Finally! :

The United States and NATO will seek to end their combat mission in Afghanistan next year and shift to a role of providing support and training to Afghan security forces, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said Wednesday.

U.S. military commanders had said in recent weeks they would begin a transition this year toward taking more of an advisory role as Afghanistan’s national army and police take greater responsibility for fighting the insurgency. But Panetta’s remarks were the first time the Obama administration has said it could foresee an end to regular U.S. and NATO combat operations by the second half of next year.

Let’s see what Romney says about this. He’s been for getting out of Afghanistan, as he was last June:

“It’s time for us to bring our troops home as soon as we possibly can — as soon as our generals think it’s okay,” Romney said. “One lesson we‘ve learned in Afghanistan is that Americans cannot fight another nation’s war of independence.”

More recently — in one of the Florida debates — he was kinda sorta in the Panetta ballpark:

“Our mission there is to be able to turn Afghanistan and its sovereignty over to a military of Afghan descent, Afghan people that can defend their sovereignty. That’s something we can accomplish in the next couple of years.”

It seems to me that Romney was giving a “we’re going to withdraw” response to a Republican audience while trying not to come off as defeatist. I may be wrong, but I’d bet that no matter who wins in November, we’re going to draw down our forces in Afghanistan, which of course is going to go to hell, because Afghan soldiers cannot and will not fight. A leaked classified US military report predicts that the Taliban will retake Afghanistan when NATO withdraws. A different classified report sheds light on why. Excerpt from the NYTimes account:

The 70-page coalition report, titled “A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility,” — which was originally distributed as an unclassified document and later changed to classified — goes far beyond anecdotes. It was conducted by a behavioral scientist who surveyed 613 Afghan soldiers and police officers, 215 American soldiers and 30 Afghan interpreters who worked for the Americans.

While the report focused on three areas of eastern Afghanistan, many of the Afghan soldiers interviewed had served elsewhere in Afghanistan and the author believed that they constituted a sample representative of the entire country.

“There are pervasive feelings of animosity and distrust A.N.S.F. personnel have towards U.S. forces,” the report said, using military’s abbreviation for Afghan security forces. The list of Afghan complaints against the Americans ran the gamut from the killing of civilians to urinating in public and cursing.

“U.S. soldiers don’t listen, they are too arrogant,” said one of the Afghan soldiers surveyed, according to the report. “They get upset due to their casualties, so they take it out on civilians during their searches,” said another.

The Americans were equally as scathing. “U.S. soldiers’ perceptions of A.N.A. members were extremely negative across categories,” the report found, using the initials for the Afghan National Army. Those categories included “trustworthiness on patrol,” “honesty and integrity,” and “drug abuse.” The Americans also voiced suspicions about the Afghans being in league with the Taliban, a problem well documented among the Afghan police.

“They are stoned all the time; some even while on patrol with us,” one soldier was quoted as saying. Another said, “They are pretty much gutless in combat; we do most of the fighting.”

I’ve written before in this space about the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his work on moral intuition and the differences between liberals and conservatives. See here and here for background — really, if you’ve never seen this stuff, it’s well worth your time. I’m not going to post on the basics of Haidt’s ideas again. But there’s a new piece on him in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it contains something I hadn’t seen before. Keep in mind that Haidt identifies as a political and cultural liberal, and an atheist. Excerpt:

Meanwhile, though Haidt still supports President Obama, he chides Democrats for a moral vision that alienates many working-class, rural, and religious voters. Though he’s an atheist, he lambasts the liberal scientists of New Atheism for focusing on what religious people believe rather than how religion binds them into communities. And he rakes his own social-psychology colleagues over the coals for being “a tribal moral community that actively discourages conservatives from entering” and for making the field’s nonliberal members feel like closeted homosexuals. (See related article, Page B8.)

“Liberals need to be shaken,” Haidt tells me. They “simply misunderstand conservatives far more than the other way around.”

But even as Haidt shakes liberals, some thinkers argue that many of his own beliefs don’t withstand scrutiny. Haidt’s intuitionism overlooks the crucial role reasoning plays in our daily lives, says Bloom. Haidt’s map of innate moral values risks putting “a smiley face on authoritarianism,” says John T. Jost, a political psychologist at NYU. Haidt’s “relentlessly self-deceived” understanding of faith makes it seem as if God and revelation were somehow peripheral issues in religion, fumes Sam Harris, one of “the Four Horsemen“ of New Atheism and author ofThe End of Faith.

