Groupthink

This is pretty remarkable.

Are Progressives Progressive?

More on that subject, from Millman, Poulos, Larison and Feeney.

Here's an interesting bit from Feeney:

the question is whether today’s (don’t call them “liberals,” call them) “progressives” operate within [the Progressive] tradition, or whether, as Yglesias has it, it describes a coalition, not a coherent worldview. One obvious fact that contradicts Douthat and Levy is that among most prominent segments of the left (intellectual, bureaucratic, activist) you don’t find much truck with the idea of progress. The traditional engines of Enlightenment progress – western reason, science, trade – have some real enemies among the multicultural, environmentalist, and anti-globalization left. Yes there is some conspicuous impatience to remove issues from public debate in the name of (real or spurious) scientific consensus, and this smacks of the old progressivism, but in general it’s the neo-Reaganite right that fetishizes optimism, believes in things like destiny and in America as the advance guard of western democratic values, etc.

I think both American political coalitions include people who fetishize optimism and progress, actually: the neo-Reaganites are more likely to locate the vanguard of progress in the United States, and the Clintonians in a somewhat more nebulous global community, but both tend toward a "bridge to the twenty-first century" visions of steady upward ascent in human affairs that has roots in the Progressive Era. Meanwhile, both coalitions include skeptics of progress as well, your Robert Borks on the one hand and your Bill McKibbens on the other. This ought to make the current left-right alignment deeply unstable (how can McKibben vote for the same party as Larry Summers? etc.), but for reasons that belong to a longer blog post than this one it holds together better than you might expect.

What Is Eugenics?

Ezra writes that it's "very unfair" to apply the word "eugenics" to, say, the contemporary trend toward the elimination of Down's Syndrome by selective abortion, because "traditionally, the term has been used to denote efforts to direct or encourage breeding by high status, socially dominant individuals in order to select for their characteristics, and discourage breeding by low status individuals (criminals, the insane, blacks, etc) in order to wipe their characteristics from the gene pool. For Ross to conflate that with parents who decide to abort infants with medically disastrous genetic mutations is a real stretch."

First of all, Down's Syndrome is not a "medically disastrous" genetic mutation, unless you take an extremely broad definition of the term "disastrous." Second, while the means of "traditional eugenics" were obviously very different from what's emerging now - involving state power rather than parental choice, and selective breeding/sterilization rather than prenatal genetic screening and abortion - the ends were the same: the genetic improvement of the human species through the scientific management of the reproductive process. Obviously, the question of whether and when to apply the term is contested, since nobody wants to be associated with the way early-twentieth century eugenics was practiced in the United States. But the use of the word to describe the abortion of the genetically-disordered, and the possible long-term Gattacization of reproduction, is hardly a reductio ad Hitlerum; it's more of a reductio ad these guys. Moreover, the usage hardly unique to the political Right - see here and here and here and here and so on. (That guy Habermas: What a wingnut!) Indeed, many defenders of genetic enhancement through prenatal intervention - and by other means as they become available - have embraced the term "liberal eugenics" (to be contrasted with the old, authoritarian eugenics), rather than repudiating it. Which suggests that it's not all that "unfair" a word for conservatives to use to describes the practices and trends in question.

The Latin Mass (II)

Rod Dreher's thoughts are here. Among other things, he writes:

I don't understand how it is that the Latin mass can be something that nobody but the tiniest sliver of Catholics want, but it can also be a nuclear bomb that obliterates the Catholic Church. Benedict is making a slight accomodation to help a certain number of Catholics who have endured a lot of very, very difficult times, and who are in many cases making extraordinary sacrifices to keep the faith. I don't understand why making the Tridentine mass more widely available should be interpreted as a move designed to force non-traditionalists out of the Church. If the Pope were withdrawing the Paul VI mass and replacing it with the old mass, they'd have a point. But he's not; he's only offering more choices to the faithful, within the Church's continuing tradition. And that's wrong ... why?

Downes' point about the pope's latest move exacerbating the factionalizing of contemporary Catholicism is more on point, but it says more about Downes' lack of paying attention these past decades than it does about the pope. Many engaged Catholics of the left and the right already parish-shop. Everybody knows which parishes in a given diocese have the reputation for being orthodox, and which have the reputation for being progressive. It shouldn't be that way, I recognize, but that's how it's shaken out since the Council. The divisions Downes sees coming have been with us for some time now. True, most Catholics continue on at their parish, and probably don't get involved with the faith at the level of caring overmuch whether the pastor is orthodox or progressive. But is that a good thing? In most of the parishes I was involved in as a Catholic, peace was kept because the priests/deacons avoided talking about controversial aspects of Catholic teaching.

I agree with all of this, and - just to be clear - I don't think that the slight damage that may be done the tattered unity of American Catholicism outweighs the benefits of restoring a much-beloved liturgy that probably never should have been restricted in the first place, and that will enhance the religious devotion of many thousands of faithful Catholics, most of whom are not nutty Hutton Gibson types but sincere, ordinary believers who merely want to worship God in the most elevated manner they know. I just find myself very, very weary of the divisions in the American Catholic Church, of which the liturgical division is just one manifestation, and which make it so very hard to just be a ordinary Catholic, orthodox and American at the same time. (Not that Christianity is supposed to be easy, of course ...)

Jody Bottum wrote a long essay on Catholic culture in America last year, in which he suggested that "one can find at least hints that Catholicism has finally begun to leave the deadlocked past behind." I liked the essay and the sentiment, and I certainly hope that he's right, but I don't always see it. The post-Vatican II battle has cooled off, yes, but sometimes it feels like there's an awful lot of scorched earth left behind where nothing green is growing.

A Question of Motives

Matt, on the Pollack-O'Hanlon pro-surge op-ed:

... it's worth noting the incentives that O'Hanlon and Pollack face. If they bow to reality and say the US should move rapidly to start cutting our losses in Iraq, then they're people who advocated in favor of a disastrous policy and this'll be bad for their careers. If, by contrast, they say the surge is looking good, and then work together with Bush administration officials and The Weekly Standard to construct a stab in the back narrative about Iraq, then they can hope to salvage their professional reputations at the expense of liberals.

I think the professional incentives cut in precisely the opposite direction. O'Hanlon and Pollack's current reputations depend on their perceived status as centrist wise men who write for places like, well, the Atlantic. Associating themselves with the dwindling faction that still hopes for victory in Iraq, or with a "stab in the back" narrative once the war is over, might make them popular guests on the right-wing talk show circuit, but it's likely to undercut their current status in the D.C. commentariat, not enhance it. From a professional standpoint, it would be far safer for them to take a Peter Beinartesque route, apologize for their mistakes, and bash Bush whenever the subject of Iraq comes up than to associate themselves with a strategy that only Bill Kristol, Joe Lieberman and David Petraeus seem to think has any chance of succeeding. That's what the "serious" people and would-be wise men on the center-left are doing these days, so far as I can tell - backing a (very slow) withdrawal from Iraq, while concentrating their fire on both the precipitous-withdrawal crowd and the proponents of the surge. And besides, isn't a common complaint on the anti-war left (and right) that hawkish pundits who reverse course don't suffer, career-wise, for having "advocated in favor of a disastrous policy"?

There are personal incentives - the desire to be vindicated against all odds chief among them - that cut in favor of O'Hanlon and Pollack supporting the surge, to be sure. But unless they define professional success as a sinecure somewhere in the vast right-wing conspiracy, which I doubt, I don't think they can be accused of careerism.

Update: Jon Chait makes a similar point.

The Latin Mass

As a self-identified conservative Catholic who's regularly appalled by the state of the liturgy in the American Church, I'm generally sympathetic to those cheering the reinstatement (or, since it was never technically banned, the promotion) of the Tridentine Rite. However, the argument raised in this op-ed (via Andrew) speaks to some of my own fears:

It’s easy enough to see where this is going: same God, same church, but separate camps, each with an affinity for vernacular or Latin, John XXIII or Benedict XVI. Smart, devout, ambitious Catholics — ecclesial young Republicans, home-schoolers, seminarians and other shock troops of the faith — will have their Mass. The rest of us — a lumpy assortment of cafeteria Catholics, guilty parents, peace-’n’-justice lefties, stubborn Vatican II die-hards — will have ours. We’ll have to prod our snoozing pewmates when to sit and stand; they’ll have to rein in their zealots.

And we probably won’t see one another on Sunday mornings, if ever.

I suppose I would fall into the author's "smart, devout, ambitious Catholic" camp, but I also think that shifting to the vernacular was the right decision overall, however badly implemented; I think that the attempt to increase lay participation in the Mass, however dreadful many of its fruits, was a necessary and long-overdue step in a Church that still has a serious problem with clericalism; and I'm troubled by the self-marginalizing tendencies among many of the people who share my understanding of what Catholic orthodoxy is supposed to mean. I admire what home-schooling parents do, but I don't want to home-school my kids; I wish more people went to confession and fewer people went up to Communion, but I also want to attend a church where the lukewarm and the zealous can feel comfortable sitting side-by-side in the pews; I understand the impulse behind Ave Maria University and all the other redoubts of neo-orthodoxy, but I'm wary of the separatism they embody. And I hate the polarization in the Church that makes me feel like I have to choose between what the op-ed accurately describes as the listlessness of the typical suburban Mass on the one hand - thick with "parents sedating children with Cheerios; priests preaching refrigerator-magnet truisms; amateur guitar strumming that was lame in 1973" - and what often seems like a strident, more-Catholic-than-the-Pope zealotry on the other.

The Blame Game

Robert Novak:

Karl Rove, President Bush's political lieutenant, told a closed-door meeting of 2008 Republican House candidates and their aides Tuesday that it was less the war in Iraq than corruption in Congress that caused their party's defeat in the 2006 elections.

Rove's clear advice to the candidates is to distance themselves from the culture of Washington. Specifically, Republican candidates are urged to make clear they have no connection with disgraced congressmen such as Duke Cunningham and Mark Foley.
In effect, Rove was rebutting the complaint inside the party that George W. Bush is responsible for Republican miseries by invading Iraq.

Obviously I find this rebuttal less-than-convincing. (How many people, I wonder, have even heard of Duke Cunningham?) But while Rove is wrong, he isn't all wrong. The important thing to recognize is that all of the GOP's problems in '06 - Iraq, Katrina, and scandals in DC - reinforced one another, fitting easily into a single overarching narrative of misgovernment, incompetence, fecklessness and corruption. Or put another way, the Republican Party found itself on the ropes from '05 onward because of Iraq (and the rising appeal of a a new-model populism), and first the Katrina response and then the various Beltway scandals, from Abramoff to Foley, were the body blows that kept them there.

Going forward, though, the notion that Congressional Republicans need to mainly worry about distancing themselves from Capitol Hill corruption, rather than the Bush Administration's Iraq policy, is at best unpersuasive, at worst absurd. Sure, the lingering memory of scandal will probably play some role in the '08 race, but voters' memories are short, particularly once a party loses power. (The indictment of Dan Rostenkowski wasn't a big issue in the '96 and '98 elections, for instance.) At the very least, Foley and Abramoff and Cunningham won't be in the public's face in '08 the way they were in the midterms. Whereas Iraq will be.

