« May 2007 | Main | July 2007 » June 2007 ArchivesJune 29, 2007Apologies ...... for the light posting, which will continue through the weekend. On Monday, we kick off our second annual experiment in live-blogging the Aspen Ideas Festival (here's last year's foray), at which point I'll be coming to you live from deep in the Rockies, where I'll hopefully avoid coming down with altitude sickness this time around. June 28, 2007Knocked Up And Abortion, UncutDraw your own conclusions. (And obviously, obviously, this is NSFW.) Bringing It All Back HomeBill Kauffman makes the case for secession. Waiting For HarryAlan Jacobs - an occasional contributor, I might note, to the new American Scene - gets his Potter on. The Dismal ArtI finally got around to reading - okay, skimming - Tom Junod's Esquire profile of Angelina Jolie, which Ron Rosenbaum famously called "the worst celebrity profile ever written." Junod's campaign for Angelina's canonization provides plenty of ammunition for this judgment, in a certain way, but I would submit that Rosenbaum is missing the point: Given that it is self-evidently impossible to write a good celebrity profile, the only thing that a talented writer can strive for in such circumstances is the sort of maximal absurdity that's calculated to, well, drive a Ron Rosenbaum around the bend. Insofar as Junod achieved this with his self-evidently ridiculous "this is a 9/11 story" story about Jolie, he should be applauded, rather than condemned. Or put another way - given a choice between reading Junod's ludicrous, pretentious, wildly over-the-top Jolie profile and a typically dreadful, "I spent thirty minutes with a star and I'm being paid to make her seem sexually attainable to my readers" celebrity piece like, say, GQ's cover story this month on "The Summer of Jessica Biel," I'll take Junod every day of the week. June 27, 2007The New American SceneThey're still working out some kinks in the site, I believe, but if you don't go check out the kick-ass design and crack team of bloggers Reihan has put together over at what was once our shared home, well, you shouldn't be reading blogs to begin with. Knifed In the Ankle?Jonah chides me for lending legitimacy to the comparison, which he suggests is implied by the term "stabbed in the back," between American conservatives today (or after Vietnam) and post-World War I German right-wingers. This was certainly not my intention: I didn't mean to "gamely go along" with any such comparison, but merely to acknowledge what I think is the self-evident reality that many conservatives blamed our defeat in Vietnam on liberals who undermined the war effort at home, and that a similar narrative seems to be developing on the Right where Iraq is concerned. If there's a better, less historically-loaded shorthand for this narrative than "stabbed in the back," I'm happy to propagate it. But while obviously there are lefties who would love to draw the Republicans-to-Nazis analogy, I think the term has a general application that's independent of the connotations Jonah imputes to it. (For instance, when Max Boot - no Iraq-War dove or liberal lapdog he! - wrote a column criticizing this narrative earlier this year, he used precisely the same language, writing that "Just as it did during the Vietnam War, a myth is likely to develop in which America's valiant fighting men and women were stabbed in the back by unpatriotic, even treasonous, reporters.") Jonah also writes: I think Ross is basically wrong when he says that the Vietnam syndrome didn't help conservatives. Vietnam saturated American politics in myriad ways that helped the Reaganite Right, particularly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, become the party of American confidence. "Morning in America" makes little sense without Vietnam. I didn't mean to imply that the need to kick the Vietnam syndrome, get back on our feet and start kicking ass again wasn't part of the narrative that Republicans rode to power in the 1980s; obviously it was. But I think that when this narrative was deployed most successfully, by Reagan and others, it didn't involve blaming liberals for losing Vietnam so much as it involved blaming them for being overly traumatized by our defeat and acquiescing to American decline as a result of that trauma. It's a subtle distinction, maybe, but I think an important one. June 26, 2007The Stab in the BackTwo out of two Matts agree: If the U.S. pulls out of Iraq or fails to bomb Iran, the "stab in the back" narrative is going to become the centerpiece of a revived post-Bush conservatism, and progressives need to steel themselves to combat it. Myself, I think that liberals should be praying that the Right embraces the "stabbed in the back" theory of what went wrong in Iraq (and possibly Iran as well), because it will push conservatives toward political irrelevance. Yes, many conservatives have long nursed the belief that we could have won in Vietnam if liberals hadn't turned gutless and anti-American, but this belief hasn't won the Right any elections: Not in a country where large majorities consistently say that the Vietnam War wasn't worth fighting. The association of conservatism with foreign-policy strength and liberalism with foreign-policy weakness emerged from the Vietnam era, true, but it emerged because the trauma of Vietnam pushed liberalism to the left of the country on foreign policy and defense in general, not because the majority of Americans were mad at liberals for losing Indochina specifically. (They were more likely to be mad at liberals for getting us into the mess in the first place.) And the successful conservative foreign-policy rhetoric of the last forty years has traded on Democratic weakness in the face of the Soviet/Islamist threat, not on rehashing the battles of 1966-75. Ronald Reagan didn't go around giving speeches about the Tet Offensive and the Treason of Walter Cronkite - he talked about Iran or Afghanistan, Star Wars or defense spending, Central America or the Berlin Wall. So when Dinesh D'Souza tells conservative cruisegoers that "it's customary to say we lost the Vietnam war, but who's 'we'? ... The left won by demanding America's humiliation," he isn't broadening conservatism's base - he's shrinking it. Which is what a post-Bush conservatism that obsesses over how the liberal media undid the Iraq Occupation by failing to "report the good news" would do as well. Cruisin' With The Right
