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Reihan: Very Specific Josh Ritter Track Recommendations
I own three Josh Ritter albums, and I've listened to and enjoyed scattered tracks from Animal Years and The Golden Age of Radio. In truth, The Golden Age of Radio was purchased for the sole purpose of extracting sappy tracks for mixtapes. Animal Years, in contrast, contains the perfect protest song, "Girl in the War." There is nothing explicitly political about the song, and it's not nearly as dark or eerie as anything done by John Vanderslice, the master of paranoiac, cinematic Iraq-obsessed music. Rather, "Girl in the War" is sweet and affecting, and it turns on a reversal that while not uncommon is certainly rooted in reality: a boyfriend or husband praying for the safe return of his girlfriend or wife from the war. Paul said to Peter you got to rock yourself a little harder
Pretend the dove from above is a dragon and your feet are on fire
But I got a girl in the war Paul the only thing I know to do
Is turn up the music and pray that she makes it through When this song came out, it knocked me on my ass. The album did not. Apart from the festive screwball of "Lillian Egypt," nothing else came close. All the same, I enthusiastically recommended the album to friends, including our very own Ross Douthat.
While training from Washington to New York on Friday, I passed the time reading The Abstinence Teacher (more on that later) and listening to Ritter's latest, The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter. From beginning to end, the album is near-flawless, assuming you like this sort of twangy, jangly music. (Which I do, despite the part of me that mocks the rest of me for this sad fact.)
If for whatever reason you are reluctant to buy the entire album, I recommend "To The Dogs or Whoever," "Mind's Eye" (which sounds slightly Spoonish, and incidentally it seems that Spoon the band has displaced spoon the utensil according to Google, which is saying something), "The Temptation of Adam," "Open Doors," "Real Long Distance," and "Empty Hearts."
Reihan: Subway Demographics
Rest assured, political blogging will return shortly. For now, more half-asleep reflections.
I recently told a friend that I'd sooner have my eyes scooped out with spoons than be caught reading a book commonly consumed on either the F or L trains in New York, which, as she helpfully pointed out, is kind of idiotic. To this day I haven't read The Corrections, and I don't think I ever will. Indeed, when someone tells me that, "Oh man, it's actually a really great book," I immediately think to myself, "when we're living in a post-apocalyptic 'time of troubles,' this person is not, for the good of humanity, sharing my bunker or my canned peas." The trouble is I quite like Tom Perrotta, so I've already caved. The smart and principled thing to do would be to follow the lead of my good friend GCAW and only read book that are twenty years old or older, to know they've stood the test of time.
Continue reading "Reihan: Subway Demographics" »
Reihan: Question Time
Just a reminder: all posts that begin "Reihan: Yackety-schmackety, something incoherent" are written by Reihan Salam, not Ross Douthat. I stress this because I don't want you to think that Ross has gone mad. Love-mad, perhaps, but not mad in the, "I'm a character in Jane Eyre, and I have the sneaking suspicion that someone has locked me in a closet," not to be confused with Trapped in the Closet.
The following is a reflective post that can be safely skipped.
Continue reading "Reihan: Question Time" »
Reihan: My Favorite Critic
Creating a kerfuffle is a commerical imperative. So I'm of course very skeptical when I'm told David Edelstein (long one of my favorite movie critics) is courting controversy by endorsing Brian De Palma's latest. Who exactly is going to attack Edelstein? I assue a doughty band of conservatives will go through the motions of blasting De Palma's film (which I haven't seen), and I assume Edelstein will treat them with withering contempt. As for Edelstein's friends and fans, who are many, they will cheer him on.
Now of course, Edelstein is raging against the powerful, specifically the "warmongers" in the White House, etc. And of course these "warmongers" will do absolutely nothing to disturb the bubble of (relative) domestic comfort most Americans enjoy (relative to military families, and of course relative to Iraqis fleeing their homes and losing their lives, part of the "collateral damage" De Palma evokes). This is part of the reason performing rage can be so gratifyng: it suggests a more expansive moral sense, and it is an implicit rebuke to Bush's manifest failure to call for shared sacrifice.
Let's accept that the invasion of Iraq was an inexcusable blunder, and let's accept that the burdens are overwhelmingly borne by a small minority of Americans. When De Palma talks about "urgency," I have to assume he means that we urgently need to withdraw US forces from Iraq. That, of course, is a much trickier argument, and it's not clear that incendiary images clarify rather than cloud our thinking. Consider the incendiary images and bloody shirts that have started so many wars, including, arguably, the war in Iraq.
Edelstein references the "noise machine" that will surely crank up to attack Brian De Palma. But again, who really believes that (a) a mostly marginalized group of conservative (or rather "right-wing") critics will be able to destroy or even mildly dent Brian De Palma's reputation as an auteur? I'm not even sure a string of astonishingly bad movies could do that at this point. And (b) who believes that a movie like Redacted would get a wide and enthusiastic audience in the absence of this "noise machine"? Yes, it will pack the art-houses. Or it won't. A ferocious "noise machine" can only help in that regard. As for the "other America," the 95 percent who would never consider seeing such a film (it's tough to find babysitters, and why spend an evening watching something like Redacted?), the "noise machine" isn't exactly making much of a difference.
