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Iraq as Success Story
Matt's right; this Brian Doherty piece on why the Iraq War may yet be regarded - wrongly - as a good idea is very smart. And I basically agree with its premise - that we shouldn't let any successes achieved from here on out blind us to the absolutely disastrous consequences of the initial invasion. Eventually, as Julian Sanchez notes, Iraq is bound to settle down, in some sense at least - but this settling down, if and when it comes, won't prove that the war was a good idea in the first place.
However, something like the reverse is also true: Just because the initial invasion was almost certainly a mistake doesn't necessarily mean that the continued presence of U.S. troops is a mistake as well. And I detect some goalpost-shifting here among the partisans of immediate withdrawal. Back in September, when Petraeus was testifying and the fur was flying, Matt was making roughly the same point that he and Julian and Brian Doherty are making now, except that he was saying things like "maybe Bush can change his line to the idea that if we just keep staying the course for 4 or 5 more years, casualties will drop massively because everyone will already be dead or displaced." Now it's less than two months later, the violence has continued to diminish, and Matt's response is: "After all, internecine violence in Iraq won't continue forever and since most ethnically mixed neighborhoods have already been cleansed, it's at least plausible that the worst is behind us." And he's right - it is at least plausible. But given that only six weeks ago he was throwing out "4 or 5 more years" as a timeline for when Iraq might start to settle down, I think it's also "at least plausible" that when we look back on the last year of American military operations in Iraq, we'll judge them to have played a major role in putting the worst behind us earlier than most people anticipated.
I'm not nearly as optimistic ("Iraqtimistic"?) on that count as this gentleman, mind you, but I'm hopeful.
What Compassionate Conservatism Did
I'm working on a review of Michael Gerson's book, so I basically want to keep my powder dry on the subjects that everyone's talking and talking about. But this, from Matt, seems worth a rejoinder:
It's clear that there's a strain of Republican Party rhetoric that's similar in spirit to the Catholic-inspired Christian Democratic parties of the European center-right. Gerson, both as a speechwriter and as a columnist, clearly falls into that tradition. So, too, for most of his presidency has George W. Bush. And now on the campaign trail Mike Huckabee has taken up that banner.
But what neither Bush nor Huckabee nor anyone else seems to have offered is a policy agenda that cashes the rhetorical checks they're spreading around. If the libertarian tradition in the GOP mostly consists of a free-market agenda that's friendly to the interests of rich people and big companies, the Bushian deviations from the free-market line have overwhelmingly been aimed at advancing lobbyist-friendly policies. Similarly, Mike Huckabee talks a good game about inequality, but his distinctive policy proposal is a massively regressive (and phenomenally stupid) National Retail Sales Tax. There's just no there there. In practice to find Republicans likely to support programs that help poor people, you need to look to the generically "moderate" (i.e., vulnerable) Republicans representing culturally liberal coastal areas — Susan Collins, Gordon Smith, etc. — and Christian Democratic talk remains just that: talk.
I don't entirely agree. Bush did have a pseudo-Christian Democratic policy agenda: It consisted of the faith-based initiatives, No Child Left Behind, the prescription drugs bill, and immigration reform. The first was small potatoes, but the rest weren't small at all. Now it's true that both the prescription drugs bill and the immigration bill were friendly to business interests as well as to seniors and recent immigrants, which is what you'd expect from an administration where both Gerson and Dick Cheney had the President's ear. But there's no inherent contradiction in giving more money to schools or seniors and to corporations (though there's the problem of how you pay for it all); or in helping illegal immigrations toward citizenship and helping businesses keep their supply of cheap labor. And those combinations constitute a large chunk of the Bush domestic-policy record - or the attempted record, in the case of immigration reform.
I should add that I think it's a record that points to a significant problem with any "compassionate" or "big government" or "Christian Democratic" conservatism - the tendency to just co-opt liberal ideas and make them more business-friendly, while leaving anything distinctively conservative by the wayside. But I don't think you say there's no there there and leave it at that.
The Religious Right After Bush
Jeff Sharlet is right that the "end of the religious right" has been breathlessly predicted many times before, and that evangelical Christians aren't going to cease being an important force in American life just because their supposed "crack-up" was splashed on the cover of the Times Magazine. And Father Neuhaus is certainly right to point out the silliness of liberal mood swings where social conservatism is concerned: As he writes, they "scare themselves by creating the boogeyman of a monolithic theocratic assault and then console themselves that the advancing forces are in disarray." (You can read Sharlet's post, in part, as a furious scream directed at suddenly-complacent liberals: "Don't you get it! The boogeyman's still out there ... homeschooling its children ... telling them not to have sex before marriage ... running crisis pregnancy centers ... trying to convert the heathen overseas - and it'll get us eventually!")
But while the Times article in question didn't deliver anything close to what was promised by its over-the-top advertising and sweeping claims, I think its core points, however modest, were all worthy of note: First, that the close personal identification evangelicals felt with George W. Bush has given way to a certain amount of disillusionment with his Presidency, which feeds into a suspicion of politics in general that's always latent among conservative Christians; second, that the issue matrix, if you will, for religious conservatives may be slowly changing, with concerns about the environment and global poverty rising and the focus on homosexuality, in particular, diminishing; and third, that "none of the 2008 Republican front-runners come close to measuring up to President Bush in the eyes of the evangelical faithful," which is creating significant fault lines and stresses as social conservatives decide where to cast their vote, stresses which didn't really exist over the past eight years.
So yes, as Fr. Neuhaus writes, "there is no evangelical crackup ... there is a normalization of conservative Christian activism in the public square. As on the left, organizations and activists on the right maneuver mightily to direct sometimes contentious constituencies toward their preferred political outcomes." But it's precisely as a look at some of the arguments associated with this maneuvering that - once I tuned out the heavy breathing - I found David Kirkpatrick's article to be an interesting read.