I know it's been a whole ten years since Eric Alterman unburdened himself of 5,000 words on the plutocratic excesses of the NR cruise for the Nation - only to have his own magazine start cruising itself shortly thereafter - but the bulk of Johann Hari's dispatch from the belly of the conservative beast feels stale to me even so. The concept is part Hunter S. Thompson, part David Foster Wallace, and part Tom Wolfe; the execution has a college journalism-ish, "find a place where the wackos gather and make fun of them" feel to it. (Who would have ever guessed that Muslim-bashing, Jimmy Carter-hating wingnuts go on ideological cruises? Next up: "Berkeley - It's Still Full of Marxists!") I've done some of those myself; I should know. Still, it's worth reading for the miniature portrait of Bill Buckley and Norman Podhoretz, passing like, er, ships in the night: Heads A'BloggingMe and Jon Chait, hating on David Broder together. Updike on Shlaes RevisitedI just re-read my earlier post and I think I'd like to disassociate myself from my own snarkiness. Sure, Updike's essay wasn't very good at all, but neither was it bad enough to be described as "solipsistic flapdoodle," and I'm not sure why I was so obnoxious about Updike not being a professional historian. (Shlaes isn't one either, technically.) Particularly since with this piece and his earlier Aimee Semple McPherson review, Updike seems to be tackling books that fall outside the usual New Yorker orbit - and even if he ends up giving them the usual New Yorker gloss, it's still a tendency that ought to be encouraged. Also, it's more interesting to use the review to analyze the psychology of the typical Depression-era voter - which Updike's FDR-voting ancestors assuredly were - than to make fun of Updike's leaps in logic. Here's Daniel Larison's take: Updike’s story is an interesting portrait of how government-exacerbated crises can work, perversely enough, to instill even greater support for the government: the Depression was so miserable that people became grateful for whatever assistance they could get, even though the very programs they were using were working, on a macro level, to perpetuate their misery. I basically agree with this, though being somewhat more sympathetic to big gummint than Daniel I would suggest that the relief programs that people were most immediately grateful for - and that were politically necessary, I would submit, if not always economically ideal - weren't usually the ones that did the most damage to the economy. You could have had the unemployment relief and the jobs programs, in other words, without the attempts have the government rig wages and prices - or the WPA without the NRA, the CCC without the AAA, if you follow me. (Ah, the New Deal ...) Update: Isaac thinks I was right to begin with. God is Not Great Is Not GreatYou can find my contribution to the great Hitchens debate in the latest Claremont Review of Books. June 25, 2007Updike on ShlaesAs a non-historian who aspires to review works of history here and there - and perhaps even write one, who knows? - I don't want to begrudge a non-historian like John Updike the chance to review Amity Shlaes' revisionist history of the Great Depression. But if you're reviewing a book that makes specific historical arguments - helpfully summarized here by Shlaes herself - about whether the New Deal did or did not make the Great Depression worse, you need to do better by way of analysis than this (extended) "rebuttal": The Bridge
I saw two movies over the weekend, A Mighty Heart and The Bridge, a 2006 documentary about suicide and San Francisco's Golden Gate. Both were interesting misfires, and they misfired in similar ways - by misunderstanding where the central drama of their story was located, and heading off in another direction instead. In the case of A Mighty Heart (of which I'll have more to say, probably, in the next National Review), this meant turning the story of Daniel Pearl's kidnapping and murder into the attempted canonization of Angelina Jolie - sorry, Marianne Pearl. In the case of The Bridge, it meant chasing the stories of the people who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, rather than the story of the bridge itself. The director, Eric Steel, spent a year filming the bridge from afar, a feat of cinematic endurance that enabled him to film at least half-a-dozen suicides in the act of jumping. This astonishing, morbid footage is the spine of his documentary; the rest of it is taken up by interviews with the jumpers' nearest and dearest, and with one jumper who leaped at age eighteen and survived the fall, buoyed up to safety by a passing seal. Steel was inspired to embark on the project by an article on Golden Gate bridge-jumpers that Tad Friend wrote for the New Yorker, but his film misses what made that piece so interesting. Friend investigated both the Golden Gate Bridge's history as a suicide magnet and San Franciscans' odd relationship to this history, from the media frenzy over the five hundredth and thousandth suicides to the