CORRECTION: I posted here that the partition of India left almost no Hindus in Pakistan or East Pakistan. Reihan Salam has pointed out to me (which I should have remembered) that this was not true of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. Bengal was (even after its first religious partition and subsequent reintegration under British rule) exceptionally difficult to carve up into Hindu and Muslim districts; and the second Partititon of Bengal in 1947 did not succeed in doing so. Many Hindus migrated from East-Bengal-cum-East-Pakistan into Indian West Bengal, but not all did. I appreciate the reminder.

Today's an honest-to-goodness work day for me, so blogging will be light. But a few interesting bits and pieces:

This week's New Republic contains a piece (not yet online) on Brazil's presidential election. An interesting supporting role is played by Critical Legal Studies godfather Roberto Unger, whose democratic vision apparently now includes presidential recourse to plebiscites to get around parliament-- in other words, as TNR notes, old-style Latin American executive-populist strongman authoritarianism, and a refusal to be bound by constitutional procedures (of which Unger has been a critic for years). Unger is a figure of the radical left in the academy, but has now allied himself with the status quo, anti-globalization candidate of Brazil's oligarchs.

Michael McConnell seems likely to win Senate Judiciary Committee approval for a seat on the federal bench, with subsequent Senate approval all but assured. An important factor in that is the vocal support for him among center-left legal academics like Sunstein and Tribe. What's interesting to me is the variety of responses to that fact, from Byron York's view that this is near-nepotism ("[M]any of the professors know and like McConnell — and it appears that those personal connections trump any objections to his opinions on abortion. Priscilla Owen, it seems, just didn't know the right people.") to the NYT's matter-of-fact view. Is there any other moment in American domestic politics when the academy plays as significant a role as in judicial nominations?


Finally: Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, like her predecessor Bruce Babbit, has been held in contempt of court in connection with Interior's shameful mismanagement of the trust fund that is supposed to send royalty checks to Indian landowners for the mining and logging that takes place on their property. The judge in the case, Royce Lamberth (a Reagan appointee) held that "there is no longer any doubt that the Secretary of Interior has been and continues to be an unfit trustee-delegate for the United States." The truth about this case is that the United States has been and continues to be an unfit trustee for the interests of American Indians, who would not need a paternalistic trustee-guardian relationship for land ownership even if the trustee had not proven itself "disgracefully" incompetent. The U.S. should settle the $10 billion lawsuit for mismaganement of the fund, and should then get out of the Indian trust fund business. Any Indian landowners who want help in managing their relations with the miners and loggers can find much more competent assistance in the private sector. This is one of my areas of academic expertise-- the pseudo-paternalistic treatment accorded to indigenous landowners by settler-state governments such as the U.S. and Australia. ("Pseudo" because paternalism is supposed to be in the interest of the person being trated like a child; in fact the settler states have often acted assumed the role of trustee or guardian even though it was from those states' interests that the indigenous peoples most needed protecting.) But I'm wearing my citizen's hat as well as my scholar's hat here; I'm disgusted with Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and don't want such abuses to be committed by the government that acts in my name.

The always-contentious Martin Kramer mourns the loss (ten years ago) of Elie Kedourie and his knowledge of Iraq. Kedourie's reputation has suffered under attack from Said and company; and I certainly think he was wrong about some important things. (Kant, for instance, was not the father of nationalism.) But, along with Ernest Gellner, Kedourie represented a now-fading-or-faded type of intellectual that is much missed.

More, from the NYT magazine, about the rural Democrats' pitch for pro-gun southern votes. The NYTM's angle, unsurprisingly, is whether this strategy is good for the Democratic Party. I remain interested in the puzzle of whether voting for such candidates is a good strategy from the voters' perspective. As a personal reaction, as distinct from an intellectual one, I'll admit to some sympathy for Tapped's complaint that "in this rural-urban dialectic, it's always assumed that the urban folks are supposed to pay homage to the rural folks." I care more about encouraging pro-trade, pro-market suburban Democrats and pro-choice, pro-gay Republicans-- both suburban species, not rural ones-- than about encouraging pro-gun Democrats; and I share the suspicion that parties pandering to the prairies and the Old Confederacy will be wrong more often than they are right. The occasional Zell Miller seems to me more than outbalanced by the Daschles, Hollingses, Harkinses, and Dorgans (disclaimer: I once worked in Byron Dorgan's office, when he was in the House rather than the Senate), the occasional Gramm or Goldwater by the Helmses and Thurmonds. (I know, I know-- if the sticks are so bad, where are the impressive Senators from big urban states, now that Moynihan is gone? But the House looks somewhat different. The suburbs don't yet dominate any big state, but they own lots of House seats.)

