Professor Hadley Arkes is looking at real estate in Malta:

After the election: I’ve been on the internet, looking at real estate in … Malta. Just think, a four-bedroom townhouse, near the new marina, in Zabbar, $350,000 USD (asking). Hmm. It is not only that the outcome of our election portends a moral disaster at several levels. It is that the people around us, our fellow citizens, the people with whom we share control over our lives, have taken leave of their sober judgment, if they had possessed any. For they seemed willing to drift happily into the camp of a candidate who is at odds with what most of them profess to favor.

Well OK, Professor, but maybe you should check out this map first.  I hear that Iraq, Cuba, Algeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo are all nice….

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Professor Arkes, both as an educator and as an intellectual.  I don’t think I’ve had another professor so engaged in the scholarship or thought process of his students.  His presence on campus is invaluable, so I’d encourage him to stop thinking about Malta and stay right where he is.  But I’m not sure that I can buy this argument:

One survey has about 80 per cent of the public opposed to the prospect of removing the secret ballot for workers in deciding on a union. And yet, Obama, receiving firm backing from the AFL-CIO, voted in favor of that policy. Most people in the country would take seriously the points made by Justice Scalia on detainees at Guantamo: that “at least thirty of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield,” and that it is wrong to put in control of the battlefield unelected judges, who have no responsibility to the people whose lives are at stake. And yet Barack Obama welcomed the decision in the Boumediene case to put the military under the control of judges.

We could go across the board, through the issues of policy, whether health insurance, taxes, or the authority of the government to track the calls connected to a terrorist network. On one issue after another, the public seemed willing to vote for a man whose positions were quite at odds with their own.

Look - hundreds of polls are taken every month, and every Nate Silver reader knows that data are only meaningful if you don’t cherry pick your polls.  But most of these claims don’t hold water anyway.  Americans routinely poll in favor in favor of habeas corpus rights at Guantanamo, affordable health care for all, lower taxes for the middle class, and the termination of warantless wiretapping.

The point is, you can manufacture any type of argument about this stuff however you want.  So I won’t attempt to do it.  But perhaps the best proof that Americans weren’t simply blinded by Obama’s charm and good looks is that they voted an additional 6-9 Democrats to the Senate and 20 Democrats to the House.  This would indicate that the American public is currently better aligned with the Democratic agenda than the Republican one.

But what’s striking to me - given Prof. Arkes’ background as one of the top natural law thinkers in the world - is that he’d rely on an argument predicated on the current public opinion.  This type of justification is usually postulated by moral relativists.  But Professor Arkes surely knows that owning black slaves used to be pretty popular too.  He’s actually witnessed the radical change in popular opinion on issues of segregation and civil rights.  Though I didn’t always reach the intended conclusions in my Political Obligations class, I found myself strangely attracted to natural law theory.  Because - regardless of what the public thinks - if slavery is wrong then it is always wrong.

Which is why I don’t care much for using polls on social or “moral” issues as justification for policy.  But in some cases I suppose they may help us understand a situation better.  Professor Arkes:

Obama brought out a massive black vote, and in California that vote produced a split of 70-30 in favor of a constitutional amendment to secure traditional marriage and reject same-sex marriage…In other words, we learn again that issues such as marriage, abortion, and the rejection of racial preferences are for the most part net winners. And we learn the lesson anew with a Republican leadership at the national level that is ever reluctant to receive the lesson.

He neglects to mention another part of the very same poll: voters under the age of 29 voted “No” on Proposition 8 by a stunning margin of 22 points.  So when Professor Arkes scolds the Republican leadership for it’s alleged reluctance to embrace a social issue like same-sex marriage, he should remember that the GOP has its future to think of.  Either it will have to move away from that ideology (see Charles M. Blow for details) or find a way to convince young voters that their views are misguided.

Of course - on this issue - Malta (which has universal health care, by the way) would be a fairly safe choice.  According to a recent poll, only 18% of Malta’s population favors same-sex marriage.