Why conservatives are morphing into anti-authoritarian dissenters.

Megan McArdle observes:

//In the ultra-liberal enclave I grew up in, the liberals were at least as fiercely tribal as any small-town Republican, though to be sure, the targets were different. Many of them knew no more about the nuts and bolts of evolution and other hot-button issues than your average creationist; they believed it on authority. And when it threatened to conflict with some sacred value, such as their beliefs about gender differences, many found evolutionary principles as easy to ignore as those creationists did. It is clearly true that liberals profess a moral code that excludes concerns about loyalty, honor, purity and obedience -- but over the millennia, man has professed many ideals that are mostly honored in the breach.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who had questions about the prevalence of conformity on both sides of the political spectrum:

The way I saw it, this slavish obedience to authority and tradition on the part of conservatives was the true source of the culture war between liberals and conservatives over foreign war, abortion, same-sex marriage, gun control, and racial inequality. They way I saw it, conservatives clung to old, near-sighted ways of thinking and fell in line with the dictates of the "man in charge." If only conservatives would think for themselves -- like liberals do -- the war would be over and we could get on with life, governance, and progress. Or so I thought.

Then, in 2012, I went on a cycling trip around Cuba.

Jeremy Frimer, the author of the piece, noticed that socialists seemed unable to tolerate even mild questioning of Che Guevara’s eminently questionable legacy. Frimer is a researcher at the University of Winnipeg, and he decided to investigate. What he found is that liberals are actually very comfortable with authority and obedience -- as long as the authorities are liberals (“should you obey an environmentalist?”). And that conservatives then became much less willing to go along with “the man in charge.”//

The ever-sensible Megan McCardle deconstructs one of those "gosh-wow!" reports on violence against women.

Here is her article:

But there’s an even bigger problem: Who answers which questions? This is an issue that repeatedly plagues online surveys. Say you want to know how many of your readers have kids with autism. If you put up a survey asking people about their special-needs kids, with maybe some follow-up questions about the challenges of dealing with the special-needs bureaucracy, what do you think will happen? Parents of special-needs kids will forward the survey to each other, tweet about it, discuss it over coffee. And when you get your results back, you’ll find out that 50 percent of your readership apparently has kids with special needs.

And indeed, at the end of her article, Hess says: “Some of the journalists who responded to the survey were assaulted by journalists with whom they did not directly work, but the news business is an erratic one. We could be working with them soon. And then we could be working beneath them.

“So we keep whispering. The survey is still live; female journalists can report their experiences anonymously here.”

Did I click through the survey to report that I have been working as a journalist for 10 years and have never once been pushed, shoved, pinned down, punched, kicked, torn, folded, mutilated or spindled? Of course not; I already have a very full day. But I bet that if I had been assaulted, I’d have clicked through to share my story.

All of which is to say that people who feel strongly about something, or have had something unusual happen to them, are much more likely to respond to your “opportunity survey” than, say, folks who work at Bloomberg with brilliant, courteous and respectful editors and a swell boss. That’s why professional opinion researchers discourage their use to represent the broad public experience.

This survey undoubtedly tells us one thing: Some female journalists have been assaulted and harassed, which is appalling. But contra the Slate headline, we have no idea how common this experience actually is.//

If you are a leftist and Oakland is tired of you, it is most definitely time to go home.

Megan McArdle writes:

Remember all the paranoia about the "violent undertone" at tea party protests? Some of the things happening at a few of these protests is starting to seem like more than an undertone. I would far rather have my neighbor stand outside his house with a gun, then have him lob fireworks at my house, or get a bunch of his friends to cordon off my house so they could "arrest me". The tea party were demonstrating in a combined space and making life a little hot for legislators. These people are roaming around in mobs, damaging property and repeatedly clashing with the police. And no, I'm afraid I don't think that this is because the police are biased against left wing protesters; I think it's because the tea partiers stayed within the law.


Perhaps I am overreacting, but the events in Oakland seem to suggest that some faction of that group, at least, is not trying to work change within the system; they're trying to take over bits of it by force. Camping in a public park is a harmless extension of one's public rights. Barricading ports, shutting down streets, breaking into buildings, and setting bonfires . . . these are not.

I think that goes too far for most people. It certainly does for me. And the latest poll from Quinnipiac seems to indicate that the growing public disorder is costing them the high levels of support they once enjoyed. A few weeks ago, a Time poll showed that Occupy Wall Street had about twice as much public support as the tea party. Now their unfavorables are higher than their favorables, and both are only a few points better than the tea partiers. Among independents, they're indistinguishable.

The Weiner Scandal and Andrew Sullivan's Hypocrisy on Gay Marriage.

Andrew Sullivan argues that Weiner's behavior is of no interest to the public and is purely a matter between himself and his wife since marriage, in Sullivan's view, is a purely private affair.

But, wait!, says Megan McCardle, if that's the case, then why is Sullivan such an ardent supporter of homosexual marriage?:

But I also don't think it works to say that it's nobody's business but the couple's whether people keep their marriage vows. Andrew has been a great proponent of gay marriage--not civil unions, but marriage. Why was it so important to call it marriage, if everything about it is entirely private? Why not stop with legal equality and leave marriage to the heterosexuals? If all the benefits are private, then a combination of legal visitation/property sharing rights, and whatever private arrangements the two parties choose to make, should be more than sufficient.


