This was funny.

Semi-Serious but not really answer:

1. One that uses some forward leaning term like "progressive"

2. One involved in the "cool" industries usually design, fashion, coffee (Starbucks and Peet's). There needs to be some kind of vague sophistication being sold. Think Design within Reach or Room and Board over Big Bill's Furniture Barn.

3. A company with cool employees or ads that feature young and vaguely hipsterish people.

4. A mythical strawmen conjured by libertarians and conservatives so they can jump up and down and say "See! See! Liberals have Big Corporations too"

I think Tom basically represents what was always a strain in American politics because of our Calvinist-Puritan heritage.

The early British colonialists essentially came in two types: Puritans who felt that the high-church Anglicans were too squishy and wanted a theocratic utopia. And early/proto Capitalist adventurers who wanted to get very rich. Somehow these two groups managed to create people like Anne Hutchinson, William Penn, and Roger Smith who can almost kind of be the origins of the American left/liberals.

I think you basically see the two original groups still largely animate the American right. They see freedom being about imposing their religious dourness on others and ultra-Capitalism without restraint. They also tend to seem rather drawn to apocalyptic terms and how everything is a grave assault on life as they know it and their freedoms. I see them as basically seeing politics as a zero-sum game and freedom gained by others must mean freedom lost by them. Higher wages for the working class mean less money for the rich, the rights of women to get contraception mean less rights for their theocracy, etc.

You can read almost any book on American history and here the same language and tone being used by right-wingers through out our history that Tom does. This is nothing new. The most seminal work on this is probably:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_American_Politics

Sample quote:

"American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years, we have seen angry minds at work, mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated, in the Goldwater movement, how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But, behind this, I believe, there is a style of mind that is far from new, and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style, simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.[1]"

I once was rehearsing a play with my cast in grad school and we were outside because the weather finally turned nice. In the background a nun in roller-blades came flying by.

I think this goes beyond requiring employers (Catholic or otherwise) to provide contraception and other reproductive/family services that they have moral objections to. It goes to the ability of employers to be paternalistic and fire employees for out of work practices that they disagree with.

There are a lot of benefits to at-will employment but I often think we take it too far. In my opinion it should be modified to prohibit lifestyle firing. An employer should not be allowed to fire an employee for any lawful practice engaged in during off-work hours. There do seem to be a lot of pompous "Christian" business people who try to micromanage their employees lives.

This is where I would promote a liberty that restrains the rights of employers. Hypocritically or not, I would have no problem with an employer who orders employees to cover up tattoos and remove non-traditional piercings during work hours. An employer does have a right to convey an image and culture in the office and during work hours but not while employees are off the clock. There was an article in the New Yorker recently about forsenic linguistics. The article opened with a man who was tried and convicted for killing his wife and two sons. The backstory was that he was having an affair with a cocktail waitress but could not divorce his wife because he worked for a "Christian" organization that would terminate employees who divorced. I say tough luck to the employer with that kind of moral rule.

You point to the tensions of value pluralism but I don't think we are very good at the balancing acts as another post in the Democracy symposium said. Most American political fights tend to be between ideologues on one side v. ideoglogues on the other side. The biggest divides between liberals and libertarians seem to be issues of economics (wealth v. fairness) and some "nanny state" health issues.

IIRC there is a fair bit of peer-reviewed psychological research that shows that Bloomberg's soda ban could be a good public health measure. I believe the research shows that if people are served smaller portions, they will eat less and not go back for seconds. I don't think anyone would doubt that obesity is a serious public health issue and an economic one because of rises in diseases like diabetes and heart issues among the severely overweight. Yet any attempt to do something about it results in cries of nanny state and paternalism.

The issue is that humans seem to be deeply tribal in nature. This observation goes back as far as Aristotle to John Donne to modern day psychologists and other scientists like Johnathan Haidt. Haidt basically thinks that it is the inherently tribal nature of people that allowed us to survive and thrive especially during our caveman years when we had much fewer advantages to animals. In Ezra Klein's recent piece on the Individual Mandate in the New Yorker (more really on how groups change policy positions), Haidt said that people might not always come up with the best ideas but we can often be "really good team players."

Yes a lot of people in the pundit and armchair pundit classes like to talk about the wisdom of the Founders especially how the Founders warned against political parties. However, forming political parties is just what people do. It is natural for like minded people to get together and form power by numbers. No one has ever found a way against this except absolute monarchy perhaps.

