Ron Brownstein – the well-respected political columnist of the Los Angeles Times – seems to think many people who post on this blog and the blogger himself are marginal at best. He writes in his post-election wrap up:
But exit polls gauging voter sentiment showed that though he continued to enjoy overwhelming support from his conservative base, he had made only limited progress at expanding his reach among voters beyond it.
Of course these are the LA Times’ exit polls and we know how accurate their polling methods are (see under Schwarzenegger). But perhaps Brownstein is right, perhaps there are only very few of us who are not conservative automatons and able to think for ourselves, weighing various issues and making a choice, in this case for Bush. [Please keep the steam from flying out of your ears.-ed. I'm trying, I'm trying.] I doubt it, though it’s possible. But even so, I would hate to be Brownstein. What a pedestrian way to see the world. How dull and backward looking! (hat tip: Catherine Johnson)
Speaking of banality and being marginalized…
Has anyone seen the shameless stunt that has taken front & center on MichaelMoore.com?
What a scumbag.
(Then again, as Dennis Miller would say, calling Moore a scumbag would be an insult to bags of scum!)
Just who the hell got beat here, and who the hell won more votes than any president in history?
sheesh.
Roger, I think Brownstein’s little ditty gives you folks who were left and then came right a bit, a bit of insight into the abuse conservatives take from the right, simply for being conservative.
I have been called a racist, a biggot, a nazi, and a browshirt in the course of the last year, simply for being a (fairly moderate, I think) conservative. You, as a BUsh voter, will now be subjected to 4 years of your intelligence being question and being called an automoton, a Rovebot, a facist, a mindless zombie, etc.
Welcome to the club sir, we’re damn glad to have you !
I had to laugh there at CNN’s Bill Schneider explaining why so many analysts got it wrong. He blamed bloggers! He said the pros (like himself I guess) knew better than to report exit polls because they knew they weren’t a good gauge but bloggers, who don’t understand these things reported them, which I guess forced the networks to report them. So there you have it: the MSM analysts weren’t wrong, the bloggers were wrong!
Whoever’s to blame I want to thank them. I have a British internet betting account and when those exit polls came out showing Kerry leading Bush went from 4/6 to win to 5/2. I made a bet and today I have a few more dollars in my account! Good thing I didn’t listen to the (well-paid) experts.
For Brownstein to comment about anything is a travesty–those MSM talking heads last nite could not even come to the obvious conclusion that an actual vote beats an exit poll every time. That simple concept seems to have escaped the vast majority of the commentariat. If they had an IQ higher than a rutabaga, they could have done what Michael Barone did or own estimable DTP did: look at actual voting behavior as measured by votes cast! There’s a concept.
The LA Times, and its writers and editorial staff are scum–they disgraced themselves during the Davis recall and unlike simple one celled organisms, have shown no ability to adapt and learn.
Re: Matt Evans at November 3, 2004 02:05 PM
Your Nazi reference calls to mind a couple of responses I received from a letter I wrote to my local newspaper a year or so ago, which I had forgotten until now. The day it was published I received an anonymous phone call from an individual who said “I had to read your letter to the editor and now you have to listen to me.” After I inquired as to his identity and phone number, since he obviously had mine, and he declined to provide such, I chose to disregard his instructions and hang up. Couple of days later I received a poison post card that began with “Dear Adolph,” thereby providing me with a sample of his handwriting. Needless to say, I have the postcard on file, and have acquainted all concerned with the details of this incident, including the phone number of the caller, who apparently was unaware of caller ID.
I expect most of us who have spent a long time on the right could relate similar experiences, especially those who get published.
RogerA -
Thanks for reminding me about Michael Barone’s superb performance during the Fox election coverage.
Message to Roger Ailes:
Next election, cut Smith by 75% and increase Mr. Barone’s time on camera by at least 50%. I only watched Fox for the ticker (the best one of the networks) and Michael Barone’s excellent analysis.
We keep telling them the secret of their failure over and over, but the truth must be just too painful. Among the many explanations which only partly explains: liberalism is a social intelligence, not an intellectual intelligence. Being a liberal means picking up the cues, the references, the inside jokes, the ideas in fashion without having to be told. By showing that you “get it,” you show that you belong to that group — that you are a natural inhabitant and not an intruder.
