« May 2008 | Main | July 2008 » June 2008 ArchivesJune 30, 2008Blogging GNPThe nice thing about having a co-author is that he can help shoulder the load of responding to comments on your book - and with that in mind, here's Reihan responding to Ezra Klein, to Ramesh, to Norm Ornstein (by way of Jonah Goldberg), and of course to Rush Limbaugh. James Bond Will ReturnOnly one thing could have made up for the news that Keira Knightley - who seems required by law to be cast as the female lead in any film that requires a costume and an accent - will ruin what otherwise sounds like it could be a kick-ass King Lear adaptation. And here it is: Mission Impossible?Noam Scheiber on the GOP and the Sam's Club agenda: There may some day be a political party oriented toward working class voters whose ideological stance resembles Sam's Club-ism. But I don't think that party's going to be the GOP. (Nor will it be the Democratic Party--I think one or both of the major parties would have to die off and be replaced by this future party.)The people who fund and run the GOP are simply too committed to the idea of cutting taxes for affluent people and reducing government spending--basically the opposite of what Ross and Reihan propose. In fact, even saying the GOP estabilshment is "committed" to these things understates the grip of economic libertarianism over the party. It suggests a worldview that's the product of some reflection, when in fact the economic libertarianism of big GOP donors is mostly an expression of their self-interest--i.e., they want to keep their own taxes low. The idea that a party structured this way would embrace policies directly at odds with this mission is really tough to imagine. Which is why, for example, Mike Huckabee's candidacy was doomed the second he started attacking the "Wall Street-Washington axis." This strikes me as wildly overstated. Does the GOP have powerful interest groups that would resist some of the reforms we’re talking about? Sure. Is it hard to win the Republican primary while campaigning explicitly - and clumsily - against some of those interest groups? Sure again (though Huckabee did win quite a few primaries, and his eventual loss had at least as much to do with his failure to break out among non-evangelical voters as with the populist tack he took). Is the GOP going to morph into a soak-the-rich, pro-regulation party? Of course not - and I wouldn't be happy if it did! But the idea that every move the GOP makes is choreographed by a bunch of moneymen who are only interested in keeping their own taxes low by whatever means necessary doesn't square with reality. For one thing, the GOP's big-money donors don't all want the same thing: Some of them want low income taxes, some of them want low corporate taxes, some of them (though not all that many, I suspect) want government programs slashed, some of them want deregulation, some of them want regulation, some of them want pro-business judges appointed, some of them want subsidies for their industries, etc. etc. (And there are a few big-money donors who are in it for the social issues, believe it or not.) Which means, in turn, that there are lots of ways that the GOP can remain a pro-business party without all its money drying up: A right-of-center party that appoints conservative judges, opposes onerous regulations, and tries to keep taxes on investment low - all of which Reihan and I favor - is going to look pretty appealing to a lot of its current moneymen even if it's also interested in pro-family tax reform or education reform or any other issue that appeals more to the party's voters than to its donors. (And all of this is leaving aside the extent to which the Obama/Paul model of internet fundraising may make the old "big donor" approach to funding campaigns obsolete anyway.) Moreover, even in its current incarnation GOP politicians are constantly pushing ideas that have little or nothing to do with "cutting taxes for affluent people and reducing government spending." During the Bush years, a Republican President was responsible for (among other things) No Child Left Behind, a new prescription drugs entitlement, a sweeping program to fight AIDS in Africa, and new (though not particularly substantial) investments in faith-based anti-poverty programs. None of these had much to do with a self-interested economic libertarianism, and some of them, in fact, had nothing much to do with political self-interest either. I'm not endorsing all of these initiatives by any means, and indeed I think "compassionate conservatism" represents a dead end for would-be right-of-center reformers. I'm just suggesting that it's hard to see how this record squares with the Scheiber vision of what the GOP can and cannot do. (And yes, of course, Medicare Part D included giveaways for GOP-leaning interests, but that doesn't prove that Republican donors won't accept anything except tax cuts and government slashing; it just proves that if a Sam's Club agenda ever gets enacted, there will have to be some compromises along the way. And that's true of any agenda you care to name: It's just how politics works.) I don't want to be Pollyannish on this point: I'm much less confident than, say, David Brooks that the vision Reihan and I have sketched out actually represents the future of the GOP. There are all sorts of roadblocks, institutional and otherwise, to sort of change we're interested in, and our ideas may not survive whatever contact with political reality they earn. But ultimately, a more working-class friendly GOP is no harder to imagine than was, say, the neoliberalism of Bill Clinton, which also required breaking with party orthodoxies and taking on entrenched interests. It may not happen, but it's a long way from being impossible. Rush Limbaugh Can't Remember My NameBut he knows that I'm destroying conservatism. (I'm in good company.) Look, Rush has a serious and principled point: Maybe conservatives shouldn't try to reform the welfare state; maybe the lesson of the Bush years is that you just