The CW these days is that with Americans having real (i.e., economic) problems to worry about, they’re no longer inclined to engage in “culture wars” over abortion, church-state separation, GLBT issues, etc. Aside from the rather insulting premise that struggles over personal freedom, equality, and for some combatants, the structure of the universe and the definition and meaning of human life are less important to people than real growth percentages, it’s not actually true. Cultural issues are less visible in Washington for the simple reason that Democrats control the congressional agenda (if not always the results), and are generally either uniniterested in or divided over cultural issues. (This doesn’t, of course, keep conservatives from claiming that health care reform legislation is actually designed to promote both abortion and euthanasia).
Outside Washington, however, the culture wars often rage on. For a good example, check out a long, fascinating piece by Russell Shorto that appeared in the the latest New York Times Magazine, on the Texas State School Board’s ongoing struggles over public school curriculum and textbook content.
As you may know, Christian Right leaders in the late 1980s, frustrated by the limited ROI from their involvement in national politics, encouraged their followers to run for local office, particularly school boards, in an effort to promote theocratic thinking from the ground up and from early childhood on. The bitter fruit of this strategy is most on display in Texas, where self-consciously Christian conservatives running as Republicans captured the State Board of Education in the late 1990s.
Shorto explains in detail how the Board’s Christian Right bloc pores over textbook content in periodic reviews, usually offering hundreds of amendments to recommendations made by expert panels (which are themselves being skewed towards theocratic views). He also notes that these activities have an impact far beyond Texas, since the state’s gigantic market heavily influences how textbook companies operate nationally. That the Christian Right bloc is interested in religio-political rather than educational goals is best exemplified by the presence on the Board of Cynthia Dunbar, who commutes once a week from Texas to Lynchburg, Virginia, to teach at the late Jerry Fallwell’s Liberty University School of Law. Among other things, Dunbar has publicly denounced the very existence of public schools, and said sending one’s children to them (she didn’t, of course) is like “throwing them into the enemy’s flames, even as the children of Israel threw their children to Moloch.” Just the kind of person you want supervising an entire state’s public schools.
Most interestingly, Shorto demonstrates that the ultimate goal of the Christian Right bloc on the Board goes well beyond such headline issues as the teaching of “scientific creationism” or church-state separation hot buttons. They are mainly, as Dunbar puts it, focused on embuing students’ understanding of American history and law with a “biblical worldview.” That means, in practice, emphatically teaching such distinctly non-biblical principles as “American exceptionalism” (which for these folks means America’s divine mission to Christianize the world, by military means if necessary), limited government, and absolute property rights. It’s a very political–one might even say secular–agenda that happens to coincide nicely with the long-range agenda of the secular as well as the religious Right. And it’s an excellent example of how in Conservativeland cultural and economic issues cannot be neatly separated. If God’s a hard money man, an anti-tax activist, and a neocon, then the whole idea of a “Christian Nation” has implications significantly broader than municipal Christmas creches, or even abortion and LGBT equality.
Shorto suggests that the extremism of the Texas State School Board has been controversial even among conservative Republicans, and points to a Republican primary challenge to Board member Don McLeroy (a dentist whose especially heavy hand with science textbooks led to his removal as Board chairman by the state senate) on March 3 as a bellwether:

If Don McLeroy loses, it could signal that the Christian right’s recent power surge has begun to wane. But it probably won’t affect the next generation of schoolbooks. The current board remains in place until next January. By then, decisions on what goes in the Texas curriculum guidelines will be history.

I’d say McLeroy’s defeat, if it happens, is more likely to produce a shift in Christian Right tactics than any real loss of power. But I’ll probably be watching his numbers on March 3 as avidly as I watch the gubernatorial primary battle between Tea Party favorite Rick Perry and U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchiston. In good times and bad, the culture wars abide.

