Monday, December 9, 2013

Andrew Jackson Lives! America’s Foreign-Policy Populism. By Robert Golan-Vilella.




Andrew Jackson Lives! America’s Foreign-Policy Populism. By Robert Golan-Vilella. The National Interest, December 5, 2013.

Golan-Vilella:

In his well-known book Special Providence, Walter Russell Mead laid out a typology that divided American foreign-policy thinking into four broad schools: the big-government, pro-business Hamiltonians; the Wilsonians, determined to spread U.S. values around the world; the Jeffersonians, concerned primarily with preserving America’s identity at home; and a group that he dubbed the Jacksonians. While the first three are readily identifiable—and well represented within the Washington elite (especially the the first two)—the Jacksonian school is at once the most difficult to describe and the most interesting. Mead calls it a “large populist school” that “believes that the most important goal of the U.S. government in foreign and domestic policy should be the physical security and the economic well-being of the American people.” Its adherents believe that America should not seek out foreign wars. But should it become involved in them, then “there is no substitute for victory,” in the words of Douglas MacArthur.
 
If you want to get a sense of how Jacksonian America sees international affairs, as good a place as any to start is the Pew Research Center’s latest version of its “America’s Place in the World” survey, released earlier this week. The quadrennial study polls both the general public and members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The full results of the 2013 survey show a strong current of Jacksonian thinking in the public across a wide range of foreign-policy issues.
 
The main headline that some observers have grabbed on to in the Pew poll is that the number of people who say both that the United States “does too much” in helping to solve world problems and that it plays “a less important role” as a world leader are at record highs. But it’s not quite that simple. The “less important role” that the U.S. public envisions its government playing abroad still involves doing quite a lot of things. 56 percent think “U.S. policies [should] try to keep it so America is the only military superpower,” and on average Americans want to preserve current levels of defense spending. Large majorities said that “taking measures to protect the U.S. from terrorist attacks” (83 percent) and “preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction” (73 percent) should be “top priorities” among U.S. long-range goals.
 
This is a public, in short, that cares deeply about maintaining an overwhelmingly powerful military and taking decisive action against what it sees as core threats to American security—both central tenets of Jacksonian thinking. What the public doesn’t see as top priorities are things like “helping improve living standards in developing nations” (23 percent), “promoting democracy in other countries” (18 percent), and “promoting and defending human rights in other countries” (33 percent).
 
In the Pew survey, the public breaks most decisively with CFR members on issues like economics, trade and immigration. The public is far more likely (82 percent) than CFR members (29 percent) to consider “protecting the jobs of American workers” to be a top priority. The same is true when it comes to “reducing illegal immigration” (48 percent versus 11 percent, respectively). These are deep and enduring divides that are reflected in how consistent these numbers have been over the past twenty years. This, too, tracks with Mead’s description of the Jacksonian school. As he wrote in Special Providence:
Jacksonian opinion is instinctively protectionist, seeking trade privileges for American goods abroad and hoping to withhold those privileges from foreign exports. . . . They see the preservation of American jobs, even at the cost of some unspecified degree of “economic efficiency,” as the natural and obvious task of the federal government’s trade policy.
Likewise, Mead says that Jacksonians “are also skeptical, on both cultural and economic grounds, of the benefits of immigration,” seeing it as “endangering the cohesion of the folk community and introducing new, low-wage competition for jobs.”
 
This doesn’t mean that the public is wholeheartedly opposed to immigration or trade. Indeed, one section of the Pew study found a significant level of enthusiasm for increased economic engagement with the rest of the world. What it does mean is that their views on these issues are often based principally on their concern for American jobs. One measure of this is that while the public believes that “more foreign companies setting up operations in the U.S.” would help rather than hurt the U.S. economy (by a 62 to 32 percent margin), they decisively oppose “more U.S. companies setting up operations overseas,” with 73 percent saying they thought it would hurt the economy. This is in direct contrast to the CFR members, 73 percent of whom think that more U.S. companies setting up operations overseas would benefit the economy.
 
All this suggests that the Jacksonian influence remains a powerful one in shaping Americans’ views of the world. Yet at the same time, it also helps to demonstrate the limitations of this influence. One might use the data above to try to argue that because there are these key issues on which public and elite opinion diverge, there would be potential political rewards for a party that better aligned itself with the Jacksonian sensibility. But it’s hard to imagine that either foreign policy in general or issues like trade in particular would rank high enough on the list of issues that concern the electorate for this to make much of a difference. More likely, candidates will continue to pander to Jacksonian America on the campaign trail and then ignore those promises once safely in office. As Daniel Drezner put it during the 2012 presidential campaign, “You campaign as a mercantilist; you govern as a free trader.”
 