can't achieve conservative ends within the framework that FDR and company built; maybe Reihan and I are just government-loving quislings. But like Daniel Larison, it seems to me that if Rush really believes this, he shouldn't be wasting his time with the modern Reagan-Gingrich-Bush GOP at all - it's just a pack of quislings from start to finish. There's only one contemporary politician who would pass Limbaugh's stringent purity test, and his name is Ronald Paul. But hey - maybe I'm wrong. And if Rush cares so much about the future of conservatism, I'm sure he'll be happy to have me and Reihan as guests on his high-rated radio program, so he can publicly set us straight. June 29, 2008The Past Is Another CountryYou should, of course, read Norman Ornstein’s review of Grand New Party in the Sunday Times Book Review, but you should also read David Frum’s demolition of Allan Lichtman’s White Protestant Nation, which purports to be a history of American conservatism from the KKK (yes, it's that sort of book) to the present. This passage sums up the essence of Frum's critique, which could apply equally well to some other recent attempts to analyze liberalism and conservatism: “White Protestant Nation” fails ... because Lichtman lacks the historian’s intuition for change over time. He hails women’s suffrage as progressive and damns immigration restriction as antipluralist and reactionary. Yet many of the most important proponents of suffrage favored immigration restriction — and many of the pro-immigrant groups opposed suffrage. Advocates of racial equality like Norman Thomas could also be adamant isolationists; internationalists like J. William Fulbright could be determined segregationists. Facing this refractory reality, it might make sense to accept that the political alignments of the 2000s cannot easily be projected backward 70 years or more. The question of how to read the current liberal-conservative split back in time is, of course, one of the many strands in Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, a book that I once promised to comment on at length and then - as its author helpfully points out today - never followed through. Mea culpa! All I can say is that haven't forgotten my promise, and still intend to make good on it - and Jonah should be pleased to know that I receive an average of an email a week reminding me that I haven't delivered on that front. Soon, I promise, soon ... A Choice, Not An Echo (II)Ramesh on Grand New Party: Their ideas have been described as "Clintonian triangulation from the right." But people often misunderstand that parallel. They think Clinton chose the views of swing voters over those of Democratic voters. In a lot of cases, though, the liberal orthodoxies he abandoned had little support even among rank-and-file Democrats. Democratic voters liked the idea of "ending welfare as we know it." They liked his slapdown of Sister Souljah's remarks. Clinton had to push aside or change certain Democratic elites, not to change the worldview of his voting base. I would only add that price controls for prescription drugs represent an excellent example of the sort of me-tooism that I was talking about yesterday: It's an idea that would poll well among Republicans and swing voters alike - just like the reimportation of prescription drugs from Canada and Mexico, which Tim Pawlenty, the main who coined the "Party of Sam's Club" line, has seized on in his quest to chart a more reformist course - but it's a lefty idea and a bad one, and a GOP that takes it up would gain a short-term tactical edge at the expense of the party's (and the country's) long-term interest. June 28, 2008A Choice, Not An Echo
Ed Kilgore wonders about parallels between a Sam's Club Republicanism and the Rockefeller Republicanism of yore: The argument that the GOP can rebuild an electoral majority by shrugging off its anti-government mentality and strategically accepting key elements of the New Deal/Great Society legacy is not new, though it hasn't been heard in a while ... Indeed, this was the animating idea of the "moderate" or even "liberal" Republicans of yore, who struggled with the conservative movement for control of the GOP for decades, and didn't completely succumb until 1976, 1980, or even 1994, depending on how you measure these things. I think the Rockefeller Republican tradition is a useful one for today's GOP to look back on, but I tend to think that it's useful primarily as a cautionary tale. Republicans in this tradition did achieve some real successes, in policy as well as politics, but in hindsight they often look like prisoners of me-tooism: They became so convinced that the only way the GOP could win was to accept the post-Roosevelt consensus that they missed the opportunity afforded by the post-Sixties crack-up to actually offer real reforms to that consensus. As a result they lost the GOP, and eventually the country, to the once-unlikely alliance of Goldwaterites and neoconservatives - by which I mean not only the Podhoretzes and Kirkpatricks, but all the ex-liberal voters, from blue-collar Catholics to Sunbelt evangelicals, who joined the GOP in the '70s and '80s, and eventually formed the heart of the new Republican majority. This is why Grand New Party spends a lot more time on the neoconservative tradition, broadly understood, than on the Rockefeller-Republican tradition. The Rockefeller types were too often content to imitate what the Democrats were offering; the neoconservatives were bold enough to offer something different. Liberal Republicanism gave us John Lindsay's mayoralty; neoconservatism gave us Rudy Giuliani's. Liberal Republicanism gave us Richard Nixon's wage and price controls; neoconservatism gave us Ronald Reagan's economic boom. Liberal Republicanism gave us affirmative action; neoconservatism gave us welfare reform. And so on. I spend a lot of time talking about the dangers of the retrenchment mentality on the Right - by which I mean the assumption that all the GOP needs is to go back to conservative