Hugo Rifkind in the Spectator traces these troubles to a generational divide:

Speaking almost factually, it’s pretty unlikely that the Tory grass roots are ‘swivel-eyed loons’. By most estimates, their average age is somewhere between 65 and 70, and swivelling your eyes behind bifocals rather defeats the purpose. Meanwhile, according to a poll by Survation this week, 33 per cent of those over 65 would vote Ukip tomorrow, and 13.4 per cent of everybody else would. Similarly, according to an ICM poll earlier this year, 37 per cent of over-65s fancy the idea of gay marriage, compared with 72 per cent of those below. This is glaring stuff.

… let us recognise Mr Cameron’s difficulty for what it is. Which is, essentially, that he faces a concerted fightback from an older generation that feels the world slipping from its fingers, and has had enough.

Or if you prefer, we can put the bellicosity on the other side, and identify an aggressive move … by a younger generation — or, to be more accurate, a couple of younger generations — who realise the world is finally theirs and wish to brand it with their stamp. This is why equal marriage, in particular, has become such a big deal, despite affecting relatively few people. It’s not just a symbol. It’s an early skirmish, between those who feel it is time to stop just living in their country and start owning it, and those who have owned it until now and don’t want to let it go.

It’s not just a matter of assertiveness, though. In the UK as well as the U.S., the cultural backdrops against which the older and the younger cohorts have grown up have been so different as to lead quite naturally to widely divergent views—indeed, opposite views of what constitutes stability and crisis, or who is aggressing against whom.

The Republican Party is in the same boat as Cameron’s Conservatives: however “grand” the GOP may or may not be, it is certainly the Old Party. National Journal‘s Charlie Cook observed earlier this year:

While Republicans still do better than Democrats among voters 40 and older, particularly those over 65, they are losing to Democrats among voters in their 30s—and losing badly among those under 30. As someone who just turned 59, I can make this next provocative statement: Democrats are doing better among voters who can be considered the future. Republicans are doing well among those who could be described as the pre-dead.

What’s true of the party is true of its ideology’s media organs as well. Last September, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported:

As was the case two years ago, The Colbert Report and The Daily Show have the youngest audiences of the 24 news sources tested: 43% of Colbert’s regular audience is younger than 30, as is 39% of the Daily Show’s regular viewers. Just 23% of the public is 18-to-29.

Regular readers of the New York Times also tend to be younger than average. Nearly a third (32%) of regular Times readers – are younger than 30.

In contrast, political talk shows, particularly conservative talk programs, have older audiences. Large majorities of the regular viewers of Sean Hannity (66%) and The O’Reilly Factor (64%) are 50 and older. Just 43% of all Americans are 50 and older. And while just 17% of the public is 65 and older, 42% of regular Hannity viewers and 40% of regular O’Reilly viewers are in that age category.

Hard demographics for Rush Limbaugh’s audience aren’t easy to come by, but there’s little reason to think the story there is much different.

The challenge facing conservatives on either side of the Atlantic is not simply to “modernize” their message but to discover what the characteristic form of conservatism for the post-Cold War generation looks like. The pitched battles conservatives fought in the 19th century over the relative status of different forms of Christianity and concerning extensions of the franchise and the rights of the lower classes are utterly unintelligible to the activists of today—most of whom would probably sympathize in retrospect with the radicals of the earlier era. Trying to formulate conservatism in the absence of historical context is doomed to fail. And when the historical context changes, the form of conservatism will eventually do so as well.

Both murderers were wounded by police. One was photographed and recorded. His message:

“There are many, many (verses) throughout the Quran that says we must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I apologize that women had to witness this today, but in our land women have to see the same. Your people will never be safe.”

According to ITV, one murderer, hands dripping blood, ranted, ”We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you.”

Both killers are Muslim converts of African descent, and both are British born.

Wednesday also, Stockholm and its suburbs ended a fourth night of riots, vandalism and arson by immigrant mobs protesting the police shooting of a machete-wielding 69-year-old.

“We have institutional racism,” says Rami Al-khamisi, founder of a group for “social change.”

Sweden, racist?

Among advanced nations, Sweden ranks fourth in the number of asylum seekers it has admitted and second relative to its population.

Are the Swedes really the problem in Sweden?

The same day these stories ran, the Washington Post carried a front-page photo of Ibrahim Todashev, martial arts professional and friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who, with brother Dzhokhar, set off the bombs at the Boston Marathon massacre.

Todashev, another Chechen, had been shot to death by FBI agents, reportedly after he confessed to his and Tamerlan’s role in a triple murder in Waltham, Mass.

Though Tamerlan had been radicalized and Moscow had made inquiries about him, he had escaped the notice of U.S. authorities. Even after he returned to the Caucasus for six months, sought to contact extremists, then returned to the U.S.A., Tamerlan still was not on Homeland Security’s radar.

