The evidence of Shahzad’s mediocrity begins with a Spring 1998 transcript which, quoting the New York Times, “showed that he earned D’s in English composition and microeconomics, B’s in Introduction to Accounting and Introduction to Humanities, and a C in statistics.”  Peretz comments:

Let us give Shahzad the benefit of the doubt: He was a certified mediocrity. Nothing better. Why does America desire such certified mediocrities? … what conceivable national interest was served in giving such a dross of a young man a student visa?

I’m not sure what Peretz is suggesting; perhaps a GPA requirement for nationalization?  Not exactly — such an implied requirement would only apply to immigrants of certain races.

We do have anself-interested [sic] obligation to deal with Latin American would-be immigrants and sojourners, if for no other reason than that they are our neighbors, very close neighbors; and the prosperity of Mexico, the islands, and below Mexico to Central and South America is therefore our concern.

There are also countries (of which, by the way, Pakistan is one, like India and South Korea and others) from which talented men and women want to come to live and work in the United States. The emphasis should always be on talent, rigorously measured.

This pretty clearly, if accidentally, suggests that talented immigrants don’t come from Latin America.  So (a) all the talented people in Latin America want to stay put or (b) there are none to begin with.  Either way, Peretz creates a strange double standard: It’s okay for Mexican immigrants to be construction workers, but Indian immigrants better be doctors.  I don’t think that the proximity argument suffices because air travel makes even Pakistan only a day away.

Peretz finishes:

Frankly, we have enough of our own mediocrities not to go out of our way to welcome others. And we should especially scrutinize those from countries in which terror is now part of the national culture.

I don’t see how this is a useful prescription; should we scrutinize a Pakistani accountants with a couple of C’s more closely than a Pakistani engineer with straight A’s? Isn’t the latter more dangerous?

Underlying Peretz’ post are racism and intellectual snobbery rather than constructive ideas on the relation between immigration policy and terrorism.

Photo Credit: Flickr (pjern)

I suspect that this new twist will produce tax credits and incentives for nuclear power and “clean coal” even larger than the ones already agreed upon.  My reason: the ads in the last issue (April 29) of The New Republic.  One from an electric-company-funded climate-advocacy group, one from a nuclear advocacy group, one from a builder of nuclear power plants, and the back cover from the builder of a “clean coal” plant.  The coal and nuclear crowd’s lobbyists are putting the full-court press on the Democrats, while Kerry has already announced that the oil companies like his bill; it may be difficult for them to take that back.  With that in mind, I think that coal and nuclear will take much of the pork that was meant for offshore oil.  And I don’t think that Republicans will fight too hard for their supporters in the oil industry, just as they seemed to have given up the Wall Street fight.

Photo Credit: Flickr (wallyg)

Rahm Emanuel

New York Times Magazine, I know you’ve probably been working on this magnum opus on Rahm Emanuel for weeks, but I feel like this take from the New Republic was more than enough.

Oh, and this. And this. But, yes, I’m a sucker and read all of them anyway.

PS. And this.

Photo credit: spdpurtill’s flickr.

But it was just at this point that the new romanticism of business so cleverly came in. Human imagination had never before conceived anything so fantastic as the idea that every individual is actuated in all his desires by an insight into just what is good for him, and that he is equipped with the sure foresight which will enable him to calculate ahead and get just what he is after. Nor did the imaginative flight pause with this conclusion. All the work of the world, from the most ordinary to the most extraordinary, is presided over by this omnipresent deity of calculating reason, who through his uniform presence in each separate individual is summed up by integral calculus into a virtually omniscient mind. Through its beneficent and overruling power, self-interest becomes a social lubricant instead of a cause of friction, and the zeal of each one to get ahead of everybody else promotes the general welfare. If there are those who seem to be left out of its distribution, there is always the assurance that the ways of Providence are proverbially mysterious.

It is characteristic of romance, of the glamorous and imaginative projection of excited emotion, to remain outside the sphere of argument. One is either inside the romance or outside it. It is true and is the standard of truth, if you are inside; it is silly or insane, if you are outside. Thus, when one says that the present world crisis is merely the consequence of the general acceptance of the particular romance which has gone by the name of business, one speaks from the outside. It is commonly assumed that the explanation of the economic crisis must be itself economic. So it must—if one stays inside the business dream. Since it is part of the dream that cool, far-sighted intelligence controls the operation of the energies and instruments by which desires are satisfied, one within the dream must seek for a rational explanation. From outside the romance, that fact itself gives the key to the explanation; we cannot call gambling an exercise of cool and calm rationality without sooner or later tripping up.

