Book review: "Maid" and the problem of the undeserving poor

Become a Patron!I just finished a fascinating and important book called "Maid," by Stephanie Land, which seems to have been shepherded to publication by Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of the best-selling sensation "Nickel and Dimed," and founder of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.I say the book is important because it strips away virtually all the cultural baggage of the war on the poor and, I assume unintentionally, asks the simple question: what do you do about people who are poor because they are idiots?Library shelves groan under the weight of books about the underlying causes of poverty stemming from racism, sexism, free trade, sudden sickness, economic dislocation, alcohol and drug addiction, and so on. But Stephanie Land doesn't suffer from any of those problems. She grew up in a white middle class household in Alaska, went to public schools, moved to Washington State, and was admitted to the University of Montana in Missoula (more on that later).And then her life went to shit, for no obvious reason.

Why is Stephanie Land a maid?

Despite "Maid" being the title of the book, this question becomes more and more bewildering as the book progresses. As the narrative opens, she's living a carefree life in Port Townsend, Washington, an isolated, aging hippie community, where she works at a cafe, hangs out in bars, and meets Jamie, the soon-to-be father of her soon-to-be child, Mia.After discovering the pregnancy, which she decides to keep, and being violently threatened by Jamie, who she decides to continue living near so he can have a relationship with his daughter, she moves into a series of inadequate transitional housing arrangements, and begins her career as a maid.Why she does this is never adequately explained, and as the book goes on it becomes increasingly bewildering. She hates all her co-workers. She hates driving between houses and she hates paying for gas, neither of which she's reimbursed for and the combination of which leave her making much less than minimum wage. She terrorizes her clients by constantly blurting out uncomfortable information about her personal life, and hates most of them as well (the central section of the book is a recitation of all the grievances she developed against every one of her clients in the roughly two years the book covers).But most of all, she hates filth. "Disgust sensitivity" varies widely between individuals and cultures, and is even correlated in some studies with political orientation, which you can see in people like Donald Trump who describe immigrants as a kind of filthy, sick, penetrating, and contaminating force that has to be stopped and sterilized. Stephanie Land suffers from an extremely high level of disgust sensitivity, which is not particularly unusual, but makes cleaning people's kitchens and toilets an obviously strange career choice.

The Strange Story of the Car Accident

About two thirds of the way into "Maid," Land recounts a breathtaking story, which I'll try to share the highlights of:

"'Can I have my window down?' [Mia] asked, her sick voice squeaking a little. 'I want Ariel's [a Little Mermaid doll] hair to blow like in the movie.' I did it, not caring how ridiculous that seemed. I just needed to get to work. I needed to finish work. I needed to sleep..."I glanced to my right as an older brown Ford Bronco passed us. I locked eyes with the other driver, and he gave me a smile, then pointed to Mia's window, just as I saw a flash of red hair in the back window behind Mia's seat..."Over the next bend was a stoplight where I could do a U-turn. I have time, I thought. I could turn around, stop on the eastbound side of the highway, jump out, grab her doll, and then take the next exist, go under the bridge, turn back around, and we'd be on our way..."As I stepped from my car out onto the asphalt, the wind from cars speeding by felt hot, blowing through my favorite green t-shirt that had thinned over the years. I scoured the grass that divided the east- and westbound traffic, my ponytail smacking toward my face, so much so I used one hand to hold it against my head. I must have looked odd, searching for a doll amid the candy wrappers and soda bottles full of piss that had been dumped in the median..."Then I saw the shape of the tail, fanned into two sections, but no sign of her shell-bikini-clad upper body. 'Shit," I said again. I bent down to pick it up, and heard it."The sound of metal crunching and glass exploding at once. It was a sound I knew from accidents I'd been in as a teenager, but I had never heard it like this."A car. Hitting another car. My car. My car with Mia sitting in the back seat."That sound was the window next to my baby girl's head exploding, popping like a glass balloon."

Her daughter is unhurt in the accident, but her car is totaled and she's unable to work for several more days until she's able to borrow a car from a different casual boyfriend. Weeks or months later (the book's timeline is always a little bit confusing) she collects an insurance check and is able to replace her car.

The Strange Educational Journey

Throughout "Maid," Land relates her studies at Skagit Valley College, a 2-year public college in Washington State, mainly through the prism of the Pell grant that covers her tuition there. But there is no sense that she learns anything from Skagit Valley College. She takes online math and physics courses, and passes open-book tests after putting her daughter to sleep. She even passes physical education courses by lying about her workout routine. She is doing all this based on an intuition or hunch that doing so will somehow, someday, "improve her life."Hilariously, what actually improves her life is going down to the financial aid office and taking out a student loan, since once she does that she finally has enough cash to put down a deposit on an apartment that's not infested with "black mold," one of the many contaminants she's obsessed with fighting. The fact that she could have done so on page 1, instead of page 200, of her harrowing tale genuinely never seems to have dawned on her.

