Richard asks:

When in the past 25 years has the Republican Party ever made a non-left-wing argument, or championed a non-left-wing cause?

In my short life the only time I felt a sort of rollback of Leftist assumptions was 1994-1996. In hindsight 1996 was the turning point, in particular the government shutdown, but that wasn’t clear to me until the rise of George W. Bush and “compassionate conservatism.” The Reagan years I associate with sitcoms such as Family Ties, not considerations of policy or politics (being as I was a child), so I can’t speak to that. Of course, I’m not very versed in political history so my impression could be entirely wrong. I have to think on possible metrics for this sort of thing though…something plot or chartable.

A few years ago John Derbyshire made a comment in The Corner which referenced Judith Rich Harris’ argument in the The Nurture Assumption. In a nutshell, Harris points out that decades of behavior genetic research suggest that ~50% of the variation of many psychological and social outcomes are controlled by genes, ~10% by “shared environment” (e.g., parental input) and ~40% remains unaccounted for (usually this is termed “unshared environment”). Harris’ thesis is that this last consists of peer groups. This is a tendentious assertion, but the bigger point of controversy among Derbyshire’s interlocutors in The Corner was that he was downgrading the effect of parents, which is of course a “no, no” due to social conservative emphasis on this particular parameter (Charles Murray came to Derbyshire’s defense).

Consider sex. It is well known that children in single parent households have sex earlier. That teen moms tend to beget teen moms. In the public domain this is often presented as the effect of role models, or the developmental disruption which might occur in a single parent household. In other words, warp the environment, and you warp the outcome. The public policy responses from the Left and Right are manifold. Condoms, more sex education. Better values, abstinence education. Buffer the economic correlates of single parenthood with a more robust welfare state. Strengthen marriage so that single parenthood doesn’t occur. If you have an environmental problem, you have an environmental source of palliation. There’s a problem with this story: it’s probably wrong. Consider this new press release of a recent paper, Genes May Explain Why Children Who Live Without Dads Have Earlier Sex:

The more genes the children shared, the more similar their ages of first intercourse—regardless of whether or not the children personally had an absent father. This finding, the researchers say, suggests that environmental theories don’t fully explain the puzzle. Instead, genetic influence can help us understand the tie between fathers’ absence and early sex.

“While there’s clearly no such thing as a ‘father absence gene,’ there are genetic contributions to traits in both moms and dads that increase the likelihood of earlier sexual behavior in their children,” notes Mendle. “These include impulsivity, substance use and abuse, argumentativeness, and sensation seeking.

“Sensation seeking.” The 10% which is “shared environment” probably has a relatively small effect. I think the answer, if there is any, is in the 40% which is unshared. That poses a problem, because to change outcomes you need to engage in a proactive Kulturkampf. That is more daunting than giving single moms more welfare benefits, or telling them to go to church and instill some values in their children.

My friend Heather Mac Donald has a long post, The Right plays the race card, over at Secular Right. Despite her avowed atheism sometimes I do think Heather has a great deal of faith, at least in humankind and our better natures. She observes:

Republicans denounce identity politics, except when they engage in it themselves.  Steele is claiming either that Obama is going after Paterson because he is black or that Obama should not go after Paterson because he is black.  The first proposition is ludicrous, the second, poisonous.  Steele strikes me as intermittently unhinged, but his exploitation of identity discourse here is hardly sui generis.  Sarah Palin parroted Hillary Clinton’s feminist blather in announcing her vice presidency: “It turns out that the women of America aren’t finished yet, and we can shatter that glass ceiling once and for all.” Her supporters regularly accused her critics of being anti-woman.  I wouldn’t have been surprised, therefore, to have seen Limbaugh or some other Republican luminary, instead of Steele, play the race card against Obama for his anti-Paterson campaign.

This sort of tactical behavior is something I’ve observed a lot. During the battle for Social Security reform some commentators pointed out that the lower black life expectancy worked against them when it come to their benefits (liberals naturally dispute this). The problem of course is that no one on the Right wants to reform Social Security because of racial disparities, it’s just a talking point, a tactic useful in the short-term but not part of a larger strategic vision. Its transparency is also manifest to most, so I don’t understand why they even want to go there. Attempting to use liberal frames to advance Right agendas might win you some battles, but it loses you the war. The same can be said about the efforts of liberals to portray universal health care as a way to increase our “economic competitiveness.” Does anyone believe that that’s the reason that liberals want universal health care? Of course not. They’re wasting their breath, though probably most people will politely allow the argument to be heard.

Over the long term this sort of focus on short-term tactics as opposed to long-term strategy seems counterproductive and inefficient to me in terms of governance of the republic. So why does it happen? I suspect there are public choice issues at work, Washington operatives and players need to earn their keep, and they grab on to any short-term tactic which keeps them in the game. The war, that’s something that can be dealt with tomorrow…except that day never seems to arrive.

Am the only one who has reached the end of the line in terms of complacency about the state of American politics during the healthcare debate? I’m cynical, but even I have limits. I’m at the point now that the lies, liars and, the deluded public have simply saturated my ability to take it all in stride.