His father, granted political asylum, went back to the same region he had fled in fear. His mother had been arrested for shoplifting. Yet none of this caused U.S. officials to pick up Tamerlan, a welfare freeloader, and throw the lot of them out of the country.

One wonders if the West is going to wake up to the new world we have entered, or adhere to immigration policies dating to a liberal era long since dead.

It was in 1965, halcyon hour of the Great Society, that Ted Kennedy led Congress into abolishing a policy that had restricted immigration for 40 years, while we absorbed and Americanized the millions who had come over between 1890 and 1920.

The “national origins” feature of that 1924 law mandated that ships arriving at U.S. ports carry immigrants from countries that had provided our immigrants in the past. We liked who we were.

Immigration policy was written to reinforce the Western orientation and roots of America, 90 percent of whose population could by 1960 trace its ancestry to the Old Continent.

But since 1965, immigration policy has been run by people who detest that America and wanted a new nation that looked less like Europe and more like a continental replica of the U.N. General Assembly.

They wanted to end America’s history as the largest and greatest of Western nations and make her a nation of nations, a new society and a new people, more racially, ethnically, religiously and culturally diverse than any nation on the face of the earth.

Behind this vision lies an ideology, an idée fixe, that America is not a normal nation of blood and soil, history and heroes, but a nation erected upon an idea, the idea that anyone and everyone who comes here, raises his hand, and swears allegiance to the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights becomes, de facto, not just a legal citizen but an American.

But that is no more true than to say that someone who arrives in Paris from Africa or the Middle East and raises his hand to declare allegiance to the Rights of Man thereby becomes a Frenchman.

What is the peril into which America and the West are drifting?

Ties of race, religion, ethnicity and culture are the prevailing winds among mankind and are tearing apart countries and continents. And as we bring in people from all over the world, they are not leaving all of their old allegiances and animosities behind.

Many carry them, if at times dormant, within their hearts.

And if we bring into America—afflicted by her polarized politics, hateful rhetoric and culture wars—peoples on all sides of every conflict roiling mankind, how do we think this experiment is going to end?

The immigration bill moving through the Senate, with an amnesty for 11 to 12 million illegals already here, and millions of their relatives back home, may write an end to more than just the Republican Party.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” Copyright 2012 Creators.com.

Chris Coyne, George Mason economics professor and author of one of the best books on why nation-building doesn’t work, has just come out with a new book extending the argument of After War into the realm of humanitarian intervention. In the above video Coyne discusses Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails with Peter Van Buren, Robert Higgs, and Peter Boettke at George Mason.

Watching the above parody, I thought about about an NPR story from about a month ago about “retro-acculturation,” in which musician Marco Polo Santiago went back to Oaxaca, Mexico, where his parents were born to learn “cumbia,” an Afro-Columbian hybrid music they once listened to:

Santiago, 36, was born in Los Angeles and is also a native English speaker. He grew up playing hip-hop and heavy metal. But now, he leads a band in Oakland that plays an Afro-Colombian style called “cumbia.” Santiago’s journey from hip-hop to cumbia began a couple of years ago, when he took a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, where his parents were born. He came across a woman playing a quijada — that’s the skeleton of a donkey jaw.

“It was my first time witnessing that,” Santiago said. “You’ve got a piece of carcass on stage that you are using as a musical instrument, and I was just fascinated by that, you know?”

… Santiago is a textbook example of what Jackie Hernandez calls “retro-acculturation.” Puerto Rican and raised in Manhattan, Hernandez is the chief operating officer of the Spanish-language Telemundo television network, which has made it a point to reach retro-acculturated Latinos.

It turns out the term has been in use for some time now, but my only encounter with some variation of it before hearing it on the radio had been this 2007 essay from TAC, by Paul Weyrich and Bill Lind:

One of conservatism’s most fundamental impulses, and one of its most valuable in a time when history is neglected or forgotten, is to recover good things from the past. Traditional cities and towns, passenger trains and streetcars, are examples of this tendency, which we label retroculture. The next conservatism should incorporate retroculture as one of its guiding themes, a basis for its actions beyond politics. Want to fix the public schools? How about Schools 1950? We already have retro cars such as Volkswagen’s New Beetle and the Mini. Why not retro manners and retro dress? It would be nice to see men’s and ladies’ hats again instead of kids’ underwear. By making old things new, retroculture might offer a counterweight to the endless spiral downward that pop culture decrees in everything. If fire is needed to fight fire, perhaps fashion should be used to fight fashion.

So what does this have to do with Mumford and Sons? Well, for starters it seems obvious that they tap into some sort of retrocultural impulse, but they also illustrate its limits in an important way. Just as investments in trains and streetcars Lind and Weyrich cite as the embodiment of retrocultural transportation often end up as public sector boondoggles or payoffs to monopolistic companies, much modern retro-sounding music ends up as upper-middle brow emotional validation in service of big entertainment. Besides, it’s not exactly clear what they’re recovering.

