Tom Wolfe's "Back to Blood:" Buckle up, folks, it's going to be a bumpy ride

I just picked up my copy of Tom Wolfe's first new novel in eight years, Back to Blood (a story of 21st Century Miami), and opened it at random. Here's the first paragraph I read (on p. 181):

Now he looked directly at Ghislaine [a Miami girl with a French name, so I'm guessing she's Haitian]. He smiled ... to cover up the fact that he was trying ... objectively ... to assess her face. Her skin was whiter than most white people's. As soon as Ghislaine was old enough to understand words at all, Louisette had started telling her about sunny days. Direct sun wasn't good for your skin. The worst thing of all was to take a sunbath. Even walking in the sun was too much of a risk. She should wear big-brimmed straw hats. Better still, an umbrella. Little girls couldn't very well go around with parasols, however. But if they had to walk in the sun, they should at least have straw hats. She must always remember that she had very beautiful but very fair skin that would burn easily, and she should do anything to avoid sunburns. But Ghislaine figured it out very quickly. It had nothing to do with sunburns ... it had to do with sunbrowning. In the sun, skin like hers, her beautiful whiter-than-white skin, would darken just like that! In no time she could turn Neg ... just like that. 

And that's just the beginning of a racial inventory of her hair, lips, and nose.

Critic James Wood is extremely peeved in The New Yorker at Wolfe's book. Novelists aren't supposed to notice how people look! What kind of characters think about how other characters look? Vulgar characters, that's who!

Wood wants you to know that he much prefers Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, in which the characters sit around at a luxury health clinic thinking Deep Thoughts for 1,000 pages.

Here's my review of Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons.

Gopnik: America's historic prosperity = "white people with guns owning a giant chunk of well-irrigated, very well-harbored real estate"

Adam Gopnik has an eloquent review in The New Yorker called "Faces, Places, Spaces: The Renaissance of Geographic History" of a few books on the importance of geography, including Robert Kaplan's latest. 

This paragraph by Gopnik will seem less novel to iSteve readers than to most others:

The new space history has one great virtue. It forces upon historians, the amateurs we all are as well as the pros we read, a little more humility. American prosperity looks like a function of virtue and energy, but the geographic turn tells us that it’s mostly a function of white people with guns owning a giant chunk of well-irrigated, very well-harbored real estate off the edge of the World Island, bordering a hot land on one side and a cold one on the other. Really, you can’t miss. Our geographic truth enters our songs and sagas even if it evades our sermons: O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties, above the fruited plain; this land is my land, from the redwood forest to the gulf-stream waters. The geographic truth beneath our prosperity is as naturally sung by our bards as the olive oils and wine-dark sea at the heart of Greek culture were sung by theirs.

This is basically Benjamin Franklin's argument from Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind that life in America is happier than in Europe because the population density is lower and thus land costs are lower and wages are higher, so it makes sense to limit immigration. Speculating freely, I'd guess the chain of influence goes to Adam Gopnik from his sister, cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik, from cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, from me, from Old Ben.

I'd have some specific criticisms of Gopnik's essay, but it's really much better than the average, so you owe it to yourself to read it. My impression is of an urban Ashkenazi intellectual groping in good faith to recover some knowledge and wisdom lost when people without much connection to land came to dominate highbrow discourse.

Presidential debate comment thread

Tell me about it.

Is it Baroque O'Blarney overwhelming the Underperformin' Mormon? Or Mathemagical Mitt exposing the Big Oh?

And how many more wars do we need to start?

Which one acted like he was in the lead in the election?

How to fix Barack Obama? The Obama Administration has a plan: more quotas and less discipline

Barack Obama Global Preparation Academy is a shiny new $79 million public middle school with 1,154 students in Los Angeles, complete with a school spirit song:

Barack Obama Global
Preparation Academy
Preparing us for the future
Our alma mater you'll always be
For your dedication
To our education
We'll always have and loyalty
For Barack Obama Global Preparation Academy (2x)

Soaring like an eagle
Above our beloved academy
Developing in our character
And in our integrity
If we believe it
We can achieve it
Our dreams become reality (reality)
Thanks to Barack Obama Global Preparation Academy
Thanks to Barack Obama
Global Preparation
Barack Obama
Global Preparation
Barack Obama
Global Preparation
Academy

Unfortunately, some people are lacking in school spirit. Here's the lone parent's review of Barack Obama on GreatSchools.net:

hi my dauther goes to this school i dont think that for the first year it went good at all the with staft and teachers they didn't had no control on the students i dont now what happen with our principal she was good when she was in forshay with our students on deciplem now the students get to schhool late and they close all the bathroom during classes so when they need to go they can find them open when they switch to another class so they arrive late to class the teachers close there doors and dont let them in even if they see the student running to class 

(By the way, this handy GreatSchools website also informs parents that the nearest comparable school to Barack Obama is: 

W.D.M Islamic Learning Center/S.C.M.S 

0.2 miles

As we saw with the Bush Administration's embarrassing 2003 failure to find any W.D.M.'s in Iraq, many Islamics haven't learned enough yet about how to make W.D.M.'s. So, it's good to see that somebody is working with the next generation to get them up to speed W.D.M.-wise, because I believe the children are our future.)

According to the architect of Barack Obama, the project cost for this 170,000 square foot school on 7 acres was $78,900,000. Capacity of the school is 1,400 students, although they seem to be having trouble getting that many to show up.

The Los Angeles Daily News reported on October 19:

Sharette Arnold simply wanted a safe place for her twin boys. 

Fearful of gangs trolling ["Cool story, bro"] her South L.A. neighborhood and dismayed at her sons' falling grades, Arnold took advantage of a less-publicized part of Choices. 

She pulled her sons out of the underperforming Barack Obama Global Prep Academy and enrolled them in Hale Charter Academy, a high-achieving campus in Woodland Hills where Cameron and Delion McDonald are thriving. 

"Our neighborhood school is new and named for Obama, but it's in a very bad area," Arnold said Friday. "My kids had to walk past prostitutes and gang members, and there were a lot of issues at the school that made it hard for them to concentrate. 

"My babies deserve better." 

Obama Academy is one of nearly 450 Los Angeles Unified campuses designated as Program Improvement Schools because they've fallen short of academic targets for two consecutive years.

Barack Obama has only been open for two years.

Fortunately, the Obama Administration has a plan to fix what's wrong with Barack Obama: namely, too much discipline. From the Center for Public Integrity:

Alexander Johnson arrived at Barack Obama Global Preparatory Academy to pick up his 12-year-old after school on May 19, 2011.