At first glance, it’s odd that the decision of a single United States senator not to run for re-election is getting the kind of saturation coverage that Evan Bayh is now receiving. It’s not as though Bayh is Jim Jeffords, whose party switch in 2001 instantly changed partisan control of the Senate. He’s not a member of the Senate leadership, and does not chair a major committee. There was once a time when he was considered presidential timber, but having now been passed over at least twice for the vice presidential nomination, his career seems to have already peaked. And his profile in the Senate as someone who generally votes with his party while constantly complaining about it is not designed to win many friends or admirers. Yes, his retirement denies Democrats a well-heeled and popular incumbent candidate for 2010 in a difficult state, but it now appears Indiana Democrats will be able to hand-pick a successor, and it’s Republicans who will have a potentially ruinous primary.
Bayh, however, is seen as a symbol of different things to different observers in the chattering classes, and so his debankment yesterday has set them to chattering about it. “Centrist” media pundits who are obsessed with fiscal issues and believe Democrats have to move towards Republicans to create “bipartisanship” obviously viewed him as an important congressional ally, and now tend to think of his retirement as a brave Cassandra gesture in protest of a “broken” system. Republicans even more obviously are making Bayh the latest and most important example of congressional Democrats “heading for the exits” in anticipation of a 2010 GOP landslide. And on the Left, where Bayh was beginning to rival Joe Lieberman as the Least Favorite Senator, his retirement is being treated as a characteristic abandonment of party by a gutless no-account DINO, and a welcome step towards a more cohesive Democratic Party.
As always, the vagaries of the news cycle boosted the perceived significance of Bayh’s announcement, coming as it did when Washington snowstorms and then the President’s Day/Olympics recess cut off the mother’s milk of national political news. Some observers really had to reach to find something historic about Bayh’s departure; Peter Beinart’s Daily Beast column on the subject suggested that it “matters” because it dashes a dream of Democratic Hoosier success traceable to Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 presidential primary victory there.
You’d figure that when real news arrives–say, today’s revelation that a joint U.S./Pakistani intelligence operation captured the Taliban’s military commander–the political commentariat can begin to put Bayh’s retirement into better perspective. Let’s hope so.

While much of the political world is focused on the health care summit called for February 25 by President Obama, there’s an earlier summit worth watching that will happen tomorrow when RNC chairman Michael Steele meets with about 50 Tea Party leaders from a dozen or so states. Here’s how Kenneth Vogel of Politico describes it:

Steele’s planned Tuesday meeting with tea party leaders from at least a dozen states — a meeting organized by Karin Hoffman, founder of a South Florida tea party group called DC Works For Us — represents something of a breakthrough in the GOP’s courting of the tea party. Though Steele and other GOP leaders have occasionally scored meetings with individual leaders of national groups involved in the tea party movement, Tuesday will mark the first large-scale get-together between the national party and grass-roots activists from a wide array of regional tea party groups.

The meeting will further galvanize disagreements between those Tea Party activists who want to keep their distance from the GOP (many of them Ron Paul disciples and many of them affiliated with the Tea Party Patriots group that was so critical of the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville earlier this month), and those who want to work closely with Republicans to defeat GOP “moderates” in primaries and Democrats in the general election.
What makes the intra-Tea Party arguments on this subject potentially misleading is that many of these “independent” activists really want to take over the GOP in conjunction with hard-core Republican conservatives. The proportion of tea partiers who want to remain permanently independent is probably quite small. The disagreement is largely over terms for a Tea Party/Republican fusion, which makes many activists touchy about how it’s described. It’s clear now, for example, that Sarah Palin made a major mistake in Nashville by urging the Republican Party to “absorb” the Tea Party movement. “Surrender to” would have been a much more popular formulation for the crowd at Opryland.
Underlying the tension over “fusion” is the unhappiness of some Tea Party activists–understandably concentrated among self-conscious libertarians and Ron Paul “revolutionaries”–with the cultural conservatism and foreign policy militarism of “movement conservatives” in the GOP. But again, it’s unclear how many activists actually disagree with such conservative views, and how many simply support a focus on fiscal issues for tactical reasons.
in other words, you may need a decoder ring to understand reactions to tomorrow’s Steele-Tea Party summit.

