Which prominent Republicans are signing a Supreme Court brief supporting same-sex marriage?

"The list of signers includes a string of Republican officials and influential thinkers — 75 as of Monday evening — who are not ordinarily associated with gay rights advocacy, including some who are speaking out for the first time and others who have changed their previous positions."

Among them are Meg Whitman, who supported Proposition 8 [a ban on same-sex marriage] when she ran for California governor; Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida and Richard Hanna of New York; Stephen J. Hadley, a Bush national security adviser; Carlos Gutierrez, a commerce secretary to Mr. Bush; James B. Comey, a top Bush Justice Department official; David A. Stockman, President Ronald Reagan’s first budget director; and Deborah Pryce, a former member of the House Republican leadership from Ohio who is retired from Congress....

Actually, this isn't such an impressive list of names. It seems pretty pathetic to me.

[T]he presence of so many well-known former officials — including Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey, and William Weld and Jane Swift, both former governors of Massachusetts — suggests that once Republicans are out of public life they feel freer to speak out against the party’s official platform, which calls for amending the Constitution to define marriage as “the union of one man and one woman.”

Or it suggests Republican governors of New Jersey and Massachusetts aren't that conservative.

But then there's Huntsman:

Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former Utah governor, who favored civil unions but opposed same-sex marriage during his 2012 presidential bid, also signed. Last week, Mr. Huntsman announced his new position in an article titled “Marriage Equality Is a Conservative Cause,” a sign that the 2016 Republican presidential candidates could be divided on the issue for the first time.

This is the first reference I've seen to Huntsman's article, and I'm constantly scanning the web for news stories, especially on the subject of same-sex marriage, especially with the Supreme Court decision pending. Why isn't Huntsman more influential? It's uncanny that this man, a former governor, very nice looking, doesn't get more play among conservatives. Here he is trying to tell conservatives what's conservative, and I don't have to read his article or any response to it to know that conservatives will reject what he's saying out of hand, designating him not a conservative.

But how about not rejecting it out of hand? Put aside your Huntsmanophobia for a moment. He connects marriage equality to free market capitalism:

Marriage is not an issue that people rationalize through the abstract lens of the law; rather it is something understood emotionally through one’s own experience with family, neighbors, and friends. The party of Lincoln should stand with our best tradition of equality and support full civil marriage for all Americans.

This is both the right thing to do and will better allow us to confront the real choice our country is facing: a choice between the Founders’ vision of a limited government that empowers free markets, with a level playing field giving opportunity to all, and a world of crony capitalism and rent-seeking by the most powerful economic interests.

Adam Smith was not only an architect of the modern world of extraordinary economic opportunity, he was a moralist whose first book was The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The foundation of his thought was his insight that free markets and open commerce strengthened our moral fiber by reinforcing the community of shared and reciprocal economic interests. Government, he thought, had to be limited lest it be captured and corrupted by special business interests who wanted protection from competition and the reciprocal requirements of community.

We are at a crossroads. I believe the American people will vote for free markets under equal rules of the game—because there is no opportunity or job growth any other way. But the American people will not hear us out if we stand against their friends, family, and individual liberty.

I'd say that's a bit under-theorized. There's so much padding at the beginning of the article — Republicans need to win over the younger generation and so forth. The ending is a mishmash — a mere hint of an idea that might make sense. What does he say other than equality is good and free market capitalism is also good? There's this odd concession that law doesn't matter, because this is something that people are going to understand emotionally. Rather than make an "abstract" legal argument — why is law only abstract? — he appeals to emotion. You should be for equality because equality is the right principle. First of all, that's abstract. Secondly, the go-with-your-heart, emotion-is-the-answer approach is what leads so many people to oppose same-sex marriage.

The other argument seems to be that the economic issues are what's really important, so let's get this pesky marriage issue behind us so we can move on. People will "vote for free markets" if there are conditions of equality. That suggests that marriage equality is the kind of equality in the marketplace that Adam Smith was talking about. Is it? Maybe, but Huntsman doesn't even attempt to connect that all up. As I said: under-theorized. That's my abstract legalistic view and my from-the-heart emotional view.

"The blog is also now unending: you can scroll down indefinitely if you so wish..."

A nice feature at Andrew Sullivan's newly independent blog. This means that the blog is set to have a  number of posts on the page when you click there, but if you want more, you don't have to click to an "older posts" page (as you do here), it automatically provides new posts as you scroll. This gives a vivid depiction of what a blog really is: a pile of posts one on top of the other. For example, my blog is a stack of 32,381 posts.

