Monthly Archive

On Lebanon: “You have to resist Hezbollah . . . [and] try to strengthen the moderate Lebanese forces, which is not an easy matter.” ~Bret Stephens, OpinionJournal.com

Thus spake Secretary Rice, who had to have enjoyed the irony of talking about strengthening “moderate Lebanese forces” when the war she and the administration backed 100% did more than anything in the last 15 years to undermine and weaken those forces to the advantage of Hizbullah.  Strengthening “moderate Lebanese forces” wouldn’t have been easy in the best of times, but after the Lebanon war it seems a very long shot.

I found myself on a panel to discuss globalization and offered that conservatives might do well–at the voting booth and otherwise–to push free trade, liberalize markets, rein in farm subsidies, and keep Europe’s door open to Turkey. Nothing controversial for this crowd, I assumed, with the possible exception of the last. ~Matthew Kaminski, OpinionJournal.com

Reading Mr. Kaminski’s article, I had to laugh.  It cannot say much for the journalistic reputation of WSJ Europe, of which Mr. Kaminski is the editor, that he believed reheated economic liberalism was going to go down well with the representatives of the various Christian Democratic and Volkspartei groups assembled for the meeting.  When was free trade as such ever really a conservative position on the Continent?  Why would a Gaullist rein in farm subsidies?  Why would people with political roots in Catholic corporatism and some of whom remain committed to Catholic social doctrine want to liberalise markets?  Nothing controversial?  Could the man have been this delusional?

In a riposte worthy of George Grant or Wendell Berry came the answer to Mr. Kaminski’s “uncontroversial” ideas:

The reality check arrived from a German Christian Democrat. “For us, a human being is not only a function of production,” he lectured from the floor. “Our voters are not signing up to . . . your neoliberal, neoconservative agenda.”

To which Mr. Kaminski could only lamely add, “(Jeesh, I hadn’t even mentioned Iraq.)”  More simplistic, ahistorical analysis followed, such as:

In Europe’s biggest country, as well as in France, right-wing rulers remain wedded to the nanny state–which emerged with Bismarck–and to close alliances with guilds and big business that tend to stifle competition. In her day, Margaret Thatcher never felt welcome on the Continent.

There was a time when Margaret Thatcher would not have been terribly welcome in the Conservative Party, which was decidedly not given over to economic liberalism, as this was largely the position of the party’s opponents.  During the last fifty or sixty years of Tory drift, they, too, have accommodated with the “nanny state” as have most center-right parties across Europe, but their concerns have always come from very different sources and what they seek to preserve by means of regulation has usually been very different.  Unless, of course, one thinks that it makes sense to confuse the Christian Social Union of Bavaria with the SDP of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern because both have different kinds of objections to the free play of market forces.  What appears as European conservatives’ being “wedded to the nanny state” is very often their desire to preserve the character of their communities and the stability of their institutions.  Those who want liberalised markets, free trade and state rollback in Europe can vote FDP or some other similarly liberal party.  

In the real world, the GOP has hardly been very hostile to the “nanny state” in practise, and if the center-right in Europe makes alliances with “guilds and big business to stifle competition” the GOP simply makes alliances with corporations to achieve whatever it is the corporations want to achieve.  Those waiting the great age of federal deregulation under the GOP majority are still waiting.  Republicans expand government with a vigour that would embarrass and discredit most Socialist and Labour parties in Europe today.  Structurally and for all intents and purposes, the GOP is no less of a statist party than its center-right counterparts in Europe, but is actually far less oriented towards the common good as understood by conservatives in Europe.  Meanwhile, the WSJ mocks the ”economic patriotism” of the French at its own peril, since it clearly seems not to understand that such a platform would be a winning message here in America–and would be unstoppable were cultural conservatives to advocate it, rather than leaving it to the Democrats.    

I imagine that the appalling Victor Davis Hanson is to blame for most of this. I simply don’t see how one can read Thucydides without coming away with some quite emphatic lessons about the long term costs of imperial arrogance towards one’s political allies, how unnecessary military adventures turn into disasters, und so weiter. Not to mention Thucydides’ depiction of the dangers of cheap jingoism and pro-war demagoguery at home (it would be unfair to describe Glenn Reynolds and company as tinpot Kleons, if only because Kleon actually went out to fight the war that he had touted for). ~Henry Farrell, Crooked Timber

The quote from Thucydides included in Mr. Farrell’s post reminded me of a similar quote from Chateaubriand on the age of “Buonaparte”:

Words changed meaning. A people who fights for its legitimate sovereign is a rebellious people. A traitor is a loyal subject. France was an Empire of lies: journals, pamphlets, discourses, prose, and verse all disguised the truth. If it rained, we were assured it was sunny. If the tyrant walked among the silent people, it was said that he advanced among the acclamations of the crowd. The prince was all that mattered: morality consisted of devoting oneself to his caprice; duty was to praise him. Above all it was necessary to praise the administration when it made a mistake or committed a crime.

It is no wonder that the most fanatical of Bonapartists was Nicolas Chauvin, the man who gave his name to chauvinisme, which at the time originally meant a fanatical attachment to the cause of a particular political figure, in this case Bonaparte, as well as hyper-nationalism.  It is fitting then that our neo-Bonapartists with all their distortions of language should also be astonishingly virulent national chauvinists.

Henry Farrell gets medieval on a pet peeve of mine: neoimperialists invoking Thucydides. I’m not a big fan of our pundit Blavatskys who tell us that the dead would be on their side of some contemporary controversy. Orwell gets this the most of course. But if I was going to pick a historical figure supportive of democratic imperialism and the remote social engineering implied in transforming the Islamic world into a swarthier Kansas, then Thucydides would be absolutely the last on any list. ~Pithlord

Card put it on the generals in the Pentagon and Iraq. If they had come forward and said to the president, “It’s not worth it,” or, “The mission can’t be accomplished,” Card was certain, the president would have said “I’m not going to ask another kid to sacrifice for it.” ~Bob Woodward, The Washington Post

In other words, according to the former chief of staff, it is up to the generals to tell the President what the strategy ought to be and determine whether it is or is not worthwhile.  But consider this year’s response to the retired generals who said that the strategy either wasn’t working or that the war should never have been fought in the first place–they were widely denounced by GOP flacks and their very participation in the debate was viewed as a possible threat to civilian control of the military.  When civilian critics of the war say that the strategy isn’t working or that the mission cannot be accomplished, we are accused of buying into enemy propaganda and helping the cause of terrorists.  No wonder the generals who haven’t retired don’t dare go to Mr. Bush to say that the war is pointless!  No, I’m sorry, if Mr. Bush is so lacking in perspicacity and understanding that he cannot see for himself that the strategy isn’t working, it does not become solely the responsibility of his subordinates to tell him this.  He does not get a free pass on this one.  The pernicious influence of Kissinger’s “stick it out” mentality is there for all to see, and it makes you think that Mr. Bush would “stick it out” even if the generals told him that it would be pointless to do so.

Garner made his final point: “There’s still time to rectify this. There’s still time to turn it around.” 

Rumsfeld looked at Garner for a moment with his take-no-prisoners gaze. “Well,” he said, “I don’t think there is anything we can do, because we are where we are.”

He thinks I’ve lost it, Garner thought. He thinks I’m absolutely wrong. Garner didn’t want it to sound like sour grapes, but facts were facts. “They’re all reversible,” Garner said again.

“We’re not going to go back,” Rumsfeld said emphatically. ~Bob Woodward, The Washington Post

Many of this year’s prominent candidates are also surprisingly nationalist on immigration, playing off concerns about declining wages. “I do believe we must gain control of our borders,” Webb said during a debate. “We also must gain control over corporate America’s use of illegals. This, along with the Iraq war, has been the major failure of this administration.” ~David Brooks, The New York Times

It cannot be a good sign for the GOP that prominent Democratic candidates are able to articulate genuinely conservative sentiments on the war, corporations and immigration more ably than their opponents.  With the rise of candidates such as Ford and Webb the Dems may be beginning to understand that, to be successful, their coalition has to be broad enough to include those who, like Webb, have Confederate ancestors and are proud of them and what they fought for and those, like Ford, who express a natural affinity with believing Christians because they are themselves church-going folk.  What Brooks seems to miss is that as Democrats have become more skeptical of “free trade” once more, so has the nation.  Economic populism should work politically because, in spite of a perfectly respectable economy according to the numbers people in the country do seem unusually anxious about their economic prospects.  When the left-liberals do not engage in cultural warfare, whether in the courts or elsewhere, that rallies ordinary folks to oppose them, and Democrats start to sound more like the common man they purport to represent on cultural questions, the appeal of Red Republican rhetoric diminishes significantly.

What is a progressive globalist (a name Brooks invented to refer to the squishy cosmopolitans who have made up the political leadership of both parties) to do in an age when nobody seems to care much for globalisation and globalism?  There is always the attack on the dumb nostalgics:

And yet Democrats have reason to worry long term. This message is based on a sort of economic nostalgia, what The Economist called a “rose-tinted version of the 1950’s and 1960’s” — when the middle class prospered, families cohered, America dominated, unions thrived, Islam was invisible and immigrants were Irish and Italian.

That’s odd.  This sounds remarkably like the ”nostalgia” that has motivated most conservatives and Republicans since the 1960s.  It is commonplace to hear evangelicals talk about ”taking back” the country, which has more than its share of nostalgia.  Perhaps there is a real element of nostalgia in this “rose-tinted” view, but it is also based in a recognition that, on the whole, those conditions were better for large swathes of the country than the conditions we have today.  Conservatives used to know this and say as much.  Except perhaps for enthusiasm for strong labour unions, can you think of anything in that list that the average conservative or Republican voter would find undesirable?  Even if it were actually impossible to recover some measure of that old order, that does not make its appeal any less powerful.  To remind the voter of how things were–or how we remember them to be, which often is virtually the same thing–is to tap into their discontent with the way things are, and the discontent is considerable.  If Democrats could acknowledge voters’ importance of anxiety about social and moral disorder in a genuine way, best of all if they actually shared this anxiety and valued the same kinds of things that the voters valued, they would recapture a lot of middle-class voters who have written them off as the party of decadence and cultural rot.    

If there is one thing that reading about Bolingbroke and the Opposition has reminded me of, it is that the “politics of nostalgia” do not seem nostalgic to the people who espouse them, but seem to be the very stuff of principle and common sense.  Wanting to restore the ancient constitution or “the good old days” is not just some hopeless dream cooked up by poets and oddballs–though it may ultimately be out of reach–but is the natural and healthy response of people who are seeking a restoration of order in deeply disordered times.  If people want eunomia, they may respond favourably to those who offer them the nostalgic vision of the way things used to be when there was more eunomia to be had (or people at least think that there was, which is effectively the same thing as far as its impact today is concerned) and a promise to bring them back.  This was one of the principal appeals of Populism and La Follette’s Progressivism: to go forward to the “good old days.” 

Brooks continues:

This nostalgia is certainly common today. In their must-read book, “Applebee’s America,” Doug Sosnik, Matt Dowd and Ron Fournier quote an anxious Michigan voter: “This is going to sound silly, but I wish things were like they were when we were growing up. … I wish I could go back in time. We had stable lives. Mom could stay home, and we could afford it. Life was slower.”

But nationwide, and in the decades ahead, can a politics that evades the modern realities of Islamic extremism and the skill-based global economy really be the basis of a majority movement? I doubt it.

Certainly nostalgia alone won’t cut it.  Even nostalgia and criticism won’t do it by themselves.  There does have to be a positive alternative offered up.  However, the more things in the present differ from the memory of how much better things used to be, the more powerful the appeal to the past will be.  The more chaotic, uncertain and dangerous the present, the more people will want to return to something more like a previous era–even if that era was in some respects just aas chaotic and dangerous in reality–and the more willing they will be to follow those who paint that picture of the old days.  

But there is nothing that says return to the past must evade present realities.  Usually the return to the past comes about because people come to believe, rightly or not, that imitating the way things were done in the past when things seemed to have been better will tend to reproduce the same happy consequences.  Perhaps it does not always provide a handy solution, and sometimes it might be genuinely misleading, but it is almost always in the search for a solution for modern problems that people seek solace and answers in the experience of the past.  Again, real conservatives have always known this.  For Brooks it is a sort of baffling phenomenon that appears to him as an obstacle for the political success of Democrats.  Unfortunately, this sort of nostalgia could have limited appeal, but not for the reasons Brooks gives–we are a people cursed by an inclination to optimism and a stunningly naive confidence that there really is such a thing as progress.  If the ”good old days” are gone, it is only to make way for the better days to come–this is the fatuous assumption of so many.  On the whole, progressives in the Democratic Party are the worst offenders in this regard, but they have lately been joined by a great many Republicans.  Typically, the party in power is always more inclined to prattle on about optimism and the future, because they think that they control what the future will be, but there are built-in tendencies to think in this way across the spectrum. 

Incidentally, I love some of these euphemisms we have today, such as “skill-based global economy.”  What is the “skill” of labourers in Indonesia?  Their “skill” is to live in a poor country with a low cost of living and limited labour regulations.  There are skilled, educated workers in other countries, yes, who work for less than our skilled workers, and to this extent there is a “skill-based global economy,” which is to say that there is a global economy.  No one denies this, and no one is “evading” the reality of it.  Critics look starkly at the reality of it, see its deleterious effects on American workers and say, “What if we tried something that didn’t result in the death of American manufacturing?”  For some crazy reason American workers respond to this sort of thinking–obviously, they’re just being nostalgic for the olden times.  You know, the time back when they had stable jobs with decent wages.

President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan was under fresh pressure last night after India accused his intelligence agency of masterminding the Mumbai train bombings that killed 186 people.

Hours after the broadcast of an interview in which Gen Musharraf claimed that the US and its allies would fail in their “war on terror” without the support of Pakistan and the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), the senior police officer in charge of the investigation into the bombings dropped a diplomatic bombshell.

Mumbai police commissioner AN Roy said the ISI began planning the July attack in March and later provided training to the Islamic militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, that carried it out.

——————— 

The row coincided with the return to Pakistan of Gen Musharraf after a three-week foreign tour during which he has faced questions about Pakistan’s commitment to the “war on terror” and the role of his intelligence agency. 

But in an interview yesterday on Radio 4’s Today he defended the ISI and claimed that the Taliban, not al-Qaeda, posed the greatest threat in the region.

“You will be brought down to your knees if Pakistan doesn’t co-operate with you. That is all that I would like to say. Pakistan is the main ally. If we were not with you, you would not manage anything. Let that be clear,” he said in the interview, which was recorded after he had held talks with Tony Blair in London on Thursday. ~The Daily Telegraph

This is one of those ugly predicaments that playing the hegemon brings upon America.  We have been compelled to ignore the reality that the ISI and Pakistan are and long have been the leading sponsors of jihadi terrorism in the world–a dubious distinction that our government routinely pins on Iran with remarkable duplicity–because if we should push them too hard to stop their anti-Indian terrorism the ISI will go back to its old habits of arming and supporting the Taliban, making life in Afghanistan even more grim and dangerous for NATO forces and the Afghan government.  Musharraf’s remarks on Radio 4 are a not-so-veiled threat that he effectively holds the leash on the Taliban and that if he chose to let go, if Pakistan stopped “cooperating,” Afghanistan would quickly become unmanageable.  The resurgence of the Taliban would soon enough become a full-blown restoration–and one that we are hard-pressed to combat, of course, because so many of our armed forces are stuck in Iraq. 

If the U.S. really were fighting jihadis no matter where they were–as the more crazed of the neocons seem to think we are supposed to be doing–we would be absolutely obligated to take the fight to Pakistan, which does not merely harbour but actively aids and abets jihadis in Kashmir and the rest of India proper.  This is one of the worst-kept secrets in modern international affairs.  It is also an arch-proliferator of nuclear weapons and probably today represents the single greatest threat to the peace of Asia and the world–but why worry?  They are on “our” side, right? 

If the goal of our foreign policy instead is to neutralise anti-American jihadi groups, stabilise Afghanistan and pursue American national interests, we might well have to temper our reaction to Pakistani treachery.  But if the ISI was involved in supporting and preparing the Mumbai train attacks–and I have little reason to doubt that at least some elements within the ISI were involved–then the ISI and the Pakistani government have shown that they have not changed in the least and are no better than the Taliban in their deliberate support for jihadi terrorism.  The logic of the so-called Bush Doctrine would lead to the United States and India allying together against this arch-sponsor of terrorism.  Jai Hind and let’s roll, right?  This is why the Bush Doctrine is an idiotic doctrine–it would, if followed strictly, force us to push Pakistan back to the side of the Taliban and give our enemies access to the power of the world’s only nuclear Islamic state.  We would take our strong moral stance and bring disaster to South Asia. 

All of this has got to be tempered with the realistic assessment that any major conflict between India and Pakistan would almost certainly lead to a nuclear exchange with disastrous consequences for India and Pakistan, the entire region and all of Asia.  It is, however, imperative that Washington show some integrity and courage vis-a-vis Pakistan for a change and push Musharraf to hand over the ISI members responsible for supporting Lashkar-e-Taiba and also push to suppress the camps for Lashkar-e-Taiba that he was supposedly suppressing five years ago after the Parliament attack.  Our good relations with India require us to make holding the elements in Pakistan responsible for this atrocity a priority.  Our long-term national interests in the region dictate that we support India in demanding justice for its murdered citizens. 

If Musharraf is incapable of meeting reasonable demands to hand over those responsible (the example of A.Q. Khan shows that we cannot trust Pakistan to seriously punish its own), because his position is too weak and he does not really control what the ISI does, it should be clear that he has no effective control over the apparatuses of his own state and can only be relied on to keep the lid on the boiling cauldron that is Pakistan. 

If he continues to deny any ISI involvement, we can be more and more sure that he remains as committed as ever to the jihad in Kashmir and against India, which should not surprise us when we know that he came to power through the Kargil War and that he was one of the architects of that war, but it will tell us what kind of ally we have in Islamabad and what we can expect from him.       

Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, said any leader who had been aware of Mr. Foley’s behavior and failed to take action should step down. “If they knew or should have known the extent of this problem, they should not serve in leadership,” Mr. Shays said. ~The New York Times

As of right now, that would definitely include the head of the NRCC and the Majority Leader.  It presumably would also include the Speaker, his denials of prior knowledge notwithstanding (Reynolds’ new statements about Hastert’s knowledge of the affair are definitely of the, “I’m not going down alone for this one!” variety).  It is reasonable to say that the Speaker “should have known” about a serious ethical lapse by one of the Members–unless, of course, they think trolling the Internet for minors does not consistute a serious ethical lapse.  If they knew about this, as it seems they did, and they did nothing (which, in a majority that altered ethics rules to make life easier for Tom DeLay, is not that surprising), chalk it up to just one more example where holding onto power trumped everything else.  The leadership could have forced Foley out when it found out about the correspondence; it could at least have stripped him of his position heading the relevant caucus.  The best response, both ethically and politically, would have been to ask for his resignation and have a special election last spring so that you could make it clear that the majority party abhorred this sort of conduct while giving Foley’s replacement a fighting chance to win the election.  Now they have shown their relative indifference to unethical behaviour (again) and will probably end up losing the seat.  Someone remind me again why the party that endorses torture, arbitrary executive power, illegal searches and surveillance and aggressive war and shrugs at the ethical corruption of its members is fit to govern. 

Mr. Woodward reports that when he told Mr. Rumsfeld that the number of insurgent attacks was going up, the defense secretary replied that they’re now “categorizing more things as attacks.” Mr. Woodward quotes Mr. Rumsfeld as saying, “A random round can be an attack and all the way up to killing 50 people someplace. So you’ve got a whole fruit bowl of different things — a banana and an apple and an orange.”

Mr. Woodward adds: “I was speechless. Even with the loosest and most careless use of language and analogy, I did not understand how the secretary of defense would compare insurgent attacks to a ‘fruit bowl,’ a metaphor that stripped them of all urgency and emotion. The official categories in the classified reports that Rumsfeld regularly received were the lethal I.E.D.’s, standoff attacks with mortars and close engagements such as ambushes.” ~Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

As has been reported elsewhere, there are over 800 such pieces of “fruit” being launched every week.  That’s a lot of fruit bowls, Rummy.

Bush used his weekly radio address to hit back at critics who cited the newly declassified National Intelligence Estimate as evidence the Iraq war has worsened the terrorism threat. He said early leaks about it created “a lot of misimpressions about the document’s conclusions.”

 

“Some in Washington have selectively quoted from this document to make the case that by fighting the terrorists in Iraq, we are making our people less secure here at home,” he said. “This argument buys into the enemy’s propaganda that the terrorists attack us because we are provoking them.” ~Reuters

At least no one is misunderimpressionating Mr. Bush any longer!  I am curious which is worse: quoting selectively from the 2006 NIE to oppose the ongoing illegal war or cooking up a poorly-sourced, inaccurate 2002 NIE that was used to justify an unnecessary war?

On the question of buying propaganda, whose propaganda should we be buying (if we are indeed buying any)?  Perhaps the kind that says they attack us because of our freedom?  Well, not to worry, folks–in the past five years Mr. Bush and friends have been well on their way to getting rid of those pesky terrorist-causing freedoms, and very soon we won’t have to worry about freedom-hating terrorists coming here to strike at us.  Another question: if Bin Laden said that the sun rose in the east, would we need to deny this to avoid being guilty of buying “enemy propaganda”? 

Of course, no one serious is saying that if we left Iraq Islamic terrorism would go away or that there would no longer be a real threat at all, but simply that it is very likely that this overall threat would decrease if there were an end to the occupation of a Muslim country, when this occupation does generate more and more supporters for jihad for as long as we remain there.  Jihadis did not disappear after the Soviets left Afghanistan, but they also lost their “cause celebre” and there was less jihadi violence after that.  They turned to other conflicts in the world to advance their cause–they went to Yugoslavia after Bosnia broke away, they went to Sudan, they went to Kashmir and some did stay in Afghanistan, etc.  But if the goal is to reduce the incidence of Islamic terrorism, ending occupations that lend the jihadis‘ cause perceived legitimacy in the Islamic world is not a mistake and in fact works against what the jihadis themselves desire.  They want us sitting in one place in a static occupation where they can bleed our armed forces, force us into overreactions that alienate the population and turn more and more people against us.  For someone who believes this is the “ideological struggle of the 21st century,” Mr. Bush doesn’t have a clue what that kind of struggle entails–rule number one ought to be that you do not let the enemy create conditions more favourable to its message than yours.  While we who are opposed to the war are not buying “enemy propaganda,” the government seems intent on playing by the enemy’s rules and acting in ways that make the enemy’s strategy more effective than it otherwise should be. 

Withdrawal is not a long-term or permanent solution (indeed I am skeptical that a long-term “solution” is possible to something that is intrinsic to a religion of one billion people), but withdrawing from Iraq remains the least awful option and the one most in the national interest.  Mr. Bush attacks people with charges of following “enemy propaganda” because he has no credible answer to this option that does not make all the same mistakes the administration has been making on Iraq for four years.

For the GOP, when it rains it pours.  Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham and Bob Ney, meet Mark Foley.  Resigning in disgrace and/or being indicted or convicted is becoming quite the habit with these folks.  The funny thing is that Bob Ney still hasn’t resigned in spite of his guilty plea in a corruption case; Foley is resigning over some (decidedly inappropriate and disgusting) electronic chat and email.  The Republicans still have a decent chance of retaining Ney’s seat, while they have relatively little hope of holding Foley’s.  As the Russian Tocqueville of our time says, what a country! 

With the GOP majority-led Congress already fighting high disapproval ratings in a very difficult election year, each and every safe seat counts, so it is with some interest (and not a little Schadenfreude, I’m sorry to say) that I read of the resignation of Mark Foley over his, er, ethical lapses in chatting up underage Congressional pages online.  Besides the twisted irony that a man such as this was part of the Missing and Exploited Children Caucus in the House, which has been remarked on elsewhere, the political consequences of Foley’s resignation right now are noteworthy: under Florida law, once the primary election votes have been certified, the nominee’s name cannot be removed from the ballot.  That will assuredly reduce the chances of the relative unknown who will take Foley’s place of pulling out some kind of miraculous upset.  It is impossible to build up meaningful name recognition when your name will not be on the ballot in any case.  The district has been Republican-leaning, though before the resignation it was as safe an incumbent seat as any, which makes any chance of a Democratic pick-up here a disaster for the GOP.     

After going on for some time about how the real problem in all this is how being “closeted” harms gay men, Andrew Sullivan, as only he could, concludes his response to the Foley resignation with this remarkable line: “Better to find integrity and lose a Congressional seat than never live with integrity at all.”  So where exactly in all this has Mr. Foley found “integrity”?  Is it the part where he was found out to be a liar, or where he was discovered chatting up underage boys?  Note that in the entire thing Sullivan never said a word about the attempt to sexually pursue a minor–that might raise rather unfortunate questions about the relationship between homosexuality and pederasty that Sullivan has been keen to avoid. 

I like these Mexicans. They go to Catholic Church; They work hard; They’re learning English and they will eventually create a new blue-collar middle class.

Yes, I do worship at the high church of GDP. But I also worship at the high church of Catholic Mass. And therefore I’m able to combine supply-side economics with the teachings of Catholic humanitarianism. ~Larry Kudlow

Kudlow is quite the humanitarian. He has not seen a war he didn’t think was good for America and, more importantly, good for the stock market. Kudlow is so very humanitarian that he welcomes the creation of an exploited underclass. I don’t know for sure where Larry the Humanitarian stands on the abuse of prisoners and torture, but I suspect he is especially humanitarian when it comes to inflicting pain on prisoners–at least as humanitarian as he has been in cheering on the devastation of whole nations. He is so painfully humanitarian (his heart, look how it bleeds!) that he sees nothing amiss in comparing a border security fence with the Berlin Wall–the one designed to keep unwanted people out, the other to keep enslaved people in–because he literally cannot understand the difference between the two. To limit the “free movement of labour” is the same as commie oppression. That is what your stereotypical pro-immigration “conservative” believes. One wonders, incidentally, if he thinks Israel’s security barrier is a new Berlin Wall–I’m going to guess that he doesn’t agree with that comparison.

Here’s the main problem I have with the rhetoric of the people who keep pointing to the Catholicism of Mexican immigrants as if that were some kind of free pass for them (besides being based on the strange and entirely unproven assumption that Mexican Catholicism is as amenable to American political and cultural values as European Catholicism could come to be over time): the people who use the Catholicism of Mexicans and other Latin Americans as the rhetorical club with which to beat restrictionists also invariably happen to be the same people who think the freedom of movement across borders, a flood of cheap labour and maximising of GDP are the things that are most important in determining immigration policy. In other words, most of the people, including the Catholics, who are thrilled to see more Catholics crossing the border illegally are typically also the people who would be thrilled to see them cross the border if they were atheists, Muslims or Shintoists, because they are making these determinations primarily on economic grounds and have clearly made economic values their priority. I bet millions of Muslim labourers wouldn’t trouble Larry one bit. After all, we know where Larry stands on hateful “Islamophobia”–he’s against it, especially when it might bar the way to glorious international trade arrangements.

It is useful to them that the labourers in question are often Catholic, whether nominal or not, but it would not matter a whit to these people what religion they practiced so long as they lent their aid to building the Temple of GDP. It is also a sentimental ploy to tap into Catholic memories about past anti-Catholic/anti-immigrant prejudice in the 19^th century as a way of mobilising Catholic America against the enforcement of immigration law and the control of the borders. It is manifestly cynical for the most part, but few are bold enough to hold up their cynicism for the world to see as Kudlow is.

But at least Kudlow holds up the glaring contradiction of his two loyalties for all to see. He doesn’t even hesitate to embrace the language of “worship” to express his economic desires. I have long held Kudlow up as a kind of walking caricature of the money-obsessed conservative, but that is because he plays to the stereotype so perfectly that it is impossible not to think of him when trying to imagine what such a person would be like.

“Yes, I worship at the altar of Mammon. But I also worship at the altar of God,” the man says to us, “And therefore I’m able to combine Mammon with the teachings of Christ.” What was it that Someone Important said about two masters? It’s a bit fuzzy, but it was something about not being able to have two. So Kudlow has fortunately declared very openly which one he serves. Give him credit for being at least somewhat more forthright than all of the conservatives who say, “But I’m not a materialist! Look, I go to church!” Instead Larry preaches a new gospel: “I’m a materialist because I go to church!”

My Enchiridion Militis colleague Joshua Trevino now also blogs at The Claremont Institute’s The Remedy.  In spite of my own disagreements with Claremont’s other bloggers, I congratulate Josh on the position and I can say with certainty that he will bring excellent insights and writing to Claremont’s site. 

“The usual suspects say that some state may eventually give terrorists an atomic bomb. That is, put the crown jewels of its national power into hands it doesn’t control, in much the same way that the Great Powers at the end of the 19th Century were always handing out battleships to anarchists…

“As a practical matter, anyone who is all that willing to die for his principles seems to manage to do so early in his career, well before he achieves high office. Most of the people running Iran today could have easily become martyrs under the Shah if they’d felt like it. Somehow, they avoided it.” ~Greg Cochran, The American Conservative (via Steve Sailer)

 

 What a refreshing experience to see someone else exploding this particular nonsensical argument.  This is one of those claims that’s so ”serious” that you have to provide an answer to a scenario that is about as likely as happening as the island nation of Mauritius landing a man on the man.  It is a potential threat as likely to come into being as the great existential threat that America will someday face from Burkina Faso.  It is one of the most implausible scenarios in the book, yet every time we have a proliferation “crisis” (i.e., a nation Washington dislikes seeks weapons that our allies developed without penalty of invasion) this absurd possibility is held up as if it were the silver bullet that kills all realist doctrines of deterrence. 

Over the years, I have occasionally dismissed the same claim (”they might give the bomb to terrorists”) whenever supporters of intervention would throw it up as an example of why containment and deterrence no longer work.  Their spiel goes something like this:

“You see, they’re crazy and suicidal, and if you don’t believe that just consider that they might hand it off to terrorists who are definitely suicidal.  And why would they give away their most powerful weapons to people who might turn around and use them for a completely different purpose?  Didn’t you hear me before?  They’re crazy and suicidal!”