It’s been obvious for a while that in forcing congressional Republicans to attend a presidential summit on health care reform on February 25, the president is trying to place them on the horns of a dilemma: they must either admit they don’t have their own “plan,” or must advance a “plan” that could be very unpopular (viz. vouchering Medicare). More generally, Obama is trying to create a broader political context in which Americans compare the agendas of the two parties, instead of treating the November elections as an up-or-down referendum on the administration’s policies or, worse yet, on feelings about the political and economic condition of the country. The president is also seeking the deepen the growing sentiment that he’s been a lot more “bipartisan” than the opposition.
But it’s also likely that Obama is using the summit to push congressional Democrats to get their own act together before it’s too late. The formal announcement of the summit indicates that the White House will in advance post on the internet a plan that meets the administration’s criteria for reform. Here’s how Jonathan Cohn analyzes the implications of that statement:

That passage seems to suggest one of the following is true:
1) House and Senate leadership have nearly finished negotiating a new compromise version of their legislation. The text the administration plans to post will reflect that compromise.
2) House and Senate leadership are still struggling to come to an agreement, if not over what to pass then in what sequence to pass it. The administration hopes this promise will force them to wrap things up.

In other words, Obama could be engaging in a two-front offensive: forcing action by Democrats to complete or revive their own health reform negotiations, on pain of looking like fools on February 25, while compelling Republicans to choose the path of open obstruction or of perilous conservative ideology.
With the summit being just ten days away, the White House isn’t affording either party a whole lot of time to make these fateful choices. But one thing seems to be sure: by February 25, there will finally be a plan on the table that merits the much-abused term “ObamaCare.”