I complain a lot about the NYT Saturday Arts & Ideas page, for reasons largely similar to those offered by Lee Siegel in TNR some time ago, combined with some reasons common to most academics who read the page (an inability to distinguish marginal from innovative claims, political bias, etc). So, in fairness, I ought to praise two recent pieces on that page that impressed me. One, "A World War Among Professors," provides a basically fair and accurate assessment of political science's deficiencies in Middle Eastern and South Asian studies, and of its relationship to the ongoing tensions within political science between formal/quant types and adherents of other methodologies. The other, "To Keep the Peace, Study Peace" (which is too old to be accessed for free but can be purchased) analyzed the important work of political scientist Ashutosh Varshney on ethnic violence and its absence. (Varshney, it should be noted, bridges the aforementioned methodological divide, and is a fine example of the need to do so.) "Arts & Ideas" shows no sign as yet of filling the gap left by Lingua Franca; but it may be getting better.

Hmm. The NYT reports on a turn in Australian public opinion against war with Iraq. The Australian reports that, while some of Australia's left is defecting from Labor to the more decisively anti-war Greens, Liberal Prime Minister John Howard and his Coalition government remain popular despite weeks of attacks for their pro-American position. Howard has a 36-point lead over his Labor rival as preferred PM, and party preference shows a widening lead for the Coalition.

Consider this, just a day after the NYT magazine's already-widely-and-justly ridiculed headlines calling Pete Domenici a "hard-line conservative." The "Inside" box on today's front page, blurbing this story, begins
Sweden Stays Liberal. One of the parties that the Social Democrats beat was the Liberal Party.


Tom Palmer long ago pointed out to me that, for the NYT, "liberal" is simply a term of editorial approbation. Whoever the newspaper likes, in whatever country, is a liberal. (In democracies, this generally means the center-left, though it can even include avowed Communists who seem sufficiently warm and fuzzy.) But the incoherence of this approach can be almost comical. Social Democrats aren't liberals. In the great traditional divides of European politics, the liberals oppose both social democrats and conservatives or Christian Democrats. In the postwar era especially, Liberal parties have joined with both, in various combinations and coalitions at various times. But a Liberal coalition with conservative parties does not suddenly turn social democracy into liberalism. Moreover, the Social Democrats are in loose coalition with Greens and with the successor to the Communist Party; it's that entire grouping that is somehow more "liberal" than the liberal party. The semantic drift involved in calling a Social Democratic win over Liberals "staying liberal" is really quite bizarre.

At some point I intend to start posting on the fate of Europe's liberal parties. The theme: turning the traditional political scientists' question of why there is no socialism in the United States (i.e. why no explicitly socialist or social democratic party ever thrived) into the one of why there is no liberalism in western Europe. Outside the Benelux countries and occasionally Norway or Denmark, liberal parties are perpetual junior partners at best, and often seem to be on the verge of extinction. The very first liberal party, Britain's, has ceased to exist as a distinct entity, folding into the Social Democrats. Alain Madelin, the admirable liberal candidate for the French presidency last spring, came in behind not only Le Pen but also a splinter candidate from Le Pen's group and no fewer than three Communists. Germany's Free Democrats have even lost their traditional coalition-kingmaker role to the now-larger Greens. The combination of secularism, support for international trade, support for a free domestic labor market, and protection of civil liberties seems to have lost its constituency in most of western Europe (even before throwing in, say, support for immigration or for gay rights). This is, I think, a serious long-term problem for European politics. Without a revitalized liberal center, for example, Germany seems incapable of the labor market reform it so desperately needs. And France, which was once home to the most distinguished liberal parliamentary delegation ever known (including, at various times, Tocqueville, Constant, Tracy, Bastiat, Lafayette, Guizot, and more) now flirts with Weimar politics: a plurality of votes delivered to the combined fascists and communists, with a desperate struggle by the Gaullists and the social democrats to stave off disaster and no room for liberalism at all.

