Speaking of the author of No Country For Old Men, the Atlantic just took B.R. Myers' classic "Reader's Manifesto" - in which Myers goes after McCarthy with hammer and tongs - out from behind the firewall. And by coincidence, I'm just now reading All The Pretty Horses for the first time, and recently came upon this passage:
[They] walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddlelegged clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they'd ever heard before. In the gray twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool.
I thought I remembered encountering these images before, and sure enough, Myers uses this particular paragraph as an example of McCarthy's literary sins, writing:
As a fan of movie westerns, I refuse to quibble with the myth that a wild landscape can bestow epic significance on the lives of its inhabitants. But novels tolerate epic language only in moderation. To record with the same somber majesty every aspect of a cowboy's life, from a knife fight to his lunchtime burrito, is to create what can only be described as kitsch. Here we learn that out west even a hangover is something special ...
It is a rare passage that can make you look up, wherever you may be, and wonder if you are being subjected to a diabolically thorough Candid Camera prank. I can just go along with the idea that horses might mistake human retching for the call of wild animals. But "wild animals" isn't epic enough: McCarthy must blow smoke about some rude provisional species, as if your average quadruped had impeccable table manners and a pension plan. Then he switches from the horses' perspective to the narrator's, though just what something imperfect and malformed refers to is unclear. The last half sentence only deepens the confusion. Is the thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace the same thing that is lodged in the heart of being? And what is a gorgon doing in a pool? Or is it peering into it? And why an autumn pool? I doubt if McCarthy can explain any of this; he probably just likes the way it sounds.
My (limited) experience with McCarthy bears out this critique, but it seems an insufficient reason to dismiss him. McCarthy's novels cry out for a line editor with a strong sense of the ridiculous (the above paragraph, for instance, could have turned out fine with the final two sentences sliced off), but there's much more to his writing than its excesses. Which is why I prefer James Wood's more nuanced take, from a TNR review of The Road, which is reproduced at length below:
Today's movie-geek crack: the HD trailer for The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, and the red-band (i.e., rated-R; i.e., seriously badass) trailer for the Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men (hat tip: J. Last).
August 29, 2007
The Politics of Mad Men
I still haven't watched more Mad Men - I will, I promise! - but the fact that it inspires articles like this one isn't exactly encouraging. Writing for The Nation, Anna McCarthy makes the show sound like The Sopranos meets Pleasantville - a glossy, tedious exercise in ex post facto liberal condescension. Mad Men, she writes, is "concerned with demonstrating the progress we've made in gender relations since the alienated years before the women's movement," and with dramatizing "the disaffection of midcentury suburbia's 'lonely crowd' and the oppressive expectations of the feminine mystique," not to mention "the hatefulness of conformist WASP culture." (Such dramatic conceits are hackneyed enough at this point that even a Nation writer like McCarthy can recognize that they "are not terribly original," and gently suggest that may be "more revealing as a window onto the present, exposing what 'cutting-edge' popular entertainment considers the cultural gains and losses of the past fifty years.")
Then she whips out this hum-dinger of a conclusion:
Maybe, and perhaps wholly unconsciously, Mad Men signals a desire to return to a time when advertising, and the consumer culture it helped sustain, represented the vitality of Western democracy and the deeper moral meanings of capitalism. The perception that consumption is patriotic is still around, part of the arsenal of ideas used to gain support for the "war on terror," but it's becoming increasingly hard to stomach, especially as bankruptcy and foreclosure rates rise. Automobile ownership, planned obsolescence and the pure plastic perfection of Tupperware were once part of a battle against totalitarianism, American weapons of containment in the cold war. Nowadays, they are part of a global image problem, one that all the President's admen may be powerless to fix.
I understand that there's a difference, legally-speaking, between pleading guilty to a criminal offense and tacitly confessing to a crime you haven't - and probably won't - be charged with, but I still think it's unfortunate that Larry Craig might be forced to resign by his fellow Republicans, while David Vitter has apparently survived being outed as a client of a major D.C. prostitution ring. I agree with Megan that what Craig did was arguably a greater betrayal of his wife than what Vitter may have done, but from any social-conservative calculus (or at least my social-conservative calculus) prostitution has to be considered a greater social evil than cruising for gay sex in bathrooms. This relates to a point I fumbled through in my conversation with Mark yesterday - the unfortunate extent to which socially-conservative politicians have focused their fire on gays, because opposing gay rights was for a long time an 80-20 issue for the Right (though no longer), while studiously ignoring the various beams in heterosexuals' eyes. It's a hard pattern to break, but the GOP could find worse places to start than making sure that Vitter shares whatever political fate awaits Larry Craig.
The first mistake anyone who flings the “anti-American” accusation makes is to equate the government with the society as a whole. If someone or something is critical of the U.S. government, it is very often deemed anti-American or, if the person doing the criticising is American, unpatriotic. This plays by the state’s rules: it makes patriotism dedication to the state, rather than the country, and it makes the state into the embodiment of America. This is simply not true, and it’s a very good thing at times that this isn’t true. That doesn’t mean that the citizens don’t have some small part to play in the dreadful policy decisions made by the state (it is our government, after all), but the decisions being taken in Ultimatum are the sort that the public is never supposed to know about because the average citizen of this country would still probably be horrified at ordering the deaths of foreign journalists in the name of protecting some part of the behemoth security state.
Okay, but let's not take this too far. For instance, I would submit that a film like Braveheart (which, like the Bourne movies, I'm very fond of) qualifies as obviously "anti-English" even though it's technically only critical of the English government and military, or that the infamous Valley of the Wolves is an anti-American movie even though it mainly concerns itself with the wickedness of certain American soldiers (and evil Jewish-American doctors, of course). Obviously, the phrase "anti-American" is at once loaded and nebulous, but I think that it's fair to say that any film that leaves the audience with an overwhelmingly and cartoonishly negative impression of a particular nation qualifies as "anti" that nationality, whether that impression is primarily formed through a representation of that nation's government or not. I take Daniel's point, and Chris's, that the Joan Allen-Julia Stiles axis may offer enough of an alternative vision of what an American is to get The Bourne Ultimatum off the hook in this regard, but I think it definitely tiptoes toward anti-American territory more than its predecessors, by being more cartoonish in its depiction of the pervasiveness - as opposed to just the presence - of naked, self-aware evil within the U.S. bureaucracy.
Wide Stance
This Slate video may be particularly hilarious to me because I know Josh Levin, who provides the voice-over for the undercover cop's report. But it's also the best explanation I've seen of what went, ah, down in that Minneapolis bathroom. And watching the foot-touch and the hand-under-the-stall maneuver makes Craig's behavior seem more self-evidently damning than it did yesterday, when Mark Schmitt and I diavlogged on the subject.
Songs of a Native Son
Since there's apparently a "cloud over Idaho" at the moment, this seems like a good time to mention that I recently had the privilege of meeting Josh Ritter, an Idaho native and possibly the best American singer-songwriter of his (that is, my) generation. I say this as a certified musical philistine, so by all means take it with a grain of salt, but there are plenty of non-philistines out there who agree with me; Amazon calls his just-released disc "the best album of 2007, hands down, by the most under-accorded American musical genius," though personally I would suggest starting with 2003's Hello Starling and going onfrom there. If you like Dylan or Leonard Cohen or anyone else in that vein, you owe it to yourself to give him a listen.
Also, he seems like a really nice guy. So hold your head high, Idaho!
Jason Bourne, Anti-American?
I wouldn't be as quick as Chris Orrto dismiss the notion that The Bourne Supremacy is an anti-American film. (And I gave it a positive review, mind you ...) Chris writes: "This is a movie, like most, with good guys and bad guys - and both groups are made up almost exclusively of current or former employees of the 'American government.'" True enough, and certainly a movie has to do more than posit an evil conspiracy embedded in the U.S. government to qualify as anti-American; otherwise our net would sweep up everything from 24 to All the President's Men. On the other hand, there has to be some point where an indictment of the bad guys within our government becomes so sweeping as to shade into outright anti-Americanism, and I think that the earlier Bourne movies walked the line that Chris is describing more carefully than the most recent installment: In those two films, you had a sense of the American establishment being balanced between the Joan Allen position ("this isn't us") and the pro-torture, pro-Treadstone, pro-anything goes position embodied first by Chris Cooper and then by Brian Cox. Whereas in Supremacy, the rot seems to go much, much deeper; the sins the U.S. government commits as an institution, in the light of bureaucratic day, are much worse; and Allen's "good American" seems a weird anomaly more than anything else. Yes, the film ends (SPOILER ALERT) with the bad guys exposed to press scrutiny and the indictments that follow, but there's nothing in the film as a whole to give you any confidence that a few prison terms will remove the deep corruption from the system; there will be another Treadstone, and another one after that, because this is the path that our government (and by extension, our country?) has chosen to take.
Again, I liked the movie in many ways, and I'm overstating the case a bit. I just think there's a large gray area between generic "corruption in high places" films that don't have a broader anti-American message and exercises in explicit Amerika-bashing like Dogville. And The Bourne Supremacy, more than Bourne's previous outings, is way out there in the gray, and too close to America-bashing for comfort.
Second Update: I don't know why I kept calling UltimatumSupremacy above, but my apologies.
August 28, 2007
Medium Town
Over at Andrew's place, Jamie Kirchick flags something I meant to link to but let slip my mind - Mark Oppenheimer's New Haven Review of Books, a collection of essays by writers who call the Elm City home (as I did, throughout my childhood). The collection includes Oppenheimer's own ode to the Springfield, Massachusetts of his youth, the New Haven of his adulthood, and other such medium cities - the places, in other words, that aren't New York, Washington or Boston, but aren't the suburbs or the deep country either. His affection for New Haven mirrors my own, though I wonder if our shared hometown isn't a special case among medium cities, given the presence of Yale. Having a great university in a small downtown, especially so close to Manhattan, enables New Haven to offer the charms of small-city life with some of the benefits of bigger-city living, and it's enabled the Elm City to survive a disastrous period of urban "renewal," sustain itself through the 1970s and 1980s - an era that tore the heart out of places like Springfield (among many others) - and then renew and reinvent itself over the last ten years.
My fear for New Haven (whose virtues I've defended for years against skeptics and snobs from the megacities) is that this recent renewal will go too far, in some sense - that the slow but unstoppable growth of Yale, and the expansion of New York's commuting population up the Connecticut coastline, will make it more and more like a miniature version of D.C. or New York, an upper-middle class town with a ghetto thrown in, rather than the working and middle-class area where I grew up. But of course this sort of "problem" is a luxury the Springfields of the world would kill to face.
Photo by Flickr user Andrew D. Miller used under a Creative Commons license.
Repression and Republicans
On the case of Larry Craig, David Freddoso wonders "Why is it that Republicans — Craig, Mark Foley, and David Vitter — are the ones who keep getting caught in sex scandals nowadays?" No doubt some of it is random clustering (why does that phrase suddenly sound dirty?); I don't think the Vitter case speaks to any deep truth about a particular Republican predilection for prostitutes, for instance. And some of it is that there's a greater incentive for the media to go digging through the dirty laundry of politicians who trumpet their support for "family values," because of the hypocrisy factor. But it also stands to reason that the party that's associated with conservative beliefs about sex, marriage and family would include a higher percentage of the sort of people who try to avoid acting on their own homosexual inclinations for the sake of those beliefs - and that this higher rate of repression would breed a higher rate of embarrassing scandals.
The contrast between Craig - or Ted Haggard - and Jim McGreevey is instructive, in this regard. McGreevey was conducting long-term affairs with men, which suggests a person who had attained a certain comfort with his homosexuality, even as he attempted to keep it a secret. Whereas Craig and Haggard both seem to have sought out gay encounters in as furtive a fashion as possible, as someone would who's giving in to what they consider an immoral temptation, rather than merely acting on a desire they would prefer to keep hidden from the public. And not coincidentally, given this difference in how they approached their sexual desires - and the kind of scandals that ensued - both Craig and Haggard are Republicans, while McGreevey is a liberal Democrat.
I have all sorts of thoughts on this topic, but for the moment I'll confine myself to taking issue with Derb's remark that "Christianity got its start as a religion of slaves. Perhaps it is fated to end the same way." The debate over the demographics of early Christianity is sufficiently tangled to make it possible that he's right; however, there's more reason to think that Christianity got its start as a religion of middle-class urban women than that it spread primarily on the lowest rungs of the Roman social ladder. Not that a "religion of women" would be any more appealing to Derb, I'm sure - particularly where the struggle with radical Islam is concerned - but for the sake of accuracy I thought I'd throw the point out there.
