An ongoing review of politics and culture

Paris Hilton and Offshore Drilling

It was awesome. Referring to McCain as “white-haired dude” instead of using his name, saying he’s old enough to remember when “beer came in buckets”, putting up a picture of Yoda while she’s talking – why can’t McCain get her writers?

Note how she was careful to take one glancing shot at Obama, even though she was responding to a McCain ad. This was very well thought through. The scariest part of the whole thing is that her energy plan kind of made sense. It was certainly more coherent than anything put forward by either major campaign.

by Jim Manzi

08/07/08

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Peak Oil

Drilling in ANWR

We should do it for the money.

There’s a lot of oil in a very small part of a very big wilderness that 99.9% of Americans will never visit. There are, however, some reasons why making the decision to go get it is not likely to reduce prices people pay at the pump this summer. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), it would take about 10 years to get much oil flowing. It’s also not likely to be enough oil to dramatically change supply / demand (it would represent something like 0.5 – 1% of total global production for several years). Though it should be noted that at the time of peak ANWR production, around 2027, this would be equal to something like 10% of U.S. crude production, which is nothing to sneeze at, and comparable to various realistic cases for predicted energy production in this time period from some much-hyped alternative energy sources.

There’s an argument that just by signaling that we’re going to drill, we’d drive the oil market lower. There’s might be something to that, but such a prediction is highly speculative, both because the traders that set oil prices are aware of the size of U.S. conventional reserves, and because the market psychology arguments cut both ways – e.g., “Look, the U.S is committing to long-term dependence, and therefore demand will stay high”.

On the other hand, a very safe prediction is that it will be worth a lot of money to dig that oil up and burn it. The EIA estimates that there are about 2.6 billion barrels of oil in ANWR that could be expected to be extracted between 2018 and 2030. Even using the EIA’s long-term forecast for oil price – which is much lower than today’s price per barrel – that much oil would be worth about $200 billion. As an added bonus, that is almost a dollar-for-dollar reduction of the U.S. trade deficit. In the end, this is the rational argument to drill. America is a very wealthy country, but not so wealthy that we can afford to give up $200 billion as a potlatch.

Once again, as with cap-and-trade, McCain has thrown away a key part of the energy issue, which should be one of his strongest issues in this campaign. Public opinion is moving very rapidly in favor of drilling in ANWR, as you would expect given what’s happened to the price of gas over the past couple of years. According to Pew Research polling, just in the last 6 months there has been a 15-point swing in support. It is now a majority position. Imagine what could happen if a presidential candidate were actually arguing for it.

by Peter Suderman

08/07/08

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Copycats

Jody Rosen’s Slate piece on a small, liberal Texas alt-weekly that appears to exclusively print plagiarized articles is a great, fun read and an awesomely bizarre story. The piece has only been up for a few hours, but it appears to have done some damage already: The paper’s website has been taken down entirely.

My first reaction when reading the piece was a sense of awe that this could have happened at all, much less gone on for so long. After all, the sources the paper cribbed from — Slate, Salon, USA Today — aren’t exactly unknown, niche publications. But on second thought, it seems perfectly plausible. USA Today has real national reach, of course, though I’d guess its impact is still primarily confined to large urban areas. And Slate and Salon, widely read and influential as they may be, just don’t have much reach outside of coastal urban centers. I remember looking at a map of the readership distribution for a fairly popular web magazine and being surprised by how much the readership was dominated by New York and D.C. Living in one of those cities, it’s easy to forget, but even the largest publications just don’t have much direct impact outside of a few media-obsessed cities.

by Alan Jacobs

08/06/08

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codes

Things one might say about Barack Obama that would be coded racial messages:

1) He’s eloquent (because black people are big talkers, always rappin’ and signifyin’ and that kind of thing);

2) He’s inexperienced (a clear reference to America’s long history of interfering black people’s right to vote, which, while it was grossly unjust, also has had the effect of preventing them from having a lot of experience in governance and therefore being ready for the Highest Office in the Land);

3) He’s from Hawaii (because Hawaii is a long way off and kind of strange and largely unknown to the average white American, and black people are also a long way off and kind of strange and largely unknown to the average white American);

4) He’s tall (three letters: NBA);

5) He attended Harvard (because thanks to affirmative action we all know that Ivy League schools are populated almost exclusively by minorities);

6) He’s a lawyer (because lawyers, like black people, are all about jobbing the system to get what’s not rightfully theirs and not having to work for it either).

by Jim Manzi

08/05/08

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Economics

Wanna Buy a Watch?

