>One thing I notice about the rightwing organizations, from the Heritage
>Foundation to the Federalist Society, is that they regularly invite liberals
>and even leftwingers to their events on the assumption that they will only
>make their arguments convincing by testing them against the best
>intellectual opposition possible. Most leftwing organizations never invite
>conservatives to their events. The results have been that rightwingers have
>gotten much better at addressing the left-leaning concerns of the population
>than the Left is at addressing the right-leaning concerns of that same
>population.
Really? That's not my experience. What lefties have Heritage & the Federalist Society invited to their confabs? It's also not my experience that rightwingers are so practiced at debate. From having dropped in on their book parties and having them on the radio now & then, I find that they're quite unused to being challenged.
You are right, I mean correct, that left-leaners are too provincial. A while back, I had Diana Furchtgott-Roth on the radio to talk about a pamphlet she wrote denying the existence of a gender gap in pay. Her "study" was crappier than anything that Alan Wolfe ever perpetrated - she looked at college-educated women aged 26-29 who'd never had a kid, and found that women earned 97 cents on the male dollar. Of course, that's way too young for any broad conclusion, and the real hit to female earnings comes from taking time off when they have kids. I cast about for a feminist economist to debate with her - it should have been a case of a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun. But it wasn't easy to find one. Heidi Hartmann called me up to yell at me for even having Furchgott-Roth on the radio - I shouldn't give her work any exposure! Barbara Bergmann, "the dean of feminist economists," agreed to debate her, but she was a rather weak debater.
Doug