“This is rather like saying that uncontrolled cell growth is a peripheral issue in cancer biology,” Harris e-mails me. “Haidt’s analysis of cancer could go something like this: ‘Sure, uncontrolled cell growth is a big concern, but there’s so much more to cancer! There’s chemotherapy and diagnostic imaging and hospice care and drug design. There are all the changes for good and ill that happen in families when someone gets diagnosed with a terminal illness. … ‘ Yes, there are all these things, but what makes cancer cancer?”

I think Harris is being inaccurate and unfair — and, as I will shortly explain, the grounds for my saying that undermines something I would prefer to believe.

I used to believe that the theoretical part of religion was a lot more important than it actually is in the lives of religious people. In fact, I think Harris and I would probably agree, as unlikely as that sounds, that it ought to be. This is why I’m always going on about the curse of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Whatever it is, it’s not authentic Christianity, not by the historical and doctrinal standards defining orthodox (small-o) Christian belief. If we Christians declare that tradition is not binding on us in any meaningful way, that we are free to believe about our faith whatever “works” for us, then we are theologically bankrupt. I find it easier in some ways to understand the atheist who believes it’s all nonsense than the self-described Christian who takes what he wants but ignores the rest, especially the hard stuff. To be clear, I don’t believe that only saints are authentically Christian. I sin. We all sin. I struggle to understand many of the teachings of the faith. But I don’t decide, on my own authority, that I don’t have to believe this thing or that thing, because it’s too difficult, or it doesn’t “work” for me. I am not a good Christian, but I can make that judgment because I have a clear standard of what a good Christian is — a standard that exists independent of my own preferences and moods.

But.

I have come to understand that religion as it is lived in the real world is a far less propositional phenomenon than I used to think. I mean, I have come to understand that the heart of religion has less to do with propositions than I believed. The great sociologist of religion Robert Bellah, in an interview about his landmark book “Religion in Human Evolution,” had the following exchange with me last year:

TR: Your discussion of “enactive representation” — the idea that you have to do a thing to learn about it — suggests that religion can only really be understood from the inside, through its practice — this, as distinct from trying to grasp it as a set of propositions. Is this why secular-minded people have such trouble understanding the religious mindset today? And, if religious truth can only be essentially grasped through enactive representation, doesn’t that mean that there is a limit to what can be communicated across religious traditions?

RB: When I said above that religion is a way of life more than a way of knowing, I was suggesting the importance of embodied practice, in the beginning ritual, as the most basic form of religious action. The emergence of language led to narrative or, if some scientists are right, the need for myth as a comprehensive story of the general order of existence led to language, so myth joins ritual as a fundamental component of religion. When theoretical inquiry joins the mimetic and mythic culture of earlier ages in the religions that develop in the Axial Age, it does not reject ritual and myth but only criticizes inadequate forms of them and makes possible the rituals and narratives of all the great traditions. This has led some religious people and many secular people to think that religion is only another form of theory alongside philosophy and science. But while understanding the theoretical achievements of the great traditions is important we will not really know what they are about unless we make the imaginative effort to see how the world might seem if we lived in the embodied practices and narratives of these traditions, a difficult but not impossible task. Indeed it is the joy of the study or religion to undertake this imaginative task.

Religion, in this view, is more about what we do, and do in community, than what we think about what we do. This is not to devalue the value of ideas, and their role in shaping our practice. But it is to downplay them, at least a bit, and put them into a certain perspective. Myth is inadequate without ritual, and ritual is inadequate without myth. There is a dynamic interplay between the forces. And this is where I think Haidt has more insight into how religion works than Harris does. Haidt grasps, I think, that before we even consider certain ideas, they have to pass through an unconscious emotional sieve before we can rationally grapple with them. In a fascinating Templeton symposium on whether or not moral action depends on reason, the eminent neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga says:

Third (and perhaps most surprising to everyday experience), all decision processes resulting in behaviors, no matter what their category, are carried out before one becomes consciously aware of them. Whether driven by internally determined and evolved structures or by learning and experience, these behaviors are executed by the brain in an orderly and automatic way. Given this uniformity in moral choices and in brain processes, why, then, do experimental subjects supply such a diverse set of reasons for their behavior?

