In Defense of the Caucus! -- As an irrationally proud and defensive Iowan, I am annoyed by the headline of the top story on the Slate front page. It says: "The Phantom Pollbooth: Why You'll Never Know who won Iowa." (The headline over the story itself reads, cryptically, "The Vanishing.")

The implication here is that there is something wrong with the caucus system, as if there is some one right, especially legitimate, way to choose delegates for a national party convention. There is no poll booth in a caucus, it's just a bunch of people hanging out in a room. And your first preference doesn't necessarily get registered (if your favorite candidate fails to cross a threshold, then you've got to wander over to some other more successful canidate's posse to be counted). And there is no simple constant relationship between the number of people who stand for a candidate at caucus and the number of delegates you finally get.

This all seems to annoy Saletan and Schiller, who apparently think democracy essentially has something to do with adding up raw preferences in order to descry the ding an sich of the general will. They need to get over their journalist's fetishism for polls, and stop thinking democracy is the same thing as an especially big Zogby survey.

We all should know by now that every voting scheme is arbitrary in its own way, and that there's no general will to be expressed. Democracy, if it's worth anything, is only secondarily about counting heads. First, it's about procedures for social choice that diffuse power, that citizens will regard as legitimate, and which contribute to the stable, predictable functioning of the social order. People in Iowa LIKE the caucus, which is a prima facie good reason to also like the caucus. Iowans like getting together with people in their neighborhood, and talking over issues, and standing for their candidates. And there is a perfectly good procedure for deciding the winner of the caucus, and most everyone thinks that's just fine, too. Delegates get selected. So it adequately serves the superficial democratic function. But the caucus is also a community experience that brings Iowans togethers, that provides them with a sense of choosing and governing together in a way much more intimate than the casting of anonymous ballots. And in this way, the caucus serves democracy's deeper purposes very well.

Saletan and Schilller ridiculously compare what promises to be a very close caucus to the 2000 Florida presidential vote count:

Everyone could argue about which ballots should count. But at least there were ballots to look at.

In Iowa, there will be no ballots.

This strikes me as dumb. Given the nature of the Florida debacle, shouldn't it have occured to them that this is a virtue of the caucus?

Anti-Maintenance Man -- In response to my claim that men have not yet figured out how best to be men in the post-feminist world, Kim "Rifleman" DuToit writes:

Actually, we have figured it out, but I'm not so sure women are going to like the answer.

We seem to have preferred to opt out of the whole Western female societal construct. To quote a friend: "Western women are just too high-maintenance."

Which is why men are getting married much later than before, and why mail-order brides from overseas (ie. from "less-civilized" societies like Asia and Eastern Europe) have become such a growth industry.

It's why "Women's Studies" is an object of derision; why young men have no compunction to scream "Show us your tits!" to total strangers; why men no longer treat women with respect.

If women are going to be just like men, men will treat them like men.

Other women, who prefer to be treated like ladies, will be treated as such.

And if that's too "old-fashioned" for the New Woman or Metrosexual Man, so much the better for the rest of us. They can have each other, and welcome.

Lovely. The problem here is not that Kim is being too "old-fashioned," its that he's being insufferably vicious.

If demanding equal respect for equal intelligence and competence, for equal ambition and accomplishment, is just too much, "too high maintenance," for Kim, so much so that he is led to endorse the practice of seeking out "mail-order" brides who will acquiesce in subservience, then he has pretty much demonstrated the utter moral bankruptcy of his conception of masculinity. This strikes me as a confession of weakness at the deepest level. The argument that a woman with ambition, resolve, and a sense of independence is a woman who is trying to be "like a man" is of the same form, and elicits in decent people the same repugnance, as the argument that blacks who take their education seriously are trying to "be white". It's just sick. The "Western female societal construct" is an enormous triumph of civilization. Kim's inability to admire women in this mold, and to appreciate the way such women have successfully preserved their femininity while moving outside of traditional feminine domains, shows us exactly why his notion of masculinity is something no self-respecting man or woman could accept. Additionally, if screaming "show us your tits" is really Kim's idea of treating women "like a man," then his notion of the respect men owe to other men is also incredibly troubling.

I think Kim thinks he's being iconoclastic, or charmingly curmudgeonly, or something. This metrosexual thinks he should try being a man, because whatever that is, Kim ain't it. Or he should stop trying, because if he is it, then it ain't worth being.