The Strange Case of Missoula, Montana

Finally, as promised, let us return to the question of Missoula, Montana, which happens to be my hometown. Stephanie Land moved from Alaska to an isolated community in Washington State in order to be closer to Missoula, Montana, where she planned to study writing at the University of Montana. This is not an unreasonable thing to do: I myself often refer to the "conveyor belt" running between Missoula, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon.But here is the strange part: having made it all the way to Washington State, she then stopped. Despite spending 20+ hours in her car every week driving on county roads between isolated mansions, it's only in the final pages of the book that she is able to hop onto I-90 and drive straight east, arriving in Missoula about 9 hours later. I've done this drive dozens of times. It's no big deal.Once she arrives in Missoula, she realizes that all of her dreams were true, Missoula really is paradise on Earth, and she transfers to the University of Montana creative writing program.The same program she had been admitted to years earlier, in the opening pages of the book.

Conclusion: we need a welfare state that accommodates the existence of idiots

"Maid" is written in a way that seems almost deliberately designed to elicit as little sympathy as possible. That's not to say it's poorly written: in the car accident scene I paraphrased above I gasped when the other driver's car smashed into hers from behind. But all of Land's problems flow directly from her own actions: her pregnancy, her housing choices, her career choices, her educational choices, and her life choices are all made freely, with none of the kind of coercion we're used to seeing in emotional pleas to stamp out poverty. She's simply terrible at navigating the basic structure of life in the United States of America circa 2010.And I think that is ultimately the most powerful message one can take from this book. If it doesn't fit in with your existing preconceptions about the deserving and undeserving poor, "Maid" won't change your mind. But if you're the kind of person who already believes the key to fighting poverty is a generous and comprehensive welfare state, "Maid" can serve as a reminder that not everyone in poverty is the victim of this or that misfortune, historical injustice, natural disaster, or the policy decisions of your political enemies.Some people in poverty are just idiots, and that forces us to ask the inconvenient question: do idiots, too, deserve healthy food, adequate shelter, comprehensive health care, public education, and even the joys of parenthood? If so, we need a welfare state that accommodates them, too. Because Stephanie Land is proof that they need all the help they can get.Become a Patron!

Book Review: "Stubborn Attachments," Growth, and Welfare

One of my favorite libertarian economists is the director of the Koch-financed Mercatus Center, and Bloomberg columnist, Tyler Cowen. He's a truly inspired troll in the model of an Ayn Rand or a Milton Friedman, constantly asking important questions like "what if the things you think are good are actually bad?" and "what if the things you think are bad are actually good?"Recent gems include:

• Calling people who are worth billions of dollars "billionaires" is dehumanizing
• The poor need to save more money 
• Freddie Gray's death proves Baltimore needs more police

He also has an excellent interview podcast where he asks guests bizarre leading questions and they often answer, "I have no idea what you're talking about." But more relevant to today's post, he has also been on tour lately promoting his latest book, "Stubborn Attachments." I listened to enough interviews to pique my interest, so when I discovered my local library didn't have a copy, I bought one to review and donate. In Stubborn Attachments, Cowen makes 3 basic arguments:

• Wealth matters;
• The future matters;
• Therefore our principal moral duty is to take actions that lead to the highest possible level of future wealth, all of which happen to align with Cowen's prior political intuitions.

Let's look at each of these in turn.

Does wealth matter?

Since Cowen prides himself on his empiricism, this banal argument is the one where he recognizes himself to be on the shakiest ground. You see, there's a problem an empiricist runs into when arguing that human welfare requires maximizing economic output: in one of the most consistent social science findings, above certain levels of wealth, people do not report statistically significant higher levels of happiness, except in certain relative status situations (you are likely to be happier as the richest person in a poor neighborhood than the poorest person in a rich neighborhood). If you took this research at face value, you would conclude that the happiness-maximizing economic policy would be a moderately high level of per capita wealth (sufficient to maximize average happiness), distributed relatively equally (to avoid relative status effects).But since Cowen is a libertarian economist, he needs to find reasons why unequal distributions of wealth are good, rather than bad, even if they leave some people much less happy than others. Since all the empirical research contradicts this view, he resorts to speculation about reasons why he's right and the empirical research is wrong.

• Language is a poor gauge of absolute happiness. If people calibrate their use of language around their lived experience, then they might be answering a different question than researchers are trying to ask. A researcher may want to know "on a scale of 1 to 10 of conceivable levels of human happiness, with 1 being the least happy a person is capable of being, and 10 being the happiest a person is capable of being, how happy are you?" But a subject might be answering a different question: "all things considered, how happy are you?" If you've just lost a beloved parent, partner, or child, you might owe the researcher a "1" on their ideal scale, but if you're holding up better than your neighbor who experienced the same tragedy you might in fact answer a "6" based on your own internal scale. If this were the case, people might in fact be happier under conditions of higher wealth than lower wealth, even if we cannot produce survey instruments that accurately detect this, in the same way we can be confident even very small objects produce gravitational fields, despite not having instruments sensitive enough to detect them.
• Fleeting moments of extreme happiness may not show up on surveys (because people forget about them or don't take them into account when measuring their overall happiness), but morally should still be considered, and fleeting moments of extreme happiness are more likely to occur under conditions of higher wealth than lower wealth.