Headquarters

If you're curious where Yuval Levin, Glenn Beck and I get our marching orders, well ...

Note the presence of (ahem) Rainier Wolfcastle.

A New Eugenics?

Kevin Drum, scoffing at the suggestion that contemporary progressives might be enabling eugenics:

Now, here's the thing: Glenn Beck, Yuval Levin, and Ross Douthat didn't come up with this stuff themselves. But it didn't just pop up out of nowhere either. It's way too abstruse for that. Rather, some bright boy or girl in the conservative movement dreamed this up and now it's being run up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes. If it gets some attention, it'll be rolled out to a wider audience.

So whose bright idea was this? Is there a proud parent out there who wants to take credit?

Leaving aside the hilarious idea that I, Yuval Levin, and Glenn Beck (!!) are all getting fed the same talking points from some Central Command deep in the Republican Noise Machine, has Kevin Drum ever, you know, read any right-of-center magazines in the last ten years or so? Or any magazines at all? Has he read any Leon Kass, or Francis Fukuyama? (Or Will Saletan, for that matter?) Conservatives - and not only conservatives - have been fretting about eugenic-ish tendencies in the contemporary West (and elsewhere) for as long as I've been following politics. And the trends that the Right dislikes find their defenders, or at least their enablers, in two camps: bio-libertarians who welcome our transhuman future, and progressives who, whether they welcome transhumanism or not, are committed to an unfettered right to abortion, with all the consequences that entails.

Now, look - I assume that Drum is untroubled by the scale of pre-natal eugenics around the globe. I assume that he thinks that the elimination of the genetically unfit in the womb isn't something we should be worried about, because the state isn't involved and anyway fetuses aren't human beings. I assume that he's on roughly the same page as Johann Hari, who makes the case for "liberal eugenics" here on the grounds that it is "entered into by parents and it is motivated by love." That's fine: Just say so, and spare me the "eugenics? what eugenics?" hand-waving, and the pretense that conservatives are just making up crazy fantasies to smear liberals. A difference of opinion about bioethics isn't a smear.

(Though yes, Glenn Beck is certainly crazy.)

Emoticons :)

Count me as a reluctant member of the pro-emoticon club. I really only use the :), and only when it seems absolutely necessary - but if you get past the fact that yes, emoticons seem intended for “naïve tweens on AOL Instant Messenger finding out after-school soccer practice is canceled,” they actually do serve an extremely useful signalling function, particularly for those of us who tend toward sarcasm and other ambiguities in our email conversations.

Image emoticons, however, are obviously beyond the pale.

The Right's "Science" Problem

Isaac Chotiner (and various commenters) seem to think it's self-evidently ridiculous for me to put quotation marks around the "Science" that liberals claim to be defending against conservatives, given that conservatives are, in fact, arrayed against the scientific consensus on several issues. By coincidence, I wrote a piece on roughly this subject in 2005, during the intelligent design debate, and here it is. It's behind the TNR firewell, so I've pulled out some excerpts below the fold.

Continue reading "The Right's "Science" Problem" »

Ron Paul Sells Out

Ramesh, from a few years back, on Frank Meyer:

The influence of fusionism has not been wholly positive. Meyer contributed to an unfortunate tendency among conservatives toward theoretical maximalism, as in his casual reference to “the totalitarian implications of the federal school lunch program.”

David Freddoso, yesterday, on a sense-of-the-House resolution to the effect that public schools should offer healthy lunches:

What to make of Ron Paul's "aye" vote? Is he selling out to win the presidential race?

A Paul staffer informs me: "It was a sense of Congress [resolution]. It was harmless. It didn't do anything." Also, he said, Dr. Paul figures that as long as there is a school lunch program, the least we can do is make sure it isn't doing too much damage to American children.

Well, okay. I would have still thought of this vote as a teachable moment for the American people. After all, it's not often that someone like Paul gets all this attention. The wave of interest in him as the anti-war Republican gives him a nice platform from which to explain to liberals why socialism is bad.

Indeed. I know that whenever I try to explain to my liberal friends why I'm not a socialist, I usually start with the case against healthy school lunches and work my way forward from there.

Photo by Flickr user Bookgrl used under a Creative Commons license.

Links on a Friday Afternoon

Josh Levin on the worst week in sports history. Robert Messenger on why fans want cyclists to cheat. Reihan on David Brooks. Matt on what the great Brooks debate tells us about the advantages of blogging. Matt and Ezra and Matt again on the future of newspapers. Marc on Joe Trippi. William Lind makes the case for a rapprochement with Iran; Noah Millman is skeptical.

Now do your patriotic duty - get out there and see The Simpsons Movie!

Harry Potter and the Progressive Scolds

Shorter Dana Goldstein: Because J.K. Rowling, in the course of writing a fantasy saga that takes as a central theme the evils of racism, chauvinism and sexism, and the importance of treating all sentient creatures with respect, did not also suggest that heredity and family lineage are completely meaningless, that women and men are completely identical in every respect, and that there are no ingrained cultural differences between different intelligent species, such as humans and goblins, she is a Tool of the Patriarchy.

Spinning the Cocoon

That would be Hugh Hewitt, offering an utterly unconvincing explanation for why the Republicans should skip the Youtube/CNN debate. Patrick Ruffini, on the other hand, gets it exactly right:

It's stuff like this that will set the GOP back an election cycle or more on the Internet. No matter the snazzy Web features and YouTube videos they may put up, if they're fundamentally uncomfortable with the idea of interacting with real people online, what's the point?

Having spent the better part of a decade working at the intersection of politics and the Web, I can't help but feel of a deep, deep sense of dismay that we're missing something so basic. This is EXACTLY why I am afraid that we will be outraised by $100 million or more in 2008.

Yes, some of the questions on Monday were trivial. Yes, they were partisan. (I expect many of the 9/17 questioners to be partisan Republicans.) Yes, they were messy. But so is democracy. And the fact that some place so much faith in the broken mainstream media over a benign format like this one says a lot about the difficult straits the Republicans are in right now.

Hewitt's response? That the GOP candidates shouldn't participate because the left-wing MSM types picking the YouTube questions might throw one in that asks Rudy Giuliani about his connection to a priest accused of sexual abuse, an old friend of Hizzoner who has worked for Giuliani Partners since being barred from active ministry five years ago. Because I'm sure that if Rudy skips the YouTube debate, his connections to various shady characters will never, ever become something that he needs to address while running for President. Just like when John Kerry tried to ignore the Swift Boat Veterans, the issue completely went away ...

The Best News You'll Hear All Day

I can't say I've been all that thrilled about the prospect of a post-Calista Flockhart Harrison Ford suiting up for Indiana Jones and the Retirement Home of Doom, but if they're bringing Marion Ravenwood back - the only Indy love interest worth a damn - then I might have to get excited about it.

David Brooks, Yet Again

In the course of a multi-post assault on David Brooks' column on neo-populism, Ezra Klein writes:

Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam are always telling me to cut David Brooks more slack, to extend the assumption of good faith, to listen to the interesting things he has to say. So I'd really like one of them to dissolve my current impression that Brooks' latest column -- which tries to make the argument that the economy really is in very good shape, save for some issues with inequality -- isn't a pack of lies and deceptions.

I don't know about "pack," since much of what Brooks has to say I agree with: The Hacker thesis about rising income volatility seems increasingly dubious; globalization has brought a host of benefits to middle-class Americans, in terms of lower prices and greater diversity of goods, that don't show up in wage growth figures; much of the growth in income inequality is the result of trends like performance pay, longer hours for upper-income workers, and the increasing value of major corporations, none of which are amenable to easy policy fixes; tax revenues are higher and the deficit is in better shape than most liberals predicted a few years ago; and so forth.

But yes, the first two assertions Brooks makes in his column are technically correct but misleading, and if Ezra thinks that makes him a liar than I doubt there's anything I can do to disabuse him of the notion. While critiquing the doom and gloom of the neopopulists, Brooks cites rising incomes for poor families over the last twenty-five years without noting that they've stagnated or fallen in the last five; he cites wage growth figures from last year without noting that they're down in the first six months of this year; and he uses "average" wages rather than "median" wages, when the latter tends to be a better tool for assessing how the typical worker is doing. Tyler Cowen mounts a defense of the latter two points here, noting, among other things, that the "average wage" measure in question excludes management-level wages (including the skyrocketing CEO salaries that can skew averages upward) and is therefore a more solid metric than Brooks' opponents argue. But overall, I think the liberal critics are right, and Brooks' use of the data in these two examples deserves criticism and correction.

Whether that justifies calling him a "liar," or whether it might be more appropriate to treat him the way I would assume Ezra would like to be treated himself - as a fallible pundit who is sometimes insufficiently skeptical about information that dovetails with his preconceptions, and who merits respectful disagreement in such cases rather sneering and name-calling - well, make up your own mind. I'm done arguing about David Brooks. I think he's an excellent columnist; I think his body of work speaks for itself; I think that liberals who demand that the Times sack him every time he gets a piece of data wrong or attacks a straw man or commits one of the hundreds of venial sins that every columnist commits (yes, even Paul Krugman) should get a grip. And that's where I'll leave it.

Mendozzzzzzza!!!!!!!!

I'm obviously looking forward to seeing The Simpsons Movie and all, but I'm a little baffled to hear that the plot involves "Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has been elected president of the United States." In The Simpsons alterna-verse, shouldn't that be President Rainier Wolfcastle?

Dept. of Pyrrhic Victories

Obviously, the political undesirability/demonization of the term "liberal," and the left-wing adoption of the term "progressive" instead, has been an epiphenomenon of a larger conservative ascendancy in American life, and as such it isn't something right-wingers can really complain about. Still, I don't think conservatives should consider it a great victory that the modern Democratic Party's leading candidate wants to associate herself with a political tradition that, insofar as it's philosophically distinct from liberalism (and obviously there are many historical complexities involved here), is from the conservative perspective more dangerously utopian as well. I take Matt's point that "Progressive" is basically just a useful umbrella term for a left-of-center coalition. On the other hand, I'm not so sure that it's a coincidence that the revival of progressivism as a political label has coincided with a more strident secularism/atheism, a greater obsession with the supposed right-wing threat to "science" (read: left-wing policy preferences on stem cell research, cloning, genetic engineering, etc.), and a greater sympathy for Darwinism-as-a-universal-theory among thinkers associated with the political left. In one sense, as I've argued elsewhere, conservatives should welcome the relabeling of liberalism as a blow for linguistic precision; at the same time, I think it's at least partially the reflection of trends within the left that conservatives should regard with suspicion, if not outright hostility.

Ask Not For Whom The Cat Purrs

He purrs for thee:

A US cat that is reportedly able to sense when a nursing home's residents are about to die is baffling doctors.

Oscar has a habit of curling up next to patients at the home in Providence, Rhode Island, in their final hours.

According to the author of a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, the two-year-old cat has been observed to be correct in 25 cases so far.

