Apologies for the light blogging during the last few days.  I’ve been visiting family and trying to cope with a sudden flood of deadlines.  There’s lots to write about, including Al Gore’s poorly conceived op-ed in the Times, and I’ll be back be back in the saddle very soon.

The modern Democratic Party was formed out of four previously antagonistic elements in American society: urban working class and immigrant whites, Southern whites, African-Americans and upper middle class progressive reformers.  It began to take shape when Woodrow Wilson brought progressives into the mainstream of the Democratic Party; Franklin Roosevelt put all the pieces together when he built his New Deal coalition, reaching out to northern black voters while holding on to the white South.  For the first time since the Civil War, the Democrats were the natural party of government from 1932 through Nixon’s victory in 1968.

Intellectually, the progressives were the driving force of the Democratic Party of the 20th century.  Upper middle class progressive reformers, dubbed goo-goos by machine politicians offended by what they saw as an infantile and naive love of ‘good government’, are responsible for some of the greatest achievements of the twentieth centuries.  It was the goo-goos who fought for civil service reform, the development of the administrative and regulatory state, who sought to professionalize government and the academy and who generally fought (and fight) for transparency, accountability and the rule of law both at home and abroad.

Since 1968 the big story in national politics has been the gradual erosion of FDR’s grand coalition.  The white South was the first to go, alienated primarily by Lyndon Johnson’s decision to put the full weight of the party behind the civil rights movement, but also by the sympathy of many Democrats for the broader social agenda of the 1970s.  Northern working class and ethnic white voters also began to drift away from the party, turning from one of the party’s most reliable bastions of support into swing voters in the 1980s.

Today, it is mostly the goo-goos and African-Americans who constitute the rock solid core of the Democratic Party, with Hispanics and the remnants of the party’s traditional north and south white support making up the rest.  Even in decline, it’s a strong and competitive coalition and few movements can claim to have shaped American history as decisively and to have done as much good as the Wilson-Roosevelt Democrats.  As recently as last year many observers thought the Democrats were on their way to another generation of political dominance like the run they enjoyed from 1932 to 1968.

President Obama–an African-American urban candidate who is also an intellectual comfortable with elevated talk about the nuances of reform with upper middle class whites–is the ideal candidate for the new Democratic core.  One hundred years ago Woodrow Wilson played a similar role; a white southerner (and the first southerner in the White House since before the Civil War), he was also a college professor and president.

But the coalition President Obama heads is a much more fragile one.  On one side you have the old time pols of the urban machines (like House Ways and Means Committee chair Charles Rangel); on the other you have the grim and determined brigades of morally uplifting upper middle class reform.  It is a coalition of The New York Times and the contemporary version of Tammany Hall.

What holds them together is their love of the Blue Beast; good government progressives are the heirs of the old Puritan vision of the state as the moral arm of a godly community.  read more »

The Gallup organization has come out with yet another poll showing that Americans by an overwhelming percentage sympathize with the Israelis rather than the Palestinians.  This time, the pro-Israel sentiment is at a near record level: 63 percent of those asked said their sympathies lie more with Israel, 23 percent said both or neither, and just 15 percent of those polled sympathized more with the Palestinians.

Another Gallup poll last week showed that Israel had the fifth highest ‘favorable’ rating among Americans, trailing only Canada, Britain, Germany and Japan; Israel was viewed favorably by 67 percent of those polled and unfavorably by 25 percent.  The Palestinian Authority was viewed favorably by ten percent of those polled, while 70 percent viewed it unfavorably.  Yemen and Pakistan both enjoyed higher standing with those polled than the PA.

Although public opinion has been moving in a slightly more pro-Israeli direction in the last couple of years, these polls are not really news.  That is, since 1948, Americans have consistently told pollsters that they sympathized more with the Israelis than with their enemies, generally by more than two to one.

Now in case any of my readers have missed the census news since 1790, there are not now and never have been all that many Jews in the United States.  Less than two percent of the roughly 300 million people in the United States are Jewish.  This means that Jews can at most account for two of that 63 percent of the population who sympathize with Israel.  Pro-Israel gentiles in America outnumber pro-Israel Jews by a factor of 20-1, and ever since polling on this issue began, the overwhelming majority of the Americans who support Israel against its enemies haven’t been Jewish.

This brings us to a problem: why do so many people, especially self-described ‘realists’ when it comes to Middle East policy, find it mysterious that American foreign policy supports Israel?  Surely in a democratic republic, when policy over a long period of time tracks with public sentiment, there is very little to explain.  American politicians vote for pro-Israel policies because that is what voters want them to do.  Case closed, I would think.  Late breaking news flash: water runs downhill.

Yet many otherwise intelligent people are drawn over and over again to the idea that a mysteriously powerful Jewish lobby is somehow thwarting democracy to bend American foreign policy to its nefarious will.  Polls, reason, history, none of this matters.  America supports Israel because of ‘the Jews’.

As I blogged on the Sullivan-Wieseltier controversy, there’s not a lot of point in calling individuals anti-Semitic today.  This inevitably gets you into an argument about someone’s motives and since I myself lack the power to read other people’s minds, I do not feel qualified to rule on what their motives really are.  If someone has stupid ideas about American foreign policy, you can perhaps show they are mistaken.  Further than that it is very hard to go.

