Round 2 of the debate on the future of the American Right between John Hawkins of Right Wing News and Conor Friedersdorf is up.  It is again quite civilized even as both participants remain unapologetic and honest about their positions. 

Hawkins opens with a couple of haymakers, but also throws some straw men into the debate when he treats “moderates” as indistinguishable from “reformers.”  He notes, correctly, that few of the Bush Administration’s worst abuses were “conservative” in any meaningful sense, but also makes the unsupportable statement that these policies were ”a case where conservative politicians were convinced by people of Conor’s ideological temperament to abandon conservative governance, and it led to disaster.”   The reality of course is that the advocates of many of these policies came from both the movement and what is now the reformist camp.   They were in large part the result of political strategists (who, again, fall into both camps) filling the policy void left in a party without any kind of unifying positive agenda, as I’ve argued before.  Indeed, many of the reformist criticisms of the Bush Administration are precisely the same as the criticisms by the movement – specifically, that the Bush Administration pursued an un-conservative agenda. 

After missing this right hook, Hawkins then lands a doozy in discussing why movement conservatives don’t trust the reformers, noting that the reformers often seem more interested in throwing personal jabs at the Right, disowning conservatism, and supporting the Left than in actually working with the Right.  This is followed with a right-left combination, as Hawkins asks “Why do the people who get accused of being racists, xenophobes, and too dumb to understand politics always have to be the ones who forgive while the same blockheads who never learn from their mistakes insist on getting their way again?”  The first punch in the combination on racism and xenophobia hits home hard – it’s tough to earn someone’s trust if you’re making claims like that about them.  The second punch – “learn from their mistakes…” – misses because it again ignores that the mistakes of recent years came from strategists from both camps running the show rather than wonks or the base itself.

Notably, Hawkins sprinkles in a few successful blocks by conceding that the base exhibited too much partisan loyalty to Bush throughout the first term and that there needs to be more open discussion of ideas in the conservative media (though he tries to throw a gratuitous cheap shot that the Left is less willing to openly discuss ideas than the Right – obviously Hawkins doesn’t read many liberal blogs). 

Conor, however, comes back swinging, wearing Hawkins down with some strong blocks and dodges.  He opens his part of the round by narrowing the issues beautifully, conceding a number of Hawkins’ best points from Hawkins’ first post.  Then he goes on the attack with a magnificent roundhouse, writing “As a conservative, I presume you believe, as the Founders did, that political power tends to corrupt. Indeed, long experience teaches that all political and ideological movements sooner or later tend to become corrupted, intellectually lazy, blind to internal weaknesses, captive to orthodoxies of thought, and forgetful of their ostensible ends.

How can the right mitigate these ills so that when Republicans return to power, they’ll govern effectively? You’d think answering that question would be an urgent priority, especially for movement conservatives who regard today’s Republican Party as out of touch at best, and corrupt at worst, even as they pine for its return to power. But I can’t recall ever seeing the matter addressed, except by folks who are dismissively derided as “conservative dissidents.” This analysis applies whether the Republican Party moves to the right or to the center, whether or not it more successfully wins minority voters, etc.”

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.  This is in many ways exactly the point that I’ve been trying to make for weeks now.  This little flurry brings the crowd to its feet, shouting “Conor! Conor! Conor!”

And Conor isn’t even done.  He follows this punishing sequence with some very hard truths about the policy issues facing this country: welfare isn’t the problem, middle class entitlements are; the looming pension crisis; defense cuts; and the fiscal limits on our foreign policy. 

This sequence puts Hawkins on the ropes, and Conor looks poised for the knockout.  But just before the bell rings, Conor runs out of steam and throws a few weak punches denigrating the quality of the conservative media as compared to the quality of the explicitly liberal media.  This series of punches misses because it’s not clearly tied with the theme of the rest of Conor’s argument and Conor lacked the time at the end of the post to set this line of argument up properly.  The truncated resulting argument thus comes off as unconvincing and quite likely as a gratuitous shot at conservatives that Hawkins will no doubt use heavily to his advantage in the final round. 

Still, the first 3/4 of Conor’s round were near-flawless and landed some clear haymakers, where Hawkins’ round was inconsistent despite landing some solid blows.  Friedersdorf wins the second round of a tough fight.  After two rounds, I have it scored 19-all.  However, had Conor left out the last paragraph, Hawkins may well have suffered a knock-down that would have left the round 10-8.