Of all the people I'd ever interviewed who seemed to have the potential for stardom, he was the person who seemed best equipped to handle it, because he seemed capable of getting along with pretty much anyone, and had what might be described as a sporting curiosity about fame. When he talked about the movie industry -- his knowledge based, at that point, mainly on secondhand reports from older filmmakers and the same faux-insider film monthlies that everyone else read -- he sounded like a kid excitedly summarizing the research he'd done for a paper on deep-sea diving or petrified wood. In 1995, after he'd moved to Los Angeles and started going on auditions and meeting with powerful people, he still seemed more or less the same guy -- observant, bemused, inquisitive and entertained by the unpredictability of life. When I did some follow-up interviews in late 1995 for my Bottle Rocket cover story -- which turned out to be my last Dallas Observer piece -- Wilson told me about a recent family reunion at which a young cousin asked his opinion of the budget overruns on Waterworld. "He asked, 'What do you think about the cost?'" Wilson said. "He sounded like a Los Angeles agent. I thought, 'What an odd question for an eight-year-old to be asking!' I told him, 'I don't know. It's not really my position to think about the cost.' Then his dad came up. He said, 'Oh, you're just protecting the industry. You're just a home-teamer.' That seemed kind of unfair to me, because I saw Waterworld, and I kind of liked it."
Read the whole thing. As Seitz remarks, "Wilson's a good-time shaman; when he appears, you smile, because know you're about to have fun. He makes good films better and bad films tolerable." He's also - or so one suspects - an immensely talented screenwriter. God willing, he'll be around, and happier than he is now, for many years to come.
August 27, 2007
The Past Is Another Country
I've heard enough people I trust rave about Mad Men to give it at least four or five episodes (I just watched the premiere two nights ago) to grow on me, and I'm happy to accept Matt's judgment that Sacha Zimmerman's review is a bit on the harsh side. But at least in episode one, this particular Zimmerman complaint rings true:
Throughout "Mad Men," corny references to the show's moment in time come thudding down on the viewer, alive with self-consciousness. The head secretary practically winks at the audience before telling the "new girl" not to be intimidated by the "technology" as she reveals a boxy, avocado-green electric typewriter. Draper chastises a subordinate for stealing a report from his trash, which he knows must have been the case because it's not like there's "some magic copying machine" around the office. And after being shown a mock-up of a space-themed advertisement, he riffs on how ridiculous it is to think that we would ever go to space. Then there are so many references to how none of the characters--even pregnant women--seriously believe cigarettes are bad for them (insert annoying "we know better now" coughing fit here), it's maddening. I get it: It's 1960! Now move on.
Part of what makes historical dramas so tough to pull off is that you're constantly walking a tightrope between the lure of this sort of thudding, look-back-in-irony condescension, and the instinct to generate sympathy through anachronism - for instance, by making sure that the hero of your epic Crusades movie talks an awful lot like a modern secular liberal. And I think this tightrope gets harder to walk the closer to the present day your story is set: HBO's Rome (which had many flaws, but largely avoided these particular traps) successfully wallowed in the pastness of the past precisely because its landscape was so alien to most viewers, with none of the connections to contemporary politics or mores that tempt filmmakers to condescension or anachronism. Whereas a show like Mad Men has it tougher: It's hard to separate a portrayal of that not-so-distant era from our own opinions (and memories) of it, and our knowledge of what followed on its heels.
But I'll keep watching ...
August 26, 2007
Wow
Words fail me. As they failed her.
August 24, 2007
The Silence of God
That Mother Teresa endured a long dark night of the soul will come as no surprise to anyone who read Carol Zaleski's essay on the subject several years ago, but the depth and duration of her spiritual crisis nonetheless has the capacity to shock, and to humble.
Naturally, Christopher Hitchens has something to say about it:
In 1948, Hitchens ventures, Teresa finally woke up, although she could not admit it. He likens her to die-hard Western communists late in the cold war: "There was a huge amount of cognitive dissonance," he says. "They thought, 'Jesus, the Soviet Union is a failure, [but] I'm not supposed to think that. It means my life is meaningless.' They carried on somehow, but the mainspring was gone. And I think once the mainspring is gone, it cannot be repaired." That, he says, was Teresa.
I think that this is a rather poor analogy for all sorts of reasons, but chiefly because it conflates the experiential and ideological aspects of religion. One can, certainly, experience religious faith as a kind of ideological belief - as the adherence to a compelling and all-encompassing system of thought that explains the world and one's purpose in it. And this sort of belief is arguably analogous to Western Communists' (misplaced) confidence in Marxism generally, and the Soviet Union specifically. But the "mainspring" of religious faith for most believers - and particularly for a mystic like Mother Teresa - is the personal experience of God as a being who loves them and communicates with them, rather than the intellectual experience of Catholicism (or some other specific faith tradition) as a philosophical system that persuades them. This is why most religious people remain religious while being entirely ignorant of anything resembling serious theology, and indeed, why religious bodies can exist and thrive with at best a minimal theological superstructure. The theology is an attempt to make sense of the experience; the experience itself the primary thing.
So if one set out to find a secular analogue to what Mother Teresa experienced in her encounters with the divine, a more appropriate sneering comparison for Hitchens to employ might be to people caught up, not in an ideological fervor, but in a cult of personality - people who believed in the Soviet Union not for Communism's sake but for Stalin's, or in Nazi Germany because they were mesmerized by Hitler. And then her dark night of the soul would be analogous to, say, banishment from the Great Dictator's inner circle, rather than to ideological disillusionment. This analogy would seem to suit some of Hitchens' purposes, since he's forever complaining that the Judeo-Christian God is a totalitarian despot; on the other hand, the thing about cults of personality is that the personality in question tends to be, you know, real, which is hardly a notion that Hitchens is likely to entertain where Mother Teresa's God is concerned.
And his unwillingness to even entertain it is one of the (many) reasons why Hitchens' brief against religion is so thin: An ideologue himself, he finds it easiest to argue against faith-as-ideology, while leaving largely untouched the more difficult and more important question of what we should make of faith-as-experience. Confronting the case of Mother Teresa, who experienced the presence and love of Jesus Christ intensely throughout her young adulthood and (understandably) made these experiences the basis for her career as a missionary nun, Hitchens is like a man who seeks to disprove not only the faithfulness but the very existence of a woman's absent lover by arguing that her mind is held captive by a primitive, oppressive and dangerous theory of eros. Even if such an ideological critique were true (and obviously I find Hitchens unpersuasive on this count as well), it wouldn't get him where he wants to go, because the crucial question - whether the original experience itself is real; whether the now-absent lover still loves her, and whether he exists at all - would remain unanswered, and indeed unaddressed.
Well, I suppose it was inevitable that the Weekly Standard would figure out some way to trash the 7 enlisted men from the 82nd Airborne, who wrote the courageous Op-Ed piece about the unreliability of our Iraqi allies in the New York Times last Sunday.
By all means, read the Standard piece in question, written by seven Iraq War veterans: Whatever you think of its arguments, it's a model of respectful disagreement. (No thuggery here!) That Klein takes this as an example of "heroes" being "trashed" is emblematic of the difficulties involved in having soldiers, whether generals or enlisted men, take part in political debates as soldiers - a problem that extends to parents and relatives of military personnel as well, and runs from Cindy Sheehan on the dovish left to these commercials from the hawkish right. In each case, there's an assumption that our soldiers are invested with a unique political as well as moral authority, and that to question this authority is to disrespect (or "trash") their sacrifice.
Writing for the Atlantic earlier this year, Andrew Bacevich argued that this state of affairs owes something to the "irresponsible politicking of generals and admirals," something to "the abdication by Congress of its constitutional duties on matters of peace and war," and something to the foreign-policy blunderings of "an imperial, irresponsible, and habitually dissembling administration." But he suggested that it's also a predictable consequence of the move to all-volunteer force:
Military service, once viewed (at least nominally) as a civic obligation, has become a matter of choice. As a result, the burden of “defending our freedom” no longer falls evenly across society. Those choosing to serve do not represent a cross section of America, and most are presumably well aware of that fact.
To assuage uneasy consciences, the many who do not serve proclaim their high regard for the few who do. This has vaulted America’s fighting men and women to the top of the nation’s moral hierarchy. The character and charisma long ago associated with the pioneer or the small farmer—or carried in the 1960s by Dr. King and the civil-rights movement—has now come to rest upon the soldier.
Bacevich's conclusion ought to be appended to any "veterans speak out" op-ed or advertisement that appears from now till the conclusion of the war:
On matters of policy, those who wear the uniform ought to get a vote, but it’s the same one that every other citizen gets—the one exercised on Election Day. To give them more is to sow confusion about the soldier’s proper role, which centers on service and must preclude partisanship. Legitimating soldiers’ lobbies is likely to warp national-security policy and crack open the door to praetorianism.
But the real worry is that the next generation isn't being tamed so much as unleashed, though not exactly liberated. These girls' post-quince lives will not be nearly so closely supervised as they might have been in their home countries, and they won't move toward anything like the same conclusion. Latina teens are among the most at-risk group of teenagers. Despite a high rate of religiosity, they are—like so many children of first-generation immigrants—often alienated from their parents' worldview. It doesn't help that more than 25 percent of Hispanic children live below the poverty line. They are also the fastest-growing teenage demographic: By 2020, one in five teens will be Hispanic. According to the National Campaign To Prevent Teen Pregnancy, Latinas have the highest teen birthrate of all major U.S. racial/ethnic groups: 51 percent of Latina teens get pregnant at least once before the age of 20, nearly twice the national average. Alvarez interviews one hairdresser who notes that of seven girls he styled for their quinces, four invited him, within the year, to a baby shower ...
It is notable that the quinceañera, which originated as a prelude to a wedding, in this country seems to have become a substitute for the wedding a girl may never have. One of Alvarez's central questions is why parents are willing to spend so much arduously earned money—the average price of a quince is $5,000; the colloquial phrase for giving a party you can't afford is "throwing the house out the window"—on a one-night blowout. The answer is that for many of these girls, a quince is the only blowout her parents can be sure of giving.
The Mundy piece calls to mind Heather Mac Donald's City Journal essay on Hispanic family values, which includes this passage:
I think I (and others) have actually been too easy on Bush's unhinged analogies speech yesterday. He'd like us to believe, I guess, that the crux of the debate about the Vietnam War was that hawks warned that after the war America's collaborators in South Vietnam would suffer, whereas doves naively said the Viet Cong were going to offer flowers and sweets.
Back in the real world, though, the essence of the matter was that hawks were warning that the survival of political democracy around the world quite literally depended on South Vietnam staying in non-Communist hands. A Communist victory in Vietnam was said to be destined to lead to the rest of Indochina going Communist, from which the Reds -- emboldened -- were going to march into Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Our allies in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan would prove incapable of resisting the onrushing tide. With Communism triumphant in Asian, Western Europe would turn to Finlandization to stave off direct Soviet domination, and next thing you know the New World would be crushed beneath the vast economic might of the Old.
It sounds crazy, yes, and the reason it sounds crazy is that it was crazy and when we eventually left Vietnam it turned out that while hawks and doves alike all made some bad forecasts, the hawkish point of view on the big strategic question was completely wrong whereas the dovish view was completely correct.
Well, okay, the fall of Vietnam didn't lead to a Red Dawn-like scenario, with America standing alone - actually, alongside "six hundred million screaming Chinamen," if I remember the movie right - against the Soviet juggernaut. But the Communist victory in Vietnam did lead to the rest of Indochina going Communist, as the domino theorists predicted, and it played a role in the Soviet advances across the Third World during the rest of the 1970s - from Ethiopia and Mozambique to Afghanistan and Nicaragua, with various other proxy wars thrown in for good measure. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that the world wasn't reallygoing the Soviets way in the late '70s, as people on both sides thought it was - or at least that their internal contradictions prevented them from capitalizing on the opportunities that the U.S. defeat in Vietnam afforded them, and eventually led them into their own Vietnam-style overreach. Similarly, our enemies in al-Qaeda, Iran and elsewhere probably won't make the kind of gains that, say, Rick Santorum and other feverish voices anticipate if we pull out of Iraq, and they simply aren't strong enough to pose an existential threat to the U.S. over the long run. But they will win a real victory, just as Soviet Communism won a real victory in the early 1970s, and that victory will have real repercussions around the globe. I think we were right to pull out of Vietnam when we did, and wrong to be there in the first place, but it's too simplistic to say that the domino theory looks "completely wrong" or "crazy" in hindsight; there are an awful lot of dead people in Indochina, Latin America and Africa who would quibble with that assessment.