Here's the NEJM piece. I'm sure this is grist for the great cats-dogs debate; I'm just not sure whose side it buttresses. (via Rod Dreher)

The Year of the Spouses

While putting Fred Thompson's bad week in context, Ambinder zeroes in on Mrs. Thompson's role in the campaign:

Campaigns at this stage often require a single puppet master. Good Ole' Fred has one: wife Jeri Kehn Thompson.

Thompson unwisely allowed tension to develop between his wife and the rest of the campaign staff. Ex-campaign-manager designate Tom Collamore did not mesh with Jeri Thompson and the friction between the two was evident to the rest of the staff. At times, Kehn Thompson would simply countermand Collamore's instructions. She has final hiring authority -- something that every campaign manager needs and Collamore never had. The Thompson presidential staff will be her staff more than Fred's. ...

Now -- the strong hand of Jeri Thompson is not necessarily a force for evil. Spouses can be good campaign managers: Jenny Sanford managed her husband Mark's four successful congressional and gubernatorial campaigns in South Carolina. But Thompson's press has been brutal and borderline sexist, a consequence of her many detractors speaking on background to reporters. Thompson has worked as a professional political consultant and knows the basics of putting a campaign together. And Fred Thompson trusts her to make decisions. Incoming staffers need to accept that Jeri is first among equals. It is unclear whether any adviser will rise as a counterweight to the spouse. Probably not: Michelle Obama, Elizabeth Edwards, Bill Clinton and Ann Romney are probably the most powerful quartet of spouses to exert influence in a presidential race ever.

Bush, of course, had something like this situation in '00, except that it was a work wife - Karen Hughes - running the show as Karl Rove's co-equal, not Laura herself. Combining the two positions seems risky: The Clintons pulled something like it off in '92, but not without an awful lot of bumps along the way. In any case, it will be fascinating to watch how this dynamic unfolds across multiple campaigns - particularly with Elizabeth Edwards' cancer finding its way into the race, or not - and there's probably a book or at least a long magazine article in here somewhere, for an enterprising reporter. (Marc?)

Boring!

No, Newt, don't do it! Don't endorse Fred Thompson - or at the very least, don't endorse him yet! Play hard to get! Demand the Vice-Presidential nod as the price of your support, and get it in writing! Keep flirting with jumping into the race! Look at the polls - even with Thompson in the mix, "none of the above" is still in the lead! This might be your hour after all!

Above all, ask yourself - What Would Charles De Gaulle Do? He wouldn't endorse Fred Thompson, that's for damn sure.

Dear Mr. Zemeckis ...

... They have this radical new technology. It's kind of like the motion-capture you used first in Polar Express, and now in Beowulf, in that you start out by filming actual live human actors. Only get this: You don't have to put them in "standard-issue bodysuits covered head-to-toe in tiny sensors"; you can just put them in costume. And you don't have to take their captured movements and place them into a computer-generated scene; you can just build a set and film them moving around in it. And best of all, your actors don't end up looking like characters in a video game, or a mediocre computer-animated kids movie - they look like (I know, this is hard to believe) real people. They call this cutting-edge, newer-than-new technology "live-action." Think about it.

Look, I can understand the appeal of motion-capture. It's done wonders for creating fantastic CGI creatures, from Gollum to King Kong, and at some point - maybe some point soon - it will give directors tremendous flexibility in how and what they film. And obviously, somebody has to be a pioneer and make films filled with glossy-looking, zombie-ish motion-captured characters (like, well, Polar Express) so that others can make better ones later.

But I want to see a good Beowulf movie, dammit, not one that's a technical leap forward but still looks, in its trailer at least, more like a high-end video game than any Old English epic ought to.

The Deathly Hallows

There have always been two critical camps on the Harry Potter phenomenon – the small band of haters, which includes Harold Bloom, A.S. Byatt, and lesser lights like Ron Charles, and the host of apologists, which includes more or less everybody else. I'm a card-carrying member of the latter group; I’m not a Potter obsessive by any stretch, having read each book only once, but I am a great admirer of Rowling’s work, and I’ve always thought that that her skill as a storyteller and world-builder outweighs her literary weaknesses. Reviewing The Half-Blood Prince for NR, I put the pro-Rowling case this way:

… the Potter saga succeeds as few fictions do, and proves, in the process, that there's more to writing than felicitous prose or perfect psychological realism. As with James Fenimore Cooper, or H. P. Lovecraft, or any of the host of novelists whose stories linger long after their stylistic blunderings are forgotten, it's in that mysterious more that Harry Potter's success resides: not in the telling, but in the tale.

I would still stand by this assessment overall – but Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I’m sorry to say, is grist for the haters. (Obviously, spoilers follow below.)

Continue reading "The Deathly Hallows" »

Stratification by Biology

In the Cato Unbound discussion of Brink Lindsey's (excellent) book, Julian Sanchez writes:

On the economic front, since everyone seems to be focused on healthcare, it's not entirely clear to me which way technological progress in the medical sector is going to push. It may be that ever-rising costs make clear that public provision of cutting-edge care for everyone is unsustainable. But, paradoxically, medical innovation might also undermine the sense that we live in a "post-scarcity" economy, even in the colloquial sense. Suppose, for instance, that Ray Kurzweil is right that cascading and accelerating development will soon entail that buying a few more years of life with current state-of-the art tech allows people to survive until the next innovation, which will give them enough of a boost to reach the next horizon, and so on indefinitely. It might become possible to radically extend the human lifespan, but only at massive cost. Would we countenance a situation where the very wealthy enjoyed a century or more of middle-aged vigor while the rest of us were stooped and grey after a mere 80 or 90 years? Or would our conception of what constitutes an acceptable amount of "survival" expand to fill the available space? This may sound like sci-fi speculation, but again, if we consider the scale at which Lindsey's argument works, if it works, we need to consider the kind of changes we should anticipate by midcentury, not the next midterms.

I'm currently involved in finishing up what aspires to be a very sober and serious book about the Republican Party and class politics, and sober and serious books don't, by definition, traffic in Kurzweil-style theories about the coming availability of radical life extension. Nonetheless, I have a strong suspicion that something like what Julian summons up - some form of radical transhumanish innovation that's available to the rich long before it trickles down to the middle-class and the poor - is going to radically change the landscape of Western politics at some point over the next century or three.

I, of course, will immediately seek a leadership position in the Butlerian Jihad when that moment arrives - which again, isn't really something that you can say in a sober and serious book about public policy. That's why they invented blogs, I guess.

Update: Just to be clear - yes, as Matt says, the Butlerian Jihad was directed against thinking machines, not transhuman genetic engineering projects. But I think the spirit of the Butlerian Jihad would apply equally well to both. Clearly, this makes me a theological liberal.

The Cocoon

The relaunched page for the Victory Caucus is intended to be "a one-stop-shop for anyone interested in learning about what's really going on in the war." To this end, it boasts two columns of links: One is headlined "Official US Sources," and includes releases from Centcom and DoD touting progress in Iraq; the other is headlined "Blogs and New Media," and includes links to military bloggers and freelancers like Michael Totten. There are exactly zero links to any of the media organizations that do the vast majority of on-the-ground reporting from the Middle East.

When the next generation of conservatives sits down to analyze where this generation of conservatives went wrong, they would do well to start with efforts like the Victory Caucus page, and the mentality it represents - not the traditional (and justified) right-wing belief that many establishment institutions aren't to be trusted, but the naive and ridiculous theory that they can be ignored entirely. As those noted pacifists and appeasers Rich Lowry and Max Boot have suggested, this delusion hasn't just cost conservatives their credibility and their majority; it's contributed mightily to America's struggles in Iraq.

TTWOU?

Is it just me, or is the Giuliani campaign's insistence on renaming the post-9/11 conflict with al Qaeda "the Terrorists' War on Us" easily the worst coinage of this election season? It doesn't just tie up the tongue; it makes it sound like America's in a defensive crouch and getting pummeled, which is hardly the image that Rudy's "peace through ass-kicking" candidacy is trying to project. The "War on Terror" is dumb for all kinds of reasons, but at least it's pro-active.

The Spoiler

Andrew's right: As the Libertarian Party's nominee for President, Ron Paul would be as formidable as any fringe-ish third party candidate could hope to be; depending on the general election matchup, he might be able to match Ralph Nader's 2000 influence, or even slightly exceed it. If Giuliani's the GOP nominee, Paul can woo the hard-core civil libertarians, the hard-core anti-immigration types, and the hard-core pro-lifers; if Hillary's the Democratic nominee, he can pick up some Nader voters who think she's insufficiently anti-war. As Chris Caldwell's profile makes clear, the Paul candidacy attracts more than its share of kooks and nutters, but that's no bar to him getting lots of media attention and enough votes to shake things up a bit.

Yes, he's said he won't leave the GOP, but he ran for president on the Libertarian ticket once before, so his party loyalty can't be all that strong. And as long as the internet fundraising keeps rolling in, you know an awful lot of people will be telling him to do it.

Nixon Redux?

Matt Continetti, making the case against the Rudy-as-Nixon argument, points out that Rudy's "economic program is pretty much in a separate galaxy from Nixon's" - that the Giuliani neocon-influenced foreign policy is likewise roughly the opposite of the detente-and-realism overseas vision of the Nixon-Kissinger years - and that Rudy is very unlikely to appoint the next Harry Blackmun, what with his Federalist Society legal advisors and his pledge to appoint strict constructionist judges. These are strong points; where Matt's case is weaker, I think, is when he tries to rebut Michael Gerson's suggestion that Giuliani is "a talented man without an ideological compass." Matt writes:

The only evidence for this that Gerson offers is Giuliani's endorsement of Democrat Mario Cuomo over George Pataki in the 1994 New York gubernatorial race. But Giuliani's (wrongheaded) decision had more to do with his longstanding rivalry with Pataki and Pataki's patron, former New York senator Alfonse D'Amato, than ideology.

Hmmm. I would say that a Republican politician's willingness to endorse a member of the opposition party - and not just any Democrat, but a lion of liberalism - suggests a weaker-than-average ideological compass, at the very least.

Continue reading "Nixon Redux?" »

The Fanboy As Critic

Do you know what I really dislike? Extremely long critical essays that describe their subject, often in painstaking and florid detail, without bothering to interpret it. Like, for instance, this NYRB essay on The Sopranos: In more than 5,000 words, Geoffrey O'Brien manages to tell us almost nothing about the show that a reasonably literate viewer doesn't already know. This is the essay for you if you never noticed that on The Sopranos, "bad or misconstrued information bounced around in a world defined by random breaks, mostly unlucky," or that "any throwaway line could encapsulate a scarily decentered world," or that "a single episode could juxtapose a certain number of disparate elements, and the high pleasure was in the jarring elegance of the juxtaposition." Or if it interests you to learn that "Coppola's Godfather films and Scorsese's Goodfellas [were] crucial reference points for The Sopranos." Or if you need a critic to explain that "Chase's neatest trick was to make a show about the mob—a show that laid out in gratifying detail the workings of scams and hits, political connections and techniques of intimidation, internecine maneuverings and FBI infiltrations—that constantly suggested that the mob was not what the show was really about." The whole piece is a fan's letter, not a critic's analysis, thick with plot summary, favorite scenes and bits of dialogue, written in the pantingly verbose style of an overeducated version of Harry Knowles: "These Soprano women made iridescent the masculine monochrome of the gangster genre ... the mere sight of [Tony] padding yet again in white bathrobe toward the refrigerator evoked a disheveled Wotan worthy of a show whose capacity to extend and savor its transitions could seem Wagnerian." Gag me with a spoon.

