I really shouldn’t talk much more about Charles Murray’s book, since I still haven’t read it. (Maybe I’ll read it on break this week.) But I did want to respond to Ross Douthat’s “one cheer for Murray, one cheer for Frum” response to the book on his blog, as well as his most recent column.

Douthat says Murray gets three important things right that make his book worth reading:

First, he says, Murray “one of the strongest and most lucid explorations of the existing data on the long-simmering social crisis in working-class life, and the extent to which American society’s recovery from the dislocations of the 1960s and 1970s has been a recovery primarily for the upper middle class.” That’s a careful choice of word, “explorations” – indeed, it’s a word that doesn’t usually go with the two applied adjectives. (What’s a “strong” exploration? What’s a “lucid” exploration?)

The word that usually goes with those adjectives isn’t “explorations” but “explanations.” And one of Frum’s strongest criticisms of Murray isn’t that he offers no solutions, but that he doesn’t even offer a diagnosis – that his analysis of how we got here is thin to nonexistent. If true, that’s a huge, indeed fatal omission.

Second, he says, Murray “offers a convincing account of how meritocracy has exacerbated the problems that Murray describes . . . creating a self-reinforcing pattern in to those with much social capital, much more is given, while to those without, even what they have is taken away.” Again, I’ll need to read the book to see whether he gives such an account. I’m extremely sympathetic to criticisms of meritocracy as an ideology, as well as to criticisms about how meritocratic our system actually is (a rising class wins power and privilege by open contest, often overcoming handicaps to do so, but inevitably tries to pass that power and privilege on to its heirs, deserving or no).

But I still want to hear the mechanism by which meritocracy causes trouble for the struggling working class. I’m assuming the mechanism is that the self-perpetuating “winners” of society come not to care about members of the working class, and conspire to promote their own interests to the detriment of those of the working class. But such an argument requires a view as to what that conspiracy consists of – how working class interests are frustrated in the real world. Are they prevented from organizing politically? Or forming unions to promote their economic interests vis-a-vis their employers? Are their wages being forced down by high levels of immigration, or by free-trade? Are taxes diverted to projects and services that benefit the meritocratic elite, and diverted away from areas that are predominantly working-class?

If I understand correctly, the argument Murray makes is that the negative impact is cultural. The “cultural elite” looks down on working-class culture, and at the same time the cultural elite declines to promulgate their own, more stable lifestyles as an aspirational goal for working-class families. To caricature the argument, if wealthy people drank more Bud and went hunting more often, working-class men would work harder to emulate the wealthy by staying employed and marrying their girlfriends.

Implying that he takes this idea seriously, Douthat identifies as the third thing Murray gets right that he makes a strong case “for the power of so-called ‘traditional values’ to foster human flourishing even in economic landscapes that aren’t as favorable to less-educated workers as was, say, the aftermath of the Treaty of Detroit.” It remains true that thrift, industry, marriage, community involvement – these are surer routes by which to pursue happiness and prosperity than any other. But the job of a social scientist is to identify something resembling a causal mechanism. What encourages (and what discourages) thrift, matrimony, etc? In the absence of such a mechanism, a “case” isn’t really being made at all, much less a strong one – unless we really still need to hear a case made that these virtues are actually valuable.

And I really don’t think we do. Murray, after all, agrees that the right half of the economic bell curve does relatively well on the thrift/industry/fidelity axis. They may or may not “preach” that gospel (I hear it preached rather a lot, actually), but they don’t just practice it; they believe it.

Filling in what he sees as Murray’s gaps, Douthat’s most recent column identifies four ways that the government could actually make a difference to working class people:

“First, if we want the poor to be industrious, we should do everything possible to make their industry pay off.” Douthat suggests moving away from the payroll tax toward some other financing mechanism for entitlements. I am inclined to agree – the payroll tax is doubly regressive, both because of the cap and because returns to capital, ignored by the payroll tax, may really be returns to labor. I’m more skeptical of wage subsidies, which I suspect mostly depress pre-subsidy wages. Personally, I think it’s past time to revisit the question of the minimum wage, and whether it shouldn’t really be substantially higher than it is today. At a minimum, the conversation we should be having should be about how to get wages up at the low end. If that’s the acknowledged goal, we can have a good debate about the means to that goal.

