Kingmaker: Why Sarah Palin’s Endorsements Really Are That Big A Deal vs. Romney’s Problem in a Nutshell. I estimate that Mitt Romney’s IQ is around two standard deviations above Sarah Palin’s. That’s democracy.

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Intrade probability of the House of Representatives going to the Republicans:

Policy consequences?

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The heritability of religiosity is modest in the American environment. In some environments, such as Saudi Arabia, a normal range in variation in religiosity obviously can not express itself. But under more relaxed conditions it seems that around half of the variation in religiosity in the population can be traced to variation in genes; in other words, the trait value runs in families. Obama’s father was born a Muslim, but was an avowed atheist. I couldn’t find survey data from Kenya, but I did find some from Tanzania. According to the World Values Survey 8 out of 1171 respondents did not believe in God in Tanzania. The equivalent figure for the United States was 51 out of 1200. And his mother, from what we can tell, was also an atheist. The United States and Kenya are not, and were not, Saudi Arabia, but neither were they Sweden or Japan. Though one had license to be an atheist, it was certainly culturally atypical, and all the pressures would have gone in the other direction. From this I conclude that Barack H. Obama lacked a natural disposition toward supernatural belief.

Which is where environment steps in. From what I know of his biography (far less than most I assume) he did not receive any push toward religion until he began to consider his future in black urban politics. For historic reasons that African American church is the core institution within that ethnic community, maintaining a line of continuity even to the antebellum period. The relationship of black Americans to their churches is perhaps analogous to Greeks to Greek Orthodoxy. A Greek may not be very religious, but to be Greek is to be Greek Orthodox. Contrast this with a Korean ethnic identity, which can entail a host of religious or irreligious orientations. The analogy between blacks and Greeks breaks down insofar as black religion is sectarian and highly fractured, resembling the competitive marketplace common among white evangelicals. This even includes black Islam, which despite a recent move toward orthodoxy, originally resembled black Christianity far more than conventional Islam. One can perceive the black attraction to a particular style of religion in the fact that they are underrepresented in American Buddhism, except in Soka Gakkai, an “evangelical” Japanese Buddhist sect (a black Congressman from Georgia, Hank Johnson is a member).

Barack H. Obama started out with the biological “raw material” of being black in America. But from what we can tell he had to learn and socialize to be a black American during adulthood. An almost necessary constituent of being black in America is a relationship with a prophetic, evangelical and revivalist religious culture. Even if one is irreligious personally, this is the religious culture which one grows up in, and is familiar with. Obama, being raised in a white secular household did not experience this firsthand, so he could not afford to remain detached from religion as an adult. I can not speak to the sincerity or opportunism of Obama in accepting conversion into the Christian community, but one can not deny that the event lay at the nexus of disparate personal tensions, between his familial heritage and upbringing, which was extremely secular compared to the norm, and what was necessary to become a part of black America, a identity which is imbued with a religious tinge.

Finally, one must address the reality that most secular people do not view all higher superstitions as standing on equal ground. I had a Dutch friend who was an atheist who once explained to me how much more superstitious Roman Catholicism was than Calvinism. He was naturally from a Calvinist cultural background. Similarly, atheists from a Roman Catholic background on occasion will give the church its philosophical due in relation to the rank emotionality and blind faith which they perceive to be the bread & butter of evangelical Protestantism. The Protestants may respond that at least they read the Bible which Catholics also claim to believe in! At even a further remove, Edward Said was from an Arab Protestant background, but was an avowed atheist as an adult. Despite that he would assert that Islam was his civilization! This is I think analogous to atheist Jews who retain a strong identification with the religious culture of Judaism. So I suppose we can wonder where Obama’s heart is. I suspect that despite his lack of belief in the truth claims of black Christianity, he identifies with it on a moderate level as an expression of black nationalism with which he is not without sympathy toward, but balanced against this is a cosmopolitan respect for religion as a generality, from his sister’s philosophical Buddhism to Islam.

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Since Andrew noted a revision of the name for the “Cordoba House,” I thought I would discuss something which has alway bothered me: the perceptions of Muslim Spain by both the opponents and proponents of the project. The opponents argue that Muslim Spain, itself a category encompassing seven hundred years and a variety of polities, was characterized by the domination of Muslims over Christians and Jews. The proponents of the project suggest that Cordoba as the capital of Al-Andalus was a brilliant example of the efflorescence that can occur in a climate of cultural pluralism. Both are strictly true. The problem occurs when we interpret the past through our own particular normative lens.