But I think you can say something about society at large, and in this case I think you should.  While I say nothing because I know nothing about the motives of particular people, it’s impossible to understand the popularity of ILS or Israel Lobby Syndrome (the belief that the organized, insistent power of American Jews as deployed through organizations like AIPAC is primarily responsible for American support of the Jewish state) without assigning a role to a lingering whiff of anti-Semitism in the American air.

At a time when most of America’s Jewish leadership was strongly anti-Zionist, American gentiles overwhelmingly supported the Zionist cause.  And today American gentiles are generally more hawkish on Israel than American Jews who on this issue, like so many others, tend to skew toward the center-left band of the American political spectrum.

Some ILS victims have a ‘clever’ explanation for this disturbing fact: Jewish media power. The insidious, overwhelming power of those sneaky Jews in the mainstream media feeds a steady stream of pro-Israel propaganda disguised as news to the idiot gentiles out in the boondocks and the dumb hicks and yokels swallow the propaganda hook, line and sinker.

Again, I say nothing about the motives of individuals, but only entrenched, unconscious anti-Semitism could make an opinion this dumb seem so credible to so many otherwise intelligent people.

Let us take, for example, Sarah Palin, who formerly kept an Israeli flag in her office while serving as governor of Alaska.  How much influence does the mainstream media have on her thinking about abortion?  About global warming?  About US relations with Cuba?

The answer, of course, is that whatever the sources of Ms Palin’s opinions on a very wide range of subjects, the mainstream media has not played a major role in her intellectual formation.  And what is true for her is true for a great many other Americans who disagree with the mainstream media virtually across the board. They are more likely to disagree with the mainstream media than to mindlessly parrot its views — so why does it seem even remotely credible to assert that Palin and so much of the rest of the country is pro-Israel because of Jewish media power?

Again, a deep and unreasoned belief that powerful Jews control things and that the powerful Jewish media shapes public opinion could lend broad social credibility to ideas with so little support or coherence.

American foreign policy in the Middle East may not be wise and it may not be right.  That subject is and must remain open to debate, and every American citizen is entitled to have and to express an opinion on the topic.  But a failure to recognize that long standing, deeply rooted and consistent gentile public opinion is the driving force behind that policy–foolish or wise as that policy may be–is just dumb.  And when smart people go suddenly and inexplicably dumb, it’s reasonable to posit the presence of an irrational, uncontrolled mental force — in this case, ILS. Not every victim of ILS is an anti-Semite, but the prevalence of ILS shows that anti-Semitism like other forms of racism and unconscious prejudice retains a more powerful place in our society than we would like.

A report from the Pew Research Center out this morning isn’t getting huge play in the press, but it offers a much bigger clue to the shape of our future than anything you will read on the front page of today’s New York Times.

The report is on public attitudes toward unions, and it finds that despite the recession and the electoral swing to the left in 2008, unions have significantly less trust and support than ever before. The Pew data reinforces similar poll results from Gallup; support for unions this year was at its lowest level since Gallup first asked the question in 1936.

Overall, Pew reports that 42 percent of those questioned had an unfavorable view of labor while only 41 percent viewed labor positively.  Among whites, just 37 percent view unions favorably; 46 percent have an unfavorable view.

The public’s view of unions has shifted noticeably since 2007, with independents tracking close to Republicans than to Democrats on this question.  Support for labor has noticeably weakened among blacks, Democrats and senior citizens; members of union households remain strongly favorable.

Although Pew doesn’t provide us with much data about why these changes are taking place, I think several factors are at work.  First, there are more unionized workers in the public sector now than in private enterprise, and dislike of the arrogant, incompetent DMV worker who cannot be fired and gets a better pension than you do runs pretty strong.  Second, more people think unions won’t work in the jobs that they have.  If costs go up, business shifts to non-unionized firms either inside or outside the US.  Third, the perception that bailouts have gone to sustain wages for unionized workers has not resonated well with people who think they will pay taxes in order to support higher wages and benefits for other people.  Fourth, scandals and overreaching (ACORN, card check) have sharpened public distrust of the labor movement.

The news for unions isn’t all bad.  read more »

Regular longtime readers of this blog know about E. Benjamin Skinner, a former Team Mead research associate who has gone on to great things.  He wrote a book on slavery in the contemporary world, A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery, which received the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for nonfiction. In the course of researching this book, Ben traveled all over the world, meeting modern day slaves and slave traders in Asia, Africa and Europe as well as both North and South America.  These days, he’s become very grand.  He is a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy of Harvard Kennedy School, and a Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. But his passion for fighting slavery and protecting the poorest and the most vulnerable among us continues, and this is the spirit that inspires the guest post below.

Ben’s first encounter with the realities of contemporary slavery came when he went to Haiti some years ago and negotiated the purchase of a young child from one of the traffickers who exploit the desperation of poor parents to ‘place’ children in homes where they are forced to work as domestic servants, beaten and abused in many other ways.  Over the years he came to understand how widespread this practice is, and how deeply rooted it is in the poverty and inequality of Haitian life.  The recent earthquake in Haiti not only created orphans; it has brought many more families into the destitution and hopelessness that can make placing ones child in the hands of strangers and hoping for the best seem like the only option. Ben’s reflection on the misadventures of the Americans detained in Haiti for child trafficking share one of my frequent concerns on this blog: the degree to which good intentions so often go horribly wrong when fools rush in.

