Kevin Drum’s not much of a pothead (“I’ve never smoked a joint in my life. I’ve only seen one once, and that was 30 years ago. I barely drink, I don’t smoke, and I don’t like coffee.”) but he’s come to the conclusion that we should decriminalize marijuana and wrote a great piece in Mother Jones about it. This isn’t really the key to the argument, but I was interested in this research on marijuana-alcohol substitutability:

He found that raising the drinking age did lead to lower alcohol consumption; the effect was modest but real. But then DiNardo hit on another analysis—comparing cannabis use in states that raised the drinking age early with those that did it later. And he found that indeed, there seemed to be a substitution effect. On average, among high school seniors, a 4.5 percent decrease in drinking produced a 2.4 percent increase in getting high.

I have smoked pot but frankly it’s just not something I enjoy very much. And anecdotally it’s definitely the case that my marijuana consumption plummeted as it got easier for me to buy alcohol. Conversely, my selfish reason for liking marijuana prohibition is that it reduces the extent to which friends want to engage in pot smoking—which I find unpleasant—as a social activity.

The Bulldog coffee shop in Amsterdam (my photo)

That said, back to the real world of public policy I think the only serious debate is over exactly how you want to manage decriminalization. If you really legalize pot and sell it in stores and such, then you can tax it. But the development of large-scale commercial enterprises dedicated to marijuana advertising would have deleterious effects. So maybe it’s better to do something Dutch-style where you’re not wasting law enforcement resources on curtailing the marijuana trade, but the technical illegality keeps things restrained.

I met McNamara once, at a conference. He was self-effacing, and breathtakingly concise. I understand the charm. But there is something wrong with a culture in which a McNamara is feted for his “guts” while George McGovern and Gene McCarthy, who opposed McNamara’s mistakes, are regarded as nobodies. In one of the uglier passages of In Retrospect, McNamara sneers at the antiwar protesters who marched on the Pentagon in 1967. If they had been more “disciplined” and “Gandhi-like,” he says, “they could have achieved their objective of shutting us down.” Instead they were “troublemakers” who “threw mud balls” and “even unzipped [soldiers'] flies.” This is contrition? Shouldn’t McNamara be admitting that the mudball-throwers, after all, had been right?

That’s Mickey Kaus, being a liberal, back in 1995 writing for The New Republic. Way more surprisingly, though-provoking, and interesting than any quantity of tired “contrarianism” about how conservatives are always right about everything.

Ross Douthat on Sarah Palin:

That last statistic is a crucial one. Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

I think the implicit idea here that the real class struggle in the United States is between graduates of fancy colleges and graduates of less-fancy colleges is pretty blinkered. Consider the Census Department’s information on educational attainment in the United States of America:

As you can see, less than a third of the population has a bachelor’s degree. But both of Sarah Palin’s parents belong to that educational upper class. And so does Palin herself. Meanwhile, I think it’s telling that Douthat’s idea of a counterpoint to Obama’s Ivy pedigree is Palin rather than, say, Joe Biden of the University of Delaware and the Syracuse University College of Law. Biden strikes me as an excellent example of the fact that a person can attend some not-so-fancy universities and yet be both enormously successful and widely acknowledged to be a smart person with a command of the issues. Palin, by contrast, is someone who Douthat acknowledges needs more time “to bone up on the issues.”

And that is the key to people’s complaint with Palin; not that she attended North Idaho College but that she ran for Vice President and spoke out on a range of issues without seeming to understand any of them. That’s a big deal, and it’s not mere snobbery to point out that it’s a big deal.

Meanwhile, John Sides points out that educational attainment has relatively little impact on public approval of Palin:

When you consider that college graduates and people without bachelor’s degrees typically disagree on political issues, there’s nothing noteworthy about this rather small gap. College graduates are somewhat less conservative on culture war issues than non-graduates, so you would expect them to be less friendly to cultural conservative politicians irrespective of their personal qualities.

Rasmussen finds:

Fifty-six percent (56%) agree with the view that governments derive their only just authority from the “consent of the governed.” Interestingly, one-in-four Americans (25%) disagree.

Isaac Chotiner seems a bit distressed that the 25 percent number is so high. But I don’t think people should embrace this consent of the governed notion, and my understanding is that most political theorists would reject it. How would you measure consent? And how much consent do you need? After all, there’s no set of rules for governing society that everyone is going to agree to. Legitimacy is better thought of as deriving from substantive criteria—legitimate regimes govern with a decent respect for human rights and political freedoms and afford people a reasonable chance to change policies from within the system. And the way the relationship between consent and legitimacy works, is that when you have a legitimate rights-respecting regime people tend to treat it as legitimate, which is to say consent to following the rules.