The Right and Global Warming
Jim Manzi's NR essay proposing a conservative response to global warming - one of the smartest right-of-center policy manifestos I've read in a long time - is available online here. Everyone should read it: Conservatives will find a sensible blueprint for moving from the denialist fringe to the political mainstream, and liberals will get a taste of how a wised-up, heads-out-of-the-sand Right could kick their ass on the issue.
I feel a certain unease with Ross Douthat’s disquiet with Jon Chait’s unhappiness happiness with Bill Kristol’s anger with certain liberals’ dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq. Seriously, Ross’s objection to Chait – or, more accurately, Ross’s unwillingness to wrestle with Chait’s argument – seems to rest entirely on the fact that Chait’s magazine, The New Republic, has a wishy-washy, passive-aggressive, hard-to-pin-down position on the war ...
The underlying mystery here is hardly a mystery. At TNR, Peretz remains a vigorous defender of the war. Chait and some others were for the war and have become critics of its execution. Foer and others were against it from the start. I’m not sure how you would synthesize these positions into Weekly Standard-style editorial calls-to-arms or what, in the nature of magazines, obliges TNR to do so. TNR and the Standard are simply different kinds of magazines.
By the same token, Ross’ critique of Chait would be considerably more powerful if it were possible to discern clearly what Ross’ own view on the war was at the present time. It isn’t that Ross never writes about the war, but he doesn’t say much about what kind of Iraq policy he thinks would be best. In his bloggingheads appearances, he will often make a point of declaring himself to be something of an agnostic on the “surge,” and thus ends up, by default, with a “wait and see” position. That’s fair enough, but it is a bad position from which to criticise someone else’s reticence about Iraq policy.
Meanwhile, Chait himself writes that I'm guilty of a non sequitur for using his attack on Kristol as an excuse to gripe about TNR's recent silence on the Iraq War. I take his point, but I don't think that my turn was exactly a non sequitur so much as an expression of disinterest in a controversy that's completely tangential to the much-more important debate about what to do next in Iraq - a debate from which TNR, both in its editorials and in the essays it chooses to run, has largely absented itself of late. Kristol accused The New Republic of giving up on success in Iraq - indeed, of choosing to ignore evidence of success because of a commitment to a narrative of defeat - and cited the Beauchamp piece as his prime example, and I think Chait is absolutely right to call that criticism unfair and unfounded. (Though I think Chait's larger attempt to draw a contrast between the old neocon idealism and the new neocon thuggery is considerably weaker, as are some of his other swipes). But it's unfair and unfounded in part because it's impossible to tell what TNRdoes think about the war, which in turn gives the whole debate a sideshow quality that makes me inclined to tune it out.
Jon Chait's attack on Bill Kristol's supposed "thuggery" in support of the current American strategy in Iraq would be considerably more interesting if it were possible to discern where Chait's own magazine stands on the question. The new issue of TNR, in which Chait's anti-Kristol broadside appears, contains articles on Mitt Romney and Karl Rove, the netroots and the psychology of Bush voters, and sundry other topics. It leads with editorials on Sudan (which expresses support for "an outright NATO invasion of Darfur") and Presidential library fundraising. And it marks the seventh straight issue in which TNR's editors - who passive-aggressively endorsed the surge back in May - have seen fit to say exactly nothing about what the United States should be doing, whether militarily, politically or diplomatically, about the minor difficulties we currently face in Iraq. Which leaves the reader with the impression, fairly or not, that TNR's take on the most important foreign-policy question facing America is that Bill Kristol is a jerk.
Lost in the Bureaucracy
I think Shadi Hamid (via Matt, who shares his take) is a little hard on that Peter Baker piece I mentioned yesterday, about how Bush's democracy-promotion agenda has been frustrated by the foreign-policy bureaucracy. For one thing, I don't agree with Hamid's claim that in Baker's telling, "President Bush comes out as a courageous visionary whose wonderful ideas were stilted by the State Department bureaucracy and by the government’s traditional resistance to new ideas." Rather, I think he comes across as a well-meaning, ineffectual, and extremely naive politician whose somewhat dubious ideas were effectively resisted by the State Department bureaucracy (though maybe I'm just reading the piece through the lens of my own biases). Meanwhile, both Matt and Hamid make the point that when Bush really wanted a policy course pursued - namely, the invasion of Iraq - the opposition from the professionals in the State Department and elsewhere was steamrolled. Which is true enough, and I don't think there's any question that invading Iraq was a higher priority for Bush than the larger reorientation of American diplomacy in a more pro-democracy direction. But I think the contrast between how Iraq played out and what's happened to the freedom agenda doesn't just speak to Bush's priorities; it also speaks to the unfortunate truth that it's become easier for an American chief executive to invade a foreign country than to control the more banal, day-to-day workings of his own diplomatic corps.
And we are a spiritual nation. We are a nation that was founded upon — the only nation I can think that was founded upon the notion that there is a — a — that there is a God. We hold these truths self-evident, that all men are created equal, et cetera.
Isn't the point of self-evident truths that we do not need God to perceive them?
Maybe so, but in the specific document that Biden was attempting, with characteristic grace, to cite as support for his point - the Declaration of Independence, that is - the existence of God is itself taken to be self-evident, and the principle of human equality is grounded on what the authors describe as the self-evident truth that human beings are "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." No doubt many of them thought of this Creator as a watchmaker God or some similarly impersonal Designer, rather than the Judeo-Christian Deity, and of course one can attempt to ground the principle of human equality on something other than endowments from a Creator. But the fact remains that insofar as the Declaration should be considered the founding document of the United States of America (which is a whole separate debate), Biden's comments about America being founded on the notion that there is a God seem inarguably - one might even say self-evidently - correct.
August 21, 2007
Respect Versus Compassion
I mean to link to it last week, but Michael Currie Schaffer is on to something when he draws a contrast between Tommy Thompson and Karl Rove's styles of conservative governance. I would go a bit further than he does, though, and suggest that there was an ideological as well as a practical difference between the two, which makes it something of a mistake to call Thompson "the original compassionate conservative." As Reihan and I have argued elsewhere, the sort of right-wing politics that Thompson embodied - particular in the push for welfare reform - was predicated on respect, rather than compassion; it emphasized self-help, individual responsibility and equal treatment, and lacked the implicit condescension that has lurked in Bush's "when people are hurting, the government's got to move" tendencies. This is a slippery distinction, I admit - No Child Left Behind, Bush's signature issue in 2000, was an uneasy hybrid of the two impulses, as were many of the Administration's foreign-aid forays - but I think it's a real one, and it goes to the heart of a number of Bush-era failures, the "comprehensive" immigration reform debacle chief among them.
I also think Schaffer is too quick to dismiss the political appeal of Thompson-style good-government conservatism, particularly in a general election. He writes:
Of course, before casting Rove as the villain in the GOP's abandonment of the gubernatorial goody-goodies of Thompson's generation, it's worth going back to the scoreboard. When he ran his candidate as a policy-paper perusing governor, Rove and the GOP lost by half a million votes and dipped to 50 seats in the Senate. Waging total politics, at least the first couple times, led to more successful results. Rove didn't so much betray the wonks as cast them aside when they proved unpalatable to any body of voters not dominated by the likes of David Broder. Rove's time may have passed in 2006, but Thompson's had passed well before it.
This is unconvincing stuff. Given the state of the economy and the post-impeachment unpopularity of the Congressional GOP, 2000 should have been a banner year for Democrats, and the fact that George W. Bush did as well as he did had a great deal to do with his (Rove-crafted) image as a "reformer with results," particularly where education policy was concerned. (As Josh Green notes, quoting Rove, "people who named education as their top issue voted for the Democrat over the Republican 76–16 percent in the 1996 presidential election, but just 52–44 in 2000.") Just because Bush improved his showing in '04 by hammering away on national security doesn't make his 2000 performance unimpressive, and it certainly doesn't demonstrate that a reformist, pragmatic conservatism is necessarily a political loser.
Photo by Flickr user Whereisyourmind used under a Creative Commons license.
Dysfunction in High Places
Peter Baker's long WaPo piece on how the Bush "freedom agenda" was stalled by bureaucratic intransigence is a depressing read on every front. On the one hand, it's a damning portrait of a weak President who entertained delusions of world-historical grandeur but couldn't even keep his own Vice President on board with the mission, let alone his Cabinet agencies; on the other it's a story of how the federal bureaucracy works to frustrate and undermine the elected officials whose policies it supposedly exists to implement. It moves from depressing White House anecdotes like this one ...
Gerson, Bartlett, Karl Rove, Peter Wehner and other aides met at the White House on Jan. 10, 2005, with a group of academics. Yale University historian John Lewis Gaddis suggested that Bush promise to work toward "ending tyranny" by a date certain in 20 or 25 years. Some scoffed, but Gerson liked the idea.
The group adjourned to lunch in the White House mess, where, Gaddis later recalled in a lecture, Rove recommended the "chocolate freedom tart," a French desert renamed during the Iraq invasion.
... to depressing bureaucratic anecdotes like this one:
Defiance of Bush's mandate could be subtle or brazen. The official recalled a conversation with a State Department bureaucrat over a democracy issue.
"It's our policy," the official said.
"What do you mean?" the bureaucrat asked.
"Read the president's speech," the official said.
"Policy is not what the president says in speeches," the bureaucrat replied. "Policy is what emerges from interagency meetings."
On both fronts, the word that comes to mind is decadence.
Up in the Air
My instinct is to agree with Matt when he suggests that post-9/11, "airplanes have become relatively unattractive targets for terrorists," which means that "endlessly piling on more and more security measures to air travel is pointless." That said, there seems to be a persuasive argument (via Reihan, a few months back) for implementing different security measures than the ones we have now, focused less on passengers at the metal detectors and more on the planes sitting unguarded on the tarmac.
It's also worth noting that while one would assume that terrorists recognize that it's now easier, as Matt writes, to "blow up a train or a bus, open fire on a crowded subway station, try to hijack a truck carrying deadly chemicals, or do any number of additional things" than to muck around with airports and hijackings, it isn't entirely clear that they do recognize this. The lure of the airline attack (and the spectacular attack in general) seems to persist even in a climate where attacks on lower value targets would be far easier to pull off, and arguably just as damaging. From Richard Reid to the the British bomb plot to the idiots who wanted to attack JFK to the car bomb at the Glasgow airport, a disproportionate percentage of post-9/11 plots have involved planes and airports, even though trains, buses, shopping malls and other low-security targets would seem like more logical places to wreak havoc. Why this is I'm not sure - force of habit? a desire to disrupt global transportation? the symbolic appeal of striking at one of Western modernity's more visible technological achievements? - but it's something to keep in mind when you're suffering through the agonies of airport security.
August 20, 2007
Cat Ladies
Unlike Matt, I was familiar with the term "cougar" - a descriptor for older women on the prowl for younger men - but it's still a little weird to see it show up as a category in Mark Penn's ridiculously fine-grained typology of American voters. I thought of "cougar" as a pejorative phrase like "butterface" or "two-bagger," or at least a mildly offensive one like MILF - in other words, the sort of thing you'd hear all the time from a certain kind of guy, and absolutely never from a political consultant.
The Way West
Once you get past the civics lectures from Paul Haggis, Robert Redford, and company, this fall's movie season might be remembered as a good few months for stories from the American West. There are two straightforward Westerns that look promising - The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, which should be worth seeing for the cast alone (any movie that finds room for Zooey Deschanel and Mary-Louise Parker deserves an audience); and 3:10 to Yuma, a remake of a 1957 classic, which stars Russell Crowe and Christian Bale and gets a glowing advance review from Aintitcoolnews' Quint here. There's also No Country For Old Men, the Coen Brothers' take on Cormac McCarthy's desert noir, which is earning goodadvance word, and Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, due out at Christmas-time, with Daniel Day-Lewis as an oil prospector in Old California. Meanwhile, the Sean Penn-helmed adaptation of Into the Wild - not a gunslingers-in-cowboy-hats movie, but a "Western" film in the broader sense of the word - looks like it has a chance to be great.