Despite my recent disagreements with Conor, one area where he is indubitably correct is in criticizing conservatism’s inability to engage the culture in which it must exist.  This, to me, is not a political issue – it has little to do with winning elections or with governance – but it leaves conservative cultural critiques utterly tone-deaf, ghettoized, irrelevant, and incapable of understanding context.  Sonny Bunch and Peter Suderman notwithstanding, there are few things more dreadful to read than a conservative television, music, or movie critic or even just a conservative attempting to discuss television, music, or movies.  Today presents us with Exhibit 1,234,324 (estimated) of this problem: conservative outrage over this week’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The cause of the outrage?  In the episode, Larry David accidentally urinates on a picture of Jesus Christ hanging in a bathroom.  The typical Curb Your Enthusiasm set of misunderstandings, inappropriate conduct, etc. follows. 

The result is a series of headlines decrying the blasphemous contempt for Christians this displays – how, after all, could anyone think urinating on a picture of Jesus Christ is amusing or socially acceptable or anything other than a blatant attempt to marginalize Christians?

The problem is that this line of thinking completely, utterly, and preposterously misses the point of the show, not to mention the punchline: Larry David is an asshole.  Not just a little bit of an asshole, either, but quite possibly the world’s biggest asshole.  That Larry David’s politics happen to be liberal has not a lick to do with why his show is funny.  Indeed, to the extent his politics are involved at all, it is to make fun of his own politics, which in some cases result in him being an even bigger asshole (witness the episode where he abandoned a woman mid-coitus because he learned that she was a Republican).  David’s character in many ways is in fact supposed to be a liberal Archie Bunker, just without the lovable core.  As such, Larry David’s character is the type of character that could only be played by a liberal; were he played by a conservative, liberals everywhere would be complaining about how the show paints an unfair picture of liberals. 

The point of Curb Your Enthusiasm is absolutely, positively never that you’re supposed to laugh with Larry David, it’s that you’re supposed to laugh at Larry David.  If you ever – ever – think that Larry David is supposed to be a hero or a decent person or that his character intends his actions to be humorous, then you’re not only missing the point of the show, you’re probably a complete asshole yourself.  What makes the scene in this particular case funny isn’t that someone urinated on a picture of Jesus Christ, it’s that Larry David is the type of asshole who would urinate on a picture of Jesus Christ and show absolutely no remorse for it.  In short, he’s not mocking Christians, he’s mocking himself.

And if you honestly don’t think that David would have been willing to, say, draw a picture of Muhammed for similar purposes, then you’re just not getting the point.  Indeed, the main reason why you’re unlikely to see David do that on his show is that in this country it wouldn’t be remotely asshole-y enough; too many people would be cheering him on for it to have any kind of comic effect in the context of the show.

Via Memorandum.

UPDATE: In case the above is still unclear, the difference between laughing at and laughing with a character is summed up by the fact that Larry David’s character on Curb is the type of person who would think that “Jerk Store” is a witty and funny comeback:

Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate.

Confront them with annihilation, and they will then survive; plunge them into a deadly situation, and they will then live. When people fall into danger, they are then able to strive for victory.

Sun Tzu – The Art of War

I’m still trying to decide if Conor is willfully misreading me or if this is simply a rhetorical tit-for-tat.  Conor pounces on the title of my “strategy” for taking responsibility for the conservative movement – which I flippantly called the Trojan Horse Strategy.  If you recall, the Trojan Horse is a story from Homer.  In it the Greeks (think dissident conservatives) built a big wooden horse and filled it with some Greek fighters and then left it on the doorstep of the city of Troy.  They then pretended to sail away.  The Trojans (think: conservative movement) unwittingly brought the horse inside thinking it was a parting gift and were roundly beaten by the Greeks who sneaked out, unlocked the gates, and let their hiding army inside.s

Okay – so it’s a terrible analogy for what I’m trying to do.  I’m not trying to “defeat” the conservative movement, after all.  Just change it for the better.  My point is simply this: quit hurling spears at the walls of the conservative movement in vain.  Don’t you see, the only way to make a real, lasting difference is to get inside?  And to do that you use this big wooden horse and then….yeah.  Terrible analogy.

But that was my point, bad analogy or no.  I fleshed it out with some nice bullet points like 1) don’t alienate the base; 2) don’t alienate the independents; 3) try to reconcile social, fiscal, and defense conservatives; 4) try to nudge these groups in a more practical, productive, and ultimately good-for-the-country direction – etc.  (Nudge is key here.  I think it is more effective than denouncing people as racists or calling their radio show hosts out as bigots or as “rude” or whatever…see the above Sun Tzu quote….)