basics, to promise to bust pork and drill in ANWR, and its majority will magically reappear. But me-tooism is a major danger as well. Talking like a Democrat may be a matter of political survival for, say, Gordon Smith, but you can't build a successful national party without finding a way to draw distinctions, and having a GOP that reacts to the Democrats' success simply by offering similar policies with minor modifications (as John McCain has done on cap-and-trade, for instance) is bad for the party in the short term - the Rockefeller Republicans won their share of elections, but they never managed to break the Roosevelt majority's hold on Congress - and bad for the country in the long term. If there's anything I've taken away from the experience of writing this book, it's that we need a wider-ranging conversation about domestic policy, not a narrower one - and for that to happen, tomorrow's reformist Republicans need to be more creative about looking for reforms that the Democrats can't (or won't) champion than the Rockefeller Republicans were before them. June 27, 2008Dobson vs. ObamaApologies for the lack of new content, Grand New Party-related and otherwise; book publicity and blogging don't mix well, apparently. Regular posting will hopefully resume soon; in the mean time, I have some thoughts on the Dobson-Obama spat up at the Current. June 26, 2008Rape and the Death PenaltyWhen I have more time, I hope to respond to Noah Millman's searching meditation on the death penalty, but for now you should just go read it. Iraq and False Choices“The mask slips,” Andrew writes of this Max Boot post, in which Boot argues that “in order to build on the success that General Petraeus and his soldiers have had, we need to maintain a long-term commitment in Iraq – for 100 years if need be, as John McCain has said.” What mask? Max Boot has never pretended to be anything other than a liberal imperialist, an advocate for the necessity of reshaping the American military dramatically to prepare us for a long series of “savage of wars of peace.” The real question is whether Boot’s neo-imperialist posture and the current left-of-center position on Iraq – the surge has succeeded, therefore we need to leave just as quickly as if it had failed – are the the only positions available as we debate the Iraq question in this election. Andrew thinks so, writing that Boot “helps us realize that this election is indeed at root a decision on whether to keep troops in Iraq for the next century or more.” But this strikes me as an overstatement: There are no decisions that John McCain can undertake, up to and including basing decisions, that a future administration can’t reverse as the facts on the ground change, and there’s no reason why McCain’s plan to gradually reduce our numbers in Iraq over the next four years can’t serve as a prelude to a minimal American presence in that country throughout the 2010s, with a complete pullout a possibility as a conditions on the ground (and the wishes of the Iraqi government) permit. Andrew goes on: This obviously isn’t about Iraq, as we are fast discovering. It’s about an ever greater American entanglement in the Middle East in part to secure oil supplies we need to wean ourselves off and in part a foolish attempt to protect Israel. Well, maybe. There are certainly people for whom the debate over troop levels in Iraq is ultimately about whether American foreign policy gets set on a more explicitly imperialist trajectory, and there’s no question that such voices will be more empowered under a McCain Administration than by a President Obama. The question is whether the likely practical results of a McCain Presidency – a Presidency that will be constrained by all kinds of factors, foreign and domestic – will so empower the Boot vision of America’s role in the world (which I do not share) as to make a vote for McCain a vote for Boot.The alternative, which seems more plausible to me, is that a vote for McCain under these circumstances is a vote for something for modest: Namely, a reduction in U.S. forces in Iraq that will proceed more gradually than the reduction Obama is promising, and that will leave the long-term question of the size and scope of America’s entanglement in the Middle East for future administrations to wrestle with. June 25, 2008The Way Things Ought To BeYes, it stars Shia LaBeouf. But that aside, Eagle Eye sounds and looks the kind of mindless-but-fun action movie that used to make me (and this guy) look forward to summer. Naturally, it's being released in the fall. For the Fourth of July weekend, we're getting Will Smith as a drunken superhero instead. Cruel and Unusual PunishmentThere's no question that the "cruel and unusual" clause of the Constitution require judges to look outside the text of the document and make more-subjective-than-usual judgments about contemporary mores, evolving standards, and so forth. But that seems like an excellent reasons for Supreme Court Justices to err heavily on the side of respecting legislative decisions in these cases. (Particularly those judges, one might add, whose constitutional theories supposedly bias them in favor of rulings that expand, rather than contract, the public's freedom to participate in their own government.) I don't think that rape, even the rape of a child, merits the death penalty. But I don't think so strongly enough that I'm comfortable with Anthony Kennedy et. al. telling the people of the United States that they aren't permitted to impose it. The Follieri FolliesEveryone no doubt will have their favorite anecdote from the saga of Raffaello Follieri, who until recently was most famous for dating Anne Hathaway and being friends with Clinton pal Ron Burkle, but now seems likely to be remembered for bilking everyone foolish enough to invest in a scheme to use his (apparently nonexistent) Vatican connections "purchase Roman Catholic Church properties in the U.S. at low prices, flip them, and sell them" out of millions of dollars. Naturally, it's the Catholic details that