In the weeks after the January 12 earthquake, anonymous Americans saved many lives. Keziah Furth, a 24-year-old Bostonian, had been volunteering with Angel Missions Haiti as a nurse to homeless Haitians for months before the quake. Despite barely having enough aspirin let alone sophisticated medical equipment, she had the skills and dedication to save dozens, perhaps hundreds of lives in the makeshift refugee camp near her Port-au-Prince clinic. Among those she saved, as I wrote about in Time, was someone who once saved my own life.

Of course Kez’s work, and the work of thousands of other well-trained American health care workers, military personnel and disaster specialists now in Haiti, no longer makes headlines. Predictably, the fool’s errand of the Baptist missionaries from Idaho has instead consumed the post-earthquake news cycle. On January 29, that group tried to smuggle 33 Haitian children across the border into the Dominican Republic. Laura Silsby, their doe-eyed leader, claimed the children were orphans. The Associated Press now reports that all had living parents.

But for the media, these clowns fit the stereotype of the American do-gooding rubes, guided by God, unruffled by facts. They are a corny sideshow at a time when the main event seems far too depressing to watch. For the rest of us, there are some inconvenient but vital truths uncovered by their actions.

Firstly, there is no indication that the Baptists intended to enslave the children, but they leveraged the social isolation and withering poverty that enable human traffickers—those who recruit, transport or harbor slaves—to lure their human prey in Haiti. Prior to the earthquake, there were some 225,000 child slaves in Haiti, forced into domestic servitude, for no pay beyond subsistence. Without a concerted international effort, that slave population will grow in the wake of the disaster.

As I wrote about in A Crime So Monstrous, I was once offered a 12-year-old girl for domestic and sexual slavery in broad daylight in Port-au-Prince. The price was $50. The trafficker told me that he could easily convince parents to send their children from the grossly underdeveloped highlands of southern Haiti. read more »

President Jimmy Carter, and his National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, have both taken issue with my recent article in Foreign Policy about Obama’s Jeffersonian and Wilsonian foreign policy impulses, entitled “The Carter Syndrome.”

As I said in my reply, my  “article was not really about Carter or his administration. It was about the current U.S. president and the intellectual, cultural, and political challenges he faces.” Readers may remember, however, that others have disagreed with the comparisons made and historical frameworks employed in my article.

Of this group of dissenters, however, President Carter is the only person I’ve voted for, and I  am honored to have his reply, even if we don’t reach the same conclusions.

At the tea parties here in glamorous Queens we make sure we serve genuine Devonshire clotted cream with the scones and we keep our pinkies carefully extended while lifting the delicate porcelain cups to our lips, but a very different kind of Tea Party has my friends in the upscale media and policy worlds gravely concerned.   To hear them talk, all the know-nothings, wackadoo birther wingnuts, IRS plane bombers, Christian fundamentalists out to turn the US into a theocracy, the flat earthers and the racists have somehow joined together into a force that is as politically formidable as it morally and intellectually contemptible.  These Tea Partiers, I am frequently told, are ‘reactionaries’.  They long for an older, safer and whiter America — a more orderly place where their old fashioned values were unchallenged, one in which ethnic minorities weren’t in their faces, gays weren’t demanding acceptance, and in general life looked more like “Ozzie and Harriet” and less like “South Park.”

I’m sure that description fits some of the people at some of the Tea Parties, but I think it misses the point.  Yes, the Tea Partiers represent something very old in American life and in some ways they want a return to traditional American values, but the traditional American value that inspires them the most is the value of revolutionary change.  The Tea Party movement is the latest upsurge of an American populism that has sometimes sided with the left and sometimes with the right, but which over and over again has upended American elites, restructured our society and forced through the deep political, cultural and institutional changes that from time to time the country needs and which the ruling elites cannot or will not deliver.

That doesn’t mean that everything populists want works out.  Andrew Jackson’s war against the Second Bank of the United States caused a depression in the short term and then left the country with a lousy, crash-prone financial system for the next eighty years.  His immensely popular Indian Removal Act that sent the eastern Indian tribes to Oklahoma was no triumph of justice and compassion.  And while a later generation of populists gave women the vote, it also brought in Prohibition.

But you don’t have to buy every line item (or even any line item) in the emerging Tea Party program to see the movement’s potential.  Its ruling passion is a belief in the ability of the ordinary citizen to make decisions for himself or herself without the guidance or ‘help’ of experts and professionals.  No idea has deeper roots in American history and culture and by global standards Americans have historically distrusted doctors, lawyers, bankers, preachers and professors: everybody who presumes that their special insider knowledge gives them a special right to decide what’s best for the rest of us and historically no political force has been stronger than the determination of ordinary Americans to flatten the social and political hierarchy.

The United States has rarely been in greater need of rapid transformation than we are now.  The information revolution, the rapid development of the global economy, the shift of cultural and economic power from Europe toward Asia, the enormous wave of immigration that since the 1960’s has been remaking the body politic once again, the breakdown of the progressive or blue social model as industries and financial markets rise and fall with a velocity not seen in the last 100 years: these changes are taking place all around us, but our institutions and policies are very far from keeping up.

Today in the United States many of our core institutions are fundamentally out of sync with reality: they cost more than we can pay but they don’t do what we need.  read more »

In yet another American poll guaranteed to make folks unhappy down under, Australia failed to make the list of Americans’ favorite foreign countries.  The top five were Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Japan and Israel.  But a closer look at the Gallup poll holds — slightly — better news for Oz.  They didn’t make the top five because they weren’t on the list of countries the pollsters asked about.  The same thing happened last year; Australia wasn’t one of the choices on a Gallup poll asking what countries were America’s closest allies.  That’s true although Australia is one of only a handful of countries that has helped the United States in all its major wars from World War Two to the present conflict in Afghanistan.

