According to Ethan Bronner in the New York Times, “Senior Israeli officials accused President Obama on Wednesday of failing to acknowledge what they called clear understandings with the Bush administration that allowed Israel to build West Bank settlement housing within certain guidelines while still publicly claiming to honor a settlement ‘freeze.'”

If the Bush Administration really endorsed such understandings, shame on them. Expanding the settlements at all violates the interests of the Palestinians, the United States, and, in my opinion, Israel. What’s more, the Administration’s actions would then be contrary to what it told the American people and the world. That would be both dishonest and undemocratic. The opposition (including Senator Barack Obama) could not even criticize the Bush policy if it was secret and contrary to what the Bush administration was claiming publicly.

As the first of his famous Fourteen Points, Woodrow Wilson called for “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.”

Probably, Wilson was too idealistic. I can concede that sometimes governments must strike private deals or understandings. But here is a super-modest, minimalist Wilsonian principle to guide the Obama Administration:

“When one US administration strikes a private deal contrary to its public posture, that deal has no moral or legal force for the administration that succeeds it.”

That’s me, hard at work yesterday morning at Project Vote Smart’s HQ in Montana. By later that day, I was in my old home town of Washington, DC, walking near Dupont Circle on a warm summer evening. By later this evening, I’ll be home in a Massachusetts suburb, in a detached house with a driveway, nestled among tens of thousands like it.

I’m still impressed by the speed and ease of travel, but what really strikes me is the vast diversity of this country. Yesterday, as we drove in a pickup truck through a small town in Montana that looked like a place where Gary Cooper could still walk bowlegged out of the saloon, my driver noted that New York State is better than you’d think. Upstate, he said, there are lots of regular people–dairy farmers and the like. I happen to be from Upstate, but from a dense city built on auto parts and salt rather than milk. We’ve got all kinds of “regular people,” and we’re all part of one vast, complicated, interdependent whole.

I’m two and a half hours southeast (I think) of Missoula, Montana, amid dramatic alpine mountains, getting ready for a meeting with the good folks at Project Vote Smart. This is where scores of college interns come every summer to crunch data about American politicians and enjoy the fishing, hiking, and the black bears, one of whom ran across the property earlier today.

Nicholas Kristof in today’s New York Times:

If you want to tell whether someone is conservative or liberal, what are a couple of completely nonpolitical questions that will give a good clue?

How’s this: Would you be willing to slap your father in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit?

And, second: Does it disgust you to touch the faucet in a public restroom?

Studies suggest that conservatives are more often distressed by actions that seem disrespectful of authority, such as slapping Dad. Liberals don’t worry as long as Dad has given permission.

Likewise, conservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust. People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance’s drink are more likely to identify as conservatives.

The upshot is that liberals and conservatives don’t just think differently, they also feel differently. This may even be a result, in part, of divergent neural responses.

These are depressing findings. We believe we are reasoning about Judge Sotomayor’s judicial opinions–or at least about the relevance of ethnicity and gender to a judicial appointment–when all that really matters is our visceral reaction to authority figures and sharing drinks. This research reminds me of the application of birth-order theory to politics. Supposedly, first-borns are conservative; younger siblings are more radical. That’s another example of a basically immutable trait that shouldn’t have any relevance to our political views, but that seems to affect them.

But such theories have two huge limitations. First, they do not explain historical change. Maybe the French revolutionaries of 1789 were more comfortable than their royalist opponents were with slapping their fathers in jest and sharing glasses. But there are always people with these traits. So we need an entirely different explanation for why the French Revolution happened in 1789 instead of 1750–or never. We also need a different kind of explanation for why the Revolution took the course that it did. Immutable traits won’t explain change, unless the distribution of those traits shifts, which would itself require an explanation.

Second, these theories don’t explain the content of our political views. Today, liberals tend to favor legal gay marriage, and conservatives tend to oppose it. Fifty years ago, liberals tended to favor racial intermarriage, the opponents of which tended to be conservatives. The psychology of this debate may have remained the same over the fifty years. That is, opponents of “miscegenation” in 1950 might have had the same attitudes toward sharing glasses of water that opponents of gay marriage do today. But it makes an enormous difference that interracial marriage is now a settled issue–as gay marriage will likely be in another 20 years.

I am open to the possibility that immutable and non-rational traits help determine who takes which side in political debates at any given time. But what the two sides believe and who wins the debate must be determined by other factors. We should hope that the strength of arguments is one of the factors that counts.

I’m speaking tonight at an annual meeting of the League of Women Voters in Winchester, MA. I have actually been a member of the League (which doesn’t discriminate by gender) since I was in my twenties. I was then working for Common Cause–frequently a coalition partner of the League–and writing a book about the Progressive Era. I love the fact that the League was launched by suffragists at the end of the Progressive Era, just when they were sure that the 19th Amendment would pass and women would be able to vote. Their immediate response was that women should vote well, which would take work. Note the combination of equality (votes for women as well as for men) and quality (voting after talking and learning). That remains the essential combination. I also appreciate the combination of governmental reform and grassroots civic action.

The Winchester chapter has asked me to talk about generational issues. The rising generation offers a lot of promise for American democracy and shares some traits with the generation that launched the League in 1920. (Idealism, enthusiasm for consensus and deliberation, and some leeriness about political parties.) It is a different question whether the new generation will choose to populate and sustain the League itself. I don’t have an answer to that, but I hope to discuss it.