This is one of the inescapable dilemmas of cultural commentary. We need to believe that our work is vitally important. The right-wing and left-wing professional agitators need to keep the cultural temperature at or near the boiling point, to curry favor, to build audiences, to raise donations. And ... and again, the most important issue is: are Iraqi children better off or worse off under a continuing American military occupation? I don't think the answer is obvious. I'm inclined to think we're doing some good, and that the sectarian violence could get far worse, but this is a near-run thing.
What I do know is that no, Redacted really isn't vitally important and standing up to the "noise machine" is a surefire route to bestselling success.
In Edelstein's post, he references Ross.
In his Atlantic blog, right-winger Ross Douthat makes fun of my review of Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah, which also touches on the moral devastation of Americans in Iraq. I said in my column that although it’s a clunky piece of storytelling and a third-rate mystery, it’s also a powerful and important film. Douthat sees this as representative of a liberal tying himself up in knots to praise a movie he dislikes but agrees with politically. If he thinks those are knots, he should read me on Michael Moore!
To Edelstein's credit, he seems to be acknowledging, with grace and good humor, that Ross's assessment was sound. Most critics would prefer taking a potshot, and he didn't. (My suspicion is that Edelstein sees "right-winger" as insult enough.)
Reihan: Breaking Through
I need to write at greater length about Shellenberger and Nordhaus, the men behind "The Death of Environmentalism" and the forthcomng Break Through. For now I'll just note that I think Dave Hawkins misunderstands their very important and very persuasive argument.
In truth, I'd much rather hear what Brad Plumer has to say first. A friend of mine and I were recently talking about how much we enjoy Plumer's idiosyncatic blog, and we both expressed the hope that he won't become a political beat reporter. That is a noble profession, to be sure, but my sense is that Plumer's comparative advantage lies elsewhere, specifically in synthesizing Vulcanian logic, an impressive command of scientific evidence, and a deep familiarity with many shades of leftish thinking. To the extent Plumer becomes a muckraker, it ought to be more in the vein of Multinational Monitor than Roll Call.
Reihan: Meet Your New Overlord
Via Engadget, the ElmoSapien.
Incidentally, this image bears a striking resemblance to my own winterwear. And people wonder why I hardly ever catch cold. More, and more coherent, blogging to come. I will now submerge myself in a briny tank of knowledge.
Reihan: Why Tuesday?
Matt Yglesias asks, "Why Tuesday?"
Turns out a good friend of mine worked on a related project a short while back called, appropriately enough, Why Tuesday?
Reihan: Why Private Military Contractors Are A Good Thing
A debate has erupted over US reliance on private military contractors in Iraq and elsewhere. My sense is that the brilliant and decidedly uneven Robert Young Pelton, a staunch critic of PMCs, has set the tone for the debate. My own view is different. We do depend on PMCs, we're likely to depend on them even more over time, and this is a very good thing. Consider John Robb's thoughts on the subject.
The defining fact of our time, as John Mueller has argued, is the decline of war. This, of couse, contradicts the Colin Gray view and I can see how it might seem strange given the bloody conflicts that dominate the headlines. But this doesn't change the normative shift that has taken place over the last century, from a time when military aggression was seen as both inevitable and acceptable to the present, when it is seen as an offense against all things good and decent. A similar normative shift was behind the decline of enslavement in the West, which began long before the vile practice became economically impracticable. Ideology matters.
The kind of conflicts we're seeing and are likely to see are far more like crime, pervasive and opportunistic, than like conventional interstate warfare. The patriotic sentiments that motivated volunteer armies in the past are harder to apply to campaigns designed to strengthen vulnerable foreign states, or to limit the extent of bunkering and other criminal activities that have no obvious ideological valence. And so we will need to rely on skilled professionals to help police the world.
To be sure, there are legitimate concerns about abuses committed by PMCs. That is a failure of the US and Iraqi governments, but not of PMCs as a matter of principle.
Reihan: What's Good for Wikipedia is Good for America
That is a maxim I can get behind.
Seth Roberts reports on a brief conversation with Aaron Swartz, a savvy activist (savvtivist?) who is frustrated by Wikipedia's failings. The basic take-away: how impressive, and how useful, would Wikipedia be if it had leadership as far-sighted and competent as that of Craigslist? (Check out this amazing chart.)
Reihan: Artists on Consumption
One member of the VII collective is Lauren Greenfield. A friend recently introduced me to her photographs, which focus on how we, and particularly the women among us, shape and manipulate our bodies.
On a somewhat lighter, yet still very vital and intelligent, note, Kate Bingaman-Burt runs a wonderful website called Obsessive Consumption, currently in housecleaning mode.