Megan McArdle, in reference to a Portfolio blog entry, asks “why are sales common in the midmarket, but unheard of at both discounters and many luxury brands?” Her answer is that:

In the case of luxury brands, it is “This is a product for people who are willing (and able) to pay for quality)”. In the case of the discounters, it is “You will get the best possible deal every time you shop here.”

There’s a lot of truth to this, but there are some problems with it. First, sales are pretty far from “unheard of” at discounters. Consider dollar stores. Think this is a weird little niche? Between them, just Dollar General and Family Dollar operate about as many stores in the U.S. as does Starbucks. They are a huge part of what discounters are in the America. Here are current pages of sales at Dollar General and Family Dollar. Think about other competitors in each of Wal-Mart’s key segments. Here is a sale at Ross (“Dress for Less”) that provides at extra 10% to seniors on Tuesdays. Coupons are central to the grocery business. Here’s the Rite-Aid pharmacy (original name, “Thrif D Discount Center”) set of sales for this week. Here’s the current clearance sales circular for K-Mart. And so on.

It’s true that Wal-Mart has built a brand around the concept of Everyday Low Price (EDLP), but, while they weren’t the first retailer to do something like this, it was an innovation on their part. It is very far from inherent to discount retailing. The most important single driver of its introduction was that elimination of unpredictable spikes in demand allowed the creation of a much more cost-efficient supply chain. As with most of what Wal-Mart does, it was about cost reduction and logistical efficiency. Other discount retailers have attempted to copy this approach, sometimes successfully, but often not. Failures have mostly been due to inability to reap the potential cost reductions.

Different lower-end retailers have different strategies for EDLP vs. more promotional approaches (often called Hi-Lo), that tend to be driven by capabilities, installed infrastructure, historical brand / customer base and so forth. But in general, low-end retail tends to be a highly promotional / sales-oriented business, not the reverse.

These strategies tend to interact, and different retailers will often seek complementary niches. Not everybody who shops at discounters has the same psychology. Often, once Wal-Mart has entered a local market, for example, it can perversely increase the incentives for a Hi-Lo pricing approach for competitors, since Wal-Mart has already taken a disproportionate share of consumers for whom EDLP is most appealing.

Another factor that tends to influence whether a given retailer employs a no-discount strategy is the set of multi-dimensional trade-offs between the revenue decay from a product once it is put on a shelf, the velocity of inventory turnover for that product and the costs of holding the product in stock (both the opportunity cost of the capital tied up in inventory and actual cash costs). This is why Wal-Mart is not absolutely pure about EDLP. As Megan notes, you can sometimes get sales on electronics there, because they rapidly lose consumer value as new models are introduced. The same with clothing, where you will find seasonal clearance sales racks. This is one reason why you will often see explicit sales father up into income categories for women’s clothes (even more than men’s clothes, where fashion changes much more slowly, and therefore goods maintain value longer) and electronics than you do for other products.

It is true that there is normally less (explicit) discounting for high-end goods, all else equal. There is a lot, however. As per the prior comment, all else equal, you will tend to see this more for rapidly depreciating goods with significant holding costs and lower sales velocity. Another place you see it is very expensive items. Consider cars. Here’s an $87,000 Mercedes with “incentives” from the retailer. It’s harder to find sales (at least expressed publicly) for, say, Bentleys, which cost yet more. But what about your private jet? Here’s a Valentine’s Day promotional sale for private jet rental (“special value-added benefits from Avis, Sea Island, and Ermenegildo Zegna”!). Donald Trump has marked down his house from $125 million to $100 million. You can find discounts in almost any category and price level if the spend becomes a significant component of the buyer’s income or wealth. So it’s not so much “luxury brands” for which discounting is unheard of, but something more like “luxury brands for which the purchase price is small versus the typical buyer’s income, and either the retail experience is psychologically important or the item is a status symbol”. And, as with all such guidelines, there will doubtless be exceptions.