We could personalize this and ask why Gallup hates Australia, but something else is at work.  Possibly because the two English speaking democracies at the other end of the world are so far away, and possible because they are seen as so friendly and so safe, the American media largely ignores everything that happens in the Antipodes.  For evidence of this, just go to the Yahoo.com news site, where, dead last on the world news page, there’s a link to news from “Australia/Antarctica.”  But look on the bright side, Australians: it could be “Antarctica/Australia.”  When I checked the site’s front page this morning, there were 18 recent stories from this part of the world.  Five of them were about whales — either being stranded or being hunted.  Two were about a shark attack and the gallant granny who bashed the shark on the nose until it let her go.  One was about flooding in Sydney.  Another was a hard journalistic look at the use of cat food in the war against cane toads.  After the nine nature stories came terror; there were four stories related to terrorism, one about an interview given by the always fascinating Colonel Qaddafi of Libya to an Australian television channel.  Trade with China came next, with two stories.  Mary Makillop’s sainthood, Pauline Hanson’s moving plans, and Quantas’ announcement that first class seats would be cut on some flights rounded out the news from down under.

Apparently, apart from the whales, cane toads and sharks, not much goes on down there.  In New Zealand it all seems to be about animal euthanasia.  There’s a page one story on some euthanized whales, and on page two there’s a heartwarming story about a New Zealand teenager who faced prosecution after taking his five month old puppy (Buck) from a veterinarian.  Since the family couldn’t afford Buck’s expensive surgery needs after the puppy was hit by a car, the vet was going to have to euthanize him.  19 year old Bronson Stewart wasn’t having that and drove off with the pup, putting himself at risk under New Zealand’s anti-cruelty laws.  The story, I am happy to report, turned out well.  Once the generous New Zealand public became informed about Buck’s plight, the money was found to give him the operation.  This story is datelined February 10; evidently since then New Zealand has been pretty quiet, except for the shocking whale tragedy.

In fact, Americans would have a great deal to gain by staying in touch with politics and culture in the nethermost dominions of the British Queen.  The long and complex story of relations between the Maori and the rest of the New Zealand population has something to teach us about the opportunities and the complexities of multiculturalism.  Australia’s struggle to choose between its strong environmental leanings and the economic interests of much of the country would help us gain perspective on some of our own issues.  Australians spend a lot of time thinking about Indonesia and Asia more generally; we would be smarter about an important part of the world if we spent a little more time listening to what they have to say.  I’ve recommended the Lowy Institute’s website for Americans interested in getting an Australian perspective on world affairs. The Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian are great newspapers you can follow on-line.   Peter Hartcher at the Sydney Morning Herald is one of the great journalists working today anywhere.  Peter was one of the first people to raise serious questions about Fed policy under Alan Greenspan; if I’d listened to him then I’d be a rich man today.

(And thanks as always to Sam Roggeveen at the Lowy Institute’s remarkable Interpreter for keeping me up to date on all matters Australian.)

In the meantime, I’m keeping my eye on the cane toad story.  Apparently, someone has discovered that putting cat food by ponds where cane toads are hatching lures Australian ‘meat ants’ to the site.  The swarms of meat ants not only scarf up the cat food; they go for the young cane toads.  This is the most disturbing thing I’ve discovered about Australian wildlife since I found out that kangaroos lure dogs into ponds and drown them.  A country where the meat ants devour the poison toads is the kind of place you have to respect; I think we should make it very clear to the Australians that we like them as people and respect them as allies, and please please don’t send us any meat ants.

The meltdown of the climate change movement is entering a new phase as the European left turns on the UN climate change office and the IPCC.

The German left wing press, one of the world’s strongest supporters of the ‘climate change movement’ is turning against the scientists and UN bureaucrats responsible for leading the movement.  A round-up of German press coverage over the unexpected resignation of UN climate chief Yvo de Boer offers a perspective on the failures of the climate change movement that is both more scathing and more frank than anything the mainstream US press has yet brought itself to utter.

“De Boer’s Resignation is Catastrophic,” runs the headline on Der Spiegel’s English language website.  Die Tageszeitung, a leftish daily, says that De Boer’s resignation may signal the collapse of the effort to stop climate change by treaty: “a signal that world diplomacy is not the way to win the struggle against climate change.”

The German press is also wondering why de Boer has resigned while Pachauri, widely seen as bearing more individual responsibility for the IPCC’s failings than de Boer, still clings to his job.  The Sueddeutsche Zeitung, considered another left leaning newspaper has a much harsher assessment:

At last even the UN is drawing consequences from the disgrace of its climate politics over the last few months. Scientific documents were suppressed; the summit was prepared with such unbelievable dilettantism that it had no chance to succeed; then there was the bitter argument over false predictions about the melting of Himalayan glaciers. The resignation of Yvo de Boer — chief of the UN’s climate secretariat and one of the responsible figures — is overdue.

In France, the left wing Le Monde — the New York Times of France — wrote about a “total confusion” in the global climate change movement following De Boer’s resignation.  According to Le Monde, the diplomatic process has broken down completely; De Boer’s resignation at least brings this out in the open. Le Figaro, a more conservative newspaper, offers an article on the proposal to reform the IPCC made by 5 leading scientists in Nature.  Figaro quotes a leading French scientist who attacks the current process as biased and unfair, given IPCC’s status as a quasi-official body. In another piece, Figaro describes the climate skeptic movement’s attacks on the mainstream consensus (Sorry, the links are to articles in French).

