This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
If you’ve been following the Copenhagen process this week, you may have noticed that the “debate” over climate change and what to do about it has regressed. Whereas, just a few years ago, George W. Bush acknowledged the human role in global warming and John McCain was a leading proponent of climate-change legislation, know-nothingism is now resurgent. The GOP pins its electoral hopes on slogans like “drill, baby drill” and “cap-and-tax”; McCain has soured on cap-and-trade; and on the nation’s airwaves and op-ed pages, climate-change deniers (and their more circumspect brethren, the “skeptics”) crow triumphantly at every snowstorm and every controversy, real or imagined, that puts climate scientists on the defensive.
Worse yet, many years of painstaking efforts to explain climate change to the American people and get them concerned about it seem to be gradually unraveling. As Chris Mooney notes in a piece on the ‘disastrous’ turn in the narrative, an October 2009 Pew report shows that, since April 2008, the number of Americans who believe there is “solid evidence the earth is warming” has dropped from 71 percent to 57 percent. During that same period, the proportion who accept the existence of climate change and attribute it to human activity has dropped from 47 percent to 36 percent–not exactly a robust constituency for immediate action. (There is a brand new poll from the World Bank that suggests more robust support among Americans for carbon emissions limits; I hope–but don’t believe, in the absence of more details–that it’s accurate.)
What is causing this apparent unraveling? There are three competing theories as to its source:
(1) The first and most obvious is that support for allegedly expensive or growth-threatening environmental action always declines during economic downturns. Gallup periodically asks Americans which they value more: environmental protection or economic growth. Interestingly, from 1984–2008, a plurality (and usually a strong majority) of Americans always prioritized the environment over growth (even when their voting behavior indicated otherwise). But this tendency to prioritize environmental action does flag during recessions, as was evidenced by a steep slide in the “top priority environment” / “top priority growth” ratio from 70 percent / 23 percent in 2000 to 47 percent / 42 percent in 2003. After an uptick in support for the environment as a priority over the economy from 2004–2007, the ratio nose-dived during the most recent economic crisis, to the point where an actual majority said the economy is more important in March 2009 (51 percent / 42 percent), the first time that has happened in Gallup’s polling.
(2) A second possibility is that the change in public opinion is largely a byproduct of the radicalization of the Republican Party. There’s certainly some support for that proposition in the Pew surveys. As recently as 2007, 62 percent of self-identified Republicans told Pew they believed there was solid evidence for global warming. That percentage dropped to 49 percent in 2008 and then to 35 percent this year. (There’s also been a similarly large drop in belief about global warming among self-identified independents—a group that includes a lot of people who are objectively Republicans. The drop among Democrats has been less than half as large.) It’s probably no accident that this change of opinion occurred during the 2008 campaign, when Republicans suddenly made offshore drilling their top energy-policy priority, and this year, when virtually anything embraced by the Obama administration has drawn the collective wrath of the GOP.
(3) Then, there’s the third factor that might explain the changes in public opinion: a determined effort by the hard-core anti-environmental right to dominate the discussion and change its terms. This is the main subject of Mooney’s essay, which focuses on the “statistical liars” like columnist George Will who have distorted climate data to raise doubts about the scientific consensus, and on the continuing brouhaha in the conservative media about “Climategate.” Matt Yglesias has gone further, arguing that climate-change deniers have scored a coup by convincing the mainstream media (most notably the Washington Post, which regularly publishes Will’s columns, and recently published a predictably shrill op-ed by Sarah Palin on the subject) to treat the existence of climate change as scientifically debatable.
I have no compelling evidence to demonstrate which of these factors has contributed most to the gradual ungreening of America, but there are ways to mitigate the negative impacts from all three. Fears that environmental protection is “unaffordable” in a poor economy are obviously cyclical, so unless we are in a recession that will endure for many years, this problem should at some point recede. What’s more, there’s some evidence that suggests efforts to sell action on climate change as “pro-growth” via investments in green technologies can help cushion the public’s skepticism.
Meanwhile, the second and third causes—GOP radicalization and the revival of a powerful denialist media presence—are clearly interrelated. Self-identified Republicans who spend a lot of time watching Fox News are obviously influenced by the torrent of “information” about the “hoax” of global climate change; while both conservative opinion leaders and GOP politicians are invested in promoting polarization on a historic scale. But this toxic environment would be largely self-contained if misinformation weren’t bleeding over into the broader discourse that includes Americans who don’t think Obama is a committed socialist or that environmentalists want to take the country back to the Stone Age.
And that’s why Yglesias is right: This is one area of public policy where “respect for contrary views” and “editorial balance” are misplaced. Sure, there are many aspects of the climate-change challenge that ought to be debated, and not just between those at the ideological and partisan extremes. But we shouldn’t be “debating” whether or not the scientific consensus on climate change actually represents a vast conspiracy to destroy capitalism and enslave the human race, any more than we should be debating whether “death panels” are a key element of health care reform.

