protest movement in Germany. The killing provided the clear-cut rationale for the movement’s opposition to what its members saw as a violent, unjust state, when in fact the supposed fascist villain of leftist lore was himself a committed socialist.

The incident seems to have been even more formative than the Kent State killings in this country, an event that was enormously important as well. Here, by the way, is the famous picture from the latter, in case you’ve never seen it:

kentstate-1.jpg

And here’s the Times on the German photo:

Mr. Ohnesorg’s death had a powerful mobilizing effect. The photograph of a woman cradling his head as he lay on the ground is among the most iconic images in Germany. Average students who might never have joined the 1968 protest movement were moved to action. And on a darker note it became the chief justification for violent action by terrorist groups like the Red Army Faction and the Second of June Movement, which even took its name from the day of Mr. Ohnesorg’s killing.

No one knows even now whether the killing was ordered by the Stasi to create just such social upheaval, distrust, and unrest, or whether it was something that Kurras did on his own. His own statements (he was acquitted in a trial after the killing) are predictably self-serving and can be dismissed; the man was a spy: And what if I did work for them? What does it matter? It doesn’t change anything.

We may never know the whole truth. But there’s no question that the killing itself did change quite a bit. The question for today is whether the knowledge of Kurras’s actual identity will change anything for those Germans who believed it to have been something quite different for the last forty years. Just remember, as the song “A Puzzlement” goes on to say, people will defend and rationalize and even fight against a change in their perceptions of the world:

And it puzzle me to learn
That tho’ a man may be in doubt of what he know,
Very quickly he will fight…
He’ll fight to prove that what he does not know is so!

Judging judges: the wise latina, the white man, and justice

The New Neo Posted on by

Much attention is being paid to the following statement made by Sonia Sotomayor in a 2001 speech in Berkeley, California:

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases”¦I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor [Martha] Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

To summarize: Sotomayor is saying that she is not especially bothered by the fact that judges may be using their own ethicity and/or gender to come to different decisions. Justice is not blind and impartial, and apparently this is okay with her. In fact, she celebrates the phenomenon, saying that she hopes a wise latina woman would dispense better decisions than a white man because of her “rich” life experiences; she embraces this sort of judicial inequality.

In doing so, Sotomayor stands Sandra Day O’Connor’s much wiser formulation about wisdom—O’Connor believes it can be possessed equally by people of either gender, and no doubt she would have included “of any race”—on its head. Sotomayor is instead saying that she wishes for such differences, and hopes that the superior judgments would be rendered by someone of her own particular gender and ethnicity.

This statement alone ought to disqualify her from any consideration for a position on the Supreme Court, including clerk (although it won’t). Why do I say this? It’s not just the racism inherent in it, although that is bad enough. It is not even her idea that people’s life experiences and even their ethnicity and gender sometimes do color their judgments; that observation is true. It is her idea that this sort of differential justice and judgment based on gender and ethnicity would be something to celebrate in a judge rather than to guard against and minimize.

Sotomayor has abandoned the idea that the possession of judicial wisdom is something that is—or should be—color and gender blind, that it ought to have a certain reality that transcends a judge’s own personal history. In other words, she does not believe that those who dispense justice can be impartially and equally wise, and that wisdom is something separate from one’s gender and ethnic identity.

Impartiality may be difficult or even impossible to achieve, and reasonable men (and women!) can differ about when it is being displayed, but one of the most sacred and important foundations of our legal system is that it is nevertheless something for which we must strive. In a very different context, I recently observed:

That’s why justice wears that blindfold. It’s not that she’s unaware, it’s that she’s supposed to be impartial.

In that post I was criticizing Obama for overriding the impartial rule of law in order to get a result he thought was right and fair in the Chrysler restructuring. He threw out contract law to favor his buddies in the unions and to criticize and short-change the first lenders.

Therefore it’s no accident Obama chose Sotomayor as the first of what will probably be several picks for Supreme Court Justice. They are both on the same page about justice: it is what they, in their infinite wisdom and valuable life experience as members of minorities defined as underprivileged and worthy of special and favored treatment, declare it to be. Not what a bunch of less-wise white men who “haven’t lived that life” might think it is. But paradoxically, the idea that there is some superiority inherent in a person’s racial or gender makeup is an example of a pernicious type of thinking that our rule of law has evolved to combat.

