I just had a good conversation with Randy Brinson, chairman of Redeem the Vote, with whom I’ve talked several times before. If you look at the Redeem the Vote website, you’ll see a strongly conservative political organization that questions evolution, favors Judge Alito, and otherwise takes positions consistent with the “Christian Right.” However, there is a huge difference between Redeem the Vote and some of the more partisan political groups on the religious right. It is the difference between principle and partisan expediency–a difference that also distinguishes groups on the left.

Redeem the Vote wants to help citizens solve what appear to them to be public problems. I disagree with some of the “problems” on the organization’s list. For example, I don’t think it’s bad when schools exclusively teach evolution. Nevertheless, I recognize genuine democratic problem-solving when I see it, and I believe it contributes to our civic life.

In practice, this means that …

1) Redeem the Vote registers young voters in all demographic groups and communities. As a result, a substantial proportion of their registrants are Democrats. They want people to vote “pro-life” and otherwise conservatively on social issues. They make conservative arguments while canvassing. But their approach is open-ended because they are willing to take the chance that they may register people who will vote on the other side, which happens a lot. This is an authentically democratic and civic approach. By the way, Redeem the Vote seems to have turned out a lot of new voters, a majority of whom supported Bush in the end, even though many chose to register as Democrats. That shows that when you give people an opportunity to make up their own minds, they tend to trust you and listen to your arguments–which is a lesson for activists on all sides.

2) Redeem the Vote works with strange bedfellows. For example, they have released a paper on the freedom to teach about religion in public schools. They distributed it jointly with the Alabama chapter of the National Education Association, normally seen as a bedrock liberal organization. The paper was originally written by my friends at the First Amendment Center, who are staunch civil libertarians. All agree that it is legal to teach about religion in schools. Redeem the Vote has also worked with anti-poverty groups to try to support economic supports for pregnant women that may lower the abortion rate.

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Amy Harmon has a front-page New York Times article today entitled “Young, Assured and Playing Pharmacist to Friends.” All of her sources are youngish adults who obtain mood-altering or performance-enhancing drugs by sharing stockpiles, buying medications online, or lying and exaggerating to their doctors about their symptoms.

On the one hand, the article seems important to me, because it raises significant issues. For instance, is it generally a good idea to self-prescribe, relying on public information, peers, and personal experience for information? Or is it generally better to rely on physicians? When is it right to treat mild depression, undesired weight gain, or insomnia with chemicals? Is that cheating, or is it smart? Why are these young adults unhappy, to start with? Are they just overly sensitive? Or is there something (perhaps consumerism and careerism, or the way dating and courtship are structured today) that is responsible for their discontent? Finally, is the advertising and R&D of pharmaceutical companies responsible for overuse of medications, or should we hold individuals responsible for their own consumption?

On the other hand, I was struck by the difference between Amy Harmon (as a journalist) and any academic researcher. Harmon talked only to young people who self-prescribe pyschotropic medications. She did a great job finding these informants. But she could say nothing about how typical they are in the overall population. Implicitly, the article implies that many–or most–young people obtain mood-altering controlled medications without legitimate prescriptions. Is this true? Or are there many young people who would never do such a thing?

An academic researcher would almost certainly start with some larger, more representative population–not necessarily a sample of all youth, but a sample of some demographic group or community. The researcher would then describe a range of behavior and attitudes. The results would be less compelling, less alarming, less attention-grabbing than this article. They would provide more reliable guidance, however.

Picture a classic diplomatic scene–perhaps Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill side-by-side at Yalta, or Nixon and Mao in China. It’s easy to interpret these scenes according to a “realist” theory of politics. The leaders have power and are in a position to make decisions. They represent their countries, so it is almost as if the nations themselves were sitting down to negotiate. The countries’ interests are their own security, prosperity, and influence. The leaders negotiate rationally to maximize those interests.

Hal Saunders, a senior American diplomat who flew with Kissinger himself on the “shuttle” flights that advanced peace between Israel and Egypt, is very familiar with that kind of politics. In a forthcoming book entitled Politics is about Relationship (Sage), he argues that the “realist” model has never been adequate, either as an explanation of the way the world works or as a normative framework for deciding what we should do. Inadequate even in situations like the “carefully managed” relationship between China and the United States of the early 1970s, the realist theory fails utterly to explain such critical developments as the construction of a democratic society in South Africa, the sustainable economic development of poor countries, or the evolving relationship between the US and China today.