08/05/08

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Sadr as Groucho

From today’s WSJ:

Mr. Sadr isn’t giving up armed resistance entirely. Mr. Obeidi said Mr. Sadr will continue to direct small, special armed cells for limited military operations against U.S. forces. He said specific details about these cells, and how they can be distinguished from rogue Mahdi Army members, will be publicized at a future date.

by Noah Millman

08/05/08

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Fringe Elements

Some of you may recall my rapturous review of a play based on a couple of Chekhov short stories from last fall. Well, Studio Six is back again, with a production of Hidden Fees, a contemporary Russian play whose premier in English will be part of this year’s New York Fringe theater festival. Details are here. I will admit to being a biased source; I know one of the members of the company, and have been assisting them in whatever way I can. But I do think they constitute an exceptionally promising bunch of young actors, and I encourage anyone to head over to the Cherry Lane this month to check them out in performance. (And readers of The American Scene should note that this particular play is a biting commentary on unaffordable family-formation – so even those of you who ignore my theater reviews might have an interest.)

Don’t wait for the review, as I’ll be heading out of town the day after I see the show. Just see it.

by Peter Suderman

08/04/08

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Entitlement Reform?

J.P. Freire, responding to my post on limited government, wonders why conservatives aren’t spending more time talking up entitlement reform:

In other words, conservatives haven’t done a very good job of explaining how they want to deal with entitlements. Rep. Paul Ryan is one of the few people talking about this — my only question is why aren’t there more? Even within the conservative caucus?

I think the answer to this is pretty simple. For one thing, a lot of politicians don’t really know how to talk about entitlement reform. They can talk broadly about making changes, but the details are tougher in large part because conservatives haven’t put much effort into effectively branding reform. Entitlement programs are complicated beasts, and it’s not an easy thing to talk about them in a way that’s efficient and accessible. Rather than get bogged down in the details, lots of politicians just avoid the subject, or speak in platitudes.

The other problem, I think, is one that a lot of conservatives don’t like to admit, and that’s that, in the current political environment, entitlement reform just isn’t all that popular. There’s some support in the abstract, but the reality is that much of the voting public genuinely likes not just entitlements but the the idea of a state that provides entitlements. What the right needs on this front is smart messaging that makes the underlying ideas accessible, but that’s going to require some experimenting. And right now, experimenting with various messaging approaches isn’t exactly an enticing prospect for conservative legislators because those attempts inevitably get them tarred as stingy Beltway insiders who want to take away your Medicare and Social Security.

08/04/08

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The Story of English, or the Global Phase Shift

Some years ago, there was a fantastic PBS mini-series on the history and possible future of the English language. Or at least I hear it was fantastic. I never saw it, but my parents did buy the book that accompanied the program, which I found as a kid. Man, the book was far out — particularly the sections on established and emerging creoles. Basically, The Story of English argued that the same historical forces that fragmented the Roman world were driving apart Englishes spoken around the world. We live in a globalizing world (this was before the term globalization was widely used, but they got the drift), yet this doesn’t mean the end of particularisms: far from it. I recall having read that as American English “homogenizes,” we’re actually seeing a proliferation of new accents — strange admixtures caused by geographical churn.

I was thinking about this last week when I read about Australia’s state-building and peacekeeping efforts in the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, and elsewhere in the Pacific, and the backlash it has caused. (WSJ.) As Australia admits a vast number of high-skill economic migrants and refugees, its demographic composition is changing rapidly. For example, there are serious tensions between a fast-growing Muslim population and non-Muslims, even in rural areas and small towns, that more closely resembles the scene in France than in the US. Then you have large number of East Asians, who, one suspects, will assimilate and intermarry over time, giving rise to a distinctive Australian type quite different from the Anglo-Irish Australia of the past.

