Despite the Bible’s message of love, compassion, and respect, there are an unknown number of conservative congregation heads using their pulpits to push animosity and hate — aimed mostly at the political hot topics of the day.

In the fallout from President Obama’s endorsement of marriage equality, video and audio has cropped up of several right-wing pastors in different states advocating physical violence toward gay people and generally disparaging the LGBT community. Here are some of the worst religious messages being shared at church:

–North Carolina Pastor argues for a gay concentration camp. Charles Worley told his congregation, “Have that fence electrified so [the homosexuals] can’t get out. Feed ‘em, and– And you know what? In a few years they’ll die out. You know why? They can’t reproduce.”

– Kansas Pastor says gays should be put to death. Curtis Knapp tells his church, “Oh, so you’re saying we should go out and start killing them? No, I’m saying the government should. They won’t, but they should.” Listen:

– Indiana Pastor says gay marriage leads to abuse of children. “A decision to allow same-sex marriages today lays the foundation for the definition of marriage to become Silly Putty tomorrow capable of endless reshaping in the future,” says Pastor Paul Brewster. “That, in turn, is a recipe for children to be made victims of all sorts of abuse and the welfare of our society to receive a fatal blow.”

– Maryland Pastor says his ‘flesh’ likes the idea of killing gays. Dennis Leatherman shouts, “Kill them all. Right? I will be very honest with you. My flesh kind of likes that idea. But it grieves the Holy Spirit. It violates Scripture.” Listen:

– Pastor advocates child abuse on gay children. Sean Harris says if a son shows what is perceived as effeminate behavior, a parent should “squash that like a cockroach,” and if they see their son “dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch.”

– At church, a child sings “ain’t no homo gonna make it to heaven” — in the same town where a fifteen year old killed himself after being bullied for being perceived of as gay by his classmates. Pastor Jeff Sangl of the Apostolic Truth Tabernacle cheers on.Watch it:

These incidents were caught on video or audio, but there are likely many, many more sermons where hate speech goes unrecorded and unrecognized. These pastors, of course, do not represent Christians broadly, but where this hatefulness goes unchecked, it discredits religious institutions as a whole and harms every neighborhood that it infiltrates.

I first got to know Judith Curry—the Georgia Tech researcher who blogs at “Climate, Etc.,” and has been drawn into controversy for, in her words, “challenging many aspects of the IPCC consensus”—when I was working on my second book, Storm World. I spent a fair amount of time with Curry, and with the other scientists profiled in the book—interviewing them in person, getting to understand their research. This is what science writers do.

At the time, Curry and her colleagues were just coming off a media feeding frenzy after having published papers linking hurricanes to global warming right in the middle of the devastating 2005 hurricane season.

When Storm World came out, it is no exaggeration to say that Curry gave it a rave review. I want to quote in full from her Five Star endorsement at Amazon.com, which is entitled “Science writing at its very best.” Bear with me, this will all become very relevant; and I’ve bolded a few important parts:

To provide a frame of reference for this review, I and my colleagues Peter Webster and Greg Holland are among the scientists that are featured prominently in Storm World. Our involvement in the issue of hurricanes and global warming began when we published an article in Science shortly before the landfall of Hurricane Rita, where we reported a doubling of the number of category 4 and 5 hurricanes globally since 1970. When Chris Mooney first approached me with his idea for writing a book on this topic, I was somewhat skeptical. I couldn’t see how this could be accomplished given the rapid changes in the science (I was worried the book would be outdated before it was published), the complexities of the technical aspects of the subject, a concern about how the individual scientists would be treated and portrayed, and a concern that the political aspects of the issue would be handled in a partisan way. Over the course of the past year and a half, it became apparent that Mooney was researching this issue extremely thoroughly and was developing a good grasp of both the history and technical aspects of the subject. Upon finally reading the book, I can only say Storm World has far exceeded any hope or expectation that I could have had for a book on this subject.

The book is surprisingly rich in technical detail, and Mooney has grasped the nuances of the breadth of scientific arguments and uncertainties. He provides a fascinating history with rich insights into the current controversy. The individual scientists are portrayed accurately as well as sympathetically and colorfully. The political aspects are treated in an insightful and nonpartisan manner. I am most impressed by the fresh insights provided by this book, which besides being a ‘good read,’ Storm World is an important and timely contribution that deserves careful consideration in the dialogue and debate on hurricane policy in the U.S. Storm World is science journalism at its absolute best.