I don't know whether this is quite enough to make for one of those dubious Arts and Leisure stories in which three anecdotes are claimed to betoken a major pop culture trend; on the other hand, I certainly wouldn't object to a larger revival of the Hollywood Western. It isn't my favorite genre by any means, but given that we've probably hit a creative wall - for a while, at least - where mob movies are concerned, Hollywood needs to find some mythic American stories that don't involve kryptonite or the Batmobile, and the Western is an obvious place to go looking for material.
The Politics of Fear
Color me underwhelmed by the social science research cited by John Judis in this article, which purports to show how sub-rational responses associated with the fear of mortality explain the political success of George W. Bush specifically, and social conservatism more generally, in the wake of 9/11. On the one hand, it seems unsurprising to the point of banality to suggest that a heightened awareness of one's own mortality can increase the attraction of religious traditionalism, in-group solidarity, and so forth. On the other hand, the specific examples Judis cites to demonstrate how these psycho-political tendencies have impacted the politics of the last six years seem tissue-thin:
For instance, because worldview defense increases hostility toward other races, religions, nations, and political systems, it helps explain the rage toward France and Germany that erupted prior to the Iraq war, as well as the recent spike in hostility toward illegal immigrants. Also central to worldview defense is the protection of tradition against social experimentation, of community values against individual prerogatives ... and of religious dictates against secular norms. For many conservatives, this means opposition to abortion and gay marriage. This may well explain why family values became more salient in 2004--a year in which voters were supposed to be unusually focused on foreign policy--than it had been from 1992 through 2000. Indeed, from 2001 to 2004, polls show an increase in opposition to abortion and gay marriage, along with a growing religiosity. According to Gallup, the percentage of voters who believed abortion should be "illegal in all circumstances" rose from 17 percent in 2000 to 20 percent in 2002 and would still be at 19 percent in 2004. Even church attendance by atheists, according to one poll, increased from 3 to 10 percent from August to November 2001.
Moving backward point by point, there's no evidence that the post-9/11 spike in church attendance persisted beyond a very narrow window of time. On an issue where polls vary as wildly as they do on abortion, a three percentage-point swing would seem to be at most barely meaningful, and probably just statistical noise. Maybe the debate over gay marriage was more salient in 2004 than 1996 because of "worldview defense" in the wake of 9/11, but Occam's Razor would suggest that a certain Massachusetts Supreme Court decision, and the predictable public backlash against judicial activism that ensued, might have had at least something to do with it. (Gay marriage wasn't much of an issue in the '02 midterms, you'll recall, when "worldview defense" should have been at its height.)
The rising hostility toward illegal aliens sounds like a better example of what Judis's researchers are talking about, since immediately after 9/11 there was a spike in the percentage of Americans who suggested that we should admit fewer immigrants every year. But by the time immigration surfaced as a major political controversy, in the autumn of last year, the numbers had settled back to around pre-9/11 levels, which suggests that the salience of the issue lately has far more to do with normal politics - specifically, voter hostility to a sweeping immigration reform proposal championed by none other than President Bush - than with some atavistic hangover from September 11.
Finally, I don't know how much outright "rage" there was toward France and Germany - I think it was more a question of people jumping at the chance to crack jokes about effete, weaselly Europeans - but sure, the whole "freedom fries," pouring-out-French-wine business was dumb and chauvinistic, so I'll give that one to Judis. It doesn't change the fact that much of his piece seems like typical liberal heavy breathing about how certain voter preferences - for security over liberty, and tradition over experimentation - are illegitimate and dangerous because they tend to favor conservatives, and because they helped George W. Bush win re-election.
The Courage of Their Convictions
I don't usually get annoyed by Hollywood's politics, but I was traveling this weekend (hence the lack of blogging), and my two plane rides offered time enough to read through Entertainment Weekly's fall movie preview issue - which was time enough to be consistently irritated. (This will be a great autumn, I'm afraid, for Very Serious Political Dramas.) Though maybe my irritation had less to do with the politics per se than the frequent protestations about how the movies in question don't take sides in any ideological fight. Start with Reese Witherspoon discussing Rendition, "a sober political drama about a pregnant Midwestern woman who discovers that her Egyptian husband ... is being secretly held by the U.S. government." (It looks pretty sober to me.) She explains:
"It doesn't smash people over the head with a message - you're not even sure if the husband is guilty or innocent - which is one of the reasons I wanted to do it," Witherspoon says. "It represents different cultures in a real human way."
Hey, maybe so. I'm more willing to give Witherspoon the benefit of the doubt than I am Paul Haggis and his new Iraq War drama, In the Valley of Elah:
A film about the effects of war on soldiers when they return home is certainly not an easy sell. "I think it is going to be upsetting," says Sarandon, who plays the soldier's mothers. "I don't think people want to know the damage that war is doing to our men." But Haggis doesn't see Elah as a political film. "It doesn't matter if you thought going into Iraq was right or wrong," he says. "Let's set all that side and ask, 'What's the hidden human cost?' I have the same hope for [Elah] that I had for Crash - that it'll stir debate, that people will walk out of the theater arguing and talking about what's happening in America."
Via Julian Sanchez, I came upon a quote from Christopher Hitchens that I hadn't encountered before. It runs:
In order to get my own emotions out of the way, I should say briefly that on that day I shared the general register of feeling, from disgust to rage, but was also aware of something that would not quite disclose itself. It only became fully evident quite late that evening. And to my surprise (and pleasure), it was exhilaration. I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a traveling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated. On one side, the ethics of the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan. (Those are the ones I love, by the way.) On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic fascism. I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials. And because it is so interesting.
This reminds me of nothing so much as the passage early in Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, when the protagonist, Guy Crouchback, feels similar stirrings (albeit with vastly different political motivations) upon hearing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact:
The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.
No photograph of him has ever been published, but those who know Daniel Miller say that he resembles his father. Some say it's the nose, others the mischievous glimmer in the eyes when he smiles, but the most telling feature, the one that clearly identifies him as Arthur Miller's son, is his high forehead and identically receding hairline. He is almost 41 now, but it's impossible to say whether his father's friends would notice the resemblance, because the few who have ever seen Daniel have not laid eyes on him since he was a week old.
Louis Menand, in a great piece on voter irrationality from a few years back:
... after analyzing the results of surveys conducted over time, in which people tended to give different and randomly inconsistent answers to the same questions, Converse concluded that "very substantial portions of the public" hold opinions that are essentially meaningless-off-the-top-of-the-head responses to questions they have never thought about, derived from no underlying set of principles. These people might as well base their political choices on the weather. And, in fact, many of them do.
Findings about the influence of the weather on voter behavior are among the many surveys and studies that confirm Converse's sense of the inattention of the American electorate. In election years from 1952 to 2000, when people were asked whether they cared who won the Presidential election, between twenty-two and forty-four per cent answered "don't care" or "don't know." In 2000, eighteen per cent said that they decided which Presidential candidate to vote for only in the last two weeks of the campaign; five per cent, enough to swing most elections, decided the day they voted.
Seventy per cent of Americans cannot name their senators or their congressman. Forty-nine per cent believe that the President has the power to suspend the Constitution. Only about thirty per cent name an issue when they explain why they voted the way they did, and only a fifth hold consistent opinions on issues over time. Rephrasing poll questions reveals that many people don't understand the issues that they have just offered an opinion on. According to polls conducted in 1987 and 1989, for example, between twenty and twenty-five per cent of the public thinks that too little is being spent on welfare, and between sixty-three and sixty-five per cent feels that too little is being spent on assistance to the poor. And voters apparently do punish politicians for acts of God. In a paper written in 2004, the Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels estimate that "2.8 million people voted against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or too wet" as a consequence of that year's weather patterns. Achen and Bartels think that these voters cost Gore seven states, any one of which would have given him the election.
Just "steps away from the holy mosque.” With a "spectacular view of the Ka’abah.” Cartier, Starbucks and Tiffany have already signed leases.
As Michael Linton writes, it's not as strange as it sounds (to me, at least). But it's still strange.
August 16, 2007
Undoing 1707?
Is it my recent trip to Scotland (where the above, totally un-ridiculous photo was snapped; that's the tartan of Clan Burberry I'm wearing around my head, I believe), my affection for Braveheart and Rob Roy, or my undying loyalty to the House of Stuart that keeps me intrigued by the progress of the Scottish National Party?
Which ever it is, Alex Massie (your source for all things Scottish, and a confirmedBraveheart-hater, the philistine) has the relevant details and analysis.
The Zen of Cheney
I'd like to associate myself with Jason Zengerle's remark that Dick Cheney "could well benefit from a round of media appearances - because, while his views may be crazy and alarmist, his public presentation of them isn't." The odd thing, of course, is that Cheney entered this Administration with a reputation for being anti-charismatic but deeply responsible, but if anything the reverse has proven true: When he's ventured out of the undisclosed location, he's actually been a much more compelling spokesman for the Administration than the President, even as he's been associated with many of its more reckless and tone-deaf policy decisions.
(Though he wasagainst the Harriet Miers nomination: Credit where credit is due.)
The Political-Theological Problem; Or, "A Whiff of Nativism"
On the question of whether the separation of church and state should be extended to the separation of religion and politics, I wrote that "Andrew misunderstands American history, American religion, and the intersection thereof," and accused him of "trying apply a continental model of faith and politics to a context where that model has never applied, and so and so forth." He responds:
His argument is weak, which is why, I suppose, he feels the need to grace it with a whiff of nativism ... If someone thinks I'm wrong about a country I wasn't born in but have lived in my entire adult life, then please say why I'm wrong. Don't play the "you weren't born here" card, however guilefully.
The "and so and so forth" in my original point was intended as a suggestion that I have said why I think that Andrew's wrong, at length and ad nauseum, in many other places, and didn't see the point of rehashing the arguments again. For what it's worth, you can find my brief against what I take to be Andrew's vision of secular politics elucidated in this review essay, this exchange with Damon Linker, and a host of blog posts (see here or here or here or here; I'm sure I've written others as well).
But for the sake of debate, let's take up Andrew's latest salvo:
Maybe this makes me a sucker, but I find it perfectly plausible that George W. Bush reads a book every 4-5 days. I doubt that most of them are dense works of public policy (or searing critiques of his Administration), but what we know about the President's personal habits - particularly his attachment to a bourgeois, early-to-bed early-to-rise lifestyle that includes a librarian wife - suggests the kind of guy who reads for a while before bed without fail, and probably reads extensively on plane trips as well. He strikes me as the kind of male reader who makes Harlan Coben novels and Joseph Ellis books into bestsellers - not a omnivorous wonk like Clinton, or a would-be intellectual like Gore, but a reader nonetheless.
Boots on the Ground
By harmonic convergence, this Glenn Loury essay on the U.S. prison population is getting lots of attention in the same week that I finished up The Wire, Season 3 (twelve episodes calculated to eliminate all faith in our nation's approach to the drug war), and that the Smike Brownbuckabee combination - two conservatives with an admirableopen-mindedness on reforming our criminal justice system - came in second at Ames.
Prison reform is one of those impossible issues where all the incentives cut against changing the present system, because its injustices and cruelties are borne by a small percentage of the population, and its benefits are spread across the public as a whole. Loury's essay emphasizes the racial elements at work in the system, and they're real enough, but our incarceration policy is sustained by cool reason as much as racism. Mass incarceration emerged out of prejudice, yes, but also as a rational, albeit draconian, response to a social crisis: We lock up young black men by the hundreds of thousands because it's the only sustained response that we were willing to muster to the large-scale familial and social breakdown that helped sustain America's thirty-year crime wave. Loury's essay briefly acknowledges this point, but largely elides it; he wants to focus on race, but it's memories of the crime wave, I would argue, that offer the larger stumbling block to reform. (Particularly since crime still hasn't dropped back to pre-1960s levels in many parts of the country.) There's a Catch-22 at work, too: So long as crime keeps falling, it's taken by most people (the Fox Butterfields of the world aside) as a sign the system is working; but then if crime starts inching back up, as it has the past two years (though there's good news for this year), well, nobody's going to be interested in reforming prisons during an era of rising crime!
For serious reform to make any headway, then, two things need to happen. First, conservatives need to continue their movement on the issue (only Nixon can go to China and all that), and second, reformers need to marry their efforts to a new crimefighting strategy. You can't replace something with nothing: If mass incarceration is responsible for (as seems likely) twenty percent of the reduction in crime since 1980, then the prison reformers need to offer policies that promise to make up that same ground in some other way.
