However you feel about gay marriage, you must marvel at the success of gay rights advocates in effecting such a monumental shift in social attitudes in such a short time. Social change of this scale usually works much slower, through the tedious but quite effective method of just waiting for your opponents to die out. But generational turnover only explains a part of the gay marriage story. Mostly, people are just changing their minds, and quickly.

How to explain this sudden outbreak of mind-changing? Ross Douthat, an outspoken opponent of gay marriage, had a gracious piece last week in which he offered one dominant dynamic at work here. He argued that a major factor has been the successful framing of the issue in morally absolute terms: 

The most enduring [political and social] victories are often won by movements and factions that succeed in branding opposing views as not only mistaken but unthinkable, not only foolish but immoral, and that use stigma as well as suasion to cement the gains that they’ve achieved. This is what’s been happening in the gay marriage debate these last 10 years and more.

I think this is very astute. The successful framing of this issue in morally absolute terms certainly had a large role in moving public opinion, and in forcing a progressive president to choose a damn side already. One can’t stick with the "reasonable people can disagree" line if all of one’s supporters/peers have decided that only moral monsters disagree. 

This got me thinking about whether other progressive issues could benefit if advocates were more willing to frame the debate in morally absolute terms. It seems liberal-minded folks are far less comfortable—and therefore less adept—than their conservative counterparts when it comes to wielding the language of morality in policy debates.

I was therefore very interested to see this piece on how immigration reform advocates are looking to the lessons of the gay rights movement as a template for successful policy change:

"My members are telling me that we need to learn from the gay community,” said Dee Dee Garcia Blase, founder of the Phoenix-based Somos Republicans…."We need to take a lesson from the (lesbian and gay) community with regard to being that loud, squeaky wheel that gets fixed,” Blase said. “We need to be more aggressive, and we realize it.”

She doesn’t mention the moral framing angle, but one wonders whether focusing more on such framing would help make xenophobia as socially and politically taboo as homophobia.

The trajectory of the gay rights movement is certainly difficult to replicate on immigration. For one thing, every Democrat including the president already supports sweeping immigration reform in principle. The key is to make the price of opposition much costlier. Demographic and electoral realities might play a much more dominant role here than banking on a society-wide moral epiphany.

There’s also the power of the steady erosion of "the closet", which did so much to normalize and humanize the gay issue by "revealing" that there were gays and lesbians among our friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors. And only history’s greatest monsters would want to strip their friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors of basic civil rights and benefits. There is some limited potential for a similar humanizing "closet" dynamic on immigration. Affecting stories like that of Jose Antonio Vargas—a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who "came out" as an illegal immigrant last year—can certainly help.

I’m actually not too sanguine about this. After all, notwithstanding the steady public approval of gay marriage and gay right in general, Republicans still nominally support a constitutional amendment on marriage, support DOMA, advocate for state-level referenda to curtail gay rights, etc. They are certainly less conspicuous and less bombastic in their opposition than they used to be, but oppose it they do.

And of course there are two sides to every moral equation. While in the gay marriage debate, opponents are left clinging to the flimsiest of arguments from biblical authority, immigration opponents still offer plausible-sounding (though badly mistaken) moral pieties about job displacement through which they can couch their xenophobia and general out-group animus.

I doubt there will ever be a clear moral consensus on other policy issues like taxation or the provision of social services. The main point remains though. You can only move public opinion so far by means of  abstraction and intellectualization. Having the charts and graphs on your side is a fine thing, but, as Douthat suggests, you conquer the public square by rendering your opponents’ position not just wrong but morally tragic. Liberals should get better at this. 

For several decades we’ve been in a process whereby the two parties are becoming increasingly ideologically homogenous. By now, it’s sort of taken for granted that every Republican is pretty conservative and every Democrat is pretty liberal, and ideological crossover in party identification doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But this has not been the modern norm:

This ongoing process of partisan sorting makes perfect sense. More ideologically homogenous and coherent parties are an inevitable and natural result of a two-party system. The illusion of cross-partisanship in the 20th century—where some liberals were Republican and lots of conservatives were Democrats—was only maintained due to the phenomenon of the Dixiecrat. But the reign of the Southern Democrat was always a contingent, unnatural state of affairs. Bruce Bartlett has good essay on the subject, tracing Southern political affiliation from the Civil War on through the New Deal, the Jim Crow era, to the present. Bartlett’s conclusion:

The demise of the conservative Southern Democrat is the primary reason for the rise of political polarization. The era in which they held significant power in the Democratic Party was a historical anomaly; polarization is actually the norm, to which we are now returning. The good old days of bipartisanship are as dead as the conservative Southern Democrat.

