Here’s the publisher’s summary over at Amazon:

For eighteen years, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith have been part of a team revolutionizing the study of politics by turning conventional wisdom on its head. They start from a single assertion: Leaders do whatever keeps them in power. They don’t care about the “national interest”—or even their subjects—unless they have to.

This clever and accessible book shows that the difference between tyrants and democrats is just a convenient fiction. Governments do not differ in kind but only in the number of essential supporters, or backs that need scratching. The size of this group determines almost everything about politics: what leaders can get away with, and the quality of life or misery under them. The picture the authors paint is not pretty. But it just may be the truth, which is a good starting point for anyone seeking to improve human governance.

The central idea is hardly a new one: that the best approach to reverse-engineering the behavior of politicians is to assume that their primary motivation, and the criterion according to which all their decisions are made, is the acquisition and retention of power. But what the authors have done with this book is to use this idea to build a consistent quantitative and predictive model, based on the relative sizes of three coalitions: the general “selectorate”, a much smaller group of “influentials”, and most important of all, the “essentials”: that collection of individuals who must be kept happy in order for the leader to retain his grip on power.

The authors did particularly well, I thought, in their analysis of how different sorts of governments (as characterized by their relative coalition sizes) interact with each other, particularly as regards war and foreign aid. That chapter alone was worth the price of admission.

As is always the case with these ‘here’s-the-big-new-idea-that-explains-everything’ books, I found myself disagreeing with some of the tendentious conclusions and recommendations the authors presented in the final chapter — but I understand that everybody’s got an axe to grind, and none of it was enough to seriously detract from what I think was a very insightful and useful intellectual effort. Go and get a copy.

I don’t suppose this will have much effect on the vote. It’s hard to imagine that his coming out in favor of SSM will snatch any supporters away from Mitt Romney, and although a majority of blacks oppose legalizing same-sex marriage (the latest poll I’ve seen reported 55% opposed and 42% in favor), I doubt that this will cost Mr. Obama much, if any, of his lock on the black vote.

Interestingly, Mr. Obama also said that although he personally approves of same-sex marriage, he thought that decisions about its legality should be left to the States. (Indeed, this just happened yesterday, with North Carolina voters rejecting the idea by a wide margin.) I mention this because I can’t think, offhand, of any other examples of Mr. Obama endorsing this sort of federalism; it isn’t generally his style at all.

Another interesting question, what with a Mormon standing as Mr. Obama’s opponent this fall: what percentage of supporters of same-sex marriage would object to the legalization of polygamous marriages? On what principled basis can they do so?

As you’d expect, this item has evoked a lively response from the Right. For sheer entertainment value it would be hard to top Iowahawk’s riposte, which you can have a look at here.

The word has, of course, been a rallying cry of socialists and Marxists for a very long time — so much so that Wikipedia even has an entry about it.

Perhaps this indicates a refreshing frankness on the part of the campaign, a willingness to fly their true colors, so that voters can make a genuinely informed choice — to call, as it were, a spade a spade, on the assumption that socialism is in fact what a lot of Mr. Obama’s essential coalition actually wants.

At the very least: as dog whistles go, that’s a pretty low-frequency one.

President Obama, warning the other day that he would view a negative ruling by the Court as “judicial activism”, unburdened himself of a real whopper:

“Ultimately I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,” Mr. Obama said in the Rose Garden appearance.

This is absurd, of course; ruling on the Constitutionality of acts of Congress is what the Court does, and has been doing since Marbury v. Madison. One can only assume that Mr. Obama,. with his degree from Harvard Law, does know that — so one can only assume that he simply doesn’t care, and is trying to paint the impending smackdown he is likely to get from SCOTUS as motivated by right-wing politics, rather than Constitutional jurispridence. All of a sudden he’s worried that he’s actually going to lose, and is laying the groundwork to turn the visceral anger of his base against the Court’s conservative Justices.

It’s working already. I have a student, a lawyer in his fifties, who in class last night complained to me that anyone could see that it was all just political: because after all, the ones who were seen as most likely to rule against the individual mandate — Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas — are all Republicans.

