Democracy in America

A COUPLE of weeks ago Dan Savage, a columnist and activist perhaps best known for making Rick Santorum hate Google and for trying to comfort bullied gay teens, gave the right a gift. At a high-school journalism convention, he attacked Bible-backed anti-gay bigotry. He pointed out that the Bible does indeed condemn homosexuality, but it also endorses slavery. "We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people," he said, "the same way we learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about masturbation...We ignore bullshit in the Bible about all sorts of things." During this portion of his speech some students walked out. When he moved on to another topic, he said, "You can tell the Bible guys in the hall to come back now because I'm done beating up the Bible. It's funny to someone who is on the receiving end of beatings justified by the Bible how pansy-assed people react when you push back."

Mr Savage was making one valid point and one sloppy one. The former: people who justify anti-gay bigotry by brandishing a Bible but ignore other, less convenient biblical prohibitions (the list might also include mixed fabrics and divorce) are hypocrites. The latter: people quick to condemn ought not to be so quick to take offence. The problem with the latter point is that however true it is in the abstract, it was not necessarily true in the particular. No evidence exists that the students who walked out ever condemned or bullied anyone. However poorly Mr Savage may have been treated in high school, it was not by the students in the audience, and they deserved more from a famous and accomplished journalist than derision. Mr Savage acknowledged as much when he apologised, both for the regrettable and infantile slur "pansy-assed" and for using what the great J. Anthony Lukas called "a barnyard epithet" to refer to the Bible. (He could, of course, have opted to make a broader point: that nobody should be so quick to take offence; that journalists will hear a lot of things over the course of a career that they find offensive and even hurtful, and walking out anytime that happens will result in a short career and a narrow mind; that, however ugly his language Mr Savage was at least advancing arguments, and that surely at least one of those offended souls hoping to make a life out of words could have found a few to hurl back at him rather than just flouncing out in a huff.)

Mr Savage's apology did not stop the outrage machine. Some seem to have taken particular delight in hurling Mr Savage's epithets—bully and basher (of Christians and Christianity, rather than gays)—back at him. The American Thinker harrumphs, "Evidently, bullying is one of those things that is defined by the 'victim'." Well, yes: in fact it is. Bullying is the strong picking on the weak, not the other way around (the other way around is satire). One could make the argument that in the case of Mr Savage's speech, he was the strong one, and the high-school students were "victims", but that would be weak tea indeed. Mr Savage is one person, not a movement, and of course those students whom he gave the vapours were free to leave. Not everyone has such freedom. Gay teens, not Christian teens, kill themselves at higher rates than the general populace. Nobody calls Christianity an abomination. One blogger accused Mr Savage of "Christian-bashing" for pointing out the Bible's position on slavery. A writer for a Focus on the Family site said that "using profanity to deride the Bible...is obviously a form of bullying and name-calling." In fact it is neither: Mr Savage, however intemperate his language, was arguing, not name-calling. That is a crucial distinction, and one that too often eludes the showily devout. If the Bible is in fact the word of God it can survive a few arguments about context and application.

(Photo credit: AP)

STEPHEN KING is the world's bestselling horror novelist. Somewhat to my surprise, he also has strong opinions about tax policy, which he lays out in salty language in the Daily Beast. Mr King, who is extremely rich, wants his tax rate to rise. Why not cut a personal check to the IRS, then? Here's what Mr King has to say about that:

Cut a check and shut up, they said.

If you want to pay more, pay more, they said.

Tired of hearing about it, they said.

Tough shit for you guys, because I'm not tired of talking about it. I've known rich people, and why not, since I'm one of them? The majority would rather douse their dicks with lighter fluid, strike a match, and dance around singing “Disco Inferno” than pay one more cent in taxes to Uncle Sugar. It's true that some rich folks put at least some of their tax savings into charitable contributions. ... All fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough.

What charitable 1 percenters can't do is assume responsibility—America's national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts. Charity from the rich can't fix global warming or lower the price of gasoline by one single red penny. That kind of salvation does not come from Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Ballmer saying, “OK, I'll write a $2 million bonus check to the IRS.” That annoying responsibility stuff comes from three words that are anathema to the Tea Partiers: United American citizenry.

But those $2m bonus checks would help, wouldn't they? So why not go ahead and do it? Mr King is frank:

And what [rich people] do give away is—like the monies my wife and I donate—totally at their own discretion. That's the rich-guy philosophy in a nutshell: don't tell us how to use our money; we'll tell you.