I don't think these are very convincing arguments, not because they are false, but because they're irrelevant: I don't think human happiness is a particularly interesting or instructive moral value. The moral problem with Flint's poisoned water supply is not that drinking poison makes people "unhappy," the moral problem is that it kills them. The moral problem of doctors telling people that smoking is a safe and healthy habit is not that smoking makes people "unhappy," the moral problem is that doctors have a duty to protect the health of their patients.Cowen cleverly tries to address this issue by saying what he's really interested in isn't wealth, per se, but wealth "properly measured," which he refers to as "Wealth Plus." Wealth Plus starts with economic activity, but adjusts it to include "measures of leisure time, household production, and environmental amenities, as summed up in a relevant measure of wealth." The problem with this trick is that it doesn't resolve any moral questions; instead it begs them. If I place a high moral value on biodiversity ("environmental amenities") and Cowen places a low moral value on it, then we're going to start with vastly different estimates of our current wealth. But what's worse, in a book concerned with growth, is that over time our estimates will grow further and further apart! My high weighting of environmental amenities means that my value of Wealth Plus might stagnate or fall while his happily compounds over the centuries, until our descendants are standing on a barren rock hooked up to coal-powered happiness engines. To me this is a nightmare, to Cowen a triumph of moral reasoning.In other words, rather than his policy views naturally following from a proper focus on Wealth Plus, he's simply moved the moral argument backwards from "what policies are moral?" to "what is the moral method of calculating Wealth Plus?"

Does the future matter?

Speaking of our descendants, the middle part of Stubborn Attachments is a lively discussion of a problem that has long vexed both economists and moral philosophers: how much weight should we give to the well-being of people in the future, including the very distant future? The technical term for this is the "discount rate," which is derived from the idea in economics that a dollar in the future is worth less than a dollar today, because a dollar today can be invested to grow into more than a dollar in the future.By analogy, moral philosophers ask how we should discount the effects of our actions on future beings. A very high discount rate would imply that we should have very little concern for the well-being of people in the future, and almost no concern for people in the distant future (the same way a dollar today is worth many thousands of times the value of a dollar in 500 years), while a low discount rate implies we should consider the welfare of people in the future very close in value to the welfare of people living today, and even people in the distant future should be seriously considered.Cowen summarizes the debate neatly, and argues that the correct discount rate is very low or zero: we should consider the well-being of people in the very distant future to have virtually the same moral weight as people living today.I found this section lively and interesting, and for what it's worth, I agree with Cowen that zero or near-zero discount rates are the most appropriate.

If Wealth (Plus) matters, and the future matters, what should be done?

Cowen sets up his argument to neatly lead into his preferred policy outcomes:

• Economy activity is a principal input into Wealth Plus, an inclusive measure of human well-being;
• The future should be given moral weight equal or near-equal to the present;
• Therefore we should very strongly prefer policies and actions that will put the world on the highest sustainable path of economic growth, subject to the constraint of near-absolute human rights (I didn't discuss his view of human rights because it's uneventful, you just need to know he thinks they should be treated as near-absolute).

Fortunately, Cowen isn't coy about what he thinks those policies and actions should be:

• "We should redistribute wealth only up to the point that it maximizes the rate of sustainable economic growth."
• "An overly generous level of wealth transfer harms economic growth. Many people end up working less, or working less hard, and the associated higher tax rates discourage entrepreneurship and can lead to economic stasis."
• "Excess or poorly conceived welfare expenditures may create urban cultures of dependency and crime" (yikes).
• "Non-infrastructure government spending is correlated positively with lower growth rates."
• "Excess transfers...make it harder to absorb high numbers of immigrants from poorer countries...too high a level of benefits is likely to mean...a lower level of migration."
• "Rather than redistributing most wealth, we can do better for the world by investing in high-return activities like supporting immigration and producing new technologies with global reach."
• "Utilitarianism may support the transfer of resources from the poor to the rich. A talented entrepreneur...can probably earn a higher rate of return on invested resources than can a disabled great-grandmother. Indeed, a common complaint in the literature on inequality is that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer, or at least more or less stay put. If this portrait is to be believed, then the rich earn higher returns on their accumulated wealth" (emphasis mine).

What does Cowen think we are doing when we argue over politics?