But there is no particular reason to mourn these "good old days" in which ideological chaos reigned in the party system. The parties having more ideological coherence is a good thing for democracy. A situation in which all Democrats believe one thing and all Republicans believe the opposite makes it much easier for the average voter to act on his or her policy preferences. Back in the "good old" non-polarized Dixiecrat days, if you were a committed racist just looking to move the ball forward on more racism, it might have been completely non-obvious how you should vote. Party identification didn’t help, and even if you knew your local candidate to be a fine racist, you’d have to make strategic calculations about which party might be better overall for racism if they had the majority. It was a mess.

So regarding the eclipse of Senator Lugar, Jonathan Chait notes that as moderate Republicans go extinct, it’s not their moderate policy positions we mourn—Republican voters ought to elect whomever they think best represents their preferences—but rather we mourn their moderate process positions, and their moderate view of what it means to be an opposition party in a "creaky political system poorly equipped to handle unified, fanatical parties."

The social norms that previously kept the parties from exercising power have fallen one by one. Under Obama’s presidency, Republicans have gone to unprecedented lengths to block completely uncontroversial appointments, paralyzing the government and using the power to paralyze government to nullify duly passed laws. It is bringing on an approaching crisis of American government.

Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein concurs, and reiterates that the issue isn’t ideological extremism per se, but "radicalism and irresponsible behavior" in pursuit of ideological goals. Process extremism, if you will:

The most liberal, or most conservative, Member of Congress can find ways to compromise with the other side; there’s nothing inherent in conservativism, or even in ideological extremism, that precludes compromise, comity, respect for institutional norms…. [The problem is that] the Republican Party is severely dysfunctional, not severely conservative.

Though maybe it is inevitable that ideological extremism will beget process extremism. I’m not sure. Senator Lugar’s vanquisher, Richard Mourdock, seems to be an extremist in both substance and process, and advocates total opposition to Democratic initiatives on principle. He said this morning: "I think bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view." Elsewhere he explained why compromise was unnecessary: "I hope to build a conservative majority in the United States Senate so bipartisanship becomes Democrats joining Republicans…we are at that point where one side or the other has to win this argument. One side or the other will dominate."

It’s the fevered dream of the forever majority; and if it’s indeed impossible (which it is) for one side to "win" the eternal argument, then refusing to stop short of that unattainable goal will lead to a perpetual state of constitutional crisis. Good times.

Mr. Mourdock may not even win so we needn’t fret for the future of representative democracy quite yet. But as Jon Chait warns, there are still long-standing procedural norms in the Congress that have yet to be undermined and exploited by obstructionist-minded Republicans; there remains a wide frontier for the new process extremists to conquer.

When we think of automation in the workplace, we think of displaced factory workers and a decimated manufacturing sector more generally. And rightly so; manufacturing employment in this country has been declining for half a century.

The types of technological advances we’ve seen in the past twenty years have overwhelmingly affected the job prospects of lower-skilled, lower-education workers. Economists call this process "skill-biased technological change"—meaning simply that this current round of advances and innovations happen to disproportionately advantage higher-skilled workers with lots of education. This has contributed to the large spike in income inequality over this time, along with a stagnation in median wages.

The advances in information technology and the sciences, financial sector "innovation", and all-around Silicon Valley wizardry all strongly advantage those workers with unique skill sets and lots of fancy degrees.

In the manufacturing sector it’s doubly cruel, because as technology has eliminated the lower-skill jobs, it’s created new employment opportunities for higher-skilled programmers and engineers who must tend to all the machines. (Though as the joke goes: How many workers do you need for a manufacturing plant? Two. One man and one dog. The man to feed the dog, and the dog to keep the man away from the machines.)

This skill-biased change will continue to create vexing employment problems for the large majority of workers who do not have a college degree or more. For instance, in the coming decades, the wide-spread adoption of driverless car technology will displace yet more reliable lower-skill employment: truck drivers, cab drivers, various public transport operators. And whatever parts manufacturing is left will likely be finished off by 3D-printing technology.

Well, anyone looking for a little schadenfreude can take heart: It turns out that higher-skill workers are not immune to this process. Indeed, the machines are now coming for the smart

people. Start with the lawyers:

The Southern District of New York recently became the nation’s first federal court to explicitly approve the use of predictive coding, a computer-assisted document review that turns much of the legal grunt work currently done by underemployed attorneys over to the machines. […]

The task of combing through mountains of emails, spreadsheets, memos and other records in the discovery process currently falls on a legion of "contract attorneys" who jump from one project to another, employed by companies like Epiq Systems. Many are recent grads who are unable to find full-time employment, or lawyers laid off during the recent recession.

A lawyer friend of mine whose company has used this technology tells me that it still has many limitations, and requires a lot of human oversight and intervention to train the software to respond accurately. However he concedes it’s just a matter of time before these limitations are overcome.