At the same time, New Zealand is, as a friend recently explained, becoming a more Pacific country. New Zealand’s history is very unique in that relations with the indigenous Maori population were governed by a Treaty, and so the Maori have long played a prominent constitutional role. The Maori have a formidable imperial history of their own, which colors relationships with other Pacific islander populations. The has been a large influx of Pacific islanders, in part out of deference to Maori wishes to frame a humane policy toward (sometimes distant) cultural relatives. Meanwhile, large numbers of New Zealanders, generally among the more ambitious, are emigrating to Australia. New Zealand also has a distinctive political tradition that will presumably grow more distinctive over time.

So America isn’t the only exceptional nation — all of the Anglo-Saxon settler states are changing at a fast clip. Something similar is happening in Europe, where elites are increasingly shaped by the Erasmus culture and migrants are interacting with native populations in very different, highly unpredictable ways. In Latin America, we see the continuing political “indigenization” of countries like Bolivia and Paraguay that were always heavily indigenous: what we’re seeing is a more equitable distribution of power, which looks like and feels like a slow-motion revolution. In Brazil, the economic boom and PT populism is fostering a redistribution of power within the country just as Brazil is gaining newfound prominence in the wider world. In India, a lot of different things are happening at once — indigenization is happening; traditional elites are using, or trying to use, their cultural and administrative capital to seize new levers of economic power; and than you have Erasmusian transnational assimilation, etc. China has a small but growing Christian minority. South Korea has a far larger Christian minority, and familiar left-right politics.

All of this is to say that all of the global pieces are moving, even in the familiar precincts of the West. It’s not obvious what the new alignments will be. It’s not obvious that China will continue to have a smooth rise. I sometimes think of GNP as in tune with the “indigenization” of America, which is an idea that’ll take some unpacking. We’re fixated on Iraq and Afghanistan, foreign policy traditionalists are fixated on China’s rise. Latin Americanists are really into Venezuela and to a lesser extent Bolivia. I think the real action is in Parag Khanna’s Second World, and in traditional allies that are simultaneously undergoing weird phase shifts. I’m going to try to think this through.

08/03/08

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Dara on Cultural Capital

Dara Lind writes, astutely:

Part of it might be that in the era of conventional “high culture,” familiarity with certain acceptable kinds of art was telegraphed much more publicly. Going to the opera was an event and, therefore, an opportunity to signify your sophistication to anyone who happened to see you on the way. Even hanging a work of art in the foyer was something that people would see before they necessarily had an intimate level of acquaintance with you. So in addition to serving as a “common substrate” that you were required to master in order to become one of the elite, it signaled a warning bell to anyone who wanted to interact with you but was firmly outside the elite: don’t even bother.

The dominant art forms of the present, on the other hand, are mediatized enough that we consume them in much more private settings. So in order to know a person’s taste in something it is necessary to have a relationship with him/her first, thus making it impossible for elite preferences to serve their second function. This is infinitely more true now than it was in 1996: back then, if you didn’t think you were the kind of person who liked gospel it was more or less impossible to discover it without going out in search of it, and therefore risking the disapproval of others, whereas now you can figure your tastes out pretty well without leaving the (solitary) glow of your laptop screen.

So maybe you’re barking up the wrong tree: instead of comparing the taste of today to the taste of twelve years ago (or the last few hundred years), maybe the source of cultural capital has shifted. Is there anything that serves both as a vocabulary to be mastered and as a signal for who it’s acceptable to approach? (My guess is that technology and social media fit the bill—signifying status via standing in line for an iPhone 3G, etc., with people with MySpace accounts constituting a sort of “anti-elite”—but I could be persuaded otherwise.)

I think this comment is totally dead on, particularly the last part. Which raises lots of new questions.

Read the full article

08/03/08

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Samantha Power and the Subtle Invocation

Samantha Power has a review essay on the Democrats and foreign policy, and she rightly gives Matt Yglesias’s excellent Heads in the Sand a strongly favorable notice. I recommend the piece on the strength of her wise endorsement alone.

