In the half-century since Stanley Milgram’s famed psychological experimentation on unwavering obedience to authority, it seems that little has changed about human impulses, other than the need for television cameras to go with the simulated electrocutions:

The producers of [the French television documentary] “The Game of Death,” set to air Wednesday night, wanted to examine both what they call TV’s mind-numbing power to suspend morality, and the striking human willingness to obey orders.

“Television is a power. We know it, but it’s theoretical,” producer Christophe Nick told the daily Le Parisien. “I wondered: Is it so important that it can turn us into potential executioners?”

In the end, more than four in five “players” gave the maximum jolt.

“People never would have obeyed if they didn’t have trust,” Nick was quoted as saying in the paper’s Wednesday edition. “They told themselves, ‘TV knows what it’s doing.’”

I’m a bit dumbfounded that none of the participants recognized the Milgram template, which was copied step-by-step. It should have been a dead giveaway that something fishy was going on. I consider that historic episode to be near-common knowledge to anyone who went to school in the States. Maybe it’s not as widely known in Europe? (Then again, I’m sure far too many Americans probably would whiff on this too.)

In fact, this is worse than Milgram’s experiments. Back then, the test subjects at least had anonymity to mask their actions — they could rationalize that no one outside of a Yale University lab would ever know what they had done. But adding in the modern-day convention of a (fake) reality show means that the French participants carried out their deeds knowing full well that millions would be watching. Draw your own conclusions on how that reflects current societal mores.

Despite the false-front this time around, Europeans seem to approach reality TV a bit too seriously:

In the Netherlands in 2007, a game show titled the “Big Donor Show” was branded as tasteless and unethical for offering a kidney as top prize. Its aim, to raise awareness about those awaiting for organ transplants, appeared to work: over 12,000 people registered as organ donors after the broadcast. That was at least three times the normal average – for a month.

Silly Euros! Don’t they know that true reality television, a la the American iterations, has no redeeming value? At best, it produces forgettable celebrity and even more forgettable gross-out spectacles. No additional electricity required.

Among the predictable anti-1960s culture-war changes proposed by the newly-reactionary Texas State Board of Education for school textbooks is an almost out-of-place targeting of the nation’s third President:

- Thomas Jefferson no longer included among writers influencing the nation’s intellectual origins. Jefferson, a deist who helped pioneer the legal theory of the separation of church and state, is not a model founder in the board’s judgment.

Despite a rationalization that Jefferson’s ideas were derivative of others’ (and thus are curriculum-redundant), it’s pretty clear that his lack of devotion to strict Christian ethics puts him out of favor with modern-day conservatives.

As it turns out, this makes for strange bedfellows. A long-standing argument on the left that Jefferson was too much of a socio-political extremist to merit continued reverence basically aims for the same result: A marginalization of Jeffersonian ideals within American political culture. While there hasn’t been a concerted push from the liberal side to excise the Sage of Monticello from U.S. history, an unexpected impetus from across the political aisle could prompt a critical reappraisal that transcends ideology.

Considering all this, I guess it’s a wonder that Jefferson hasn’t been purged from his founding-father perch yet. The notion of his ideals might be just about correct, considering that they incur offense from both sides of the political divide, might be what’s saving him.

The dismal science meets spiritual quantification in “The Economics of Sainthood (a preliminary investigation)”, a paper out of Harvard’s Economics Department:

Saint-making has been a major activity of the Catholic Church for centuries. The pace of sanctifications has picked up noticeably in the last several decades under the last two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Our goal is to apply social-science reasoning to understand the Church’s choices on numbers and characteristics of saints, gauged by location and socioeconomic attributes of the persons designated as blessed.

Among the econo-ecclesiastical terms applied to this analysis: “Saint-making fatigue” and “canonization per capita”. What, no “initial beatification offering (IBO)”?

YEOW! Just got a paper cut on my pinkie. Hurts like the devil.

Shouldn’t paper cuts would be a thing of the past? If that “paperless office” that Newsweek had predicted back in 1975 would get here already, I wouldn’t be in this pain right now. Nor would I be compelled to consult dubious preventative cures.

For whatever reason, the state of California is suddenly concerned with renaming mountaintops:

- In the San Francisco Bay Area, some religious nut objects to the devilishness inherent in Mt. Diablo, and proposes calling the peak Mt. Reagan instead. This effort appears to be headed nowhere.

