Some of my conservative friends often complain about the difficulty of constructing a "usable history" out of the movement's recent past, and I sympathize with their plight. When leading exemplars of your political tradition were trying to preserve segregation less than four decades ago, it's a bit hard to argue that your party, which is now electorally based in the American South, is really rooted in a cautious empiricism and an acute concern for the deadweight losses associated with taxation. That project would really benefit, however, if more of them would step forward and say that Helms marred the history of their movement and left decent people ashamed to call themselves conservative. The attempt to subsume his primary political legacy beneath a lot of pabulum about "limited government and individual liberty" (which did not apparently include the liberty of blacks to work amongst whites or mingle with other races) is embarrassing. But if it goes unchallenged, what are those of us outside the conservative movement to think?

From Alain de Botton's The Architecture of Happiness:

Endowed with a power as unreliable as it often is inexpressible, architecture will always compete poorly with utilitarian demands for humanity's resources. How hard it is to make a case for tearing down and rebuilding a serviceable but mean street. How awkward to have to defend, in the face of more tangible needs, the benefits of realigning a crooked lamppost or replacing an ill-matched window frame. Beautiful architecture has none of the unambiguous advantages of a vaccine or a bowl of rice. Its construction will hence never be raised to a dominant political priority, for even if the whole of the man-made world could, through relentless effort and sacrifice, be modeled to rival St. Mark's Square, even if we could spend the rest of our lives in the Villa Rotunda or the Glass House, we would still be often in a bad mood.

Riding the subway is fun? Yeah, if you like dirty, stinky foreigners who can’t speak English.

I’ll ride on a subway everyday when you spend your Sundays at NASCAR races.

The combination of capitalism and petroleum products has done more to lift people out of poverty than every liberal idiot and idiotic liberal idea in the history of mankind.

By the way, it’s fucking July 4th and it’s cold outside dickhead.

the majority of voters are voting as blind partisans. Of the rest, most are being driven by the macro factors (shitty economy, sick of Bush) or purely by issue salience (vote Republican when I care about national security, vote Democratic when I care about the economy) or other such things. And yet, few people like to say that kind of thing. And this is where the campaign comes in.

The main impact of campaign attacks, I think, is not to actually change anyone's mind but rather to familiarize everyone with the talking points of the side they agree with. In 2000, voters who valued "experience" turned out to favor Al Gore strongly. In the 2008 campaign, I think it's clear that voters who value "experience" will favor John McCain. That's not, however, because there's some coherent bloc of "experience" voters who shifted loyalties -- it's because "experience" was a Democratic talking point in 2000 and it's a Republican talking point in 2008 so people change which candidate attributes they value. In 2004, you could find a lot of Democrats who thought John Kerry military service proved important things about his fitness for office, whereas in 2008 Republicans are more likely to say that about John McCain.

These are the sort of margins that suggest anything could've been the culprit. A couple hundred votes in Florida, a couple thousand in Ohio, and Democrats win. The losses weren't the clear consequences of a great economy or a popular Republican leader or a particular confluence of circumstances. Indeed, given the backdrop of 9/11, the elections have actually been substantially closer than one might expect.

But losses require some sort of change, and so what's happened is that the call for change has also come on the margins: The substantive beliefs of a party are protected by the powerful, but style can be thrown under the bus. So things like a candidate's penchant for pedantry, or his "elitist" bearing, became the acceptable culprits. The ideas remained basically the same. By 2008, however, the policy environment had shifted dramatically, and the Democrats had been out of power for almost a decade, and so the base elected someone who represented a more substantial break with the past. If Obama racks up a big win, however, it will be largely because the underlying factors (shitty economy, Bush fatigue) moved the core electorate, not because stylistic factors (great speeches!) moved the marginal electorate.

On the other hand, things are getting better. In 1991, DC's homicide rate was 81 per 100,000 residents -- the highest in the country. In 2006, it was 29.1 per 100,000 residents, the lowest rate since the 80s. But it sure doesn't feel safe. Some days, you finish keeping watch on your hospitalized friend and decide to get a drink. Sitting at the bar, you see police lights reflected in the glass. The ice cream shop across the street was just hit by armed robbers. Of course it was. Happened a few years ago, too. You laugh with your friends about it being the unluckiest ice cream shop in town ("What? Did the candy story have too complicated a lock?"), and then start talking about the new frozen yogurt place that opened up in Dupont. About time we had one of those, you say. Crime has become a conversational bridge, like talk of the weather or traffic.

Commenters say my link to Spencer's PayPal doesn't work, and I've not been able to figure out how to make it work. If you want to donate to Brian's recovery, you can PayPal me at ezra.klein@gmail.com. If you want to send notes, or DVDs from Amazon, or anything of that nature, you can send to:

Ezra Klein
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If you're looking for ideas, here's my suggestion: Brian will probably be laid out on the couch for a bit, and the boy does love horror movies. About three nights out of five, I'll come downstairs in the morning and find that Brian fell asleep on the sofa watching reruns of The Hills Have Eyes, or some other movie about the Thing that came from the Place. So I'd go in that direction.

In the Douthat household, the prequels don't exist - not now, and certainly not in a future where I'm charged with introducing a new generation to the Skywalker universe. Indeed, I intend to carefully vet all of my children's friends to ensure that there's absolutely no risk of a playdate or sleepover bringing them in contact, even fleetingly, with Jar Jar Binks, Count Dooku, the midichlorians and Padme Amidala, Queen of frickin' Naboo.

Maybe. For now, the simplest reform, and the one that fits best with actual trends in funding, are the small-donor democracy ideas Mark Schmitt elaborated in Democracy a year or two back. The idea, basically, is that private funding isn't the problem. The problem is the tilt towards big donors, bundlers, corporate PACs. Since those groups can give $2,000 easily, politicians are more responsive to them than to small donors. You could solve that by putting a match or a multiplier on small donations. If you gave $250, say, it would be matched to $500. Or maybe $500 would become $1,500. In any case, small donors would become more economically competitive with large donors. Given the internet's remarkable success in enabling small donor fundraising and enlarging the pool of people willing to give, such strategies seem even more plausible now than they did two or three years ago.

This month, Radar has an interesting article on the contemporary inability of big budget movie star's to ensure box office success through sheer force of presence. The article quotes a lot of folks who seem puzzled by this phenomenon, but it seems fairly clear: Movie stars were effective for a reason. A decade ago, if you wanted to see a movie, and you didn't have the Sunday LA Times around, you just went to the movies and walked into whatever looked good. There wasn't much accessible information. One way for a film to signal quality was to feature a major movie star, because a big star meant lots of money, which meant that even if the production had problems, it would be slick and entertaining. So movie stars had a major effect; they signaled a sort of trustworthy professionalism on the part of the studio. Now, however, the net made it much easier to access direct information on the relative quality of film's, so not only do I have better information than casting, but it's become fairly clear that casting isn't much related to quality.

Moreover, review aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic have made that information much more authoritative. If one aging white guy didn't like Hancock, I'd probably just assume he wasn't into the concept. But since no one likes Hancock, I probably won't see the movie. They create consensus where there used to be only opinion. This may mean I miss some good movies -- Van Wilder, which I sort of love, got an 18 percent from Rotten Tomatoes -- but it also means I see fewer bad films. My sense is this is widely true, but I have no data on that.