I think it is fine and good for Tyler Cowen to write down for his superfans and for posterity his thoughts on wealth, happiness, growth, and policy. I also enjoy writing down my thoughts on those subjects. Cowen's mistake, however, is in thinking that he has an unusually clear-eyed, unusually empirical, unusually ethical answer to these questions. Instead, he appears to me to have an unusually dull and muddied view.Take, for example, the current political debate over whether the United States should adopt a single-payer healthcare system, where people stay on the same federal health insurance plan from pre-natal care to cradle to grave. Such a plan would have a number of positive and negative effects. On the one hand, over the long term federal taxes would likely need to be somewhat higher to finance the increased federal expenditures on health care, and those higher taxes might have a negative effect on long-term economic growth if they discourage work and investment. On the other hand, the increased ease of switching between employment, independent contracting, and self-employment might have a positive effect on entrepreneurship and matching between employers and employees, and lead to increased economic growth. Moreover, reducing the share of the workforce, office space, and financial capital dedicated to unproductive private health insurance activities, and increasing the share dedicated to productive activities, might have an additional positive impact on economic growth. Finally, providing consistent lifetime healthcare to the entire population, including the currently uninsured, might increase the overall health and productivity of the population, another positive impact on economic growth.My point is not that the benefits of universal national health insurance will outweigh the costs, although it should come as no surprise that I think they will. My point is that everyone involved in the debate knows that we are already arguing about whether the benefits will outweigh the costs! That is, to a first approximation, what it means to say a policy is "good" or "bad," that you support it or oppose it.Consider as another example the recent controversy over the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Proponents argue that the construction of the pipeline is a productive investment that might be expected to increase long-term economic growth. Opponents of the pipeline argue that on the contrary, easing the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels will accelerate the warming of the climate, reducing the long-term quantity and quality of "environmental amenities" and actually reducing "Wealth Plus." Moreover, the native residents of the area assert a "near-absolute" rights claim that they don't want to expose their ancestral waters to the risk of environmental catastrophe. These are complicated arguments, but they are arguments that we are already having. Tyler Cowen contributes nothing to the argument except insisting that the moral stakes are very high that we make the right choice instead of the wrong choice.But we already know the moral stakes are very high — that's what the fight is about!

Book review: Reihan Salam and the limits of American greatness

The local public library recently spit into my hands Reihan Salam's slender volume about US immigration policy, "Melting Pot or Civil War? A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders." The "son of immigrants" in question is Salam himself, who is so thoroughly integrated into American life he manages to hold down a gig writing for the fringe conservative website National Review.Reading the work of conservative "intellectuals," whether it's Reihan Salam, Ben Sasse or Jeffrey Goldberg, is obviously a curious exercise given how fundamentally our politics and values differ, but I never fail to learn something from these books about the conservative mind, and Salam's latest book proved to be no exception.

What's the problem with immigration?

I always try to give the most generous interpretation possible of these conservative ideologues so no one can claim I'm taking them out of context or setting up straw man versions of their arguments just because I disagree. Salam's argument against immigration (or against "open borders" as he puts it), hinges on the following observations:

• the foreign-born share of the population is historically high and rising;
• the foreign-born share of the working-age population is historically high and rising;
• a community of immigrants that is replenished with new arrivals is less likely to encourage integration into established American institutions, and may even "draw established Americans into its cultural orbit" (horrors!);
• low-skilled immigrants are likely to have low-skilled children, who will both use means-tested programs and agitate for social justice.

Rarely has anyone interpreted the "melting pot" so literally

It's true that humans don't actually melt, even at very high temperatures, with the Indiana Jones canon notwithstanding. But they do the next best thing: they marry. And Reihan Salam is obsessed with marriage. In particular, intermarriage:

• "Marrying outside one's own ethnic community was often frowned upon"
• "The children and grandchildren of European immigrants became much more likely to marry outside their ethnic tribes"
• "It would be one thing if the likelihood of intermarriage were identical for more- and less-educated Hispanics, but that's far from the case"
• "Today, rising rates of intermarriage and residential integration suggest that a growing minority of blacks are finding a place in the mainstream"
• "When Italians stopped arriving in America, Italian Americans had little choice but to marry non-Italian Americans"
• "Assuming these college-educated, native-born Hispanic women are marrying college-educated non-Hispanics, it's quite likely both that their children will be college-educated themselves, and that they'd find themselves in social networks that are more Anglo than Hispanic"

Now, I have to confess, I'm the marrying type. I myself got married in August. Two of my brothers are married. My late father loved marrying so much he did it 4 times!But even as a marital fellow, I found Salam's obsession with marriage and breeding creepy as hell. The reason for it, however, soon becomes clear: Salam uses marriage, and particularly intermarriage, as one of many substitutes for a vigorous state.

Reihan Salam's vision is of America's weaknesses and limitations

The key to understanding Salam's vision of the United States, I realized, is that buried somewhere deep inside the United States, perhaps somewhere under Kansas or Nebraska, is a powerful enchanted object that grants the United States certain powers:

• the United States, alone amongst the nations of the world, can integrate immigrants into its multiethnic, participatory democracy.
• the United States, also uniquely, has the power to improve the economic well-being of its residents by training them to take its good-paying, middle-class jobs.

Unfortunately, while the "opportunity crystal" (as I've dubbed it) is powerful indeed, its powers are limited, and thus those responsible for this magical object must carefully allocate that limited power between these two admittedly worthy goals.As Salam writes: "I find it useful to distinguish between amalgamation, in which intermarriage and other forms of cultural intermingling cause the ethnic boundaries separating different groups of Americans to blur to the point of insignificance, and racialization, in which a minority group finds itself ghettoized in segregated social networks [emphasis his]."Amalgamation is one of the enchanted gemstone's powers, but it must be carefully rationed in order to make sure the middle class is accessible to as many natives as possible, and if there are too many immigrants and not enough leftover power, we face the dire threat of racialization instead.But all this is false. The limits on the ability of the United States to assimilate immigrants come from the willingness of the United States to assimilate immigrants. The limits on the ability of the United States to afford decent pay and working conditions to the working class come from the unwillingness of the United States to guarantee decent pay and working conditions to the working class. There's no enchanted object whose power we need to carefully ration. It's just us.