This question is answered by the fourth discovery. There is a special device, usually in the brain’s left hemisphere, which seeks to understand the rationale behind the pattern of behavior observed in others and/or oneself. It is called the “interpreter” and concocts a story that appears to fit the variable behaviors in question. It follows from this that, since everyone has widely different experiences upon which to draw, the interpretation one comes up with will vary widely as well.

Knowing that the brain carries out its work before we are consciously aware of an action does not and should not lead one to conclude that we are not to be held personally responsible for our behavior. The very concept of personal responsibility implies that one is participating in a social group whose rules can be learned. When our brains integrate the myriad information that goes into a decision to act, prior learned rules of behavior are part of that information flow. In the vast number of decisions that a brain makes, playing by the rules usually pays off.

So, the practices of our community and the stories we tell help our unconscious brains decide which propositions seem rational to us. Our emotional instincts — both inborn and learned — are bound to play a role too, don’t you think?

To refocus, I prefer to believe, like the atheist Sam Harris does, in a more or less rational correspondence between belief and behavior. But we humans are messier than that. If Jon Haidt is focusing more on religion as what people who call themselves religious do instead of what they believe (or say they believe), then his conclusions make more sense. Jesus Christ was not a theology professor. The other day, I was talking to a good friend who is one of the most serious believers I know. He works in a hospital, and sees a lot of suffering every day. He is also a very conservative Christian. He said (I’m paraphrasing from memory), “In the end, it’s all about relationships. Look at the Gospels. Jesus taught, but he always taught within the context of establishing a relationship with the people. He loved them, and he taught them. But first he loved them.”

As my longtime readers know, I’m deeply concerned about the loss, in the current era, of a sense of religious orthodoxy — that is, the belief that religion makes objective truth claims. If religion becomes imbalanced towards the relational and the therapeutic, it will lose its essence. This is the danger Moralistic Therapeutic Deism poses to authentic Christianity. As the sociologist of religion Christian Smith wrote:

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is also about providing therapeutic benefits to its adherents. This is not a religion of repentance from sin, of keeping the Sabbath, of living as a servant of a sovereign divine, of steadfastly saying one’s prayers, of faithfully observing high holy days, of building character through suffering, of basking in God’s love and grace, of spending oneself in gratitude and love for the cause of social justice, etc. Rather, what appears to be the actual dominant religion among U.S. teenagers is centrally about feeling good, happy, secure, at peace. It is about attaining subjective well-being, being able to resolve problems, and getting along amiably with other people.

Smith summarizes what, for the American teens he interviewed for his study, is the whole of religion: “Just don’t be an asshole.” That’s a far cry from what Jesus said is the whole of religion: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind [and] love your neighbor as you love yourself.” MTD is a simulacrum of Christianity, and therefore more dangerous than outright atheism. Better to have a thousand Christopher Hitchenses lined up against you than one gifted MTD pastor.

But, as Philip Rieff so brilliantly diagnosed nearly 50 years ago, we live in a therapeutic age, one particularly characterized by the power of emotion to determine human affairs. (Rieff also said in the book that there are worse ways to live; “Just don’t be an asshole” is better than many alternatives). The therapeutic mindset is deeply corrosive of the fundamentals of Christian faith, as Rieff showed. But like it of not, that’s the age we live in. This is why Haidt’s work is so illuminating, I think. Because emotions, not rationality, are so determinative of our thoughts and actions, it’s important to have a better understanding of the different emotional orientations that inform political and religious stances. This is not to supplant rationality, but to have a better understanding of its limits. If you wish to persuade people who disagree with you, and who do not understand or intuit the rules of rational discourse and argumentation — and that’s very many people these days, on the left and the right, as many of us will have experienced — you need to understand how they think. It seems to me that this is all Haidt is saying. Like other prominent New Atheists, Sam Harris has an almost autistic faith in the power and role of reason, and a corresponding hatred for those who don’t fit into the rigid rationalist frames he has fitted for them. I think of a story my mother tells about me, in kindergarten, standing inside the great room at Jackson Hall, overcome by anger and frustration when my classmates marched counterclockwise when I wanted them to march clockwise. This is a temptation intellectually-oriented people have: an urge to interpret the world as an expression of syllogism, theory, idealism, rationality. In fact, intuition and emotion are far more important than we prefer to think — especially in an era in psychological history that privileges intuition and emotion.