"Stories to Masturbate to" -- I'm proud to report that the Fly Bottle is #2 in this search on AOL, just after "A Special Weekend" by D. at Spinkle's Golden Showers! [WARNING: For the love of sweet Jesus DO NOT READ "A Special Weekend" by D. at Sprinkle's Golden Showers!!! Just don't.]

[To National Review Readers: Sorry about this, didn't know you were coming. I repeat: DO NOT READ THE STORY. I mean it.]

State to You: "Tell me about your mother." This is just nauseating. The New York Times reports that the Bush administration is planning to provide "$1.5 billion for training to help couples develop interpersonal skills that sustain 'healthy marriages.'"

This is apparently what compassionate conservatism comes to: the intrusion of the state in even the most personal spheres of life; social engineering through therapy.

"We know this is a sensitive area," Dr. Horn said. "We don't want to come in with a heavy hand. All services will be voluntary. We want to help couples, especially low-income couples, manage conflict in healthy ways. We know how to teach problem-solving, negotiation and listening skills. This initiative will not force anyone to get or stay married. The last thing we'd want is to increase the rate of domestic violence against women."

I'm sure the government will soon come around to the view that single people need listening skills too!

And it's nice to be assured that the state will stay its healing hand and won't force us into riveting 50 minute sessions down at the community center with besweatered, milquetoast PsyDs anxious to tell us how to live our lives.

Imagine:

"In order to increase your compassion for one another, you need first to have greater compassion for nature. Try not eating meat for a week, and see if you don't find yourself more sensitive to your partner's feelings!"

Or, worse:

"The first thing we've got to talk about is Jesus. Is Jesus in your life? There's no reason NOT to beat your wife if you don't accept Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior. I like to say that family that prays together stays together."

Coming soon to a church basement near you.

[Link from Tyler Cowen @ the Volokhs.]

The New Capitalist Man -- Terence O. Moore is worried that manhood is ailing, and that our culture now produces only barbarians and wimps. While there is some truth to his complaints, my issue with this kind of conservative social criticism is its utter lack of imagination. The world has changed, and despite Moore's loathing of whiners, all he seems to manage is a mannered, whining lament for classical "thumotic" masculinity. One hopes for more from social critics. Moore's essay is a perfect example of the kind of rote conservative judgment that I complained about yesterday in a post about the films of Whit Stillman. He just can't seem to accept that there are new conventions, for better or worse, and so cannot bring himself to think critically and usefully of what it means to live a life within those conventions, rather than bleat impotently about the lost world.

Conservatives tend to see the feminist movement and the so-called sexual revolution as perverse, willful repudiations of the sorts of regulative convention that make civilization possible. Yet here we are; civilization remains. And they fail to relate these cultural shifts to the ongoing development of capitalism, which, in other moods, they are only too eager praise. The increased economic autonomy of women, of which the feminist movement is as much a response as a cause, fundamentally alters the terms of sexual and marital relations, and thereby fundamentally alters the social meaning of man- and womanhood. What we need is a rethinking of what it is to be a man when women don't need us economically, don't require our paternalistic care, don't conceive of themselves primarily as units for the production of babies, and thus look to relationships with men to meet human needs beyond economics, protection, and reproduction. We men haven't quite figured this out yet, and so, yes, we are a bit adrift about how exactly to express our masculinity in today's world. But it does no good to quote C.S. Lewis at us, and blame us for lacking sufficient martial virtue. Moore should make himself useful and think about what we men should be and do now given that our social role is irreversibly changed and women are never going back to the gilded cage.

[Cross-posted on Liberty & Power.]

Giving a Whit about Convention -- Julia Magnet's thoughtful paean to the films of Whit Stillman moved me to dwell on tensions in my own character that reflect, I think, the uneasy integration of fairly traditional (read: conservative) values and the values of the "sexual revolution." Magnet enthusiastically approves of Stillman's rearguard defense of traditional conventions, and his indictment of the move to overthrow them in an attempt to, you know, liberate us from their strictures, to free us to strike out boldly on the journey of self-actualization. I too approve, sort of. But not at all enthusiastically. I am composed of too much of what they condemn.