“Second, if we want lower-income Americans to have stable family lives, our political system should take family policy seriously, and look for ways to make it easier for parents to manage work-life balance when their kids are young.” Agreed again – and I’m glad to see that Douthat is willing to say that left-wing approaches should be on the table here.

“Third, if we expect less-educated Americans to compete with low-wage workers in Asia and Latin America, we shouldn’t be welcoming millions of immigrants who compete with them domestically as well.” One can debate whether we’re actually “welcoming” millions of immigrants or whether we’re merely “permitting” them, but I agree here as well. It’s past time that we retool our immigration policies so that they serve the general interests of the American citizenry rather than the narrow interests of employers. That doesn’t mean closing the doors; it means revamping the system to select for immigrants that will add the most value. I agree with Ron Unz that a higher minimum wage would be very helpful in changing the political dynamic around imported labor at the low end of the wage scale. I think shifting from our current patchwork visa system and the “diversity lottery” to a system of auctioned residency permits would also be beneficial, improving the average skill level of immigrants, making enforcement much more straightforward (businesses who hired illegal immigrants would have defrauded the government by not purchasing a visa at auction, and could be fined some multiple of the fraud as damages) – and would bring in revenue to boot. But ultimately, the goal isn’t to avoid competition with foreign workers – we can’t avoid that entirely, and in many cases if we don’t import the workers we’ll wind up exporting the jobs. It’s to change the dynamic by which we talk as if having low wages is a competitive advantage for an advanced economy. It’s not. And if it isn’t, then if we’re importing large numbers of foreign workers specifically because they will work for lower wages, then we’re doing something wrong.

“Finally, if we want low-income men to be marriageable, employable and law-abiding, we should work to reduce incarceration rates.” The case for better policing and swift justice as both a more humane and a more effective anti-crime policy than mass incarceration is extremely strong.

What strikes me about the list, his original and my additions, is how traditionally liberal it is. The underlying assumption is that people, generally, want to work, want to marry, want to raise their kids right. Not everyone, of course, but the vast majority. We just need to make sure the system isn’t rigged against working people, but rather rigged, ever so slightly, in their favor, and not designed to create perverse incentives that undermine these virtues.

Most strikingly, there’s no “culture war” paternalism here. Douthat isn’t saying that the solution to working-class woes is a new evangelization. He isn’t saying that the way to get working class men to marry their girlfriends is to make contraception less available. I’m not saying he doesn’t believe those things would be good, nor even that he doesn’t think they would be helpful. I’m saying that recognizes either (a) that government can’t do much about them, or, more likely, (b) they are not central.

I call the list “traditionally liberal” because that’s what it is: FDR would recognize it, but so would Lyndon Johnson and so would Bill Clinton. “Raise wages at the low end” is a central traditional liberal goal. I see no reason why liberals would object to a higher child tax credit in principle – and Douthat acknowledges that the other “family policy” ideas on offer are liberal ideas. Immigration is an issue that, to some extent, scrambles categories, but I don’t think either what Ron Unz is advocating nor what Matt Yglesias is advocating are policies liberals should object to, and outright restrictionism hasn’t actually been the policy of conservative Republican Presidents in, well, in a very long time indeed (and if you go sufficiently far back in time, you’ll discover prominent restrictionists on the left as well as the right). And while crime policy today is also something that scrambles categories, sentencing reform is more a project for conservative intellectuals than a mainstream idea in conservative circles, and I think the alternatives to tough sentencing that Douthat alludes to would find a warm welcome in many liberal circles.