After Storm World came out, Curry also invited me to speak at Georgia Tech, where she works.

Given that I got to know Curry and greatly appreciated her support for my endeavors, I avoided criticizing her in subsequent years—even though we were increasingly on different “sides” of the highly polarized web battle over global warming. And for the most part, she didn’t really seem to criticize me either (or at least, not that I noticed).

So imagine my surprise when I came across this post at Curry’s blog, about my new book The Republican Brain. Unlike Storm World, Curry admits she has not read the book. Nevertheless, she cites a variety of critics—none of whom seem to have read the book, either—and uses labels like “neurotrash” and “neurobabbling” to describe what, she seems to think, I am up to.

In the process, Curry repeats a common but fundamental misunderstanding of the research on the psychological or biological underpinnings of ideology—suggesting that I’m claiming that “a defensive ideology is hardwired into [conservatives'] brain.” Nope. Wrong.

Continuing her misunderstanding of the subject matter, Curry posed a classic false choice:

Multiple choice test: Republicans are more skeptical than Democrats about climate change because:

a) A defensive ideology is hardwired into their brain

b) A growing distrust of scientific institutions because of the politicization of science

First, and to repeat, there is no “hardwiring.” That is not the ‘psychology of ideology’ thesis. But there is such a thesis, and it is based on a great deal of research.

Second and more important, the conservative distrust of science is America a combination of both conservative psychology and also developments in the political environment. This is something I explain in detail in the book that Curry has not read. It is also something I explain in a new item at Salon.com.

To draw an analogy with the hurricane climate debate, these sorts of errors are roughly on par with saying that global warming ’caused’ an individual hurricane (nonsense), and with saying that if we have a quiet hurricane season, then there must be no global warming, or no global warming effect on hurricanes (nonsense). The hurricane-climate issue is scientific complex and characterized by uncertainty, and so is the psychology-politics issue—but that doesn’t mean there isn’t serious science on both topics, or a need to report on it.

I fully expect dismissive reviews from ideologues who have not read my book, and from contrarians who don’t want to admit what the science has to say about political ideology. But from someone who has called my previous work “science writing at its absolute best”, and extolled me for grasping “the nuances of the breadth of scientific arguments and uncertainties”?

I am not asking Curry to suddenly become an expert in political psychology. All I’m asking is this: Doesn’t a writer who, in your own words, practices “science journalism at its absolute best,” merit a more, shall we say, engaged treatement?

This seems to be a lesson that Patricia Heaton, who currently stars in The Middle and is famous for her role on Everybody Loves Raymond, learned last week. It’s no secret that she’s conservative, but when she jumped on the bandwagon and commenced attacking Sandra Fluke on her Twitter feed, things got out of hand. “Hey G-Gal! Change major to Health Sciences, then look at pix of people w/syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, and chlamydia! Instant birth control!” she wrote. “Hey G-Town: stop buying toothpaste, soap and shampoo! You’ll save money, and no one will want to sleep with you!” Things went on this vein for some time, with Heaton also retweeting other nasty things people were saying about Fluke. The conversation, such as it was, revealed both that Heaton had no idea whatsoever what was at stake in the contraception coverage debate, and that she has a real nasty streak.

Heaton appears to have recognized, at minimum, that her tweets weren’t exactly helpful to her public profile—she’s deleted her Twitter feed. She might consider taking a lesson from her progressive counterpart on a show about a working-class family. Raising Hope star Martha Plimpton’s Twitter feed is funny, and fact-oriented, and she’s serious enough about her work on contraception and women’s health to write pieces on the subject in Slate. It’s possible to have strong opinions—in Hollywood as in everywhere else—without being downright horrible to other people.

I think we may err, and I would include myself in this as I say “we,” in being a little bit too eager to promote some of those rare projects on the Right. It was very hard for me because I love “Atlas Shrugged” the book. “Atlas Shrugged,” the movie… I couldn’t believe that so many on our team contrived to like it. Because it was not a successful film, it wasn’t good. So I think to that extent, partially, the Right-wing stuff is very often very ad hoc and it’s a one-off. Which is why it’s so remarkable when something comes outside… way outside the system of extraordinary high craft-quality, let alone artistic quality. Like “The Passion of the Christ” or even “Fireproof.” “Fireproof” was not a masterpiece, it’s not an Oscar-worthy film. But it was emotionally, I think, an interesting film and sound and reasonably well-crafted.