The “realist” account is in fact quite unrealistic, because it ignores the following factors (among others). First, political identity is complicated. Roosevelt at Yalta and Nixon in China did not represent a unitary entity called the “United States” with a known set of interests. Rather, these men had complex identities (as individuals, members of parties and administrations, representatives of their countries, and human beings). Insofar as they represented the United States, its identity was complex and constantly contested. They, like their fellow citizens, had choices about how to define America and its interests. Subjects of totalitarian states have fewer evident choices. Yet even the Russians and Chinese had identities that were subject to change. As soon as Soviet diplomats stopped identifying as representatives of Communism or of the USSR and began seeing themselves as Russians, the Soviet Empire was over.

The realist picture also focuses too narrowly on the few people who hold the conspicuous power to issue orders–especially orders to armies and navies. There are always other players and other forms of power. Again, the US opening to China represents an apparent example of “realist” politics, since just four men initially drove the diplomatic process, operating in near secrecy, and thinking mainly of national security interests. Yet it mattered enormously that US public opinion had already turned in favor of peace with China. That means that millions of Americans were players. Moreover, the relationship between the United States and China had already been launched by decades of missionary activity, immigration, trade, and cultural exchanges. These interactions created perceptions, stereotypes, habits, and modes of relating between the two nations that had enormous impact on Kissinger, Nixon, Zhou Enlai, and Mao, despite the apparent power and freedom of these leaders.

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Some French intellectuals really believe it. They are convinced that the Arab and African youth who are rioting in their suburbs are completely French, totally committed to the traditional ideology of the French leftist working class, which includes the great republican trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Culture, race, and religion are irrelevant, although certain ancient French values inspire the immigrant youth. What we see in France are young citoyens taking to the barricades to defend the Rights of Man against Anglo-Saxon inequality and cultural separatism.

See, for example, this priceless interview that I translate from yesterday’s Le Monde:

Emmanuel Todd (historian and demographer): But I see nothing in the events themselves that radically distinguishes the children of immigrants from the rest of French society. I see exactly the opposite. I interpret the events as a rejection of marginalization. None of this could have happened if the children of immigrants hadn’t embraced a few of the fundamental values of French society, such as, for instance, the dyad of liberty-equality. Among other actors–the police led by the government, the local authorities, the non-immigrant population–I have seen maybe some exasperation, but no wholesale rejection.

Q: You want to say that the youth are revolting because they have accepted the republican model and believe that it doesn’t work?

Todd: Exactly. I read their revolt as the hope of equality. French society is wrought by the rise of inegalitarian values that touch the whole developed world. Well enough accepted in the United States, where its only political effect is the rise of neoconservatism, this global inegalitarian tendency goes over badly in France. It collides with an egalitarian anthropological value that has been at the heart of peasant family structures in the Parisian basin. That substrate, which rose up in the 17th century or earlier still, is not found among the English peasantry, for whom the inheritance of land was unequal.

When you are at the top of the society, you can get used to this inegalitarian trend, even if it is against your principles; that is not too uncomfortable. In contrast, the popular center and middle classes take it very badly. They give votes to the [National Front Party of Le Pen], which has an egalitarian component, with its ability to say shit to the elites, and an inegalitarian component, with its tendency to look below for a scapegoat, in the immigrants.

These kids from the suburbs, from African or Maghreb origins, they are not at all in the same situation as the Pakistanis of England or the Turks of Germany. For the daughters of Algerians [in France], the rate of mixed marriages hovered at the beginning of the 1990s at around 25%, when it was at one percent for the daughters of Turks [in Germany] and infinitesimal for the daughters of Pakistanis [in Britain]. The simple ethnic mixture of bands of youth in France is inconceivable in Anglo-Saxon countries. Obviously, I’m not meaning to give an idyllic vision of the France of 1789, which put to work the national republicans’ dream with its assumption of a Universal Man.

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Moderate Republicans have beaten back an effort to cut federal spending by $54 billion, partly because the proposed cuts would have hurt poor Americans. However, it is both possible and desirable to cut federal spending that benefits special interests. Although the following cuts would be very difficult for politicians to support, we should demand them:

Close the Commerce Department (too much corporate welfare), retaining the Bureau of the Census, the Patent Office, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as independent agencies … save $4.9 billion.

Cut federal highway aid in half … save $17.3 billion.

Close the Small Business Administration (too much corporate welfare), preserving only “direct disaster loans” … save $20 billion.

Cut “commodities and international” spending from the Agriculture Department budget; also cut farm loans … save $6.3 billion

Cut the NASA budget by $6 billion by narrowing the agency’s mission to research using unmanned spacecraft

Total savings: $54.5 billion [Source: GPO]