- In SoCal, the unfortunately-named Negrohead Mountain (formerly even more unfortunately-named as the derogatory form of “Negro”) is no more, with the summit now officially renamed Ballard Mountain, after the black pioneer who first homesteaded there.

Must be a case of mountain fever gripping the Golden State. We’ll know it’s reached its peak when calls for a “Mount Schwarzenegger” start sounding.

In the immediate afterglow of Team USA’s 5-3 win over Canada in men’s hockey, the comparisons are already being made between tonight’s impressive upset and the 1980 Miracle On Ice win over the Soviets.

Not to detract from this win, but I don’t see it. The Americans might have been an underdog coming into these games, but they’re hardly Davids going up against Canadian/Russian/Swedish Goliaths. Like most of the rest of the Olympics squads, the U.S. is stocked with National Hockey League players, which already puts them on more of a par than the all-amateur 1980 team that bested professional/military players from Europe.

I’m sure the impending 30th anniversary of the Miracle team tomorrow is fueling the hype. Take this win for what it is: A thrilling victory over a stacked Canadian team that had the home-crowd advantage going for it. It might turn out to be one of the ages, but for now, it’s enough that it’s of the moment.

As far as I know, the Canadian beaver is not an endangered species. Its print counterpart, on the other hand, is a goner, done in by a 1-2 punch of the schoolyard and the Internet:

To be more precise, the title ["The Beaver: Canada's History Magazine"] was doomed by a vulgar alternative meaning that causes Web filters at schools and junk mail filters in e-mail programs to block access to material containing the magazine’s name… The trouble went beyond Web pages. The magazine found that its attempts to e-mail classroom aids to teachers were thwarted by its name, as were attempts to contact many readers.

It’s a sincere shame that a venerable journal like this has to succumb to such crude slang. And how primitive is Canada’s IT infrastructure that it employs such hamhanded filtering technology? In the face of these challenges, I guess it’s right to be worried about The Beaver.

Although the Canucks aren’t helping matters any with events like The Great Canadian Beaver Eating Contest…

I’d wager neither Malthus nor Moore envisioned that their theories on exponential growth over time could be applied to the implements of coloring-book art:

…“Crayola’s Law,” which states: The number of colors doubles every 28 years!

If the Law holds true, Crayola’s gonna need a bigger box, because by the year 2050, there’ll be 330 different crayons!

The accompanying visual aid above, formally titled Crayola Color Chart, 1903-2010, draws from Crayola’s own corporate crayon-color chronology. I’m not sure how this accounts for retired and renamed hues — like when “flesh” was racially de-labeled into “peach” in 1962 — but I’ll accept the algorithm, in recognition of the sheer devotion required to uncover it.

As for what’s driving this multiplicity of color-sticks from the original 8 to the current 120? Maybe the world is getting more visually subtle. Or else Crayola just likes making up new color-names for marketing purposes, and simply tweaks existing shades to manufacture expansion. There goes the mathematics right out the window…

In Mexico, it’s not the Mayan home-grown 2012 doomsday that’s the big calender-numerological worry. Rather, it’s this year, for historical-repeat reasons:

First there was 1810, when an insurgent priest named Miguel Hidalgo gave a nighttime battle cry that sent thousands of Mexicans into the streets to oust the Spaniards. Then came 1910, the year that was supposed to be the government’s crowning centennial. Parades were held, banquets given — and within a month, the Mexican Revolution began.

The numerology isn’t fringe thinking in Mexico. It’s regularly discussed in the nation’s biggest newspapers and by politicians. On a recent morning, leading newspaper El Universal awoke its readers with three foreboding opinion columns on the matter: “The Fear of 2010,” “The Impending Revolution” and “2010: Third Revolution?”

“In matters historical, sometimes numbers say more than words,” wrote one author in a piece titled “1810, 1910, 2010,” that appeared on New Year’s Day.

This kind of talk has become so common that the imagined revolution even has a name already: the estallido social, or the “social explosion.” Nearly every day, Mexican politicians can be heard warning darkly of its coming.

Disregarding the persuasiveness of a self-fulfilling prophecy, it’s hard to imagine an imminent full-scale regime change south of the border. But at least they’ve already got a name for the anticipated three-peat — branding first!

If great orators like John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan had wanted to trade depth for breadth when delivering their historical addresses, Twitter would have been the ticket.

Granted, some of the timeless gravitas is lost, like when Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech is optimally tweet-compacted:

@mlkingjr29 I have a dream: one day this nation will rise up & ppl will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

@mlkingjr29 Perfect 140! Booyah.