Anyways.  Here’s Conor’s take: [Read more →]

Conor Friedersdorf has posted another entry in the “sprawling, muddled debate about the state of the right, the role dissident conservatives should play, and the wisdom of attacking talk radio hosts” that’s been playing out recently, with Conor and Rod Dreher on one side, and fellow Gentlemen Freddie, Mark, and E.D. on the other, with a special appearance by Julian Sanchez. I myself was a little bit unclear on what Freddie meant by “taking responsibility” when he started this whole thing, and I think the debate has defaulted to Julian’s interpretation:

It’s not that opinion writers should have bad consciences about not being party activists, or that a fondness for Edmund Burke actually makes one “responsible” for whatever some racist loons shout at a town hall, which would be silly, but is also an easy way to read the claim on a first pass. Rather it’s that there’s an actual conservative base out there supporting the political actors, they’re not going away anytime soon, and if the conservative movement’s going to pull out of this toxic death spiral, someone who’s not an imbecile or a psychopath is going to have to identify with them enough to lead them out of the fever swamps.

And so we’ve been focusing on the relationship between dissidents and the base, and gotten into issues of leadership and tone and rhetoric, with Mark and E.D. offering their advice. Now, the League is more of a confederation than a union, so I don’t have to join up with my co-contributors on this line of argument. And so I’m actually with Conor on the idea that, in Mark’s phrase, “conservative wonks aren’t doing their job”:

Put another way, tweaking Rod Dreher for his failure to fully invest himself in reforming “the conservative movement” with wonky solutions acceptable to the base makes about as much sense as criticizing Reihan Salam for failing to abandon his cosmopolitan tendencies long enough to convince culturally conservative Texans to raise backyard chickens in the name of spiritual fulfillment and environmental sustainability. What a shame it would be if everyone who understood and embraced conservative insights uniformly turned their attention toward or away from politics! It is preferable that folks who identify as conservative adopt different postures toward “the conservative movement,” play greater and lesser roles in shaping it, wield influence in different places, and make varying contributions to American culture, political and otherwise, more generally.

All of which is to say, I have no interest in telling conservative wonks or dissidents what they should be spending their time writing or arguing about. I do, however, want to try out another angle on “taking responsibility,” and I think it might actually be more in line with what Freddie was ranting about.

In his piece, Conor reiterates a point he’s made before:

…I insist on reaffirming the distinction between the political philosophy conservatism and “movement conservatism.” The flaws that are so evident on the right are entirely due to the latter. [emphasis added - wrb]

This distinction can be made for any political philosophy that gains enough popularity to become significant in the halls of power. (Although when I try it for liberalism, I feel like I have to drop in a modifier like “Millean” or “Rawlsian.” Can we really take it for granted that “the” conservative philosophy needs no such modifier?) Since politics is a realm where concern for the common good has to contend with every kind of individual or communal interest, only rarely does a political philosophy find anything approaching a pure representation.

It seems obvious that no one would subscribe to a political philosophy if she believed that philosophy would ruin the world. But it’s not so hard to believe that someone could endorse a political philosophy without considering the problems that will come from imperfect instantiations of that philosophy.

To take a small-scale hypothetical: let’s say I become convinced that deregulation is generally good for the economy, with only rare exceptions, and that the widget industry has been under heavy regulation for years and years. Now, I conclude that a comprehensive deregulation of the widget market will lead to lower costs for consumers, lower barriers to market entry for would-be widget makers, and more innovation in widget design. It seems like I should advocate deregulation, right? Except — WidgetCo Inc. has a powerful lobby in Washington. If they manage to get their hooks in the deregulation process, they’ll skew it so that the rules they like stay in place and the rules they don’t go. It still counts as deregulation, but it redounds to the benefit of WidgetCo. If it turns out that partial deregulation is worse than the status quo, and it’s apparent that partial deregulation is ever so much more likely than comprehensive deregulation, my anti-regulation stance starts to look a little bit, well, irresponsible.

So, if you advocate for a political philosophy, taking responsibility means that you ask yourself: what does it look like when this philosophy goes wrong? What happens when it’s taken up by self-interested people? How will it be twisted by power? When Freddie says he takes responsibility for liberalism, I think what he means is that he can look at his how his political philosophy worked out in the real world, even in its Carter-years excesses and mistakes and say, “It was worth it.” Not: “They called themselves liberals, but it’s like they never even read Mill!”