As I said a year and a half ago in one of my early anti-Hanson posts:

Next is the canard of Iran arming terrorists with nukes. One does not need to be an expert in Near Eastern affairs (and Mr. Hanson certainly is not) to know that no state, whatever its ideology, will ever hand over nuclear weapons to some rogue third party, no matter how much it may theoretically agree with that group. Raison d’Etat and a basic logic of the government keeping control over such an immensely powerful weapon dictate that any state that invests its resources in such a weapon will not squander that weapon on a group over which it has no meaningful control, but to which it will inevitably be linked should that group decide to use the weapon. The political calculation of the risks involved would show any remotely sane person, however fanatical he might otherwise be, that there is nothing to be gained by such a course of action. Even if some ayatollah were moved to pursue such a mad plan, the military would probably sooner depose him than allow such a stupid decision to be carried out, or he would be ousted by other elements of the clerical regime itself. Nothing is more certain in politics than the desire of a state to preserve its existence and power, and every ideology will come crumbling down when it conflicts with that basic imperative of Realpolitik.

Earlier this year I hit a similar note in response to the Official Persophobe Hysteric, Stanley Kurtz:

People who obsess about an Iranian bomb frankly baffle me. What do they think the Iranians are going to do with nuclear weapons? What do all states do with nuclear weapons? They stockpile them and use them as a deterrent. They do not wantonly launch them, nor do they hand them off to terrorist or paramilitary groups. The chief reason to fear Iranian nukes is the threat of their use, and particularly the threat of their use against America or an ally of ours. The Iranian government is not so daft as to invite openly the complete annihilation of their country by doing anything so transparent as first-strike nuclear attacks against anyone.   

And then again more recently I answered Mario Loyola on this same charge:

This is to hide behind the propaganda that Iran will give away one of its yet-to-be-made nukes to some third party (presumably Hizbullah)–something that no nuclear weapon state has ever done and which no remotely self-interested government ever would do.   

One historian has recently suggested that the strain of isolationist thought in Bolingbroke’s writings was an important European source for Washington’s Farewell Address and its warning against foreign entanglements.  Particularly meaningful to Washington was the statement of English aloofness contained in the Patriot King.

Other Nations must watch over every motion of their neighbors; penetrate, if they can, every design; foresee every minute event; and take part by some engagement or other in almost every conjecture that arises.  But as we cannot be easily, nor suddenly attacked, and we ought not to aim at any acquisition of territory on the continent, it may be our interest to watch the secret workings of the several councils abroad; to advise and warn; to abet and oppose, but it never can be our true interest easily and officiously to enter into action, much less into engagements that imply action and expense.

————————————-

Bolingbroke may have been a nationalist preoccupied with patriotic service, but his nation was not expansionist or interventionist.  His Tory realism might encourage wars at sea to protect England’s interests, but it did not seek to spread any moral attitude or political ideology, as seventeenth-century Commonwealthmen had sought to do; it did not seek to intervene on the continent in the name of liberalism and freedom as nineteenth-century liberals sought to do. ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle

Come home, America–and come back to Bolingbroke.

Even if it be granted that Bolingbroke was a “patriotic” nationalist when not in exile, it should be noted that he was not an expansionist, like the seventeenth-century Commonwealth nationalists.  As often with nationalists, a heavy streak of isolationism runs through his writings on England’s dealings with the outside world.  This isolationism is an outgrowth of Bolingbroke’s emphasis on the supremacy of national interest in determining foreign policy.  In his discussion of national interest Bolingbroke emerges an early proponent of what has come to be called the realist theory of international politics, which in England is most closely identified with Tory writers and statesmen….Tory realism holds that the determining factor in a state’s attitude to other states is its national interest, not sentiment, morality, or ideology. ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle

That Bolingbroke and his Opposition appeared to later radicals with a radical face is neither surprising nor difficult to reconcile with his basic conservatism.  Part of the ideological dynamic of his politics was “populist,” even though an early and most aristocratic populist manifestation, and inherent in populism is a force at once intensely radical and reactionary.  It is always “the people,” be they yeoman farmers, urban small traders, or failing gentry who are being victimized by the small conspiratorial financial interests.  In Bolingbroke’s view, these conspirators had captured the government; the King, ministers, and legislature spoke at their bidding.  Bolingbroke’s Opposition inevitably took on a popular tone in its perpetual plaint that the government and its ministers and legislature were alienated from the people, the true source of power.  There was, of course, much more to Bolingbroke’s Opposition than this.  What concerned him particularly was that the conspiracy of government and vested interest had removed “the people’s” natural leadership from power.  In defending the one, however, he often had to defend the other; for “the people” and the aristocratic leadership faced the same enemy. ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle

Bolingbroke’s conservatism stands not only as the fons et origo of Country-Jeffersonian-Republican agrarian resistance to the new Court of the Federalists and Whigs, but perhaps even as the core of the entire Anglo-American populist tradition.  I will go so far as to say that, as good as Burke can be, it is the Viscount Bolingbroke and not the Irish Whig who represents the real source of Anglo-American conservatism.  It is especially to him that we should look as “the reactionary imperative” becomes ever more imperative. 

Conservatism as such did indeed become an articulated position only in response to the French Revolution, but Bolingbroke’s Opposition laid the groundwork for the arguments of the American tradition far more and defined an anti-liberalism that was also anti-Lockean but which appropriated the Whig mythology of 1688 as a moment of constitutional renewal–in spite of the historical falsehood of this claim–so that the “modern Whigs” might be defeated.  As Jefferson did with the Constitution, and as American conservatives have attempted to do with the entire liberal project, Bolingbroke sought to recast the usurpation of 1688 as a return to political moderation, the restoration of the mixed constitution that Walpole was then perverting and destroying.  He sought to make the best of the political settlement at hand and guard English liberties against the corruption that was now ruining them.  To better fight Walpole, he did not attach himself to embittered Jacobitism, and instead embraced the commonwealth vision of Harrington and passed it on to the English Tories and American patriots who embraced it equally. 

The unification of the interests of aristocrats and the people against consolidation and moneyed interest finds strong parallels in early Jeffersonianism, the alliance of Southern aristocrats and “plain republicans” of the North and the alliance of planters and yeomen in the Southern Democracy.  Bolingbroke, Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Stonewall Jackson, Bryan all fought some different form of the moneyed interest and “bank rule”; all fought in their different ways the corruption and consolidation of government.  The same themes of defense of the small town, small firm and small farm against the encroachments of concentrated wealth and power and the confluence of the two in government circles recur again in the history of American Populism in the 19th century and even find echoes in the career of the Insurgent Progressive, Bob La Follette.   

Bolingbroke’s reactionary radical combination of defending the people and their liberties against the usurpations of the government and the moneyed interest, the Opposition’s rejection of the standing army, and its aversion to war and foreign entanglements all anticipate many of the themes developed by American agrarians in their arguments and taken up again by their latter-day populist inheritors.  Look homewards, America–and look to Bolingbroke.

To preserve liberty by new laws and new schemes of government, whilst the corruption of a people continues and grows, is absolutely impossible: but to restore and preserve it under old laws, and an old constitution, by reinfusing into the minds of men the spirit of this constitution, is not only possible, but is, in a particular manner, easy to a King. ~Bolingbroke, The Patriot King

Via Leon Hadar

President Bush is absolutely certain that he has the U.S. and Iraq on the right course, says Woodward. So certain is the president on this matter, Woodward says, that when Mr. Bush had key Republicans to the White House to discuss Iraq, he told them, “I will not withdraw, even if Laura and Barney are the only ones supporting me.” ~CBS News 

Via A.C., I see that Mark Rose will be with George Bush until the bitter end on Iraq. I’m glad to see some good ole’ fashioned American gumption and sticktoitiveness. Think of the great loss to history if Napoleon had turned back from Moscow, or the Donner Party had stopped at a Holiday Inn.

So stick with it Mark, I’m sure you will be vindicated in the end — if not on Earth, then on whatever planet you currently inhabit. ~Clark Stooksbury

I think I understand why Bush is so averse to withdrawing from Iraq.  It would require him to think, one might even say “obsess,” about Iraq far too much–like all those losers in fakeworld–and then he would cease to be a “real” person.  He might even lose his mojo again, which no one wants.

But here is the intriguing question in our age of kakistocracy: what if Laura and Barney also decided that Bush was wrong on Iraq, that it was time to leave?  What if Barney (who is, correct me if I am mistaken, his dog) decided to cut-and-run, or at least play fetch with strategic redeployment?  Apparently Iraq policy hinges on the opinions of Laura Bush and the presidential dog, so we need to change their minds pronto!  As I see on the dog’s website (yes, friends, the President’s dog has a website–we are indeed doomed), he has a ”birthday” on Saturday, so maybe we can get him something nice and, in return, he will convince Bush that he is mistaken in his Iraq policy.  It’s worth a shot.  We certainly don’t seem to be getting anywhere with the humans.   

President Bush barely mentioned the war in Iraq when he met with Republican senators behind closed doors in the Capitol Thursday morning and was not asked about the course of the war, Sen. Trent Lott, R-Mississippi, said.

“No, none of that,” Lott told reporters after the session when asked if the Iraq war was discussed. “You’re the only ones who obsess on that. We don’t and the real people out in the real world don’t for the most part.”

Lott went on to say he has difficulty understanding the motivations behind the violence in Iraq.

“It’s hard for Americans, all of us, including me, to understand what’s wrong with these people,” he said. “Why do they kill people of other religions because of religion? Why do they hate the Israeli’s and despise their right to exist? Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me.” ~CNN

Via Doug Bandow

Isn’t it encouraging to know that the administration and the Senate Republicans don’t “obsess” about something as minor as the Iraq war?  I mean, they have more important things to do than worry about the old “central front” in the “ideological struggle of the 21st century,” as do all of the “real people out in the real world.”  Pay attention, kids–it’s an election year!  Can’t be wasting time on war-this and war-that.  People who want to talk about Iraq just want to divide this country, and we can’t have that.  After all, there’s a war on!  

Presumably this means that the Iraqis themselves are either not “real people out in the real world” or that they, too, are fairly easygoing about the course of the war these days.  Which is it, Senator?  The rest of what must be the fake world is dying to know!

The rest of Lott’s comment is almost unbelievable.  I mean, I have a hard time believing someone actually said something this ridiculous.  It is right up there with Rodney King’s “Why can’t we all just get along?” in its vapidity. 

What’s wrong with these people?  Well, how much time do you have?  In a sense, there is nothing wrong with them that isn’t also wrong with everyone on this planet.  What is wrong with them is that they are human and are powerfully attached to a religion that glorifies violence as a means of fulfilling religious duty.  (This would be the moment for my necessary paleo remark that culture and religion are very significant and determinative of the kind of political life a people will have.)  Why do people kill in the name of religion?  Because, well, they believe it is part of being religious and as a way of defending their religion and, yes, glorifying their god, which may not seem like much of an answer to some, but if you ask a patriot why he kills on behalf of his country or why a nationalist kills on behalf of the Nation he would give much the same answer.  Take patriotic zeal, then magnify the importance of the thing being defended by a hundred, and you begin to understand why they do what they do.  Why do liberal interventionists will the deaths of supposed violators of human rights?  Because they think they are protecting something precious–religious war, when understood in the same way, seeks to protect one of the most precious things of all.  We used to understand this, when we considered the Faith to be something precious and worthy of complete devotion. 

If a man believes his religion has been insulted or his coreligionists injured by others, even though his religion preaches peace and forgiveness, the passion to vindicate the honour of the religion through acts of revenge is deep-seated and powerful.  Christians are called to forgive and pray for their enemies, which is often extremely difficult, because the same passion to defend the honour of the Cross exists in us.  Of course, God reserves vengeance, as He reserves judgement, for Himself–it is not our place.  But as with so many things we seek to claim for ourselves roles that are not ours. 

It is a basic human passion, one that can be restrained or unleashed by the religion in question, but one that every normal human being–some might call them “real people”–ought to be able to understand.  Understanding is not approval, but it should hardly be so difficult or so foreign to us.  The role of honour and vendetta in dictating behaviour, so completely familiar and understandable to Western men until not that long ago, is central to understanding all of these conflicts.

As for Lott’s last asinine question and statement, I am moved at once to laughter and despair that men such as this are responsible for making policy and passing laws in our government.  It takes someone with a truly superficial mind and superficial acquaintance with the problems of the region to focus (one might even say “obsess”) on the similar appearance of Sunni and Shi’ite Arabs, as if that, rather than their names, where they live, where they go to worship and who their relatives are, was going to be the way that people from different sects distinguish themselves from each other.  I wonder whether this is some particularly American hang-up that makes it so that Americans cannot grasp group differences if they are not marked clearly and plainly by a colour line.  Thus the Balkan wars in the ’90s must have seemed equally baffling to Mr. Lott–Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim, who can tell the difference?  Of course, to those who know how to look and know what to look for, the differences can become apparent readily enough, but even when they are not apparent they remain powerful differences.   

In an article for the Nation I have only glanced at, Blumenthal apparently couples us with Wes Pruden and Fran Coombs of the Washington Times, both rather moderate conservatives and good Republicans. Pruden, remember, is the “ultra-right-winger” who fired Sam Francis (in fairness to Pruden, I’m not sure he had much choice), while Fran is the husband of Marian Coombs, who has, gasp, written for Chronicles on a number of occasions. Pruden and Coombs, whose career prospects might be damaged if their names are associated with us, should sue the Nation for libel. The Nation, by the way, used to be better than this, though I do remember how difficult it was to talk seriously about anything with Victor Navasky, when we did a radio show together. To twist his tail a little, I pointed out the convergence of our opinions on several key subjects. In horror, he squeaked, we had nothing in common. What is he afraid of, that someone might take him for a normal American? ~Thomas Fleming

Is it at all ironic that free enterprise is mostly defended only by people who have never had a real job in the for-profit sector? ~Thomas Fleming

The following Republican members of the House of Representatives voted against the Torture-”Terrorist” Tribunal bill (HR 6166) today.

Ron Paul, Roscoe Bartlett, Wayne Gilchrest, Walter Jones, Steven LaTourette, James Leach, Jerry Moran. ~James Bovard, Antiwar Blog

Good for these men.  Leach and Paul have distinguished themselves as being opponents of this bill and the war, and Jones later came around to seeing the war as a mistake, but I was genuinely surprised to not find Hostettler’s and Duncan’s names on this list of dissenters.  Now someone please remind me which party is the defender of “traditional American values.”  Somehow I keep getting distracted by all of these endorsements of torture and extralegal tribunals.

Here is a key element of the Militiary Commissions Act of 2006:

No alien unlawful enemy combatant subject to trial by military commission under this chapter may invoke the Geneva Conventions as a source of rights. 

In other words, the government denies these prisoners the protections of international conventions our government has ratified because it pleases them to do so.

Update: This is a description of some of the main provisions of the bill from The Chicago Tribune:

But other human-rights lawyers are less sanguine. “This bill doesn’t say what techniques are prohibited,” said Jumana Musa, an advocacy director of Amnesty International. “That is the problem with a system that has no check and an administration with a long and colorful record of broad interpretations of the law.”

The measure would define under the War Crimes Act “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions, such as torture, cruel or inhuman treatment and the intentional infliction of “serious bodily injury.”

It also gives the president authority to interpret the Geneva Conventions by an executive order made public and subject to congressional review. The order will not list specific techniques, and no one knows for sure what exactly the order will say.

The bill shields U.S. officials from prosecution under the War Crimes Act retroactively to 1997, when the original law was passed criminalizing violations of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

In short, another capitulation to executive usurpation and abuse–for the sake of freedom, no doubt.

In this crucial dimension of the War on Terror, what counts, as in Indonesia, Egypt, and Argentina, is American diplomacy. America’s diplomats should reach out — however discreetly — to Cuba and other countries where significant elements of the government see no future on the Chávez bandwagon. The lodestone should be flexibility. A lot is riding on the deftness, imagination, and resourcefulness of President Bush. ~Mario Loyola

Happily, the stakes are not as high as Loyola makes them seem, so there is rather less riding on the “deftness, imagination and resourcefulness of President Bush.”  Thank God.

But Chávez represents something new in postwar history. Chávez seeks to divide the world into two camps, two poles in opposition: north v. south, colored v. white, collectivist v. democratic, “humanist” v. “capitalist imperialist.” Turning the United Nations into its power center, the Non-Aligned Movement, rising as a new hostile superpower in a new cold war, will find itself increasingly drawn to the intoxicating poison of violent Muslim extremism. And the United Nations is now its home base. ~Mario Loyola

Chavez is, of course, a blowhard and a despot.  He is also a democratically elected blowhard and despot, which makes him a curious leader for the world’s anti-democratic forces.  Collectivism and democracy are typically not opposed to one another, but the former often follows from the latter and takes its destructively populist logic from the democratic principles of equality and popular sovereignty. 

The United Nations is notoriously powerless, and is also still under the heel of the five permanent Council members.  Normally the main complain from the right these days is that the U.N. is useless and impotent, not that it is the launching pad for world domination.  To make this organisation into your power base is about as threatening to the real powers of the world as a boy’s tree fort is threatening to the military base down the street.  By all means, dismantle the U.N.–I would be among the first to cheer on hearing of its dissolution–but spare us the stories of the power-hungry (which Loyola keeps repeating again and again because, of course, our politicians never do anything for the sake of power) developing world intent on challenging us. 

For the NAM to be anything like a superpower, the constituent members of the NAM would have to be able to wield the kind of financial, military and political power of a superpower, and they simply haven’t got it.  Some of their members have some oil, I grant you, and they can make some mischief in that area, but otherwise they represent a potentially annoying but minimal challenge to America and Europe. 

Of all the chimerical enemies dreamed up by the threatmongers, the terror that is the Non-Aligned Movement is as insubstantial as it gets.

If one of the chief problems with Wal-Mart is its tremendous concentration of wealth and power and its practise of wielding its enormous power over its suppliers to their and our disadvantage as a “monopsony,” it seems fairly clear to me that its ability to put large pharmaceutical companies over a barrel and dictate damaging price reductions that “benefit consumers” should worry a great many people.  It should at least bother the people who find Wal-Mart’s practises towards its suppliers troubling.  If all we’re concerned about is the end result (oh, look, cheap drugs!), Wal-Mart is again saviour of the poor and the great benevolent hegemon.  As long as people don’t mind taking their bread (or medicine) from an overlord, because he is a benevolent overlord, who can be bothered to complain?  As usual, I will, and for just these reasons.

L’habitude d’aimer l’argent corrompt egalisment les moeurs et la politique de l’Angleterre; la corruption des suffrages dans le Parlement y est devenu un moyen aise d’introduire le Despotisme. ~Marquis D’Argenson, Considerations sur le gouvernement Ancient et Present de la France

Steve Sailer quotes one of several readers writing in on the dating scene today:

My experience in the undergraduate dating scene, such as it is, has been that Feynman’s admonition against paying compliments to women is somewhat outmoded. He was writing at a time when chivalrous traditions in America were still relatively strong, everyone thought that the way to woo and wed was trhough [sic] whispering sweet nothings. Not to be melodramatic but today chivalry is dead or at least in a persistent vegetative state. What this means for the women in my social circle is that they almost never receive compliments from men. I noticed this and have found that when I do issue a compliment they are remarkably greatful [sic]. Obviously compliments alone don’t do it, you have to show enough ‘machismo’ to be in the game, but their rarity has allowed compliments to regain a certain amount of value today.

Not to rain on anyone’s parade, but this seems to me to be almost completely and in all ways untrue.  Not only are compliments rare, but when they are offered they are a sure sign of a man who has no idea what he is doing.  Men who persist in this habit are almost assuredly living in a time warp or are, like myself, dedicated reactionaries. 

I do not presume to know much of anything about this part of life, but I can tell you that chivalry is (unfortunately) only too dead and complimenting ladies has gone the way of wearing powdered wigs and waistcoats–as has the distinction of referring to some women as ladies–because the compliments, while technically appreciated, are worse than useless.  They are in most cases counterproductive or as good as putting up a giant, blinking sign that says, “Hey, I’m desperate and a walking, talking anachronism!”  This is a loss for the ladies, and for women in general, and a loss for civilisation, but there it is.

Kevin Jones has tracked down an online copy of The Traveller by Oliver Goldsmith, part of which I quoted from Kramnick’s book on Bolingbroke here.  The entire poem is worth reading, but these two parts most caught my attention:

Thine, Freedom, thine the blessings pictured here,

Thine are those charms that dazzle and endear:

Too blest indeed were such without alloy;

But fostered even by freedom, ills annoy.

That independence Britons prize too high,

Keeps man from man, and breaks the social tie;

The self-dependent lordlings stand alone,

All claims that bind and sweeten life unknown.

Here, by the bonds of nature feebly held,

Minds combat minds repelling and repellled;

Ferments arise, imprisoned factions roar,

Represt ambition struggles round her shore;

Till, over-wrought, the general system feels

Its motions stop, or frenzy fire the wheels.

———————————

O then how blind to all the truth requires,

Who think it freedom when a part aspires !

Calm is my soul nor apt to rise in arms,

Except when fast approaching danger warns:

But when contending chiefs blockade the throne,

Contracting regal power to stretch their own;

When I behold a factious band agree

To call it freedom when themselves are free;

Each wanton judge new penal statutes draw,

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law;

The wealth of climes, where savage nations roam,

Pillaged from slave to purchase slaves at home;

Fear, pity, justice, indignation start,

Tear off reserve, and bare my swelling heart;

Till, half a patriot, half a coward grown,

I fly from petty tyrants to the throne. 

I can understand why Republicans would be annoyed at the piling-on on George Allen, but how exactly is it “anti-Semitic” to read something into it when Allen seemed angry and embarrassed at the suggestion that he had Jewish ancestry?  I know turnabout is fair play, and conservatives frequently enjoy that moment of “Gotcha!” when they think they can pin the old accusations of racism and anti-Semitism, deployed for so long against the right as recklessly as you please, on the other side, but it is my estimation that this “scandal” of the netroots is probably overblown and exaggerated by the very same kind of hypersensitivity that has motivated the obsession with George Allen’s prejudices.  More to the point, the example of the Cardin staffer sent over by MoveOn seems to be something of an isolated incident.  It is hardly the makings of a general trend. 

The doctrine of jihad—violence in the path of Allah with the objective of converting, killing, or else subjugating and taxing the “infidel”—was Muhammad’s most significant original contribution to world history and to the history of ideas, as I have argued elsewhere at some length. It defined Islam in its earliest days, it has defined the relations between “the world of faith” and “the world of war” ever since, and—as we’ve seen from the reactions to Pope Benedict’s lecture—it continues to define the mindset of Islam to this day. ~Srdja Trifkovic

This is also the only segment of Pope Benedict’s lecture with which a reasonable person will take issue. He seems to suggest that Muslims can be “our partners in the dialogue of cultures” on the basis of God-as-Logos, and if that is so, he is wrong.

For all of the reasons quoted above, Islam is not amenable to dialogue. Among non-Muslims it seeks converts or subjects, not partners. After two decades of “dialogue,” many Christians have made many concessions and uttered many apologies for their side’s supposed past misdeeds, without getting anything in return. They merely encouraged the other side in the belief that there is no need for any “dialogue” since the apparent lack of rock-solid faith and conviction on the Christian camp makes their ultimate embrace of Allah and his prophet a logical outcome. Their expectations were kindled in 2001 when Benedict’s predecessor kissed the Kuran inside a mosque in Damascus—built from a desecrated Christian cathedral—and exclaimed, “May the hearts of Christians and Muslims turn to one another with feelings of brotherhood and friendship.” Such gestures encourage the hope that clear re-stating of Islamic dogma will prompt infidels to see the light.  ~Srdja Trifkovic

Islam has a moral philosophy and a legal code that explicitly denies the possibility of judgment based on natural morality or on the allegiance to any other source of authority but itself. It mandates submission to the letter of revealed law (Kuran) or to the precedent of the Prophet (Hadith). Analogies thus derived stand above reason, conscience, or nature. A Muslim knows that a thing is right simply because Allah says so, or because his prophet has thus said or done. There is no “spirit of the law” and no rationality behind the revealed law for human reason to discover. There is no critical discernment and revelation and tradition must not be questioned. No other standard of good and evil can be invoked. Islam’s denigration of the individual conscience befits the demand for an obedient servant’s prostration before a capricious master whose commands have no rational basis. The political consequences are crucial for societies that derive their concept of authority from this image. Any notion of freedom distinct from that implicit in that complete submission is forbidden and sinful.

It should be added that the Mutazila Islamic sect Mu’tazili in eighth-to-tenth century Baghdad tried to use the categories and methods of Hellenistic philosophy to assert free will and responsibility for one’s actions, and claimed—as per Professor Varisco—that Allah would be unjust if he predestined all human actions; but they were denounced as heretics. In orthodox Islam, any notion of freedom distinct from that implicit in the complete submission to the will of Allah is not an ideal, but a perilous trap. Only Allah creates our acts and enables us to act, while we are but transmission belts with a preordained balance of debit or credit that determines our destiny in the hereafter. Even prayer is a payment of debt, not communication, offered in the hope of placating a capricious and unpredictable Master. ~Srdja Trifkovic

Even more surprising is the Journal’s suggestion that parties are a healthy phenomenon.  In an age characterized by violent opposition to faction and party Walpole’s writers stand out as exceptions in their favorable reaction….No wonder, then, that Burke looked back on Walpole as a practitioner of party government with such pleasure.  Burke, the zealous missionary of party, had only praise for Walpole.

Sir Robert was an honorable man a sound Whig.  He was not as the Jacobites and discontented Whigs of his time represented him, and as ill-informed people still represent him, a prodigal and corrupt minister.  They charged him in their libels and seditious conversations as having first reduced corruption into a system.  Such was their cant.  But he was far from governing by corruption.  He governed by party attachments.  The charge of systematic corruption is less applicable to him, perhaps than to any minister who ever served the Crown for so great a length of time. ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle

In his assessment of Walpole and his enthusiasm for faction, Burke did not do himself any credit, since Walpole was assuredly the master of what the Opposition called corruption–the buying of placemen and loyal MPs with Treasury money, the purchase of hack writers to shill for Government policy, etc.–and to govern by party attachment did appear to Bolingbroke and ought to appear to American conservatives as something deeply pernicious for a republican system or indeed for any mixed constitution.  It does not speak well for the “spirit of party” that Walpole and his associates were the ones who enthusiastically endorsed party government and fashioned the myth of a virtually permanent two-party politics.     

While the latest chatter is that the Dems may win back the Senate and not take over in the House and the new election analogy is 1986 (would that mean the equivalent of Iran-Contra is just over the horizon for Dobleve?), I remain unpersuaded of this latest view (of course, it was only a month ago that the Dems winning the Senate was a crazy dream entertained only by Kossacks and fools–pardon the redundancy).  Anyway, I made my reckless predictions, and I’m sticking to them: Dems win both houses, albeit by narrow margins. 

However, it occurs to me that narrow Democratic victories on both sides of the Capitol could be the worst of all worlds in a way that I hadn’t considered until just recently.  Narrow margins of victory–one or two seat majorities in both houses–will be written off as generic second-term discontent and explained away by the professional hacks, er, commentators as they point out the local reasons for specific Republican losses (in Virginia, they will have plenty of alibis that have nothing to do with national trends; in Pennsylvania, they will spin defeat as having nothing to do with Iraq, which will be only partially true; in Indiana they will write it off as weird anti-Daniels sentiment, which is also partly true, etc.).  That means that instead of a chastening defeat, a true humiliation that would shake the party and the “movement” to the core and force them to stare long and hard at themselves in the proverbial mirror, they will instead feel that they have suffered a mild rebuke, from which they will learn nothing.  They will convince themselves that their minor defeats can be explained by referring to local political conditions in Ohio or Connecticut and that these failures do not represent broader trends.  They will be reconfirmed in their convictions that the national direction of the GOP and the “movement” is the right one.  Neocons, never ones to let reality get in the way of a good story, will tell the tale of their vindication and will redouble their efforts to push their policies in spite of having been discredited on Iraq.  If the Republicans do not even lose both houses, the GOP leadership won’t even think twice about anything it has done. 

In a strange way, I could almost come around to thinking that Jacob Weisberg might be right–maybe the Democrats winning in November would be an undesirable outcome, not so much because it would be bad for that party (which is his main concern), which doesn’t matter to me, but because it would possibly be such a weak repudiation of GOP rule that it does not send a message and nonetheless leaves us with a rather ridiculous cast of characters in charge of at least one house of Congress.  Should the Dems win with reliable pro-war members such as Melissa Bean back in the House, the disastrous policies of the last four years will probably retain effective majority support in that chamber.  Nonetheless, I remain convinced that accountability is imperative and even if they learn nothing the GOP must suffer some consequences for what it has done to this country.

But it is indeed possible that there will be neither humiliation nor reform, in spite of what some conservative worthies hope will happen, but simply a minor hiccup on the way to the imagined “permanent majority” that annoying partisans will compare to 1942, noting that Republican victories that year were an exception to the general trend of Democratic dominance for the next fifty years.  (Let us pause for a moment and consider the possibility that this might be the case–can you imagine a future of fifty years of something like neoconservative Red Republican rule, broken up only by the odd Democratic President?  That there are GOP equivalents of Korea and Vietnam yet to follow in the decades ahead?  It’s all too horrifying to contemplate.) 

Like most people who opposed the Iraq war, the Pithlord is constantly accosted by chastened righties I argued with back in 2003 who cry, “You were right! The Iraq war was a terrible idea! How do I correct my worldview so I don’t make mistakes like that again?”

We at Pith and Substance are always anxious to help. And since everyone who can be convinced has now been, I am willing to let my rightie bretheren in on a secret: I didn’t really know anything about Iraq either! I talked to a few emigrés — I read Makiya. But I don’t know Arabic. I had never been to Iraq. My grasp of Shi’ite theology is superficial. For reasons that escape me now, I did read the Ba’athist constitution once, but sub-Leninist blather is not very informative.

I’m sure I wasn’t alone among those skeptical of the war. Indeed, a few of my comrades in the anti-war movement were astonishingly ignorant even by my standards.