It’s a great essay. Like most of Dewey’s work: highly recommended, and highly difficult to summarize — so I’ll stay a bit more general. Dewey says that the Great Depression was a refutation of the romance that is economics. I’d say that today we’re in a similar position. The Financial Crisis made a mockery of the core institutions, people, and ideas that constitute the field of modern economics. It exposed the field as unable to do arguably its most important job as a descriptive social science — predict social phenomena. And it proved it unable to perform arguably its most socially beneficial function as a policy tool — prevent massive economic calamities.

It’s clear that just as our national economies will be restructured in the wake of the Crisis, so too must the discipline of economics itself.

To use Dewey’s word, modern economics is a” romance. “More than most social theories, it relies on an idealized picture of the world, one rife with bias, normative assumptions and “spiritual” depictions.  More than just a set of tools, economics is, as New Yorker writer John Cassidy says, an “austere theory of human behavior.” To economics, people are like black boxes. They have no psychologies, no values, no histories, no cultures. They buy and sell in marketplaces; they never get free lunches; and they act with perfect rationality and relentless greed. Assuming these things, we can explain everything. It’s a fairly brutal idea — the outwardness, the cool rationality, the greed — but it’s also inspiring. Like Marxism, it promises to endow man with the tools to conquer his world. But it does that only by dissolving the thick and complex social bases that constitute that world; it aspires to elevate man only by reducing him.

I don’t want to get overly polemical here. (I’m sure I already have!) The fact is, I have a huge amount of respect for economics and the tools that it’s given us. We couldn’t live without those tools, of course. But the other fact is, economics is not sufficient. Not only do its prevailing theories fail to explain and predict our world, but the moral assumptions behind those theories often have the terrible effect of providing a glossy academic justification for a lot of what is gross in our world — voracious human greed, inequality, the institutional monopoly of elites, etc. I’ll state it in this way: by believing wholeheartedly in the romance that is “economic man,” we’d lose too much — too much experimentalism, too much creativity, and too much of the human daring and improbable striving that fail to fit in its models.

Added: Of course it’s true that not all economic theories rely on absurd human behavior models that tend to legitimate opportunism and greed. But most of them do. Behavioral economics is a great counter-example and success story, and its rise supports the fundamental point that the field is going to be changing substantially in order to deliver correctives to its models. As I say in the comments: that’s a good thing! Where economics will be ten, fifteen years from now we can only guess. But it will almost certainly be better. Economists and students that are using neuroscience and pyschology to correct the delusions of those models are indeed fighting the good fight, and they should be applauded.

Photo credit: Columbia Record

I think that this is definitely one of Obama’s major problems with this demographic, but I’d add that his yuppie-ness combines with a couple of other factors to create the problem. Specifically, I think his race does hurt him with some of the white working-class, and I think that the long-term GOP strategy of identifying Democrats (all Democrats) with elitism is also partly to blame. These three factors, namely Obama’s class and professional background, his race, and his actual political affiliations and positions, interact to cause him major problems with the white working-class. As Judis says, a great politician could transcend the first factor, and learn to speak to people whose immediate concerns he does not truly share. It’ll be harder, or impossible, for him to transcend the other two factors, and so I think we can anticipate that he’ll always have problems with the white working-class demographic.

I think the best evidence that Obama’s problems with the white working-class go deeper than his yuppie-dom is that not every yuppie politician suffers from the same problems. Scott Brown, for instance, certainly has the make of a yuppie, at least if Obama does: He grew up working-class in a broken home, but went on to Tufts and BC Law, became an attorney, and almost immediately started a political career. He even has the looks of a yuppie! But he comes off as a populist, as a common man, or at least so it would seem. What are the other variables here, besides yuppie-dom? First, race; and second, and more importantly, he’s a Republican and thus can take advantage of the symbolism of driving a pick-up truck in a way a Democrat couldn’t, because the Democrats haven’t spent three decades trying to get working-class people to believe that driving a pick-up truck is more important than fighting for working-class interests.

Photo credit: Flickr stream of ww3billard

The Death of Conservatism, by Sam Tanenhaus, Random House, 2009.  $17, 144 pp.

In 1962, legendary ABC News anchor Howard Smith ran an hour-long segment titled “The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon.” Smith proclaimed Nixon, who had just lost the race for Governor of California only two years after narrowly losing the 1960 Presidential election to John F. Kennedy, to be politically finished. Six years later Nixon would capture the White House.