But I say “traditionally” liberal because there is a critique of meritocracy that is on-point here, but it’s one that, if Murray makes it, I don’t know how he squares it with his libertarianism. Meritocracy encourages people to believe that their power, wealth and status are earned. Which, to a certain extent, is true, but only to a certain extent. We don’t all start off equally-endowed with all talents, and not all talents are equally valuable in the marketplace.

There is a strain in liberalism – call it “client-service liberalism” – that is the liberal counterpart to conservative paternalism. This view holds that the solution to any social problem is to provide professional services to alleviate it. If, for example, there’s an upswing in teen pregnancy, we need more counselors to talk to teens about making good choices. If too many kids don’t have the skills to compete in the “new economy” then we need to “fix the schools” so that everybody can get a good job. And so forth.

Now, I’m a school-reform proponent in good standing, but “everybody” can’t get a “good” job if a “good” job is a job that requires higher education. Not everybody has the native talent to make it – and somebody still has to do those “bad” jobs.

Helping the working class starts out with a recognition that there will always be a working class – even if it earns its way into a middle-class lifestyle, and calls itself middle class. If we look at the jobs vast numbers of people do, and say, well, they should be low-paying because they don’t (or I don’t think they should) require that much skill, then we really are resigning ourselves to the progressive immiseration of a big chunk of society. If, on the other hand, we start from the proposition that a wealthy society shouldn’t tolerate such immiseration, then you can have a productive argument about what ways of preventing it will be most efficient and effective.

But, prior to having that technocratic argument, helping the working class requires that the working class have political organs through which to help themselves – or, rather, to protect their own interests. And when I look at today’s political parties, and non-party political actors, that’s what I see as most lacking.

I keep beating this drum, because I believe it. Overwhelmingly, Americans today are politically organized around culture. On the right, the strongest single political force is the conservative Christian political movement. This is not a working-class movement; the heart of Christian America is middle, maybe even somewhat upper-middle class. But it’s the biggest “populist” force on the right. And it’s not only not working-class, it’s not organized around class interests at all. And beyond the explicitly Christian right, the rest of the right is organized overwhelmingly around cultural appeals – that’s what the extreme belligerency of GOP foreign policy talking points is mostly about, for example. On the left, meanwhile, it’s still true that the big organizational muscle represents sociological/ideological interest groups and the social-service-providing sector. The big-gun unions are the NEA and AFSCME. Race- and gender-based advocacy groups are strong. There is not, on either side, an organizational structure devoted to advancing the interests of the working class as a class.

I don’t think the culture war is a conspiracy. Nor do I think that the issues that animate culture warriors on both sides are irrelevant – culture matters. And people care about these issues – certainly I do; I don’t lack opinions on these topics. But they are not the organizing basis of my political worldview. The culture war is an arms race that can’t be won because the median voter is at the median spot culturally; move him or her, and you move the political center – but if you’ve done that, you’ve already moved the culture, so why do you need to win an election on culture-war issues? Winning an election requires changing the culture, in other words, but changing the culture was the reason you were trying to win an election on these issues. (Obviously, at the margins there’s some cultural impact to each election, but I doubt the return on political investment is remotely adequate.) Meanwhile, the culture war is mostly just a reliable way to sort voters into political camps, so that politicians on both sides can win their votes without attending to their true interests. As such, the success of culture-war politics is one more barrier standing in the way of the development of a politics that could actually help working class America.

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A brief word apropos of Washington’s new marriage law on why, in my view, legislatures – rather than courts or referenda – are the proper venue for securing rights.

With time, I’ve taken a less-and-less fundamental, principled view of the way different organs of power operate within a political system, and more of a realist view. I used to get very hot under the collar about judicial law-making, for example, until it became clear to me that, on the one hand, nobody could agree on what constituted such law-making (was the Rehnquist Court’s “Federalism revolution” law-making or not?) – and, on the other, what principled difference it made whether courts were acting as legislatures, since, in an ultimate sense, they were accountable to the legislatures who appointed them, and hence to the people (or, in some cases, directly accountable to the people, in those jurisdictions where judges are elected).