But it wasn't, because gay couples wanted public recognition of their commitment. And well they should. But the public recognition exists for a reason--marriage is a great deal more than just saying "We like to sleep together and pick out bathroom tile." Did she show up at his campaign events? If she did, they were both happy to have the marriage be part of a very public persona. You can't use your marriage to shore up your political position, and then complain when people get curious about your performance as a husband--particularly when you piqued their interest in such a public way.

Society takes a greater interest in marriages than in other relationships because society, as well as the individual, has an interest in strong marriages. Strong marriages support a strong society. And society supports the marriage by encouraging people to do the very hard work of keeping their promises. One of the ways in which society ensures strong marriages is by tut-tutting (or worse) at people who don't keep to their vows: who abandon spouses, treat them badly, or yes, violate their trust by engaging in covert sexual activity. I'm a big fan of sexual privacy. But you cannot have a public institution that rests in part on fidelity, and also complete privacy on those matters.


Call me old-fashioned, but I think that social sanction can be very helpful in assisting us in doing important but difficult things. Marriage is stronger if people who find out that their friends are cheating don't say, "Awesome, is he hot?" but "How could you do that to Jason?" Marriage is stronger if people who cheat are viewed with slight revulsion, and so are the (knowing) people who they cheat with. Marriage is stronger when people who decide not to care for seriously ill spouses are met with an incredulous "What the hell is wrong with you?", not "Yeah, I couldn't handle that either." Of course it would be nicer if we didn't need this sort of help. But we are a flawed species.

This is, to be sure, a bit trickier in an era when people like me and Andrew accept that there can be healthy non-monagamous marriages. Maybe, folks have suggested, she was totally okay with this! This seems possible, but not really very likely. I know a decent number of people in open marriages, but they are very far from the majority of the people I know. Looking at what polls and research we have on this sort of thing, plus an unscientific survey of my friends and the women who have written me, I'm going to go out on a limb here and speak for heterosexual married women as a class: I'm pretty sure that most of us are not okay with our husbands sending racy photos to strangers, or engaging in phone sex with same within weeks of our wedding day. And if she's totally okay with this, how come she hasn't said so?

Because it would be embarrassing? But if there's nothing wrong about what Weiner did, or about having a relationship in which the spouse has said it's okay to do what Weiner did, then why shouldn't she just say so? Andrew has spent years hounding Sarah Palin because he thinks her stories about childbirth don't add up. Why does Weiner have any less obligation to clear up apparent inconsistencies in his public story?

Megan is right about Sullivan's hypocrisy, but she's wrong about "open marriage," which is an oxy-moron.

The conventional assumption is that marriage means fidelity.  People who get married trade on that assumption in many ways.  Let's assume that Weiner and his wife were in an "open marriage."  Wouldn't it be the case that Weiner was trading on the image and assumptions of his being married - that he was settled down, that he was mature, that he was able to restrain his impulses - in the minds of his constituents and people generally in society?  Wouldn't the fact that Weiner was married and, yet, privately had an arrangement that negated a principle element of marriage, make him every bit a hypocrite as any "family values Republican" who cheated on his wife? 

This exchange is interesting in showing that at least one prominent homosexual defender of homosexual marriage doesn't believe that marital fidelity is an essential part of marriage, which does raise the question, apart from wanting to redefine marriage for other people, why do they make such a big deal about marriage?

Update:

James Taranto deconstructs the issue:

Sullivan comrade Glenn Greenwald responds:

McArdle has absolutely no idea what vows Weiner and his wife have made to each other, and she shouldn't know, because it's none of her business, despite her eagerness to learn about it and publicly condemn it. Even if she had any idea of what she was talking about--and she plainly doesn't--nothing is less relevant than Megan McArdle's views of the arrangement Anthony Weiner and his wife have for their marriage and whether each partner is adhering to that arrangement.

When opponents of same-sex marriage are caught violating their vows, proponents tell us it is relevant because it shows that those opponents are hypocritical in claiming to be serious about the institution of marriage. When the likes of Sullivan and Greenwald defend Weiner, they reveal exactly the same thing about themselves. It isn't that they care about marriage, which they are happy to reduce to a mere "arrangement," but that they refuse to tolerate it as a heterosexual institution.

Travel from Corcoran to Borden in a high speed train!

Megan McCardle explains the reason why the Central Valley will be the first part of California's high speed rail to be opened:

So basically, the feds wanted to spend $2.6 billion, plus any cost overruns or operating costs, to put in a train for which there was no evident demand.  Why?  Because they didn't have any better options, and they wanted to build a train.  The California High Speed Rail project, following similarly sound reasoning, is going to start out in California's not-very-populous Central Valley, because . . . it's easier to get the right of way.  Never mind that there aren't any, like, passengers.

Philip Klein at the Spectator has more:

As the Authority was fighting off the "train to nowhere" label, it had some good luck -- incoming Republican governors John Kasich and Scott Walker turned down high-speed rail stimulus funds granted to Ohio and Wisconsin, saying they couldn't afford the rail projects given their states' fiscal problems. The Obama administration acted quickly to divert $624 million of the rejected money to the California project. The new infusion, with matching amounts from California, allowed the Authority nearly to double the proposed first segment, to 123 miles, and make it reach just north of Bakersfield (though short of its downtown).


Officially, the Authority gives several explanations for the location of the first section. The cost of building in the Central Valley and of acquiring any land is cheaper, and the terrain is much flatter.

Who cares about the economics of the plan.  They've got funding and Central Valley is flatter than where most Californians actually live!