The reality is that compared to any present nation, excepting cases such as Saudi Arabia or North Korea, Muslim dominated Spain was a profoundly illiberal place, with dhimmis often relegated to a role analogous to that of blacks before the Civil Rights era. And yet on the balance around the year 1000 Al-Andalus was more religiously diverse and tolerant than any polity west of the Indus, in the world of Islam or Christendom. Though Muslims accepted the right of Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians to practice their faith so long as these groups accepted Islamic domination, as an operational fact by the year 1000 these communities were already in the midst of a precipitous slide toward marginality or extinction. The last flickers of North African Christianity in the Maghreb were going dark, and the power and influence of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian religious eminences at the heart of the Muslim world was no more as their communities no longer had the demographic parity to make them noteworthy.

Muslim ruled Spain had a more robust Latin Christian culture than North Africa, which was always linguistically divided, with the Berber tribes only lightly touched by Romanitas. Additionally, the Muslim elite in Spain was divided between Arab and Berber, as well as Arab factions whose roots go back to divisions in the Levant and Arabia proper. Geographically Spain was also very far from the core of the Muslim world, an exotic land literally on the edge of the world. So as a structural matter the relationship of non-Muslim and Muslim was more balanced than it was in most of the Islamic world, producing a de facto culture of relative toleration and pluralism in the year 1000 in Al-Andalus which was more akin to the period of the Umayyad Caliphate in the year 700. The last of the Church Fathers, John of Damascus, was an official for the Caliphs of Damascus. There was no way that Muslims in this period could monopolize even the highest positions in the bureaucracy because of their numerical inferiority and the continuing cultural power of the Greeks. The Umayyads were not fundamentally more tolerant than the later Abbasid Caliphs, who relied more exclusively on a Muslim bureaucracy (though often these were recently converted families, such as the Barmakids). They were simply in a position which their actions bespoke toleration because that was the price which pragmatism demanded.

What I’m pointing to here is the to distinction between an attribute and a situation. We know as an empirical fact that the partisans of the Abrahamic faiths are not very tolerant of dissent from their religious monopolies when they are in a position of power. But, in a position where the faith can not impose its will on a society toleration is a characteristic. So the first Christian monarchs in pagan European lands were often rather tolerant of the religious feelings of the majority, but beyond a particular point the Christian powers that be imposed their faith on the non-Christian majority (generally the key was the extension of Christianity beyond the royal family to members of the nobility who could serve as ideological allies; if this did not occur the populace could remain firmly pagan as they were in the case of the Wends). The distinction between the attribute of tolerance, and a situation which fosters tolerance, can be muddled. In the case where a particular religion is supremely dominant the idea of tolerance may simply seem ludicrous and peculiar on the face of it, a temptation toward heresy and error. But in a situation where a plurality of religious opinion is a structural fact of the universe tolerance may seem a necessary attribute of a civilized person; from what I have read the last Mughal Emperor was a genuinely latitudinarian individual in matters of religion, but I do not believe it is a coincidence that he was a product of the Indian cultural milieu.

Bringing the issue back to the present, moderns tend to co-opt pre-moderns for their own ideological ends, when the pre-moderns had no such ideology, or when ideology did not even exist. Muslim Spain was not an idyll of toleration which could serve as a model for any modern nation. Rather, in its day and age it was a region where different cultural strands, Romance, Arab and Berber, Muslim, Christian and Jew, persisted uneasily. In the years between 1000 and 1250 the Muslim tide retreated before the Reconquista states in the north of Spain, and Islamic powers in the Maghreb were invited in to staunch the expansion. They failed, and the last 250 years of “Muslim Spain” consisted of the tenuous existence of the Emirate of Granada as a vassal of Christian powers. What would have happened if the North African powers had rolled back the Christian advance?  Over time the decline in Christian numbers would reduce the community to marginality or extinction, and there would certainly be eventual extinction of Romance dialects outside of mountainous areas, and probable absorption of Al-Andalus culturally into the Mahgreb.

So far in this post I’ve been implicitly focusing on the uses and abuses of this period of history by partisans of  multiculturalist Left-liberalism. What about conservatives who see in the attempt by Muslims to idealize Cordoba a dominionist agenda? My personal experience with Muslims is that many do have some nostalgia for Al-Andalus. Not as an example of the multicultural tolerance which it may represent, but rather the high water mark of Arab Muslim civilization, both geopolitically and culturally. But that need not be the only interpretation, and I can grant that more sophisticated Western Muslims may co-opt the past in a manner which makes their own existence within a liberal order possible. I have noted for example Western Muslims citing approvingly the existence of their co-religionists historically as a minority in non-Muslim lands, or even the subordination or alliance of Muslim polities with non-Muslim ones. My impression from the Muslim commentary in the past is that these were seen as deviations, embarrassments, or pragmatic compromises. But many Western Muslims do not see them in that way at all, but rather as more genuine expressions of what it means to be Muslim.