Do you mean Mitch McConnell? That would be a bad choice. I don't know how Republicans feel about him but he is just as much of a cartoon villain for Democrats. Obama can use McConnell as an example of needless obstruction for the sake of putting party above country. It would be a variant of 1948 with Harry Truman and the "do nothing" Congress.

I agree that Portman and Pawlenty would probably have been better choices in some ways from a political prospective because they don't give Obama and the Democratic Party any real fire. Both seem relatively popular within the Republican base and are presentable to undecideds as decent chaps. Ryan gives Obama and the Democrats an Ayn Rand-worshiping cartoon villain. My facebook feed is already lighting up with stuff against Ryan and his budget. I can't have seen my Democratic friends (and I am included obviously) getting this worked up against Portman or Pawlenty.

Is it worth trying to gain Wisconsin while alienating and possibly (or probably) losing Florida and Ohio?

Is picking Ryan the equivalent of going all the way home with the base? Or does it only get him to second?

This is a very good post.

I agree with you that civil liberties are popular in the abstract but not so popular in actual practice for the most part especially civil liberties dealing with the rights of alleged and actual defendants in criminal cases. The exclusionary rule and confrontation clauses are probably some of the most vexing issues in jurisprudence. I don't think any country has come up with an adequate solution to the problem of illegally seized evidence. Most people can agree that search warrants are good and that police should follow them.

The problem with criminal law is that crime is more inherently emotional than most other aspects of law. Civil litigation is usually only vexing to the parties in the case with a few big blockbuster exceptions that are highly political like Duke v. Wall-Mart, Ledbetter, Brown v. Board of Ed, Lawerence v. Texas, Roe v. Wade, etc. People react strongly and it is very hard to be counterintuitive and defend civil liberties in the face of shocking and notorious crime. It might be one of the hardest things in the world. Certain crimes produce more strong reactions than others and there is a lot of really appalling facts in criminal law.

A lot of civil libertarians are fond of quoting Ben Franklin's line on "People who prefer security over liberty deserve neither." But no one has ever really come up with a practical way of convincing non civil libertarians on how to accept this line. Also no one has come up with a good metric on how much danger is acceptable in the name of liberty. This is a hard question to answer and most people do not want to be martyrs for liberty. Most people would probably rather put up with the indignities of a security state than risk harm by terrorists however remote.

Who was the most ardent civil libertarian on the Supreme Court? Probably William Douglas. Most people also considered him a cantankerous jerk and all-around not very pleasant person. The best spokespeople for civil liberties on the bench were probably a lot more affable and charming like Earl Warren and William Brennan but even they often managed to earn the scorn of conservatives.

What are the mobility rates of people in developed nations over people in less developed nations?

I know a lot of people who are very mobile in the US but they tend to come from the upper-middle class. Basically they were born and grew up in one area, probably went to undergrad in a different city or state, then grad school or first job somewhere else, and then they eventually find a "home" in their late 20s-early 40s. Sometimes later.

How many people in the United States stay local for college/university vs. going to somewhere where commuting is impossible?

I think mobility is an increasing part of being part of the upper-middle class unless you long to a profession (lawyer/doctor) that is local in nature. Lawyers are constrained by bar licenses to a certain extent (it is very common to have two or three but more is excessive) and medicine is a more local profession in general. The business people who really pull ahead are the ones who don't mind uprooting their families to live abroad when the corporation needs it.

Did you happen to see the article in the Atlantic on this issue from last summer?

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-rise-of-the-new-global-elite/8343/

Like others, I thought this was a very good post and agree like you that I don't know what the solution is. The author of the Atlantic article suggests that the solution might end up being something dramatic like punitive actions to drag the global elite down to the nation-state level especially if people feel left behind. So people would use the tools of liberal democracy to destroy the global elite who have transcended liberal-democracy and the nation-state.

Living in San Francisco for four years has turned my body composition to gossamer by 15 percent. Luckily I am still 85 percent New York concrete and steal.

Very oblique reference to a probably not really Kurt Vonnegut quote is hopefully not lost.

The number is probably more because not all states requires sheriffs to report the number of issued licenses and many do not.

Yes I know but that is part of the point. The current United States is not Afghanistan or Somalia. We have a long time to go before we are close to the anarchy that is Mad Max.

And there are very few people alive (if any) who can remember when America was that bad.

I agree.

To hear some or many CCW, it makes me wonder if they see the world as resembling Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

As I mentioned before on another post, The Old West actually had a lot of gun control.