So how did we get it right? We couldn’t read the folkways of Iraq, but we knew that, whatver they were, they were the folkways of Iraq, of an alien culture in a civilization with good reasons to dislike and distrust us. In the unlikely event democracy held there, it would necessarily be in conflict with external occupiers. ~Pithlord

Of course, it didn’t hurt that most of the people who did know the Near East, Islam and Iraq in particular well were fairly skeptical of the entire project, too.  It was also not promising that the average person who had read a little about Iraq still probably knew more than George “I Thought The Iraqis Were Muslims!” Bush himself.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, a Catholic mother of five from San Francisco, has fewer children in her district than any other member of Congress: 87,727. Rep. Chris Cannon, R-Utah, a Mormon father of eight, represents the most children: 278,398.These two extremes reflect a stark demographic divide between the congressional districts controlled by the major political parties.Republican House members overwhelmingly come from districts that have high percentages of married people and lots of children, according to a USA TODAY analysis of 2005 Census Bureau data released last month.GOP Congress members represent 39.2 million children younger than 18, about 7 million more than Democrats. Republicans average 7,000 more children per district. ~USA Today  

It’s interesting that information about this divide in American politics is finally filtering out more and more into the press, but it should be noted that Steve Sailer has been on the case of both the “baby” and marriage gaps for quite some time.  It is easy to say this in retrospect, now that these “gaps” are receiving more and more attention, but how was it that these social trends and their political impact evaded notice for so long?  Shouldn’t it be obvious that, on average, those with more children and relatively stable marriages are more likely to favour policies and rhetoric tailored to these sorts of families, and those with fewer or no children and those who are not married or who have had far less stable marriages will prefer an entirely different set of policies and rhetoric?  Presumably, talk about defending marriage would tend to fall on deaf ears in many of these Democratic districts because there are, on average, fewer married people who would find threats to the institution of marriage at all worrisome.  This clearly puts left-liberals in a real bind demographically, as they are typically committed to positions that are at least supposedly more friendly to the unmarried and childless, which means their existing base is unlikely to reproduce itself in sufficient numbers to remain competitive with the other side.  This makes mass immigration ever more attractive to most liberals, who were already in favour of it, but which in turn makes them even less attractive politically to the burgeoning numbers of married people in the heartland with larger families.  I suspect those who have a lot of children will likely be more averse to mass immigration, because they have already made an investment in the future of the country and will viscerally want to make it more likely that part of the country’s resources and territory go to their descendants rather than someone else’s.  Besides the obvious benefit of votes for their chosen party, it makes sense that liberals would be more indifferent to new peoples coming into the country, especially when these are predominantly their parts of the country in California, since at some level they know they do not expect their children and grandchildren to be there in great numbers, if they will be there at all.  This troubles them less than it might otherwise because there is at least the hope that the immigrants will fuel the future of progressive politics into which these people have invested so much of their hope and energy.  They expect their values to be reproduced in the new immigrant populations, which makes actual reproduction less important to them politically.  Maybe that isn’t right, but it sounds plausible to me. 

On a tangentially related note, I think this gap, and the related insight that those who are married with larger families tend to become more conservative in their ”values” and voting habits, also helps explain why academia has been going leftwards for quite some time.  Professional academics have to invest a great deal of time, money and energy into becoming professional academics–all of which might have gone into having and raising children otherwise.  We waste, er, spend between six and ten years after college graduation just getting our degrees and several more getting established in something resembling stable employment.  Academic lives are initially very rootless–for the ambitious, there is the constant traveling to conferences, giving talks, doing research for this or that fellowship and the frequent moves to different schools before you are on the tenure track–and while grad students may get married often enough (though I would have to guess that cohabitation or long-term relationships between singles represent a much larger proportion of grad students than is true of the general population our age) they will inevitably have fewer children early on and ultimately end up having fewer all together because of 1) relative lack of financial resources, 2) the perception of insufficient time for raising children and 3) the initial insecurity of academic appointments.  Add to these things that many schools, including some of the most prestigious, are in cities and states with a higher average cost of living, and you have an acute case of the costs of forming a family being too high for the academic and his spouse.  Add to this the fact that people who opt for grad school tend to come overwhelmingly from households with more liberal politics (since, for various reasons, some of them quite good, conservative households tend to inculcate a desire to do practical and, well, productive work that does not lend itself to going off to graduate school to study early modern Italy), you have a recipe for a permanently left-leaning academy because academic life imposes the kinds of pressures on family life and creates the kind of people who would end up being more attracted to liberal politics even if they came into grad school with other “values.”  There will, of course, be exceptions and qualifications to this (and there are oddballs such as myself who try to resist being pulled in these directions).  I suspect it would make a huge difference whether the grad students are very religious or not.  But the bottom line is that unless you come into grad school with strongly-rooted conservative attitudes, you will inevitably be pulled leftwards–not so much by the intellectual biases of academia as such, though these don’t help–because of the nature of academic life and the social consequences for those who participate in it.  If I am wildly off base here, I welcome stories of the English Lit Ph.D. student with five children.  Perhaps such people exist, but I have never encountered them or heard of them.    

On a related topic, it is curious that 20th Century Fox undermined the release of Idiocracy as much as it did when, as an academic friend of mine recently observed after seeing it, “this is what is happening today,” meaning that the well-educated and intelligent people are not reproducing in sufficient numbers and the thoughtless, less intelligent masses are having children all over the place.  (In fact, it isn’t as if birthrates are exactly exploding anywhere in this country, but the gap is certainly real and noticeable.)  In any case, this is the perception of one academic after seeing the movie.  She looked on this prospect with horror.  The hyper-educated and, typically, the fairly liberal (the two tend to go together for the reasons given above) see themselves only too well in the yuppie couple in the opening of the film who never find time to have children, who do not reproduce themselves and do not pass on their genes and leave the world to be inherited by the less intelligent.  The elitist impulse in highly educated (or perhaps I should be careful here and say highly schooled) liberals runs up against their egalitarian fantasies, and what they fear in private can, of course, never really be talked about in public debates.  These sorts of anxieties would have to be translated into comedy, like Monty Python’s old sketch from The Meaning of Life about the teeming hordes of Yorkshire Catholics and the apparently childless, dry-as-dust Protestant who assures his wife, whom he hasn’t gone near in a year, that he could have sex anytime he wants without worrying about having children because of the wonders of contraception.     Serving the liberal pieties that intelligence and heredity have nothing to do with each other, the studio sabotaged and failed to promote Idiocracy, even though the very liberals whose pieties would theoretically have been offended by the entire subject would have secretly been nodding their heads and looking askance at the teeming hordes of “breeders” (to use the charming term preferred by some homosexual and population control activists) who, in addition to being obnoxiously likely to have more children, are also in the estimation of these same liberals the dim-witted, dangerously religious, backwards, Bush-voting masses in flyover country whom they suffer with barely constrained rage.

Tagged by James Poulos 

1. One book that changed your life? 

Dostoevsky, Crime & Punishment 

2. One book that you have read more than once? 

Dostoevsky, Crime & Punishment

3. One book you would want on a desert island? 

Xenophon, Cyropaedia

4. One book that made you cry? 

Lauro Martines, Fire in the City

5. One book that made you laugh? 

Demetrios Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ

6. One book you wish had been written? 

How The Byzantines Created Western Civilisation by Sir Steven Runciman  

7. One book you wish had never been written? 

Karen Armstrong, A History of God

8. One book you are reading currently?

Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle (obviously)  

9. One book you have been meaning to read?   

Doderer, Demons

10. Pass it on  

Michael Brendan Dougherty, Dan McCarthy and Chris Roach

“I support Ferdinand and Isabella,” he proclaimed, in reference to the medieval Catholic monarchs who drove the Moors out of Spain in 1492. ~Gulfnews.com

That’s excellent.  So it is a pity that Aznar is also the fool who committed his country to Iraq and initially attempted to pin the Madrid bombings on ETA rather than acknowledge the far greater likelihood that it was jihadi terrorism directed against Spain.  Ferdinand and Isabella and their heirs typically looked after Spanish interests, sometimes even lending their aid (as at Lepanto) in great struggles against the Turk, but they usually did not launch campaigns with no discernible connection with the interests of their kingdom.  So how did Aznar come to the odd conclusion that invading Iraq would accomplish much of anything when the borders of his own country are constantly under pressure from immigrants from the Maghreb and points south?

Perlmutter enjoys a 40 percent advantage among self-described moderates, who represented almost half of the poll respondents.

The poll was being conducted just as an outside Democratic “527″ committee launched an attack ad saying that while O’Donnell once wanted to abolish Social Security, he now wants to privatize it.

O’Donnell got on the air almost immediately with an ad apologizing for writing an essay in 1995 as a 24-year-old communications director for Newt Gingrich’s Progress & Freedom Foundation titled “For Freedom’s Sake, Eliminate Social Security.”

In the ad, O’Donnell went on to say he would never abolish or privatize Social Security. And he countered that Perlmutter wanted to raise taxes and decrease Social Security benefits - a claim Perlmutter firmly denies. ~Rocky Mountain News

At first glance, it seemed implausible that a closely contested, formerly GOP seat would suddenly open up to a 17-point Democratic lead, but then you see that O’Donnell, the Republican, is basically holding on to registered Republican voters in his district (they make up 38%, he is getting 37% support) and has lost almost all of the independents.  If O’Donnell once wrote a paper calling for the abolition of Social Security, good on him.  However, he ran away from his old position so fast that it is clear that he knew the revelation would kill him with these “moderates” and “independents,” and apparently so it has.

Most “independents” are not, alas, wild-eyed folks on the green left and black right (people who take their politics so seriously they will not water them down for the sake of irrelevant things such as winning elections), but are instead the squishy, largely non-political folks who inhabit the center and say silly things like, “Why can’t we have more bipartisanship?” or “I like Colin Powell.”  When you want to find real “moderates,” don’t go looking for Joementum or John “What Torture? I Don’t See Any Torture Here!” McCain, who are the heroes of the establishment’s definition of moderation (where “moderation” equals unflinching support for all major establishment projects).  Instead take a look at people who will be scared out of their minds–not necessarily for any particular reason–at the prospect of someone privatising (gasp!) Social Security.  They are not frightened of this because they know anything about what privatisation of Social Security would entail, since they almost certainly do not know anything; “partial privatisation” would also mean nothing to them.  They are frightened of this because it is a strange, dramatic change in the way the government works and people in the “center” are far more of the stick-in-the-mud kind of temperamental conservatives than most people who self-apply the label of conservative.  These people do not oppose change for philosophical reasons, but simply because they have no idea what the change might do.  This makes them nervous, and they don’t like being nervous. 

For the “moderates,” whether something is broken in government or not no one should touch or change anything too dramatically or suddenly.  They love to hear the words “reform” and ”consensus” and they really love rhetoric that hits the empowerment theme–Bubba was a master in manipulating these people with this kind of talk–but when it comes time to do the actual reforming, they don’t want anyone to be too hasty.  In fact, they would prefer that no one do much of anything very drastic at all, but they will always be the first to complain that the government “hasn’t done anything” about this or that.    

Because these people often hold the balance of power in contested districts, the fate of elections often turns on whether poorly informed, easily scared ”moderates” will be stampeded into one party’s corral or into the other’s.  To do this, all it takes is to suggest that your opponent is some crazy radical who wants to start abolishing things, and if he wanted to abolish Social Security, he must want to make you insecure, and there is nothing that “moderates” value more than having their sense of security reinforced. 

This is why terrorism worked well as an issue for the Red Republicans for four years and why the so-called “security moms” rallied to their side, and it is also why the “moderates” will start rushing in the opposite direction when GOP candidates and the GOP majority no longer fill them with confidence and make them think that they are becoming less secure.  Whether income inequality, Iraq, immigration or specific attacks on policy questions like this one foster that feeling of insecurity, the Republicans now stand to lose on the basis of the same largely irrational response of “moderates” that brought them victory in the past two elections. 

As angry as we may get at the blasphemies of artists, we absolutely must object to this capitulation on the part of the Germans in the face of Islamofascism (yeah, I used the word: what is fascism as a tactic — as distinct from a political philosophy — if not using the threat of violence to suppress speech you don’t like?). ~Rod Dreher

Now I agree with Rod that giving in to intimidation from outraged Muslims, even over something as obnoxious as Neuenfels’ anti-religious artistic license, is unacceptable.  It is another attempt to dictate what non-Muslims can say about anything pertaining to Islam, but unfortunately this time it has been successful, as the offending performance has been cancelled on account of the threats it provoked.  So on the substance of the matter, Rod and I agree. 

But then there’s that old “Islamofascism” again.  Here I can at least see why someone might choose to call the use of intimidation and threats of violence fascist tactics, but there is nothing particularly fascist about these kinds of tactics.  These are the tactics of most practitioners of “direct action” in the 20th century West (e.g., syndicalists, the New Left), the tactics of the “propaganda of the deed” of 19th and 20th century anarchists and the tactics of fanatics the world over–it is the threat and use of violence to achieve a political objective, in this case the suppression of someone else’s speech, which is, when directed against civilians (as this assuredly was), the very definition of terrorism. 

Fascists used terror, but there is nothing especially fascistic, rather than Jacobin, communist, democratic or anarchist, about terror.  Evidently fascism seems to be the word many people really want to use when talking about these people.  I don’t know whether this is a result of neverending conditioning that fascism was the Worst Thing Ever to which all bad things must hereafter be compared (in this, fascism plays a secular role similar to that of Arianism in medieval heresiology as a kind of archetypal evil, an Urboese I suppose you might call it in German, to which all later evil doctrines must be compared of necessity as each new enemy is simply a recapitulation of the errors of that doctrine) or if we simply lack the vocabulary to describe succinctly the contempt we feel for this particular foe.  But it seems clear that those who want to use fascism to refer to jihadis and Muslim intimidation more generally very much want to convey the magnitude of their hostility by using one of the most , albeit constantly overused, demon-words we have at our disposal.  I understand that desire, but fascism became the universally hated thing that it is both through what fascists did and through the effective thoroughgoing demonisation of anything associated with it by the fascists’ enemies.  In the same way, jihadis and jihadism, and perhaps Islam itself, could acquire the same reputation and their name will become a curse to those who speak it because of what they have done, but this will never happen if we continually fall back on our references to fascism and implausibly identify the jihadis as the Islamic branch of that ideology or as people inclined to use “fascist tactics.” 

The longer we keep talking about and thinking of these people as fascists, we give them something of a free pass by not using the names proper to them and instead rely on old names from another time.  Had their enemies treated fascists in this way, applying old terms to them rather than demonising their own name, there would likely have been a great deal of propaganda about the fascists as some new form of absolutism and absurd neologisms would have had to be created to talk about the threat of the Germanoabsolutists. 

If there were a need, as in the old heresiology, to use these labels as a way of understanding something new and foreign–interpreting Bogomils as new Messalians or Manichees, for instance–it would be one thing, but jihadis and Islam are hardly a new arrival on the scene and have their own names appropriate to them.  They employ terrorist tactics, which is not something relatively new for jihadis, and are quite outrageous enough in their own right without needing to be compared to any other villains from our history. 

Bolingbroke has no attachment to the social outlook that underlies liberal ideology.  Natural society was a political society, he suggests, and had no unbridled freedom to be lost in some later establishment of government.  Men, dispersed in families, formed numerous distinct political societies under paternal government.  Fathers were the chief magistrates and kept peace and order in their relatively small and homogeneous society by their natural authority….Inherent in natural society is “authority, subordination, order and union necessary to well-being.”  The liberal notion that consent is the only legitimate basis for political obligation is rejected completely. ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle

Bolingbroke saw the ideal political world as a “genuine” polity, a commonwealth where politics was part of a functional order carried on by the natural leaders of society.  In such an order government sprang from the patriarchal roots of the landed family, and public service was as much the duty and responsibility of heads of families and localities as was their care and control of the core family.  In the “genuine” polity, “the image of a free people” writes Bolingbroke, “is that of a patriarchal family, where the head and all the members are united by one common interest.”  Government was not yet an artificial function whereby men came together and rationally conceived laws.  A “genuine” order needed few laws, because the dealings of men were prescribed by time-honored codes of duty and honor.  In such a system, a much less clear-cut distinction between public and private relations existed because men in society were held together by the natural bonds of family, geography, and interest rather than by an artificial act which has brought together isolated individuals.  The order and links in God’s social structure had existed long before man, and thus, in Bolingbroke’s “genuine” polity, man’s entrance into society placed him among natural affiliations and natural relations to others, whether as governor or as governed, as relative or as neighbor.  The passing of this “genuine” order was described in a poem by one of the later nostalgic Tory poets, Oliver Goldsmith, author of the first full-length biography of Lord Bolingbroke and of The Deserted Village, the classic eighteenth-century literary rejection of the new order.  In The Traveller (1764), Goldsmith described the demise of a “genuine” political system.

As nature’s ties decay
As duty, love, and honour fail to sway,
Fictitious bonds, the bonds of wealth and law,
Still gather strength, and force unwilling awe. ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle 

At length corruption, like a general flood
(So long by watchful Ministers, withstood)
Shall deluge all; and Avarice, creeping on,
Spread like a lowborn mist, and blot out the Sun;
Statesman and Patriot ply alike the stocks,
Peer and butler share alike the Box,
And Judges job and Bishops bite the Town,
And mighty Dukes pack cards for half-a-crown
See Britain sunk in lucre’s sordid charms; ~Alexander Pope, Moral Essays, Epistle III (lines 135-143)

Reactionary populist leaders need not be small farmers, threatened artisans, or shopkeepers.  In the united front of a populist reaction to early capitalism it is appropriate–most especially in one of its first manifestations–that the generals were well bred and the troops were yeomen farmers and small traders.  They could make common cause so easily because they both perceived the extent of the threat.  Bolingbroke’s career and writings bear an amazing consistency when they are seen in this light.  From 1701 to 1715 he championed the antiwar, antimoneyed interest in Parliament [bold and italics mine-DL].  His populist tendency may account for the seeming aberration of his Jacobite years, and explain the perpetual attack in all his political writings on the new role of finance in society. ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle

You have to know that your political and personal reputation is going down in flames when there is an online insult generator with your name on it. 

So I will leave this post as the tombstone for this ugly little blog that brought out the vilest in me and has now left me in deep shame for the rest of my life. Always remember this, kids: you may not really be as witty and edgy as you think you are; the Internet amplifies everything, especially your most ridiculous stupidity, so don’t go writing callous things even during those days that you happen to feel depressed and like shit and you need that feeling of not caring; limits usually exist for a good reason; your imaginary enemies are not the same as the real breathing people; groups are not monolithic so that all their members equal the one you hate the most and who may or may not return the favour; and finally, remember that regardless of their labels, all people are individuals with feelings, fears and hopes that you really, really should always respect. ~Ilkka Kokkarinen, Sixteen Volts

Deep shame for the rest of my life?  Is the man serious?  So maybe he crossed the line and said some rude things on a few occasions–for this he will feel “deep shame” for the rest of his life?  That’s ridiculous.  If he believes he has seriously done wrong, he can give up the blogging (as he has done) and change his ways–but why would he feel “deep shame” for the rest of his life?  I can see it now: Kokkarinen in his dotage some decades hence is sitting out in his backyard staring off into the distance, his face drawn in a look of anguish, his eyes haunted by the thoughts of…his mean blog entries!  Oh, the humanity!  If there is one thing we can all agree on about blog entries, it is that they are fairly trivial.  If he made a mistake with some of them and he feels bad about that, so be it, but it is just about as serious and shameful as shouting at someone in anger on the highway.  You shouldn’t do those things, but if anyone feels “deep shame” for the rest of his days because he has done either of those things he has bigger problems than being mean to people on a blog.  It sounds more like his woman has laid a heavy guilt trip on him for which he will be paying for the rest of his days–and that’s the real shame. 

Also, why would you “always” show everyone respect?  As a general rule, yes, you should show people respect until they give you a reason to do otherwise, but respect is not some automatic, permanent given thing that everyone can expect no matter what.  There are people who have not earned respect or who have lost it, presumably by doing things a fair sight more shameful than writing a zinger on a blog about overweight lesbians.  Good grief.   

Update: Glaivester has a nice, succinct post called Stop Your Sniveling and Groveling, Ilkka.  Amen to that.

If Locke’s political ideas are sometimes caricatured for picturing the state as a joint-stock company, this caricature seems nowhere more appropriate than in the birth of the Bank.  The scheme of Locke’s friend Halifax had made 1,272 individuals actual owners of the state.  Interestingly enough, Locke was among them. ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle

Since the Revolution [of 1688], the distinction between Whig and Tory had disappeared, but in its place the Dissertation [upon Parties] cites the rise of new divisions.  There were those who were angry with the government but who wished to keep the constitution–Bolingbroke’s position.  There were those who were averse to both the constitution and the government–a small number of Jacobites and republicans.  Finally, there were those attached to the government who were, in fact, enemies of the constitution–Walpole and his group.  The second group was unimportant.  The first and third Bolingbroke labels country and court, or constitutionalists and anti-constitutionalists.  In rhetoric anticipatory of Burke’s, Bolingbroke described the sacred constitution which he saw Walpole and his anti-constitutionalists bent upon destroying.

That noble fabric, the pride of Britain, the envy of her neighbors raised by the labor of so many centuries, repaired at the expense of so many millions and cemented by such a profusion of blood; that noble Fabric, I say, which was able to resist the united efforts of so many races of giants, may be demolished by a race of pigmies.

Echoes of Swift are heard once again when Bolingbroke describes the anti-constitutionalists as insects of the earth, “and like other insects, though sprung from dirt, and the vilest of animal kind, they can nibble, gnaw, and poison, and if they are suffered to multiply and work on, they can lay the most fruitful country to waste.” ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle

In Bolingbroke’s history, according to Herbert Butterfield the first important “Whig” history, the dynamics were provided by the interplay of two “spirits,” one of liberty and one of faction.  The former embodied the national interest while the latter embodied individual and partisan interest.  Bolingbroke saw the development of English history as a Manichaean struggle between these good and evil forces.  The spirit of liberty was represented in the mixed constitution whose parts were so balanced that no one part depended on the other, while the spirit of faction was embodied in any threat against this ideal constitutional structure. ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle

I believe it likely that it is from this tradition that Washington drew upon when he warned against the “spirit of party” and also this tradition Madison was drawing on in his denunciations of faction in the Federalist Papers.  Note the importance of the mixed and balanced constitution for Bolingbroke, as for Harrington before him and for the Country tradition and the Founders after him.  Note, too, that those who claim to speak on behalf of “the Founding” seem to have no idea what a “mixed constitution” is, nor are they apparently very familiar with the English political tradition whence it derives.

In a dream d’Anvers, the fictional editor, found himself in a pleasant and fruitful island where a happy and prosperous people lived in freedom.  The countryside abounded with produce and the cities were rich in skilled artisans and honest traders.  The island’s government was stable and free.  “The constitution of her government was so happily mixed and balanced that it was the mutual interest of the Prince and the people to support it.”  Liberty and plenty filled the happy Commonwealth.  But suddenly, a tree shot up, and grew so high that its head was lost in the clouds and its branches darkened the land.

I saw it put forth a vast quantity of beautiful Fruit which glittered like burnished gold, and hung in large clusters on every bough.  I now perceived to be the Tree of Corruption, which bears a very near resemblance to the Tree of Knowledge, in the Garden of Eden, for whoever tasted the fruit of it, lost his integrity and fell, like Adam, from the state of innocence.

The fruits bore inscriptions such as “East India,” “Bank contracts,” “South Sea,” “Differentials,” “Patents,” “Credit,” “Stocks” and other terms characteristic of the new order.  Perched in the middle of the tree was a fat man who plucked down golden apples and tossed them to the crowd below.  The tree and its fruit poisoned everything in sight.  As the blight spread and covered the entire land, the farms would not produce, the artisan went hungry, the merchant laid up his ships, and “a general scene of poverty discovered itself amongst all ranks of the people, and nothing was to be heard through the whole land but piercing lamentations and agonies of despair”–nothing, that is, but the gluttonous laughter of those scampering in and around the tree and eating of its financial fruits. ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle

In an updated version, the fruits might read “Enron,” “K Street Project,” ”Wal-Mart,” “Offshoring,” “National Debt,” “Creative Destruction,” and so forth.

Eleswhere, The Craftsman pictured Walpole as a giant from whom hung huge bank bills, exchequer notes, lottery tickets, and tallies, but only a small bag of money.  How better to describe the new economy based on vast paper credit and little real money?  Walpole is also “the greatest monster of power and wickedness, that ever infected the face of the earth.” ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle

The Craftsman’s favorite weapon was the most effective in the Augustan arsenal, satire.  An angry Member of Parliament descrived how the paper’s writers “shot their poison in the dark and scattered it under allegories in vile libels.”  Walpole’s system was depicted as a unique form of government, the Robinocracy or Robinarchy.  In a “Persian Letter,” The Craftsman of October 18, 1729, has Usbeck, a traveler to England, writing home of this strange form of government, made up of three orders: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, in which all three are dependent upon the Robinarch, or chief ruler, who, although legally a minister and creature of the Prince, is “in reality a sovereign, as despotic, arbitrary a sovereign as this part of the world affords.”  The Robinarch and his associates come from plebian stock and have few estates, yet “he rules by Money, the root of all evils, and founds his iniquitous dominion in the corruption of the people.”  The Robinarch secures to his will the deputies in the assembly as well as the Prince.  In the past this may have been a difficult task, but modern Robinarchs are skillful in encouraging luxury and extravagance, which, together with the disbursement of honors, titles, preferments, and pensions, help make the Robinarch’s task an easier one. ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle

The object of the war [of Spanish Succession], the containment of Louis XIV and French power, had been secured as far as the Tories were concerned.  But the Dutch, the Emperor, and Marlborough wanted more.  The French must be driven from Spain.  “No peace without Spain” became the Whig cry.  But the patience of the country esquires was exhausted.  Tory opposition to the war became a political outlet for their grievances against what the Tory writers called the “modern Whigs.”  The modern Whig with his war and his new financial order was undermining the country.  Land taxes, national debt, the Bank, the moneyed corporation, stockjobbers, the Dutch-Emperor alliance, redcoats trudging through foreign lands–all were sponsored and defended by the “modern Whig.” ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle

To the minds of Bolingbroke, Swift, and Pope, Walpole perfected a politics of administration and manipulation that contributed generously to the total degradation of public life.  Politics for Bolingbroke’s circle was supposed to be played out in an elaborate theater where the style of the performance was almost more significant than the deeds done.  In order to perform the governmental roles of statecraft properly, one had to be properly bred.  Walpole’s administration had instead, they felt, perfected politics as an acquired skill, one of conciliating interests and manipulating men, mean talents that stripped the glory and the gloss from politics.  The image Bolingbroke preferred shines through the many classical allusions found in his and opposition writings.  With theatrical gravity, noble gentlemen stand before the people and win support by virtue of their eloquence and the compelling aesthetic force of their rhetoric, whereas in his own age Bolingbroke felt that politics consisted of sordid and undramatic management and behind-the-scenes manipulation of interests and ambitions. ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle

It is Bolingbroke the critic of a corrupt and venal society who has so appealed to the English Tories.  They are not concerned with Bolingbroke the philosopher.  If they care about religion they are apt to dismiss the Enlightenment Bolingbroke as an aberration explained by his sojourn in France.  What really matters and what enshrines Bolingbroke in the Tory Pantheon are his political writings and career, in which he rejects the new age of liberal individualism and the introduction of financial capitalism into English society and politics. ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle

Is it just me, or has the conclusion of the lonelygirl15 episode coincided with a surprising amount of discussion on blogs about the perils and pitfalls of modern relations between the sexes?  It started with Steve Sailer’s first post on the social implications of the success of the lonelygirl15 charade:

I’m reminded once again of how little effort young men and young women in modern America put into connecting with each other mentally. There’s a gigantic number of high IQ lonely guys out there desperate to meet a girl who wants to talk about the things they like to talk about.

Now The Corner is abuzz with Ally McBeal references (see links above) with the Derb commenting:

The following (edited to protect the innocent) is typical of many.

“Derb—-I suspect that when the smart, attractive 34-year-old woman says ‘I can’t find a man’ she means she can’t find a man who is up to her standards. I also suspect those standards are pretty high. Just check out some of the profiles on yahoo.com to see what I’m talking about.

“I started looking through those a few years ago after my wife died and I couldn’t believe the exacting specifications most of these women had for a mate. I was excluded from at least 75 percent of them just by the height requirement. I’m [unimpressive height] and 5′9″ seemed to be the minimum. I soon figured out that finding a woman willing to marry a [fifty-plus]-year-old man with an adopted [preteen]-year-old granddaughter was going to be an exercise in futility if I went the domestic route.

“Which is why I’ve been married to a beautiful [East Asian female] for two years now.  She’s also the best mother any daughter could ask for.  She’s only [really unimpressive height].”

Reading emails like that—I’ve just read a bunch of them—it’s pretty plain that the unattached women of America are wilfully ignoring a huge stock of first-rate potential husbands.  Their loss. 

Which reminds me of Steve Sailer’s observation that Asian women have several advantages in the “marriage market.”

Presumably if you could get all the Ally McBeal impersonators and all the “high IQ lonely guys” together, and then convince them all to stop being so self-involved and ridiculous, the problem would virtually solve itself.  The main problem seems to be getting past the second step in this process.
 

In contemporary America, this presumption toward freedom may no longer be valid, as Mr. Will makes clear. The lower middle classes and nearly everyone else, for that matter, really do love Wal-Mart and are quite happy to sell their American birthright of independence and self-sufficiency for a bowl of processed – but cheap! – soup. This is the challenge facing the new populists of the right: how to advocate and promote the free and sturdy democratic qualities of the common man – qualities that made America great – when the common man has apparently turned his back on those virtues?

The genius of Wal-Mart lies in its ability to make dependence attractive to individuals and communities. The fact that independence is handed over willingly by the masses only makes the surrender that much more difficult to overcome.

If it is to be overcome, it will require an effectively conservative and populist appeal to the conscience of freedom, independence, morality and sturdy self-sufficiency that is still alive in this country.  ~Caleb Stegall, Dallas Morning News

The sheer size and power of Wal-Mart ought to make any conservative wince. A private entity the size of the U.S. military with the economic clout of the Federal Reserve is no friend to liberty. It should be clearly understood that the conservative’s objection to centralized power and wealth – either in its statist or its corporate forms – is primarily, perhaps exclusively, an objection to its capacity for imposing servility and dependence among his fellow citizens, who should be free.

In this, postwar American conservatives are heirs to the Jeffersonian, anti-Federalist and populist arguments of the 18th and 19th centuries. These decentralists, state’s-righters and agrarian champions presumed a basic level of democratic and economic sturdiness and self-sufficiency in the common man. Left to his own devices, it was thought that the common and working classes – the Minutemen of the Revolution, the pioneers of the West – would not willingly don the yoke of servitude, but would prefer to be free, despite the sacrifices and hardship such a life might entail. ~Caleb Stegall, Dallas Morning News

Unfortunately, those who are conditioned to think that economic dependence on ever-larger corporations is a mark of their “economic liberty” (look at the wonderful selection! look at all of the “choices” we have!) rather than a sign of their servility do not even realise that they have donned the yoke of servitude.

