Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Shields on the Catholic Vote

Good column today by CNN's Mark Shields on the Catholic vote, including this reminder:

Newspaper support for or opposition to church people in politics depends almost entirely upon whether that particular newspaper opposes or supports the particular cause which the church people are championing.

I confess to having a tendency to doing the same thing, but I'll try working on it.

Middle America Revisited

In response to my post on Kerry and Buffett, Kevin Drum wants a definition of "Middle America," opining:

Wealth transfer-wise, surely Middle Americans would almost unanimously do better under Democratic policies than they would under Republican policies designed to endlessly shift tax burdens from the rich to the middle class while simultaneously insisting that middle class programs like Social Security and Medicare need to be slashed to the bone in order to avoid future fiscal catastrophe?

Then how does Drum explain the vast swaths of red in the middle of that famed map? Setting aside mere geography, however, I would make three points.

1. Drum's critique invokes the normative question of which party best serves Middle America's interests, while my original post was mainly a positive claim about how one might describe a particular party. If he wants to change the terms of the debate, that's fine, but let's be clear that that is what he did.
2. CNN's exit polling data for the 2000 election explicitly breaks down voting patterns by class. The data make clear that the middle classes broke for Bush, while the elites and the working class/lower class went for Gore. So that's one definition of Middle America.
3. Drum obscures the fact that my post was as much about the so-called "God gap" as about economics. (Perhaps I erred by conflating the this issue with the wealth transfer point, although I don't think so for many of the same reasons Steve Verdon set out.) Again, refer to CNN's 2000 exit poll. Those who attend religious services weekly or more than weekly went strongly for Bush. Those who attend less frequently or not at all went for Gore. Can there be any doubt that the Democratic party has been captured by secularists at the top? Bolce and De Maio observe, for example, that: "According to the 1972-1992 Convention Delegate Surveys, secularists (that is, atheists, agnostics, religious “nones,” the unchurched, and assorted self-identified irreligionists...) constituted the largest “religious” bloc among Democratic delegates." They also observe that:

   An interesting fact, ... is that when cultural conflict is framed as a clash between Democratic secularist values and Republican traditionalist ones, the Democrats suffer more in the people’s estimation than do the Republicans, particularly in the South and Midwest. American National Election Survey (ANES) data and Pew Research Center polls support this point: more than twice as many respondents in these surveys felt antagonistic toward “nonbelievers” as toward the “Christian right”; these same polls also showed that the positions favored by nonreligious respondents on gay marriage, vouchers, partial-birth abortion, and school prayer are opposed by majorities of religious moderates and traditionalists—opposed, that is, by the majority of the American people.

   Religious moderates and traditionalists, especially those in the South and Midwest, strike me as precisely the sort of people Lasch was talking about when he described the elite's hostility towards "Middle America."

Kerry and Buffett

John Kerry is wooing corporate CEOs (whom he was calling Benedict Arnolds not so long ago, albeit while taking their money) and with some success:

Mr. Kerry disclosed that he has launched a major push to enlist corporate supporters and touted two stars he has landed so far: investment sage Warren Buffett and technology executive Steve Jobs, both of whom will be advisers, the senator said.

Why does this not surprise me? Consider what Christopher Lasch had to say about elites, including business elites like Buffett and Jobs:

[T]he new elites, the professional classes in particular, regard the masses with mingled scorn and apprehension. In the United States, “Middle America”—a term that has both geographical and social implications—has come to symbolize everything that stands in the way of progress: “family values,” mindless patriotism, religious fundamentalism, racism, homophobia, retrograde views of women. (The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy at 28.)

As far as the elites are concerned, Middle America and the Republican Party are synonymous. Given the trend for religious voters to lean Republican, while secular voters lean Democrat, moreover, Lasch's comments about elite attitudes toward religion are particularly telling:

A skeptical, iconoclastic state of mind is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the knowledge classes. ... The elites’ attitude to religion ranges from indifference to active hostility. (Id. at 215.)

Here then is how I we see the modern Democratic party - secular elites at the top using the levers of government to effect wealth transfers from "Middle America" (update: here I borrow Lasch's phrase to capture folks such as small business owners, NASCAR dads, much of the middle and upper-middle classes, especially in fly-over country, and so on; see also the next post) to reliable Democrat constituencies and special interests in return for votes. (There's an excellent article on the "God Gulf" in the current issue of First Things, the mostly Catholic/mostly neo-conservative opinion monthly to which I strongly urge you to subscribe.)