Todd Seavey has long tried to convince me to give up on the word "liberal," to just accept that in 21st-century America it means whatever the New York Times thinks it means. I think that-- among other reasons for not doing so-- this usage makes both history and current events in the rest of the world even more opaque to Americans than they ordinarily are. Those who cannot understand why Adam Smith was a liberal not a conservative, and why liberals run against social democratic parties, are condemned to an understanding of politics as shallow as... well, as that of the front and op-ed pages of the NYT.

Pulled up from The New Yorker's archives for this week: an important piece from the indispensable Bernard Lewis.

Oh, fer cryin' out loud. I understand why this was the moment for the U.S. to make a diplomatic show of not being unilateralist or isolationist. But rejoining UNESCO? Couldn't we have come up with something that was both less trivial and actually the right thing to do-- like, say, repealing all our illegal trade barriers erected over the last eighteen months?

See Instapundit's collection of apposite (and stirring) Tolkien quotations.

Roderick Long joins the ranks of bloggers, with an essay on his still-dovish and still-anarchistic interpretation of September 11, and of what came before and has come since. I won't respond in any serious way, since I don't think I'll be able to match the job that Brink Lindsey has done over the last year in articulating why he doesn't agree with that stance. But I will say that the last year has made me more interventionist than I had ever thought conceivable, by convincing me that even the internal affairs of other states can pose a mortal threat. The central example: libertarian foreign policy is predicated on trade. In 1991, I was firmly of the camp that said, "Even if Saddam gets control of the Saudi oil fields, he'll still have to sell the oil for it to be of any use to him; so, ultimately, who cares, in any way stronger than caring about the somewhat increased market share he'd control that would allow him to raise prices?" (And a mere price increase had to be weighed against the costs of war; it was not itself a likely justification for going to war.) I now believe that the endless flow of American dollars into Saudi hands has financed the spread of a vicious and deadly ideology, has even financed the growing dominance of that ideology over other, benign forms of Islam, and has done so even in the United States. And I believe that even the government of a free and religiously tolerant society ought to take notice of such trends and developments, in a fashion other than saying "Well, when they kill some of us, we'll take them to court and demand compensation." Trade is sometimes the beginning of the story, not the end. And I say this as someone who remains convinced that free and open trade is among the most central goals of a foreign policy. But: do I think the world would be improved if the U.S. withdrew from Saudi Arabia, withdrew its support for Israel, stopped offending the murderers with an interventionist foreign policy, and continued to buy oil ad infinitum from the Saudi government, thereby continuing to enrich the Wahabbi clerics and their movement? No, I'm afraid I can no longer bring myself to believe such a thing.

Of course I welcome Roderick's contributions; he is someone who has taught me a great deal over the years and whose opinions and judgments carry weight with me. But on this set of issues, I can no longer agree with him

The article in yesterday's NYT about rural Democrats touting their pro-gun-rights credentials made me wonder: what is the rational course of action for a pro-gun-rights voter in such a district? More broadly: what's the rational voter to do, when confronted with two candidates with similar positions on the voter's primary issue or issues, one of whom belongs to a party that shares those views, one of whom does not?


Here are the intuitions pulling in two directions. On one hand, parties matter. If the southern white rural man votes for a Democrat for Senate, he may end up with a pro-gun-rights Senator-- but an anti-gun-rights Senate Majority Leader and chairs of all the relevant committees. Similarly, if a northeastern pro-choice suburban woman votes for an Olympia Snowe or Lincoln Chafee (or, until last year, Jim Jeffords) for Senate, she might get a pro-choice Senator, but she'd ensure a pro-life Majority Leader and pro-lifers' control over most committees. American voters probably underappreciate and underemphasize the importance of parties in their votes for legislators-- unlike in Westminster systems, in which almost all votes are cast on the basis of which party the voter wants to control the legislature as a whole, almost none on the basis of the individual candidate's views. We personalize and localize our Senate and House races to a significant degree; it's very hard to nationalize Congressional elections (though it can sometimes be done). But given the state of American partisan politics right now, any given Senate race or any given House race might well determine which party controls the chamber. (Incentives are different when one's in an era of one-party dominance, as in the House from the 50s until the 90s.)

