Religious Freedom Around The World

I saw some pictures the other day of some Sikhs wearing turbans in the U.S. Army and it made me a little proud.  America has done a decent job of allowing people of different faiths, or no faith, to coexist.  Creationism is kept out of public schools, and the government is kept out of mass.  But what’s particularly interesting about this is the diversity of approaches taken by other advanced democracies.  America, France, Germany, and Great Britain all have modern religiously tolerant governments, but the way each goes about it is different.

Universal Toleration: The government doesn’t tell religions what to do, but the government (aside from some small instances of “ceremonial deism”) doesn’t promote religions at all.

Laïcité (aggressive secularism): The French model is arguably the most atheistic of any democratic country.  The French have spent over 200 years trying to purge Catholicism from the public sphere, and it shows.  While generally speaking the French are as free as anyone else to practice their religion, any interference in the public sphere can be attacked by the state.  The most famous example being Sarkozy’s banning of the burqa.

Entangled Equality: The German model doesn’t separate church and state, it integrates them.  Germany has a Church tax that people pay, and you can direct it to whatever religious community you want – Atheists have a few ethical societies they can choose from, or you can opt out entirely and send it to the state instead.  Religion is taught in public schools, with parents being able to choose which denomination teaches their children, with a general philosophical ethics class available as well.  The state administers many programs for various religions, but attempts to do so equally.

Official Church: England, on the other hand, still maintains an official church.  Ancient endowments and donations ensure that the general public isn’t taxed to pay for the church anymore and other churches and religions are tolerated.  The church serves a rather public ceremonial function and is the largest church in the country.  Perhaps as a consequence of its official nature, the doctrine and practices of the Anglican church are very diverse, and it’s notably socially liberal.  Though the Archbishop of Canterbury runs the church, and the Queen is its official head, Parliament has ultimate authority over the church.  An official church doesn’t result in religious control of the state, but rather state control of religion.

I think the American model works best, because I don’t want to harass religious folks like the French sometimes do, I don’t want the government collecting taxes for churches, and I’m annoyed by the spectre of an official path to heaven.  But of course I feel that way, I’m an American.  If you couldn’t choose the American system, which would you choose?

Second Best Religious System?

Lessons from the GOP Nomination contest

Now that it's over (and it is over), here's what are some lessons learned from the GOP nomination fight in 2012:

1. The Party Decides. The Party Decides. Seriously, The Party Decides. Despite what appeared to be a chaotic race, with no less than 7 different national front-runners, despite the sturm and drang about the "Tea Party", despite the lack of enthusiasm for Romney, the Republican Party coalesced around a compromise candidate with decent campaigning skills who positioned himself so as to not offend any major party interest group.

You couldn't have created a better test for the "Party Decides" framework: Romney's weaknesses, longstanding fractures within the Republican Party, and miserable economic conditions were a perfect storm to upset the system. And yet, as we see party actors from all spectrums of the Republican party turn to destroy Newt after his improbable South Carolina win, the theory seems as safe as ever.

2. The Invisible Primary is the Most Important Primary. By the time people actually started voting the number of possible nominees had dropped to two: Romney and Perry. Romney successfully cajoled, bribed, threatened, or just flat out beat most of his potential competitors before a single delegate was selected. I'm reasonably certain he forced out Barbour and Thune, and I know he beat Pawlenty by drying up his donor base. Huckabee had his own reasons, and I won't even speculate that Palin has a coherent thought process, but they both ran and lost in the invisible primary as well. Others, like Jindal or Christie, might've thought about running and been told not to early on.

3. SuperPACs. SuperPACs have played an outsized role in this nomination contest, and it's not clear why. So far they haven't really done anything that 527s couldn't do in the past. (527s couldn't say "Vote for X" but they could say "X is an evil jerk".) The invisible monsters that don't report donors and savaged Democrats in 2010 haven't been playing in the Republican contest. But it seems like some sort of psychological barrier has been broken.

While it hasn't really ever been illegal for a rogue billionaire to decide to single-handedly prop up a candidate, what has happened between Newt Gingrich and Sheldon Adelson has been remarkable. One of the ways in which the parties retain control of the nomination process is the way political donations are structured. Since people can only give a couple thousand dollars to a candidate, it requires candidates to appeal to a fairly wide swathe of middle class partisans in order to have enough money to seriously compete for the nomination.

Newt was never going to be the nominee. But we may have returned to the era where Joe Kennedy can buy his son a Presidential Nomination. (Hear that, John Huntsman, Sr.?)

4. You Can't Jump In Late. It's a perennial fantasy. Wes Clark, Fred Thompson, and now Rich Perry stand as monumental failures. Your best polling will be on the day you announce. If you're going to run, then run.

The most obvious point of this, as it applies to Perry, is that if you start running earlier, you get to have your big mistakes earlier. If Perry had managed to screw up a few debates before anyone was paying attention, he could have a year to recover and find his game. (Rumor has it that he didn't jump in the race because he was having back surgery, and then his painkillers from recovery were the cause of some of his odd behavior.)

But it goes beyond that: people who jump in late have a harder time raising money, the best staff is taken, some key party elements have already committed, etc. If you're going to run, then run.

5. Don't Get Drafted. Jon Huntsman's campaign to be the Republican for people who don't like Republicans was pretty awful. But that wasn't his fault! He was in China when the campaign started, and could not legally speak to the people trying to get him to run about campaign strategy. By the time he started running, they'd created the McCain 2000 retread. Despite the fact that McCain lost, and that the GOP has gotten more conservative, Huntsman was more-or-less forced to play they hand they dealt him.

5a. Don't hire John Weaver.

6. GOP Voters are Hyper-Informed. I do not mean that they are correct, especially about basic facts about reality. But rather, GOP partisans watch partisan TV, listen to partisan radio, and read partisan newspapers and blogs. The people who vote in the GOP nomination process really follow the race. That is what produced the surges last year, and that's why state-level results have been tracking so well to national results. Things like the ground game and local group participation matter much less when the potential electorate is filled with highly informed voters.

7. The Candidates Don't Get to Pick the Issues. I don't just mean Romney's well-publicized flip-flop on abortion. Anyone not named Rudy Giuliani could tell you that the GOP isn't going to nominate a pro-choice candidate any time soon. What was more interesting was the backlash against Gingrich for his rejection of the Ryan budget, or Perry's cratering in the polls for favoring a more moderate stance against illegal immigration.

As a corollary to #6, the rise of highly polarized national parties with highly informed partisan voters means that candidates have much less leeway to choose their positions than they used to.

8. Ron Paul is The Future. In the alternative future where only people who are under the age of 30 can vote, Ron Paul has won every contest to date. The GOP has been losing younger voters consistently since 2004 (this is a new phenomenon, despite the stereotypes, there historically hasn't been that big of a partisan difference between age cohorts in voting over the past 40 years). And of the young voters who are open to being Republicans, they favor an unconventional candidate with issue positions far outside of the GOP mainstream.

I've been saying for years that if the GOP wants to keep being able to win national elections, they'll need to convince Hispanic people to start voting like White people. Bush (and Perry) seemed to understand this, even if the rest of the party has rejected it this time around. But now it seems that unless the GOP does something about its issue positions — purge the neo-cons, or roll back the drug war — it will become a rump party for a generation.