So much for artists on consumption. The weak-willed among you are welcome to try artistically consuming via Cool Hunting, a fantastically well-designed and smart blog that has duped many otherwise sane people into spending money on freeze-dried fruits, strange sneakers, and distressed denim.
Reihan: The End of Iraq's Christian Community?
Check out this vivid photo essay from VII.
VII, incidentally, is a truly impressive group of gifted photojournalists who've banded together to stick it (gently) to The Man. More power to them.
Reihan: The Frugal Players Club
Recently, my good friend Josh suggested that Delonte West of the Seattle SuperSonics and Roy Williams of the Detroit Lions should double-date: all evidence suggests that they'd be drawn to the same kind of woman, namely a down-to-earth gal with a love of fried foods. First, Delonte (from an ESPN story titled, appropriately enough, "Flowers, Popeye's and romance"):
Continue reading "Reihan: The Frugal Players Club" »
Reihan: Hello!
As you may have read earlier on, my good friend and co-author Ross Douthat is getting married very soon and he'll be out of the country for some time after that. Once he returns, he will be rested and ready to take the blogosphere by storm, if necessary subduing rival blogs with a series of shattering (rhetorical) blows. My advice to said rivals: get your emergency preparedness kits in order.
So who is this Reihan Salam? Rather than bore you with biographical details, I will list a few things I like. Note that I'm deliberately excluding things produced by personal friends or colleagues. I'm also excluding things that could embarrass or haunt me in the years to come, thus radically reducing the scope of this enterprise. In particular, I'm thinking of my favorite shirts. When I idly daydream about how I'd fare in a post-apocalyptic landscape, thoughts prompted in part by the recently-resurrected CBS drama Jericho, I think about whether my shirts will survive the unending chaos.
Continue reading "Reihan: Hello!" »
Away
I'll be gone, getting married and honeymooning, for the next seventeen days. I trust nothing of any importance will take place in that span, but in case it does, Reihan, my frequent collaborator and erstwhile co-blogger, will be offering pointed commentary in this space. So don't go away.
The Ahmadinejad Follies
From the LA Times, via Chris Suellentrop:
These critics not only disrespect such core American principles as academic freedom and freedom of speech, they disrespect the intelligence of Ahmadinejad’s audience. It isn’t likely that many were swayed by his wild-eyed questioning of the facts of the Holocaust or who was really behind the 9/11 attacks. The biggest laugh of the afternoon came when, in response to a question about the Iranian regime’s brutal treatment of homosexuals (a crime punishable by death), Ahmadinejad remarked, “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.” He also declared that “women in Iran have the highest level of freedom” even though they are forbidden from such basic social activities as attending soccer games, and said “we are friends with the Jewish people” while attributing nearly all the world’s ills to Jews. It’s hard to believe that anyone with a third-grade education would find him convincing.
In 1939, a journalist named Alan Cranston was outraged by a sanitized English-language translation of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” so he edited his own abridged version that bared the German dictator’s sinister soul. Cranston, who later became California’s longest-serving Democratic senator, understood something that Obama, Romney, McConnell et al do not: The best way to discredit a tyrant is to let him do it himself, in his own poisonous words.
This is astonishingly dumb. As Matt says, "free speech" is not at stake in a private university's decision to invite speakers to address its student body. Nor, I hope, was anyone who opposed the Iranian President's appearance seriously worried that he was going to convert his Ivy League audience to Shi'a radicalism. But just because a bunch of Columbia students found him ridiculous doesn't mean that everybody else did - and it's the "everybody else" that he was playing to.
And yes, of course one shouldn't censor the rantings of a tyrant to make him sound moderate. But the notion that "the best way to discredit a tyrant is to let him do it himself, in his own poisonous words" is just pious nonsense untouched by experience. A dictator's "poisonous words" are quite often the source of his strength, not a chink in his armor; so it was with Hitler, and so it is (albeit to a far, far lesser extent) with Iran's dinner-theater demagogue. Alan Cranston's more-accurate translation of Mein Kampf was an admirable contribution to the West's understanding of the Nazi regime, no doubt, but if I recall my history right, it didn't exactly bring Hitlerism to its knees.
She Can't Be Stopped
Nothing in John Dickerson's list of strategies for stopping Hillary goes any distance toward persuading me that any of her rivals can derail her march to the nomination. (I think Dickerson himself would agree ...) Going into the primary campaign, the main hope for the non-Hillary candidates seemed to be the theory that there existed a large chunk - say, sixty percent or more - of the Democratic electorate that would only vote for her under duress, either because they didn't like her personality, because they thought that she was too right-wing (particularly on foreign policy), or because they thought she was unelectable in November. At this point, that hope seems to have been dashed: The anti-Hillary share of the primary vote is shaping up to be right around forty percent, which in a divided field simply isn't anywhere near enough to derail a candidate with Hillary's institutional advantages and deep reserves of support. If Edwards dropped out before Iowa, or if Obama did - or maybe, maybe, if Gore got in - you might see this landscape shift a bit. But small-bore attacks on her honesty, her cozy relationship with lobbyists, or her electability just aren't going to shift the dials as far as her rivals need to shift them.