As Mr. Will sees it, the liberal war on Wal-Mart in the name of the common man is really a war on the preferences of the common man. By couching his arguments in terms of “consumer sovereignty” and the “preferences of ordinary Americans,” Mr. Will undermines liberal objections to Wal-Mart by co-opting the historically liberal defense of unconstrained freedom of individual choice. This is effective for puncturing the pretensions of liberal elites, but it’s a curious position for an avowed conservative. 

Arguments from preference for, say, complete sexual freedom, unlimited abortion license and illicit drug use have never been very convincing to conservatives. Instead of asking what conditions most Americans prefer, postwar conservatives have traditionally asked the more important question: What conditions will make common Americans free – free not just to pursue their baser appetites, but to fashion an independent and virtuous life? Further, conservatives have argued that our democratic system of self-government cannot last in the absence of a class of men and women who are truly free by virtue of their moral, economic and cultural independence from the centralized management classes.

One of the primary conditions of freedom is a widespread distribution of capital, both economic and cultural. This accounts for conservatives’ long-standing skepticism and mistrust of centralized and concentrated enclaves of money and power with their tendencies toward societal management at every level. The oppressive effect of the management elites is essentially the same whether those elites sit in the board room, the judicial chamber, the legislative halls or the Oval Office. ~Caleb Stegall, Dallas Morning News

Buchanan’s economic nationalism is synonymous with mercantilism and is not only the economics of empire, but the economics of THE empire. As Charles Beard notes in his history of America, the Boston Tea party was only partially a reaction against taxes. In fact, even with the tax, the tea was priced below market rate. But that was exactly the problem. The Americans were virtually forced to buy their tea from the British merchants because “national-unity” bulding trade barriers made the cost of importing tea from foreigners prohibitive. Thus, the tea became a symbol of government control of the economic system. Yet, all the King wanted was national unity, did he not? Shouldn’t British subjects buy tea from other British subjects? Doesn’t that build unity? How dare those Americans suggest they should be able to buy goods from whomever they want. Such insolence! Such contempt for national unity.

I am firmly convinced that most modern “conservatives” would be firmly on the side of the British were it 1776. ~Ryan McMracken

This would be the same Mr. McMacken whose first instinct when he hears Mr. Buchanan use the phrase “blood and soil” in the context of talking about national identity is to start hearing refrains of the Horst Wesellied.  That is to say, he is someone who is likely to make enormous leaps in associating things based on superficial similarities. 

Thus, if you support protective tariffs today (which a fair number of Founders supported in their own time) you are as bad and presumably un-American as those who supported the Stamp and Tea Acts–nevermind, of course, that a great many Loyalists also opposed many of the novel tariffs imposed from 1765 on.  They, the Loyalists, simply didn’t think it was right to resist this with violence.  In other words, they didn’t think it was worth killing people over a tariff dispute.  Critics of Lincoln at the LRC Blog might appreciate the wisdom of such a view better than most. 

Mr. McMacken also seems to be rather confused about what most “modern conservatives” believe about trade and economics–unless I have missed something, Mr. Buchanan’s economic views are not exactly taking the “movement” by storm and in fact they represent one of the important points of divergence between some paleoconservatives and a lot of “movement” types.  If Mr. Buchanan’s economic nationalism supposedly puts him in the company of 18th century Tories, it assuredly does not put him in the company of most “movement” conservatives.  In short, this post by Mr. McMacken doesn’t make a lot of sense. 

In any case, Mr. McMacken talks about being on “the British side” in 1776 as if this were some terrible insult, yet in my book to associate a modern conservative with the Loyalists would be the highest form of praise for the authenticity of his conservatism, regardless of anything else it might say about him.  George Grant often observed that “American conservatism” was no such thing, since it was just a sort of liberalism in a nice suit, and argued, as many others have, that the expulsion and suppression of the Loyalists eliminated a major source of genuine conservatism in the United States.  To liken a conservative today to the Loyalists is to compliment him in the most glowing terms, provided that one is not indulging in the traditional ideological denunciation of Tories as enemies of liberty. 

Of course, opposition to Parliament-imposed tariffs then had everything to do with questions of self-government and the tradition that taxation required consent, which the patriots believed they had not given because the taxes were passed in Parliament and not their local legislatures, and nothing to do with the usual objections to economic nationalist measures.  In fact, most anti-”free trade” arguments today are tied closely to questions of retaining sovereignty and ensuring that commercial policy is set by our representatives in Congress rather than by international organisations and commissions.  The populist and economic nationalist position here is much more like that of the patriots than that of the Loyalists, since the latter many of the tariff measures but ultimately accepted Parliament’s right to pass such laws.  In the end, the patriots fought not to prevent all such taxation (think of the Whiskey Rebellion) but to retain control over how and by whom that taxation was levied.  Globalists and free traders would typically like to cede that control to international, unaccountable bureaucracies; economic nationalists–one might call them economic patriots–refuse to cede any control that should properly remain with the Congress, which remains at least theoretically accountable to the citizens of this country.  Who’s on “the side of the British” now?  

Obviously, given many things I have written over the last two years, I personally take a dim view of Hamiltonianism and regard the Country tradition, which stood in stark opposition to Hamiltonian/Federalist, Whig and Republican economic policies, as the true source of the genuine Anglo-American conservative and agrarian traditions.  I accept as very compelling John Taylor’s argument that protective tariffs, as opposed to revenue tariffs, are unconstitutional, and I have never seen a compelling counter-argument that they are not.  But virtually no one I know of since John Taylor has advanced such a view, and that is certainly not the basis for libertarian objections to tariffs.  In any case, I think the American System and “internal improvements” were among the first usurpations by the center at the expense of the states and the people; they began the unhappy story of concentrated wealth and concentrated power working together to the detriment of the people; they inaugurated the slow march to the destruction of the Republic.  All that being said, in an industrial world a nation needs to have domestic industry if it wants to be able to provide for itself and remain relatively independent of foreign manufactures and credit. 

To be a critic is to embrace apostasy as a way of life. It is to upset settled opinions and challenge unquestioned beliefs. It is to set out on one’s own, to think without limits, accepting truth, in all of its complexity, as one’s only measure. A critic need not be an atheist, but he cannot be an traditionalist or orthodox believer. In anything. ~Damon Linker

Actually, to be a critic is to embrace the possibility of having to be a dissident and going into opposition against those in positions of power, authority and influence.  It is not a mentality that necessarily must reject all authorities or all orthodoxies–the best critics may be the most faithful, most orthodox and most traditional, because they have some ground on which to stand besides their own tiny personal experience.  There is no possibility of criticism without some standard by which to judge, and the accumulated wisdom of traditions and the boundaries of orthodoxy provide a wealth of understanding against which one can judge the merits and flaws of ideas.  But in the end being a critic, while worthy in certain respects, has only limited value.  To define yourself even by your dissidence, much less your apostasy, is to live a life that is not fully human, as man truly becomes who he is only in koinonia and not in separation and autonomy.  Someone who celebrates his apostasy is rather like a madman who enjoys his insanity.   

It is nonsense to talk about thinking “without limits”–there is no such thing, for starters.  There are limits to human comprehension and human thought–thinking “without limits” is to pretend to be able to think as God can.  Taking “truth” as your only measure must contradict this kind of thinking “without limits” in any case, since truth is itself a limit and a restriction on what an honest man can and should think and imposes limitations on everything you do and say.  There is no real virtue in upsetting settled opinions unless those opinions have absolutely no merit, which is rarely the case–this is merely to be a bomb-thrower and a crank, which is neither ultimately very interesting nor does it make any contribution to anything.  Sometimes beliefs are unquestioned for very good reasons (i.e., because they are true, and certainly because they are deeply meaningful to people) and questioning them sometimes violence to the truth.  When I see someone celebrating his own apostasy and making it into some kind of virtue, I feel sorry for him and wonder what it is that Neuhaus et al. could have done to drive him screaming into the outer darkness.  People like this make an idol out of doubt, and they relish uncertainty.  But the Lord did not say that doubt–which is, in any case, a mark of the Fall–would set us free, but the Truth.  What is so attractive about the chains of doubt that Linker would embrace them so tightly?

Democrat Bob Casey appears to have doubled his lead over Sen. Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania’s Senate race, according to a poll released today.

Mr. Casey had a 14-point lead in the Quinnipiac University Poll, with 54 percent of likely voters saying they planned to vote for him compared to 40 percent for Santorum. One percent said they wouldn’t vote and 6 percent said they didn’t know. Casey had a seven-point lead among likely voters in a match up between the two in the same poll on Aug. 15. ~The Post-Gazette

Wanna see theocon Michael Novak in complete intellectual meltdown? Check this out.

When neocon Norman Podhoretz makes similarly paranoid claims, he at least writes a 15,000-word essay in which he tries to back it up. But not Novak, who thinks it’s sufficient to tell us that it just “feels like 1938.” Actually, I think it feels even more like 2006. But maybe that’s just me. ~Damon Linker

But it does more than obfuscate; it also flatters ignorance. After all, Brooks would seem to be saying both that “the masses” have a different view of Islam than the country’s “intellectual elites” and that the uninformed (unintellectual) views of the former are more sensible than the views of those who actually know what they’re talking about — who know something about the Middle East, its cultures, its languages, its history. But is this true? And has the country benefited over the past five years from the leadership of elites who take their cue from the masses, bragging about their lack of intellectual curiosity and expressing contempt for the “reality-based community” of journalists and scholars? ~Damon Linker

The basic point–that it is probably unwise to prefer the uninformed and unintelligent to the better informed and more intelligent–is sound.  The Bush administration has played to the crowd and picked up on their sort of rhetoric, mixing it with its own noxious brew of ideological certainty and shocking ignorance of the Near East. 

But in relation to Brooks’ original claim, Linker’s point may not hold up quite as well, since one of the important points that Brooks made (and one where he is probably more right than wrong) was that the non-elite Americans may not be well-informed about the history or culture of the Islamic world (obviously they are not, since a great many of them bought Bush’s “freedom agenda” baloney hook, line and sinker–then again, so did many “intellectuals”!) but they also know what they see in the Islamic world and it aint a “religion of peace.”  It is this sort of common sense and a refusal to engage in PC cant about the virtues of Islam, while also pretending that jihadism is some sort of mutant strain that has nothing to do with Islam per se, that I believe Brooks was praising in the ordinary American.  It is something that the elite–be they journalists, academics or politicians–typically refuse to do, because they do not want to denigrate a “great world religion” or because they think it is strategically advantageous to say nice, flattering things about Islam, even if they happen to be untrue. 

On the other hand, the non-elites gave us such intellectual garbage as “Islamofascist,” which the GOP and movement leadership has embraced in a sure sign of intellectual degradation.  We are caught in something of a bind: we have a population that knows next to nothing about the region the government seems intent on “remaking” in one way or another and the elite currently in power that does not seem particularly more knowledgeable.  When Brooks was referring to elite attitudes, I suspect he was almost entirely referring to academia and the non-GOP media.  

Why do so few scholars and their students regularly read and engage with The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and the handful of other periodicals devoted to fostering informed debate, discussion, and thinking on a range of topics, both political and literary? ~Damon Linker

On behalf of academics, I would have to say that for most of us, most of the time, there is less and less time to engage with these things on a regular basis as research, dissertation-writing, article-writing, coursework and teaching take over.  This summer I have enjoyed a respite from a lot of that after getting a good deal of work done on my dissertation, but the days of maniacal hyper-posting are coming to a close, as they must during the school year.  I intend to remain involved in regular blogging and attuned to the political scene, but I believe that I am actually unusual in the degree to which I take interest in political questions anyway.  People I know here at Chicago and at other graduate schools, who are undoubtedly better scholars than I am because they clearly work harder at it, are often amazed at my familiarity with current events and the political debates of the day, to which they dedicate only a small portion of their time.  In the end, they do not take an interest because, well, there is so little that is actually intellectually interesting about these topics.  Who needs the NYRB when you have dozens of specialist journals with their own particular sets of reviews and articles to digest?  Those are the reviews you are interested in reading as an academic.  Of course there are politically active academics and those who do make time to involve themselves in these discussions, but this is very much rooted in the quirks and character of the academics in question.  For some people, there really are limitations on their time that prevent them from following the contemporary debates, but for others it is simply not the way they want to spend their free time.  I would say that this is normal for most academics and most graduate students. 

By the time all of that work is done, there are relatively few who want to start delving into the problems of the latest political debates.  Academics will stay informed of things in the news, but they are hardly going to throw themselves into the fray–especially those who do not yet have tenured positions.  Academics probably think that they have plenty of informed discussion going on in their midst (perhaps they are right, perhaps not) and do not need to go to TNR, the Review of Books or anywhere else in the printed press for engaging with political and literary topics.  Besides, in the highly specialised world of modern academia what is the incentive for most academics to take an interest in the commentary of generalists, who are unlikely to tell them anything in the area with which they are unfamiliar?  Hyperspecialisation is a real problem for academics, and it is something that I hope to never fall into, if I haven’t already, but it is what our academic institutions are geared towards creating. 

Pope Benedict’s words in Regensburg about the university and the community of reason it represented were remarkable for how alien they would have sounded to so many people at American universities, where scientists look askance at the rest of us, social scientists look askance at the humanists, and vice versa, and the divinity, business and law students live in their own universes.  At Chicago, the division is dramatised by many of the science buildings being clearly on one side of Ellis and the rest of the University being on the other (and the scientists will refer to the rest of us as being on “the other side of the street,” which might as well mean “the other side of the planet”)–and the law school is off in its own world across the Midway.  You can tell how bad things have gotten when the buzzword of choice for everything you do is “interdisciplinarity,” which is the tired, half-hearted attempt to rebuild the shattered sense of university. 

…Damon Linker now has a blog (hat tip: Rod Dreher).  This should be fun to watch as he takes on the FT crew while also possibly making wild and unfounded statements about religious conservatives in America.  Best of all, what does Linker call his new blog?  What else?  “The Apostate.”  So, irony aside for a moment, the choice Linker poses seems to be between the supposed fanaticism of the Neuhaus crowd and apostasy.  Not exactly a tough choice for most believers.

The name of Linker’s blog reminds me, on a completely different, personal note, of the name of a short story I wrote back in high school.  It was not a good short story (it was a very abstract story that was supposed to be critiquing the conformity of individualists, or something like that–no, really, it was), but I thought the title was one of those clever, late modern conservative “I’m really more subversive than you subversives are” uses of language, which was The Apostate of the Heretics. 

My creative writing teacher didn’t get the joke in the title, partly because she didn’t know what apostate meant, which I found a little hard to believe.  I’m not sure if she got the joke when I explained what it meant.  Then again, when I wrote another story based loosely on the 21st chapter of the Gospel of St. John and used St. Peter’s Aramaic name, Cephas, in the dialogue, she didn’t know who Cephas was, so I guess being an English teacher at a high-level private school requires you to know some things more than others. 

One of the advantages and disadvantages of living in Hyde Park is the opportunity to browse amazing bookstores that serve the University community–between the Co-Op and Powell’s, you are likely to be able to find any new or used book you might want to find (barring highly obscure, long out-of-print or very specialised technical texts), which also means that you are likely to be tempted into getting quite a lot of books when you visit either store.  Today brought such a fortunate and catastrophic visit to Powell’s, which has a modest Byzantine collection (but even a modest Byzantine collection is awesome compared to the piddling selection at most chain stores), a passable theology collection and an astonishingly broad history section all together.  Looking for the complete works of Bolingbroke?  You can find them there.  Need a primer for Old English?  There it is.  I was less impressed with their theology section, which runs heavily to the modern, lacks any real representation of Orthodoxy and which, oddly enough, contains a copy of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Liberty or Equality?, which is hardly a theology book.  But even given these limitations it still surpasses the religion sections at Borders, which run heavily to the DaVinci Code debunkers and the 987 books of Thomas Merton (it only seems as if there are that many, when there are, I believe, really only 852)–for a Trappist, the man is unusually verbose.

So the haul at Powell’s was quite interesting, and constitutes my leisure reading list for this year (whether or not I will get to most or all of these is another question).  Since other bloggers sometimes regale their readers with their latest reading choices, I thought my selections might be of interest to readers of Eunomia, so here they are by category.

Theology & Church History

J.E. Merdinger, Rome and the African Church in the Time of Augustine 
Ernst Renan, Averroes et l’averroisme  
 

Nova & Vetera: Patristic Studies in Honor of Thomas Patrick Halton 

Frederick J. McGinness, Right Thinking and Sacred Oratory in Counter-Reformation Rome
British History

Hugh Douglas, Jacobite Spy Wars 

Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole

Byzantine History

Paul Alexander, The Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople: Ecclesiastical Policy and Image Worship in the Byzantine Empire

Georgina Buckler, Anna Comnena: A Study 

Strangers to Themselves: The Byzantine Outsider

Near Eastern History

Meir Zamir, Lebanon’s Quest: The Road to Statehood, 1926-1939

But, why shouldn’t we think that the Iraq war has increased terrorism in the world, or at least the risk of it? The hornet’s nest analogy is apt, albeit clichéd. We were stung — and stung badly — well before the Iraq war. And after the multiple stings of 9/11 we decided to take the fight to nests. ~Jonah “Lie For a Just Cause” Goldberg

Gosh, this is almost as clever as the “flypaper” metaphor for fighting terrorism in Iraq.  Remember the flypaper?  Like flies, terrorists would be drawn to the disaster of Iraq so that we could kill them there–as if they were all going to show up for our convenience, and as if there were a finite number of them that we had to get rid of before the problem was solved.  Back then, remember, it was a positive plus that terrorists were flocking to Iraq–”it shows that they’re afraid!” people told us.  It’s rather like the idea that the pirahnas feeding on a cow that stumbles into the river are afraid of the cow. 

The hornets’ nest analogy would be great, except that invading Iraq, c. 2003 would be rather like kicking over an anthill of fire ants while claiming to be pursuing the hornets.  You still get bit by some nasty fire ants, and then you get stung by some more hornets while you’re dealing with the ants, while the hornets’ nests are perfectly intact in Hornetistan (a.k.a., Pakistan).  Then it occurs to you that you might ought to just stay out of ant and hornet-infested territory, or focus on a specific few nests that are most threatening to you.  But that would obviously be the wrong conclusion to draw, because you are on a mission to destroy all hornets everywhere for all time.  Which is great, except that it is impossible.

Shelton said he also remembers a disturbing deer hunting trip with Allen on land that was owned by the family of Billy Lanahan, a wide receiver on the team. After they had killed a deer, Shelton said he remembers Allen asking Lanahan where the local black residents lived. Shelton said Allen then drove the three of them to that neighborhood with the severed head of the deer. “He proceeded to take the doe’s head and stuff it into a mailbox,” Shelton said. ~Salon

Now I should say at this point that I cannot recall the last time a politician has been subjected to this kind of piling on–though Trent Lott is probably the best precedent for the inquisitio that has been going on–and you have to know that people who routinely make bigoted, outrageous, hateful statements about Christians or particularly Catholics, the secular liberal target of choice, are never scrutinised, mocked or disrespected to the degree that someone accused of racism is.  Mormons are also usually fair game for a good bigoted joke or two, and nobody will think twice about a politician making such a joke. 

Of course the obsession with Allen’s prejudices is advantageous for the Democrats, their exploitation of it opportunistic and cynical, and the missteps of the last two months by Allen have been the kind of self-inflicted injuries that every politician dreams his opponent will cause to himself.  The unbalanced, obsessive anti-prejudice crusade of some modern journalists is tiresome and destructive–it is the worst of thought-policing and liberal neo-Puritanism all rolled into one.  The fascination with what Allen said among friends in his youth is in all likelihood the product of a warped mind that must ferret out and purify the body politic like a latter-day Jacobin.  Allen may not come out looking particularly good, but the people intent on digging up his peccadilloes appear almost crazed in their pursuit of these typically minor, irrelevant aspects of his character. 

All that being said, if the story told above about the doe’s head is true, there was clearly something rather wrong with George Allen and there probably still is something wrong with him.  It’s as if he has aspired to embody the worst stereotypes about Southerners while embodying few or none of the good qualities that are representative of traditional Southern men. 

Let’s cut through it.  No normal person really cares about macaca, and few even really care that he didn’t want to talk about his Jewish ancestry (in truth, it is none of our business), and even fewer care whether he has a Confederate battle flag–which in itself is far from a demerit, but one of the few marks in the man’s favour in my book.  These are things for agitators and very vocal minorities within minorities to take an interest in.  Quite a few people will shrug if they hear that Allen used the word nigger, not because they approve of it but because they cannot see how it is that significant that someone used such language in private in his youth–and which he has apparently subsequently stopped using.  Incidentally, there is also nothing more tiresome than the precious habit, more common among preciously sensitive white people than among anyone else, of referring to this word as “the n-word”–which shows a decorum and restraint that they do not extend to the old profanities that carry equally crude and ugly meanings. 

What is so damning about all of these things for the man is that he is so thoroughly dishonest about all of it, refusing to own up to things that he evidently has done and has said.  By issuing another denial, which may have been discredited already, he further diminishes his credibility and comes off looking worse than he ever would have otherwise. 

It is ridiculous that things such as these are going to be the deciding factors in the Virginia Senate election, and it is a shame that the November vote will be a referendum on Allen’s indiscretions rather than his virtually criminal acquiescence in and support for an illegal, unconstitutional war of aggression and other usurpations by the executive branch.  In supporting this war, in failing to oppose the President in his various breaches of our fundamental law, he violated his oath to defend the Constitution, which ought to be a damned sight more important than anything he may have said or done back at UVA.  But, of course, in vapid modern America, his support of the criminal war is supposedly one of his political assets, while his youthful stupidity is what will cost him his re-election.  In light off this, does anyone really need me to recount all the reasons why modern democracy is a sham and a horrible way of running a government? 

“Nobody can go back and reinvent the past,” Condoleezza Rice told Katie Couric on “60 Minutes” Sunday night. But this nugget of truth came amid a flood of retrospective reinvention in which Rice equated the war in Iraq with the civil rights struggle of the 1960s — and left me wondering whether I was hearing polished sophistry or a case of total denial. ~Eugene Robinson

Perhaps there’s some devilishly clever postmodern irony in Secretary Rice’s comments.  People reinvent the past all the time–not literally, but in the sense that everyone reshapes the past by reshaping the interpretation of what happened.  The past is something that can be contested and controlled, and as Michael has observed recently he who controls the past controls the future.  Consider a few examples of recent reshaping.  President Bush says that he and his administration never implied any connection between Hussein and 9/11, even though he rhetorically aligned 9/11 and the “threat” from Iraq in numerous speeches.  No one ever said that Iraq had nukes–except for the Veep.  “You go to war with the army you have,” the Poet of the Pentagon said–except that Rumsfeld neglected to mention that he intentionally left rather large parts of that army elsewhere on purpose and with no intention of remaining there very long.  And so on.  Some people call this selective memory, others call it putting things in the best light.  Less generous people call it lying, but let’s not get too judgemental. 

Hacks and propagandists manipulate history to serve the turn of their masters.  This has been going on since, well, ever since history was recorded.  Thus anarchic Iraq can be likened to the period of the Confederation, because this tells us that things will get better and the Iraqis are doing just fine, the Sunni insurgency can be likened to the non-existent “Werewolves” of post-WWII Germany (Rumsfeld & Condi) to prove that everything will work out, and everything (and I do mean everything) can be likened to 1938 Europe and every enemy can be compared with fascists as a way of rallying people to the colours and convincing them of the vital necessity of fighting for “as long as it takes.”  Normal people might want to stop fighting Iraqis who are butchering each other, but relatively few want to pitch in the towel in the anti-fascist crusade.  It has become something of a commonplace in the historian’s trade that people reinvent the past all the time, because the person who dictates what happened in the past can often determine what should be done now through an appeal to (created) memories–and who would be better for this than the people with the empire that creates its ”own reality”? 

Incidentally, why doesn’t anybody liken things to 1689 Augsburg?  The Augsburgers have called and complained about the obvious ongoing discrimination against the War of the League of Augsburg (known as King William’s War to us colonials), one of those petty disputes over rights in a German principality and French aggrandisement under Louis XIV–which has so many obvious parallels to today’s problems, don’t you think?  I mean, isn’t it obvious how a French invasion of small German states applies to today’s problems?  Aren’t the parallels between the Sun King and Saddam Hussein just jumping out at you?  No?  Why not?  You must want to submit to the Islamobourbons! 

Now presumably Secretary Rice meant that you cannot actually go back and alter events in the past, which is true.  Who would know this better than the “student of history”?  But Rice shows that you can abuse history to no end and still claim to be a student of history–apparently in all seriousness. 

But Robinson is late to the game if he has only just now discovered Rice’s Iraq-is-the-new-civil-rights-movement argument.  (One might like to think that the fantastically obvious glaring differences between predominantly nonviolent protest for political change inside an existing democratic political order and a war of aggression to overthrow a foreign despotism would stop Rice short, but it doesn’t–after all, it’s always 1938, unless it’s 1963 in Birmingham.) This has been at the heart of her stump speeches since almost the start of the war, offering us such pearls of wisdom as this selection from her 7 Aug 2003 speech:

Like many of you, I grew up around the home-grown terrorism of the 1960s. I remember the bombing of the church in Birmingham in 1963, because one of the little girls that died was a friend of mine. Forty years removed from the tragedy I can honestly say that Denise McNair and the others did not die in vain. They — and all who suffered and struggled for civil rights — helped reintroduce this nation to its founding ideals. And because of their sacrifice we are a better nation — and a better example to a world where difference is still too often taken as a license to kill.

Knowing what we know about the difficulties of our own history, let us always be humble in singing freedom’s praises. But let our voice not waver in speaking out on the side of people seeking freedom. And let us never indulge the condescending voices who allege that some people are not interested in freedom or aren’t ready for freedom’s responsibilities. That view was wrong in 1963 in Birmingham and it is wrong in 2003 in Baghdad.

The desire for freedom transcends race, religion and culture — as countries as diverse as Germany, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, and Turkey have proved. 

This is how she, the black woman from Birmingham come to Washington, makes the war in Iraq not just the grandiose project of advancing the “freedom agenda” but also makes it into a particularly personal quest to make sure that Title VII is vigorously enforced from Basra to Sulamaniyeh…or something like that.  No one will be denied accommodations or employment on the basis of race in the bombed-out marketplaces of Baghdad–no, siree.   

In spite of having apparently missed this long-running theme in Rice’s self-indulgent rhetoric, Robinson makes a couple solid observations:

In her interview with Couric, Rice went on to argue that critics of the administration’s Middle East policies are like the racists who contended that black Americans were not ready to participate in democracy because they were “kind of childlike” and couldn’t handle the vote. But that’s a bizarre analogy. The last stand by white racists against integration and voting rights for African Americans wasn’t about patronizing attitudes some whites might have held — it was about power. It was about the knowledge that blacks were not just ready but also determined to exercise the right to vote.

She makes it sound as if those who disagree with the administration are standing in the schoolhouse door. But no one wants to deny Iraqis or anyone else the chance to practice democracy. The question is whether democracy should, or can, be imposed at the point of a gun.  

Yes, you see, if you oppose a war that kills tens of thousands of foreign people, you hate those people and think them inferior and inherently incapable of self-government.  If you support that war and believe that all the Ay-rab understands is force–because you, unlike the Arabs themselves, understand the depths of “the Arab mind”–then you are an enlightenened and benevolent friend of those people.    

Frankly, if it makes any difference to those inclined to believe the Secretary, the civil rights movement/Iraq analogy is actually insulting to black Americans, who were not typically likely to empower parties with armed militias that would be engaged in ethnic and sectarian mass killings.  There is also the small problem that black Americans in the 1960s were, well, Americans and partook of the same cultural and political inheritance that made representative government possible here.  To be blunt, Nuri al-Maliki isn’t really anything like Medgar Evers, now, is he?  The Iraqis, whatever else you might want to say in favour of them, have had no such advantages and have been doing all of this more or less from scratch; in practise, they have shown their preference to side with people like themselves (which is perfectly normal) and to vote in the interests of their ethnic or religious community, and these communities have their allegiances to the exclusion of the “nation” or the government.  This is not really a knock on the Iraqis, who are failing just as any other people would fail to adapt to a political system that is totally alien to their history and culture (we would likely make a mess of Byzantine ceremonial rites and Chinese court protocol), but it is simply an observation that such habits are highly unlikely to produce successful mass democracy in a heterogenously populated  nation-state that lacks any real political consensus. 

Real students of history know these things.  Professional liars–and what are diplomats if not that?–do not, and more importantly they don’t care that they don’t know it.  They will say whatever they need to say to make the deal or sell the policy.  Mix that ingrained dishonesty with fanatical, moralistic self-righteousness, such as this “we are fighting the new KKK” sort of argument, and you have a very nasty, dangerous cocktail on your hands.

Though he’s supported every free-trade agreement since he’s been in Congress (except, just recently, CAFTA), he is running as a born-again nationalist: His campaign was one of the first in the nation to run ads against the Dubai port deal. “We need to control our borders,” Ford says, and proceeds to conflate immigration and security issues and the multiplex and Beslan: “We don’t want to learn that terrorists came across the border and exploded our movie theaters, or that they’ve blown up 25 schools in the Midwest.” ~Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect

A Democrat who understands the salience of border security and immigration (Ford voted for the Sensenbrenner bill) and can actually sound more conservative on these issues than his opponent is going to do well this year; one with the charisma and campaign skills of Harold Ford is probably going to wipe the floor with Corker.  If the Harold Fords of 2006 can successfully exploit anxiety about GOP dithering on border security, it will be because the Republicans frittered away every opportunity they had for six years to act on one of the most basic responsibilities of government. 

Steinfels does a decent job deflating all of the theocracy hype coming from the left, though what he has to say was said earlier and better by Ross Douthat last month.  There were real communist agents connected to progressive politics in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and there were people who really were com-symps, but the threat here was not simply the influence of a radical marginal group on American politics but the undue influence of agents of a foreign power on the domestic political life of the United States.  If there were some kind of Christian Reconstructionist Theocrat International (because Reconstructionism is just so terribly popular) that was seeking to subvert the government and spread its influence covertly, the comparison might begin to be credible.  Of course, that Theocrat International would have to be party to the deaths of millions for the moral equivalence between the two to be at all legitimate.