The New Class Warfare
Maybe it isn't a conscious strategy for the Democrats, but it makes a certain sense: Take from the super-rich, who aren't tax-sensitive, and the pretty-damn-rich, who will probably vote for the GOP no matter what, and give to upper-middle class professionals, a constituency where the Dems have been making inroads for a while now. Greg Mankiw reports, Reihan comments.
A Clinton Restoration?
Among the strongest non-ideological arguments against the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, to my mind, is the one that Andrew, among others, has frequently marshaled - that putting her in the White House would keep the country mired in the Bush-Clinton civil war that's defined our politics for quite a while now, trapping us all in the political psychodrama of the Baby Boomers for another 4-8 years. The question is whether this sort of reasoning has any resonance with the general public. Matt Continetti, parsing AEI's latest political report, offers reason to think it doesn't:
In September, when ABC News / Washington Post pollsters asked respondents whether they approved of Bill Clinton's presidential job performance, 66 percent approved and 32 percent disapproved. Furthermore, when those pollsters asked whether respondents were "comfortable with the idea of Bill Clinton back in the White House," 60 percent said yes, they were comfortable, while 30 percent said they were uncomfortable.
I'm pretty sure those numbers would begin to move if the pollsters scanned likely voters in a presidential election. And if the Republican National Committee spent millions on a slew of negative ads reminding the country of Clinton's bad karma. I'm just not sure how much the numbers would move - or in what direction.
Still, as it stands, about two-thirds of the country wouldn't mind if Clinton were back. Republicans to whom I've talked have long thought that if people realize that a Hillary Clinton presidency would mean the return of Bill Clinton and all of his, you know, baggage, then those people would not want Hillary Clinton to become president. Maybe that's not quite true.
If you followed politics religiously, as everyone who writes about politics for a living does, the Clinton years were a poisonous and depressing era in American history, and another Clinton term sounds like an enormously wearying prospect. But of course most Americans don't follow politics religiously; they tuned out the Clinton wars then, and I'm sure they'd be happy to tune out a revival of the Clinton wars now, if putting Hillary in the White House would bring back certain other aspects of the pre-9/11 era. A "back to the Nineties" narrative sounds like a terrible idea if you care about the quality of life inside the Beltway, but I doubt that's nearly as important to most voters as it is to us pundit types.
Photo by Flickr user MarcN used under a Creative Commons license.
There's Only One October
Jim Caple, before Game 4 of the World Series:
This is the seventh series this postseason and it likely will be the fifth to end in a sweep (of the 22 previous teams to take a 3-0 World Series lead, 19 swept it). Of the other two series, one ended in four games. Even the one series that went the limit scarcely had a good game -- the average margin of victory in the American League Championship Series was five runs, with Boston outscoring Cleveland 30-5 the final three games. And let's not get into all the days off without any game at all.
You know a postseason is bad when the most interesting moment is an invasion of insects.
Obviously, I'm not complaining about the outcome, but Caple's right. Buster Olney has similar thoughts, behind the ESPN firewall, and he makes the larger point that really, there hasn't been a good World Series since the Tribe-Marlins tilt of 1997.* (And that one involved the Marlins depriving the Indians of a championship, so I've basically stricken it from my memory.) I would add that the postseason as a whole hasn't produced any really memorable series in the three years since the Yanks-Red Sox war in '04 (and the neglected, but likewise excellent, Cards-Astros battle the same year). Yes, the Sox-Indians went seven games this year, as did the Mets-Cards semi-final in '06, but I wouldn't call either one a series for the ages, and beyond that it's been a sweep here, and a sweep there, with precious few of the extra-inning marathons and shocking turnarounds that you look for in postseason baseball.
Continue reading "There's Only One October" »
(N)autocracy
I've griped about this before, but he keeps doing it, so once again - Robert Kagan's column about "the surprising resilience of autocracy in China, Russia, Venezuela and elsewhere" is at least somewhat undercut by the fact that neither Venezuela nor Russia are really autocracies, as the word is actually defined, and China certainly isn't one.
Just saying.
Update: As is Daniel Larison.
Nothing To See Here
Sorry for the light posting - I'm crashing on a piece, and bleary-eyed from the World Series. While I recover, go read David Kirkpatrick on the religious right's semi-crack-up, if you haven't already; also Theodore Dalrymple's fine City Journal essay on the new atheism; any number of things in the new Claremont Review of Books; and Terry Teachout:
I suppose we all reach a moment in our lives when we lose interest in the new, and I suspect that moment comes sooner for technology than for art. For now I seem to be staying fairly open to new things--my experience as a blogger suggests as much--but I have yet to send my first text message, nor does my somewhat superannuated cellphone contain a digital camera. On the increasingly rare occasions when I feel the need to take a picture of something, I buy a disposable film camera, the postmodern equivalent of a Brownie, at the corner drugstore.
Today a friend walked into my office, all abuzz over some new online service or gizmo - let's call it "Z." He tried to describe to me what it does, failed, and said: "Oh, it's like a much slicker version of Y." I responded, "What's Y?" He said - "Oh, well, it's the newer, more popular version of X." I said: "What's X?" Which suggests that I'm well on my way to crossing the Teachout threshold.
And that reminds me - as a public service announcement, I should mention that while I have a Facebook account, I have never ever used it for anything (except once to look at someone else's Facebook page), and frankly I don't even know my own password. So if you've asked me to be your friend or otherwise acted friendly in the Facebook realm, I'm not ignoring you: I'm just ignoring, you know, the modern world.
The Zeal of a Convert
Ryan Lizza's piece on Mitt Romney is just as good as everyone says, but I found this passage somewhat puzzling:
In private, a Romney aide frankly conceded that, aside from accusations of “flip-flopping,” his greatest political liability is his religion, which is unfamiliar to most Americans. Jan Shipps, a leading non-Mormon scholar of Mormonism, said that it was useful to consider the difference between Romney and Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, who holds the highest government post of any Mormon in American history. “Reid is a Church member,” Shipps said. “But he is a convert. I’m sure he’s devoted, I’m sure he’s a tithe-paying member and all of that”—devout Mormons contribute ten per cent of their earnings to the Church—“but he was not born into the Church. He didn’t get Mormonism with his mother’s milk, as it were. But Romney is a sixth-generation Mormon”—what scholars call a DNA Mormon. “His ancestors were some of the very first converts.”