(Nor will flip-flopping campaign strategies, for that matter, though I agree with Noam that there's good reason to think that Edwards and Obama ought to trade approaches.)
The Uses of Illiberalism
Will Wilkinson has a pair of provocative posts on the Haidt thesis, one responding to Yuval Levin, one responding to me. Here are some excerpts from the latter:
Whatever else you might say about them, family, community, and religion are the chief preserves of illiberal sentiment in our society. Of course, family, community and religion don’t have to be illiberal. For example, most strands of Christianity have been successfully “civilized” — by which I mean radically liberalized — by the liberalizing pressures of modernity. One of the problems with conservatives is that, over and over again, they confuse an attack on the illiberal elements of family, community, and religion as attacks on family, community, and religion itself. For example, arguments for gay marriage are not arguments against the family, despite what most conservatives insist. They are liberal argument for equal-opportunity families. Arguments for racial integration aren’t arguments against community. They are liberal arguments for non-racist communities. Etc. If family, community, and religion (and other civil society institutions) are stabilizing, which I don’t doubt, they can be stabilizing without being unjust and harmful.
I would agree that you can liberalize family, community, and religion, and that this process has sometimes been a good thing for everyone involved. But I think that each of these aspects of human affairs must by definition retain an illiberal core, or else cease to exist in any meaningful sense. So for instance, one can reduce the duties that children owe their parents, and the power of parents over children, without eliminating the family entirely. But you cannot treat parents and children, or husbands and wives, as free agents with no obligations to one another save those they deliberately choose, without vitiating the very concept of family. Similarly, nation-states can reduce the distinctions they make among their citizens, and between their citizens and the foreign-born, without ceasing to exist as meaningful communities. But if they eliminate the latter set of distinctions entirely, as libertarians sometimes seem to suggest they should, so that everyone is effectively a citizen of everywhere else, then the very concept of community, or at least political community, ceases to have any practical meaning.
Continue reading "The Uses of Illiberalism" »
Bollinger v. Ahmadinejad
Larison nails it:
On reading the blog account of the big to-do at Columbia today, it occurs to me that Ahmadinejad must have found Bollinger’s “sharp challenges” much as Francis Urquhart described Prime Minister’s Question Time: “very frightening -- like being mugged by a guinea pig.”
Consider this “challenge”:Why do you support well-documented terrorist organizations that continue to strike at peace and democracy in the Middle East, destroying lives and the civil society of the region? You could almost imagine Ahmadinejad replying, “I thank the honourable gentleman for his concern for peace and democracy, which my government has always shared. We have always worked to bring peace and democracy to the rest of the world, because we love all of the nations of the world. Naturally, we abhor terrorism and I refer the honourable gentleman to my previous answer.”
In his speech, Ahmadinejad did actually say, “we love all nations.” ... The point is that posing such questions to a demagogue simply lends meaning and importance to whatever the demagogue says in response. It sets him up to blather on about whatever he would like to say. If he ignores the questions, nothing has been proved that we did not already know, and if he answers them he will invariably spin them to his advantage. Demagogues often have a good knack for turning a phrase and playing to a crowd - that’s how they got to be demagogues.
The core of the problem, to my mind, is summed up by Bollinger's remark, in his email to the school, that this was an opportunity for Columbia students to "listen to ideas we deplore." This sort of earnest liberal piety demonstrates a fundamental inability to grasp what someone like the Iranian President is all about. If Ahmadinejad were interest in making a serious, sustained case for political Islam, or even if he were presenting a David Irving-style brief on the Holocaust, there might be some value in having him appear at Columbia and face questions - perhaps not from the university president, but from someone well-suited to engage with his arguments. (If Sayyid Qutb were alive and writing, for instance, I would be very interested to watch him debate a liberal, secular Ivy League political philosopher.) But the Iranian President was never going to actually elucidate or defend his most controversial ideas before a Western audience - and certainly not at Columbia University, of all places! Not when he could further his objectives by refraining from saying anything at all.
So ask him about the Holocaust, and he'll say that further research is needed, and besides, why should the Palestinians suffer for whatever may or may not have happened to Jews sixty years ago? Ask him if he wants to destroy Israel, and he'll tell you: "We love all nations. We are friends with the Jewish people." Ask him about women's rights, and he'll say: "Women in Iran enjoy the highest levels of freedom." Ask him about the execution of homosexuals, and he'll tell you that there are no homosexuals in Iran. Ask him about nuclear weapons, and he'll tell you that Iran wants to live in peace with its neighbors and the world. And so on and so forth. There are no controversial ideas here; there are, in fact, no ideas at all. Which is why it didn't matter what Bollinger said: He was being played for a fool right from the beginning.