I hope I’ve been clear here: I am not dismissing rationality, or the importance of theory. If I were, I wouldn’t care about MTD, when in fact I think it’s the deadliest enemy of Christianity there is. I am only trying to convey why Jonathan Haidt’s work has been so important to me in helping me to understand how others think, and why others think what they do, in this era. And why I myself think as I do. And why liberals and conservatives today constantly talk past each other.

Funnily enough, two different people posted two different stories in the comments section, titling them “Dreher bait,” within a few minutes of each other. I’m not going to post links in the comboxes to stories that are off topic, but well, they kind of are Dreher bait. Here ya go.

1. A Seattle library says adult patrons should be able to watch hardcore porn in full view of everybody else. This is not constitutionally required of them. The state Supreme Court ruled that public libraries can censor hardcore porn if they want to:

“A public library has traditionally and historically enjoyed broad discretion to select materials to add to its collection of printed materials for its patrons’ use,” the opinion said.

“We conclude that the same discretion must be afforded a public library to choose what materials from millions of Internet sites it will add to its collection and make available to its patrons.”

“A public library has never been required to include all constitutionally protected speech in its collection and has traditionally had the authority, for example, to legitimately decline to include adult-oriented material such as pornography in its collection. This same discretion continues to exist with respect to Internet materials.”

So why would the Seattle public library go to bat for patrons being perverts in public? Because these librarians are so open-minded and liberal that their brains have fallen out.

2. Two gay teen brothers (well, one openly gay, the other uncommitted, but Gawker is making crap up), the sons of a billionaire and a supermodel. It sounds like Falcon Crest for the Twenty-Teens — but it’s real life.  Peter Brant Jr. seems like a horrible person, but I say that only because he describes himself as a “socialite” and swans around with a cigarette holder. Alas, I have nothing to say about this, but I enjoy it being brought to my attention, in an Ignatius-at-the-Prytania way. So, thanks, Dreher baiter!

A Mark Shea reader has a provocative comparison to make between Red China’s quest for the atomic bomb, and Iran’s present search — with particular reference to Western intelligence agencies’ killing Chinese scientists working on the bomb. The post ends sarcastically like this:

Luckily China never developed either bombs or missiles, thanks to our heroic targeted killing of “enemy combatants” who were in the service of Mao.

I’m going to have a longer post on a new piece on Jonathan Haidt in a bit, but I had to pull this from the sidebar out for a separate piece. Longtime readers will remember I posted something about a talk Haidt — an atheist liberal — gave to a conference of fellow social psychologists. In it, he said that the extreme underrepresentation of conservatives in their field led to them not understanding how conservatives think, and thus to distorted conclusions. Haidt’s was a plea for intellectual diversity in the field, not for its own sake, but because the bubble social psychologists live in stood to distort their research and analysis. Marc Parry, a Chronicle of Higher Educationwriter, reports that the talk didn’t go over well with some in the audience. This is priceless:

Another [objection to Haidt’s speech] is that his argument might arm those who are “eager to dismiss our findings,” as John T. Jost, a psychologist at New York University, expresses it. “We’ve seen this with climate-change issues,” he tellsThe Chronicle. “If you can just accuse the scientist of ideological bias, then you can ignore the research findings.”

Got that? Haidt is wrong not because his data and analysis are incorrect, but because they are not helpful to the cause. Jost sounds like he’s ignoring Haidt’s findings because Haidt — a secular liberal! — has reached an ideological conclusion that Jost finds discomfiting. More from the Parry story:

One young psychology professor feels that Haidt painted an accurate portrait. It’s a measure of the sensitivity of this topic that the professor, a conservative who contacted Haidt to express her gratitude for the talk, declined to let The Chronicle publish her name. She fears that exposing her political leanings could cause friction with her colleagues, and she also worries that going public could sabotage her career, damaging her ability to win tenure or preventing her from getting hired by another college. The professor, who earned her Ph.D. from a major public research university on the East Coast, recalls frequent jokes about Republicans. One conference presenter, she says, discussed the need to mold undergraduates into liberals while their minds are malleable. “It makes you feel not welcome,” says the professor, who now teaches at a Christian university in the South. “They basically hold an attitude that conservatives are racist and full of hate and stupid.” She also says a liberal mind-set guides researchers. “They’re not testing things that might contradict their findings,” she says.