Read the full article

08/03/08

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I Think I Was Wrong About Afghanistan

I was talking to Graeme, a colleague who is also one of my best friends, about Afghanistan — he was embedded with Canadian forces battling the Taliban, and he came away extremely impressed. Because Canada has a tiny military, it has a bizarrely unspecialized military.* MPs are doing the work of infantrymen, to name one small example, and they are incredibly effective killers of insurgents. Unfortunately, they simply can’t expand their numbers. The Canadian effort in Afghanistan has stretched their forces very thin. So assuming we are going to ignore the broader strategic context and focus solely on the fight within Afghanistan’s borders, it is true, as Obama has argued, that more US troops would make a real difference.

At the same time, the insurgency is fueled by Pakistan’s fundamental strategic anxiety — a fear of being squeezed on both flanks by India, as Robert D. Kaplan explains in an Atlantic Dispatch.

The Karzai government has openly and brazenly strengthened its ties with India, and allowed Indian consulates in Jalalabad, Kandahar, Herat, and Mazar-e-Sharif. It has kept alive the possibility of inviting India to help train the new Afghan army, and to help in dam construction in the northeastern Afghan province of Kunar, abutting Pakistan. All this has driven the ISI wild with fear and anger.

This is not say that fear is justified, but it is real and it is shaping the conflict. And so Kaplan emphasizes the central importance of active diplomacy designed to assuage Pakistani fears and get them on-side.

In the midst of all this, both Bush and Barack Obama talk simplistically about sending more American troops to Afghanistan. The India-Pakistan rivalry is just one of several political problems in the region that negate the benefit of more troops.

Kaplan ends on a really intriguing note.

The lesson: To get bin Laden, we need a coherent regional policy of development that draws all three countries into an organic embrace. A manhunt alone will fail. A policy of nation-building in Pakistan and Afghanistan will, counterintuitively, lead to a successful manhunt.

This actually sounds like something Obama would instinctively get. But he is framing his Afghanistan policy as part of an argument about Iraq. Still, one senses that he would get the non-military dimension of the conflict. My sense is that McCain would too, judging by the regional experts he’s surrounded himself with.

The Pakistani security community sees the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area far less simplistically than we do. It knows many Taliban fight without a particular worldview; they are merely ornery Pashtun backwoodsmen who feel left out of the power structure in Kabul.

Here I’m picturing Yosemite Sam.

The Pakistanis also know elements loosely aligned with Karzai, such as former mujahideen commanders Din Mohammed and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who do in fact have a clear anti-American, al-Qaeda-sympathetic worldview. Pakistan is far more threatened by Talibanization than the U.S. is, but victory will require deft diplomacy, including alliances with some Taliban elements against others.

There is a growing sense in neocon circles that Karzai has to go. I wonder about who the likely alternatives are — I’ll do some digging.

Bizarre factoid. North Korea has 23 million people and a 1.2 million-man army. Canada has 33 million people and 75,000 active personnel in the Canadian Forces, a small fraction of whom are deployable combat troops.

by Alan Jacobs

08/03/08

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a poem by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (ca. 1972)

How easy it is to live with You, O Lord.
How easy to believe in You.
When my spirit is overwhelmed within me,
When even the keenest see no further than the night,
And know not what to do tomorrow,
You bestow on me the certitude
That You exist and are mindful of me,
That all the paths of righteousness are not barred.
As I ascend in to the hill of earthly glory,
I turn back and gaze, astonished, on the road
That led me here beyond despair,
Where I too may reflect Your radiance upon mankind.
All that I may reflect, You shall accord me,
And appoint others where I shall fail.

(Solzhenitsyn died today at the age of eighty-nine.)

08/03/08

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Greg Anrig's Operation Chaos

… has written an op-ed on the bankruptcy of conservative ideas.

Read the full article

08/03/08

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Eclecticism and Class

For Pierre Bourdieu, the cultivation of taste was a key way elites entrenched their power. By devaluing cultural styles embraced by the vast majority, and by embracing highly exclusive cultural forms that take a lot of time and money to fully appreciate (classical music, opera, etc.), elites create high barriers to scrappy strivers who want to reach the commanding heights of society. This has been a running theme for a long time — think of Lucky Jim or any of the good, totally tragic Merchant-Ivory films. In the film adaptation of A Room with a View, which my sisters made me watch hundreds of times when I was a kid (I’m still scarred), the hero is this democratic freethinker who has an undisciplined and semi-untutored love of beautiful things, so intense that he at one point climbs up a tree and yells like a lunatic. And of course you root for him, even though Daniel Day-Lewis Cecil Vyse was clearly the cooler dude. But yeah, Cecil Vyse, who hates Lucy’s country cronies and is a massive snob, is the classic elitist Bourdieu villain.