On the other hand, it's strategically important to encourage those elements of the opposing party that have views most like one's own, for two reasons. One is so that the opposing party perceives electoral returns in shifting toward your view. The other is to prevent your own party from taking you for granted. It's strategically desirable to be perceived as part of a swing-voting class-- especially, again, in an era of very-closely-balanced parties. It's strategically undesirable to be viewed by one party as utterly unavailable and by the other party as utterly dependable. Pro-choicers should want there to be pro-choice Republicans; gun supporters should want there to be pro-gun Democrats. It seems to me terrifically important that there be Republicans in favor of gay rights and Democrats in favor of free trade (though it'd be nice if Republicans remembered that they're supposed to favor that, too). Moreover, even putting a party in the majority doesn't necessaily put that party's majority caucus into complete control. The Boll Weevil Democrats in the early 80s became the swing-voters in the House itself, and were able to control its agenda, even in the face of atavistic Old Democrat Tip O'Neil's gavel. The northeastern Republicans had almost-comparable power in the Senate before Jeffords' switch. Electing your local counterintuitive candidate (the pro-gun Democrat, the pro-choice Republican, etc) can strengthen the position of their bloc within their party-- and that might be desirable even if it meant that a party you oppose in general took control of the chamber.

There would be ways to formalize these countervailing considerations, but they likely wouldn't tell us anything more than the intuitions themselves do. How to weigh them depends on how closely balanced the parties are, how fervently opposed to your views the leadership of one party is, how whether your local counterintuitive candidate would have a bloc of similar-minded legislators with whom to join, whether the issue is one that routinely comes to floor votes or one that routinely lives or dies in committee, etc. Some gut-calls: right now it would be very much in the interest of African-Americans to support any Republicans who come near to their policy views; the black vote is being written off by the GOP and taken for granted by Democrats. Gay and lesbian voters have moved a little further toward swing-voter status, and would be well-served to move further still. In both cases Republican House candidates would be better to support than Republican Senate candidates; Majority Leader Lott would oppose their interests more than Speaker Hastert. Pro-free-trade voters should not vote for any Democrats for the House, no matter how free-trade they might be; Speaker Gephardt is an outcome such voters should fear. Pro-choicers might want to vote for pro-choice Republicans for the House but to stick Democratic in the Senate, to ensure continued control of Judiciary. States'-rightsers should engage in the same reasoning: Republican control of Senate Judiciary should take priority over encouraging federalist Democrats in the Senate, but the House is fair game. And those rural gun voters: my guess is that it is currently rational for them to support their local pro-gun Democrats. First, they're not seeking to change law, but to fight a holding action. (If you're on the side of legislative change, it's more important for your party to control the schedule, the rules committee, etc.) Second, contentious gun bills don't get attached as amendments to omnibus bills in committee and then pass in the dead of night; they come up for floor votes, and pro-gun Democrats help to kill them.

One more complication: I've been pretending that the rational voter votes as if his or her vote will be decisive, and he or she knows that. In fact, his or her vote will not be decisive under ordinary circumstances, and he or she knows that. This increases the incentive to vote for a counterintuitive candidate. You want your local pro-choice Republican to win a smashing victory instead of a squeaker; you want your local pro-gun Democrat to put up a respectable showing instead of getting crushed. The "cheering for your side" expressive aspect of voting (analyzed in Brennan and Lomasky's Democracy and Decision takes priority when you're voting in, say, one party's safe House district (as almost all House districts are).


Note that there are many fewer complications when voting for a governor or president. An executive gets to set his or her administration's policies, and isn't part of a governing coalition in the same way that a legislator is. The northeasterners can continue to vote for their Welds, Patakis, and Whitmans, without fearing that they're tipping control of the country to southern Republicans they despise. Something equivalent can be said about southern Democratic governors.

Via Instapundit: Larry Summers' September 11 speech at Harvard.

Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah has written a letter of condolences and sympathy to President Boush and the American people for last September's attacks. He writes in part:

"We in Saudi Arabia felt an especially great pain at the realisation that a number of young Saudi citizens had been enticed and deluded and their reasoning subverted to the degree of denying the tolerance that their religion embraced, and turning their backs on the homeland, which has always stood for understanding and moderation... I would like to make it clear that true Muslims all over the world will never allow a minority of deviant extremists to speak in the name of Islam and distort its spirit of tolerance."