In the end, one overriding fact is worth keeping in mind: Americans are perennially unhappy with the direction of world affairs. Nine times over the past twenty years, Pew has asked, “All in all, would you say that you are satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the world these days?” Every time, between 64 and 81 percent have said they were dissatisfied, with only 12 to 28 percent satisfied. This year was no exception, with only 16 percent satisfied and 78 percent dissatisfied. The reason for this is anyone’s guess. Maybe the U.S. public just has unrealistic expectations about the world. Or maybe it’s because international news coverage is dominated by crises and disasters, and not by long-term positive trends like declines in global poverty and violence. But there’s at least one other potential explanation: the persistent gap between the outlook of Jacksonian America and that of the (usually Hamiltonian or Wilsonian) representatives that generally make up the country’s foreign-policy establishment.


Your Cell Phone Might Be Making You More Anxious. By Alexandra Sifferlin.

Do You Use Your Cell Phone a Lot? It Might Be Making You More Anxious. By Alexandra Sifferlin. Time, December 6, 2013.

The relationship between cell phone use, academic performance, anxiety, and Satisfaction with Life in college students. By Andrew Lepp, Jacob E. Barkley, Aryn C. Karpinski. Computers in Human Behavior, Vol. 31 (February 2014).

Liberals Want to Stop Men From Checking Out Women. By Patrick Howley.



Liberals want to stop men from checking out women. By Patrick Howley. The Daily Caller, December 8, 2013.

Howley:

In the progressive future, men will not be able to look at women’s bodies because that is a terrible thing to do — and science says so.
 
Researchers have offered a definitive report into the science of the male “objectifying gaze” in the December 2013 volume of “Sex Roles: A Journal of Research” (Volume 69, Issue 11-12, pp 557-570).

“Although objectification theory suggests that women frequently experience the objectifying gaze with many adverse consequences, there is scant research examining the nature and causes of the objectifying gaze for perceivers. The main purpose of this work was to examine the objectifying gaze toward women via eye tracking technology,” according to the abstract of “My Eyes Are Up Here: The Nature of the Objectifying Gaze Toward Women” by Sarah J. Gervais, Arianne M. Holland, and Michael D. Dodd.
 
“Consistent with our main hypothesis, we found that participants focused on women’s chests and waists more and faces less when they were appearance-focused (vs. personality-focused). Moreover, we found that this effect was particularly pronounced for women with high (vs. average and low) ideal body shapes in line with hypotheses,” according to the report.
 
This is the kind of study MSNBC commentators can hold up when they’re talking about “rape culture.” Because men are just all Bashar al-Assad and sex is their chemical weapon. Fifty-one percent of the U.S. population is a victimized group now. Don’t you know? Women are like Indians now. You can’t give them a once-over, a polite grin, and be on your way. You can’t notice the fruits of their several-hour morning project of preparing themselves to be looked at. Pretty soon, looking at a woman’s chest will legally be a “hate” crime instead of a love crime.
 
It’s already started. There was the Massachusetts secretary who sued her boss for staring at her breasts. There was the social media uproar when two tech conference presenters in San Francisco made a joke presentation for an app based on men’s desire to stare at breasts.
 
This is what the progressives exist to do. They take away our activities. If it’s an activity and it’s kind of fun or pleasurable, the progressives are going to take it away.
 
That’s the very basis of their personality type. They’re the regulators. The hall monitors.
 
Maybe catching a side glance of some cleavage on the subway isn’t for you. Fine. But for those of us who enjoy that, it’s one more thing that we’re allowed to do in this country. I’m not big on skiing, but if I see somebody walking down the street with some skis I’m cool with that. Why ban things that you might want to try sometime?
 
I’m not saying looking at tits is any kind of noble pursuit. But it’s one more freedom. It’s one more thing that has been allowed in this country since the time of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. One more thing that we’re not going to be allowed to do in the progressive future.
 
And you know what else? A lot of women like it.
 
Ladies, how are you going to feel when the progressives prohibit men from paying you a compliment on your walk home from the bar? You know there’s always one friend of yours who waited all night for that.
 
