The Republican health plan fixes a problem Paul Ryan feels passionately about

This idea is, to many liberals, perverse. It means that Ryancare doesn’t give the neediest families enough help to afford decent insurance while blowing a substantial chunk of change on families who don’t really need much help.

.. One school of thought holds that a major problem with the Affordable Care Act is that it creates a structure where a hypothetical near-poor person has very little financial incentive to increase his labor market earnings. Ryan’s American Health Care Act restructures the subsidies in a way that doesn’t accomplish anything from a health insurance point of view, but does directly address this labor market issue.

.. But Ryan has a pretty consistent and somewhat metaphysical theory of poverty whereby helping poor people by directly providing them with additional material resources doesn’t count. What he wants is for the government to help poor people become more like middle–class people and raise their labor market earnings.

Hence, in Ryan’s view, all means-tested benefits create what he calls a “poverty trap,” where the existence of benefits reduces the incentive to bootstrap your way up the income ladder.

The New Evangelical Moral Minority

If the Southern Baptist church can’t be bigger, Russell Moore wants it to be better.

.. Moore was respectful, but he seemed puzzled by Land’s eagerness to defend Palin. “Dr. Land thinks that Governor Palin’s resignation was a shrewd move,” he said. “I don’t. I don’t understand it at all.” Later in the show, after Land had hung up, Moore offered a broader critique. “We, as evangelical Christians, are really, really prone, it seems to me, to become so enthused with political figures that we just automatically impute to them almost superheroic status,” he said. “Put not your trust in princes,” he added—Psalm 146:3. “Or in princesses, either.”

 .. For a long time, Southern Baptists had not only a faith but a cause. They saw God’s greatness reflected in the inherent goodness of the American South—and, more recently, in America itself.
.. And in the Obama era Land’s status as an old-fashioned culture warrior came to seem, to some members of the church, like a liability. In 2012, after George Zimmerman, a neighborhood-watch volunteer, fatally shot Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old African-American, Land said on his own radio show that activists were seizing on the case “to gin up the black vote for an African-American President.” When he was criticized, he suggested that Zimmerman had behaved rationally; a black man, he said, was “statistically more likely to do you harm than a white man.”
.. his radio show was cancelled, and, under pressure, he resigned from the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, which he had led since 1988.
.. admonishing Southern Baptists to think first—and often—about their own sins. The denomination was formed, in 1845, by white Southerners who split off from a national Baptist movement that was growing increasingly intolerant of slavery. Moore sees in his theological ancestors a cowardly and catastrophic willingness to ignore the uncomfortable. “If you call people to repentance for drunkenness, or for adultery, or for any number of personal sins, but you don’t say anything about slaveholding or about lynching,” he says, “you’re just baptizing the status quo.”
.. both view abortion as the defining atrocity of our age.
..Trump responded, inevitably, on Twitter, calling Moore a “nasty guy with no heart!” On CNN, hours later, Anderson Cooper asked Moore to continue the dialogue, and Moore flashed a crickety smile. “It’s one of the few things that I can agree with Donald Trump on,” he said. “I am a nasty guy with no heart—we sing worse things about ourselves in our hymns, on Sunday mornings.” He added, “That’s the reason why I need forgiveness from God, through Jesus Christ.” He had found a way to mock an insult with a prayer.
.. the so-called “Trump effect”: in October, seventy-two per cent of white evangelicals agreed that an elected official who “commits an immoral act” in private could nevertheless behave ethically in public; five years earlier, only thirty per cent agreed with the statement.
..Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Church, in Dallas, a flagship S.B.C. congregation, was probably speaking for many if not most Southern Baptists when he suggested that Trump was justified in responding to Moore’s “vitriolic attacks.” In Jeffress’s view, Trump is precisely the kind of protector whom Christians should support; he has said that, when it comes to defending America from Islamic terrorism and other threats, “I want the meanest, toughest son-of-a-you-know-what I can find.”
.. Moore thinks that the idea of a moral majority is wrong, and was probably wrong when it was created: he suspects that earnest, orthodox Christians have always been outnumbered. Like any believer, he wants his church to grow, but he doesn’t seem particularly threatened by the thought that it might not.
.. He says that Christians in America must learn to think of themselves as a marginal community, struggling to survive in an increasingly hostile secular culture. In such a context, Muslims might seem less like enemies and more like allies in the fight for religious freedom.
.. Southern Baptists. After centuries of regional dominance, the denomination has been shrinking: last year, the church reported fewer than three hundred thousand baptisms, the lowest number in more than half a century, and a decline of about a third since the peak, in 1972
.. At the annual meeting, he said, “Brothers and sisters, when you have a government that says we can decide whether or not a house of worship can be constructed based upon the theological beliefs of that house of worship, then there are going to be Southern Baptist churches in San Francisco and New York and throughout this country who are not going to be able to build.”