That wasn’t always the case, but we’ve (arguably) lost the participatory musical culture on which particular genres–such as cumbia, or American folk music–depend. I’m not sure there’s anything that can be done about that, and that dissolution itself has given rise to interesting new forms, as I wrote in a recent essay for the Umlaut, but it ensures the permanent retro-ness of the retrocultural project.

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Venner was a serious figure in France’s extrême-droite, a phrase with different and far richer connotations than “extreme-right” in America. A major current of French intellectuals opposed the Revolution, quite understandably, and kept at it, rhetorically, throughout the 19th century. A French Right standing for traditional authority, order, aristocracy, the nation (and skeptical about fraternity, equality, and the various French republics) has been a constant and serious force, able sometimes to speak for nearly half the country. The far right hasn’t been violent since the early sixties—when right-wing officers of the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète tried to spark a coup against De Gaulle for letting go of Algeria—but as a current in French political life, it is always there. Today its main concern is immigration, particularly Muslim immigration, and in its current political incarnation, the Front National, led by Marine Le Pen, has jettisoned the party’s submerged but never absent anti-Semitism for a militant pro-Zionist and anti-Muslim line. Le Pen garnered 18 percent of the vote in last year’s presidential election, and the FN is a fairly serious minor party, receiving 13 percent of the first-round votes in the legislative elections and holding quite a few local offices. Hostility to immigration is a “populist” cause, and many of the FN’s voters used to vote communist; nevertheless there is an aristocratic and intellectual aura to the far right dating to the Revolution, and not entirely absent from today’s FN. It is this of which Dominique Venner was a part.

The goals of the suicide are easy enough to imagine. Part is surely vanity—Venner’s blog, I’m sure, has received more attention in the past two days than its entire previous existence, and every intellectual wants to be read. He was old and recently diagnosed with a grave unspecified illness. His concrete goal was to pull together two disparate groups of disaffected conservatives, the opponents of gay marriage (as in the U.S. a sizeable, somewhat shell-shocked minority) and the opponents of immigration. In his suicide note he tries to connect the two causes:

I protest against poisons of the soul and the desires of invasive individuals to destroy the anchors of our identity, including the family, the intimate basis of our multi-millennial civilization. While I defend the identity of all peoples in their homes, I also rebel against the crime of the replacement of our people.

In any case, no one in Paris is treating Venner as some kind of lone nut. He has fought for his beliefs, long after they were no longer fashionable. In 1954, you could not find a single major French politician supporting Algerian independence, and De Gaulle had to maneuver against the entire political system to bring France to accept it. Venner was one of several who never would, who believed that Algeria was eternally part of France and was willing to fight for it, even so far as plotting against his head of state. Like many high-ranking French officers, he plotted and lost and spent time in prison. Upon release he then carved out a career as an activist theoretician and, later in life, as a serious historian. Marine Le Pen, the third ranking French presidential candidate, honored him after his death.

I am not entirely without sympathy—there is part of the French Right which has a certain  appeal. But it has a knack for making very bad choices at critical moments, for being unable to recognize when to fight, when to retreat to more sensible ground. Charles De Gaulle, in my view probably the  greatest man of the 20th century, was able to incarnate much of the right’s virtues and sensibilities, but with a much sounder sense of  blending these virtues into the politics of a modern democratic republic. De Gaulle, often accused of being a fascist (in many cases ignorantly, by Americans) opposed Hitler in 1940 and understood that Algerian independence was inevitable in 1958. (I would be curious if Venner ever reflected upon what the effect of keeping Algeria would have been on the current demography of France.)

I too would oppose what Venner called “the replacement of our people,” but I suspect the reality is something different. Throughout Paris you can see groups of French lycéeans, flirting, smoking cigarettes, having their coffee in their cafes, huddling on their motorbikes. They now come in all colors. To some extent then, the demographic of old France is not being replaced so much as supplemented. It’s of course a question of balance and of numbers. I would trust De Gaulle to chart the right course, but sadly there is little evidence he has any true heirs in France’s political class.

A self-described “constitutional purist,” he started working for the Sentinel in 1972 and two years later began writing a column that would continue through 2001.

“He was more concerned with the individual, and he felt that the government should be more of a servant of the people,” said Manning Pynn, a friend and a retired Sentinel editorial page editor.

Reese’s writing developed an intensely loyal following during a time when metropolitan Orlando was a decidedly more conservative region than it is today.

Still, Reese did not always follow the conservative line, and sometimes embraced a libertarian viewpoint instead. His readers did not always agree with him, said Jane Healy, who was a longtime Sentinel editorial page editor.