As smart machines get, well, smarter, one can envision all sorts of previously "safe" jobs put in peril. The progeny of Apple’s Siri or IBM’s Watson will be capable of handling far more sophisticated tasks than answering trivia questions or performing glorified search commands. Any job with a quantitative component or one that requires a high synthesis of information or data is on notice: the machines are coming. Even quintessentially "human" fields like medicine will see profound changes as surgical robots and fully-automated diagnostics and therapeutics make many doctors obsolete.

It is fascinating to speculate what this future economy dominated by smart machines across the entire skill spectrum will look like. Will machine productivity be so incredibly high as to make human market labor largely superfluous? In this age of abundance will we enjoy far more leisure time and engage in more satisfying, less remunerative creative work? Will everyone have a profile on Etsy?

For important historical context I’ll just note that George Jetson worked only 9 hours a week, as did all other full-time Jetson-era workers. Ironically he was in the manufacturing sector (sprockets), and his job required him to sit and periodically press a button a few times a week. Yet an ominous theme of the show is that while the Jetson-universe is full of leisure and near-total automation, nobody seems to perceive their lives as being any easier. Alas, that part sounds plausible:

I tend to be strongly drawn to ambitious macro-narrative books that explore these themes of institutional, economic, and geographical determinism, like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel; and not only because they tend to reinforce my preexisting biases about opportunity and outcomes, though there is that. It is absolutely astonishing the extent to which various societal pathologies and dysfunctions can persist in the same locales over decades and even centuries, seemingly immune to  political and economic upheavals, cycles of war and peace, and large-scale population migration.

Two recent books seek to explain the enduring economic and political differences between modern states by investigating their particular institutional inheritances: Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, and Daron Acemoglu’s Why Nations Fail. I haven’t read either yet but I sure plan to.

I thought of the stubborn persistence of these historical inheritances while reading a fascinating paper (via The Browser) that looks at anti-Semitic attitudes in Germany over time. Not surprisingly, since the end of WWII there has been a massive decline in anti-Semitism, such that today, on average Germans are no more likely than other Europeans to harbor anti-Jewish views. But within the country major regional disparities exist.

What the researchers found is that the areas of Germany in which the population was most anti-Semitic from the late Imperial period into the Nazi era (1890-1930s) (Lower Bavaria I’m looking at you)——as measured by voting preferences for explicitly anti-Jewish parties——still contain the largest proportion of committed anti-Semites today. Conversely, where support for anti-Jewish parties was low in the past, today there remains much more inclusive views toward Jews and outsiders in general.

Hateful views about Jews persist in regional patterns despite the strong public condemnation of such views beginning after WWII, and they persist despite massive population migration during the middle decades of the 20th century. The authors’ takeaway:

Support for the anti-Semitic parties in the period 1890-1912 is a good predictor of both broad anti-Semitism and the share of committed anti-Semites [today], and the effects are large.

But if a mere hundred years of robust continuity is not quite enough for you, there’s this:

In earlier work, we show that towns that saw [anti-Jewish] pogroms in 1350, at the time of the Black Death, were still more anti-Semitic in the 1920s and 1930s. [Which in turn are still more anti-Semitic today.]

So if you happen to have been born today in one of these areas that were regional hotbeds of anti-Semitism in 1350 (!!), you would be far more likely to grow up with a Jew-fixation yourself. That’s over six hundred years of localized cultural continuity on the Jewish question. It’s difficult to fathom.

14th century Germans: Can you spot the anti-Semite?

There is certainly a story here about the inter-generational propagation of race-hatred, and the authors look at a few different de-Nazification interventions to try and discern how these types of corrosive ideas might be dislodged in a population over time.

But this is also a story about how accident of birth and parentage, and the prevailing economic and political institutions one inherited and one’s ancestors inherited, all cast a deep shadow over one’s breadth of opportunities, one’s character, and therefore, the realistic scope of potential individual outcomes. Republicans like to argue against redistribution schemes by asserting their support for equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. But it’s increasingly clear that of the two, truly equalizing opportunity among the citizenry is by far the more radical and frankly unimaginable program, requiring as it would a massive governmental coercive intervention at every stage of life, along perhaps with a time machine to coerce and harass your distant ancestors as well.

We can of course transcend and overcome the many outside claims made on the subsequent trajectory of our development and character. But these claims often attach to us as powerful bungee cords, circumscribing our ability to stray beyond a certain perimeter of possibility before they snap us back behind the line. They can break if strained enough, but a viable political system must be structured so as to be mindful that these cords are fortified by centuries of mystic reenforcement, and are not undone merely by national myth-making and bootstrap metaphors.