Contrast O'Brien's vaporings, if you will, with Emily Nussbaum's justly-praised post-finale reading of the show. Nussbaum takes up some of the same concerns that O'Brien does, particularly the audience's complicated relationship with Chase's characters, but then actually advances an argument about that topic, in an essay that's a model of clarity and economy - two-thirds the length of O'Brien's, and eight times as interesting.

Potterdamerung

I've finished the book, but my thoughts will take a little while to sort themselves into proper criticism; for now, if you don't mind spoilers, start with Russell Arben Fox and Eve Tushnet and work your way deeper into the internets from there.

Update: It doesn't deal with Deathly Hallows, but I quite liked Megan McArdle's piece on the economics of Harry Potter, or "Why are the Weasleys poor?"

Should Vitter Resign?

Jonah leans that way, but with caveats; Jason Zengerle looks at Congress's recent anti-prostitution gestures; Ramesh writes that "maybe one reason that Vitter hasn't been more forcefully and widely condemned is that our law and culture don't treat prostitution as simply 'illegal,' like drug dealing ...You can't advertise for drug deals in the yellow pages, but you basically can for prostitution." He also asks "how far" we want to take Ruth Marcus' reasoning "that prostitution is different from adultery on moral as well as legal grounds," because, in her words, "One is demeaning to a particular woman, the second to all women."

I'm not sure how far I'd run with that particular way of phrasing it, but I think her basic suggestion is right. I'd put it this way: Adultery where you don't pay for sex is arguably a worse sin against your spouse than going to a prostitute, because you're cheating emotionally as well as physically; however, going to a prostitute is a worse sin against society, because it makes you an active participant in a industry that profits from a kind of large-scale degradation that goes far beyond the damage it does to a single marriage. (Similarly, using drugs might be a worse sin against people close to you than selling drugs, because their lives will be more damaged by your addiction than by your dealing - but selling drugs is a worse crime against society as a whole, and merits harsher penalties.) Adultery is a matter of private morality, in other words, whereas procuring a prostitute is a matter of public morality; that's why the latter is an appropriate target for criminal penalties, and why Vitter shouldn't be able to get away with claiming that his actions belong to the private sphere.

Yes, prostitution will always be with us, and it's possible for me to imagine a society where I would support the kind of Catholic libertarianism that this writer recommends, on the grounds that it's simply too pervasive and inevitable a vice to legislate against. But America in the twenty-first century isn't that society; we're rich enough and sexually permissiveness enough that both potential prostitutes and potential johns should be able to find other ways of getting what they need (income and sexual excitement, respectively). Ramesh is right that we tend to treat prostitution with a wink and a nod, which is why Vitter almost certainly won't have to resign. But the law is correct, the winking and nodding isn't, and if Vitter did what he appears to have done I think there's a strong case he should step down.

Meanwhile, Deborah Jeane Palfrey's lawyers are busy arguing that she's protected by Lawrence v. Texas ...

Political Fictions

It's not the Harry Potter reaction you all (okay, maybe just a few of you) are waiting for, but you can find my review of Sammy's House, by Kristin Gore, in this Sunday's Times.

Your Potter Roundup

Jonathan Last has all the predictions you'll need. Megan McArdle and Kieran Healy, meanwhile, remind me why Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - where the Lost-style "everybody acts like idiots" phenomenon they identify was at its worst - was far and away the most irritating book in the saga. Meanwhile, this old John Holbo post identifies the pastiche (actually, one of several pastiches) that's at the heart of the Potter mystique.

As for me, just like with The Sopranos finale, I'm going to be behind the pop-culture times: I'll be occupied all weekend and won't even get to start reading the book till Sunday night at the earliest. So expect blogging to be light till then, since I'll be on something of a media fast.

Dangerous Nation (II)

I am, however, in agreement with Robert Kagan when he argues that American predominance will persist long after the Iraq War:

... foreign policy failures do not necessarily undermine predominance. Some have suggested that failure in Iraq would mean the end of predominance and unipolarity. But a superpower can lose a war — in Vietnam or in Iraq — without ceasing to be a superpower if the fundamental international conditions continue to support its predominance. So long as the United States remains at the center of the international economy and the predominant military power, so long as the American public continues to support American predominance as it has consistently for six decades, and so long as potential challengers inspire more fear than sympathy among their neighbors, the structure of the international system should remain as the Chinese describe it: one superpower and many great powers.

One note of caution, though: Kagan persistently refers to our main potential challengers, China and Russia, as "autocratic" nations, which strikes me as a confusion of terms. And this confusion makes him less attuned than perhaps he should be to the possibility that the current Chinese model of government, in particular, might increasingly inspire sympathy (and emulation) as well as fear. I'm no China expert, obviously, but it seems to me that the People's Republic has moved steadily away from the autocratic model of Mao and Deng, and toward what might be described as a one-party meritocracy - a rule by the best and the brightest in which the path to power for a talented individual is open enough to co-opt precisely the kind of people who would ordinarily be leading agitators for democracy. Whether this model is sustainable in the long run remains to be seen, but if you're a developing nation looking for a path to modernization (or, perhaps, a particularly anti-populist EU bureaucrat), the Chinese system promises all the benefits of liberal democratic capitalism without the messiness of, well, democracy. I'm still enough of a Fukuyaman, even now, to suspect that China will eventually democratize, but in an unstable world with an interconnected global elite, I think we underestimate the ideological appeal of an undemocratic meritocracy at our peril.

Dangerous Nation (I)

Robert Kagan:

Historians will long debate the decision to go to war in Iraq, but what they are least likely to conclude is that the intervention was wildly out of character for the United States. Since the end of World War II at least, American presidents of both parties have pursued a fairly consistent approach to the world. They have regarded the United States as the “indispensable nation” and the “locomotive at the head of mankind.” They have amassed power and influence and deployed them in ever-widening arcs around the globe on behalf of interests, ideals, and ambitions, both tangible and intangible. Since 1945 Americans have insisted on acquiring and maintaining military supremacy, a “preponderance of power” in the world rather than a balance of power with other nations. They have operated on the ideological conviction that liberal democracy is the only legitimate form of government and that other forms of government are not only illegitimate but transitory. They have declared their readiness to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation” by forces of oppression, to “pay any price, bear any burden” to defend freedom, to seek “democratic enlargement” in the world, and to work for the “end of tyranny.” They have been impatient with the status quo. They have seen America as a catalyst for change in human affairs, and they have employed the strategies and tactics of “maximalism,” seeking revolutionary rather than gradual solutions to problems. Therefore, they have often been at odds with the more cautious approaches of their allies.

This is true but deceptive. Yes, every American President since 1945, and several before it, have shared similar premises (at least publicly) and employed similar rhetoric about the United States' role in the world. But our chief executives have differed significantly in how they went about implementing the "indispensible nation" vision that Kagan limns in this passage. America's finest postwar Presidents, Eisenhower and Reagan, were distinguished by their restraint in the use of military force; they intervened frequently around the world, yes, but surgically rather than sweepingly, and they deliberately avoided investing large numbers of American soldiers to open-ended commitments in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Bush, by contrast, seems likely to be remembered as part of a tradition of American overreach that runs from the Phillipine-American War through Woodrow Wilson, the decision to drive to the Yalu in Korea, the disastrous slow-motion escalation in Vietnam, and now the attempt to democratize Iraq. If you abstract far enough upward, Bush is squarely in the post-WWII American foreign-policy tradition. But so is every President before him, which suggests that abstracting this far hides the distinctions that make all the difference.

Jon Lovitz, Andy Dick, and Phil Hartman

As celebrity altercations go, this one - and the backstory - is pretty remarkable.

A Modest Proposal

Via Larison, here's Jim Pinkerton:

... with all due respect to former Vice President Al Gore, we might as well just say it bluntly: Muslims with atomic weapons are a greater threat to America than global warming.

When kids see "Harry Potter," they should be thinking first about defending their country, and their civilization, against evildoers wielding weapons of mass destruction. After that's taken care of, they can then worry more about carbon dioxide.

Or perhaps left and right could agree that children should be brought up to live in fear of neither global warming nor weapons of mass destruction. Would that be too much to ask?

Resign, Senator

Ruth Marcus is right about David Vitter, and E.J. Dionne and David Ignatius are flat wrong: Making use of a prostitution ring isn't a private matter, and Vitter should not be sitting in the United States Senate while the "D.C. Madam" is facing up to 55 years in prison for selling what he was apparently interested in buying. I hope Deborah Jeane Palfrey does call him as a witness, so that he can explain how his phone number ended up on her call list, and whether the "very serious sin" he admits to committing includes, you know, breaking the law. Sure, maybe he only got a massage - you know, just like Ted Haggard - but at the very least his constituents have a right to hear him explain himself.

"What about the thousands of other people whose phone numbers are on the D.C. Madam's call list?" Ignatius asks. "Are they fair game?" Um, well, insofar as being on her call list suggests that they solicited sex for money, then the answer seems to me to be yes. If a politician were caught with his name on the "call list" of a prominent drug dealer, he wouldn't be able to wriggle out of it by admitting to a "serious sin" and leaving it at that. And unless prominent Republicans are prepared to join Matt in supporting the repeal of laws banning prostitution - which I certainly hope they aren't - then they shouldn't be backing Vitter's "it's a private matter" line. It isn't. It's a crime.

Richard Milhouse Giuliani

John Podhoretz and Peter Robinson both dismiss Michael Gerson's case for a Rudy-Nixon analogy. Here's JPod:

... unlike Nixon in 1968, Giuliani actually has a record of executive governance ... During his eight years in New York, he cut welfare benefits, cut two dozen taxes, balanced budgets, and used recsission powers to refuse to spend boondoggle money voted by the City Council. He achieved extensive deregulation and sought (unsuccessfully, and unfortunately) to revise the city's zoning law to make New York more hospitable to job-creating businesses.

Of all the candidates in the race, Giuliani is the person who has the greatest claim on having fought for — against a violently hostile liberal establishment — and achieved some very important governmental changes, all of which deserve to be called "conservative."

Yes, but ...

Continue reading "Richard Milhouse Giuliani" »

Our Blogging Future, Ctd.

Against my blog semi-triumphalism, Reihan offers a a qualified defense of non-blog forms of web journalism:

... to the extent the Slates and NROs and TNRs and Salons of the world serve as curators and gardeners, trimming, pruning, and shaping, I think they'll continue to serve a valuable and valued function.

... Consider The New Republic under Andrew Sullivan, much maligned by liberals today and celebrated at the time. As a collection of strange personalities, the magazine was peerless: it is no coincidence that the best of our bloggers, Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan (our mutually antagonistic bloggers), are alums of that era of TNR. But you also had unlikely dispatches from unlikely writers, which reflected this cultivated collective personality. A hive mind is better than a single mind. And what's a really great magazine if not a hive mind?