“He was very blunt, and he told it like it was,” Healy said. “Nothing was too controversial for him. He really was one of a kind.”

Eric Garris of Antiwar.com, which often ran Reese’s columns, remembers him here.

Somewhat ironically, considering his later view of Bush’s wars, Reese was pivotal in electing him president in the first place. He had supported Pat Buchanan in the past, but at the critical moment in 2000 backed Bush, and an influential independent conservative adding to the Republican column even a handful of votes that might otherwise have been up for grabs or have sat out the election would have been enough to tip Florida. But that’s just politics. Reese was a great columnist and a man of conscience, and it’s a shame we don’t have more writers like him.

Sweden has the reputation of being a placid, comfortable place, where the contradictions of capitalism have been softened into irrelevance. That reputation is now very much out date. For the last four nights, mobs of young men have run riot through the suburbs of Stockholm. No deaths have been reported, but windows have been smashed, cars burnt, and police attacked with stones and other weapons.

The riots were set off by the police shooting an old man who threatened them with a machete. In light of yesterday’s atrocity in London, that decision looks eminently reasonable. But allegations of police brutality are really just a pretext. The rioters, most of whom seem to be Somali immigrants or their children, are angry at what they see as economic and social marginalization.

This attitude is particuarly disturbing because Sweden has invested more energy and money to integrating immigrants than any other European country. It’s also reliably prosperous: there’s no mass unemployment, as in France or Spain.  What’s happening around Stockholm, then, can’t be explained away as a reaction to official neglect or poverty. Rather, it’s a predictable consequence of  mass immigration from the Third World  into a small, ethnically and culturally homogeneous society.

Immigration critics on this site and elsewhere worry that the United States is failing to assimilate the millions who have come here, legally and illegally, since the 1960s. I think those fears are mostly exaggerated. Although fashionable multiculturalism can inhibit assimilation, American life has proven to be an reliable solvent of foreign identities. As Christopher Caldwell has argued, however, the classic nation-states of Europe lack the cultural resources to absorb an influx of population from some of the poorest and most backward societies in the world. I’m glad I don’t live in Stockholm tonight.

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What everyone agreed on during Apple CEO Tim Cook’s appearance before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Tuesday was that it wasn’t actually about Apple’s tax dodging. It could have been dozens of other companies.

Apple did nothing illegal, and they’re the largest corporate taxpayer in America. The subcommittee’s report presents Apple as a “case study” in how multinational companies game the tax code, not accusing them of anything, per se. And though Senator Rand Paul took issue with  ”the spectacle of dragging in” Cook, representing one of “America’s success stories”—an oddly combative tone to take, which seems to have everything to do with his upcoming trip to Silicon Valley—Cook voluntarily appeared, and the subcommittee report even refers to Apple as a success story too.

Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) reassured Paul that it wasn’t about Apple, but about “investigating a tax code that is not working for the American people, is not working for businesses in this country, which some business decide how many taxes they’re going to pay, how many they won’t, what they’re going to leave offshore in terms of profit, cooking up all kinds of arrangements to avoid paying taxes.”

So why did Cook choose to appear? The Guardian’s Heidi Moore suspects this is because the subtext of Cook’s appearance was to build support for a tax holiday for repatriating overseas profits.

The reason why a lot of these multinational companies are so multinational is America’s corporate tax rate is one of the highest in the world, at 35 percent, which means companies park approximately 1.7 trillion in profits offshore (often figuratively) and don’t pay taxes on it. Everyone wants to lower it, but it’s the low-hanging fruit of tax reform—Paul called it a “sweetener” in his statement—so Congress holds out for a chimerical comprehensive tax reform package.

Two proposals have been released recently to repatriate foreign earnings. Rep. John Delaney (D-MD) has proposed tax exemptions proportionate to the company investing in infrastructure bonds.

Slightly better is Senator Paul’s repatriation bill, titled the Emergency Transportation Safety Fund Act, after the much less consequential infrastructure fund it also creates. Unlike the 2004 holiday which was largely used to repurchase stock and is widely seen as a failure, Paul’s bill doesn’t expire. (Why people see it as a failure is important—it’s clear that the expiration date led to short-term decision-making, that savings from the tax holiday went mostly toward repurchasing stock is a feature, not a criticism.)

These are both short-term fixes that do nothing to solve the underlying problem of high corporate tax rates, and mostly function as another tax loophole for large corporations.

It was easy to portray the hearing as just another lesson in harassment via the tax code, just like Tea Party groups, and that’s basically what Paul did. But it’s politically daft to suggest the hearing was in any way adversarial. Cook met with President Obama this November and was a donor to his campaign in 2008. Given the cozy relationship, he probably didn’t have to be “dragged” very hard to appear before a committee controlled by Democrats.