I suppose I see what Shipps is getting at - Romney's family history emphasizes Mormonism's various strangenesses in a way that Harry Reid's non-Mormon family history doesn't. But if you're trying to decide whether you should vote for a politician with peculiar-seeming religious beliefs, wouldn't you be much, much less likely to vote for them if they were a convert, like Reid, than if they'd been born into the faith? After all, most people stay in the religion they're born into, regardless of its theology or history; conversion, by contrast, suggests a much more profound assessment, and acceptance, of your religion's beliefs and practices. So one can look askance at Mormon teaching and still say, well, of course Mitt Romney's going to stay in the Church - he's just sticking with the faith of his father and mothers (and mothers, and mothers ...). But Reid deliberately chose Mormonism (and apparently persuaded his wife to convert from Judaism as well), which suggests a different and more radical acceptance of its doctrines than you'd expect from a member of the Romney family.
(And I don't mean to single out Mormonism here: If you think that anyone who believes in Roman Catholicism should have their head examined, then a convert-politician - like, say, Bobby Jindal - ought to be much weirder and more worrisome than a cradle Catholic office-seeker.)
Heads A-Blogging
Me and Matt, on Hillary's electability, how to take down Rudy Giuliani, and other pressing issues of the day.
"The Only Thing That Worries Me About You Is Your Optimism"
That would be Jose Maria Aznar to George W. Bush, a month before the invasion of Iraq. Read the whole thing.
Masscult and Podcult
James Wolcott, on the controversy over JPod's appointment to be editor of Commentary:
... it's ridiculously prissy for Podhoretz's doubters and detractors to act as if Commentary risks infection from the alien virus of popular culture. Before it became strictly the lyric sheet for perpetual war, Commentary ran numerous essays about popular culture without feeling it had to apologize to Lionel Trilling. It ran a number of Robert Warshow's influential essays, it published Jewish hipsters such as Albert Goldman, Seymour Krim, and the young future director James Toback, for years it featured a film-review column by William S. Pechter, it even made room for Clive James's brilliant tour de force about Norman Mailer's Marilyn ...
Point is, if I know about Commentary's record of popcult coverage, shouldn't its contributors and donors have more of a clue instead of treating young Pod as if he were the lucky sperm club's tribute to Roger Ebert?
Indeed. The Times quotes Podhoretz saying that there won't be a "popping up" of the magazine - i.e. no "cover stories on 'Gossip Girl'" - but I'm with Andy Ferguson:
[JPod]'s style is a mix of “Mad magazine meets Foreign Affairs,” said Mr. Ferguson, who added he should develop that sensibility as editor. Commentary has such an air of sacred reverence around it, he said, that Mr. Podhoretz, may be “the only intellectual and conservative in America who is not intimidated by it and who could therefore change it.”
I suspect that Commentary won't stop running the occasional unpersuasive defense of neoconservatism under its new editor, but I'm hoping that - JPod's protestations to the Times notwithstanding - it makes room for that Gossip Girl piece. (I'm sure Reihan would be available to write it.)
Friedmanland
While I agree with Peter Suderman that the whole "me and my cool friends are doing our best to change the world, but it's so hard" meme (propagated here, commented on here and here and here) is deeply irrititating, it's not nearly so annoying as the Thomas Friedman column that kicked off the discussion, which I only just now got around to reading. After complaining that today's younger generation are "too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country's own good," Friedman writes:
Generation Q would be doing itself a favor, and America a favor, if it demanded from every candidate who comes on campus answers to three questions: What is your plan for mitigating climate change? What is your plan for reforming Social Security? What is your plan for dealing with the deficit -- so we all won't be working for China in 20 years?
I'm sorry, but this is just ... just ... asinine. The notion that today's college kids are going to forge a mass movement capable, in Friedman's words, of "speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall" to protest the growth of the federal deficit - which is likely to start rising again soon, but currently is only 1.2 percent of GDP - and the absence of Social Security reform (an issue that only Republicans want to talk about at present, and one where the time horizon for action is still measured in decades) suggests a truly awesome detachment from the realities of American politics, American life, and human nature. But then again, this passage appears in a piece in which Friedman, without a trace of irony or self-awareness (but to the sound of Matt's jaw hitting the floor), dubs my peers ''the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad," so "awesome detachment" might be too kind a phrase for what's going on here ...
Incidentally, if you're a NYRB subscriber, or have three bucks to burn, I highly recommend John Gray's savaging of The World is Flat from a couple years back. And if not, there's always Matt Taibbi's classic review, which (as always with Taibbi) isn't half as funny as it thinks it, but remains pretty damn funny for all that.
The Safe Choice
I agree with Jonah that a Hillary candidacy offers certain advantages to the GOP; I'm just not sure that this means the Democrats would be wrong to nominate her. As I've probably said before, Hillary may not be the best choice for the Democrats, but she's definitely the safest; I think nominating her more or less guarantees the party 48 percent of the vote, since she's sufficiently tested and savvy and all the rest of it to make a Dukakis or Dole-style wipeout almost completely unimaginable. And in a year when things will (probably) be going the Democrats' way anyway, there's a lot to be said for nominating a known quantity and assuming that, in spite of what Jonah rightly calls the "irreducible core" of anti-Hillary sentiment, the political landscape alone will ensure that her guaranteed 48 percent rises to 51-53 percent by November '08. Whereas Obama and to a lesser extent Edwards both have a higher ceiling, but also a much lower floor, since neither has been through the fire already the way Hillary has (indeed, Obama has never run against significant GOP opposition of any kind), and either one could flame out disastrously in the heat of a general-election campaign.
