Reviewing Bob Shrum's book, and discussing Shrum's now-famous admission that he convinced John Edwards and John Kerry "to opportunistically endorse a war they knew was wrong," Matt writes:
Indeed, in retrospect what’s shocking about the miscalculation on the war vote is less its simplistic nature—the war authorizing resolution was high-profile and popular, so Shrum advised his clients to vote for it. But neither Kerry nor Edwards was in a tough 2002 reelection battle. It didn’t matter whether or not the resolution was popular. A politician who took a stand against it would have two years to wait for events to vindicate his view. As, indeed, the skepticism about the war that Shrum attributes to Kerry and Edwards was vindicated by election day 2004. Which might have done them some good had they actually made the right call. The view that good policy is good politics sounds sappy and naive, but on this kind of issue it’s true—the first thing you need to ask yourself when trying to decide whether or not backing some invasion will be politically savvy is what you think will happen if the invasion actually takes place.
The only flaw in this line of reasoning is that it's possible to think that a war will prove both misguided and enduringly popular. Maybe, as Matt suggests, Kerry and Edwards thought that Iraq would be a disastrous mess by 2004, in which case he's right: Their votes made no sense as policy or politics. But maybe they thought that the Iraq War was a bad idea because the doctrine of pre-emption set a dangerous precedent, or because they thought that invading Iraq was a distraction from the hunt for Bin Laden, or because they feared long-term blowback from further U.S. adventures in the Middle East - all of which would have been reasonable reasons to oppose the war, but none of which would have given them confidence that they would be vindicated in the court of public opinion any time soon. Opponents of the First Gulf War, for instance, would argue that the events of 9/11 vindicated their concerns - because the Gulf War created a permanent U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, providing grist for anti-Americanism across the Islamic world - but there hasn't been a massive post-9/11 backlash against George H.W. Bush or Brent Scowcroft, to say the least. Or to take a more remote example, I'm inclined to think that our intervention in the First World War was a strategic mistake and that both the Spanish-American War and the Mexican War violated just-war principles - but had I been an anti-war politician in 1914 or 1899 or 1846 I would have suffered politically for taking these stances, regardless of whether I was right on the merits.
Nobody can know for sure, obviously - and Edwards' own explanation of his vote for war, as Matt points out, is further muddling the issue - but I suspect something like this thought process was at work in the Shrumian assumption that opposing the invasion of Iraq made for bad politics.
Peace With Honor II
A commenter points out that to compare the 1968 election to '08, and public opinion on Vietnam to public opinion on Iraq, you have to factor in the role of the Tet Offensive: Support for the Vietnam War was higher in 1967 than support for the Iraq War is in 2007, but Tet hadn't happened yet, and when it did it drove the "Vietnam was a mistake" numbers way up.
Here is a useful (if somewhat difficult-to-parse) comparison, from 2005, of public opinion on Vietnam versus Iraq; the Vietnam data starts in August 1965; the Iraq data in March 2003:
After the Tet Offensive, the percentage of the public saying that the Vietnam War was a mistake rose from around forty percent toward fifty percent, reaching 53 percent in August of 1968 (If James Joyner's analysis of this data is right) and continuing to rise slowly throughout the Nixon years. (However, the "mistake" numbers for Vietnam didn't reach today's "Iraq was a mistake" levels until around 1973, five years after the first Nixon campaign). So the Iraq War will be about 5-10 percentage points more unpopular in this election than the Vietnam War was during the '68 race - assuming, that is, that the Iraq War numbers don't worsen (or improve) in the next six months.
Jonah makes the point that Nixon could make his appeal for an honorable end to the war in Vietnam because his right-wing, hawkish bona fides were unimpeachable, and adds that since none of the current crop of Democrats have the national-security chops to pull a Nixon in '08, "the most likely candidate to run the most persuasive Nixonian strategy would be one of several Republicans." I'm not sure. Given where the GOP base seems to be, I doubt a "peace with honor" candidate on the Republican side would get much traction in the primary field, however hawkish he might be on other fronts. And while Jonah's right that the none of the Dems have anywhere near the hawkish cred that Nixon enjoyed, the Iraq War is so much more unpopular going into '08 than the Vietnam War was going into 1968 - 61 percent of Americans think the Iraq War was a mistake as of this month, whereas in July of 1967 only 41 percent of Americans thought sending troops to Indochina had been a mistake - that the Democrats may not need as much foreign-policy credibility as Nixon enjoyed to run a successful "peace with honor" campaign.
28,000 Words Later
I did it. I read - with, okay, some skimming here and there - Paul Berman's behemoth of an essay on Tariq Ramadan. And you know what? There's a pretty good piece buried under all those words, one that uses Ian Buruma's favorable treatment of Ramadan, and his unfavorable treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to illustrate the tendency of Western liberals to prefer Islamists of a seemingly-moderate stripe to anti-Islamists, like Ali, who seem too strident. Such a piece would have been a valuable contribution to the debate over whether Western liberalism should seek dialogue with the more moderate elements within political Islam - with Ramadan a prime example - or pursue confrontation instead, along the lines suggested by Ali. I'm by no means certain which side of that debate I'm on, Buruma's or Berman's, but that's all the more reason for TNR to run an essay that contributes substantially to the argument.
But such a piece could have been about, oh, I don't know, 5,000 words long. A 28,000-word essay, by contrast, needs to do more than raise troubling questions about Tariq Ramadan (which Berman successfully does); it needs to demolish him, to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt the debt he owes to Qutbian thought and beyond Qutb to National Socialism, to lay bare his sympathies for global jihad and expose his desire to bring the whole edifice of European liberalism crashing down. It needs to include more meat, less hemming and hawing ("I have no way to resolve this quandary, except to hazard a guess that all these writers, friend and foe alike, may have arrived at a truth ...), fewer forays into portentous speculation ("And does he dream in secret of something larger? Maybe he does, on some theological level, which would not be unusual. All great religions dream great (and dangerous) dreams") and equally portentous understatement ("a fascist label, or some reasonably similar term, seems faintly applicable--or more than faintly--even now ...). It needs to include, above all, fewer passages like this one:
Caroline Fourest, in Brother Tariq, makes the argument that, in the end, the ambiguity in Ramadan's outlook can only serve to confer legitimacy on the revolutionary Islamist idea, which is willy-nilly bound, in turn, to elevate ever so slightly terrorism's prestige. Fourest pictures a young man from North Africa in France, attending a lecture by Ramadan, and she wonders what ideas somebody like that might take away. Hamel, in The Truth About Tariq Ramadan, scoffs at Fourest's argument and observes that, for all the accusations against Ramadan, nothing has ever been proved, and out of the many thousands of people who have in fact attended his lectures, only a single person, a man from the Lyon district, is known to have ended up in Al Qaeda's Afghan training camps. Who is right in this dispute?
Hamel, the scoffer, would carry the day in a court of law. Still, it is easy to imagine that, in a small way, Fourest may be on to something.
"Ever so slightly ... it is easy to imagine ... in some small way." When Berman writes of Ramadan's discussion of Salafist terror that "a veil of timidity and euphemism hangs over the entire discussion, which could lead a sleepy reader to miss his meaning altogether," he could just as easily be describing his own essay, which builds up great expectations but turns out to include nothing that could not have been argued more tightly, more briskly, and more convincingly at a fifth the length.
The Atlantic and American Conservatism
Reihan has a detailed response to Patrick Ruffini's thought-provoking post on movement conservatism after Bush (which is the continuation of an interesting back-and-forth he's been having with Soren Dayton), so I'll confine myself to addressing this line:
A new conservative movement would, as the gravitational pull of these things go, make the GOP more conservative. And that would mean largely undoing the Bush legacy in domestic policy. A new agenda will not come from the pages of the New York Times or the Atlantic.
Um ... that would be the Atlantic that published James Q. Wilson's "Broken Windows," Dinesh D'Souza's "Illiberal Education," Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's "Dan Quayle Was Right," and Bernard Lewis's "The Roots of Muslim Rage" - to name just a few of what I think could be fairly described as "agenda-setting" pieces for the American Right. Now obviously the Atlantic is not a movement-conservative magazine, and thus it's never going to be the primary place where the Right's internal debates get hashed out. It is, however, a magazine with a long tradition of publishing interesting ideas and arguments from across the political spectrum, and it's a place that has historically been far more hospitable to conservatives than certainother general-interest magazines I can think of. And a conservative movement that writes off the Atlantic - and by extension any non-movement publication - as irrelevant to its agenda is a conservative movement with a seriouscocooning problem.
Fred Thompson is to the Republicans in '08 as Wes Clark was to the Democrats in '04. In other words, the highpoint of his campaign will be the day he gets in the race, because once he's a serious candidate--and not just the fevered daydream of a dissatisfied base--voters will realize he's not all that.
It's an interesting parallel, and clearly there's some truth to it, but Thompson has one thing going for him that Clark didn't: He's a savvy politician, not a wide-eyed neophyte, and he clearly knows a thing or two about running for office. His non-campaign campaign to win the conservative base's heart - from the radio commentaries to the anti-Michael Moore YouTube bit - has been smarter politics than almost anything else we've seen from the Republican field so far, and it suggests that Thompson understands the voters he's trying to woo in a way that many of his rivals don't. Clark, by contrast, always seemed at once out-of-his-depth and deeply weird; he was a good candidate on paper, at least if you closed your eyes and squinted, but a disaster on the stump. And the enthusiasm for him was always more calculated than genuine; liberals liked him because they thought that nominating a soldier was the way to beat Bush, not because he appealed to them as liberals. Thompson, by contrast, is trying to appeal to the Right's heart as much as to its mind: He's seeking to be the conservative Howard Dean, the standard-bearer for the Republican wing of the Republican Party, except with the added bonus that he's more electable than Dean ever was.
Thompson has all sorts of other weaknesses, of course - the womanizing and the wife young enough to be his daughter, the touch of laziness and the lack of impressive political achievements, the long Senate voting record waiting to be picked apart. But he flat-out knows politics in a way that Wes Clark didn't, and that alone makes him a more formidable contender than the Supreme Allied Commander ever was.
Rich Lowry reports that "an influential Republican strategist" tells him that "if Iraq looks the way it does now in September, Bush will lose about 25 Senate Republicans on a bill with some sort of timetable for withdrawal." Meanwhile, via Rod Dreher comes this (possibly dubious, obviously) nugget about the President's mindset:
Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated "I am the president!" He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of "our country's destiny."
For some time now, George W. Bush's determination not to give an inch on Iraq has made it ever more likely that his successor will take office with a large American force still deployed in that country - which has in turn made it ever more likely that we'll still be occupying Mesopotamia, in some sense at least, deep into a Clinton or an Obama Presidency. No matter what they're saying about withdrawal now, I suspect that if either of the main Democratic contenders inherits a substantial occupation, they'll sustain it longer than anyone suspects - out of inertia, out of fear of the alternatives, out of hope that a corner will get turned and they can claim the credit, and for a host of other reasons as well. (Many of these same forces, you'll recall, kept America in Vietnam for seven long years after Nixon was elected promising to end the war.)
Both of the films Apatow has directed offer up the kind of conservative morals the Family Research Council might embrace — if the humor weren’t so filthy. In “Virgin,” the title character is saving himself for true love. “Knocked Up,” which opens on June 1, revolves around a good-hearted doofus who copes with an unplanned pregnancy by getting a job and eliminating the bong hits. In each of the films, the hero is nearly led astray by buddies who tempt with things like boxes of porn, transvestite hookers and an ideology about the ladies possibly learned from scanning Maxim while scarfing down Pop-Tarts. By the end, Apatow exposes the friends as well meaning but comically pathetic and steers his men toward doing the right thing.
I'm in the midst of writing my Knocked Up review for the next NR, so I want to keep most of my powder dry on this topic, but suffice it to say that any social conservative who wants to know how to connect with "the kids" in an era when TNR staffers volunteer as extras in "erotic films" and evangelical teens are losing their virginityearlier than mainline Protestants and Catholics ought to be locked in a room and forced to watch Apatow's movies for an afternoon. (And I'd be happy to be locked in there with him.)
Rudy the Libertarian
David Boaz points out that he isn't one. Matt points out that this calls into question the Boaz thesis that there's a large "libertarian vote" out there waiting to be claimed. Rather, Matt writes, "there's a medium-sized constituency for lower taxes plus less government regulation of sex," which is basically what Rudy's selling when he isn't talking about terrorism and 9/11.
Andy Ferguson, as usual, got here first, when he pointed out that Rudy has positioned himself as the candidate of "every voter who is at once pro-choice and pro-war, pro-gay rights and pro-Patriot Act, against guns and in favor of privatizing Social Security." Whatever else this is, it shouldn't be confused with libertarianism.
Nixon in '08
Via Brink Lindsey, and coming soon to a Democratic Presidential campaign near you:
“There are two or three societal trends that are driving us in an increasingly deep center-right posture,” he said. “One of them is the power of the computer chip. Do you know how many people’s principal source of income is eBay? Seven hundred thousand.” He went on, “So the power of the computer has made it possible for people to gain greater control over their lives. It’s given people a greater chance to run their own business, become a sole proprietor or an entrepreneur. As a result, it has made us more market-oriented, and that equals making you more center-right in your politics.” As for spirituality, Rove said, “As baby boomers age and as they’re succeeded by the post-baby-boom generation, within both of those generations there’s something going on spiritually—people saying it’s not all about materialism, it’s not all about the pursuit of material things. If you look at the traditional mainstream denominations, they’re flat, but what’s growing inside those denominations, and what’s growing outside those denominations, is churches that are filling this spiritual need, that are replacing sterility with something vibrant, something that speaks to the heart of the individual, that gives a sense of purpose.”