Sullivan has also moved his archive, which goes back to January 2001: "I have given a sharp dagger for anyone who wants to make me look foolish – so have at it." I don't think the archive makes him look foolish. I read him all the time back then, when he called himself conservative and tried to define conservatism in new ways. Or is the appearance of foolishness not in what those old opinions were, but in the later deviations? Would you read the sort of person who would go 12 years without contradicting himself?

The Dictionary of Received Ideas — my imagined modern American version of it — has this under "contradiction":

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

That's the reflexive quotation but you can keep scrolling in that poem, Walt Whitman's tall stack of lines:

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through
with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too
late?

I wait on the door-slab....

"The more I study the history of intellectuals, the more they seem like a wrecking crew, dismantling civilization bit by bit — replacing what works with what sounds good."

Writes Thomas Sowell, in a column called "On Christmas, Liberals Are By No Means Liberal."

After watching a documentary about the tragic story of Jonestown, I was struck by the utterly unthinking way that so many people put themselves completely at the mercy of a glib and warped man, who led them to degradation and destruction. And I could not help thinking of the parallel with the way we put a glib and warped man in the White House.

Wow. That's harsh.

Here's the documentary about Jonestown. And here's Sowell's excellent book "Intellectuals and Society."

"Conservative Pundits: Accepting Same-Sex Marriage Is Common Sense."

Trend watch.

Of course, same-sex marriage started out as a conservative idea, and lefties resisted. That was back in the day when marriage was patriarchy and oppression.

Here's a prediction: Once gay marriage becomes the norm, the left can get back to critiquing marriage. That topic got backburnered.

ADDED: Recommendation: Conservatives should get on the side of same-sex marriage now, make it part of what is traditional, and embrace the "marriage" ideal generally (and for all) going forward. The left will go off in another direction, and good old marriage will be yours once again.

AND: If you don't remember when lefties called it right-wing to support gay marriage and gays in the military, read "Richard Goldstein’s Heresy Hunt," and article from 2001, referring to a Village Voice writer who despised that notorious right-winger, Andrew Sullivan::

... Goldstein decried the so-called "gay right" because he says that they bring the issues of gay marriage and gays in the military to the forefront, making them more prominent, while they should be arguing for an end to workplace, housing and public accommodation discrimination. "They believe in civil equality, not equal opportunity," he said....

... Goldstein said we should revile the gay right because they are "a masculinist group of gay writers." They are men and women who worship and aspire to traditional masculinity and "cannot see beyond their privilege." He then equated masculinism with marriage-and-military advocates: "In times of war, masculinist values come to the forefront and feminist values recede.... If these people prevail.... the masculinist version of homosexuality will come to dominate the movement. ... It is the most dangerous thing we face today, I believe."

And watch "The Great Gay Debate" from 2002, with Andrew Sullivan, attacked from the left, at his fiery best. Conservatives missed a great opportunity a decade ago.

As it becomes apparent — is it apparent? — that Obama is likely to lose — going to lose? — the election...

... what should we expect to see?

1. Desperate attacks, material that otherwise would not have been dumped into the public discourse.

2. Liberals distancing themselves, saying things like "He hasn't presented us with a comprehensive plan for his second term," to preserve their ability to say, after the election, that the American people did not choose conservatism and they don't want conservatism; they merely selected what seemed to be a plan over the absence of a plan; they wanted change and we have a new plan for change.

3. ???

Repeating the old marshmallow test — the one about kids' capacity for delaying gratification.

And changing the results by exposing the kids — pre-temptation — to untrustworthy/trustworthy adults.

“Being able to delay gratification — in this case to wait 15 difficult minutes to earn a second marshmallow — not only reflects a child’s capacity for self-control, it also reflects their belief about the practicality of waiting,” says Celeste Kidd, a doctoral candidate in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester and lead author on the study.” Delaying gratification is only the rational choice if the child believes a second marshmallow is likely to be delivered after a reasonably short delay.”

You can imagine the social policy the researchers would like to support. The ability to delay gratification is tied to future economic success (according to the old study), and if the capacity for delaying gratification is purely a matter of character, it seems to justify different economic results. One can feel good about being a big old conservative, who favors equal opportunity and scoffs at equalizing the results. You want differential outcomes, because they are deserved and they are incentives.

But if we find out that a child raised around unreliable adults will adapt by taking the rewards that are available in the present and that this child has shown good aptitude in refraining from delaying gratification, our conservatism won't feel so comfortable anymore and we're amenable to arguments about equalizing outcomes.