A more realist view is concerned primarily with the political consequences of structuring your government in a certain way – along with the consequences of uncertainty about what that structure is. So, from that perspective, here’s why I think our elected representatives are the right folks to decide whether, for example, gay couples should have their marriages recognized by the state.

When the courts speak, they say, in effect, that the law already holds this or that. To hold that same-sex marriage “is” legal in a state where it was not previously recognized is, since there is no statute saying this explicitly, to hold that it is implicit in the law that already exists, or implicit in some reality that underpins the law. This, in turn, communicates to the people that the rights and privileges of citizenship are not something they, the citizenry, have secured, but something that must be secured from them. It therefore makes them worse citizens.

A referendum makes people into worse citizens from the opposite direction. When a citizen votes in a referendum, he or she is not obliged to weigh competing interests or objectives. The citizen votes on a single matter, and that is that. This is an infantile form of legislation, because in the real world choices impose tradeoffs. This is obvious if you talk about budgetary matters – the citizenry could perfectly well vote for a balanced budget, to prohibit spending cuts, and to prohibit tax increases, and effectively dare the legislature to get out of the Catch-22. (Some would argue that this is precisely what the citizens of California have done.) But it’s also true in matters that are not budget-related.

When a legislature deliberates, it takes into account not only the preferences of the citizenry, but the intensity of those preferences. If a majority opposes an action, but a minority supports it much more strongly, there is a good chance that the action will be taken – and this may well be a proper result, because the benefit to the minority may vastly exceed the cost to the majority. Moreover, the legislature has the freedom to act as it sees fit, and then wait to see whether apparent opposition dissipates before the next election. It has the leisure, in other words, to deliberate.

I believe, in other words, in representative democracy. On the evidence, that system is the worst system of government – except for all the others. I’m glad that the state of Washington decided what they did. But I’m also glad that they decided it how they did, by a free vote of the people’s representatives. And if the citizens of Washington are not happy with the decisions of their representatives, they can vote the bums out and thereby teach them a lesson about the intensity of the majority’s preferences in this matter.

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Oh, well, I suppose I ought to say something about yesterday’s primaries and caucuses. What strikes me most about them is: this is just what the designers of a new, more drawn-out calendar wanted.

Remember 2008? There was a seemingly endless “invisible primary” in which a variety of candidates were suggested (most notably Fred Thompson and Rudolph Giuliani) as alternatives who could save the GOP from John McCain. When they failed to catch fire, the only candidates left standing were: John McCain, Mike Huckabee, and Mitt Romney.

By the time of the Florida primary, the first large-scale contest, McCain had already won New Hampshire and South Carolina. Huckabee had won Iowa, but was perceived (correctly) as a candidate with a relatively narrow appeal – mainly to southern evangelical Christians (the only states he won outside of the south were Iowa and Kansas). Romney had won the Nevada and Wyoming caucuses, on the strength of Mormon support and organizational prowess, and was running (in spite of his record) as the movement conservative alternative to McCain. Florida was his chance to prove that he could do more than win peripheral contests where organization mattered more than mass appeal. But he lost Florida. And only a week later came Super Tuesday, with a huge number of delegates in a huge number of states in play. In particular, New York, New Jersey, California and Illinois – all states that were relatively receptive to a candidate positioned as a moderate or “maverick” Republican – all held their contests on Super Tuesday. Romney managed to win a handful of caucuses, and Huckabee managed to win a handful of southern and border states, but none of that mattered. McCain had won the big-delegate contests in “blue” states, and it was game over.