This is poorly reasoned — confusing correlation with causation — but we’ll be hearing a lot more of it, I think.

Anyway, as I said, tensions are high, and getting higher. Here we are in an election year, with the country breaking apart over irreconcilable, axiomatic disagreements about what America is and what governments are for, and the President’s signature accomplishment — bitterly fought and narrowly won on a blood-soaked political battlefield — is in real danger of being nullified. So when Mr. Obama fired off his warning shot across the Judiciary’s bow on Monday, it provoked a warlike response from a three-judge panel on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, ordering the DOJ to report back by Thursday on whether the President actually believes that the Supreme Court has the power to strike down unconstitutional laws.

For the appeals court to make such a flamboyantly provocative gesture shows how high the temperature’s getting here. There’s often bad blood between the branches, but the smoldering feud between this administration and the conservative Justices is about as openly hostile as I’ve ever seen. (Remember the SOTU after the Citizens United ruling?)

Such high drama! and mighty entertaining — but the stakes are even higher.

After much back-and-forth I wrote:

Bottom line: Constitutional law is a fascinating study, combining history, literature, philosophy, logic, and even psychology. You and I can discuss it at any length we like, and it’s stimulating and interesting to do so, but ultimately what we decide here doesn’t really matter. We have our opinions, but the only opinion that carries any weight is the Court’s, and even that one looks to be fairly closely divided on this issue.

Supreme Court appointments matter. It’s one of the big reasons why the the next Presidential election matters so much.

I almost added the following, but thought I’d post it here instead:

Most of the bickering about these Constitutional-limitation issues is a matter not of Constitutional “truth”, but of temperament, and of axiomatic differences about the proper form and scope of government. To paraphrase G.C. Lichtenberg, the Constitution is like a mirror: if a Utopian looks in, you can’t expect a realist to look out.

The United States Federal Government is the largest and most complex apparatus of state power that has ever existed. It rules over hundreds of millions of people and the largest economy in history, and it wields military strength that dwarfs any other that the world has ever seen.

“That may be true,” you say, “but why bring it up?”

I bring it up because we individual citizens are small, and the bigger the Federal government is, the smaller we each become in relation to it. Actions of the Federal government must be broad enough in scope to apply with the same fairness and aptness to the citizens of Wyoming, Alaska, Texas, and Hawaii as they do to me. I am one voice in hundreds of millions, and my local concerns will compete with those of all those other, far-flung corners of the Union — places whose social, political, religious and economic contexts and concerns may differ from my own community’s in a thousand ways.

On the other hand, my state’s government is far smaller, and my county and municipal governments smaller still. Being so much smaller means that they can focus with much sharper resolution on the particular issues that confront their little subset of the nation’s geography and population — and that those citizens will far better able to make their voices heard above the din.

People will generally be happier, will have more control over the affairs of government that daily affect their lives, and will better able to create a shared public life as a community, the more that the mass of government power lies as closely to their local community as possible. After all, the central principle of our Republic is that power flows from the people upward, not from the Federal government downward. The apex of collective power in Washington should be the small end of the pyramid, not its base.

Moreover, in a Republic of semi-autonomous States, each becomes its own laboratory of innovation. Given that there are many ways to solve the myriad problems of governance, decentralization of power makes possible the exploration and comparison of different solutions, with every State free to adopt those that seem best suited to their local temperament, and to serve as an example to others.

If you want further justification for this view, then consider that men are fallible, and prone to the abuse of power. Wisdom then suggests that the less centralized and concentrated the power, the narrower will be the possible scope of its abuse — and the closer those entrusted with such power are to those to whom they are answerable, the warier they will be of the consequences.

These, then, are some of the reasons why we conservatives prefer the bridle to the spur when it comes to aggrandizations and consolidations of Federal power. I won’t attempt to articulate the opposing view, but comments are welcome, as always.

The insurance mandate is nothing like requiring people to buy broccoli — a comparison Justice Antonin Scalia suggested in his exasperated questioning of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. Congress has no interest in requiring broccoli purchases because the failure to buy broccoli does not push that cost onto others in the system.