Salam's immigrant hellscape is social democracy

What's wrong, you might ask, with a continent-straddling country that happens to have some pockets of people who are, by comparison with the rest of the population, relatively homogenous, relatively recent arrivals, and relatively low-skilled?Salam has an answer, and it goes back directly to the passage I quoted above about "racialization." You see, "racialized" immigrants, or those who "find themselves ghettoized in segregated social networks," might not like it very much. Specifically, the children of low-skilled immigrants (whether documented or undocumented), will use their influence as US citizens who can't be simply deported if they become inconvenient, to try to ameliorate some of the poor conditions they find themselves in.Which brings us to the core of the question: what don't low-skilled, low-income second-generation citizens like about the United States? Salam provides 3 basic answers:

• they don't like their wages, which are too low;
• they don't like their working conditions, which are too inhumane;
• and they don't like their living conditions, which are too primitive.

In other words, they're right. Wages in the United States are too low. Working conditions in the United States are too inhumane. Living conditions in the United States are too primitive. And it turns out the children of relatively recent immigrants aren't thrilled about it and might do something to change it!Salam is so concerned about this possibility that he wants to preemptively keep them out. I'm so thrilled about this possibility that I want to preemptively admit them.

If you aren't willing to pay taxes nothing is possible

Americans today have inherited an incredible array of institutions, from public universities to building inspectors, from public water and power utilities to post offices, from subways to regional rail. Most of them are still staggering along well enough, despite every attempt to bankrupt and dismantle them in the last 30 years. You can still get a drivers license replaced, you can still register to vote, you can even still get a building permit approved, eventually (here in DC we have a special bribes-only channel for approving building permits).But if the plan, from now until the heat death of the universe, is to reduce the government's financing stream by 20% every 8 years while dismantling all the institutions of accountability, then we're simply doomed. Without vigorous wage and hour enforcement, wage theft will continue regardless of the number of immigrants. Without fair scheduling and paid family leave laws, working conditions will deteriorate regardless of the number of immigrants. Without new construction and vigorous enforcement of tenants rights, living conditions will deteriorate regardless of the number of immigrants.Immigration, in this sense, is Reihan Salam's canard. He hates immigrants as much as everyone else in his party, he just hates them in a kinder, gentler way: it's not because they're foreign, it's because of the strain they'll put on the system. But the only reason the system is under strain at all is because of, you guessed it, Reihan Salam.

"Suicide of the West" is not a very good book

Last week I got into a discussion on Twitter with a long-time conservative reader who was upset about something he called "tribalism." We went back and forth for a while but I couldn't figure out what he was talking about, and then I remembered that I had recently heard the National Review "The Editors" podcast endorse a book by an NRO staffer named Jonah Goldberg called "Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy."I figured that rather than bug my reader on Twitter for answers he couldn't give me, I'd go right to the source. If anyone could explain tribalism to me, it would be the guy who wrote the book on it! I was wrong.

A book about big eternal ideas that's relentlessly, tiresomely focused on the present

Goldberg is a conservative ideologue, but his ideology is based entirely on the conservative grievances of late 2017. A few examples:

"Barack Obama said in his Farewell Address:"'Our Constitution is a remarkable, beautiful gift. But it's really just a piece of parchment. It has no power on its own. We, the people, give it power—with our participation, and the choices we make. Whether or not we stand up for our freedoms. Whether or not we respect and enforce the rule of law. America is no fragile thing. But the gains of our long journey to freedom are not assured.'"Many of my fellow conservatives were angered by this, and given Barack Obama's remarkable, yoga master-like flexibility in interpreting constitutional text, I can understand why" (p. 97).

Taken on its face this is a remarkable confession of motivated reasoning.

"The question almost surely was intended to be rhetorical in the same way the organizers of an essay competition at Oberlin asking 'Has diversity made us stronger?' would simply assume the contest was over who would most creatively—or loyally—answer 'Yes'" (p. 135).

How did the big scary liberal arts college in Ohio hurt you, Jonah?

"I've tried to avoid making explicitly partisan arguments, but attention must be paid to the insidious and incestuous relationship between the Democratic Party and government unions. It is no accident that the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents the IRS, gave about 96 percent of its political donations during the 2016 election cycle to Democratic candidates" (pp. 196-197).

This one is particularly incoherent because the book is a paean to the role of non-state organizations in giving life meaning. Then he just hangs a huge asterisk on his thesis that reads: "except unions."

Does the Constitution "work?"