Power and Weakness
Ezra:
I genuinely don't understand the quaking fear over Ahmadinejad's interview at Columbia. When did America become so weak, so insecure, that we mistrust our capacity to converse with potentially hostile world leaders? Do we really believe the president of Columbia is so doltish as to be outsmarted by a former traffic engineer from Tehran? Do we really see no utility in publicly grilling prominent liars in such a way that their denials lose credibility? What do we have to lose from a foreign leader, even a hostile one, somberly laying a wreath at the site of a tragedy? When did we become so afraid? And for all the conservative talk that a loss in Iraq will diminish our reputation for strength and thus harm our security, how must it look when some three-foot tall Iranian firebrand keeps trying to dialogue with us and we keep dodging his calls?
I think it's worth distinguishing between two inter-related objections to Ahmadinejad's Columbia appearance. The first, which is mine, is that it's shameful for a great American university to supply a prominent platform to an odious figure like Iran's President, particularly at a time when his government is almost certainly involved in attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. The second, which can follow from the first but doesn't necessarily, is that the act of inviting Ahmadinejad to speak is a manifestation of American weakness that may eventually contribute to our destruction at the hands of our enemies. For hints of the latter take, see this Roger Kimball post, in which he quotes from Bagehot:
History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.
Were the year 1938, and the speaker in question Adolf Hitler as opposed to Ahmadinejad, this quotation would feel more apropos. But this is where I part ways with some of my confreres on the right: I don't think it's accurate or useful to suggest that the American intellectual class is preparing our country for "destruction" by extending a nauseating degree of courtesy to a poisonous Iranian demagogue. The German Fuhrer was actually an existential threat to the free nations of the West, and the failure of the chattering classes of his era to reckon with that threat did prepare their nations for the destruction visited on them in World War II. Whereas Ahmadinejad is a tinhorn rabblerouser with a tenous grip on power, and the country he attempts to rule is a paper tiger whose quest for nuclear weapons is a manifestation of its weakness, not its strength. I despise him, and I fervently wish that I inhabited a country whose great universities had the good sense not to treat his appearance in New York as an occasion for a lesson in "free speech." (Particularly given the slight double standard that occasionally seems to be at work in American academia these days.) But I don't fear him, because I think that America is easily strong enough - and our enemies weak enough, more importantly - to survive the folly on display at Columbia University today.
Update: See also Reihan's thoughts.
Obama and the World
Marc goes inside the candidate's head:
In private, Obama likens himself to Reagan, according to some of his friends. He believes that the very act of Americans choosing to elect him would amount to the biggest foreign policy advance of the past 20 years, would immediately change the way, say, a young boy in Lahore views this country, would crush the propaganda gains of radical Islam since the end of the first Gulf War, would heal the scar that serves as a reminder of America's original sin (slavery), would directly engage the mass Muslim world in a way that no one who voted for oil or empire could, and ... you get the idea.
Okay, so this is ridiculous and overblown and self-serving, but ... it isn't totally wrong. To the extent that the President isn't just the leader of our country, but the face of America and our chief overseas PR man - a role that Reagan and Bill Clinton both played well, and that Bush has displayed little facility for - Obama is probably the most attractive candidate in either party's field. (So long as he stops talking about bombing Pakistan, of course.) This is not the sort of consideration on which elections should turn, but neither is it worth dismissing out of hand.
Update: Larison, as is his wont, prefers to emphasize the negative.
Your Daily Dose of Thompson-Bashing
It's a bad sign when Mario Loyola (!) accuses you of "rabble-rousing" and "perhaps laziness, too," for suggesting that the U.S. deny an entry visa to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It's an even worse sign when Mark Steyn - self-described as "the least anti-American non-American on the planet" - lays into your "we've shed more blood for liberty than the whole world put together" braggadocio not just once but over and over again.
Meanwhile, Papa Bear's unstoppable campaign juggernaut rolls on.
Debating RomneyCare
Cato and Heritage discuss how it's working out so far.
Old Dog, Same Tricks
I am shocked - shocked - to discover that Grady Little is still a terrible, terrible manager.
Newt '08
At this point, why not?
Weekend Linkage
Christine Rosen on social networking and narcissism.
The Derb explains why he is not an Islamophobe.
Peter Galbraith on Iran's strategic victory.
If you missed the Labash-Ferguson one-two punch in the last two issues of the Standard, you should remedy that oversight.
And while I'm definitely on the "Hillary probably can't be stopped" bandwagon, and I think the parallels between 1980 and 2008 can be counted on the fingers of Homer Simpson's left hand, it is remarkable how quickly conventional wisdom can get up-ended in American politics.
The MSM Strikes Back
There are an awful lot of bad sportswriters out there (hello, Murray Chass), but there are even more dumb fans. And when a smart reporter goes up against a busload of outrageously dumb questioners in an online forum - well, that's what I call entertainment.
Ahmadinejad at Columbia
Gotta agree with Kristol on this one.
