Blogging GNP

The 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 Return

Only 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."

Having said all that, these guys are right: The GOP is absolutely screwed. Even though the money comes from the same place it has for decades, the votes increasingly come from socially-conservative working-class people. At some point something's got to give. I just think it's going to be the GOP--which will basically cease to exist--rather than the moneymen and powerbrokers.

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 Name

But 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.

The Past Is Another Country

You 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.

Perhaps the single most famous attempt to impose a white Protestant identity upon America was the State of Oregon’s effort to suppress Catholic schools, which culminated in a landmark Supreme Court case named for Walter Pierce, the Democratic governor who signed the legislation. During World War II, Pierce, by then a member of Congress, would favor the internment of Japanese-Americans. He was also a supporter of women’s rights, prison reform and New Deal economic legislation. So: Was Walter Pierce a liberal? Or a conservative? Or perhaps we should accept that once we voyage back in time, we arrive in a different political landscape, with issues not easily assimilated into our present-day controversies. Lichtman, like Gilbert and Sullivan, believes contrary-wise that every child born alive is born a little liberal or else a little conservative.

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.

Similarly, the Republican rank-and-file would, in the main, be willing to support the policies that D&S have in mind. A pro-family tax reform, for example, would have more support from those Republican voters than it has yet gotten from the conservative intelligentsia. On some issues the Republican rank-and-file would probably be willing to go further than I think wise. I imagine price controls for drugs would poll well among Republican voters, for example. In my new role as the elder statesman of the young turks—Brooks gave me the position in his column today—I will do my part to prevent populist excesses.

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.

A 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.

... To conservatives, [Nelson] Rockefeller was the perfect embodiment of an elite, anti-grass-roots tradition of Eastern Seabord Republicanism, and popular support for him was no more genuine than the manufactured "We Want Willkie!" demonstrations in 1940 that representated an earlier form of the same "betrayal" ... But looked at from another angle, Rocky (along with other prominent Republicans of the 1960s and 1970s, such as George Romney, Chuck Percy, and Bill Scranton, in a tradition that went back through Ike and Tom Dewey, all the way to Alf Landon) was a Republican "modernizer" who believed, like Douthat and Salam, that the anti-government habits of GOP conservatives bred during the long era of opposition to the New Deal were keeping Republicans from harvesting a vast number of middle-class votes.

Teddy White wasn't alone in viewing pols like Rockefeller as representing a vibrant future-oriented option for the GOP, and not the elitist symbol of surrender to Big Government so familiar in conservative polemics. In the 1960s and much of the 1970s, the Ripon Society, promoting a distinctive blend of social liberalism and market-oriented public-sector activism, was a happenin' place within the Republican Party ... And while Richard Nixon's Disraeli-style experiments in public-sector activism may have been motivated by sheer political opportunism, they were as legitimate an expression of a certain brand of Republican philosophy at the time as his better-known pioneering of a harsh and divisive cultural conservatism, and did contribute to his 1972 landslide victory.

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.

Dobson vs. Obama

Apologies 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.

Rape and the Death Penalty

When 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.

The Way Things Ought To Be

Yes, 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 Punishment

There'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 Follies

Everyone 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 Surge

Here'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.

Yet More GNP

You 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):

Continue reading "Yet More GNP" »

More GNP

You 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

You may have heard that Reihan and I have co-authored a book. You may not, however, have heard that Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class And Save The American Dream is actually available for purchase as of today, both in your local bookstore and over the internet. If you really, really enjoy this blog, you'll probably enjoy the book, so you strongly consider buying it. Likewise, if you really, really hate this blog, and keeping coming back just to see what horrifying thing I'll say next, you should probably consider buying it as well: It'll be two hundred and fifty pages of pure hathetic joy (and you should feel free, of course, to scribble imprecations in the margins).

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.

And I think it's not a coincidence. McCain and Obama both feel they can take the hit on these issues in part because they're both branded as "reformers" and thus don't need to worry as much about being perceived as corrupt. Years ago, of course, McCain had a different reputation as a consequence of the Keating 5 business and became a reformer in part in order to change that reputation. But politicians who have the clean image can feel free to ditch process constraints whenever convenient.