Far less stirring than an offline delivery from the podium. Somehow, I don’t see any future inspirational rallying cries emerging from a 140-character gist-of-it quip.

Some way or another, we’ve managed to get through the first ten years of this century without a decadal nickname.

Some publications like Slate have chosen to trundle forward with their use of “the aughts,” a term that was also used to refer to 1900 through 1909 and is synonymous with “zeroes.” Others have tried giving it a cute spin, like The New York Times’ Fashion & Style section, which calls it “the aughties.”

Ammon Shea, author of a book about reading the Oxford English Dictionary in one year, argues that use of “the aughts” is not something that has happened naturally. “It is more an idea that some people have of the way that the term should have been used,” he says…

Leo Ribuffo, a history professor at George Washington University, doesn’t think the country’s collective indecisiveness on a word is cause for concern. “The lack of a catchphrase doesn’t mean that people don’t understand an era can be very, very important,” he says. (Although he does think the decade has the potential to be considered “pretty bland” in the long run.)

Ribuffo believes that one of the decade’s best chances for securing a label lies in a prominent figure or celebrity coming up with a term that catches on with the public, such as Tom Wolfe’s decision to anoint the 1970s “The Me Decade.”

I’m pretty amazed that it’s come this. At the turn of this century, I figured the pop-cultural penchant for labeling every little thing would have ensured a snappy moniker within a year of 2000’s ball-drop. Instead, nothing. Not only that, but I detect a fairly apathetic attitude toward the issue: Most people don’t see a particular need to give a name to this ten-year span.

I can’t believe a decade that’s included 9/11, major media transformation, and economic upheavals will go down in history as “pretty bland”. Likewise, a tidy name has to emerge to provide future reference.

If Jesus always came off as too namby-pamby for your liking, the Conservative Bible Project will deliver a Scripture free from suspected liberal-leaning translative interpretation:

The project’s authors argue that contemporary scholars have inserted liberal views and ahistorical passages into the Bible, turning Jesus into little more than a well-meaning social worker with a store of watered-down platitudes.

“Professors are the most liberal group of people in the world, and it’s professors who are doing the popular modern translations of the Bible,” said Andy Schlafly, founder of Conservapedia.com, the project’s online home.

Experts who have devoted their careers to unraveling the ancient texts of the Scriptures, many in long-extinct languages, are predictably skeptical about a project by amateur translators.

“This is not making scripture understandable to people today, it’s reworking scripture to support a particular political or social agenda,” said Timothy Paul Jones, a professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., who calls himself a theological conservative.

Religious publishers already provide an alphabet soup of Bible translations for a range of theological outlooks, from the King James Version (KJV) to the Revised Standard Version (RSV) and beyond. The most widely used traditional translations were overseen by scholars who are considered the best minds in conservative Christianity.

“The phrase ‘theological conservative’ does not mean that someone is politically conservative,” said Schlafly, who lives in Far Hills, N.J.

This liberal slanting, Schlafly argues, ranges from changing gendered language — Jesus calling his disciples to be “fishers of people” rather than “fishers of men” — to more subtle choices, like the 2001 English Standard Version of the Bible, which uses “comrade” and “laborer” more often than the conservative-friendly “volunteer.”

I guess these conservative cranks have run out of secular topics on which to focus their outrage, so now they’re turning to the spiritual. When you start probing for conspiracies among chapter and verse, I’d say you’ve pretty completely lost touch with this mortal coil.

As long as they’re looking for historical material that will jibe with and validate their pre-conceived notions, I’ll point the CBP in an obvious direction: Albert Rosenberg’s weirdo Gnostic/”Aryan Christ” theories. It’s a brush of Nazism with which to tar this latest Bible-cleansing effort; but it shows how unoriginal the effort is to begin with.

A long time ago, I took quite a shining to the following quote. It’s by none other than Albert Einstein, from his book “Living Philosophies”:

“I am a horse for single harness, not cut out for tandem or team work. I have never belonged wholeheartedly to country or state, to my circle of friends, or even to my own family. These ties have always been accompanied by a vague aloofness, and the wish to withdraw into myself increases with the years.”

You could say I once identified closely with this sentiment. I still do, although decidedly less so; if anything, I think I’m moving in the opposite direction, toward more personal connections later in life. As usual, I opt for the backward approach to life. Of course, I presumably have more than enough years left to shift gears yet again.