Other People's Liberty
Sigh. When I saw the Post was running a short "fact-check" piece on Fred Thompson's claim that "our people have shed more blood for other people's liberty than any other combination of nations in the history of the world," I thought, hey, good for them. But then I saw this:
The number of overall U.S. military casualties, while high, is still relatively low in comparison to those of its World War I and World War II allies. In World War II alone, the Soviet Union suffered at least 8 million casualties, or more than 10 times the number of U.S. casualties for all wars combined. According to Winston Churchill, the Red Army "tore the guts out of the Nazi war machine." It can be argued that Soviet troops were primarily fighting to free their homeland from Nazi occupation. After fighting its way to Berlin, the Soviet Union imposed its own dictatorship over Eastern Europe. Even so, Soviet sacrifices contributed greatly to the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi domination. Soviet forces died for their own country and their own tyrannical government, but they also spilled blood on behalf of their Western allies.
If you want to rebut Thompson's claim, might I suggest that arguing that Stalin's Red Army was fighting for "other people's liberty" probably isn't the best way to do it?
Continue reading "Other People's Liberty" »
Our Unchosen Obligations
Run, don't walk, and read Yuval Levin on the Haidt thesis.
More Allies, More Problems
Expanding NATO to include Australia, Japan, Israel, India, and various other friendly nations is a marginally better idea, I'd say, than trying to start a "League of Democracies" from scratch. Maybe. But I'm going to have to agree with the paleocons and pomo-cons: It's still a really lousy idea.
Leave aside the issue of whether it's wise to belong to a treaty organization that might require us to intervene on India's behalf if they were attacked by Pakistan, or send troops to Lebanon the next time Hezbollah launches a major assault on Israel. I'm afraid I just don't see what pressing problem an expanded NATO is supposed to solve. Have we conducted any military operations lately where we slapped our forehead and said "wow, if only we had the Japanese locked into a mutual-defense pact, everything would be going much more smoothly?" Back when the Clinton Administration was struggling to convince the Western European powers to intervene more forcefully in Bosnia, did anyone think to themselves "if only we had the Israelis, the Australians, the South Koreans and the Singaporeans at table as well, this would be a piece of cake?"
I suppose one possible idea is that adding India to our primary military alliance would give us more local credibility if NATO wanted to intervene in, say, Bhutan, or that adding Singapore would give our potential operations in Borneo more multilateral cred. (Let's leave aside the question of what adding Israel would do to NATO's credibility in certain areas of the world.) But isn't that what we have diplomats for? When we needed to intervene in Afghanistan, we persuaded the Pakistanis and the Uzbeks and the Russians to go along with it, even though they weren't NATO member states; conversely, when we felt we needed to invade Iraq, we couldn't persuade the French and the Germans to sign on to the invasion, even though they were theoretically our "partners" in NATO. In neither case did the military alliance, or lack thereof, matter nearly so much as old-fashioned diplomatic skill (or, in the latter case, the lack thereof).
Maybe there's some important military advantage to a bigger, badder NATO that I'm missing - smoother joint anti-terror operations, maybe? But more likely, it's just pointless chest-thumping - the equivalent of Romney's pledge to "double Guantanamo" or Thompson's brag about how we're better at defending liberty than everybody else in the whole wide world put together.
The Centrist Media
To Paul Krugman's complaint that right-wing triumphs get characterized by the mass media as "conservatives on the march," while liberal triumphs produce headlines about a return to the "center," Matt writes:
But here's the thing, I've heard conservatives complain about this too. When conservatives secure political power, it's all "holy shit: conservatives!" but when liberals secure political power, it's all "don't worry, they're centrists." There's truth to both perspectives here, but I think the right fundamentally has the better of this argument. It wouldn't have been helpful to liberals or to liberalism for Time to greet the 2006 elections with a photo of Nancy Pelosi flanked by Charlie Rangel, Henry Waxman, David Obey, and John Conyers under the headline "THE LIBERAL TAKEOVER."
To which Ezra rejoins:
That said, it does pound in some narratives that matter. To go back to my Heath Shuler article, it was the Right who sought to argue that he was a conservative. They did that because it was good for the press to report the election as a triumph for "conservatism," that reigning ideology that had been failed by perfidious Republicans. So rather than the collapse of years of unified conservative rule being seen as the failure of the ideology, which would in turn lead the press to paint future adherents as politically radioactive, it actually enhanced the superficial appeal of "pure conservatism."
I think both Matt and Ezra are right, because they're talking about different terminology. To the extent that the term "conservative Democrat" creeps into the narrative where Democrats like Shuler and Jim Webb are concerned, it's a (minor) victory for conservative talking points. To the extent that winning Democrats are described as centrists, though, it's a sign that liberal media bias - in which a moderate liberalism is the center, and everything else is right-wing kookery - is defining the terms of the discussion.
Why I Am A Social Conservative
Everybody's talking - Andrew, Rod, Will (who got there first), the Times - about Jonathan Haight, his theory of moral instincts, and how it applies to American politics. I thought I'd jump in, starting with a long quote from Haight's recent critique of the Dawkins-Hitchens-Harris tribe of neo-atheists.