city's resolute (and popular) refusal to put up the kind of barrier that might prevent so many people from leaping to their deaths. Steel, by contrast, largely leaves this sort of context out and focuses on the suicides themselves, using the bridge as a gorgeous, inscrutable backdrop for a series of conversations about mental illness that are depressing without being particularly illuminating. All suicidal people may not be alike, but in The Bridge, at least, their families and friends' accounts tend to blur into one another, while the Golden Gate itself hovers untouched in the background, its dark allure a mystery that the film circles but isn't brave enough to approach. Photo by Flickr user Marymactavish used under a Creative Commons license. The Vice President in His LabyrinthReading the first part of the Post's series on the vice-presidency of Dick Cheney - a man who “expresses indifference, in public and private, to any verdict but history’s” - I kept thinking of what Scooter Libby's defense team presented as a typical morning briefing for Cheney's chief of staff during the period when he claimed to have had a memory lapse. Here it is, via JPod: "Bomb defused . . . explosions . . . East African extremist network . . . Info on possible Al Qaeda attack in U.S. . . . concern about specific vulnerability to terrorist attack . . . Israeli military action . . . Country's security affecting Al Qaeda . . . International organization's position concerning country's nuke program . . . Iraq's porous borders present security threat . . . Demonstrations in Iran turn violent . . . Israeli offer of cease fire to Palestinians . . . Memorandum assessing Iranian presidents view on terrorism . . . Problems in leadership in PLO . . . Info on 1920 Mesopotamia and insurgency on modern-day Iraq . . . Potential effect of improved governance in Iraq." People in D.C. love to play the “What Happened to Dick Cheney?” game. How did somebody so clinical and cautious and coldblooded end up as the architect of what seems in hindsight like such a cockeyed Iraq policy? How did the Ford-era Chief of Staff famous for insisting that everyone in the White House respect “the process” of policymaking become such a loose cannon, brazenly bypassing rival Cabinet agencies and making enemies of everyone from Colin Powell to John Ashcroft, while advancing increasingly implausible arguments to defend his own office from scrutiny by either Congress or the press? How did the man who was supposed to be the Bush Administration’s grownup-in-chief become associated with a national security strategy premised on the “one percent doctrine,” arguably the least level-headed response to terrorism imaginable? Against BipartisanshipAnd Michael Bloomberg. Jonathan Chait says what needs to be said. (And speaking of Chait, this discussion promises to be entertaining.) June 22, 2007Good News For RepublicansAmericans still don't trust government. The liberal spin on these numbers is summed up by Stanley Greenberg: In their breathtaking incompetence and comprehensive failure in government, Republicans have undermined Americans' confidence in the ability of government to play a role in solving America's problems ... So Americans' distrust for government is all the Bush Administration's fault, huh? Let's look at the trends over time, courtesy of Pew:
Lazy Friday Blogging (II)I've been meaning to work in some baseball blogging here and there on this site, in imitation of Matt's basketblogging, and a slow Friday seems like as good a time as any to link to this site, which isn't always executed quite as well as I'd like - though the Dewey entry hit me right in the "deep well of male emotion" spot - but which has the potential to become the online version of one of the great baseball books of all time. Lazy Friday Blogging (I)Okay, it's no Veiled Conceit (where have you gone, Veiled Conceit?), but this site has a certain potential. June 21, 2007Whistling Past DixieI like Alex Massie and Daniel Larison's contributions to the whole "does the South hold American politics hostage" debate that Paul Waldman and Kevin Drum kicked off, largely because - as you might expect - I didn't find the original complaint particularly persuasive. Drum's suggestion that "most Southerners just flatly refuse to vote for anyone who comes from north of the Mason-Dixon Line" is a particularly self-defeating form of liberal condescension: It's the same line of identity-politics thinking that convinced certain Democrats that the way to win over the hawkish rubes out in the heartland was to nominate a veteran for President in '04, and have a lot of veterans at their convention, and talk a lot about "reporting for duty." Of course Southerners are somewhat more likely to vote for Southerners than non-Southerners, everything else being equal, and maybe they're somewhat more likely to vote for one of their own than a Californian or a New England Yankee would be. (It wouldn't be surprising if a region that's considerably more culturally particularist than the rest of America cared more about, well, cultural particularism in assessing Presidential candidates than the rest of the country does.) And sure, Waldman's probably right that John Edwards "can go to places where Clinton, and to an extent Obama, can't." But not that many places. Remember that Edwards ran for President in '04 in part because he was probably going to lose his N.C. Senate seat anyway, and he didn't do Kerry any good in the Carolinas in the general election. Indeed, you could argue that he owes his current prominence almost entirely to liberal identity politics: Had he hailed from Oregon, say, instead of tobacco country, there's little chance that Kerry would have picked him as a running