One possible answer, I think - again, drawing a bit from The Wire as well as from public policy research - is more cops on the beat. This could be the twofer that (right-wing) prison reformers offer skeptical voters: Lighter sentences and more emphasis on rehabilitation on the one hand, and larger, more active police forces to pick up the slack (and ideally gain even more ground) on the other.
Update: I should note that this "prison reform plus more cops" idea shows up in the forthcoming book I'm writing with Reihan; it's a Douthat-Salam hive-mind product, not an idea original to me alone. And it owes a debt to John Donohue, among others.
August 15, 2007
Hope Is Not a Policy
When I said that I wanted to hear more from surge proponents about what the U.S. should do politically in Iraq, this wasn't what I had in mind.
A Conservative DLC?
I agree with the spirit of Peter Beinart's column about why the Right needs its own version of the DLC, but not the specifics. Soren Dayton has extended analysis and caveats here; my main gripe is that when Beinart cites specific instances of how conservatives have lost touch with the public, and how they're hostage to a "hard-core" base, his list is heavily weighted toward the excesses of the religious right. Not that religious conservatives' blunders haven't played a role in the GOP's difficulties, certainly, but Beinart's choice of anecdotes suggests that he thinks - as many people on both sides of the aisle do - that the right-wing version of the DLC ought to be a home for the Christie Todd Whitmans of the world, rather than, say, the Tim Pawlentys and Mike Huckabees, and that it should spend more time taking on Jerry Falwell than, say, Grover Norquist. Which seems like a good way to ensure such an institution's immediate and lasting irrelevance.
A reporter should not be assigned to cover subject X unless he has as good an understanding of X as a baseball writer is expected to have of baseball.
I'm certainly sympathetic to the notion of demanding greater expertise from reporters - even if it would mean putting the folks at Get Religion out of work - but alas, applying the baseball test might not carry us quite so far as one might think. The sports blogosphere may be slightly ahead of the political blogosphere in providing alternatives to lousy, lazy MSM reporting and commentary, but overall the pattern in both realms is similar - scads of bad professional journalists, and hordes of bloggers who love to ask, DeLong-style, "why oh why can't we have better baseball writers?"
I suppose it is worth noting that Sam Brownback's recitation of the "All for Jesus" line is a quote from Mother Teresa that he apparently deploys in his stump speech regularly. It isn't his original formulation but he uses it to describe his political motivation. It is the core of his political message. In a religious context, it is a vulgar but completely legitimate expression of faith. In a political context in a secular society, it is a toxin that will eventually corrode civil discourse into sectarian warfare. Which is, of course, what the Christianists want. They have the biggest sect, after all.
Yes, indeed: Today, 15 percent of the vote at the Iowa Straw Poll; tomorrow, majoritarian theocratic tyranny. (Hitler came to power by democratic means, you know ...)
I would go on, but it would just be the usual tedious argument about how Andrew misunderstands American history, American religion, and the intersection thereof, and how he's trying apply a continental model of faith and politics to a context where that model has never applied, and so and so forth. Instead, I'll punt to Larison:
Sullivan’s larger point is worth keeping in mind: so long as it remains nicely separated from anything involving real life, confined to an irrelevant private sphere of “religion” that need never include venturing outside beyond the front door, religious faith is fine, albeit a bit crude for the high-minded doubt-filled pundit, but once it moves into the public sphere it is poisonous and vile. Devotion to the Lord, once it escapes the safe environs of the closet, becomes an acid that destroys the bonds of the political community. That is what Sullivan and other such “skeptical” conservatives believe about religion. Religious conservatives would do well to remember this whenever they are tempted to entertain sympathy for the appeals of the “skeptics” to reason and moderation.
I would only add that I think the sentence "it is a vulgar but completely legitimate expression of faith," with its snobbish overtones and arm's-length distaste for Mother Teresa (!), is the most unfortunate - and revealing - part of the whole post.
Max Boot has a long piece in the next Commentary that's essentially a critique of every available plan for rapid or semi-rapid withdrawal from Iraq, followed by a brief defense of the surge. He concludes:
Notwithstanding some positive preliminary results, the surge might still fail in the long run if Iraqis prove incapable of reaching political compromises even in a more secure environment. But, for all its faults and weaknesses, the surge is the least bad option we have. Its opponents, by contrast, have been loudly trying to beat something with nothing. If they do not like President Bush’s chosen strategy, the onus is on them to propose a credible alternative that could avert what would in all probability be the most serious military defeat in our history. So far, they have come up empty.
This is not satisfactory. Those of us on the fence about the surge are well aware of the potential consequences of withdrawal, but we are also aware that at some point, unwinnable wars must be given up as lost. As bad as admitting defeat would be, it's preferable to asking thousands more Americans to die for what ends up being judged a mistake. Avoiding that outcome, as Boot and the rest of the surge's proponents acknowledge, requires a political solution that seems, for now at least, to be beyond the grasp of the Iraqi government. So if we are to continue on our current path, we need to have less talk about the dangers of the alternative military approaches, and more talk about our options on the political front. Merely saying that "it's up to the Iraqis" and referencing the ghost of Ngo Dinh Diem as a warning against too-overt American meddling is unsufficient. If we're risking further American casualties on a high-risk military strategy in the hopes of averting defeat, we need to be prepared to consider high-risk political options as well. I don't know what these options might be - moving up the elections? a soft partition? - but if they don't exist, or if Boot and other surge proponents are too cautious to argue in their favor, then the surge's opponents will win the debate by default, and deservedly so.
Photo courtesy of the Department of Defense.
The Sleeper Issue
Since I agreed with Frum's take on Rove, it stands to reason that I agree with Jonah's similar analysis as well. I only wonder about his remark that "the Medicare prescription drug benefit may be surprisingly popular, but the promised political windfall never materialized." It depends on what your definition of windfall is, I suppose. The prescription drug benefit may not be remembered as a step toward a lasting conservative majority, but my sense is that it was intended more as a necessary concession to a popular liberal idea - with a few free-market elements and some sops to business constituencies worked in, obviously - than as a pillar of Rove's long-term realignment strategy. And in the short term, it did produce something of a political windfall: Promising a prescription-drugs benefit on the campaign trail in 2000 clearly helped Bush in his race against Gore, and passing it helped the President more in 2004 that most people realize. Bush's biggest gains, by age bracket, from '00 to '04 came among voters 60 and older, and without Medicare Part D I'm willing to bet that those numbers would have been different enough to tip a few extra states to John Kerry.
Exploring The Infinite Abyss
Via Tyler Cowen comes a list of the ten most awesome movies Hollywood killed, many of which (Chris Rock as Fletch? Unbreakable 2?) don't sound all that awesome. I like this list, from the same source, a lot better.
Where's the Outrage?
I guess it's possible that a "hack gap" has something to do with it, but think the easiest explanation for why Stu Bykofsky's "We need a new 9/11" column hasn't attracted the same kind of sustained criticism on the left that, say, Markos Moulitsas's "screw 'em" reaction to the deaths of military contractors in Iraq attracted from right-wingers is that nobody knows who the hell Stu Bykofsky is. There was plenty of sustained outrage when Ann Coulter called John Edwards a faggot, you may recall, because Ann Coulter is famous, and it's smart politics to tar the conservative movement with offensive comments made by one of its best-selling authors. Similarly, Kos's comments about the deaths in Fallujah came at a moment when the left-blogosphere was just emerging as a significant player in liberal politics, with Kos as the acknowledged king, and so his vile (though retracted) comments made ideal fodder for the left-blogosphere's many critics. Whereas Bykofsky is a Philly columnist who mainly writes about local issues (see here, here and here for representative columns), who seems to have basically liberal politics and no national reputation to speak of, and whose connection to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy appears to start and end with his support for the War on Terror. Which makes him a pretty lousy target for sustained left-wing outrage.
So I've been reading about this strange case in Phoenix, in which a man was tasered to death by police after he nearly killed his three-year-old daughter in what was apparently an exorcism attempt. You can listen to some of the 911 calls here, and twice - just after the 0:50 mark, and again after the 1:35 mark - what sounds like a low, hungry growl creeps into the audio.
It's probably just a sound glitch, but it's creepy as hell. Literally.
Office-Seeking, Ctd.
I wanted to say a bit more on Matt's post on careerism in the foreign policy community, particularly this passage:
There are plenty of positions for people interested in foreign policy and national security issues that aren't like that -- there are career jobs in the foreign service, the intelligence agencies, and the military. There's also academia. But if you aren't as interested in serving your country or pursuing disinterested scholarship as you are in trying to get a political appointment, it might be a great idea to secure a post as a Brookings or CSIS fellow. Which is fine on one level, obviously, those jobs need to be filled ... But what I didn't understand years ago, and that many people still don't understand today, is that this means these people are, in fact, politicians rather than scholars or analysts
He goes on to write that "you find a much higher level of candor and intellectual honest[y] when you look for experts who aren't life-long job seekers," and cites as examples "guys like Rand Beers and Richard Clarke and Flynt Leverett who were all professionals who had jobs until they quit them because the Bush administration was determined to steer the ship of state into the rocks." I think you can debate the extent to which Clarke and Leverett, in particular, might have had careerist motivations for quitting their jobs (and even Beers' resignation, while impressively principled, ended up setting him up to be National Security Adviser in a hypothetical Kerry administration), but even granting their intellectual honesty, these guys are well known precisely because it's so rare for career bureaucrats, whether in the foreign service or the intelligence community or wherever, to break ranks with whatever administration they're serving. If anything, the pressures of careerism seem stronger among the professionals than in the world of office-seekers.
Jonah Keri compares Rick Ankiel, the can't-miss pitching prospect turned Steve Blass disease victim turned - for a few games, at least - slugging right fielder, to Roy Hobbs in The Natural. But Hobbs was an old man by the time he re-appeared in the Show, whereas it's only taken Ankiel a few years to go from pitching trainwreck to starting right-fielder. So the real parallel has to be to Roy Tucker, the Kid from Tomkinsville, and the hero of the greatest boys' baseball books ever written.
I don't know a surer sign of American decline that the fact that in this summer of sporting discontent, Roy Tucker's creator, John R. Tunis, is being considered for deletion by Wikipedia.
In retirement, Rove will have a willing audience among his party's faithful. Though the president has lost his shine among some die-hard conservatives, Rove largely hasn't—despite being the architect of the push for comprehensive immigration reform. Even after the 2006 losses, conservatives were saying it wasn't Rove's fault, but the fault of a corrupt, confused GOP congressional leadership. Conservatives also need Rove to survive as a guru. While Republicans are momentarily depressed, it doesn't come from a fundamental conundrum about their party's core beliefs. Many just think that circumstances, a poorly managed war, and a distracted president harmed the execution of GOP policy.
I don't know about this. Inside the beltway, an awul lot of conservatives are sour on Rove (as Josh's essay bears ample witness), with the purists viewing him as having sold small-government principle down the river and the pragmatists holding him at least partially responsible for the '06 defeat. As for the broader "movement," my sense is that the feeling toward the Architect runs from mild affection to irritation (see Michelle Malkin's reaction to his resignation) to indifference (see Ed Morrisey's rejoinder to Malkin's post), with none of these sentiments burning terribly bright. It's worth remembering that pro-Bush conservatives have traditionally tended to downplay Rove's role in the administration and scoff at the whole "Bush's brain" theory (see, for instance, K-Lo's instant reaction this morning); this means, in turn, that Rove's reputation as a world-historical figure has always been more inflated on the left than on the right.
Unlike Noam, I think it's relatively easy "to overstate the significance of Huckabee's performance" at Ames, for reasons suggested by Noam's very next sentence: "Combined, Huckabee and Brownback - the field's two leading social conservatives - outpolled Mitt Romney today 33 to 31.5." Combined. Yes, maybe Brownback will drop out soon, but there aren't all that many opportunities for a socially-conservative dark horse to raise his profile dramatically, and while "Huckabee comes in second to Romney at Iowa Straw Poll (and might have beaten him without Brownback in the race)" sounds nice and all, it just doesn't have the same ring as "In stunning upset, Huckabee wins Iowa Straw Poll." And it probably won't have the same candidacy-boosting consequences, particularly for a guy who isn't exactly swimming in the resources you need to capitalize on political opportunities.