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.

The New Classics

Of 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....

Part of the reason we find it so difficult to think about demographic change is that we fail to notice the goalposts changing around us. It’s true that the people we call social conservatives in this country are reproducing faster than the people we call social liberals. But what will it mean to be “conservative” in America a century from now? In 1908 being a social conservative meant something far less amenable to tolerance than “legal marriage is for straight people!” Yes, Utah’s birthrate is higher than that of Bangladesh. I don’t know how to worry about that particular factoid, because I have no idea what it will mean to be a socially conservative Mormon in 30 years. It certainly means something different today than it did 30 years back.

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.

Europe's Catholic Problem

Noah 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.

Porn 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?

The 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 Adultery

Riffing 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 Land

I 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.

If it were my memorial service, though, I think I'd want the up-tempo version ...

Inside the Empires

From Jim Fallows and Alex Massie, two complementary meditations on being abroad in China and in America.

Pax Americana

Daniel 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.

But hope springs eternal for Douthat. Five decades of blundering interventions doesn’t convince him that interventionism in general is a bad idea. Like Doug Feith and everybody else, he just wants smarter interventions, prudent interventions — better management ... But where is this caution going to come from? Who counsels it? There was at least a minority of liberal internationalists who opposed the Iraq War, and I tend to agree with Douthat that if Gore had been president we would not have invaded Mesopotamia. But I think it’s quite probable that Gore would have taken us into Darfur or Somalia (which, unlike Iraq, actually was and is an al-Qaeda base), and I doubt such an intervention would have proven much more prudent or successful than Bush’s Iraq farrago. Liberal internationalists have at least as bad a record as the neocons ...

If you want a prudent foreign policy that keeps America out of unwinnable wars in places like Iraq and Somalia, you should support noninterventionism. Neither neoconservatism nor liberal interventionism nor old-fashioned Cold War conservatism will ever be cautious enough to avoid such entanglements. To hope that any of these ideologies of intervention will “proceed with greater caution” than they have in the past half-century is as vain as to hope that visiting the Department of Motor Vehicles will one day, under the right management, be an efficient and pleasant experience.

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.

The Survival of Culture

Here'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 Power

Mark 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 Conservatism

Following 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 passionate outrage at what is bad about it. A free and liberal politics will consist of men with both types of attitudes, and so will consist of two (and really only two) distinct views about the given world and change. For me, the definition of conservatism has to do with that attitude of humble gratitude, and therefore with a mode of change as continuity. But a proper conservatism would be very reticent to define itself.

I think this is very fine; I would only add that I didn't actually mean to assent to DeLong's characterization of conservatism as lacking "contents," and I certainly didn't mean to characterize conservatism as a utilitarian approach to politics. I merely meant to suggest that because conservatism has more to do with dispositions and attitudes and preferences than with universal principles, its "content" - the institutions it sets out to defend, the habits it hopes to conserve, etc. - will perforce vary from time to time and place and place, which can make it appear content-free to observers mistakenly expecting to find in conservatism a perfectly consistent set of ideological precepts for ordering society.

I also think the distinction between "humble gratitude" and "passionate outrage" helps clarify Tyler Cowen's question of whether opposition to segregation can grow out of a conservative approach to politics. This distinction would suggest that while conservatives might indeed oppose segregation as conservatives - there's no reason that one can't start with a "humble gratitude" about the world as you find it and a belief in "change as continuity" and come to the conclusion that Jim Crow ought to be gradually done away with - they weren't ever likely to do anything dramatic about it as conservatives. If there's anything that's clear from the history of the civil rights movement, it's that the essentially unconservative spirit of "passionate outrage" was a prerequisite for real change. (Likewise, I think that one can oppose abortion today in a spirit of conservatism, especially so long as the principle goal of a pro-life politics is the slight alteration of the Supreme Court's composition - but that being said, in the long run the pro-life cause will succeed or fail based on how much "passionate outrage" it can generate.) Which is to say that it isn't just a regrettable accident of history that American conservatives were more likely to either defend segregation or propose only half-measures to do away with it, since a failure to generate sufficient outrage when times and evils demand it is a failure to which conservatism is by its nature heir - just as radicalism is by its nature heir to the reverse evil, the tendency rushing to embrace novelties (eugenics, Communism, etc.) that promise dramatic improvements, without pausing to consider the costs.