Think about that. This professor is so afraid for her career that she won’t even allow herself to be publicly identified as a conservative. I get this. I’ve mentioned before my friendship with practicing Evangelical Christians in major broadcast and newspaper newsrooms who were afraid for their colleagues to learn about their conservative Christianity, for fear of how the bias would affect their careers. And yet, the same people who inspired such fear in dissenters surely thought of themselves as paragons of open-minded liberality and tolerance. As with the field of social psychology, so with the field of journalism: if everybody, or nearly everybody, sees things more or less the same ideological way, they’re not likely to ask questions that would undermine what they prefer to believe. This is not something particular to liberals, obviously. It’s human nature. There are liberals who believe that liberals cannot oppress, only be oppressed. You find conservatives who think the same way, from the Right. It is particularly appalling, though, to see it among people who pride themselves on their open-mindedness and tolerance, when the truth is they only tolerate people who already agree with them.

Consider the hellacious smackdown the US Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals put on Eastern Michigan University for discriminating against Julea Ward, a Christian graduate student studying for her degree in counseling, who was thrown out of the program just shy of completion (despite her 3.91 GPA) because her religious beliefs prevented her from affirming same-sex relationships and non-marital heterosexual relationships involving sexual activity. It wasn’t that Ward told these people they were wrong; it’s that she recognized that she wouldn’t be able to serve them as they wanted, and instead referred them to a counselor who would. From the federal court’s opinion: Ward responded that she did not discriminate against anyone. She had no problem counseling gay and lesbian clients, so long as the university did not require her to affirm their sexual orientation. Because her professors taught her that counselors dealing with such clients “cannot talk about anything other than affirming [their samesex] relationships,” —a message Ward’s religious beliefs prohibited her from delivering—Ward asked that she be allowed to refer gay and lesbian clients seeking relationship advice to another counselor. Two days later, the university sent Ward a letter conveying the committee’s unanimous opinion that she violated the code of ethics. Because Ward was “unwilling to change [her] behavior,” the committee expelled her from the counseling program, effective that day. Ward appealed the committee’s decision to the Dean of the College of Education, Dr. Vernon Polite. He denied the appeal.

Dean Polite — love it. More from the court ruling:

What exactly did Ward do wrong in making the referral request? If one thing is clear after three years of classes, it is that Ward is acutely aware of her own values. The point of the referral request was to avoid imposing her values on gay and lesbian clients. And the referral request not only respected the diversity of practicum clients, but it also conveyed her willingness to counsel gay and lesbian clients about other issues—all but relationship issues—an attitude confirmed by her equivalent concern about counseling heterosexual clients about extra-marital sex and adultery in a values-affirming way.

The court found that the university’s claim that Ward violated their policy was rejected. There was no evidence of such a policy:

Many of the faculty members’ statements to Ward raise a similar concern about religious discrimination. A reasonable jury could find that the university dismissed Ward from its counseling program because of her faith-based speech, not because of any legitimate pedagogical objective. A university cannot compel a student to alter or violate her belief systems based on a phantom policy as the price for obtaining a degree.

The only thing Julea Ward did wrong was to hold conservative religious beliefs to which the professoriat at her university objected. She didn’t even try to impose those beliefs on others — in fact, just the opposite. These liberal professors punished this woman because she believed the “wrong” things. Hooray for what Rusty Reno calls “a season of judicial sanity.”

Megan McArdle doesn’t get why so many people, including fellow seculars, are willing to double down on forcing the Catholic Church to pay for contraception as part of its employee insurance. Excerpt:

I’ve seen several versions of Kevin’s complaint on the interwebs, and everyone makes it seems to assume that we’re doing the Catholic Church a big old favor by allowing them to provide health care and other social services to a needy public.  Why, we’re really coddling them, and it’s about time they started acting a little grateful for everything we’ve done for them!

These people seem to be living in an alternate universe that I don’t have access to, where there’s a positive glut of secular organizations who are just dying to provide top-notch care for the sick, the poor, and the dispossessed.

More:

And I’m fairly certain that if I wanted to stage a confrontation with Catholic charities, it would not be over something as trivial as forcing them to provide birth control coverage to their employees.  Preventing pregnancy is not a low-frequency, high cost event, and thus it is not really insurable.  It’s just a backdoor transfer from wages to birth control consumption.