Just got in from the FANTASTIC FEST screening of APOCALYPTO tonight.  From seeing the film for a second time in the same day. After the second screening, I have to say it plays even better. The themes about how the industrial needs of a civilization, even a primitive one - lay the groundwork for moral, societal and physical decay really begin to come out. ~Harry Knowles

Via Peter Suderman

In describing its portrait of a civilization in decline, Gibson said, “The precursors to a civilization that’s going under are the same, time and time again,” drawing parallels between the Mayan civilization on the brink of collapse and America’s present situation. “What’s human sacrifice,” he asked, “if not sending guys off to Iraq for no reason?” ~Reuters

Via Dan McCarthy

I’m glad to see that Gibson hasn’t lost his combativeness and his willingness to court controversy–at least of certain kinds.  But the interesting question is this: will his shots against the Iraq war be considered more offensive than his drunken tirade?  My guess would be that it is going to get him at least as much scorn and hostility.  I’m even more interested to see Apocalypto now than I was a few weeks ago.

Also, do you suppose the Mayas thought that their sacrifices would ward off the Toltecofascists?

Goldberg ends with recommendations, some sensible, some quirky, for building a progressive movement to counter the dangerous brew of fundamentalist Christianity and belligerent nationalism. Among them is the advice that progressive should “win their neighbors over, not just beat them in court.”

That is not likely to happen without a significantly greater effort to understand those neighbors and their beliefs. At the end of her book, calling for a movement to oppose the theocrats, Goldberg runs up all the old banners of the war between secularism and religion, pitting “freedom and Enlightenment” against “stale constricting dogmas” and “holy books.” Reading those words, I question not only whether I — and a lot of people like me — belong in her ranks, but also whether she, or Kevin Phillips, or even my friend Jim Rudin, really want us. ~Peter Steinfels, The American Prospect

As I observed at the time that Goldberg’s book was coming out, her denunciation of “stale constricting dogmas” and “holy books” left little wiggle room for her program, which becomes more and more obviously not simply anti-fundamentalist but simply anti-religious and specifically anti-Christian. Goldberg truly is a child of the Enlightenment–and anyone who has read my blog over the past two years knows that this is not a compliment–in her intractable hostility to public religion in general but most especially hostility Christian public religion. In this she is at least more serious than the people who try to have it both ways, pretend that Voltaire and Bossuet, Locke and Laud, Spinoza and St. Peter can all live together under one big roof of Christian-laced liberalism. To such people there can only be one response: Ecrasez la blasphemie!

First, the general idea of “fascism” — the creation of a centralized authoritarian state to enforce blanket obedience to a reactionary, all-encompassing ideology — fits well the aims of contemporary Islamism that openly demands implementation of sharia law and the return to a Pan-Islamic and theocratic caliphate.

In addition, Islamists, as is true of all fascists, privilege their own particular creed of true believers by harkening back to a lost, pristine past, in which the devout were once uncorrupted by modernism. ~Victor Davis Hanson, National Review

Back to basics.  Jihadi basics: jihadis (a.k.a., Islamists) are Islamic reactionaries; they are a product of modernity but are anti-modern; they do want to bring back the Caliphate, which makes them as un-fascist as Novalis was for romanticising the medieval papacy.  Fascist basics: fascists are not reactionary in any meaningful sense, since they are above all an ideology dedicated to modernisation, the new, the future, the creation of the “New Order” and the new man; they are modernisers and are not anti-modern; they are a mass movement with no attachments or sympathies with the ancien regime or its partisans; they are not the heirs of Counter-Revolutionary rightist politics, but a mass revolutionary nationalist movement, none of which has anything to do with being “reactionary” in any sense beyond the purely pejorative way in which that term is bandied about by progressives who use it as if it were an insult.  More Fascist basics: fascists did not want to recreate a pristine order taken from the past, though they did want to restore their nations to what they believed had been past glories, but instead wanted to regenerate their nations and see them born anew.  Their emphasis on newness, modernism, futurism puts them starkly at odds with any real reactionaries.  Fascism’s palingenetic urge has next to nothing to do with reviving an old order; Nazis would borrow certain symbols and ideas from the German medieval past, but they had no intention of recreating the Empire of the Hohenstaufens, much less the Holy Roman Empire, which would have offended them in its cosmopolitan and Catholic nature.  In brief, if jihadis are Islamic reactionaries, which they are, they cannot be Islamic fascists.  Pick one or the other, if you must, but for goodness’ sake stop confusing the two–as Hanson always, always does.

Then there is the canard of generic fascist anti-Semitism as proof of the connection:

Because fascism is born out of insecurity and the sense of failure, hatred for Jews is de rigueur [sic].

Of course it is important to note here that Italian Fascism initially had no anti-Semitic impulses (unlike National Socialism, it did not originate out of the charged atmosphere of the struggle between Habsburg liberalism and various nationalisms that frequently focused on Jewish support for liberalism as a way of discrediting it and simultaneously of finding a political reason to despise Jews), and in the 1920s had Jewish supporters, which makes even more sense when you understand that Fascism claimed to be–and was–a revolutionary, modernising movement of the sort to which Jewish intellectuals are frequently drawn.  Judenhass in Islam is as old as Islam itself; it needs no comparing with the obsessions of the Nazis, because it has its own sources and its own very simple, religious reasons.  The similarity here is noteworthy, but ultimately superficial, as Islam and fascism also both view traditional Christianity with contempt, though the former does so rather more than the latter.  The point is simply this: adherents of totalising worldviews naturally regard those who do not belong to their worldviews as enemies.

Then there is Hanson’s historical error:

Second, fascism thrives best in a once proud, recently humbled, but now ascendant, people.

This is misleading and simplistic.  Sociologically, fascism thrives in nations that are late-comers in modernisation (Payne refers to them as second-tier modernising nations, I believe) but which are actually potentially on the verge of becoming major powers.  Their former humiliation is irrelevant–Italy was on the winning side in WWI, for all the good it did them, as was Japan, which had only gone from victory to victory in the international arena since the Meiji Restoration.  Resentment and overconfidence alike can encourage militarism–which is actually a far better term for what Japan represented anyway. 

The jihadi impulse is far more elemental; for them, it is simply the fulfillment of religious obligation to struggle for Islam and bring the world into submission to Islam.  Rain or shine, victory or defeat, no matter what has happened in the recent or distant past, the jihadi will persist in the struggle (and, incidentally, it is because of the nature of the word jihad that Mein Kampf would be called jihadi in some parts of the world).  In fact, there is no question of any Muslim nations being in the “ascendant” where the jihadis find their most willing recruits, as there are no “ascendant” Muslim nations even remotely on par with the modernising nation-states that bred fascist movements–it is typically in the nations that have been on the receiving end of defeats for as long as anyone can remember that the jihadis do best.

So anyone who speaks about “reactionary fascism” or “religious fascism” doesn’t know what he’s talking about, since there are no such things.  You can, of course, despise all reactionaries and despise all fascists, but you must understand that they not the same and have next to nothing in common.  For my part, as a reactionary, I won’t stand for the association, since fascism represents the antithesis of everything I believe.

Religious conservatives are unhappy the Republican-led Congress hasn’t paid enough attention to “values issues,” he said, noting that even a push this summer against same-sex marriage came too late.

“It has not escaped our notice that they waited until just a few months from the November elections to address our agenda,“ Cureton said. ~AP (via Michael Silence via A.C. Kleinheider)

Christian conservatives are beginning to wake up and are tired of being taken for granted. Waving the flag, saying nice things about the “culture of life” and wacko stunts such as the Terri Schiavo intervention don’t cut it for these folks. They want more than scraps from the table, and they are tired of waiting. Watch the Rovian machine buckle and collapse.

It may truly take a Democrat to put the screws to the employers that so need those screws in them.

I was at the Business Roundtable Forum back in April, Mr. Corker. I heard the code words: employers shouldn’t be cops.

Well, as I said before, there is a lot of agreement on that. The country does not want to make employers cops, sir, they want to make them perps.

The fact, Mr. Corker, that I am thinking that Harold Ford might help do that should scare the crap out of you. ~A.C. Kleinheider, Volunteer Voters

It’s posts like this and candidates like Harold Ford that make me ask: why exactly do we want the GOP to be in control of government?

The navy’s proudest outpost is found on the southern banks of Lake Titicaca, more than two miles above sea level.

A monument near the entrance to the Titicaca Naval Base depicts a Bolivian soldier thrusting his bayonet into the throat of a Chilean soldier beside the words, “What once was ours, will be ours once more.” ~The New York Times

Via Steve Sailer

I can’t say that I fully understand the passionate desire to reacquire guano-rich territory, but I do respect the Bolivians’ sense of historical memory and their refusal to let bygones be bygones.  That coastline is theirs, and they’re going to get it back someday.  Good for them.  They are, in some sense, stuck in the same position as the Serbs in the Balkans–cut off from the coast, with which they have been historically connected.  Besides, if it’s good enough for other nations, it’s good enough for the Bolivians. 

Personally, though, if there were ever a new War of the Pacific (how’s that for irony?) I would be hoping for a Chilean victory.  Bolivia is dysfunctional enough–there’s no reason to bring more of South America under the rule of the fantastical Aymara utopia of Evo Morales.

Do you notice one thing in that list that seems like a bit of an odd fit? And yet, conservatives have long fought for phonics with the same revolutionary zeal that they bring to the rest of their agenda. And they don’t merely argue that phonics should be a substantial part of any good reading program — which it should — but that phonics should be the exclusive method of teaching reading to kids. “Whole language” meets with about the same reaction as a cry to arms against “secular humanism.” I’ve never quite understood how phonics came to occupy the same pedestal as the Lord’s Prayer, but there you have it. ~Kevin Drum

Er, well, if you say so.  I am skeptical that phonics actually holds anything like the hallowed place among conservatives that Mr. Drum describes, and I am also skeptical that there are untold legions of phonics purists insisting on a phonics-only education.  There are clearly some who take this view, and some have even reached positions of authority in the government, but the onset of phonics-only fascism is as far away as the future theocracy.  

Let’s take a look at some of the components of the godless “whole language” program that I ought to despise with every fibre of my being:

The components of a whole language literacy program include:

• literate classroom environment;
• reading to and with students;
• individualized instruction;
• independent reading;
• students as authors;
• integrating literacy skills into curriculum across disciplines;
• increased parent involvement.

The villains!  Increased parent involvement?  I know that no God-fearing conservative would stand for that!  Independent reading!  Everyone knows that conservatives don’t allow any kind of independent activity for their children–we keep them tied to our belts with elastic rope (we have become much more lenient in recent years) and we teach them to stare at the ground until it is time for their phonics exercises.  Students as authors?  Whoever heard of such a thing?  Where would it end?  Before you know it they’ll be writing subversive tracts and setting up their own blogs!  No, clearly no conservative would ever want to have anything to do with these things. 

Maybe there are proponents of phonics who take such extreme positions on how to teach children to read, omitting all attempts to instill creativity, use reading in an interdisciplinary way (read history? nah!) or teach them to understand meaning and context, but I doubt very much that very many people listen to them or that they represent anything like a majority among conservatives who work on educational methods or conservatives in general.  This seems to me to be a ludicrous attack that is uncharacteristically sloppy for Drum.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology. ~The New York Times

But remember Bin Laden said that Iraq was vital to their global jihad (Michael Novak has just told us so), so no matter what you do you must not make any kind of rational judgement about this information that would seek to weaken or reduce the jihadi threat.  Under no circumstances should we consider concluding the war in Iraq, even though it daily works to the enemy’s advantage for us to remain.  We must have resolve.  After all, it’s 1938 and the fascists are coming, aiee!

When Thaksin, a former policeman who made his fortune from telecommunications, came to power in 2001, he broke with the old order. He put police cronies in charge of the southern border and shut down two intelligence clearing centres. Soon, reports in the media alleged that corruption, smuggling and racketeering were rife.

In January 2004 militants raided an armoury and started a killing spree. Since then they have murdered Buddhist monks, teachers, hospital staff and civil servants — anyone seen as representing the Thai state. The army seemed powerless to halt the chaos. ~The Times

THE Royal Thai Army will adopt new tactics against a militant Islamic uprising, following the coup that sent Thaksin Shinawatra, the ousted prime minister, into exile in London last week. According to sources briefed by the army high command, Thaksin’s bungled response to the insurgency in southern Thailand, which has claimed 1,700 lives in two years, was a critical factor in the generals’ decision to get rid of him.

Military intelligence officers intend to negotiate with separatists and to use psychological warfare to isolate the most violent extremists, in contrast to Thaksin’s heavy-handed methods and harsh rhetoric. ~The Times

The parallels with our own experience in Iraq are only too obvious.

Troops, who have tied yellow ribbons to their gun barrels to signify loyalty to Thailand’s revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej, pose for photographs with children and tourists. One army spokeswoman on television is a former beauty queen. General Sonthi has even ordered his troops to smile more.

This charm offensive seems to be working. A poll showed that more than 80% of Thais – including the rural poor, among whom Thaksin enjoyed most support – favour the coup. ~The Sunday Herald

Now I won’t make that most pernicious of silly democratic arguments that because 80% of people in a country approve of something it is necessarily therefore right or desirable, but it really ought to put an end to any notion that this coup lacks the support of the Thai people.  This demonstrates (yet again) that what most people desire is some decent measure of order and the (well-founded) belief that their government is not corrupt; Thaksin was failing to provide for good order in the south of the country with his poorly executed war against guerrillas and his heavy-handed drug war, and he manifestly corrupted himself and the government during his time in power.  Sonthi Boonyaratglin doesn’t exactly flow off the tongue, but it is a name of a general who has helped to save his country for his king and people against the people’s government.

At the heart of Friedman’s error is a lack of justice and a confusion about human nature. Most people are not would-be managers or flexible entrepreneurs prepared to change careers every two or three years. People work to live, to support their families, and to feel useful and productive. A decent human being is concerned when anyone loses his job and doubly so when that person is his countryman. And it’s simply unrealistic to expect people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s to retool for new careers. But, hey, it’s important entire regions of America (and the world) are impoverished so that Friedman can have a Starbucks latte with Indians in Monteverde or wherever he is this week. ~Chris Roach

But I’m sure Friedman will shout: the world is flat, and so is Uruguay!  At which point I suspect the Uruguayans will kindly ask him to leave for insulting their fine mountains.  This is what Friedman actually said about Uruguay:

The New Yorker once ran a cartoon by Peter Steiner of two dogs, with one sitting at a computer keyboard saying to the other, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

Nobody also knows you’re Uruguay.

Um, not to be too geeky about this, but aren’t there routers and IP addresses that tell people things like this?  But more basically, did Friedman just compare Uruguay to a dog?  Did one of the local patriots smack him in the face for this insult to national honour?  I hope so.  I honestly have no idea what Uruguayans might have to be proud of, and they must have something, but comparing someone’s country to a dog is just poor form. 

I am not sure, but the average Uruguayan probably has about as much sympathy for the Uruguayan Round of GATT as the average West Virginian, which is to say not a whole lot.  Perhaps the near-collapse that Uruguay suffered in the wake of Argentina’s default (one of those small unfortunate incidents that followed upon Argentine embrace of the Great Whore of Neoliberalism) soured the locals on Friedman’s starry-eyed mentality of “Globalisation is to bright I have to wear shades made in Indonesia by child labourers and ordered online through a Nigerian server.”  It also cannot be very comforting for computer engineers in this country to read that Indian corporations have started to outsource their own computer engineering jobs to Uruguay–next stop on the Flat World Express, Namibia.  Have broadband, will not travel.  One will instead facilitate an ever-more dislocated, uprooted world that moves concrete, real-world industries to ever-poorer countries and pawns expendable, easily outsourced service jobs off on the rest.   

Chris takes Friedman apart with ease and skill in this post.  It is a pleasure to read, and I strongly recommend it to all.

If nothing else, he’s captured Allen’s self-absorption. Watching Garden State, it’s impossible not to remember that Braff is writing for himself and directing himself. As such, it’s kind of annoying that 80 percent of the shots are close-ups of Zach Braff. It’s also irritating, for that matter, that he created a role that requires Natalie Portman to fall in love with him. ~Josh Levin, Slate

This reminds me of the discussion of the “indie girl” stereotype, for which Portman in Garden State was the archetype (”manic depressive without the depressive“).  It causes me to wonder: if most every guy today supposedly wants the Natalie Portman ”indie girl,” does that mean that all of them have to become the “insufferable tool” Zach Braff? 

To follow up on Braff’s self-absorption with a different Natalie Portman connection, one gets the feeling that if Braff had co-starred with Portman in V for Vendetta all of the masks worn by V and the crowds at the end of the movie would have been reproductions of Braff’s face, not that of Guy Fawkes.  And V for Vendetta would have then managed to be even worse than it already is–if that is possible.

Well, it is time for some accountability at Eunomia.  Last month when the macaca business began in the Virginia Senate race, I laughed it off and said with certainty that it would have no effect on Allen’s re-election or his future presidential fortunes.  Here were some of my remarks on 15 August, which now look positively dim-witted:

It’s easy to pick on predictions, but this one seems to be begging for a little ridicule.  Except for the 1-2% of the country that actively worries about presidential primaries two years before they happen, not only will no one will remember Allen’s odd, apparently ill-chosen “macaca/macaque” reference during this campaign come ‘08, but I doubt strongly that Virginia Senate voters will remember it in three months’ time.  The Plank is getting excited at the thought of Allen jeopardising his re-election with this.  Give me a break.  I like Jim Webb and I think he’s excellent on the war, but right now it’s going to take a lot more than an obscure French racial slur to bring George Allen’s campaign down.

Oops.  Well, you live and learn.  What I have learned from this mistake is to never expect very much from public opinion and assume that the most trivial, irrelevant “scandals” will be the most important for the outcome of the election.  Underhanded deals with the Chinese?  Aggressive war?  Torture?  Massive incompetence?  Culture of corruption?  Not important.  Macaca?  Important. 

Obviously, I underestimated the power of The Washington Post, the stupidity of the Allen campaign, the silliness of the public and the political importance of a truly frivolous controversy.  Now not only is Allen on the ropes in a tied race that he should have won in a walk, as detailed in a new Weekly Standard article (hat tip: Jim Antle), but he has every chance of suffering an embarrassingly sizeable loss as late-deciding voters go for the challenger.  Since I have come to take a dim view of Mr. Allen, I don’t much care that he may lose (in fact, I am hopeful that he will), but it cannot say very much for our political system if something this insignificant can change the course of elections.

And if I were trying to become rich and famous, I would not be in graduate school or working as a non-partisan critic of political spin, both of which pay virtually nothing and attract far less attention than partisan vitriol. ~Brendan Nyhan

It is certainly rich to see Kossacks accusing someone else of seeking glory and power, since Daily Kos and associated blogs exist for virtually no other purpose than to mobilise and organise (and whine) in the pursuit of Democratic power–power that the chief Kossacks undoubtedly expect will benefit them once they have driven the craven centrists out of their midst and cleansed the party in a purifying fire of maniacal raving.  They like to make noise, and they like to get noticed–it is part of the blogger persona, though it seems to have developed a mutant strain with those folks.  They have some real influence, but I bet they also expect that influence to profit them.  I’m not holding that against them, but it is peculiar that they would set about making a reasonable, non-partisan critic into some kind of gold-digging shyster, as if there was big money to be made in hacking off two thirds of the population and alienating the most politically hyperactive people on the Web.  What this entire episode, which began here, has shown is not so much that liberal magazines are easily intimidated by the blog left, but that the blog left chooses to crucify the oddest people for seemingly spurious, frivolous reasons and thus reveals their own shocking frivolity. 

So Nyhan said that it was stupid to compare the administration to fascists–well, it is stupid, just as it is stupid to compare ever third-rate dictator on the planet with Hitler.  He also said that calling a book about Ann Coulter Brainless was, well, rather brainless, since Coulter may be many things but a person lacking in intelligence isn’t one of them.  What bothered the Kossacks in the first case and the TAP editors so much with the others was that Nyhan was perfectly right in both of these cases and all they could do was throw a hissy fit. 

No, there is no reward for even-handed or judicious or intelligent criticism if it does not exempt your “side”–and you simply must have a side–and in pointing out precisely those flaws that plague all partisans you will mostly receive scorn from both sides in due course.  Today the GOP bloggers are saying soothing, conciliatory things about Mr. Nyhan, but that is because he was “defenestrated” by liberals for saying things critical of liberals; were he to make the same sort of dismissive remarks about Islamofascism at NRO, they wouldn’t be able to get him out of the window fast enough.

It’s unclear why President Bush’s approval ratings have risen, but the Washington Times offers a suggestion we can safely rule out — the masterful PR work of Tony Snow:

Former talk show host Tony Snow took over as President Bush’s communications point man four months ago, beefing up the press office staff, honing internal operations and deploying a quick-response strategy.

Now, polls show, the president’s approval rating has jumped to its highest level since January.

Could Mr. Snow be responsible for the surge?

Answer: No. That is all. ~Brendan Nyhan

Short, sweet, and to the point.  And he manages to belittle Tony Snow with a minimum of effort.  The more I see from this Nyhan, the more I like his style.

Since I have been writing on the theme of conformity, dissidence and blogging, perhaps a few belated words about The American Prospect’s termination of Brendan Nyhan’s blogging at their site are in order.  Most observers of the situation have deplored the reason for what some have called Nyhan’s “defenestration” (people apparently don’t just get fired anymore!), namely that Nyhan, who considers himself a non-partisan analyst, refused to stop dishing out some criticism to the liberal side.  One of the offending posts in question, attacking both the tiresome habit of neocons in comparing everything in foreign policy to the Nazis/fascism and the liberal habit of comparing their domestic enemies to Nazis/fascism, was as refreshing as it is rare.  But in all honesty, who was Nyhan kidding?  The large conservative magazines no longer have to enforce ideological conformity with purges such as this because they long ago established the ground rules for what would pass for acceptable dissent, and the limits of permissible discourse are exceedingly narrow, everyone knows where the limits are and nobody, if he wants to long remain associated with those magazines, crosses them.  The Prospect is drawing its boundaries in accordance with what the blog left declares to be acceptable and unacceptable.  I despise these sorts of purges, but they happen all the time–and no one has less credibility in denouncing them than the people who have mastered the fine art of writing entire groups of people out of the conservative movement. 

As for liberal complaints about the uppity Kossacks dictating terms to the Prospect, some perspective.  After fifteen years or so of whining about a lack of progressive alternative media, liberals have finally gotten their equivalent of talk radio in the netroots and have found that it comes at the price of unleashing the unseemly passions of the core supporters and giving them a real voice that can influence and intimidate others.  The GOP was smart about how it has handled the talk radio phenomenon–it approves of it enough to make the radio hosts feel as if they are part of the GOP team, and eventually they become, as Limbaugh did, hacks who will say almost anything on behalf of the party (who knows? perhaps he has even come to believe the preposterous things he says!).  The GOP has come to understand the value of talk radio as the vent that releases built-up pressure among their political base, especially on intense issues such as immigration; its magazines have nothing to fear from the blog right, because the major GOP bloggers are all more or less marching along in agreement with the major magazines and think tanks.  The problem of how to handle intimidation from RedState or lgf never comes up, because these blogs simply don’t make any attempt to enforce conformity on the magazines–instead, they enforce the magazines’ conformity on their members and commenters. 

The NROniks can talk about their penchant for heterodoxy all they like (no, really, they have said this!), but in fairness I have never seen the NROniks go after the looney fringes of Republican blogging (think Little Green Footballs) or the fever swamps of talk radio (think Michael Savage).  Instead of belittling the unseemly Bush-worship of PowerLine’s Hinderaker, some denizens of The Corner seem more interested in competing with him for Chief Lackey.  The issue in the Nyhan case has never been whether the Prospect would criticise Democrats, but whether a non-partisan analyst would be forced to toe an ideological line dictated by blog activists.  NRO and the like do not face this problem, because they and the righty bloggers are all more or less toeing the same line to begin with.  All of this is deplorable, but as has been noted before one of the very purposes of the “movement” has been to enforce conformity, not encourage debate and dissent.  Liberals can look at the conservative operation as something of a success story, in terms of election results, provided they ignore the deleterious effect this “success” has had on the quality of ideas and thought in the “movement.” 

It sure makes a noticeable difference to wake up in the morning when you know that from now on, you are going to be a good person, and all that cynicism and biting sarcasm and automatically fixating into finding weaknesses in things is gone. This feeling is probably the secular version of what the religious people feel like after their conversion. ~Ilkka Kokkarinen, Sixteen Volts

I had earlier noticed this part of Dr. Kokkarinen’s final post, but had wanted to say something about another aspect of his explanation for giving up blogging.  On behalf of sarcastic cynics and critics everywhere, I have to say: give me a break!  Sarcasm, especially bitter sarcasm, is sometimes just the needed antidote for the pretensions of public intellectuals–such people thrive on the air of seriousness and self-importance they bring to their work, and nothing punctures that overinflated balloon faster than a shot of sarcastic wit.  Who are we bloggers to puncture that balloon?  Well, if not us, who?  Who will hold up the claims of these people to scrutiny?  The regular media?  That’s a good one.  Their colleagues?  Unlikely.     

Critique serves a vital function in any discussion, and must perforce be rather negative, though that does not have to make it purely destructive.  There is something rather tiresome in the assumption that by giving up writing blog entries in a sarcastic, cynical vein you have thereby become a better person.  If you were a bad person for doing these things before, you have not significantly reformed–you have simply stopped broadcasting your views to the world–and if you were not a bad person for doing these things there is no sudden “conversion” from being a bad, cynical blogger to a good, positive non-blogger.  Some people are more prone to see flaws than others; you cannot turn this off with a snap of the fingers.  If you have a knack for withering criticism, it is part of who you are and not something that you can simply shut off; it will simply be expressed in a new form. 

Dr. Kokkarinen is, of course, free to do as he pleases and doesn’t need to justify ending his blog with some appeal to moral reform–he could simply say that he wants to focus all his energies on teaching, which would be admirable enough and would have exposed him to less scorn from those sarcastic cynics who remain.  But it doesn’t say much in his favour that he has chosen silence and the least path of resistance when he came in for some heavy criticism because of things he wrote; even if he was wrong in what he said or how he said it, there is a certain principle that ought to make him insist that his writing does not hinge on the approval of the people he criticises. 

It says even less that he thinks that by shutting down his blog and silencing himself he has therefore become a better person.  If an academic wants to be done with polemic, criticism and even sarcastic negativity, he may as well go into another line of work–these things are part and parcel of the competitive atmosphere of the academic world, as it should be in a world that ought to thrive on vigorous, serious and, yes, respectful debate.  These aspects of academia can sometimes become excessive and degenerate into fruitless vendettas between scholars and researchers, but this kind of rivalry has existed for a very long time.  Anyone engaged in inquiry and active in “the life of the mind,” whether in a professional capacity or in his free time, will sooner or later find himself confronted with critics and those who would just as soon see him silenced.  The odds are that if they wrap themselves up in the mantle of the injured victim, the less merit their objections have.  How mistaken it is, then, to yield to the complaints of such people, who, in all likelihood, have no good retorts to his criticisms and have had to resort to this kind of PC harrassment.   

The flight of Kokkarinen has prompted many comments across a great many blogs, most of which touch on similar points: 1) freedom of speech in Canada seems rather weak when something like this happens; 2) PC-mania is out of control; 3) Kokkarinen was wrong to capitulate and scuttle his blog.  But no post I have seen expresses all of this with the contempt that Mr. Ellila musters up here: 

Lame.

This “apology”, which is a thinly veiled parody, is a pathetic attempt by Ilkka to lick the jackboots of feminazi thugs in order to keep his job at the Soviet university by making the thoughpolice believe he genuinely repents his thoughtcrime.

Ilkka reminds me of the ghetto Jews who cooperated with the SS in the false hope that they would save their own asses.

In stark contrast, when Hans-Hermann Hoppe, professor of economics at the University of Nevada, was attacked by the thoughtpolice for saying homosexuals are less interested on the average in planning for the future as heterosexuals because the former generally don’t have children and the latter do, he refused to surrender, and successfully sued the university for breach of job contract, and managed to get a lot of positive public attention, thereby humiliating the Soviet-style inquisitors who wanted him to give up his Goldsteinism. ~Mikko Ellila

Over the top?  In some ways, possibly, but Mr. Ellila hits on this as an aspect of what I have been calling the inquisitio nova–the dedicated persecution of the thought crimes of various kinds of prejudice in an attempt to maintain a sense of ideologically defined moral purity and control over the definitions of what is and is not acceptable thought. 

If Dr. Kokkarinen really believes that his blog was nothing but an exercise in nattering negativism and cynical hostility, it is strange that he should have started commenting on matters of controversy at all.  Any blog that touches on cultural and political topics, if it is not to become an echo chamber for the partisans of the state or the ruling party, has to be contrarian, oppositionist and frequently dissident.  A certain degree of cynicism is unavoidable when confronted with the endless waves of half-truths and deceptions that flow from the official sources of information, the pretentious theories of academics and the governments of the world.   

Frankly, I think cynicism, like pessimism, has received a bad name from people who benefit from ignoring its criticisms, mostly because these people frequently confuse it with nihilism–a belief in nothing–when it has been at its best a kind of humanist critique of the pretensions and idols of this world.  A Cynic motto was: Deface the coin (which had clear associations with ruining counterfeit currency–”deface the coin” was a call to cut through the webs of fraud and deception).  The Cynics themselves were often personally quite objectionable people, and their contempt for all convention was excessive and unbalanced, but in this they also possessed a keen eye for recognising cant and denouncing frauds when they were put in places of honour.  It seems to me that this could contain perils for the person who assumes the Cynic pose, and certainly contemptus mundi without the love of God can become nothing but a purely vicious resentment, but in their detachment from the glories of this world the Cynics (exemplified by Diogenes meeting Alexander while seated in his bathtub) possess the first half of the wisdom of the later ascetics.  The second half of wisdom was, of course, to leaven the bitter bread of criticism with the fullness of the Truth.  The obvious corollary of defacing the (counterfeit) coin is to respect the legitimate coin.  There is nothing wrong with naysaying as such; it is when there is never anything to which one would say yea that a habit of criticism can become soul-destroying.  Yet, in my experience, those who object to paper schemes, ready-made answers and the armed doctrines of this world have strong commitments to an affirmative vision of order that they are trying to protect against the sophists and schemers.  I would much rather be among those calling it as we see it, who pull at the loose threads of ideological tapestries, who mock those who have position but not authority, than to be one of the legion of excuse-makers and apologists for the powerful of this world, who, I’m sorry to say, make up a surprisingly large proportion of the allegedly independent media of blogs.  In the end, it is far better to speak the truth mixed with some bitterness than to speak deceitful words smoother than oil and sweet to hear.    