So Republicans will keep winning because Americans are becoming more entrepreneurial and "market-oriented" and because they're increasingly "saying it's not all about materaliasm, it's not all about the pursuit of material things"? It's hard to imagine a balder description of the essential contradiction at the heart of the GOP coalition, and yet Rove seems unaware that there's anything contradictory here at all.
I rented Smokin' Aces last night with a friend, looking for a mindless action movie to wind down my Memorial Day weekend, and here’s what I don’t understand: Why would you a take a really good action-movie concept – rival groups of hitmen competing to off a mob witness who’s holed up atop a Lake Tahoe casion – load it up with a stellar ensemble cast, and then turn it over to Joe Carnahan, a youngish director of no discernible talent whose main claim to fame is having been tapped, and then un-tapped, to direct Mission: Impossible III? Carnahan's last (and first) feature film was Narc, a dour, mediocre cop noir that won some critical praise by layering a patina of brutality over what was essentially Training Day without a sense of humor or Denzel Washington. Smokin' Aces is rather more fun, but only because of the cast and the concept; Carnahan loads the movie with bells and whistles, going for an overstuffed Ocean’s 11 meets Quentin Tarantino meets Guy Ritchie vibe, but he seems completely unaware of what a good thing he has in the "may the best hitman win" plot. By the end of the movie, the various weird and interesting hitpeople - the lesbian assassins, the master of disguise, the nihilist with the burned off fingers, the crazy neo-Nazis - have been reduced to footnotes, and the climax of the movie isn't the crazy action sequence atop the hotel (ideally involving a helicopter or two and some rocket-propelled grenades) that the story seems to building toward, but a talky expositional scene in a hospital, in which a plot twist at once predictable and hopelessly byzantine is revealed, and Ryan Reynolds (one of my favorite actors, wasted in a straight-man role) is forced to choose between his career and his honor. Or some BS like that. Where's Michael Bay when you need him?
When it comes to plot in action movies, less is more; when it comes to action, more is more. The final twenty minutes of Smokin' Aces gets that rule exactly backward.
Comedy Is Hard
Jonah defendsFletch - its funniness, not its politics. I wonder when he last watched it. I, too, was under the impression that Fletch was a laugh riot, based on having seen it when I was about thirteen years old (I also remember enjoying Fletch Lives, which should tell you everything you need to know about my standards back then.) But then Reihan persuaded me to watch it with him, and sure enough, it's not funny. I mean, not even close to funny. I think I might have chuckled, mildly, once or twice, but that's about it. It's not just that Fletch isn't in the same league as various broadcomicmasterpieces from that era - it's not even playing the same sport.
I missed Matt’s snarky comment about right-wing populism and ‘80s comedy:
Mass market comedy, as seen in Hollywood films, strikes me as a pretty good partner for post-Goldwater conservatism. Comedy, to be funny, usually requires the skewering of the powerful in some sense. But the mass culture marketing demands that your product not actually do much to challenge prevailing ideas in the world. It's a bit of a paradoxical situation, but it nicely mirrors the efforts of a political ideology designed to further entrench the privileges of the country's wealthy elite and its white Christian majority and somehow do so in the name of anti-elitism.
The idea that white, middle-class Christian Americans, simply by virtue of being part of our country's "white Christian majority," never have any legitimate grievances against the American political system has a long and distinguished pedigree on the left. Whether you believe it circles back to the original Fletch-vs.-Ghostbusters dichotomy that Reihan raised last week. If you think that the biggest problem in urban America in the early 1980s was corrupt cops in cahoots with Republican businessmen sticking it to the friendly drug dealers down at the beach, then you're likely to find the idea of right-wing populism as ridiculous as Matt does. On the other hand, if you think the biggest problem was an incompetent, well-meaning bureaucracy that couldn't deal with clear and present dangers to urban life, well, you're probably a Reagan Democrat and a Bill Murray fan.
May 27, 2007
Memento Mori
What better day than Memorial Day to take some time and digest Jody Bottum's thought-provoking essay on "Death and Politics", in the latest First Things? (It's just the thing to kick back with after the barbecue ...)
To me, the only real explanation for Democratic behavior is this. The party's leadership and political thinkers simply can't conceive of national security issues as anything other than a source of potential political problems to be coped with, never as a set of potential political opportunities. Since congress can't unilaterally end the war, then, there's no reason to have a confrontation with Bush; national security debates are just pure downside. Overwhelming polling data backing the liberal position isn't a reason to go on offense, it's a reason to think Democrats can succeed in slinking away.
I know the conventional wisdom on the left is that all the Republican politicians who are talking about September as a hard deadline for the surge to show results will end up falling in line behind Bush when the crucial moment arrives. But if the GOP is still staring at numbers likethese come the fall, well, I don't are how many Victory Caucuses Hugh Hewitt founds, a lot more Republicans besides Chuck Hagel and Gordon Smith are going to decide that Iraq isn't worth their jobs, and as Rod says, the end-the-war wind will be at the Democrats' back from then on out.
From my "give the surge a chance" point of view, waiting till the fall is the right thing to do, and from the country's perspective there's a lot to be said for having a controversial occupation come to an end under something approaching bipartisan auspices. From a purely partisan-Democratic point of view, though, I take Matt's point: If the Democratic Party were conditioned to think of foreign-policy debates as things to be won, rather than avoided, I don't think you would have seen so swift a climb-down on a question where public opinion is clearly on their side, and I certainly don't think you would have seen so much fretting in the Democratic ranks about the need to get a bill to Bush's desk by Memorial Day Weekend. E.J. Dionne is right that ultimately, the Dems can't end the war without defunding the troops, and they aren't going to do that (yet) - but he's also right that as a matter of tactics, the Democrats had more to gain than to lose by forcing an unpopular President to veto popular legislation at least one more time. It's hard not to think that if the Republicans had a wartime issue where 63 percent of the country agreed with them - which is the percentage of the public that wants a timetable for leaving Iraq - they would be thinking more about how to go for the jugular, and less about the risks associated with having a President whose approval rating is mired in the low 30s accuse them of being unpatriotic over a holiday weekend.
May 24, 2007
Et Tu, Minerva?
We may not have Lost to kick around for the next nine months, but we do have the last Harry Potter novel coming up - and via the indispensible Jonathan Last comes the best Potter theory I've read in quite some time. It's so crazy, it might just turn out to be true.
Two Faces of Libertarianism
It's interesting that the most compelling moment of the Presidential campaign so far involved a face-off between Rudy Giuliani and Ron Paul, because the two men demonstrate just how much two candidates can diverge on policy matters and still both be cast as the "libertarian" in the race. Paul is a libertarian of process and results, you might say: He wants a system of government designed to maximize individual freedom, which to his mind involves a return to lost constitutional principles that strictly circumscribe what the federal government can and cannot do. Giuliani, by contrast, is a libertarian of results alone, and only on certain issues. He wants to maximize "reproductive freedom," for instance, and doesn't care if doing so involves ceding enormous authority to unelected judges; he wants taxes to be low, but doesn't question the principle of income taxation (as Paul does), and so forth. On other issues, meanwhile, he's decidedly authoritarian, which is why it's passing strange to see so many self-described libertarian conservatives - Ryan Sager, for instance - swooning for a guy who has the potential to be Dick Cheney Part II on civil liberties, except with a zest for gun control thrown in.
Passing strange, but perhaps a sign of which face of libertarianism has the broader appeal these days. When the Davids (Boaz and Kirby) at Cato did their analysis of the "libertarian vote", they largely bracketed questions about foreign policy and the national security state, and defined their subjects as voters committed to "economic dynamism and social tolerance" - a description, not coincidentally, that fits Giuliani to a tee. Insofar as there's a constituency for something called "libertarianism," then, it may be a constituency that's comfortable with the sort of libertarianism that Rudy represents, authoritarian tendencies and all. In the world of think tanks and punditry, there are plenty of libertarians (Andrew, for instance) who find Rudy's views on social issues appealing and his views on civil liberties appalling, but I'm not sure there are that many voters who share that consistency. Instead, it seems - at least based on Giuliani's poll numbers compared to Ron Paul's - that a libertarianism that's pro-choice, pro-growth and pro-"enhanced interrogation techniques" is the only libertarianism that has any mass appeal these days.
Of course, one could argue that a libertarianism that's comfortable with wiretaps, gun bans, waterboarding and so forth is no libertarianism at all - which is why when John Tabin frets about whether libertarianism "can survive Ron Paul," I think he's somewhat missing the point. If anything, the question is whether a principled, consistent libertarianism (which I don't endorse, but do admire) can survive Rudy Giuliani, whose candidacy may invite Americans with libertarian inclinations to accept an expansive interpretation of executive power and a dim view of civil liberties in exchange for lower dividend tax rates and the right to abortion - and may demonstrate that this is a trade that today's "libertarian" voters are happy to make.
"A Clinton Who Hadn't Read the Books"
Sure, Bob Shrum's book is doubtless tendentious and self-serving, but Michael Crowley's excerpts only confirm my abiding distaste for John Edwards, and my abiding mystification at his appeal. I understand that he's made himself over as the standard-bearer for smart lefty ideas of the sort that haven't had many standard-bearers of late, and I suppose that if a Republican candidate went around calling himself the Sam's Club candidate and talking up policies I favor I'd be willing to overlook a lot . But even so, every time I hear him speak I feel like I'm drowning in a sea of smarm - and I don't care whether he told John Kerry about crawling up on the slab with his dead son and vowing to make a difference in the world once, twice, or fifty times; the fact that he would tell the story at all creeps me out. (Particularly since it's of a piece with this bit of repellent mummery.)
But then again, I was also somewhat put off by his decision to stay in the race in spite of his wife's cancer, and the American public decidedly disagrees with me on that score - so maybe my Edwards-hating just shows how out of touch I am. Also, I should note that everyone I've known who's worked on his campaigns says he's the nicest boss imaginable. So maybe it's just a sign of the weird power that Barack Obama exerts over impressionable minds that I can't fathom why any anti-Hillary liberal would opt for Edwards over him.
Read Jonathan Last's account of how the Flight 93 Memorial is shaping up, and weep.
The photo above, incidentally, is of D.C.'s World War I Memorial, which is simple, small, lovely and inspiring, even though it probably didn't cost $44.7 million dollars and definitely doesn't include any windchimes. Go figure.
Photo by Flickr user JerseyHawaii used under a Creative Commons license.
Real comprehensive immigration reform – seal the borders, amnesty those here – is never going to happen. The Democrats don't want to seal the borders, ever, because immigrants (eventually) vote Democrat (legally, if we're lucky). One third of the Republicans don't want to amnesty because they're immigrant (and Muslim!) hating know-nothings (I'm a conservative GOPer myself and I've learned this the hard way). Another third want to amnesty and also don't want to seal the borders because it is good for the economy. And the last third, who want a balanced approach, don't have the power to win on the issue, being one third of one half. Oh well.0
I think this is a reasonable analysis of the state of play, but I still don't see why it couldn't happen. What you need is a President who wants it to happen, and a Republican majority in Congress of the sort that we had, oh, about four months ago. First the President works with the two-thirds of the Republicans who support enforcement and peels off enough Democratic votes (the Dems are divided on the issue too, remember) to get a serious enforcement bill passed. Then, if and when the enforcement provisions seem to be working and the rate of illegal immigration has slowed to a more manageable rate - to roughly the rate in the 1980s, maybe - that same President (now into his second term, presumably) could work with the two-thirds of Republicans who might support amnesty and the many Democrats who would definitely support it, and get one passed.
The key ingredient here, obviously, is a President who isn't George W. Bush. As Mark Krikorian has argued, rightly I think, our current chief executive "is opposed — morally and emotionally repelled — by the idea of enforcing the border with Mexico. It's just uncompassionate, in his view, and nothing's going to change that." If someone wants to come to the U.S. to work, and someone in America is willing to hire them, Bush seems to believe that it's unjust to stand in their way. Which is why we are where we are today, and why a serious enforcement push was never going to happen under this President.
Apocalypse Now
I hope I am not being unkind to our sister publication when I say that I find National Journal's cover story on American decline almost entirely unpersuasive. Or rather, I find it persuasive that the Iraq War, the rise of China, and growing anti-Americanism from Moscow to Caracas are reducing American influence relative to where it stood in, say, the late 1990s or early 2003. But this is not at all the same thing as the beginning of the end of the American era. Yes, we may not be a "lone superpower leading the world" forever, but we weren't a "lone superpower" from 1945 till 1991, and yet that span of time is still regarded, rightly, as part of the "American Century." Great powers often acquire rivals, and even get defeated by rivals for that matter, without being understood as being in decline: nobody dates the beginning of Rome's eclipse to Crassus's defeat by the Parthians at Carrhae, and the heyday of the British Empire still had over a hundred years to run when they were beaten by the Franco-American alliance in the the 1770s. The fact that, say, India and Brazil "don't hesitate to assert narrow national interests that often have little to do with Washington's agenda" tells us very little about whether America's headed for a long-term slide, any more than the mere existence of France, Austria, Spain and Prussia spelled Gibbonesque doom for the eighteenth-century Britain.
