Honestly, sometimes I think that the best thing going for liberalism is that conservatives are so busy declaring victory that they’ll have no time to campaign or govern. Of all the reflexive reactions to various political stimuli that you see coming from the right of center, constantly asserting the inevitable rise of conservatism is really the most innocuous and the most understandable. Everyone needs to feel enthused about their general political platform, we all feel a certain degree of optimism for some of our causes, and you certainly can’t say that the left is immune to this disease. Nor am I. I am an anti-teleologist, but there are among my causes certain that I think are only a matter of time. Still, what I think has been unique to the right is the frequency and insistence of column after column and blog post after blog post that insists that a certain set of factors are going to align to make conservatism’s rise a fait accompli. This tendency has grown, meanwhile, in a time of decline in partisan politics for political politicians, and I wonder where the utility lies for the right for this disconnect.

What disturbs me about Ross’s column– what would disturb me more were I an ideological fellow traveler of his– is that in his accounting conservatism’s rise among the young is defined entirely negatively. In Ross’s prognostication, liberalism fails to fix an unprecedented series of economic challenges (created by collection of laissez faire-proselytizing zealots and cynical opportunists), and conservatism reaps the whirlwind. You’ll note that Ross offers no prescription whatsoever for the right or the GOP to actually solve our deep economic problems. He only brags that as liberals lose, conservatism will be standing on the field. Which is great for partisans and hacks everywhere and terrible for those who genuinely love their country.

I find this is a common affliction in our political discourse. Conservatism need only watch liberalism lose; liberalism must actively win. Liberalism must solve problems; conservatism must only be willing to live with them. I hear a lot, from people like Conor Friedersdorf or Mickey Kaus or others, that there is something beneficial in a Democratic president and a Republican congress, because this is a combination that reins in the excesses of either. I think that there are members of this here League who would echo similar sentiments. Yet we need to be clear what such a situation actually privileges, which is the status quo. Now in some sense preserving the status quo does indeed represent victory for conservatives, but often the status quo is simply antithetical to contemporary conservative goals. You need look no farther than illegal immigration to see that. Republican gains in the Senate in 2010 makes immigration reform, of any flavor, a distant dream. And yet it is exactly the status quo that Republicans are supposed to hold as worst of all. Making the perfect the enemy of the good leaves only the bad.

When Ross speaks about Democratic failures opening a space for the GOP, he may be hearkening back to the grand old days of the Republican technocrat, when the GOP had a reputation for being full of hard-nosed bastards who knew how to get things done. But those days are long gone. I ask– I genuinely ask– what was the last major accomplishment of the GOP? What reason does anyone have to think that the GOP can get anything done at all? Ross hints at something I hear a lot from Republicans lately, that the left’s obsession with bashing George Bush keeps us from confronting the right as it stands today. But this obsession cuts both ways. If I were to tell you all the ways in which Republicans have failed to solve problems, there would invariably be people accusing me of obsessing over the now-gone Bush administration. Yet reckoning with the wider breakdowns in Republican leadership can’t happen as long as anything that happened during the Bush administration must be excised from analysis of the current GOP. If the Bush administration has become the convenient flogging horse of liberal pundits and bloggers like me, it has also become the convenient repository of blame for conservatives and the GOP, an edifice onto which problems can be conveniently fobbed off, as we have so many of us come to think of Bush America as a strange place disconnected from our current country.

Surely, legislation like the prescription drug benefit bill must inform our current legislative efforts– a victory for humanitarianism, surely, and for those among our most vulnerable, but a massive and hideously expensive entitlement that does not and never did have any consideration of paying for itself or reducing costs.

Whatever else is true, this is true: believing in and working towards limiting the amount of efforts the federal government undertakes is a principled and potentially profitable standpoint. Reflexive can’t doism is not. It is a glaringly sad statement about American affairs how much one of our two dominant political parties has become defined by what it insists cannot be done. Ross Douthat may be right that the Republicans can win by just not winning. But it’s a recipe for disaster for this country. Both parties need to have agendas, even if one is an agenda of scaling back and tamping down, and both need to equally be held to the standard of actually doing well for the country.

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I have said before and continue to say that opponents of health care reform simply have nothing to say in the face of the real, persistent and growing pain of a vast number of Americans without adequate access to health care. You will find, in fact, that the comment section of this very blog can at times be a kind of microcosm for these non-argument arguments– all the evasions, the feints, the topic changes, the concern trolling, the incrementalism, the calls for “more study,” the disingenuousness, the absolute and unwavering dedication to doing anything except acknowledging and confronting the fact that a country that crows so loudly that it is the greatest on earth has an army of people whose lives are in the process of being raped by this American healthcare system. Why, comments on this post might even show a little more….

There are actual sick people with actual families feeling actual pain and facing actual tragedy because of this grotesque, wasteful, perverse, immoral, evil system that we labor under. Health care reform is a necessity because this is true and the fact of its truth tells us that change has to come.

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The reason for the hoops they make commenters jump through is another of Nick Denton’s despicable but highly effective innovations into blogging. Gawker blogs create a false sense of exclusivity which Gawker can then market as a kind of intangible commodity to be doled out to the credulous and needy commenters. It’s a velvet rope effect, a way for people to feel a little bit of privilege and to have an opportunity to look down at the proles, which I’m sure is almost always something denied to them in their real lives. It’s very transparent, and rather sad, and it says something terrible about the human condition both that someone could dream it up and that so many people could fall for it. But there it is.