American politics is lit with these stories of self-reinvention and political turnarounds, yet Sam Tanenhaus, in The Death of Conservatism, decrees a political obituary for the entire conservative movement. Tanenhaus, who has once called himself “a chastened liberal,” traces the conservative movement from its roots in Edmund Burke to its modern leaders like William Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan, and finally its death: the 2008 presidential election. Ultimately, Tanenhaus’s obituary comes much too soon, and proclaims an end to a movement that is very much alive.

Whither Conservatism?

The book follows from an essay Tanenhaus wrote in The New Republic in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s election, and it is the ascendancy of Barack Obama which overshadows the author’s argument. Obama’s victory, Tanenhaus argues, was not so much a positive referendum on liberal ideology as it was a negative referendum on eight years of the Bush administration. “During two terms of George W. Bush,” he writes, “conservative ideas were not merely tested but also pursued with dogmatic fixity.” Tanenhaus holds up the resounding failure of the Bush administration and its policies, as evidence of conservatism’s demise and rejects the role of a new liberal energy in that election.

Tanenhaus’s definition of conservatism is central to his concise book. Tanenhaus divides conservatism into two groups: ‘revanchist’ conservatives and realist conservatives. Revanchist conservatism is rooted in the politics of revenge and extremism, and the author argues that this wing of conservatism has overtaken the realist wing and suffocated true conservative principles.  The issue arising from this division of conservatism is that Tanenhaus lumps the Bush years among the revanchist aspect of the party. Yet Bush was seen in the conservative wing of the party as an ideological betrayer, especially on the growth of government and deficits and immigration.

Looking Ahead

“In each instance [of conservative losses], crushing defeat gave the movement new strength and pushed it further along the route to ultimate victory,” Tanenhaus writes. “Today it is impossible to make this case.” The future Tanenhaus sees for the conservative movement is a bleak one, in which the intellectual base of the party, found in “journals like Commentary, National Review, and The Weekly Standard,” slowly deteriorates until it becomes a “mouthpiece of the Republican Party at its most revanchist.” For Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review and the New York Times Week in Review, this claim is all too predictable, and his critiques of his conservative counterparts sound far more partisan than analytic, often relying on finger-pointing at conservative celebrities such as Rush Limbaugh.

“Today’s conservatives resemble the exhumed figures of Pompeii,” Tanenhaus writes, “trapped in postures of frozen flight, clenched in the rigor mortis of a defunct ideology.” This grandiose statement is typical of Tanenhaus’s literary flair -but today’s conservative landscape is no Pompeii. Although conservatism has paled next to the energized progressivism of Obama, it is far from the ghastly death Tanenhaus diagnoses.  A quick examination of conservative leaders today finds plenty of vital signs. Tim Pawlenty remains a popular conservative, while Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney are considered among the leaders of the Republican Party despite their heterodoxies on key ideological points like abortion. The conservative movement today is more steeped in realism and compromise than Tanenhaus acknowledges.

Tanenhaus is not entirely off-base. The uncompromising extremism of the Bush administration, rooted in men like Dick Cheney, John Bolton and John Ashcroft, and a hard-line neoconservative foreign policy, has certainly passed, and perhaps this is the obituary Tanenhaus meant to write. But the movement itself is still alive, and will continue to be for quite some time. Movements and leaders are never finished in America-they are just waiting to make a comeback.

Well, yes and no.  The important point is that while nuclear war is improbable, it has extremely high costs (not unlike a total meltdown of the US financial industry). The likelihood of global thermonuclear war is, yes, less than it used to be.  But one has to recognize that it is not and can never be zero.  All it would take is a glitch in decades-old Russian missile defense systems (or a psychotic hacker) to set one off.  God knows we’ve had enough close calls; just in 1995, we came within five minutes.  And those are only the incidents we’ve been told about. Every single day, there is a small but finite chance of the destruction of humanity.  And while I’m not good at math, I understand well enough what that means: given nuclear weapons and a sufficient amount of time, the probability of human self-destruction asymptotically approaches one.  And if the Big One ever goes down,  it takes little imagination to know what the survivors will say as they huddle in their bunkers: We should have seen this coming.