But gifts to the government may be earmarked for specific purposes. The rich can tell the government how to use their money. Deficit-reduction, infrastructure, education, health care, poor relief: take your pick. So go ahead! Why not?

YESTERDAY Matthew Yglesias and Kevin Drum got into what looks to me like a largely semantic back-and-forth over whether Europe's inability to respond to the euro crisis can properly be termed a "collective-action problem". Basically, both are making the by now familiar neo-Keynesian point about the European dilemma: continent-wide austerity is driving the EU's economy into depression, but no European actor is willing to buck the trend and advocate deficit spending in order to generate growth in other European countries. As my colleague puts it, critiquing the reaction to the success of French Socialist presidential hopeful Francois Hollande: "The overwhelming criticism is a sort of 'look how inappropriate fiscal expansion would be for the French economy' take. The point is that the economy that matters is that of the euro zone as a whole. And when one steps back and looks at the dynamics in play, it becomes clear that the robotic push for national-level austerity across the euro zone is undermining integration and thereby exacerbating the crisis." Paul Krugman agrees.

Mr Yglesias goes on to make the point that the reason why America functions as a pretty decent single-currency area, despite radical disparities in wealth and productivity between different regions, is that unlike the EU, it guarantees very large transfer payments from richer to poorer areas to smooth out the differences.

[M]ost individual European countries have a lot of within-country transfer payments from rich people to poor people but Europe as a whole is marked by a high level of inequality and near-total absence of transfers. If in the United States every bailout of the poor parts of the country by the rich parts was marked by protracted negotiations and stern demands that West Virginia "reform" its underperforming economy we'd be in perpetual crisis. And of course you might ask yourself why the federal government does so much for low-income residents of the United States and so little for the poorer low-income residents of low-income Mexico. And of course the reason is nationalism. Nationalism inspires us to help our fellow American when we can and leaves us relatively cold about the plight of people living in Peru.

Along these lines, one might hypothesise that one way for the EU to effectuate the kind of transfers that could put the euro zone on sounder footing would be to shift responsibility for social safety-net spending from individual governments to Brussels. This is a solution that is at least as politically and administratively impossible as any other euro-zone rescue programme, but it's a way of thinking about the problem. And conversely, one might ask what sort of moves might America make if it wanted, for some insane reason, to give itself precisely the kind of pro-cyclical government policies that are crippling the euro-zone right now. One way to do so would be to shift responsibility for social safety-net spending from the federal government to the states. Drawing down transfer payments from richer regions of the country to poorer ones, and devolving spending onto governing entities that, like European governments in the aftermath of the new EU fiscal stability pact, are required to balance their budgets, would mimic some of the dynamics we're seeing in Europe right now. It would be a move towards transforming America into more of an American Union, as it were.

For example, if Medicaid had shifted to a system of federal block grants to states in 2001, the system would have cut federal funds available to most states by more than 35% in 2010. That would have meant those states, mainly those hit hardest by the recession, would have had to come up with the funds themselves by raising taxes or making other cuts, or simply dropped Medicaid coverage for some of their residents. The effect would mimic what has happened with social spending in peripheral European countries like Spain as recession-induced austerity measures have further crippled the weakest economies, and such state-level recessions would have ultimately threatened the American economy in the same way recessions in peripheral euro-zone countries are threatening the European one. I'm sure Paul Ryan doesn't think that by advocating shifting the social safety net to the state level, he's trying to make America more like Europe, but it is what it is.

THE value-added tax is getting some love lately, but will anyone listen? In his new book, "The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform—Why We Need It and What It Will Take", Bruce Bartlett, an erstwhile Republican wonk, comes out in favour of a VAT. Josh Barro, a center-right economic policy analyst, writes today in favour of a VAT at Bloomberg View. Just one more curmudgeonly self-hating conservative tax analyst and we have a trend! (If you're not sure how a VAT works, Mr Barro's third paragraph has you covered.) 

Conservatives have long opposed a VAT on the grounds that it makes raising revenue too easy. Rather than starving the beast, a VAT awards the beast a lifetime pass to the Golden Corral. In a review of "The Benefit and the Burden", David Henderson, a research fellow at the Hoover Institute, tracks the evolution of Mr Bartlett's VATitude:

For a few years now, he has argued that the United States should adopt a vat, and he continues that argument in his book. Conservatives and libertarians tend to oppose a vat on the grounds that it is a “money machine” for the federal government. Indeed, Bartlett writes that he had opposed the vat on those grounds. So why did he change his mind Because he no longer sees “any hope of controlling entitlement spending before the baby-boom deluge hits.” He writes, “The United States [he means the U.S. government] needs a money machine.”