This seems particularly stupid because the Catholic Church will almost certainly be granted an exemption by Republicans if they get even a little bit more power.  So I’m not sure I see the benefit in going out of your way just to tell the Church you’d like them to, well, go to hell.

Well said. Here’s the thing: in an abstract world, they might have a point about the confusion that would result if every religious employer demanded exemptions from every federal regulation that even slightly impinged upon its conscience. But we do not live in that world. We live in a world in which a concrete entity, the Roman Catholic Church, runs, more or less, a large number of medical, educational, and other charity-oriented institutions As McArdle says, many of these facilities and institutions serve the poor. Where are the secular liberal organizations running schools for inner-city kids, in many cases not even Catholic kids, and offering them the best chance they have at a decent education? On the trivial matter of providing for a relatively cheap and easy to obtain product — contraception — the Obama administration is going to frog-march this invaluable institution forward into a progressive future, and put all that it does for the poor — things that nobody else can do — at risk?

It makes no sense, morally or politically. So you don’t like the Church’s position on birth control, and don’t understand why it’s such a big deal to the Church. So what! Whether or not you, Obama Administration, understand this or not, it is a very big deal to the Church. We now know that this Administration is prepared to push around religious institutions in very serious ways for trivial reasons. The overwhelming majority of Americans — even Catholic Americans — reject the Catholic Church’s teaching on contraception. But they I believe a non-trivial number of them know a significant threat to religious liberty when they see it. And they’re not going to forget it this fall. Again, from a matter of practical politics, this thing is absolutely baffling, because so unnecessary, except that at some point, some folks within the Administration — including Sebelius, the Catholic HHS Secretary — decided that they were going to stick it to the Church on this minor issue.

A thought experiment. You are the Mayor of Popperville. In your town lives a small number of Orthodox Jews, who, because of their hard-to-understand (to you, at least) religious rules, have to walk to their synagogue on the Sabbath. For some reason — again, this is a thought experiment — it becomes clear that the great majority of Poppervillians would benefit ever so slightly from a change in the law that would prohibit pedestrian traffic through a certain area of town. This rule change would make it easier for most Poppervillians to go about their business. But this happens to be the only path open to the town’s Orthodox Jews. You are considering a proposal that would ban walking in that part of town on Saturdays, for the ease and convenience of the vast majority. The Orthodox Jews object. “I know this doesn’t make sense to you,” their rabbi says, “but it’s very important to us. Can’t you be more tolerant?”

You say, “But there are only a few of you. Most of the Jews in this town drive to their synagogues. You are asking the majority to accomodate your strange rules. Why should we let you do that? If we do, what will other religions demand?”

And the rabbi says, “Most Jews don’t observe this practice, it is true. But we do, and it’s very important to us. If Popperville changes this law, our community is going to have to move to another town. We can’t violate our consciences.”

You say, “Well, I’m sorry you feel that way, but we can’t compromise. You’re still going to keep operating the Mt. Sinai hospital your community funds, right? So many people depend on it.”

“Well, no,” says the rabbi. “We cannot in good conscience do that. We will have to close the hospital.”

“But that’s not fair to all the people who depend on it!”

“Mr. Mayor, if you pass this law, you will give us no choice. The people of our town have been able to get where they want to go with minimal inconvenience until now. It is not unreasonable for the town to accomodate our practice, as strange as it may seem to you. If you will not, then we have no choice but to withdraw — not out of meanness, but because we cannot do what we believe is evil in the sight of God.”

“But it’s just … walking? I don’t understand.”

“I see that you don’t understand,” says the rabbi. “You are not asked to understand why we believe what we do. You are only asked to accept that it is extremely important to us, and to make a reasonable accommodation for our practice, which, let’s be honest, has never been a problem in this town.”

You’re the Mayor of Popperville. What do you do?

[Advice to potential commenters: I’m not going to post anything that makes the false claim that this issue has anything to do with Church institutions taking federal money. It does not. This HHS rule applies to organizations that take federal dollars, and those that do not. So don’t confuse the issue.]

Noah Millman says George Packer has it wrong, that the GOP is not, in fact, going to have a McGovern moment anytime soon. I think these are good observations:

The Presidency of George W. Bush hasn’t been mentioned much on the campaign trail this season, but that doesn’t mean his policies have been repudiated by the various contenders for the nomination – particularly not with respect to foreign policy and the ongoing “War on Terror” – with the exception of Ron Paul. The same can’t entirely be said for domestic policy – there has been some sniping at TARP, some criticism of the level of spending, but nothing resembling a sustained critique – except from Paul. If anybody fits the McGovern mold this time around, it’s Paul, not Gingrich.

