A wonky day on the blogosphere and I’m too tired for wonking, so ‘m afraid this is all I can leave you with today.

One of the more amazing aspects of the health-care debate is how steady public opinion has remained. Despite repeated and intense sales efforts by the president and his allies in Congress, most Americans consistently oppose the plan that has become the centerpiece of this legislative season.

In 15 consecutive Rasmussen Reports polls conducted over the past four months, the percentage of Americans that oppose the plan has stayed between 52% and 58%. The number in favor has held steady between 38% and 44%.

In response, Andrew Sullivan cites one poll (Yougov) which shows a majority favouring healthcare reform whilst ignoring almost every other single poll taken this year that shows more Americans opposed to healthcare than supportive. In fact, 38 polls taken into 2010 asking whether Americans approve or disapprove of the Democratic proposals for reform show them disapproving whilst only three polls show Americans approving.

And he then offers this chart from Pollster.com to prove Rasmussen wrong (he takes out Rasmussen polls to get this effect):

What it shows is that in the last four months, the range of people disapproving is 6%, exactly what Rasmussen shows and the range of those approving is 6%, again exactly as Rasmussen shows.

And then Sullivan critiques the Rasmussen poll itself:

And Pollster’s poll of polls, excluding Rasmussen’s outlier numbers, favoring the old, white and Republican, show a dramatic rise in support this past month, as the consequences of getting nothing at all begin to sink in:

Or voters as they are also known (it will be the white middle-aged and elderly who will make up the vast majority of the voters in November).

I could ignore polls to get an impression I wanted too, but then that would be dishonest wouldn’t it?

For example, here’s Obama’s approval measured by registered and likely voters (ie those that actually matter and can be arsed to vote):

7% more disapprove than approve of Obama. Here’s the same poll aggregation (both aggregations are for 2010 only) with all polls thrown in (ie polling all Americans, not just those prepared to vote):

It’s not difficult to create your own reality, the problem is, no-one else shares it.

There are many differences between the New Left and the Tea Partiers. One was on the left, the other is on the right. One was bohemian, the other is bourgeois. One was motivated by war, and the other is motivated by runaway federal spending. One went to Woodstock, the other is more likely to go to Wal-Mart.

But the similarities are more striking than the differences. To start with, the Tea Partiers have adopted the tactics of the New Left. They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor. This mimicry is no accident. Dick Armey, one of the spokesmen for the Tea Party movement, recently praised the methods of Saul Alinsky, the leading tactician of the New Left.

It was a somewhat disingenuous comparison. Alex Massie offered his two pennies also.

But I have just had the pleasure of reading this brilliant critique of Brooks’ article by Lee Harris at The American and he makes what should have already been an obvious point, that there is little merit in the elites critiquing a populist anti-elite movement.

First he dissects Brooks’ “Wal-Mart hippie” comparison. The New Left were not hippies:

But Brooks is not really comparing the Tea Party movement to the hippie movement of the ’60s. Instead, he is comparing it to the New Left of the same decade. In one respect he appears to have made an honest mistake. In his mind, the New Left and the hippie movement have strangely merged. Members of the New Left “went to Woodstock”—didn’t they? Actually, no, they didn’t. We should not confuse the carefree, frolicking hippie movement of that era with the mirthless and dour New Left of the same period. Hippies were whimsical spirits. The New Lefties were mirthless zealots. Hippies smoked pot and had fun. New Lefties read Lenin and plotted revolution. New Lefties regarded hippies as frivolous and fatuous. Hippies looked on New Lefties as the ultimate downers.

And comparisons between the Tea-Partiers and the New Left are invalid too:

Second, Brooks completely ignores the most striking feature of the New Left—the very quality that distinguished it from the Old Left. The Old Left, in good Marxist fashion, based its revolutionary hopes on the men and women who must work for a living, while the New Left went out of its way to culturally alienate working-class Americans by supporting the Black Panthers, attacking patriotism, insulting the police, and demeaning military service. Drawn largely from major universities, and often springing from privileged and affluent backgrounds, the adherents of the New Left were elitist to the core, assuring that the appeal of the New Left would be narrowly limited to only a tiny segment of the American population. But that is precisely the point at which Brooks’ comparison between the New Left and the Tea Party movement falls to pieces. The Tea Party movement has mass appeal; the New Left did not.

And Harris’ conclusion?

But too many of those currently involved in “analyzing” the Tea Party movement seem to have no genuine interest in grappling with its potential historical significance. They are content to ridicule and scoff at it. They are delighted to draw analogies between the Tea Partiers and various inconsequential fringe movements of the past, such as hippies or the New Left. But no approach could possibly be more counterproductive than a policy of conspicuous disdain. There is no surer way of convincing the Wal-Mart crowd that America really has fallen into the hands of arrogant elitists than to show contempt for working people like themselves. It is one thing to preach to the choir. It is another thing to spit at the congregation.