There is a version of the history of American civilization that goes like this: the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights embody a set of universal ideals that the Founders fell far short of. However, those shortcomings have been addressed one-by-one by subsequent generations, which have used the universal promise of the founding ideals to correct injustice after injustice to better bring America in line with her values.This is a story with obvious appeal. It means the genocide of the native population of North America, slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, restriction of the franchise to men, Chinese exclusion, Japanese-American internment, segregation, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, redlining, police violence, the war on drugs, mass incarceration, stop-and-frisk, purges of the voter rolls, gerrymandering, are not features of our constitutional order, but violations of it or even attacks on it.And this is more or less the story Goldberg tells, although he would not put it in exactly these words: we have a Constitution of ideals, which each generation seeks to make more imminent in the lives of the people.There is a problem with this story, however, and that is the fact that at each turning point in this story, those fighting to fulfill the ideals of the Constitution have been confronted by those who insist the true meaning of the Constitution lies is the status quo or a reversion to an earlier, less just order.

Why The South Must Prevail

In 1957, William F. Buckley, a father of the modern conservative movement and the founder of National Review (Jonah Goldberg's employer), published a short column which is worth reading in full, headlined "Why The South Must Prevail." He wrote:

"The central question that emerges-and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that isanswered by merely consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal-is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes-the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race."

Jonah Goldberg is many vile things (an apologist for torture not least of them), but I don't know if he's a racist or not, and am not trying to imply that writing for a magazine founded by a racist that spouted racist vitriol for decades makes you a racist by association. That inference is left to the reader.What I am saying is that it has always been the business of conservatives to insist that whatever progress has just been achieved in fulfilling the ideals of the Constitution is the last work that needed to be done, and all further work should be abandoned.It has become unfashionable to remember that George W. Bush ran for reelection in 2004 on a campaign of amending the Constitution to ban marriages, nationwide, between people of the same gender. Today, with the right to marry the person of your choice upheld by the Supreme Court, the very same people insist that the work of equality is done. "This far and no further" is always the order of the day.

The coincidence theory of conservative politics

All this feeds into what I call the "coincidence theory" of conservative politics, which takes two main forms:

• The coincidence of timing says that whatever era a conservative is born into happens to have finally settled once and for all every important issue, or might have gone a bit too far.
• The coincidence of reason says that when you apply logic and reason to a problem, you happen to arrive at exactly the conservative's preferred policy.

I discussed the coincidence of timing above, but Goldberg also illustrates the coincidence of reason in his attack on the minimum wage:

"At least in the medieval guilds it was understood that giving an inexperienced worker an apprenticeship—i.e., a shot at learning a trade—was something of great value. The wage, if there even was one, was trivial compared to the opportunity to learn how to be a blacksmith, mason, or tanner. That was the path to prosperity. First jobs, particularly for unskilled non-college-educated young workers, play the same role. If you work hard and learn the business at, say, McDonald's, you will likely be promoted to assistant manager before the year is out. That is invaluable experience. Raising the minimum wage above what employers can bear or to the level where hiring an iPad makes more sense is immoral, because it is tantamount to taxing entry-level jobs. If there is anything more settled in economics than the proposition that taxing an activity reduces that activity, I don't know what it is. To say that the minimum wage should be a 'living wage' is to tell employers they must pay inexperienced workers above their value, and that is unsustainable" (p. 204).

It's irrelevant to me whether you agree with Goldberg that it's "immoral" to raise the minimum wage, or if you agree with me that if we are to require people work to survive, we must pay them enough to survive.What's obvious is that our policy beliefs are upstream of our political beliefs. You can see by Goldberg's story about the minimum wage that he did not start with a set of beliefs about the medieval guild system and then deduce his view on the minimum wage from that; he started with a belief about the minimum wage and then worked backwards from that to a just-so story about medieval guilds.The coincidence of reason is not unique to conservatives, but in my experience they are uniquely incapable of acknowledging it. Leftists who want to raise the minimum wage do not pretend to start with an elaborate just-so story about "returns to capital being above their historical norm and government intervention being necessary to recalibrate the economy-wide return to capital and labor." They start with a story about the need to raise the minimum wage, and then explain how capital can afford to pay for it because of the enormous profits capital is currently earning.Everyone is entitled to marshal the most convincing available arguments for their preferred policy views. But if you find someone who believes those arguments caused their policy views, or that their policy views are the inevitable or necessary consequence of some external feature of the world, you are dealing with someone who does not, or is pretending not to, understand how political beliefs are actually formed.

Unfortunately, I didn't learn anything about "tribalism"

I was excited, 200 pages into "Suicide of the West," to arrive at Chapter 10, "Tribalism Today: Nationalism, Populism, and Identity Politics." Finally, I thought, I'd get some answers about what this "tribalism" business is all about and what's so horrible about it.I did not, but to explain why not, it's worth quoting the core of Goldberg's thesis, as near as I can identify it:

"We still believe that the government shouldn't exclude some groups based upon arbitrary prejudices. But the rest of the melting-pot formula is breaking down in three ways. First, we are now taught that the government should give special preferences to some groups. Second, as a cultural imperative, we are increasingly told that we should judge people based upon the group they belong to. Assimilation is now considered a dirty word. And last, we are taught that there is no escaping from our group identity" (p. 211).