It's actually "Barack Obama Global Preparation Academy," which is probably wise. The word "preparatory" is practically impossible for anybody in America to pronounce reliably since the death of William F. Buckley Jr.

By the way, have you noticed how schools usually aren't called schools anymore? And the more words in the title of the school, the more doubtful the enterprise, kind of like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea? Practically the only school with a simple name to start up in Southern California in this century was Oaks Christian School in Westlake Village, which is where people like Wayne Gretzky, Will Smith, and Joe Montana send their kids. There may be a connection.

When his son, A.J. didn’t appear, Johnson went inside the Los Angeles middle school. What he found was devastating. 

A.J. and a friend had gotten into a physical altercation over a basketball game, and school staff had summoned not parents, but police officers. Neither boy was injured, and the school ended up suspending his son for only one day, Johnson said. But officers wrote up a court citation and decided, on the spot, to also handcuff and arrest A.J. as the alleged aggressor — after what Johnson believes was only a cursory look into what had happened. 

Despite Johnson’s pleas for another solution to what the citation said was a “mutual fight,” officers drove A.J. to a station, booked him, fingerprinted him and took a mug shot before releasing him. The family hired a lawyer, and school staff later apologized. But Johnson and his wife still can’t comprehend why school officials got police involved. And while school police say they have a duty to fight crime, the Johnsons can’t help but think that officers arrested their son because of snap judgments about African-American kids in South Central Los Angeles. 

“He’s got good grades and he’s never been in trouble,” Johnson said he kept telling police. “Tell it to the judge,” he said police replied.  

An anti-school discipline protest in L.A.

What happened to the Johnsons’ son is the type of incident — in Los Angeles and elsewhere — that has the Obama Administration’s Department of Education and a growing number of juvenile-court judges deeply concerned. In fact, the issue of police citations has been included in a federal review of discipline-reform plans that the Los Angeles Unified School District – under pressure to reduce high rates of suspensions of black students — was required to submit earlier this year to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. 

“Generally speaking, in all but the most serious cases we would hope that district officials review a range of options … before referring students to the court system,” the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, Russlynn Ali, told the Center for Public Integrity in an interview that touched on both Los Angeles and national trends.   

Russlynn Ali, another member of the Obama Administration's West Indian coterie (Trinidadian subcon version?), is all very fine as a civil rights spokesmodel, but it's just not been the same since Xochitl Hinojosa left the Obama Administration for that campaign job in Nevada.

Months ago, the Los Angeles district failed to submit any records of police citations or arrests of students to Ali’s office so they could be included in the office’s most recent mandatory Civil Rights Data Collection. The collection of those 2009-2010 statistics from most U.S. schools was an unprecedented attempt by the Education Department to assess an apparent national upsurge in referrals of students to law enforcement.    

Los Angeles’ data and New York City’s, too, were conspicuously missing. But in April, the Center for Public Integrity and a Los Angeles civil rights group, the Labor-Community Strategy Center, obtained and analyzed a large portion of the L.A. data that Ali’s office had expected to get.    

The data — obtained through a public records act request — contained tens of thousands of citations to lower-level juvenile court issued by Los Angeles Unified’s own police force from 2009 through 2011. 

The data don’t include arrests, which are recorded separately, or separate citations that officers referred directly to a higher-level delinquency court, where Johnson’s son ended up. The data don’t include tickets written by city police either. 

But the citations do likely represent the bulk of police-student interactions, and reveal how pervasive the ticketing of students has become in this large metropolitan district, which is struggling with high dropout rates and budget cuts.   

The Center found that Los Angeles’ school officers, part of the largest school police force in the country, issued more than 33,500 tickets to students between 10 and 18 years old over three years. That worked out to about 30 citations a day, every day.   

More than 40 percent of these court citations were to kids 14 and younger, mostly for disturbing the peace, followed by daytime curfew violations, including tardiness, and scattered tickets for cigarettes, lighters, marijuana, vandalism or having graffiti “tools,” such as a Sharpie. Black students, about 10 percent of the district’s student body, received 15 to 20 percent of all tickets, depending on the year, and Latino students, 74 percent of enrollment, also received a disproportionate number.  

Can't be too disproportionate: the maximum arithmetically possible is that the 74 percent of students who are Latinos get 80 to 85 percent of the tickets.

Additional Center analysis also shows that these lower-level court citations were highly concentrated in low-income areas where children of immigrants and African-American families attend school.

You think?

Last year, there were more than 25 middle schools in such areas where at least 50 citations to lower-level court were given to students, many of them 11 and 12 years old.  At least a dozen of those schools showed 70 or more tickets issued to students, who were overwhelmingly black and Latino. 

After initial findings from the data were disclosed in media reports in late April, students and parents held protests in early May. The Labor-Community Strategy Center urged that the district cut tickets by 75 percent and adopt a moratorium on citations until more studies were done. District police officials declined to stop ticketing, but have engaged in community discussions about reforms.     

Ali said she couldn’t comment directly on “independently gathered” Los Angeles statistics. But, she said, “the data you cite reveal, and the recent Civil Rights Data Collection data show nationally, that students of color are disproportionately disciplined.” 

In March, Ali’s office revealed the results of what it had gleaned from districts nationwide that had complied and submitted their arrest and citation numbers for 2009-2010. The findings were stark: Black students, 18 percent of enrollment, represented 42 percent of school-based referrals to police. Latinos, 24 percent of enrollment, were 37 percent of school-related arrests. 

“While the magnitude of the problem is something those of us involved with civil rights enforcement have been keenly aware of, I would not be telling the truth if I did not say that I found the data surprising and disturbing on a personal level,” Ali said. 

Ms. Ali doesn't seem to know what the word "magnitude" means. It's not actually a synonym for "direction."

“Mind you,” she said, “racial disparities revealed by data alone don’t constitute a civil rights violation . . . But at minimum, they should certainly be cause for concern and lead to conversations about why the disparities exist and what can be done to ensure fair learning opportunities for all students.” 

A courageous conversation, as Eric Holder, another West Indian, might say.

Ali’s office has offered aid to help districts comply with another upcoming request that’s part of a new national collection of data. ... 

Civil rights groups fear that because of this concern for safety, ironically, black, Latino and low-income students are being subjected to unequal police scrutiny over minor matters and more searches than kids in affluent areas.    