caught my eye: "According to several witnesses, Follieri kept various ceremonial robes, including robes of senior clergymen, at his office in New York, New York. One witness told [the FBI agent who wrote the complaint] that he/she had been traveling with him to change out of the monsignor's robes and put on the robe of a more senior clergyman in order to create the false impression that Follieri had close ties to the Vatican." I also liked the bit about his "engineering reports," which supposedly cost $800,000 to produce: "When he eventually submitted them to investors, the reports were, they noted, each two to five pages long, written in Italian, and contained exactly no engineering information." The Consequences of the SurgeHere's Ezra Klein, responding to this David Brooks column praising the President for the decision to implement (and stick with) the surge: ... the argument over the surge was never an argument positing that more troops couldn't lead to less violence. Folks forget this, but the surge was actually part of Howard Dean's 2004 candidacy, when he was running as an anti-war candidate. In June 2003, on Meet the Press, he said, "I can tell you one thing, though. We need more troops in Afghanistan. We need more troops in Iraq now." I disagreed with him, but that was the plan: More troops, leading to less violence, leading to withdrawal. It was a plan that Democrats, even liberal Democrats, supported. Would Brooks like to credit Dean as a military visionary? This is a good point, but one that cuts both ways. Yes, Brooks' argument does imply that Howard Dean and John Kerry deserve credit for championing a surge-style increase of forces back in 2004. But what does it say about Dean and Kerry, and the Democrats in general, that they championed increasing America's footprint in Iraq only so long as doing so gave them a "we're tough too!" club with which to beat up Bush - and only so long as there seemed to be no chance that Bush would actually call their bluff? Of course it's possible to mount an argument, as many liberals did in 2006, that the seeming inconsistency stems entirely from dispassionate analysis: The surge was a good idea back when Democrats favored it, you see, but the changing facts on the ground made it a bad idea in '06. In other words, the surge just happened to become the wrong thing to do around the time George W. Bush got around to embracing it. But this argument seems awfully convenient, to say the least ... Ezra goes on: The argument over Bush's surge was in fact an argument over whether we needed a strategy which continued the war indefinitely, or a strategy where success was defined in an achievable way, and an end was sought to the conflict. The former won out, and administration replaced political goals with security goals. But given sufficient manpower and treasure, America could tamp down on violence in Iraq indefinitely. We could start up a draft, and deploy 7 million troops to the country, which would probably quiet down daily squabbling pretty quickly. I'm sorry, but this is just revisionist history. A large part of the surge debate was about whether it would work - and not whether it would work "given sufficient manpower and treasure," but whether it would work given the more limited and within-our-means escalation of forces that the White House was proposing. Meanwhile, saying that the anti-surge voices on the left were calling for "a strategy where success was defined in an achievable way" is a polite way of saying that they were calling for a strategy in which we declared defeat and got the hell out. Unlike some people on the right, I don't think that this point of view was dishonorable and/or treasonous; my own support for the surge was of the deeply lukewarm variety, and part of my mind inclined toward the view that accepting defeat sooner rather than later represented the best way forward. But let's not pretend that this approach was something other than what it was: It was a blueprint for giving up on Iraq, cutting our losses and leaving, and calling it "a strategy where success was defined in an achievable way" is just a way of talking around the reality of defeat. Ezra goes on to quote Matt Duss on "why many of us felt an endless deployment in Iraq was a frankly bad idea": Leaving aside the fact that [the surge's] "victory" ... in addition to obviously representing a monumental climbdown from each and every one of the numerous justifications previously offered for the war, does not actually add up to "an Iraqi state" as much as to "a series of armed militia communities we're going to call Iraq," was this outcome really worth 4,000 American dead, over 28,000 wounded, and, by the end of 2008, some $600 billion in American treasure? Was it worth over half a million Iraqi dead, many times that maimed, and some 3 million displaced? Was it worth creating an open source laboratory for terrorists to develop and sharpen their tactics against the most technologically advanced military in the world, enabling them disseminate those tactics around the world via internet? Was it worth losing a thousand dollars at poker just to win twenty at blackjack? And then here's Ezra himself on the same point: We've sacrificed long-term strategy at the altar of short-term security. That made sense for the Bush administration, which didn't want to be judged a historic failure and so needed to wrestle the everyday metrics till they showed some semblance of an upward trajectory (fans of the Wire will recognize this strategy). But the political question -- which is, as it's always been, the central question -- remains unanswered. A few months ago, Maliki, the putative head of the government launched an assault on Sadr, who's arguably the most popular Shia leader in the country. CFR's Stephen Biddle, who's an optimist, thinks the military would overthrow Maliki if given the chance. And he sums up the situation saying, "What is achievable is sustainable stability, a sense of an end to large-scale violence that holds over a long