Let's judge Paul Ryan.

Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski put this up yesterday with the title: "Paul Ryan Gets Testy and Walks Out of Interview."



Buzzfeed has now changed the title to "Paul Ryan Gets Testy And Ends Interview," because he obviously doesn't walk out, and they've also put this up now:

The reporter knew he was already well over the allotted time for the interview when he decided to ask a weird question relating gun violence to tax cuts. Ryan responded as anyone would in such a strange situation. When you do nearly 200 interviews in a couple months, eventually you’re going to see a local reporter embarrass himself.

So... not only doesn't he walk out, he doesn't end the interview.

Maybe Kaczynski is straining to win back lefty friends after he called "handkerchief" on the Romney "cheat sheet" conspiracy theory.

Anyway, let's focus on "testy." Did Ryan get testy? Ryan speaks eloquently about guns and crime and a need to restore "civil society" to the inner cities, which prompts the reporter to ask "And you can do all that by cutting taxes? By — with a big tax cut?" It's not a terrible question, really, but it does reveal the reporter's liberal mentality. Ryan's civil society — the basis for individual "discipline" and "good character" — is "what charities and civic groups and churches do." That's standard conservative ideology, but the reporter, presumably thinking in terms of government finding ways to rebuild individual good character, leaps to the issue of tax cuts. He can't envision the private groups — charities and civic groups and churches — building civil society. He's got the "you didn't build that" attitude.

So he asks a tax question and Ryan responds as if the reporter had made the assertion implied in the question and says "Those are your words, not mine." That's abrupt. He could have said your question shows that you don't understand what civil society is and explained the deep ideological difference between conservatives and liberals, but the reporter isn't his ideological opponent. He's a reporter, supposedly asking neutral questions, and the implied argument about the role of government would need to be spelled out before it could be refuted.

It's late in the interview, and the off-camera voice says, "Thank you very much." Ryan, yanking out his microphone, says "That was kind of strange," as if the question were a complete non sequitur. And then: "Trying to stuff words in my mouth," as if it were not a question. I read this as a dominating tactic, and the reporter goes beta: "I don't know if it's strange." Ryan mellows slightly: "No, but it sounds as though you're trying to answer my question for me. That's a little odd." And the reporter meekly agrees.

Ryan could have been a bit nicer, but I liked this display of dominance in managing the reporters who are looking to get their sound bites out of him. I'm sure this reporter would have loved to show Ryan stymied by contradictory aspirations about fixing the inner cities and cutting taxes. The reporter tried to get on top and got schooled. I'm okay with that.

The secret video reveals Romney as "the sneering plutocrat..."

"... fully in thrall to a series of pernicious myths that are at the heart of the mania that has seized his party," says Jonathan Chait.

[Romney] believes that market incomes in the United States are a perfect reflection of merit. Far from seeing his own privileged upbringing as the private-school educated son of an auto executive-turned-governor as an obvious refutation of that belief, Romney cites his own life, preposterously, as a confirmation of it. (“I have inherited nothing. Everything I earned I earned the old fashioned way.”)...

The revelations in this video come to me as a genuine shock. I have never hated Romney. I presumed his ideological makeover since he set out to run for president was largely phony, even if he was now committed to carry through with it, and to whatever extent he’d come to believe his own lines, he was oblivious or naïve about the damage he would inflict upon the poor, sick, and vulnerable.  It seems unavoidable now to conclude that Romney’s embrace of Paul Ryanism is born of actual contempt for the looters and moochers, a class war on behalf of his own class.

There are plenty of conservatives who will celebrate all of that. Not the "sneering plutocrat" part, but the Paul Ryanism.

Chait is demonstrating how Democrats can stir up antagonism to Romney, but much of that antagonism will be felt by people who were never going to vote for Romney... like Chait himself. I have never hated Romney, he says. Yeah, you didn't hate him because he seemed so bland and ineffectual, and you didn't think he'd win. But Paul Ryan and his crisp conservatism — that, you hate. I'd say Romney ought to avoid sucking up to Chait. That's the McCain mistake: You get liberals to like you, but they don't vote for you, and the conservatives lose interest.

Chait gives it all away when he brings up Ryan and portrays him as contemptuous. "Sneering plutocrat" is a great phrase, and I expect Democrats to take advantage and plunge forward with that meme. But Ryan is no sneering plutocrat. He brings youthful vitality and intelligence to the conservative cause. If Romney seemed like Ryan in the secret video, that's a useful revelation.