Zoe Rawson, an attorney with the Labor-Community Strategy Center, who has defended students in court, said: “We are both policing students of color differently because they live in these areas and rely on the public education system, and we are using the police and the courts as a punitive tactic for school discipline despite evidence that it is ineffective, harmful and wasteful.” 

... The task force report cited an Arizona State University criminologist who found that a first-time court appearance in high school increases a student’s odds of dropping out by at least a factor of three. The impact was greater for a student who was only marginally delinquent.   

Correlation does not imply Caucasian.

Some of Los Angeles’ inner-city schools have struggled with dropout rates as high as 50 percent. The citations examined by the Center were concentrated at those schools, as well as at middle schools that feed students into those secondary schools. ... 

Christopher Ortiz, the district’s school operations chief, said in a more recent interview that school administrators are told that that the role of school police is clear: “School police do not do classroom management.” ... 

I've been trying to point out for years that public schools need a level of disciplinarians in between teachers and SWAT teams in body armor. If you want smart teachers who like thinking about how best to teach The Great Gatsby or the Quadratic Formula more than they like thinking about how to put punks in their places, you need to back teachers up with Assistant Deans of Discipline, guys with necks wider than their heads who live to put punks in their places.

Up to now, most kids in Los Angeles with lower-level citations have been summoned to an “informal” juvenile court. They must appear with a parent during court hours, which means students miss school and the parent misses work. Students can face hundreds of dollars in fines, and if they don’t show up to court – many are afraid to tell parents about a ticket – their infraction has a misdemeanor offense added on. ... 

Jerod Gunsberg, the Johnson boy’s attorney, said that it took six months to get that 12-year-old’s assault charges dismissed in delinquency court. Gunsberg said a probation officer told him she didn’t understand why A.J.'s case was in that court, but that he wasn’t the first student to be referred from his school. 

The court put A.J. into an informal diversion program of four sessions of anger-management counseling, asked him to write a book report and urged him to continue to get good grades. 

The district said no one at Barack Obama or the district could discuss the case because of confidentiality laws. Statistics show that at least 50 citations for lower-level juvenile court were issued at Barack Obama last year. 

A reader writes to explain what's going on: "Schools get a quota of how many black students they can suspend per year. By May 19, 2011 they were no doubt at their limit for the 2010-2011 school year. However, they can still call the school cops to cite or arrest troublemakers."

The Johnsons pulled A.J. out of Barack Obama for a while, but had to drive him a long distance to a more affluent school in Santa Monica. They noticed there were not a lot of police cars patrolling there. At Barack Obama, when his son got into his first fight, “it all went south when police got involved,” Alexander Johnson said. “They didn’t have anyone to handle discipline, and they told me everything goes straight to police.” 

The Johnsons put A.J. back in Barack Obama this year, and the school welcomed him back, his parents said, and assured them that a new staffer had been appointed to handle discipline. 

Gunsberg said that, unfortunately, even though charges were dismissed and A.J. was not required to formally admit to any wrongdoing, his mug shot and fingerprints remain on file with police until he can try to have them sealed in five years or when he turns 18. 

Center for Public Integrity data editor David Donald contributed to this report.

Meanwhile, Hans Bader of Open Market reports that the Obama Administration is even farther along than with Barack Obama in fixing up what's wrong with Oakland's public schools, which is, coincidentally enough, too much discipline:

Under pressure from the Education Department, which investigated it over “racial disparities” and “disparate impact,” the Oakland, California, school system has agreed to impose “targeted reductions in the overall use of student suspensions; suspensions for African American students, Latino students, and students receiving special education services; and African American students suspended for defiance.” ... These “targeted reductions” are racial quotas in all but name. (“Disparate impact” is when a process affects one racial group more than another, despite having no racist motive, such as when whites have higher average scores than minorities on a standardized test.)

By the way, I want to congratulate Hans Bader on really turning his life around since that unfortunate 1988 incident at the Nakatomi Plaza office tower. I guess one night of rehabilitation with Officer John McClane, NYPD, was all it took. Let that be a lesson to us all.

Villaraigosa in 2016!

From Politico:

The Los Angeles mayor gave a pretty obviously nonresponsive answer when Radio Iowa's O. Kay Henderson asked if he has any presidential ambitions for 2016: 

Villaraigosa spoke with Radio Iowa before his speech this evening. As for whether Villaraigosa might run for president in 2016, Villaraigosa said he plans to “reflect” when his term as mayor ends in the middle of next year before deciding what he’ll do next. “I want to figure out how we move America and, importantly, my state, toward what I call a radical middle,” he said.

He was in Iowa to headline the state Democratic Party's Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, which is of course what you do if you are simply interested in promoting policies of the "radical middle." 

Villaraigosa has talked about running for governor of California in the past, so it's no shock that he has ambitions beyond his city and perhaps state. That he (as well as other mayors like Cory Booker and Rahm Emanuel) are already being talked about as presidential prospects for next cycle reflects both the prominence of mayors in the Democratic Party, and the relatively thin collection of governors and senators the party might field in 2016 if Hillary Clinton doesn't run.

The Democrats actually still have a number of white male governors with executive experience and track records of appealing to state-wide electorates who sound far more plausibly Presidential than these guys. But the Democratic Party is evolving along with the demographics of America, so, yeah, sure, why not Tony Villaraigosa in 2016? 

Just repeat after me: "Correlation Does Not Imply Caucasian"

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) wrote in his famous 1993 essay Defining Deviancy Down:

In a 1992 study entitled America's Smallest School: The Family, Paul Barton came up with the elegant and persuasive concept of the parent-pupil ratio as a measure of school quality. Barton, who was on the policy planning staff in the Department of Labor in 1965, noted the great increase in the proportion of children living in single-parent families since then. He further noted that the proportion "varies widely among the states" and is related to "variation in achievement" among them. The correlation between the percentage of eighth graders living in two-parent families and average mathematics proficiency is a solid .74. North Dakota, highest on the math test, is second highest on the family compositions scale - that is, it is second in the percentage of kids coming from two-parent homes. The District of Columbia, lowest on the family scale, is second lowest in the test score. 

A few months before Barton's study appeared, I published an article showing that the correlation between eighth-grade math scores and distance of state capitals from the Canadian border was .522, a respectable showing. By contrast, the correlation with per pupil expenditure was a derisory .203. I offered the policy proposal that states wishing to improve their schools should move closer to Canada. This would be difficult, of course, but so would it be to change the parent-pupil ratio.

