Gallup’s most recent survey has found that Americans aren’t very satisfied with the way things are going. 82% are dissatisfied. The good news is that it’s been worse: it’s presently a tiny bit better than it was last year at this time and it was even worse just after President Obama had been elected.

I’ll make a prediction: it will get even worse. The strategy of both political parties and media seems to be to stoke dissatisfaction.

Today the editors of the Washington Post have given us the benefit 0f their opinion on gerrymandering:

Partisan gerrymandering in states such as North Carolina and Illinois enables one party to take more seats than its underlying support warrants. North Carolina’s median congressional district — under the new maps — favored President Donald Trump by 14 percentage points in 2020, so only an astonishingly large anti-GOP wave would win Democrats the number of seats the state’s overall voting patterns would suggest they should hold.

Gerrymandering can also be used to kill competitive districts. In Texas, for example, mapmakers drew deeply red and blue districts — and few that lie in the middle.

Their solution to the problem?

States that use some kind of independent process to draw maps tend to end up with more competitive districts.

No map is perfect, because even commissions acting in good faith must balance competing interests. Drawing maps that reflect the preferences of a state’s overall electorate can conflict with ensuring that communities of interest remain in the same district. For example, Virginia’s map may overrepresent White voters because it packs many Black voters into two districts to ensure minority communities can elect representatives of their choice. Even so, maps drawn by independent commissions, who lack the glaring conflict of interest state legislators bring to the table, have over and over again proved fairer.

Ideally, every state would embrace a strong redistricting commission process, in which the line-drawers are nonpartisan, balanced between the parties or some mix that produces maps on a binding, not an advisory, basis. But only 10 states have fully independent commissions. Most state legislators have proved unwilling to surrender the power to choose their own voters.

To some extent that’s circular, “begging the question”. How are the commissions constituted? Fourteen states use redistricting commissions. Of those five are political commissions which is to say no fairer than the state legislature. How California’s redistricting committee is constituted is described here. My cursory reading suggests that although it is notionally non-partisan it is pragmatically just as partisan as the state legislature is.

I have a modest proposal: why not draw districts algorithmically? The criteria would be contiguity, compactness, uniformity in size (plus or minus 10%), and political boundaries (political entities should not be split other than to satisfy the size requirements). Such a method would be faster, fairer, and more transparent than any state legislature or commission.

I agree with a lot of Thomas Main’s piece on the dangers of illiberalism at The Bulwark. I agree that illiberalism whatever its source poses a danger. I agree that it’s a factor on both the left and the right. In general I agree with the approach that he takes. He begins by defining his terms:

I posit that a working definition of illiberalism that applies to both left and right might be summarized as any system of beliefs which run counter to the political philosophy summarized in the Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration’s main principles are political egalitarianism; human rights; limited government; electoral democracy; the legitimacy of change; the rule of law; and tolerance. You could define illiberalism many ways, but an easy one would be: any explicit rejection of, or attack on, that order. Any ideology of whatever orientation, right or left, that explicitly repudiates these principles is illiberal.

I agree that 4 million Americans expressing some level of support for neo-Nazism is troubling.

As I said, third-party web traffic numbers are not perfectly accurate. But consider a poll conducted in 2017 by Reuters/Ipsos in conjunction with the University of Virginia Center for Politics: It found that “6 percent of respondents said they strongly or somewhat supported the alt-right . . . 8 percent expressed support for white nationalism [and] . . . 4 percent expressed support for neo-Nazism.”

Given that America has roughly 250 million adults, if at least 4 percent of them support neo-Nazism, then our nation has at least 10 million proponents of one form of radical right-wing illiberalism. That would be larger than the number of adult Jews in America (of whom there are about 4.2 million). Or, if you prefer: larger than the populations of 43 states.

I agree with his characterization of these sites as “illiberal Right”: Vox Popoli, Daily Stormer, VDARE. I don’t know these sites so can offer no opinion: Occidental Dissent, Return of Kings, Mattforney.com. I think that characterizing Zero Hedge as “illiberal Right” is a bit of a stretch. I think it’s a gold bug site that may post some illiberal things and is generally anarcho-capitalist in bias. If an equivalent standard is applied, a lot of mainstream sites would then be categorized as “illiberal Left”.

I think he gravely underestimates the reach of the illiberal Left.

Consider this statement:

The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination

I think that fits Mr. Main’s definition of illiberalism. And it would place the New York Times solidly in the ranks of “the illiberal Left”.

Is ruling by executive edict illiberal? I think it violates the strictures on limited government, the rule of law, and electoral democracy.

Is support for gerrymandering and states that engage in gerrymandering illiberal? If you reserve your criticism for North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas and ignore Illinois and New York, I think it clearly is. That would include many, many mainstreamm media outlets.

And then there are cases in which two values which I will agree are liberal values conflict with one another, e.g. the rule of law and political egalitarianism. The filibuster violates political egalitarianism but it is the law. Does opposing the filibuster render one illiberal? That’s a judgment call. How about federalizing state election laws? Liberal or illiberal? I think the answer is that it’s a judgment call.

Is support for federal involvement in health care, education, and any number of other issues that go well beyond the limited powers given to the federal government in the Constitution illiberal?

Today’s cause célèbre is the attempted deplatforming of Joe Rogan. Illiberal or not?

I found Kevin Drum’s recent post thought-provoking. He opens by advising Democrats to take the “median voter theorem” seriously and closes by asking why progressives aren’t faring better:

Life should be good for liberals right now. The Republican Party has gone insane and is led by a guy who makes Ted Cruz look like George Washington. We should be kicking their asses all over the place. But we’re not. We’ve tossed away the chance of a lifetime.

Figuring out what our problem is requires lots of dispassionate, clear-eyed thinking in response to a simple question: What is it about us that scares so many people? I sure wish that weren’t in such short supply.

Let’s start with the median voter theorem. It was proposed about 70 years ago and the short version of it is that the candidate whose views most closely approximate those of the median voter tends to win elections. This diagram can explain why that might be:

By Colin.champion Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
Kevin sees it slightly differently:

I’ve always thought it’s the other way around: we vote more against the party (or candidate) we hate rather than for the party we like. The median voter theorem still holds, but my version tells us that the losing candidate is the one who’s closest to what the median voter hates.

From which he concludes and I hope I’m misinterpreting him here, that Democratic politicians need to do a more effective job of making voters hate Republicans. That’s pretty consistent with the assertion frequently heard that Democrats have a messaging problem.

I, on the contrary, go along with Napoleon. There are only two great motivators, fear of loss and hope of gain, and Democratic politicians in the policies that they advocate are doing too effective a job at making the median voter fear what they intend to do and little job at all of convincing the median voter that they have something to gain by supporting them. It might help if they weren’t quite so transparent in showing that they themselves gain by what they advocate while showing little inclination to abide by the restrictions they would impose on others, cf. Nancy Pelosi’s recent remarks about members of Congress buying and selling stock and the frequently observed violation of mask mandates by Democratic politicians. They don’t have a messaging problem; they have policy and behavior problems.

There’s another related hypothesis called “Hotelling’s principle of minimum differentiation” which can be summarized as politicians tend to drift to the position of the median voter. I think that hypothesis has broken down completely, largely on the basis of the fabulous amount of money spent in national campaigns and the psychology of major donors. Rather than moderating their views, politicians are drifting ever farther to the extremes. Let’s return to the diagram above. What if, rather than three candidates there are just two and, while the views of voters are dispersed across the spectrum, the two candidates occupy opposite poles? IMO that describes our present situation pretty succinctly.

For decades I supported the Head Start program on the grounds that it was needs-based and devoted resources to kids who desperately needed attention. My support began to wane as mixed results began to be reported.