I think Goldberg's formulation is useful because a slight reformulation puts it in direct contrast with the actual beliefs of progressives in America today:

1. First, the government gives special preferences to some groups. Redlining, for example, is a practice that prevented the residents of predominantly black neighborhoods from receiving federally backed mortgages and accumulating housing wealth. FHA loans were a special preference given to the white residents of white neighborhoods.
2. Second, people are judged based on the group they belong or are perceived to belong to. Race science, as practiced by Charles Murray and his acolytes, who are quoted extensively throughout "Suicide of the West," is a systematic, comprehensive, negative judgment on the value of African-American culture and civilization, and elevation of white European culture and civilization. 
3. Last, we are not allowed to escape from our group identity. State violence against ethnic minorities, whether Japanese-Americans, Hispanic residents of Maricopa County, or black Montgomery bus riders, was based on an inescapable identity assigned by the organs of state power.

We are not taught these things. These things are true, and we have the choice whether to learn them or not. If we choose to learn them, we have the choice whether to act on them or not.And when we do learn them, and when we do act on them, we can count on facing opposition from the Jonah Goldbergs of the world at every turn.

Ben Sasse is running for President and wants you to buy his book

Ben Sasse, the junior Republican Senator from Nebraska, has begun his campaign for what we used to call the highest office in the land, and he has begun it with a lie. The lie is found in the opening paragraphs of his recently published book, "The Vanishing American Adult, Our Coming-of-Age Crisis — and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance," and for your benefit I will reproduce the lie in its entirety:

Early in my tenure at Midland University, a group of students in the athletic department was tasked with setting up a twenty-foot Christmas tree in the lobby of our basketball arena. These were hearty and healthy kids, 18- and 19-year-olds. They got the tree up, took out some decorations, dressed the tree, and began to leave, concluding that the job was done. That was when one of the university's vice presidents happened by and noticed something odd. The Christmas tree was decorated only on the bottom seven or eight feet, on the branches the kids could easily reach.Why, she asked, was the work only half done?The head of a sorority replied, "We couldn't figure out how to get the ornaments on the top.""Was there not a ladder in the gym?" the vice president queried. "Was maintenance unwilling to bring one?"She was met with shrugs. No one had bothered to look or thought to ask.This day's failure wasn't at all about lacking brains; it was about will. It was about ownership. It was about not having much experience or interest in seeing tasks through to completion.

Every word in this story is a lie:

• what is "a group of students in the athletic department?" Were they just walking by the basketball arena when they were impressed with the duty of Christmas tree decoration?
• Midland University does offer a major in Athletic Training; is part of the coursework of Athletic Training majors to decorate Christmas trees unsupervised?
• Midland University, like all such institutions, does have a lot of vice presidents. So this story could have been referring to the "Vice President for Finance and Administration," the "Vice President for Admissions and Enrollment," the "Vice President of Development," the "Vice President for Academic Affairs," the "Vice President for Student Affairs," or the "Vice President for Human Resources." But not only does it not specify which vice president "happened by," it also doesn't explain what on earth the vice president was doing in the lobby of the basketball arena, or what her interest was in this supposed Christmas tree! I should note here that there is some evidence that a Christmas tree has been decorated on Midland's campus at least once.

Everything about this foundational lie goes to the core of Ben Sasse's ideological project. How did students become tasked with decorating a twenty-foot Christmas tree? Were they employees? Where was their supervisor? Who would be responsible if one of these hale and hearty young people fell from a twenty-foot ladder and was killed or disabled?This lie is not the only problem, or the most important problem, with Ben Sasse's book, but it's important to keep in mind as the central conceit of it colors the rest of the text.

An abbreviated list of problems Ben Sasse has with kids these days

• They talk differently;
• They watch YouTube;
• They use social media;
• They rewatch The Office;
• They lack agency, initiative, and liveliness;
• They do not seem to enjoy having conversations with their parents;
• They seem tired, listless, and enervated;
• They have trouble sleeping when it is hot.

I am making fun of Ben Sasse, and will make fun of Ben Sasse a lot more before this review is over, but what I'm not doing is exaggerating. To understand what Ben Sasse is wrong about, you have to understand what Ben Sasse thinks is wrong, and the above is a list of the symptoms Ben Sasse has identified of the disease he believes today's youth are suffering from.