This is an underappreciated point. Can you find a single significant point on which Romney, Gingrich, or Santorum differ substantially from George W. Bush? It’s amazing. If Bush were considered a successful president, they would be bringing him up all the time. That they do not, even as they have an incumbent Democrat they deride as a failure, tells you that they know Bush and his legacy are poison. And yet, they may not believe in Bush, but they sure believe in what he stood for. And so does the GOP base, evidently.

Noah again:

Regardless of who the GOP lost with this year, I wouldn’t expect a profound soul searching. The Democrats had to lose a run of five out of six Presidential elections over two decades to thoroughly remake their party. If you want to know what will likely follow a Romney loss, take a look at what followed Dole’s loss in 1996.

Regrettably, this is probably true. I really did think after the failed Bush presidency and the Obama defeat of McCain, the GOP would do the soul-searching thing. Didn’t happen. Not even close. Maybe it’s just me, but whenever I hear Romney speak, it’s nothing but recycled GOP boilerplate. I cannot imagine why anybody who isn’t already a highly partisan Republican would vote for him, except that he’s Not Obama (which, let me be clear, might be reason enough). My point is that the GOP is not offering a credible vision of the future. Nobody wants Newt because they think he has good, innovative ideas for America’s future. They want him because they think he can tear Obama’s heart out with his teeth. That is hardly what future GOP victories are built on, especially when the oldsters start to die off.

Daniel Larison also has smart things to say about the GOP future, should Obama win a second term:

Something that makes it difficult to analyze the possibility of “an ideological reckoning with the base” is that there is no consensus among conservatives about what that reckoning would look like and what it ought to produce. More “reformist” moderates and conservatives in the GOP think that this reckoning would involve driving Tea Partiers and populists to the margins and developing a more “centrist” governing agenda, whereas many movement conservatives see Bush-era accommodations with the welfare state and so-called “big-government conservatism” as the things to be repudiated and resisted in the future. Dissident conservatives see both groups as too accommodating of the security/warfare state as well as the welfare state. The desired “reckoning” would look different for each group, and there are enough contradictions in Gingrich and Romney to provide justifications for each group to claim that their view has been vindicated by an electoral defeat.

Below the jump, a quiz Charles Murray uses to start out his new book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” about the fragmentation of white America. I got the original here, on a site maintained by Murray’s publisher. You’ll have to go there for scoring and analysis.

I scored a 38, which shocks me. If I hadn’t grown up where I did, and wasn’t living here now, I wouldn’t have scored even that high. (e.g., my parents are the only smokers I’m ever around). My bubble is thick indeed. There are some whose bubbles are much thicker. But not many. Here’s what Murray says my score represents:

A second- generation (or more) upper-middle-class person who has made a point of getting out a lot. Range: 0–43. Typical: 9.

What’s especially interesting, at least to me, is that I would have scored about the same when I was making $40,000 a year and living in Washington, DC. It’s not always a matter of income, but of class markers. Paul Fussell anticipated this in his incredibly bitchy, incredibly insightful 1983 book “Class.” It’s badly outdated now, of course, but still well worth reading (see Sandra Tsing Loh’s remembrance). Fussell anticipated the rise of what he called the “X person” — what Douglas Coupland would later label “Generation X.” These are people who scramble class categories by having cultural tastes that don’t correspond to standard income. I have a friend, an academic whose parents are academics, and who was on food stamps at one point, but who would, by Murray’s measure, score upper-middle class, all because of taste and life experience. So even though Murray’s framework is imprecise when it comes to income, it is still a useful reality check. As I’ve said again and again, the real class warfare in America is not strictly economic, but cultural. The two are connected, obviously, but don’t neatly correspond.

Here are the questions below. Again, click on this link for your scoring and analysis. I’d love to read your scores and what you think about them.

1. Have you ever lived for at least a year in an American neighbor-hood in which the majority of your fifty nearest neighbors prob-ably did not have college degrees?

2. Did you grow up in a family in which the chief breadwinner was not in a managerial job or a high-prestige profession (defined as attorney, physician, dentist, architect, engineer, scientist, or col-lege professor)?