Since the Soviets invented the bomb and gave us the “balance of terror”, human civilization has been going through the motions with a loaded gun pressed its head.  It’s easy to dismiss the danger because it hasn’t happened, but when discussing the possibility we really ought to remember we wouldn’t be able to discuss it if it had.  Our good record so far makes it easy to overestimate our future security.  Not to mention that if no one had nukes, the relative power of the US military would be far great: nukes are a relatively cheap way to project power.  All in all, I find it hard to see why skipping along the precipice of human extinction is considered the “mainstream” of US foreign policy.

Historic challenges await America’s new leader

As Election Day unfolded, pundits, politicians, and ordinary citizens attempted to put into perspective the first election of an African-American to the nation’s highest office. Barack Obama was never shy about running as the “change” candidate, calling for “an end to politics as usual.” In examining the electoral map, it is tempting to conclude that Obama has already begun to deliver on his promise to forge a new brand of politics. He won nine states that George W. Bush had won in 2004, including Virginia, a state that no Democrat had won since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

But while Obama’s unique skills and compelling personal story created a very difficult challenge for his opponent, it was the state of the economy and Bush’s track record that conspired to make 2008 the Democrats’ election for the taking. Obama’s ability to tackle the immediate problems confronting the country will determine the extent to which his victory alters the political landscape.

It’s the Economy, Stupid

In many ways, the 2008 electoral map resembles that of Bill Clinton’s 1992 triumph over George H. W. Bush. The 370 electoral votes garnered by Clinton in 1992 to Bush’s 168 is a nearly identical split to Obama’s 365-162 victory. Just as the 1992 election cycle was dominated by growing anxiety over a slowing economy, today’s ongoing financial crisis renewed panic over the economy.

In an interview with the HPR, Thomas Patterson of the Harvard Kennedy School noted that “In times of economic trouble, we assign the president to be the safeguard of the economy.” But looming anxiety over failures to bring the country out of recession hurt voters’ confidence in Republicans. According to exit polls, only 20 percent of voters felt the nation is headed in the right direction, with seven percent happy with current economic conditions. Furthermore, 85 percent said they were worried about the state of the economy; more than half reported being “very worried.”

The election “can be seen as a reaction to the last eight years,” said Matthew Platt, a government professor at Harvard, in an interview with the HPR. Just as economic conditions in 1992 led voters to overwhelmingly reject George H. W. Bush at the polls, this year’s recession handed the White House to the Democrats. In a campaign season that highlighted Republican failures, Patterson said, the 2008 election was one that the Democrats “just weren’t going to lose,” whether or not Obama headlined the ticket.

Delivering on Change

Obama’s victory came as a result of both Republican failures and his message of change. On the heels of such an issue-focused election, however, if the new administration fails to deliver on reform, its mandate may be short-lived. Platt cites the economy, health care, foreign policy, and climate change as spillover election issues at the top of Obama’s docket and says that his mandate is riding on his promise to address them. No one really knows how deep the current economic downturn is; its effects could last until 2010, or possibly longer. “A difference between now and the 1930s,” Patterson noted, “is that the electorate’s patience is shorter.” In two years, if the economy does not recover, a Republican resurgence similar to that of 1994 is likely.

Anyone predicting that the outcome of the 2008 election marks a new era for Washington may therefore be jumping the gun. Though 2008 proved to be a satisfying year for Democrats, one need only look back six years to the 2002 midterm elections to witness the Republicans’ most recent heyday, as they won majorities in Congress to complement their control of the White House. That could have marked the start of a new Republican era in America, but that possibility soon disappeared as a mounting death toll in Iraq, a growing national debt, and a series of Republican scandals rocked the Bush administration.

This January offers the promise of a similar fresh start for Democrats, but Barack Obama has a narrow window to deliver on his sweeping promises of reform. There is no guarantee of another four years, or even another two, for his party to gradually phase in its wide-ranging agenda. For Democrats, prospects in future elections rest on the hope that they will deliver the promised change quickly in the approaching months. And for that, it is finally their candidate’s turn to take the lead.

An ambitious attempt to reshape the Republican promise

Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream
by Ross Douthat & Reihan Salam, Doubleday, 2008, $23.95, 256 pg.

It is no longer morning in America. Something has gone wrong with the conservative vision, a vision now lost amongst the sands of Iraq, an economy in malaise, and a culture divided. As the frustrated Bush era ends and Democrats are enthroned in Washington, one question—“What must be done?”—has hung over the American right. Providing a provocative answer to that question are Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam in their new book, Grand New Party. Douthat and Salam, two young and rising conservative writers, call on Republicans to adopt a radically new agenda attuned to the working class. Proposals that fall outside the standard tax-cuts-and-culture-war “return to roots” rhetoric that often seizes the GOP in times of doubt deserve our deep attention.