Yes, Obama wants to socialize medicine. Of course it will cost more; he’s not a genie who can magically generate medical services with three wishes. No, we don’t have a free market in healthcare, our rotten employer-driven system is the stepchild of the warfare state and wage controls. It’s lassoed by reams of ridiculous regulation. Many states force insurance to cover infertility treatments, as if women who decide to focus on their careers deep into their 30s are a medical condition. Rather, this is just a transfer of wealth (via higher premiums) from those who have children in their 20s, when fertility is optimal, to those who try to breed at the tail end of their fertility curve.

Speaking of regulation, doctors protect us against quacks through licensing and certification, and also manage to limit their labor supply so they can bid their services up. Those services involve me telling my doctor what cortisone inhaler to prescribe when I have bronchitis. $200 charge to insurance there for their signature based on my advice.

A follow up to Richard’s post where he references the film Idiocracy, I though I’d bring some hope in change. Data bloggers The Audacious Epigone and Inductivist regularly touch upon issues of dysgenics, but of late they haven’t been quite as pessimistic. Take heart where you can get it.

A few months ago I noted the peculiarities of domestic dog cognition, especially their likely psychological adaptations which make them an optimal pet. Now, new research, Dogs and babies prone to same classic mistake:

These results suggest that dogs and infant share a social mindset where certain cues prepare them to learn from humans. It’s not the case that the gestures and facial signs were just distracting for that would lead the animals or infants to search both hiding places equally - instead, they both preferred the one that the object was initially hidden behind.

As they say, “read the whole thing,” but the take-home point is that dogs and babies are easily distracted by experimenters because experimenters are people, and people are fascinating. The same was not true with wolves, who were not distracted by humans.

In the early part of this decade Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate took the country by storm and spent many weeks at the top of the bestseller lists. To a great extent this book helped to rocket Pinker up to the status of a first-rank public intellectual in the same league as Richard Dawkins or E. O. Wilson (The Language Instinct was a great book, but was not a cultural phenomenon). But some of the objections to Pinker’s thesis was that it was addressing a problem which didn’t exist, that is, the denial of human nature in academic and public forums. It seems the success of The Blank Slate contradict such assertions, but over the past few days I poked around the General Social Survey and found that contrary to Pinker’s critics the tabula rasa remains supreme in the minds of the public. I posted my first find over at Secular Right, but there’s another variable of even greater interest, “LFEGENES,” which asks if some people are born with better genes than others. The most surprising thing is that general uniformity of opinion on this issue. Of the results below in general only those for age groups show a difference outside of the 95th confidence interval. In other words, excepting the old we are all blank slaters now….

One of the truisms of politics seems to be that what is “Republican” or “conservative” in one region of the country may differ from what it might mean in another region. This explains Mitt Romney’s transformation from a liberal Republican, at least on the national spectrum, to a moderately conservative one once he was in the race for the presidential nomination. Conversely, John Edwards morphed from a “New Democrat” as Senator from North Carolina to a liberal lion as a national figure. As it happens, I suspect in both of these cases their earlier incarnations were matters of political expedience, while their later ones likely reflect their sincerely held values. By some measures Olympia Snowe is more liberal than Ben Nelson, a case where regional configurations come to the fore and override the strong effect of partisan orientation when it comes to determining ideology.

I was curious as to how this bubbled up from the regional level. So I decided to look at the General Social Survey. I limited the sample to the years 1998-2008 for contemporary relevance, as well as only whites to remove ethnic confounds. The regions are broken down by the Census divisions. I looked at “hot button” social issues or religious values since these exhibit stark differences between the parties, and highlighted Republicans/conservatives in New England and Democrats/liberals in the most traditionalist region of the country, the “East South Central,” Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky.

At least when it comes to social issues, New England Republicans and conservatives resemble Democrats and liberals in the South. No surprise.

View the details here.

Michael Lewis has written a parody article from a putative Goldmanite. Here’s a sample:

Every time we hear the phrase “the United States of Goldman Sachs” we shake our heads in wonder. Every ninth-grader knows that the U.S. government consists of three branches. Goldman owns just one of these outright; the second we simply rent, and the third we have no interest in at all. (Note there isn’t a single former Goldman employee on the Supreme Court.)

More seriously, here’s a New York Magazine piece on Goldman. Finally, some readers with time on their hands and space in their iPod might want to listen this radio program which has Matt Taibbi and Charles Ellis on. Ellis is the author of The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs, while Taibbi penned the now famous anti-Goldman screed in Rolling Stone, The Great American Bubble Machine. What is interesting is that if you listen to the program the host is obviously shocked at Ellis’ naked and unvarnished condescension toward those outside of Goldman’s magic circle. Ellis goes so far as to assert that the bailouts were to the benefit of Main Street, not Wall Street. After all, Goldman was apparently hedged against every calamitous contingency (or so Ellis assures us). There are also several instances where Charles Ellis simply remains silent in the face of a question because he feels it is so ludicrous that it is beneath him to respond. Ellis’ tone throughout suggested that he was one who felt that speaking on this topic to those outside of the magic circle was a waste of time, because they obviously just wouldn’t “get it.” Through his equanimity and utter assurance that all will be well in the world of Goldman, come hell or high water, Charles Ellis seems to be making Simon Johnson’s argument for him.

Because of Taibbi’s article Goldman is trying to go on the public relations offensive (see this interview with Planet Money). But whenever they talk I just keep thinking of this old song from Shaggy.