Because there is some overlap — because some of the socially intelligent are also intellectually gifted — liberals falsely conclude that the possession of the one entitles them to claim the other. Hence actors, who perhaps by definition must be socially intelligent, have the most disdain for those socially inept people who don’t understand that it’s not cool to be a cowboy or work at some uncool job or live in Nebraska or something.
So it just does not penetrate when you attempt to make a logical persuasive argument. “Don’t you get it? Bush is like, stupid. All the cool kids know that. The people who don’t know that are so… oafish”
As long as they equate social intelligence with actual intelligence, they are going to continue to sink into progressive obscurity.
Roger-
Now that the Democrats have been defeated, have you turned on your own party, calling those with long standing values and ideologies similar to the President’s a group of automatons who can not think for themselves and who are incapable of weighing issues and making choices?
I haven’t read Brownstein’s article, but the quote you included makes no reference nor suggestion of any such thing.
He seems to be making reference to exactly what exit polls were designed for- gathering of statistical information so the next campaign knows where they went right/wrong. The stuff Rove turns into gold.
…and so you’ve been marginalized. So what? Either you think there is no such thing as a conservative base, or you think they are a bunch of automatons?
I am new to this world of blogs, because the ones I had come across in the past seemed to be grasping at straws. I started reading this blog and it fascinated me. In fact, it almost changed my vote. I see your readers ability to pic up on what your saying, and make great debate of it, I just think you’re really reaching with this one- or maybe I just don’t get it this time.
Actually, AVI, in a sense, I think the Left is really quite lacking on social intelligence, in that the Left does not understand real human nature.
Jimmy Carter, for example, does not understand that Yassir Arafat (may he die soon) can manipulate him effortlessly and turn around and support suicide bombers anyway.
John Kerry truly does not understand that Vietnam vets are angry about what he said about them in ’71. (He didn’t mean it in a personal way.)
Geraldine Ferraro is puzzled, astonished that the troops overwhelmingly support Bush.
The 20-year-old war protestors do not believe that anyone in Iraq could possibly think that the US Army is an improvement over the Ba’ath party.
It just goes on & on. I understand why Bush made faces during the debates!
I’ve heard people remark that if they didn’t know anything about the candidates, they’d vote for the one who seemed smarter. I used to think so too. Now I think it’d be better to vote for the one who seemed to understand human beings better.
As a former liberal, doesn’t Bill Bennett’s piece today in the National Review give you any pause ?
I wonder if any of these people bemoaning the idea that Bush’s voters listed morals as a key issue understand that many like me consider bringing democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan as well as all people to be the single most fundamental moral issue at stake in this election. Perhaps they should have asked about democracy in the Middle East instead of simply labeling this issue under the rubric of terrorism.
I wonder about that “moral values” question myself.
I think the pollsters intended it as code for some sort of traditional stance on gay rights, but who knows what the voters were thinking as they answered that question?
It could be some were thinking, “a guy who calls his fellow soldiers a bunch of war criminals on mere heresay–that offends my moral values.”
Some were probably thinking, “I agree with GWB that human beings want & need freedom–I share that moral value.”
***
All in all, that question had the same fine hallmark of quality of the rest of the exit polling.
Well, to my weird way of looking at the world, this is the flip side of Groucho’s famous, “I wouldn’t be a member of any club that would have me.” That being, of course, “I am proud to be a member of that worthy group of people unwelcome in that club which wouldn’t have us.”
Bostonian,
Those that believe that the Cartesian theorem cogito ergo sum has been proven tend to be insusceptible to logic. Exhibitions of the hubristic nature of the belief that ego is the epitome of existence shall never be in short supply. The biggest giggle of all is knowledge that those making the exhibitions are incapable of understanding the profundity of the ignorance being displayed. They walk the entire train from the Descartes powered engine through the Hegelian dining car and into the Marxian caboose without ever realizing that the train is incapable of leaving the station.
They walk the entire train from the Descartes powered engine through the Hegelian dining car and into the Marxian caboose without ever realizing that the train is incapable of leaving the station.
Someone call John Derbyshire and get that sentence preserved in lucite.
Apparently 11% of Democrats went to Bush, 7% of Republicans went to Kerry.
I imagine many on this blog are part of that 11%.
Details are on CNN’s electoral page.