In the kingdom that "has always stood for understanding and moderation," devoted to "the tolerance that their religion embraced," it is illegal to practice any religion but Islam; illegal to teach any interpretations or schools of Islam other than the official one (resulting, in particular, of persecution of Shi'ites and Sufis); illegal to wear symbols of any religion but Islam; illegal to import, publish, or circulate books supporting any religion but Islam or any rival interpretation of Islam; illegal to possess such books; and illegal to celebrate the holidays of any other religion, even in private.

I was prompted today, for reasons I won't go into, to wonder about the magnitude of the Palestinian "Nakba" of 1948-- the mass fleeing/ expulsion from the new state of Israel-- compared with other population transfers of the late 1940s. The results:

Between 700,000 and 750,000 Palestinians were refugees by the end of 1949. More than 100,000 remained in Israel. Those 750,000 left under very complicated and messy circumstances-- some fleeing attacks and village-razings by Zionist paramilitary groups, some urged to leave by surrounding Arab states or local Arab leaders, some fleeing under fear of local ethnic cleansing that appears to have been justified, some fleeing under fear that appears not to have been.

In 1945/46, three million Sudeten Germans were expelled, by clear and official state action, from Czechoslovakia-- essentially the entire such population. The expulsion was preceded and accompanied by somepretty substantial local violence.

The number of Germans expelled from Poland (partly from areas that were reallocated from Germany to Poland, partly from Danzig, partly from Poland's original territory) is under dispute but seems likely to have been more than 10,000,000-- again, nearly the entirety of the relevant population. Again, there was a great deal of associated violence; more than 1,000,000 Germans may have been killed.

The partition of India in 1947 sent more than tens of millions of refugees across the new borders in all directions-- again, often as part of a spiral of fear about local violence and pre-emptive violence. Millions were killed. While a substantial Muslim minority remained in India, almost no Hindus remained in Pakistan or East Pakistan. (UPDATE: See correction here.


More on this later. But notice that in only one of these cases is there still serious talk about a "right of return." Even if-- as is not true-- the entire group of 750,000 Palestinians had been 1) expelled 2) by deliberate centralized Israeli policy, this would have been a comparatively mild instance of the ethnic politics of the immediate postwar era. Notice, too, that the expelled Germans-- much as they might nurse historical grudges and want public apologies or compensation-- have never engaged in the organized murder of Poles or Czechs, have been received into the German states as citizens, and have thrived in democratic and capitalist settings.

I am very far from being an apologist for forced population transfers. But it is worth remembering how standard a part of international politics they were in 1945-50, and worth insisting on a common principle for addressing the legacies of all such transfers.

Australia is deploying forces to the Persian Gulf. Howard is playing up the possibility of a strong UN/ inspector response to Iraq-- but isn't using the UN as a club with which to beat the U.S. '"It's the UN that has the responsibility, and people who've been so quick to criticise the US – and there have been too many, in my view – are missing the point," Mr Howard said after a memorial service in Canberra. "America's not in the dock – it's Iraq's failure to comply with the United Nations resolutions, and the failure so far of the United Nations to do anything about that failure, which is the main issue."' As Sullivanhas been stressing lately: there's certainly a way to make good, strong use of the UN right now. This seems to be Howard's position: more UN-ish than Blair's, but wanting a much more aggressive UN response than does, say, Chirac.

See Dan Drezner's useful rejoinder to Robert "the Earthling" Wright's essay on gloablization and terrorism.

Eugene Volokh responds to my questions below about why scholar-blogging seems to be less prone to public-intellectualitis than do other forms of public commentary, and what he says seems persuasive about why blogging invites but op-eds repel admissions of uncertainty, nuance, and error.

Joe Conason claims that "so far the only media outlet with the courage to cover this story is the Orange County Weekly," that no one else has talked about the Dana Rohrabacher- Taliban meeting. As I recall, Joshua Marshall gave the story extensive play almost a month ago...

We keep hearing about the risk that Britain will be the only state standing alongside the U.S. in the event of war with Iraq. This has become somewhat less likely in the last few days, but it was never very likely. While Canada, for instance, is sounding obstructionist, the U.S. can almost certainly count on support from Australia-- and, indeed, already is counting on it. Australia lacks Britain's force-projection capabilities; but it also lacks Britain's messy EU ties and its primitive left.