One of the most confusing (but important) details in the health reform debate is the impact of reform on health costs. Last week a lot of reform opponents crowed when the independent administrator (who title is “Actuary”) of the Medicare program released a report suggesting that total national health care costs would be roughly the same in ten years under the pending Senate bill as under status quo policies. It thus wouldn’t, said critics, “bend the curve” of rising health care costs.
As Jonathan Cohn of TNR explains today, one obvious problem with that diagnosis was the arbitary cutoff date of 2019; costs under the reform scenario would actually go down for a couple of years, then go up sharply when the uninsured are covered in 2014, then trend more modestly downward after that. Moreover, the report doesn’t reflect the intended cost savings in the bill that CBO refuses to “score” based on their “speculative” nature, which happen to reflect what serious cost-hounds have been recommending most urgently.
But beyond that, even if you accept that the “curve” doesn’t “bend,” there’s this little matter that over 30 million additiional Americans will have health insurance under the reform scenario as scored by CBO. In other words, even if the costs are the same, the benefits are higher. That ought to count for something in this debate.

The big political story of the weekend has to be the election of City Controller Annise Parker as the first lesbian mayor of Houston. Yes, that’s right Houston, big-oil stronghold, Bush-rearing, 4th-largest-city-in-America Houston.
Although Democrat Parker is not the first openly-gay candidate to win an election for mayor of a major American city — Providence, RI and Portland, OR have had gay mayors — she will be the first openly-gay mayor of a megalopolis. She won with 52.8 percent of the vote in a run-off against another Democrat, highly-respected African American civil rights attorney, Gene Locke, who received 47.2 percent of the tally. Locke was supported by much of Houston’s business establishment.
Parker’s election is being heralded as, not only a major milestone for gay rights, but also a harbinger of new urban politics. But there are many traditional aspects of her election — low turnout (16.5 percent of eligible voters); her status as a born-and-raised, Rice-educated, life-long (except for 2 years) Houstonian; her fiscal conservatism creds, enhanced by a strong background in urban financial management; and her employment in the oil and gas industry for 20 years.
Although Parker and her partner for 19 years have adopted three children, Texas still has a state law that bans same-sex marriage. And Houston’s city council had earlier voted down benefits for same-sex partners.
According to The Houston Chronicle wrap up by Bradley Olson.

Her victory capped an unorthodox election season that lacked a strong conservative mayoral contender and saw her coalition of inside-the-Loop Democrats and moderate conservatives, backed by an army of ardent volunteers, win the day over Locke, a former civil rights activist who attempted to unite African-American voters and Republicans.
…In many ways, the race was framed by the financial anxieties voters have experienced over the past 18 months. At the polls, voter after voter cited Parker’s experience watching over the city’s $4 billion budget as a primary consideration in their choice…Instead of being turned off by a politician reluctant to promise the world, voters responded to Parker’s straight talk about all that might not be possible in the coming years. Dozens of Houstonians interviewed by the Houston Chronicle said they appreciated her often blunt answers that made Locke’s proposals seem vague.

In Rick Casey’s incisive analysis, also in The Chronicle, he adds:

His [Locke’s] backers had nothing against Parker but did not believe she could overcome the lesbian label. They believed Locke could win by combining the black vote with a substantial portion of Republicans who would vote against Parker because of her sexual orientation…That turned out to be wrong. For one thing, as the low turnout indicates, neither candidate had the star power to boost voter participation.
More important for Locke, his appeals to Republicans, particularly as a law-and-order candidate, didn’t stick, and the anti-lesbian vote turned out to be smaller than expected.
…Greg Wythe, a bright political analyst and blogger (www.gregsopinion.com) who has joined Mayor Bill White’s gubernatorial campaign, did a precinct-by-precinct analysis of the first-round of votes. It showed Parker coming in first or second in such Republican areas as the West Side, Kingwood and Friendswood. Locke came in a poor fourth in those areas.
I believe it was Locke’s performance in those areas that led his finance team members to take the desperate step of aligning the campaign with gay-bashing Steve Hotze — thereby pushing undecided white liberals and moderates into Parker’s well-run campaign without turning out enough anti-gay votes to win.

Despite the gay-bashing in the late weeks of the mayoral campaign, her sexual orientation was clearly a non-factor for most voters. The two most salient lessons of Parker’s election for Democratic candidates might be that gay-bashing doesn’t work in city-wide elections and impressive financial management creds are a formidable asset in urban politics.