Interestingly, beermaker Molson Canadian recently rolled out a low-calorie brewski called Molson 67. The number in the name refers to the calorie-count per bottle.

I find that interesting because, being a student of history, I instantly recognized that “67″ as a reference to 1867, the year that Canada’s nationhood was established. Invoking the year of independence, in whole or in part, is fairly recognizable as a patriotic gesture north of the border, exemplified by a storied junior hockey team in the Canadian capital. The parallel with America’s 1776 — Spirit of ‘76, 76er’s, etc. — is obvious.

It can’t be a coincidence. You have to believe that Molson purposely concocted this special beer with a caloric value that matches Canada’s birth-year, all for the subtle-but-inherent marketing value. What red-blooded Canuck wouldn’t want to knock back a couple of cold ones that suggest love of country merely when you ask the bartender for the brand?

And yet, a cursory search of the news mentions and corporate communication surrounding last month’s launch of Molson 67 doesn’t seem to mention the patriotism angle. They wouldn’t want to be overbearing with it, but I’m surprised it didn’t get at least a passing mention. Is it possible that this crucial part of the marketing message got diluted by the time the beer hit the market? Or are Canadians not sufficiently gung-ho enough about their history to care?

It’s amazing some U.S.-based brewer hasn’t thought of a similar 76-calorie beer for the American market. Molson, of course, is part of Molson Coors, which is headquartered in Denver. So I’m guessing that a red-white-and-blue festooned “Coors 76″ will appear on Stateside store shelves in the near future.

With today’s Green Bay at Tampa Bay game featuring the Bucs in their orange creamsicle throwback uniforms, there’s no way I wouldn’t throw up a post with the above Vinny Testaverde photo in it. Bucco Bruce lives again!

Actually, what pushed me over the edge was the game unexpectedly being broadcast here. That was an audible — the scheduled Arizona at Chicago game turned into a lopsided affair by halftime, so FOX decided to switch over to Buccaneer Ball. Thankfully so, as far as I’m concerned. Not least because it further extends the odd frequency of Bucs games on New York television this NFL season.

This game is an especially nostalgic mind-blower. The Bucs really went all-out with the throwback imagery: Not only the all-orange for the jerseys and coaches’ polo shirts, but even Raymond James Stadium is decked out with the franchise’s original colors, right down to the giant white Bucco Bruce helmet painting at mid-field, with no sign of the current pewter-and-red color scheme. I guess every NFL team goes to these lengths when they do a throwback game, but it seems even more complete in Tampa, probably because I was living there when those colors were current.

And of course, the sad-sack Yuckaneers are reborn on the field, with the 2009 team coming into this game winless, and looking deservedly so through three quarters of play this afternoon. Only appropriate that the opponent be Green Bay, in a revival of the “Bay of Pigs” matchups from decades past.

It’s no secret that American urban/suburban planning since the early 20th Century has been decidedly car-centric, to the detriment of pedestrian egress. The groundwork for automotive primacy started with a psychological tar-and-feathering of the traditional two-legged road presence:

The very word “jaywalk” is an interesting — and not historically neutral — one. Originally an insult against bumptious “jays” from the country who ineptly gamboled on city sidewalks, it was taken up by a coalition of pro-automobile interests in the 1920s, notes historian Peter D. Norton in his book Fighting Traffic. “Before the American city could be physically reconstructed to accommodate automobiles, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where cars belong,” he writes. “Until then, streets were regarded as public spaces, where practices that endangered or obstructed others (including pedestrians) were disreputable. Motorists’ claim to street space was therefore fragile, subject to restrictions that threatened to negate the advantages of car ownership.” And so, where newspapers like the New York Times once condemned the “slaughter of pedestrians” by cars and defended the right to midblock crossings — and where cities like Cincinnati weighed imposing speed “governors” for cars — after a few decades, the focus of attention had shifted from marauding motorists onto the reckless “jaywalker.”

The genesis of the “don’t play in the street” rule that most of us grew up with. If you’re not in a car, you don’t belong on the road (and it is a four-wheel minimum in this vehicular terrain — bikes and motorcycles are only barely tolerated).

In the automobile’s defense: Where else are they supposed to traverse? It’s not like a driver can opt for a shortcut on the sidewalk — s/he had to stick to the asphalt. A sensible delineation of pedestrian/automotive spaces, with ample room for both sidewalks and roadways, should be the goal. It’s when, for instance, residential subdivisions are built with nothing but lawn-edging roads that the balance is thrown out of whack.