IN THE COMMENTS: Crimso said:

Did Chait actually suggest it is wrong to have contempt for looters and moochers? 

And edutcher said:

When you've lost Jonathan Chait...

you've really started to scare the Lefties. 

"This could be the opportunity for Romney and for that campaign to finally take the gloves off and take the fear off and just start explaining conservatism."

Said Rush Limbaugh on his show today.

Start explaining liberty to people and what it means, and explain that they don't have to be in that 47%.  There's no reason for them, for everybody, to essentially have given up on their future in this country.  There's no reason for it.  This is, to me, such an opportunity to espouse conservatism and to explain to people. Now that people are focused on this, now that people are paying attention to it, this is a golden opportunity, and we know Romney's got it in him because of what he said to these people.

Whether Rush has that exactly right or not, Romney is being tested, and we will see if he can rise to the occasion. The media are showing what they can do, putting Romney on the defensive, using what they have to make us look at something negative about him even and especially when some truly newsworthy problem is plaguing Obama. I want to see what Romney can do, getting on top of this media beating (which is not going to end).

David Brooks heard no "talk of community and compassionate conservatism" at the GOP convention.

It's embarrassing. He really let his bias show when he said:

[T]here is a flaw in the vision the Republicans offered in Tampa. It is contained in its rampant hyperindividualism. Speaker after speaker celebrated the solitary and heroic individual. There was almost no talk of community and compassionate conservatism. There was certainly no conservatism as Edmund Burke understood it, in which individuals are embedded in webs of customs, traditions, habits and governing institutions.

As Roger L. Simon points out (via Instapundit):

Hello, where were you, David? On Thursday evening, one after the other private citizen came forth to testify to Mitt Romney’s extraordinary personal charity and deep community spirit. I have never seen anything like it at a convention, Republican or Democrat. I don’t know if you would call it Burkean, but you would certainly call it eminently decent and highly laudable. The culmination was Ted and Pat Oparowsky of New Hampshire who recounted how much time and attention the young Mitt Romney gave their son, a child he did not know, when the boy was dying of cancer.

Maybe Brooks skitters away from the part of the web of customs, traditions, habits and governing institutions that is religion.

I'd love to see Brooks write another column and explain — if this is what he thinks — that the compassionate, communitarian activities done within religion don't count as part of a political party's vision for America. Perhaps these activities are like the good things you do for your family and friends. It's a group of insiders, and someone operating within government needs a "vision" that relates to the whole community, not to groups that give each other special treatment.

But I don't think he'll be able to prop up his old Edmund Burke ventriloquist doll to say that. Brooks will need to come out and say it on his own. And then we can judge whether David Brooks represents conservatism (even for NYT op-ed page purposes).

"What's happened to intellectual life on the right?"

"In their flight from elitism, [conservative intellectuals] end up in a populist swamp peopled by autodidacts and fundamentalists. They become cheerleaders for a world without intellectuals, hastening a future in which they themselves will be irrelevant."

"No one pretends that better laws would prevent all tragedies, but if that were the standard, then we wouldn't pass any laws at all."

On NPR last evening, the topic was the Aurora movie-theater murders, and the NPR host, Robert Siegel, invited WaPo's E.J. Dionne to comment on "mass shootings, guns and politics." Siegel quoted something Dionne had written, that events like this cause "our whole public reasoning process [to go] haywire." That is, other people go crazy and can't think straight, so let's check out the quality of Dionne's thinking.

What I mean by that is that the NRA and the rest of the gun lobby have such a firm hold on our political system that no one can bring up the notion, which we bring up with every other kind of tragedy, that maybe we can do better. Maybe there are laws we could pass that would prevent something like this.

No one pretends that better laws would prevent all tragedies, but if that were the standard, then we wouldn't pass any laws at all. We have the most permissive gun laws pretty much in the industrialized world. And I hope, but I have no confidence, that we won't make the same mistake again.

I'd like to think that one time, we could say: Oh, let's open this up. Let's talk about the assault weapons ban. Let's talk about ways in which we might reduce the chances that someone with mental problems might get a gun. And I'm just worried that we're going to revert right back to our usual sort of giving and saying, well, the gun lobby controls Washington, so we can never do anything about things like this.