Harris is spot on. The elites are floundering in trying to understand what it is that the proles are complaining about and that only leaves them one avenue; to ridicule. And the more they fail to engage, the greater the fuel to fire up the populists further. It is the start of a new culture war that has the potential to resonate in future elections.

This is one of the best articles I’ve read in recent times, I strongly urge you to read it in full.

Fully one-quarter of the space on this year’s form is taken up with questions of race and ethnicity, which are clearly illegitimate and none of the government’s business (despite the New York Times’ assurances to the contrary on today’s editorial page). So until we succeed in building the needed wall of separation between race and state, I have a proposal. Question 9 on the census form asks “What is Person 1’s race?” (and so on, for other members of the household). My initial impulse was simply to misidentify my race so as to throw a monkey wrench into the statistics; I had fun doing this on the personal-information form my college required every semester, where I was a Puerto Rican Muslim one semester, and a Samoan Buddhist the next. But lying in this constitutionally mandated process is wrong. Really — don’t do it.

Instead, we should answer Question 9 by checking the last option — “Some other race” — and writing in “American.” It’s a truthful answer but at the same time is a way for ordinary citizens to express their rejection of unconstitutional racial classification schemes. In fact, “American” was the plurality ancestry selection for respondents to the 2000 census in four states and several hundred counties.

So remember: Question 9 — “Some other race” — “American”. Pass it on.

There are, in both countries, three political directions, a toxic right, a statist left, and a third way—the trickiest approach—which involves complicated role-playing, ideological legerdemain, and marketing acumen.

I’m not sure I really buy this analysis but it does have elements of truth. But how about a fourth way. A principled yet pragmatic, positive and hopeful right. A right that doesn’t see the value in underwriting the ruinous liberal behemoths of massive entitlement programs as Cameron does with the NHS, but also a right that recognises the anomic dangers of an anti-statist slash and burn program. A right that celebrates the positive benefits of “we” conservatism represented by our allegiances to family, faith and nation. A right that brings values to the head of debate, recognising that the modern erosion of values is ruining society. But also a right with a vision for a more positive future that celebrates the dynamic nature of society.

Conservatism is about inclusion, integrity, the recognition that a rights based culture is a construct, a belief in responsibility, both personal and shared, and a commitment to self-improvement. It recognises that hate is ugly, but that universal love is unrealistic and that we are as equally defined by our flaws as we our by our strengths.

I’m proud to consider myself a conservative, I’m just not necessarily proud of some of the current forms of the philosophy.

Islamic fundamentalism represents a tiny minority of Muslims in the UK, only 6% of UK muslims supported the July 2005  London underground bombings. That’s too high, but hardly a reflection of mainstream British Islam.

The 2001 UK census tells us that the percentage of muslims in the UK is 2.7%, less than three times the number of Hindhus.

Staistally, muslims just aren’t that important in the UK and so I ask again, why are the British right so interested in them?

Now to be honest, from time to time, Paul Krugman will write something interesting, but most of the time, he has just turned into a partisan hack trading on his economic nobel-ity.

And the evidence for his partisan hackery? Try this:

Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman takes note in his New York Times column of what he calls “the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties”:

Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally.

“What Democrats believe,” he says “is what textbook economics says”:

But that’s not how Republicans see it. Here’s what Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, had to say when defending Mr. Bunning’s position (although not joining his blockade): unemployment relief “doesn’t create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”

Krugman scoffs: “To me, that’s a bizarre point of view–but then, I don’t live in Mr. Kyl’s universe.”

What does textbook economics have to say about this question? Here is a passage from a textbook called “Macroeconomics”:

Public policy designed to help workers who lose their jobs can lead to structural unemployment as an unintended side effect. . . . In other countries, particularly in Europe, benefits are more generous and last longer. The drawback to this generosity is that it reduces a worker’s incentive to quickly find a new job. Generous unemployment benefits in some European countries are widely believed to be one of the main causes of “Eurosclerosis,” the persistent high unemployment that affects a number of European countries.

So it turns out that what Krugman calls Sen. Kyl’s “bizarre point of view” is, in fact, textbook economics. The authors of that textbook are Paul Krugman and Robin Wells. Miss Wells is also known as Mrs. Paul Krugman.

So when you are writing a partisan liberal blog, benefits do not lead to further unemployment because that would do damage to one of the key tenets of the liberal position; having people feel obligated to the government. But when you are educating younger minds in the realities of economics, then things are different. Maybe someone could provide a better definition of hack, but the description fits as far as I’m concerned.

By Israel