Still, I’m glad I can traverse the streets of New York with the occasional outside-the-lines crossing, with little chance of getting collared for a jaywalking offense. Foot- and wheel-based traffic flows generally find a harmony in this tightly-packed urbanscape.

We’re fairly infested with ladybugs around here. I don’t mind one or two crawling about, but no joke, I’m running across groups of them everyday.

I’ve found that the best way to dispose of them is to vacuum them up with a Dustbuster, with the proper narrow-slotted attachment. That way, you avoid having to swat them or scoop them up, which necessitates having to touch them, which means you wind up with their foul-smelling, defense-mechanism odor on you.

What’s the deal with such a stench coming out of a such daintily-named insect, anyway? Seems incongruous. I had suspected that this was an instance of contradictory naming: Giving an appealing name to something that’s otherwise repellent, along the lines of the Iceland-Greenland historical misnomering.

For that to be the case, there’d have to be a corresponding nice-smelling bug with an odious name. I instantly thought of the stinkbug as the likeliest candidate. But no such luck — turns out that that critter is appropriately named for the smelly secretions it emits.

But not the ladybug. I guess it lucked out in the zoological PR game.

When it comes to historical stock market performance analysis, there’s a new beast in Wall Street’s menagerie:

“The reality is, all long-term markets in the last century, with one exception, were either bull or range-bound,” said [money manager Vitaliy] Katsenelson, who calls the up-a-little-down-a-little markets “Cowardly Lion” markets — where occasional bursts of bravery lead to stock appreciation, but ultimately are overrun by fear.

“Every protracted, secular bull market that lasted about 15-17 years was followed by a Cowardly Lion market that lasted about as long,” Katsenelson said. The only exception was the Great Depression, where the bull market was followed by a bear market.

And, in the aftermath of the boom-and-bust Great Recession era, we’re now allegedly at the start of a Cowardly Lion economic cycle. Hopefully some financial wizard will come along and conjure up a hard-charging bull before too many years.

Greg “Puck Daddy” Wyshynski saw fit to link back and expand upon my little post on what might have been had the Edmonton Oilers and Toronto Maple Leafs swapped cities/arenas in the early 1980s, the proposal of which recently has been alleged by former Oilers owner Peter Pocklington. Much thanks to Wysh for the added exposure in the hockey blogosphere.

I was inspired to comment on the Puck Daddy blog on some of the further ramifications from this what-if-ing. Included in that is Wysh’s point about the New York Rangers’ Stanley Cup drought possibly having extended well past 1994, since they wouldn’t have had a cash-poor Oilers franchise from which to import Cup-winning ringers that year (in which case, the New Jersey Devils’ new Prudential Center arena might have a seat count representing the year 1940). Another commenter pointed out that the Calgary Flames would also have been affected in this scenario; since they arrived in the province in 1980 (from Atlanta), I’d speculate that they, not a relocated Leafs team, would have become Alberta’s favored team.

Anyway, since I went a little long in my commenting on Puck Daddy, I figured I should bring that verbiage back to this blog, for personal posterity’s sake. So here it is, and if it doesn’t speak for itself, at least it’ll leave some cryptic puckery for future pondering:

As for team mergers, it’s the NHL’s distinction to have fostered the last one among the 4 big leagues: 1977, when the Minnesota North Stars basically swallowed the Cleveland Barons (formerly the Golden State/Oakland Seals, answering the question, “Whatever happened to the now-extinct 6th team from the 1967 expansion?”). The major consequence of that deal is that it brought the Gund brothers into the league, who later moved on to the expansion franchise in San Jose.

Minor quibble: The league was already set on Sunbelt expansion before Bettman, under President-For-Life John Ziegler. If anything, to further the never-was scenario, I’d think they’d have started planting flags in Florida and Texas earlier, in the late ’80s — and maybe achieve a favored-nation-status with ESPN that extends to present day? (Hah!)

Anyway, Gretzky would be the central figure here. Reminds me of similar speculation from some AP writer 10-15 years ago, who wondered what would have happened had Bobby Hull never signed with the Winnipeg Jets, thus strangling the WHA as a stillborn. Ultimate upshot: Gretz enters the Draft in the late ’70s, gets picked by the Leafs in the 2nd round (due to size concerns), and goes on to lead his hometown team to glory. (If anyone can track down that anonymous wire article, I’d be a happy camper.)