Maybe we can do better.... laws can't solve everything... but if that were the standard, then we wouldn't pass any laws at all... so... so, what? Since we do sometimes pass laws, we must think that laws can sometimes help when there's a problem. And there's a problem, so... so... what?  Let's open this up. Let's talk about it.  E.J. Dionne is afraid we'll just knee-jerk do nothing, instead of knee-jerk propose gun control... I mean think and think with thoughtful contemplation and talk about and around and through and through and arrive at the solution that immediately popped into E.J. Dionne's mind.

I'm fascinated by this notion that we do sometimes pass laws and therefore that means that we should pass laws. The resistance to passing laws is some nasty dysfunction caused by a nefarious interest group — here, the NRA — but good people want to do something. This do something orientation is characteristic of the modern liberal mind. I heard Dionne saying that on the radio yesterday evening, but it came back to me as I was reading about rabies and marveling at the crazy — desperate — ideas for a cure: "you burn a hair from the dog that bit you and insert the ashes into the wound... [a] maggot from a dead dog's body... a linen cloth soaked with menstrual blood of a female dog... [c]hicken excrement, 'if it is of a red color'... [a]shes from the tail of a shrew-mouse...."

When is it that reasoning goes haywire? After Dionne presented his patchwork of liberal logic, the host called upon David Brooks. (Don't say NPR doesn't balance liberals and conservatives!) He said...

Well, I'm no fan of the NRA, I'm not really an opponent of gun control or an assault weapon ban...

That sounds like a necessary preface for the NPR listeners, but I'm going to give Brooks credit for subtly deactivating the bogeyman Dionne inserted into his call to action, because Brooks continues with:

... but, you know, public policy is based on evidence and data and whether it would work. 

Brooks is displaying the pin with which he is about to puncture the liberal's inflated self-image.

This is one of the most studied things in criminology. And the weight of the evidence is pretty clear that there's no relationship between gun control and violent crime. Areas with higher gun control do not have less violent crime. Over the last few years, the number of new guns entering the country has been about four million a year. 

So you've got to look at evidence, not your instinctive notions about what just might work. Put down that shrew mouse's tail now, E.J.

At the same time, violent crime has plummeted by about 41 percent a year.

Brooks's "evidence and data" dump seemed really powerful until he got to that implausible percentage. What is it, 41% a decade, I don't know what to make of this point-counterpoint style radio presentation. There are no links to click on, so I'm just forced to be suspicious of Brooks's I've-got-the-facts posturing. [ADDED: Meade suggests that the percentage of decline has increased by 41% a year.]

Brooks concludes:

So I'm not necessarily opposed to the policy, I don't really think it would matter in violent crime generally, and I really don't think it would matter too much in the case of lunatics or whatever who are committed to this sort of pre-planned massacre.

So Brooks retreats to reassuring the NPR audience: He's not opposed to gun control, he just doesn't think it would work.  He began with the assertion that "public policy is based on evidence and data and whether it would work," explained why he didn't think it would work, but nevertheless won't oppose the policy. Brooks isn't a conservative by my standard. I think to be conservative, you should have the instinctive orientation: do nothing. You have to convince us what you've got there is better than nothing. And what have you got there? A bucket of red chickenshit? A dog's tampon?!!

Now, how will the very very thoughtful E.J. Dionne deal with Brooks's argument from evidence! and data! He's got to demonstrate that he's one of the smart people, the non-haywire people, your betters who proposed open and thorough debate about solutions to problems (after the bogeymen are kicked out of the room):

DIONNE: If we had better background checks, yes we'll miss some lunatics, but with real background checks, we could reduce the number of lunatics who get guns. And there's also a spillover. If you have permissive laws in one state - as Mayor Bloomberg has shown, Mayor Bloomberg of New York, who has proposed a lot of very practical remedies, not sweeping remedies but practical remedies - he's shown how loose laws in one state can send guns into a state that may have stricter laws. So I don't think we should throw up our hands and say it's impossible...

BROOKS: Yeah, one area of agreement, I do think people who have history of mental health issues, and this came up with the Loughner case, that...

SIEGEL: The shooting of Gabby Giffords...

BROOKS: That should show up when you're trying to buy a gun. And legally, that's supposed to happen, but it doesn't always happen.

SIEGEL: We don't know all that much about the suspect. So far no indication that any such record would have shown up. We just don't know yet.

DIONNE: Right, and my argument is not that you can prevent every one of these things, but when I heard this this morning, like everybody else, I was, you know, sick about it. And I just thought that every time this happens, people say, well, there are very particular factors in this case, so let's not talk about gun control, gun control wouldn't solve it. Well, maybe it would, or maybe it wouldn't in a particular case, but it would prevent some of these things in the future.