Suffice to say that the Romney campaign did not much enjoy this ad. Several commentators have weighed in, with some backing the Romney campaign’s claim that Obama is merely trying to distract from the dour economic news, and others saying there’s nothing wrong with a president touting a major foreign policy success. George W. Bush, after all, was not particular averse to using the memory of 9/11 to scare score some votes. By comparison that was a bizarre tactic, since 9/11 itself was as far from a foreign policy success as can be imagined, and at worst it was a major blunder. And it’s not as if the subsequent wars it spawned were masterful strokes of statecraft. At least Obama is reminding us of something unequivocally good he did, which would seem to be the prerogative of a president standing for reelection.

How about the implication that a President Romney wouldn’t have been up to the challenge? That is nasty politics right there. His supposedly damning quote: "It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person."

But does anyone disagree with that statement? I very much doubt Obama himself disagrees with it. Now as fortune would have it we didn’t have to move heaven and earth to get bin Laden. But I think President Bush’s decision to downgrade the priority of catching him in the context of our overall national security strategy was the right call, as was Mitt Romney’s endorsement of that policy.

It seemed for a time, even years after 9/11, that al-Qaeda remained the central organizing force of our entire foreign policy posture; in resources, in attention bandwidth, and in our bilateral relationships abroad. This was unhealthy and a terrible misallocation of priorities and resources. A strategic pull-back from AQ-mania and a realignment to better reflect our proportional challenges in the world was very welcome.

Don’t misunderstand: the PoliticsInVivo household, not known for its nationalist outbursts, nonetheless poured a whiskey toast when the news of bin Laden’s downfall started trickling in one year ago.

But that doesn’t mean Bush/Romney were wrong regarding relative priorities. The intelligence gleaned from the SEAL operation seems to have revealed and confirmed what we already suspected: that AQ was a weakened, fragmented group sapped of vitality, skilled personnel, and materiel. And if we are indeed safer because of the bin Laden operation (and I think we are), have we dialed back the airport security ratchet, which after all was installed to counter and deter the very danger bin Laden exposed on 9/11? In this safer post-bin Laden world, has the DHS budget been slashed? Are we engaging in more, or fewer, drone attacks?

This isn’t to argue for or against any of these specific policy changes, but to show that there’d really be no substantive policy differences whether that SEAL raid happened or not. It really wouldn’t have been worth assigning lavish resources and attention to get one man. I don’t know how far the Obama campaign is going to take this issue as election season wears on, but there are plenty of legitimate accolades for them to claim here without dissembling or flirting with demogoguery.

Update: Conor Friedersdorf notes the other charge made in the ad–that Mitt Romney disapproved of striking al-Qaeda targets inside of Pakistan–is taken wildly out of context. The full quote shows Romney saying that a president merely should not announce such military intentions ahead of time, and, "[o]f course America always maintains our option to do whatever we think is in the best interest of America."

After listening to all three days of Supreme Court hearings, I am prepared to announce the shocking revelation that the oral arguments have reinforced my preexisting biases concerning the constitutionality of Obamacare.

In truth, whatever idiosyncratic opinion you have of the matter, you can easily find scads of analysis online to bolster or challenge your view. I have nothing comprehensive to add to that discussion. I do have some thoughts on a few of the recurring arguments presented in the case.

One thing I think has been revealed is that brilliant lawyers and judges can make lousy economists and health policy pundits. There is a tendency, which I admit I share, to listen to the justices confidently interject with their piercing arguments and concerns and to be a bit dazzled by the argument-from-authority fallacy. That surely these robed jurists possess near mythical skills of logic and rhetoric, and are able to assimilate and master most any area of human endeavor. But like all accomplished people, including (especially!) intellectuals, their knowledge is confined and highly domain-specific. Upon reflection, some of the justices’ hypotheticals and slippery-slope analogies against the mandate were simply ridiculous.

Take the question of externality and cost-shifting; that if some people do not buy health insurance, the price goes up for everyone who does have insurance. Justice Scalia asserted that the same could be said about buying a car: “If people don’t buy cars, the price that those who do buy cars pay will have to be higher. So, you could say in order to bring the price down, you’re hurting these other people by not buying a car.” But—as if this were not obvious—where is the issue of free-loading in the car market? If I can’t afford to buy a Chevy, I don’t get to go down to the Chevy dealership and demand one for free, and there is no regulation in place that forces the dealership to provide me one and stick other Chevy owners with the tab. Also, as economist Henry (don’t call him Hank) Aaron notes at Brookings, it’s possible that more demand for a product will engender more output and therefore lower the marginal unit cost, but it also has countervailing effects that may raise the price. It’s rotten logic and even worse economics.