To adapt a current-day political statement for hockey purposes, call this “Buds for Oil“: A long-ago proposal to simultaneously relocate two Canadian-based NHL teams.

The biography of one-time Oilers owner Peter Pocklington says the scheme called for the entire team to move to Toronto to play in Maple Leaf Gardens. The Leafs, in turn, would have found a home in Edmonton’s new arena, which at that time was called the Coliseum.

In the book “I’d Trade Him Again,” Pocklington says Leafs owner Harold Ballard was having financial troubles and made the proposal in 1980. Ballard also wanted Pocklington to pay him $50 million in cash.

Pocklington, who was vilified in Edmonton when he traded Wayne Gretzky in 1988, says he was all for the market swap, but Ballard backed out in the end.

To find an equivalent, you could look to the 1972 NFL ownership swap between the Los Angeles Rams and Baltimore Colts. That deal actually went down, although the team colors and players remained in their established locations (until both teams left their towns years later), with only Robert Irsay and Carroll Rosenbloom swapping deeds. The Oilers-Leafs exchange would have taken things a step further, with an Original Six franchise leaving Canada’s largest city, and being replaced by a squad from the just-vanquished upstart World Hockey Association.

Had this somehow happened, the obvious result would have been the transfer of the Ontario-born and bred Wayne Gretzky from the western hinterlands to the heart of hockey country. Presumably, these Toronto Oilers would have hauled in a clutch of Stanley Cups in the ’80s. What’s more, it would have been extremely unlikely that Pocklington would have felt the financial pressure to trade away Gretzky by the end of that decade. So the Great One might have stayed with one team for his whole career, and the NHL’s Sunbelt expansion would have needed a different catalyst than the LA Kings’ acquisition of Gretzky (although it still would have happened).

As for the prospects of the Edmonton Maple Leafs, I’d have to believe they would have fared much worse. The city of Edmonton showed during the lean ’90s that it didn’t care much for supporting a foundering organization, and the Ballard-led Leafs were exactly that. Without a wildly successful team to root for, chances are that NHL hockey would have withered in Oil Town, to the point where a relocated Leafs franchise might have had to relocate yet again — leaving Edmonton without an NHL team in the end.

No telling just how much meat there was to this. Ballard could have just been feeling out possibilities for raising the cash he wanted (which he ultimately got from bringing in Molson Brewery as a partner). Likewise, Pocklington could be trumping up what was only informal talks, just to generate interest in his book. But it’s an intriguing alternate-history scenario.

Defying what seems like conventional political wisdom given the economic context, socialist and left-of-center coalitions in Europe just got trounced in several national elections.

A particular low point in organizational competence among traditional leftists on the Continent is presumed to be the reason for this failure to capitalize on the wake of the Great Recession. In addition, the term “conservative” has a decidedly different meaning over there:

Some American conservatives demonize President Obama’s fiscal stimulus and health care overhaul as a dangerous turn toward European-style Socialism — but it is Europe’s right, not left, that is setting its political agenda.

Europe’s center-right parties have embraced many ideas of the left: generous welfare benefits, nationalized health care, sharp restrictions on carbon emissions, the ceding of some sovereignty to the European Union. But they have won votes by promising to deliver more efficiently than the left, while working to lower taxes, improve financial regulation, and grapple with aging populations.

Europe’s conservatives, says Michel Winock, a historian at the Paris Institut d’Études Politiques, “have adapted themselves to modernity.” When Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Germany’s Angela Merkel condemn the excesses of the “Anglo-Saxon model” of capitalism while praising the protective power of the state, they are using Socialist ideas that have become mainstream, he said.

Aside from this, I think history provides some guidance. During the Great Depression, Europeans didn’t react to the crisis in their livelihoods by ushering in socialist/communists governments. In fact, they embraced the opposite solutions: National Socialism in Germany, right-leaning governments in Britain, and so on. Granted, conditions were more radical on the eve on World War II; still, the reaction to economic uncertainty is, indeed, reactionary among the broader population. There’s no reason to think that people will change those habits now, even in the bosom of decades-old welfare states.

As for the Euro-lefties plan to regain relevance by hitching their cart to the Green movement: Shaky option. Again, despite traditional alignments (especially in the States), there’s no particular reason for the eco-politicos to stick with one end of the political spectrum in Europe; they could just as easily achieve their policy goals by working with the same conservative governments that have just received their electoral mandates. If that’s the best the socialists can come up with, then they really are bereft of ideas.