Finally, someone has taken a public opinion survey that provides something better than a vague, distant glimpse of the Tea Party Movement. A new CBS/Times poll drills down below the surface and reveals that the Movement is not exactly the vastly popular political behemoth we have been led to believe it is. And it’s mostly composed of conservative Republicans and conservative independents who never liked Barack Obama to begin with, who dislike him now with an unusual intensity, and who have policy views that are well to the right of national public opinion.
The poll shows 18% of Americans identifying themselves as Tea Party supporters, with fully 43% saying they don’t know enough about it to have an opinion, or have never heard of it at all. (In a separate question, 55% of respondents say they know “nothing” or “not much” about the movement). There’s no straightforward report of party ID among tea partiers, but the composition of the various partisan components indicates they are roughly two-thirds Republicans, one-third independents, with a very small smattering of Democrats. For all the talk of tea partiers being equally hostile to both major parties, 62% of them have a favorable view of the GOP, while only 9% have a favorable view of the Democratic Party. 80% have an unfavorable opinion of President Obama.
Are tea party enthusiasts anti-corporate “populists” who could theoretically be attracted to a more left-bent, populist Democratic Party? Doesn’t look like it, since tea partiers are much more likely than Americans as a whole to oppose increased bank regulations, and nearly twice as likely to think Obama is prejudiced in favor of poor folks (not a compliment, given their general hostility to him). They are also much, much less likely to attribute the federal budget deficits they hate so much to the Bush administration. Nearly half of them erroneously believe the Obama administration has already raised taxes (again, not a good thing in their eyes).
There’s a lot more we could learn about tea partiers from a more detailed survey of their opinions on economic and cultural issues, and for that matter, on foreign policy. Since the activist-leadership of the movement includes both Ron Paul veterans and Christian Right culture-warriors, there may be less unanimity on some subjects.
But the more I learn empirically about these folk, the more I’m inclined to my original feeling that they are mostly very conservative 2008 McCain-Palin voters who have been radicalized by various events of the last two years. They are not anything new under the political sun, aside from the intensity of their beliefs, including counter-factual beliefs such as the conviction that Barack Obama has raised their taxes. As such, they mainly represent a force pushing the Republican Party to the right, which is where the Republican Party was headed anyway.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
One mini-saga of the past decade in American politics has been the flirtation—with talk of a deeper partnership—between progressives and libertarians. These two groups were driven together, in the main, by common hostility to huge chunks of the Bush administration’s agenda: endless, pointless wars; assaults on civil liberties; cynical vote-buying with federal dollars; and statist panders to the Christian right.
This cooperation reached its height during the 2006 election, in which, according to a new study by David Kirby and David Boaz, nearly half of libertarian voters supported Democratic congressional candidates—more than doubling the support levels from the previous midterm election in 2002. (As Jonathan Chait noted after the first Kirby/Boaz study of libertarian voting, their definition is overly broad, encompassing 14 percent of the electorate.) At the time, left-wing blogger Markos Moulitsas hailed the influx of “libertarian democrats” into the Democratic coalition. Soon, even the Cato Institute’s Brink Lindsey was proposing a permanent alliance of what he called “liberaltarians.”
Well, you can say goodbye to all that. The new Kirby/Boaz study reports that libertarian support for Democrats collapsed in 2008, despite many early favorable assessments of Barack Obama by libertarian commentators. Meanwhile, the economic crisis has raised the salience of issues on which libertarians and Dems most disagree. And there’s no question that during Obama’s first year—with the rise of the Tea Party movement and national debate over bailouts, deficits, and health care—libertarian hostility to the new administration has grown adamant and virtually universal. But what progressives need to understand is that the end of this affair is actually a good thing.
The progressive-libertarian alliance may have provided tactical benefits in 2006, augmenting the Democratic “wave” election of that year. But 2008 showed that libertarian support is hardly crucial: Obama still won “libertarian” states such as Colorado and New Hampshire handily, even without their backing, and he generally performed better in the “libertarian West” than any Democratic nominee since LBJ.
In terms of a deeper bond based on philosophical congruence, it’s true that modern liberals and libertarians share common ideological roots in eighteenth and nineteenth century Anglo-American liberalism. Both believe in a world of rational actors, and both consider the promotion of individual autonomy to be a positive good. With the emergence of the “neo-liberal” and “New Democrat” movements of the 1980s and 1990s—which lauded capitalism, technological progress, and free trade—the potential for overlap only increased.
What’s more, these groups have a sociocultural affinity. Secularism, prevalent in both liberal and libertarian circles, makes them more comfortable with each other in an era of culture wars. (In my own Washington think tank years, the two camps often coexisted on panels and over lunch or drinks—the sort of professional and social interaction that rarely if ever occurred with the Christian warrior wonks of the Family Research Council.) Plus, people on both sides of the “alliance” undoubtedly enjoyed the psychic rush of breaking bread with someone from “the enemy camp” who could quote Thomas Jefferson and rage against the Iraq war and corporate welfare.
Yet this liberal-libertarian lovefest was doomed. As Jonathan Chait argued in his 2006 essay, true “liberaltarianism” would require progressives to give up their core goals of smoothing capitalism’s rough edges and delivering economic security. Amid the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, that ain’t happening.
Moreover, with the arrival of the Tea Party movement, libertarians have acquired a kind of mass political cachet that they’ve never before enjoyed. As Nate Silver estimated last year, the early tea parties were “two parts Ron Paul/libertarian conservative–with its strength out West and in New Hampshire–and one part Sarah Palin/red-meat conservative–with its strength in rural areas, particularly in the South.” This phenomenon has pulled libertarianism rightward: Despite some expressed concerns about the crudeness and cultural conservatism of many Tea Party activists, it has become clear that most self-conscious libertarians are willing to participate in, and cheerlead for, the Tea Party movement as though their political futures depend on it.
That, in turn, has torn open cultural rifts between libertarians and liberals. Progressives who previously fawned over the libertarians’ Jeffersonian modesty are now exposed to the unattractive aspect of libertarianism that is familiar to readers of Ayn Rand: a Nietzschean disdain for the poor and minorities that tends to dovetail with the atavistic and semi-racist habits of reactionary cultural traditionalists. After all, it is only a few steps from the Tea Party movement’s founding “rant”—in which self-described Randian business commentator Rick Santelli blasted “losers” who couldn’t pay their mortgages—to populist backlash against all transfer payments of any type, complaints about people “voting for a living” instead of “working for a living,” and paranoid conspiracy theories about groups like ACORN.
Certainly, few self-conscious libertarians have much tolerance for racism, but they are encouraging a point of view about “welfare” that has long been catnip to racists. And that’s a problem for liberals. How can an alliance last in a climate where a progressive think tanker has to look down the rostrum at that nice Cato Institute colleague and wonder if he or she privately thinks the poor are “looter scum”; or if he’s willing to get behind the Sarah Palin presidential candidacy that’s so wildly popular in Tea Party circles?
The gap is wide enough that even liberals who are frustrated with the president have trouble mustering any sympathy for the Obama-bashing of contemporary libertarians—a sign that the earlier alliance really was an ephemeral product of the Bush administration’s many sins. For example, most progressives reacted angrily to the very latest proposal for a left-libertarian convergence, in which activist and blogger Jane Hamsher touted a coalition between Tea Party activists and the left against health care reform and corporate bailouts.
So could “liberaltarianism” make a comeback in a not-too-distant future, when today’s passions have abated? You never know for sure, but the next major obstacle to cooperation may well be the Supreme Court’s decision on corporate political spending in Citizens United v. FEC, which libertarians celebrated as a victory for free speech, and most liberals denounced as a travesty if not a national disaster.
Cancel the Valentine’s Day hearts and flowers; this romance is dead.