Mr Henderson contends that Mr Bartlett fails to justify the spending to be financed by the VAT money machine, and suggests that if it's indeed politically infeasible to rein in spending, it might be better for the government to shaft its creditors by defaulting on its debt rather than bleeding taxpayers with a VAT. Mr Bartlett says default would amount to "grossly immoral theft", but Mr Henderson isn't so sure. "Really?" he says. "It's worse to default on creditors who took a risk than to forcibly take money from taxpayers who have no choice?" This question deserves some serious reflection, but for now I'll just say "Yes" and move on. 

JUST up the street from me at the moment, on the corner of the Bernauerstrasse, is a massive photo-mural depicting the same street corner on an August day in 1961: a snapshot of Hans Conrad Schumann, an East German soldier, hurdling the barbed wire on top of the still-under-construction Berlin Wall to get to the West, and freedom. In those days, the stakes that led communist regimes to construct obstacles to emigration were clear: they were afraid that combined envy of the West's prosperity and, to a lesser extent, its intellectual and religious freedom would lead huge masses of their citizens to flee abroad. That, obviously, is not an anxiety that affects today's Chinese Communist regime. The fact that China does not fear that any sign of openness will lead large numbers of its citizens to emigrate is one background factor behind Beijing's apparent willingness to reach a face-saving agreement to allow dissident lawyer Chen Guangcheng to apply to "study" in the United States.

The thing that has surprised me from the beginning of the drama is that it could possibly take place. We still don't know how Mr Chen managed to get from his village to the American embassy, but it seems extraordinary that the Chinese could have allowed a high-profile dissident to escape, could have lost track of him after his escape, or could have allowed him to approach the embassy to ask for asylum. On a couple of occasions during the time I spent in Vietnam, dissidents made surprise, unauthorised contact with American personnel at the embassy or ambassador's residence, but secret police stationed on the street nearby intervened extremely rapidly. In general, police seemed to know beforehand when dissidents were likely to stage such moves. That knowledge turned the relationship between dissidents, the regime, and the US government into a sort of choreographed dance, with limits drawn and signals sent based on mutual interest in avoiding embarrassment over declared positions. So it's not surprising that the result of the Chen Guangcheng drama looks likely to be one that allows America to maintain it has been true to its commitment to defending freedom of conscience, and also allows China to maintain it has not allowed Mr Chen to flee and claim political asylum.

That's not that different from the way things operated in the old days. The relationship between communist states and America around dissidents has always been a bit of a dance. What's changed is that America's interest in protecting dissidents is no longer a matter of either economic or strategic self-interest. China is not a military foe, or an enemy of capitalism; it's our largest trading partner. And now I'm going to go out on a limb and say something rather gushy and perhaps obnoxiously self-congratulatory: The fact that China is not our enemy makes our continued commitment to defending freedom of conscience for Chinese citizens all the more laudable. We really have nothing to gain from protecting Chen Guangcheng, except that it lets us give ourselves a pat on the back and walk down the street feeling all free and democratic. So let's! Sure, as William Dobson points out, China is probably just as interested in getting rid of Mr Chen as we are in protecting him. And sure, immigrants these days tend to come more because they're tired, poor and hungry than because they're yearning to breathe free, and Chinese citizens these days are less interested in coming to America precisely because the path to middle-class security probably leads through Guangdong rather than Los Angeles. Still, when that rare individual comes along who really considers the freedom thing more important than the wealth thing, we apparently still feel honour-bound to do something for him. And that's a nice thing.

(Photo credit: AFP)

THIS George Will column is strange. The main subject is "The People's Rights Amendment" recently put before the house by Jim McGovern, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts. The proposed amendment to the constitution specifies that constitutional rights apply only to "natural persons" and thus would deny "all corporate entities—for-profit and nonprofit alike" constitutional protections. As Mr Will points out, many collective human enterprises are formally organised as corporations. This newspaper is one. So is the UAW. Under Mr McGovern's amendment, Mr Will writes:

Congress—and state legislatures and local governments—could regulate to the point of proscription political speech, or any other speech, by the Sierra Club, the National Rifle Association, NARAL Pro-Choice America or any of the other tens of thousands of nonprofit corporate advocacy groups, including political parties and campaign committees.