In the next Atlantic, Andrew has a long and (to my mind) largely persuasive piece making the case that Obama, out of the candidates running, is the most likely to be a truly transformational figure in American politics, carrying us past the polarization of the Baby Boom era into whatever's waiting on the other side. But the flip side of this is that Obama could also be a disaster as a general-election candidate in a way that Hillary almost certainly couldn't be - and for a Democratic Party that sees the next election as theirs to lose, the risk-reward calculus probably militates in her favor.
In a semi-related vein, I liked Ramesh's "one term for McCain" idea when he floated it months back, and I still like it now that he's re-issued it.
Photo by Flickr user sskennel used under a Creative Commons license.
Dumbledore Is Gay (II)
Of my remark, in response to J.K. Rowling's "by the way, Dumbledore's gay" announcement, that "a writer confident in her powers wouldn't feel the need to announce details like this," Neil Gaiman - yes, that Neil Gaiman - writes:
All that tells us is that Ross Douthat doesn't write fiction.
(Ouch.)
You always wind up knowing more about your characters than you can get onto the page. Pages are finite, and the story isn't about giving you all the information about everyone in it any more than life is. Things the author knows about characters (or at least, strongly suspects -- it's never really real until it hits the page, because the process of writing is also a process of discovery) that don't make it onto the page could include the characters' backstory, what they like to eat, the toothpaste they use, what happens to them after the story is over or before it began, and what they do in bed. That something didn't turn up in the books just means it didn't make it onto the page or wasn't relevant to the story. (Or even, it made it in and the author cut that scene out because it didn't work. One of my favourite scenes in Anansi Boys went because it made the chapter work better when it was gone.)
(I remember being astonished when I learned a few years ago, from an obituary, that two teachers I'd had as a child were a same-sex couple. Mostly astonished because at the age where they taught me, I didn't imagine that teachers had romantic lives, or were even entirely human; and learning that they were a pair reconfigured everything I knew about them, which wasn't very much.)
Neverwhere has two gay characters who are Out, as far as the book is concerned, and one major character who is gay but it isn't mentioned, simply because that character was one of many people in that book who don't have any sexual or romantic entanglements during the story. So it's irrelevant.
... And, truth to tell, sexuality tends to be such a minor thing, if you have several hundred characters running around in your head. You know more than you've written. One of the characters in Wall in Stardust, for example, is not what he is pretending to be in a way that has nothing at all to do with sex, although the clues are all there in the book, but if I don't do another story set in Wall you'll never find out who he is, or even why he's interesting.
I think the crucial question here is whether Dumbledore being gay is just a "a minor thing," just one of many quirks that the reader doesn't need to know while reading the books but might be interested to discover after the fact - or, as with Gaiman's two lesbian teachers, whether it's something that "reconfigures" everything we thought we knew about the Hogwarts Headmaster. I would submit that it's closer to the latter than to the former, given the role Dumbledore plays in the saga and the significance of his varied relationships to all the other players in the story; it isn't quite the equivalent of Rowling never giving the reader any clue that Snape was in love with Lily Potter, only to mention it in passing at a public appearance in 2009, but it's closer to that sort of thing than to, say, a piece of interesting trivia about how Minerva McGonagall once dated a guy from Slytherin. I'm not saying that every piece of information about every character needs to be spilled out on the page; I'm not even saying that one should be able to know, from reading the books, that Dumbledore is homosexual. I'm just saying that a writer with confidence in her powers would write that sort of important detail into the story in such a way, whether explicit or implicit, that she didn't feel the need to explain it after the books came out. (I'm trying to picture Melville patiently explaining to the Illustrated London News that yes, Claggart did have a thing for Billy Budd - or Proust telling a Paris audience: "Don't you get it? The narrator's gay! Albertine's a guy!")
Continue reading "Dumbledore Is Gay (II)" »
The Iraq War and the Movies
Chris Orr and Dana Stevens discuss.
Bet On Colorado
The Red Sox were only seven games better than the Rockies over the course of the regular season, a nearly-meaningless edge when you're talking about a seven-game playoff series. In the second half of the season, they were considerably worse. In the postseason, they've gone 7-3; the Rockies have gone 7-0. Admittedly, the National League offers markedly inferior competition, and I do think the Red Sox are a better team than the Colorado. But 2-1 favorites? Not hardly.
(All betting lines provided for informational purposes only.)
The Perils of Book Reviewing
In which Mom wasn't stuffed in a freezer, after all.
You're What's Wrong the GOP. No, You Are.
Let's drill down a bit in the Erick Erickson analysis I mentioned yesterday:
While the media has been filled with stories about the socons ready to bolt from the GOP if Rudy is the nominee, the real story and the untold story is that the business community is even more ready to bolt from the GOP. For the last eight years they've watched as the socons have scored every significant win on the right — stem cells, judges, etc. Only against Labor have the fiscal guys scored wins. But there have been no budget cuts, no culling of pork, steel subsidies, etc.
The fiscal guys see the writing on the wall. They see Hillary's position. And they are just about ready to cut a deal. And then you have the Republican libertarians who are just about ready to really vote for Ron Paul, doing to the GOP in 2008 what Ralph Nader voters did for the Democrats in 2000.
Of course social conservatives could argue it exactly in reverse, pointing out that stem cells and Terri Schiavo were symbolic gestures with little practical import; that Bush invested far more political capital in his (successful) first-term tax cuts and and his (failed) second-term push for Social Security reform than he ever did in, say, the stillborn push for a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage; and that the GOP Congress passed bill after bill larded with giveaways for various favored industries. (Those conservative judges Bush appointed tend to be relatively business-friendly as well.) Obviously, the various interest groups in the "fiscal con" coalition - business interests, supply-siders, deficit hawks, and libertarians - have policy goals that cut in different directions, and the latter two groups, in particular, have plenty of cause for disappointment with Bush. But it's far from clear that the last six years have been a net win for the social right and a net loss for everybody else in the coalition; it might be more accurate to say that both social conservatives and small-government conservatives have taken a back seat to supply-siders and business interests.