But wait — in America, as far as I can tell, members of “the elite,” understood as people with the most occupational prestige, take great pride in their broadmindedness. Distinctions are important, but the distinctions aren’t classic high-low distinctions. I talked to this brilliant, brilliant kid a few months ago, an African American student at an exclusive Southern prep school, and he noted that the cool kids — the kids with the most cultural capital, so to speak — listened to a dizzyingly wide range of music, from extremely twee indie pop to the grimiest hip-hop. So in a sense the cultural code was actually more inscrutable: there was no stable canon one could master. Rather, you had to be sufficiently and continuously plugged in to sense which way the cultural winds would shift, which is exhausting for those trying to succeed at status politics. One could argue that this is at least as insidious as cultural elitism along the lines described by Bourdieu. There’s no denying, however, that it is different.

In “Anything but Heavy Metal,” Bethany Bryson described how “cultural omnivorousness” and exclusion can co-exist. She coined the term “multicultural capital.”

Tolerant musical taste, however, is found to have a specific pattern of exclusiveness. Those genres whose fans have the least education — gospel, country, rap — are also those most likely to be rejected by the musically tolerant. Broad familiarity with music genres is also significantly related to education. I suggest, therefore, that cultural tolerance constitutes multicultural capital as it is unevenly distributed in the population and evidences class-based exclusion.

The paper was written in 1996. Since then, my sense is that the terrain has shifted: no one can be both musically tolerant and dislike gospel, country, or rap, at least not in any thoroughgoing way. As for the title of Bryson’s essay, it is also a sign of the times: metal is increasingly seen as the most innovative popular genre, and it is fast fragmenting into extremely stylized, impenetrable subcultures. I’d say the cultural omnivore of this moment is obligated to have some familiarity with extreme doom sludge metal. Which is why I’m not a cultural omnivore. To me, sludge metal sounds like someone drilling into my brain. But I digress.

My brief forays into elite America have frequently involved extremely long conversations about the popular television sitcom Martin, which starred comedian Martin Lawrence as a fast-talking radio DJ and as an unpleasant, hirsute, “round-the-way” girl named Sheneneh. The main way I form friendships, and I don’t think I’m alone in this regard, is by drawing on this shared stock of lowbrow cultural references. I recently spent a frighteningly long time with my high school friends constructing detailed fan fiction scenarios about Family Matters, the premise being that the actors Jaleel White and Darius McCrary, who played Steve Urkel and Eddie Winslow respectively, despised each other because McCrary was a militant black nationalist and White was a scene-stealing scoundrel keen on “mainstreaming” the series. We also devised an unctuous white executive producer who insisted that his naked attempts at increasing series ratings were in service to his radical brand of Freirian Pedagogy. It made more sense at the time.

The point is, this stock of references has proved an essential substrate for forming friendships with other anglophone North Americans. I recall going on a date once with a young woman who had never watched much television — a good thing — and discovering really quickly that we had very little to talk about. (There were other reasons too, rest assured.) Yes, this reflects kind of poorly on me. Yet I certainly don’t think I’m alone in this regard, and I wonder how the simultaneous pervasiveness and exclusiveness of this cultural style will change as we transition fully to a distributed, digital culture. Will we still have the common substrate? Or will we cluster early — say in our teens — and hive off? Or, and this is an optimistic scenario, will we expect to have less in common and expect to learn more, to be more open and flexible in our tastes? This is a big subject.

by Alan Jacobs

08/02/08

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culinary conservatism, part II

The theologian Jaroslav Pelikan once wrote, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” The idea of “tradition” is a central one in the kind of conservatism that I am most drawn to — the kind that moves from Burke through Kirk — but it is a vexed notion. To use Pelikan’s language, one man’s tradition is another man’s traditionalism. Did Russell Kirk’s cultural proposals amount to a vibrant conserving of the best of the past, adapted to the modern world, or did they amount to little more than nostalgia? Was Kirk’s attachment to what he called his “ancestral homeland” in Michigan an admirable model of cultivated tradition, or, in this young country, a kind of faux-aristocratic posing?

