something about "The Great Debate" by Yuval Levin

Politics makes for especially caustic conversation in America these days. We discuss political polarization because we wonder if honest bipartisanship is dead and if we are headed for a point of no return. We sometimes seem violently rabid in our views; then we wonder if we have always been like this.

Whatever the case, Yuval Levin lays down some historical context for today's American Left-Right binary. Representing the founder of conservatism, Levin shows us Edmund Burke (1729-1797), widely credited as the founding philosophical Conservative. Levin briefly introduces the Dublin-born author, politician, and philosopher, then paraphrases Burke's political ideology, drawing largely from Burke's writings on the American and French Revolutions.

Representing the modern American Left is Thomas Paine (1737-1736). Steeped in both the American and French revolutions, the English-born Paine authored the (in)famous pamphlet "Common Sense," which, to many, inspired the rebels' declaration of independence from Britain in 1776. Levin paraphrases Paine, drawing from his American Revolution writings and his defense of the bloody French Revolution.

In The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right, Levin devotes more time to Burke, largely using Paine to further refine an explanation of Burke's views. But Levin does not misrepresent Paine, exactly, so no real harm done. And Pain's shortchange comes as no suprise--Yuval Levin is a conservative intellectual born in Israel who founded National Affairs.

By the end of The Great Debate, Burke's and Paine's stances were so qualified, excepted, and nuanced as to be ripe for accusations of inconsistency and flip-flopping. Same old, same old.

All or nothing when talking values and money

In this week's editorial, David Brooks either misses the point or hopes to talk around it.

He argues that the Occupy protest movement targets the wrong type of inequality. To make his argument, Brooks organizes inequality into two varieties conveniently named Blue and Red. According to Brooks, Blue inequality--the target of the Occupy movement--consists of the wealth gap between the elite business/finance sector and everyone else. Red inequality consists of the opportunity and values gap between college graduates and those who never make it to college.

The differences between college grads and non-college grads, Brooks says, are "inequalities of family structure, child rearing patterns and educational attainment". Besides making the sweeping generalization that college graduates are better at raising children and run better homes, Brooks makes the common mistake of separating values and economics and then emphasizing one at the expense of the other. The poor need stable, good paying jobs to support a family the way Brooks wants them to. Liberals tend to overemphasize the economics of poverty, while Conservatives focus on values.

Towards his conclusion, Brooks writes that Blue inequality is "not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the nation’s stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent." With jobs being outsourced or eliminated due to downsizing, and with workers' wages stagnant while CEO pay skyrockets, Brooks is naive to think that if only the poor married before having children, their conditions would improve and opportunity would follow.