Meanwhile, a friend writes:
I find it fascinating that the major players in the Republican coalition, the SoCons and FiscalCons, instead of attacking the neo-cons and hawks, are spending their time fighting with each other.
It's true: As in the Cold War, foreign-policy hawkishness has become the glue holding the fragile GOP coalition together, even as Iraq has made foreign policy a general-election liability for the Right, instead of the asset it was in the Reagan years. Which is one way to explain the weird aftermath of the '06 debacle, in which social conservatives and fiscal conservatives each blamed one another for the defeat, when it was perfectly clear that the Iraq War had more to do the party's degringolade than the corruption of the small-government movement or the excesses of the religious right.
Update: I should note that the title of this post owes a substantial debt to the Dougherty Doctrine, which holds that all debates about the future of the GOP boil down to the following: "If it were more like me, the Republican Party would be better off. It’s failing because it’s like you."
The Most Obnoxious People in Sports
Via JVL, your (semi-accurate, alas) guide to being an insufferable New England sports fan. (I get the feeling the author doesn't much care for Bill Simmons ...) Meanwhile, Ben McGrath profiles Scott Boras.
Why Not Huckabee?
Why won't social conservative bigwigs back the Huck? Erick Erickson suggests it's because they're political realists who know that Huckabee's unacceptable to the fiscal cons, and thus would actually fracture the Right's coalition more than Rudy would. Ambinder agrees, but also speculates that the "SoCon establishment in Washington fears Huckabee because Huckabee can empower social conservatives DIRECTLY, without the mediating influence, or dollars, of the SoCon establishment." Both these theories are plausible; I'd only add that every would-be endorser wants to back a winner, and Huckabee still has a much slimmer chance of taking the GOP nomination than Romney and Thompson, the other plausible recipients of a SoCon Establishment blessing. (Likewise, electability - or the lack thereof - is one of the many reasons why Brownback probably won't endorse Huckabee.)
In any case, it's hard not to be impressed with the political feat that Huckabee pulled off this weekend - spiking, at least temporarily, the SoCon leadership's endorsement of Romney by sheer force of rhetoric. Or so Erickson says:
I'm told that people in the room tabulating the votes were stunned by Huckabee's showing. Stunned, for some of them, is an understatement. It seems clear to me that this was an opportunity for the leaders of the social conservative movement to sigh, shrug, and embrace Romney. They intended to.
They gave Romney a platform by himself on Friday night. They played heroic anthems for his entry and departure. He had the night all to himself. And he did well. Then Huckabee showed up the next day, sharing the same time cluster as Rudy. And Huckabee, with a speech he wrote himself, was magnificent.
Now, you can call me partisan or biased or whatever you want, but all I'm doing here is reporting. The leaders of the social conservative movement who were present, the Arlington Group members you hear so much about, were ready and willing to get on board Romney's campaign on Saturday morning. Then Huckabee spoke. Then the straw vote was tabulated. Then they realized that were they to do so, it would put them completely out of step with their members.
"With a speech he wrote himself." Hard not to like the guy ...
Update: See also Amy Sullivan's take.
Becoming the Yankees
William Rhoden:
The door is open for the Red Sox, with a rich baseball tradition and a high payroll, to replace the Yankees as the team the nation loves to hate ... The possibility is there for the spending: no more just missing the brass ring, but rather grabbing that ring season after season. But does Red Sox Nation really want to do this?
Vince Lombardi’s exhortation that winning is the only thing, in retrospect, has caused unimaginable heartache and blues. It sounds good but is probably antithetical to inner peace.
Look around. The pursuit of winning has tempted some of us to break rules, tear moral fiber, take performance-enhancing drugs and jettison a manager who failed to lead his team past the first playoff round for three consecutive years.
I would ask Boston fans whether they really want to see their team do this. Do they want a franchise whose ethos is that winning titles is the only thing?
Here's the problem: I understand where Rhoden's coming from, and there's no question that I look at the Yankees and their fans and feel more than a little pity for them, trapped as they are in a cycle where the ordinary joys of having a winning baseball team are overshadowed by a grim win-at-all-costs mentality. But I'm not sure what the Red Sox organization is supposed to do to avoid this fate: Yes, they should avoid signing unlikeable mercenaries who can't perform in the clutch (ahem, Kevin Brown), but overall I think they have an obligation, having grown financially fat off the dollars generated by a passionate fan base, to plow that money back into the team on the field. (This was always something you had to respect about Steinbrenner: He was crazy and horrible and tyrannical and all the rest, but you always knew that he was in it to win baseball games, not to get rich.) And if you do plow the money from a passionate fan base back into the team, and do so intelligently, you're going to have the chance to grab the brass ring season after season - which in turn creates the sort of unreasonable expectations that the Yankees currently labor under.
Rhoden raises the spectre of the Sox signing Alex Rodriguez this winter as an example of what turning into the Yankees might mean, and I take his point - but look, if the Red Sox ownership has the chance to sign Rodriguez for an amount that makes sense given the team's resources, what should they do? Not sign him, out of some sense that it's bad form to want to win as much as the Steinbrenners of the world? Surely not. Yes, they should consider the character of the team as well as its rotisserie value; yes, they should spend more money on the farm system than on free agents (more Pedroias, please, and fewer Julio Lugos); yes, they shouldn't adopt Steinbrenner's star-chasing obsessions when the stars in question are passing their primes. But if you're the custodian of a franchise like the Red Sox, the trap of high expectations is one that you have to be willing to step into, even knowing what it's made of baseball in the Bronx.
Dumbledore Is Gay
I don't think there's much to say about this, except that it seems like a case of J.K. Rowling trying to retroactively bestow a level of adult complexity on her characters that they don't possess on the printed page. A writer confident in her powers wouldn't feel the need to announce details like this after the fact, and a writer who understood the strengths and limitations of her creation would recognize that trying to smuggle this level of psychological realism into the Potter series is a fool's errand that can only diminish her achievement - by reminding adult readers of what it isn't (a serious work of realistic fiction, I mean), rather than letting them enjoy it for the gripping, inventive children's fantasy it is.