Matt Evans: My favorite insult from a lefty was when one told me my “discourse” was “a terrorist and fascist discourse”. Love the sinner, hate the discourse, I guess.
mbro,
I’m at a loss to see what it is you are struggling with here. The quote Roger gave us was:
Relative to Roger’s Place (which I believe gives suitable context Roger’s post) and even in the general sense, this single sentence from Mr. Brownstein is crawling with abject stupidity.
Firstly, the wild inaccuracy of yesterday’s exit polls are a non-stop topic of discussion for the MSM (of which Mr. Brownstein is apparently a member in good standing). So for starters we know that the exot polls failed to guage voter sentiment with any reasonable degree of accuracy. At this point we can discount any “evidence” produced by said exit polls. Assuming Mr. Brownstein is sentient he is also aware of this little interesting disconnect between drawing accurate conclusions and yesterday’s exit polls.
But Mr. Brownstein, brave soul that he is, forges ahead nonetheless and presents us with conclusions he has drawn from the demonstrably useless exit polls. Now we know that Mr. Brownstein is either subsentient or disingenuous.
The conclusion the brave Mr. Brownstein wishes to share with us is “[Bush] continued to enjoy overwhelming support from his conservative base, he had made only limited progress at expanding his reach among voters beyond it.”
We know this conclusion is likely false because the exit polls were demonstrably useless. We have confirmation that it is, indeed, false because many (the preponderance?) of regulars here at Roger’s Place are “beyond” Bush’s “conservative base”.
Related to this matter and somewhat fortuitously, the TV is on and I can hear it in the background where a talking head is yapping about how one of the surprises the Dems faced was that Bush managed to reach beyond his base. Fascinating indeed.
What am I missing?
Oh, and by the way… Is anyone as amused as I am that the left has started calling itself “the reality-based community“?
Nice reality-based predictions they were making last night, surely. Whatever would Karl Popper say?
Bostonian,
Oddly enough you may have provided us with proof of the Superior Intelligence of the Left.
If doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results is considered ample evidence of inferior intelligence then doing the same thing repeatedly and getting identical results must be ample evidence of superior intelligence.
How’s my logic?
Yippee, another thread!
Thank God George Bush won.
Can you imagine what we’d all be posting right about now if he hadn’t?
Hmm.
Come to think about it, probably the same stuff, only way more depressed.
Catherine, yes, I can:
How to prevent those two dimwits from giving uranium to Iran. That would be on my discussion list.
Bostonian
Glad you made your post.
I have no idea whether one camp has more “EQ” than the other, but having been a liberal all my life, and having noted the same gaping holes in social intelligence on the left that you have, I sure wouldn’t argue that liberals have a monopoly.
Mickey Kaus (yes, I have a bit of a Mickey Kaus obsession) always interests me here.
He’s an incredibly smart guy; nothing gets past him.
And yet he has a major blind spot for the military, and, I think, for civil religion. (Seeing as how WichitaBoy is calling it ‘civil’ religion, not ‘civic’ religion, I’m going with civil.)
Just last week he applied his “Feiler Faster Principle” to the Bin Laden tape, arguing that the whole thing would have “blown over” by the weekend.
He compared the tape to Teresa Heinz Kerry’s Laura-Bush-never-had-a-real-job gaffe, saying, “Wasn’t that the 2000 election?”
Now that’s nothing if not a big, fat gap in social intelligence.
The resurfacing of Bin Laden after a 3-year silence is not on an emotional par with Tersa Heinz Kerry mouthing off about Laura.
What I want to know is, What are the equivalent blind spots on the right?
I haven’t been hanging out with conservatives long enough to find out. Though I did gain a clue in an interview exchange with Ed Goeas the other day. Goeas was explaining why Republicans do badly in weekend polls, which he said was due to the fact that only working class Democrats are home on weekends. Then he added, “No normal person talks to a pollster for 20 minutes on a weekend,” or something like that. I had a moment of recognition: oh . . . . r-i-i-i-ight . . . the heartless conservative thing.
It’s all coming back to me now.
Vernor
Haven’t read the National Review article yet. I will.
CNN was interesting on this issue today, but I have to get my son to bed . . . so I’ll try to post tomorrow.
hi, mbro!
I’m still in skimming mode, and have only hopscotched thru Brownstein, but in what I did read I didn’t see him calling conservatives automatons.
It seems to me, though, that he has to be way off base arguing that George Bush made “only limited” progress at winning voters outside his base.