Both neoconservatives and their foes, it's worth pointing out, have a vested interest in inflating the current crisis: The neoconservatives because it lets them argue that defeat in Iraq means defeat for all time, the realists and liberals because it lets them suggest that their wise counsel is all that stands between us and a Bush-created abyss. But while this is a tough moment for America, no question, it's still the case that we'll probably leave Iraq with our long-term advantages - economic, military, geographic, demographic - over our rivals more or less intact. And for all the current polarization, we're enduring almost none of the kind of internal instability that actually did make our institutions totter in the early 1970s. So maybe everyone - from the Zbigniew Brzesinskis who think that our Iran policy leaves us "one miscalculation away from catastrophe" to the Donald Kagans who claim that "our very existence could be at risk" if we pull out of Iraq - should take a deep breath and lay off the doomsaying. (Though to be fair to them, the NJ piece starts out with an apocalyptic frame, and clearly went out looking for quotes to suit that theme.)
Also, it's a small point, but I really don't follow this bit:
Could the Byzantine emperor Constantine XI have guessed, awakening to the sound of battle trumpets on a May morning in A.D. 1453 to find a Turkish fleet amassed outside his city walls and Turkish soldiers tunneling under his city, that the scales of history hung in the balance? Probably not.
You know, I bet he had a pretty good idea. And when we wake up with a Chinese fleet in San Francisco Bay and Hugo Chavez's air force bombing Florida, I'll be happy to admit that the American era hangs in the balance. (And also, that Rick Santorum was more prescient than anyone ever imagined.)
May 22, 2007
Jedi Blog Tricks
I may be a prequel hater, but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy a good Star Wars blogathon as much as the next dork. This entry, from one Ryland Walker Knight - with a name like that, he sounds like he should be carrying a machine gun through a post-apocalyptic landscape - mounts as convincing a defense as can be mounted of Revenge of the Sith, and though I'm not at all convinced, I'll concede his point that if Lucas had filmed the thing with subtitles, Mel Gibson-style, it would have packed more punch.
I just did a quick flip through a Simon & Schuster catalog for the fall. Mary Matalin’s Threshold imprint looks to be really taking off. How can you not be excited by the upcoming John Bolton Surrender Is Not an Option (Amen!)? She’s also got a Lynne Cheney autobiography (our next First Lady!), What’s the Matter with California?, and a book by the Duke lacrosse coach — subtitled: The Untold Story of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case and the Lives It Shattered. One can’t help to be glad that she’s in the book business.
Allow me to torpedo my chances of signing a lucrative book deal with Threshold by suggesting that if I were placed in charge of a right-leaning imprint at a major publisher, I hope I would manage to make it something more than a clearinghouse for Cheney familymemoirs, screeds by loudmouthed TV personalities, ghostwritten quickie books, anti-Malcolm Gladwell Malcom Gladwell knockoffs, and polemics by TWA Flight 800/Ron Brown conspiracy theorists.
Free Culture
I would almost be sympathetic to Mark Helprin's argument that copyrights should last forever, and that his great-great grandchildren, rather than the publishers of Barnes & Noble Classics, should profit from Winter's Tale - almost but not quite, both for the reasons Matt proposes and for others - if he were simultaneously arguing for a far more lenient definition of "fair use." This, to my mind, is the real way that copyright and intellectual-property laws stifle creativity - not by preventing five different publishers from bringing out competing editions of the same book, but by preventing other artists from piggybacking on existing works and making something new out of them. (Unless they're willing to confine themselves to parody.) Our language's greatest writer, remember, was a shameless thief, copying themes and plots and characters with abandon to create his plays. Yet if a twenty-first century Shakespeare wanted to take, say, the plot of Star Wars as the jumping-off point for his genius, his Tragedy of Anakin Skywalker would have to sit unpublished on a hard drive for seventy years after George Lucas's death. Copyright law, to my mind, should give an artist control over the work itself, but not the world it summons up: If I want to publish a novel set at Hogwarts or a sequel to Gone With the Wind, J.K. Rowling and the Mitchell estate shouldn't have veto power.
Despite the best efforts of the Mehlmans and Martinezes to make the GOP ârelevantâ to constituencies that donât care much for Republican policies, the GOPâs core demographic remains and presumably will remain for the foreseeable future middle-class, married white voters with families.
Yes, except that the core demographic isn't enough. The GOP can build a political majority around the married, Middle-American middle class, but not if it remains a lily-white party: It needs larger percentages of the Hispanic and yes, the African-American vote to offset the growing Democratic advantage among white, socially-liberal Bobo voters who might have been Reaganites a generation ago. (The growing familial disarray in the white working class is likewise a political boon to the Democrats, since single mothers don't often vote Republican.) Bush's insight in this regard was correct, but his strategy for winning a larger share of the minority vote rests on three wobbly pillars - gay marriage, which won him Ohio in '04 but won't be a national issue for much longer; the war, which worked until it became clear how badly he mismanaged it; and amnesty for illegal immigrants, which is aimed at precisely the wrong part of the Hispanic demographic. There's no evidence that middle-class Hispanics, the people the GOP needs to woo, are likely to reward the Republicans for legalizing millions of maids, dishwashers, and migrant laborers, and the migrant laborers themselves certainly aren't going to vote for the GOP anytime soon.
Not everyone understands this point. "For all the scare tactics of the extreme right about the death of the GOP, we know one thing," one of Jonah G.'s emailers writes. "Since the 86 bill the hispanics trend to the the GOP has been increasing not decreasing." First off, this isn't true: The GOP's share of the Hispanic vote dropped in 1988, 1992, and 1996, before rising under Bush. Second of all, you would expect the Republicans to do better and better among Hispanics as the last amnesty receded into the past, and its beneficiaries assimilated and started to move up in the world. Whereas another amnesty - or whatever we're calling the Senate bill - undoes these gains and takes the GOP back to square one, by adding millions of natural Democratic constituents to the voting pool. Regularizing these millions' status might be the right thing to do, for moral reasons - I think it is, but only as a follow-up to a successful interdiction campaign - but it will involve the Republicans making electoral sacrifices for the greater good, rather than reaping a windfall of new GOP voters, as the more Pollyannish pro-immigration conservatives would have one believe.
What's weird is that the Bush Administration knows this, in some part of its brain - its campaign against the ephemeral menace of voter fraud is driven, in part, by the understanding that if large numbers of illegal immigrants vote, the Democrats will be the beneficiaries. Yet somehow they wave this point away when it comes to actually legalizing the illegal population, with lots of bright talk about how Hispanics are natural Republicans. They aren't: They're like any immigrant population, natural Democrats while they're in the barrio and natural Republicans once they've reached the suburbs. If the GOP wants to win Hispanic votes, it should worry about smoothing that transition: It's the politically savvy way to tackle the needs of Hispanic America, and the right one.
May 21, 2007
The Hinges of Fate
Speaking of military history, the latest Nation includes a review of what sounds like a fascinating Ian Kershaw book on ten "fateful choices," in 1940 and '41, that determined how the Second World War turned out. (I'm particularly interested in the argument that Hitler was right to declare war on the U.S. after Pearl Harbor - or at least that he didn't have any better options.)
Arms and the Student
I agree with the general point of Fred Thompson's defense of teaching military history, and the old Victor Davis Hanson column that he draws on, though I share some of the caveats expressed here. The best reason to teach military history, to my mind, isn't that the Battle of Gettysburg is necessarily more important than half a dozen other topics a student might study, but that it's more interesting, offering an exciting gateway - particularly for boys, whose progress through our educational system leaves a lot to be desired these days - into a subject that can easily become dry as dust. Plenty of people, myself included, have gone on to be interested in the Missouri Compromise, the tariff controversy, and Reconstruction because they first thrilled to accounts of heroism and cowardice, genius and incompetence, at Little Round Top and Marye's Heights and Lookout Mountain. I'm willing to bet the progression rarely happens in the opposite direction.
Immigration and the GOP II
I've been waiting to read something smart that contradicts this analysis, but I haven't found it.
Flip-Floppery
Matt has an interesting post comparing Romney's rightward flip-flops to John Edwards' journey to the left over the last few years. He notes that "liberals are primed to believe that Edwards is sincere in his new, more liberal persona, since we tend to think that the New Edwards' stands are correct on the merits," and suggests that presumably the same should go for conservatives and Romney: "Becoming pro-life looks like a pander to me, but to people who find the pro-life view plausible, the view that Romney converted to it is also going to seem more convincing."
I'm largely inclined to agree, and I'd endorse Matt's additional contention that a politician's persona, however calculated, is usually a pretty reliable guide to how he'll govern, regardless of what he "really" believes. That said, I'd suggest a distinction between Romney and Edwards, which may explain why Romney has gotten more grief for his ideological transmogrification - namely, that Edwards' political migration on domestic policy looks more like a development than a flip-flop. In 2004, he was running as a Shrum-style "people against the powerful" tribune of the working and middle classes, whereas today he's running as more of an anti-poverty crusader - and while these are definitely different positions, they're not necessarily contradictory. (Indeed, his way of framing his Shrumian themes - all that "Two Americas" rhetoric - blurs easily into LBJ-style poverty talk.) This contrasts with Romney's simple volte-faces on guns, abortion and immigration, where his earlier position and his new one are mutually exclusive, and where he has to say that he changed his mind, rather than being able to claim that the new position is related somehow to the old one.
(It's also the case that Romney has changed his mind on hot-button issues that the press likes to write about, while Edwards has changed his mind on wonky issues the press finds boring - so that may play into the dynamic as well.)
On foreign policy, of course, Edwards has decidedly flip-flopped, rather than developed, in his views on the Iraq War. But this flip-flop is shared by half the Democratic Party, and while Edwards' leftward turn on the issue happened early enough to look like a political calculation - positioning him to be the anti-Hillary in '08 - it also happened early enough to make him look relatively prescient, which tends to take the sting out of charges of opportunism.
Meet the New Core, Same as the Old Core
I try to avoid so much as thinking about Harvard these days, having spent more of my post-college life immersed in the topic than is strictly healthy. But humor me for a moment, since my alma mater has decided to replace its Seventies-era baggy-monster of a Core Curriculum - long an embarrassment to the term "Core" - with a new program in "General Education" that promises to be, well, more or less identical to the old Core.
The old system required students to take a semester-long course in each of the following topic areas: Foreign Cultures; Historical Study; Literature and Arts; Moral Reasoning; Quantitative Reasoning; Science; and Social Analysis. The new system, by contrast, will require students to take courses in each of the following topic areas: Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding; Culture and Belief; Empirical and Mathematical Reasoning; Ethical Reasoning; Science of Living Systems; Science of the Physical Universe; Societies of the World; and the United States in the World. Pretty revolutionary, huh? After all, this is Harvard: Why have Quantitative Reasoning when you can throw in an extra fifty-cent word and come up with Empirical and Mathematical Reasoning?
The new system, according to its proponents, will be better attuned to the "real-world" applications of the liberal arts, though insufficient interaction with the "real world" never seemed to be a problem at the Harvard I remember. What was a problem was the intersection between the university's horror of anything resembling a canon and its desire to pretend to have a Core Curriculum, which meant that students were required to spend a quarter of their academic time choosing amongst the random hodgepodge of "Core" courses, which were burdensome and restrictive without making any attempt at all to add up to something approaching a comprehensive liberal arts education. "Approaches to knowledge" was the buzzword: You learned the scientific approach to knowledge, the literary approach to knowledge, and so on and so forth, and it didn't matter whether you learned it while reading Dante's Divine Comedy or taking "Women Writers in Imperial China: How to Escape from the Feminine Voice." The approach was all; the knowledge itself didn't matter.
Perhaps the new General Education curriculum will do better: It isn't clear, as yet, which courses will go under each of the "new" umbrellas, and perhaps the end result will purge the trivia and esoterica, and leave roster of worthwhile options for students to select from. But more likely, the new curriculum will serve the same function as the old: It will serve to limit students' freedom, as any educational system must, but it will do so in the service of no vision grander than the the belief that Harvard is Harvard, and needs to have something it can call a Core.
Jay Cost makes a sharp point about Tommy Thompson's hopeless, embarrassing campaign for the Presidency:
Sixty years ago, before the rise of television and before the rise of the primary as the principal tool for selecting presidential candidates, a man with Thompson's record would have been a very strong contender for the GOP nomination. This would have been when state party leaders were in charge of selecting nominees for the White House, back when the conventions were actually the convening of these leaders for this purpose and not to bump temporarily the pre-determined nominee's poll position by a half dozen points. These leaders would probably have been very attracted to Thompson. Four terms as governor and a successful stint in an important cabinet-level department -- these are impressive accomplishments. And he is from Wisconsin. Conceivably, he could swing not just the Badger State to the GOP column, but also Minnesota and Iowa.
Unfortunately for Thompson, it is 2008 and not 1948. We have a new way of nominating presidential candidates today. It requires a candidate to come off as competent, honest and likable on television. So Tommy Thompson is a non-starter.