mate in '04, and even less chance that he'd be considered one of the "big three" Democratic contenders this time around. Divided They FallIf there's any state where a semi-obscure social conservative ought to be able to make some noise, it's Iowa. And sure enough, if you add Sam Brownback's six percent to Mike Huckabee's seven percent in this Mason-Dixon poll, you have "Smike Brownbuckabee" nearly tying Rudy Giuliani for third place, and only four points behind Fred Thompson for second. As the various front-runners start to go after one another, you could imagine Brownbuckabee building some under-the-rader momentum and maybe even sneaking out a win in the Caucuses, which would create media interest and momentum, boost fundraising, and give him a chance to at least be an influential spoiler in the later primaries. Unfortunately, "him" is a "them." Push It To The LimitJust a little something to get you through the afternoon. In Defense of CircumcisionSince Andrew is on one of his periodic anti-circumcision crusades, I thought I'd say a few words in the procedure's defense. Since this is a family blog, I've placed them safely below the fold. The Art of the PossibleMatt writes: “Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical,” US President George W. Bush said yesterday “a nation founded on the principle that all human life is sacred.” That, of course, came during his address on the need to ban embryonic stem cell research. I feel like I've heard this line of argument a lot, and in some sense of course it's true: If killing embryos is wrong in the way that Bush suggests it's wrong (and in the way I think it's wrong) then it should be prohibited, not merely left unfunded. But in another, more accurate sense, the critique is somewhat silly. Bush's approach isn't a "goofy split-the-difference compromise," it's a politically realistic split-the-difference compromise, which is what politics happens to be all about. Let's suppose, for instance, that a President believes - as many people do - that free health care is a universal human right, and that the government, not private organizations, should provide it. And let's suppose that the Congress passes a bill that gives free health insurance to children, but not to adults. And let's further suppose that said President signs the bill, and in the course of the speech remarks that "I applaud the Congress for recognizing that health care is a universal human right." Obviously in one sense this is BS, since the bill doesn't recognize any such thing - but it's still a smart thing for the President to say. Sure, he could be completely honest and say: "This bill is a small step in the direction of my real goal, which is the complete takeover of the health care industry by the U.S. government." And similarly, Bush could have vetoed the stem-cell bill while remarking that he hopes to one day ban all embryo-destructive research, and maybe even pass some Italy-style laws protecting embryos in general. That would have made him consistent; it would also have made him an idiot. (In a related vein, for anyone interested in the embryo controversy - regardless of your point view - this Mother Jones article from last summer on America's "embryo glut" is required reading.) Obama-Bloomberg '08It's Paul Starr's idea, and it makes an awful lot of sense to me. Bloomberg isn't going to be President - no way, no how - and at some point he has to be smart enough to figure that out. As a Vice-Presidential candidate, though, his moderate liberalism would help balance a more liberal nominee like Obama or Edwards, his executive experience would shore up a ticket that would otherwise lack any, and he might help secure the Northeast in the event that the Dems were up against Giuliani. Far more important, though, would be the narrative (and you know how I feel about veeps and narratives). The press that gave us stories like this one wouldn't care that Bloomberg was never really a Republican: They would take the "unity ticket" concept and run with it. For Obama, in particular, whose whole campaign is predicated on getting beyond our differences and so forth, the patina of bipartisanship would be invaluable. As for whether Bloomberg would be content playing second fiddle, well, as Starr points out, both Al Gore and Dick Cheney have proved that "the vice presidency is no longer something to be scoffed at." No doubt he would be promised some important policy bailiwicks within an Obama Administration, and while his age might preclude him running for President after the eight years are over, that ain't necessarily the case. (Bloomberg seems pretty vigorous at the moment.) And again, barring a series of extremely unlikely events, he isn't going to become President in 2008 anyway. The Vice-Presidency is a pretty impressive consolation prize, and it's one that might actually be within his grasp. June 20, 2007Hef's WomenAs a frequent, albeit unwilling, viewer of The Girls Next Door, I found Daphne Merkin's meditation on the show for Elle at once maddening (since I found myself disagreeing with her about seventy percent of the time) and fascinating (since she's wicked smart). It makes an interesting companion piece to Jon Zobenica's great Atlantic essay on Playboy, which of course, being a subscriber and all, you've already read. The Future of Homosexuality, AgainA while back, during the whole "gay sheep" controversy, I remarked that if homosexuality can be detected in utero, we're likely to start aborting gay fetuses long before we start trying to "cure" them, because "there will almost certainly be a period of years or decades when it becomes possible to estimate your child's probability of homosexuality in utero, but not to 'inoculate' said child against