This book review is cross-posted from Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, where it first appeared in the Winter 2010 issue.
A Review of:
Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right By Jennifer Burns • Oxford University Press • 2009 • 384 pages • $27.95
Ayn Rand and the World She Made By Anne C. Heller • Nan A. Talese • 2009 • 592 pages • $35
When the novelist, philosopher, and social critic Ayn Rand died in New York in 1982, her world had been reduced to a small group of sycophantic disciples, ironically dubbed “The Collective.” Twenty-plus years later, though, the circle of Rand’s influence is arguably wider than ever. While Rand has never lacked for book sales–the nature of her fiction virtually guarantees a self-renewing audience of underappreciated adolescents and self-righteous business executives–at present, her work is exerting far more political influence than it has enjoyed since the earliest days of American libertarianism. As Jonathan Chait of The New Republic and others have explained, Rand’s denunciations of government taxation and regulation as “looting” and her moral defense of capitalism are crucial to conservative rhetoric these days, especially within the militant “Tea Party” movement.
What a coincidence, then, that two well-researched, serious books on Rand should appear this year. Jennifer Burns, a University of Virginia historian, has penned a fine account of Rand’s life that particularly focuses on her place in the pantheon of the American Right, while veteran magazine editor Anne C. Heller (her resume ranges from The Antioch Review to Lear’s) has written a more conventional biography that thoroughly explores the heretofore darker corners of Rand’s life, including her childhood and adolescence in revolutionary Russia. While neither are Rand disciples (although Burns, unlike Heller, was given access to Rand’s private papers, zealously guarded by her institutional monument, the Ayn Rand Institute), both defend her philosophical originality and her literary talent, and both view her as a tragic figure whose greatness was spoiled by her intolerance for dissent and her abusive private behavior toward her closest associates and potential allies. They also think she has been vindicated by her posthumous impact on the libertarian movement and a variety of writers and entrepreneurs, including the founders of Wikipedia and Craigslist.
But much as Rand craved appreciation for her work (as sadly reflected in the worshipful eyes of The Collective and her bitterness about every negative book review she ever received), it’s hard to imagine that she would have been terribly happy about its current appropriation by a motley assortment of conservative populists, who mix quotes from The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged with Christian Scripture and the less-than-cerebral perspectives of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. In her own view, Rand was nothing if not a systematic philosopher whose ideas demanded an unconditional acceptance of her approach to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, psychology, literature, and politics.
Rand’s famous intolerance should not be dismissed as simply the psychological aberration of a flawed genius. She feared, for good reason, what lesser minds might do with the intellectual dynamite of her work when divorced from its philosophical context. The prophetess of “the virtue of selfishness” made rigorous demands of herself and all her followers to live self-consciously “heroic” lives under a virtual tyranny of reason and self-mastery, and to reject every imaginable natural and supernatural limitation on personal responsibility for every action and its consequences. Take all that away–take everything away that Rand actually cared about–and her fictional work represents little more than soft porn for middle-brow reactionaries who seek to rationalize their resentment of the great unwashed. This is why Rand was so precise about the moral obligations and absolute consistency demanded both of her fictional “heroes” and her acolytes. She hated “second-handers,” people who borrowed others’ philosophies without understanding or following them.

Read more…

A new survey of Israeli public opinion conducted by Gerstein-Agne Strategic Communications for the New America Foundation offers a far more nuanced view of opinions about Obama and efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict then the standard American media narrative. Here’s the summary:

Despite repeated media reports touting a “4 percent Obama approval rating” and arguments that the United States has lost the Israeli public’s support for renewed peace efforts, Israelis actually demonstrate a much more supportive and nuanced view of President Obama, and there is solid backing for an American-sponsored final status agreement along the lines of where the parties left off nine years ago at Taba and in the recent Olmert-Abbas negotiations.
The survey also shows that Prime Minister Netanyahu has a great deal of political space to sign a peace agreement with the Palestinians, including within his own Likud party.