Some sort of tax holiday would be a massive boon for Apple. Why should Congress apologize to Cook for letting him make his case for why one is necessary?

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Pilling argues that the prospective free-trade union will, in effect, both reverse and replay the story of China’s admission to the World Trade Organization—allowing Beijing to be singled out as an unfair trader on the one hand (thereby slowing its economic ascent) and on the other creating “a block so powerful and attractive that China will feel obliged to mend its errant ways in order to join.” Pilling doesn’t think TPP will achieve its grand objectives, whatever modest benefits it may confer on states like Vietnam (“giving it preferential market access”) and Japan (“through nudging industrial and agricultural reform”).

Actually, the last thing Japan needs is cheap, imported rice—through all the hardships of the past 20 years, the Japanese have remained a healthy and culturally distinct people. Why give that up for the 21st-century equivalent of $24 of wampum? Yet Japan may sacrifice much for the illusion of a multipolar East Asia—for China’s neighbors, strategic considerations are at least as much a motive here as strictly economic ones. The leverage TPP would give Asia’s second-tier powers over China would be minimal in real terms, but to whatever extent it helps them persuade themselves that they aren’t really second tier, it is something deeply to be desired. No doubt there are certain U.S. lobbies that gain something concrete from the agreement, but the opportunity to manipulate perceptions of power in the region is part of Washington’s motivation as well.

It’s an unnecessary as well as futile ploy: quite apart from the dubious economic merits of TPP, it will aggravate the Chinese, encouraging them to lash out with their own symbolic displays of power, while the reality of the East Asian balance is unchanged. China is in the paradoxical position of being vastly more powerful than any of its neighbors, yet being surrounded by so many suspicious states large and small—not only the likes of Vietnam and Japan, but such giants as Russia and India—that it will never enjoy the freedom to throw its weight around that the U.S. enjoys now or that the Soviet Union once wielded in Europe. China is both paramount and constrained; what TPP does is to give Beijing one more reason to resent its condition. That helps drive nationalistic provocations, and TPP will mean more of them.

Glory be. Who would have thought that a conservative movie could receive such an enthusiastic reception?

Skeptic that I am, I believe that’s because nobody but me realizes it’s a conservative movie. It does not touch on the political, and it doesn’t preach. The focus is kept on culture, and it communicates its politics in a very personal way, letting the script and acting (both excellent) make its points so effectively that the audience is unaware of the larger implications.

The Story

“Mud” is a coming-of-age story about two 14-year-old boys, Ellis and Neckbone, growing up in an Arkansas town on the Mississippi River.

Ellis is distraught because his parents are separating and plan on getting a divorce. The boys find refuge from the world on an island in the Mississippi, where they stumble upon a fugitive from the law who calls himself “Mud” (Matthew McConaughey). Mud is madly in love with beautiful Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), who is supposed to meet him in their town. Mud’s crime is that he killed the man who impregnated Juniper and who threw her down the stairs to abort the baby. We know nothing else about the circumstances of that fight and why it resulted in the death.

The problem is a lynch mob organized by the victim’s father and other son. They are not legal bounty hunters. They plan to kill Mud in revenge, not bring him back to justice in Texas, where the murder took place. And they have paid off the local police to let them do it.

The two boys are drawn to Mud. Ellis especially, who is desperate to believe that love can exist and survive, even if it seems to have failed with his parents. They try to help Mud escape, and in the process learn some painful lessons about human love. But with teenage boys, hope springs eternal, even if it meets some detours.

Enough of the plot. I want you to see “Mud” and find out what happens on your own.

Why “Mud” is Conservative

First, the movie supports the ideal of fidelity in love and marriage.

Whether our characters achieve that ideal is not the point. Ellis believes that it is the goal, his father does too, and Mud would like to achieve it.

Second, this is that rare movie that treats poor Southern whites with respect. It does not glamorize them, but neither does it demonize them or sneer at them the way most movies do today. Mud, Ellis’s parents, and another key character are not perfect by any means, but they are essentially decent people trying to cope with hard circumstances. We see the complexity of motivations in each of them; there is not a one-dimensional character among them.

And third, men are treated with respect in this movie, unlike virtually all of daytime TV today and most contemporary movies. They may be foolishly idealistic about their relationships, but they do not beat up or degrade their women; they seek to protect and love them.

“Mud” may be a bit sappy in that we end up hoping for the best with each of our “sorta’ good guys”—Mud, Ellis’s parents, and the kids themselves, who at this point are just learning what adult life is about. But it is refreshing—and conservative in its own way, I would suggest—to end the movie experiencing hope rather than cynicism.

Today the IRS official in charge of the exemptions unit where the targeting of conservative groups occurred went before the House Oversight committee, and refused to answer any questions.

The ranking member on the committee Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) has called for Lois Lerner’s resignation already, and said during the hearing today that he was ”disappointed” that she pled the fifth.

Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA) referred to the IRS’s behavior to this point as “stonewalling” that “can’t continue,” and suggested a special prosecutor might be necessary. “There will be hell to pay if that’s the route we choose to go down,” he said.

“I have not done anything wrong. I have not broken any laws,” said Lerner in a brief opening statement. “I have not violated any IRS rules and regulations, and I have not provided false information to this or any other committee.”

She then declined to answer any questions. When pressed by Chairman Darrell Issa, (R-CA) as to whether there were any more specific areas she would be willing to talk about, the former director repeated, “I will not answer any questions.”

The IRS maintains that the targeting that went on was not political, and claims that interpretation is borne out by the Inspector General’s report. The IRS commissioner at the time, Douglas Schulman, said in his opening statement that the questions for tea party groups “created the appearance” of political targeting, which he said was nonetheless “inappropriate and damaging.”

The two Democratic Reps on the oversight committee aren’t the only ones who have questioned the IRS’s handling of the scandal thus far. On Tuesday, Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Baucus asked “Why wasn’t more definitive action taken?” after the IRS found out the targeting was going on. No one was fired at the time, when commissioner Schulman found out about it in May 2012.

One was reassigned, but today Schulman said, “To the best of my knowledge I was not involved in the reassignments.”

Though conservatives are working hard to tie the scandal to the upper levels of the administration, that link need not exist for the targeting to have been politically motivated. The IRS’s behavior takes place within the context of the president’s criticisms of tax exemptions for right-wing groups, with many Democratic legislators going further calling for them to be investigated.

The first lawsuit by Tea Party groups has now been filed, and today the RNC issued a Freedom of Information Act request for more information.

The White House has had to walk back several claims about who knew what, when. Howard Fineman has more on that.

The hearing is still going on, updates to follow.

Update: Reps Markey and Holmes-Norton pile on. Markey focuses on the IRS asking about the content of the prayers of Christian conservative groups, to which Schulman responded that “sounds inappropriate to me.” Holmes-Norton says it would be “far worse if there were outside influence, outside the IRS.” The IG responds that there is no evidence of that yet.

Update:

RT @darrellissa: E-mail show @ustreasury IG knew internal #IRS investigation found wrongdoing back in July 2012 1.usa.gov/16OiSr9

— GOP Oversight (@GOPoversight) May 22, 2013

Rep Jordan: Schulman visited WH 118 times

— Jordan (@j_arthur_bloom) May 22, 2013

Jordan brings up that 132 different members of Congress contacted Shulman about 501(c)4 status in the time period they’re focused on.

— Jedediah Bila (@JedediahBila) May 22, 2013

IRS IG says they’ve had trouble getting an answer on how and why the agency started targeting tea party groups

— Jon Ward (@jonward11) May 22, 2013

Update: Inspector General J. Russell George says, “We have had some difficulty in terms of getting clarity from some of the IRS employees we’ve interviewed.”

Shulman: “I dont take personal responsibility for there being a list with criteria on it.” @amspec #IRS

— Kaylin Bugos (@KaylinBugos) May 22, 2013

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Last year, when First Solar was taking a beating from congressional Republicans and in the press over job layoffs and alleged political cronyism, CAP’s Richard Caperton praised Antelope Valley in his testimony to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, saying it headed up his list of “innovative projects” receiving loan guarantees. Earlier, Caperton and Steve Spinner—
a top Obama fundraiser who left his job at the Energy Department monitoring the issuance of loan guarantees and became a CAP senior fellow—had written an article cross-posted on CAP’s website and its Think Progress blog, stating that Antelope Valley represented “the cutting edge of the clean energy economy.”

Though the think tank didn’t disclose it, First Solar belonged to CAP’s Business Alliance, a secret group of corporate donors, according to internal lists obtained by The Nation. Meanwhile, José Villarreal—a consultant at the power-
house law and lobbying firm Akin Gump, who “provides strategic counseling on a range of legal and policy issues” for 
corporations—was on First Solar’s board until April 2012 while also sitting on the board of CAP, where he remains a member, according to the group’s latest tax filing.

Read the whole thing, it’s a great illustration of why the Democratic party’s version of liberalism isn’t remotely opposed to big business. First Solar is an almost perfect case study in how it’s usually not thriving upstart companies that benefit from government favors, it’s flailing, politically-connected ones seeking to preserve their place in the market.

In the fall of 2011, First Solar finalized nearly $4 billion in loan guarantees fromt he Department of Energy, as part of a program enthusiastically endorsed by ThinkProgress and CAP’s other affiliates. They also received a $455.7 million loan guarantee from the Export-Import Bank to build plants in Canada.