Most interesting of all, perhaps, and as noted by Orwell, “religion is also taboo.” The schoolchildren appear to know nothing of Christianity; in this latest novel Harry and even Hermione are ignorant of two well-known biblical verses encountered in a churchyard. That the main characters nonetheless have a strong moral code and a solid ethical commitment will be a mystery to some — like his holiness the pope and other clerical authorities who have denounced the series — while seeming unexceptionable to many others. As Hermione phrases it, sounding convincingly Kantian or even Russellian about something called the Resurrection Stone:
“How can I possibly prove it doesn’t exist? Do you expect me to get hold of — of all the pebbles in the world and test them? I mean, you could claim that anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist.”
It's true that the Potter novels aren't an explicitly Christian fantasy in the same sense as the Narnia books (although Christian themes and motifs abound in Rowling's universe); what they assuredly are, though, is a series in which the central moral difference between the protagonist and the villain revolves around each's attitude toward his own mortality, and each's faith (or lack thereof) in the soul's survival after death. If Hitchens wishes to take this as an endorsement of atheistic materialism, by all means.
There is, of course, no organized religion to speak of in Lewis's land of Narnia either, and none of the Pevensie children seem to have received any religious education in their native England. (Which explains why none of them ever burst out: "By Jove, we seem to have wandered into the middle of a Christian allegory!") This was precisely the point: By purging his saga of explicit religiosity, Lewis famously remarked, he hoped to make his religious themes "appear in their real potency," and "steal past those watchful dragons" who rob the Christian message of its novelty and power. Whether Rowling had something similar in mind in her religiously-inflected saga I have no idea, but at the very least it's worth noting that the Resurrection Stone does in fact exist, Hermione's Hitchens-esque objections notwithstanding.
August 11, 2007
The Village Voice and Rudy
Matt and Bruce Bartlett both link to this VV takedown of Rudy Giuliani's (not-so?) heroic role in 9/11. Bruce suggests that the article "has been totally ignored by conservative bloggers" (to be fair, Ramesh linked to it on the Corner), while Matt writes:
The attack seems like it could, in principle, be very damaging. But coming from liberals it almost seems to me to help Rudy, whose campaign seems to be premised in part on the idea that if Village Voice writers hate him so much, he must be doing something right. I feel like these kind of stories would need to appear in National Review to draw blood. Otherwise, it's the equivalent of how Hillary Clinton's conservative detractors are her primary campaign's best friend.
No doubt such a story would draw the most blood if it appeared in NR, but really, it would draw more blood, or at least attract more right-wing attention, if it appeared almost anywhere other than the Village Voice. I'm no great Rudy booster, but I'm much, much more likely to take this kind of story with a grain of salt because it appears in an extremely left-wing alternative weekly (but I repeat myself) that did nothing but bash Hizzoner, sometimes fairly but usually not, throughout his mayoralty. Forget NR: There's a whole world of more mainstream liberal publications that would lend far more credibility to a story like this, and that would be happy, I would imagine, to run a devastating takedown of Giuliani's "hero of 9/11" reputation. And so fairly or not, the fact that it didn't run in the Times Magazine or Time or Newsweek or The New Republic or Vanity Fair or Esquire or almost anywhere else makes me automatically inclined to approach it with more skepticism that it may deserve.
Beauchamp and Libby
First, a correction: I suggested that the appearance of Scott Thomas Beauchamp's "Baghdad Diarist" was "a case of a magazine giving a break to a young writer ... because the young writer's likeable wife asked them to," but I am reliably informed that Beauchamp and his future wife were only acquaintances when she mentioned him to TNR's editors.
Second, TNR has posted another update, in which they write that the Army, by restricting access to Beauchamp and refusing to share any of the details of its own investigation, has thrown up a wall to further inquiry. TNR's critics, needless to say, aren't buying.
At this point, the Beauchamp story is beginning to bear more than a passing resemblance to the Libby affair. Both are Iraq War-related controversies in which the underlying accusation (perjury in a case where no criminal charges were filed, embellishment or fabulism in a back-page TNR Diarist) is less significant than what the alleged crime is supposed to represent: In Libby's case, the "Bush lied, people died" theory of the war; in the Beauchamp affair, the belief that the press is actively undermining the American mission in Iraq. And in each instance, not only the interpretation but the facts of the case seem to shift depending on whose account you read. I hope that we'll reach a point with the Beauchamp case where at least the facts will be agreed upon, but I wouldn't bet on it; barring a public, obviously uncoerced recantation from Beauchamp himself (or his corroborating witnesses), or a military investigation that vindicates his claims, it seems more likely to end, like the Libby affair before it, as a matter of whom you believe, and why.
August 10, 2007
Ames-Blogging
If that's what you're looking for, you'll want to check in at Ambinder's place over the weekend. (He's got Josh Green guest-posting, as well.)
Partisanship and the National Interest
I don't mean to make this Bill Kristol week around here, but ... while reading through the responses to that dreadful Ignatieff piece, I came upon this from Henry Farrell:
When the intellectual history of the lead-up to the Iraq war is written, I suspect it will have to disentangle at least four different causal chains to understand why so many public commentators supported it (or, if they failed to support it, expressed their disagreement sotto voce ). First – the use of the Iraq war and the spread of democracy by force by a particularly unscrupulous crowd of conservative public intellectuals to, as they hoped, establish Republican hegemony. This was never a secret – read Kristol and Kagan’s 1996 Towards a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy for the blueprint – an argument in which the good of the oppressed of the world and the good of the USA inevitably redound to the dominance of the Republican party.
I'm afraid I don't see how thinking that what's good for the United States of America is also good for your political party counts as being intellectually "unscrupulous." And if it does, then Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan hardly have a monopoly on the vice. Practically every pundit and public intellectual thinks that their pet idea - whether it's neo-Reaganism, Sam's Club Conservatism, or whatever the heck Peter Beinart was selling his fellow liberals - is at once the solution to America's ills and the ticket to a lasting political majority. This can produce some deep silliness, like Linda Hirschman's argument that the repudiation of John Rawls will cement a new Democratic majority, but there's nothing particularly sinister about it.
In the case of Kagan and Kristol, one might add that nothing either one has written since things turned sour in Iraq suggests that they value GOP dominance more than their ideas about how the U.S. should act in the world. It's very clear that for both of them, the neo-Reaganism comes first, and the fate of George W. Bush and the Republican Party comes second.
Beauchamp, One More Time
In a graphic illustration of how the Scott Thomas Beauchamp scandal is tearing Washington apart, neoconservative and sometime-TNR contributor Eli Lake more or less agrees with me about the significance of the Beauchamp controversy, while neoconservative and sometime-TNR contributor Charles Krauthammer agrees with Ace of Spades and company.
The most telling moment in Lake's conversation with Mike Crowley, I think, comes when Lake says something about Beauchamp being a creep, and Crowley responds that he doesn't really know the guy, but that his wife, the TNR staffer Elspeth Reeve, is "absolutely the sweetest person that I know." This could be construed as further support for the "Frank Foer is risking his magazine's reputation and his job because he doesn't want to tell a junior staffer that her husband is a liar" theory of the case. But it really suggests, once again, that this was a case of a magazine giving a break to a young writer not because his work "fits perfectly into the most virulent narrative of the antiwar left," as Krauthammer would have it, but because the young writer's likeable wife asked them to. They got burned as a result, and deservedly so. But not because they hate America.
August 9, 2007
Thank You, You May Be Quiet Now
Having said what I just said, TNR's inappropriate silence on what to do about Iraq today is vastly preferable to Michael Ignatieff's ridiculously prolix mea culpa for having supported the invasion in the first place. I'm with Poulos:
... like many people Ignatieff's piece left me with ... a creeping sensation of dread, an actual intellectual dampness and a dankness of the soul. Rarely does one see so many grotesquely obsequious yet arrogantly obtuse self-assurances crammed into a single apology.
Indeed. This is one of those rare cases where the ranting, pleased-with-itself HuffPo takedown of the piece more or less spoke to my feelings as well.
The Anxiety of Influence
I appreciate Matt's extended reflection on careerist motivations in the foreign policy community; I've often felt that he's very quick to leap to the "professional incentives" explanation for some argument or another, and it's interesting to see his thoughts laid out at length on the subject. I think that his argument is strongest when he writes:
People aren't bribed into changing their views. But people know that if they have a view on some topic that's impolitic to express, the smart thing to do is find some different issue to talk about. So you wind up with Michael O'Hanlon and Kurt Campbell writing a book which says we've over-militarized our foreign policy, but that nonetheless concludes that there's no case for cuts in overall defense expenditure and no planned weapons systems that should be eliminated. Similarly, if you take the view that the view that there's neither a strong national interest case, nor a strong case from universal morality, for making Israel the largest recipient of US foreign aid spending, you find a topic other than US aid to Israel to write and speak about.
In other words, careerism doesn't shape what people write so much as it shapes what they don't write. I certainly notice this in my own writing: I can't think of any opinions I've expressed that I didn't wholeheartedly believe (at least at the moment I expressed them), but I can certainly think of opinions that have gone unexpressed because I'm more circumspect about what lines I cross (and what people I risk offending) than perhaps I should be. And I'm a wannabe pundit, with a much weaker set of "don't break ranks" career incentives than someone who's angling for a government job.
A commenter asks what I have against Minority Report. I'll let Chris Orr tell it:
A clever little sci-fi thriller that falls apart utterly in its final act. Instead of fulfilling its destiny in the hotel room with Anderton, the pedophile, and the gun, the movie careens off its tracks, substituting a riotously idiotic conspiracy and trampling the fate-v.-free-choice theme it had developed. The last shot, of a little ocean-side cabin bathed in honeyed sunlight, is so ridiculous it almost seems a cry for help.
It's really a marvelous film until the two-thirds point, and sometimes when I catch it on cable I try to convince myself that everything that happens after Tom Cruise gets "halo'd" is just a dream inside his imprisoned brain - which would explain how a dystopian sci-fi story turns into a mediocre Columbo episode in the final reel. But I don't think that's what Spielberg had in mind.
Meanwhile, Peter Suderman writes that "from a creative perspective, the Beard has gone soft in his old age. From a technical perspective, he’s approaching flawless." I wouldn't disagree, and Spielberg's stunning technical proficiency is one reason why I've seen every movie he's made in the past ten years, frustrating as I've often found them. I do think, though, that - as our disagreement about Ratatouille suggests - Peter's a little more interested in filmmaking-as-craft and I'm a little more interested in filmmaking-as-storytelling, which makes him more favorably inclined toward later Spielberg than I.
Jaws ... is a prime example of Hollywood entertainment at its best, a pitch-perfect balance of style and spectacle, of great storytelling combined with visceral filmmaking, a splendid marriage of art and commerce. It is, as I have said many times before, a perfect movie. This is not to suggest that the film does not contain plot holes, logical errors or just good old-fashioned movie mistakes (including that Spielberg “favorite” of showing the shadow of the cameraman). Not at all. Jaws is “perfect” for what it was intended to be. It is not “perfect” in the sense that it is free of mistakes. In fact, the film is loaded with them, but Jaws is that rare kind of product where even the mistakes seem to improve the film rather than detract from it. Every creative decision made for this film was exactly the one that needed to be made. Any other movie could have only 1/100 of the “mistakes” contained in Jaws and still not be 1/100 as terrific a film. In art, there is a difference between doing the “right” thing and doing the “correct” thing.
As an admirer of Spielberg, but not a true fan, I've always thought that Jaws is the best of his movies, and one reason (among many) is precisely the quality of perfection that Arlyn identifies - the fact that "every creative decision made for this film was exactly the one that needed to be made." Which is another way of saying that it's the rare Spielberg film that doesn't include at least one jarringly bad creative decision. I suspect the pulpiness of the underlying story, in part, kept him from from the maudlin (or just plain strange) excesses that mar everything Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan and Munich to A.I. and Minority Report; on the other hand, I looked forward to War of the Worlds because I thought the source material was pulpy enough to keep Spielberg honest, and he ended blowing that one but good.
David Carr, on the "firewall" included in the Murdoch-buying-the-WSJ deal that will prevent Murdoch from meddling with the editorial page (or not):
So how did Mr. Murdoch permit this deal to happen? The editorial page at The Wall Street Journal has always been its own little kingdom, known for a medieval brand of conservatism and a willingness to take on anybody in defense of its version of liberty, including strafing its own news pages.