period of time. That I think is potentially doable in Iraq if the United States expends the necessary effort. If we fail in that, there's a danger that this war could spread throughout the region. And that's a really powerful threat to U.S. interests." That's the universe of outcomes we went to war for? Defeat means catastrophic failure, and success means an absence of genocide? These are strong arguments, but they're considerably stronger as points against having gone to war in the first place than as points against the surge. Was the invasion worth all the blood and treasure it's cost us? I say no. (Here's the most recent argument to the contrary, incidentally, which I'll try to take up a later date.) Was the surge worth the blood and treasure it cost us? That's a separate question, and one to which Duss and Ezra are largely non-responsive. When you've already lost a thousand dollars at poker, why wouldn't you take the opportunity to win a few of those dollars back? (Particularly when those "dollars" are counted in actual human lives.) Or again, the "absence of genocide" in Iraq may not be the outcome we went to war for in the first place, but in a landscape where genocide seemed like a real possibility it doesn't look all that shabby. And while it is of course quite possible that the surge will look like a long-term strategic failure, I would find arguments to that effect considerably more persuasive if they didn't seem so blase and dismissive ("some semblance of an upward trajectory" ... "the altar of short-term security" ... "twenty on blackjack") about the thousands and thousands of Iraqi lives that appear to have been saved, however temporarily, by the decision to add troops in 2006 rather than withdraw them. June 24, 2008Yet More GNPYou can listen to Reihan and me chatting about Grand New Party with Tom Ashbrook (with a brief appearance from Bob Kuttner) right here; Reihan offers a post-mortem on the interview here. Meanwhile, I'm afraid there's more video (go below the fold if you dare): More GNPYou can listen to me chatting about the book with John Miller here, on his wonderful Between the Covers podcast series. Meanwhile, if the following doesn't convince you to purchase Grand New Party, then nothing will: The complete, marginally-more-substantive Bloggingheads is here. Grand New Party
I don't think I'm going to manage Jonah Goldberg's achievement of replying to almost every reviewer (here are two early reviews, if you're interested), but there will probably be a fair amount of Grand New Party-related chatter around these parts for the next couple weeks - so if this post hasn't persuaded you to buy the book, rest assured that I'll be back to try again soon enough. Also, Reihan and I will be on NPR's On Point this morning at 11 AM, and we'll also be talking about the book tomorrow night at the Borders at 18th and L Street in Washington, so if you're in the neighborhood feel free to stop by and hurl tomatoes, or whatever fruit or vegetable you prefer. Reform For Thee ...Matt ponders the irony of campaign-finance reform: It's interesting that the result of not one but both major parties nominating presidential candidates known as process-oriented reformers has merely resulted in an usually large volume of campaign finance shenanigans -- from McCain illegally backing out of the system after having used public financing to secure a loan, to Obama wriggling out of a commitment to use public financing for the general election. I bet that two years ago, reformers would have told you that a McCain-Obama matchup would be great for their cause. In practice, it's turned out to be terrible. This is no doubt part of what's going on, but of course the deeper reality is that the attempt to stringently regulate campaign spending is one of the more pointless and useless reformist causes in modern American politics - and one that matters so little to actual voters that even its purported champions can't be bothered to practice what they preach. It would be nice if the experience of actually running a competitive campaign for President persuaded McCain and Obama to repudiate their misguided positions on the issue. But that would mean losing the Broders of the world forever, so instead they'll just play the hypocrites. June 23, 2008The New ClassicsOf course I have my problems with Entertainment Weekly's list of the Top 100 Movies since 1983 (yes to Shrek? no to Batman Returns?), but any list that has Titanic, Moulin Rouge, Die Hard and Lord of the Rings in its top ten, with American Beauty and Ferris Bueller's Day Off nowhere to be found, is okay in my book. Speaking of books, though - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire at number two? Cold Mountain, of all mediocre things, at number nine and Donna Tartt's The Secret History all the way down at number sixty-nine? EW, how could you? The Survival of Culture (II)Kerry Howley, refusing to fret over birthrates and cultural change: I'm not enough of a cultural hegemonist to care whether the people living on this particular piece of land maintain the dominant American culture into perpetuity; if, in the year 3000, the entire world is dominated by Danish mores, I will not feel slighted. Still, the “conversion versus inheritance” debate is a relatively unhelpful way to approach the issue. The word conversion suggests a wholesale repudiation of one set of beliefs and acceptance of another, but cultures shift as the result of millions of choices at the margin. Europe is rapidly secularizing; you wouldn't call that inheritance, nor would you call it conversion. (You might call it spiritual drift, though I tend to think they're drifting toward something better.) The conversion/inheritance framework assumes that the host culture remains static as outsiders bend to its dictates; it allows for no single person to claim a place in more than one tradition; and it fails to acknowledge that we are moving toward a more mobile society with ever more return and circular migration.... The point about the weakness