When the British press attacked the IPCC, the US media insofar as they noted the British attacks at all, dismissed newspapers like the Telegraph and the Times as right wing outlets — Fox News in print.  What do they say about this latest inconvenient truth: that left wing papers on the Continent increasingly believe that the movement to get a global climate treaty is dead and that the follies, dilettantism and errors of the climate change advocates rather than the churlishness of their critics is to blame?

Nothing.

The blogosphere has shamed some leading US newspapers into paying perfunctory attention to one of the biggest stories in several years.  But there’s still no sign that the US press is ready to pursue this still unfolding story with anything like the determination it deserves.  Until then, Americans will have to rely on the internet to watch this story unfold — and every day that goes on, the mainstream US media lose readers and respect.

There’s nothing like Lent for reflecting on the sins of other people; I thought I’d start at the top — with the bishops of my own church.  As the Episcopal church along with the other mainline Protestant denominations diminishes, we don’t have to look far to see bishops and leaders who are largely failing in their core assignments: to tend to the health and promote the growth of the congregations in their area.  Yet even as we have fewer and fewer effective and successful leaders, we have no shortage of political, ‘prophetic’ bishops.  When they can, they meet with world leaders and jet off to exotic locales to bring peace and fight for justice.  When they can’t do that, they sign statements of concern, issue reports and otherwise tug on the skirts of an indifferent public seeking attention for their political views.

In the mainline churches, which is what I know best, the political views leaders express are generally those of what could be called the ‘foundation left’ — emotionally grounded in concern for the poor and development, historically linked to the ‘new left’ mix of economic and social concerns as developed in the 1960’s, shaped by an atmosphere of privilege and entitlement that reflects the upper middle class background of the educated professionals who run these institutions.  The social sins they deplore are those of the right: excessive focus on capitalism, too robust and unheeding a promotion of the American national and security interest abroad, insufficient care for the environment, failure to help the poor through government welfare programs, failure to support affirmative action, failure to celebrate and protect the unrestricted right of women to abort.  I am of course speaking very generally here and there are lots of individual exceptions, but many of these folks are generally tolerant of theological differences and rigidly intolerant when it comes to political differences: they care nothing at all about doctrines like predestination but get very angry with people who disagree with them about issues like global warming or immigration reform.  Theological heresy is a matter for courtesy and silence, but political heretics fill them with bile.

Back in the days of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war, it was news when Episcopal bishops sided in public with liberal causes.  It took real courage for bishops and priests to speak up in some cases; one of the clergymen in the town where I grew up had been driven from his last parish in Alabama because he spoke up for the Montgomery bus boycott led by Martin Luther King.  Other priests received death threats; some who participated in the Freedom Rides and other demonstrations were beaten by angry mobs.

But these days an Episcopal bishop would have to go to a lot of trouble to get into the news for backing a liberal political cause.  The headline says it all: Liberal Official of Small, Declining Liberal Denomination Endorses Liberal Idea.  This isn’t news for two reasons: it is utterly predictable and it doesn’t matter.  Trivial and predictable are not news, and the political stands that the mainline clergy take are almost always both.  A statement by an Episcopal bishop will not change one mind or one vote; at least in all my years in the pews I’ve never met a single Episcopalian who said that the opinion of a bishop does or should have the slightest influence on how Episcopalians vote and if the churchgoers aren’t paying attention to the bishops I can’t imagine anyone else is.

I’m not urging the bishops to change their politics.  I’m urging them to shut up.  More precisely, I’m urging them to base their ministry on a clearer understanding of their situation and their role.

Let me nail some cyber-theses to the virtual door.

1.  Nobody cares what you think while your tiny church is falling apart.

In a diocese not a thousand miles from my home in glamorous Queens, there once was a bishop whose long and public battle with alcoholism rendered him unable to carry out his duties.  For years and years this diocese suffered under grievous mismanagement and its rotten condition was an open scandal widely discussed and lamented throughout the national church.  Yet in the general shipwreck of his episcopacy, this bishop (or what remained of the diocesan machinery) somehow managed to get ‘prophetic’ statements out on political causes of various kinds.  So far as I know, none of these statements ever had any impact on anyone’s thinking anywhere on Planet Earth.

This poor bishop, now thankfully retired, was an extreme case, but why, exactly, would any sane person today pay attention to the political pronouncements of an Episcopal bishop?  Episcopalians are a tiny minority of the population and the church long ago lost its social power and cachet.  The Episcopal church today is in the worst condition it has been since the aftermath of the Revolution; its clergy has visibly failed to keep the church together or prevent its ongoing decline.  I’m afraid that the penchant to make political pronouncements proceeds less from a true prophetic vocation than from a nostalgia for a time when it mattered what Episcopal bishops thought.  In any case, there is nothing more ridiculous than a proprietor of a failing concern who officiously lectures everyone else on how to manage their affairs.  Please, for the sake of what remains of the dignity of your office, give it a rest.

2.  American Episcopal bishops have so spectacularly screwed up their relations with Africa that they are in no position to lecture secular leaders on international politics.