In 2009, at what may or may not turn out to be the close of a conservative era, I’m not sure what I can say. The excesses and missteps of Buckley-style conservatism (which conceives of itself as in opposition to and separate from contemporary liberalism) strike me as fearsome indeed. But, really, that’s neither here nor there for this post. The point is that a person bears some responsibility for making sure the political philosophy she advocates isn’t an unstable equilibrium, prone to breaking down into something bad when deployed in the mess of political reality.

It’s clear to me that Conor and to a lesser extent Rod don’t understand what Jamelle, Freddie, E.D., and myself have been driving at in our various critiques of reform-minded conservatism.  Conor’s misunderstanding is made apparent in this statement from his interview with Scott:

Perhaps we’re getting at what puzzles and galls me so much about recent posts at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen about how dissident conservative writers ought to conduct themselves. The notion is that these writers should assess an ideological subset of the American public, discern their sensibilities, and craft all subsequent writing so as not to offend them. What a fool’s errand. There are times when people react badly to hearing the truth plainly stated. It is a journalist’s job to tell them that truth anyway, as forthrightly and accurately as one can put it.

Although I don’t wish to speak for Freddie, Jamelle, or E.D., this seems to miss the point of our critiques entirely.

Our point has nothing to do with insisting that Conor or anyone else soft-pedal their critiques of Limbaugh, et al, although those attacks may well have the effect of making matters worse.  It certainly does not suggest that reform-minded conservatives should refrain from objecting to torture or the conduct of the War on Terror or civil liberties violations by the Bush Administration – quite the contrary, Ron Paul’s growing influence on conservatism shows that it is possible to passionately dissent without forfeiting the ability to move conservatism in your direction.  Nor do I think we are suggesting that Conor or any other specific reform-minded conservative is to blame for the current state of the Republican Party.

No, the point is that reform conservatives need to recognize that there is an ideological problem with conservatism as currently constituted as an amalgam of libertarianism, hawkishness, and religious fundamentalism that leaves modern conservatism incapable of governing well or ethically.  It is all well and good to criticize the Bush Administration or to take issue with talk radio, but until reform conservatives recognize what caused the Bush Administration’s faults and the hyper-vitriol of talk radio, they will be unable to do anything about it.

[Read more →]

Conor Friedersdorf is a name that one increasingly sees popping up around various points in the blogospheric highways and biways. Whether guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan, writing pieces for the quickly rising Daily Beast, being railed against by radio talkshow host Mark Levin, or offering insights and analysis via his home digs at The American Scene and True/Slant, Conor’s is a name on the move.

Some folks have come to know of Conor through his mix ups with big name conservatives like Mark Levin and Andrew Brietbart without also familiarizing themselves with an essay he wrote called Electric Kool Aid Conservatism for the American’s Future Foundation Doublethink Online (and catching the eye of C11 Managing Editor Joe Carter, which helped to land Conor the gig wherein I became familiar with his work) wherein Conor laid out the need for an increase in conservative journalists as opposed to conservative activists. It struck me that no analysis of Conor’s recent work could really be called complete without also looking at Electric Kool Aid Conservatism.

As a result, I emailed Conor to see if he would be game for conducting an interview on that and hios newest project The GOP Speaks. Graciously, Conor agreed.

Check out the transcript after the jump. [Read more →]

In his response to Freddie, Conor writes:

This is sloppy reasoning. It treats conservatism as though it is indistinguishable from the Republican Party and the Bush Administration — as though a political philosophy and an American political coalition are the same things — and it proceeds to make a rather stunning implicit assertion: that if one objects that conservatism isn’t responsible for some ill, one must necessarily believe that no one is responsible for it.

I am broadly sympathetic to this type of argument, but I’ve come to realize that it largely misses Freddie’s point, which I take to be a criticism not of any specific strain of conservatism but rather of the notion that modern movement conservatism is a salvageable governing philosophy.  In other words, as I wrote this morning:

Individually, each of the various forms of conservatism can present a viable philosophy of governance such that no individual strain of conservatism can bear the brunt of the blame for conservatism’s failings.  Collectively, however, the need to keep each strain within the tent leaves conservatism as a movement incapable of governing well on the national level based on the issues this country faces at this moment.