Cowboys and others were not allowed to go around town with their guns. Upon entering a town, people had to check in their guns with the Sheriff or at a large hotel and receive a ticket. You could pick up your gun again when leaving town. The mythic fight at the OK-Coral was because the person did not want to check his gun.

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/23/nation/la-na-tombstone-20110123

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-winkler/did-the-wild-west-have-mo_b_956035.html

This is a very good post. I am not in complete agreement but it was all very well thought out.

I've never been much of a cluber but was convinced to go clubbing by a friend in January 2011. There was a double homicide at the club that night. Both were stabbing murders. One seemed to be very random. The other might have been gang-related, I don't remember.

The police were trying to keep things as calm and orderly as possible while they investigated. Sadly they were dealing with a lot of young 20-somethings who were drunk and probably a decent amount were high. Eventually the police decided to let people leave through the back entrance while asking people if they saw anything. Some people tried to create a bit of a panic in order to overwhelm the police and push through.

This was when the murders were done with a knife. I can't imagine what the panic would be like if a gun was involved.

That's a pleasant image.

You bring up a very good point. Largely because I brought up the same point below ;)

Our society is a lot more complicated than the society of the early American Republic. It was very easy for Thomas Jefferson to imagine a country filled with small and self-sufficient yeoman farmers.

Doing so now would result in a great reduction of wealth.

I suppose this is another example when not having any Scot-Presbyterian or Calvinist blood in my veins is a bit of a problem.

I don't see the problem with a government providing a safety net and social welfare programs. In fact, I would say that this is one of the primary responsibilities of civil government. Yes there are issues of paying for things is important. But the whole concept of moral hazard is an odd one when it comes to healthcare. Why do we always hear about moral hazard in the U.S.? Do British conservatives and libertarians talk about moral hazard and the welfare state? I imagine not.

As you said, the writer was an 18th-century Scott, he could not imagine how complex society would get and this goes beyond the Industrial and post-Industrial society. This goes to medical advancements and other procedures. When the writer lived it was quite possible to imagine a low-government society filled with largely self-sufficient yeoman farmers. Same with the early American republic. Now we would view such a nation as being a poor one. Likewise, modern medicine can provide for relatively happy lives for people who would have been quickly dead during the 18th-century.

Complex society produces complex problems that demand often very tricky solutions. These are not necessarily cures just policies that make a problem better or worse.

Cronyism and partisan patronage seem to be problems that are vexing to all forms of government and not just liberal democracies. There are always hacks of all ideologies seeking a sinecure. Some positions will always be seen as a reward for party loyalty and service. For example plumber ambassadorships like Japan and the UK. I don't think these are problems that society will ever be rid of because they are the result of human emotion and psychology, not forms of government. You can find ways to minimize the impact of cronyism but it will never go away.

For all of our troubles, the basic forms of American democracy have so far proven to be very secure. Same with the British parliamentary system and in countries like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Yup.

The GOP is now controlled by a very hard-right base. They have destroyed or cowered all their moderates. Even the most conservative Democrats (who tend to give most Democrat no end of grief) tend to be more liberal than the most liberal Republican.

Romney might want to be a moderate but he is controlled by a far-right base. He knows what they want and he will give them far-right judges and justices. Very young ones at that who can be on the judiciary for decades and impede progress.

There seems to be a certain subset of libertarian/conservative whose reason of existence is too piss off imaginary liberals. Starw-men liberals who want to assign five social workers to every citizen from craddle to grave.

There are a lot of times when I am convinced that if you told a conservative or libertarian that a liberal policy solution would have a 100 percent (or even 90-95 percent) success rate, the libertarians and conservatives would still be against it. Their reasoning would be to annoy liberals.

You are right about not being able to argue with these people. I am generally not a fan of internet memes but I saw one from a friend this week. The statement was "Arguing with Republicans is like playing chess with a pigeon. You can be the best chess player in the world but the pigeon will still walk all over the board, knock over pieces, and squawk in victory"

I can get behind that statement.

Everyone knows that Communism was just a red herring.

I don't take it as a given that unemployment is really the only issue in this election.

It is an important issue along with the rest of the economy but there is never a single issue.

A lot of liberals like me do not want to see President Romney appoint someone who will make Justice Thomas look like William Brennan. A lot of conservatives do not want to see President Obama replace another Supreme Court justice.

And this is always one example.

I think culture war issues have and always will be a permanent part of the American political landscape. I am currently reading a history book on the United States in 1857. There is a lot of truth in the cliche that "the more things change, the more they stay the same." A lot of the same type of rhetoric was coming from the same people on the same issues.

I don't know whether this is uplifting or depressing.