This parent-student ratio concept is worth remembering.

As is commenter Rob S's revision of the now-cliched "Correlation does not imply causation" into the less euphemistic "Correlation does not imply Caucasian," because we definitely wouldn't want you to draw that lesson!

"Underperforming Barack Obama"

From the L.A. Daily News:

Most of the parents who sign up for LAUSD's Choices program hope to send their child to a specialty magnet - a performing arts program for an aspiring actor, perhaps, or a medical academy for a would-be doctor. 

Sharette Arnold simply wanted a safe place for her twin boys. 

Fearful of gangs trolling her South L.A. neighborhood and dismayed at her sons' falling grades, Arnold took advantage of a less-publicized part of Choices. She pulled her sons out of the underperforming Barack Obama Global Prep Academy and enrolled them in Hale Charter Academy, a high-achieving campus in Woodland Hills where Cameron and Delion McDonald are thriving.

However, if Romney messes up the final debate, I claim dibs on the term "The Underperformin' Mormon," a phrase that Google tells me has so far only been applied to 7'6" ex-BYU basketball center Shawn Bradley.

The phrase Underperformin' Norman was coined by John Derbyshire for Bush Administration Transportation secretary Norman Mineta, who refused to allow ethnic profiling in airport security after 9/11 to prevent Japanese from being interned, or something.

Big Gay Gallup Poll

Gallup included the question: "Do you, personally, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender?" for 3 months of surveys, getting 121,000 responses

The always reliable Daily Mail headlines:

'White people are less likely to be gay': Poll reveals African-American community has highest percentage of 'LGBT' adults in U.S. 

Gallup survey, based on interviews with more than 121,000 people, showed that 3.4% of U.S. adults were lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) 

Highest proportion in black community, at 4.6%, followed by Asians (4.3%), Hispanics (4%) and Caucasians (3.2%)  

Poll found 44% of LGBT adults were Democratic, and 13% Republican

I don't find the results too surprising, but I want to point out a couple of issues: 

There are several percent who don't say know either, just "Don't Know" or "Refuse to Answer."

We don't have any way of knowing what the plain dumb error rate is. (E.g., we can't separate out the male lesbian percentage.) One of the authors of the Gallup Poll, Gary Gates, has discovered in the past that it's not uncommon for a sizable percentage of unusual situations in data to be comprised of typos.

Our work indicates that over 40 percent of same-sex “unmarried partner” couples in the 2000 U.S. Decennial Census are likely misclassified different-sex couples.

There was a flurry of excitement and Brokeback Mountain fantasizing among the, uh, more Andrew Sullivan-like press, over reports after the 2000 Census that there were more gay domestic partnerships in places like Wyoming than in Washington D.C.. But it mostly turned out to be people filling in their Census forms carelessly.

In a study on the military, Gates estimated:

An estimated 2.9% of women on active duty are lesbian/bisexual compared to only 0.6% of men.

Wow, 0.6% of male active duty military personnel are gay / bisexual ...

John List on the virtual nonexistence of "stereotype threat"

The concept of "stereotype threat" is a vastly popular explanation for The Gap. In 2004, I argued that the most plausible explanation for studies finding that if you tell a Designated Victim Group that they are expected to score lower on a low-stakes test requiring mental effort in return for no reward, they will indeed score lower:

Of course, to me as a former marketing executive, there's an obvious alternative explanation of [Claude] Steele's findings: the students figured out what this prominent professor wanted to see, and, being nice kids, they delivered the results he longed for. This happens all the time in market research. After all, this was just a meaningless little test, unlike a real SAT where the students would all want to do as well as possible.

However, an even more cynical interpretation has been floating around on the fringes of public discourse for a number of years: publication bias. Studies that find stereotype threat get published, while studies that don't don't: the File Drawer Effect.

From an interview with John List, Homer J. Livingston professor of economics at the U. of Chicago:

RF:  Your paper with Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt came to a somewhat ambiguous conclusion about whether stereotype threat exists. But do you have a hunch regarding the answer to that question based on the results of your experiment? 

List: I believe in priming. Psychologists have shown us the power of priming, and stereotype threat is an interesting type of priming. Claude Steele, a psychologist at Stanford, popularized the term stereotype threat. He had people taking a math exam, for example, jot down whether they were male or female on top of their exams, and he found that when you wrote down that you were female, you performed less well than if you did not write down that you were female. They call this the stereotype threat. My first instinct was that effect probably does happen, but you could use incentives to make it go away. And what I mean by that is, if the test is important enough or if you overlaid monetary incentives on that test, then the stereotype threat would largely disappear, or become economically irrelevant.  

So we designed the experiment to test that, and we found that we could not even induce stereotype threat. We did everything we could to try to get it. We announced to them, “Women do not perform as well as men on this test and we want you now to put your gender on the top of the test.”  And other social scientists would say, that’s crazy — if you do that, you will get stereotype threat every time. But we still didn’t get it. What that led me to believe is that, while I think that priming works, I think that stereotype threat has a lot of important boundaries that severely limit its generalizability. I think what has happened is, a few people found this result early on and now there’s publication bias. But when you talk behind the scenes to people in the profession, they have a hard time finding it. So what do they do in that case? A lot of people just shelve that experiment; they say it must be wrong because there are 10 papers in the literature that find it. Well, if there have been 200 studies that try to find it, 10 should find it, right? 

This is a Type II error but people still believe in the theory of stereotype threat. I think that there are a lot of reasons why it does not occur. So while I believe in priming, I am not convinced that stereotype threat is important.

Gregory Clark on "Surnames and the Laws of Social Mobility"

Economist Gregory Clark, author of A Farewell to Alms, has a new draft paper (via Marginal Revolution) called Surnames and the Laws of Social Mobility, with lots of of fun facts about surnames in England, America, Sweden, India, and China.

For example, in the U.S., surnames that are at least 90% black include Washington, Smalls, Merriweather, and Stepney. Using Jewish and black surnames and their frequency on the American Medical Association roster relative to their frequency in the overall population, we can see that blacks are becoming less under-represented as doctors and Jew less over-represented.

Decade Jewish Black

1970-9    5.72    0.19

1980-9    4.96    0.22

1990-9    3.59    0.26

2000-9    3.30    0.28

Unfortunately, Clark doesn't cite in his references either of the pathbreaking books of surname analysis by Nathaniel Weyl (1910-2005). His initial studies, which he published in 1963 in a book co-written by Jerry Pournelle's mentor Stefan Possony called The Geography of Intellect, were published in Mankind Quarterly in the early 1960s. You can find them at Unz.org here. 