As an atheist with little sympathy for Islamic civilization I do find this new sentiment peculiar, but the key to understanding it is human cognition: the explicit models and rationales which people give for their beliefs may not truly inform you of the deep logical structures which are the causal roots of why they believe what they believe. There are many Christians today who claim that their religion entails that they be anti-racist, pro-feminist, anti-capitalist, pacifist, pro-capitalist, racialist, etc. Which one of these is the “real Christianity”? As an unbeliever I do not believe that it is of any use to distill Christianity down to an idealized reality. Rather I accept that the religion is defined by the parameter space which religious believers occupy. Christian libertarians and Christian socialists who argue that their political beliefs derive from their religion are both equally sincere, and, equally misguided in grounding their politics in a false axiom (that God exists, and Christianity is Truth).

Western Muslims who claim the “real Islam” is totally compatible with democratic liberalism may be part of the same general phenomenon. Though the reality is that Muslims today are by and large an illiberal lot, these individuals may believe that they have access to the True Islam. As a factual matter what I believe has happened is that some Muslims have become liberals, and their liberalism entails a certain set of constraints on their religious beliefs, which they rationalize by asserting that these are more in keeping with their religious tradition than the illiberal aspects which they must discard. Granted, Muslims in America are more socially conservative than the average, about as conservative as evangelical Protestant Christians. And there is always the problem that they identify with an illiberal Islamic international. But probably the best bet for America is to aid & abet the belief by Western Muslims that their interpretation of their religion is the religion, and limit the immigration of Muslims from foreign lands so that the new cultural norm takes hold among the Muslims we already have.

Note: I’m not going to publish historically ignorant comments (or I’ll delete them). Stupidity is blasphemous to me, and we live an iniquitous age! In other words, don’t lecture me on details you don’t grasp.

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Over at Discover Blogs a comment I thought of interest:

Most of the sensitivity/grievance culture of the Right is purely fabricated – we (including me as part of the Right) only do it to point out the hypocrisy within the Left at showing outrage, etc., only when it benefits the Left’s cause, or to create cognitive dissonance within the Left or the left’s media. Even the demands for “ideological diversity” within academia are a rhetorical gambit rather than a real demand – aimed at diminishing the prestige of Leftist academics and reducing the authority of their pronouncements, rather than actually getting more conservative academics. (However, if a conservative grad student demands “ideological diversity”, he probably means it, in the “give me a job” sense.)

Unfortunately, some people on the right, particularly the more Christian sort, have actually started to take this stuff seriously instead of understanding that it’s all just a put-on to embarrass the Left.

I agree with this in the generality. When libertarians argue against social security because it discriminates against blacks males, who have shorter life expectancies and may never reap benefits from a system they’ve paid into, they don’t really oppose social security because of disparate racial impact. That’s just an argument which might appeal to liberals.

On the other hand, I do think that some Christian conservatives sincerely accept the validity of grievance and sensitivity as organizing principles of discussion. I suspect this is a feature of the evangelical Protestant subculture in the United States, which has long been oppositional, and felt dismissed and condescended to by the mainstream society.

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Over at Discover blogs I have two posts up, Republicans, the middle class party and Republicans still the party of the rich. Also, if you want to talk about limousine liberals, note that there is only one precinct in Manhattan where Republicans outnumber Democrats, the downtrodden southwest corner of the Upper East Side.

Poking through the GSS I will tell you what I’ve stated before: wealth/income and education have opposite independent effects when it comes to politics. All things controlled those with more money are more conservative and/or Republican. All things controlled those with more education are more liberal and/or Democrat. As a rule economic class status is much more salient as a predictor of politics for those without college degrees than those with college degrees. In plain English there’s a really strong tendency of those without college degrees who are in the upper income brackets to being conservative, and those in the lower income brackets to being liberal (at least in their voting patterns and alliances). The distribution is more uniform for those with college degrees.

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In my post below I refuted the contention that the Democrats are the party of the rich. As I noted there is some evidence that the super-rich may tilt Democrat. There are some economic and social sectors which lean Democratic because of their social liberalism, but there is no preponderance that I have seen in the data for the rich identified with that party. As I have observed, even in New York City, one of the citadels of cultural liberalism, the wealthy tend to be more Republican. The only precinct in Manhattan with more Republicans than Democrats is in the Upper East Side across from Central Park.