When the Fred Thompson boomlet started up, I batted around an idea for a piece called "The Wrong Thompson," or something like that, all about how Tommy and not Fred ought to be the dark horse candidate for the GOP nomination. After watching the former Wisconsin Governor in two debates, though, it's clear that making the case for Tommy Thompson is rather like making the case that the town meeting and direct democracy ought to take over all the federal government's functions because you get better governance that way; it's an idea that has merit in the abstract, but not in the world we actually inhabit. In an era without television, Tommy Thompson might have been a fine Presidential candidate and as effective a Chief Executive as he was a governor in Wisconsin. But in a world in which a national politician's effectiveness - his ability to rally support for his agenda, in particular - depends on his ability to communicate through mass media, a Thompson Presidency would be an epic disaster.
Today's Best Debates
Ramesh Ponnuru versus Thomas Edsall on Giulianism. (I'm with Ramesh.)
Megan McArdle, on her temporary blog, versus Ezra Klein on government-mandated vacation. (I think I'm somewhere in between.)
And of course, Mickey Kaus versus immigration "reform." (You know who's side I'm on.)
Invincible Ignorance
I'm sure there will be worse reviews of Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth, but it's hard to imagine there will be many that are more annoying that Lisa Miller's, in Newsweek. Here's a representative passage:
In a discussion elsewhere in "Jesus of Nazareth," Benedict goes to lengths to show that when Jesus said, "The Kingdom of God is at hand," he didn't mean the apocalypse. What he meant, the pope writes, is that "God is acting now—this is the hour when God is showing himself in history as its Lord." This interpretation may be profound and in keeping with Benedict's Christ-centered message; it is not, many scholars would say, historically accurate.
Ah - those "many scholars." All honor and glory be theirs! There is, indeed, an interpretation of Jesus of Nazareth's life that holds that when he said "the Kingdom of God is at hand," he meant "the end of the world is coming, prepare to be raptured!" But it is by no means the consensus view, and the Pope - who has, one might venture, read slightly more recent Biblical scholarship than Lisa Miller, "religion editor" of Newsweek though she may be - ought to be able to argue with this interpretation without being accused of painting over "historical accuracy" in the service of a fairy tale - er, "Christ-centered message." (Particular by a writer whose summary, elsewhere in the piece, of recent historical-Jesus forays starts with the Jesus Seminar and ends with the Jesus tomb.)
And then we have this:
"Jesus of Nazareth," then, will not bring unbelievers into the fold, but courting skeptics has never been Benedict's priority. Nor will his portrait join the lengthy list of Jesus biographies so eagerly consumed by the non-orthodox—the progressive Protestants and "cafeteria Catholics" who seek the truth about Jesus in noncanonical places like the Gnostic Gospels. Moderates may take "Jesus of Nazareth" as something of a corrective to fundamentalism because it sees the Bible as "true" without insisting on its being factual. Mostly, though, "Jesus of Nazareth" will please a small group of Christians who are able simultaneously to hold post-Enlightenment ideas about the value of rationality and scientific inquiry together with the conviction that the events described in the Gospels are real.
All the other Christians, of course, will be too busy snake-handling, blowing up abortion clinics, and beating their wives to read it. Plus they're illiterate.
Both Mattand I have both made comments along these lines before, but with Andrew remarking that "I never thought I'd say this but in comparison with his successor, John Ashcroft is an honorable man," it seems worth revisiting the topic, and asking whether there was ever any reason to think that John Ashcroft wasn't an honorable man? If you think that all conservatives are dishonorable, I suppose there was - but apart from that, Ashcroft was a man of right-wing but fairly unremarkable political views who had a long and reasonably distinguished record as a public servant when he was nominated by George W. Bush to be attorney general. From that point on he was persistently smeared, mocked and ridiculed by liberals and the press, primarily, so far as I can tell, because he belonged to a Protestant sect that prohibited dancing and may have ordered a statue's bared breasts draped during his press conferences. The anti-Ashcroft hysteria never took any note of the fact that he was one of the most competent, experienced and independent-minded members of the Bush cabinet, who was never touched by scandal and whose fingerprints appeared on none of the Administration's blunders; only now, when it has become clear that Ashcroft was an honorable opponent of a particular example of Bushian excess, is he getting a small dose of credit for his conduct as Attorney General.
Alberto Gonzales, by contrast, while he has taken a great deal of (deserved) fire since becoming attorney general, hasn't been subjected to half the scrutiny and smears that Ashcroft endured - because while he may be a lackey, a time-server, and an underqualified yes-man, his religious beliefs don't creep the media out. And that makes all the difference.
Great Moments In Constituent Services
The cult of "something must be done" claims another victim:
Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, said he had doubts about this approach, but said Congress had to do something because his constituents were telling him that “they feel they are being overrun with uncontrolled immigration.”
And so he signed off on a bill that will probably ... increase illegal immigration. Good work, Senator.
There isn't a living critic I respect more than James Wood - and I respect him more than most of the dead ones, too. So it's with something approaching horror that I came upon this passage in his review of Cormac McCarthy's The Road:
It is the common weakness of novels such as Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor, P.D. James's Children of Men, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, or even Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and Orwell's 1984, that they are all to some extent science-fiction allegories in which the author extrapolates from the present, using hypothetical developments in the future to comment on crises that he or she sees as already imminent in his or her own time. Thus, in the post-nuclear age of A Canticle for Leibowitz, secularism will triumph and religions will die; in Lessing's and Burgess's worlds, juvenile violence and waywardness have spun out of control (these two novels were written in 1961 and 1974, in the two decades of "The Sixties"); in James's Britain of twenty years hence, males have become infertile and immigrants are rounded up by a totalitarian government and put in cages. There is nothing wrong with any of this, except that some essential illusionistic pressure is taken off the novelist, who can then merely describe the life that we know but with a twist, the old world that most of us recognize but that is suddenly more horrid to live in.
It's a characteristically lucid and insightful bit of analysis, except for the fact that his description of James' novel is inaccurate. The immigrants in the cages belong to Alfonso Cuaron's film adaptation, not to the (far superior) book, in which the government is gently authoritarian rather than totalitarian, with an immigration policy (a minor thread in the narrative, not a major one as in Cuaron's movie) that partakes more of "guest workers" than roundups and cages. I assume (and hope!) that Wood isn't pretending to have read Children of Men, and that it's simply a case of the English-speaking world's finest literary critic confusing a novel with its film adaptation. But even that is mildly depressing.
The Wisdom of Repugnance
Julian Sanchez is quite right about this: If you support the blanket legalization of abortion, there's really no reason to find the abortion of embryos and fetuses with genetic defects any more morally problematic than the abortion of embryos and fetuses for financial reasons, or personal reasons, or almost any other reason you care to name. If anything, as Julian says, it's arguably less morally problematic:
I am supposing, for instance, that as self-identified pro-choicers, they're not raising a fuss about abortions had on the grounds that a child would be too disruptive or economically draining at some point in a woman's life. Why are these very reasons suddenly suspect if instead it's that the added difficulty of raising a child with a serious disability would be too disruptive or economically draining?
Julian suggests that this is "a case [where] people are vaguely uneasy about something that seems analogous to various other objectionable things," - i.e. Nazi-style eugenics - "but where in fact the analogies break down precisely at the points of objectionableness." For my part, I like to think that people are uneasy about the practice because they understand on some fundamental level that abortion is wrong, and killing a fetus because of something particular to its nature, rather than something particular to the mother's situation, throws the wrongness into relief - by serving as a reminder that a fetus is alive, with human qualities, and that in killing it you're killing a creature rather than a thing.
The Party of Peace
Via Rod Dreher, a fascinating reminder that Ron Paul is right about at least one thing - there was a time when the GOP sold itself as the anti-war party:
May 16, 2007
Where Are The Realists?
I think Andrew is getting a littletoo excited by the Ron Paul phenomenon. The idea that Paul should be removedfromthe debates is ludicrous, obviously - so much for that vaunted Republican intellectual diversity! But while it's interesting to have Paul's hard isolationism represented in the conversation, his views don't come close to representing a viable present-day alternative to Bush-style crusading interventionism; he's a curiosity rather than a serious corrective. Indeed, the attention that Paul's getting isn't, pace Andrew, a sign of the hidden strength of conservative opposition to Bush's Iraq policy - it's a sign of its weakness, and the vacuum that's opened in what used to be the space between neoconservative interventionism and Paul-style isolationism. Nor are the Hugh Hewitts going after Paul because they're "afraid" of him, as Andrew would have it; they're going after him because he's a poor spokesman for opposition to the Iraq War - sure, it's intellectually consistent to oppose the 2003 invasion and the first Gulf War and the creation of NATO, but it's not a plausible position for the contemporary GOP to take - and because they can use his tendency to stray into deep right field as a way to discredit any criticism of the Bush Administration.
The vacuum that Paul currently occupies is supposed to be filled by an internationally-minded realism. Indeed, it's precisely the coexistence of realism and idealism in Republican foreign policy, the fruitful tension between the two strains of thought, that has long made the GOP the party to be trusted in international relations - because the idealists elevate the realists, and the realists keep the idealists grounded. When the pendulum swings too far in one direction or another, this tension has usually produced a correction, of the kind that, say, the original neocons and then Reagan provided to the cynical machtpolitik of Kissinger. But there's no sign of a realist corrective in the current GOP field: There were ten candidates on that stage besides Ron Paul yesterday night, and not one of them was willing to call the Iraq War a mistake, which seems to me like the place that a serious realist critique of his Presidency's foreign policy needs to begin.
It's a sorry, sorry sign for Republican foreign-policy realism that the closest thing to a champion it has on the national stage is Chuck Hagel - a self-promoting buffoon, so far as I can tell, and a politician whose grasp of current foreign-policy debates leaves much to be desired.
Nothing Would Be Better
Of George Lucas' stated intention to make two more made-for-TV Star Wars films, Tyler Cowen remarks "better than nothing." I'm not so sure. Is what's almost sure to be yet another bad Star Wars movie really "better" than no more Star Wars at all?
How you answer this question, I think, depends on whether bad sequels actually reduce your enjoyment of an excellent original. If they don't - if your love for The Empire Strikes Back is unaffected by your loathing for Attack of the Clones - then "better than nothing" makes sense, because after all there's always the infintesimal chance that Lucas will surprise us and make something halfway decent. But if you're like me and find unhappy memories of, say, Matrix Revolutions creeping in when you're watching the original Matrix, then nothing is better than a something that has a ninety-five percent chance of being God-awful.
This is particularly true, I think, when bad sequels aren't just bad, but deliberately undercut themes and plot points from the earlier films - as the "midichlorians," among other atrocities, did with the mythology of the Force in the original Star Wars movies, or as the whole storyline of Terminator 3 did with the arc of the first two films. A bad sequel that exists more or less in isolation from its predecessors, by contrast - The Godfather Part III springs to mind - is easier to quarantine, and thus less objectionable.
Talent on the Military
Regarding my earlier post on whether we should increase the size of the military, Jim Talent writes in:
Ross Douthat ... disagrees with my claim (in the March 5, 2007, National Review) that the Army should be larger. He asserts that the Army would be adequately sized already if not for the nation building exercise in Iraq, which he does not support. I don’t begrudge him or anyone their discontent with the Iraqi operation but I would point out the following:
It's hard to believe now, when evangelicals and fundamentalists make up the most organized bloc in American politics, but before the Moral Majority a person's churchgoing habits didn't tell you much about how they voted, and politicians weren't expected to make lavish displays of their piety. The notion of church/state separation, now widely regarded by Republicans as part of a devious war against Christianity, was a widely shared principle. Falwell himself once denounced preachers who got involved in governance, though not out of devotion to a secular republic: As a committed segregationist, he decried the work of Martin Luther King Jr, saying, "Preachers are not called to be politicians, but to be soul winners."
Two points. First, before the 1970s, whether a person went to church didn't tell you that much about their voting habits, but where they went to church certainly did. Is the separation of church and state really more imperiled today than it was in, say, the 1920s, when Catholic Democrats and Republican Protestants did battle over whose interpretation of Christian teaching on alcohol should be the law of the land? Or in 1900, when William Jennings Bryan, he of the "Social Gospel", ran for President against William "let's Christianize the Filipinos" McKinley? Seriously?
Second, isn't it a little weird that Michelle Goldberg basically seems to agree with Jerry Falwell's critique of Martin Luther King?
Giulianism and the GOP
Tom Edsall’s TNRcover piece on Rudy Giuliani is persuasive when it argues that Rudy could win the Republican nomination despite being pro-choice - and I’m not just saying that because Hizzoner cleaned up at the debate last night. It’s considerably less persuasive, on the other hand, when it suggests that “Giulianism,” at least in its current form, could remake the GOP in Rudy’s image. Not that there isn’t a potential Giuliani majority out there – obviously I think there is. But capturing it would involve a very different strategy from the one Rudy is pursuing so far. By Edsall’s own account, what Giuliani’s campaign offers at the moment is a mix of War-on-Terror maximalism, social liberalism and hard-line fiscal conservatism, a combination whose appeal seems distinctly limited when divorced from the appeal of Rudy Giuliani himself. If Rudy wins the nomination and the general election, it will most likely be in spite of this ideological cocktail, not because of it – he’ll win the primary because at least some pro-lifers and gun owners like him enough to overlook his stance on their litmus-test issues, and then he’ll win in November because at least some of the populist swing voters who decide general elections are sufficiently fond of him to overlook his apparent disinterest in their socioeconomic anxieties. It’s hard to see a politicians who’s so sui generis, and whose appeal is ultimately personal rather than political, affecting a sweeping ideological transformation of his party, or his country.