3. Have you ever lived for at least a year in an American community under 50,000 population that is not part of a metropolitan area and was not where your college was located?

4. Have you ever lived for at least a year in the United States at a family income that was close to or below the poverty line? You may answer “yes” if your family income then was below $30,000in 2010 dollars. Graduate school doesn’t count. Living unemployed with your family after college doesn’t count. Take your best guess. For estimating your family’s past income,you should multiply what you or your parents used to make by theinflator appropriate to that time. For example, if your dad made$7,000 a year when you were growing up in 1970, you should mul-tiply that by 5.61. He made about $39,270 in 2010 dollars. Youmay estimate the inflator for any particular year from these: 1940,15.66; 1950, 9.12; 1960, 7.41; 1970, 5.61; 1980, 2.64; 1990, 1.67;2000, 1.26.

5. Have you ever walked on a factory floor?

6. Have you ever held a job that caused something to hurt at the end of the day?

7. Have you ever had a close friend who was an evangelical Christian?

8. Do you now have a close friend with whom you have strong andwide-ranging political disagreements?

9. Have you ever had a close friend who could seldom get better than Cs in high school even if he or she tried hard?

10. During the last month, have you voluntarily hung out with people who were smoking cigarettes?

11. What military ranks do these five insignia represent? [Note from Rod: I can’t reproduce them here; go here if you want to see them. I’m betting you’ll know whether or not you know the answer, even without looking. Me, I didn’t know.]

12. Choose one. Who is Jimmie Johnson? Or: Have you ever purchased Avon products?

13. Have you or your spouse ever bought a pickup truck?

14. During the last year, have you ever purchased domestic mass-market beer to stock your own fridge?

15. During the last five years, have you or your spouse gone fishing?

16. How many times in the last year have you eaten at one of the following restaurant chains? Applebee’s, Waffle House, Denny’s,IHOP, Chili’s, Outback Steakhouse, Ruby Tuesday, T.G.I. Friday’s, Ponderosa Steakhouse

17. In secondary school, did you letter in anything?

18. Have you ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club or Rotary Club, or a meeting at a union local?

19. Have you ever participated in a parade not involving global warming, a war protest, or gay rights?

20. Since leaving school, have you ever worn a uniform?

21. Have you ever ridden on a long-distance bus (e.g., Greyhound,Trailways) or hitchhiked for a trip of fifty miles or more?

22. Which of the following movies have you seen (at a theater or on a DVD)?

Iron Man 2, Inception, Despicable Me, Tron Legacy, True Grit, Clash of the Titans, Grown Ups, Little Fockers, The King’sSpeech, Shutter Island  

23. During the 2009–10 television season, how many of the following series did you watch regularly?

American Idol, Undercover Boss, The Big Bang Theory, Grey’s Anatomy, Lost, House, Desperate Housewives, Two and a Half Men, The Office, Survivor

24. Have you ever watched an Oprah, Dr. Phil, or Judge Judy show all the way through?

25. What does the word Branson mean to you?

You see the new study showing that pythons and anacondas have devoured much of the wildlife in the Florida Everglades? Excerpt:

Officials can’t stop invasive pythons and anacondas from marauding in the Everglades, Reed said; they can only hope to contain them. “We’re trying to prevent spread to the Florida Keys and elsewhere north.”

The snakes were released by pet owners into the Everglades, where they started to breed. A female python can lay 100 eggs, though 54 is considered the norm. The study was described as the first to show pythons are causing the decline of native mammals in the Everglades.

When researchers struck out to count animals along a main road that runs to the southernmost tip of the park, more than 99 percent of raccoons were gone, along with nearly the same percentage of opossums and about 88 percent of bobcats. Marsh and cottontail rabbits, as well as foxes, could not be found.

Well, screw the raccoons, I hate them anyway. Still, this is crazy. Why does the government let anybody own a python, a boa constrictor, an anaconda, or any other giant snake not native to this country? It makes no sense. You do not need to be owning a big snake! Who the hell thought it was a good idea to let people own giant non-native snake species as pets? Did it never occur to anyone in authority that hey, this might be a problem if they got into the wild and started reproducing?!

I live in a part of the world that is full of snakes.  We don’t need any more because jackass pet owners set snakes that aren’t native to this place free.

Except if they eat armadillos too. Then, never mind.