As all this was happening, First Solar was beset by a number of threats to its business, mainly the introduction of more efficient Chinese and Canadian solar panels and diminished demand in Europe. In 2010 they had a net income of $664 million, and in 2011, a net loss of $39 million, in part because of a $215 million “manufacturing excursion” involving solar panels that failed at high temperatures. In 2012 it was one of the worst performing members of the S&P 500, despite a major cash infusion from the Walton family—heralded friends of labor and the environment, them—on New Year’s Eve 2011.

First Solar quickly sold three of the largest solar farms for which they received loan guarantees; Antelope Valley, Desert Sunlight, and Topaz Solar. In fact, the day after a $1.46 billion loan guarantee was approved in late September 2011 for Desert Sunlight, it was sold to NextEra Energy. It was dubbed 2011′s North American Solar Deal of the Year.

A GAO audit found that the DOE’s loan guarantee program had significant oversight problems.

The DOE estimates the project CAP’s Richard Caperton praised will create 20 permanent jobs.

Bill McMorris has more on CAP’s “Business Alliance.”

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According to the suit, the ACLU has made several futile attempts to obtain the FBI files since a reader alerted [Antiwar.com editors] Garris and Raimondo to this lengthy FBI memo in 2011. The details in question begin at page 62 of the heavily redacted 94-page document. It’s clear from these documents, the suit alleges, that the FBI has files on Garris and Raimondo, and at one point the FBI agent writing the April 30, 2004 memo on Antiwar.com recommends further monitoring of the website in the form of opening a “preliminary investigation …to determine if [redaction] are engaging in, or have engaged in, activities which constitute a threat to national security.”

“On one hand it seemed almost funny that we would be considered a threat to national security, but it’s very scary, because what we are engaging in is free speech, and free speech by ordinary citizens and journalists is now being considered a threat to national security and they don’t have to prove it because the government has the ability to suppress information and not disclose any of their activities – as witnessed with what is going on now at the AP and other things,” said Garris.

“The government’s attitude is they want to know all, but they want the public to know as little as possible.”

That’s the crux of the matter. How many more, and more intrusive, incidents are there like this and the Justice Department’s sweep of Associated Press phone records and surveillance of Fox News’s James Rosen? Whereas the Justice Department’s investigations were meant to be in pursuit of national-security leaks, Antiwar.com seems to have been targeted based on nothing more than its name and mission: reporting critically on U.S. foreign policy. In none of these cases does Uncle Sam’s dragnet seem at all justified—which is presumably why the government resists disclosure of its activities. We’ll have more as the suit proceeds.

On the one hand, Packer likes developments that enhance the lifestyles of the educated upper middle class: “marriage equality, Lipitor, a black President, Google searches, airbags, novelistic TV shows, the opportunity for women to be as singlemindedly driven as their male colleagues, good coffee, safer cities, cleaner air, photographs of the kids on my phone, anti-bullying, Daniel Day Lewis, cheap communications, smoke-free airplanes, wheelchair parking, and I could go on.” On the other hand, he’s sorry that these benefits aren’t more broadly shared. Life is pretty good in brownstone Brooklyn and its spiritual counterparts. But it’s gotten harder and harder in “urban cores like Youngstown, Ohio; rural backwaters like Rockingham County, North Carolina; and the exurban slums outside Tampa…”

So how can this be the best of times for gays, sufferers from cardiovascular disease, African American politicians, TV fans, ambitious women, and so on, but among the worst for the urban poor, agricultural workers, and overleveraged homeowners? Packer can’t quite figure it out:

We usually think of greater inclusiveness as a blow struck for equality. But in our time, the stories of greater social equality and economic inequality are unrelated. The fortunes of middle-class Americans have declined while prospects for many women and minorities have risen. There’s no reason why they couldn’t have improved together—this is what appeared to be happening in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies. Since then, many women and minorities have done better than in any previous generations, but many others in both groups have seen their lives and communities squeezed by the economic contractions of the past generation.

Although his economic generalizations are accurate, Packer’s remark is historically and politically obtuse. Rather than shedding light on the profound divergence in Americans’ fortunes and expectations over the last few decades, it reflects a spiritual crisis of the BoBo elite, which is unwilling even to contemplate the possibility that its commitments to individual autonomy and expressive consumerism are incompatible with the egalitarianism that it pretends to favor.

In the first place, note Packer’s unexplained use of the first person plural. In his view, “we usually think of greater inclusiveness as a blow struck for equality.” This is probably true of contributors to The New Yorker. But the automatic association of “inclusiveness” with equality is a fairly recent development in American thought, and reflects the triumph of the New Left rather than any inherent affinity.

Before the 1970s, labor unions were the most effective advocates for economic equality in American life. At the same time, they were for the most part indifferent and in some cases actively hostile to the liberatory aspirations of gays, women, and blacks.