And there you have it, the liberal mind at work, in real time.

Take the actively viral "you didn't build that" meme and cross-pollinate it with the slightly dimmed "Julia" meme and breed a vigorous new small-government/individual responsibility conservatism...

Charles Krauthammer, hammering "you didn't build it":

Obama’s infrastructure argument is easily refuted by what is essentially a controlled social experiment. Roads and schools are the constant. What’s variable is the energy, enterprise, risk-taking, hard work and genius of the individual. It is therefore precisely those individual characteristics, not the communal utilities, that account for the different outcomes.

A similar point was made very well by rhhardin in the comments on this blog, back on July 15th, the first day we talked about "you didn't build it":

You're paid for knowing what to do.

That's just as competitive with or without bridges. You have to guess well or you fail.

Take away the reward for knowing what to do, and there's less of it happening, as we see today.

Infrastructure raises the general standard of living, but not need for guessing right. Guessing right is what the private market does, bridges or no bridges.

Government guesses wrong, and wipes out the economy entirely.

Later rh added:

A chaplin was captive in a German prisoner of war camp.

Every month or so red cross packages arrived, with cigarettes, meat, jam, and so forth.

Every month the chaplin would set off trading stuff, letting meat lovers trade cigarettes for more meat and so forth.

Every month he'd return to his bed with the equivalent of two red cross packages, a gain from trading.

Everybody he traded with is better off, and yet he comes out with a profit.

What he knows is the barter price of things, who to go to next, and so forth, to enable all the trades to happen.

Should he turn in a portion of his profit because he couldn't have done it without the red cross?

Why? Everybody is better off already owing to his efforts.

Krauthammer goes on to say that conservatives as well as liberals support infrastructure. (I note that we disagree about some infrastructure, notably high-speed rail.) The real divergence is over things like "transfer payments and redistributionist taxation, about geometrically expanding entitlements, about tax breaks and subsidies to induce actions pleasing to central planners... free contraceptives for privileged students and welfare without work... endless government handouts...." Here, Krauthammer reminds us of the notorious "Julia" cartoon.

Julia’s world is totally atomized. It contains no friends, no community and, of course, no spouse. Who needs one? She’s married to the provider state.

Or to put it slightly differently, the “Life of Julia” represents the paradigmatic Obama political philosophy: citizen as orphan child. For the conservative, providing for every need is the duty that government owes to actual orphan children. Not to supposedly autonomous adults.

If the Romney campaign can take the actively viral "you didn't build that" meme and cross-pollinate it with the slightly dimmed "Julia" meme and breed a vigorous new small-government/individual responsibility conservatism...

On individualism, collectivism, Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, George Orwell, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Isaac Newton, and Dee Dee Ramone.

Conservatives are fond of the quote "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." It's attributed in that form to George Orwell, though apparently the closest he got to saying it was:

"[Rudyard Kipling] sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them."

I want to compare that to Obama's notorious "you didn't build that quote" and Elizabeth Warren's "you didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory."

I know Obama's quote is (hilariously) defective in its failure to give any significance to the work a business owner has put into his own business, but the reason Obama's quote is important that it's not merely an obviously incorrect overstatement, but that it reveals his frame of mind in putting the efforts of the collective people over the work of the individual.

But Obama opponents, in their eagerness to exploit that quote, are forgetting about the ways in which conservatives like to call attention to the dependency of the individual upon the collective.

Another old quote I thought of is "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" (which was originally written by Sir Isaac Newton).

There is a core idea here that is shared by conservatives and liberals (and anybody else who isn't delusional).
Only a comically arrogant person, speaking about himself, has no one else to acknowledge. I heard from someone who had a job of reading a ton of never-to-be-published manuscripts that it was very common for amateurish authors to write on the dedication page: To Myself. (Or perhaps even: To Myself, I couldn't have done it without me.) I remember when The Ramones got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Dee Dee Ramone said: "I'd like to congratulate myself, and thank myself, and give myself a big pat on the back."

Dee Dee was being funny. In most sincere speeches, a person getting recognition for accomplishments is likely to say something like: I couldn't have done this on my own. I owe my success to my parents, my wife, to this community, to my church, and to the grace of God.

But that would be the business owner himself speaking, being modest and gracious and reaching out to make connections to those he acknowledges. He's built his business, and now he's building something else: community and his own reputation.  He's choosing to elevate the collective over the individual out of his own free will as an individual. And he acknowledges the parts of the collective that he believes — in his free mind — have truly helped him.