Another common theme in the hearings was the “unprecedented” nature of this particular form of mandate, and a lot of the justices’ time was spent looking for ways in which this power does or does not already exist. David Frum had an interesting piece today, noting that some of the major issues in this case—imposition of a welfare entitlement on the states; severability of the law’s constituent pieces—mirror very closely those discussed in Helvering v. Davis, the 1937 case that upheld the constitutionality of the original Social Security program.

I am far from granting that the mandate is unprecedented, or conceptually different from other forms of government coercion (Will Wilkinson discusses this here); but even if it is, I don’t see how that bears on the question of constitutionality. It’s quite evident by now that this sort of purchase mandate is politically unpopular, which is likely why Congress has thus far refrained from passing many laws that make people buy stuff. But just because Congress hasn’t ever taken a particular action doesn’t mean the action is not necessary and proper and therefore constitutional. And as any lawyer will tell you, novelty in the application of the Commerce Clause power has hardly EVER stopped the Court from affirming the expansion of that power. You can be angry or indifferent about that fact, but what would indeed be novel and near-unprecedented is for the Court to suddenly find a clear and articulable limit to that power.

Another issue of shabby logic: A lot of the hearing was given over to the slippery slope fallacy: “If Congress has the authority to do X, what’s to keep it from doing Y?” The SG was asked repeatedly for a “limiting principle”, or a clear line at which this claimed congressional authority ends. He had no good answer, and even seemed a bit stymied by sophomoric arguments like the broccoli canard. What’s to keep Congress from mandating broccoli purchases? For one thing, I am unaware of a nationwide broccoli insurance market complicated by the adverse selection problem, ever-rising costs of broccoli premiums, and tens of millions of Americans whose inability to afford broccoli forces a massive broccoli cost-shift onto the rest of broccoli-eating society. But, let’s assume I’ve missed something and such a broccoli economy exists. What limits Congress in the broccoli sphere is the same thing that limits Congress in areas where there is already wide consensus that it has the power to act, yet doesn’t. As Matt Steinglass notes at the Economist, Congress’s ultimate “limiting principle” is democracy! Politicans like being reelected, and to be reelected you have to do marginally popular things, and avoid doing widely unpopular, arbitrary, or odious things.

For instance, Congress’s taxation power is undisputed, and from what I can tell, completely limitless. If we allow Congress to tax at 30% what’s to keep Congress from raising everyone’s effective tax rate to 100%? Well, for one thing it would mean every elected representative who voted for it would be swiftly ushered out of office in the next election, replaced by politicians promising to overturn it. The desire to not commit career suicide implementing a policy that will not last beyond your abbreviated tenure sounds like a pretty forceful limiting principle to me.

Likewise, Congress can declare war whenever it likes. What prevents Congress from voting to invade  Canada in order to appropriate all of its natural resources? (Christopher Hitchens was once asked what Thomas Jefferson would think about modern America. He said that most of all Jefferson would likely be appalled that we had not yet conquered Canada, and shocked that the young hearty men of America have so dishonorably allowed the British flag to continue flying in North America.) We don’t invade Canada because it would be extraordinarily immoral, illegal, and wasteful, and would garner precisely 0% public support. Well, ok, no more than 25% support. Fine, 40%.

Anyway, I thought Paul Clement was fantastic and a pleasure to listen to. His nimble mind surely made this a tighter ninth inning than it should have been. Still, my contrarian prediction: John Roberts writes the majority opinion upholding the mandate. If they do strike it down, all that’s left is to make Jefferson’s dream a reality, and invade and annex Canada; then we could at least use their health care system.

In honor of budget day here in DC, let’s talk a little about debt.

In my experience, people who insist that the U.S. is on an economic path toward Greece-style mayhem tend to view the concept of debt as a simple morality play, in which incurring debt at either the household or the national level is inherently profligate and indulgent, whereas balancing the books is inherently prudent and responsible. These people tend to analogize public debt to, say, personal credit card debt. It is something to be avoided and shunned, and to the extent that it is not, it is a mark of deficient character, miscalibrated morals, and unsteady discipline. They also might find compelling such arguments as, “Just as families are tightening their belts around the kitchen table, so too must government.” Specific policy views then develop from this normative “mood.”

You can see how this view of debt is seductive and intuitive at first glance. It happens to be the case that it is quite hard to understand and to explain the phenomenon whereby a federal government issues various debt securities in a fiat currency it controls, and how that is nothing whatsoever like your crappy car loan (or like Greece for that matter). Many members of the financial media seem unable or unwilling to discern the difference, allowing politicians to either ignorantly or deliberately conflate the two. But as with all complex policy questions, reducing them to morality plays that pit the chivalric on one side and the decadent on the other is not a very useful or sophisticated analytical lens.