He cites as two examples of movies he really loves Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, particularly noting the latter’s focus on the immigrant experience. I’d really love it if the latter in particular could be remade or updated and embraced by conservatives and liberals alike, though I suspect there’d be less conservative sympathy for the immigrants if they were Latino rather than European and undocumented rather than products of Ellis Island. And Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is really more an anti-corruption movie than a Democratic or a Republican one.

While these two movies might not be fantastic proof, it is true that conservative ideas and decently-crafted filmmaking aren’t inherently incompatible. I thought there were a lot of things that didn’t work about Act of Valor, but the movie did really reinforce for me that if we’re going to send people away from their families to do extremely dangerous things on our behalf, they may have to live by an alternate set of values than my own to get through it. You can sell forceful projection of American military force through action movies, or fiscal responsibility through family comedies. There are a lot of options for pairing ideas with genres, and a lot of people you can hire to make dialogue sing rather than thud. You don’t have to make a movie bad to make it authentically conservative.

I have a problem.

I’m angry at Leslie Knope. I’ve been worried about this for a couple of episodes, but in between railroading Ben when he shows signs of interest in someone else; having a high-school level meltdown with him and ruining a Model United Nations tournament; and tonight, stealing Ben’s pencils, engineering a protest against her own park, and aggressively talking over Anne, the show’s made a fairly aggressive turn back towards the grating Leslie Knope of Season One it was difficult to invest in. This tendency’s always been there, and it played a key role in one of the best episodes of last season, “The Fight,” in which Leslie both pushes Anne to apply for a new job and to read Freedom all in the same night. And so it seems fair that Anne calls her out again tonight, explaining that “You made me watch all 8 Harry Potter movies. I don’t even like Harry Potter…when we go to a bar, you order my drink for me.” And maybe Leslie is worth eating 10 cheesecakes to Anne, but she’s been difficult to watch and root for lately.

The show’s approach to fixing that also sort of feels like a disappointment to me. Yes, Leslie and Ben are an entirely endearing television couple. But that also means that watching Leslie make a heartbreaking choice to walk away from him to pursue the dream of her life was genuinely rewarding. It was a real sacrifice that illustrated the value of that dream to her. Resorting to a cliche Leslie-can-have-it-all narrative betrays that. And it won’t feel like real progress to me either if the choice she makes is Ben, rather than City Council and all that lies beyond.

Fortunately, tonight’s two other arcs just killed it for me, and I think they worked in part by playing very close to straight in a way that recalls what Cheers could pull off amidst the crazy because people cared so much. First, there’s Tom, who gets carried away when Chris asks him to pick a new font for the department, insisting on rebranding to look like the Apple Store or the Sopranos logo. He even dreams up a reality television show pitch for the Park Rangers. And he’s devastated when Jerry shoots him down, saying “Isn’t dreaming big exactly what got you in trouble at your old company?” But it’s Jerry who inspires Tom to come up with a retro campaign to both raise funds for and boost visits to the park — and Tom’s mature enough to give him credit. The point, it turns out, is that imitating well-established and ridiculous pop culture tropes isn’t genuinely big or creative thinking. And Pawnee can be a canvas for genuinely innovative marketing schemes. Tom may find his future in government after all.

Then, there’s Andy’s decision to try out a college class, which I thought was a lovely continuation of what may be this season’s strongest thread: April and Andy’s slow maturation into true adults. Andy takes a fairly predictable tack when he first starts course shopping, opting for a gut guitar class, then getting disappointed by a class on the science of lasers. But he’s riveted by a Women’s Studies class (and watching him get shot down by the professor at the end is delightful), and devastated when he finds out that classes actually cost money. For a minute there, it looks like that realization could cause the couple to backslide again. “My parents paid for my classes. I’ll just have them paid for yours, too,” April tells her husband. But instead of taking the easy way out, he tells her no. And Ron steps up to encourage Andy to do the right thing, telling us, “Why not? I like the kid. And I have the money. One thing I promised myself when I buried gold in my backyard is that I’d never be a hoarder or a miser about it,” and then telling Andy on his first day of classes, when he worries about not having brought books or a computer “Just pay attention to the lecture. And enjoy.” Other than Andy’s reaction to the classes, the plotline was played almost entirely without laughs, and I kind of appreciated that.