When members of the foundation left lecture the rest of the world, the need for better relations with the oppressed peoples of the developing world is one of their favorite themes.I would be the last person to say they don’t have a point; I’ve spent enough time in the slums of three continents to have some small sense of the need for some basic changes in our world.  But the bishops of the American Episcopal church have no lessons to teach.  The American Episcopalians are currently engaged in a bitter struggle with their equivalents in African countries like Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda over a variety of theological issues, of which the question of the ordination of openly gay bishops is the most prominent.  Now it’s my view that in the long run as the church reflects on the issue of homosexuality, it should and will come to a place closer to that of the American Episcopal mainstream than to that of the Nigerians.  But this process of reflection and debate will take more time than the Americans want to give it, and it will take some theological procedures very different from those that are currently fashionable in the American Episcopal church.

Be that as it may, it’s clear that if there is a secret to managing respectful North-South relations in the 21st century, the American Episcopal bishops don’t have it.  African church leaders compare their American counterparts to George W. Bush: arrogantly unilateral, deaf to other points of view, seeking to impose a uniquely American agenda on those who do not agree. That’s not entirely fair, but there’s enough truth in it that when it comes to America’s place in the world, the Episcopal church should listen as others speak.  Who knows — maybe we’ll learn something.

3.  In the contemporary world the job of the clergy isn’t to provide political leadership.  It is to help laypeople grow into better, wiser political leaders.

Back when Henry VIII was chopping the heads off his wives, bishops were political as well as religious leaders. read more »

The Washington Post this morning has a strong story on the collapse of the movement to stop climate change through a binding treaty negotiated under UN auspices.  And even the normally taciturn New York Times is admitting that the resignation of the top UN climate change negotiator suggests that no global treaty will be coming this year.

Short summary:  the current iteration of the movement–with its particular political project and goals–is dead.  This will not be news to readers of this blog where the news was announced on February 1, but never mind.

Anyway, as the Post now belatedly acknowledges, the movement to stop climate change through a Really Big and Comprehensive Grand Global Treaty is dead because there is no political consensus in the US to go forward.  It’s dead because the UN process is toppling over from its own excessive ambition and complexity.  It’s dead because China and India are having second thoughts about even the smallish steps they put on the table back in Copenhagen.

Doornail dead.

As the Post story shows, the mainstream media is now coming to terms with the death.  Environmentalists are still trying to avoid pulling the plug, but the corpse is already cool to the touch and soon it will begin to smell.  As the global greens move from the denial stage of the grief process, brace yourself for some eloquent, petulant and arrogant rage.  Tears will be shed and hands will be wrung.  The world is stupid, uncaring, unworthy to be saved.  Horrible Republicans, evil Chinese, demented know-nothing climate skeptics have ruined the world and condemned our grandchildren to lives of sorrow and pain.  Messengers will be shot; skeptics will be blamed for asking questions and the media (and the internet) will be blamed for reporting the answers.

This storm will have to blow for a while; there’s a lot of emotion and conviction in the ‘climate change’ community.  A year ago they were the last, best hope of the world, a shining band of brothers (and sisters) who were saving the planet and taming the excesses of self-destructive capitalist greed.  The Force was with them and the world lay at their feet.  They were going to be greeted as liberators by a grateful world desperate to be saved.

Now they are just another piece of roadkill on the heartless historical highway–an unforgiving place for people who seek to change the behavior of the world through comprehensive treaties, like the nuclear freeze proponents before them and like the advocates of the Grand Global Treaty Against War in the 1920s.  (And at least the 1920s peace movement got its Grand Global Treaty: the 1929 Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawed war forever, sparing all future generations from this terrible scourge.)

The climate change movement now needs to regroup, and at some point it will have to confront a central, unpalatable fact: the wounds from which it is bleeding so profusely are mostly its own fault.  This phase of the climate change movement was immature, unrealistic and naive.  It was poorly organized and foolishly led.  It adopted an unrealistic and unreachable political goal, and sought to stampede world opinion through misleading and exaggerated statements. It lacked the most elementary level of political realism–all the more egregious given the movement’s politically sophisticated and very rich opponents. Foundation staff, activists and sympathetic journalists cocooned themselves in an echo chamber of comfortable group-think, and as they toasted one another in green Kool-Aid they thought they were making progress when actually they were slowly and painfully digging themselves into an ever-deeper hole.

The service the movement now needs (but likely won’t get) from its close friends in the mainstream media is a harsh and unsparing review of exactly who screwed up and why.  What dodo-brained foundation executives streamed money to groups committed to a suicidally unrealistic political strategy?  Have they been fired yet?  Why not?  Who were the ignorant, self-righteous ‘leaders’ who shouted down anybody with doubts about this disastrous course?  Why haven’t they resigned yet?  When will they?  Whose brainchild was the brilliant idea that the IPCC didn’t need a full time chair?  What hare-brained funders failed to provide Phil Jones and the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia with enough clerical help to comply with the freedom of information act?  And why was there no one available to counsel Jones when, apparently, he realized that some of the requests couldn’t be satisfied because key data was lost?  How did the climate of carelessness at the IPCC develop — and why were warning voices from inside the movement ignored in the rush to get all the alarming but unverified predictions into print?

Failure to deal sternly and coldly with those who made these errors will leave the same incompetents in charge for the next stage of the movement. This will probably happen; social promotion is something liberals do very well and the blame for this mess is so widespread that few of the movement’s leaders will want any uncomfortable questions to be asked.