Who among the leading candidates is making a real small government agenda an important part of his campaign? Of course, everyone always talks about tax cuts and reforming the tax code, but Mr. Bush was one for tax cuts and spending increases. Sam Brownback can talk about killing the tax code with a “dull axe,” but we will wait in vain for the “compassionate conservative” to take that dull axe to any federal programs … The candidates will make noises about shrinking government, the same way that Mr. Bush made similar noises during the primaries when he needed to fend off attacks from the right, but they are not making any proposals to this effect. I think Ross has taken their Reagan-mania too much to heart: they are mouthing empty platitudes, not making concrete statements about policy.
Well, I agree that the drumbeat about the importance of budget-cutting and the need for further tax cuts is more rhetorical than substantive, and it’s true that nobody has put forward a detailed ten-point plan for abolishing cabinet agencies, privatizing Social Security, reviving the balanced budget amendment and or anything like that. Nonetheless, rhetoric matters: George W. Bush wasn’t wildly detailed about what “compassionate conservatism” meant in the run-up to the 2000 primaries, but the language he used and the issues he talked about – the EITC, educational standards, faith-based initatives, and so forth – set a tone for his campaign that carried through to the general election, and then into his administration. And what we’re hearing from the current GOP field is setting a tone as well, one that tells the country that a vote for the Republican Party is a vote for dividend tax cuts, porkbusting, and not much else. Daniel’s right that none of the major candidates are talking like Ron Paul on domestic policy, but that doesn’t mean that they’re channeling Bush Or if they are, they’re stripping out everything that once made our current President an interesting and successful politician, until only the dullest right-of-center boilerplate remains. David Brooks’ line about this being a field of George Allen impersonaters looks smarter every day.
But there’s still time for all of this to change …
A few weeks before reading Katharine Park's intriguing volume on the early history of anatomical dissection, I found myself at a luncheon where alumni of a large Ivy League university had gathered in the interest of educational sodality and fund-raising, a variety of rite commonly favored by organizations of aging graduates and their alma maters. Perhaps to prepare the mood for the postprandial speaker--a visiting art historian about to discuss the works of Leonardo da Vinci--one of the group's officers was holding forth at my table on a thesis so consistent with common preconceptions about the intellectual backwardness of the Catholic Church that it always finds a receptive audience. With a forcefulness honed by decades as a trial lawyer, he was regaling his attentive listeners with accusations of the obstinacy with which the church opposed human dissection during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This, he pointed out … had necessitated all kinds of clandestine and gruesome activities on the part of those whose aim was to study the human body, whether for scientific purposes or because they were artists of the caliber of Leonardo, Titian, and Raphael. Not only was medical knowledge thus stunted in its advancement … but such opposition necessitated the well-known horrors of grave-robbing in order to obtain cadavers for study, an unnatural activity that marred the image of the profession of healing until late in the nineteenth century.
Of course, Nuland points out, this is all hogwash:
Daniel Larison, in the course of arguing - rightly, I think - that Woodrow Wilson's foreign-policy legacy was far more disastrous than George W. Bush's will prove to be, makes a provocative comparison:
As large as Iraq looms on the scene today, as politically significant as the war is today, and as much as it will sour the public on intervention in the near future, I think we may be surprised at how quickly the effects of the war pass away and recede into the distance. Calamitous and awful as it has been, it still remains a war on a relatively limited scale and will wind up having a primarily regional impact. It has acquired the prominence that it has because it involves the superpower, but it will ultimately probably possess the historical significance of the Boer War or some other colonial misadventure of the British Empire.
One might also conjure up an analogy from America's own past - our long counter-insurgency in the Phillipines, which dragged on for more than a decade and cost more than 4,000 American and hundred of thousands (!) of Filipino lives, only to be completely forgotten by most people a century later. I've always been partial to the Filipino analogy, but it's worth remembering that the Phillipines, like the Transvaal, was a distinctly peripheral theater in the early 1900s, which substantially reduced the war's ripple effect on geopolitics; Iraq, on the other hand, is rather more centrally located, and sits athwart a region that matters a great deal to the global order (Edward Luttwak's provocations aside), at least until its oil wells run dry. So there's always a chance - albeit a small one, I think - that the Iraq War will prove a prelude to a larger conflagration of some kind, playing the Spanish Civil War to a Mesopotamian World War II.
If no such wider conflagration ensues, though, the best analogy for Iraq may be the one everyone always falls back on already, Vietnam - a war whose geopolitical significance proved negligible in the long run, and whose most profound consequences played themselves out on the American home front.
Oh, and just as Vietnam didn't mean the end of America's status as a global superpower, neither will the Iraq War. That outcome, at least, I'd be happy to put money on.
How Dare They?
Scott Lemieux wonders "how on earth" Christine Stansell's retelling of the history of abortion rights made it into the New Republic, since it breaks with the Jeff Rosen-Ben Wittes "Roe is bad law" line. I wondered how on earth it made it into the New Republic because it's completely tendentious and unconvincing. There is, for instance, the assertion that "before Roe v. Wade, abortion was as widely practiced as it is today," a canard that requires one to believe, among other implausibilities, that the abortion rate went down after legalization. There's the historical cherry-picking - a ballot initiative here, a Saturday Evening Post headline there - to suggest that public opinion and the Supreme Court were on exactly the same page in the late Sixties and early Seventies. (They weren't.)
And then there's this, which isn't so much wrong as delightfully obtuse:
So how, despite public opinion, did abortion opponents manage to waylay and subvert pro-choice measures in state after state before 1973? The answer lies in the intractable determination of religious conservatives to recast abortion as a debate over the primacy of child-bearing and the personhood of the fetus, rather than as an issue of women's well-being.
So you're saying that they used the power of argument to defeat you! Those ... those unspeakable bastards!
May 13, 2007
The War Party
Sometimes, you get things wrong. In January, just as the long march to primary season was getting under way, I wrote a piece for the Atlantic in which I argued that in spite of the conservative movement's dreams of a return to small-government purity and the media's fantasy of a revived Rockefeller Republicanism, George W. Bush's mix of social conservatism, "big government" conservatism, and overseas interventionism would continue to define the GOP for some time to come. In particular, I suggested that you could see this dynamic at work in the primary field - none of whose leading contenders hailed from the foreign-policy realist wing of the party, none of whom were associated with Gingrichian government-cutting (including Newt Gingrich, version 2.0), and none of whom, including the pro-choice Rudy, seemed eager to pick a fight with social conservatives.
For this election cycle, at least, my prediction doesn't look so hot.
Matt's right that Michael Kinsley's review of God Is Not Great offers some profound insights into how the the media-public intellectual complex works. It's also a textbook example of how that complex works. First, Christopher Hitchens writes a polemic that ranges across religion, religious history, philosophy and science. Then, the editors of the New York Times Book Review decide to commission a review from Michael Kinsley, presumably because both Hitchens and Kinsley are well-known figures in the media-public intellectual world and "Kinsley on Hitchens" has a nice ring to it. Never mind that Kinsley has never evinced any expertise or even any particular interest in the topics and arguments that Hitchens is covering - it's Kinsley on Hitchens! How can they go wrong?
And sure enough, Kinsley has produced a review that, because he's a smart guy and a good writer, has some interesting things to say about Hitchens' career, but has absolutely nothing of interest to say about the book itself. Indeed, the review is essentially a felicitously-written plot summary, which lists some of Hitchens' arguments and deliberately shrugs off analysis. For instance:
The book is full of logical flourishes and conundrums, many of them entertaining to the nonbeliever. How could Christ have died for our sins, when supposedly he also did not die at all? Did the Jews not know that murder and adultery were wrong before they received the Ten Commandments, and if they did know, why was this such a wonderful gift? On a more somber note, how can the “argument from design” (that only some kind of “intelligence” could have designed anything as perfect as a human being) be reconciled with the religious practice of female genital mutilation, which posits that women, at least, as nature creates them, are not so perfect after all? Whether sallies like these give pause to the believer is a question I can’t answer.
But you're reviewing the bloody book! Should they give the believer pause? Has Hitchens devastated religious faith, as he plainly thinks he has? I'm glad he's entertaining - but is he persuasive? Does his book confirm you in your nonbelief, or leave questions unaddressed? Hitchens takes these questions seriously - shouldn't the reviewer, whether an atheist, a believer, or somewhere in between, have the decency to do the same?
Ah, but it's Kinsley on Hitchens. Brilliant!
Update: The line I bolded doesn't appear in the IHT version, which I linked to above, but only in the Times itself.
May 11, 2007
The Art of Self-Marginalization
Reihan had some sharp comments on this Pat Buchanan column when it first appeared, and now Eve Fairbanks chimes in. The piece in question, in which Buchanan blames the Virginia Tech shootings on the Korean hordes who have entered the country in the past few decades, is a good example of why it's so lonely over here on the moderate-restrictionist side of the immigration debate - because all the other restrictionists seem determined to take every chance they get to act like, well, the liberal caricature of an immigration opponent.
In theory, the position that low-skilled immigration levels are too high, and that we should do more to control our southern border and reduce the unprecedented numbers coming in before we consider implementing an "earned legalization" program, seems like one that lots of reasonable people could take. But in practice, almost nobody does: You're either a sunny comprehensive-reform optimist, or you're writing darkly about the mass-murdering tendencies of "the 864,000 Koreans" in our midst.
Be Not Afraid?
Eve Tushnet, in a post from a while back, had some thoughts that seem relevant to the "should atheists envy believers" question:
Of my suggestion that it's a little convenient for liberals to play the character card in the case of Rudy Giuliani when they tended to dismiss it where Bill Clinton was concerned, Matt writes:
But look, here, by the time the extent of Bill Clinton marital issues came to light in 1998, the man had been President of the United States for more than a few years, so it was hardly necessary to go searching around for hints and clues as to whether or not one would approve of his conduct in office. Indeed, my sense is that conservatives mostly regarded Clinton's misconduct in this regard as a kind of synecdoche (or maybe metonymy -- sorry, Mr. Glassman!) for an failed presidency. Most Americans, by contrast, viewed Clinton's presidency as reasonably successful and his conduct vis-a-vis his wife, children, and Monica Lewinsky therefore not-especially-relevant to their judgments.
Um ... the extent of Bill Clinton's marital issues only came to light in 1998? My sense is that the only people who were all that surprised by the Monica Lewinsky scandal were Clintonista liberals who'd managed to convince themselves that everything we knew about Clinton's years as an Arkansas hound dog had been invented by David Brock. Everyone else knew who Clinton was in 1992, and definitely knew by the time 1996 rolled around, and both times Democrats dismissed the character argument as irrelevant, and adopted the European principle that private lives shouldn't matter in politics - precisely the principle that Emily Bazelon wants to throw overboard where Rudy is concerned.
Like Peter Suderman, I wasn't exactly blown away by Radar Magazine's hitjob on Adam Moss's New York Magazine. I don't read New York all that much, but then again it isn't written for me - like so many things in Gotham, it's written for Manhattanites and aspiring Manhattanites (whether they live in Brooklyn, Boston, or Topeka), not for Yankee-hating New Englanders transplanted inside the Beltway. It's dedicated, as Peter says, to exploring the lives and lifestyles of the New York elite - and more importantly "the middle and upper-middle class strivers who desperately want to be part of the true elite" - which is why it doesn't do the kind of "rollicking, narrative-driven, first-person journalism" that the Radar piece accuses of it failing to produce. It does "fail," sure, in the same way that Entertainment Weekly and National Review and Good Housekeeping all fail to channel the spirit of Hunter S. Thompson - because it isn't that kind of magazine. Maybe it was once, but no more - and it's pretty good at being what it is now.
Oh, but Radar has Adam Moss's number:
New York takes no chances, climbs out on no limbs, plants no flags. It is the only magazine, with the possible exception of Christianity Today, in which you will find photographs of clothed (!) virgins illustrating an issue purportedly devoted to sex, to cite just one missed opportunity for mixing it up.
Yes, if only there was some brave magazine editor out there daring enough to cross America's Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice and put out a "Sex" issue with some naked people on the cover. There's hardly anything like that in the magazine world these days. And there's certainly none of it at Adam Moss's New York.
It's been brutal watching Rudy try to finesse the issue, and since he's not going to run as pro-choice and anti-Roe, maybe this is as good a strategy as any:
After months of conflicting signals on abortion, Rudolph W. Giuliani is planning to offer a forthright affirmation of his support for abortion rights in public forums, television appearances and interviews in the coming days, despite the potential for bad consequences among some conservative voters already wary of his views, aides said yesterday.
I doubt that he can win the nomination like this, but it's not entirely out of the question, particularly in a frontloaded primary season where his weaker rivals may not have time to accept defeat, drop out, and allow the anti-Rudy vote to coalesce around a single candidate. (Though a brokered convention - the dream of pundits everywhere - might be a more likely outcome in that scenario.)
The larger question is whether winning the GOP nomination as a down-the-line pro-choicer might prove to be a poisoned chalice. Frankly, if Giuliani being the Republican nominee doesn't prompt a third-party run by a pro-life candidate that cuts into his general-election support, then social conservatives ought to retire from politics out of sheer embarrassment.
Uncle Sam Wants You
Let me add my voice to theskepticismabout what seems to be the consensus position - running from Rudy through Romney, McCain, Obama, and Hillary - that we need a much larger army. I'm open to the possibility, but I'd like to have the whys of it explained a little bit more clearly.