Newspapers, magazines, broadcasting entities, online journalism operations—and most religious institutions—are corporate entities. McGovern's amendment would strip them of all constitutional rights. By doing so, the amendment would empower the government to do much more than proscribe speech.

I agree with Mr Will that the amendment is therefore an extremely bad idea. However, there is no danger whatsoever that Mr McGovern's proposal will make it through even the first step of the amendment process. So what's Mr Will really on about?

Here's the oddity of the column: it begins with a discussion of a recent academic paper in which "the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion' (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled". That is to say, the authors argue it's morally okay to kill newborn babies. According to Mr Will, the argument "helpfully validates the right-to-life contention that the pro-abortion argument, which already defends third-trimester abortions, contains no standard for why the killing should be stopped by arbitrarily assigning moral significance to the moment of birth". And then he writes, "Now comes Rep. Jim McGovern ..."

Oh no! What does he want to do? Kill babies!? Not quite. As we've seen, Mr McGovern wants to deny that corporations should enjoy the rights of "natural persons". Though Mr Will never returns to the argument in favour of the permissibility of baby-killing, the connection seems clear enough. Just as the philosophers writing in the pages of The Journal of Medical Ethics can find in pro-choice arguments no principle of personhood that would forbid the slaughter of burbling newborns, there is likewise no principle implied by progressives' denial of legal personhood to corporations that would forbid further violence against our divine endowment of rights. So look out, Americans! Progressives want to put your first-amendment rights on the chopping block. And then what? Newborn gumbo?

I think we'd do well to acknowledge that rights cannot function as effective constraints on individuals or governments unless they are widely acknowledged as legitimate. You may believe, as I do, that rights are conventional rules of a certain kind. Or you may believe that they are an objective part of mind-independent moral reality. It doesn't matter. Even if rights are written by God into the book of nature, it doesn't make a whit of difference unless enough of us happen to agree about which rights of what shape are "out there". Now, I happen to think that newborns ought to enjoy the legal protection afforded "natural persons" whether or not they have crossed some metaphysical finish line and attained natural and/or moral personhood. I also happen to think that if citizens have certain rights, then it is not possible to deny incorporated groups of citizens these rights without violating the rights of their members. But this is by no means obvious. We should talk about it. But Mr Will's column discourages reasoned conversation not only by characterising a proposal to alter the status quo conventions about corporate rights as "proposed vandalism of the Bill of Rights"—that is, as the defilement of our sacred civic text—but also by very shadily associating the proposal with the idea that it's morally okay to slay newly-baked babies. I suggest we resist the sophistical, anti-deliberative drift of Mr Will's column and take this chance not only to continue the debate about the justifiability of corporate personhood but also to commence an open-minded public conversation about the justifiability of our society's baby-slaying conventions.

WHILE we're on the subject of gay marriage, I'm often at a loss for a good example of the logical fallacy traditionally known as "begging the question" (petitio principii), which did not historically mean simply "to raise the question". Our style book explains question-begging briefly here. But I think Maggie Gallagher, an opponent of same-sex marriage, actually just provided an even more perfect, real-world example for Daily Beast readers. 

To beg the question means to base an argument on the very conclusion you're trying to argue. It's a form of circular reasoning. So what does Ms Gallagher say when asked what tangible harm has come from same-sex marriage in those states that have allowed it? She responds (1) that people who believe in opposite-sex marriage only are being stigmatised, and (2) that marriage threatens to be re-normed as the union of two people of whatever sex, which means that children may not (by definition) have both a mother and a father.

A more perfect bit of question-begging is hard to devise. To (1), those people are being stigmatised mainly for being wrong, not for being evil, and that's because they can't give any better argument against gay marriage than (2): that gay marriage is not marriage, which they define (without defending) as between a man and a woman.  

I can certainly think of hypothetical bits of evidence that might make people like me and The Economist's editors re-think support for gay marriage. Ms Gallagher was asked to provide it.  But she offers no children suffering because they have two mothers. No higher divorce rates. No other social ills in the states where gays can marry. This is all that one of the country's most prominent opponents of gay marriage has to offer when given a softball question about the harm of gay marriage: no actual harm at all, except to the entry under "marriage" in Maggie Gallagher's personal lexicon. That's a social ill I can live with.