VDH on Abu Ghraib

It's a pity Victor Davis Hanson's essay on the Abu Ghraib abuses is only available on the WSJ's pay site, as it is probably the best balanced commentary I've seen yet. On the one hand, Hanson makes clear that such abuses cannot go unpunished:

These seemingly inhuman acts are indeed serious stuff. They also raise a host of dilemmas for the U.S. - from the pragmatic to the idealistic. We must insist on a higher standard of human behavior than embraced by either Saddam Hussein or his various fascist and Islamicist successors. As emissaries of human rights, how can we allow a few miscreants to treat detainees indecently - without earning the wages of hypocrisy from both professed allies and enemies who enjoy our embarrassment? In defense, it won't do for us just to point to our enemies and shrug, "They do it all the time."

I think VDH is basically right here. Absent WMD, unseating a brutal dictator remains the strongest argument for Bush's intervention. As such, our own people must be purer than Caesar's proverbial wife. On the other hand, as VDH explains later in his essay, there is an important difference between the sort of systematic, yet often purposeless, policy of torture and brutality under Saddam's regime and what we may still hope will prove to be the unauthorized acts of a few rogue elements.

The guards' alleged crimes are not only repugnant but stupid as well. At a time when it is critical to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, a few renegade corrections officers have endangered the lives of thousands of their fellow soldiers in the field. Marines around Fallujah take enormous risks precisely because they do not employ the tactics of the fedayeen, who fire from minarets and use civilians as human shields.

Some Roman general or another supposedly said: "Let them hate us as long as they fear us." I doubt whether that policy has ever worked. Carrying that policy into effect today, moreover, would require a level of violence that would violate every norm of just war and human rights. Yet, conduct that inspires hatred, without inspiring fear, arguably is even worse. Such conduct not only violates those norms, but also ultimately proves self-defeating because it perpetuates the cycle of violence (as illustrated by the long wars in Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine). Put another way, even if one believed the ends justified the means, which I emphatically do not, that argument is especially inapt here where the immoral means seem unable to accomplish the immoral end. On the other hand, Hanson appropriately reminds us that there is in fact a double standard at work here:

The Arab world - where the mass-murdering Osama bin Laden is often canonized - is shocked by a pyramid of nude bodies and faux-electric prods, but has so far expressed less collective outrage in its media when the charred corpses of four Americans were poked and dismembered by cheering crowds in Fallujah. The taped murder of Daniel Pearl or a video of the hooded Italian who had his brains blown out - this is the daily fare that emanates now from the television studios of the Middle East.

Finally, Hanson takes a shot at those who cannot put it in conext:

We who are appalled in our offices and newsrooms are not those who have had our faces blown off while delivering food in Humvees or are incinerated in SUVs full of medical supplies - with the full understanding that there will be plenty of Iraqis to materialize to hack away at what is left of our charred corpses. War is hell, and those who do not endure it are not entirely aware of the demons that are unleashed, and thus should hold their moral outrage until the full account of the incident is investigated and adjudicated.

One thinks of Henry V's decision to murder the prisoners at Agincourt. It is almost impossible today to judge Henry's decision because one cannot know the stresses battle imposed. To be sure, this does not excuse what happened (and I don't believe VDH intends it to do so). Instead, I suspect VDH intends to invoke the Christian balancing act of hating the sin while still loving the sinner.

Graduation Gifts

With graduation right around the corner, you are doubtless wondering what to get the fledgling lawyer in your life. Might I suggest:

A nifty little book on insider trading? At a slightly higher price point, there is a snazzy medium-sized book on mergers and acquisitions that might fit the bill. And, if money is no object, there is a whopping big book on the entirety of corporate law!

(Heh.)

Tung Yin on Kerry

Prof. Yin notes that "Kerry has a certain Clintonesque approach to public statements, which is to say, technically true but often misleading" ... and he's got examples!

While I was Away: Souter Mugged

< tongue-in-cheek > As much as I deplore violence, this report gives me new hope for the Supreme Court. After all, they say that a conservative is a liberal who just got mugged. < /tongue-in-cheek >

While I was Away: The Kerry Medal Row

While I was out sick, I gather there was another kerfuffle over Kerry's medals. I can't quite make heads or tails of it though: Did he throw his medals too far or not far enough? Or what? Anyway, I gather the gist of it is that Kerry is a lying hypocrite. Or something. I don't see what the big deal is. Aren't all politicians - on both sides of the aisle - lying hypocrites? I thought it was part of the job description. I believe it was Ambrose Bierce who defined a politician as: "An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared."