Re: Your Mood

Esquire, I feel your pain. I was born in the opposition (the Reagan years), and then had to live through its redux for another eight under Bush. (And, really, Clinton wasn't all that much to cheer about by 1998.) I suspect you don't regard the Bush Years as the embodiment of conservative principles -- we'll disagree on that -- but I want to offer you some unsolicited advice: things aren't so bad. Cheer up.

I remember election night 2004, when most of my college campus was in shock. I remember the head of the college Democratic Party chapter wandering in a daze (really, just circling again and again) around the campus center, and the next day, everyone was depressed. Reading the media wasn't all that helpful; The New Republic wrote that American liberalism was headed for a long internal decline.

Things were bad then, but in four years it all change. So, just watch, you guys will be back. Yes, health care won't be repealed, but there are all sorts of things your side can do to modify it to suit your own agenda (no, really! You can finally pass that 'doc fix' everyone's talking about, or press for more cuts to Medicare, or scrap that "Independent Advisory Commission" that may finally bring on the totalitarian utopia you guys said would occur after Social Security and Medicare was passed).

When President Obama came into office, I recall Jonah Goldberg extolling some of the joys of being in the opposition. And there are many -- no doubt getting to call the current head of state a fascist and wave around 'DON'T TREAD ON ME' flags are high on the list -- but there are also some pains. Sometimes, you lose. (For the liberal side, think about how tough it was to swallow Bush's climate-change policy, or the Iraq war, or tax cuts for the rich -- policies no less momentous than the health bill, in my opinion.)

Let me say one final thing: I really don't think this bill is as "landmark" as everyone says. All this nonsense that the legislation somehow guarantees Obama a permanent place in presidential history strikes me as somehow absurd (the guy could lose his majorities this November -- very likely -- and then hobble to defeat by 2012, with only the stimulus, credit card reform (and, since it was snuck into that bill, letting guns into national parks) and a very modest health care bill to show for it).

We disagree about this bill, which your side depicts as the end of America as we know, and my side thinks has somehow solved all our problems. Nonsense: the employer-based system remains largely in place (though may very slowly fade out, an objective that both Republicans and Democrats should favor). The bill received the qualified support of parts of the insurance industry, the American Medical Association and the AARP -- we could cynically say it bought our all the stakeholders, or we can simply say it's so watered down to be quite meaningless. That the bill so eerily resembles the one Republicans proposed in 1994 strikes me as a strong indicator of its moderation.

Anyway, that's beside the point. Loathe the legislation all you want; wallow in the angry editorials, the harbingers of doom, CBO dartboards -- but don't worry. Your side will be back, sooner than you think.

Dog Whistle Politics, Krugman Style

Remember this column:

[H]ere's what Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House — a man celebrated by many in his party as an intellectual leader — had to say: If Democrats pass health reform, "They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years" by passing civil rights legislation.

… Think about what it means to condemn health reform by comparing it to the Civil Rights Act. Who in modern America would say that L.B.J. did the wrong thing by pushing for racial equality?

Remember this column not because it's fatuous nonsense. Remember it because it's a gleaming example of Krugman's tactics. It's dog whistle politics par excellence, where only the hint of Republican racism invokes nodding heads of agreement among loyal NYT readers.

His column also has the added benefit of being patently false. Gingrich never said that about the Civil Rights Act. But I suspect for Krugman's readers, just because he got his facts completely wrong shouldn't distract from the narrative. You see, imputation and innuendo are much more persuasive than actual data and facts. The facts just get in the way; they don't fit the story!

For Krugman, the protean term "Republican" covers all manner of sins. Depending on the day, it can mean anything from venal, to evil, to stupid. Today, Republican = Racist.

He is an influential American economist. He owns prime real estate in one of the most widely read newspapers in the world. He is a consistent fixture on Sunday morning talk shows. He commands (browbeats?) the respect of many important intellectuals. He is, after all, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. Readers, analysts, policy makers, writers – anyone really – who bow at the altar of Krugman, remember this column.

Who’s Reading This Blog?

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and now president of the American Action Forum, wrote an eye-opening op-ed in the NYT last Saturday detailing the morass of deceit housed in the new health care bill. For instance:

In reality, if you strip out all the gimmicks and budgetary games and rework the calculus, a wholly different picture emerges: The health care reform legislation would raise, not lower, federal deficits, by $562 billion.

… [S]ome costs are left out entirely. To operate the new programs over the first 10 years, future Congresses would need to vote for $114 billion in additional annual spending. But this so-called discretionary spending is excluded from the Congressional Budget Office's tabulation.

… In addition to this accounting sleight of hand, the legislation would blithely rob Peter to pay Paul.

… The health care legislation would only increase this crushing debt. It is a clear indication that Congress does not realize the urgency of putting America’s fiscal house in order.

A day before this op-ed was published, I wrote that the bill won't reduce the deficit. I said it contains provisions which outline how not-yet-invented "future cost-saving initiatives" rely on "accounting gimmicks" that amount to a "budgetary sleight-of-hand." The bill, I also said, will be like other entitlement programs: it will "burden the budget and worsen the debt."

There are a lot of similarities between my post and his op-ed, no?

I doubt that Doug Holtz-Eakin – who makes his living and reputation scouring legislation and producing sober analyses – reads this blog. But the facts we point to should give you a sense of how serious people look at this bill.

Only time will tell if the new health care bill will reduce the deficit as the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats say it will. For the sake of the federal budget, let's hope Holtz-Eakin and I are wrong.

My mood...

I believe that this health care bill will unavoidably lead to a universal health care system because it is creating a perverted and pretend "free-market" system that is unsustainable. And at the point where government is responsible for health care in any meaningful and broad sense, it will fundamentally and irrevocably destroy the relationship between the individual and the State. Add in the fact that we're already screwed from our profligate spending and well...I don't see much to be hopeful for in our future.

I can't say I'm feeling angry right now. More just resigned and sad about what is to me another severing of the connection to the philosophy that has made our country unique and led to its greatness. And it's sadder still to see how happy so many people will be at the result of this bill. The lesson I take (and which Berchmans will not) is: Ignorance is bliss, I suppose.

And like Pandora's Box, it doesn't even matter if Republicans someday take control and repeal the stupidity of this reform. Some things once done, cannot be undone. Precedents are set and there is no return.

I see that Mark Steyn was feeling much the same as me, if in more stark terms (terms that opponents would call hyperbolic I'm sure; I just think those critics have their heads up their asses in utopian optimism):

Here's Steyn, on The Corner:

Happy Dependence Day! [Mark Steyn]

Well, it seems to be in the bag now. I try to be a sunny the-glass-is-one-sixteenth-full kinda guy, but it's hard to overestimate the magnitude of what the Democrats have accomplished. Whatever is in the bill is an intermediate stage: As the graph posted earlier shows, the governmentalization of health care will accelerate, private insurers will no longer be free to be "insurers" in any meaningful sense of that term (ie, evaluators of risk), and once that's clear we'll be on the fast track to Obama's desired destination of single payer as a fait accomplis.

If Barack Obama does nothing else in his term in office, this will make him one of the most consequential presidents in history. It's a huge transformative event in Americans' view of themselves and of the role of government. You can say, oh, well, the polls show most people opposed to it, but, if that mattered, the Dems wouldn't be doing what they're doing. Their bet is that it can't be undone, and that over time, as I've been saying for years now, governmentalized health care not only changes the relationship of the citizen to the state but the very character of the people. As I wrote in NR recently, there's plenty of evidence to support that from Britain, Canada and elsewhere.

More prosaically, it's also unaffordable. That's why one of the first things that middle-rank powers abandon once they go down this road is a global military capability. If you take the view that the US is an imperialist aggressor, congratulations: You can cease worrying. But, if you think that America has been the ultimate guarantor of the post-war global order, it's less cheery. Five years from now, just as in Canada and Europe two generations ago, we'll be getting used to announcements of defense cuts to prop up the unsustainable costs of big government at home. And, as the superpower retrenches, America's enemies will be quick to scent opportunity.

Longer wait times, fewer doctors, more bureaucracy, massive IRS expansion, explosive debt, the end of the Pax Americana, and global Armageddon. Must try to look on the bright side...

So....

We have 100 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities. Someone explain to me why we even bother pretending we have a future.

Our society is f*****.

(For fun...if that's the word...here's this: http://www.usdebtclock.org/)

Bart Stupak

Should we start molding Bart Stupak's "Profile In Courage" award now? Or should we wait until the President signs a later executive order over-riding the EO that bought Stupak's vote?

RE: Health Care…

Esquire wants to know what we think about the current health care debate. Here are my answers:

1) I don't know if they've been 'good' for democracy, but the debates do show the genius of our system. Democrats want to ramrod this thing through, no matter what; our system won't allow it.

2)

(i) No. And serious people know this. But the point of the legislation is not to reduce the deficit. The point is to slow the growth of healthcare costs and provide as near-universal coverage as possible. Moreover, as this recent letter to the President from some leading economists notes:

Taken together, these measures are a serious, multi-faceted initiative to improve the quality and efficiency of American medical care, rein in the fastest growing portion of government and private budgets and provide a valuable platform for future cost-control efforts.

You read it right: "future cost-control efforts." This budgetary sleight-of-hand is akin to what Matt Miller of the WaPo calls the 'magic asterisk'. These are the footnotes placed at the bottom (or worse, at the end) of a government budget proposal in which it outlines how this proposal won't break the bank because of some future cost-saving initiative yet to be invented. Miller explains:

This symbol of budget villainy dates from the Reagan era, when White House budget director and uber-deficit monster David Stockman sought to mask his reckless debts behind a footnote pledging large "future savings to be identified.

The Obama administration has already heavily employed the 'magic asterisk' in its FY2011 budget submission. For example, in the so-called 'temporary' 2009 stimulus bill, the administration attempts to make permanent tax two provisions by folding them into their baseline projections.

All of this is just technical nonsense, anyway. Every administration now does it. But outside of the accounting gimmicks and esoteric budget analyses, here's how to think about it: what entitlement program hasn't burdened the budget and worsened the debt?

I suspect Berchmans will point to the fact that Medicare cuts enacted over the decades have 'stuck' or that the CBO generally underestimates savings in various health bills. But the truth of the matter is, these 'savings' are miniscule compared to the growth in healthcare costs. If fiscal discipline were truly a goal of this administration, then this legislation would not exist.

(ii) For those without health insurance?: a big 'yes'. Overall health care? I doubt it. And so do these other economists.

(iii) I don't know about faith, but it will certainly increase our dependency* on politicians. Some may not see a problem in that. I do.

3)

(i) President Obama has been unusually candid and honest in this debate, for a politician. He can be faulted for taking stats out of context and not being truly forthright about the effect of healthcare on taxes, businesses, and the deficit. But it seems that he truly believes government-aided health care (how else do we call it?) will reduce costs (see 2(i)).

His narrative has been magnificent and almost free from hyperbole.

(ii) Both Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are less talented than Obama, which is easy enough to see. So with regard to their public pronouncements: not honest nor compelling. But that's irrelevant. Their job is to see that government-aided health care (seriously, what the hell is it?) gets passed as soon as possible. And to that end, their work behind the scenes, honest or not, is truly the stuff of legends.

(iii) House Republicans are like House Democrats. They'll do anything -- and I mean anything -- they're told. It's the nature of the position.

The distinction lies in the Senate. Look, I think it's sad that the narrative lately has surrounded this notion that Senate Republicans are legislative intransigents and therefore guilty of 'bad governance'. Here's how to see it: if Republicans are philosophically opposed to any interference in health care by government and Democrats forward a bill that proposes one of the largest interventions ever, compromise shouldn't be expected.

(iv) The CBO get a lot of credit for their scoring on various health care bills. Quietly and efficiently, Elmendorf and his staff looked at the numbers, gave us sober reviews, and did it expertly. And they did all this within a heated political environment. They deserve our praise.

(v) Don't get me started on the media. If one wants to look for an industry that illustrates the folly of capitalism, an industry where there is truly a race to the bottom, look no further than our cable media outlets, professional bloggers, and some of our daily newspapers.

*I put together a little graph over a month ago using new data from the BEA. It shows that "transfer receipts" -- personal income that comes directly from government in which no services are performed -- now outpace investment income. That is, in the aggregate, our income is comprised more of government benefits than of dividends, interest, and rent put together. To put it yet another way, Americans get paid more for doing nothing than for investments, making us more dependent on politicians. But more on that in an upcoming post.

Health Care...

1) Do you think that the congressional debate/procedures on health care legislation have been/will be good for democracy?

2) Do you think that the health care legislation as written will...

    i) reduce the deficit?
    ii) improve health care in America?
    iii) increase faith in the American political system?

3) How honest do you think the following are being in the portrayals of the health care reform legislation?

    i) President Obama ?
    ii) Nancy Pelosi / Harry Reid ?
    iii) Congressional Republicans ?
    iv) The CBO ?
    v) The media ?

(These are individual questions; not "multiple choice")

Tea Party and Federalist Papers

I mentioned earlier my bemusement that the Tea Partyers (partyists?) were reading the Federalist Papers for solace. Esquire challenged me, and I never responded. Turns out other people have done it for me. This from Dana Milbank in WaPo:

A member of the audience passed a question to the moderator, who read it to Armey: How can the Federalist Papers be an inspiration for the tea party, when their principal author, Alexander Hamilton, "was widely regarded then and now as an advocate of a strong central government"?

Historian Armey was flummoxed by this new information. "Widely regarded by whom?" he challenged, suspiciously. "Today's modern ill-informed political science professors? . . . I just doubt that was the case in fact about Hamilton."

Jonathan Chait of the New Republic fills out the rest here.

Derbyshire on all things Exceptional...

I really enjoyed this piece by John Derbyshire. It's his take both on national exceptionalism and the exceptionalism of the human species.

Derbyshire has become one of my favorite writers. I sometimes disagree with him, I more frequently wish I disagreed with him (because his conclusions challenge me and make me uncomfortable), and I almost always find his writing very enjoyable to read.

School Indoctrination

When President Obama exhorted high school students not to drop out in that summer speech last year, some conservatives lambasted the effort as indoctrination-lite. I thought it was a silly debate -- the same way Esquire thinks the Second Amendment can't be read any other way than his, apparently -- but I don't think the latest Texas shenanigans are.

At least in the textbook world, where Texas goes, so does the nation. And so, when the local board of education decides to review the curriculum to include glowing accounts of Nixon's and Reagan's leadership, that matters because it might affect how students in, say, Arkansas or Montana learn about the ideas. Some of the concepts under attack include the separation of church and state, and some Founders didn't make the cut either -- Thomas Jefferson was removed from a list of figures who inspired the Enlightenment.

Not all the modifications are bad. I don't mind high school students learning more about Milton Friedman alongside John Maynard Keynes (though I doubt how much they'll appreciate about what either had to say). And, really, let's all admit this: Jefferson was a douchebag.

So, in the spirit of high school:

INTERESTING QUESTIONS FOR GROUP DISCUSSION -- Can any curriculum be devoid of ideology? Is there a difference between partisan editing and earnest, good-faith political education? Should we care about all this nonsense, since a) our kids better not learn social studies, but math and science, if they hope to get a job?, and b) our kids are all going to private school anyway?

Marc Thiessen and Jon Stewart

You can watch the full interview on the Daily Show website. First off, I think the television interview was completely fair, despite Thiessen's whining at the end otherwise.

And, secondly, at least in the initial discussion about the 'Al Qaeda 7,' Thiessen completely falls flat. There's a moment when Stewart asks him if a lawyer who represented only pedophiles would be open to disrepute (i.e., sympathetic to pedophilia), and Thiessen replies something to effect of, "Yes; why does this lawyer keep representing them?" That's just absolutely unbelievable.

There's some notion on the right that were it not for excessive lawyering, the complex legal questions about detainee rights and habeus corpus would not have arisen. I just don't think that's the case, and the fact that the Supreme Court again and again sided with these lawyers moves me in that direction. These were legitimate arguments and disputes that needed to be heard and decided, not frivolous lawsuits that somehow managed to persuade five of the nation's most eminent jurists.

As for the rest of the interview -- on torture, etc. -- I think Thiessen does a better job holding his ground.

Lowry & Ponnuru answer their critics

National Review's Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru have answered critics (both negative and sympathetic) of their article on American exceptionalism.

I think it's a pretty good response. They address many of the points that we have discussed here.

I Don’t Know Why Either

Alex Tabarrok makes an interesting point this morning:

"I don't know why anyone interested in the welfare of children would want to discourage this kind of experimentation."

The experiment he is talking about concerns charter schools in Harlem. According to new research and Harlem parents whose kids are enrolled, these schools have made important improvements in educational achievement among poor and black students. Geoffrey Canada, founder and president of Harlem's Children Zone, a charter school district in Harlem, says that his schools have found the "equivalent of curing cancer for these kids. It's amazing. It should be celebrated." Charter school successes in New York are so great that the State Legislature receives regular pressure from voters to lift the limit on the number of charter allowed across the state, including Harlem.

There are some who want to discourage this kind of experimentation. Namely, Bill Perkins, state senator from Harlem, opposes charter school expansion there. He is, among other things, not a fan of the for-profit model that charter schools rely. And as the NYT tells us, he thinks Harlem parents are "being sold something that is hype, that is all about creating more demand."

Well, Tabarrok reminds his readers that one of the more successful charter schools, Promise Academy, resides in Perkins' district. If Perkins gets his way, the successes found at Promise Academy will not be replicated anywhere else in Harlem. That raises two important questions, one of which Tabarrok already alluded to: why oppose this experimentation? And how successful is Promise Academy anyway?