Weyl then updated and extended his work in 1990's The Geography of American Achievement.

Weyl was a swashbuckling figure, who was a Communist in the 1930s until the Hitler-Stalin pact, and provided corroboration for Whitaker Chambers' testimony against Alger Hiss. His name occasionally comes up in JFK conspiracy theories. 

Weyl worked through many of the issues that Clark is stumbling upon, such as the need for more than one measure of social mobility. For example, more black surnames becoming doctors is a good sign of upward social mobility, but it's not clear that fewer Jewish names becoming doctors is a sign of downward mobility among Jews, because you can also exit upward or sideways.

For example, Matthew Weiner, creator of Mad Men, is the non-M.D. son of an M.D. (a highly distinguished one, too). Is he an example of downward or upward mobility? 

Weyl's solution to this kind of puzzle was to present multiple data sources to allow the reader to make up his own mind, which is something that Clark should study.

P.S. Dr. Clark emails to assure that Weyl will be cited in the final draft.

Dept. of Not Getting Moynihan's Joke about the Canadian Border

From The New Republic, an elaborate article that doesn't seem to notice how literal its titular metaphor actually is:

Blue States are from Scandinavia, Red States are from Guatemala 

A theory of a divided nation. 

Jonathan Cohn October 5, 2012 | 12:00 am 

... We’ve come to think of “blue” and “red” states as political and cultural categories. The rift, though, goes much deeper than partisan differences of opinion. The borders of the United States contain two different forms of government, based on two different visions of the social contract. In blue America, state government costs more—and it spends more to ensure that everybody can pay for basic necessities such as food, housing, and health care. It invests more heavily in the long-term welfare of its population, with better-funded public schools, subsidized day care, and support for people with disabilities. In some cases, in fact, state lawmakers have decided that the social contract provided by the federal government is not generous enough. It was a blue state that first established universal health insurance and, today, it is a handful of blue states that offer paid family and medical leave. 

In the red states, government is cheaper, which means the people who live there pay lower taxes. But they also get a lot less in return. The unemployment checks run out more quickly and the schools generally aren’t as good. 

Assistance with health care, child care, and housing is skimpier, if it exists at all. The result of this divergence is that one half of the country looks more and more like Scandinavia, while the other increasingly resembles a social Darwinist’s paradise. 

Americans have been arguing over which system is morally and economically superior since the beginning of the republic. But every now and then, the worldviews have clashed and forced a reckoning. The 2012 election is one of those moments. ...

THE QUINTESSENTIAL blue state is, of course, Massachusetts. There, health care is available to almost everybody, regardless of income or preexisting medical conditions. Welfare benefits are among the most generous in the country, and the state spends hundreds of millions on public housing each year. These programs don’t always lift people out of poverty or protect them from financial catastrophe. Still, Massachusetts’s residents get a lot more help from their state government than people who live elsewhere in the United States. It is reliably at the forefront of efforts at the state level to do what the federal government will not.  

In colonial times, during their fabled town meetings, New Englanders established America’s first public schools and worked to look after those who had fallen on hard times, even though it meant higher taxes. In Albion’s Seed, a history of colonial settlement patterns, David Hackett Fischer writes that efforts to care for the vulnerable “went beyond the minimum.” 

As Fischer pointed out, New England Puritans tended to be, literally, "from Scandinavia:" their English-born ancestors were concentrated in the Danelaw region of a thousand years ago in eastern England. Isaac Newton, for instance, a classic eastern English Puritan, looked rather like Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap.

About a century later, a wave of immigrants from central, southern, and eastern Europe arrived in the Northeast and upper Midwest, grafting Catholic notions of social justice and Jewish notions of social responsibility onto the old Yankee sense of mutual obligation.

... The South was slower to industrialize and slower to take measures to protect the vulnerable. By the time of the Great Depression, most Southern state governments did not provide any form of cash assistance to people in poverty. 

One likely reason was the region’s own equally distinctive colonial ancestry. Appalachia had attracted fiercely individualistic immigrants from the Scottish and Irish woodlands. Virginia’s founders, meanwhile, were a group of well-educated elites who, unlike the Puritans, wanted to recreate the society they left behind, including its class divisions. ... 

But something else had soured the South on social welfare: race. Programs to help poor people were, inevitably, programs to help African Americans. Southern whites wanted nothing to do with helping former slaves get an equal footing in society. They did embrace the New Deal, in part because Franklin Roosevelt and his allies went out of their way to accommodate their racial sensibilities: Social Security, for example, initially exempted agricultural and domestic workers. By the 1950s, however, the South was once more under attack for its denial of civil rights to African Americans. Later, it came to see the anti-poverty programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society as yet another effort to redistribute money to blacks (even though, like the New Deal, it also helped many whites). 

... The biggest victory for these counterrevolutionaries came in 1996, when Republicans passed a bill, signed by Bill Clinton, to “end welfare as we know it.” The legislation gave states wide leeway over how to manage benefits and, over time, gave them less money to spend.

... This was fitting, because, just as Massachusetts is the model for the blue state, Texas is the model for the red. 

Today, Texas doesn’t even try to provide the kind of protection for its vulnerable residents that Massachusetts does. ... 

THIS PATTERN generally holds for the red states and the blue states overall. ... “The story is pretty clear,” Meyers says. “If you are poor, you want to live in a blue state.”  

By nearly every measure, people who live in the blue states are healthier, wealthier, and generally better off than people in the red states It’s impossible to prove that this is the direct result of government spending. But the correlation is hard to dismiss. The four states with the highest poverty rates are all red: Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Texas. (The fifth is New Mexico, which has turned blue.) And the five states with the lowest poverty rates are all blue: New Hampshire, New Jersey, Vermont, Minnesota, and Hawaii. The numbers on infant mortality, life expectancy, teen pregnancy, and obesity break down in similar ways. A recent study by researchers at the American Institute for Physics evaluated how well-prepared high schoolers were for careers in math and science. Massachusetts was best, followed closely by Minnesota and New Jersey. Mississippi was worst, along with Louisiana and West Virginia. In fact, it is difficult to find any indicator of well-being in which red states consistently do better than blue states.

Or, perhaps, the causality of the correlation works in the opposite direction: that wealthier states, having fewer poor people, can afford to be more generous to their poor?