I understand that Carr is using the word "medieval" pejoratively rather than descriptively here, and I apologize for harping on a pet peeve of mine, but ... if you were looking for the branch of conservatism furthest removed from the actual sympathy-for-the-medievals strain on the American Right, you could do worse than start with the WSJ's editorial page and "its version of liberty." Calling Russell Kirk's conservatism "medieval" is somewhat inaccurate but at least asymptotic to the truth; calling Robert Bartley's conservatism "medieval" is just an abuse of the term, one that's typical but unwarranted, dammit.
August 7, 2007
Looking For Reagan
Eric Kleefeld raises a good question over at Andrew's place: How bad do conservative pessimists expect '08 to be? In response, both Bruce Bartlett and Liz Mair point out that there are very few obvious toss-up seats in play in the Congressional races, which suggests that even in what will probably be a good year for the Dems, the Republicans won't necessarily drop that far below their current totals in the House and Senate. (In the latter body, the consensus seems to be that New Hampshire and Colorado are the most likely Democratic pick-ups, followed by Minnesota and Oregon.)
This analysis seems basically right to me, and if anything, it heightens the pressure on the Dems to pick the best possible nominee and run the best possible campaign. Various long-termtrends are going the left's way, certainly, particularly on size-of-government issues, and there's reason to think that an incremental victory in '08 might be followed by similarly incremental gains in subsequent elections, which would gradually build a majority large enough to enact, say, the entire Ezra Klein agenda. (I have a piece on this theme in the next Atlantic, though the phrase "Ezra Klein agenda" is sadly absent.) But nothing in American politics is certain, and years like 2008 - when the GOP is likely to be as weakened and on-the-ropes as it's been in my lifetime - don't come around all that often. Which means, in turn, that the Democrats have every reason to aim and hope and pray for something more sweeping than a three-seat pickup in the Senate. Their goal should be a Reagan in '80 wave, the sort of sweep that could threaten Republican Senate seats in Maine and Virginia, New Mexico and even Nebraska, and dozens of GOP-leaning Congressional districts besides.
For that, though, you need a Reagan, and I don't think they have one. Obama has a touch of the Reagan magic, and at first I was sure the Dems should roll the dice with him, risking a loss in the hopes of gaining a landslide. But up against Clinton he looks so green ...
Photo Courtesy of Ronald Reagan Presidential Library
American Exceptionalism
Both Matt and Ezra have generally favorable responses to this Matt Miller piece, which argues, inter alia, that it's silly to call John Edwards a lefty populist, because his views would place him square in the Western European mainstream:
The centrepiece of Mr Edwards’ agenda is a call for universal health coverage. It sounds radical to American ears, perhaps. But Margaret Thatcher would have been chased from office in the UK if she had proposed a health plan as radically conservative as Mr Edwards’ – under which private doctors would supply the medicine, and years would still pass with millions of Americans uncovered.
Mr Edwards wants to lift the minimum wage substantially, and to boost wage subsidies for low-income work besides. But the outer limits of Mr Edwards’ ambition would leave low income work less generously compensated than the minimum wage and subsidy blend enacted by Britain’s New Labourites Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – arrangements Conservative party leader David Cameron says suit him just fine.
... I could go on, but you get the point. The fact that a Thatcher-Cameron-Buffet agenda can be hyped as “populist” says more about propaganda success and media norms than anything else.
Or maybe it says something about the actual-existing political spectrum in the United States of America, which is surely the relevant criteria to use when deciding whether to describe an American politician as "left" or "right." Similarly, if I were writing about the French elections, it would be silly for me to argue that the French press shouldn't label Sarkozy a "conservative" because after all, he's well to the left of Ronald Reagan or Bob Barr - since in the French context, which is the one that matters, he is right wing.
Obviously, progressives like to set Western Europe as the norm, and the United States as the exception, because they find Western Europe's political spectrum more congenial than ours; conservatives from time to time do the reverse, particularly when writing about France. But there's no independent standard that makes British or French socialism "normal," and U.S. libertarianism "absurdly to the right," as Ezra puts it. Especially since it's not particularly surprising that a collection of small densely-populated countries that share a common cultural, economic and political history over the last few hundred would gravitate toward one political and economic model, while a large, more-sparsely populated country with a very different political, cultural and economic history would gravitate toward a very different political and economic model. To assume that the former is the standard by which the normalcy of the latter should be judged, or vice versa, is to leap over a whole host of variables and arguments.
There is, of course, the liberal case that the U.S. would be just as left-wing as Europe if Republicans hadn't manipulated the system to skew the country away from its own preferences, but I've never found it terribly persuasive.
TNR's Real Problem
As a friend just pointed out to me, it's not that they're out to discredit the war in Iraq by arguing that U.S. troops are committing all kinds of awful atrocities. (If you want to know what a magazine that takes that line looks like, see this cover feature in The Nation.) It's that they're seemingly terrified of actually saying anything about the war in Iraq now that everyone else on the left seems to have given it up for lost. In the months since they cautiously endorsed staying the course with the current military strategy, they've published very, very little about Iraq: the pro-war liberal Kenneth Pollack's case for a "surge in bureaucrats" to complement the current military strategy and the anti-war conservative Andrew Bacevich's skeptical look at General Petraeus's prospects for success have been the only pieces, so far as I can tell, taking a strong position on some aspect of the current conflict. And this silence has made it easier to read Scott Thomas Beauchamp's minor Diarist piece not as an embarrassing editorial mistake, but as The New Republic's grand statement against the war.
She's Right, I'm Wrong
Michelle Malkin writes of this post: "Notice how in defending his criticism that my blogging on this topic has been 'ludicrous' this supposedly 'reasonable' conservative doesn't bother to link a single one of my posts."
She's absolutely right. While talking to Chait, I thought that I had encountered the (ludicrous) claim that TNR handpicked Scott Thomas Beauchamp as part of a deliberate campaign to smear our troops and undermine our military operations in Iraq on her blog; in fact, I had encountered that (ludicrous) claim here and here on her blog, but in the form of extended quotations from Dean Barnett and Bryan Preston, not in her own words. And I apologize for suggesting otherwise.
One of the most depressing things about the Tibet story is that is shows the power of propaganda. If a totalitarian state tells its people X for half a century, permitting no other point of view, people will end up believing X, however patently false X may be. Ordinary Chinese people are baffled if you suggest that the Chinese authorities give Tibet independence, or at least genuine autonomy. "But Tibet has always been a part of China," they say, genuinely surprised that you don't know this "fact." Obvious ripostes ( e.g. "If Tibet has always been a part of China, how come they don't speak Chinese?") bounce right off.
On a related theme, I was having drinks last week with a journalist who's spent the last five years in China, and he was remarking on the widespread Chinese ignorance of what, exactly, happened at Tiananmen Square. It's something that he's frequently asked about by young Chinese, he said, and when he tells the story, the response often goes something like this: "Well, then it's a really good thing the government covered it up, because otherwise there would have been a revolution."
Of course, given the history of what revolutionshavemeant for China over the last two centuries, this isn't quite as morally callous as it sounds at first.
The Beauchamp Affair
Of my conversation with Jon Chait this morning - in which I argued that TNR probably shouldn't have run the Scott Thomas Beauchamp pieces, but also contended that the right-wing blogosphere's reaction has often run well over-the-top - Ace of Spades writes:
Okay, Ross.You keep earning your reasonable stripes by basically kissing your liberal pals' asses while meanwhile saying nothing at all -- except to the extent you just agree with what your betters have figured out before you did.
On the other hand, it gets rather good here. Here Douthat notes what was pointed out to him by the "ludicrous" "Michelle Malkin slash Ace of Spades front" -- namely, that Beauchamp seems to have most likely lied, and not made an "error," in claiming the Burned Woman mockery occurred in Iraq rather than Kuwait -- and Jonathan Chait admits that it does seem reasonable to conclude Beauchamp did not make an "error" but rather deliberately lied.
Remember, though, Douthat, who did nothing on this story, is superior to any of us rightwing crazies simply by parroting what we have written.
Just to clarify what I had in mind when I used the word "ludicrous," here's a snippet from one of Ace's earlier posts:
It seems that "Scott Thomas" got himself a nice little gig at TNR -- a possible stepping stone to bigger and better things, like a literary agent and first-time-novelist's advance of $100,000 -- but he had one problem: He had nothing actually interesting to report. The routine relocation of bodies from a cemetery to a new resting place wasn't going to get him that advance, after all. So, as any budding writer would do, he used the power of imagination to make it all seem much more interesting than it actually was.
And TNR fell for it, of course. They wanted the prestige of having an actual reporter on the ground in Baghdad, and of course they wanted the stories coming from that correspondent to be as horrific and morale-killing as possible. They wanted to believe, and so they did.
I just taped a Bloggingheads session with Jon Chait in which I expressed considerable skepticism about the Kagan-Daalder call for "a Concert of Democracies" as a non-UN source of international legitimacy for American-led interventions. It appears, though, that I didn't read the piece carefully enough, since in my back-and-forth with Chait I talked a lot about how tough it would be to decide what countries qualify as "democracies" (does Venezuela? Russia?), but via Matt I see that Kagan and Daalder actually pre-emptively address that objection by defining "the world's democracies" as "the United States and its democratic partners in Europe and Asia." Which I guess means NATO and the lands down under plus Japan, South Korea, and India.
If anything, this formulation makes their argument even less persuasive. After all, even if we table the question of how Russia, China, the Arab world, Latin America and Africa would react to a new intervention-authorizing body that was designed to exclude them, it seems to me that if we're looking for a NATO-style organization that can lend legitimacy to interventions that don't have a prayer of passing the Security Council, we should just use, well, NATO - and then try to bring other allies on board on an ad hoc basis, without ideological litmus tests. (A "Concert of Democracies" mission that deliberately excluded Putin's Russia and Musharraf's Pakistan would have had a much tougher time toppling the Taliban, one might venture, then the actual NATO-led, Russian and Pakistani-approved intervention.)
Obviously, it's true that much of what makes us uncomfortable about Scientology is unique to Scientology. I think I was pretty clear about Scientology's unique oddness, its propensity for authoritarianism, etc. In fact, I linked to the exhaustive Rolling Stone piece that is if anything far more damning of Scientology than the Time piece you linked to (and I said I find it generally persuasive). So obviously I was making a circumscribed point, one which I think holds: Scientology is weird, but so too is religion weird, and we shouldn't sit there in Mass or Shabbat services and be so smug.
I do think Scientology has ruined lives. I think many, perhaps most of the horror stories, that we read are true. But if Scientology has 8 or 10 million members -- and I think that's a big exaggeration they make, so let's say 1 million committed members -- than even several hundred of these stories, however lurid and true, wouldn't make Scientology worse (by our admittedly fictional, utilitarian/consequentialist calculus) than other faiths. I know people whose lives were destroyed by Opus Dei -- indeed, I know people whose lives were destroyed by the massive church coverup of pederasty. I know people destroyed by the evangelical subculture, by the mainstream Mormon culture, by Judaism.
That would be the ongoing Bruce Bartlett-Eric Kleefeld discussion about supply-side economics and the tax system, over at Andrew's place. It starts here; the conversation about the benefits and drawbacks of shifting from income to consumption taxes (like Bartlett, I'm a fan) kicks off here.
(And yes, it's a sign that you've been in Washington too long when you refer to yourself as a "fan" of consumption taxes.)
August 5, 2007
Working-Class Millionaires
Personally, when someone says "working-class millionaire," I think "guy with a high-school education who ends up running a really successful chain of car dealerships." The New York Times, however, thinks "people in Silicon Valley who 'only' have a few million dollars in the bank." Of this phenomenon, Matt writes:
This is part of the weirdness of the new era of hyper-inequality, where not only does the top one percent pulls away from the other 99 percent, but the top 0.001 percent pulls away from the other 99.999 percent. Even very rich people feel the even richer pulling further and further away and don't feel themselves to be as privileged as, objectively speaking, they really are.
Hyper-inequality is part of the story here, no doubt; on the other hand, I'm pretty sure there have always been people who are rich by any normal standard, but want to live the lifestyle of the super-rich and find themselves scrambling to keep up. And my interest in/sympathy for their plight is ... limited. To my mind, the most telling passage in the piece is this:
David Koblas, a computer programmer with a net worth of $5 million to $10 million, imagines what his life would be like if he left Silicon Valley. He could move to a small town like Elko, Nev., he says, and be a ski bum. Or he could move his family to the middle of the country and live like a prince in a spacious McMansion in the nicest neighborhood in town.