E. Coli Conservatives?

Al Gore, endorsing Obama:

If you care about food safety, if you like a T on your BLT, you know that elections matter. If you bought poisoned lead-filled toys from China or adulterated medicine made in China, if you bought tainted pet food made in China, you know that elections matter. After the last eight years, even our dogs and cats have learned that elections matter.

Sounds like he's been reading Paul Krugman on how Milton Friedman poisoned your food, and Rick Perlstein on "e. coli conservatives." So far the only attempt I've seen to actually quantify the Bush-era decline in food safety belongs to Alex Tabarrok, who pulls up numbers suggesting that, well, it hasn't declined at all. There are obviously a lot of variables at work here, and I wouldn't call Tabarrok's chart dispositive - but I'm curious if there are any actual numbers, as opposed to anecdotes, to support the Gore-Krugman-Perlstein thesis.

Iraq in Theory and Practice

I'm broadly sympathetic to the non-interventionist critique of the Yglesias thesis - namely, that Matt's book is trying to draw a bright line between Bush-style crusading neoconservatism and liberal internationalism, when they're actually both aspects of the same hawkish and interventionist spirit that has run through American foreign policy for generations now. To Michael Brendan Dougherty's points, though, I do think that the paleocon lens tends to obscure some very real distinctions between neocons and liberal internationalists: the two worldviews do have significant commonalities, but there are differences as well, which manifest themselves in the sort of interventions the two groups tend to end up championing. (You'll rarely hear, for instance, many liberal hawks waxing eloquent about how we must prepare for war with China.) Thus it isn't quite so outrageous as Dougherty suggests for Matt to present the invasion of Iraq as an "isolated freakout" on the part of the liberal foreign-policy establishment. Yes, there was some overlap between Clintonian hawks and PNAC signatories in the 1990s, and yes, the whole foreign policy establishment was technically committed to "regime change," but the neoconservatives were always vastly more interested than the liberals in the cause of toppling Saddam, and without the impetus of 9/11, things probably would have stayed that way. (Likewise, had Al Gore been President instead of George W. Bush, it's possible that the U.S. would have still invaded Iraq ... but I'm not sure it's all that likely.)

That being said, I do think that the ease with which many liberal hawks who would have been cool to the idea of invading Iraq circa 1999 went over to the interventionist position after 2001 suggests a deeper problem with Matt's attempt - or any attempt - to build systematic theories for international engagement: Namely, that unless you're a very stringent non-interventionist (or a pacifist), no matter what theory of foreign policy you choose, you'll always be able to find justification within the confines of that theory whenever a particular intervention seems like a good idea. In this vein, I sometimes think too much of the debate over the Iraq War has been bogged down by arguments over theory - by Christians arguing over whether just war tradition accommodates the invasion; by liberals arguing (sometimes with themselves) over whether it fits within the Truman paradigm, by everybody arguing about neoconservatism's place in American political history - when to my mind the chief lessons of the war have to do with issues of prudence and practicality, and more specifically with the question of when the costs of war, in lives and treasure, are worth the risk involved and the gains that might be won.

Put another way, I don't think the lessons of Iraq necessarily discredit liberal internationalism, or realism, or neoconservatism, or any of the many theories of U.S. engagement with the world that were invoked to justify support for the war. I don't come away from the events of the last five years convinced that we should never intervene abroad on purely humanitarian grounds, or that we should never go to war without an international body's authorization, or that the whole of American Middle East policy since 1991 (or 1945) has been discredited, or even that we should never launch wars of pre-emption. I come away from them convinced of a point that's simultaneously narrower in scope, but more universal in its application: That whatever theory we take as our guide to international affairs, we need to proceed with greater caution than America displayed in the aftermath of 9/11 about the efficacy of military force, and the costs and consequences of using it.

Conservatism, Defined and Debated

My stab at a definition prompted criticism from John Holbo and Brad DeLong. I'll take the latter first:

I think John is a little too easy on Ross Douthat, because I do not believe that conservatism is a political philosophy. Conservatism is the practical principle that the pieces of furniture you have that suit and are comfortable should not be thrown away. And conservatism is a rhetorical mode of justification--effective on those who respect authority. But it isn't a philosophy.