But there is more granular nuance here. In Andrew Gelman’s Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State he reports data which shows that though Democratic leaning states tend to be wealthier, on average within those states the wealthy tend to vote Republican. Another detail is that the correlation between income and voting Republican is weaker within Democratic leaning states, but very stark in Republican states. Even when you control for race in states like Mississippi this remains the case. Gelman’s data and analysis tends to rebut the argument in What’s the Matter with Kansas?.

And yet going back to the aggregate, there’s still more to be said. As noted in the comments there is actually data to suggest that the modal Republican is middle class, while Democrats have a more varied socioeconomic coalition. Quite often middle class Republicans tend to be above average in income and wealth, but are not necessarily college educated. By contrast, the lower classes lean strongly Democratic. The upper classes are more polarized. So one model using the aggregate Democrat and Republican coalitions is that the former are an alliance between the lower class, minorities,  knowledge professionals and liberal wealthy, and the latter are a coalition between the middle class, the business class, and the conservative wealthy.

Below are some data from the GSS. The survey was taken in 2006, and had a variable which inquired into household wealth. I looked at voting for Bush, Republican identification, and liberal and conservative orientation, for whites. As one ascends education, intelligence, an wealth, the ideological landscape becomes more polarized, so I thought that showing “one half of the equation” was misleading in the last case. I added the tick-marks for confidence intervals since the sample sizes get small as you go up the class ladder.

Note: The previous post brought out a lot of empty and baseless (aside from one’s own self-worth) commentary in people, some of which I did not publish. I understand that political posts tend to bring the retard out in people, but try to keep it under control unless you want to waste time tapping away at a keyboard and not having anything to show for it. Having your comment published is not a right. Here’s a link to the GSS ANES browsers.

Variables:

Row – wealth(r:1-3″Less than $40 K”;4-5″$40 – $75 K”;5-6″$75 – $150 K”; 7″$150 – $250 K”;8″$250 – $500 K”;9″$500 – $ 1 million”;10-12″More than 1 million”)
Column – PRES04 partyid(r:0-2″Democrat”;3″Independent”;4-6″Republican”) polviews(r:1-3″Liberal”;4″Moderate”;5-7″Conservative”)
Select – race(1)

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I notice that Roger L. Simon has an uninformed post up, The Party of the Rich, where he says:

Back when I was a kid, we used to assume the Republicans were the party of the rich. It was a given — all those plutocrats with chauffeurs shuttling them between the penthouse in Sutton Place and the weekend manse in Southampton.

Of course that was pretty idiotic then (a Kennedy was in the White House), but it’s outright moronic now.

There are some isolated data that the super-rich may now be more favorable to Democrats than Republicans, but by and large the classes with capital remain Republican. I looked at the American National Election Studies data set for 2008. Since minorities voted overwhelmingly for Obama I limited the sample to whites. Then I broke it down by income and looked at who they voted for and which party they identified with. The data seem to indicate that Roger L. Simon should not be throwing around terms like “moronic,” as he lives in quite the glass house.

I assume at this point my liberal readers may wonder if there is a vast conservative media conspiracy to create a false model of reality. Perhaps. But I think there’s a less complicated answer: liberal social and economic elites are culturally much more prominent on a day to day level than conservative social and economic elites. By the former I mean the entertainment and media industries. So wealthy liberals may be outnumbered, but they can project their voices and attain greater visibility more easily because they have more friendly operators of the cultural megaphones. In contrast, socially liberal but broadly politically conservative plutocrats such as David Koch generally allow more folksy types such as Dick Armey to speak for them in public.

Also, there’s a weird dichotomy on the Right when it comes to their self-image, and the esteem which the rich and the not-so-rich are held. I attended a Cato Institute event in the early 2000s, and among economic conservatives there was a worry that the public did not understand the critical role that the “producers” played in our society. And yet by contrast there is also an element of the Right which has internalized an almost Marxist frame whereby the economic elites, the holders of capital, are delegitimized as sources of authority. Ergo, the social conservative folksy face of the American Right which takes pride in its petit-bourgeois base.

Note: My own personal sympathies lean with the Right. But I am also extremely turned off by the faux and authentic populism which is currently ascendant. A genuine conservatism accepts hierarchy, distinction of role, a certain authority given to elites and specialists. I understand why cultural conservatives feel that the elites and specialists (technocrats) can not be trusted, but it seems to have gone too far in rejecting the very concept and idea of elites and technical knowledge, welcoming a radical and revolutionary flattening of social orders.