In my research I have found that there are two common ways that cultures suppress and regulate selfishness, two visions of what society is and how it ought to work. I'll call them the contractual approach and the beehive approach.
The contractual approach takes the individual as the fundamental unit of value. The fundamental problem of social life is that individuals often hurt each other, and so we create implicit social contracts and explicit laws to foster a fair, free, and safe society in which individuals can pursue their interests and develop themselves and their relationships as they choose.
Morality is about happiness and suffering (as [Sam] Harris says, and as John Stuart Mill said before him), and so contractualists are endlessly trying to fine-tune laws, reinvent institutions, and extend new rights as circumstances change in order to maximize happiness and minimize suffering. To build a contractual morality, all you need are the two individualizing foundations: harm/care, and fairness/reciprocity. The other three foundations, and any religion that builds on them, run afoul of the prime directive: let people make their own choices, as long as they harm nobody else.
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Reproductive Rights and Neo-Eugenics
I trust that Kevin Drum will be writing a very strongly worded letter to the editors of Dissent regarding their regurgitation of talking points straight from the right-wing sandbox. (hat tip: Cheryl.)
All snideness aside, the essay in question is very much worth your time.
Gossip Girl vs. The O.C.
Here's one take, from the smartest teen soap opera fanatic I know.
Also worth a look: This mini-interview, in which Josh Schwartz dissects the mistakes he made with The O.C.
Losing the Tax Issue
Ramesh, in today's NYT:
What Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani — who have made the most detailed remarks on taxes of the top-tier candidates — are really saying is that they will make sure that taxes on capital gains, dividends, estates and high earners will stay low. Not many middle-class taxpayers will benefit directly from any of those policies.
... Both Mr. Romney and Mr. Giuliani speak vaguely about making sure the alternative minimum tax doesn’t affect any more middle-class families. That is a step in the right direction. But it isn’t a tax cut.
Mr. Romney has also proposed an initiative to make the return on middle-class savings tax-free. It may also be a step in the right direction, but it’s small change. The primary focus of the Romney and Giuliani tax plans remains high earners.
What would be a serious middle-class tax cut? One answer is to expand the tax credit for children. But none of the candidates is proposing to do so, or any other big tax relief for regular folks. You might think that Mr. Giuliani would want to do everything he can to appeal to social conservatives short of actually becoming one himself. But why should he offer a pro-family tax cut when even the hard-core social conservatives in the race aren’t interested? Mike Huckabee wants a national sales tax and Sam Brownback wants a flat tax. Either proposal would increase taxes on a lot of middle-class families.
The Republicans in Congress are no better. For much of the right, the great passion of the moment is to make sure that the carried interest at hedge funds is taxed at what look an awful lot like preferential rates. For years, liberals have said that Republicans talk about “family values” but won’t do anything to meet the economic needs of families. Right now, on taxes, that charge hits home.
Read the whole thing. I would only add that while smart liberals may not think much of Barack Obama's tax plan, it seems likely to have a lot more mass-market appeal than anything the GOP candidates are proposing.
Update: Reihan adds his two cents here.
It Was a Very Good Year
Regarding this exquisitely annoying Cass Sunstein piece, which makes the case that the current Supreme Court isn't ideologically balanced but wildly, wildly right-wing - because, you see, it's considerably more conservative than it was when Cass Sunstein was a Supreme Court clerk, in the halcyon year of 1980, against which all other years must be judged - well, what Megan said.
Putin After Beslan
Via a reader, here's a video clip from the Putin speech that's cited in that Paul Starobin profile I mentioned. No subtitles, but you don't need them to get the idea.
The EITC Versus Wage Subsidies
Don't let your eyes glaze over - it's one of the most interesting anti-poverty debates, I swear. Megan digs in to the difficulties with the EITC here, while Matt makes the liberal case for a much more generous, much less strictly-policed EITC here. The smartest case for wage subsidies can be found here or here, from the recent Nobel winner Edmund Phelps. (I should note that Reihan and I will make a somewhat-less-brilliant case for wage subsidies in our forthcoming book.)
D.C. and the Constitution
The gang over at the Plank have been hammering away at this representation-for-D.C. issue, so I thought I'd see how TNR's editorials on the subject dealt with difficulty that any legislation granting the District a voting representative in the House is almost certainly unconstitutional. Here's their entire take on the constitutionality issue:
McConnell and Bush base their opposition on ostensibly constitutional grounds, arguing that the Constitution grants congressional representation only to states, which, of course, the District of Columbia is not. But the legislation, as it's crafted, addresses these concerns--since it provides for expedited judicial review of the bill if it's challenged after becoming law. As Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine said in voting for the bill in committee last week, "I have concluded that the constitutionality of this legislation is a close call and is best resolved by the courts and not by this committee."
Er, okay, I guess. So Congress has no responsibility to consider the constitutionality of the legislation it votes on, beyond ensuring that the Supreme Court rules on it ASAP? Really?