Regardless, Conor’s point above fails for a more basic reason insofar as it is specifically an attempt to defend Douthat against Freddie’s criticism: Douthat himself does not distinguish between the conservative movement and the GOP.  Indeed, in his remarks at Princeton University yesterday, he spent several minutes explaining why he views the conservative movement and the GOP as “interchangeable” terms. 

Again, it may be that no individual strain of conservatism can be viewed as consistent with the activities of the Bush Administration.  But collectively, the amalgamation of all those strains of conservatism into one master ideology is what not only enabled those activities, it perhaps made them inevitable.  For that, those interested in the notion of a conservative “movement” need to be prepared to accept responsibility if conservatism is to emerge from the wilderness as not merely an electable movement, but also a competent and coherent one capable of governing.

As someone who walks ninety-five percent of the places I go, I find myself deeply in line with Conor Friedersdorf (now helping to sub-in over at the Dish with Patrick, Chris, and Conor Clarke as Andrew takes some time off to focus on an essay for the magazine) when he describes his walking preferences.

Says Conor,

Were I given the choice between walking to work on a tranquil suburban trail that winds through a few parks… or else across town on Canal Street, up through the Lower East Side, and into my office… I’d definitely choose the chaotic, noisy, smelly New York City commute. It’s not boring, due to the street-scape and the varied people who inhabit it. Jane Jacobs described it a an urban ballet — which is a lot more diverting everyday than watching grass grow.

I walk to work literally every morning and to do so I spend approximately thirty minutes going through a number of neighbourhoods and then into the downtown core to where my office building lies. As it stands, there isn’t an “alternate route” that I can take that conforms to the happy trails upon which Conor is commenting from his experience as a journalist in California and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Walking throughout the various neighbourhoods that are within appropriate distance within the metropolis where I reside has been an invaluable experience and has caused me to develop a much more, for lack of a better word, organic sense of community than I had when living for a much longer period of time in a city that prides itself on being extremely walkable.

The reason for that is twofold. Firstly, my schedule when I lived in that city tended to be so hectic that I drove most places I went out of sheer time efficiency and was required to get to places in time periods that necessitated driving. Certainly nothing to fault the city in question for on that count, one’s schedule is always one’s to change. But the other reason is that often when I did talk time to do some walking, I was encouraged to do so on just the kinds of paths that Conor describes. Those paths, by and large, tended to removed from the true cityscape of my residency and so little real connection took place, despite how pretty the walk in question might have been.

At core here is, I think, a much more prevalent perception than we often acknowledge: walkable paths are located where they are and look the way that they do because we tend to see our cities as economic prisons that we need to escape when we are not forced to be there for employment purposes, rather than the kind of “urban ballets” that Conor quotes Jane Jacobs as seeing. Of course, this view is largely self-realizing and our impulse to think that real life is only and ever realized once we escape the confines of The City means that we capitulate towards leaving those space unembraced, cold, foreign, and impersonal.

I can say without reservation that learning to set that ubiquitous impulse aside and structuring my life in such a way as to really spend some grounded time within the neighbourhoods of the city where I live on foot has resulted in one of the most sincere and gratifying feelings of connection and affection I have felt in my adult life. That those feelings arise in a city that generally receives a crinkling of the nose from friends I’ve left behind in cities that are aesthetically and perceptually more desirable only really reinforces for me the notion that we tend to overly romanticize our notions about community, forgetting — much to our detriment — just how sturdy the ability to connect in meaningful ways with both our fellow citizens and our built environment is and can be.

I’ve just moved, not far, but enough to warrant a new path to work.

In blazing that trail, I’ve left behind old fellow wayfarers and come to start to recognize new ones. I have the opportunity to discover new pockets of beauty within this city, like the heritage building that I now walk by every morning that is held like a secret revealed only to the patiently-minded pedestrian. And I come to know my new neighbourhood from a vastly different vantage point, feeling its connections to other neighbourhoods and the tanlged beehive of downtown, and imbue it with a love and warmth that allows this seeming prison to release itself with the grace of a ballerina’s perfect arc.

Image via Flickrer roujo

I haven’t had a chance to parse through and offer some thoughts on the debate we hosted between Conor Friedersdorf and Dan Riehl, nor the unfortunate fall out that transpired after the exchange. There was a lot going on in that debate and the resulting blow back and so it might be a bit ambitious, even for blogger of my verbose persuasion, to attempt to capture everything in one post.