I know that the Rumsfeld theory - that America needs a smaller, lighter, more-agile military, rather than a bigger one - is assumed to have been discredited by Iraq, but it's only been discredited by Iraq if you think that the U.S. should be committing itself to the pacification and democratization of more large Middle Eastern countries in the near future. This does seem to be the theory of at least some of the proponents of a larger army. For instance, Jim Talent, in a long print mag-only piece for National Review calling for a larger military, framed America's current national-security challenge this way:
Emily Bazelon, writing in Slate, makes the case that Rudy Giuliani's mistreatment of his wife and children should be a political issue. "It's not only the religious or the uptight that can be put off by an utter lack of personal morality in a presidential candidate," she writes. (Glad we cleared that up.) She goes on:
A past like Giuliani's betrays a level of self-indulgence that, if nothing else, suggests that more fireworks are in store and that the show will be long-running. We'll all be strapped into front-row seats. Giuliani's psychodramas may or may not tell us about the sort of leader he'll be, but we've already been forced to think enough about the sort of man he is. (The prospect of President Hillary Clinton and four more years of her marriage leaves me with a similar sense of dread.) All elections are trade-offs. But when a candidate starts off with a loutish and loathsome past, chances are good that his time in office will be marked by missteps and distraction and that he'll be more irritating and less effective as a result.
I seem to recall a few conservatives - okay, maybe all of them - making precisely this argument about Bill Clinton without very many liberals joining the chorus, and I'm sure that Bazelon's discovery of the character issue in Giuliani's case has nothing to do with his party affiliation. (Perish the thought!) That said, I don't think having liberal voices as well as conservative ones making the case that character counts contributes all that much to our understanding of the issue. Of course character counts: The question is how it counts, and there we see through a glass darkly, if at all.
In hindsight, for instance, it's clear that certain of George W. Bush's personal attributes - his intellectual incuriosity, his sense of personal calling, his abiding loyalty to friends and allies, his stubborness when challenged - have led his Presidency into disasters. But it's perfectly possible to imagine a Presidency in which those same qualities in the chief executive turned out to be great advantages that led to great successes. Loyalty, stubbornness, a sense of mission - all of these can be positive attributes in the right circumstances, and even Bush's incuriosity could have proven a better quality in a wartime President than, say, Bill Clinton's obsessive-compulsive intellectualism. That these traits worked out badly for the country is apparent, but only now, just as the only way to know for sure how Rudy Giuliani's various personality traits will affect his Presidency would be to elect him President and see what happens. Sure, his psychodramas might engulf the country, as Bill Clinton's often did - but electing Presidents without obvious inner demons gave us Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, while a morbid, moody depressive was arguably our greatest Chief Executive. The pressures of high office work in different ways on different temperaments - alcoholics and philanderers sometimes rise to the occasion and sometimes don't, and the same seems to go for tee-totalling, uxorious, psychologically well-balanced types. At certain junctures, a self-consciously normal guy like Gerald Ford is the man you want; at others, you want a hard-drinking romantic like Winston Churchill. It's just tough to know what sort of character will suit the times until the times are over.
Guns on the Wall
I agree with John Podhoretz's complaint about this week's Sopranos (beware of spoilers if you click through), but I don't think the implausibility he points out significantly marred what he rightly calls a great episode. I do, however, want to associate myself with Alan Sepinwall's comments this week, which get at something that worries me as well:
... I really do hope something is coming of all this. Since this final season began, I've been warning everyone that Chase and company may not be going for an earth-shattering conclusion, but more of a life-goes-on finish. But the writers have spent so much time over the last five episodes hinting that some apocalypse is coming - whether it's Phil making war with New Jersey, Tony taking out Chris or vice versa, the FBI completing their RICO case, Muhammed and Ahmed up to no good - that if none of that comes to pass, every bit of anger from the fans is going to be justified.
There comes a point when the storytelling stops being daring and unconventional and starts being sloppy and cruel.
Obviously, part of the genius of The Sopranos lies in how it confounds expectations (though if I read one more piece that references the missing Russian from the "Pine Barrens" episode as an example of this tendency, I swear ...). Over the years, Chase and company have taken Chekhov's dictum about the gun on the wall in the first act that needs to be fired by the third and said, well, maybe it does and maybe it doesn't, and it's more dramatic if the audience doesn't know which it is. But as Sepinwall suggests, if the final season of your show has about a dozen guns on the wall, all of them obviously cocked and loaded, you more or less have to pull the trigger. If you don't, you'll have sacrificed the very sense of realism that The Sopranos has labored so hard to build - and as Jonah says, you'll leave the audience with the suspicion that you never had any idea what you were doing to begin with.
May 8, 2007
God in the Dock
Credit where credit is due - Christopher Hitchens seems willing to argue the question of God's greatness or lack thereof anytime, anywhere. Here's an account of his debate with Al Sharpton, which sounds (as you might expect) like fine entertainment that left something to be desired on the intellectual side of things; here, more promisingly, is the beginning of an extended exchange between Hitchens and Douglas Wilson, hosted by Christianity Today, on the question "Is Christianity Good for the World?" (Wilson is also blogging his way through God is Not Great on his own site.)
Of course, what I'd really like to see is a Hitchens-Daniel Larison face-off ...
Hate Crimes and Hypocrisy
On the question of whether hates crimes legislation should be extended to cover gays, Ramesh writes:
[Brad Plumer] seems to think that it would be bigoted for conservatives to accept laws against hate crimes while opposing their extension to cover hate crimes motivated by hostility to gays. I don't see why a conservative who thinks hate-crimes laws are a bad idea generally couldn't conclude that they aren't going to be uprooted from the statute books but shouldn't be expanded in scope, either. Politicians make this sort of judgment all the time.
If gays were a minor or trivial category in this area, Ponnuru might have a debater's point. But, as a proportion of their population, gays are the largest single group victimized by hate crimes in the U.S., just behind all those targeted for their various religions (which includes over 90 percent of Americans, as opposed to the 3 percent that gays make up.) Doesn't excluding the most vulnerable group suggest a bizarre set of priorities? Take Ponnuru's and my religion, Catholicism. In 2004, there were 57 hate crime incidents recorded against Catholics. In the same year, there were 1,197 such incidents against gays - and yet Catholics vastly outnumber gays in the general population. What sense does it make to include Catholics (and Zoroastrians and Mormons) in hate crime laws but not gays - who are exponentially more likely to be victims?
But if you oppose hate crimes legislation in principle (as Andrew does, for what I think are very good reasons) but recognize that it's politically unfeasible to roll back the laws we have on the books, the fact that gays "are the largest single group victimized by hate crimes in the U.S." would seem to be an argument against extending hate crime laws to cover them, not an argument in favor of it. Suppose I opposed any ban on abortion, but lived in a country where the practice was illegal in the third trimester, and where public sentiment made rolling back the late-term ban unfeasible. Then suppose a politician proposed extending that ban to cover the first two trimesters. It wouldn't make any sense for my pro-life friends to say, in an effort to persuade me to support the ban's extension: "hey, we already have a ban on abortion, and most abortions take place in the first two trimesters, so if you accept the late-term ban, you should accept the early-term ban as well." If a law's bad, but you can't get rid of it, the last thing you would want to do is expand it dramatically.
I understand where Andrew's coming from in this argument - he's reacting against the double standard of having hate-crime protections for Catholics but not for gays, and he's of course right that the reason that many GOP lawmakers feel comfortable drawing the hate-crimes line where they do is because of the persistence of anti-gay sentiment. His opposition to hate crimes laws, in other words, is taking a back seat to his desire for gay equality; if we're going to have unjust laws, he thinks, they should cover gays as well as blacks and Jews and so forth. But if you believe that prosecuting someone for what's in their heart, as opposed to what they've done, is illiberal and arguably unconstitutional, does it really make sense to dramatically expand such prosecutions just to prove a point of principle? Or put another way, if hate crimes laws are really "a contest of vulnerability in which one group vies with another to establish its particular variety of suffering, a contest that can have no dignified solution," as Andrew once eloquently put it, then why does he want homosexuals to be ushered into the contest? Just because Pat Robertson doesn't want them there?
Rush Limbaugh, Animal Lover?
I wasn't quite as irritated with this Will Saletan column as Megan McArdle; I just thought it was a little obtuse. Against people who claim that tolerance for gays has paved the way for bestiality chic, as embodied by the quasi-documentary Zoo, Saletan argues that the men who love horses are more like frat boys than gay men, more Rush Limbaugh than Tony Kushner. "At the core of [the zoophiles'] mentality is a craving for otherness," he writes. "Zoophilia isn't homo. It's hetero. Very hetero." Later, he argues that zoophiles treat horses the way misognyists treat "bimbos," that horse-on-man action is a way "to get away from failed marriages and friendships," and that the nights when the men get together to "pester the horses" have the air of a "frat party," rather than a gay orgy. He concludes: "If you're worried about where this mentality comes from, don't look at Brokeback Mountain. Look at Limbaugh."
I'm a cultural conservative. What does that mean? Well, for instance, it means that when I read a Garance Franke-Ruta op-ed arguing that we need to raise the age of consent for appearing in a pornographic film to twenty-one, in order to shrink the talent pool available for amateur smut purveyors like Joe "Girls Gone Wild" Francis, I think: Age of consent? Why not just throw the creep in jail on an obscenity charge? And when Garance explains that going after the pornography industry directly is too hard, because it would require "moralistic sermons and abridgements of speech," I think no, you actually don't need the moralistic sermons; a nice stint in prison does the trick just fine.
But being a cultural conservative doesn't mean being a puritan. You have to be able to distinguish between Debbie Does Dallas and D.H. Lawrence, between Ron Jeremy and James Joyce, between the violence in Hostel and the violence in The Godfather. You have to recognize, above all, that there are certain magnificent works of art that aren't supposed to be fun for the whole family - works of art whose greatness is inseparable from their willingness to show the world as it really is, warts and gunshot wounds and all - works of such raw genius and unsurpassed integrity that to censor or compromise them in any way would be akin to painting clothes on the nudes in the Sistine Chapel, or hanging a pair of Hanes on Michelangelo's David.
Why is it good news that one of my favorite shows has announced that it's going off the air? Because it isn't going off the air till 2010, there will be three more (16-episode) seasons and they'll run re-run free, and if there was ever a show whose creators needed an end-date to shoot for, it's Lost. But there's a larger lesson here, and one that I wish some other great TV shows had taken to heart: Imagine how much better The Sopranos would be if David Chase had been kept to four or five seasons, or The X-Files if Chris Carter had stopped churning out episodes in 1998 or so. I know Deadwood fans were sorry to see David Milch's revisionist Western cut off after three seasons, but maybe they should consider themselves lucky that there will never be a season four, or seven, or twelve (Al Swearengen faces off against William Jennings Bryan for control of the Populist Party! Hijinks ensue!). The same goes for The Wire, which seems poised to leave on a high note after this year's final season with its "best show on TV" halo still untarnished.
As a general rule of thumb, I think the better the show, the more it needs a cut-off date. Three's Company could have run forever; Seinfeld should have ended a season or two earlier than it did. Ditto the long-running Beverly Hills 90210 versus its far superior heir, The O.C., which could have left on a George Costanza-style high note by calling it quits after its near-perfect first season. Similarly, I'd think more fondly of HBO's Rome if it had only been a mini-series, without the mediocre second season, and I'm worried there's a similar sophomore drop-off awaiting Big Love. Leaving too soon makes a show immortal, while leaving too late ... well, would My So-Called Life be remembered as fondly as it is if we'd had to watch Angela Davis and Jordan Catalano get together, break up, get back together, break up - and then, worst of all, go off to the same college?
Families Matter
I'm late coming to this, but Mark Thoma responded to my earlier comments on Jacob Hacker's thesis about rising income volatility, and then Reihan responded to Thoma here.
As Reihan says, I think that Thoma is taking a somewhat narrow view of what counts as the results of the Sexual Revolution. First, he writes that "the most likely explanations for increasing income volatility are quite different from the 'policy from liberals caused more family breakups, which in turn caused increased income volatility' explanation we are hearing from conservatives." (Actually, I wouldn't say that "policy from liberals" was the main reason behind the increase in family instability since the 1960s, only that some liberal policies exacerbated the problem.) Then he lists those "most likely explanations," and here are his first three:
1. Families rely on two incomes now, so when one worker leaves the workforce, income drops. Likewise, there’s no potential second earner to bump up his/her hours when earnings/hours of the prime worker drop.
2. There are more single individuals. This group has always had higher income volatility.
3. Government taxes and benefits do less to cushion income shocks than they once did.
Er, yes, and numbers one and two are partially the consequences of ... the Sexual Revolution, no? Women move in and out of the workforce more than they used to, creating more volatility; people delay marriage longer than they used to, creating more volatility; women are more likely to have children while they're single, creating more volatility. Of these three trends, it seems to me that policymakers should ignore the second - income volatility among metropolitan singletons is hardly a pressing issue - while doing more to help parents who want to take time off to raise their kids (rather than just subsidizing daycare), and more, as well, to encourage people to get and stay married.