Despite my own selective conservative streak, conservatives often make me uncomfortable, because they so often lack the sort of discerning judgment they laud. (This is, needless to say, not a lack exclusive to conservatives.) In her discussion of the characters of Metropolitan Magnet writes:

What really riles Charlotte is the fact that Alice still has standards, judges people, and rejects postmodern equivalency. "I'm sorry," Alice unhesitatingly pronounces, "but I don't consider the guy who did the Spider-Man comics to be a serious author." In Stillman's eyes, what makes Alice so attractive is just this refined capacity for judgment.

Perhaps refinement is required to omit Stan Lee from the Canon. But this sort of judgment is very often rote, reflexive and unrefined, not unlike Magnet's casual use of 'postmodern' as an epithet. I've met enough St. John's and Hillsdale grads, quasi-Straussian pseudo-intellectuals, and martini quaffing, cigar puffing, Burke quoting suspenders-wearers, to see that, these days, endorsement of a conservative weltanschaung may be no more than a particularly luxurious form of transgression, and that the stoutly anti-postmodern judgments that Stillman and Magnet so admire may be simply what one says.

It's true, conventions allow us to coordinate and constrain our behavior so that we are able to pursue our various ends without coming to grief. But it's also true that conventions retard, stultify, and oppress. The trick is judging which conventions do which, or if they do the latter, whether there is a compensating benefit. Such refined judgment is surpassingly attractive because it is surpassingly difficult. However, I worry that it is in the nature of conservatism to be indolent in judgment about the cultural patrimony. Some, perhaps many, of our conventions are worth defending, and so conservatives will often be right to defend them -- but right by default, and not by any discernment about the particular case. Yet some of our institutions are "peculiar," as they say, and demand our unreserved opposition. The Grimke sisters', for example, were not wasted lives.

Discussing Stillman's lament over lost mores in The Last Days of Disco, Magnet write,

The adherents of the sexual revolution presented a world without consequences. Freed from the restrictions of convention, we would satisfy our every desire and increase the store of human happiness. This proved to be a lie: sex has profound consequences--emotional, moral, and physical--as Stillman dramatizes in the final twist he gives to Alice's story. Her one encounter scars Alice for life--Tom gives her herpes. Though Tom imagines himself a critic of the sexual revolution, in this instance he embodies its wounding irresponsibility: he knew he had a venereal disease but took no precautions, assuming that Alice?s promiscuity excused his carelessness.

This is a powerful, perceptive scene. But Magnet betrays a lack of refinement in her insistence on overstating its lesson. Convention as such was never abandoned. Traditional conventions were effaced and transformed to create new ones. That sex has profound emotional, moral, and physical consequences was never in dispute. The question is whether it's marriage or nothing. Few believe that wanton promiscuity adds to "the store of human happiness." But it's not clear that the loosening of sexual constraint has not. The emotional, moral, and physical consequences of sex on my life, and the life of most of my unmarried friends, men and women, has been far from disaster. I don't doubt that the transition to new conventions created human wreckage. I don't doubt that herpes got around. But I do doubt that we would be better off overall with the old constraints.

Some of which, by the way, are with us still, and which, by the way, are cruel, demeaning, and immoral. Ask a couple of loving men or women who would like to be afforded the benefits and protections of a legal marriage. A conservative who has developed even a weak capacity for moral discernment and social judgment should see through to the logic of the institution and endorse gay marriage. But instead we get vehement, unrefined declamation of prejudice, which is not, I believe, the same thing as having standards.

The point is that we should all be conservatives insofar as there are conventions and standards worth conserving. (There are.) And we should be hesitant to throw off norms we find inconvenient, because they may serve larger purposes we don't understand. But some of our conventions are perverse and wrong. So we've got to have standards that allow us to pass judgment on them, and we have to be willing to change the conventions and norms if need be. The choice isn't between the conventions history happened to pass down to us and the relativist abolition of all standards. The choice is between the intelligent application of social judgment and apology for injustice.

So let us all abhor the cheap confession of low feeling, admire the stoic virtues, preserve the conditions for love and family, praise the ennobling and beautiful, love our freedom, hold one another responsible, and treat each other with respect, courtesy, and due deference. And then... screw like the end is nigh.

Spread Thin -- Well, very suddenly, I am teaching an introductory aesthetics course at Howard University, not far from my digs. I'm scrambling to prepare.

In addition, I'm guest blogging over at Liberty & Power. And I'm still blogging at Radley's until, I guess, he tells me I'm not.