Update: My response to Neil Gaiman's remarks is here.
Foreign Aid and Tax Credits
Justin Muzinich is a friend of mine, but don't let that dissuade you from reading the very sharp op-ed he's co-penned in today's Times.
Huckabauer
In the midst of an engaging back-and-forth with Reihan about Mike Huckabee, Daniel Larison writes:
Incidentally, aside from his having an agreeable personality and executive experience, what substantially distinguishes Huckabee’s social conservatism plus populist streak from a similar Gary Bauer-type candidacy? What policies does Huckabee advocate that should make him more appealing than a Bauer?
Right, that's the rub: Huckabee has the rhetoric of a reformist (Sam's Club?) Republican, but when it comes to interesting domestic policy ideas that distinguish him from the rest of the field, he's got ... um ... this. (The Ponnuru plan, meanwhile, which would be an obvious fit with his rhetoric, languishes without a GOP champion.) Still, even without much in the way of innovative policy proposals, having the whole "agreeable personality and executive experience" thing down isn't small potatoes: Gary Bauer, after all, was a D.C. activist with little charisma and next-to-zero leadership experience, and as such (and I like Gary Bauer!) was a preposterous standard-bearer for any kind of reformist conservatism, whereas Mike Huckabee is a successful and popular former governor of a red-to-purple state, whose track record in government compares favorably to most of his competitors in the GOP field. There's no question that Huckabee would need to flesh out his agenda to make himself anything more than an early-primary spoiler, and I agree with Daniel that there may be more-impressive candidates waiting to take up the "different kind of Republican" mantle come 2012. But even now, he's a vastly more interesting political figure than Gary Bauer ever was.
Who Owns the GOP?
David Brooks and Dean Barnett both tackle Huckabee's gradual rise today, and both see a lot of promise: Brooks writes that whereas "each of the top-tier candidates makes certain parts of the party uncomfortable ... Huckabee is the one candidate acceptable to all factions," while Barnett acknowledges that the Huck's "taxing and spending in Arkansas may not be every conservative's ideal," but suggests that he "probably has fewer policy skeletons in his closet than anyone else in the field."
I dunno - as Matt says, taxing and spending are a pretty big deal in the GOP, and it's clear that Huckabee wouldn't be acceptable to this particular faction, at the very least. Throw in his wetness on immigration and his various rhetorical forays toward a "conservatism of the heart" on trade and inequality and so forth, and you have a candidate with as many deviations from GOP orthodoxy as John McCain and Fred Thompson, certainly, if not Giuliani and Romney (both of whom have enough skeletons to fill the whole house).
Which is why the current Republican race is so interesting - it's a laboratory, in a sense, for determining which interest groups really have clout in the GOP primaries, and which issues really excite the faithful. If Rudy Giuliani wins the nomination, it will tell us a lot about the real influence (or lack thereof) of folks like James Dobson; if John McCain gets the nod, we'll know that immigration and (to a lesser extent) campaign-finance reform are more important to activists than to actual voters; if Huckabee becomes a significent spoiler (or, though it's much more unlikely, an actual contender) then we'll know the Club for Growth doesn't have quite as much clout as most people, left and right, assume to be the case. And if Fred Thompson or Mitt Romney wins, it will reinforce the notion that all of the various issues and interest groups jostling in the GOP tent really are a package deal, and that the best way to take the nomination, now and forever, is to make sure you've checked all your boxes, even if it means flip-flopping like crazy.
Haggis Hearts Kucinich
Why am I not surprised?
Always Scribble, Scribble, Scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?
I'm late joining the back-and-forth between Ezra Klein and Jason Zengerle - continued here and here and here, with Matt chiming in here - on whether there's anything like merit pay for journalists, but here's my two cents. I basically agree with Ezra that print journalists' salaries tend to be determined "through some undefined mixture of our editors liking our work and our office presence, the time we've been at the magazine, our age, and so forth," and that this doesn't bear much of a resemblance to a system that pays teachers based on their students' test scores, which is the sort of "merit pay" that kicked off the whole discussion. Jason's right that some media institutions, the Atlantic included, make an effort to figure out who's reading what in the magazine and filter that information into staffing decisions, but I don't think I'm giving away any trade secrets when I say that this remains a highly inexact science, and one that plays a pretty small role in how much everyone gets paid.
However, one factor that Ezra leaves out is output, and especially freelance work, which for many journalists is either a major source of supplementary income or their only source of income, and which follows a somewhat stricter, easily-defined metric than salaries at the Prospect or the Atlantic: The more words you write, the more you get paid. It's not exact by any means, since a freelancer who writes 10,000 words for Esquire and GQ over the course of a year will make more money than one who writes 20,000 words for the assortment of Beltway political magazines, but it's a place, and a pretty important one, where the statistical correlation between performance (measured by words produced) and pay is somewhat more direct.
And then there's the blogosphere, where we do know (roughly) who reads what, and how well individual writers are doing in attracting readers. At least a few prominent bloggers already have deals with their publications whereby they're paid more for higher traffic, and less for lower traffic, and of course if you run your own blog, your blog-ad revenue is determined by how many readers you attract. So as journalism becomes less print-bound and more bloggy, Ezra's claim that journalists don't get paid for performance, of some kind at least, will be less valid than it today. Whether it's the sort of performance that makes for high-quality journalism is another question entirely.
Giuliani's Nader?
Inspired by Matt Continetti's thoughts on the likelihood of a social-conservative third-party challenge if Rudy get the GOP nomination, Reihan writes:
Would such a party, drawing 10 percent of the population at most, concentrated almost entirely in the Old South, doom the rump Republicans?