This may be a bad year for Leslie fans, but it’s a wonderful one for Ron, and Nick Offermans building an Emmy nomination reel. Ron easily could be a joke character, a cartoon conservative. But this season in particular, Parks and Recreation‘s built his worldview out beyond anti-government skepticism. He encouraged Tom to go out on his own, but when that doesn’t work, he gets him back in a job where his talents will at least be of some use. He sticks to his guns on scouting, but doesn’t react badly when Leslie first embarrasses him and then makes it up to him. And he genuinely wants Andy to better himself. Ron may be the only compassionate conservative on television.

As a historian, Andrew Roberts can’t possibly be surprised by Europe’s rightward turn during the recession:

Across Europe, left-leaning governments, as much as those of the right, have been cutting budgets and imposing austerity measures. Far from being the much-heralded “crisis of Capitalism” that the left has so long and salivatingly augured, this recession has in fact seen Capitalism’s ultimate triumph. Greek rioters, Spanish trade unionists, German regional governments, French pension protesters, Britain’s Labour Party, general strikes: Capitalism—in the shape of its Archangel Gabriel, the IMF—has outmaneuvered them all.

A few weeks ago, economists Markus Brückner and Hans Peter Grüner published research on this exact topic. They found that “for every percentage point decline in GDP growth over two quarters, support for the far right rises by 0.136 percentage points,” which is a statistically significant effect, though not an electorally significant one.

That said, you need only look to Europe in the 1930s to see how economic distress distorts the political landscape. Right-wing parties successfully capitalized on widespread insecurity to gain power or influence in Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria and France. The Democratic Party won out in the United States, but there were sizable right-wing populist movements throughout the decade, as well as a growing and vocal far-left.

The short of it is that economic insecurity leads people to take a zero-sum approach to politics, as they fight to protect their gains from others. And this feeds naturally into right-wing populism, and a xenophobic style of politics that demonizes outsiders to the perceived national community. I thought this was obvious, but apparently not.

I actually don’t know that much about Richard Posner’s political views, being primarily familiar with his (quite good, in my opinion) more abstract and philosophical work. But he’s definitely a political conservative, a Reagan appointee, and an important product of the conservative legal movement. He also seems about done with the whole thing:

My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.

And then came the financial crash last September and the ensuing depression. These unanticipated and shocking events have exposed significant analytical weaknesses in core beliefs of conservative economists concerning the business cycle and the macroeconomy generally. Friedmanite monetarism and the efficient-market theory of finance have taken some sharp hits, and there is renewed respect for the macroeconomic thought of John Maynard Kenyes, a conservatives’ bête noire.

I don’t agree with this in every detail. I don’t see a lot of evidence, for example, that the GOP’s opposition to abortion rights suddenly became a huge political loser starting in 2006. But Posner is unusual, even among the dissident camp in the conservative movement, in his willingness to acknowledge that (a) conservatism is as conservatism does and you can’t just wash your hands of George W. Bush, and (b) that the failures of conservatism-in-practice were really comprehensive across a whole swathe of different policy domains.

Via Tyler Cowen, Daniel Klein offers up a study that proves the obvious:

Conservatives say they are for small government and individual liberty, but a content analysis of leading conservative magazines shows that most have preponderantly failed to take pro-liberty positions on sex, gambling, and drugs. Besides many anti-liberty commissions, the magazines may be criticized for anti-liberty omission—that is, failing to oppose anti-liberty policies. Magazines investigated include National Review, The Weekly Standard, The American Enterprise, and The American Spectator. We find that National Review has had the strongest record on liberty on the issues treated, while the others have preponderantly failed to be pro-liberty or have even been anti-liberty.

I sort of doubt that anyone was genuinely confused about this, but now we have a real study to prove it. On the other hand, conservative do take the freedom of business enterprises to have a negative impact on the quality of the air you breath, the quality of the water you drink, and the stability of the climate you live in very seriously. They’re also pretty keen on the freedom of employers to discriminate on the basis of race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. These are important freedoms to many Americans.