In yesterday's NYT, David Brooks tells us that a new study of Harlem's Children Zone, which counts Promise Academy as one of its own, found "enormous" gains in educational achievement among its students. Brooks gives us a summary of the study:

[T]he most common education reform ideas — reducing class size, raising teacher pay, enrolling kids in Head Start — produce gains of about 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.3 standard deviations. If you study policy, those are the sorts of improvements you live with every day. Promise Academy produced gains of 1.3 and 1.4 standard deviations. That's off the charts. In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students.

Let me repeat that. It eliminated the black-white achievement gap.

Stirring stuff, indeed. It seems to me that Promise Academy and other charter schools of the same ilk are producing some extraordinary gains.

Yet Bill Perkins' point remains. Charter schools like Promise Academy will likely produce more demand. In the for-profit model, suppliers will do everything they can to convince us that more of what they sell is more of what we need. It'll just be another race to the bottom, according to this argument.

But if that supply produces 1.3 to 1.4 standard deviations in educational gains, what's wrong with more demand? Why would anyone want to discourage these kinds of gains? Don't people understand that opposing charter school expansion means staying with the educational status quo? Why would anyone want that? What's wrong with educational experiments if they produce better outcomes?

I'm with Alex: I don't know why either.

(Addendum: When Brooks uses statistical terms to illustrate the large improvement students in Harlem make at Promise Academy – 1.3 and 1.4 standard deviations worth of improvement – he says these achievements are "off the charts." Well, not really. These achievements are large but still on the charts.)

Who Holds Your Money?

The following is a great graph produced by New York Times graphics editor Hannah Fairfield. She shows us the distribution of customer deposits between big and small banks throughout the country. Using FDIC data and analytical research from the IRA Bank Monitor, the graph illustrates deposit competitiveness – market concentration between big and small banks – in different regions of the country. It's a beautifully-imagined visual display of quantitative information.

DC v. Heller, Round 2

The Supreme Court heard arguments in McDonald v. Chicago, which will decide if the Second Amendment is to be incorporated against the states (as opposed to just the federal government, was decided in Heller). It's a case full of delicious irony, since it puts the conservative jurists in the uncomfortable position of whacking states' rights, and vice versa for liberals.

OK, it's not that dramatic. Apparently, 42 states already guarantee the individual right to bear arms, even as they allow for a whole range of reasonable restrictions. As long as the Court incorporates the Amendment and allows for those regulations (as it did in Heller), I don't think we'll have much of a problem. This is how the liberal American Constitution Society put it:

There are two ways to think about "reasonable regulation." The first is what I've long endorsed: the Second Amendment should be governed by the formal "reasonable regulation" standard uniformly used in state constitutional law. Forty-two states have constitutional protections for the individual right to bear arms and all of them apply a deferential standard by this name. Under that test, any regulation will be allowed to stand so long as it doesn't effectively destroy or nullify the individual's right to have a gun for self-defense. Some types of weapons can be banned so long as individuals have access to others. Applying this test, almost all gun control survives.

Some people, of course, are more scared about what the dreaded five will do. I liked this Bloomberg article, because it highlights how far the gun control debate has shifted to the right since the Democrats dropped the subject altogether. Even if take a limited view about gun control, it's difficult (at least for me) to justify allowing unconcealed weapons without a permit, or carrying guns into a bar or place of worship or airports. The author, Ann Woolner, even comes up with her own gun amendment (yes, a bit ridiculous, but again, taken in the context of liberal angst, rather understandable):

“Well-regulated firearms, being necessary to the security of the states, the right of the people to be safe from gunfire as they go about their daily lives shall not be infringed.”

A few worthwhile essays...

that deal in different ways with American Exceptionalism:

First, I may have once linked to this, but this is Charles Murray's 2009 Irving Kristol Lecture before AEI, entitled "The Happiness of the People." (And Berchmans: It's based on the Federalist Papers! :))

And second, here is Jim Manzi's much discussed essay in National Affairs entitled "Keeping America's Edge." (I haven't actually finished this one yet, but it's interesting).


[If either of these have been discussed on here before and I missed them, my apologies for doubling up]

That Victor Davis Hanson post I noted below...

