The reporter covering my old stomping grounds in suburban New Jersey wrote a nice piece on the way local houses of worship are contending with the debate over global warming. There's been quite a bit of press lately about the rift between Richard Cizik and people like James Dobson over global warming, including a PBS Frontline special and several subsequent features in high-profile dailies and newsmagazines.
I'm rather interested in this topic, for three reasons. First, as a student of American Politics, I'm very interested in any issue that threatens to disrupt entrenched partisan voting patterns. One of the top indicators of vote choice in the U.S. is church attendance -- if you attend once a week or more, you're quite likely to vote Republican, while if you never attend church, you are very likely to vote for a Democrat. So, if religious organizations begin to take climate change seriously, that change could induce many voters who are currently voting for Republicans to cast ballots for Democrats. According to very consistent National Election Study survey research, voters from both parties overwhelmingly agree that Democrats are more likely to take steps to protect the environment. So increases in concern about the environment would seem likely to benefit only one of the two parties.
Second, as a very cynical observer of the Republican Party, I'm interested to see how members of the party attempt to deal with global warming from a policymaking perspective. One of the reasons why Republicans have been less eager to deal with global warming is because their ideology offers them very few practical solutions to solve the problem. Since the real core of the issue is finding ways to reduce carbon emissions, it is evident to most observers that the solution will involve some combination of regulation and externally-imposed incentives geared toward reducing consumption. A party with a libertarian regulatory outlook inherently detests many of the solutions that global warming makes unavoidable. Rather than adopt a pragmatic approach that would compromise their policymaking orientation, Republicans are simply attempting to deny that climate change represents a real threat, or even that it is even being caused by human actions. A revolt on the issue by the religious right would emphasize in bold the major ideological differences between the two major coalitions that hold the Republican Party together. It is logical that if Republicans are ever going to come around on global warming, it is the religious right that would lead the way, not the libertarian right.
Last, I'm an environmentalist. So, to see groups on the religious right potentially come on board with my primary policy interest is encouraging. Unfortunately, I suspect that most of the impetus behind the recent interest in climate change from people of faith comes from the religious left, which for some reason never manages to get much press. I suspect that when I'm done crunching data on churchgoers' attitudes on the environment between 2000 and 2008 I won't find any meaningful change from today's attitudes.
Our "Balanced" Media
Whammo! Pow! Shocker! Obama is finished!
As I've been pointing out, there is a crisis in our mainstream media.
As I've been pointing out, there is a crisis in our mainstream media.
Public opinion vs. conventional wisdom
I've never seen anybody get flamed this bad in the blogging world. It's especially alarming given the fact that it's Joe Klein's very own blog. He really had no clue what he was getting himself into.
The problem with Joe Klein (and I don't hate his articles as much as the liberal bloggers do -- I find some of them to be pretty enlightening) is along the lines of what Brad was talking about with The New Republic. A lot of these pundit, elitist writers have totally lost touch with American politics. Their "conventional wisdom" often seems more applicable to a distant galaxy.
Take, for instance, the "conventional wisdom" on cutting off funding for the Iraq War. Any casual reader of all the mainstream media outlets would unquestionably be led to believe that the party that voted to strip the commander in chief of his powers and use the Congressional power of the purse to stop the Iraq War would be committing political suicide. I've been arguing on and on for a while now, that public opinion is often misguided and irrelevant, but that what people are really looking for is strong leadership and passionate, entrenched beliefs (though not entrenched to the point of stubborness). So regardless of what the American people think of cutting off funds, they clearly oppose the war, oppose Bush, and want our troops out within the next year. So how could it be politically detrimental for Democrats to stand up and use their Constitutional power to its full capacity to force an end to the war? Wouldn't the American people see this, at the very least, as an act of courage?
Despite the elitist consensus that cutting off funds in unthinkable, a Fox News poll shows that the non-binding resolution is a waste of time and that half of Americans would support cutting off funds to end the war. Even when Democrats have public opinion behind them, they still refuse to act on specifically what it is mandating. Why? Because of pundits like Joe Klein, The New Republic, etc. who have driven it into their heads that they would be writing their political obituaries.
Still, it's nice to have public opinion on your side, but it doesn't mean its always right. Doing what is right and what you believe should always take precedence. But why do what you don't believe when public opinion is on your side?
The problem with Joe Klein (and I don't hate his articles as much as the liberal bloggers do -- I find some of them to be pretty enlightening) is along the lines of what Brad was talking about with The New Republic. A lot of these pundit, elitist writers have totally lost touch with American politics. Their "conventional wisdom" often seems more applicable to a distant galaxy.
Take, for instance, the "conventional wisdom" on cutting off funding for the Iraq War. Any casual reader of all the mainstream media outlets would unquestionably be led to believe that the party that voted to strip the commander in chief of his powers and use the Congressional power of the purse to stop the Iraq War would be committing political suicide. I've been arguing on and on for a while now, that public opinion is often misguided and irrelevant, but that what people are really looking for is strong leadership and passionate, entrenched beliefs (though not entrenched to the point of stubborness). So regardless of what the American people think of cutting off funds, they clearly oppose the war, oppose Bush, and want our troops out within the next year. So how could it be politically detrimental for Democrats to stand up and use their Constitutional power to its full capacity to force an end to the war? Wouldn't the American people see this, at the very least, as an act of courage?