Today’s progressives usually see this hostility as an expression of bigotry, and thus miss its strategic significance. For the labor movement, workers’ collective power against employers was vastly more important than individuals’ freedom to pursue their sexual orientation or personal ambitions. The unions’ success in the postwar period is partly attributable to the subordination of all other considerations to the goals improving wages, benefits, and working conditions. For labor, in other words, equality had little to do with the number of women and blacks sitting on the management side of the table—let alone gay marriage (which AFL-CIO President George Meany mocked as early as 1972).

The transformation of equality from an economic ideal to a social principle is important for understanding what’s wrong with Packer’s second claim. In our time, the stories of greater social equality and economic inequality are far from “unrelated”. Rather, social inclusion has been used to legitimize economic inequality by means of familiar arguments about meritocracy. According to this view, it’s fine that the road from Harvard Yard to Wall Street is paved with gold, so long a few representatives of every religion, color, and sexual permutation manage to complete the journey. Superficial diversity at the top thus provides an moral alibi for the gap between the one percent and the rest.

Did it have to be this way? Packer suggests that it does not, noting that social and economic equality progressed together for a while before diverging in the ’70s. But that divergence was not simply an accident. Rather, it was a predictable result of the takeover of Democratic Party by the New Left, which was far more interested in sexual and cultural revolution than in representing unfashionably conservative workers.

Over the next few decades, erstwhile radicals learned that they could get more of what they wanted by cooperating with business than by opposing it. The New Left got affirmative action, relaxed gender norms, and good coffee, while the corporations acquired a new justification for their profits. The libertarianism adopted by many Silicon Valley types is the most rigorous theory of this fusion of inclusiveness and capitalism. But the “social liberalism, fiscal conservatism” popular on Wall Street and at elite universities is a milder and therefore more palatable version of the same idea.

More generally, it is hard for a society characterized by ethnic and cultural pluralism to generate the solidarity required for the redistribution of wealth. People are willing, on the whole, to pay high taxes and forgo luxuries to support those they see as like themselves. They are often unwilling to do so for those who look, sound, or act very differently. In this respect, the affirmations of choice and diversity that now characterize American culture, tend to undermine appeals to collective action or shared responsibility. If we’re all equal in our right to live own lives, why should we do much to help each other?

Over the past several years, I have posed versions of this question to a number of intelligent, well-educated progressives who are puzzled by the coincidence of increasing social inclusion and economic inequality. I’ve never yet heard a convincing answer. George Packer is right to observe that:

No iPhone app or biotech breakthrough can do anything about this disparity. It’s not a problem that the most brilliant start-up entrepreneurs are equipped to solve. It seems immune to engineering solutions, since it has coincided with a period of rapid technological change. It’s one of those big, structural problems that requires action on many fronts, from many institutions—from government at all levels, from business, from the media and universities. It needs a shift in laws, priorities, social relations, modes of production, and in the ways people think of their rights and obligations as citizens.

But I wonder if he’d actually approve of the implications of such a shift, which is more likely to take the form of déclassé populism than the manicured progressivism on offer at The New Yorker. 

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This is why a convention was a bad idea.

The Chesapeake bishop who clinched the Virginia GOP’s nomination for lieutenant governor this weekend has a history of crazy, unhinged statements that everyone from Buzzfeed to Bill Bolling have already criticized. Many of them are pretty standard charismatic fare, but there’s some genuinely offensive stuff in there too, like saying liberals “have done more to kill black folks whom they claim so much to love than the Ku Klux Klan, lynching and slavery and Jim Crow ever did.”

Ordinarily there’s a certain logic to putting someone who can please the party faithful on a ticket’s second slot—the Paul Ryan to Mitt Romney. But Cuccinelli is anything but a squish, and E.W. Jackson’s nomination does nothing but ensure a very conservative nominee is associated with his very conservative running mate’s crazy, unhinged statements.

More importantly, the LG is the tiebreaking vote in the state senate right now. The current Republican LG hasn’t reliably voted with his party (on transportation, voter ID and redistricting). But Jackson will not win. That means the state GOP didn’t just give up the lieutenant governorship, but control of the state legislature too.

Dave Weigel has more:

Democrats win in Virginia, in off-years, when they convince suburbanites that the GOP has lost its mind. They will point out that the lieutenant governor, rather unusually, has real clout in Virginia at the moment. The state Senate is evenly split between the parties, and the state’s second-highest ranking official gets to break the ties. Bolling provided key votes on a tax-hiking transportation plan and a voter ID bill. Jackson repeatedly told Republican activists why Bolling was wrong; if you’d have put him in the chair, he’d have sided with hardcore conservatives.

A month ago, before the party took him seriously, Jackson gave a long interview to an Internet radio host named Anna Yeisley, and told her that the lieutenant governor’s office would offer him even more than the vote. He’d approach it as a “platform to move this commonwealth into a conservative, constitutional direction when the legislature is not in session.”

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