As it happens, I am not a very useful or sophisticated economic thinker. So we’ll outsource this a little. We know that about 46% of public debt is foreign-held. This foreign share of our debt has risen enormously in the past forty years. Why do foreign entities want to lend so much money to the U.S.? Well just like domestic bond holders, some want a safe rate of return from the most secure country on the planet. Some foreign governments (ahem, China) also hoard U.S. dollars in order to depreciate their own currency relative to ours, which boosts their exports.

Well, thanks to this enlightening piece in the Economist, I’ve learned today that there are all kinds of other rather inscrutable reasons that foreigners gobble up U.S. debt. Behold:

Clearly, demand for American government debt is driven by much more than a hunger for returns. Financial-market participants use Treasury bonds and bills as collateral to secure lending, for instance. And for risk-averse investors such as foreign central banks, money-market funds and retirees, America’s debt is uniquely suited to storing savings without much due diligence. In short, its government debt is a lot like money. […]

…[T]he surge in Treasury debt since 2008…has supplied private investors and financial institutions with enough “money” to satisfy their hunger for safety and grease the wheels of the markets. That is analogous to the dollar’s role as reserve currency, which obliges America to issue debt securities in which foreigners can invest those dollars.

(The dollar’s reserve status is a critical factor, and was referenced by David Cameron recently, explaining Britain’s perhaps-premature pivot to austerity by noting its inability to raise the funds to engage in fiscal stimulus like the U.S. can.)

This is pretty fascinating, and what’s amazing is that it has very little to do with the exploding cost of Medicare or the defense budget. And it’s not a national security issue like many deficit-hawks would have you believe; there’s no foreign conspiracy to gain nefarious leverage over the U.S by “owning” its financial destiny. In fact it’s not clear to me that there is any moral or value component to this at all. It’s just the way it is. As Matt Yglesias says, “It’s because the deep and liquid market in US Treasury bonds plays a foundational role in the global financial system.” In this context I wouldn’t even know what “balancing the budget” would mean, or why it’s desirable.

Now, it’s certainly true that we have a major current account imbalance—due primarily to rising health care costs—which is not sustainable in the long term. There are various schemes on offer to deal with this, from the cost-containment measures embedded in the Affordable Care Act, to Paul Ryan’s plan to end Medicare and provide health vouchers to old people so they can buy private insurance on their own. We’ll see which way President Romney decides to go.

I think this is mostly a(nother) post about epistemic modesty in the face of overwhelming complexity (see here and here and here), and a warning against reductive moralizing. Happy budget day!

Update: Noah Millman has some good thoughts on this. He notes that although the issuance of Treasuries plays a unique and crucial role in stabilizing the global financial system, the debt does indeed have to be rolled over someday, at prevailing interest rates. The party cannot last forever, and what we use this debt money for does indeed matter.

I always enjoy when national politics turns to the deep South, and both the candidates and the campaign media begin acting like they are in a foreign country whose language and folkways they cannot hope to understand, only reference obliquely with a light-touch pander. I never thought I’d say this but it really makes one nostalgic for Bill Clinton, if only to come and make the awkward go away.

At rallies in Mississippi and Alabama, which hold primaries Tuesday, the candidates awkwardly fished for something they might have in common with Southern audiences. Newt Gingrich talked about gun racks but got his facts wrong. Mitt Romney announced, “I like grits.” Rick Santorum tried to describe a connection to Alabama but admitted he was not a frequent visitor.

Painful.

Anyway, Public Policy Polling has released a new survey asking likely Republican voters in Mississippi and Alabama all sorts of questions about candidate preference. They also threw in some incendiary cultural questions, perhaps just to pique the interest of political bloggers who are sick of this primary already. Well it worked. Here are a few results:

In Mississippi:

In Alabama:

People like to jump all over these sorts of things, but I’ve never been impressed by this brand of “look how dumb people are” polls. As I’ve written before, I think many respondents use their answer to register general opposition or support of the person being polled; or if it’s a religious/cultural question, they use their answer to affiliate with their perceived cultural/tribal allies and stick it to their ideological opponents. Respondents do not necessarily engage in a good-faith weighing of the available empirical evidence in the 10 seconds they have to answer the question.

In this case, it’s safe to say that basically every single likely Republican voter in Mississippi and Alabama does not approve of the president. Some oppose particular policies, and some have a more identity-based aversion (these aren’t mutually exclusive of course). The same is true of liberals who disapprove of, say, Rick Perry.

These southern Republicans calling the president a Muslim are not saying that they have good evidence that he sneaks away from the Oval Office to pray toward Mecca five times a day and thinks Mohammed was god’s final prophet. They’re saying they don’t care for the guy and that he’s not one of them. Crediting him with being Christian—the truth as it happens—would be too close to saying he was just like them in a way that they consider absolutely fundamental to their self-conception of their identities.