For example, as Isaac Chotiner observes, Andrew Breitbart doesn’t seem to have actually seen the end of Gran Torino. Isaac, meanwhile, likes any list that encourages people to go see The Lives of Others. And I agree, but we’re really defining conservatism down if we take “the pervasive intelligence state of Communist East Germany” to be a distinctly conservative notion. Perhaps more truly typical of the conservative worldview is that after Lives of Others comes in at the number one slot, The Dark Knight takes position number twelve specifically because of its alleged advocacy of pervasive surveillance. Many movies on the list, (Pursuit of Happyness e.g.), aren’t even remotely good.

Back during the Republican presidential primaries, there was a lot of sentiment that sure Rudy Giuliani was a baby-killer and didn’t hate gays, and sure he lacked relevant qualifications for the presidency, and sure he seemed to be involved in a bit of corruption and cronyism, but, hey, he pissed off a lot of liberals so he must be doing something right. I think that’s the spirit in which you have to understand the boost being given to RNC Chair candidate Chip Saltsman by the fact that he’s a bit racist:

The controversy surrounding a comedy CD distributed by Republican National Committee chair candidate Chip Saltsman has not torpedoed his bid and might have inadvertently helped it.

Four days after news broke that the former Tennessee GOP chairman had sent a CD that included a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” to the RNC members he is courting, some of those officials are rallying around the embattled Saltsman, with a few questioning whether the national media and his opponents are piling on.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of modern American conservatism is that it believes in a curious concept of “color blindness.” In this view, racism is bad. But absent truly egregious behavior, it’s not something you’d really get all that upset about nor is it something you should be really attuned do. But so-called “political correctness” — meaning something like anti-racism that’s gone too far — is a really serious problem. Any hint of political correctness is worth getting upset about. And the views of actual members of racial minorities as to what is and isn’t racist should be completely discounted. Rather than saying that the prudent and decent white person will steer a mile clear of racist activity — sending out “Barack the Magic Negro” CDs, for example — the best course of action is to deliberately drive straight at the line and then get really upset at anyone who says you’ve crossed it.

As I documented, the right initially tended toward a neo-Hooverite line on the economic crisis. Then came a seeming shift and the emergence of a broad consensus in favor of strong action. Recently, though, there’s been a tilt back in the neo-Hooverite direction even as the crisis has grown more severe and along with it, increased blogospheric interest in what motivates neo-Hooverism. Steve Benen offered a five-fold categorization of motives:

1. The Moral Explanation: Ed Kilgore explains that some on the right thing America is too fate and happy. This is a bit like David Frum’s nineties vintage Donner Party conservatism.
2. The Benefactor Explanation: Matt Stoller says the right is more interested in entrenching inequality than worrying about the economy.
3. The Illiterate Explanation: Maybe they’re just dumb.
4. The Strategic Explanation: TPM Reader JF observes that a long depression serves the GOP’s political interests.

The obvious thing to say about this is that these explanations are mutually re-enforcing. In particular, the fact that a prolonged economic downturn serves the GOP’s political interests massively increases the grasp of the other factors. It’s one thing for a political party to buck the desires of its interest-group base or the ideological biases of its core supporters when doing so is necessary for the party’s political fortunes. But to buck those desires when doing so would be bad for the party’s electoral prospects is really asking a lot.

Beyond that, the emergence of age polarization in the electorate may play a role here. Elderly people, and especially the more prosperous group of elderly people, are actually reasonable well-positioned to weather a deflationary storm. By contrast, young people pay a huge lifelong economic price for graduating into a weak labor market or getting laid off after only a few years in the workforce.

Meanwhile, it’s worth recalling that at the peak of his political power, when Bush was making his most disastrous decisions, conservatives not only thought he was a good president, but a great one. There was practically a line around the block to write paens to his genius. Here’s David Gelertner’s “Bush’s Greatness” from the September 13, 2004 Weekly Standard:

It’s obvious not only that George W. Bush has already earned his Great President badge (which might even outrank the Silver Star) but that much of the opposition to Bush has a remarkable and very special quality; one might be tempted to call it “lunacy.” But that’s too easy. The “special quality” of anti-Bush opposition tells a more significant, stranger story than that.