I just don’t see how a 51% share of the popular vote translates to “limited.”
At this point I am really hoping somebody, somewhere got some decent exit data.
Because I would really like to know what the hell happened out there.
Bostonian
How to prevent those two dimwits from giving uranium to Iran. That would be on my discussion list.
True, but we’d probably be blaming it all on Dan Rather.
That’s a JOKE, folks.
OK, I’m going to scram out of here before people start throwing stuff at my head.
(And, uh, why don’t I just add that I am REAL glad we are NOT sitting around chewing over ANY NUMBER of Kerry-Edwards foreign policy initiatives.)
Knucklehead-
I fail to correlate the use and subsequent failure of exit poll information to accurately predict the election, with its failure to give reasonably accurate information on voter trends. They are designed as a means to gain information within a specific group, not to compare information across groups.
I think it is virtually impossible to emphatically state that these polls are useless in this regard.
They are proven useless at predicting winners, but their misuse should not invalidate their intended use.
Roger:
The LA Times and the entire MSM is trying to do anything but give Bush his due. They are trying to paint Bush as a minority leader even though he got a majority of the voting population. By making the insipid point that he failed at getting past his base they try to keep the illusion that the Times still speaks for the majority of the country. I have been reading the LA Times for my entire life, much of my political life I was a rabid Democrat. They are out of touch with most of the country. They speak from on high with the certainty that they represent what the bulk of America wants when in reality they represent a small sliver of the population. It’s ok to not swim with the tide and to stick up for what you believe but the Times is so arrogant and ignorant that they can’t read the tea leaves and realize that they are the minority view and that the people who disagree with them are the majority. The news and editorial sections are far left and the calendar(entertainment) and the book review sections are in the Mother Jones spectrum of the political world. My sister still gives me her old Mother Jones issue in a vain attempt to bring me back to the fold. I laugh mostly but at least they realize that they are a small portion of America. Browstein and the Times are isolated from reality they don’t have any idea how out on the fringe they are.
Catherine:
As a life-long liberal myself, I don’t know for sure what the blind spots are on the right.
One of them, though, is the belief that human decency is rooted in religious tradition. I won’t knock religion, but as an atheist from a family of atheists, I know that human decency is independent of religion.
There’s a very interesting book called _The Blank Slate_, which is about human nature and the instincts that we come into the world with, including our instincts about each other.
Mbro, I don’t think these exit polls are designed at all. I think they’re given precisely as much thought as this month’s Cosmo sex quiz.
mbro,
Well, take what you will from whatever you find meaningful in the exit poll data or analysis thereof. I have no doubt you’ll take what I’m about to type with however many grains of salt you choose.
The Republican party is expanding well beyond whatever it is Democrats believe it to be. There are reasons for this that are based in what the Republican Party has done to make itself more “attractive” to a wider “audience”. OTOH there are reasons for this that are based in what the Democratic Party has done to make itself less attractive to wide “audience”. Neither party will ever be attractive to all the people all the time but one will always be slowly expanding at the expense of the other. Let me give you my uninteresting little story of how I became a Republican.
My voting journey began in 1976 when I cast my first ever presidential vote for Jimmy Carter. He won. I was and, up until this very year remained, registered as an independent. As an independent and, at that time, a soldier, I came to judge my vote for Carter as a big mistake. Nothing that has happened since has changed that assessment.
My life has moved me around a bit and I’ve consciously made the decision to remain “independent” several times. I never considered myself party of either parties “base”. In fact I stubbornly insisted on remaining part of the “independent base”. My next vote was for Reagan because Carter was, IMO, such and big mistake that I felt he had to go – he deserved to be fired for poor performance. For many years I continued to be an “independant”. I split my vote according to what I thought was some reasoning but basically boiled down to whether or not I thought the incumbent deserved to keep his job or not. I can’t recall ever voting for a Republican who won and left me feeling I’d made a mistake. This has happened several time when I voted for Democrats who won but that’s relatively minor.
Over the years my circumstances have changed a great deal. I’ll spare you the autobiography and cut to what matters in terms of how I became a Republican. None of this happened in some Eureka Moment – it is a matter of slow but sure recognition as I slowly but surely “improved my lot in life”. I haven’t achieved any rarified economic altitude. The people I share a neighborhood with are ordinary middle class folks. Union tradesmen, teachers, office workers, police, firemen, lawyers, government workers, etc. This ain’t no gated, lake-front community or rolling estates but ain’t nobody starving either.