same-sex attraction." But the more I read about the state of the science on same-sex attraction, the less I'm sure that's right. Consider this fascinating article on "The Science of Gaydar", which has this to say about the state of the "what causes homosexuality" debate: Because many of these newly identified “gay” traits and characteristics are known to be influenced in utero, researchers think they may be narrowing in on when gayness is set—and identifying its possible triggers. They believe that homosexuality may be the result of some interaction between a pregnant mother and her fetus. Several hypothetical mechanisms have been identified, most pointing to an alteration in the flow of male hormones in the formation of boys and female hormones in the gestation of girls. What causes this? Nobody has any direct evidence one way or another, but a list of suspects includes germs, genes, maternal stress, and even allergy—maybe the mother mounts some immunological response to the fetal hormones. So even if homosexuality turns out to have a genetic basis, which I assume it does, it's perfectly possible to imagine researchers finding a way (as the article puts it) "to regulate hormone flow and direct the baby’s orientation" without attaining any of the breakthroughs in gene therapy that would be required to reengineer the genes themselves. (Whereas with Down's Syndrome, say, it seems - based on my admittedly sketchy understanding of the science - to be gene therapy, abortion, or nothing.) In which case you won't have genetic screenings for homosexuality that force socially-liberal parents to decide whether their commitment to gay equality outweighs their desire for grandchildren, and socially-conservative parents to decide whether their opposition to abortion outweighs their distaste for the idea of gay offspring; you'll just have a regimen of hormone treatments that promises to keep your embryo straight, which is something that both sides of the culture war will find much easier to justify. Anyway, that's just one of the interesting issues the article raises, so go read the whole thing. Bloomberg RoundupWhile Hizzoner keeps pretending he won't run, I recommend reading Marc, Matt and David Frum on the potential impact of his candidacy. The Left AscendantRod writes, of the Taibbi discussion: To be clear, I don't believe that we're going to see a left-right fusion of any sort. The value I see in Taibbi's essay is his sense that the left doesn't have a lot to offer now -- that it's populated by a bunch of cranks and juveniles who are great at whining and complaining, but who don't offer much practical help. Ross has said that it's ridiculous for a leftie like Taibbi to complain about the worthlessness of the left when everything's coming up roses for them in advance of the 2008 election. I should have been clearer in my earlier comments. I don't just think that the left is doing well politically; I think that they may get the chance to enact a pretty substantial and wide-ranging policy agenda if things go well for them in '08. Taibbi (and Rod) think liberals don't have anything substantive to offer; I think that's plain wrong, and it's a dangerous delusion for conservatives, in particular, to entertain. True, what the left has to offer now is roughly the same thing it offered in the 1970s and '80s, which is to say a dramatic expansion of the welfare state - but the ideas for how to go about this are much sharper than they used to be, thanks to years in the wilderness and a greater appreciation for free markets, and the political climate is a lot more favorable to a renewed push for social democracy than it was in, say, 1979. If Taibbi disagrees with this agenda, fine, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't, and that's what makes his whinging so irritating: He's trotting out warmed-over Thomas Frank, kvetching about how the DLC made the Democrats "sell out on financial issues in exchange for support from Wall Street" and how "no one has stepped up to talk to the 30 million working poor who struggle to get by on low-wage, part-time jobs" in a year when (as Matt points out) the Dems have moved so far toward the "progressive" wing of the party that Hillary Clinton, the rightward-most of the leading candidates, is running well to the left of John Kerry in 2004. Charlotte Simmons Goes To YaleSo a Yalie named Aurora Nichols - a financial-aid student, and the daughter of community college grads - did a senior project that was supposed to be a commentary on class and money in the Ivy League: She took pictures of her everyday purchases - deodorant, takeout, etc. - and interspersed them with her classmates' abstract paintings. This earned her a profile in the Hartford Courant, which in turn earned her, well, commentary like this on a Yale message board: "The thought if people having to rub elbows with such a gauche and uppity poor and worse her yokel trash family made me ill. Why do we have to be egalitarian?" Ah, Yalies. And then this: "Her story is proof that elites lower the bar for poors. 