To understand Ben Sasse you have to understand lifecycle effects

In perhaps the only moment of self-awareness in his entire 273-page book, Sasse writes on page 8, "How do we know the situation with our kids has really gotten worse; don't all parents always worry about their teens?"The answer, of course, is yes. I use the term "lifecyle effects" to refer to the ways in which predictable changes in the perspective of the observer over a lifetime influence his or her opinion about the conditions being observed.To give a simple example, I find that temperatures in the summer are much less comfortable for me in my early 30's than they were in my early teens. Someone ignorant of lifecycle effects would conclude that summers are hotter than they used to be, while someone who is conscious of lifecycle effects would wonder whether people in their 30's are consistently less comfortable with summer heat than people in their teens. You should always rule out lifecycle effects before trying to find an explanation for something you think has changed since you were younger.Sasse does not. Instead, his criticism of America's youth is based entirely on his memories of how his own adolescence differed from the adolescence of today. Correcting this error is not as easy as it seems. Consider, for example, if Sasse's father were alive today. You might think he could turn to his father and ask, "dad, I know due to my biases I can't render a useful judgment, but you saw me grow up and you're seeing my daughters grow up, so you can be objective: are kids today less self-reliant than I was when I was a kid?"Now that you know about lifecycle effects, you know this can't work. 45-year-old Ben would be asking 75-year-old Grandpa what 75-year-old Grandpa thought about 14-year-old Granddaughter Sasse compared to 45-year-old Ben. Since Ben has made a Senator of himself, nothing would be more natural than for Grandpa to judge that Ben had an ideal upbringing. Since Ben's kids are homeschooled teenagers, Grandpa may have natural and inevitable concerns about their immaturity.But lifecycle effects don't end when you turn 45 — they continue until they end as all lifecycles do. No, to find out whether kids these days really are suffering in an unprecedented way from the maladies Ben Sasse has diagnosed, he would need to ask 45-year-old Grandpa Sasse what he thought about 14-year-old Ben. In other words, he would need to interrogate contemporaneous records to see whether the particular complaints 45-year-old Ben registers were made by other 45-year-olds about young people in previous times.If they were, then Sasse would be forced to reckon with the fact that the basic conceit of his book is wrong: adolescents today do not suffer in an unusual or unprecedented way from the maladies he diagnoses them with.

What do contemporaneous records show about adults' views of adolescents?

Here I have to confess: I love PSA's. Public Service Announcements and other educational films of earlier eras are not historical records of America's past (for one, they're in black and white). What they are is a perfect crystallization of what some adults — writers, directors, and producers — thought would appeal to other adults — parents — when it came to the education and upbringing of their children.Even more importantly, given the income and wealth disparities of race and class, such films are focused almost entirely on the precise population Ben Sasse is concerned with: the parents and children of white middle-class and upper-middle-class families.So, what do the PSA's of the past have to say about the concerns of parents of the past about the youth of the past?The 1954 educational film "Habit Patterns" is a personal favorite of mine. The first time I saw it I was fairly sure it was about a girl unexpectedly beginning a menstrual cycle, but it's actually quite a bit more interesting than that. In it, the villainess Barbara (unlike Ben Sasse's daughter Helen across the street):

• sleeps in past her alarm clock;
• makes her mother shout up the staircase to get her out of bed;
• tells little lies;
• has no plan for her day at all;
• puts off mending the collar on her dresses;
• decides to cover the spots on her sweater with a scarf;
• wasn't ready in time for her father to take her to school, disappointing him;
• didn't have time to be picky about her food or think about her diet;
• didn't have time for milk, to say "good morning," or for manners;
• made a pretty picture with her rumpled skirt, her spotted sweater and her hair in a tizzy;
• was late for school.

These are not cherry-picked examples. I have transcribed the precise crimes alleged against young Barbara in 1954. They don't just have a striking resemblance to the inadequacies and disappointments alleged by Ben Sasse, they are identical, all the way down to listlessness and enervation.

The rest of the book

Ben Sasse is running for President of the United States, and "The Vanishing American Adult" has a kind of genius about it: targeted at the voting-age parents of children under the age of 18 in order to make them feel as sympathetic as possible to Ben Sasse's view of their children's inadequacy. The children, naturally, don't get a say in it.To achieve the goal of being elected President, Ben Sasse's actual prescriptions by necessity can't be too specific, and so the rest of the book is filled with predictable banalities. Children should work, read, save, travel, and spend time with their elders. Also, they should love America.This is Benjamin Spock with an American flag waving over it (there is, happily, an American flag on the book's cover). You can, technically, take parenting advice from it, if you're the kind of person who wants to lecture their toddler about the importance of resilience.This is a bad book, and Ben Sasse is a bad man, but no review of it and him would be complete without a final quote of the most Bensassian passage in the entire text, in which he describes finding the perfect ranch for his daughter to learn the essentials of ranching:

We thought it would be a special formative experience for Corrie to spend time working on a ranch. The rancher would get some free labor and out daughter would build some character by an unrelenting encounter with daily necessity. Our poopotologist [ed: don't ask] helped us find a rancher who was willing to take on a teenage girl for a month. For obvious reasons we didn't want her to go to some remote cattle operation with a bunch of 20- and 21-year-old men working as hired hands. We were hoping for a family environment. We found just the place: a family-owned-and-operated ranch, where an earthy old rancher and his wife and three grown children and a new grandbaby lived and worked.

To call this pandering would be to give a bad name to the great panderers of history. If Ben Sasse thinks his political fortunes lie in the pool of late-middle-aged men who are concerned about their daughters spending time with virile, unmarried men, he has every right to hunt down their votes everywhere he can find them.But the rest of us have the luxury of shaking our heads in disbelief at this pitiful shell of a man.