As I’ve gone from a dopey kid with “three hots and cot” and a pittance of income that quickly burned a hole in my pocket to a middle-aged, middle-class, college-educated homeowner now putting a couple kids through college I’ve passed through a few phases and types of employment. Good years/bad years, worker-bee/manager kinda variations but always in the direction I considered “improvement”.
What I eventually came to realize is that at all stages along this “improvement” road I was traveling I’d find that the Democratic Party (at least beyond the local level) complained ever louder and more insultingly about people like me.
The Democratic Party slowly but surely drove me to violate my stubborn independence and vote, as a protest against them, the straight Republican ticket. In this 2004 election cycle the Democratic Party went farther than I can tolerate and pushed me to the point of feeling that I must stand clearly against them and now I am a Republican.
Over the past few weeks I’ve having a “run up to the election” chat with a friend. She is a mature woman – a retired educator. To paraphrase her, “I’ve spent my life as a Democrat and have actually demonstrated and argued with friends and family for civil rights, women’s rights, abortion rights. But now I find that I’m a ‘Republican’ because the Democrats have chased me away! The Democratic Party today promotes civil rights only for identity groups – ordinary people like me can go to hell. Women’s rights groups don’t care a hoot about women’s rights anymore – they’re just shrieking anti-Republicans. The pro-choice movement isn’t about giving women a right to choose an abortion if they need it – its about convincing as many women as possible to have abortions. I can’t be part of this – its gone too far!”
The Democratic party is chasing members and independents away. Some of us are finding that Republicans are not Bible-thumping gargoyles who gleefully starve little children and ransack old people’s homes to steal their meds. In fact, we’re finding that Republicans are mostly ordinary folks like us who care about a whole lot of stuff and, quite frankly, live liberal lives rather simply shouting “I’m a Liberal” three times as some sort of incantation added as stool softener to some bigotted screed about how horrible “the others” are.
Bostonian:
Religion has produced many failures and many indecent moments and people. There are many Christians that know that the structures of religion often get in the way with a proper relationship with God. There are many atheists who are wonderfull, moral people and have done many good things. The one problem,IMHO, that they have is that the backbone of thought and philosophy that produces a decent society is built on the back of the religous thought and structures. I have yet to see a coherent non-God based philosphy that isn’t filled with more holes and inconsistencies then the religous ones they are trying to replace. There are many wonderfully written papers and books that have tried to create a new way but they have fallen flat or have not been able take hold with human beings. They tend to be clinical and cold. The reliance on science tends to produce lovely technical possibilities but they tend to reduce man to amoral machines and that tends to produce awfull results. I have read many excellent and often accurate articles on the problems with religous thought but when pressed to give a fully formed replacement for God I have yet to hear a replacement that either makes intellectual or practical sense. I am sure you disagree with me and this is not written in a sense of hate but the results don’t seem to back you up. I know the litany of religous monsters, but that doesn’t prove the absense of God nor do the failures of religion back up the myriad of half formed or incomplete non-God based philosophies that have never taken hold of mankind.
Kevin P–
I’m not faulting religion per se, and I have no replacement to offer. Every attempt to replace it in a top-down fashion has resulted in the same horrors of all top-down inventions.
I am telling you that human beings have instincts for reciprocity and for a sense of fair play. Numerous fascinating experiments have established this. And it should not be surprising: we are social animals, after all.
Humans have other, opposing instincts as well. But amorally seeking one’s own self-interest is not the only instinct we possess, and it is critical to understand that.
The process of socialization includes training people to trade off these instincts in a manner conducive to getting along reasonably.
***
I’m an atheist, I have a conscience, and I am not an abberation.
Kevin P & Bostonian,
Hopefully we can pull off a discussion of this sort without either side insulting the other. That will be more difficult for the “atheist” viewpoint to pull off because, well, we don’t quite fathom religious faith and, therefore, cross lines we aren’t aware of.
Kevin P – this is purely a personal observation, but I don’t concern myself with holding any comprehensive and coherent “philosophy”. I won’t argue one way or another that any religion, or all religions, do or don’t present comprehensive and coherent philosophies. I find philosophy way too much work to follow along with but I have put minor effort into trying to discover if there is one that somehow matches my own ideas. The best fit I’ve discovered so far is “contractarianism” but I’m not religious about it. It fits as well as I have a need for.