Alasdair MacIntyre thinks that Burke himself had succumbed to a rigid traditionalism, adhering mindlessly and unquestioningly to an idealized past — which just goes to show that MacIntyre has not read Burke well, or at all. But MacIntyre rightly demonstrates (primarily in his 1988 book Whose Justice? Which Rationality?) that this moribund traditionalism is one of the twin dangers facing any Burkean conservatism. The other is the maintaining of a merely nominal connection with one’s tradition, using its language perhaps but losing sight of its core principles.

Each of these dangers confronts the conservative impulse when it encounters the new. But if those are the dangers, what are the possibilities? This is where it pays to reflect on the cooking of Frank Stitt, whose restaurant Highlands I described in my first post on this subject. Stitt is an Alabama boy whose encounter with French and particularly Provençal cuisine did not cause him to abandon the food of his childhood in favor of the new and exciting Continental alternative, nor to reject this new world to which he had been exposed and simply “return to his roots.” Instead, he saw this encounter with very different culinary traditions as an opportunity to renew his own tradition of cooking and eating. He saw that there are certain analogies between the country cooking of Provence and the country cooking of Alabama; he came to believe that if a great tradition of cuisine could come out of the one, similar possibilities might lie in store for the other. He discerned in Provençal and French techniques opportunities for taking what his own Southern culture already did and helping it to do those things better. So when I eat fried green tomatoes at Highlands I am simultaneously connected to highly developed Continental ways of cooking and presenting food and to my Alabama childhood.

This is of course just what Rémy does for Anton Ego in Ratatouille. (And I would also suggest that this is what Brad Bird himself does in his movies, but that’s a story for another day.)

I understand this kind of culinary art as profoundly conservative in this sense: you love and respect a particular tradition so much that you eagerly embrace ideas that are alien and new if those ideas help your home tradition to become a better version of itself. And I also take my reflections in this post to be complementary to, yet distinct from, the essay by John Schwenkler that set me on this path of thought. John is concerned with certain practices of food making and consuming that follow from conservative commitments; I am more concerned here with habits of thought. But surely the two are necessary complements to each other.

As I have suggested, these habits of thought require a kind of analogical imagination: you have to be able to see something in the alien and new that echoes or resonates with what you know. Frank Stitt has this kind of imagination; many of my favorite artists do. And anyone who thinks this kind of culture-making worthwhile should try to think analogically as well: what would that kind of thing look like in my work? A difficult but necessary task: as Douglas Hofstadter likes to say, “Analogy is the motor of the car of thought.” And analogical thinking is especially necessary to a healthy conservatism, a healthy sense of tradition.

08/01/08

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The Real Steve Schmidt

Lawrence Lowe has a terrific, insightful piece on Steve Schmidt at TNR that is well worth your time. This is interesting:

Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist for the California governor’s re-election campaign, told me that Schmidt isn’t always “comfortable with the whole social conservative aspect of the party. He’s a big patriot and has a big respect for the military—his wife was a navy nurse—but being judgmental and moralistic, that’s just not his cup of tea.” Dowd recalls having long conversations with Schmidt, whose sister is gay, over cigars in Schmidt’s backyard “about civil unions and gay marriage, where he wasn’t necessarily in lockstep with the Republican Party.”

Weaver describes Schmidt as “hardly a right-wing reactionary guy” and counts him among a corps of Republican operatives in their late 30s and early 40s—most of whom have served in the Bush White House—who hope to chart a less divisive course for the party in the coming years.

The trouble is that “being judgmental and moralistic” is fully consonant with charting a less divisive course — the question is, what kind of public morality are you championing? I strongly believe that Republicans need to reject anti-gay rhetoric and policies. But a pro-marriage politics, for example, is less about abandoning moralism than embracing a more inclusive moralism. Isn’t it? I think so.