Figured I'd post it, since it was mentioned in my comments below. In my first reading, I don't find all of this totally convincing (or at least in the way he presents it), but there are a few worthwhile points in there:

More on American Exceptionalism [Victor Davis Hanson]


Very good piece [referencing Lowry/Ponnuru's]; couple of thoughts:

1) American exceptionalism — Perhaps it derives in part from our putting a higher premium on freedom and liberty than, as in the French and other European cases, egalitarianism and fraternity; also, we were truly the first multi-ethnic state that sought to embrace a common culture rather than carve out cultural or racial fiefdoms. By 1820 there were already all sorts of sizable blocs of European ethnics, and so America no longer thought of itself as of merely English descent. I might quote as a dissent from this theory Obama’s moral equivalence on exceptionalism — remember he said that we are exceptional only in the sense that everyone else, from the Greeks to the Brits, thinks they are exceptional, too.

2) Proletariat — Perhaps it would be better, when speaking of an early rural society, to talk of an absence of peasantry: We had no concept of a large underclass of only quasi-free people attached to barons as serfs; instead, yeomen agrarians were the Jeffersonian ideal, a nation of independent farmers rather than peasants (as John de St. Crevecoeur wrote).

3) A gun-owning society, unlike Europe — On the theory that an armed citizenry would fight any federal effort to overturn individual liberties: That tradition later made our citizenry more comfortable with firearms, with obvious advantages for our military

4) “We in Europe are the Obama” — Obama also fails to see the irony that only an exceptionally free and proud America could have provided the military umbrella necessary to Europe’s development into an essentially disarmed socialist society — one dependent militarily and economically on the U.S. largely because we are so unlike it. Or, as a French intellectual whispered to me at a party not long ago, “There is only room in the West for one Obama — and we in Europe are the Obama.”

Obama also fails to see that American exceptionalism resulted in a degree of freedom and affluence for millions impossible elsewhere, which in turned fueled his own romantic idea of utopianism, e.g., because America was so rich and leisured, an Obama could indulge in criticizing it for not being consistently perfect.

Good point on Obama’s distancing himself from American traditions; he is a paradox since his own success would be impossible in Europe or in Africa or Asia, and yet even in his privilege he sees himself as often antithetical to the very conditions that made him.

A question remains: Much of Obama’s comfortable leftism is a product of careerism; for a prep-school kid who went to Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard and ended up in Chicago, his chic redistributive and radical ideas were sort of like medieval churchmen wearing crosses — it was part of entré into the club.

So it is hard for Obama to question an orthodoxy that for him was amazingly lucrative and opportune in careerist terms. Without a race-class-gender grievance mindset, and without a fault-America-first worldview, Obama would never have risen so far so fast in the circles he navigated. His only challenge now is to disguise and manipulate before an edgy public the thoughts, associations, and assumptions that have been second nature to him for 30 years but which are proving to be an anathema to the American people. He is our first president to be entirely unfamiliar with the productive classes of the private sector, without experience in anything much outside of universities and grievance politics. Consequently, he is increasingly bewildered that he can’t sway foreign heads of state and now the American public with the same old “hope and change” vacuity that so wowed Ivy League totems.

NRO forum on American Exceptionalism...

I thought this "symposium" (to use NRO's term for any online discussion with more than two contributors) on Lowry/Ponnuru's article (and American Exceptionalism specifically) was pretty interesting.

Not all the authors are in full agreement, but the ideas are interesting.

Another (final!) hit on Ponnuru/Lowry

This from The Economist blog, Democracy in America. The author takes issue with the National Review boys' assertion that America is freer, more individualistic, more democratic, and more open and dynamic than any other nation on earth:

How would we truly rate democracies if we had point-by-point, careful comparisons? Well, it so happens that a Washington-based and government-funded NGO, Freedom House, rates every country on earth for "free" and "democratic" qualities. (Full disclosure; I'm an advisor to the group.) Specifically, it gives every country a rating from 1 to 7 on political rights (call that "democracy") and another on civil liberties ("freedom"). America, as a matter of fact, gets an overall 1-1 rating; so do many of the other democracies, mostly in Europe. But there are finer-grained measures—subscores on questions like "electoral process", "rule of law" and "freedom of expression" that add up to the two topline measures. Not only does America not have perfect subscores; looking at the table for the most recent year with full data (2008), we see that right next to it in the table is Uruguay, which has higher scores in several categories and thus a higher overall score. Ranking all countries on these subscores, America comes in a multi-way tie for 30th place. So according to a respected NGO often considered to be on the centre-right (though the board is politically diverse), America is not the freest country in the world, or most democratic. It isn't second or third either. It's merely in the top tier.