Today the editors of the Wall Street Journal criticize the pre-K component of President Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill on empirical grounds:

Researchers at Vanderbilt University have been running a long-term study on Tennessee’s state pre-K program, following 2,990 low-income children. The program was oversubscribed, so researchers followed applicants who ended up in a program versus those who were turned away. This means all the children had parents motivated to sign them up for pre-K, which makes for a statistically appropriate control group.

Democrats say pre-K will give poor children a leg up for the rest of their lives, a “transformational investment,” as the White House pitched it. But the latest Vanderbilt findings, in the journal Developmental Psychology, found that “children randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children, with the strongest negative effects in sixth grade.”

Also: “A negative effect was also found for disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services, with null effects on retention.” That more children needed special education is especially salient: Part of the progressive pitch is that government will spend less money on such interventions later if it shells out for pre-K. Don’t count on it.

They also give a shout-out to the study that caused me to begin questioning Head Start:

A seminal government study on Head Start, the 1965 early education program for low-income children, found the program produced no discernible advantage in elementary school performance. At least that program appears to be merely a waste of money instead of threatening active damage.

I wonder a bit about the Vanderbilt study, curious about how randomized it actually is and whether the controls are actually controls at all. But the point is well-made. What’s important is not how well-intentioned the program is but how well it works. Let’s not succumb to the politician’s fallacy:

1. Something needs to be done!
2. X is something
3. Therefore do X

I also have reservations about the social model represented by universal pre-K but that’s a different question. It will have run-on effects that are hard to anticipate. Will it give us the kind of society we really want?

I agree with the editors of the Washington Post. The federal classifies too much, declassifies too little, and doesn’t do a particularly good job of keeping its secrets. It needs reform.

The 2020 report recommended that a new high-level executive be appointed to oversee the effort, and a new national declassification system be created that would work toward timely release of information. Technology must be used to modernize the aging systems, the report found, and the government ought to deploy the tools of big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cloud storage and retrieval to build a modern system with automation. Not everyone is sold on the automation concept, but it deserves exploration. The slow, page-by-page declassification process is broken.

So far, Ms. Haines said, current priorities and resources for fixing the classification systems “are simply not sufficient.” The National Security Council is working on a revised presidential executive order governing classified information, and we hope the White House will come up with an ambitious blueprint for modernization.

The nation needs to guard its secrets to function properly. But over-classification is counterproductive and adds to public distrust. A big improvement would be to simplify the classification process into two tiers, “secret” and “top secret,” with appropriate protections and guidelines that will also prevent labeling as “classified” material that does not need to be protected. In the words of one chair of the Public Interest Declassification Board, Nancy E. Soderberg, “Transformation is not simply advisable but imperative.” She was right about both the need and the urgency. That was nearly 10 years ago.

As a college chum of mine once wisecracked, the best way to protect your secrets is not to have any. I’m skeptical that the moves proposed by the editors would materially improve matters. When did adding another level of bureaucracy ever make an organization more secure? I’m also skeptical about the federal government’s ability to manage technology. By its very nature the government bureaucracy is standards-based and standards are inherently retrospective in nature. Technology just moves too fast for a standards-based system to keep up with.

At 1945 Robert Kelly asks a question which should be familiar to you—why can’t the Europeans handle the Ukraine crisis themselves?

Ukraine is a serious, but limited, crisis. For the Ukrainians living near Russia’s potential invasion points, the possibility of serious violence looms. And for Ukraine’s fledgling, unsteady democracy, such an invasion would be a disaster. Even Russia’s grey zone warfare – a mixed attempt at subversion and bullying without opening invading the country – would be terrible. It would set Ukrainian democracy back a decade or more, corrupt the government, and likely split the country. Russia clearly has the ability to enforce its will on Ukraine in the short term, and there is little the West can do about it barring the risk of major escalation.

But this crisis is also limited, which too much of the breathless alarmist news coverage is missing. Its scope is mostly limited to Europe, specifically Eastern Europe. And it is a crisis mostly for the Europeans themselves, between Russia and the European NATO allies. Those allies should, thirty years after the end of the Cold War, finally take the lead on European security questions, because the consequences of Russian action mostly concern them. The US does not need to be heavily involved – even if it is doing so – because the fallout for the US and for the US position in Asia is likely quite minimal.