And if you happen to be a woman who isn’t employed by the Democratic National Committee or the New York Times, maybe you’re really not all that offended by these sorts of things. Because you realize that when progressives ban things, they don’t just prohibit activities: they set a new rule that goes out through the culture that must be obeyed.
 
And the new rule affects everyone. From the guy who now has to cover his face so as not to look at a hot girl’s tits, to the girl whose tits can no longer be looked at, to the friend of the girl who could have laughed when it happened, to the bar owner standing outside who could have lured them both in for a drink, to the husband’s small business partner who knows the story of how they met and smirks about it over dinner, to the daughter at their 30th anniversary party who decided that she just wanted to be a full-time mom and raise her kids Christian and send them to private school and she was proud of her decisions in life.
 
This is why conservatives will own the future of this country, and progressive leadership will fall by the wayside. Americans in nursing homes don’t like their activities being taken away. But that nurse who comes in Tuesdays for hip rehabilitation? She’s just fine.



Libs Want Men to Stop Looking at Women. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, December 9, 2013.

My Eyes Are Up Here: The Nature of the Objectifying Gaze Toward Women. By Sarah J. Gervais, Arianne M. Holland, and Michael D. Dodd. Sex Roles, Vol. 69, No. 11/12 (December 2013).

Abstract:

Although objectification theory suggests that women frequently experience the objectifying gaze with many adverse consequences, there is scant research examining the nature and causes of the objectifying gaze for perceivers. The main purpose of this work was to examine the objectifying gaze toward women via eye tracking technology. A secondary purpose was to examine the impact of body shape on this objectifying gaze. To elicit the gaze, we asked participants (29 women, 36 men from a large Midwestern University in the U.S.), to focus on the appearance (vs. personality) of women and presented women with body shapes that fit cultural ideals of feminine attractiveness to varying degrees, including high ideal (i.e., hourglass-shaped women with large breasts and small waist-to-hip ratios), average ideal (with average breasts and average waist-to-hip ratios), and low ideal (i.e., with small breasts and large waist-to-hip ratios). Consistent with our main hypothesis, we found that participants focused on women’s chests and waists more and faces less when they were appearance-focused (vs. personality-focused). Moreover, we found that this effect was particularly pronounced for women with high (vs. average and low) ideal body shapes in line with hypotheses. Finally, compared to female participants, male participants showed an increased tendency to initially exhibit the objectifying gaze and they regarded women with high (vs. average and low) ideal body shapes more positively, regardless of whether they were appearance-focused or personality-focused. Implications for objectification and person perception theories are discussed.


The Pope’s Self-Defeating Anti-Capitalist Rant. By Shikha Dalmia.

The Pope’s Self-Defeating Anti-Capitalist Rant. By Shikha Dalmia. Reason, December 3, 2013.

What the Pope Gets Wrong About Capitalism. By David Harsanyi. Reason, December 6, 2013.

The Pope Should Know Capitalism Fights Poverty. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, December 9, 2013.

Papal Bull: Why Pope Francis Should Be Grateful For Capitalism. By Louis Woodhill. Forbes, December 4, 2013.

The Heretical Pope Francis vs. Rush Limbaugh. By Christian Caryl. Foreign Policy, December 7, 2013. Also here.

The Pope and the Right. By Ross Douthat, New York Times, November 30, 2013.

Pope Francis and the argument for compassionate capitalism. By Michael Gerson. Real Clear Politics, December 10, 2013. Also at the Washington Post.

Pope Francis “Evangelii Gaudium” Calls for Renewal of Roman Catholic Church, Attacks “Idolatry of Money.” By Naomi O’Leary. Reuters. The Huffington Post, November 26, 2013. Also here.

Evangelii Gaudium. By Pope Francis. Vatican.va, November 2013. PDF. No to an Economy of Exclusion (Paragraphs 52-60.)

In Defense of the Crass Consumerism of Walmart—and Everyone Else. By Liel Leibovitz.

In Defense of the Crass Consumerism of Walmart—and Everyone Else. By Liel Leibovitz. Tablet, December 6, 2013.

Enough already with blasting shopping as soulless: Jewish tradition is nothing if not a defense of commerce.

How Adam Lanza Wrecked Obama’s Second Term. By Alex Seitz-Wald.

How Adam Lanza Wrecked Obama’s Second Term. By Alex Seitz-Wald. National Journal, December 9, 2013.

U.S. Strategy in the Middle East (Unclassified). By Martin Kramer.

U.S. strategy in the Middle East (unclassified). By Martin Kramer. Sandbox, December 9, 2013.