The Land Down Under was the first state to invoke a mutual-defence treaty with the United States last September; days before NATO held that the North Atlantic Treaty had been triggered, Australia said so about the ANZUS pact. (Note that ANZUS is now entirely a treaty between Australia and the U.S., since New Zealand has effectively withdrawn from it.) And this from a state whose nearest neighbors are Muslim giants that it would rather not offend, before it was at all clear how Malaysia and Indonesia would line up in the war on terror. Prime Minister John Howard was in Washington on 9-11, and his administration has been firmly on side ever since.



I don't want to make Howard out to be a great hero; with respect to refugees and asylum he's been really quite terrible. (See this article, or this paper, by my friend, the distinguished Australian political scientist William Maley.) But his administration has faithfully reflected Australia's political climate on matters of war and peace, and that climate is very different from that of Germany, France, or even Britain. Just compare Scott Ritter's current stance with that of Richard Butler, an Australian former UN weapons inspector and UN ambassador who says that it's the Security Council that's on trial: "If the Security Council cannot get its act together on this one, I do not believe it would survive this failure to put down this most extreme rejection of its authority." Howard can't precommit to military action the details of which he doesn't know; but expect the Aussies to fight alongside us.

On a related note, the Australian-led UN reconstruction of East Timor seems to me a useful example of institution-building by outsiders, one that could be kept in mind for today's Afghanistan and tomorrow's Iraq. It required a large and serious investment of time, money, and attention; but it set limited, attainable goals and a finite timetable. And it was substantially successful. Our quarter-heartedness in Afghanistant is making our long-term project much harder, and is contributing to a sense among both Europeans and Iraqis that we can't be counted on to do the job right in Baghdad. See Spencer Abraham's article in the New Republic.

Politics from back home: I was born and raised in New Hampshire, and cut my teeth on New Hampshire politics. I still follow it with at least moderate intensity. The intensity is going up right now, because Senator Bob Smith looks very likely to get unceremoniously retired next week. It's a pretty rare event for me to be rooting for a Sununu for anything; John Sr. had that dreadful Al Gore quality of being sure that he was twice as smart as anyone else in government or politics, and the same Gore-like propensity to overplan as a result. (Remember the W-vs-Gore debates about intelligence, humility, and so on, when some on the right made a virtue out of W's apparent lack of intellectual firepower? The balance seemed obvious to me then, and still does now. What one wants in an executive is someone who's smarter than he realizes that he is, someone with the humility of a Socrates rather than that of a Schweik. Sununu Sr., like Gore, lacked either sort.) John Jr. genuinely is more pro-Arab than I'm at all comfortable with, though he's certainly not the security risk Smith is now portraying in a nasty ethnic slur. (Sununu is of Lebanese descent. See this piece from last year's New Republic by Franklin Foer or this one from the Manchester Union Leader describing Smith's new TV commercial.)



But Smith is now and always has been a disgrace, a public embarrassment to New Hampshire, to the Senate, and to the Republican Party. (I care least about the public image of the last, but it counts for something.) His silly run for President, his brief turn to the theocratic U.S. Taxpayers' Party, and his craven and opportunistic return to the GOP in exchange for a committee chairmanship, only showed the whole world what had been evident for years to those who looked carefully enough: Smith is, simply, ridiculous, quite apart from his views on the issues (he's never met a civil liberty he liked, for instance; what's more, he's anti-trade-- and what are Republicans for if they're going to vote against trade agreements?)



If Smith joins Bob Barr and Cynthia McKinney in early retirement, then the Capitol will be a much less colorful place next year-- and a much less absurd one.



In case it wasn't clear: this is a political-scientist's-hat-off, citizen's-hat-on post...

Category of in-case-you've-missed-'em:



Ronald Bailey's coverage of the Johannesberg summit and
Gordon Silverstein's thoughtful New Republic piece on Congress and war. TNR has made for exceptionally good and important reading the last couple of issues, just as it did for several issues just under a year ago

Hmm. Just hours after posting the below thoughts on blogging and peer review, I noticed that HealthFactsandFears.com editor Todd Seavey made similar points in his excellent e-monograph "Libertarians, Smoking, and Insanity" (specifically in the epilogue).