I’m normally not one of those commentators who wants to blame the ignorance or selfishness of the American people for our political problems. To put it simply, if ignorance is an issue, the blame lies with government, educational, and political officials who apparently haven’t spent enough time educating the public on basic facts. And when it comes to selfishness, there’s no question both major political parties have often competed to convince voters that they should conduct a personal cost-benefit analyisis on their ROI from what they pay in taxes, and cast ballots appropriately.
Still, it’s a bit startling to read the latest ABC/WaPo poll and find that Americans on average think that 53 cents out of every dollar of federal expenditures are “wasted.”
In a very perceptive post for 538.com, Tom Schaller notes that this finding is actually consistent with polls taken for the last twenty years. He goes on to separate the three very different perceptions this consistent opinion might reflect:

The possibilities for what makes government “wasteful” are many, but it seems to me waste can be reduced to three non-exclusive types:
1. Ineffective spending: Spending on programs that do not work;
2. Inefficient spending: Excessive spending or overhead/overpayment on programs that do work; and/or
3. Inappropriate spending: Efficient and effective spending on programs that the respondents normatively view as something the government shouldn’t be involved with in the first place.

Schaller concludes that types 1 and 3 are what most Americans are complaining about, but acknowledges that there’s not much of a national consensus about spending that’s ineffective or inappropriate. If that’s true, then the best progressive response to widespread public convictions about government “waste” would involve constant assessments of the effectiveness of government programs, and a clear sense of priorities that don’t add up to “more of the same.” But this should be undertaken with a clear-eyed understanding that Democrats aren’t much trusted to “cut out waste” in some categories of federal spending, such as defense, just as Republicans aren’t trusted to pare back highly popular New Deal/Great Society programs like Social Security and Medicare.
That means Democrats must articulate a clear and comprehensive strategy for balancing fiscal discipline and government reform with popular public activism on big national challenges that aren’t considered impractical or inappropriate. It’s not that hard to fight what Schaller calls “type 2” waste: bureaucratic inefficiency and so forth. Showing that progressives combine a good set of priorities with a jeweler’s eye for “what works” could be the keys to the poltiical kingdom.