However, experiences of the morning have brought a particular element of the whole foofaraw back into focus, namely the ways in which cultural cues are both deeply embedded and a priori inform our political discourse in what I take to be unhelpful ways.

The lead in: despite only working at the company wherein my employment currently resides for four and a half months, I have come to be considered management. I wasn’t hired into any kind of management specific role and to this day my job title and description remain ephemeral at best. None the less, walking around this office I am treated with a certain deference (unwarranted in my opinion) because of the perceived position of power I happen to occupy.

From my experience, when you’re management, it is important to demonstrate that no task with which any of your employees might become saddled is too small or too lowly for you to perform, as well. My conception of management, cast as it was in the fires of not-for-profit work, is that you recognize and acknowledge the power differential that tips in your favour, but that you conversely pitch in and participate in getting whatever work needs to get done.

Full stop, period, bottom line.

To that end, today I am wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and boots, both because I have to move the president of the company from an office in one building to and office back in the primary building, and because it happens to be casual Friday and the first day of Stampede here in Calgary. To move all of the items from one office to the next, I am also pushing a cart between the two buildings out in the public, in addition to wearing “moving office” appropriate clothing.

Now, because I look the way that I do and because I’m pushing a cart around, people with whom I’ve been interacting with outside have been treating me qualitatively differently than when I am, say, walking around in a suit and tie, which is my normal garb. Even with an event where jeans and a t-shirt are as ubiquitous as they are during Stampede currently running, there is a noticeable difference to how people approach me.

To the average passerby I am no longer “management”, I have become a physical labourer and they have altered their behaviour patterns towards me in what they take to be the appropriate fashion. It never enters their mind that the criteria by which they determine what behaviour patterns are appropriate are entirely arbitrary, all they know is that we have certain cultural cues about you treat certain classes of people and they are abiding by those cues — rightly or wrongly.

Nothing particularly controversial there.

The point: so it generally seems to go in our political discourse as well, but in the case of cultural cues that enter into our politics we have a few monkey wrenches that create difficulties for our smooth analysis. As pertains to politics and the culture wars, the use of cultural cues because key elements in normative statements of derision about “the other side” and their unfitness for ascendancy to the levers of governance within society.

So it also seems to go with Dan Riehl and Robert Stacy McCain (two examples, go through their respective websites for many other posts on this topic) as pertains to their reactions towards Conor Friedersdorf and the results here I take to be muddy at best.

Now, let’s get all the cards on the table before we move forward. [Read more →]

Last week, the Blogger Still Known As Publius wrote a nice piece arguing that the potential-to-likely passage of net neutrality, a public health care option, and energy reform disprove, or at least have a strong potential to disprove, public choice theory.  Unfortunately, I must respectfully dissent. 

First, a quick primer on the relevant portions of public choice theory for the uninitiated.  Here, Publius is correct that Conor’s passing remarks provide a good summation:

I wish that progressives would realize that parties with a narrow vested interest in a legislative outcome are always going to enjoy an advantage over the diffuse interests of the populace, and especially that portion of the populace that is without power.  Community organizing is never going to change this basic fact, nor is any campaign finance reform that passes constitutional muster, nor is a bigger Democratic majority in Congress.

Although not all public choice theorists are libertarians, all (or at least almost all) libertarians are public choice theorists.  Indeed, some version of public choice theory, intentionally or unintentionally, lies at the heart of just about any of the myriad strains of modern libertarianism.* So whether public choice theory holds up to scrutiny is pretty important to both vindicating and undermining libertarianism.

Publius’ argument is that, although public choice theory should be taken seriously, the passage of net neutrality, a public health option, and/or energy reform would be inexplicable under public choice theory because the benefits of each would be spread out diffusely, while the costs would be concentrated on a handful of narrow interests. 

Unfortunately, this completely misunderstands public choice theory and also assumes that no narrow interests benefit from the aforementioned agenda, regardless of whether one thinks that agenda is still good policy. 

[Read more →]

Is unworthy of being called an idea at all. And I think that Conor Friedersdorf proved himself willing to be dangerous with his ideas in pushing the envelope around conservative thought in America. For the next six weeks, Conor will be blogging for The Atlantic in lead up to and during their annual Aspen Ideas Festival. The site will definitely be worth checking out on a regular basis.

So, true to form, there were problems hooking the discussion up via Blog Talk Radio, but Dan, Conor, and I gave Skype another whirl and managed not just to get through over an hour of conversation, but also had a really great and spirited dialogue. [Read more →]