When the Thai military plotters pulled off their coup, they, like many another gang of revolutionaries before them, took over the radio and television stations in the Thai capital. Thank heavens for the Internet, talk radio, and other alternative media. In that respect, we’ve had a coup in the United States almost since the beginning of the Bush administration. ~Lawrence Henry, AmSpec Blog

I’m not sure, but I think this has to win some kind of prize for being the most bizarre use of the “liberal media” trope I have ever seen.  But maybe I’ve got him wrong.  Perhaps Mr. Henry is suggesting that NewsCorp and Clear Channel are engaged in a coup against the constitutional government of the United States?  He might be onto something….But I really don’t know what he’s saying.  First of all, I don’t know what to make of someone who thinks that a military coup that has the support of the king is revolutionary.  I am also unsure what difference the existence of alternative media makes when almost all the urban and educated people in Thailand are thrilled by the coup and are ecstatic at the downfall of Thaksin; Thaksin’s political base is among the poor and rural folks in the north and east of the country, who presumably do not have their own blogs and routine Web access.

Well, the Duke’s fans should be a bit more wary of this particular film. There’s a fairly simple reason why The Searchers is so highly rated by critics. Whether by accident or design, it is ultimately a liberal telling of the settling of the western frontier.

Specifically, the film’s theme is race. It portrays the settling of the west as an explicitly racial struggle for dominance between the Indians and the whites. More to the point, it subtly but unmistakably subverts Wayne’s heroic image by making his character’s motivations all about race. Which is exactly why liberals love it. ~Sean Higgins, The American Spectator

So liberals love a movie whose premise is the savage raid and kidnapping of a young white girl by Indians?  They love a movie that valorises family vendetta and violent frontier self-help?  They love a movie where white men with guns seek to exact vengeance for the wrong done to their own?  Well, liberals certainly have changed!  Do they also love Birth of a Nation? 

But Mr. Higgins’ rather baffling interpretation of The Searchers does not stop here.  He goes on, quoting the maestro of PC film criticism:

As Ebert has noted: “Ethan’s redemption is intended to be shown in that dramatic shot of reunion with Debbie, where he takes her in his broad hands…and says, ‘Let’s go home, Debbie.’ The shot is famous and beloved, but small counterbalance to his views throughout the film — and indeed, there is no indication that he thinks any differently about Indians.”

It’s because of such unresolved questions that so many film critics — especially, yes, the liberal ones — love the film. How often do you get to see the assumptions of politically correct history played out in a film with a conservative icon like Wayne in the leading role? To create something comparable today Bill Bennett would have to appear dealing drugs in a gangster rap video.

Did it ever occur to anyone that, however forced the ending might be, it is a resolution that respects the importance of blood ties and that Edwards realises, in the end, that his niece is kin and therefore must be protected no matter what else has happened?  The lesson is not that of the bad racist who suddenly mends his ways, but that of the man obsessed who very nearly destroys the reason for his quest in the first place; viewed in this way, the ties of blood between him and his niece are the only things that restrain him. 

And I do hate to burst Mr. Higgins’ bubble, but a PC reading of the history of the West would have omitted the whole savage Indian raid-cum-kidnapping part to begin with.  In the true victimology of the West, Indians never did these sorts of things–or they were provoked into doing them–and the emphasis in history books has been for the last 20 years on the Trail of Tears, Sand Creek and Wounded Knee to the exclusion of anything else.  The decades of desultory violence between settlers and Indians are thus collapsed into a convenient morality tale of the oppressor stealing from the natives, pure and simple.  This is not to ignore white atrocities, but to recognise that they are hardly the entire story.  In a truly PC version of frontier life, we would be treated instead, Dances With Wolves-style, to the perfidy of the Bluecoats and the simple nobility of the Indians. 

To call The Searchers a liberal or PC telling of frontier history would be like calling Apocalypto a PC recounting of the fall of the Maya.  Though I have only seen snippets of the latter in previews, it is clear enough that Gibson intends to focus on the violent self-immolation of Mayan civilisation, complete with human sacrifice–all of which was something that was only a couple generations ago considered simply impossible, on account of what had to be the benevolent, peaceful nature of all Native American and Mesoamerican peoples.

It may be that liberal film critics adore the film because they themselves misread what it is saying.  That is hardly any reason to validate their interpretation or knock The Searchers simply because it has some notable liberal fans who see the anti-racist morality tale in it that they want to see. 

There’s a game that kids (and, OK, me too) like to play with the fortune cookies you get at Chinese restaurants. Read the fortune, but append the phrase “in bed” to whatever it says. Hilarity ensues. The game illustrates that in fortune-telling, as in everything else, context matters. A couple of additional context-setting words transform platitudes into dirty jokes. Much the same could be said of the ongoing debate about the role of democracy promotion in American foreign policy.

Shadi Hamid, as he explained first in The American Prospect and again for Tom Paine, thinks it should be at the center of progressive foreign policy. Spencer Ackerman, also writing in the Prospect, disagrees, preferring a focus on human rights. John Hulsman and Anatol Lieven take yet another view, preferring a focus on what one might call the construction of a liberal state infrastructure, “the rule of law, a reasonably independent and efficient judiciary and police, a law-abiding, honest and rational bureaucracy and a population that enjoys basic rights of labor, movement, and free discussion.”

The way I see it, there’s less to this dispute than meets the eye. The real problem is what’s missing — those crucial additional words that determine context. And context makes all the difference. From my perspective, you can take any of these proposals — “let’s promote x,” “let’s promote y” — and add the phrase “through legitimate international institutions and mechanisms of international law” and it’s all to the good. Absent that phrase, it’s not so good. In particular, the neoconservative contention that we should promote x and y through unilateral military action is a terrible idea. ~Matt Yglesias, The American Prospect

Via Jim Antle

Personally, I think Michael’s fortune cookie idea was much more entertaining.

In Eastern Europe, the United States of America has never served as an imperial power. These are countries that have either been dominated by Russians for hundreds of years, or else were previously dominated by Germans before falling under Russian hegemony. The United States was in no way involved in these efforts at imperial domination, and expended considerable blood and treasure throughout the 20th century combating the local imperial powers. ~Matt Yglesias, The American Prospect

Besides Yglesias’ apparent blind spot to the entire decade of the 1990s, what is this about “eastern Europe” being subject to the Russians for centuries?  Which “eastern Europe” are we talking about?  Most of what used to be called eastern Europe in the Cold War years had almost never been under Russian control (e.g., the old Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, the old Yugoslavia); much of this same area is often now described as central or central-eastern Europe as the geographical definition of Europe stopping at the Urals has gained some recognition. 

I’ve just become aware that some of the opinions and observations expressed in this blog may have offended various individuals or groups at one point or another. I apologize, and promise that it won’t happen again. I’ve been such a stupid jerk.

I came to this realization last night. As I struggled to explain the male-centered “principles” behind “logic” to my child I realized that it was I who needed to be taught. What I had been conditioned by a racist and sexist society to view as “learning” and “knowledge” was nothing more than a social construct designed to oppress and humiliate womyn and minorities. Feminine ways of knowing, magically connected to the Goddess by a great invisible web of compassion and empathy, veiled by my euro/phallo-centric mentality, will no longer be suppressed in our household.

Reflected in the eyes of my young daughter was the image of intolerance, bigotry, racism, ageism, ablism, regionalism, exploitation, homophobia, sexism, and speciesism that I have come to embody. How could I not see? It was a terrible epiphany. I’ve let this child down horribly by not confronting the appalling white male privelege that, through the violence of my inaction and unwillingness to confront and denounce others like me, has made me complicit in the oppression of others, excuse me, the Other. I have been made to see the horror of my white-hetero privelege, and I renounce it. ~Dennis Dale

Here Dennis Dale has an outstanding, hilarious piece of satire aimed squarely at Ilkka Kokkarinen’s final post.

After a three year run, The New Pantagruel is closing shop. Our incursion was never intended to be a long one. We are not careerists and had no intention or ambition to become part of the media establishment, Christian or otherwise. We did wish to demonstrate that such populist anti-liberal incursions were possible, and occasionally desirable. Against a chorus of establishment naysayers, The New Pantagruel succeeded on a shoestring budget and without any insider access in garnering national attention and influence, particularly within the elite Christian press and some political outlets. Our voice was primarily a voice of dissent, and it has been heartening to know that such voices can still capture the spirit of a large number of diffuse people and perspectives in today’s managed climate of “centrist” opinion. 

Ours can largely be summed up as a localist, decentralist, anarcho-Christian and authentically conservative approach to politics and culture. As we have written previously, we believe that to suffer one’s place and one’s people in the particularity of its and their needs is the only true basis for finding love, friendship, and an authentic, meaningful life. This is nothing less than the key to the pursuit of Christian holiness, which is the whole of the Christian adventure: to live in love with the frailty and limits of one’s existence, suffering the places, customs, rites, joys, and sorrows of the people who are in close relation to you by family, friendship, and community–all in service of the truth, goodness, and beauty that is best experienced directly. The discipline of place teaches that it is more than enough to care skillfully and lovingly for one’s own little circle, and this is the model for the good life, not the limitless jurisdiction of the ego, granted by a doctrine of choice, that is ever seeking its own fulfillment, pleasure, and satiation. 

Taking that charge seriously, The New Pantagruel has, essentially, argued itself out of existence. This is a good thing. In the end, we are pessimistic romantics. We believe life is eucatastrophic: a joyous catastrophe. Instead of spending endless hours before the faceless void of the “new media,” we will be engaging the tragedies and necessities of raising families, rebuilding neighborhoods and small towns, and fighting to preserve and save that which we love. As we dive back into the particularities of our places and people and their needs, we hope you will do the same. And remember, Fr. Jape is watching you. ~Caleb Stegall and Dan Knauss, The New Pantagruel

Caleb and Dan’s gain is our loss.  The New Pantagruel contained some of the most interesting commentary online (and I don’t just say that because I once wrote an essay for it), and the world of webzines and blogs will be greatly impoverished as a result of tNP’s disappearance.  No more will Jape’s carrier pigeons fly to bring us the latest in curmudgeonly wisdom, and no more will neo-Calvinists and Lutherans have to fear the biting wit of the old Jesuit.  The enemies of the Permanent Things can rest a little easier now.  The sophisters, economists and calculators can rejoice (if economists are capable of real joy).  But one suspects, in good Pantagruelist fashion, that the last laugh will be on them.

This is not some underhanded attempt to grovel because I am afraid of losing my job or something. Because I’m not, as far as I know. And even if I were, that would be peanuts compared to the idea of the woman you love looking at you and you see how she is disappointed of you, asking you why you would want to write mean things. I would rather shovel shit for living every day than have to come up with an answer to that. Because there really is none. ~Ilkka Kokkarinen, Sixteen Volts 

The end of Dr. Kokkarinen’s blog has become something of a hot topic these days.  Not having been a regular reader of Sixteen Volts, I cannot be sure just what sort of “mean things” “offended” and “hurt” so many that would compel a blogger to throw in the towel as a matter of profound shame (his word).  Steve Sailer notes that his university employer objected to his “skepticism about the intellectual consistency of lesbian-feminist theory,” which it deplores as “sexist” and “homophobic” (natch).  But apparently what really did it for Dr. Kokkarinen was that his woman said he was being mean.

This is of interest to me because I have remarked in the past on the futility of blogging, and others have noted the harmful effects that blogging can have, but I have never before heard of a blogger giving up on this particular pastime because his girlfriend/wife wanted him to be a nicer person.  

There are undoubtedly better ways to spend your time than by blogging.  No one is more keenly aware of this than I am.  You could read.  You could listen to edifying, beautiful music.  You could write the Great American Novel, or at least a cheap knock-off of the same.  You could, as Michael does, go salsa dancing.  You could, as I actually have done recently, help out at your local church.  If you felt fairly unmotivated, you could watch a movie and probably still have found the time better spent. 

But if you are going to blog, then surely the point would be to make some kind of substantive contribution to an ongoing debate.  People who are afraid of being “negative” in blogging are the sorts of people who eventually don’t want to have vigorous debates of any kind for fear that someone, somewhere may be offended by a strong view.  Personally, I have never been a big fan of people who say things like, “Accentuate the positive,” and I honestly don’t know what a “positive” political blog would look like.  Would it simply be entry after entry where you quote someone and say, “I think this is just great.  I agree wholeheartedly.  Good job!”?  There is a time and place for those sorts of posts, though usually statements of approval can be pretty redundant, but there has to be more meat to a blog if anyone is going to read it for substantive commentary. 

Obviously if a blog became your entire life–which, happily, Eunomia has not, despite what my frequency of posting might suggest–there would be something seriously wrong.  If you delighted in writing posts that denigrated people for who they were, rather than critiquing or even ridiculing their absurd, offensive or dangerous ideas, you probably do have a problem of some sort.  In my case, I admit that my criticisms tend to be fairly dripping with contempt and sarcasm, but I make no apologies for being a relentless critic of people who routinely endorse the nuclear massacre of civilians, torture or aggressive war.  I try my best to keep the criticism focused on the quality of the ideas in question and never let it stray too much to the people, even when these people endorse some of the most despicable things.  If I have crossed that line, it was probably a mistake, but I would not expect my readers to take my arguments seriously if my posts were focused unduly on people rather than their arguments.  To take that other path of ad hominem attack is to embrace fallacious arguments and embark on a journey bound for insanity and the derangement of the Kossacks.  But I seriously doubt that Dr. Kokkarinen was making ad hominem attacks–usually when people claim to be “hurt” by someone else’s reasoned opinion, it is because they cannot take rational criticism of their own ideas and choices in life.     

If people take my criticisms of, say, Islam as an example of being “mean” towards Muslims, when they are nothing of the sort, there is nothing I could do about that, since this sort of reaction is irrational and cannot be seriously debated.  In just the same way the hysterical reaction to Pope Benedict’s comments about Islam in the context of his Regensburg address on faith and reason should not merit an end to criticism or a compromising of what one believes to be true.  It would appear from Steve Sailer’s post that the reaction to Dr. Kokkarinen’s blog is of much the same kind–visceral, emotional, irrational and very PC–so it is a shame that he has chosen to accept other people’s characterisations of his writing as “mean” and hurtful, especially when it seems clear from the laments of his readers and other bloggers that his is a voice that had something worthwhile to contribute and a voice that will be missed when it is gone.

On a lighter note, Steve Sailer offers an intriguing way to evade the PC brigades that would have appealed to Tolkien:

Perhaps this suggests that the survival of freedom of speech in the West rests with the Finnish language. Maybe we should start studying Finnish to use as a secret language for the discussion of ideas forbidden to be mentioned in English?       

This would be an interesting thing to try, but it would probably be difficult to do.  Do you know how many cases there are in Finnish?  Something like fifteen.  Fifteen cases!  The Hungarians, whose language is distantly related to Finnish, have much the same problem with a language loaded down with different case forms.  When the Hungarian national anthem begins, Isten aldd meg a magyart (God bless the Hungarian), part of the reason for this prayer must be an appeal to God to have mercy on a nation that has such a complicated language.  Oh well.  Ilyen az elet, as my cousins say. 

Update: Contrast this unwillingness to be “mean” with the simple, straightforward refusal to bow to conformity here. 

If you trace the concept of “victory” in his remarks on Iraq, and those of subordinates, you discover a war that was won three and a half years ago, and today has barely started. ~Michael Kinsley, Slate

Opponents of the war in Iraq may opine that it has no relation to the war on terror, and that our retreat from Iraq will even help us in the war on terror.

Their views may be honorable, but our enemies have declared Iraq to be the decisive battlefield. That makes it so. ~Michael Novak

So we have granted to the jihadis the power to determine what is and is not true about this war?  That is surely a strange thing–and it uses jihadi statements in a way that war supporters abhorred in war opponents when we have cited Bin Laden’s statements to explain the proximate causes of the current conflict.  It has been close to being virtually a thought crime to suggest that disentangling ourselves from the Near East would likely reduce the threat of jihadi terrorism by depriving it of popular causes that it could exploit.  It is now the sum of wisdom to agree with Bin Laden’s depiction of the war in toto because it happens to serve the turn of people who supported the invasion of Iraq long before Bin Laden ever said one word about it.  This is really something of a despicable ruse, another way of tricking the public to support something that is not in the national interest and which positively harms the war against Al Qaeda everywhere else in the world.  It is, alas, what we have come to expect from Mr. Novak and his confreres.    

But how is it the “decisive” battlefield?  What will be decided?  The word “decisive” has a specific meaning here that does not seem to match up to the realities of the Iraq war.  Whether America or the jihadis ”win” in Iraq, neither will thereby be guaranteed to win the entire war, nor does he who “loses” it lose the entire war.  If it were the “decisive” battlefield, this would have to be the turning point, the Stalingrad of the whole shooting match, after which our total defeat becomes inevitable if we “lose” and after which our total victory becomes inevitable if they “lose.”  There are, of course, far more than two sides currently fighting in Iraq–at my last count, there were at least five, not including American forces (they are Sadr’s death squads; the Iraqi government; Al Qaeda; Sunni insurgents; ex-Baathists), some of which cooperate against the others, some of which do not.  If the Iraqi government + Sadr start to prevail, as seems more likely, Bin Laden can talk about how vital Iraq is to his cause all he likes–it will avail him nothing. 

(Why is the only story out of Iraq each day a bombing that kills six, when there are more murders than that each night in a group of a half-dozen cities or so in the U.S.? Our enemies count on that. They want the drip, drip, drip of American blood, because they think we do not have the moral toughness to stand it.) ~Michael Novak

Except that that isn’t the only story out of Iraq each day.  This is nonsense.  In recent months, the stories usually include the dozens of Iraqis killed by bombs and the dozens more murdered by death squads and, then, to top it off comes the story about Americans killed by roadside bombs.  How many American cities can boast thousands murdered by death squads in one month?  I’m going to take a wild guess and say none.  Forget the drip-drip-drip of American blood–how about the slosh-slosh-slosh of Iraqi blood?  Or are these Iraqi deaths not terribly important to be worth reporting? 

Not only might that tell people that the war is not going well, but that the administration is entirely clueless in handling the situation.  Is Novak saying that the failure of U.S. and Iraqi government security is something the press shouldn’t report?  As I read his article, it seems to me that he is saying that reporters who report on realities in Iraq that do not conform to the most delusionally optimistic scenarios of war supporters are aiding and abetting the enemy cause.  If that is what he thinks, he should say so clearly.   

They are willing to wager everything in Baghdad and its surroundings. Either they will reap glory, triumph, and sure victory in Iraq, having humiliated the proud United States and shown what a phony it is — or they themselves will be deflated, humiliated, and put on the ashbin of this century. Here is where the line has been drawn. ~Michael Novak

But they haven’t wagered “everything.”  They are wagering relatively little.  Al Qaeda in Iraq is one branch of the tree, one front among many.  The very language of “central front” betrays outdated, conventional thinking about this war, as if this were a war with static lines created by two armies in the field and as if conventional tactics (i.e., defeating the enemy “in the field”) could secure victory.  If Al Qaeda in Iraq were defeated, does anyone believe that this would signal to them or to others in the Islamic world that they had been relegated to the “ashbin of history”?  They would view it as a temporary setback, just as they have been able to adjust and reorganise to the fall of the Taliban.  If restoring the Caliphate is the supposed prize, the final goal, the jihadis will presumably take the long view and view any defeat as one small hiccup in their eventual, supposedly divinely-ordained victory.  Jihadis are used to be relegated to the “ashbin of history” (they have not enjoyed what you would call a winning streak of late) but they have the most stubborn insistence that they do not belong there and they keep crawling back out, shaking off the ash and making another play for power.  If our civilisation has any mettle in it, we would do the same.  One is reminded of the lines from Gladiator:

Quintus: A people should know when they’re conquered.

Maximus: Would you, Quintus?  Would I? 

In this confidence of eventual victory the jihadis are thinking ideologically, but democratist fundamentalists in the West think in much the same way about their virtually inevitable, almost historically-guaranteed triumph.  If America is seen as having been driven out of Iraq, if this is counted to us not as a strategic retreat but a genuine, humiliating defeat (which only becomes more likely the longer we stay), does anyone think that we are going to curl up and die?  Does anyone think it will humble for a moment the buffoons who led us into this war?  No, the very same ideologues who sold the country on this disastrous war will be back, almost immediately, to tell us where the next “crucial” battleground is and why we really must stop them this time; they will probably continue to urge us to pursue the same goals: disarmament of certain regimes and democratisation.  Neither set of ideologoues would learn anything, because for them defeat only teaches them to redouble their effort and their dedication to the Cause.  For those of us in the “reality-based community,” defeat is a signal that something fundamental is awry and needs serious fixing.  Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for the rest of us, whoever “wins” in Iraq neither side will be consigned to the “ashbin of history,” because both sides’ ideologues are positively certain that history is on their side. 

Like many others, I have been following closely the words of our enemies. President Bush recited many of them in his speech on September 6: bin Laden, Zarqawi, Zawahiri. They have all seen Iraq as the central battle in this Third World War (counting the Cold War, it is the Fourth). They have said the whole Islamofascist dream of a Universal Caliphate, holding all of humankind in submission, hinges on this battle. ~Michael Novak

Sometimes people like Novak say such wacky things that I don’t know how to respond.  As I have noted before, every time someone uses the word Islamofascist, I believe his credibility on whatever he is talking about has been reduced by 10%, because anyone who uses such a word ipso facto misunderstands who we are fighting and shows himself to be oblivious to the flaws with this word.  Presumably he is referring only to Al Qaeda “Islamofascists” when he talks about the “Islamofascist dream,” but it’s hard to be sure, since one of the supposed advantages of this term, like the phrase “Islamic fascist,” is that it intentionally blurs lines and lumps together all kinds of different groups and regimes.  

So the “Islamofascist dream of a Universal Caliphate” hinges on the fighting in Iraq, eh?  And presumably the “glorious victory” of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea is close at hand.  I’m sure some hard-core propagandist in Pyongyang has said similarly overblown things, which we don’t take the least bit seriously, but for some reason we are supposed to take jihadi enemy propaganda as a statement about reality–perhaps because so many of us take government propaganda as a statement about reality?–and then plan accordingly.  It is not uncommon for bluster and grandiose declarations to be masks for weakness and impotence, and usually the grander the declaration the less likely it is that it will be realised.  Thus we know that when Krushchev said “we will bury you,” he actually had no means to “bury us” and no real-world prospects of acquiring the means.  When jihadis talk about how this or that battle is vital to the restoration of the Caliphate, it is about as substantive as a different propagandist’s declaration that we have to keep fighting to make sure “government by the people” does not perish from the face of the earth or that we are fighting to “make the world safe for democracy.”  In jihadi theory, the desultory warfare in Chechnya and the endless Kashmiri insurgency are also crucial to the restoration of the Caliphate–talking about the restoration of the Caliphate is part of their recruiting drive and their way of explaining their involvement in a fight to others.  If Iraq has become a more important battlefield for Al Qaeda than some of these others, it is because we are there and they see it as a golden opportunity to humble and discredit us.  By insisting on staying, we let them dictate our military deployments and our strategy, and while we run down our armed forces we make sure that withdrawal in the future will be less and less on our own terms and more and more on the terms that they set for us–in which case, there will indeed be much more humiliation than if we were to leave now at our own discretion.

Iraq has become the new version of 1980s Afghanistan, the rallying point for mujahideen everywhere–and Bosnia and Chechnya were no different in the 1990s–but unlike Afghanistan the main neighbouring country intervening in the country’s affairs is not one aligned with a movement friendly to Al Qaeda but in fact represents one of its opponents.  Stubborn persistence in Iraq and hostility towards Iran almost guarantees a repeat of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, because Washington refuses to seek rapprochement with the one regional power that could keep our withdrawal from precipitating a decade of civil war.   

With every kind of propaganda, even when victory in the specific fight is achieved, the stakes were never what the propagandists claimed and the outcome often has no relationship to what the propagandist told us to expect.  By playing according to the script the enemy gives us, goading us to fight them on the “crucial” battlefield and convincing us that all is lost if we do not, we have already ceded a huge psychological advantage to them.  They get to tell us, in a sense, how to beat them–will it be any surprise if they are lying to us and forcing us to fight in all the wrong places?  While we fight on the “central front” that they have now designated for us as the “crucial” battleground, they are securing themselves ever deeper footholds in the Northwest Territory of Pakistan and making themselves increasingly untouchable.  Whether they are aware of it or not, those who take Al Qaeda pronouncements about Iraq as justification for remaining in Iraq are helping the enemy to wear us down at a time and place of their choosing while reconstituting their organisation in relative safety inside an allegedly allied country whose government cannot effectively act against them.  If they were to read an article such as Mr. Novak’s, and when they hear the President utter similar statements, they could not help but be pleased.  

Well, the danger to our country in 2006 is even greater than it was in 1938, in at least one respect: The destruction may well be borne into our midst not by armies, air forces, or ships, but by suicidal individual terrorists. ~Michael Novak

Now I wouldn’t want to ruin Mr. Novak’s amusing fantasy life with anything so dreary as facts, but in 1938 there was no immediate threat to the United States, certainly not from Germany and not even from Japan, though FDR was working assiduously to make sure that they would become our enemies.  The country that was mainly in danger in 1938, as it turns out, was Poland, though that had not stopped Poland, along with Hungary, from grabbing some territory from the Czechoslovakians.  The involvement of Czechoslovakia’s other neighbours in the Munich land-grab is part of the Munich deal that latter-day fanatics don’t tend to remember because it forces them to remember that the principle of ethnic self-determination that their hero, Wilson, had propagated was one of the central justifications for the entire debacle.  They have, of course, learned nothing, apparently remembering little about these events except what fits the narrative of appeasement and unrelenting fascism.  People in this country write about how “it feels like 1938 all over again” (Novak’s own words) as if we were Britons, Frenchmen or Poles.  Last I checked, we were not. 

Doug Bandow notes another tiresome “1938ist” article, this time by Michael Novak, and asks the obvious question: who cares if the jihadis believe Iraq is the “central front,” and why should we fight the war on their terms?  Letting your enemy decide when and where to fight is ultimately self-defeating–so much for the lie that this administration and its supporters want to “take the fight to the enemy.”  They have, in fact, yielded all initiative in this war, which is something that all of the misdirected fury of the ”pre-emption” in Iraq has obscured from view.  Invading Iraq was not so much the product of an aggressive, ’forward policy’ that will put the enemy on the defensive as it was a phenomenally unwise campaign that walked straight into the trap the jihadis were hoping we would walk into. 

This is much the same as what I asked a few weeks ago when I cited The Economist’s observation of the creepy parallelism of the jihadi and neocon narratives about the war.  Back on 1 September I said:

So preoccupied with the facile and laughable nature of the phrase ”Islamic fascism,” I have neglected to discuss this other significant problem: imagining a seamless, unified “Islamic fascist” enemy replicates the Al Qaeda jihadis‘ own conception of the war and works to their advantage by fighting the war on their terms.  We are not fighting them where they are, which is what we should do, but fighting them as they would like us to be fighting them (with the added bonus of toppling a dictator whom they hated).  You even see neocons citing statements from Al Qaeda leaders about the fighting in Iraq today as some sort of “proof” that Iraq is vital to our war.  It is vital to someone’s global war, but it isn’t ours–vital to their war, because it gives them exactly the kind of fight they want.  By collapsing every discrete and distinct case of Islamic militancy (or, in the case of Syria and Iran, simply regimes that Washington despises) into the generic and misleadingly named “Islamic fascism,” the administration and its hangers-on daily lend credibility to the jihadis‘ propaganda that this is a generalised war against almost any kind of Muslim nation, be it Sunni or Shi’ite, secular or theocratic, authoritarian or partly democratic.  That works to their advantage, not ours, particularly if it causes us to commit ourselves to more conventional wars and occupations of Muslim nations, thus providing them with new fields for the jihadi harvest.

The King’s actions have always been guided not by his interests, but by the country’s, which is why the Thais will almost certainly accept his wishes once again, and why this coup will very probably work. The people, like their monarch, understand the limits of democracy and the boundless advantages of flexibility in a turbulent world. ~Alex Spillius, The Spectator

And while his predecessors were guilty of many things, none behaved like a president, or even a king. Thaksin’s great error, made over and over again, was to confuse the country’s good with his own; to judge an attack on him as an attack on the state. There is only one embodiment of the nation and the people, and that is the King. To an army fiercely loyal to the crown, the attack was intolerable.

He also angered the top brass by befriending the Burmese junta, with which he has a satellite television deal, and by reducing the Thai military presence on a volatile border. Bangkok’s middle classes, meanwhile, saw him as a tax-dodging crony capitalist who exploited his position and subverted democracy for the benefit of his family and friends. ~Alex Spillius, The Spectator

On my first cinema visit in Bangkok, I dropped my popcorn. The lights had dimmed and I had settled back when the whole audience stood up quickly and obediently. The King’s anthem had started. Flustered, not knowing that the anthem is played at every performance of every film in the realm, I joined them, and in the process tipped my snack all over my neighbour’s knees.

It was my first week in what ended up being a six-year residency in the Thai capital, and the first of many similar mishaps. A few days later, in the city’s only central park, the national anthem (a different tune from ‘the King’s anthem’) blared out without warning from tinny speakers attached to lampposts. Walkers, joggers and courting couples all halted their activities for the daily 6 p.m. tribute to majesty.

Our own royals can only dream of such reflex loyalty. And in modern Britain of course, even standing up for the national anthem would be met with utter derision by teenagers and their parents. But Thai subjects seem to enjoy any opportunity to demonstrate their allegiance to King Bhumibol. If there are any republicans, they do a good job of disguising themselves. Which is why the fact that the King seems to support the coup in Thailand is crucial to its success — King Bhumibol’s wish is his people’s command. 

King Bhumibol came to the throne in 1946, after the unexplained shooting of his brother, King Ananda Mahidol. He was only 18. After growing up mostly in Switzerland he had no preparation. He promised to ‘reign with righteousness for the benefit and happiness of the Siamese people’ and has fulfilled his pledge. His royal projects in the north have provided substitute crops for farmers previously growing opium poppies. With his encouragement the unsustainable logging of hardwood trees was brought to an end. His speeches have emphasised learning, harmony and tolerance. His people’s response, especially in rural areas, would make our own royals blush. Thai villagers not only literally prostrate themselves in his presence but lay down handkerchiefs for him to walk on and then preserve the cloth with his footprint at home. He is pictured in a variety of guises in homes and businesses up and down the country. ~Alex Spillius, The Spectator

It is also worth recalling that it was King Bhumibol who made it possible for a peaceful transition back to democracy after the last coup in 1992, and who seems to be the only person capable, as Franz-Josef II once said about his own role in the Habsburg Empire, of protecting his people from its government.  When monarchists tell you that monarchy is generally more just and well-ordered a type of regime than others, it is this sort of monarch that they have in mind.  Monarchy is not suited to all places and all peoples, just as democracy is not, but King Bhumibol gives us a glimpse of what a good monarchy might look like.