An American Struggle

Grand New Party’s backbone is a unique account of American history; while the authors pay some service to the American tradition of limited government, the narrative is one of a nation unafraid to use government to address economic change, and of the failures and successes of politicians to exercise that judicious activism. The book begins by detailing the Progressive era reforms early in the last century, describing the rise of the welfare state as a natural reaction to the advance of industrial capitalism. Above all, the New Deal occupies a central place in the author’s attentions and prescriptions. We often view the New Deal as a seamless element in the long march of liberalism. But Douthat and Salam emphasize the socially conservative, “maternal” side of the New Deal; how Social Security, housing policy, unionization, and welfare all promoted the interests and mobility of working-class families, albeit in an unabashedly traditionalist and patriarchal sense.

In Douthat and Salam’s view, a resulting Golden Age of working-class stability and upward mobility lasted until the social and cultural maelstrom of the sixties. That decade, they argue, saw the beginnings of an assault on the working class via a wave of crime, family breakdown, the “hardening of meritocratic arteries,” and an increasingly polarized culture. At the same time, they write, the Democratic Party swung to the left, failing to make the sale to culturally conservative working-class voters. From that point forward, the old liberal consensus was finished, but not to Republican gain; Republicans were unable to articulate a conservative New Deal to tackle this breakdown of the working class. (The authors do make a claim to the Nixon and Reagan legacies, noting that neither actually governed as a small-government conservative.) All this while, globalization was taking its toll in what the authors clearly believe is the greatest economic challenge to the working class.

Problem and Solution

It is in the last decade that the crises of the working class and conservative difficulties have coalesced. George W. Bush’s presidency began in a way seemingly amenable to a Grand New Party agenda of family-focused institutions and policies. His “compassionate conservatism” appeared to mirror the prescriptions proposed here. But Iraq and political squabbles overtook the Bush presidency, and eight years later, illegitimacy has increased and marriage has weakened, knocking out the family support crucial for social mobility. In the author’s analysis, the upper class gets by in the global economy while immigration and the labor glut emaciate working class wages. In order for either party to win the allegiance of the working class, it must address the resulting economic inequality and anxiety. Neither party has done so.

What is the way out? The plan offered here for Republicans would be the most cohesive attempt at social transformation since the Great Society or the New Deal. The authors recommend changing the tax code to favor poorer taxpayers and families, especially traditional two-parent ones; subsidies for homemakers; investments in infrastructure to revitalize suburbia; a reinvention of government involvement in healthcare and education; wage subsidies and “green collar jobs” to encourage employment; a wave of new police officers; and a crackdown on illegal immigration. The policy recommendations reflect Grand New Party’s role as a conversation-starter rather than definitive manifesto, drawing mostly from approaches suggested by other policy thinkers. And there are a few gaping omissions from the potpourri; the drug war, for example, an effort as bipartisan as it has been disruptive, disproportionately targets the working class, especially the African-American and Hispanic segments the authors are eager to draw into the new Republican coalition. But serious reform on that issue goes unconsidered here.

Prospects for Renewal

This plan for an active, class-conscious conservatism is nothing if not bold. And it may well become the new orthodoxy, if only because the small-government bogeymen of Grand New Party, who would ignobly obstruct compassionate government, are practically impossible to find these days. Nearly all the rising star governors of the Republican Party demonstrate the reformist tendencies that are in sync with the authors’ plans, whether those governors are managerial centrists such as Mitch Daniels and Mitt Romney, populists such as Mike Huckabee, or technocratic reformers such as Bobby Jindal. If these strands of conservatism do not take over the GOP, it will not be because of the ghost of Goldwater; the sheer inertia of formulaic conservatism may be its biggest foe. There is also the possibility that these managerial schemes will fall victim to the same interest-group politics, bloat, and miscalculation seen in the Bush experiment in compassionate conservatism.

An equally possible future for this new flavor of politics, in fact, is one that is outside the conservative movement altogether. The proposals here are bound to be popular with the working classes and, partially due to their hostility to free trade, the proposals already lean Democratic. Given the new president’s penchant for preaching the virtues of parenting and his hobbyhorses of green collar jobs and economic reform, it is possible that Democrats could seize most of this new conservative thunder. After all, very little here is poison to the left; “God, guns, and gays” social conservatism is explained as legitimate part of working-class insecurity but is not an active requirement for the authors’ policies. Liberals willing to hide their cultural colors could very well ride this new reaction against the vicissitudes of capitalism and modernity.