It’s actually appropriate, given what Gawker once was– a place to vent the juvenile rage of the permanently envious, people altogether comfortable in the material ways of the world but denied the kind of celebrity, access and recognition that their upbringing has conditioned them to lust after. There was, as that n+1 piece pointed out, something noble in the openness of that jealousy and frank admission of anger in the face of a community that was not recognizing the genius of those who thought they deserved it. Those days are long gone, of course, and instead stands the relentless bullying and cruelty that Gawker now stands for. But the commenting system has become a kind of microcosm of the Manhattan that Gawker once looked on, where people strive for the ultimately worthless but in context invaluable chits of social recognition and the prized commodity of being able to look down on those who look up.

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As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies making a mane;
The tane unto the t’other say,
‘Where sall we gang and dine to-day,

Where sall we gang and dine to-day?’
‘In behint yon auld fail dyke,
I wot there lies a new slain knight;
And naebody kens that he lies there,
But his hawk, his honnd, and lady fair,

His hawk, his honnd, and lady fair.
‘His hound is to the hunting gane,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady ‘a ta’en another mate,

So we may mak our dinner sweet,
We may mak our dinner sweet.

‘Ye’ll sit on his white hause-bane,
And I’ll pike out his bonny blue een;
Wi ae lock o his gowden hair
We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare,
We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare.’

‘Mony a one for him makes mane,
But nane sall ken where he is gane;
Oer his white banes, when they are bare,
The wind sail blaw for evennair,
The wind sail blaw for evennair.’

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My feelings towards MMA are kind of similar to my feelings toward metal. I love metal, and I respect it. I do, in one sense, take metal seriously, and have great respect towards the musicians involved. However, I don’t take it too seriously, and if it can make me laugh, that’s a good thing. Metal is often ridiculous, and that’s a good thing. Some matchups just amuse me, in a good way. Like Kimbo Vs. Houston (if it happens). Part of me takes this matchup (Couture/Coleman) seriously, as I respect both fighters. But another part of me just thinks it’s Metal as fuck, in the funny way. And that’s a good thing. With some metal you just laugh and throw up the devil horns. Same thing with MMA. Just laugh and enjoy the ride.

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That sucks, because I find the new metrics in sports, and particularly in baseball, to have an awful lot of useful, generative ideas about strategy, about talent evaluation, and about sports appreciation. But it’s sometimes so buried in such absurd, over-the-top “us-vs.-them”-ism that it becomes very difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. It is indeed true that OBP was for a long time a criminally underrated stat; it is not true that “a walk is as good as a hit”. (Just ask the coach with a man on third and two outs playing a team with a great double play combo.) It is true that Joe Morgan says a lot of stupid things about baseball; it is not true that the Fire Joe Morgan crew “knows more” about baseball than Joe Morgan. Who we should choose to listen to about effective baseball strategy is a different question. But who knows more? The guy who played and coached and lived baseball for decades. That’s who. Sorry.

One argument that I keep hearing about all this is that we can’t take into account the fact that the Patriots, you know, lost the game after Belichick went for it. Listen to Bill Barnwell from Football Outsiders– one of the best and most sober websites in the arena of new metrics, by the way, and one I respect a great deal:

The important factor that the cacophony of responses seems to be missing is that you can’t judge Belichick’s decision by the fact that it didn’t work. As we’ve mentioned more than once in these pages, you cannot judge decisions by their outcome. You have to consider the process that goes into them, and then decide whether they’re right or wrong at the moment they’re made.

Let’s be clear about this:  this claim amounts to saying that we should abandon induction as a tool for evaluating choices. Now, we’ve know that induction has certain problems as an evaluative tool since, oh, the time of Plato. But I put it to you that you simply cannot exist as a functioning intelligence without recourse to inductive thinking. You will find it very, very hard to go through your life making decisions if you abandon evaluating the consequences of past decisions.

Plus, Barnwell is writing this from a site that engages in analyzing sports based on statistics. And what is aggregating statistics but evaluating choices by their outcomes over and over and over again? A coach chooses to run or throw or go naked bootleg or run hound right, hen right, fox right, max protect, ZIP 989 on 2, many times in a season. The FO guys evaluate what happens– they judge those decisions by their outcomes– and then treat the results of those decisions as though they have supreme predictive power. So which kind of induction is legitimate, and which is not? As is usually true, the power and wisdom of metrics depends entirely on which cherries you pick, which is absolutely true of the conventional wisdom in sports as well. People choose data based on the way it supports their suppositions. Film at eleven.

Ultimately, the problem with these new metrics is that their apostles are so consumed with the desire to buck the conventional wisdom that they cloud their own ability to reasonably evaluate sports. The tendency to reflexively contradict the conventional wisdom is just as distorting as the tendency to reflexively support it. More so, I would argue; the conventional wisdom is often conventional because it is banally true. Which is exactly why we should take the valid and valuable criticisms and minor revolutions that go on in insurgent intellectual movements to heart, and use them to our advantage, but to also approach them with a healthy amount of skepticism.

Update: Link fixed.

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They freed him.

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