Reihan and I proposed some possible steps in our Party of Sam's Club essay, which I won't bore you by rehashing here. I would suggest, though, that this shouldn't be cast as a debate about whether we're going to roll back the Sexual Revolution by government fiat; obviously we aren't. It should be a debate about how to deal with the landscape we face now - a debate, for instance, over whether we should attack the instability in working-class life by simply funneling more money to Americans when they hit a moment of crisis (as, say, an expanded wage insurance program would do), or whether we should seek policies that sharpen the incentives to form stable families, so that Americans need less government help when the crisis arrives, and their children need still less, and so on.
And yes, I'm aware that liberals more or less have the floor to themselves right now in this debate, because conservatives don't want to talk about anything except cutting pork and fighting terror these days. But the election season is young ...
Update: Just to clarify, when I said "of these three trends" above, I meant the three trends I mentioned in the preceding sentence, not the three trends Thoma mentions in the preceding quotation. Sorry for the sloppy writing ...
Dirty Old President
So I thought Fred Thompson's chances at the GOP nomination were looking pretty good - right up until I took a look at Fred Thompson. For some reason, I had this idea that he'd been frozen in time around Die Hard 2, but here he is getting interviewed by Sean Hannity last week, and looking, well, a lot older than I expected. It's particularly remarkable when you consider that he's only five years Mitt Romney's senior - though Romney, obviously, has made some kind of fountain-of-youth pact with the devil:
But it isn't just that Thompson looks his age, and then some. If you fast-forward to the 6:45 moment, you'll hear him talking about how his pro-life views were sharpened when he saw a sonogram of his daughter kicking in the womb - which is a touching story, but also a reminder that Thompson's daughter is only three years old, which in turn is a reminder that Thompson's wife is twenty-five years younger than he is. We've had Presidents and presidential candidates with younger wives before: Edith Wilson, Woodrow's wife, was sixteen years his junior, Liddy Dole is thirteen years younger than Bob, and of course Grover Cleveland topped them all. But even in this age of second marriages and late-in-life childbearing, I'm not sure the country will be all that thrilled to have what looks, fairly or not, like a trophy wife in the White House.
Matt sides with Jon Chait; Ezra sides with Karl Rove. I take Matt's point that the atheist's self-proclaimed envy for the believer's faith is often a form of condescension, along the lines of saying "I wish I could believe in your crazy religion, you gullible fool, but I'm just too smart for that." On the other hand, I think there are circumstances where the condescension fades into the background: It's hard to see, for instance, why an atheist parent trying desperately to cope with the loss of a child wouldn't envy a Christian who believes in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting, even if that envy has an element of condescension woven in.
Of course, the death of a child is an extreme circumstance, and in the daily round of eating, sleeping, working and copulating, it's possible to make the case that - assuming there is in fact no God - the consolation that religious believers get from their creed is outweighed by the inconvenience, repression and sacrifice their belief system requires. (There's also the fact that a non-trivial number of believers, as one of Ezra's commenters points out, are as likely to be freaked out by their experiences with the numinous as comforted by them.) In the Western context, there's the question of hell as well: If the possibility of eternal damnation seems more frightening to you than the possibility of extinction, then you have less reason to envy an orthodox Christian his belief system. The moralistic therapeutic deism that passes for Christianity for many Americans, of course, is more self-evidently enviable - though also more self-evidently ridiculous. (There's that condescension!)
And then there's the variance in religious teachings to consider. Were I not a Christian, for instance, I'm pretty sure I would envy Christians their beliefs about the afterlife, since the survival of consciousness and the resurrection of the body more or less matches up with my deepest longings concerning what awaits after death. (This correlation is one of the many reasons, of course, why I am a Christian to begin with.) I'm less sure that I'd envy someone who believes in reincarnation, or the annihilation of the self in some pantheistic sea, or some of the other religious notions about last things, because I find these concepts barely more consoling than the materialist attempts to reason away the fear of death - which is to say, not consoling at all.
The Times has a piece today about shock jocks in the post-Don Imus landscape, arguing that talk radio "remains as arguably and insidiously untamed in the days after Mr. Imus’s collapse as it was before." (What "insidiously untamed" means" I'm not quite sure ...) The story's sampling of beyond-the-pale remarks includes a host describing a caller as a "brain-dead fetus” and a “late-term abortion that somehow crawled out of the Dumpster”, and another one asking a professional whistler: "Would it be possible, could you whistle ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ while I rape a girl?” But then there's this:
Mr. Muller ... also suggested on the same broadcast that “radical Muslims” would not stop until they had flattened American religion like a steamroller.
His children, he predicted, “will probably be killed because I’m bringing them up Catholic, and maybe their children will be brainwashed and put into some sort of situation where they’re wearing a burka and they follow Shia law, because that’s what these radicalized Muslims want.”
He also mused about several other matters, including, “I just wonder why we care so much about Virginia Tech kids.” He quickly qualified the remark by saying, “Don’t pull that out of context,” before indicating that soldiers killed in Iraq deserved comparable gestures of mourning.
Um - so what precisely is beyond the pale about this? The last bit is an example of choosing your words poorly while making a completely reasonable point; the material about "radical Muslims," meanwhile, is obviously alarmist and over-the-top in its predictions about the future, but is the Times really arguing - on the day a Zawahiri videotape gets released, no less - that there aren't radical Muslims who would like to flatten America and impose shari'a on the West? Whether we should take their threat all that seriously is an open question, and I'm certainly not a fan of, say, Presidential candidates building their entire foreign-policy agenda around the dangers posed by a new Caliphate; for the most part, I think we should spend more time laughing in the face of radical Islam's dream of overthrowing the U.S. than we spend obsessing about it. But that doesn't mean the Zawahiris of the world aren't dangerous, or that people who call attention to their long-term goals are bigots and/or racists, which I assume is how the Times means for us to regard Mr. Muller.
Now maybe he did say something beyond the pale: Maybe he went on to conflate all Muslims with al Qaeda, or suggested that the entire population of Dearborn should be deported, or argued that Islam ought to be outlawed in the West. (And I'm sure you can find more than a few shock jocks who've made comments along those lines.) But the Times doesn't quote him saying anything like that, and as a result the story leaves you with the impression that anyone who thinks that "radical Muslims" want to take down the U.S. is a ranting bigot and ought to be hounded from the airwaves.
May 4, 2007
Derby Days
If, like me, you can't make the Kentucky Derby this weekend, the next best thing is following along with my colleague Tim Lavin as he bets, drinks bourbon and blogs, hopefully in that order, from Churchill Downs.
The Fortunate Believer
Of Karl Rove's statement (according to Christopher Hitchens, at least) that he's "not fortunate enough to be a person of faith," Jon Chait writes:
The quote itself is far more interesting than the fact, which doesn't surprise me in the least. If you don't believe in God, then why would you think believers are "fortunate" for putting their faith in a nonexistent higher being? You wouldn't. Yet Rove, for political reasons, must genuflect to the notion that religious people are morally superior to atheists. The line perfectly encapsulates the condescending and way Republican elites have manipulated religion.
I don't think calling religious believers "fortunate" is the same thing as calling them "morally superior." I've heard plenty of atheists remark that they envy religious people their faith in God, an afterlife, the beneficence of the universe, or what-have-you. This sentiment isn't universal, obviously (see Hitchens himself for a counter-example), but I think it's perfectly reasonable for someone who's convinced that life is a meaningless round of pleasure, pain, and Machiavellian campaigning that ends when you die to feel a little envious of people who believe something slightly more optimistic.
Spidey the Third
So I saw Spiderman 3 last night, and ... well, to find out what I thought, you'll just have to wait for the next issue of National Review. In the interim, though, may I suggest that you check out Neill Cumpston's Mom's review, which I think gets at some of the, ah, difficulties with the movie.
Oh, and if for some unaccountable reason you're unfamiliar with the Cumpston oeuvre, here's Neill on 300, Neill on Grindhouse, and Neill on Return of the King. (They are, let's say, Not Safe To Be Read Aloud At Work.)
American Junta
Now that everyone'stalking about Thomas Sowell's yearning for a military coup, Professor Bainbridge tackles the more important question of whether a coup would work. As James Joyner has already pointed out, the definitive text on this matter is Charles Dunlap's The Origins of the Military Coup of 2012, though I would also recommend the Harper's symposium on the topic from a couple years back, whose roundtable included Dunlap, Andrew Bacevich, Richard Kohn and Edward Luttwak. Sadly, all those worthies were too sober-minded to take the possibility of an actual Seven Days in May all that seriously, and so the discussion turned rather quickly to the somewhat duller topic of civilian-military relations - but it's still worth a look.
Is Ron Paul related to Ian McKellen? Why are we giving men running for the highest office in the land thirty seconds to answer serious questions? Is Sam Brownback running for preacher? Why did John McCain crack a weird grin right after promising to follow Osama to the "gates of hell"? Is there anything more painful than watching Rudy Giuliani talk about abortion? Is there anything more painful than watching Tom Tancredo talk?
Mitt Romney was the winner by default, I thought, since the other major candidates didn't distinguish themselves, and none of the minor candidates made an outsize impression. (Though how you would make an impression in that kind of ridiculous, overcrowded forum I have no idea.) McCain didn't hurt himself but didn't really help himself either, and every time I hear him talk I'm reminded of what a surprisingly weak public speaker he is. I was more impressed by Giuliani than Ryan Sager was, but that isn't saying much; he seemed more Presidential than most of the other folks on stage, but he didn't make much of a case for himself as a conservative. Among the also-rans, Hunter and Huckabee did best. It's too bad being one of the best governors of the last twenty years doesn't make Tommy Thompson a more plausible would-be President. If you read Paul's remarks in a transcript, he sounds reasonable; if you watched him, he sounds like your nutty uncle.
Overall - and I hope this doesn't make Daniel Larison's head explode - watching the debate made me raise my estimate of Mitt Romney's chances at the nomination. I certainly agree that he comes across as overpolished and a bit "like a well-cast actor in a movie of the week about a guy running for president," as Jonah put it. But in a field where most of his opponents look like badly-cast actors, that actually may give him a leg up.
Speaking of well-cast actors, I revised my estimation of Fred Thompson's chances upward as well.
Mickey Kaus gets the best line: "Is Sarkozy unavailable?"
More Bloomberg
I had missed this WSJ piece on his potential candidacy, but I wasn't missing much - it's a classic example of how not to analyze American politics, and particularly third-party forays. Trying to outline Bloomberg's potential appeal, for instance, the Journal has this to say:
One dinnertime chat does not a ticket make, though it would certainly confirm my impression that Chuck Hagel is less a principled anti-war conservative than an unprincipled attention-whore. (And I say this as someone who would like to see a principled anti-war conservative in the '08 race - and one who's a little more plausible than Ron Paul.) What's more interesting, to my mind, is the question of whether there's any combination of Republican and Democratic nominees that would provide a natural opening for Bloomberg to run as an independent. It's hard to imagine, for instance, that he would get much oxygen in a Giuliani-Obama contest - there would already be one pro-choice New York Mayor in the race, the Dems would be so excited by their candidate that there wouldn't be much room to peel off left-leaning independents, and the only disgrunted voters looking for a candidate would be social conservatives, hardly Bloomberg's natural constituency. What he would need is a race in which the other two candidates are perceived as extremists, particularly by the national media - which would be Bloomberg's natural constituency. So if, say, George W. Bush ran again, opposed by Howard Dean, the opening for Bloomberg would be obvious - but that doesn't seem terribly likely, does it? Nor does a Duncan Hunter-Dennis Kucinich battle royale, and so forth.
Failing that, Bloomberg might be able to capitalize on a situation in which the two nominees are perceived as respectable but highly-conventional representatives of their respective parties - but I don't think you're likely to get that this time around either, at least not in the way that gives Bloomberg an opening. What he needs is a Republican who's a conventional right-winger on social issues and a Democrat who's a conventional lefty on economics, and few of the plausible general-election matchups fit that bill. I suppose Romney versus Edwards comes closest (that is, post-2004 Romney versus Edwards), but if that's the general-election pairing I'll buy a hat and eat it.
The more-plausible year for a Bloomberg run, in a way, was 2004, when both candidates were flawed and polarizing figures and there was clearly room to run between them. Though on the other hand, the stakes in that election were taken (erroneously, I think) to be so high that very few voters would have been willing to risk throwing their vote away - something Americans seem to have an inordinate fear of doing - by casting it for someone not named Bush or Kerry.
That said, Bloomberg does have enough ready cash to pay thirty million people two hundred bucks each to vote for him. So he's got that going for him.
Rejoice, America ...
... because Chris Orr, heretofore the author of TNR Online's Home Movies column, has been freed to write about first-run films instead, starting with Spiderman 3 today - which, surprisingly, he rather likes.
Update: I spoke too soon. Reliable sources inform me that this is actually a one-off new release review for Orr - a transparent attempt by TNR to cash in on the Spiderman publicity blitz, no doubt - and that Home Movies will return shortly.
What Is Truth?
Like Andrew, I'm withholding comment on Christopher Hitchens' anti-God broadside, since I have a review of it forthcoming in the next Claremont Review of Books. One thing I didn't get a chance to take up in the review, though, is the famous quote from Gotthold Lessing that Hitchens uses as an epigraph for one of his chapters, a quote that also serves as the epigraph for Andrew's entire book. It follows below:
"The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist."
- Philip Roth, "Writing American Fiction," 1963
"James E. McGreevey, the nation's first openly gay governor, has become an Episcopalian and wants to become a priest in that faith, according to a published report ...