of the conversion-versus-inheritance dichotomy is well taken. Saying that we shouldn't fear a Scandinavianized world, though, seems a little beside the point; as Poulos points out, "the question Kerry and her fellow travelers need to answer is whose mores they’d not want to take over the world, ever, under any circumstances." The fertility alarmists (the smarter ones, at least) aren't upset about the prospect that Western culture won't survive in exactly its current form; they're upset about the prospect that whatever Western culture emerges from those "millions of choices at the margin" will be changed for the worse by demographic pressure from cultures that look nothing at all like modern Denmark. Now it's entirely possible that this alarmism is, well, alarmist, and certainly Kerry's right that the intersection of cultural and demographic change is way too complicated to be effectively predicted. But the mere fact that cultures don't stay static and that cultural change happens swiftly doesn't guarantee the endurance of liberal norms. What Kerry's banking on, perhaps correctly, is the fact that in the modern era, the sort of goalpost-shifting she's talking about has, in a broad sense, moved us consistently in a modern liberal, secular, Dane-like direction. But past results don't always predict future ones (to take a very extreme example, the Pax Romana was very good at assimilating barbarian tribes until, well, it wasn't), and at the most basic level, it remains the case that cultural norms are passed on more effectively from parents to children than in almost any other way that we've devised. Birthrates aren't the only factor in the survival of a given set of norms, but they are a factor, and not a small one either. And so while they may not offer good reasons for wild alarmism, I think falling birthrates among people who share your norms are at the very least a legitimate cause for concern, assuming you approve of the norms in question and disapprove of others. June 21, 2008Europe's Catholic ProblemNoah Feldman on Europe's Islamophobia: ... a hallmark of liberal, secular societies is supposed to be respect for different cultures, including traditional, religious cultures — even intolerant ones. There is something discomfiting about a selective respect that extends to the Roman Catholic Church, with its rejection of homosexuality and women priests, but excludes Islam for its sexism and homophobia. If you find this parallel persuasive, you may be persuaded by the rest of the piece as well - up to and including Feldman's suggestion that Europe would be having an easier time assimilating Muslim populations if the continent were still home to millions of Jews. June 20, 2008Porn and Adultery (III)A reader points out that the real question is where giving foot massages falls on the infidelity continuum: The natural follow-up, of course, is this: Would you watch porn with Marsellus Wallace's wife? June 19, 2008The GOP Must Die!As is often the case with these things, the premise behind this Harper's symposium - that the GOP needs to be shoved into the "well-deserved oblivion of the Anti-Masons and the Know-Nothings" - is more interesting than its contents. But it is an interesting question: We've gone over a hundred and fifty years with the current two-party system, but there's no reason in principle that the GOP (or the Democrats) couldn't go the way of the pre-Civil War Whigs. What would have to happen, though, is not what most Democrats have in mind when they fantasize about politics these days - namely, an enormous Democratic majority and a Republican rump. Rumps are often resilient things (just ask the GOP of 1964, or 1934, or the post-Civil War Democrats), especially when they're centered around a particular regional or cultural identity, as a GOP reduced to its Southern stronghold would be. Political parties are more likely to collapse from internal contradictions than they are to be ground out of existence by a bigger, stronger rival: That's what happened to the Whig Party, which was undone by the Compromise of 1850 and the debate over slavery, and to a lesser extent it's what happened to the British Liberal Party over Irish Home Rule and World War I. In both cases, the party went from a relatively strong position to near-total collapse, thanks to an issue or issues that were big and divisive enough to strike at the core of the party's identity. It's almost possible to imagine something like this having happened to the Democrats had the Iraq War turned out differently, with a left-wing peace party and a centrist, hawkish, McLieberman party emerging from the rubble. It's harder to envision how it would happen to the post-Bush GOP: Obviously, there are plenty of ideological fault lines that could peel various constituencies away, but it's tough to see any emerging issue that could split the party down the middle; it seems more likely that the Republicans' worst-case scenario is a long stint in the political wilderness than a fast train to oblivion. Porn and Adultery (II)So, a question for Will Wilkinson et al (and judging by the commentary, there's a lot of al out there): If your wife/monogamous partner sought regular sexual gratification through watching prostitutes have sex with one another, you would have no grounds on which to feel jealous or perturbed? No grounds for feeling that they were being in some sense unfaithful? Really? My point here, to be clear, is not that regularly watching hard-core pornography is exactly the same thing as committing adultery. My point is rather that there's a consistent continuum here - as opposed to the sort of inconsistent continuum that Will accuses me of mustering - that links the varying ways that a person who's committed to sexual monogamy can find sexual gratification outside of marriage. And I think that regular consumption of hard-core pornography is closer to the actual adultery end of the continuum (insofar as it involves actual-existing other people and actual physical acts) that it is to the "occasionally entertaining sexual thoughts about that cute girl on the subway" end of the continuum, and as such it's not "insane" to see morally meaningful similarities between porn-watching and cheating on your spouse. Porn and AdulteryRiffing on these comments from a Fox News sexpert, which raise the idea that "using porn, at least beyond a magazine like Playboy, is the equivalent of having an actual affair," Julian Sanchez writes: This is tossed off as though it ought to be obvious to the ordinary reader. It strikes me as obviously insane. I can think of any number of valid concerns one might have about what sort of porn one’s partner is consuming, or the extent of it. But the proposition that one of them is any similarity between porn viewing and “having an actual affair” would not have occurred to me. Is this view held by any significant number of sane people? Well, look at it this way: Is there any similarity between "having an actual affair" and having sex with a prostitute while you're married? I think most people would answer yes. Then consider: Is there any similarity between having sex with a prostitute while you're married and paying to watch a prostitute perform sexual acts for your voyeuristic gratification? Again, I think a lot of people would say yes: There's a distinction, obviously, but I don't think all that many spouses would be inclined to forgive their husbands (or wives) if they explained that they only liked to watch the prostitute they'd hired. And hard-core porn, in turn, is nothing more than an indirect way of paying someone to fulfill the same sort of voyeuristic fantasies: It's prostitution in all but name, filtered through middlemen, magazine editors, and high-speed internet connections. Is it as grave a betrayal as cheating on your spouse with a co-worker? Not at all. But is it on a moral continuum with adultery? I don't think it's insane to say yes. Riding Out Tonight To Case The Promised LandI can think of worse testaments to a life well lived than to have Bruce Springsteen play the the greatest rock and roll song of all time at your memorial service.
June 18, 2008Inside the EmpiresFrom Jim Fallows and Alex Massie, two complementary meditations on being abroad in China and in America. Pax AmericanaDaniel McCarthy, unsurprisingly, uses my remark that "unless you’re a very stringent non-interventionist" almost any foreign-policy theory can provide grounds to argue for a given overseas intervention to mount a brief for non-interventionism. He writes: Yes, exactly — which is why some of us at TAC (by no means all) counsel “very stringent” non-interventionism. Douthat is correct that whatever the theoretical differences between neoconservatism, liberal internationalism, and a variety of other interventionist perspectives may be, they all give policymakers — specifically, the executive branch — wide discretion for waging war. Stringent noninterventionism and pacifism provide a check against that. Douthat criticizes Michael by saying, “the paleocon lens tends to obscure some very real distinctions between neocons and liberal internationalists,” but Douthat himself acknowledges that, performatively, those “real distinctions” aren’t so real after all. I think Douthat would have to agree with Michael that Yglesias is wrong when he says, “America traditionally hasn’t engaged in Iraq-scale blunders.” Over 50 years, liberal internationalism, Cold War conservatism, and neoconservatism have engaged in many such wars, some rather bigger (Vietnam, Korea) and others somewhat smaller (Gulf War I, Kosovo) than our present neocon adventure. I think my disagreement with the non-interventionist point of view comes down to the question of whether the benefits that flow from the Pax Americana that's been created by America's quasi-imperial role in the world are worth the blunders that more-or-less inevitably accompany it. If you think that the international scene over the last sixty years would have looked roughly the same without a large American presence abroad - without the doctrine of containment and its sometimes-effective, often-clumsy implementation, and without the likelihood that the American military would intervene to punish cross-border aggression and the possibility that the American military would intervene to prevent humanitarian tragedies - then non-interventionism makes a great deal of sense. If, on the other hand, you believe - as I do - that the Pax Americana is largely responsible for the absence of major cross-border wars and the general upward ascent in human affairs since the calamities of the early twentieth century (an ascent from which the United States itself has benefited enormously), then you'll be more inclined to look at the various disasters we've waded into as arguments for greater caution in exercising our quasi-imperial function, rather than arguments for giving up our present role entirely. So I think that Harry Truman blundered, obviously, when he order American troops across the 38th Parallel; likewise, I think George H.W. Bush blundered (though to a lesser degree than Truman) when he left the U.S. stuck garrisoning Saudi Arabia following the first Gulf War. But overall, I think better a Korean War and the two Iraq Wars, however badly executed, than the more, shall we say, freewheeling international order that prevailed prior to the Pax Americana - better for the world, and better for America. As for the secondary point of whether it's vain to hope for the sort of caution I'd like to see in foreign policy without a purist non-interventionism as our north star, I'm afraid I don't agree. There have been plenty of reckless decisions undertaken by American leaders over the last half-century, but there have also been plenty of leaders who proceeded with an admirable caution in committing American troops abroad, without being anything close to purist non-interventionists in spirit or in practice. The presidencies of Reagan and Eisenhower, in particular, stand out as eras when a broadly internationalist spirit proved