Despite the elitist consensus that cutting off funds in unthinkable, a Fox News poll shows that the non-binding resolution is a waste of time and that half of Americans would support cutting off funds to end the war. Even when Democrats have public opinion behind them, they still refuse to act on specifically what it is mandating. Why? Because of pundits like Joe Klein, The New Republic, etc. who have driven it into their heads that they would be writing their political obituaries.
Still, it's nice to have public opinion on your side, but it doesn't mean its always right. Doing what is right and what you believe should always take precedence. But why do what you don't believe when public opinion is on your side?
I don't get it
Ann Coulter at the Conservative Political Action Committee:
I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.
Okay, the comment is definitely offensive. Check. It was unwise for Mitt Romney to promote her and he should condemn her remarks. Check. Ann Coulter is an insufferable douche bag. Check. But does anybody actually get it?
I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.
Okay, the comment is definitely offensive. Check. It was unwise for Mitt Romney to promote her and he should condemn her remarks. Check. Ann Coulter is an insufferable douche bag. Check. But does anybody actually get it?
The Decline of the New Republic
I'm a bit late coming to this piece of news, but apparently The New Republic has gone biweekly. I can't say it's a surprise to me, since the magazine's circulation has declined by 40% in about six years. But for a long time, TNR was one of the elite voices of American Politics, the center-left equivalent of National Review.
According to Franklin Foer, TNR's biweekly move represents a reconfiguration of the publication's resources. Going forward, TNR will focus more on web-based content, and it will publish a "glossier" and "more visual" magazine. Both decisions probably have merit; I think that the age of news weeklies might be coming to an end, since most of the stories that show up in Time or Newsweek tend to be pretty stale by the time they make it to people's mailboxes. And I think there is a demand for web-based magazine-style reporting, for the simple fact that more readers are getting their news online now. I commute to work and into the city primarily on trains and subways, where one might think that the newspaper and magazine format would be fairly convenient. Yet, I find them cumbersome and annoying. Maybe I'm alone in that, maybe not.
As to the idea of making a substantive magazine more visual, well, I don't have any sympathy for that orientation. But if that's what TNR wants to do, I imagine their consultants and circulation people have their reasons.
Why do I care about all of this? I was a subscriber to TNR for more than a year, and I abandoned the subscription because I believed so many of the magazine's writers are transparent egotists. The articles always seemed to consciously stake out the middle ground on controversial issues, and tried to appear radical by endorsing conventional wisdom or the status quo. When TNR endorsed the Iraq invasion, its editors thought they were being counterintuitive by bucking the left-wing consensus that invading Iraq was a mistake. But their arguments were ultimately not very complicated or interesting. They were just following the mainstream media's consensus.
And that's the thing about TNR that led me to finally abandon the magazine. I don't have a problem with right-wing views, centrist views (whatever that means), or left-wing views. But I do have a problem with elitism, especially when it serves to reinforce hollow ideas. Reading almost anything written by Marty Peretz at this point drives me insane.
So, by chance, I happened to be reading Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (on the train!) today, when I encountered this passage:
"Only by insisting that problems shall not come up to him until they have
passed through a procedure, can the busy citizen of a modern state hope to deal
with them in a form that is intelligible. For issues, as they are stated
by a partisan, almost always consist of an intricate series of facts, as he has
observed them, surrounded by a large fatty mass of stereotyped phrases charged
with his emotion. According to the fashion of the day, he will emerge from
the conference room insisting that what he wants is some soul-filling idea like
Justice, Welfare, Americanism, Socialism. On such issues the citizen
outside can sometimes be provoked to fear and admiration, but to judgment
never. Before he can do anything with the argument, the fat has to be
boiled out of it for him."
passed through a procedure, can the busy citizen of a modern state hope to deal
with them in a form that is intelligible. For issues, as they are stated
by a partisan, almost always consist of an intricate series of facts, as he has
observed them, surrounded by a large fatty mass of stereotyped phrases charged
with his emotion. According to the fashion of the day, he will emerge from
the conference room insisting that what he wants is some soul-filling idea like
Justice, Welfare, Americanism, Socialism. On such issues the citizen
outside can sometimes be provoked to fear and admiration, but to judgment
never. Before he can do anything with the argument, the fat has to be
boiled out of it for him."
Why would I care about this quote in the context of TNR? Well, Lippmann became a founding editor of the magazine in 1913. Hard to believe, but TNR has retained this attitude through the intervening century. The "truth" must be correctly interpreted by the self-appointed geniuses who can interpret the intricate series of facts into lean and easily digestible bits of facts for all of us idiots who leaf through their writings. If you ask me, this attitude is why TNR is failing, not only the effects changing media and boring swaths of white paper and words.
Thank god TNR was here to tell us we should trust our President.
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