McGreevey, 49, shocked the nation in August 2004 by proclaiming himself "a gay American" who had an extramarital affair with a male aide, and that he would resign that November.
He has applied to the General Theological Seminary in Manhattan and is awaiting word of whether he has been accepted to the program there, the newspaper said, citing two people familiar with McGreevey’s plans who declined to be identified because McGreevey has not formally announced his plans."
Just When I Thought I Was Out ... They Pull Me Back In
Can we please retire the phrase "jump the shark"? It started as a specific term for a specific moment in the life cycle of a television show - the point of no return, the moment when a show is lost to its downhill slide - and has gradually turned into a general term thrown out to describe any episode, or series of episodes, that isn't up to snuff. So this season of Lost, which has been generally mediocre and went through a stretch of truly terrible episodes, first sparked debates about whether the show had gone shark-jumping, and then - once things got a little better - about whether it was possible to "un-jump the shark", which is like debating whether you can return from the, um, point of no return.
This is all by way of saying that last night's episode of Lost was really good, as were several episodes before it, and if you've given up on the show you might consider giving it another chance. Basically, it's clear that the creators had an overall arc in mind for this season, but didn't have enough good material within the arc to fill out the full twenty-four episodes, and found themselves spinning their wheels for long stretches. (Andrew Dignan discussed this problem here, pointing out that the shorter seasons on HBO often make those shows feel tighter and less bloated.) This required pointless flashbacks and enormously frustrating sequences where characters deliberately avoided pursuing leads and asking questions that any normal human beings in their situation would jump all over. It was bad, bad, bad. But it wasn't irreversibly bad, and for the last few episodes it's been at least partially reversed, and the series is interesting again. I hope it stays that way, but if it starts going downhill again - which is perfectly likely - I hope that we can stop talking about whether Lost has jumped, un-jumped, re-jumped or de-jumped, and just talk about where it went wrong and whether it can get better again.
May 2, 2007
Here Comes Incest?
So says Jeff Jacoby. I'm skeptical - not because the right to incest doesn't arguably follow from the logic of gay marriage, as Jacoby says, but because I think the demand for marrying one's sister is far too low to overcome the "ick" factor involved. The gay population is small, but not that small - even at 2-4 percent of the American population, it's large enough to create both a mass constituency for gay marriage and a still-larger percentage of Americans who count homosexuals as their friends and neighbors, and understandably wish them happiness as a result. Whereas even if the incest taboo begins to fray, I think the number of would-be Ptolemies and Cleopatras is so vanishingly small that Americans - including Supreme Court Justices - will never have much of an incentive to put the logic of Lawrence v. Texas ahead of their repugnance.
Moreover, the case for gay marriage appeals to Americans' sense of fairness in a way that the argument for incest doesn't. If gays can't (or shouldn't) marry straights, the pro-gay wedlock argument runs, then they deserve to marry someone. Whereas a straight guy who wants to marry his sister isn't just asking for the right to marry the kind of person he's attracted to - he's asking for the right to marry a specific person, and that's more easily refused.
Republicans In Fiction
Earlier this year, Ben Nugent wondered in N+1 why there aren't more novels written by Republicans. Now, via Andrew, comes a good explanation for why there aren't more novels about Republicans:
... the cast of characters in what is arguably the worst administration since Nixon's strikes me as devoid of literary interest. Practically the only enduring contribution of this crew to America's writers is its patented brand of cant ... But behind the words lurk people who have, for seven years, refused to grant room for ambiguity, complexity, and doubt - preconditions for the moral universe in which modern literature is possible. Instead, we get a stilted reduction whose protagonists, depending on who's reading, are either simply Good, or simply Wicked. We get Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint. We get "Stuff Happens" and "Guantanamo" - bracing theatrical experiences, but not dramas per se. A mark of the current administration's moral failure, and perhaps of its artistic triumph, is that it has sterilized many of the avenues for protest against itself. It brings out the worst in us, and has, by its relentless aestheticization of every aspect of American life, made the aesthetic feel insufficient. Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps some artist or press secretary somewhere is even now working up a giant masterwork that illuminates W as a tragic hero caught on the horns of history. Somehow, though, I'm not convinced such a work would ring true. Anyway, I'm not holding my breath.
So wait ... it's the Bushies' fault that all the anti-Bush agitprop of the last six years has been such artistic rubbish? Because the Administration has "made the aesthetic feel insufficient" and "sterilized many of the avenues for protest against itself"? Because its members are "devoid of literary interest?" I'm happy to blame the current Administration for all sorts of sins, but this is just pathetic. If Soviet Communism didn't make "the aesthetic feel insufficient" for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, then I don't want to hear a peep from the poor delicate darlings who think they're too traumatized by the Bush years to write anything that's any good.
Moreover, you don't have to view our current President as a "tragic hero caught on the horns of history" to think that there might be some good drama to be found inside this White House - in, say, the ruin of Paul Wolfowitz's idealistic dreams; or the tangled, rivalrous interplay of Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice; or the peculiar family dynamic between Dubya and his father; or the President's strange, semi-spousal relationships with inner-circle women like Karen Hughes and Harriet Miers ... and that's just to take the first few examples that spring to mind. No, the fact that none of our artists have managed to make something out of this Administration tells us way more about the artists than the Bushies. It suggests that there aren't any interesting Republicans in our fiction not because Republicans aren't interesting, but because our intelligentsia's political prejudices blind them to the possibility that a Republican might be, well, a complicated human being rather than just the sum of every liberal's fears.
The Moral Obligation to Have Children?
I'm going to regret getting back into this, I know, but ... while guest-blogging for Andrew I wrote what was probably a somewhat slipshod post arguing that it's somewhat solipsistic to decide how many kids to have based entirely on whether you think each additional child will add substantially to your happiness, since one of the best reasons to have children is to make another person's happiness possible - by, well, making that person's existence possible. Will Wilkinson wrote a rather waspish post in response, in which he accused me of "not making sense, and insulting low-breeders on the way." I'll quote him at length below the fold:
So says Edward Luttwak, writing in the British Prospect. Here's an excerpt:
The third and greatest error repeated by Middle East experts of all persuasions, by Arabophiles and Arabophobes alike, by Turcologists and by Iranists, is also the simplest to define. It is the very odd belief that these ancient nations are highly malleable. Hardliners keep suggesting that with a bit of well-aimed violence ("the Arabs only understand force") compliance will be obtained. But what happens every time is an increase in hostility; defeat is followed not by collaboration, but by sullen non-cooperation and active resistance too. It is not hard to defeat Arab countries, but it is mostly useless. Violence can work to destroy dangerous weapons but not to induce desired changes in behaviour.
Softliners make exactly the same mistake in reverse. They keep arguing that if only this or that concession were made, if only their policies were followed through to the end and respect shown, or simulated, hostility would cease and a warm Mediterranean amity would emerge. Yet even the most thinly qualified of middle east experts must know that Islam, as with any other civilisation, comprehends the sum total of human life, and that unlike some others it promises superiority in all things for its believers, so that the scientific and technological and cultural backwardness of the lands of Islam generates a constantly renewed sense of humiliation and of civilisational defeat. That fully explains the ubiquity of Muslim violence, and reveals the futility of the palliatives urged by the softliners.
The operational mistake that Middle East experts keep making is the failure to recognise that backward societies must be left alone, as the French now wisely leave Corsica to its own devices, as the Italians quietly learned to do in Sicily, once they recognised that maxi-trials merely handed over control to a newer and smarter mafia of doctors and lawyers. With neither invasions nor friendly engagements, the peoples of the Middle East should finally be allowed to have their own history—the one thing that middle east experts of all stripes seem determined to deny them.
I can think of a number of problems with this line of argument, not all of them having to do with our dependence on foreign oil. But it's certainly appealing at our present pass. (hat tip: Rod Dreher)
Freedom Is Freer Than You Think
Maybe you thought that Monday of this week was Tax Freedom Day, the day you stopped working for the government and finally started working for yourself. Well, think again: Julian Sanchez, taking what I'm sure is a temporary break from the cause of "advancing liberty," explains why your Tax Freedom Day probably happened a lot earlier than the Tax Foundation would have you believe.
(Unless, of course, you're stinking rich, in which case may I suggest that you consider giving the gift of the Atlantic to all your less-fortunate friends?)
May 1, 2007
The New Left 2.0
In his new TNR essay on the netroots, Jon Chait compares them to both the Christian Right and the conservative movement more generally. I think Chait's analysis of the "movement" quality of the netroots is spot-on, but he glides over what seems like a significant distinction between "movement" conservatism and netroots liberalism - namely, the extent to which the latter is tied less to any specific set of issues than to a hatred of the present Administration and all its works. I'm not saying that such passion isn't a good catalyst for organizational and electoral success, but I'm less sure that it's the kind of thing that sustains a movement in the long term, the way the conservative movement was sustained by a series of major policy goals - from reversing Roe v. Wade to shrinking the size of government to defeating Communism - over the course of its decades-long rise. The gang at National Review weren't involved in political journalism just because they hated JFK and the liberal establishment; the ideas drove the politics, not the other way around.
Obviously netroots liberals do have policy goals - as Chait says, they tend to hail from the leftward flank of the Democratic Party, which means they'd like to see the usual round of universal health care, stricter regulations to combat global warming, increased spending on anti-poverty programs, and so forth. But none of these issues seem to inspire nearly the same kind of passion that, say, rolling back marginal tax rates or ramping up military spending inspired in the New Rightists of the '60s and '70s. Netroots liberals may cheer when the Democratic Congress exhumes the ERA, say, or "comparable worth," but that's not why they're in politics - they're in politics to end the Iraq War and beat the Republican Noise Machine at its own game. And the consequence, for liberalism and the country, may be that once the war is over and Bush has exited stage right, we'll be left with a new movement liberalism that imitates the worst qualities of the contemporary conservative movement - the team-player mentality, the obsession with keeping "our guys" in power and "their guys" out - without having bothered to acquire any more substantive reason for being in politics. Markos Moulitsas says he wants to imitate Grover Norquist; the danger is that he's starting out where Norquist has finished up.
The Seamless Garment of Death
Memo to Dean Barnett: If you're looking to persuade me that torture is a necessary wartime evil, it's probably not a good idea to start by comparing it to abortion and the firebombing of Dresden. Just a thought.
(Mark Shea has a more thorough response to Barnett's weird exercise in right-wing relativism.)
Republicans For Obama
Discussing that Pew data I mentioned earlier, which shows that the public's perception of a candidate's ideological stance often bears little resemblance to their actual ideological stance, Matt hits on a deep point:
The hot book of last year among populist-leaning liberals was Jacob Hacker's The Great Risk Shift, which argued that income volatility has gone way, way up for most middle-class Americans in the long era of GOP dominance. A lot of smart people I know were skeptical about his claim, and now there's some pretty comprehensive data from the Congressional Budget Office report suggesting that individual income volatility hasn't gone up since the 1970s.
Hacker defends his argument here; Tyler Cowen isn't impressed by Hacker's defense, to say the least. What's interesting to me, though, is that Hacker's argument now rests on the contention that even if individual income hasn't become more volatile, family income has, and family income is what we should care about. That's a perfectly plausible point of view: Given the changes in family structure over the last thirty years, you would expect greater volatility, some of it from benign factors (the income swing that comes when a woman eaves and then re-enters the workforce, say) and some of it from darker trends, like rising illegitimacy and the growing divorce divide. And you'd expect working-class Americans, in particular, to be hardest hit by this family-related volatility, since they have much higher rates of divorce and single parenthood than the well-off and well-educated.
But the subtitle of Hacker's book, you'll note, isn't "How The Sexual Revolution Created Higher Levels of Risk For American Families and What To Do About It." It's "The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement - And How You Can Fight Back." In other words, he's taking data that would seem to support the socially conservative contention that changing family structure has had a lot of negative externalities for vulnerable Americans, and using it to claim that 1) Republicans have shredded the safety net and 2) we need a much, much stronger one than what we currently have. The first point is at best debatable - if our safety net is shredded, then why aren't individuals experiencing more income volatility too? - and the second point just amounts to the rather predictable liberal claim that a bigger welfare state is the answer to increasing family breakdown.
I'm skating rather quickly over a very complex terrain, admittedly, and I should also note that I actually agree with a few of Hacker's policy prescriptions, if memory serves (I don't have the book in front of me). I just think that he's taking a narrative that, if true, provides a lot of grist for social conservatives and claiming, somewhat simplistically, that it vindicates a rather conventional liberal worldview.
Whose Ox Would Gore Gore?
Mickey Kaus speculates that a machiavellian Clinton campaign secretly wants Al Gore in the race, the better to split the left-wing, anti-Hillary vote and let her ride a plurality to victory in the shortened primary season. That's always been my assumption about a Gore candidacy - that it would either knock Edwards and even Obama to the sidelines and create an Al-Hillary battle royale, or that Gore would just further fragment the anti-Clinton vote and guarantee her victory. But as Obama's strength grows, I'm starting to wonder ... Are we sure that a Gore candidacy wouldn't take more votes from Hillary?
Compromise, rather than absolutism, has been the watchword of anti-abortion efforts for some time now. But the pro-life movement can't give up on overturning Roe without giving up on its very reason for being.
Forget the predatory lenders, Wall Street sharks and their government enablers: The current economic crisis, and the housing bubble that produced it, all started with George Bailey.