Having put up over 1,900 posts between Polemics and Eunomia, I have to say that this has been a busy couple of years. 

September has been another very successful month for Eunomia thanks to the many links from other blogs that have been bringing in new readers.  The month is only two-thirds over, and there have already been over 5,700 unique visitors to the site, which is already 400 more than the total for last month.  My thanks to everyone who has linked to the site and to all of the readers and commenters who have made this site the small success that it is.

“Anarchist” has the advantage of being disreputable enough that no respectable person would call himself one. No Trotsky fan mugged by reality is going to label himself an anarchist, and no bomb-dropping patriot would even think of it. In some respects the term isn’t quite an accurate description of what I think, since I do acknolwedge the need for institutions of public order. But the modern state is, if anything, an institution of public disorder and a thing whose essence is coercion and the abrogation of property rights, and which is almost totally lawless to boot. The present administration gives about as much evidence of that last point as anyone might ask for. “Anarchist” has its own negative connotations and dubious history, of course, but it’s far and away better than to be a Beltway “conservative” and not nearly as presumptious as calling myself a libertarian. So I think I’ll stick with it. ~Dan McCarthy

Perhaps I should reorganise my blogroll with an Anarchist section.  In any case, I share Dan’s frustration with the problems of choosing political labels these days.  For my liberal friends, it is usually satisfactory for me to say that I am a conservative; they don’t know from paleo or neo, and trying to explain the difference would just make their heads hurt (I know it can give me a headache some days).  Usually, I will stick with conservative as my generic label if politics should come up in conversation, as loaded as the term has become with all of the baggage of misrule and warmongering, though reactionary is undoubtedly preferable for the same reasons that Dan gave for anarchist.  No one who would want to work at a think tank would ever call himself a reactionary, which is one good reason to call yourself by that name.  

In writing I will almost always identify myself as a paleoconservative or simply a “paleo,” which has two happy consequences: it makes it absolutely clear that I can in no way be confused with the catastrophe of a government we currently have and it is also sure to drive dedicated neocons slightly crazy.  It does also happen to reflect most closely what I believe, and seems to represent those things that are best in the Anglo-American, European and Christian traditions that are worth protecting and which are in need of saving. 

Still, reactionary has a strong appeal, and I am glad to use it from time to time.  Certainly, others consider it a fitting name.  But it is terrifically clarifying–virtually nobody wants to be a reactionary (just as, once upon a time in this country, nobody wanted to be called a conservative–perhaps someone should write Reaction Revisited or The Reactionary Mind to get things started?).  A neo-imperialist will not call himself reactionary, because he believes he represents a liberal, progressive imperialism–you know, the “good” kind–and for neoconservatives there is simply no term more reprehensible that they can use to demean someone (except perhaps for fascist).  They like to refer to “liberal reactionaries,” by which they mean liberals who want to protect their institutional advantages; this is not reaction, but just institutionalised liberalism, the same as it has always been since 1789.   

It is better still to not simply call yourself a reactionary, but in fact to embrace reaction with gusto–approvingly quoting Maistre or Donoso de Cortes is a fun start, and Metternich is a good role model to recommend to others.  If that isn’t black enough for you, there is always Bonald for a dose of counter-revolution and Walter Scott for the Scotch version of the same.  For a lighter, more poetic touch, you can’t beat Novalis’ romantic Catholic reactionary medievalism.  Of course, as these things go, most fairly moderate conservatives of the ’50s would be counted as reactionaries today, so the term can tend to be a bit fluid, but if this tells us anything it is that while reactionaries may be inflexible self-styled conservatives have a bad habit of tending to eventually drift along with every bad innovation that comes along.  Rather than standing athwart History yelling, “Stop!” conservatives often wind up catching a ride on the tail-end of History whispering, “Would you mind if I made a few suggestions, if that wouldn’t be too much trouble?” 

The reactionary may reject most or all innovations, sometimes including good ones, but in the process he refuses to entertain a number of positively terrible ideas that the conservative may be willing to play along with or try to “shape” in a “conservative direction.”  There are times when the only right answer to the Red is the Black, and increasingly I am of the view that we are now in such a time that calls for raising Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s “black banners.”  That is a colour that, as it happens, was also the colour of the flags of anarchists.         

Thailand’s coup plotters were feted as conquering heroes yesterday as Bangkok happily surrendered its freedoms to the camouflage-uniformed troops of the military junta that toppled their controversial leader.

The soldiers, idling in their tanks and jeeps on the streets of Bangkok, were mobbed by well-wishers who showered them with bouquets of carnations and daisies, gifts of fruit and bottles of water.

Parents brought their toddlers to admire the troops and pose for triumphant photos with the armoured vehicles. Crowds cheered for every jeep that drove out of military headquarters. The military vehicles were soon filled with flowers.

For months, the same crowds had been bitterly protesting against Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, accusing him of undemocratic actions. Now, they welcomed his demise at the hands of military leaders, oblivious to the irony that their enemy had been overthrown by the most undemocratic means possible. ~The Globe and Mail

The distaste for Thaksin may have colored the tepid U.S. response. “Nobody wants to go to bat for Thaksin. He’s just an odious figure,” said Michael A. McFaul, director of Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. “But there’s the problem — democracy’s not about picking winners and losers, it’s about defending institutions.”

Lorne W. Craner, former assistant secretary of state under Bush and now president of the International Republican Institute, agreed that U.S. concerns with Thaksin did not justify a coup. “You can’t sanction a coup just because you don’t like the guy if you’re going to stand up for democracy,” he said. “It’s unconstitutional.” ~The Washington Post

But Thaksin alone isn’t the only problem.  Both major political parties have been at risk of being banned for illegal behaviour, and the election commission that oversaw the one-party elections in April is under investigation.  Thailand has been facing a crisis of many of its basic institutions because all of those responsible for those institutions have failed.  One can make the argument that the intervention of the military, which has been approved, if not originally planned, by the king, is giving Thailand the time to sort out the tremendous legal and political problems of its democratic system.  The juxtaposition in this story of the Thai situation with other despotisms–such as that of Aliyev in Azerbaijian or Musharraf in Pakistan–is simply inappropriate.  Here there is clearly a military intervention to save the country from an overtly corrupt and irresponsible leader, and one that is sanctioned by a unifying national figure; in Pakistan, Musharraf’s takeover was just one more spasm in a fundamentally disordered polity and one that shows no signs of ending or yielding to democratic rule (not that democratic rule in Pakistan would necessarily be desirable for anybody).  In Thailand’s case, there is every reason to think that this coup will ultimately work to the benefit of the country and to the reform of their democratic politics.  As with the administration’s tacit approval of the attempted coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002 (I bet they wish they’d made more of an effort to support that one!), the mild rebuke to the coup leaders in Thailand is one of the few signs of foreign policy sanity in this administration.  Thailand is a perfect example of how a formula of “more democracy” or “democracy no matter what” can backfire and actually harm a country.  Thaksin exploited his party’s popularity in all those venal and self-serving ways that demagogues will, and in this he showed the seedy side of democracy, which is always potentially present in every democratic regime.  The Thai coup reminds us that there are things, like good and stable government, that can actually be more important than democracy, and that the one-solution-fits-all strategy of democratisation is inherently misguided and foolish.   

As a Jew, I found Fox’s question profoundly offensive. Trust me, the wounded minority card is not one that I play with much frequency. But the attempt to “tar” Allen as a Jew in a southern state was at the very least disturbing, and I actually consider it sickening. ~Dean Barnett

Who said the woman was trying to “tar” anyone?  She was asking a question.  Good grief.  You’d think we were in 16th century Castile and there was a question of barring those with “impure” blood from positions of power!  Not only was it a legitimate question, it was a question derived from a news story in The Forward, which is a magazine some might consider rather amenable to Jewish Americans.  If the entire subject is irrelevant, then there was no harm in asking.  If it was relevant, there is nothing wrong in asking. 

As a reporter, Ms. Fox was seeking out information that Allen, a public figure, has been reluctant to give (for whatever reason).  Clearly it doesn’t really matter where Allen is part-Jewish, but why is it somehow off-limits?  Since the entire, ridiculous “macaca” incident, it has become at least tangentially relevant that his mother came from French Tunisia, where such slurs were used, and, therefore, it was somewhat relevant what Allen’s family history in Tunisia was. 

It might be worth noting that none of this would have become a focus of this race had Allen not chosen–and he is entirely responsible for this–to belittle and mock a Webb campaign employee simply because he wanted to do so.  I have argued in the past against the excessive piling-on of the anti-prejudice brigades, and I am convinced that this sort of enforcement of purity of thought and attitude, as defined by such people, is damaging to the general quality and vibrancy of political debate.  But Allen could have saved himself a lot of grief had he chosen to ignore the Webb staffer following him around the state or simply been forthright in handling the aftermath to this absurd controversy.  Instead, he allowed it to linger on and continued to compound it with things like his odd performance on Monday.

It is strange in the extreme to regard that question as an attempt to “tar” anyone with anything, unless you sincerely believe that Virginians are of such a mind that they would turn on Allen were he to reveal this information about his heritage.  Frankly, that’s an insult to the overwhelming majority of Virginians, for whom this doesn’t matter one way or the other.  The attempt by Allen apologists to make this question into a kind of political hit comes off sounding forced and phoney.  It’s “sickening” to ask Allen about his mother’s background?  Then what does that say of all the people who have delved into the life of Mitt Romney’s great-grandfather and the frequent focus on Romney’s Mormonism as a potential political liability?  Is that also “sickening,” or is that just routine journalism?

Allen’s heritage became an issue in the Virginia Senate campaign Monday, when television reporter Peggy Fox raised it at a televised debate in front of 600 business executives in Fairfax County. Allen repeated what he has said in the past: “My mother’s French-Italian with a little Spanish blood in her. And I was raised as she was, as far as I know, raised as a Christian.”

In fact, Allen had just recently learned about their Jewish roots when he made those comments. Allen declined to comment, but his mother said she had sworn him to secrecy. ~The Washington Post

So, in short, when Allen pretended to be offended at Fox’s question on Monday and then made a statement that turns out to be have been false (i.e., that his mother was raised a Christian), he did not even have the excuse of ignorance.  Maybe this topic has no place in this or any election, and I find it hard to see how it could really matter, but there remains something strange about it.  If he knew about this on Monday–and quite a few people had figured out his family background apparently a long time before last month–why the harsh reaction and the non sequitur lecture on religious freedom?  In any case, this has got to be the only time in American politics in recent memory that I know of where a politician has discovered Jewish ancestry and did not seek to exploit that aspect of his heritage for all it was worth. 

Update: Allen may resent people “casting aspersions” about religious identity, but his campaign manager has no problem casting asperions about their adversaries’ anti-Semitism.

Jim Antle has given his election predictions, so I will join in this display of reckless punditry and flesh out the rest of my predictions for November. 

I have already recklessly called Virginia for Webb after Allen’s implosion over the last month, which has reduced him in the wake of “macaca” to criticising Webb for the latter’s opposition to women in combat (which shows him to be a ridiculous pander), suddenly “discovering,” as if for the first time, that some black Americans may find the battle flag slightly objectionable (which makes him a fraud), and pretending to be horrified at questions about his mother’s possible Jewish ancestry (he says that he believes in religious liberty, you see, and he also apparently believes that Virginians don’t want part-Jewish Senators, which makes him seem rather odd).  Besides those things, Allen fared quite poorly in his Meet the Press encounter with Webb–and that is the assessment of Republican bloggers and observers.  The race is a statistical dead-heat, and will tip towards Webb as Allen languishes below 50% in the polls and late swing voters go for Webb.  On election night, George Felix Allen will be very infelix.

The House will flip, as there are definitely 14 Republican-held seats that are already leaning the other way, and the flip will be made possible by the late rally of Michelle Bean in Illinois’ 8th, and will be secured by Heather Wilson’s late collapse in New Mexico’s 1st and the possible damage done to the GOP candidate in Ohio’s 18th by Ney’s refusal to resign (and, possibly even more damaging because it would be rather chaotic, the need for a special election to replace Ney if he does resign).  Wilson continues to poll well below 50% in a district that has always gone to the GOP from the time of Manuel Lujan through the Schiff years until today.  Wilson does always benefit from a sizeable absentee vote that gave her a comfortable margin two years ago, but this time I don’t think the late surge can save her this time.    

Ford will beat Corker in Tennessee, as the latter’s already lacklustre campaign will falter in the final weeks.  Casey will struggle in the final weeks to not lose a race that has been his all along (and which his pitiful campaigning has almost squandered), but he will hold on to win in Pennsylvania by a considerably reduced margin, perhaps no better than 3 or 4%.  Whitehouse will win Rhode Island [corrected] fairly easily, as Chafee’s campaign will have been sufficiently financially weakened by the hard-fought primary to make it ineffective in the closing days.  The anti-GOP sentiment in Ohio will be impossible for DeWine to overcome, and he will fall, though perhaps by a very slim margin.  I agree with Jim that Montana goes to the Dems and New Jersey goes to the GOP.  Talent will falter and lose in Missouri.  I am fairly sure that Steele will not win in Maryland against Cardin, in spite of Steele’s studied attempts to avoid the label of his own party; he would not have adopted his “independent” pose if he didn’t think it was necessary, but in the end people will still see that he is in the Republican candidate and in the current environment this will cost him too many votes.  That means a Democratic net gain of six, which means Democratic control of both houses.  In a sense, that isn’t terribly reckless–it is what I have been saying all year long, but I had not previously made my specific predictions.  The latest Times/CBS poll, which admittedly always comes up with numbers on the low end for Republicans, points to massive discontent with the majority party and no significant 9/11 bump for Dobleve, and this discontent is translated very specifically into a large anti-incumbency majority:

In one striking finding, 77 percent of respondents — including 65 percent of Republicans — said that most members of Congress had not done a good enough job to deserve re-election and that it was time to give new people a chance. That is the highest number of voters who said it was “time for new people” since the fall of 1994.

If the poll is at all accurate and if roughly two-thirds of Republicans believe their own incumbent members do not deserve re-election, those of us who are hedging our bets and talking about one or two-seat majorities in the House are likely to be shown up as having been all together too conservative in our guesses and not reckless at all.    

Update: Kyl in Arizona only leads by 5 points, which now makes Arizona an unexpected contested Senate race that should probably not be this close.  Kyl won re-election in 2000 in a basically uncontested race (except by Greens and Libertarians), and easily won his first race against then-Rep. Coppersmith during the bloodbath of 1994.  Pederson is his first really serious competition, and Kyl seems to be struggling.  I am not quite reckless enough to call an upset here, but it bears watching.

Ratzinger is not stupid. Including the reference to the passage that has incited Muslim anger was no accident. It was a calculated, intentional strategy designed to help George Bush and the Republicans in the 2006 elections, just like the Catholic church systematically helped Bush and the Republicans in the 2004 elections, through Cardinals and Bishops who attacked Kerry.The Vatican has become a partner with the republicans [sic], so they coordinate, come the final stretch of election time, to make things happen, make statements, take positions that help the Republicans. ~Rob Kall

What he has said about Pope Benedict in the first line above cannot be readily said for Mr. Kall.  Why would this controversy aid the GOP?  He tells us:

They help the republicans [sic] because the Republican positions on birth control, abortion, stem cells, gay marriage, pre-marital sex are closest to the Roman Catholic Church’s positions.By firing up an angry Muslim response, a predictable response after the cartoon episode earlier in the year, the Pontiff in red has created a media situation that makes nervous soccer Moms and quick to ignite Christian nationalists rev up their fear, their xenophobia and… their loyalty to the Republicans– who not too deeply beneath the surface– are racist, anti-Muslim, anti non-Christian.
 

 

Do Republicans have a “position” on birth control?  Is it close to that of the Catholic Church?  Is there a broad anti-contraception caucus in the House that I am not aware of?  Do you often hear about the Anti-Condom Amendment being pushed through the Senate?  This would be the same party in power when the Bush-appointed head of the FDA approved Plan B, right?  This would be the same administration that approved but did not expand federal funding for stem-cell research, right?  Does anyone have any clue what any of this has to do with the Muslim reaction to the Pope’s speech in Regensburg?  

But then we find out the real deal: Christian nationalists will go on the rampage!  Ah, yes, the Christian nationalists–a non-existent group made “famous” by Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming earlier this year–who allegedly form an elusive, amorphous group that stretches all the way from Marvin Olasky (!) to Christian Reconstructionists and who have very little in common with one another politically except that they are all conventionally considered to be on the right.  Presumably such people, if they are what Kall says they are (almost none of them is), are already “ignited” by the war with jihadis and their own worldview.  “Nervous soccer moms” might react in different ways–it is in no sense clear that these eternal swing voters will stick with the GOP because some Muslims are burning the Pope in effigy (this assumes that they are following the controversy as closely as pundits and bloggers are, which is almost certainly a mistake).   

If the Vatican works so tirelessly to aid Republicans (and presumably, the clever alliance works both ways), why has it consistently opposed the foreign policy ventures undertaken (Iraq) or endorsed (Lebanon) by Mr. Bush and the GOP?  As fun as it must be to believe in an overarching global conspiracy of Pope and President, it might help if the Pope in question had demonstrated anything remotely like partisan loyalty–as if the head of a worldwide church that espouses a belief in its own universality and catholicity, not being bound by the petty squabbles of partisanship in one nation out of many, could be bothered to tailor his theological addresses to suit the electoral needs of a party that has distinguished itself in recent years for injustice and misrule.  Of course, the notion of any such deliberate or planned cooperation is preposterous, but it reflects the depth of lunacy that has taken hold among quite a few liberals that not only see the Catholic Church as their enemy (that is hardly new) but regard it effectively as a wing of the GOP.  Partisan paranoia and hysteria rarely get this outlandish.

But, strip away Kall’s wild-eyed claims and consider a serious question: how could Pope Benedict’s quoting of a Byzantine emperor’s criticism of Islam and Muhammad help Republican electoral prospects?  If it was such a clever strategy to tip the elections in the GOP’s favour, how exactly does the strategy work?  Where’s the payoff?  Has anyone noticed a “Regensburg bounce” in the polls?  I don’t think so.  

Certainly the controversy has prompted The New York Times editors to say a number of phenomenally stupid things, but it has hardly become a burning election-year issue.  Everyone on the right, regardless of how much they disagree among themselves, sees merit in Pope Benedict’s speech and regards the reaction in the Islamic world as deplorable; a sizeable number of people on the left view the situation more or less similarly, though certainly with hostility towards the Pope’s general arguments against deficient modern rationalism and the like.  The main difference seems to be that the prevailing wisdom on the left about the entire controversy is “this is what happens when religious leaders meddle in the real world,” while there is a clear and ringing endorsement of most of what the Pope had to say, even if there are some on the right who regret the inclusion of the quote from Manuel II.  Then there are people like Kall, who see the entire thing as a sinister ”ploy.”  Ironically, if more liberals are like Kall in their delusions about the arch-Republican Ratzinger (the idea is simply too funny), the better the controversy will work for Democrats in the fall. 

To the extent that the NYT view is typical of left-liberal opinion, their response could give the impression that Democrats are too wary to criticise the Muslim overreaction and too willing to believe that “dialogue” and ever more submissive attitudes towards every unreasonable Muslim sensibility will resolve all major problems.  On the other hand, if Christopher Hitchens is more representative in his definition of the struggle against jihadis as a “war to defend secularism,” and Rosie O’Donnell’s equation of the threat from “radical Christianity” with the threat from ”radical Islam” is widely shared, it is possible that this entire controversy will energise secular voters–already scared by a half dozen alarmist books declaring the onset of American theocracy–and drive them to the polls to fight what they will probably see as an explosion of religious fundamentalism all over the place. 

In this, they will be acting irrationally, as there is no coming theocracy and no “Christianists” coming to take them away to some V for Vendetta-like concentration camp, but this may intensify an already highly motivated core of Democratic voters, whom we know from past elections to be predominantly secular people.  For unrelated reasons tied to administration social policy this year, there could well be a diminution of evangelical and conservative Christian enthusiasm for the administration and the GOP majority (though the administration and Congress’ foursquare support of Israel during the Lebanon war may help the GOP with some evangelicals).  The combination of motivated secular voters and dispirited Christians could work to the advantage of the Democrats, if this controversy has any electoral impact at all, but it is obscure to me how the controversy even enters into the political contest, much less how it figures to aid the GOP.  The best thing people such as Kall could do to fulfill their own predictions would be to keep harping against Pope Benedict and remind middle-of-the-road voters just how much liberal Democrats hate the Catholic Church and everything it represents.

The pope and the Vatican can also do more. For the past two years, Benedict has been a no-show at interfaith gatherings in Assisi, begun 20 years ago by his predecessor, John Paul II. Last year, he issued an edict revoking the autonomy of Assisi’s Franciscan monks, a move that was seen as a reaction against the monks’ interfaith activism. On the occasion of this year’s gathering, he issued a statement about religion and peace that was read by an envoy, but his absence spoke louder than his words.

The pope also recently reassigned the Vatican’s former head of interreligious dialogue, Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, an expert on Arab affairs, to a diplomatic post in Egypt. According to a report in The Times by Ian Fisher, the move was interpreted by some church experts as reflecting Benedict’s skepticism of dialogue with Muslims. As his unfortunate comments show, the pope needs high-level experts on Islam to help guide him. ~The New York Times

Via Rod Dreher

Rod calls the editorial “ignorant and objectionable,” which is probably too generous, and does a good job demolishing the better part of it point by point.  Rod points out the excesses that went on at the ecumenical love-fests at Assisi, which should surely make even the most dedicated ecumenist blush with shame.  Rather than go into my usual refrain about Why Ecumenism Doesn’t Work, I would like to mention briefly an episode from the career of Francis of Assisi that his latter-day brethren have either forgotten all together or choose not to remember.  This was the moment in 1219 during the Fifth Crusade at the siege of Damietta, which was the main Ayyubid fortress protecting the approaches to Cairo and preventing the Crusaders from advancing inland, when Francis came and challenged the Ayyubid ruler of Egypt to a trial by fire in an attempt to convince him of the truth of Christianity.  Francis’ intentions were pacific (he desired to remove the need for violence between the two sides), but his conviction in the rightness of the Faith was no less powerful for all that. 

It does Francis of Assisi dishonour to associate his birthplace with the sort of ecumenism that makes no such attempt at evangelisation and gives the impression that the legacy of Francis is one of compromising the Faith or cruelly pretending that those who stumble in the darkness of religious error should be allowed to remain in the ditches into which they have fallen.  Francis was far too noble and compassionate a Christian to have endorsed anything of that kind, and those who bear his name today do him a disservice when they engage in dialogue with a “zeal not according to knowledge.” (Rom. 10:2)  Pope Benedict was right to avoid these meetings in the past, and he has been right to discipline the Franciscans for these excesses.  That The New York Times finds value in such meetings is almost a guarantee that they ought not to take place.

He puts the word “conscience” in quote-marks:

The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective “conscience” becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. [My italics.]

This is no typo. Ratzinger has long disowned the notion of an individual conscience as we have long understood it in the West, as I explain at greater length in my forthcoming book. His view is that if your conscience goes against anything that the Pope says at any time, then it isn’t really your conscience. It’s a false conscience in a mirror of the Communist idea of “false consciousness”. Your real conscience, Benedict insists, is always in agreement with the Pope. ~Andrew Sullivan

Wow.  This is the kind of thing I would expect from thirteen year-olds who think willfulness and disobedience against their parents are the same thing as freedom.  That is, I would expect it from kids who are too young and immature to know and discern any better.  Where to begin….

Let’s start with what Pope Benedict said.  He referred to subjective “conscience,” so it makes sense that it would be put in scare quotes to make it clear that Benedict understands–properly–that real conscience is not subjective.  It is not some little personal voice in your head telling you what you personally find wrong, but serves as a witness to both the natural law inscribed in human nature and creation and the moral law revealed by God.  St. Maximos described this natural law in Ambigua 19 (translation by Louth):

Whence in both cases I think it necessarily follows that anyone who wishes may live an upright and blameless life with God, whether through scriptural understanding of the Spirit, or through the natural contemplation of reality in accordance with the Spirit.  So the two laws–both the natural law and the written law–are of equal honour and teach the same things; neither is greater or less than the other, which shows, as is right, that the lover of perfect wisdom may become the one who desires wisdom perfectly. 

Of more obviously direct application is Pope John Paul II’s 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio, in which he described, among other things, the activity of conscience and its expression of natural and moral law.  For this reason, conscience is not an expression of subjective experience or subjective thought, but that faculty in man that recognises moral truth established by God:

This applies equally to the judgements of moral conscience, which Sacred Scripture considers capable of being objectively true.

Confusion about the nature of the truth, or a view that regards truth as subjective, will consequently distort the understanding of what conscience is and what it does: 

In the Encyclical Letter Veritatis Splendor, I wrote that many of the problems of the contemporary world stem from a crisis of truth. I noted that “once the idea of a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason, is lost, inevitably the notion of conscience also changes. Conscience is no longer considered in its prime reality as an act of a person’s intelligence, the function of which is to apply the universal knowledge of the good in a specific situation and thus to express a judgment about the right conduct to be chosen here and now. Instead, there is a tendency to grant to the individual conscience the prerogative of independently determining the criteria of good and evil and then acting accordingly. Such an outlook is quite congenial to an individualist ethic, wherein each individual is faced with his own truth different from the truth of others”.

So a proper understanding of conscience would not tend towards an “individualist ethic,” and so would not have anything to do with subjective ”conscience.”  We then properly use our faculty of conscience, as we do our reason, as a way of understanding and applying the truths that have been revealed to us:

Yet the Gospel and the Apostolic writings still set forth both general principles of Christian conduct and specific teachings and precepts. In order to apply these to the particular circumstances of individual and communal life, Christians must be able fully to engage their conscience and the power of their reason.

Thus Pope Benedict has drawn out the connections between individualism in reasoning generally and in moral reasoning more specifically.  Both privilege the self, both stress subjectivity, and both ignore the objective nature of intellectual and moral truth. 

The Catholic Catechism then states even more clearly what a good conscience involves:

A good and pure conscience is enlightened by true faith, for charity proceeds at the same time “from a pure heart and a good conscience and sincere faith.”

The more a correct conscience prevails, the more do persons and groups turn aside from blind choice and try to be guided by objective standards of moral conduct.  (CCC 1794)

Just as a proper use of reason is one illumined by faith, so it is with conscience.  Good conscience involves the submission to objective standards, and, of course, it is God Who has set down these standards and willed them for our improvement in the life of virtue leading to salvation in Christ. 

This is extremely close to an understanding that is the common inheritance of both Catholics and Orthodox, received from St. Maximos, who taught that subjective choice (gnome), deliberation and the choosing will (gnomikon thelima) itself were products of the Fall (and therefore did not exist in the Incarnate Word), whereas natural human will and human freedom in their proper forms always acted in accordance with the will of God.  Though I do not recall having seen references specifically to conscience in the works or studies of St. Maximos that I have read, it seems perfectly clear that obedience to divine will is what would show good moral judgement for St. Maximos.  Decisions cease to be a product of unnatural choice and more and more a product of free will, which naturally wills what God wills as it becomes purified of the effects of sin.  Free obedience is the true “freedom of morality,” and subjective choice and conscience are those things that keep us bound by the bonds of sin, autonomy and separation from God.

So when Sullivan prattles on about how “we” have long understood individual conscience in a certain way, by “we” he cannot actually mean Catholic and Orthodox Christians.  Indeed, I think he cannot be referring to most Christians over the centuries, but specifically in the tradition in which Pope Benedict is working Sullivan cannot be more horrendously wrong (as usual) when he suggests that it is somehow Pope Benedict who has departed from some proper consensus about the nature of conscience or when he implies that conscience truly should be understood as something subjective.  There would be almost nothing more abhorrent than this complete perversion of the meaning of what conscience is, which is right judgement in accordance truth and justice, which is to be in accord with God Himself.   

It is often said—and was said by Ratzinger when he was an underling of the last Roman prelate—that Islam is not capable of a Reformation. We would not even have this word in our language if the Roman Catholic Church had been able to have its own way. ~Christopher Hitchens, Slate

I should have remarked on this yesterday, but actually thought it so weak that it was not even worth criticising.  But then it occurred to me that there are people who think “clever” references to the Reformation are the perfect way to undermine a Catholic authority’s arguments, because, you know, the Reformation did so much ”good” for the world and the Catholic Church was against it, which obviously proves that Catholics can never have anything to say about reform in any context ever again.  So there.  This is a tactic perfected by irresponsible teenagers who try to justify their disobedience and stupidity by pointing to their dad’s fondness for strong drink: “Sure I drove the car through the living room, but you…drink…liquor!”

The weakness and irrelevance of Hitchens’ point here are made most clear when you consider the content of the rest of the speech to which Hitchens was trying to respond.  In that speech, Pope Benedict made it very clear that a terrible distortion of the relation between reason and faith, and the first example of the process of “de-Hellenisation” that he was speaking about, was a result of the Reformation:

De-Hellenization first emerges in connection with the fundamental postulates of the Reformation in the 16th century. Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living historical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical system.

The principle of “sola scriptura,” on the other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics appeared as a premise derived from another source, from which faith had to be liberated in order to become once more fully itself. When Kant stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this program forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality as a whole.

So there is a real question whether Pope Benedict could, ecumenical understanding notwithstanding, really approve of the effects of the Protestant Reformation to which Hitchens makes his predictable reference.  But, you might ask, what other reformation was there?  Hitchens also would have to be ignorant of the fact that reformatio was a word that had been used in the context of the monastic and spiritual renewal movements of the twelfth century (and made known to modern audiences in the late Giles Constable’s The Reformation of the Twelfth Century–an excellent book that serves as a fine introduction to the spirituality and social context behind the founding of religious orders such as the Cistercians) and had long had meaning for Latin Christians in the context of spiritual renewal.  It was on this tradition that the Reformers themselves were drawing, though obviously the authorities in Rome did not agree with either the spirit or the content of much of what they proposed for their reforms.  This did not mean that there was no effort at reform on the Catholic side before Luther, but simply that the Reformed churches do not have some kind of monopoly on the use of that language and it is not hypocritical or contradictory, as Hitchens suggests, for Catholics to speak in terms of reformation since the word was, if you like, theirs before it was anyone else’s.  Obviously the Catholic Reformation itself tends to obviate this objection anyway.  