I don't think - and I certainly don't hope - that magazines as we know them will go the way of the dodo in the internet age. I think that certain kinds of magazines don't work as well anymore (Time and Newsweek, for instance, and maybe some of the opinion journals), and will either have to change or die - but in the same way that I don't see books becoming electronic anytime soon, I tend to think that the magazine-as-object will still exist in 2025 and beyond. People like the glossy photographs, they like the hive-mind quality that Reihan identifies, they like getting something book-like in the mail. Circulation will doubtless drop, but the magazine market will still exist, and you'll still see the newsstands with their endless plane and train-reading options. (At least, I think you will.)

Continue reading "Our Blogging Future, Ctd." »

God's Comeback?

This WSJ piece, on the revival of religion in Europe, dovetails perfectly with my argument in the last Atlantic that European life - and particularly European politics - may be partially desecularizing (even as a mass secularism rises in America). Which is reason enough to be suspicious of it: Every writer should be wary of arguments that coincide too neatly with his own. So yes, there are real signs that faith may be making something of a comeback on the continent, but it's also worth remembering that Christianity in particular has dwindled so far in recent years that it has nowhere to go but up - and that journalists and intellectuals have been writing organized religion's obituaries for so many years that they're hungry for anything resembling a trend in the opposite direction. Which means that any "here comes God" analysis on this front, including my own, needs to be taken with at least a grain of salt.

Continue reading "God's Comeback?" »

From Academy Award Winner Paul Haggis

Words to choke on. Anyway, here's your 2007 Best Picture Winner.

The First Potter Review ...

... is up, courtesy of the Baltimore Sun. And perhaps for fear of various legal repercussions, it says very little in very few words. But I detect a spoilerish tinge to it even so, so read at your own risk. (This means you, Russell Arben Fox!)

Update: They've put up a longer version.

The Case Against Knocked Up, Continued

I'm reminded that John Podhoretz shared the thinking woman's take on Knocked Up:

Alison decides to keep the baby and to try and see whether she and Ben can forge a relationship. Ben has nothing else going on--and besides, Alison is hot, so he's game. In furtherance of her goal, Alison asks Ben what he usually expects to do on a second date. He responds that he generally expects oral sex (the actual dialogue is far more explicit). And he doesn't seem to be kidding, since he tells her that's what he told his buddies he thought he'd get out of the evening.

And here we have the problem with Knocked Up. How you react to this movie depends on how you react to this scene. The plot of Knocked Up hinges on Alison finding Ben cute and cuddly, a human teddy bear, lovable despite all his surface flaws. The audience must feel the same way about Ben if the movie is going to work its magic on us.

But on what planet would an irresistibly cute teddy bear basically beg for oral sex from a vulnerable woman who is trying to determine whether said teddy bear, a man she barely knows, could be someone with whom she might be able to raise a child? If that is the planet you live on, or a planet you can imagine visiting, or a planet you think exists, then you might be knocked over by Knocked Up.

It's also interesting to note the long sequence that follows the blowjob incident, in which a frantic-seeming Alison goes on a laborious search for the perfect gynecologist, and eventually settles on an avuncular, stable-seeming older man - that is, precisely the kind of solid masculine presence that's absent from her life. (Her own father, one assumes, is either dead or on the lam somewhere east of Suez, since he never bothers to put in an appearance during his daughter's crisis.) Again, this sequence is played for laughs - and I did laugh - but it isn't necessarily funny. Particularly since the movie could have easily sacrificed a few of the horrified yuks - by making Ben clumsy but not quite so crass, poor but not quite so shiftless, etc. - and still been terrifically hilarious. Which is why Denby's right, I think, when he suggests that the film's devotion to "the dissolution of a male pack, the ending of the juvenile male bond," ultimately goes too far and undercuts the marriage plot. Especially since you need look no further than Apatow's own The Forty-Year Old Virgin for an example of a (similarly socially-conservative) raunchfest that manages this balance more effectively.

Meanwhile, Noah Millman has Apatow's next project lined up ...

Heresy and Democracy

Just a quick response to Ramesh's characteristically thoughtful post on the question of Bush's heresies, or lack thereof. I agree that neither Christianity nor Anglo-American conservatism is necessarily incompatitable with the following propositions: That human beings have political rights that are a gift from Almighty God, that democracy is to be preferred to tyranny, and that the U.S. has a moral obligation to support human rights-recognizing, democratic governments abroad.

But what Bush seems to believe is something more sweeping - that the fact "a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom" means that the universalization of "forms of government that are based upon liberty" are historically "inevitable." This may be true, but it is not Christianity, and it is not conservatism.

None of the Above '08!

It has a certain ring to it ...

Men At Work

As fellow laborers in the thankless but necessary task of convincing readers everywhere to pay no further attention to Alan Wolfe, I commend the efforts of Daniel McCarthy, R.R. Reno, and Kevin Holtsberry.

Market-Friendly Versus Family-Friendly

Dana Goldstein:

By “argue big,” Obama meant expanding the terms of the pro-choice debate beyond access to abortion, contraception, and comprehensive sexuality education and into a larger discussion about family planning and work-life balance for women. He called for “updating the social contract” with gender pay equity, paid maternal leave, and longer school hours that make it easier for mothers to work.

From the latest Pew survey on working mothers:

Among working mothers with minor children (ages 17 and under), just one-in-five (21%) say full-time work is the ideal situation for them, down from the 32% who said this back in 1997, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Fully six-in-ten (up from 48% in 1997) of today's working mothers say part-time work would be their ideal, and another one-in-five (19%) say she would prefer not working at all outside the home.

There's been a similar shift in preferences among at-home mothers with minor children. Today just 16% of these mothers say their ideal situation would be to work full time outside the home, down from the 24% who felt that way in 1997. Nearly half (48%) of all at-home moms now say that not working at all outside the home is the ideal situation for them, up from the 39% who felt that way in 1997.

What Obama is proposing is a market-friendly program - a set of reforms designed to make it easier for women to work full-time while they have children. But what women actually want, the polls suggest, is a more family-friendly system, which makes it easier for them to work part-time or not at all while their children are young. If Republicans were smart, they would find a package of reforms tailored to precisely that desire: For instance, they could advance a significant Ponnuru-style (or Cesar Conda-style) tax credit for families with children; a health care plan that severs health insurance from employment, so women don't feel bound to jobs they dislike; and maybe even a package of tuition credits for women (or men!) looking to re-train and re-enter the workforce after staying at home for a few years. This would outflank the Democrats on an issue they think they own, and leave them stuck with the Linda Hirschman vote.

But, of course, it wouldn't do much to fend off the Caliphate, so why bother?

What's The Matter With John Edwards?

Ezra Klein, on why the Edwards' campaign isn't getting traction:

Part of his problem, from the beginning, has been that the media has treated him as yesterday's news. How many recent magazine covers has Obama received? Clinton? Edwards? Part of his problem has been that he's run, at times, a bad campaign, and made more news for missteps than for triumphs. And part has been that he's gotten strangely little coverage for his strengths, such as an apparently enduring lead in Iowa (though it looks like Hillary is closing in), substantial strength in general election match-up polls, and a compelling and detailed political platform. But at the end of the day, one of the reasons people don't like yesterday's product is the simple belief that it belongs to yesterday, and that, more than anything else, strikes me as the perception Edwards is battling.

As Jason Zengerle points out, a dearth of magazine covers hasn't exactly been Edwards' problem to date. Frankly, I've always thought that the media has given too much credit to Edwards - and in the process, artificially inflated his candidacy - by consistently lumping him in a "top three" with Clinton and Obama. He's a one-term Senator with no significant constituency in his home region who didn't exactly dazzle in his previous national audition - failing to capitalize on a broken-field chance at the nomination after Howard Dean imploded in the '04 primaries, and then failing to distinguish himself as John Kerry's running mate in the fall. (I've mentioned this before, but it's worth noting again: No losing vice-presidential candidate has taken the White House since FDR.) He has no foreign-policy experience whatsoever, and he admits to badly flubbing his biggest test on that front, the Iraq War authorization vote - a test, incidentally, that his similarly-inexperienced rival Obama passed with flying colors. And while his policy proposals may be admirably detailed, he's preaching what often feels like a "war on poverty" populism to an electorate that seems to be looking for more of a Jim Webb-style "save the middle class" populism; his "wealth versus work" '04 campaign, ironically enough, seems like it would be better-suited to the present moment than the "lift-up-the-underclass" themes he's emphasizing this time around.

Finally, he oozes smarm: He's got all of Mitt Romney's inauthenticity problems with hardly any of the substantive achievements. Everyone who's met him or worked for him thinks the world of him, and no doubt he's just as lovely as they say - but when he talks, I cringe. And to judge by the polls, I'm not alone.

Photo by Flickr user Michael Millhollin used under a Creative Commons license.

The Truth Will Set You Free

James Poulos:

... instead of fearing a revolt that will never come, Republicans running for president should do Ron Paul one better and carry out the smartest preemptive attack ever conceived -- pledging as a central part of their campaigns to abandon Bush on Iraq, immigration, and big government. Within the party, only Iraq will be a pill that goes down sideways, at least at first. But watch. Repudiating the president is so firmly grounded in fact and prudence that it will be contagious. What the candidates have already gotten away with, in the way of tepid criticism of tactics in Iraq, has gone over like a dream. Mitt Romney's more adventurous knocks against Bush's leadership have gone unanswered. This is because everyone knows they are accurate. They want more. They want to stop living a public lie. Instead of the national reign of fear predicted by the president's leftist critics, it is the political right that suffers silently in dread. This is a needless shame and waste, and the clock is ticking. Repudiating Bush everywhere he has erred will be something like going to confession. The great wave of relief to come will power the energy needed to turn from defending the indefensible by awkward half-measures to promoting in full measure true conservative government.

No Republican candidate who hopes to win the nomination can join the Dick Lugars of the world in hinting at phased withdrawal from Iraq, not so long as the base still believes in victory as strongly as it does. But one could imagine a leading contender at least taking a line suggested by this Rich Lowry post - defending the current military strategy in Iraq and holding out hope for victory, that is, while simultaneously attacking not only the President's handling of the war (as McCain has done explicitly, and others have implicitly) but his unconservative ideological premises as well. Yes to Petraeus, in other words, but no to Bush. It's not the full Poulos, but it's something.

Our President, The Heretic

I think Andrew's right that he slightly misread David Brooks' column on the theological confidence of George W. Bush; on the other hand, this is a case where Brooksian subtlety might have been better supplemented by a dose of Sullivan-style outrage. At this point I'm with Andrew and Rod Dreher: I'm fed up with the President's messiah complex, and I don't bloody well want to hear any more about Bush's "theological perspective" that freedom is the Almighty's gift to all mankind, and so history's on our side in the Middle East, and yada yada yada. (Rich Lowry has more Bush quotes on that theme.) Every time I find myself leaning toward the view that maybe, just maybe, it's good that Bush is being stubborn about keeping troop levels high in Iraq, because we have a moral obligation to prevent a bloodbath and a large and active military presence is the only way to do it, I read quotes like the above and find myself swinging toward Rod's argument that whatever happens when we're gone, not one more American soldier should die for the President's world-historical delusions. Not one more.