The survey examines Israeli opinion in unique detail, with an extensive battery of questions and in-depth “paragraph A vs. Paragraph B” policy choices like those used in many Democracy Corps studies.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
In case you missed it, once-and-maybe-future presidential candidate Mike Huckabee traveled to Calgary, Alberta, Canada the other day and delivered himself of an address (according to his own pre-speech account, reported in the local press) focused on the terrible temptation of conservatives in the United States to tolerate diverse points of view, under the shorthand of a “Big Tent.”
That would be bad, said Huck, struggling from afar against the vast forces calling for ideological heterodoxy within the Republican Party.
As someone who adores our Neighbors to the North, and has made speeches there on occasion, I was struck by how odd it was for Huckabee to be sending this particular message in this particular place. It is customary for Americans speaking in Canada to express a great deal of interest in, you know, Canada. Maybe Huck did that in his actual speech, but he sure did seem to make it clear to the S.E. Calgary News that he wanted to inform Canadian conservatives of the threat of creeping liberalism among their counterparts down south.
To be sure, Huck’s on a long-term mission to make his image among conservatives match his actually extremist views. He outraged most of the Right’s chattering classes in 2008 by suggesting there were grounds for resentment of economic inequality in George W. Bush’s America. And his many detractors on the talk radio circuit have just been handed a big hammer, via the Maurice Clemmons story, to crush his presidential ambitions.
So maybe Huck’s just exhibiting message discipline. But you have to wonder if in Calgary he went over the brink into an assault on those godless socialists in the U.S. who contemplate a pale imitation of the notoriously totalitarian Canadian system of publicly provided health insurance (which most Tories in Canada would not even think to repeal). And you also have to wonder if U.S. conservatives generally will ever stop beating the dead horse of Republican “moderation.”

Reactions to the President’s speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize have for the most part been modestly positive, even from Republicans who uttered faint praise in the midst of denunciations of the prize and its recipient.
In the New Republic, TDS Co-Editor William Galston went further than most Democrats or Republicans, callling it “the best speech of Obama’s presidency.”

What struck me most favorably about the speech was Obama’s moral realism–about the world, and about his own role within it. Forcefully, but with dignity and restraint, he distinguished his responsibilities from those of King and Gandhi, who led nonviolently as private citizens. “Evil does exist in the world,” he declared, and as long as it does, war is a moral possibility, sometimes a moral necessity. And not only to defeat evil; “the instruments of war,” he said, “do have a role to play in preserving the peace.”

Aside from his effort to articulate a realistic “just war” philosophy, Obama’s speech, says Galston, also struck a nicely nuanced note about a subject many feel he has shirked since taking office, the role of human rights in U.S. foreign policy:

He went on to describe the kind of peace America seeks: “Peace is not merely the absence of visible conflict. Only a just peace based upon the inherent rights and dignity of every individual can truly be lasting. It was this insight that drove drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the Second World War. In the wake of devastation, they recognized that if human rights are not protected, peace is a hollow promise.”
But all too often, Obama continued, their principles are ignored. In some countries, leaders falsely suggest that human rights are merely aspects of the West, foreign to and imposed on non-Western cultures. In America, realists and idealists contend endlessly against one another.
“I reject this choice,” the president declared. “I believe that peace is unstable where citizens are denied the right to speak freely or worship as they please, choose their own leaders, or assemble without fear. Pent up grievances fester, and the suppression of tribal and religious identity can lead to violence. We also know that the opposite is true: only when Europe became free did it finally find peace.” These truths have practical implications for the conduct of American foreign policy. “Even as we respect the unique culture and traditions of different countries,” Obama promised, “America will be a voice for those aspirations that are universal.”

It was certainly an unusual speech for a politician and a head of state; you could no more imagine George W. Bush giving it than you could imagine Bush receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in the first place. But Galston views it as potentially a harbinger of the future direction of Obama’s foreign policy, and a “better balance between private engagement and public firmness, and between carrots and sticks,” in terms of diplomatic relations with repressive regimes.

TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages makes a good companion piece to our staff post yesterday on Lee Fang’s expose of the right wing’s campaign to “swift boat” scientists concerned about global warming. Teixeira reports on a new poll, by WorldPublicOpinion.org, which indicates that a very healthy majority of the Amerian public supports “taking action to stop climate change.”:

…In the U.S. component of this survey, conducted in late September, 58 percent of the public said we had not done enough to deal with the problem of climate change, compared to 28 percent who thought we’d done the right amount and just 13 percent who thought we’d done too much.
Moreover, an overwhelming 82 percent said our country has a responsibility to take steps to deal with climate change.

Even more impressive:

The public’s sense of America’s responsibility in this area includes supporting a U.S. commitment to limit greenhouse gas emissions as part of the Copenhagen agreement, if other countries are willing to do the same. An identical 82 percent support such a commitment, compared to just 15 percent who don’t.

Looks like the climate-change denying swift-boaters have flunked, and badly. As Teixeira concludes, “Conservatives who urge slow or no action on climate change are fond of saying they represent the true voice of America on this issue, not progressives. As usual, they’re wrong.”