We do not know how Grand New Party’s brave new welfare state may play out. There is no denying that there is a political harvest to be reaped, however, and as the working class continues to be buffeted by economic and social insecurity, whoever offers up a plausible set of solutions will be rewarded. Grand New Party offers a cogent case for Republicans to change course and take that road back to power. It is now up to them to decide whether they want to offer this next New Deal to the working class.

During the summer of 2006, Chief Justice John Roberts spoke publicly about the need for greater unity on the nation’s highest court. In a commencement address at Georgetown Law School, he urged that “unanimity, or near-unanimity” would yield “clarity and guidance” for lawyers and lower courts trying to understand the Supreme Court’s rulings. Yet despite Roberts’ ambition, the greatest impact of the Bush appointments appears to have come less as a result of the new Chief Justice than of the rightward shift that occurred after Justice Samuel Alito replaced the more centrist Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Although Roberts appears to have had some success promoting unity and collegiality, the Court’s decisions in many cases are still characterized by longstanding ideological divisions. With O’Connor gone, the Court’s most contentious jurisprudence ismuch more likely toconverge around the moderate conservatism of the Court’s new center, Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Elusive Consensus

In Time this past summer, Jeffrey Rosen, law professor at George Washington University and legal affairs editor of The New Republic, described the Court’s most recent term as “a group hug” between liberal and conservative justices. While Roberts’ 2006-2007 term saw 33 percent of the decisions split five to four, that number dropped to 17 percent in the most recent term. By encouraging narrower opinions and persuading the Court to take fewer contentious cases, Rosen argued, Roberts improved the chances for consensus. But it is hard to overlook the divisiveness of the 2006-2007 term. Although the next term did see the percentage of splits cut almost in half, full unanimity fell significantly too.

The moderate level of success is not, however, due to a lack of effort. There is little Roberts can really do when the Court ruptures along old ideological fault lines, and when that happens, all eyes are on the median justice. Anthony Kennedy, Rosen told the HPR, has been perhaps the “biggest obstacle” to Roberts’ vision because he “prefers sweeping, broad decisions written by Justice Kennedy,” rather than the narrow ones Roberts hoped would promote broader agreement.

A New Center of Gravity

Since O’Connor’s departure, Kennedy has played the role of “swing justice” with relish. In the 2006-2007 term, he made the majority in a perfect 24 of 24 of cases decided by a five to four vote. Richard Fallon, professor at Harvard Law School, recalled in an interview with the HPR that many Court watchers begantalking about the “Kennedy Court” instead of the “Roberts Court” as a result.

One of those watchers was Benjamin Wittes, Research Director in Public Law at the Brookings Institution. “In a huge number of important cases,” Wittes told the HPR, “it really comes down to persuading Kennedy.” Rosen agreed, arguing that due to Kennedy’s sway the Court is more likely to “lean right,” especially on issues such as affirmative action, abortion, and campaign finance. Fallon likewise noted that the five to four decisions to uphold the federal partial-birth abortion ban in Gonzales v. Carhart and to strike down a handgun ban in D.C. v. Heller were “signals” that the center of gravity had shifted.

At the same time, the Court’s “red shift” has been less dramatic than many observers anticipated. Tom Goldstein, a partner at the law firm Akin Gump who has argued nearly 20 cases before the Court, told the HPR that the Court has been “fairly pragmatic rather than dogmatic or idealistic.” Kennedy’s tendency to buck the conservative bloc on issues ranging from executive power during wartime in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld to capital punishment for child rape in Kennedy v. Louisiana means that the overall jurisprudence is less alarming to liberal Court watchers and less polarizing to the public at large than it could have been.

If the Court’s basic ideological makeup remains intact over the next few years, Roberts will continue to have an incentive to promote unity. “His temperament, his pragmatism, and his persuasive powers will be tested,” Rosen noted. Over the long haul, Roberts’ pragmatic judicial temperament may allow him to put a more distinctive stamp on the Court’s jurisprudence. Wittes described Roberts’ role as more “setting a tone” of collegiality than exerting actual “leadership.” But even building that ethos of cooperation and “mutual respect,” Wittes cautioned, is “a ten-year project, not a one-year project.”