In fact, I think Andrew lets Bush off too easily when he says "as a very abstract theological principle, it's hard for a fellow Christian to disagree" with the President's contention that "a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom." On the one hand, there's nothing "abstract" about that particular Christian principle: The gift of freedom that Christ promises is far more real than anything else in this world, if Christian teaching on the matter is correct. On the other hand, there's nothing that's political about that promise, and the attempt to transform God's promise of freedom through Jesus Christ into a this-world promise of universal democracy is the worst kind of "immanentizing the eschaton" utopian bullshit. It's Hegel meets Woodrow Wilson meets James Kurth's "Protestant Deformation" meets the American heresy, and Christians and conservatives alike ought to be appalled by it.

Update: My (somewhat more measured) response to Ramesh is here.

Blogs: What Are They Good For?

What do I think about blogging in this, which is apparently the year ten A.B.? Glad you asked. First, I think that blogs are here to stay and then some - that they're the first journalistic form perfectly adapted to the strengths (and weaknesses) of the internet, and that they'll probably crowd out the "web column" and the "web article" as time passes. This is obviously a somewhat self-serving point of view, since the Atlantic has clearly made precisely this bet in its recent web investments - but I think it's the right bet, and the right point of view. I like article-heavy sites like Slate and TNR.com and all the rest, but I wouldn't be sorry to see them gradually transition to a bloggier format, where Kaus and Shafer and Saletan and Zengerle and Orr and so on all have a "vertical" page of their own, and the homepage is more of a blog-aggregator than a traditional magazine homepage. There just isn't enough that's, well, webby about a web article; it's a print format trying to make it's way in a post-print landscape, going against the grain of the medium rather than with it.

So - if blogs are a big, big part of the future of web journalism, is this good news or bad? I'd say it's good news for punditry, and bad news for other, deeper forms of writing.

Continue reading "Blogs: What Are They Good For?" »

Black and White?

Ron Charles, the latest critic to explain how Harry Potter is destroying literature as we know it, serves up this pearl of wisdom:

The vast majority of adults who tell me they love "Harry Potter" never move on to Susanna Clarke's enchanting "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell," with its haunting exploration of history and sexual longing, or Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials," a dazzling fantasy series that explores philosophical themes (including a scathing assault on organized religion) that make Rowling's little world of good vs. evil look, well, childish.

Yeah, sure, whatever. Of course Philip Pullman is a better literary craftsman than J.K. Rowling. But the kind of hectoring Manichaenism on display in Pullman's His Dark Materials makes Rowling look like Patricia Highsmith by comparison. Difficult as it may be to believe, one can be a masterful prose stylist and have a somewhat childish worldview, all at the same time.

Peter Suderman has a more thorough (and polite) dressing down of Charles' essay here.

Don't Come Knockin' ...

I don't always like David Denby, to say the least, but this essay raises a lot of good questions. Here's a snippet:

“Knocked Up” ... feels like one of the key movies of the era—a raw, discordant equivalent of “The Graduate” forty years ago. I’ve seen it with audiences in their twenties and thirties, and the excitement in the theatres is palpable—the audience is with the movie all the way, and, afterward, many of the young men (though not always the young women) say that it’s not only funny but true. They feel that way, I think, because the picture is unruly and surprising; it’s filled with the messes and rages of life in 2007 ....

Authentic as Ben and Alison seem to younger audiences, they are, like all the slacker-striver couples, strangers to anyone with a long memory of romantic comedy. Buster Keaton certainly played idle young swells in some of his silent movies, but, first humiliated and then challenged, he would exert himself to heroic effort to win the girl. In the end, he proved himself a lover. In the nineteen-thirties, the young, lean James Stewart projected a vulnerability that was immensely appealing. So did Jack Lemmon, in his frenetic way, in the fifties. In succeeding decades, Elliott Gould, George Segal, Alan Alda, and other actors played soulful types. Yet all these men wanted something. It’s hard to think of earlier heroes who were absolutely free of the desire to make an impression on the world and still got the girl. And the women in the old romantic comedies were daffy or tough or high-spirited or even spiritual in some way, but they were never blank. What’s going on in this new genre? “Knocked Up,” a raucously funny and explicit movie, has some dark corners, some fear and anxiety festering under the jokes. Apatow takes the slacker-striver romance to a place no one thought it would go. He also makes it clear, if we hadn’t noticed before, how drastically the entire genre breaks with the classic patterns of romantic comedy.

The sharpest critique of Apatow's movie that I've heard came from a woman I know, who argued that the debate about abortion is somewhat beside the point: The film's central implausibility isn't that Katherine Heigl's Alison would keep the child, but that she would keep the man. I think most people would agree that the leads' never-quite-resolved mismatch is, as Denby puts it later in his essay, "the weakest element in the movie"; the question is whether it's something to be forgiven with a laugh or endured with a shudder. I forgave it and laughed my way through the movie, but then again I'm a man; my friend was one of those less-amused young women Denby has in mind, and she argued (persuasively) that you could easily read Knocked Up as a film about the awful things that a woman will accept to ease the terrible vulnerability of pregnancy. Only a deep, unsettling and not-at-all-funny desperation, in her view, could explain why Alison would accept as a boyfriend (and presumably a husband) a man as gross, insensitive, underemployed and immature as Seth Rogen's Ben - a guy, she pointed out, who goes on a profane rant in a crowded restaurant when Alison tells him that she's pregnant, tries to beg a blowjob from her on their second date, invites her over to fast-forward through porn movies to help him get his dot-com smut empire off the ground, abandons her to rescue his bong during an earthquake, and so on and so forth, with precious few romantic gestures thrown in to mitigate his blundering. (He gets a job, eventually reads some baby books, and ... that's about it.) His rants are funny, sure, and he's basically good-hearted, but would you want your daughter to marry him? Or more aptly, would you want your daughter to be so freaked out by her pregnancy that she felt like she had to make it work with him?

I'm still turning over these questions in my mind.

Lower-Middle Reformism, Anyone?

Frank Luntz:

To be perfectly blunt, no Republican can win the White House without winning Ohio. Although readers of this column would no doubt like to see and hear the presidential nominees up close, the reality is that California, at least when it comes to elections, is as blue as the Pacific. A successful Republican candidate in Ohio will have learned how to articulate a culturally conservative message fused with government accountability and economic opportunity specifically tailored to voters in the industrial heartland. Without the support of the anxious working class, Ohio will also turn deep blue. And so will the United States.

I hope Jonah, in the spirit of consistency, will call Frank Luntz to account for making the kind of "nonsense" prediction that's typical of "young wonky bloggers" these days.

Update: I see Larison beat me to the punch.

I'm Telling You For the Last Time

The first comment on my last post reads:

(It just tends to fall on inner-city children rather than upper-middle class twentysomething newlyweds.)

...which is entirely the fault of conservatives like yourself who work tirelessly to restrict sex ed, contraception and ban abortion, all of which exist to ameliorate the complications that come from sex. But of course, being a conservative means never having to be responsible for the actual real-world consequences of your opinions.

I've said this before, but one more time: There is very little evidence that sex ed programs have more than a minimal impact on teen and twentysomething sexual behavior. As with most trends, the effects of peer interactions, popular culture, socioeconomic background, parental values and a host of other variables swamp, and then some, what happens in public schools. (Which is why the war over sex ed, at least in public policy terms, is mainly sound and fury, signifying little.)

Continue reading "I'm Telling You For the Last Time" »

On Chesil Beach

The novella is vintage McEwan, for good and ill. The good is his usual brilliance as a wordsmith - the gorgeous yet precise prose style; the by-now-predictable genius for summoning up compelling inner lives. (Not to mention vivid set-pieces: The ill-starred marriage bed of the book's young newlyweds joins the road to Dunkirk in Atonement and the balloon-invaded field in the opening scene of Enduring Love on the list of memorable McEwan landscapes.) The bad is the touch of chilly, faintly-misanthropic micromanagement that often mars his works. On Chesil Beach is better in this regard than the rancid Amsterdam and the overschematized Saturday, but the reader still too often has the sense that the characters are just chess pieces pushed around by the author's heavy hand, and that their unhappy fate is more the result of literary predestination than free choice. (I sometimes think that McEwan is never surprised by his characters, which is the sign, perhaps, of an author a little too much in control of his stories.) The novella's tragedy grows organically out of the protagonists' weaknesses, no doubt, but I still didn't quite believe in it, and if you asked me, the moment after I finished reading the novella, why it happened the way it did - why, in particular, the newlyweds let the opportunity for happiness slip through their fingers - I would have answered "because McEwan wanted it that way."

Then there's Damon Linker's argument that On Chesil Beach, by dramatizing the plight of sexually-inexperienced young people in a Puritan culture, demonstrates the bankruptcy of conservative nostalgia for Ye Olde 1950s. In the struggles of McEwan's star-crossed newlyweds, Damon descries an indictment of an entire social order, and of the "impotent cries of moral fuddy-duddies" who would lament its passing. And he is of course right that some social conservatives exaggerate the horrors of the Sexual Revolution and minimize the problems associated with a more repressed era, though by the same token many social liberals do precisely the reverse - for instance, by suggesting (as Damon does) that the revolution in sexual affairs swapped the horrors of "physical and psychological suffering" for a more manageable set of "complications and confusions," when obviously there's plenty of "physical and psychological suffering" associated with a more latitudinarian sexual framework as well. (It just tends to fall on inner-city children rather than upper-middle class twentysomething newlyweds.)

Continue reading "On Chesil Beach" »

Ask and Ye Shall Receive

Here's Russell Arben Fox's reply to my post requesting pro-Latter Day Saint sources explicating, defending, or explaining away the Book of Mormon's history of Mesoamerica; check out the extensive comments on my post as well, and this post at Times and Seasons. (Here's a good place to start if you want to know how believers respond to objections to the Book of Mormon's authenticity.) I can't promise that I'll wade my way through the recommended material all that quickly; I can promise to minimize blanket dismissals of Mormonism until I'm better informed as to the pro-LDS side of the argument.

The Case For Deterrence

While at Aspen, I remarked of a panel on nuclear proliferation that "nobody seemed willing to consider the notion that deterrence might be a viable strategic option in a world with, say, fifteen nuclear powers." For an extended consideration of precisely that notion, I recommend this essay (full disclosure: the author is a friend) in the latest Orbis, which makes the case for Cold War-style deterrence - even in an age of proliferation - as the "proper policy of a confident great power that is satisfied with its place in the global order."

What Mormons Believe

In addition to agreeing on the importance of taking an extremist approach to Iraq in our latest Bloggingheads, Matt and I are awfully hard on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. And it occurred to me afterward that, unlettered rube that I am, I've never read a comprehensive defense/explanation, by a smart Mormon, of their church's (seemingly-fantastic) beliefs about the prehistory of the Americas. Such a thing must exist, and so I'm hoping that someone - maybe Russell Arben Fox, maybe the larger gang at Times and Seasons - can point me in the right direction.