Variables:

Row – v085195 v083097
Column – v083249(r:1-9″-$20 K”;10-14″$20-$40 K”;15-17″$40-$60 K”;18-20″$60-$100 K”;21-*”$100 K+”)
Select – v081102(1)

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One Especially Silly Aspect of the Ground Zero Mosque Fight:

–The mosque would be an “unnecessary provocation.” (Sarah Palin)

–”It’s not about religion, and is clearly an aggressive act that is offensive.” (Newt Gingrich)

–Abe Foxman said in an interview on Friday that the organization came to the conclusion that the location was offensive to families of victims of Sept. 11.

Are these not the exact same sentiments that were voiced by people who thought that Salman Rushdie should not have published The Satanic Verses, and that Danish newspapers should not have run cartoons featuring The Prophet Muhammad? The idea that people have some sort of right not to be offended is one the many silly and pernicious things about these arguments.

My first reaction to the story, or the idea of an Islamic cultural center, etc., at that that particular location was offensive. I am admittedly not a person who is very well disposed to the Islamic religion, and my attitude toward religion as a whole is biased toward personal disinterest at best. Upon further review I can see a pragmatic medium/long-term case for the center’s existence for a variety of reasons. More broadly I think there are more important things (e.g., our fiscal situation!) which we might focus on. And I think using the current laws in place to block the construction of the cultural center is not in the broadly liberal tradition of the United States when it comes to religion.

But the specific opinion about the cultural center is not the primary issue here. Rather, I do believe that there is something to be said here for the elevation of perceived offense at the center of our culture. My friends on the Left tend to be very indulgent/understanding of offense on the part of women and minorities. The far Left has been preeminent in constructing the concept of Hate Speech, which operationally seems to be a secular form of blasphemy. One issue which has been communicated to me is that people’s feelings and visceral responses, their perception of the object or action to which they take offense, has to be taken seriously, no matter if you judge the response meritorious or not. You don’t know their experience, and their perceptions of discomfort are tangible and real negative outcomes.

The response to the “Ground Zero Mosque” indicates that this really isn’t the ultimate core of the Left’s acceptance of the code of sensitivity. Rather, there are particular things that one can acceptability be offended by, and other things which one should not be offended by. The “post modern” interpretation is actually simply a superficial gloss over the reality that there are things we value, bright lines we draw, and those which we do not value, and bright lines we do not draw. The cultural Left seems to find the cultural Right’s offense without merit, open to deep criticism of motive, etc. Some of the criticism is grounded in lines of argumentation which I find plausible. Much of the logic against the cultural center seems post hoc rationalization of a conclusion which derives from an emotional response. But the genuine, if often inchoate, offense of many cultural conservatives, is the target of skepticism, contempt and dismissal. That’s because the values of cultural conservatives are in a deep way perceived to be wrong, without value, on the cultural Left. The fact that some people have different values is without value or importance. The Left lives in just as black and white a moral universe as the Right; the color coding is just different.

The “Ground Zero Mosque” affair then shines a light on the reality that America is a large nation, with diverse values and priorities. What may be offensive in one part of the nation is not offensive in another, and vice versa. For a unitary political order this is a long term structural problem.

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Liberals in the United States love to laud European ways as a cudgel against American conservative exceptionalism. But they don’t admire all European ways, Ezra Klein on Lindsey Graham’s possible floating of a constitutional amendment to repeal birthright citizenship:

How then to explain Graham’s announcement — on Fox News, no less — that he’s stepping into the immigration issue with a proposal that’s much more divisive, and much more dangerous? “I may introduce a constitutional amendment that changes the rules if you have a child here,” he said. “Birthright citizenship I think is a mistake. … We should change our Constitution and say if you come here illegally and you have a child, that child’s automatically not a citizen.”

Putting aside the cruelty of the position, which penalizes children for the sins of their parents, this is certainly “bringing up immigration.” And indeed, it’s trying to use birthright citizenship as a wedge issue against the Democrats. Worse, it centers the conversation on illegal immigration rather than the immigration system. That’s a much more toxic, and much less productive, conversation.

Many European states have restricted birthright citizenship within the last generation. It’s probably a corollary to a welfare state. I happen to agree with Will Wilkinson that birthright citizenship is probably a major impediment to any resolution of immigration flows where there has to be compromise, because the stakes are just too high for everyone involved.

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