And what makes states healthier, wealthier, and wiser? As Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out: proximity to the Canadian border -- i.e., being whiter. For example, Massachusetts is only 18% Non-Asian Minority, while Texas is 51% NAM (which, of course raises the metaphysical question, when Non-Asian Minorities are no longer a minority, what are they?)

So, TNR's lesson is that if Democrats want the whole country to be more like Massachusetts, Democrats should back an immigration policy of letting in more Scandinavians and fewer Guatemalans, right?

By the way, when speaking about Massachusetts, it's important to keep in mind that a major reason it doesn't have many blacks and that its blacks aren't as big of a problem as elsewhere is because it has an abundance of violent, tribalist, anti-black Irish to keep the blacks down. Boston is the only place I've seen in the U.S. where blacks appeared to be afraid of white civilians walking down the street. Having a lot of scary Irish around makes theorizing at Harvard a lot more pleasant.

In contrast, poor Milwaukee, a nice German social-democratic town (as Alice Cooper points out in Wayne's World, Socialist candidates were elected mayor of Milwaukee three times in the 1920s), had high welfare and a direct rail line from the Mississippi Delta, and it just got the worst of Southern blacks.

Correlation does not prove causation, but correlation does prove correlation

It took a surprisingly long time for the modern statistical concept of correlation to emerge. It was implicit for a long time, but Francis Galton worked out the basics in 1888 (when, by the way, he was 66 years old). 

So, it's not surprising that people aren't really good yet at thinking about correlation.

In recent years, the cliche "Correlation does not prove causation" has emerged as a staple of Internet discussions, which I guess is a good thing, although it often appears in the more questionable form "Correlation does not imply causation."

In truth, correlation suggests causation. If A correlates with B, then perhaps A causes B. Or maybe B causes A. Quite possibly, some C causes both A and B, or various combinations.

Now, it could be that a finding that A correlates with B to some extent might be just a coincidence due to a limited sample size. Fortunately, we have good statistical techniques for measuring that possibility, and we have the test of replication. Similarly, attempts at replication can help weed out apparent correlations cause by incompetence, fraud, unconscious bias, and the like, although they can never be ruled out completely.

But, keeping those caveats in mind, we can say (with only a reasonable degree of overstatement):

Correlation does prove correlation.

For example, illegal immigration is correlated with many important social measures. This doesn't prove that illegal immigration "causes" high or low high or low school achievement. As we've all heard, "Correlation does not prove causation!"

But, few have heard, "Correlation does prove correlation."

For example, it does prove (to the extent that anything can be proved)  that illegal immigration is correlated with low school achievement. Moreover, the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of illegal immigrants tend to have below average school performance.

Furthermore, these correlations have been around for as long as they've been measured.

Now, it is conceivable that these correlations will vanish tomorrow.  Thus, the insistence is widespread that the burden of proof must be on those pointing out the correlations to prove causality beyond any doubt.

But, shouldn't the burden of proof be on the people asserting that the correlations will vanish to come up with at least a prima facie theory of why that will happen?

George McGovern

The 1972 Democratic Presidential candidate is gravely ill at age 90. From a reader review of popular military historian Stephen Ambrose's book The Wild Blue:

This book has two central characters and is mostly a story about their shared experiences. The first subject is 2nd Lt. George McGovern, who in 1944 was just a typical US Army Air Force pilot; nothing here hints at the man, who, nearly 30 years later, would run for US president. The second is a machine, the B-24 Liberator, and one plane in particular - McGovern's "Dakota Queen", which he piloted on 35 bombing missions over Germany from his base in Cerignola, Italy, as part of the 741st Squadron, 455th Bomb Group. ...

35 bombing missions (30 as pilot) over occupied Europe was a lot. The brass tried to set the number required so that an airman had better than a 50% chance of surviving. But not a whole lot better.

The Liberator comes by it's neglected treatment in history, and it's earned reputation as an ugly duckling quite fairly, as the following description of conditions in the plane attests. "Steering the four-engined airplane was difficult and exhausting, as there was no power except the pilot's muscles. It had no windshield wipers, so the pilot had to stick his head out the side window to see during a rain...there was no heat, despite temperatures that at 20,000 feet and higher got as low as 40 or 50 degrees below zero...the seats were not padded, could not be reclined, and were cramped into so small a space that a man had almost no chance to stretch and none whatsoever to relax. Absolutely nothing was done to make it comfortable for the pilot, co-pilot, or the other eight men in the crew..." Yet, as with all ugly ducklings, it had it's day and earned it's admirers. There were more B-24's built than any other US airplane and Ambrose says "it would be an exaggeration to say that the B-24 won the war for the Allies. But don't ask how they could have won the war without it." 

The greater emphasis of the book is on McGovern and his crew's experiences and it's in the telling of these stories where Ambrose's skills always shine; allowing the personal recollections of the participants to make the events come alive for us the readers. We follow the crew from induction through training to their arrival in Italy in 1944. There was danger from the outset. The book reveals that in basic and advanced flight training over 3,500 men lost their lives, 824 in 1943 alone; survival was an issue even before entering combat.

The number of non-combat (training and transport) aerial deaths in WWII was staggering by today's standards.

McGovern and his crew experienced their fair share of adventures on missions. On one flight an engine quit, then another was hit by flak; on two engines he was losing altitude rapidly but McGovern managed to nurse the bomber down for an emergency landing on an airstrip less than half the length the B-24 normally required. For this feat McGovern earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. By highlighting McGovern's experiences are we to believe that the book is portraying him as exceptional? Not at all. The reality is that when he arrived in Italy in 1944, McGovern was a 21 year old pilot. His co-pilot and navigator were the same age and half his crew were teenagers. What Ambrose sees as extraordinary is that these stories of survival, skill, courage, fortitude, bravery, and duty, are all, each and every single one, the exploits of very young men - even boys. Indeed he says "in the twenty-first century, adults would hardly give such youngsters the key to the family car, but in the first half of the 1940's the adults sent them out to play a critical role in saving the world."

McGovern was not, by nature, a physically fearless man, so 35 missions was quite a psychological challenge for him to overcome.

I'm reminded of Frank Capra's account of a publicity tour he made with Colonel Jimmy Stewart in 1946 to promote It's a Wonderful Life. They had hired a private plane and pilot to get them to a Texas city in time for a parade in their honor, but the flight encountered, at various points, electrical storms, high winds, fog, dust storm, night, running low on fuel, mechanical problems, and losing track of where the airport might be. Capra, who knew nothing about flying, found the experience worrisome, but Stewart, who had commanded at least 20 bomber missions over Germany and knew every single thing that could kill an airman, was utterly terrified.