The Lead-Crime Connection

Steve Sailer has a good roundup, with analysis.

Terrorists Hate Lemonade, Y'All

It pains me to say it, but while I watched Fred Thompson's video address to the National Right To Life Committee a few weeks back, my thoughts weren't all that far removed from James Wolcott's.

The Critics and Ratatouille

In the next NR, you'll find my review of Ratatouille, which I'm one of the few critics in America not to swoon for. I think this (swooning) post from Peter Suderman gets at the film's strengths, and also suggests why it's earned more critical laurels than (to my mind) it deserves. After a rapturous description of the film's many fine action sequences, Peter finishes up:

For all [Brad] Bird’s proficiency as a storyteller, he’s really an action director, a filmmaker who thrills to motion and movement, scope and spectacle, the inner workings of complex machines tiny, intricate, interlocking parts and the airy thrills of flight. So yes, Ratatouille is great because it’s poignant, and achingly sweet, and superbly witty. And yes, it has the character of Anton Ego, the single greatest portrayal of a critic ever to grace the silver screen. And yes, it’s a strikingly beautiful film, with a warm fall palette and a vision of Paris that is mad with ambition and romance. But even more than all of these things, Ratatouille is great, and especially a great summer movie, because, quite simply, it kicks ass—just like an action movie should.

Except for the part about "poignant, and achingly sweet, and superbly witty," I agree with all of this. The film's action sequences are brilliant; its palette is lush enough to sink into; its attention to detail is remarkable. As a feat of cinematic technique, at least in the medium of animation, it may be unrivaled, which is why people who are interested in the technical art of cinema tend to like it so much. And when you throw in the fact that yes, Anton Ego may indeed be the "greatest portrayal of a critic" in cinematic history, I think its no wonder that the reviews have nearly all been raves. (Call it the Sideways phenomenon.)

However, the script is not superbly witty, the human leads are frankly unappealing (Owen Gleiberman called Linguine, the kitchen boy, "a one-note stumblebum," which I think is too kind by half) and the villain is cardboard and lamer-than-lame. Technically, Ratatouille is a great advance on The Incredibles. As a complete work of art, though, it's nowhere close.

This Used To Be My Playground

I'm not going to come out and say I miss being on The American Scene or anything; the digs here are pretty nice. Instead, I'll say that there are an awful lot of ongoing discussions over there that I've been really enjoying - including, but not limited to, Reihan and James Poulos on rewriting/destroying the Constitution; Reihan on Dana Goldstein vs. David Brooks (a topic that this Observer article dovetails with nicely); and this conversation about education.

Also of interest: Reihan on David Vitter's sordid past, and Alan Jacobs on the suburbs.

The Lessons of Iraq

Even though he doesn't necessarily agree with me about Cheney, I agree with Matt about this distinction:

... I get a little queasy when I hear Democrats talk about Iraq teaching lessons about the need for solid intelligence. The lessons I've learned about Iraq go to the strategic calculus that says "we should engage in unilateral preventive military strikes to prevent countries from acquiring nuclear weapons in order to bolster US hegemony in the Persian Gulf," not a lesson about how one should or shouldn't process internal Intelligence Community disagreement about the state of a foreign WMD program.

An important point about Cheney, regardless of what you think about his motivations, is that he could have been right. In this particular case, U.S. intelligence overestimated Saddam's nuclear capacities; in other recent cases, though - Iraq circa 1991, Pakistan in the late-1990s - the same intelligence system significantly underestimated a foreign country's capacity to produce a nuclear weapon. In other words, sometimes a Dick Cheney approach to analyzing intelligence - the assumption that things are worse than the CIA says they are, rather than better - will turn out to be correct. Which is why it isn't enough to boil the Iraq debate down to an argument over spycraft and the interpretation of ambiguous data; you then have to abstract from what the intelligence says to what we should do about it, and the lessons of the Iraq occupation - to my mind, at least - tend to militate against a strategy of military preemption/prevention even in cases where an invasion would prove the Dick Cheneys of the world right.

That said, Matt Feeney's point about process is also a good one:

... the more relevant question is not about veracity or intentions. It’s about process: the disastrous combination a very popular administration pressing extreme constitutional prerogatives, a rollover Congress ceding its oversight authority (and it’s own war making power) on the eve of war, and a superhumanly willful Vice President using the most awesome bureaucratic ninja skillz in the history of bureaucracy to exploit the constitutional ambiguity of his office and push highly idiosyncratic policies through highly unconventional (and conveniently direct) paths to the President’s desk. Who was lying is almost a moot point. People become irrationally, existentially attached to ideas they have to fight and hurry and scheme to implement but don’t have to defend in open argument. This seems to be an obvious risk in having a unitary executive jealously guarding its commander-in-chief authority.

Also, for an interesting treatment of the broader topic of why we went to war and how the WMD analysis factored in, I recommend my friend Elbridge Colby's recent essay on George Tenet, particularly the later sections of the piece.

God on the Tube

My First Things essay on religion and contemporary television is now online. I think my analysis of The Sopranos holds up pretty well in the wake of the finale; I'm less certain about my analysis of Lost. (Though maybe that goes without saying.)

I Agree With Thomas Friedman

Hard to believe, but there it is:

The passions that have been unleashed in Iraq are not going to accommodate some partial withdrawal plan, where we just draw down troops, do less patrolling, more training and fight Al Qaeda types. It’s a fantasy.

The minute we start to withdraw, all hell will break loose in the areas we leave, and there will be a no-holds-barred contest for power among Iraqi factions. Our staying there with, say, half as many troops, will not be sustainable.

Wait ... no, actually, I don't quite agree with him. (Phew.) I think he's right that having, say, a 75,000-man army sitting in Iraq baby-sitting a bloody civil war for years to come is a bad idea; I'm less convinced that it's an unsustainable idea. In fact, my worry is that it's extremely sustainable - that we'll have some kind of compromise over the next year or so that drops U.S. troop levels downward (letting the Democrats claim victory) but that keeps a substantial force in Iraq (letting Bush claim victory) deep into the next Administration and beyond, and that both sides will go along with it even though, as Stephen Biddle writes, it will mean "continued U.S. casualties with little positive effect on Iraq's ongoing civil war." Never underestimate the ability of the American establishment to sustain what seems like an unsustainable policy, if doing so prevents them from making hard political choices. (See Vietnam, South, 1969-75.)

I don't know what to do about Iraq (obviously). But it seems to me that you can either look at the ongoing, low-grade civil war as something we have a moral and strategic obligation to prevent from spiraling out of control, in which case we need to follow Petraeus's lead and be prepared to continue the surge for months and years to come, regardless of the absence of a political settlement (and with the long-term hope that the violence will gradually diminish, and that Iraq circa 2015 will look like, say, Bosnia today); or you can argue that the cost of occupation to American national security outweighs our moral and strategic interests in preventing a greater bloodbath than we have now, in which case we ought to focus on getting out completely. (Or pulling back to Kurdistan, though I'm more skeptical than Andrew is about that option; his suggestion that "the Turks and the Kurds can become an arc of hope" for the region sounds an awful lot like like the frequent pre-Iraq War suggestion that "Iraq's Sunni and Shi'a can become an arc of hope" for a divided Middle East.) In other words, I swing back and forth between supporting Bill Kristol and supporting a hasty-as-possible withdrawal. But I suspect we'll get the worst of both worlds instead: A continued U.S. presence and continued U.S. casualties, and a steadily-worsening civil war that we're helpless to prevent.

Dana Stevens Strained Political Analogy Watch

The self-parody continues apace:

In Harry and his pals' fifth year at Hogwarts, the stalwart headmaster, Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), is in the process of being overthrown by Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton), a Ministry-appointed prig who wants to whip the students into shape for their upcoming wizardry exams, the OWLs. Her blind allegiance to standardized testing, not to mention her relentless chipping away at civil liberties, recall a certain U.S. president, but the analogy is never overplayed. (emphasis mine)

I'm sure it isn't.

The real question is how long Stevens can keep this up. I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry comes out next week; that should provide fodder for some digs at GOP homophobia. Then there's The Simpsons movie, which is bound to have at least a few political jokes for her to batten on; then The Bourne Ultimatum (Stevens: "Bourne is the ultimate rebuke to neocon imperialism: he's blowback incarnate, the nightmare that haunts Dick Cheney's dreams"); then an adaptation of Neil Gaiman's fairy tale Stardust ("As the fallen star, Claire Danes' fragile radiance symbolizes the beauties of the natural world that are imperiled by the Bush Administration's stonewalling on global warming"); and then, of course, there's Nicole Kidman's The Invasion, about pod people taking over Washington: the strained analogy practically writes itself.

Sure, it's going to be pretty hard for her to top comparing Decepticons and Autobots to Republicans and Democrats. But I have faith - just like a certain U.S. President.

The Believer

I'm late coming to it, but I think Andrew is wrong about this:

I can still just about believe that Bush thought the WMD case was sound. I can't believe, given all that we now know, that Cheney did. He's too smart. The data he read, we now know, was far more equivocal than the data the public was provided with. He's not new at this. He probably never wanted to make the WMD argument anyway, put it in to appease the UN crowd, and certainly wasn't going to query its validity. We may never know, of course, because Cheney will have destroyed the evidence, but if I had to guess, I'd say it's obvious Cheney knew all along that the WMD line was a cover, not a real threat, but realized by the summer of 2003 that any hint of this leaking (even from a two-bit blowhard like Wilson) needed swift and brutal rebuttal. They were embarrassed enough by the WMD bust, but if it was revealed that they had ignored all the caveats beforehand, it could get really dicey.

Now I don't know Dick Cheney, obviously, and I don't claim any special knowledge of his motivations. But I do know some very smart (albeit junior) people inside the government who were looking at the same data Cheney was looking at in 2002 and 2003, and who drew exactly the same conclusion that his pre-invasion remarks suggest that he drew - namely, that Saddam's programs were probably more extensive, and more dangerous, than our intelligence suggested. That's the thing about equivocal evidence: People read it through the lens of their pre-existing biases, and the pre-Iraq War biases on the Right (and not only on the Right) were similar to the biases that led the Committee on the Present Danger to overestimate Soviet strength in the 1970s - specifically, a belief that dovish analysts elsewhere in the government were underestimating the capabilities of America's enemies. In both cases, highly intelligent people got things dramatically wrong, by reading into incomplete evidence and drawing unwarranted conclusions that dovetailed with their own political prejudices. In neither case, I think, do you need to assume duplicity to explain what happened. Cheney may have misled the public about how solid the intelligence was that led him to draw the conclusions he did - and I don't mean to defend such conduct - but I'm willing to bet that he believed those conclusions as strongly as Bush did, if not more strongly.

