Summaries of New Research
Edited By Eli Lehrer
POLITICS
Peaceniks Profiled
James Q.Wilson and Karlyn Bowman, “Defining the ‘Peace Party,’” The Public Interest, Fall 2003 (thepublicinterest.com)
Before U.S. troops even entered Iraq, about 80 percent of Americans either supported or lacked a strong opinion about the Bush administration’s efforts to end Saddam Hussein’s regime. The remaining fifth of the population constituted what James Q.Wilson and TAE Opinion Pulse editor Karlyn Bowman call “the peace party”: the strongly anti-war faction in the United States.
The two find that “the peace party cannot be explained by age, income, or education.” Instead, it consists of a variety of diverse groups who oppose the war for varying reasons. The major ones are:
• Core Democratic voters: An increasingly strident Democratic Party base dislikes nearly anything associated with Republican policies, wars included.
• African Americans: While blacks have typically supported American military actions in the past (about 60 percent supported the first Gulf War), over 70 percent oppose American engagement in Iraq. While no single reason stands out, Wilson and Bowman attribute this trend to dislike of the President among blacks, anti-war speeches by black leaders, and an overall move to the left on foreign policy issues among African-American voters.
• People with graduate degrees: While education had little effect on propensity to support the war effort in general, people with graduate degrees were overwhelmingly likely to oppose the war.
The “peace party,” the two contend, will have significant influence on the Democratic Party’s Presidential nominating process and senatorial campaigns. Candidates hoping to win the Party’s nomination will need to criticize the war. But if they hope to win the election, they will also have to, at the very least, show support for America’s troops. The anti-war stance may prove unpopular, however, because politicians will have to explain “why they voted against a war that quickly and with remarkably few deaths displaced a monstrous dictator, ended the terror of the Iraqi people, and diminished the support to terrorist organizations.”
Neo Whats?
Irving Kristol, “The Neoconservative Persuasion,” AEI on the Issues, AEI, September 2003 (aei.org)
In recent months, media commentators and politicians alike have talked about neoconservatism at great length while only rarely bothering to define the term. AEI senior fellow Irving Kristol, the “godfather” of neoconservatism, makes an effort to define it as a “political persuasion” that manifests itself time but is recognized only in retrospect.
According to him, neoconservatism seeks to “convert the Republican and American conservatism in against their respective wills, into kind of conservative politics suitable governing a modern society.” Neoconservatives, Kristol says, be “hopeful, not lugubrious,” and Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan to Barry Goldwater, Herbert Hoover, and Dwight Eisenhower.
Fiscally, neoconservatives are not averse, and favor cutting taxes even it leads to deficits. They “have no for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government.” While at home modernity, neoconservatives—even secular among them — want to work religious traditionalists to uphold decency and democratic culture.
On foreign policy, neoconservatives, Kristol says, support a muscular the state and America in particular. see the national interest in broad and want to defend democracy everywhere, encourage patriotism, while
clearly defining (and working to America’s enemies. Neoconservatives, however, do not favor world government “since it can lead to world tyranny.”
Kristol believes that these ideas made “political conservatism more acceptable to a majority of American voters” and resulted “in popular Republican Presidencies.”
SOCIETY
Crooks Get Harder
Timothy Hughes and Doris James Wilson, “Reentry Trends in the United States,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, August 20, 2003 (ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs)
The United States imprisons a greater percentage of its population than any other large Western nation, and enjoys lower crime rates at least partly as a result. At least 95 percent of those now in prison will eventually return to society. It therefore behooves society to worry about what happens to them.
Hughes and Wilson, both statisticians for the Bureau of Justice Statistics, have compiled the first comprehensive evaluation of prisoner reentry. The two find that between 1983 and 1994 (the period which coincides with America’s most intense prison capacity buildup) the percentage of individuals rearrested within three years of release rose in every category of crime the government measures.
The numbers of those mandatorily paroled as a result of “good behavior” just about doubled. The percentage serving out their sentences and simply walking away without any supervision increased from less than 15 percent to nearly 20 percent. Amongst those released on parole, about 41 percent successfully completed their terms, a number that has remained unchanged since 1990.
NATIONAL SECURITY
Progress on Missile Defense
Michael Sirak,“U.S. Pushes Ahead with Homeland Missile Shield,” Janes Defense Weekly, August 27, 2003 (jdw.janes.com)
The United States military is well on its way to developing a system to protect the homeland from ballistic missile strikes. President Bush wants an operational system by September 30, 2004, and provided no major problems interrupt construction, the military should meet that goal. During the summer of 2003, the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA):
• Conducted a successful flight test of a rocket designed to boost a kill vehicle into space where it can destroy a ballistic missile by direct impact.
• Picked a location for a new sea-based radar system to distinguish warheads from decoys and debris.
• Built a 25,000-mile fiber optic network to link missile defense system command posts.
The initial system, dubbed “Block 2004,”will consist of six interceptors in silos based at Fort Greely in central Alaska when it first goes online. At least three destroyers and a variety of listening posts will also take part. By the end of 2004, at least one AEGIS class cruiser will be in service to intercept short- and medium-range missiles. By 2006, the MDA will upgrade other early warning radars in England and Greenland, add ten land-based interceptors and 12 destroyers, and deploy an airborne laser to track and possibly shoot down missiles. Provided that Congress and the President approve, another major upgrade would begin that year.
SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT
Clearing the Air
Steven Hayward ,“Making Sense of ‘New Source Review,’” AEI Environmental Policy Outlook, AEI, July 2003 (aei.org)
Since the Clean Air Act went into effect in the 1970s,America’s air has become significantly cleaner. A variety of technical changes to the way the act works, however, have the Bush administration’s critics in the environmental movement up in arms.
When the EPA first implemented the Clean Air Act, existing facilities, even very heavily polluting ones, did not have to meet the more stringent standards Congress imposed. New facilities that might pollute the air, however, had to undergo a stringent New Source Review intended to insure that they are clean enough. Under the Act’s language, heavy modifications to an existing facility can make it “new” and subject to stricter regulation. This state of affairs lead to some odd outcomes: Many companies became afraid of investing in new technology, and some even paid penalties for installing cleaner technology because the new technology wasn’t, under the act, clean enough.
Realizing the problems implicit in the act, the Clinton administration proposed a variety of changes in 1996 that the Bush administration also supports. Among other things, the Clintonites proposed making it easier for high-tech plants to cut through paperwork, using an improved method of projecting how much pollution a plant would actually produce, and giving plant managers more flexibility to reduce and increase certain kinds of emissions at the margins.
The Bushies also proposed creating clearer (although not necessarily less intrusive) rules to define when a repair or upgrade program actually made a plant “new.” The Bush administration has also proposed a “clear skies” initiative (an extension of programs implemented by the Clinton administration) that would give power plants tradeable credits to emit pollution and reduce the number of credits available each year. This system creates strong incentives to find the most cost-effective ways of reducing pollution.
These proposed changes, most of which aroused little commotion at first, have gotten the environmental lobby quite upset. The reason, says AEI fellow Steven Hayward, is not their intrinsic merit (or lack thereof) but rather the ways in which clearer regulations would limit the ability to manipulate public policy through litigation and lobbying. Environmental groups, he says, will fight tooth and nail against anything that “remove[s] their de facto seat at the regulators’ table and courthouse steps.”
False Climate Consensus
Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, “New Perspectives in Climate Science: What the EPA Isn’t Telling Us,” The Independent Institute, Independent Policy Report (independent.org)
A new report from the Independent Institute by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas raises significant questions over the environmental movement’s supposed consensus on global climate change.
Soon and Baliunas have recently stirred up controversy by reviewing what we know about the climate over the last thousand years from “proxy data” such as tree rings and ice core samples. These strongly suggest that there has been considerable natural variation in climate with two notable extremes—the “medieval warm period” when Greenland was settled, followed by the “little ice age” when the Thames River often froze over, enabling Londoners to hold “frost fairs.” The evidence also suggests that these were worldwide phenomena, not confined to Europe as some argue.
There is no doubt that surface temperature measurements have been increasing around the world, but it is possible that these readings are artifacts of greater urbanization. Greenhouse theory holds that the atmosphere should also be increasing in temperature. But data from satellite readings compiled by John Christy and colleagues at the University of Alabama at Huntsville indicate that atmospheric temperatures have remained steady. These readings are supported by readings from independent weather balloon tests all over the world. This is a major problem for the greenhouse theory, one the National Academy of Sciences was unable to explain the issue away.
–Iain Murray
OTHER COUNTRIES
Undemocratic Arabia
Alfred Stepan and Graeme Robertson, “An ‘Arab’More Than Muslim Electoral Gap,” The Journal ofDemocracy, Volume 14,Number 3 (journalofdemocracy.org)
As the war on terror has brought the United States into closer engagement with the affairs of the Middle East many Americans have come to examine the relationship between Islam and democratic governance. In reviewing the state of electoral politics in the world’s 47 Muslim nations between 1972 and 2000,Alfred Stepan, a Columbia University professor, and Graeme Robertson, one of his graduate students, find that Islam itself seems compatible with democracy but that the Arab world has utterly failed in its efforts to establish competitive politics.
While Stepan and Robertson acknowledge that elections alone do not constitute democracy, they are a necessary prerequisite. Electoral competitiveness, the two contend, exists when the people can vote in free and fair elections and the governments they elect have meaningful political power. Muslim countries like Bangladesh, Mali, and Albania are “electoral overachievers” that have managed significant periods of democratic rule even though similarly poor countries typically fail at democracy. Arab countries, on the other hand, are democratic failures. Only one, Lebanon, had even three years of democracy.(That was before its 1975-1990 civil war.) Even countries like Yemen and Egypt, which once seemed on the path to representative government, have become less democratic in recent years. Worst of all, rich countries like Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia remain politically repressed.
Stepan and Robertson conclude that Islam itself does not seem incompatible with democracy, but there does seem to be something about the Arab world that makes it difficult for nations there to establish democratic governments. They blame the political history of the Middle East: Most national boundaries are arbitrary lines created by European powers. People without a sense of nationhood are more easily controlled. A lack of intra-nation unity, heavy military spending, and a state of near-permanent war against Israel create a fertile ground for dictatorships.
Solving the problem and bringing about real democratization, Stepan and Robertson believe, will require an Arab-Israeli peace settlement coupled with “the force of internal pressures and initiatives” brought about by Arabs themselves.
