(Miami, FL) In a genuine experiment, you somehow interact with a randomly selected group of people but leave everyone else in your sample alone. You assess everyone at the end of the experiment, assigning them scores based on a survey, test, or other instrument that measures what you care about. If the average score of the people whom you attempted to influence is higher than those in the control group, then what you did worked. There are some complications, but this is the essence of formal experimentation.

It has some big advantages …

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Today is a travel day. I’m in College Park, but I’m about to fly to Fort Lauderdale and then travel to Miami for a meeting on high school journalism. I’ll be carrying some of of the 97 letters-of-inquiry that CIRCLE has received in our current grants cycle. I don’t expect to be able to post until tomorrow.

One of the worst things about modern American politics is the use of inflammatory mailings to raise money. I used to worry about such tactics when I worked at Common Cause: our mailings, while not partisan, weren’t exactly fair and balanced. It pays to send a core constituency of like-minded people a message that will make some of them angry enough to write you a check. As a result, there are large, passionate, but completely separate political conversations going on in America.

It would help if we put communications from various ideological groups into the public domain so that what they said to their own constituencies could become part of a diverse public deliberation. Consider, then, the following “Dear Mr. Levine” letter that I recently received from good old Edwin Meese III, on behalf of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. He writes:

So much of what’s wrong in our country has its roots in the 60s revolt at our colleges and universities. I remember–I was there.

Let me tell you about my experience with the 60s radicals.

At my old law school, the University of California at Berkeley, an alliance of radical students, hippies, and street thugs got together with a view to destroying so much of what you and I value. They plunged a great institution into a crisis unprecedented in American higher education.

These people, calling themselves the Free Speech Movement, were actually interested in creating a mob scene. …

I told Governor Brown that if the radicals were allowed to stay there would be another mob scene, even bigger, the next day. I believed restoring order was important and necessary. The building was cleared and a potentially dangerous situation was defused.

And then I participated in prosecuting them.

There would be many ways to respond to this, but let me counter an anecdote with an anecdote. It is to Ed Meese’s “old law school” that John Yoo has returned after a stint in the Bush Administration. As David Cole writes, “Yoo’s most famous piece of advice was in an August 2002 memorandum stating that the president cannot constitutionally be barred from ordering torture in wartime–even though the United States has signed and ratified a treaty absolutely forbidding torture under all circumstances, and even though Congress has passed a law pursuant to that treaty, which without any exceptions prohibits torture.”

One can argue that Yoo’s memo provided any American torturers with a legal defense. Their behavior cannot be “patently illegal” (which is the standard for conviction under US military law) if a Berkeley law professor said that it was legal. Thus Yoo’s writing changed the actual legal situation regarding torture. Nevertheless, Yoo’s colleagues (some of those “60s radicals” whom Meese believes “are now entrenched in college faculties and administrations”) uphold his right to teach at their institution. Could it be that the Free Speech Movement was actually about–free speech?

There’s a “challenge to the blogosphere” that’s getting a lot of attention: bloggers have been asked to list the Ten Worst Americans of the last 230 years. I find that I am not good at this, partly because I simply don’t know as much American history as I should, and partly because I don’t pay attention to names and biographies as much as to big social trends and institutions. Thus, for example, I had no idea that Harry Ansliger was the “father” of the War on Drugs, although I recognize that policy as a major part of our past and present. So here is a list of Big Bad Things that Americans have done; each one could have a representative individual’s name attached:

1. The Atlantic slave trade and slavery itself

2. The slaughter of Native Americans and the seizure of their land

3. Jim Crow

4. Seccession and the bloody Civil War that followed

5. The Mexican-American War. (I’m very glad that the Southwest is part of the USA, but the conquest was surely immoral.)

6. Occasional waves of political repression, contrary to the Bill of Rights, such as the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), the Red Scare (1917-1920), the Nisei Interment (1942-5), and the McCarthy Era (1949-54)

7. Self-interested and harmful interventions in weak countries such as Chile, the Dominican Republic, and Angola

8. Massive underinvestment in public spaces and services

9. The flattening of vibrant urban neighborhoods and their replacement with dehumazing modernist designs. (Robert Moses should make the top-ten list.)

10. A coarse popular culture (“popular” around the globe) that glorifies violence

It would be terribly one-sided to list the bad without the good. To balance the above list, here’s a Positive Top Ten:

1. The Madisonian system of republican government with ordered liberty that has worked on a large scale for more than two centuries and proved that such a regime is possible

2. A democratic culture in which people are rough social equals, and status (especially inherited status) is relatively unimportant

3. Sustained prosperity born of freedom to innovate, optimism, and public investment in human beings

4. The absorption of waves of “huddled masses,” who have not been forced to renounce their diversity

5. The defeat of Nazism

6. Jazz

7. The Civil Rights Movement as a model for nonviolent social change in a modern society

8. The New Deal, especially as embodied in the great mid-twentieth century American cities with their solid systems of health, education, housing, transportation, and recreation

9. Restraint in war and international affairs, especially after the US became a nuclear-armed superpower

10. New York City as the world’s cultural capital, especially ca. 1930-1960 as modernism peaked and shifted to post-modernism

The last item is eccentric (although I happen to believe it). There would be excellent reasons for including the Bill of Rights, the Abolition Movement, the Morrill Act, the GI Bill, and the Marshall Plan on the positive top ten.

In 2004, about 11.6 million Americans under the age of 25 voted, an increase of about three million compared to the previous election (pdf). Although they broke for John Kerry at the end, young voters were up for grabs, divided about equally among Republicans, Democrats, and independents. Kerry and Bush traded the lead among young voters at least twice during the campaign (pdf, p. 2)

Despite the emergence of this large, energized swing vote, when Congress cut almost $40 billion from the federal budget, $12.7 billion came out of student loans. There are far better ways to cut just as much money from the federal budget, without touching education at all.

So what were the Congressional Republicans thinking? That the youth vote still isn’t all that big, compared to the boomers and the retirees? That young people turned out in ’04 but will stay home in the congressional elections of ’06? That most young voters won’t notice the cuts or know whom to blame for them? That college students are really a Democratic constituency? (Note that 41% of college students chose Bush: pdf.) These assumptions are not crazy, but they pose risks for Republicans, who may be applying outdated ideas. In the 1990s, young people were a relatively small group; they tended not to vote; and those college students who did turn out were heavily Democratic. None of this is true anymore. The Millennial Generation forms a large demographic group, seemingly more engaged in politics, and up for grabs. Those are three reasons for incumbent politicians to pay them a little more respect.