Daron Acemoglu is kryptonite to clear thought

The ruins of the slums of Venice, a mere 417 years after La Serrata

Some celebrated thinkers are so dumb that even when they are more or less right in their politics, they drive the thinking man crazy with their amazing ability to come up with stupid examples for what ought to be easy positions to validate. MIT economist Daron Acemoglu is making himself the Malcolm Gladwell of the 2010s, with a nearly infallible nose for sniffing out the worst possible argument and then putting it forward triumphantly.

Here's the beginning of a recent article inspired by Acemoglu that was the most emailed NYT article last week:

The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent

By CHRYSTIA FREELAND 

Published: October 13, 2012 

IN the early 14th century, Venice was one of the richest cities in Europe. At the heart of its economy was the colleganza, a basic form of joint-stock company created to finance a single trade expedition. The brilliance of the colleganza was that it opened the economy to new entrants, allowing risk-taking entrepreneurs to share in the financial upside with the established businessmen who financed their merchant voyages. 

Venice’s elites were the chief beneficiaries. Like all open economies, theirs was turbulent. Today, we think of social mobility as a good thing. But if you are on top, mobility also means competition. In 1315, when the Venetian city-state was at the height of its economic powers, the upper class acted to lock in its privileges, putting a formal stop to social mobility with the publication of the Libro d’Oro, or Book of Gold, an official register of the nobility. If you weren’t on it, you couldn’t join the ruling oligarchy. 

The political shift, which had begun nearly two decades earlier, was so striking a change that the Venetians gave it a name: La Serrata, or the closure. It wasn’t long before the political Serrata became an economic one, too. Under the control of the oligarchs, Venice gradually cut off commercial opportunities for new entrants. Eventually, the colleganza was banned. The reigning elites were acting in their immediate self-interest, but in the longer term, La Serrata was the beginning of the end for them, and for Venetian prosperity more generally. 

By 1500, Venice’s population was smaller than it had been in 1330. In the 17th and 18th centuries, as the rest of Europe grew, the city continued to shrink. 

The story of Venice’s rise and fall is told by the scholars Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” as an illustration of their thesis that what separates successful states from failed ones is whether their governing institutions are inclusive or extractive. Extractive states are controlled by ruling elites whose objective is to extract as much wealth as they can from the rest of society. 

Inclusive states give everyone access to economic opportunity; often, greater inclusiveness creates more prosperity, which creates an incentive for ever greater inclusiveness. 

The history of the United States can be read as one such virtuous circle. But as the story of Venice shows, virtuous circles can be broken.

This example offers a powerful historical lesson, especially if you are completely unaware that, even after 1315, Venice survived as a rich and independent state for another 482 years. (It took the military of Revolutionary France, under the direction of General N. Bonaparte, to finally overthrow Venice in 1797.) After all, who has ever heard of such post-1315 Venetians as Titian, Tiepolo, Tintoretto Veronese, Canaletto, Palladio, Aldus Manutius, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Casanova, or Da Ponte?

In 1802, five years after Napoleon's coup, Wordsworth wrote:

On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic

ONCE did she hold the gorgeous East in fee;
  And was the safeguard of the West: the worth
  Of Venice did not fall below her birth,
Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty.
She was a maiden City, bright and free;
  No guile seduced, no force could violate;
  And, when she took unto herself a mate,
She must espouse the everlasting Sea.
And what if she had seen those glories fade,
  Those titles vanish, and that strength decay;
Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid
  When her long life hath reach'd its final day:
Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade
  Of that which once was great is pass'd away.

Baseball gentrification

GL Piggy offers an analysis of class at baseball stadiums, triggered by the decline in cheering at New York Yankees home games, featuring this quote:

The new Yankee Stadium opened in 2009, at a cost of $1.3 billion to build. To pay for it, the Yankees established a block of field-level box seats that cannot be accessed by fans in cheaper seats, who were able to bring their children down to the front row to pursue autographs before games in the old stadium. ... 

O’Connor, author of the biography “The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter,” remembers sitting just behind that moat with his son this season and watching as Jeter jogged in from batting practice with a ball he was looking to present to a youngster, something he often did in the old stadium. But there were no children around the dugout. 

“So he ended up flipping the ball to Donald Trump,” O’Connor said. “I think that’s the perfect example of what’s happened.

Jeter is good at making quick decisions. Out of all the billionaires in attendance, Trump was no doubt the most childlike and therefore got the biggest blast out of having Derek Jeter toss him a baseball. Chuck writes:

In a simple model of a team’s fan base, you have proles and fat-cats.  The Yankees are probably the best example of a team which has appealed to both groups.  The storied history of the team is a source of pride for locals of all classes, and transplants are able to leech off of this legacy of success by donning a Yankee cap. 

But fat cat fans are reserved, not just in their seating arrangements but also in their ballpark demeanor.  The polite opera-friendly behavior cited in the pieces above is a good indicator of the trend.  On the flip side, prole fans are tribalists out for blood.  They are the heart and the spirit of any team.  Fat cats appreciate that the proles are in attendance.  They add diversity and authenticity, but NIMBY – over in the cheap seats instead (while they last). 

Fat cats increase revenue, but proles increase the type of experience valued by what are the baseball version of the music-snob hipster.  As with the arts and other modes of culture – of which New York City is the U.S.’s chief manufacturer – there is a feedback loop between the two groups.  Proles provide a lot of the color; fat cats provide the funds.  The two groups have maintained a silent if not contentious balance, and any tilt towards one extreme or the other threatens to uproot the symbiotic relationship. Building a fancy new stadium full of comfortable amenities is a shock to this relationship.

A few comments:

White American proles were always much better behaved at sports events than, say, British soccer fans, whose awful behavior twice led to massive death tolls in the 1980s. (British soccer then went upscale with vast success.) If you go back to baseball in the 1890s, when the Irish influence was at its peak, there was a fair amount of violence in the stands (and on the field). But even then, British custom of using sports events as pre-planned occasions for communal riots was alien.

(By the way, riotousness was one reason for the founding of the American League in 1901 and its rapid success. Ban Johnson intended for the American League to be the clean, orderly alternative to the riotous National League. Johnson gave absolute backing to umpires and in general put out a product appealing to respectable middle class Americans.)