But Mr. Koblas, 39, lives with his wife, Michelle, and their two children in Los Altos, south of Palo Alto, where the schools are highly regarded and the housing prices are inflated accordingly. So instead of a luxury home, the family lives in a relatively modest 2,000-square-foot house — not much bigger than the average American home — and he puts in long hours at Wink, a search engine start-up founded in 2005.
“I’d be rich in Kansas City,” he said. “People would seek me out for boards. But here I’m a dime a dozen.”
Poor baby.
Update: Okay, fine, I am pretty interested in their (non-)plight. I didn't just read the story, after all; I blogged about it. As did everybody else, apparently.
August 3, 2007
Interesting Things I Encountered Today ...
... While I was failing, miserably, to provide you with new blog content.
James Poulos on the case against the Kurdish option.
Tim Lee on the trouble with partisanship. (Incidentally, the Atlantic is running a great piece on a related subject - namely, why George W. Bush's expansive vision of executive power will likely be largely embraced by his successors, Democrats and Republicans alike. But it isn't out yet; indeed, it isn't even in the next issue, but rather in the issue after that, which should give you a sense of how far in advance things are planned and edited around here. So for now you'll have to take my word for it.)
The trailer for Resident Evil: Extinction. (Okay, maybe it's only interesting to me. I think I'm the only person in the world with a fondness for those films; they're the kind of dreck I like, and I'm not sure why, any more than I know why I like, say, Underworld but not the equally dreck-ish Blade trilogy. It's a lot easier to figure out why you enjoy good films then why you enjoy bad ones.)
Also, Mark Oppenheimer, who wrote that "go easy on Scientology" piece that I found so odd, has kindly sent me a response to my criticisms. I'll post his remarks (and some further remarks of my own) at some point in the next few days; for now, here's your Scientology fix for the weekend. It's the opening clip from Ted Koppel's interview with David Miscavige, the head of the Church, back in 1992 (you can find the rest of the interview hereabouts):
History Has Many Cunning Passages
Who would have imagined, back in the blogosphere of 2002, that Andrew Sullivan would one day be linking favorably to a post by Gregory Djerejian in which Djerejian "fisks" - a term invented, you may recall, to describe the appropriate response to Robert Fisk's America-bashing dispatches from the war on terror - Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon for being way too upbeat about America's role in Iraq. (The equivalent reversal, had things turned out differently in Iraq, would be for Glenn Greenwald to be posting a link praising Juan Cole for "Sullivanating" a piece by John Mearsheimer attacking George W. Bush's leadership. If that makes any sense ...)
I have no editorial comment on this; it's just interesting to think how much has changed.
The Lion in Winter
George Steinbrenner, on his way out. I've spent twenty years hating the guy, but (naturally) I feel like there's a void in my life now that he's no longer attacking players, firing managers, and lobbing potshots at Boston fans. And I'm sure that if I owned the Red Sox, I'd probably be just as over-involved and over-the-top as Steinbrenner has always been with the Yankees. (Well, okay, hopefully not this over-the-top.) He's sabotaged as many dynasties as he's built, but unlike manyowners you never doubted that he wanted to build them. In the end, there are worse qualities in an owner than being too big a fan of one's own team.
August 2, 2007
Internal Improvements
This Nicholas Kulish piece from last year seems apropos today, and not just because of its unfortunately-prescient title. It's Time$elect, so here's a snippet:
Every four years the American Society of Civil Engineers grades the nation’s infrastructure. The group looks at 15 categories, from aviation to bridges, from waste water to public parks. Last year they handed out a D, down from the D+ in 2001. The report noted different problems in every sector, but a few kept popping up almost across the board: A growing population, and growing demand that is overtaxing aging, inadequate systems.
... Back in 1982 there were 232 million people in the country. Now we’re about to pass 300 million. There’s also increased international trade and movement of goods within the country. That means more and more commercial trucks prowling the interstates at all hours. Whether you’re talking about seaports, airports, railroads, canals, or highways, our transport systems need to expand to keep up with our economic activity.
But we haven’t been keeping up. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that this year the government will spend the equivalent of 0.7% of the nation’s gross domestic product — both through direct spending and through grants — on non-defense physical capital investments. That’s abysmal by historic standards. Between 1960 and 1981, that annual spending dipped below 1% of G.D.P. only once.
If you can, read the whole thing. This ought to be a major issue in the '08 campaign; even if this particular disaster turns out to be a fluke, it's a tragedy that deserves to be exploited. The decay of our infrastructure would be an ideal executive-competence issue for a Giuliani or a Romney, in particular, to seize on, though of course as with every other "vote for change" issue this election season, exploiting it would require more distance from our current "MBA President" than any Republican candidate may be able to achieve. As for the Democrats, maybe they can pin it (not entirely unfairly; as Kulish's piece points out, earmarks are a significant part of the problem) on the sins of GOP majorities past: Their slogan can be "the I-35 Bridge, Not the Bridge to Nowhere."
Photo by Flickr user Diversey used under a Creative Commons license.
They Put the "S" in USA
Seeing the above image attached to Todd Vanderwerff's list of his five favorite Simpsons episodes (which unaccountably fails to include "Homer Vs. The Eighteenth Amendment") reminded me of this Peter Suderman remark from last week:
... unlike, say, The Sopranos, The Simpsons loves its subjects--ordinary Americans of all stripes--anyway. And after all the attention and success the country has lavished on the show, it ought to. After 18 years and more than 400 episodes, the show has risen to become more than just a whip-smart pop pastiche, but a cultural paradigm, almost certainly the most comprehensive representation of American life in the last three decades. It's not much of a stretch to say we're all Simpsons now.
The Sopranos and The Simpsons are vastly different, all right - but they're different in the sense of being opposite sides of the same coin, or tragic and comic masks placed over the same face. As a result, their similarities are legion: Both depict families - and particularly patriarchs - who are at once dysfunctional and enormously appealing; both begin with the domestic sphere and then open outward into a panorama of American society; both use what seem like egregious stereotypes in the service of a social realism that few other shows can match. Then there are the endless cracked-mirror plotlines: Compare Grandpa Simpson's nursing home experience to Livia Soprano's, say, or Homer's lesson in tolerance to Tony's reckoning with Vito's homosexuality, or Sideshow Bob's attempts to reintegrate into mainstream society to Tony Blundetto's post-prison experience, or Feech La Manna's. When cultural historians look back on the turn-of-the-century America, these are the first two shows they should watch. It's all there - first as tragedy, and then as farce.
Your (Don't Call It) Eugenics Roundup
I said I wouldn't post any more about this, but I'm going to cheat a little by posting links to other people, starting with Yuval Levin:
... surely the most essential problem with the eugenics movement was not coercion or collectivism. It wasn’t even the revolting notion of some duty to improve the race. The deepest and most significant contention of the progressive eugenicists was that science had shown the principle of human equality to be unfounded. These eugenicists badly misread Darwin. The eugenicists of today, in contrast, employ actual scientific principles to support their beliefs; nevertheless, their abuse of science is no less misguided. It is, again, being used to demonstrate distinctions among human beings that—the new eugenicists claim—are so fundamental as to make some lives not worth living, and therefore not worth protecting.
The challenge of eugenics was, and is again, a challenge to our egalitarianism. That is what lies at the heart of the abortion debate, and of the larger debate about emerging biotechnologies. These arguments are not about when a new human life begins—an empirical matter not in real dispute—but about whether every human life is equal. That question is a perfectly serious one, and there are defensible positions on both sides. But too many American progressives have answered in the negative without thinking through the consequences. And increasingly the reasons they give are not liberal reasons—reasons of liberty and personal choice—but scientific reasons, be it the great promise of some very particular avenue of medical research, or the instrument readings that demonstrate Down’s or another genetic condition.
This morning, I read Michael Specter's piece on spam - which inspired me, this afternoon, to spend a while un-junking comments that had been mislabeled by our site's spam filter, a problem that seems to have grown worse of late. So - if you were wondering why your comment hadn't shown up, or if your comment still hasn't shown up, or if it doesn't show up in the future, I'm probably not blocking you (I don't usually block comments); it's the spam filter being overzealous, and I apologize. And if you want to know why it's overzealous, well, this blog received over a hundred spam comments in the last hour alone.
What's The Matter With Scientology?
In an exceedingly odd piece, Mark Oppenheimer explains that Scientology can't be a dangerous cult because "everything of which Scientology is accused is an exaggerated form of what more 'normal' religions do." I suppose this is technically true - requiring that people pay large sums for spiritual enlightenment is, in some sense, an exaggerated version of tithing; coercion and blackmail are, in some sense, an exaggerated form of the social pressure that can keep people in a religious fold - but it doesn't seem like much of an answer to the accusations, since if they're true it's precisely the "exaggerations" that are the problem.
In-depth journalistic investigations of Scientology are relatively rare, for reasons that doubtless have nothing to do with the Church's taste for harassment and libel lawsuits, but if you read this Time Magazine piece, from the early 1990s, and come away convinced that what makes people uncomfortable about Scientology is how similar it is to Christianity and Judaism ("We need to hate Scientology," Oppenheimer writes, "lest we hate ourselves") ... well, I've got some stress tests I'd like to interest you in.
Look: Ross is a smart guy. He knows perfectly well that modern liberals have no serious connection to eugenics advocates of the past. He knows perfectly well that abortion supporters aren't motivated by eugenicist theories. He's not using the word out of a dedication to scientific precision. Rather, he and his fellow conservatives are using the word "eugenics" because they also know perfectly well that it's (quite rightly) associated with racism, pseudo-science, and Adolf Hitler. As far as they're concerned, that's a feature, not a bug.
This is highbrow Rush Limbaugh-ism, not serious argument. Back to the sandbox with it.
Below the fold - and I promise, this is my last post on the subject for a while - I've pasted a long excerpt from Sandel's "Case Against Perfection" essay, in which he uses the term "eugenics" in a fashion that, for Drum and others, qualifies him as a right-wing smear artist. His points are certainly debatable; whether they qualify as "highbrow Rush Limbaugh" I leave to you to judge.
One of Ezra Klein's commenters, on what I'll call, for the sake of tabling the argument, Gattacagenics* rather than eugenics:
the essence of Douthat's argument is that progressives are in favor of access to abortion, and abortion can be used for eugenic purposes, therefore progressives are in favor of eugenics. This is ridiculous for reasons that have nothing to do with the motives behind particular abortions. It's like saying that if you oppose banning guns, you're in favor of bank robbery, hunting bunny rabbits, and suicide.
No. It's like saying "if you oppose banning guns, and you also oppose any efforts to prevent bank robberies, then you effectively support the spread of bank robberies." Which I think is a reasonable way of looking at it. Or more accurately still (because a gun and an abortion aren't the same kind of thing at all), it's like saying "if you believe in an unfettered right to theft, then you effectively support the spread of bank robberies." In the case of Gattaccagenics, that's where the logic of Roe-style reproductive rights will carry progressives, I predict - to open-ended opposition to any attempt to restrict genetically-selective abortion and (eventually) genetic engineering in utero, whether it's intended to eliminate Down's Syndrome today, or autism tomorrow, or homosexuality or a predisposition to cancer or what-have-you the day after that.
But look, this much Ezra and others have right: What you think about Gattaccagenics is going to be deeply influenced by what you think about the morality of abortion. Yes, there are plenty of pro-choice, anti-Gattaccagenic voices out there, from Michael Sandel to (surprisingly) Leon Kass. But the more you accept pro-choice premises, the more likely you are to share the point of view expressed by the other commenter Ezra quotes - namely, that aborting fetuses with genetic abnormalities is no different than two people at risk of passing on a genetic disorder to their offspring choosing not to procreate in the first place.
*You may notice that Gattacca's Wikipedia page describes the movie as a "vision of a society driven by new eugenics," even though there is no state coercion of reproduction or forced sterilizations of minority groups depicted in the film. I hope Ezra or Kevin Drum will move quickly to correct this egregious Godwin's Law violation, which was doubtless planted by the same "bright boy or girl in the conservative movement" who whispered the term "eugenics" in my ear in the first place.
Compromise, rather than absolutism, has been the watchword of anti-abortion efforts for some time now. But the pro-life movement can't give up on overturning Roe without giving up on its very reason for being.
Forget the predatory lenders, Wall Street sharks and their government enablers: The current economic crisis, and the housing bubble that produced it, all started with George Bailey.
