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Link Biscuits: 12 April 2010

Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Mon, 04/12/2010 - 10:25
  • Jonathan Chait, Libertarian Electoral Fantasies: "Cato's Will Wilkinson predicts that a generation of younger, libertarian-leaning voters will takeover the Democratic Party and push it in a libertarian direction .... Despite Wilkinson's description of younger voters as "libertarian-ish," the reality is that young voters are far more pro-government than any other generation. .... Indeed, when libertarians like Wilkinson talk about "libertarian-ish" voters in any context, they're leaning very, very heavily on the "ish." The most thorough breakdown of the electorate is Pew's voter typology survey, last conducted in 2005, which categorizes voters into nine basic groups. The overwhelming finding of this research is that the components of both electoral coalitions are far less libertarian than their parties -- the GOP coalition has a lot of hawkish or socially conservative voters who favor more economic activism, and the Democratic Party has a lot of social conservatives who are skeptical of immigration and gay marriage. The sorting of the parties is one reflection of the massive over-representation of libertarian-ish views among elites. .... Practically speaking, the libertarian vote is non-existent, while the opposite viewpoint—economically liberal and socially conservative, which some call populist—is quite large. This fact tends to get lost in the political discussion because the political discussion is run by elites who are far closer to libertarianism than the public as a whole. (Case in point: Press critic Jay Rosen recently suggested CNN divvy its evening lineup into left/right/libertarian blocs, ignoring the vastly larger populist segment of the electorate.) Populist voters simple lack any intellectual infrastructure whatsoever."
  • Noah Millman, Who Closed the Conservative Mind?: "Ultimately, you can only have an intelligentsia if you have patrons who are interested in learning things they don’t already know. And so, if you want a conservative intelligentsia, you need patrons of a conservative temperament who want to learn things they don’t already know – things that may unsettle them. If all the patron wants is advocacy for established views in defense of established interests, then you don’t actually have intellectual patronage at all, and pretty soon you won’t have an intellectual establishment. I have never been a movement conservative, and I’ve never worked for a conservative institution, so any impressions I have are from a considerable distance – second-hand impressions at best, generally third-hand. Having declared that caveat, I will say that my general impression is that the money going to purportedly intellectual conservative organs is vastly more interested in advocacy than in developing intellectual talent or generating new insights. If I’m right, then that is something that has to change if you want an open conservative mind."
  • Streetsblog.org, New Analysis Tracks 40 Years of Changes in How Kids Get to School: "The percentage of U.S. students between ages five and 14 who walk or bike to school has remained stable over the past 15 years but remains three-quarters below where it stood 40 years ago, according to a new analysis of government data by two groups working on the Safe Routes to School (SRtS) program. Crunching numbers from the U.S. DOT's National Household Travel Survey, the National Center for SRtS and the SRtS National Partnership concluded that between 1969 and 2009, school transportation habits essentially flipped -- with auto use rising from 12 percent of the student population to 44 percent, and biking or walking going from a 48-percent popularity rate with kids to just 13 percent."