Really? The point here is whether the individual mandate is as unique as the government would like the Court to think it is. But given that poor diets lead to poor health, and so to higher consumption of health-care services, why couldn’t the government, emboldened by a favorable ruling on the individual mandate, next make the case that failure to consume one’s vegetables increases the health-care cost burden on everyone else?

The point, as Justice Kennedy noted, is that to allow Washington this expansion of coercive power changes the relationship between the individual citizen and the federal government so profoundly, and is so conducive to further intrusive infringement of federal authority on individual liberty, that there is both an extraordinary burden of justification and a need for a clearly articulated limiting principle. It seems that the Solicitor General fell well short of both in yesterday’s arguments.

The argument by the Times seems to be: we want this, we need this, so the Court should just get out of the way. The editorial begins:

In ruling on the constitutionality of requiring most Americans to obtain health insurance, the Supreme Court faces a central test: whether it will recognize limits on its own authority to overturn well-founded acts of Congress.

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. (Gotta love that question-begging “well-founded”, too.)

Others might say that the “test” the Court faces is whether it will in fact do what it was created to do: recognize limits on the enumerated powers of the executive and legislative branches to usurp the rights of the States and of individual citizens.

We’ll have to wait and see; this could still go either way. But we can be a little more hopeful, I think, after yesterday’s session.

Transcript here. Decide for yourself.

Tomorrow: severability. If the mandate falls, does it take down the whole rotten structure? Judge Vinson thought so.

President Obama: On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space.

President Medvedev: Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…

President Obama: This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.

President Medvedev: I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.

“Flexibility”, you say. “Freedom to test the outermost limits of executive power, unrestrained by fear of any consequences at the polls”, you mean.

We’ll take a quick break from our usual incisive analysis to offer a personal message:

Yes, Mr. President, here’s hoping you have maximum flexibility, come January 21st. Sleep late? Take a walk? Watch some TV? Do some work around the house? Whatever you like, sir. Enjoy!

You’ll have all the time in the world, insha’Allah.

Read it here.

Who could ever have imagined that they would deceive us like this? I feel so… used.

Friend –

If the general election were held today, President Obama would lose to Mitt Romney — according to the latest poll from Washington Post-ABC News.

And then there’s this, from today’s Times:

Obama’s Rating Falls as Poll Reflects Volatility

Despite improving job growth and an extended Republican primary fight dividing his would-be opponents, President Obama is heading into the general election season on treacherous political ground, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

At a time of rising gas prices, heightened talk of war with Iran and setbacks in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama’s approval rating dropped substantially in recent weeks, the poll found, with 41 percent of respondents expressing approval of the job he is doing and 47 percent saying they disapprove — a dangerous position for any incumbent seeking re-election.

Just thought some of you might need a little cheering up (though of course there’s a good distance yet ‘twixt cup and lip).

When it comes to calling the kettle black in this wise, however, the Left is a very, very sooty pot — and they reserve a special place in their hearts, and their foul mouths, for black and female conservatives. Michelle Malkin is a prominent member of the latter group, and has been a target, over the years, of some of Liberal America’s vilest imprecations.

She reminisces here.

Abortion is, in my opinion, the most philosophically difficult legal issue there is, and there are defensible opinions on both sides. But this is pure and insulting nannyism. The law should rule on the legality of the procedure itself, and nothing more — and respect the autonomy of women, at the very least, to make up their own minds without bullying.

Come to think of it, it looks like Slate’s Alex Pareene didn’t either.

In response, it’s fair to ask: are you guys sure you’ve thought this through? You might want to keep in mind that once you’ve ceded any territory to Leviathan, it’s very difficult to take it back — and a left-leaning Executive, insh’Allah, will not always be at the helm. Deroy Murdock and Jonah Goldberg make this simple point, in a way that should give liberals pause, here.

We will have another test of this shortly, it seems, and not a moment too soon: two important briefs (you can read them here and here) were filed today in the ongoing legal struggle against Obamacare.

More here.