Consider the 2000 election. Al Gore campaigned hard in Madison, Wisconsin at the tail end of the election in an effort to blunt the Naderites. In 1948, in contrast, Truman won a resounding victory despite the defection of the Dixiecrats and the Wallace Progressives. Why was that? As a border-state culturally conservative social democrat, he was able to portray the Democrats as Roosevelt’s national party. By naming Joe Lieberman as his running mate, Gore gestured in the direction of making the Democrats the national party. But there was something about Gore’s cultural profile that undermined this effort.
What if the rump Republicans recast themselves as the national party? For example, though the party would be divided between pro-abortion and anti-abortion factions, it would be united around the principle of local democracy. It’s easy to imagine many of the rebels being drawn back into the fold over time, and it’s easy to see how such a party, having jettisoned elements that repel voters outside of the South, could do reasonably well.
I think Reihan's absolutely right that Gore could have turned Nader's run to his advantage; I'm less convinced that Giuliani could do the same with a pro-life challenger, if only because the Republican brand is at such a low ebb right now that there are more severe limits on the next GOP nominee's ability to win over independents than there were on either Truman in '48 or Gore in 2000. But this doesn't mean that an attempted third-party challenger would doom Giuliani: As Matt says, the infrastructure social conservatives say they need for such a run is unlikely to materialize, which in turn means that you'd need a candidate with at least a certain amount of star power (at least as much as, well, Ralph Nader) to make voters pay any attention at all - and I really don't have a clue who that candidate would be. Rick Santorum isn't walking through that door ...
All this is complicated, of course, by the possibility of a Ron Paul third-party run, which would give conservatives a staunchly pro-life alternative in the race, but perhaps not of the sort that Richard Land and James Dobson are dreaming of.
Christians and the Constitution (II)
As promised, more thoughts on Jonathan Rowe's quarrel with the claim that the American founding lacked a political theology. Here's Rowe:
America’s founders likewise, following Locke, were devout theists and gave God a prominent role in politics. See for instance, the Declaration of Independence. However, the God to whom America’s founders appealed — the individual rights granting Nature’s God — arguably was not the Biblical or Christian God. For one, the Biblical God does not grant men unalienable individual rights, certainly not a right to political liberty while the God of the American founding did. Further, on matters of religious toleration, the God of the American founding was not a “jealous” God but granted men an unalienable right to worship, in Jefferson’s words no God or twenty gods.
In studying their public and private writings in detail I have concluded that America’s principle founders (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin) were not closet atheists but really did believe in this rational, benevolent, unitarian deity who fit their republican ideals much better than the Biblical God could. The inescapable conclusion is that America does have a political theology; it is just not Christianity. (For more on America’s founding creed, see this article.) Nature’s God was theologically unitarian, universalist (did not eternally damn anyone) syncretist (most or all world religions worshipped Him), partially inspired the Christian Scriptures, and man’s reason was ultimate device for understanding Him. He was not quite the strict Deist God that some secular scholars have made Him out to be. But neither was He the Biblical God. Rather, somewhere in between.
There is, I think, a great deal to this line of argument. One doesn't have to share David Gelernter's triumphalism to think that there really is a politico-theological tradition, broadly defined, that one could reasonably call "Americanism" - a kitchen-sink mix of Providentialism, Deism, gnosticism, and Hegelianism that links the Founders to the Transcendentalists to the Progressives to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. And as Rowe points out, "the tension between America’s non-Christian, generally theistic civil religion, and orthodox Christianity does not so easily resolve." That's why if you scratch the surface of many nominal American Christians, you'll find that they really believe in the Osteen-ish tenets of moralistic therepeutic Deism, a faith that lines up more neatly with American political theology; it's why, as well, so many Christian patriots expend so much effort convincing themselves (but not many other people) that America was really founded as a bastion of orthodox Christian belief.
It's also why, like Andrew, I'm personally grateful that the American Constitution is an essentially secular document - not because it protects atheists from rampaging Christianists, but because it allows orthodox Christians like myself to be loyal to America's government without requiring us to accept, whole hog, the not-quite-Christian political theology that has infused American political life from the Declaration of Independence onward. That's the beauty of our Constitutional order: It allows one to be American without being an Americanist.
You Can't Go Home Again
Do go read Patrick Deneen, Rod Dreher, James Poulos, Matt Frost, and Rod again on the topic of why the young and ambitious (even, or especially, the young and ambitious conservatives) abandon their home towns for the pleasures of the metropolis. Among other things, it's a discussion notable for Deneen's sharp explication of how Hamilton saw it all coming, and Frost's somewhat-unfair but amusing coinage of the term "Berry's Razor" (after Wendell, of course) - "which declares that any undesirable social or economic phenomenon can be explained by self-indulgence."
The Blog Glut
Catching up on my movie-watching is hard; keeping up with the proliferating campaign-related blogs is next to impossible. First my friend Matt Continetti starts up a must-read election blog for the Standard. Then Noam Scheiber and Michael Crowley kick one off over at TNR. Slate already has one; now they've added two new crack-for-political-junkies features. And of course I'm already struggling to keep up with all the scoops on the Best Reported Blog About Politics.
The only good news for a beleaguered political junkie like myself is that what Jay Cost (in a sharp post that I found, naturally, while browsing Continetti's blog) calls the "real campaign" - as opposed to the perpetual campaign - is finally, finally, about to begin.
The Movie Glut
Maybe George Clooney's inability to open a movie is confirmation of David Denby's contention (unavailable online, but helpfully analyzed by Isaac Chotiner here) that we're running out of movie stars. But I think this alternative explanation for Michael Clayton's poor showing may be closer to the mark:
"A lot of movies are going after the same audience," says a studio chief. The Kingdom; Elizabeth: The Golden Age; 3:10 to Yuma; Into the Wild; Darjeeling Limited; Lust, Caution; Eastern Promises … and many more to come. "It's a tough market," the studio chief continues. "If you don't have a defined perspective, you're just one of the many." He also argues that Michael Clayton should have been released on fewer screens. The movie is sophisticated and plays pretty urban, he explains, so putting it out on 2,511 screens put it in a lot of places where it wasn't going to rack up much business. "If it had gone out on 1,500 screens and it did $10 million, you'd say, 'Hey, it did pretty well,' " he says.
