The June edition of the ICBW podcast is now available.  Part 1 covers Brexit and the EU, with an unexpected digression into PEDs in sports, and then touches on the homelessness epidemic on the US west coast, which leads into part 2's discussion of how society handles (and mishandles) the problem of mental illness.  As always, listeners are encouraged to post their reactions as blog comments below.  Caution:  failure to listen and comment may cause an escalation of promotional efforts on our part--obviously something we all want to avoid...

The bizarre internecine war between the "Sohrab Ahmari" and "David French" factions of the US conservative movement that was kicked off by Ahmari's condemnation of "David French-ism" is likely completely incomprehensible to those not expert in the idiosyncrasies of American political debate.  But two bits of background, one contemporary and the other more historical, can help readers make sense of it.

The current-day context for the dispute is the breakdown of the Reagan-era alliance between the white working-class and commercial-class wings of the conservative/Republican coalition.  As I explained four years ago, the rise of Donald Trump signified that this alliance, which had rested on an exchange in which the white working class gained commercial-class support for its traditionalist social views, and in return supported libertarian pro-business economic policy, was in serious jeopardy.  The white working class, I argued, was no longer satisfied with this tradeoff, and their economic plight, severely exacerbated by the economic crisis of 2008, necessitated, in their view, a greater say for them in the combined coalition's joint economic direction.  This dissatisfaction placed them on a direct collision course with their pro-business allies, who naturally have their own very firm ideas regarding economic policy, as well as interests that are significantly in conflict with those of their blue-collar alliance partners.

Trump's victory, and his subsequent enactment of working class-friendly policies on trade and immigration, have further alienated libertarians and pro-business conservatives. Many of them have responded by declaring political war on Trump--and implicitly, on his working-class supporters, some of whom in turn have declared such "never Trump" conservatives to be traitors on a par with their arch-enemies, the white-collar professionals in the liberal Democratic alliance's "progressive" wing.  (The irony, of course, is that virtually all of the prominent commentators on both sides of this debate are, demographically speaking, highly educated professional writers and journalists--that is, a perfectly natural fit for the "progressive" cohort.)

Ahmari's attack on French, then, is best viewed as a Trump faction supporter's call to arms against his recalcitrant libertarian allies, who, he claims, have betrayed the alliance with their insufficient anti-progressive militancy.  Now, Ahmari is a firebrand Catholic, and his focus in his manifesto is cultural, not economic:  he accuses anti-Trump libertarian conservatives of treating progressives not as bitter enemies, but only as political opponents, in the battles over cultural issues such as abortion and religious freedom.  But then again, French, an outspoken Christian and cultural conservative who has been a tireless legal advocate for conservative free speech rights on campus, is an extremely odd target for Ahmari's cultural broadside--or, rather, would be an odd target, if his true preoccupation were cultural activism rather than tribal factionalism.

Why, then, does Ahmari couch his attack on French in terms of the latter's allegiance to "classical liberalism", rather than fire off a straightforward partisan attack on pro-business conservatives' refusal to embrace wholeheartedly the working class-centric Trump economic program?  The answer lies in the second, more longstanding element of this dispute's context:  American political culture's ambivalence about (if not outright hostility to) democracy.

In most of the world's democratic nations, democracy itself takes center stage in political debate:  factions argue about policies on the understanding that the electorate are the ultimate and proper arbiters of government's direction, and that their interests and preferences (however unsophisticated) are necessarily paramount.  But American democracy was founded over two centuries ago, when democracy on a national scale was still a new and somewhat ill-understood concept.  And to America's revered founding fathers, the essence of democracy wasn't so much the basic principle of ensuring government accountability through popular sovereignty as it was the art of defining a delicately engineered system of political mechanisms which, if designed to perfection, could produce optimally wise, efficient and effective government--irrespective of the inevitable defects and perverse wishes of a selfish, ignorant, fractious democratic rabble.

Unfortunately, American political culture has enshrined this oddly abstract vision of government into a kind of dogma, with the result that (a) most educated Americans have little use for democracy, and incessantly seek out means to suppress or circumvent it in the name of one or another public good, and (b) arguments about policy take the form of grand philosophical debates about the ideal society, and the ideal structure of government to implement it--again, irrespective of the will of the people as expressed through their electoral choices.  The result is what one might expect of policy debates untempered by the moderating influence of the democratic spirit:  all the noisy pomposity of clashing abstract absolutes, replete with the sort of extreme pronouncements and radical calls to action that make normal citizens cringe.

And so it is with Ahmari's jeremiad:  to him, it isn't radical progressives with their ludicrous, freedom-crushing policy proposals--or even wealthy, selfish plutocrats with their libertarianism and accommodationism towards popular opinion--that are the problem, but rather "classical liberalism" itself, whose political neutrality and respect for democracy fail to prohibit a priori the enactment of morally repugnant (in Ahmari's eyes) laws and policies.  Now, Ahmari never quite gets around to explaining what he would replace democracy with.  But the mere fact that he is arguing on this structural level about what amounts to some factional bickering between two ostensibly allied conservative cohorts, illustrates just how badly American founder-itis has infected the nation's political debate, obscuring the democratic essence of partisan disputes and eliding discussion of the obvious democratic approach to resolving them.

Why The Higgs Boson Is like Pornography

I few years ago I wrote about my scepticism concerning the CERN Large Hadron Collider and the discoveries they are supposedly making. I pointed out that the OPERA group was getting results by fiddling with the equipment, so how do we know that CERN isn't generally doing the same thing? This is important since no one else can build their own LHC and replicate experiments. One would hope that CERN would announce that the maintenance of their equipment is done at arms length from the people who run experiments on it, but I haven't seen this.

It turns out, however, that the situation is a good deal worse than I thought. I had naively assumed that equipment fiddling was the only source of human subjectivity in these experiments. I imagined that the experiment to find the Higgs boson would work as follows. The experiment would involve two programs, both of which would have been vetted by physicists across the world. Program 1 would run the equipment, collecting certain data (it's impossible to keep ALL the data). Program 2 would then run on the collected data, concluding the presence or not (or perhaps a probability) of a Higgs boson. A more complicated version of this would have a single program running the experiment and collecting data in an interactive fashion. In any case, once the program(s) had been written (and the equipment certified), humans would be out of the loop: there would be no subjectivity.

Apparently, it turns out that humans have to be in the loop. Apparently, the Higgs Boson is much like pornography: you know it when you see it. The process of identifying the Higgs Boson is completely subjective, but physicists will know it when they see it. But instead of scrapping the whole project, they come up with an absurd, barely comprehensible type of "blinding" that supposedly stops experimenters from consciously or subconsciously cheating in some way. They don't know what the Boson is supposed to look like in the data, but they know that they can't get away with identifying just any old stuff in the data as the Boson, so they have a complicated way of making sure that experimenters agree on what looks Bosonish without cheating somehow.

This all reminds me a bit of "climate science" (not to be confused with climate science). Some very clever people are able to detect a "human signal" in just about any weather they don't like, as well as in any small amount of warming. They cannot reliably predict any such signal, but they know it when they see it.