The national GOP, deeply unhappy with this result, pushed hard to line the state parties up behind a more drawn-out calendar. And they got what they wanted. A handful of states broke the rules, and were penalized with a halving of their delegate slates, but mostly the calendar looks like what the national party wanted it to look like. In particular:

• There are a handful of contests in February before Super Tuesday (the three caucuses – Nevada, Minnesota and Colorado – just completed; the Missouri “just for show” primary just completed; the Maine caucus; the Arizona and Michigan primaries; and the Washington caucus). A handful of contests spaced out over time and covering different parts of the country leave ample time for any number of surviving candidates to make a play for popular support, rather than ride momentum from contests just won.
• Super Tuesday itself is substantially smaller than in 2008. Fewer than half the number of states are involved, and well fewer than half the delegates are at stake.
• Moreover, Super Tuesday in 2008 was dominated by large, relatively moderate states. Nearly half the delegates at stake were from the four large moderate states mentioned above, plus Massachusetts, Connecticut and Delaware. (McCain won all these states except for Massachusetts, where Romney had been governor.) This time around, Super Tuesday is dominated by conservative states; the only states that fit the “blue state” profile are Massachuetts and Vermont, who between them have fewer than 15% of the delegates at stake. More than half of the delegates at stake are in Southern or border states: Georgia, Oklahoma, Virginia and Tennessee. Most of the remaining delegates are the spoils of caucuses in conservative Western states: Alaska, Idaho and North Dakota. And then there’s Ohio, a classic general-election “swing” state.

This is the kind of lineup the Democrats picked for the first Super Tuesday in 1988 in order to force their candidates to the right. It didn’t work for them – Jesse Jackson wound up winning the states with the largest African-American electorate, Al Gore wound up winning the border states, and Michael Dukakis wound up winning states like Texas where neither Jackson nor Gore had a clear edge. And it isn’t working exactly that way now – the front-runner is Mitt Romney, who may have run in 2008 as a down-the-line movement conservative, and who has been careful to stay on the “right” side of pretty much every line this time around as well, but who doesn’t seem to be fooling anybody. But it does look pretty much designed to force Romney – or any other candidate without solid backing from the conservative base – to run the gauntlet.

And run the gauntlet he can. The plausible worst-case scenario for Romney looks something like this. He wins Arizona, which is winner-take-all, while Michigan is a split decision, with Romney winning his natural demographic and Santorum winning his natural demographic (and the ultimate winner determined by the degree to which Gingrich proves a factor). Then Santorum wins the Washington caucuses. On Super Tuesday, Gingrich wins Georgia, Tennessee and Oklahoma. Romney wins Idaho (a strong Mormon state, similar to Nevada), Massachusetts, Vermont and Virginia. Ron Paul wins Alaska, where nobody else bothers to compete, and Rick Santorum wins the North Dakota caucus and, in a three-way squeaker, the Ohio primary.

That sounds pretty terrible for Romney, right? I mean, this is supposed to be a “realistic worst-case” scenario. But it’s a scenario in which both Santorum and Gingrich are well behind him in delegates, and both appear to be basically regional candidates (Gingrich having won only in the South and border states, Santorum having won only in the Midwest and in the Colorado caucus). Romney would still be the only one with a path to the nomination, a path that runs through the “blue” states.

Romney, in this scenario, would still be favored to win the contests in more moderate states. But they won’t come around for a good long time – Maryland on April 3rd, New York, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island on April 24th, California and New Jersey not until June 5th. As a consequence, Romney will owe his nomination even more clearly to these states than McCain did, and will have been badly weakened by the campaign.

There is logic to wanting a more drawn-out primary process, rather than rushing to anoint a front-runner (as, for example, the Democrats did in 2004). The primaries become a proving ground, testing the candidates to see whether they measure up to their own hyped virtues as vote-getters. But, as the Democrats learned in 1984 and 1988, when you have a weak front-runner or no obvious front-runner, all the long campaign does is reveal that weakness (in the first case), and reveal the divisions in the party coalition (in the second case). The GOP is getting some of both this time.

Bottom line: for a long primary process to reveal diamonds in the rough, the diamonds actually have to be there in the rough for the revealing.