What I have arrived at is a set of values to which I choose to exercise integrity. To keep things workable in times of stress I keep a reasonably simple set of rules to heart – in essence my handy-dandy summary of the contract I accept and agree to live by. Oddly enough, as AlanC pointed to on another thread, the basics of this are the 10 commandments except that I somewhat disregard the first five (the Decalogue) since they are, for the most part, pertinent only to religion (I’ll come back to this point later if I don’t forget or get side-tracked).
The remaining five are, IMO, a reasonable guide to acceptable behavior. (I made the same “correction” to the 6th commandment that AlanC did, BTW – “kill” changed to “murder”. Since its my contract I can do whatever the heck I want with it but I prefer to have at least rudimentary justification and there seems to be at least some good evidence that “murder” is what the original, or thereabouts, meaning was.)
I find this insufficient, however, for daily life so I add to the contract the “implied duties” of the portion of the Bill of Rights which has some meaning to day to day life (pretty much One and Five). By this I mean that since I have a right to freedom of religion and speech, I have an implied duty to honor that right for others. And I don’t rummage through other people’s stuff without their permission. I contractually accept that my rights are inherently restricted by the fact that everyone else has the same rights.
Its not really this simple – gotta spice things with Mother’s Words of Wisdom a bit, but it works.
Briefly going back to the first five commandments. I don’t totally disregard them but they are HEAVILY modified. The “honor they father and mother” one is a bit obvious but “Keeping the Sabbath” is not. While I don’t keep the sabbath in a religious way I like Sunday’s a whole lot, recognize that they are very important to a lot of other folks, so I pretty much chill way out on Sundays. “No other Gods…” I borrow to mean that I can’t just go ditching the values helter-skelter when they get in the way. And so on.
I don’t mean to try and hijack the thread but I noticed you two going down this road and I find it fascinating stuff.
Knucklehead and Bostonian :
Romans,3-23- “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
Romans, 9-10, via Psalms 14-3- “there is none Rightous, Not even one.”
I thought I was clear but all that I said in my previous post was not meant as a insult to either of you and the more I cling to the truths expressed above the better my life has become. As I wrote above , simply from a scoreboard style judging of worth there are many atheists who lead a better life then I have and my critique of Godless philosophies was not meant as an individual attack on any single person. I don’t want to hijack this thread anymore then I have but I do find it interesting that Knucklehead seemed to agree with part of my idea that the best of non-God philosophies are built on the back of God based philosophies. I imagine he could state that he took the best of the Bible, the Ten Commandments, and got rid of all the messy God part of it. But ,IMHO. to use part of the Bible as a template for life without God is sort of like the idea of a Vegan porterhouse steak. It could have the appearance, possibly even taste similar, but it could not reproduce the full expression of the real thing. Once again when I say I am trying to be humble this is not a pose because if you knew me and my life you would know that I have every reason to be extremely humble.
KevinP,
You gave no offense, and I took none, even if I sounded peppy.
But I think you did misunderstand my original post, which meant only to say that I think this a blind spot of the Right.
Atheists tend to develop a thick skin about these things, but I feel like every now & then it is necessary to pipe up.
If you believe that faith is *necessary* to keep people well-behaved, that contradicts a lot of interesting empirical evidence, not to mention the personal experience of many people I know.
If you think that religious folk tend to be better behaved, I can’t argue with that. It’s likely true, but I don’t know.
Kevin P – my comment hoping for discussion without insult wasn’t meant to suggest I’d detected insult. There’s a reason people avoid discussion religion and politics – it starts all fine and dandy but quickly spins out of hand. We’ve apparently managed the politics part reasonably well here at Roger’s Place. I suppose we can manage some of the religion stuff. I was just sorta warning that we should avoid taking insult where none is intended – for example a non-believer such as me might easily say something I feel is humorous whereas a believer might be insulted by the lack of seriousness.
When I intend insult I usually try to be clear about it
I agree with Bostonian that faith (the religious type) is not essential to controlling behavior. What is essential to controlling one’s own behavior is a nothing more than a set of useful values and a sense of shame. Developing those may require “faith” of one sort or another but it needn’t be religious faith. I use something I tend to see as a portion of the canon of Catherine’s Civil Religion.