Of course, it's quite another matter for the President of the United States to be speaking about the businessman, purporting to lecture him about his dependency on the work of others, especially when that lecture is directed at an audience of people who are (presumably) not so successful, whose political support the President is cultivating with intimations of wealth redistribution.

Why are conservatives so much happier than liberals?

Studies show that they are (or at least think they are or say they are). But why? My first guess, without reading on in the article is that they mind their own business. They think taking care of their own work and family is enough, and liberals feel they must worry about how everyone else is doing.

According to the column, by Arthur C. Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute:

Many conservatives favor an explanation focusing on lifestyle differences, such as marriage and faith. They note that most conservatives are married; most liberals are not....
The story on religion is much the same. According to the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, conservatives who practice a faith outnumber religious liberals in America nearly four to one....

An explanation for the happiness gap more congenial to liberals is that conservatives are simply inattentive to the misery of others. If they recognized the injustice in the world, they wouldn’t be so cheerful....

People at the extremes are happier than political moderates. Correcting for income, education, age, race, family situation and religion, the happiest Americans are those who say they are either “extremely conservative” (48 percent very happy) or “extremely liberal” (35 percent). Everyone else is less happy, with the nadir at dead-center “moderate” (26 percent).

What explains this odd pattern? One possibility is that extremists have the whole world figured out, and sorted into good guys and bad guys. They have the security of knowing what’s wrong, and whom to fight. They are the happy warriors.

"The fact is that conservative constitutional thought is so much more crisply expressed, and so much more broadly accepted, than liberal thought..."

Concedes Dahlia Lithwick, pondering why liberals (supposedly) don't excoriate the Justices who disappoint them. She notes that "there is a long tradition of liberal counter-argument to the laissez-fair [sic] constitutional vision put forth by the court’s five conservatives," but "'liberals have largely forgotten how to think, talk and fight along these lines.'"

There are 2 — at least 2 — obvious responses.

1. Liberal Justices don't disappoint. The liberal Presidents have gotten what they sought, and they haven't had the equivalent of Blackmun, Stevens, O'Connor, Kennedy, Souter, and now, perhaps, Roberts to complain about. When you're getting what you want, you keep your mouth shut.

2. Those liberal constitutional theories that get a lot of play in the legal academy don't sound right when spoken out loud in the context of public discourse aimed at ordinary people. Go ahead, put those liberal theories into clear, comprehensible words and lay them out there for the general public to compare to what conservatives say about the Constitution. The conservative theory, put clearly, is compelling to ordinary people. And Lithwick is most certainly not putting the conservative theory clearly by referring to it as "the laissez-fair constitutional vision."

It's laissez-faire, not laissez-fair, but quite aside from that, what is Lithwick trying to say? Conservatives talk about following the text and being faithful to the historical meaning of the text. Laissez-faire refers to leaving things alone. Lithwick makes it sound as though the "liberal counter-argument" is to interfere with the Constitution — to rewrite it. (I assume she thought she was saying that conservatives like laissez-faire economics, but that's not in itself a "constitutional vision.")

Lithwick complains that liberals don't know how to "think, talk and fight," but she has a problem with the way she thinks, talks, and fights as she's trying to register her complaint. Why is that?

There are 2 — at least 2 — obvious answers.

1. Lithwick is really only talking to liberals. It's a closed circle, where you never have to figure out how to speak comprehensibly and clearly, because you are all so self-assured and complacent about the goodness of your beliefs. It's babble, not intended for outsiders.

2. It really can't be made clear.

"I mean, what would you do if you were Roberts? All the sudden you find out that the people you thought were your friends have turned against you..."

"... they despise you, they mistreat you, they leak to the press. What do you do? Do you become more conservative? Or do you say, ‘What am I doing with this crowd of lunatics?’ Right? Maybe you have to re-examine your position."

Said Judge Richard Posner.

(Via AlphaLiberal.)

ADDED: Posner is admitting that there is a psychodynamic among judges that affects how judges decide cases.

IN THE COMMENTS: YoungHegelian said:

Because, when you're a grown man at the top of your game, like Chief Justice, and you screw up big time, and your friends of long standing tell you "John, you screwed up big time," what you do is go find another bunch of friends who'll kiss your ass every time you screw up big time.

What if the other bunch is the cool kids?

AND: Remember when Laurence Tribe advised Barack Obama about how Elena Kagan might have some "purchase on Tony Kennedy's mind." (I said: "I'm sure Justice Kennedy doesn't need to be tipped off to this political scheme to clamber over the crusty crags of the convolutions of his brain." But there were always other mountains to climb.)