Bush’s greatness is often misunderstood. He is great not because he showed America how to react to 9/11 but because he showed us how to deal with a still bigger event–the end of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 left us facing two related problems, one moral and one practical. Neither President Clinton nor the first Bush found solutions–but it’s not surprising that the right answers took time to discover, and an event like 9/11 to bring them into focus.

I hope to keep on revisiting some writings in this vein over the next few weeks, so if there’s any special pieces you recall or dig up, please get in touch (the form in the sidebar works) and give me a tip.

Only the Leninist cool kids will get the title, but it’s still true. At any rate, here’s Ryan Avent on the leader of the free world:

[Bush] very easily could have asked Congress to send him a stimulus bill, even a modest one, amid an intensification of what will likely be the worst recession in thirty years, if not longer. It would have made a difference. It would have made the season a little more bearable for the growing numbers of unemployed, and it would have made Obama’s task a little less daunting.

Instead, he’s spending his waning days weakening environmental rules, helping his cronies get jobs in the professional bureacracy, and preparing his pardons. What a stupid, despicable man. History can’t judge him too cruelly.

It’s true and it’s important and it’s also true and important to note that while Bush has deviated from conservative thought in some respects, he’s been despicable precisely insofar as he’s tended to represent the apogee of contemporary conservatism. There being no further point to running a sham policy operation for political purposes, Bush has just stopped even bothering to run a sham policy operation. There’s basically just nothing doing in the movement-controlled elements of the administration and the congress except a continuing effort — one that, I might add, may well prove successful over the long run — to put the survival of the human race at risk in order to advance the short-term financial interests of polluters. No effort to help shelter the poor from the worst consequences of the recession. No nothing.

And no complaints about it from the right! His indifference to the well-being of the vulnerable is their indifference.

Bruce Bartlett’s view of the Obama economic team:

So far, I am very impressed. Larry Summers at the NEC is brilliant. Tim Geithner at Treasury inspires confidence. Peter Orszag at OMB tells me that we will get honest numbers on which to base policy for a change. And Christina Romer at the CEA puts one of the nation’s top experts on the Great Depression at close hand.

This group has made me realize just how poor Bush’s appointments in recent years have been in the economic area. When slavish political loyalty is apparently the only requirement for a Bush Administration job, and demonstrable competence barely counts at all, it doesn’t tend to attract the best and the brightest. When on those rare occasions, Bush managed to get someone who is competent, there is no evidence that he paid the slightest attention to them, preferring instead the counsel of “Mayberry Machiavellis,” as former White House adviser John DiIulio called them. No wonder we are in the mess we are in.

Indeed. Does anyone even know that the Bush National Economic Council is run by a guy named Keith Hennessey? And if ever there was a time for an administration’s key economic advisers to become known by the general public, you’d think this would be it. But instead, he’s an unknown. And he’s an unknown in part because he’s a nobody. Before he ran the NEC, he was the deputy. Before that, he was on Trent Lott’s staff. He has a master’s degree and it’s not in economics. The stature gap with a Lawrence Summers is enormous.

Politico reports on conservatives trying to think of some ideas:

Kimberley Strassel, an editorialist for the Wall Street Journal, argued that Republicans would have to expand the electoral playing field by pioneering new initiatives in suburban policy.

“Conservatives have had a tendency to dismiss any quality of life issues that could be characterized as ‘green,’ like sprawl,” Strassel said. “It does affect people’s daily lives, and if conservatives can come up with ideas for making transportation, movement, communication work better, I think that would be a good thing.”

I’m not sure exactly what Strassel has in mind, but to my way of thinking an enormous amount of good could be done if conservatives were more interested in applying really basic free market principles to transportation policy. For example, why not allow developers to build as much or as little parking as they want to build when they launch a new development? Why not charge market rates for curbside parking on public streets? How about fewer restrictions on the permitted density of development? Why not reduce congestion on the most-trafficked roads through market pricing of access? It happens to be the case that most of the people who are interested in these issues have liberal views on unrelated political issues, but the specific set of views at hand don’t draw on any deep ideological principles, it’s just application of basic economic thinking to the issues and, as such, is something that should be completely accessible to conservative politicians looking to show that conservative ideas can be relevant to the concerns (environmental concerns, quality of life concerns, economic growth concerns) of a set of people who are disinclined to think of themselves as conservatives.

