Or is he just famous and opinionated? I don't know. His business background, which includes a lot of real estate development, means he knows more about state and local regulation (and wheeling and dealing) than people may realize. Dick Riordan had similar experience when he became mayor of L.A. His record as mayor wasn't spectacular, but neither was it bad. L.A.'s mayor has little actual power, and Riordan's personality is unsuited to the bully pulpit.
I do know that if the best his critics can lob against Schwarzenegger is that he's a soft libertarian, they won't score many points. The criticisms corralled in this Sacramento Bee piece make me want him to win--though I do wish he had Tom McClintock--a fiscal tightwad who knows the budget--as an advisor rather than an opponent.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 08, 2003 • Comments
Eugene Volokh is dissecting Slate's silly charge that S.W.A.T. is "fascist," and everyone under the sun is discussing whether Arnold Schwarzenegger's violent movies disqualify him for public office. (See the comments on Al Barger's Blogcritics article for an example.) Now the obvious thing to say about violent movies is that they're not reality; they're art. As Gerard Jones convincingly argues in Killing Monsters, violent entertainment can serve an important psychological purpose for nonviolent, relatively powerless people, especially children.
But there is a real political divide here, and it's not about art. A significant portion of the population, especially in California, believes it is wrong to say, even in fiction, that violence ever solves problems or that violence is necessary to protect the innnocent. Few of these folks have the intellectual or moral rigor to call themselves pacifists, but they impose a pacifist moralism on public discussion: the default assumption is that violence is always wrong. But, of course, the famous Arnold line from True Lies often applies: "But they were all bad guys."
Perhaps an Arnold candidacy will make this sub rosa debate explicit, but I doubt it. For now, he's saying he's a nonviolent man who supports gun control.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 08, 2003 • Comments
To Blogcritics, a clever idea, successfully executed. If you haven't visited recently, check out their latest offerings.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 08, 2003 • Comments
Kausfile reports that Arianna Huffington is planning to run for California governor. Arianna is charming and clever and has a lovely radio voice. She knows how to find fashionable positions and attract attention. And she's completely unequipped to be governor in the middle of a fiscal crisis (unless she can find some really, really, really rich gay guy to marry and give her enough money to cover the state deficit). In other words, she's the perfect candidate for this peculiar election in the making: a very effective publicity hound. The million-candidate election isn't about becoming governor. It's about running for governor. But somebody will eventually win, that person will have to be governor, and a screwed-up state government will very likely get even more screwed up.
This is what you get when you combine the Progressive faith in unmediated democracy--which, in this case, includes mass candidacy--with a state in which "rational ignorance" has reached an all-time high (except on the passionate fringes, including mine): a high probability that Californians will elect a joke candidate or, the next best thing, a celebrity with a lot of glib opinions and minimal nuts-and-bolts knowledge. Yikes.
For continuing coverage of rational ignorance, read The Volokh Conspiracy.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 05, 2003 • Comments
Yes, I have blue nail polish in the photo below. It's Aruba Blue, by Essie--my favorite color. In L.A., people think it's cool. In Dallas, they think it's weird. My Dallas manicurist always tries to persuade me to get a nice sedate French manicure, but the most conservative I ever wear is bright red. Professor Postrel likes the blue. He thinks it looks like car paint. Next up: Aruba Blue for my car (a slow job with that tiny brush..)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 05, 2003 • Comments
It's another environmental hate crime.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 04, 2003 • Comments
Reader (and immigration-policy expert) Paul Donnelly writes:
The Bush administration's spring fling to seek new powers against terrorism included something starkly worse than simply arrest without trial. Ashcroft's lawyers actually looked at stripping U.S. citizenship -- and several conservatives (notably the Weekly Standard folks) yawned.
The reason this is a big deal is that it turns the Founding upside down. In the U.S.A, the individual is sovereign and "We, the People" rule. In other words, we invented citizenship. Unlike a subject, being a citizen can neither be imposed on someone, nor can it be taken away if lawfully acquired -- although you can give it up, if you want. But this is not widely understood, which is why this extremely bad idea may not be dead.
Throughout the first part of the last century, Congress enacted a series of "expatriating acts", by which somebody would be considered to have given up their citizenship, even if they didn't want to: fighting in another nation's armed forces, or serving in its government, even just voting in its elections. Each of these has been thrown out by the courts, on the principle that it is the individual citizen who may choose to give up U.S. citizenship -- and if they do not, as the Supreme Court said in 1968 over an American voting in Israel's elections: the U.S. government has "no power" to take it away.
It's not surprising that prosecutors would want to strip away citizenship. But it is alarming that conservatives didn't leap to object to this inversion of sovereignty -- I had one moderately influential guy flat out insist that of course the government could hold 'a routine denaturalization' proceeding to take citizenship away from a terrorist.
Except -- there are no 'denaturalization' hearings convened by the government, because the government doesn't have that power. Why would the Bush administration even want it? There was no problem prosecuting, convicting, and executing terrorist U.S. citizen Timothy McVeigh -- and there is no need to strip citizenship from anybody, except: 1) to hide incompetent police work, or 2) to deport 'em to countries which might torture 'em.
Think about it. What OTHER reason could there be for the Attorney General to seek authority to take citizenship away from somebody who acquired it lawfully (for instance, by being born here) and doesn't want to give it up?
Paul and I sometimes disagree, but this isn't one of those times. If a single horrific attack can evoke this sort of policy reaction from conservative intellectuals and the Bush administration, what happens if we get hit again? As Glenn Reynolds noted in a link to my earlier post, some civil libertarians have hurt the cause of liberty by crying wolf too often. But that doesn't mean wolves don't exist.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 04, 2003 • Comments
The Substance of Style exists! And I have a copy.
For more on what's in the book, see this brief Q&A interview. I'm busy doing all sorts of advance work--arranging book tour events, working on related articles, putting together an online, alphabetized bibliography to supplement the book's endnotes. (Did you know that USA Today is the only major U.S. paper that doesn't charge for access to its archives?) I'm trying to keep up the blogging, but it will be light for the next few days.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 04, 2003 • Comments
Fritz Hollings, quite possibly the Senate's most consistently anti-libertarian member and definitely its most embarrassing, has announced his retirement. I guess he was just waiting for Strom to finally let him be senior senator for a while.
The seat should be a safe gain for Republicans.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 04, 2003 • Comments
In his latest column (with good links), Jacob Sullum addresses the most worrisome policy of the war on terror. The Bush administration has claimed the right to "disappear" people. That way lies every form of tyranny. I'm more open than most civil libertarians to increased surveillance and information collection, by both government and private entities. Having people know stuff, about me or others, doesn't really bother me. (I am, after all, a journalist, and while I'm anything but an investigative reporter, you can hardly be in the business and believe in stifling the free flow of information.)
What matters is what the government can do with the information it collects--what powers it has to intrude on individuals' lives, to hurt people (including bad people) directly--and what checks on those powers exist. In my mind, the single most important guide to security policy is that the government must never have the right to hold individuals within the United States, particularly (but not exclusively) citizens, secretly or incommunicado. That power inevitably turns first into the power to torture, and eventually into the power to detain and torture people whose danger to the general population is far less than their danger to the decision-making officials.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 03, 2003 • Comments