I would also note that the best explanation I've seen advanced for why Cheney circa 2001 was gung-ho for doing what Cheney circa 1992 thought was a bad idea - toppling Saddam and occupying Iraq - is the psychological impact of the mid-1990s revelations that pre-Gulf War Iraq was far closer to getting a nuclear weapon than anyone thought at the time. The fact that we had significantly underestimated Saddam's capacities in the past seems a more likely reason for Cheney's post-9/11 tendency to dramatically overestimate Saddam's capacities than the implausible motives Andrew imputes to the Veep: A willingness to agitate for an invasion on grounds he knew to be bogus, in the full knowledge that if the invasion came to pass he would be exposed as a liar.

Photo by Flickr user tswartz used under a Creative Commons license.

The Long Sneer

I should say at the outset of this post that I am not a particularly great admirer of Russell Kirk. The Conservative Mind was an important book because it was a useful and timely book: It made a plausible and accessible case that there existed, in Anglo-America, a conservative intellectual patrimony relevant to the politics of the contemporary United States, and did so at a moment when this was an unfashionable opinion (to say the least). For this achievement, contemporary conservatives owe Kirk a great debt, one that can be acknowledged while also acknowledging his limitations as a writer and thinker.

Since Alan Wolfe's hatchet job on Kirk appeared in TNR, I've had several people remark to me - as Matt remarked on his site yesterday - that they really liked Wolfe's essay, but of course haven't read any Kirk themselves. I could be snide about this, but in all honesty, were they to read him, I think they would find ample confirmation for some of the essay's judgments. Kirk is indeed repetitious and somewhat windy; he does tend to cite the same authors repeatedly; he is prone to caricaturing his opponents' ideas (though what intellectual isn't?); and there is something faintly irritating, to me at least, about his constant self-presentation as a humble landowner, "best content when planting little trees at Mecosta." It's the same thing that bugs me about Jedediah Purdy or a Wendell Berry: The romanticization of one's own authenticity, which in turn makes the authenticity seem faintly fraudulent. (Real hermits don't need to boast about being hermits.)

Nonetheless, Wolfe's essay is an intellectual embarrassment of the first order: Smug, dishonest, slipshod, ignorant, and willfully obtuse. Like much of what its author has produced of late, it's less interested in discrediting Kirk than in discrediting the political persuasion he represents, an American conservatism that Wolfe considers either "irrelevant in the face of history", borderline fascist, or (most likely) both. It's also about 6,000 words long, so I'm afraid no blog post can provide the thorough going-over that it deserves. But the following selections, I think, give the flavor of the thing.

Continue reading "The Long Sneer" »

Not Necessarily Flimflam

Of Karl Rove's Aspen talk, I wrote:

Some of it was flimflam: For instance, he simultaneously argued that a rising number of apprehensions on the border means that enforcement is working, and that a falling number of apprehensions of Brazilians means that a particular enforcement program, aimed at Other Than Mexicans (OTMs), is working as well. (Typically, as Rove no doubt knows, a rising number of apprehensions tends to mean that even more are slipping through, a principle that also holds in drug enforcement.)

Today, I got a clarification from none other than Rove himself: He was touting the number of detentions being high, not the number of arrests; arrests have gone down because of better security, he told me, while detentions have stayed up because we're doing less catch and release, and more catch, detain, and deport with non-Mexicans. And sure enough, today's Washington Times reports that arrests along the border have dropped by 24 percent this year. So score one for the Architect.

The Church in China

Of Adam Minter's Atlantic profile of Shanghai's Bishop Jin Luxian and his tightrope walk between Rome and Beijing, Richard John Neuhaus writes:

It is most regrettable that Minter thinks it necessary to take a slap at Cardinal Zen of Hong Kong, who is a man of enormous courage and a real hero in the cause of religious and other freedoms. Another China-watcher is concerned that Minter is uncritically admiring of Bishop Jin Luxian of Shanghai, who, while undoubtedly having paid a steep price for “keeping faith,” is viewed by many Chinese Catholics as having compromised himself by frequent cooperation with the regime’s repression of fellow believers.

Fr. Neuhaus is correct that the piece is quite favorable to Jin, but I'm not sure he's right to say that it takes a swipe at Cardinal Zen. Here's what I take to be the passage in question:

During one of our interviews, Jin contrasted himself with the outspoken Joseph Zen, who has become a well-known agitator against the CPA since taking over as archbishop of Hong Kong. “You cannot speak out as a bishop in a Communist country,” Jin says. “I can’t freely speak like Zen, because I must protect my diocese.” Withholding criticism of China’s religious authorities and their policies is perhaps the greatest compromise that the open-Church bishops choose to make.

I think you can take this quote as Jin expressing envy of Zen's ability to be outspoken (because of Hong Kong's peculiar position within China), or as Jin being defensive about the moral compromises he's chosen to make over the years - or, most likely, some combination thereof. But I don't think it's fair to call it "a slap."

Jihadis As Movie Villains

Here's Reihan's take, from the great Sum of All Fears controversy.

The 'Burbs

Of Joel Kotkin's vision (and mine) of our suburban future, Matt writes:

The urbanist proposal isn't "hey, jerks, why don't you all move to dense downtowns." Rather, the proposal is something like "why don't we impose carbon taxes so that things like driving long distances and heating or cooling large detached structures are priced in accordance with their social cost? Why don't we stop having the federal government heavily subsidize driving cars as the preferred mode of transportation? Why don't we have more areas that allow for high-density zoning, thus reducing the cost of urban housing?" It's not that we urbanists are unaware that many people live in low density areas because its cheaper, it's precisely that we are aware of this fact that makes us believe that the "traditional unipolar downtown" could make a comeback.

I'm all for making McMansion owners and SUV drivers feel more of a pinch, if we can find a way to do it that doesn't penalize working-class drivers and homeowners, and I would definitely support having more urban areas that allow for high-density zoning, so that middle and low-income workers whose jobs require them to be downtown from 9 to 5 don't have to commute long distances if they don't want to. (Of course, I'm against an awful lot of zoning regulations, which is a place where I tend to part ways with the crunchy-cons.) But I don't think we should make "rebalancing in the direction of urbanism," as Matt puts it later in his post, a major policy goal; I think suburbia is a great (maybe the great) American socioeconomic achievement, whose virtues far outweigh its vices, and that using the levers of government to encourage families to leave the suburbs would represent a deep betrayal of what I take to be the heart of the American Dream. (Which is a cliche, sure, but also a reality.) When it comes to global warming, therefore, I'm all for telecommuting and fuel-efficient cars and various other ways to reduce our carbon footprint; I'm not for any plan that stands athwart suburbanization, yelling stop.

Even Paranoids Have Enemies

Everyone's been making fun of this overheated Michael Fumento post, in which he gripes about Hollywood anti-anti-terrorism. And with good reason. Nevertheless, isn't it a little strange that going on six years after 9/11, there hasn't been a single Hollywood offering that offers a consistently positive portrayal of any post-9/11 U.S. military action? Or that the only major motion pictures in which radical Islam is portrayed as straightforwardly villainous have been docudramas about the events of September 2001 and their aftermath (A Mighty Heart, United 93, World Trade Center)? We've had the CIA as villains; rogue arms dealers as villains; even the Knights Templar as villains; but never, ever, jihadis. (It's telling Daniel has to go all the way back to True Lies, which was more than a decade ago, to find an example of a summer action blockbuster that pitted its hero against Islamists.) Sure, there have been some examples on TV, from 24 to Sleeper Cell, but at the multiplex Hollywood's approach to the post-9/11 world is embodied by the remake of The Manchurian Candidate: The original film was at once anti-McCarthyite and anti-Communist, suggesting that the two forces were actually hand in glove; the remake just ignores the external threat and focuses on the enemy at home, which is to say Republicans and corporations.

Maybe this will buck the trend. I'm pretty sure this won't.

Highlights From the Festival

The Ideas Festival is over and I'm on my way back to D.C. (technically, I'm sitting in the Denver airport waiting for a delayed flight - along with Karl Rove, oddly, who's Blackberrying a few seats away from me), and on the off chance you weren't checking the Ideas Festival blog all the time last week, here are some highlights: James Bennet and Jim Fallows on Bill Clinton; why Tobias Wolff doesn't think much of James Frey; Corby Kummer on the iPhone and Rupert Murdoch's favorite drink; Colin Powell: strategically incoherent and having it both ways; Fallows on China, on China again, and with yet more China; the Stephen Breyer-Ted Olson steel cage death match; Lynne Cheney wants to fight a land war in Asia; Richard Branson wants to go to the moon; why the suburbs are the future of the city; what good reporters really do; oil: just another commodity?; Aspen's dearth of social scientists and its surfeit of jet age glamour; and, of course, the coarsest moment at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Regular blogging will resume tomorrow. I hope.

Update: And here's all kinds of YouTube.

Snape the Villain?

More frenzied Potter speculation, via the redoubtable Jonathan Last.

Powell-Bloomberg '08

This isn't Aspen-specific, so I thought I'd cross-post it from the Ideas Festival blog:

One last point on Colin Powell: He may be self-serving and strategically incoherent, but he remains an eloquent and attractive figure, and a popular one. Obviously he isn't going to run for President, but if he did - well, he's pretty much the only person I could imagine winning the '08 election as a third-party candidate. I've been pretty skeptical of the Michael Bloomberg bubble, mainly because the space for a centrist, domestic-policy Mr. Fix-It is going to be pretty small in a year when the Democrats are so energized. But the space for a centrist, foreign-policy Mr. Fix-It who's also one of the most popular public figures in America (undeservedly, I think, but that doesn't matter much) is much, much bigger. He could run an Eisenhower in '52 campaign, campaigning on his personal celebrity and international experience - which is extensive enough to easily overshadow all his potential rivals - and promising (without necessarily offering specifics) to end an unpopular war. (He certainly wouldn't have any trouble raising money, whether he paired up with Bloomberg or not.) True, the Eisenhower parallel is imperfect: It's not as if Ike was in the Truman White House when the Korean War broke out, for one thing, and running Gulf War I isn't quite the same as being Supreme Allied Commander. And in the crucible of a campaign, the failures that have already tarnished Powell among the commentariat would become the stuff of national debate, knocking his approval ratings down from their current outrageous high. But as a third-party candidate, he wouldn't need an Ike-ish landslide. He need, say, 35-40 percent of the vote - and that would be within reach.

As I said, he clearly isn't going to do it. But if he did, he might just win.

Self-Parody Alert

Matt Frost, two days ago:

I haven’t seen Ratatouille yet, but in service to The Scene, I’ll probably take my children and report back, per Reihan’s request. The gushing reviews, plus the fact that Dana Stevens couldn’t detect a crypto-Republican message, make me inclined to share David Brooks’ skepticism ...

Dana Stevens, today:

That planet was once home to two alien races: the upstanding Autobots and the sneaky Decepticons. (Does anyone but me hear the echo of "Democrats" and "Republicans" in these names?)

I sincerely hope not.

The Atlantic in Aspen

The blog is up and running; serious posting will begin Monday night, when the Ideas Festival starts in earnest. I'll probably check back in here with an occasional non-Aspen post during the next week, but since I'll be running around like mad trying to get to as many panel discussions as possible, any content that shows up here will probably be links to things I'd like to blog about, but don't have the time to tackle just now - like, say, Freeman Dyson's essay on "Our Biotech Future," and Reihan's extended meditation on the same.