I was about to type that those kind of disputes are a sign of strength rather than weakness, but I’m not sure that’s quite right. Rather, the point is just that it’s a helpful exercise that ultimate serves to clarify things and give different elements a chance to rise in prominence rather than just endlessly being stuck with the same old thing. Indeed, I think one problem with Ross’s Grand New Party is that it seemed to lack the vividly drawn intra-party villains that a good intra-party fight requires.

But to these critics Bush’s primary ideological apostasy is that he supposedly presided over vast new spending increases. Both Democrats and Republicans have gleefully taken up the charge–the former in order to discredit Bush, the latter to shield conservatism from the stench of his failure. It’s a trumped-up indictment. Bush did spend generously on defense and homeland security, with conservative approval, but domestic discretionary spending actually declined from 3.1 percent of GDP to 2.8 percent. It is true that Bush approved a vast new prescription drug benefit. But 89 percent of Americans believed in 2000 that Medicare should have such a benefit. Bush’s critics on the right have no explanation for how he could have gotten elected in 2000 without promising one or reelected in 2004 without following through. Still, the critique has taken hold. The Democracy Corps poll found that, by a 17-point margin, Republicans attribute their party’s failures in 2006 and 2008 to its insufficient conservatism. (Voters as a whole attributed it to excessive conservatism.)

Of course arguably it makes sense to respond to defeat by doubling down anyway. The Democratic Party has moved left since its defeats in 2002 and 2004, and done much better in 2006 and 2008. I think some aspects of that leftward shift have been politically helpful, but others have probably been politically damaging, and all things considered I think it would be odd to argue that the party got more successful because its leader started espousing a more progressive platform. But they won anyway. And it’s a good thing that party leaders now embrace strategic redeployment from Iraq and serious action on the climate crisis not so much because embracing those ideas was or is key to electoral victory, but because those are sound views on key issues and espousing them is consistent with winning elections so politicians should be pressed to do so.

Ross Douthat and David Frum argue about whether the GOP needs to do better at targeting relatively prosperous educated professionals (Frum) or economically struggling cultural conservatives (Douthat). Ross frames the dispute:

But for the national party, Frum is right that there are real choices to be made. If you follow the Douthat-Salam model, which Reihan has dubbed “lower-middle reformism,” you’re going to be crafting a message aimed at the place where the non-college educated and college-educated categories bleed into one another – one pitched to the exurb-living college graduate who picked up a degree from a regional public university (or jumped from school to school and didn’t finish in four years, like Sarah Palin), and who probably has more in common, culturally and economically, with a lot of grads of community colleges and technical schools than he does with someone who went to, say, Swarthmore. This approach requires talking a lot about the famous “kitchen table” issues – public education and transportation, crime and health care costs – and trying to expand the definition of what it means to be “pro-family” without abandoning the GOP’s core pro-life convictions. If you follow the model Frum recommends in his column, on the other hand – call it “upper-middle reformism” – and pitch your message to the Obama-voting, ex-Rockefeller Republicans making $150,000 a year, then you’re talking to a “post-material” group of people who worry less about day-to-day economic concerns and more about causes like global warming – making Frum’s vision of a pro-choice, pro-carbon tax GOP a more plausible fit.

On the environment, I think there’s a heavy dose of false choice here. Say the Republican Party did whatever it is Ross thinks it ought to do on economic issues. That would require the government to raise some level of revenue. And if there were a carbon pricing scheme adequate to avoid the worst consequences of catastrophic climate change, that would bring in some level of revenue. The level of revenue would be high, but it would also be lower than whatever quantity of revenue is necessary to run government à la Douthat. So carbon pricing could cover some portion of the costs, with other taxes being lower than they otherwise would have been. It would be win-win — a Republican Party that has a reality-based view of climate change to appeal to upscale postmaterialists and also one that does more on kitchen table issues.

The point is that while I think there are serious arguments on both sides of the question of to what extent should carbon pricing be revenue neutral (i.e., offset by corresponding reductions in other taxes, or else rebated to the population somehow) or instead used to finance green investments, there’s no serious argument that failing to price carbon is preferable to pricing it.