I know I'm way behind in my moviegoing this fall; of course, I did just take two weeks off, so I'm probably a lousy case study, but it does feel like there's been an avalanche of "grownup films that might be worth seeing" over the past month. You can add We Own the Night, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and a few more to the list above, and then this weekend will tack on Gone Baby Gone, Rendition, Things We Lost in the Fire and Reservation Road. What's strange is that after that, the wave of prestige pictures subsides, with one a week or less (an American Gangster here, a No Country For Old Men there) opening in the month of November; the Christmas season, too, seems to have fewer Oscar-bait pictures than usual. Apparently, early autumn, rather than the holiday season, has become the preferred time to release the the films that make Hollywood feel good about itself.
Defining Neoconservatism Down
Joshua Muravchik, explaining why neoconservatism remains our surest guide to the struggle against jihadism:
As for the neoconservatives, they have taken their lumps over the war in Iraq. Nonetheless, the tenets of neoconservatism continue to offer the most cogent approach to the challenge that faces our country. To recapitulate those tenets one last time: (1) Our struggle is moral, against an evil enemy who revels in the destruction of innocents. Knowing this can help us assess our adversaries correctly and make appropriate strategic choices. Saying it convincingly will strengthen our side and weaken theirs. (2) The conflict is global, and outcomes in one theater will affect those in others. (3) While we should always prefer nonviolent methods, the use of force will continue to be part of the struggle. (4) The spread of democracy offers an important, peaceful way to weaken our foe and reduce the need for force.
These "tenets" are pretty anodyne, I'd say. Certainly most liberal internationalists would claim to agree with them; I'd imagine you could get many self-styled realists to say the same (particularly tenets 1-3); and depending on how you interpret them, I could see myself agreeing with all four. Of course, these banalities aren't what actually define foreign-policy neoconservatism, as Muravchik more or less allows elsewhere in the essay. Rather, the neocons are distinguished by what Muravchik, quoting Max Boot, calls their "hard Wilsonianism": The "hard" part makes them more likely to resort to force than liberal internationalists, while the Wilsonian part makes them more likely than realists to favor putting military force in the service of democracy-promotion. It's these tendencies, not Muravchik's four tenets, that look dubious in the aftermath of Iraq, and it's in defending how they played out in our invasion of that unhappy country that Muravchik is largely unpersuasive.
Reducing the Abortion Rate
David Edelstein, reviewing Tony Kaye's abortion documentary, Lake of Fire:
I’m glad Nat Hentoff is in the movie. I remember the civil-liberties beacon from my days at the Village Voice, where he was shunned by most of the women on staff for his views on abortion. He’s a lefty atheist who also happens to believe that life begins when the sperm meets the egg—a view I find convincing. But the answer, as the movie’s pro-choice activists maintain, isn’t banning abortion but making birth control easier to obtain ...
Meanwhile, Will Saletan glosses the latest findings on this subject:
A study concludes that the global abortion rate is falling thanks to birth control. Data: 1) The rate fell 17 percent from 1995 to 2003. 2) The biggest drop was in the former Soviet bloc and "did coincide with substantial increases in contraceptive use in the region." 3) Previous studies found that "abortion incidence declines as contraceptive use increases." 4) Abortion bans don't correlate with low abortion rates. 5) Abortion bans do correlate with high rates of unsafe abortion. Authors' conclusion: If you want fewer abortions, don't ban them; provide more birth control and sex education. Liberal reaction: Bush is making things worse by censoring abortion counseling and pushing abstinence instead of condoms. Pro-life rebuttal: 1) The data are unreliable. 2) They're being spun by pro-choice "scientists." Human Nature's view: Reducing abortions through birth control is a no-brainer.
The difficulty isn't that the data are unreliable or the scientists dishonest; it's that - as Matt points out - these kind of cross-country comparisons don't actually tell you all that much about the landscape of abortion and contraception in the contemporary United States. We know that as poor countries get richer, better-educated, and so forth, contraception use goes up and abortion rates tend to go down; what we don't have is any evidence that increasing government funding for sex ed and birth control in a rich country like the United States, where contraception is already widely available, has an appreciable impact on the rate of unintended pregnancy, and thus abortion. Most of the evidence that I've seen suggests that it doesn't. Whereas we know that when abortion was legalized in America in the early 1970s, the abortion rate went up dramatically; we also know that Western Europe, which has lower abortion rates than the U.S., also has (somewhat) more restrictive abortion laws. Which suggests if you're serious about reducing the abortion rate in America (as opposed to taking the "more abortion is a good thing" line that Matt espouses), the Edelstein-Saletan answer is something of a cop-out; if some kind of restriction isn't on the table, you probably aren't going to get very far.
Christians and the Constitution
Andrew, in the midst of an engaging Cato Unbound dialogue with Mark Lilla, Philip Jenkins, and Damon Linker:
America is substantively and experientially a deeply religious country, and its political discourse has always been saturated with religious rhetoric and imagery ... It is a country whose politics is experientially creedal. It doesn't incubate the kind of high Tory pragmatism that I admire in the English experience; or even the kind of atheist secularism that helped spawn socialism in other developed countries in the twentieth century. But the power of that religious presence — I call it “Christianism” and describe it at length in The Conservative Soul — is in many ways a testament to the strength of the secular constitution that resists it. In fact, I think that without the kind of secularism that Mark detects in the founding documents and Constitution, America would long since have succumbed to some version of theocracy or another.
Mark's basic point is that this is the natural and historical state for humankind. The achievement of keeping God at arm's length in the ordering structure of a polity is very, very rare. Very few countries have achieved it in the history of the world. America's genius is to have sustained it, even while fostering an intensely religious, roiling, and often apocalyptic culture. So Dam |