Beyond the obvious consequences for Ukraine itself, the big geopolitical takeaway is the continuing weakness of integrated European foreign policy and defense. That the US is doing so much of the heavy lifting in the crisis, even going so far as to organize alternate natural gas arrangements for Europe, is an embarrassment, demonstrating yet again that America’s European allies cannot organize around even basic needs of joint defense.

which is what I’ve been saying for some time. And, as Dr. Kelly goes on to point out, the relevance to Taiwan is serious but limited as well. The evidence that there is some “domino theory” linking the two is quite meager. If the withdrawal from Afghanistan didn’t embolden the Russians and Chinese to act on Ukraine and Taiwan, respectively, why would Ukraine? Both situations actually reflect long-standing bones of contention which have characteristics and challenges of their own.

A couple of observations. First, where he writes “Europe” read “Germany”. Infantilizing our allies, as has been U. S. policy for more than 60 years, has consequences. Beyond Germany there is no Europe other than squabbling competitors with little in common with one another. Germany is so focused on avoiding costs it has no interest in involving itself in the Ukraine situation other than rhetorically.

And I have questions. Who benefits from the U. S. doing the “heavy lifting”? Certainly not the American people. The general staff? A handful of American elites peddling influence in Ukraine? The Germans? Are the British acting as our proxies? Or is this a “wag the dog” situation both here in in the U. S. and the United Kingdom?

I’ve been saving this one up for about a week. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Joseph Epstein attempts to answer President Biden’s question (“what are Republicans for?”). In doing so he turns to the work of the late Roger Scruton, a British philosopher:

For Scruton it is crucial that citizens recognize not only the bad side of government but also the good. Government after all isn’t exclusively a “system of power and domination,” but “a search for order, and for power only in so far as power is required by order.” Order is crucial, “for it is simply the other side of freedom, the thing that makes freedom possible.” Scruton’s point is that while we may have a deep suspicion of government, we yet “have a deeper need for it.”

“Conservatism should be a defense of government,” Scruton argues, “against its abuse by liberals.” The growth of the welfare state is one notable such abuse, causing people to “turn their backs on freedom and become locked in social pathologies that undermine the cohesion of society.” One sees this above all in the countries of the European Union, where government is no longer felt to be owned by the people but is the property of “an anonymous bureaucracy” on which all depend for their comforts. In the U.S., this is still only true of those who depend on government welfare, but their number is growing.

The role of conservatism, and by extension of the Republican Party, is, in Scruton’s words, “to map out the true domain of government, and the limits beyond which action by the government is a trespass on the freedom of the citizen.” The true message of the Republican Party, then, should be not that it is the enemy of government but the advocate of a far better government, one that is both necessary and yet comports with the freedom of its citizens.

To which I would make a couple of responses. First, that’s blithe but, focusing on the Republican Congressional caucus, provide examples of that over the last decade or so. I don’t think there is one. The only things I can think of that Republicans have supported have been tax cuts and a bloated, aggressive military. A bloated, aggressive military is what’s referred to as a “valence” issue. Both parties support it; they compete only in how much they support it.

Second, today’s Republicans are not conservatives in any meaningful sense of the word. They’re certainly not conservatives that Barry Goldwater or William F. Buckley would recognize as such.

It’s easy to identify things they are against but that’s not the subject.

There isn’t a great deal of news or commentary today. People are mostly whinging about the same stuff they did last week. I am seeing more articles about a brewing civil war, some pooh-poohing the idea, some saying it’s already here.

Here’s my question. Why do people assume a second civil war would take place entirely within the U. S. borders? I think the Canadian “Freedom Convoy” has the makings of a real insurrection insurrection and, now that U. S. truckers are joining their Canadian confrères, it could actually spread. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mexican drayage drivers got into the act, too.