Frankly, I blame Al Gore.  Unlike naive scientists who know little about life beyond the lab, or eco-activists whose concepts of the international political system come from writing direct-mail solicitations to true believers in rich countries, the former vice-president had decades of experience with high politics.  It was his job to provide the leadership that could channel the energy and concern of this movement into an effective political program.  Perhaps there’s a story we don’t know yet about how Mr. Gore labored quietly and in vain for many years to explain to his fellow global greens about the difficulties and intricacies of the political process.  Perhaps he reminded them that it takes 67 votes in the US Senate to ratify a treaty, and that the ideas of the Kyoto Protocol were preemptively rejected 95-0–such a thorough beating that the Protocol itself was never even submitted to the Senate while he was in office. Perhaps he tried to explain to them that a global movement for a treaty was setting itself up for a colossal and comprehensive failure and begged them to take a more realistic course.  Perhaps he urged them to be their own harshest critics and to make sure that any information and projections that came out the movement and institutions like the IPCC should be scrubbed cleaner than clean.  Perhaps he begged them to make sure that the IPCC was staffed and led by competent, thoroughly vetted and full-time people whose tempered judgment could lead the institution through the inevitable storms it would face.

That could have happened, but I don’t think it did.  I think Al Gore failed the climate change movement and that his negligence and blindness has done it irreparable harm.  If the skeptics are right and the world isn’t warming — or if natural causes are responsible for climate change –  it doesn’t matter much.  But if Al Gore and the climate change people are even half right about what is happening to our world, the cost of Mr. Gore’s failures are incalculably great. He was the one world leader who had the standing inside the climate change movement to lead it onto a more sustainable path and, as far as we can tell from the facts now before us, he didn’t really try. 

Ultimately, the most telling argument against global warming is the lack of seriousness with which the greens themselves have approached the issue.  Getting the world to make the kind of changes greens want is a much more complex and serious endeavor than they themselves seem to have understood. As my colleague Michael Levi says in the Post, “It is becoming increasingly clear that a legally binding treaty is not in the cards…People aren’t quite sure what direction they’re going in at all.”

The greens claim to understand the dynamics of complex ecosystems better than the rest of humanity; the simplistic assumptions and unrealistic strategies with which they’ve approached the complex ecosystem of international politics don’t provide the dispassionate observer with much evidence in support of this claim.

Some readers (like Michael Barone) were skeptical when I wrote about the coming technological revolution in American medicine and hailed it as our one chance for the kind of health care Americans really want (better, cheaper and more abundant than what we now have).

But here’s a story from the New York Times that suggests that the transformation of American medicine is coming even faster than I expected.  All over the country, American men are turning to robot-assisted doctors for one of the most personal and sensitive procedures in any man’s life: prostate surgery.  Although, as the article reports, there is no clear scientific evidence that robo-docs get a better result than the old-fashioned kind, and although robo-docs cost more, patients would rather pay more to have machine-aided surgery.

I thought that patient resistance to technology would slow down the pace of change.  People wouldn’t want to trust irreplaceable body parts to the tender ministrations of a machine.  But it looks like I was at least partly wrong.  A hands-on, old fashioned urologist in Houston told the New York Times how he was losing patients when he told them that he ‘handled’ his customers the traditional way.  As the Times puts it:

But now, patient after patient was walking away. They did not want that kind of surgery. They wanted surgery by a robot, controlled by a physician not necessarily even in the operating room, face buried in a console, working the robot’s arms with remote controls.

“Patients interview you,” said Dr. Cadeddu, a urologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. “They say: ‘Do you use the robot? O.K., well, thank you.’ ” And they leave.

Read the whole thing and see the surgical company’s promotional video below–and remember Mead’s First Law:  The future is closer than you think.

Both Daniel Drezner and Daniel Larison took issue — in their customarily civil and intelligent way — with my post on the Ukrainian election.  From slightly different perspectives, they raise the same question: Ukraine just had a peaceful, democratic election.  It was even (relatively) free and fair.  So why does Mead think this is somehow a sign of the failure of the democracy agenda in Ukraine?  Sure, the ‘bad’, pro-Russia guy won, but a) ‘bad guys’ win all the time in other democracies and the sky doesn’t fall and b) he’s not really as pro-Russian as people say.  Larison is a bit more pessimistic about Yanukovych’s politics than Drezner, but the point is substantially the same: the success of democratic processes shows that democracy is moving forward in Ukraine.

Maybe I should have explained myself more fully.  It’s true that Ukraine just had an election and while I’m not sure how honest it was, and while the Braided One is still making some trouble in the courts, elections are, generally speaking, good things.  So far, the two Daniels and I are on the same bus.

But having elections isn’t the whole story.  Fareed Zakaria talks about ‘illiberal democracy,’ wherein democratic procedures mask a basically illiberal state and society.  I was born in one of those — in racially segregated South Carolina where almost half the state’s population was barred from political life and mob violence with tacit state backing was used to keep dissidents in line.  Ukraine, I fear, is something even more depressing: an incompetent democracy in which democratic procedures co-exist with a state that cannot deal with society’s core problems.  It is not alone in this; the word ‘Nigeria’ comes to mind.

These failed democracies are not necessarily unstable.  A weak democratic political system may be perfectly adapted to the needs of elites which are quietly, steadily looting the country.  In some ways conforming to superficial democratic norms may assist the elites by veiling their activities beneath a mantle of legitimizing political fluff.  It’s arguably Tony Soprano’s strategy: keep your weak, stupid uncle as the nominal head of the family.  The courts are corrupt, the police are in the pay of oligarchs and/or criminals, public institutions function poorly if at all.