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One further point about the “risk of retaliation.” Does any state that is attacked ever perceive that attack as retaliation for its own aggression? Israel perceives the Iranian nuclear program – which Iran protests is peaceful in intent – as an unequivocal provocation aimed at them. They point to Iran’s bellicose language and assertions that the Israeli state must be eradicated, to Iran’s actions in supporting Israel’s enemies in Lebanon and Gaza, and interpret Iran’s nuclear program in their light. From an Israeli perspective, a strike on Iran would be a defensive act – perhaps wise, perhaps unwise, but in either case a response to an Iranian provocation, and not an act of aggression.

Needless to say, Iran would perceive it as an unprovoked and blatantly illegal act of aggression, and might well respond, as it has threatened, with rocket attacks. But Israel would not perceive these attacks as justified retaliation against its aggression – it would perceive them as further evidence of Iran’s hostility.

If the United States came to Israel’s support in such circumstances, would most Americans perceive Iranian attacks on American soldiers or sailors, or on American interests abroad, to say nothing of American civilians, as “retaliation” for our “meddling” in a conflict between Iran and Israel? Isn’t it obvious that such attacks would only cause most Americans to line up behind even more forceful action against Iran?

I’m not saying that deterrence doesn’t work at all. But when it works, it works on decision-makers who fear both losing vital assets and failing to achieve their objectives. Pakistan can deter an Indian land invasion because Indian rationally wonders whether Pakistan might be willing to use nuclear weapons on Pakistani soil to annihilate the Indian army. This would make an Indian invasion futile; the only consequence would be the loss of a huge number of men and equipment. Similarly, the United States deterred a Soviet invasion of West Germany by promising to use nuclear weapons tactically to wipe out Soviet armor. The consequences of such a war for Germany and Poland would have been catastrophic – but the threat worked because the Soviets rationally understood that an invasion would be futile.

The fact is that there is no military in the world that can effectively deter American arms, because there is no military in the world that can impose those kinds of losses on us. Whether we can be deterred by a belated recognition of the profound limits to the efficacy of military power is an open question. The historical record doesn’t provide a lot of exemplars to follow in this regard, of hegemonic powers that retreated voluntarily because they realized that the promiscuous application of force was proving counterproductive, even in the absence of being dealt a decisive defeat. But, you know, we’re an exceptional nation, so hope springs eternal.

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As some of my readers know, I’ve got another blog, Millman’s Shakesblog, covering primarily theatre. I hope to move that blog to TAC some time later this month, and also to broaden its reach to cover movies, literature, the visual arts – but I expect its central focus to remain classical theatre. I hope it proves of interest to TAC’s existing readership and that it helps to expand what people think of as the scope of cultural coverage in a magazine like TAC.

By way of introduction to that site, the last batch of posts include:

• A review of the Chicago production of Seven Sicknesses, Sean Graney’s adaptation of all seven of Sophocles’s surviving plays. That production is over, but a different production of the play is being staged currently at the Flea Theatre in New York that I have on good report is fantastic, and that I hope to catch myself before it’s gone.
• A review of the Chicago production of Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris’s play about race and real estate, a clever riff on the classic, A Raisin in the Sun, but an interesting play in its own right, which is also finally coming to New York.
• Reviews of last year’s New York productions of Dreams of Flying, Dreams of Falling, by Adam Rapp, and of The Lyons, by Nicky Silver, two plays that appear to be about “families today” but that felt acutely dated to me.
• A review of James X, a one-man show from Ireland about the sexual-abuse scandals in that country.
• A review of the recent superb production of The Cherry Orchard at Classic Stage in New York.
• Reviews of two recent New York productions of Beckett, Fragments, staged by Peter Brook for Theatre for a New Audience, and Krapp’s Last Tape, staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with John Hurt.
• A review of Shlemiel the First, based on a cycle of stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, a show that I seem to be alone (or, alone with my family) in not particularly liking.
• A review of Richard III, currently on stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, directed by Sam Mendes and starring Kevin Spacey as Richard.
• A meditation on the use of World War I as a signifier in contemporary stage drama, prompted by the runaway success of the play, War Horse.

Visit there. I’ll let y’all know when and if the blog moves here.

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