5th in her class at a TTT high school, and a 1440 SAT should not be getting her into Yale." Seems like a straightforward morality play, right? On the other hand, here's an example, from the Courant profile, of how the brutal realities of class differences were rubbed in Aurora's face at Yale: Yes, I Am Not a LibertarianBut I thank Will Wilkinson for calling that to my attention. More seriously, I think Will is slightly misreading my original post, in which I was setting forth what I think are many liberals' unspoken premises about policies that allow for large-scale immigration - namely, that they're a form of de facto humanitarianism, and thus to be supported. I do not believe myself that "voluntary trade between American employers and Mexicans workers [is] equivalent to 'humanitarian spending.'" Rather, I believe that many people on the left think this way, at least in some sense (at the very least, it seems clear to me that most liberals don't support immigration for the same "voluntary trade 4Ever" reasons as Will and the Wall Street Journal), and so I was trying to argue with them on those grounds. But Will is of course right that I don't share his premises either. For instance: June 19, 2007Our European FutureJames Poulos and Rod Dreher think I'm misreading Matt Taibbi's cri de coeur about the lameness of liberalism, and maybe I am. I think they're misreading the contemporary American left, though, if they think there's any kind of significant fusionism waiting to happen between disillusioned lefties and the anti-Bush Right. Sure, on the margins you can find some left-wingers "experiencing the [same] sort of nauseous reappraisal of Democratic orthodoxy as certain young conservatives are concerning post-Bush Republican orthodoxy," as Poulos puts it. But most of the smart young lefties I know aren't interested in some grand convergence with disillusioned populist-conservatives; they're interested in harnessing the kind of "office-park populism" that gave us Jim Webb and Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester in order to dramatically expand social democracy in the United States. For some, this means a return the old-time religion (a higher minimum wage, strong unions, government jobs programs, etc.); for others, it means a smarter, more growth-friendly form of social democracy (think Denmark, rather than France); for most, it means some combination thereof. But the overall model is still bigger government plus cultural permissiveness, not some kind of "small is beautiful" left-conservatism out to defend the permanent things against the ravages of modernity. The left's vision of an expanded welfare state as both the answer to populist anxieties and the guardian of social liberalism is a perfectly coherent worldview, and it's one that I think has a good chance of accomplishing many of its objectives over the next few decades. (When I say that things are going well for liberals right now, that's what I mean - not just the Dems might trounce the GOP in '08, but that the overall political climate is as favorable to social democracy as it's been in thirty years.) But it's not the kind of worldview that's likely to want, or need, an alliance with the partisans of crunchy conservatism and putting Kansas First. Rod Dreher would find things to like about a more Europeanized United States - there'd be more concern about the environment; more vacation days for working parents; lots of anti-consumerist rhetoric floating around; and so forth. But it would be a defeat, not a victory, for his side of things, and all the failings of the contemporary Republican Party shouldn't convince anyone otherwise. The Cheney PrimaryMatt thinks it's peculiar that Fred Thompson is angling for Lady Thatcher's blessing, and suggests that "it all points to a weird quandry for the follow-the-leader party. Bush is too unpopular to be the ring everybody wants to kiss, Reagan is dead, and H.W. Bush is the incumbent's father ... So you've got Thatcher serving as a kind of ersatz symbolic leader of American conservatism." What's more interesting to me, though, is that Thompson seems to be treating Dick Cheney as the symbolic leader of American conservatism. I thought Thompson's frequent talk about the Scooter Libby case was part of his (quite savvy) stealth campaign to woo the conservative base, but in light of this passage (from that Thatcher story) it seems like part of a broader effort to position himself as Cheney's natural heir: The campaign will also begin rolling out a slate of advisers ... Liz Cheney, the former State Department official and the vice president's elder daughter, is consulting on foreign policy. Longtime GOP guru Mary Matalin, a friend of Thompson, will help shape the campaign's message. That would be the same Mary Matalin, of course, whose fingerprints have been all over three of the biggest right-wing fiascos of the last twenty years: George H.W. Bush's 1992 Presidential campaign, Dick Cheney's Vice-Presidency, and Threshold Books' fall catalogue. June 18, 2007The Case Against the Case Against Hillary
"We have no excuse if Hillary Clinton becomes president," Andrew writes. "We know what and who she is." Well, who and what is she? He quotes Elizabeth Kolbert reviewing the two new Hillary bios: At a retreat for Democratic senators in the spring of 1993, Clinton was asked whether it was realistic to pursue such an ambitious health-care program, given her husband's many other legislative initiatives. She responded that the Administration was prepared to "demonize" those who opposed the task force's recommendations. "That was it for me in terms of Hillary Clinton," Senator Bill Bradley, of New Jersey, told Bernstein. "You don't tell members of the Senate you are going to demonize them. It was obviously so basic to who she is. The arrogance. The assumption that people with questions are enemies. The disdain. The hypocrisy." Fair enough. But even leaving aside whether Bill Bradley's memory of that experience is entirely uncolored by anti-Clinton bias, this exchange took place fourteen years ago, in the midst of Hillary's second, and worst, year as First Lady. I'm certainly prepared to believe that this self-righteous, with-us-or-against-us streak remains an important part of her personality today; on the other hand, she has been a United States Senator for the past six years, and at the very least it seems fair to weigh her record