With so much attention riveted on the reaction of a handful of senators to the latest attempted compromise on health care reform, it’s easy to forget that House Democrats will have something to say on the subject if and when a bill finally gets out of the upper chamber. Moreover, there were some rumors circulating earlier this week that Speaker Nancy Pelosi intended to bring a Senate-passed bill directly to the House floor for an up-or-down vote, avoiding the normal House-Senate conference to work out differences (and on a bill this complex, there will be many).
But now leaders of the House Progressive Caucus–most notably co-chair Raul Grijalva of AZ–are serving notice that they and other House Democrats may demand a conference. That’s not terribly surprising in itself. After all, most Progressive Caucus members have already had to back down from earlier promises to vote against any health reform bill that didn’t include a “robust” public option, defined as one that made payments according to Medicare rates. From their point of view, they’ve made if anything more concessions than anyone should have expected. Blithely accepting a bill that does not contain a public option (in the normal meaning of the term), without a conference, undoubtedly seems like far too much to ask.
Still, the necessity of a conference adds weeks and a lot of public controversy to the timetable for enactment of health care reform, on top of the time that Republican delaying tactics will consume. So everyone should buckle up for a long ride into 2010.

Whatever else happened politically in 2009–and a lot obviously happened–one development that couldn’t quite have been anticipated was the erosion of public confidence in the case for doing something about global climate change.
Yes, recessions always diminish interest in environmental action, on the theory that it’s something we can only “afford” in prosperous times. But that’s not the half of it, as Chris Mooney explains at Science Progress:

Back in 2006, the year of the release of An Inconvenient Truth, it felt as though serious and irreversible progress had finally been made on the climate issue. The feeling continued in 2007, when Al Gore won the Nobel and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced that global warming was “unequivocal” and “very likely” human caused. Mega-companies like General Electric were burnishing new green identities, and the Prius was an icon. The Bush administration was widely suspected of having deceived the public about the urgency of the climate issue, and journalists were backing away from their previous penchant for writing “on the one hand, on the other hand” stories about the increasingly indisputable science.
Then came the election of Barack Obama, boasting a forward-looking policy agenda to address global warming and a stellar team of scientists and environmentalists in his cabinet and circle of advisers, including climate and energy expert John Holdren and Nobel Laureate Steven Chu. The United States, it seemed, would finally deal with global warming—and just in the nick of time.
Who could have known, at the time, that the climate deniers and contrarians had not yet launched their greatest and most devastating attack?

The “story” on this subject changed, says Mooney, thanks to two separate lines of argument from conservatives that exploited public doubts on climate science. The first was the hammer-headed approach of pointing to cold temperatures here or there as “proof” there was no global warming:

The new skeptic strategy began with a ploy that initially seemed so foolish, so petty, that it was unworthy of dignifying with a response. The contrarians seized upon the hottest year in some temperature records, 1998—which happens to have been an El Nino year, hence its striking warmth—and began to hammer the message that there had been “no warming in a decade” since then.
It was, in truth, little more than a damn lie with statistics. Those in the science community eventually pointed out that global warming doesn’t mean every successive year will be hotter than the last one—global temperatures be on the rise without a new record being set every year. All climate theory predicts is that we will see a warming trend, and we certainly have. Or as the U.S. EPA recently put it, “Eight of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2001.” But none of them beat 1998; and so the statistical liars, like George Will of the Washington Post, continued their charade.

The second prong of the backlash against a climate change consensus among Americans was all about the incident that delighted conservatives call “ClimateGate.” If you’ve somehow missed it, emails hacked and linked from the bowels of a British climate change institute allegedly show coverups of inconvenient data and other unkosher practices. It’s not clear why this is supposed to make us all assume that climate science is a vast cesspool of conspiracy, but that’s how it has been used by climate change deniers, notes Mooney:

“ClimateGate” generated a massive wave of media attention, blending together the skeptics’ longstanding focus on undercutting climate science with a new overwhelming message of scandal and wrongdoing on the part of the climate research establishment. This story was not going to go away, and even as scientists put out statements (most of them several days late) explaining that the science of climate remains unchanged and unaffected by whatever went on at East Anglia, the case for human-caused global warming was dealt a blow the likes of which we have perhaps never before seen.

The timing of the ClimateGate furor, on the eve of international discussions on global climate change, isn’t coincidental, and has obviously been as destructive as it was intended to be.
It may well be that increasing public doubts about climate change in this country are just rationalizations for the normal fear that saving the planet is in conflict with saving jobs, and is thus a challenge best consigned to manana.
But the aggressive campaign of denialists and skeptics, skillfully exploiting every bit of evidence and pseudo-evidence that the consensus on climate change is unravelling, is a factor too large to ignore.