A baseball franchise can coast for a long time on the myth of prole tribalism. For example, when I was living in Santa Monica in 1981, I went to a local version of the play "Bleacher Bums" about Cub fans at Wrigley Field on Chicago's North Side.. The play was dreamed up in 1977 by the Organic Theater Company of Chicago, and launched the careers of Joe Mantegna and Dennis Franz. But by the time I first went to a Wrigley Field game in 1983, however, it was clear that Wrigley Field fans tended to be yuppies like myself, looking for a sociological excuse (let's pretend to be proles!) for daytime drinking in a place where you could (prudently, like the good yuppies we actually were) walk home without getting a DUI or getting mugged by locals.

In contrast, the White Sox's Comiskey Park on the South Side really did attract prole fans, but it was almost never fashionable. I attended the last game at that historic ballpark in 1991, which I always found better-looking than the overrated Wrigley Field, but Comiskey was next to a depressing black housing project of vast scale.

Another difference between Wrigley and Comiskey was that the Cubs had started broadcasting all their homegames on the cable superstation WGN during the 1970s. The White Sox had stuck with the traditional view that giving games away on television would drive down ballpark attendance. That era is when Wrigley ascended to cultural icon status. Why? Because it was on TV.

It turns out that what modern Americans want to do is to see with their own eyes the things they've seen on TV a lot, such as Wrigley Field. This explain the economics of the lecture circuit, on which the highest paid are the people who are on TV the most and thus presumably have the least new stuff to share with paying in-person audiences.

Post-Apocalypto: Mel Gibson in "Get the Gringo"

From my new movie review in Taki's Magazine:

Among literary critics, a controversy has been raging tepidly over what purpose reviewing might hold in this age of crowdsourcing. Why rely upon one fallible pundit’s thumbs up or thumbs down when you can access the wisdom of crowds by averaging many ratings, whether elite or mass? 

As a 21st-century movie reviewer, I’ve always found this catcall hard to dismiss, which is why I try to only write about movies where I can explain something more interesting than whether I liked it or not. While I take a backseat to no one in admiration of my own taste, I have to admit that the aggregation sites are reasonably reliable. 

Consider Mel Gibson’s new crime movie Get the Gringo, which debuted in Israeli theaters back in March but is finally out now on Netflix and DVD here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Read the whole thing there.

Debate comment thread

Tell me about it.

How we got here

Here's an early 2005 post by a bar blogger named Manhattan Transfer that lucidly summarizes some of the ideological transformations of the last two decades:

In college I somehow got mixed-up in the conservative movement... The main targets of campus conservatism were political correctness. relativism and multiculturalism. Nowadays everyone has some idea what these are but in the early nineties we were still discovering them.

The conservatives countered political correctness with a vigorous support for academic freedom, free speech and free press. The best argument of the proponents of political correctness was that political correctness didn’t exist, that it was a figment of right-wing paranoia. This was defeated through endless anecdote—it’s hard to maintain something doesn’t exist when every few weeks a new example became a national scandal. The latest uproar at Harvard [Larry Summers] is as good an example as any of the censorious mentality that infects so many college campuses. 

The conservatives countered relativism with what the left called “ethnocentrism” but the right considered moral universalism. The proposition was that the values of the West might have arisen historically in the Europe but were universally applicable to humans because the Creator or Nature had endowed all men with certain rights and obligations. You can see the appeal of this way of thinking for a conservative—it combines patriotism with a certain kind of high-mindedness. Our ways are the best but not because they are ours but because they are everybody’s. 

This was related to the fight against multiculturalism, with its emphasis on the rights of minority groups. In various ways, the Left’s emphasis on valuing the perspectives and protecting or advancing the status of minorities was presented as a rejection of the American tradition of moral universalism, equality before the law, and individualism. The left wanted a society keenly attuned to the differences and diversity of our people; the right wanted color-blindness, merit-based promotion and an emphasis on both our national unity and individual accomplishments. In the mind of a campus conservative, we wanted a society of character while the multiculturalists wanted a society of race and gender. 

If they had issued conservative movement cards, I certainly would have been a card-carrying member. Nonetheless, I could not persuade myself that there wasn’t something wrong with the conservative ideology. It insisted that diversity wasn’t an important fact about our country or the world, when all my life’s experiences taught me the opposite. [Manhattan Transfer attended public school in the Lower East Side during the worst of the crack years.] When they did speak up for diversity, conservatives insisted that they stood for a different kind of diversity—diversity of ideology rather than ethnic or sex diversity. But this is one of the least interesting kinds of diversity in the world. Which three women would you rather be stuck in an elevator with: A Stalinist, a neoconservative and a feminist or a Brazillian, a Norwegian and a Thai? What’s worse, no-one mentioned religious diversity, although this has since proven to be extremely salient. 

... At some point I started to look at the campus wars of the nineties with a jaded eye. The rhetoric of both sides seemed to conceal what was really going on. The left was engaged in a strategy of subversion in which political correctness, relativism, multiculturalism and feminism were tactics to undermine traditional rules and modes of behavior in American life. The right had adopted what was essentially leftist rhetoric of the early twentieth century—equality and universalism—in an effort ameliorate the effects of the subversion. In other words, the right was trying to use moderate leftist rhetoric to combat extreme leftism. What's worse is that the right hadn't persuaded many leftists but had persuaded themselves--they had adopted their own rhetoric as an ideology. 

I wasn’t any sort of leftist. In fact, I was well on my way to becoming a decadent reactionary. The pursuit of whiskey, women and wealth seemed to me honorable ways of stooping below the struggle between the forces of leftism past and leftism future.

Consider the concept of "colorblindness," which conservatives have come to extol in reaction to racial preferences. But is blindness, on the whole, a good thing? Is blindness a desirable attribute in, say, astronomers? How do you keep blindness from turning into ignorance and obliviousness?

There's a fairly simple solution to this conundrum, but it's one that seems to be beyond the conservative mindset: no, blindness isn't a good general policy. Overall, as Faber College said in Animal House: "Knowledge is good." On the other hand, the metaphor of blindness can be a useful tool in certain policy situations: "Justice is blind."

What we shouldn't do is reason from the particular to the general. Judges shouldn't play favorites in court, so therefore American policy shouldn't play favorites between, say, American citizens and foreigners.

This really isn't that complicated, but to get the message across it takes a lot of explanation of how it works in different situations and a lot of willingness to be smeared.