The evolution question is similar. Perhaps there are a few “no” voters who are saying, “I’ve read Darwin’s work and don’t find his theory of natural selection rigorous or compelling enough.” But many more hear the question as, “Would you like to repudiate your religious identity?” or, just as difficult: “Would you like to affiliate with liberals and scientists who think you are dumb and backward?” The answers really tell us very little about people’s views, and more about their visceral emotional response to silly questions.

I have been doing a lot of Civil War reading lately and I’m admittedly in a bit of a Southern romanticist mood, but in the article I linked to at the top, what you’ll find are regular voters in Mississippi and Alabama doing their genuine best to choose between a very flawed and underwhelming field.

We’re back in foreign country territory at the end of the piece:

“Would you agree,” Williams said, turning to his co-worker, “that it’s a pig in a poke?”

“I would,” said Manley Tisdale, 33. The saying meant that whoever they got, he wouldn’t be as good as advertised.

Despite the inscrutable colloquialisms of the voters, I think it’s the Republican candidates who aren’t translating well.

Last weekend I went to see the Thomas Jefferson bible at the American History Museum. For those who don’t know, late in his life Jefferson cut and pasted together his own private version of the New Testament, excising all of the miracles and supernatural claims, and anything that could not be supported by reason, which brought the thing down to a lean 84 pages. It’s an extraordinary document and an extraordinary testament to the enlightenment values of free-inquiry which Jefferson did so much to champion and codify.

On the other side of the ledger, to put it mildly, we have Rick Santorum, absolutely mangling the intent of the Establishment Clause for us:

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum called Monday for a wider role for religion in public policy as he battled for conservative votes ahead of Tuesday’s Michigan primary.

“Freedom to worship is not just what you do in the sanctuary, it’s how you practice your faith outside of the sanctuary,” Santorum said. […]

“I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” Santorum said during the interview with ABC News This Week. “The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country.”

I think one of the most bizarre widespread cultural notions is that somehow religion and religious people are under seige or at least generally unwelcome in American civic life. To godless ears like those of your humble blogger, this just sounds insane. I cannot fathom what mixture of victimhood and insecurity and cultural unease leads one to look at American politics and conclude somehow that there isn’t enough god-talk or appeals to biblical authority, or conspicuous avowals of faith as a virtue in itself. Could it possibly escape anyone’s notice for even a day that America is one of the most religious countries in the world? And that the large majority of its citizenry, and nearly all of its legislators, subscribe to various denominations of Christianity and have done so for all of its history?

I know no Republican candidate likes to mention this, but I am old enough to remember when George W. Bush used to be president. For those who can’t or would rather not recall, Bush was a president in the early 21st century whose election and reelection may be attributed in no small part to his very strong evangelical support. The eight years of the Bush administration were characterized by regular and overt public expressions of religious faith, an unprecedented attempt to infuse religion into governmental activities (most notably through the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives), as well as various attempts to mold science policy so as to comport with certain Christian moral doctrines. This was all done not despite, but because of the natural state of religiosity that suffuses all of American life, yet which the religious themselves seem to not notice. Despite President Obama’s apparently virulent “war on religion,” he has not shuttered Bush’s faith-based initiatives, and he has continued all the various religious ticks and panders that have become routine in the presidency (including attending the odious National Prayer Breakfast, hosted by a Congressional bible club whose members belong to a secretive, sinister organization which uses its influence to advance various Christian fundamentalist goals both here and abroad.)

So forget Santorum’s inexplicable fear that the teachings of Jesus Christ don’t command enough attention or respect in the United States of America.

How about his view that “the church should have more influence/involvement in the operation of the state”? Well it leads to a very obvious and difficult objection: which church?

The establishment clause of the first amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” does not just mean that the government cannot designate a national religion or a state church. It also means that the government cannot show preference for one religion over another, or for religion over irreligion.

Yes, people absorb various moral/cultural precepts from their religious experiences. And lots of people seem to want to take these precepts and translate them into legislation or public policy. Santorum often says that the greatness of America is that everyone can bring their ideas, religious and secular, to the public square and have it out. I agree to the extent that I don’t really care what motivates people to the public square. Zeus-worship, goldbuggery, Elvis fanatics, come one and all, I say. But quite contrary to Santorum’s perverse interpretation, the public square is most emphatically not a venue in which a majority of co-religionists may use their superior numbers to impose their own moral precepts on minority sects or those who claim no sect.