Affirmative action is not tangential but rather is central to all of this. The well-intentioned but I believe fundamentally flawed policy of affirmative action went beyond its own fair and desirable original goal: that people of different ethnicities and/or races be treated equally, be subject to the same rules for admission to schools and hiring and promotion and not be discriminated against. Instead, the new requirement was that supposed equality of outcome would be forced by treating them differentially rather than the same, that the rules must be changed for groups that had previously been discriminated against, now favoring them in order to redress previous impediments to an equal playing field.

Despite its laudable aims this was a dangerous move. We all have subsequently paid dearly, including those whom affirmative action was supposed to benefit, because their achievements have forever after been tainted by the suspicion (correct or incorrect) that they might not have been able to earn them if the playing field had not been recently slanted in their favor.

I’ve thought long and hard about what would have happened without affirmative action. I’m not at all sure there was a better alternative at the time, and I applaud the integration of our society and the increased opportunities for minorities that it has brought. Justice O’Connor thought the policy should be time-limited; by 2028, there would be no need for it. But once in place, these things tend to take on a life of their own, and are extremely difficult to eradicate.

In the meantime, we have results such as Judge Sotomayor’s comments about wise latinas and white men. A more racist statement would be hard to find, as one can easily see by switching the genders and races around in the same quote. But this probably will not harm her chances at confirmation. In a troubling paradox, PC thought coupled with affirmative action has made it impossible to point out the racism of a “wise latina” without having the charge of racism hurled back thousandfold at the person making the critique.

Barack Obama used racism in a similar manner during his campaign: knowing that his own racial makeup virtually immunized him against the charge, he allowed his surrogates to call his opponents racists when any criticism of Obama was mounted. He is counting on exactly the same phenomenon to protect Judge Sotomayor.

[NOTE: I think it may be no accident that Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor both went to law school during the period when the approach known as critical legal studies was highly influential in American legal education. This movement rejected the idea that the law was—or, what was more important, ever could be—impartial, and asserted instead that it was inherently political and favored the powerful elites over the oppressed.]

[ADDENDUM: Thomas Sowell agrees that these words of Judge Sotomayor’s represent a “poisonous doctrine.” And Thomas Sowell is a black man. Does that make the “richness of his experience” less, or more, likely to lead to wisdom than that of a Latina woman? I’m so confused.]

A German breaks ranks with liberalism

The New Neo Posted on by

Perhaps I should institute a “political changer of the day” feature. Today’s is that of Spiegel editor Jan Fleischhauer.

It’s pretty funny—although very sobering as well—to read of Fleischhauer’s childhood indoctrination in what one can only call the cult of liberalism, and his astonishment at discovering he wasn’t part of the circle dance anymore:

I tried to suppress my conservative tendencies at first. I convinced myself that they would eventually pass, like adolescent hot flashes. The next time I heard a joke about Kohl, I laughed more loudly than usual, hoping not to be noticed. In other words, I behaved like a 40-year-old married father who suddenly realizes that he’s gay, and doesn’t know what to do.

Fleischhauer finally embraced his inner conservative and came out of the closest without any sense of lingering shame. In his essay, he makes an observation about liberalism and its pervasiveness that has also occurred to me lately:

I would hazard to guess that many are to the left because others are.

Man’s tendency to assimilate, though well-documented in experimental psychology, is a trait routinely underestimated in everyday life. What we call conviction is often nothing but adaptation in an environment of opinions…No one wants to be the only person in an office who isn’t asked to join the group for lunch.

As more and more people around a person are liberals, the movement reaches a critical and self-sustaining mass because it requires stronger and stronger motivation and more and more bravery to break off and differ from the group. Fleischhauer doesn’t really answer the interesting question of why liberals, who so pride themselves on open-minded tolerance, are so passionately intolerant of opinions that differ from theirs, or why they prefer to consider those on the other side to be evil rather than merely well-meaning folks who happen to disagree with them.

The closest he comes is to compare liberalism to Christianity; the implication is that liberalism acts more as a religion than a political party. But in my experience, Christians are far more tolerant of nonbelievers than most liberals are of conservatives.

Liberals see the world as a Manichean struggle between the forces of good and those of evil rather than one of ideas in which reasonable people can differ. Liberals are the good, of course, and conservatives the bad; this is what leads to the strength of the intolerance. Fleischhauer describes it this way:

In my family, the SPD [Social Democrat Party, the party of the Left] was far more than a collection of like-minded people. Instead, it was seen as a sort of political Salvation Army, which would purge Germany of the remnants of fascism and lead it to a better, more just and democratic future. It stood for everything that was good about the country and, in a sense, represented, in the totality of its members and supporters, the wealth of kindheartedness that existed in Germany…The way we were supposed to feel about conservatives was obvious. They were either deeply reactionary, because they refused to accept progress, or dangerously narrow-minded. In other words, they were either despicable or pitiful characters.

The following description of Fleischhauer’s mother captures it exactly—no denizen of Berkeley could be any more passionate about politics:

My first political memory from childhood was the vote of no confidence against Willy Brandt in our national parliament, the Bundestag. I was nine, and the radio was on in the kitchen. I was waiting for lunch, but my mother stood at the stove, motionless and with her eyes closed, listening to the votes being counted in the broadcast. The tension in the room couldn’t have been greater if the outbreak of another war depended on the outcome — or the relief when, quite unexpectedly, the chancellor was saved from the CDU’s cowardly attack, almost as if a miracle had taken place. I understood early on that in politics, two eternal powers are struggling against one another, the power of light and the power of darkness.

In the face of all of this it’s amazing that Fleischhauer ended up a conservative at all—or whatever passes for one in Germany’s politically skewed-to-the-Left landscape. He doesn’t really describe that process in the essay. But he seems at peace with it now.

And fortunately, his mother is still talking to him, although that fact seems more of a testament to the power of maternal love than to her political open-mindedness.

The missing millionaires: Laffer may have been right—and Maryland isn’t laughing

The New Neo Posted on by

It turns out that, according to this WSJ article, Laffer may have been correct when he said a state that raises taxes on the rich often finds it has fewer revenues rather than more, because the rich have their methods of getting around that.

The state of Maryland has discovered that its nifty idea of making up for a shortfall by raising taxes on millionaires didn’t quite pan out as planned:

One year later, nobody’s grinning. One-third of the millionaires have disappeared from Maryland tax rolls. In 2008 roughly 3,000 million-dollar income tax returns were filed by the end of April. This year there were 2,000, which the state comptroller’s office concedes is a “substantial decline.” On those missing returns, the government collects 6.25% of nothing. Instead of the state coffers gaining the extra $106 million the politicians predicted, millionaires paid $100 million less in taxes than they did last year — even at higher rates.

No one yet knows exactly what happened. Some of these millionaires may simply have lost a lot of money in the recession. But, as the WSJ article points out, that’s something states must factor in when they rely on sticking it to the rich when things are good; they might find an unexpected deficit when times get bad:

Progressive tax rates create mountains of cash during good times that vanish during recessions. For evidence, consult California, New York and New Jersey.

Of course, it’s possible that the state would have lost even more money without the tax hike. One way to test this would be to compare the missing millionaire mass of a state such as Maryland (one that recently raised the taxes on millionaires) to another state that failed to do so, and see if the percentages of lost millionaires are similar or different. My guess is that Maryland’s loss would be significantly higher—anyone out there want to take up the challenge of doing the research?

There’s little question that at least some of those Maryland millionaires probably took up legal residence in more tax-friendly states, although the exact number of refugees is unknown. Another part of the loss may be accounted for by more tax evasion and even outright fraud, although the extent of that would be extraordinarily difficult to estimate as well. But millionaires don’t usually get to be millionaires by being dumb about making and keeping money.

Courting diversity: the Sotomayor pick

The New Neo Posted on by

President Obama has chosen Sonia Sotomayor as the replacement for outgoing Supreme Court Justice David Souter. Even before the pick, it was clear that identity politics would be a huge factor in the decision:

“There is only one thing that is essential for this pick, probably: that she be a woman,” said Thomas Goldstein, a leading appellate attorney and founder of scotusblog.com. “Beyond that, having the candidate be Hispanic would certainly be a plus, because it would add still more to the diversity of the Supreme Court…

Of its 110 justices over the past 220 years, all but four have been white males. The exceptions are two African-Americans (Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas) and two women (Sandra Day O’Connor and Ginsburg).

Because of the fact that Justices of the Supreme Court are appointed for life, personnel change comes to that august body at a glacial pace. There’s no question that women are underrepresented on the Court compared to their present numbers in the legal and judicial ranks, and I have absolutely nothing against Obama’s appointment of a woman, or a Hispanic, or (as in the case of appointee Sotomayor) a Hispanic woman.

I do have trouble with identity politics as a whole, and with the idea that a person’s ethnic/racial background determines how he or she will decide a Supreme Court case. It shouldn’t (and, in Clarence Thomas’s case, it doesn’t—to the rage of the Left). Of course, Sotomayor was chosen by Obama not as a random judge who is both female and Hispanic, but as one who also appears to come with the proper intellectual credentials and, even more importantly, the requisite liberal philosophy.

Is she the very best judge Obama could have chosen, given that he was undoubtedly going to choose only among those of the liberal persuasion? I have no idea. Perhaps she is, perhaps not; I’d have to have read a great many of her legal opinions, as well as the legal opinions of the others who were considered her rivals for the job, before I’d have a realistic appraisal of that.

And what about her remark a while back that “the court of appeals is where policy is made” (see clip here)? She makes an unconvincing little disclaimer after she says that by jokingly adding “I know this is on tape and I should never say that…I’m not promoting it and I’m not advocating it…”, but the rest of the tape makes it clear that she believes the law is something that “develops,” and that appeals court justices help that “development” along.

Is it surprising that these would be the views held by whomever Obama would be tapping for the Supreme Court openings he was slated to fill? Was there ever a single doubt that he would nominate a liberal activist judge?

No. The only mysteries were the exact identity of the person (or persons) he would name, how far they would be willing to go to “develop” the law in the liberal direction, how brilliant or mediocre their legal reasoning would be in doing so, what cases would come up during their tenure to determine the specifics of how the law would change, and whether the majority of the other Justices would come along for the ride. We now know the answer to the first question; the other answers will take some time to unfold.

So Sotomayer’s liberalism is no surprise, nor is her gender nor her ethnic origins. And, as Robert Barnes points out in today’s WaPo, although diversity could have been furthered on the Court by appointing someone who had graduated from a public university (a mindboggling eight of the present group attended either Harvard or Yale), or someone who didn’t come from an appellate court background (all the present Justices have that history, the first time this has ever been the case), that type of diversity is not considered important. Appealing to women and Hispanics most definitely is.

Obama didn’t need to be careful to choose someone who would appeal to Republicans as well, so that they wouldn’t block the nomination. That’s the advantage of controlling the legislature with what is essentially a filibuster-proof majority. It was also part of what I was so concerned about during the 2008 campaign. Back in early October I wrote the following:

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.

Back then, that was the prospect we faced. Now, that’s the reality we face.

[ADDENDUM: Here’s an interesting take on whether Benjamin Cardozo could rightly have been called the first Hispanic Justice. My answer? No. As writer Ilya Somin indicates, “Hispanic” (and many other ethnicities) is a social construct that is somewhat arbitrary. Sotomayor fits the bill; Cardozo—a nonpracticing Jew whose ancestors had emigrated from Portugal long ago—did not.

This is interesting as well:

Democratic Cardozo’s appointment by a Republican president [Hoover] has been referred to as one of the few Supreme Court appointments in history not motivated by partisanship or politics, but strictly based on the nominee’s contribution to law.

Even back then, going beyond politics to pure meritocracy was considered highly unusual.]

[ADDENDUM II: Stuart Taylor has some fascinating things to say about Sotomayor’s views on judicial diversity and on how ethnic and gender identify inform legal decisions.]