"Libertarians, Smoking, and Insanity" is filled with good sense. The Randian and Rothbardian locks on some parts of libertarian thought has gradually been diminished, but the Szaszian lock apparently hasn't. I wonder whether the latter, like the former, isn't in part a generational thing. Those of us who came of age long after the 60s a) lived with the excesses of deinstitutionalization more than with the dangers of wrongful institutionalization; b) lacked the cultural affinity that 60s free-love-free-drugs types had for Szasz; and c) didn't grow up in an era in which Szasz was a rare expert voice for freedom. (By the time we'd heard of Hayek he was already a Nobel laureate; in the 60s his reputation was of course quite different. When there are few voices on one's side, there's a natural tendency to idolize those few.) In Rawlsian terms, many 60s libertarians were and remain comprehensive-libertarians-- convinced that, once you have a theory of the right and of individual rights, there is no legitimate place for a theory of the good, a theory of wrong-behavior-that-is-not-unjust. Or, sometimes, they were and are convinced that the existence of such a theory would undermine the case for the theory of the right. Libertarians and classical liberals of Todd's and my generation are, I think, more likely to be political-libertarians, seeing no contradiction between condemning a behavior and thinking it should be legal.

Of course, if we can see warning signs in the tobacco industry's behavior, we can also see them in the anti-smoking lobby's behavior. Fraud has been in plentiful supply in the smoking debate; and while the anti-smokers gave a long way to go to catch up to tobacco-industry junk science, the second-hand-smoke issue has allowed them to make up some of the gap.

Anyway: go read the piece. Those who've never encountered Todd's way with words should have a look. A favorite line: "Creeping socialism is a problem, but so is death."

Providence, RI mayor Vincent A. "Buddy" Cianci has finally been sentenced to prison for corruption. I covered Buddy's successful comeback election in 1990 as a reporter for WBRU (FM) in Providence-- incredulously, at the time. Until the vote count was underway I simply didn't believe that the convicted felon was even a serious contender. (During the campaign he famously commented that he "wanted to make love to the city," leading to a lot of newsroom mirth.) I haven't underestimated him since.

As has been widely reported, the last twelve years have seen a Providence renaissance under Cianci's leadership. The 1990s were an unusually good time for American cities in general, but Providence's performance has been exceptional nonetheless. And no one was ever in any doubt that Cianci's administration remained corrupt. Good-government reform types never had a chance at the polls; Cianci would never have been out of office again, if the feds hadn't intervened.

I'm glad Cianci finally got caught; my goo-goo instincts are at least that strong. I really do detest corruption and sleaze. And yet...Seeing Cianci at work taught me the wisdom of Robert Heinlein's old dicta about corrupt and reform politicians. Cianci understood his self-interest to be aligned with the interests of the city. In the future it will be easier to be an honest city contractor in Providence; but whether it will be easier to be a city resident remains to be seen.

One other concern: Cianci was, as I understand it, acquitted of eleven charges brought against him, and convicted of only one-- a conspiracy charge. I don't know the details. But I do know that RICO is abused with great frequency, that federal conspiracy charges are often bogus. I'm unsettled by the fact that Cianci could be acquitted of every detailed charge but convicted of conspiracy... to do what? To commit the very crimes he's been acquitted of? I gather that something like this will be the basis of Cianci's appeal. But for now, it's time to say farewell to someone who hasn't been as nationally-prominent as James Traficant but who seems to me larger than life by a much greater factor, someone whose great venality and great successes seem to have been very tightly linked.

A few words on why I've stalled so long on returning to this blog.

The scholar-bloggers such as Brad DeLong, the Volokhs, and Glenn Reynolds have much impressed me. But they haven't entirely reassured me about the compatibility between scholarship and blogging. It seems a funny match; it combines the kind of non-fiction writing that is slowest, most research-intensive, most oriented toward the long term, and most deliberate with the kind that is fastest, most repsonsive to the daily paper, amd most likely to be off-the-cuff.

I'm worried about public-intellectualitis-- the well-known tendency for professors with real expertise in one field to pose as experts in many others, the pose of authority that come with academics' comments on issues of the day. At its worst, public-intellectualitis corrupts both scholarship and public discourse. The latter gets skewed by the inappropriate deference shown to (and sought by) academics. The former gets slanted by scholars' attempts to do research that supports their public positions-- or, even worse, by their desire to do research that will be popular and increase their demand on talk shows and the lecture circuit. But if the worst kind of public intellectualism is that which blurs the two roles, the second-worst is that which keeps them wholly distinct-- further encouraging the tendency to hold forth on topics utterly unrelated to the writer's actual expertise. And both kinds pose perils for teaching. Only the smartest and most confident undergraduates (plus a few of the most bullheaded) are unafraid to disagree with their professors' known views.