Back in the 19th century when tiresome British do-gooders tried to push Brazilians to do things like suppress the slave trade or clean up their legal processes, Brazilians used to talk about tiny little gestures ‘for the Englishman to see’.  Formal democratic procedures in places like Ukraine can protect powerful interests from both international and domestic scrutiny and pressure by giving the Englishman something pretty to look at.  The mayor runs for re-election now and then and the dorky election observers report that all is in order; Al Capone goes on running the town.  Whatever ballot boxes are stuffed or intimidation of voters goes on takes place where the sun don’t shine and the inspectors don’t look.  There are plenty of such places in a big country like Ukraine. read more »

An editorial in today’s New York Times acknowledges something that everybody who doesn’t read the Times has known for several weeks now: sloppy work by climate scientists and the IPCC has severely dented public confidence in climate science generally, and has undermined the political prospects for government action on the issue.

Climate skeptics won’t be happy with the editorial, but considering the Times‘ stance in the recent past, the editorial represents a major advance:

The controversy over the 2007 report has been stoked by charges of poor sourcing and alarmist forecasts, prominently a prediction — in a 938-page working paper — that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. This was clearly an exaggeration, though it was not included in the final report. An overblown warning of crop failures in North Africa made it into the final report.

Set against the bulk of the panel’s work — for which it received a Nobel Prize in 2008 — these errors seem small, the result of sloppiness, not deliberate misrepresentation. But they are still costly.

In a recent editorial in the journal Nature, Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote that while the scientific understanding of climate change remains “undiminished,” the “perceived misbehavior of even a few scientists can diminish the credibility of science as a whole.”

Dr. Cicerone is right on all counts: given the complexity and urgency of climate change — and its vulnerability to political posturing — scientists engaged in the issue must avoid personal agendas and be intellectually vigilant and above reproach.

Read the whole thing. Hopefully this starts a new era in which the Times will keep its readers posted on an important story.

As of this morning, the whole staff doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo.  The Climate Action Partnership lost three major corporate members yesterday as BP, ConocoPhillips and Caterpillar announced they were leaving the alliance of corporations pushing comprehensive climate change legislation.  My environmentalist friends tell me this could be even bigger than climategate as a sign that the momentum for climate change legislation is rapidly waning.  The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times put the story on the front page; the New York Times buried it on B-6 of its New York edition.

Two stories this morning cast some light on where the country is headed.  The news isn’t good for the upper middle class.  If you are, or you plan to be, a lawyer, a tenured university professor, a manager, an architect, a civil servant or a doctor, be afraid.  Be very, very afraid.

The bell is tolling for you.

One of this morning’s ominous stories comes from Bloomberg.com: “Making Partner Less Likely” trumpets the headline, “As Big Law Firms Face Cash Crunch.”  The other comes from our old friend The New York Times, and it’s a report on a study that reports rising public dissatisfaction with the price and quality of college education in the United States.

Both stories are straws in the wind pointing to the possibility that the biggest bubble in the US economy may be coming to an end.  The biggest bubble of them all isn’t the real estate bubble; it’s not the dotcom bubble that took two thirds of the value off the NASDAQ when it burst at the start of the last decade.  The biggest bubble in the United States is the upper-middle class professional bubble; for the last generation the incomes of Americans with professional degrees continued to rise, sharply in many cases, even as incomes for blue collar workers steadily fell.  While investment bankers left us all coughing in their dust, doctors, lawyers, university professors and other professionals got generally richer while the rest of the country faced stagnant or even falling living standards.

This can’t and won’t go on.  Just as house prices can’t rise faster than household incomes for very long, college tuition can’t go on rising faster than peoples’ ability to pay.  The costs of health care, legal services and other professional services cannot keep rising if costs everywhere else are being squeezed.

Over the next generation American professionals are going to face the same forces that transformed (often, not in a good way) the life situation of the lower middle class.  The cost squeeze is on, and just as Walmart forces its suppliers to become ever cheaper and ever more competitive, so corporations are telling law firms and other suppliers that they have to cut costs.  Even as law firms cut down on creating new partners, they are shifting more and more operations overseas.  Only a relatively small part of what law firms do really has to be done in the US by an actual lawyer; there is a lot of fat in the law, and over the next thirty years it’s going to be wrung out of the system.

For universities the big story will likely be driven by the financial problems of government.  Through subsidies of various kinds, both directly through support to the universities themselves and indirectly by providing financial aid to students, the state and federal governments are the ultimate paymasters of the colleges and universities that most of our students attend.  Looking at the financial prospects of all levels of government, big changes are clearly coming down the pike for higher education.  Increasingly, politicians and taxpayers are going to be unable or unwilling to pay the extraordinary (and inexorably rising) costs of supporting the ‘research university’ model.  The natural sciences (which can claim to produce identifiable economic benefits) will probably do better than the humanities and social sciences, but overall, life for professors at state universities is going to look more like life for high school teachers now.  Tenure is going to become much, much rarer than it is now; teaching loads will likely increase.  Taxpayers are not going to subsidize research in critical literary theory very much longer.  I would not be surprised to see higher education in some states restructured through initiative and referendum petitions.  What better target for angry Tea Party organizers than heavily-subsidized nests of irreligious, left-leaning snobs who charge outrageous tuition for miseducating the youth?

Professors, beware.  Despoiling the monasteries is a traditional resort of cash strapped rulers, and our rulers will soon be turning over the couch cushions scrounging for dimes.  read more »