There’s Something About Mary Bennet

The things that make Pride and Prejudice’s middle sister so unappealing as a supporting character are precisely what make her compelling as a star.

.. In a fantastic essay for The Guardian, Charlotte Jones describes the current attempt to reimagine and reanimate Mary as largely missing the point of her creator’s novel. Austen is not George Eliot, after all; she is neither copious nor comprehensive in her empathies. She is Jane Austen, OG Gossip Girl. Her narrator, in Pride and Prejudice, is judgy. She plays favorites. She mocks. She deploys her wit with surgical strikes.

.. Mary is “the forgotten sister” because Austen chose, on behalf of her readers, not to remember her.

.. How many times have you wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how?

.. And “with nearly all of her sisters married and gone from the household,” The Pursuit of Mary Bennet announces, “the unrefined Mary has transformed into an attractive and eligible young woman in her own right.”

.. The character who once informed her youngest sister that she would not be dancing at the ball, for “I should infinitely prefer a book,” is now an author herself.

That serves as a mild rebuke not only to Lydia—it is hard to imagine such self-fulfillment materializing for Wickham’s wife—but also to Pride and Prejudice’s Mary-mocking narrator.

.. And to all of Jane Austen’s narrators, really, who—being judgmental and cruel and kind and omnipotent and arbitrary—mimic history’s own ruthless whims. They decide, as the victors in battles of everyday banality, who will be acknowledged, and who will not. They take it for granted that some people (the people, often, with the “fine eyes” and the “light and pleasing”figures) deserve attention, while others (the “plain” ones) do not.

.. the current renaissance of Mary Bennet is literary revisionism that suggests a more sweeping ethical project—one that celebrates the dignity of the marginalized.

Change Comes From the Margins

Indeed, there is a strong sense that not only Dada but also avant-garde in general is very much about a rebellion of the margins against the center. A remarkable number of avant-garde artists of the 19th and 20th centuries came — in person or vicariously, through their work — from the margins: Munch, Malevich, Brancusi, Picasso, Chagall, Kafka, Borges, Joyce, Frida Kahlo, Paul Celan and Fernando Pessoa, to name just a few.

.. By definition, any center is a site of concentration and intensity — after all, it’s the place toward which everybody is attracted in some way or another. That’s also what makes it so formidable. The center possesses a wealth of prospects, opportunities and resources, but also anxieties — it is the place where the possibility of collapse, disintegration or descent into chaos figure prominently. To keep such dangers at bay, life at the center has to be regulated in every detail, its energy well managed, impulses properly channeled and spontaneity standardized. Sophisticated and expensive bureaucracies are developed to make sure that the pursuit of happiness does not turn into a stampede.

.. For all these elaborate protocols are also meant to ensure that not everybody gets in and that enough are left out; this way the center makes itself perpetually desirable.

.. What usually happens as a result is that an inordinate amount of talent, energy and time is spent on figuring out the best ways to elbow one’s way to the core of the mainstream. Then, once there, one has to behave in a way that will never jeopardize one’s position.

.. If the center manages to recruit the marginals to work for its own purposes, then it is saved.