And even if it's okay for Congress to punt the question up to the Court, shouldn't an opinion magazine that supports the measure at least take on the (sound-seeming) constitutional arguments against it?
Update: Also, isn't NR's position - a vastly smaller federal district centered around the Mall and Capitol Hill, and then retrocession of the rest of the District to Maryland - a vastly better option? Yes, it's unlikely to happen, since Maryland would have to agree to the transfer, but it seems at least as a plausible a possibility as the Supreme Court signing off on the current proposal.
The Future of Social Conservatism
Ramesh notes a possibly-telling study:
... the generational breakdowns are interesting. The youngest voter group—those 18 to 30—are the least likely to support "the death penalty," "embryonic stem-cell research," "the separation of church and state," "abortion rights," "physician-assisted suicide," or "affirmative action." These voters are, however, the most likely to support "gay rights" and "same-sex marriage."
This comports with my general impressions of "the kids" these days, and of the culture-war landscape going forward: Abortion and the "life issues" in general have staying power; homosexuality, probably not so much.
Robert Jordan, RIP
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. What was, what will be, and what is, may yet fall under the Shadow.
Let the Dragon ride again on the winds of time.
Robert Jordan was, for about four years during my adolescence, easily my favorite writer in the world. The first five books of his Wheel of Time saga are among the best popular fantasy novels of the last few decades, with only George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire and Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn providing serious competition. Now he is dead, still young at 58, with his saga still unfinished. It went on too long - eleven books, with at least two more projected - and when it is completed (as I assume it will be, with his family or other writers filling in the blanks), it will be less than it could have been. But at its best, it was remarkable indeed: Few writers have given me such pleasure, and few, I suspect, ever will. It's hard to imagine loving any books more than the books that you love when you're fifteen years old.
Jordan was a pen name; his real name was James Oliver Rigney, Jr. He was a South Carolinian, a Citadel graduate, a Vietnam veteran, a devout Episcopalian. He is survived by his wife, Harriet. Requiescat in pacem.
The New Liberal Media
Chait-Mania '07 is over, but like Will Wilkinson, I want to make one last point. It concerns a secondary thesis of Jon's book - his argument that the Republican Party, and particularly the Bush Administration, has been able to disguise the radicalism of their agenda by effectively gaming the press corps. Jon fingers two tendencies in the press that have played into Republican hands: First, the persistence - particularly among the David Broders of the world - of a misplaced faith in the old center-left consensus, and a concomitant belief that the best way to get anything done in D.C. is for Democrats and Republicans to split the difference; second, the tendency of reporters seeking balance to report every debate about policy as "he said, she said," even when what he (i.e., the Republican supply-sider) says is either implausible, mendacious, or both.
Without getting too deep into the weeds, I wanted to advance a slightly different hypothesis about the press in the age of Bush - namely, that the current Administration was the beneficiary of a long overdue, but probably temporary attempt by the (yes, liberal) media to take conservatism seriously, after years of hoping that the whole Republican majority would just blow away in a strong wind. I don't quite agree with this Jim Henley post, but he's on to something when he writes, in response to an Atrios remark about the absurdity of believing in a liberal media:
Dear Atrios: I’m about twelve years older than you. When I was a teen and you were a toddler, and for a time after that, the media was very liberal. How do I know? I remember! Also, there used to be no ATMs. We had things called “traveler’s checks” that you bought at the bank before going on vacation instead of taking cash. In fact, an important part of vacation planning was deciding how many traveler’s checks to buy.
Now, I don’t think “the media” as such is liberal any more. I think the transformation completed itself early this century. In fact, I think the media is now as out of touch with popular sentiment from the right as the earlier media used to be out of touch with popular sentiment from the left - I’m thinking of the period from Ronald Reagan’s first campaign in 1980 to the Republican congressional takeover of 1994. I’d go so far as to say that the period in question convinced the honchos of newsrooms that “We’re out of touch with America and we have to change.”
Henley's wrong about the extent of the media's rightward turn, but he's right, I think, that somewhere in the late 1990s and early '00s, and particularly amid the rise of Fox News and the blogosphere, the MSM finally realized that they had lost a large chunk of their audience by being completely out of touch with the political changes at work in post-Sixties America. Their response was to hire more conservative columnists, inject a little more balance in their reporting, and generally change the tone with which they covered right-wing ideas and politicians. These efforts were patchwork and sometimes a little bit silly (like assigning a reporter to the "conservative beat"), but they reflected a real attempt to improve on the frankly embarrassing way that the national media had often written about figures like Reagan and Gingrich, or movements like the religious right. And they coincided with 9/11, and the rally-round-the-flag spirit that followed, which would have delivered a Republican Administration better-than-usual coverage no matter what.
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Number Two With a Bullet
So I'm watching a Red Sox-Yankees game this weekend, and midway through the telecast what looked like some frat-boy doofus decked out in Sox gear showed up in the Fox broadcast booth. It wasn't Ben Affleck, the most likely candidate, and since I had the sound off it took a good five minutes to realize that it was none other than Dane Cook, |