in the Senate against her record as Bill Clinton's health care czarina. My colleague Josh Green profiled Hillary-the-Senator, for instance, and argued that she seems to have taken the lessons of the early 1990s to heart - if anything, he suggested in his conclusion, she's taken them too much to heart: Continue reading "The Case Against the Case Against Hillary" » The Art of the TrailerSomewhere along the line, it was decided that an effective trailer needs to give away at least seventy-five percent of the movie it's advertising - up to and including any plot twists that take place before the sixty-minute mark. I don't mind spoilers all that much, so I've made my peace with this tendency; given how voraciously I consume trailers, I don't really have much choice. But it's still nice to see a teaser trailer like this one for I Am Legend that manages be riveting while giving almost nothing away. If you know a thing or two about Richard Matheson and/or the horror genre, you'll know what's sharing New York City with Will Smith; if not, you'll want to know, which is how a good trailer ought to make you feel. Immigration and InequalityLast week, Matt explained why liberals who worry about inequality don't worry about reducing illegal immigration: What most liberals think is that we should resist efforts to frame the economic problems of working class Americans as solely a matter of zero-sum competition with Mexican peasants, as opposed to something that could be more productively dealt with through measures that might compromise the interests of the global elite. Of course, one might argue that reducing illegal immigration is something that would “compromise the interests of the global elite” – which is one reason (among many others, some of them quite high-minded) why so many members of that elite are on the “left” on immigration. A slightly better way of putting what Matt is driving at, I think, is this: Large-scale immigration from Mexico to the United States is a form of de facto humanitarianism, and since Americans are generally leery of humanitarian spending (primarily because we overestimate the size of our existing foreign aid budget), liberal humanitarians have a vested interest in preserving the existing immigration system. It’s a rare issue where business interests line up on the side of raising the living standards of Third World peasants, and why mess with a good thing? Better, as Matt suggests, to go after the global elite in other arenas – like tax policy, say – where the business class’s preferred policies don’t have humanitarian externalities. To which one might respond that there’s something slightly perverse about pursuing humanitarian ends through policies that lower the incomes of your poorest citizens and raise the incomes of your richest citizens. If I proposed a new AIDS-in-Africa initiative and advocated funding it through a regressive tax that included a tax credit for families making over $75,000, I doubt that many liberals would line up behind the proposal. I would add that I’m by no means opposed to other measures that “compromise the interests of the global elite” to help out the American poor and working class. But the measures I would support – which range from wage subsidies to scrapping the payroll tax and replacing it with a VAT that hits the rich hardest – tend to involve using the government as a middleman, raising wages by redistributing income. I’m increasingly persuaded that this may be a necessary evil, but it’s far from ideal, and where when there’s an opportunity to raise wages without bringing the tax code into it, I think we should take it - particularly when it involves what's supposed to be a pretty basic function of government. June 17, 2007Stop Bitching, Start a RevolutionI've read a lot of "why liberalism is so screwed up" pieces, like this one by Matt Taibbi, over the last decade or so, and they've usually made me feel warm and fuzzy with schadenfreude. But enough is enough. At least until December 2008, I declare a moratorium on left-of-center whinging about how screwed up the left-of-center is. It's one thing to complain when you're down and out, getting smacked upside the head by Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman; it's quite another to complain, as Taibbi does, that your side of the political spectrum is "a skittish, hysterical old lady ... easily mesmerized by half-baked pseudo-intellectual nonsense, and quick to run from anything like real conflict or responsibility" when the world is actually going your way. And I say that even though I actually agree some of the substance of what Taibbi has to say about the tensions and contradictions with American liberalism; it's not that he's wrong, it's that his tone is all wrong for a political moment when his side happens to be winning. Look, liberalism has a lot of problems. FDR isn't walking through that door. And so on. But America's liberal political party just scored an enormous political victory, taking back both houses of Congress from what was supposed to be an invincible GOP machine, and there are plenty of reasons - from electoral math to fundraising numbers to, well, the polls - to think that 2008 is going to be a banner year for liberals/progressives/whatever. The right had the left on the ropes for a long time, but for now, at least, it's the other way around. Public opinion is going liberalism's way on everything from gay marriage to taxes to health care to poverty to global warming, and the Iraq War has temporarily undone conservatism's long-running advantage on foreign policy. There's more money flowing into liberal coffers than ever before; the left is well ahead of the right in internet organizing; the rising generation is having its