At its best, of course, a career as a public intellectual can *enrich* both research and teaching. There are fine examples of scholars whose work in the public sphere has exposed them to ideas and complexities they would not have encountered in an ivory tower, and fine examples of teachers whose fluent ability to communicate complex ideas to a variety of audiences serves their students very well. (No, I'm not going to name names, even in these praiseworthy categories, since the omissions could hardly help but be conspicuous. This is of course another difficulty with public-intellectualism by scholars; public interventions may be constrained by the realities of academic politics and power.) But scholar/public-intellectuals seem disproportionately likely to fail at both tasks. I used to think that the sneering by professors at their colleagues who appeared on television or wrote magazine articles or best-selling books was motivated entirely by envy. I now think that this is rarely true.

Since becoming a professor I've tried to follow a rule of not engaging in public commentary except a) in areas in which I had expertise or b) on issues pertaining to academic and intellectual freedom. (The latter proviso allowed me to sign the anti-anti-cloning petition and the anti-boycott-of-Israel petition.) These seem to me good guidelines. But, of course, there's a certain amount of creep in one's own sense of one's expertise. And sometimes one wants to offer views as a well-informed citizen, even if one's not an expert. Political scientists and political theorists and legal scholars aren't any *less* informed on the issues of the day than are many of the people whose full-time job it is to write about them, right? So run the initial rationalizations.

So what constrains scholar-bloggers from going the route of professorial op-ed columnists or the full-time talking heads who continue to draw salaries from universities? I'm not sure. But I've been following the scholar-bloggers with interest, and so far, so good. I can think of at least three potentially-helpful influences.

1) The blogosphere has some of the best aspects of peer-review built into it. Scholar-bloggers write about the issues of the day-- but their writings are instantly monitored and responded to by others as well-informed as they are. The temptation to sloppiness that comes from being an expert speraking to the masses is absent. The much-maligned self-referentialness of blogs is, I think, one of their greatest strengths. The tendency to respond to Sullivan's comment on Postrel's rejoinder to Kaus' (etc) makes blogs less op-ed-like and more seminar-like. Links are more like footnotes than one usually has access to in public commentary-- and indeed are better than footnotes themselves in an important respect. Links make it easy for the reader to read the *entire* text being responded to, rather than only the author's selection. All of this helps to keep scholar-bloggers (and other bloggers) honest.

2) An especially baleful kind of public-intellectualism is the scholarly sound bite-- the public career built on offering quick juicy quotes to the press. The reporter's call is flattering; it's easy for the scholar to believe that he or she has at least a few worthwhile words to offer on 'most any subject; and the reporter has an easy time of getting "expert" opinions either on both sides of an issue or on his or her preferred side. It encourages laziness all around, and allows the scholar to distance him or herself from the results. (" I wanted to give a long and nuanced answer, but the reporter cut me off and only used four words! What could I do? It's a format that demands quick answers!") Bloggers, by contrast, bear obvious and complete responsibility for every word they write; they get to be as thorough or as careless, as serious or as flip, as they choose. They, not reporters' phone calls, set their blogs' agendas. WHile the comments might be quick, they won't be exerpted sound-bites.

3) At least so far, there are no obvious financial returns to blogging. Much bad public-intellectualism seems to come about because of the temptation to (to put it bluntly) sell out. Magazines pay better than journals; best-selling books accessible to the public pay much, much better than do university press monographs; and the lecture circuit increases one's income by a big factor over only lecturing to one's own undergraduates. Public-intellectualism sometimes seems like easy money-- higher returns for less effort than continued scholarship. Blogging, by contrast, is by all reports a lot of effort for trivial-to-negative monetary compensation-- even after the tip-jars and Amazon-partnerships are taken into account. Once opportunity costs are taken into account, blogging is almost certainly costly for anyone who is either a freelance writer or a scholar.

How long will it take before these beneficial tendencies are outweighed by something else? How long before scholar-blogging takes on some of the nastier aspects of public-intellectualism more broadly? I don't know. But for now, things look safe.

I'm going to try to emulate those scholar-bloggers who distinguish between their scholarly-informed views and their well-informed-citizen views. For now, there are good role models to be had. But I welcome correspondents telling me that I've let boundaries blur, that I'm talking through my hat while putting on expert airs.

UPDATE: See this related post