When then-Cardinal Ratzinger or anyone else says that Islam is not capable of a ”Reformation,” they mean something far more serious than what many moderns take this to mean.  This is not a claim that Islam cannot ultimately become a religion that eventually after a century of internecine warfare embraces the principle of freedom of conscience–that much is obvious–but that Islam does not even have the theological-philosophical apparatus for self-criticism because of the very fundamental assumptions of all Muslims about the uncreated and perfect nature of the scripture they use as their authority and the untouchable paragon of virtue into which Islamic tradition has made Muhammad.  This obviously has little to do with things like practical abuses of power and privilege such as simony and questionable theology in the form of the sale of indulgences; this has to do with the very nature of the religion, its proper form, which reform and revival cannot make any better because the foundation is so lacking in the necessary essential qualities.  

What is perhaps more annoying about this remark is that it suggests that Hitchens buys into the old progressive narrative (since he is a progressive, I guess he would!) that the Reformation was some Great Leap Forward for human freedom and individual rights, which must be one of those things that Whig Protestants told themselves at night to make them feel better about the anti-Catholic massacres they committed.  In fact, the Reformation at its best and in the minds of its advocates was a deeply conservative, even reactionary, opposition to what some of the Reformers saw as excessive reliance on philosophy and humanism.  If the Islamic world were to undergo a Reformation (and who says that it hasn’t undergone the closest thing to it with the various Islamic revivalist movements of the last 300 years?) of this sort, it would actually have to become even more rigid, inflexible and doctrinaire in its emphasis on scriptural literalism and moral purity. 

If, as some have suggested, the Reformation was the attempt to apply the rigour of the monastic ethic to the laity, an Islamic Reformation would not make Islam more liberal, more open to “modernity” and all the things that people who talk about Islamic Reformations want to see, but would likely make it more hostile to all of these things.  Protestants did retain some respect for reason and philosophy, because they derived this respect from the common tradition that had incorporated the best elements of Hellenism into Christian thought, whereas Islam on the whole does not benefit from this tradition.  While it has become something of a commonplace in recent days among some defenders of the Pope to say that Pope Benedict was harder on the Protestants (who have, as of yet, failed to bomb or burn down any Catholic churches in response–what can they be waiting for?) than on the Muslims, even in his remarks on the Reformation he could just as well have been saying to the Muslims: “As mistaken as the Reformation was in separating faith and reason as much as it did, the Protestants at least have a fighting chance, because they still partake from the same tradition that we do; Islam doesn’t even have that going for it.  You should look into why that is.” 

Toward the end of the panel, Hitchens caused an uproar when he criticized the Pope’s recent comments for being anti-reason and said something along the lines of, “We are fighting a war to defend secularism.” ~Philip Klein, AmSpec Blog

At least I can understand why Hitchens would say something like that–secularism is something he values in the modern West and wants to preserve it.  I think this is awful, but it makes sense.  Atheists should want to defend secularism.  As it happens, I don’t think that we are fighting a “war to defend secularism.”  But who can explain why some conservative pundits also talk as if they wanted to fight a war to defend secularism and why conservatives say they want to fight to defend the glories of the Enlightenment? 

It might be one thing to defend these things because they are ours, that is, products of our civilisation for good or ill–like a really irritating cousin who continually embarrasses the family with his criminal record but nonetheless remains part of the family–but it is something all together different to stand up for them as if they represented some sort of superior model or desirable way of understanding the role of religion in society and understanding the world.

Other than that, Helprin repeated what has been a theme of his post-9/11 commentary, which is that America has failed to dedicate the necessary military and civil defense resources to win this war. When asked what he would do now with regard to Iraq, he said he felt like a surgeon being asked to operate on a dead patient. That is, the mistake of sending too few troops and not fighting a war of excess has already taken its toll, and there’s not much more we could do at this point to improve things on the ground. ~Philip Klein, AmSpec Blog

I share Helprin’s view and also share what is probably his frustration at being asked to work miracles by coming up with a viable “solution” for a nightmare that he foresaw and warned against–to no avail.  I sometimes marvel at the counterblasts from war supporters when those of us who predicted disaster in 2002 point to the huge flaws in existing strategy: “So what do you think we should do?” 

When I offer my “solution”: “Get out as quickly as possible,” the usual rejoinder is, “But obviously we can’t do that!  That wouldn’t be fair to the Iraqis!”  Of course, nobody gave a damn about being “fair” to the Iraqis when they urged on a war of aggression, er, liberation on their country allegedly for the sake of our national security.  Show me a war supporter who cares so deeply about the fate Iraqis, and I’ll show you someone who has run out of rational arguments in favour of staying in Iraq.  Quoth the Derb:

Whether Iraq is better off without Saddam Hussein in power, I don’t know.  To be blunt about it, I don’t care, either.  What are the Iraqis to me?

I do think, though, that administration spokespeople should retire the line about the world being a better place without SH.  This line is lame.  Setting aside the fact that the proposition itself is arguable, even if it’s true, so what?  The world would be a better place without Kim Jong Il, or Robert Mugabe, or Fidel Castro.  It’s not the rightful business of the U.S. govt. to go around making the world a better place.  It’s their business to defend and advance U.S. interests.  There is a case that the d & a of U.S. interests was served by removing SH.  Admin. officials should stress that case.  But for heaven’s sake spare us the world-saving stuff.

But his [Allen’s] huffing and puffing about the question; his veiled suggestion that there was something unseemly about asking it; and his reluctance to discuss his own background did not become him. ~Mona Charen

Well, if I go into too much detail here I shall get into trouble of the PC sort; but the main idea was, that any society ought to offer useful and productive lives to its epsilons—i.e. to citizens over on the left-hand side of the Bell Curve.  The postindustrial West has been depressingly bad at this.  Our basic approach to our low-IQ fellow citizens has been “Let them eat cake.”  It’s hard not to get the impression that we have been busily building a society of law-school elites, by law-school elites, and for law-school elites—the “Yale or jail” society.  Wal-Mart, with its simplified, stripped-down training programs that concentrate on a few easily-mastered skills and disciplines, is a small reversal of this deplorable (to my mind) trend.

Whatever you think of the society imagined in Brave New World, at least there was a place for everyone in it, bright or dim.  That is not the case with present-day Western society, except in pockets like Wal-Mart. ~John Derbyshire

Note that comparing Wal-Mart to an aspect of Brave New World here is supposed to be a compliment of sorts: it gives dim people something to do.  I leave it to the Friends of Wal-Mart to determine whether this sort of argument does more harm or good to their cause. 

But, even if I find detachment impossible, I can still profess ideological disinterest. I am certainly not attracted to the drearily platitudinous liberal secularism that Linker has now apparently adopted as his political “philosophy,” but neither am I an adherent of the “theoconservatism” that Linker attributes—with a variable degree of accuracy—to Neuhaus and his circle (unless mere hostility to the “culture of death” is enough to earn one membership). So I think I am being fairly impartial when I say that The Theocons is a poor book—on any number of counts. It is frequently badly reasoned; it is marked by a surprising degree of historical ignorance; it is polluted by a personal animosity towards Neuhaus that—while denied by Linker—is both obvious and unrelenting; and it is extremely boring. . . . ~David Hart, The New Criterion (via Mirror of Justice)

Hart, an Orthodox theologian whose writings I have commented on here before, confirms what is becoming something of a consensus view of Theocons: it is a poorly-done hatchet job motivated at least in part by personal hostility, even if, as Prof. Fox has noted, it has something important to say that got lost in the polemic.

But, if Lamont becomes the U.S. Senate’s newest rock star–and America’s most popular preppy–pardon me if I pour myself a gimlet and set sail for Wellfleet. ~Michael Crowley

As someone who grew up in what I suppose must be the sunbelt (it is very sunny in New Mexico, though you don’t run across many Goldwater fans) and who attended what I suppose one must call a prep school (to be appropriately pompous, we could call it a preparatory academy) for seven years, it might seem that I should be of two minds about the Preppy Revival (less dangerous than the Shia Revival, more comical than Evangelical Revivals, but undoubtedly with better drinks than both).  Except that, my enjoyment of Prep-Unit notwithstanding, I personally could never stand the people at my school who embraced the preppy ethos or fit the profile.  They were the people who lived in the Northeast Heights of Albuquerque and whose parents still voted for the Democrats; they were the ones who were by turns personally obnoxious and also preciously PC, in keeping with the school’s commitment to “diversity.”   

My exposure to the Southern version of preppy at Hampden-Sydney did not improve my impression.  They were the slackers from private schools in Richmond and Midlothian who came to H-SC for the networking angle, the guys who wore the classic combination of khakis and the buttoned shirt untucked in the back seemingly at all times, but especially on game days and at parties, who drove SUVs and referred to different people variously as “your boy” or “my boys.”  These were people, like those at the Academy, who took skiing trips and some of whom actually went to Aspen for vacations.  [Full disclosure: I was at Vail once–and not to ski–when I was about eight, didn’t like the place and have never been back.]  These were people who listened to Phish and thought it was good music. 

Maybe it’s because of who my ancestors were–small-town New Jersey businessmen and ministers, Midwestern farmers and my Scots-Irish railroad worker grandfather–but I cannot now separate the whole preppy lifestyle and mentality from the depradations of the Eastern Establishment and the various and sundry perfidies of Yankee misrule, both Republican and Democratic, that deformed the Republic into what it has become.  These folks had their chance at running the country, and they didn’t do especially well as far as I’m concerned.  Dobeleve is perhaps a mutant strain of the breed, combining the confidence of a Southerner with the shallowness of an Easterner, but he still belongs to that world and represents what it is capable of doing.  Finally, the New England preppy is the one I have a particularly hard time understanding.  I mean, I don’t even know what half of their lingo means (I suppose I could look it up, but what the hell is a topsider?).  That’s okay.  I’m not that interested in finding out.  

Lamont is good on the war, but I wouldn’t want to go to his country club. 

So the left has found its savior, and he is Bertie Wooster.  ~Michael Crowley

At least he isn’t Gussie Finknottle!

“I almost died when for a year and a half we had to pretend we were governing. Instead, we lied morning, evening and night,” he told his fellow Socialists.

——————– 

President Laszlo Solyom asked Gyurcsany to publicly recognize his error, saying the news of the remarks had thrown the country into a “moral crisis.” He also chastised the prime minister for “knowingly” jeopardizing people’s faith in democracy.

Gyurcsany defended himself by saying that was he trying to convince his party about the urgent and inevitable need for comprehensive reforms and to change the political culture. ~The Houston Chronicle

It has not been a good week for fans of democracy (for those keeping score, I am not one of these people).  In Thailand, the corrupt Thaksin has precipitated a coup, and in Hungary the revelations of the dishonesty of Gyurcsany and his Socialists has provoked riots, caused the forint to go into steep decline and generally made a mess of a country to which I have a family connection and for which I have much goodwill and affection. 

But imagine that–rioting because politicians in government lied!  What a quaint notion.  Were we to do the same, all of our cities would have burned to the ground long, long ago.  There is something profoundly wrong with a form of government that not only rewards deception with power, as democracy routinely does, but positively encourages deception as a necessity in fighting elections.  You almost have to admire the idealism of people who would sooner riot than accept a dishonest political leader, but then you have to ask: wherever did they get the notion that democracy had something to do with honest government? 

His quiet departure after a fresh election might indeed be best for Thailand. But for the present, and while he keeps everyone guessing, the country is on edge. There have been disquieting rumours of plots to overthrow or even assassinate the prime minister. In late August police arrested a junior army officer in a car packed with explosives, near Mr Thaksin’s home.

His critics accuse Mr Thaksin of staging the bomb plot in order to win sympathy from voters. They are also reporting rising unrest in the army over his attempts to secure promotion for his chums in the annual shuffle of military commanders. According to one popular theory, these moves are part of a power struggle between Mr Thaksin and a rival group led by Prem Tinsulanonda, a retired general who is King Bhumibol’s senior adviser. If true, the consequences could be nasty. ~The Economist

Little wonder, then, that some of the Thai military reacted as it did.  They had some reason to resent Thaksin abusing his position to make preferments for his friends in the military.  Given the man’s alleged corruption, this is not at all surprising, and makes him even more responsible for what has happened in Bangkok than I had thought.  Moreover, if this is the fruit of a rivalry between the PM and the king’s senior adviser, the coup almost certainly must have taken place with the king’s knowledge and consent.  Good for King Bhumibol.  Thaksin had become an embarrassment and a disgrace to his country, and he should have stepped down earlier this year when calls for his resignation began coming in. 

HEAVILY-armed troops backed by tanks took control of the Thai premier’s office in Bangkok while Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was out of the kingdom, witnesses said.

Witnesses outside Government House in central Bangkok said forces loyal to sacked military commander Lieutenant General Sonthi Boonyaratglin took control of the building in what appeared to be a coup.

An announcement flashed on all public television channels said police and military forces loyal to King Bhumibol Adulyadej had taken control of Bangkok “to maintain law and order”. It was accompanied by patriotic music.

The announcement said the troops belonged to the “Council of Political Reform”. It apologised to Thai citizens for the unrest and asked for them to cooperate. ~News.com.au 

So the corrupt Thaksin Shinawatra has managed to effectively sabotage one of the only successful democratic governments in southeast Asia through his grandstanding and egomania.  Thai Rak Thai, but I expect they don’t much rak Mr. Thaksin right about now.  Assuming that the army has intervened not to overthrow democratic government, but has simply become disgusted with the antics of the Prime Minister, the coup is a blunt but possibly necessary way to force Thaksin’s hand and get him to resign. 

It is to be hoped that the venerable king of Thailand intervenes to arrange some peaceful transfer of power from the military government that will allow the Thais to have their constitutional government restored to them and will have Mr. Thaksin thrown out of office.  The monarchy may be the one thing that ultimately prevents this coup from degenerating into ruinous internal strife.

Memo to the democratists: if democratic government can implode and provoke a military coup in Thailand of all places, there is not much to hope for it in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan.  Stable, reasonably just and orderly governments are what allow for the gradual evolution of the indigenous institutions and habits necessary to sustain self-government.  Without the monarchy in Thailand, one wonders whether they would not have gone the way of Burma long ago.  One-man, one-vote democracies that heighten and politicise tribal and ethnic quarrels are disasters in the making.  If democratic government can fail in a relatively homogenous, stable and relatively prosperous country such as Thailand, it is not only insecure almost everywhere but it is also hardly the magic remedy to what ails a nation. 

The difficulty, to my mind, is figuring out why the Pope chose to cite this particular quotation from this particular nonentity? Certainly many popes have made similar statements about jihad and Benedict would have had a plethora of popes to quote from. It is therefore instructive to learn more about Manuel II Paleologus. He was, foremost, the antepenultimate emperor of the Byzantine Empire, the successor to the Roman Empire. At the time of his reign (1391-1425) the Muslim Turks had their sights set on the empire’s capital of Constantinople. In 1399, Manuel traveled to England, France, the seat of the Holy Roman Empire, and Aragon seeking assistance from the various monarchs and courts. His visit was a complete bust. The split between the Greek Orthodox and Roman churches proved too wide. Unless the Greeks agreed to join the Roman Church there would be no troops, no assistance, and the Greeks were not about to surrender their autonomy to Rome, not even to save the empire, their religion and their lives.

The result: Within a few years the Turks would take Constantinople, rename it Istanbul, and the Roman-Byzantine Empire would disappear forever from the earth. (In an ironic aside, Manuel’s son Constantine, the last Byzantine-Roman emperor, was killed in battle defending the capital. Legend has it that he discarded his purple cloak and charged into the fray taking so many cuts and blows that his corpse was unrecognizable. Thus, the last Roman emperor was laid to rest in a mass grave.) ~Christopher Orlet, The American Spectator

Hey, who’s he calling a nonentity?  Even so, all of this is a good corrective to the errors I have seen elsewhere (including the accurate description of Manuel as antepenultimate emperor), though there was a “successful” reunion agreement signed in 1439 and there was a failed crusade–the crusade of Varna–that was destroyed in modern Bulgaria in 1444, all of which were more than a “few years” after Manuel’s failed tour of western Europe.

Is it really “relevant” whether Allen’s mother is Jewish?  Maybe to a few people, but not to most.  Should it make any difference in the Senate election?  I don’t think so.  Does it make any sense for Allen to lecture a reporter about religious freedom (what?) when she asks him whether he has Jewish ancestry?  Not in the least. 

Allen seems to be playing a sort of anti-Harris card: he regards religious affiliation and identity as so unimportant and irrelevant to politics that he actually plays at being offended by the very question.  I don’t think I have ever seen someone get so angry about something that he believes to be irrelevant.  I can understand dismissing something as irrelevant, but what was this weird refusal to answer a simple question?  In the end, he did answer the question, so why the big song and dance about how irrelevant it is? 

If people can delve into the polygamous ancestors of Mitt Romney in the name of journalism and we make his Mormonism a legitimate topic of debate (because it may have political significance and is relevant), why on earth is Allen’s ancestry somehow off limits?  The only reason to keep it off limits is this: if there is some attempt to use that ancestry to somehow discredit the candidate with voters, it might arguably be a kind of dirty pool that shouldn’t be tolerated.  Given Allen’s hijinks of late, I should think the last thing he needs to worry about is an “irrelevant” question like this. 

“If we called it speed dating, it will end up with real dating,” said Shamshad Hussain, one of the organizers, grimacing. ~The New York Times

Strange as it may sound (and my readers may not find it all that strange if they have been reading my blog long enough), and as laughable as calling a speed date a ”matrimonial banquet” is (for starters, it doesn’t do much for the reputation of real “matrimonial banquets”), I can appreciate the idea behind it.  Though I cannot speak from experience as a parent, I think there are a lot of parents who would appreciate an organisation like Mothers Against Dating.  For those who like euphemisms, ”assisted marriage” is as nice a way to describe arranged marriage as I can think of.  You’re not being forced to marry someone–you’re being helped along the way! 

Why this aversion to referring to dating, even for these limited meetings?  Well, for a different generation the reasons would have been obvious, and the reasons are actually even more compelling today in their way:

Basically, for conservative Muslims, dating is a euphemism for premarital sex. Anyone who partakes risks being considered morally louche, with their marriage prospects dimming accordingly, particularly young women.    

The sad thing is not just that it is often a euphemism for that, but that there can sometimes be nothing more to it than that.  Is it any wonder that traditional, morally conservative immigrants have to concoct things as odd as speed “matrimonial banquets” to cope with the age of hook-ups and Promiscuous Girl?  As I read over these sorts of stories, I have to ask: why should these people want to assimilate to our society, when it genuinely does appear to be something of a moral wasteland?   

It has been said or quoted in at least a few different places that Manuel II Palaiologos, now made famous to the entire world thanks to the Pope’s Regensburg address, was the “penultimate emperor” in Constantinople.  I am perplexed as to why people keep saying this, since he was the third to last emperor, not the penultimate emperor as people keep insisting.  Anyone with a copy of Ostrogorsky handy–or a quick Google search–could confirm this immediately.  I don’t know where this “penultimate” meme came from, but a whole lot of people need to improve their fact-checking. 

John VIII, Manuel’s son, ruled for quite a while after him (1425-1448), even effectively ruling during the waning years of Manuel II’s reign, and oversaw the unfortunate Union of Ferrara-Florence (1438-39).  John VIII was the penultimate emperor, if we must call someone this.  Constantine XI, who was famous for having gone down fighting on 29 May 1453 when the City fell, was the Last Emperor.

Well, readers can explore the issue of Belloc’s antisemitism for themselves: the Wikipedia article is a good starting point (though, given the limitations of the Wiki enterprise, not likely more than that). 

Personally, I couldn’t care less. I detest this puritan style of “writing out” from history everyone whose opinions were not precisely congruent with the thinking of college-educated Americans in the late 20th century. Belloc was a fine writer and a gentleman. He was a good poet of the second rank, and a doggerelist (?) of the first rank, if there is such a thing. He wrote essays on an astonishing breadth of subjects, probably a broader breadth than he was really competent to cope with, but almost invariably with some original or interesting insight. To the best of my knowledge, he never did any harm to anyone. He defended his faith (which is not mine) with ingenuity and vigor, and seems never to have subscribed to the near-universal Catholic anti-semitism of his time (”They killed Our Lord” etc. etc.) His opinions were not wildly eccentric in his time and place. His essay on Islam should be taken at its face value, not regarded as tainted because his opinions on other topics would get him chased out of public life today. Belloc does not live today. He lived a hundred years ago.

For goodness’ sake. Many of the things we hold to be self-evident truths will look silly or obnoxious a hundred years from now. No doubt some of those being chased out of public life in our time will be regarded by our grandchildren as heros and martyrs. So it has always been in past times, at any rate. Let’s use some historical imagination. Our own age is not the summit and end point of all human understanding. In many respects it is a stupid and frivolous age. ~John Derbyshire

Hear, hear!

Briefly, conservatism is a more or less articulate sense of normality, whereas liberalism has been described (by G.K. Chesterton) as “the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal.” Conservatism can tolerate many abnormal things that can’t be eliminated from human society, but it doesn’t call them “rights” or confuse them with normal things. And, after all, few things are more abnormal than war.

So today’s alleged conservatives (and especially the misnamed “neoconservatives”) are aberrations. They delight in destruction; they are full of enthusiasm for violent and radical action; they lack the ironic and skeptical attitude of real conservatives, the prudent sense that precipitate acts bring “unintended consequences.”

The presidency of George W. Bush has been one long object lesson in unintended consequences. It’s amusing to recall that his father was kidded for using the phrase wouldn’t be prudent, an expression the son could profitably adopt.
Until the Republicans learn that peace is normal, they will deserve defeat and infamy. ~Joseph Sobran

Righty blogger attention is mostly focused 9/18 on Islamic reaction to Pope Benedict XVI’s 9/12 speech. Normally not a subject of interest to Hotline readers, conservative blogger reaction can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here (this is by no means a definitive list). Is this a distraction for righty efforts to maintain GOP majorities in Congress? Certainly not. As DailyKos‘ founder Markos Moulitsas points out in PBS’ NOW special “Blog the Vote,” blogs political value is all about exciting the base, and nothing, it seems, fires GOPers up more than a clash of civilizations. ~Hotline

This is an interesting hypothesis.  It will probably appeal to the loons who think that theocracy is on the march in this country and that Pope Benedict was actually using an elaborate code in his speech to support the neocons and encourage an attack on Iran.  It will probably make no sense to the people who are supposed to be fired up by “clash” rhetoric, since they cannot vote for Pope Benedict but are stuck with the witless GOP. 

This is the party that has mostly succeeded in politically neutering those who, like Franklin Graham, echoed Manuel II’s view of Islam (”evil”), while welcoming the ideas of the ridiculous Daniel Pipes and Stephen Schwartz, while also adopting preposterous neologisms such as Islamofascist designed to avoid talking about the specifically Islamic nature of the enemy and to continue to pretend that the problem is an extremist fringe governed by a political ideology comparable to other totalitarianisms and therefore not really religious in nature–it is not about faith, as Gaffney said, but about power.  While the Pope is drawing on relevant historical experience (Byzantine-Ottoman conflicts), these jokers are stuck on pause in 1938 and cannot get through a sentence without making some Axis-related reference. 

As Manuel II might have observed in response to Gaffney’s remark, their faith is dedicated to the acquisition of power for their faith.  Perhaps it is done for the glory of Allah, but nonetheless that is the goal.  If anything, all of the talk about Pope Benedict will not only distract the GOP bloggers from whipping up their folks into caring about the elections but it will also convince the voters that there is something far more important going on than midterm elections.  Only if the GOP can make the sale that they have the better answer to the jihadi threat and that they know how implement that answer without massive screw-ups do they benefit from all the chatter about the Pope’s speech.  Otherwise, it will create a lot of anxiety and excitement that will go nowhere.

May the Republicans perish forever. May the vultures gobble their entrails. May their name be blotted out. In short, may they lose their shirts in November.

Yes, I’m disillusioned with the GOP. It was bad enough when I thought they were unprincipled. Now, however, it’s worse, because they do have a principle after all: war. ~Joseph Sobran

If Jim Geraghty’s Voting to Kill is right about what motivates a lot of GOP voters these days, Republican voters would say, “You better believe it!”  For their sake, I hope that they continue to vote GOP in spite of Iraq, not because of it.

Republican operatives speaking on background say that while they initially believed that split ticket voting would prevail, putting Corker in the U.S. Senate and Bredesen back in the governor’s office, they are now close to hitting the panic button.

They are afraid a lackluster Corker campaign combined with Ford’s charisma, voter dissatisfaction with President George W. Bush, Bredesen’s popularity among Republicans, and a Christian conservative base that is not convinced Corker is a reliable voice for them will result in a Democratic sweep in November. ~NashvillePost.com

As I was remarking to Michael the other day, I thought it could not be a good sign for the GOP that I literally had no idea until a couple weeks ago that Corker was the Republican candidate for Senate in Tennessee.  He is apparently better known to Tennesseans, but it seemed to me that if a political junkie and blogger such as myself had never heard his name mentioned once all year long it was probably a sign that something was going wrong somewhere with his campaign.  Apparently the Tennessee GOP received a dressing-down for their “unacceptable” performance in fundraising and mobilising the troops.  Ford, by contrast, was already something of a national media figure and comes across not only as charismatic but also reasonable and intelligent, and he seems to be campaigning well even though his family ties to corrupt relatives may hurt him.  What do our Tennessean friends have to say about this, I wonder? 

Update: Oh, here is one Tennessean’s remarks.

And more and more, the report concludes, Germans are disappointed with democracy within the country. This is especially true for those living in eastern Germany.

 

Last year, only 38 percent of eastern Germans thought democracy was a good form of government, the study said. In 2000, it was 49 percent. ~Deutsche Welle

 

Put yourself in the shoes of the average German from the old DDR.  Those who grew up under the old system probably find the transition under the unified Germany rather unpleasant and jarring (arguably, the hit success of Goodbye, Lenin! with its nostalgic DDR kitsch tapped into some sentiment that could view the DDR with both fondness and contempt); the roughly 20% unemployment in the east (the rate is higher in some of the eastern Laender) can hardly encourage a lot of enthusiasm for the status quo; there have probably been a lot of unreasonable expectations of the “why doesn’t Rostock look like Frankfurt-am-Main by now?” variety that assume there is some magic connection between having elective government and having an economic engine that generates massive wealth and that this wealth will be widely distributed to everyone by dint of being a member of the same country.  People who talk about democratic capitalism can only exacerbate this problem, as they imply that there is some necessary connection. 

These expectations of fortune and success under democracy are silly expectations, but if you grew up associating the wealthy Wessis with democracy and freedom, you might be forgiven for thinking that the acquisition of democracy and freedom (of some sort) should lead to greater economic success.  When that doesn’t happen, you assume something must be wrong with the democratic system rather than with, um, you. 

Fundamentally, the reason why most people in the West say they like democracy is because they think it is a means to get them the stuff they could not have under another system, and in this case they quite literally mean “stuff,” as in material things and wealth.  Indeed, one of the main selling points of the superiority of ”democratic capitalism” over communism during the Cold War was the former’s ability to get people lots of stuff; the austerity of communism was held up as if it were some kind of insult, when it was the oppression, not the lack of material things, that mattered.   

When the people expecting it do not get the stuff, they believe that the system has failed them.  In other cases, the democracy may be nominal or it may become the property of the plutocrats–as in Panama–and disillusionment with the promises of democracy follows swiftly.  Panama in particular has shown high levels of disapproval of democracy and strong potential for preferring authoritarianism because of the deeply corrupt nature of Panamanian democracy, alluded to so well in The Tailor of Panama (one of the best anti-interventionist films of the last 30 years), which is not at all surprising.  Democracy does not guarantee either eunomia or prosperity, and quite frequently results in neither, and expectations of either are misplaced and will inevitably lead to disappointment.  The question is not why so many people in eastern Germany are losing faith in democracy, but why so many in Germany or anywhere else still have faith in it.   

Of course, there is a good argument that it is irrational to blame the political system for your region’s economic failure, but popular preferences are very often a mix of rational interests mixed with a lot of irrational, muddled thinking.  It is generally easier to write off an entire system.  That does not mean that you are wrong to write it off, but it does suggest that you may never find anything satisfactory if you assume that the fault is in the system and not in yourself.  Democracy itself contributes to this error because it encourages people to project their own failures onto the collective of “the people” and thus avoid responsibility by attributing the problem to “all of us” and saying that this is a problem that “we” need to solve.  It is, of course, the priorities and values of the people in the system (in theory) that will dictate the people’s relative success or failure.  One of the problems with democracy is that it gives people all of the wrong priorities and many of the worst values, starting with ingratitude and laziness and working down from there. 

This is perhaps a crude portrait and possibly unfair to many Germans in the east who have not soured on German democracy (which is, incidentally, a system far more constrained and limited in its political options than even our own, if such a thing were possible), but I think it must explain part of the reason for the disenchantment.  Germans in the west have much greater confidence in democracy as a good form of government, which makes sense since their material conditions are remarkably better than those in the east:

That percentage for Germans in the western part of the country was higher, with 80 percent in 2000 and 71 percent in 2005 believing it was a positive form of government.

 

This should serve as a warning: support for democracy can often be very broad but also very shallow.  It receives as much widespread enthusiasm as it does because there is a common, but mistaken impression that it has some connection to prosperity, and when that prosperity falters or disappears there can be a large loss of confidence that paves the way for other kinds of radical mass movements. 

Democracy is unusually vulnerable to this disillusionment in the modern age, because it has tied its identity in the West to social welfarism and the competence (ha!) of the managerial state, which perversely makes the performance of government managers and the conditions of society measurements of the worth of democracy.  By making management of the economy a central preoccupation of government, economic failure redounds to the discredit of democratic government, even if the government has no direct role in economic problems.  When the managers fail to run things well, and democracy fails to provide “the safety net,” the many will seek alternative solutions.  Countries with people suffering from unreasonably high expectations, Eurosclerosis and a broken social democratic model (we suffer from two out of three of these, by the way) are at risk of losing confidence in democracy, or at least in the particular system of democratic government that currently exists as that government increasingly fails to meet those unreasonable expectations and cannot “provide the goods” that it has no role even trying to provide.  The flaw is not that democracy fails to deliver the goods, but that it very often promises to do things for people through government that they ought to be doing for themselves.  In its inculcation of dependency and apathy, it is the perfect breeding ground for future despotism.    

Still, Benedict went about this noble business in a very imprudent way. The statement he quoted—that everything new Mohammed brought was “evil and inhuman”—is simp