A physician's epiphany: "I was not, as I had imagined, a professional, but an employee."

In the wee hours today, our commenter Pogo wrote:

Can't sleep.

A little over ten years ago, I had an epiphany at work. I was struggling until I suddenly realized that I was not, as I had imagined, a professional, but an employee.

And my eyes opened, and I understood.
The employee game is an easy one to play, unless you don't know you're playing it.

So with the ACA ruling came a similarly uncomfortable epiphany.

I was the rube.
I was the patsy.
Shit!

Like the die-hard Cubs fan, always waiting for the conservatives to win, I hoped.

But then Roberts ruled, and my eyes opened, and I understood.

All that kabuki about conservative undercurrents in Washington was complete and utter bullshit. It was all of a piece, just different players jockeying for position.

And I was the idiot, believing there was some chance of reversion to ancient times.

Instead of a professional, I am an employee.
Instead of a citizen, I am a serf.
And the serf game is an easy one; its rules are old and easily learned. Bow and scrape, basically. Get yours.

My apologies for having misled anyone otherwise.

Jonathan Chait sees "frightening outlines of a future systemic crisis"...

... in Richard Lugar's defeat. 

I'm seeing outlines of liberals getting really nervous about what is — I suspect — the American voters' preference for some crisp conservatism.

PJ Media's stupid effort to attack Obama through Derrick Bell's book "Afrolantica Legacies."

Did anyone over there realize how dumb this is?

As a 28-year-old student at Harvard Law Barack Obama supported the activism of Professor Derrick Bell and urged his peers to open their hearts and minds to the words of Critical Race Theory's founder.

I've already blogged about the stupidity of attributing significance to the student who gave a nice introduction to a venerable professor. I won't repeat that. This is about PJ Media's failure to see that Bell is attacking liberals. It's stupid to tear down Bell as a way to attack Democrats. Bell is attacking Democrats!

PJ Media is reading one of the lesser Bell works, "Afrolantica Legacies." It's not available in Kindle, or I'd buy a copy right now, but I see that it's like about the 7 millionth best-selling book over at Amazon right now. The book is a collection of essays, and PJM displays photos of some pages in the book, including a collection of "rules of racial preservation," which is the first thing the PJM article decides to trash. But let's look at Bell's first rule:

No matter how justified by racial injustices they are intended to remedy, civil rights policies, including affirmative action, are implemented only when they further the interests of whites.

Hello? Who implements these race-based policies like affirmative action? Liberals! Derrick Bell is saying that white people do this when and only when it works for their advantage! The critical race thinking you're invited to do here is to understand how, when white people purport to advance black people, they are really exploiting black people for their own advantage. This is an attack on the work of the Democratic Party and other liberals. Conservatives are on the sidelines of this battle.

I am reminded of the dissenting opinion that Clarence Thomas wrote in Grutter v. Bollinger, the case that upheld the affirmative action admissions at the University of Michigan Law School:

Frederick Douglass, speaking to a group of abolitionists almost 140 years ago, delivered a message lost on today’s majority:

“[I]n regard to the colored people, there is always more that is benevolent, I perceive, than just, manifested towards us. What I ask for the negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice . The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us… . I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! … And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! … [Y]our interference is doing him positive injury.” What the Black Man Wants: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, on 26 January 1865, reprinted in 4 The Frederick Douglass Papers 59, 68 (J. Blassingame & J. McKivigan eds. 1991) (emphasis in original)....

Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. We hear the echo of the cry in Bell's first rule. Thomas ends his dissent:

It has been nearly 140 years since Frederick Douglass asked the intellectual ancestors of the Law School to “[d]o nothing with us!” and the Nation adopted the Fourteenth Amendment. Now we must wait another 25 years to see this principle of equality vindicated.

(Only 16 more years, if that's a serious time limit.)

Here's Bell's 3d rule:

Coalition building is an enterprise with valuable potential as long as its pursuit does not obscure the basic fact: nobody can free us but ourselves.

That's so much blander and duller than Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! But it's sounding the same chord.

Yeah, there's plenty of left-wing stuff in Bell's old book, but the basic insight of Critical Race Theory is skepticism about liberals. Why dig up Bell in 2012 and smack him around unless you yourself want to racialize everything?

Why? Ironically, Bell's Rule #1 might apply: The things white people do in the name of race are done only when they further the interests of whites.