compatible with avoiding large-scale blunders overseas. But there are plenty of other examples within specific Presidencies: I'm no admirer of John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman, but they showed admirable caution in refraining from invading Cuba and bombing China, respectively, when many hawkish voices were urging such a course. Likewise, George H.W. Bush refrained from occupying Iraq in 1991 (though of course that created other problems down the road), Bill Clinton refrained from intervening in Rwanda (wrongly, in my view, but that's an argument for another day) and from committing ground troops to the Kosovo War, and even George W. Bush has displayed a great deal of caution (albeit only after the chastening experience of Iraq) in his approach to North Korea and Iran, among other states. All of which is to say that the notion that we cannot hope for prudence in our leaders unless they explicitly renounce interventionism in all (or almost all) cases seems to me to borne out by neither logic nor experience. June 17, 2008The Survival of CultureHere's a fascinating exchange between Will Wilkinson and Megan McArdle, pegged to this Kerry Howley piece, on whether people invested in the survival of their culture (and particularly of Western, liberal culture) should panic over plunging fertility rates. Obviously I'm in the camp that considers declining birth rates to be a serious problem for the liberal West, and so obviously I agree with Megan's point that "the most important core beliefs most people have are transmitted not through dialogue, but through inheritance," and its corollary that no matter how "immense" and "salient" the rewards of the "liberal market culture" that Will favors, it will be much harder to pass it on down through conversion than through child-rearing. That being said, culture certainly can be passed on through conversion - otherwise Christianity wouldn't have survived Goths and Franks and Vandals - and given that low fertility rates and open borders seem to be integral to the sort of culture that Will favors, I think he more or less has to take the position that he's taking. Like it or not, the aspects of liberal modernity that he approves of aren't going to passed on through inheritance fast enough to keep up with the changing population composition of the West, and especially Western Europe, so it's conversion or nothing. Moreover, despite my skepticism about the viability of the sort of social order that he favors, I'm enough of a Fukuyaman that I won't be shocked if Will ends up vindicated. Speaking Truth To PowerMark Wahlberg, on why he passed on Ocean's Twelve: “People tell George Clooney it's great, but we all know it sucked,” the Boogie Nights star said. “I made two bad movies instead — Planet of the Apes and The Truth About Charlie — but doing that was better than sitting with Brad (Pitt) and George, telling the press how great everybody is! ‘We were in Europe, George was funny, then we had some wine ...’ — that's not for me.” Okay, it isn't quite the Clint Eastwood-Spike Lee throwdown, but I'll take all the bashing of Clooney's too-cool-for-school mystique (as opposed to Clooney's acting, which is often really good) that I can get. Burke and ConservatismFollowing up on this post, a Burke-steeped friend writes: You're going too easy on Brad DeLong today, whose reading of Burke is very far off the mark in my opinion; but your original definition doesn't really work for me either. Burke is not a utilitarian "content-free" conservative. He thinks there is a kind of natural standard of justice we can aspire to, but that the only way we can approach some knowledge of that standard is by the product of our constant rubbing-up against the realities of human nature and the resulting shaping of our institutions over many generations. That is why the practices that have generally worked to provide us with a decent society have something to tell us about how to judge new ideas, and why changes-when they are necessary or desirable-need to follow, as he put it, "the model of nature," i.e. a kind of evolution over generations rather than a sudden break or new beginning. He rejected the revolutionary mindset because it thought it could grasp the natural standard of justice directly, by reason and logic from its very distorted notion of nature, and in the process threatened to cut us off from the process of continuous change which was our only means of actually learning about justice in politics. He thought we were for the most part denied the benefit of distinct principles in politics, except in instances where there was a clear and evident violation of those rules that we surely could learn from our experience (that is why he speaks of natural law and eternal justice almost exclusively in the unusual case of the utterly shameless rape of India by Hastings). Usually, we didn't have such clear principles ("history is a preceptor of prudence, not of principles") but that doesn't mean we didn't have any standards at all, only that we had no easy way of learning them directly. He valued tradition not because it began a long time ago, but because it has been developing and improving for a long time and so was well suited to us-and in that sense he thought the present was in many respects better than the past to the extent it has been allowed to evolve in a slow and continuous way. The mode of change is the key, and the insistence on giving some preference-not absolute authority, but a benefit of the doubt-to what our fathers and their fathers did. (In this respect I think DeLong is mistaken in his characterization of the English policy toward America in the 1770s, for instance, as what the English had always done). For all this to work, though, takes a certain kind of disposition toward politics; it takes a man whose basic reaction to the given world is humble gratitude for what is good about it, rather than pass |
You may have heard that Reihan and I have co-authored a book. You may not, however, have heard that