People forget or often misrepresent the origin of the phrase “separation of church and state.” Jefferson first wrote of the “wall of separation” in response to a letter sent to him by the Baptist Church of Danbury, Connecticut in 1802. The local Baptists were concerned with persecution and marginalization at the hand of the dominant Congregationalist sect. So religious liberty as understood by the man who authored the concept was meant to protect a minority sect from the tyranny of a majority sect. And indeed most every religious tussle in history has involved the attempted imposition of one sect over another, not “religion” vs. “secularism”. Therefore it is not just the unaffiliated but especially the devout who ought to cheer Mr. Jefferson and his revolutionary wall of separation, and abhor Mr. Santorum’s wish for a confessional cage match in the public square to decide biblical supremacy over our political institutions.

If Congress is to show no preference among the thousands of religions and scores of deities, and no preference for religion over irreligion, then regardless of one’s motivation, one must argue for policy on explicitly secular grounds. No matter what your strict Zeus-adherence says about sin and virtue, there must be a secular purpose and justification for your preferred policy. If you cannot present such a purpose and such a justification, then it’s back to the sanctuary for you. This is the genius of the system which Jefferson authored, and for which Santorum holds such contempt. Haste to the day when the public square is no longer blighted and polluted by his unlettered nonsense.

Ross Douthat is not a fan of the White House’s decision to require Catholic-aligned organizations to provide its employees with insurance coverage for contraceptives. He argues that it’s not just a matter of religious freedom, but that this government politicization of morals is a dangerous precedent:

The Obama White House’s decision is a threat to any kind of voluntary community that doesn’t share the moral sensibilities of whichever party controls the health care bureaucracy.

The Catholic Church’s position on contraception is not widely appreciated, to put it mildly, and many liberals are inclined to see the White House’s decision as a blow for the progressive cause. They should think again. Once claimed, such powers tend to be used in ways that nobody quite anticipated, and the logic behind these regulations could be applied in equally punitive ways by administrations with very different values from this one.

The more the federal government becomes an instrument of culture war, the greater the incentive for both conservatives and liberals to expand its powers and turn them to ideological ends.

Right, I would never want an adminstration to just impose its moral sensibilities whenever it has control of the health care bureaucracy.

Which is why I did not like it when Douthat wrote in favor of the Bush adminstration’s intervention in the Terry Schiavo case against the wishes of her husband. Ross’s insistence in that case that the federal government encroach on a voluntary community (marital couple), just because that community didn’t "share the moral sensitilities" of the party in power seemed wrong to me.

Ross is also a long-standing advocate for the Bush administration’s ban on the use of public funds for embryonic stem cell research. Here too he seems to have had no problem with the party in power imposing its moral sensibilities on society. I might have warned Ross at the time, to no avail, that "the logic behind [the stem cell ban] could be applied in equally punitive ways by administrations with very different values."

Here is my real gripe with the Douthat line. He calls the White House regulation an "attack on conscience," and I have seen several opponents similarly decry the rule as forcing Catholics to "betray their conscience."

Whenever religion demands some special privilege or special exemption from public policy, or special state protection or innoculation against modern norms (or in its more sinister manifestation, protection from "offense"), the issue of "conscience" is inevitably invoked. The implication is always that the beliefs and morals of organized religion should be given special consideration above those of secularists. I find this a very tiresome disparity. Because, we on this side have consciences too. We believe that the wide availability and destigmification of contraception and the attendant liberation of women from the animal reproductive cycle represents one of the greatest moral and economic triumphs of humankind. Wheresoever these rights are not respected, we find political and cultural backwardness, economic stagnation, and sexual pathology. In fact, we on this side believe that teaching a doctrine that resigns women to be slaves to their reproductive cycle is not "conscience," but unconscionable.

Now, forcing female employees of Catholic-aligned institutions to go pay full retail price for birth control is not quite the same thing as consigning them to an animal reproductive cycle. But it does show how attenuated the church’s argument has become, and how much "conscience" ground it has already conceded. "Contraception is such a moral evil that my conscience requires some of you to go pay full retail price for it!" It doesn’t really have an Old Testament gravitas ring to it.

And where exactly is this contraception culture war that Ross invokes? It seems to be occurring largely in his and Timothy Dolan’s mind. Elsewhere in the 21st century, there’s not much debate as to whether birth control is ok or not. Catholics are more than welcome to adhere to or preach retrograde contraception norms among their co-religionists. But evidence suggests that no one is listening, including Catholics themselves. 98% of Catholic women say they’ve used contraceptive methods banned by the church. It’s a dead letter.

To me this is likely to be one more in a long line of issues in which the church has been forced to assimilate or abandon its doctrinal inanities when they have come into conflict with scientific or historical fact, or modern moral norms. The church has retreated so thorougly on creation, on evolution, on geology and cosmology, on gender norms and antisemitism. May its psychosis regarding sex and women’s bodies pass along as well, despite the ostensibly inviolable consciences of its flock. Remember, we too have inviolable consciences and principles, and the rejection and stigmatization of this piffle in the public square cannnot occur fast enough.