Even Mr. Kristof acknowledges that this issue is hardly cut-and-dried. He writes:

Look, there’s a genuine conflict here. Many religious believers were sincerely offended that Catholic institutions would have to provide coverage for health interventions that the church hierarchy opposed. That counts in my book: it’s best to avoid forcing people to do things that breach their ethical standards.

Quite so. And he gets the terminology right: what is at issue here is the Federal government “forcing people to do things”. That is not the same thing as prohibiting criminal acts, or prohibiting anything at all. There is a difference between prohibition and compulsion, and compelling people to perform acts that are in direct contravention to their religious beliefs has generally been recognized, throughout history, to be among the extremest forms of subjugation, right up there with rape, mutilation, and infanticide. If you wanted to degrade and humiliate a Jew or a Muslim, for example, you might force him to eat pig-flesh. And if you wanted to publicly and politically degrade and humiliate the Catholic Church, to make it bend the knee and kiss the ring, you would force it to issue contraceptives.

That many Catholics live in apostasy when it comes to this tenet of the Church’s teaching, as Mr. Krsitof and others have made sure to point out, is completely irrelevant here. The laity are not the ones who were brought under this compulsion at the whim of the Executive Branch; the Church itself was. Catholic doctrine is not configured by referendum.

Mr. Kristof, having acknowledged all this, soon loses sight of this important distinction between prohibition and compulsion, nevertheless:

The basic principle of American life is that we try to respect religious beliefs, and accommodate them where we can. But we ban polygamy, for example, even for the pious. Your freedom to believe does not always give you a freedom to act.

But of course the Church doesn’t seek to “act” here, not at all. It merely wishes not to be compelled to violate its own sacred teachings.

Mr Kristof clearly agrees with the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, that poor women having lots of babies is a bad idea all round (she expressed this eugenic, Progressive goal in her autobiography as a need to “stop the multiplication of the unfit”). Mr. Kristof argues that the “The cost of birth control is one reason poor women are more than three times as likely to end up pregnant unintentionally as middle-class women”, and that many are “relying only on condoms”.

Leaving aside what other reasons there might be, we should note here that condoms, if used properly, are extremely effective at preventing pregnancy, and that many married couples rely on them exclusively, in order to avoid the by-effects of oral contraceptives. From a public-health perspective, the condom is also the best method, short of abstinence, for preventing the spread of venereal disease. They are also cheap: a year’s supply, for a woman who has sex every single day, can be had for something like ten dollars a month. (Or, if she prefers, for nothing at all, in most cities.) Cost as an obstacle to contraception is simply not the issue that folks like Mr. Kristof would have us believe, as Andrew McCarthy argues here.

But let’s assume, arguendo, that the society at large does indeed have such a compelling interest in seeing that poor women are given contraceptives that it is determined to make it so. Even so it is hard to see why this couldn’t have been done without humiliating the Church in this way. Why not just cut out the middleman, and give the stuff away directly? Given what a political minefield this has become, wouldn’t that have been simpler, and more feasible politically?

I want to reiterate that I am no Catholic; I am not even a theist of any sort. I also think the Catholic Church’s position on contraception, like so many other positions it has stubbornly defended over the centuries, is ridiculous. But what I see here is a salient battle in the endless culture war waged by the Left against traditional society, and I see also an ever-expanding State garrisoning yet another patch of conquered territory, and bringing its inhabitants to heel. So I hie me to the ramparts.

Finally, I want to call out Mr. Kristof on a misleading statement that I will charitably assume is merely an oversight: he cites the source of some of his statistics, the Guttmacher Institute, as a “nonpartisan research organization on issues of sexual health”. The Guttmacher Institute is, however, hardly likely to be an impartial player in this debate, as we can see from its website:

Alan F. Guttmacher was president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and a leader in the International Planned Parenthood Federation in the 1960s and early 1970s, he saw the need for the institution that now bears his name, and he nurtured its development.

I considered disallowing comments on this piece, because we’ve already had ample discussion on this head. But I don’t like to do that, so I’ll leave the comment-box open.