Internet access was spottier at the conference I’ve been attending this weekend than I’d anticipated, and soon I’ll be on a series of airplanes, so I hope nobody was too upset by a weekend of half-assed blogging. The good news is that at this particular conference center, giraffes are considerably more plentiful than you usually see at a conference:

That’s The New Yorker‘s Rick Hertzberg, one of our very best columnists as well as the nation’s leading advocate of the National Popular Vote. NPV is an extremely good idea and especially if you live in a non-battleground state you ought to get in touch with your state legislators and ask them why they aren’t embracing an idea that could really enhance your state’s clout.

Hendrick Hertzberg has a great item in the latest New Yorker that touches on many points, including the right-wing’s new habit of issuing constant dire warnings that we’re about to plunge into the sort of social democratic dystopia pictured below:

After the Senate passed the stimulus, which Sean Hannity, on Fox News, denounced as “the European Socialist Act of 2009,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, pronounced it “a dramatic move in the direction of indeed turning America into Western Europe.” Whether or not greater income equality, better health, and fewer prisons would really be a dystopian nightmare, McConnell’s vision of “the Europeanization of America” has already come true in a way that bears directly on the question of “bipartisanship”: what might be called America’s parliamentary parties have come to resemble their disciplined European counterparts. As recently as the nineteen-sixties, for reasons of history and origins, the Democrats were a stapled-together collection of Southern reactionaries, big-city hacks, and urban and agrarian liberals; the Republicans were a jumble of troglodyte conservatives, Yankee moderates, and the odd progressive. Ideological incoherence made bipartisanship feasible. The post-civil-rights, post-Vietnam realignment, along with the gerrymandered creation of safe districts, has given us—on Capitol Hill, at least—an almost uniformly rightist G.O.P. and a somewhat less uniformly progressive array of Democrats.

In a followup item on his blog, Rick says “[t]he problem is, too many Americans have actually been to Western Europe, and it didn’t scare them.”

I’m not sure this is right. I suspect that only a distinct minority of Americans have been to Europe. What’s more, the minority of Americans who’ve been to Europe are disproportionately drawn from the upper-echelons of the U.S. income distribution. And rich people have it pretty good here in the land of the free. By contrast, take a look at a “bad” neighborhood in Helsinki and compare it to a “transitional” neighborhood in DC—to say nothing of a genuinely down-and-out American ghetto—and it’s almost laughable. But the beneficiaries of something like that aren’t going to Europe. Among what you might call America’s “traveling class,” the European alternative is going to look good to city-loving cosmopolitans (i.e., me and Rick Hertzberg) but pretty bad to your typical businessman. In other words, it just replicates the cultural divide that already exists among the American elite. The people who would be the main beneficiaries of a more social democratic policy dynamic—a couple of non-college parents who could really use some free child care and and guaranteed health care and pension, for example—are relatively unlikely to have personal experience that cuts one way or the other regards to how terrifying Europe is.

I don’t disagree with Hendrick Hertzberg very often, but I think this is wrong:

Short of abolishing the whole crazy system of local school boards financed by local property taxes and replacing it with an all-powerful national Ministry of Education financed by the federal income tax, I’ve always believed that the best feasible “educational reform” is, precisely, smaller class sizes.

For one thing, we need to start out with the fact that decreasing class size isn’t an alternative to addressing school finance issues and the lack of equity involved. Obviously, to have smaller classes you need more teachers and that would cost more money. And more money should be spent, especially on schools with lots of poor students (see this from Robert Gordon for some proposals to improve funding issues). But even once we’re assuming that struggling underfunded schools are going to be getting more money, I don’t think it’s totally clear that reducing class size is the best use of the marginal dollar.

There are already a lot of difficulties involved in getting the best staff available into the schools that need them the most. If you simply expand the number of people you’re trying to hire for what are currently the least-desirable positions, you’re going to wind up decreasing the average quality of your staff when we really need to increase it. Clearly, there are a lot of schools in the United States and perhaps some of them have class sizes so large that reducing them is really the most pressing need. But in most cases, I would say that creating financial incentives to better fill hard-to-staff positions is going to be a better use of money than creating new positions.