political views forged in the crucible of the Bush years, with predictable consequences - and for once, the right-wing coalition's intellectual contradictions are more pronounced than liberalism's divisions. Obviously, all of this could turn on a dime. But at the moment, liberalism looks less like a "hysterical old lady," and more like a winning coalition, than it has in years or even decades. There will be plenty of time for bitching if the Democrats blow it in '08; until then, spare me. June 15, 2007The Continuing ConversationAlex Massie continues the Knocked Up-and-abortion discussion. Russell Arben Fox rounds up the Rorty conversation, and pitches in with his two (okay, more like fifty) cents. And Emily Nussbaum has a great essay on the narrative arc of The Sopranos, and how David Chase related to his audience. Here's an excerpt: ... the moment that really wrenched the show off its axis was a brief, almost throwaway scene in the third season, in an episode titled “Second Opinion.” I remember the first time I watched it, the way it seemed to invert everything that came before. Carmela goes to a psychiatrist we’ve never met before, a Dr. Krakower. She is eager to make the session a referendum on personal growth: She wants to “define my boundaries more clearly”—from her perspective, the issue is that she’s unhappily married. She’s toying with divorce. Read the whole thing. Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at HimIt's nice to have everything I've ever assumed about Zach "voice of my generation" Braff - no, not that he's a no-talent poseur; you can tell that just by watching his movies - more or less confirmed. And by "confirmed," I mean "confirmed by an anonymous source in an online gossip item." Obviously. But the circumstantial evidence keeps piling up. Secularism and MarxismRuminating on whether the new mass secularism is really all that new, Jonah writes: ... both Waldman and Ross seem to be ignoring a fairly large elephant in the corner: Communists — or Marxists, doctrinaire socialists, dialectical materialists, whatever you want to call them. Here was a very tribal bunch. They were dedicated to the overthrow of religion and religious opiates. They protected themselves in tribal fashion in academia, government and politics. They defined themselves largely by what they hated. Etc, etc. Indeed, it's worth remembering that both Marx and Engels came to their Communism via their atheism rather than the other way around (Josh Muravchik's book Heaven on Earth makes this point vividly). Oh, definitely - but it's important to distinguish the American experience from the European here. While Communism was certainly a tribal phenomenon in the American context, it was never a mass phenomenon in the way that the new secularism seems to be, or seems capable of becoming. It was an intellectual tribe, but not a political demographic. In Europe, by contrast, Marxism was a mass movement, as were various other anti-clericalist ideologies. That's why my Atlantic piece argues that the rise of a politically-assertive secular demographic in American life, however narrow its appeal, represents an unexpected case of continental convergence, in which America's religious politics are likely to look at least somewhat more like Europe's going forward. (And vice versa, I suggest, given the culture-war battles provoked by the rise of Islam across the Atlantic.) Though it's certainly possible, as a commenter points out, that if the religious right fragments (and the Republican Party goes into the political wilderness), the nascent mass secularism will fragment as well, and what seems to be an anti-clerical dawn in American life will prove to be a false one. At the very least, there's going to be ebb and flow in the culture wars, and since we've just experienced a high tide in the Bush years it's likely that passions will cool off somewhat in the short run. Still, my sense - based both on the data and on my own personal experience - is that mass secularism has put down sturdier roots in American soil of late than anyone would have expected, say, thirty years ago, and that it's both something new and something that's here to stay. The New SecularismPaul Waldman, in the Prospect: In 1984, 7.3 percent of respondents answered "none" when the General Social Survey asked what their religious preference was. Twenty years later, nearly twice as many, 14.3 percent, gave the same answer. Of course, the number of non-religious people will varies depending on how you ask the question. (For instance, the National Election Studies asks respondents whether religion plays an important part of their lives; in 2004, 23 percent said no.) But however you define them, no one doubts that their numbers are increasing. This dovetails - unsurprisingly, since we're looking at some of the same data - with my piece in the latest Atlantic, which you could read for the price of, say, two lunches at Subway if you felt like taking advantage of this only-for-blog-readers subscription deal. (But no pressure.) The argument, in short, is that just as the elite-level secularization of the 1960s and '70s (in the intelligentsia, the Courts, and the Democratic Party) produced backlash in the form of the religious right, so now that backlash has bred its own backlash, in the form of a mass secularism whose attitudes toward religion, politics, and church-state separation are more European than anything we've seen before in American political life. This, not the supposed right-wing religious revival that conservatives champion and liberals dread, is the newest new thing in American political life, and the trend that's likely to have the most impact on the culture wars over the next decade or so. June 14, 2007 |