In a political debate undistorted by the influence of special interest money, the left-right ideological dispute would take place along that dimension with people on the right arguing that the revenue should be used to cut taxes and the left arguing that the revenue should be used to hike spending. Indeed, note that even if environmentalists are massively overstating the risks of climate change, a revenue neutral carbon price would still make us no worse off economically than we currently are, and would probably have substantial public health benefits. But instead, there are various politicians (from both parties, I hasten to ad) in the pocket of energy or auto interests and plenty of funds going from oil and coal firms to think tanks that hire people to pooh pooh the problems of climate change and so forth. And that, in turn, creates this false sense of a need to choose between an agenda to appeal to the working class and an agenda to appeal to the sort of upscale types who are more likely to care about the environment.

Consider Jimmy Carter presiding over stagflation:

In the late 1970s, it just so happened to be the case that the structure of Great Society programs and of then-widespread union contracts meant that the objective interests of union members with automatic Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) provisions, African-Americans, and public assistance recipients were quite a bit different from the objective interests of other Americans. By contrast, it was relatively easy for Ronald Reagan to assemble a coalition built around lower taxes and inflation that started with the well-off but expanded deep into the middle class. It was actually Carter who began the effort to fight inflation and deregulate certain key sectors of the economy, but that wasn’t a politically sustainable agenda for a Democrat (as witnessed by Ted Kennedy’s very strong primary challenge).

Since then, things have changed. I heard Ross Douthat on NPR this morning talking about how the conservative movement needs to return not to the policies of Ronald Reagan but to the spirit of Reaganism defined, as any successful American politics would have to be, as an effort to serious think about ways of improving middle class living standards. But one of the things that’s changed since the 1980s is a substantial growth in inequality.

Here’s a CAPAF chart showing the ratio of the top 10 percent’s income to the bottom 90 percent returning to the pre-FDR historical peak:

Normally talk about the growth in inequality begins and ends with a discussion of whether or not it’s a problem and should we try to “spread the wealth around” or just not worry. But completely aside from whether or not it’s substantively a problem, it’s a political problem for conservatives. That top ten percent is, in an important way, the base of the conservative coalition — providing loyal votes, campaign and institutional funding, etc. And as the economic circumstances of the top ten percent become more and more different from the economic circumstances of the rest of the country, it becomes harder and harder to articulate a policy agenda that speaks to the concerns of both the top ten and also the broad middle. Or, rather, it becomes harder and harder to articulate an economic policy agenda that does that. You can still put a winning coalition together under the right circumstances because people care about other things (abortion, national security, White House sex scandals, etc.) but it’s difficult to govern in a way that keeps the coalition together. Thus, you get a movement that spends an extraordinary amount of time and energy on trying to dream up problems to which capital gains tax cuts — essentially a parochial concern of the well-to-do — are the solution.

By contrast, these same historical trends combined with things like welfare reform have all combined to make it much easier than it once was for a progressive coalition to come up with ideas that unite the interests of the economically struggling with those of the middle class.

The inevitability of Barack Obama has rendered the sane lycanthropic, the skeptical bemused, the disputatious fearful. It is no coincidence that formerly reliable conservative pundits are jumping the McCain ship like bilge rats in a galley fire. Most people attribute this craven capitulation to elitism. Noonan, Frum, Chris Buckley, that dithering Converse finishing school twit Kathleen Parker, they’re elitists! No, they’re not. Or that’s not what is compelling them. They are fucking afraid. Afraid to be the last dissenting voice in the face of the Hope and Change juggernaut. The Chinese kid versus the tanks in Tiannamen they are not. They are elitists, but they are cowards first and foremost. We don’t need them. And, unfortunately for them, Obama doesn’t need them. Therefore I will speak their names no more….

Did I mention this man hates me? You and me? Yes he does. Why? Because he can. Yes He Can. Beneath that cool persona is a megalomaniac. Cool? Like Stalin after a purge, emotionally and sexually spent. Like Saddam after a torture session, dozing in his chair with someone’s genitals curled in his fist. Like Pol Pot after a petit mal seizure, mumbling a litany of the dead. Cool that way.

This blog doesn’t comment on candidates’ character, qualifications, or fitness for office but surely we can all agree that the press ought to be pursuing these questions.