DeLong presents this point as a criticism of what I wrote, but I'm afraid don't see it that way, since I don't think of conservatism as a philosophy either. It's a practical principle, yes, but I think a better way of putting it would be to call it an approach to political and social controversies, under which the fact that a given piece of furniture (i.e. a policy or institution) has suited in the past - and the fact that it is your piece of furniture, which belonged to your father and grandfather as well - gives the case for keeping it greater weight that it might enjoy if you simply tallied the chair or sofa's good qualities and compared them to the really fabulous, amazing, but still-hypothetical qualities of the fancy new one that might replace it. Now certain political philosophies may be effectively conservative in certain times and places, because they function as defenses of the existing furniture - thus Lockean liberalism is an effectively conservative philosophy in contemporary America in a way that it wasn't in the 17th century, and thus many contemporary American conservatives consider the Enlightenment, at least in its the Scottish and English manifestations, to be the patrimony that they're charged with defending. But conservatism itself (again, under my admittedly idiosyncratic definition) is not a philosophy or an ideology; it's an approach, a bias, or a political style.

Continue reading "Conservatism, Defined and Debated" »

Rudy For Veep?

I wish that David Frum would expand on his contention that John McCain should pick Rudy Giuliani to be his running mate, beyond the argument that Rudy "shares the vision of a practical, reforming, war-winning Republican Party that inspires John McCain." I can certainly see, based on Frum's vision for conservatism and Rudy's record as New York mayor, why he signed on as an adviser to Giuliani's primary campaign. (I had hopes for the Giuliani campaign as well, once open a time.) I have a harder time seeing why he's still bullish on Rudy, after the decidedly lackluster and unimaginative campaign that Hizzoner actually ran - a campaign in which Giuliani, by Frum's own account, adopted exactly zero of his senior policy adviser's ideas for a "practical, reforming" GOP domestic agenda.

Summer of the Superheroes

I'm not the only one who's had enough.

Competition

Jennifer Schuessler mines the new NEA report on artists in the U.S. economy for this terrifying statistic:

Between 1990 and 2000, the number of writers in the United States increased by 21.5 percent, during a time when the population as a whole increased only 13.2 percent.

And that was before the blogging era began.

Tim Russert, RIP

I think Matt's remarks on the passing of Tim Russert strike the right balance between respect for the man's achievements and honesty about what Matt - and many others - viewed as the weaknesses of the Russert interviewing style. But I'd take a little issue with this comment:

The blue-collar persona was, in many respects, a bizarre posture for a multi-millionaire television celebrity.

This is something you hear a great deal from contemporary liberals, whether the "ordinary Joe" affect in question belongs to Russert or George W. Bush, Bill O'Reilly or Lou Dobbs. And obviously there can be something unpleasant about this sort of persona, particularly when it's wedded to a chip-on-your-shoulder, bullying sensibility, and particularly when it requires what Mike Kinsley memorably described as "downward social climbing." But there's also something unpleasant about the insistence that rich Americans - especially self-made rich Americans - don't have the right to stay true to their blue-collar roots, and that public figures who like to talk about their Rust Belt hometowns and their working-class Dads and their favorite sports teams are somehow all frauds and phonies and reverse-poseurs. (Thus Paul Waldman: "That Russert no doubt actually prefers the Bills to other teams makes it no less of an affectation." Really?) A blue-collar persona on an inside-the-Beltway anchor can be fake and deeply irritating, but it doesn't have to be: To wax Laschian, or Kausian, there's a lot to be said for refusing to let your paycheck (and yes, your summer home) stand in the way of your sense of social equality, and your commitment to giving blue-collar America a voice in a white-collar town. I had my problems with the Russert style of interviewing as well, but it's hard to see how he would have been a better anchor if he hadn't self-consciously tried to ask questions that he thought his Dad's friends back in upstate New York would want the powerful to answer. Maybe he didn't live up to the role he assigned himself - Buffalo's man in Washington - but his viewers, and American democracy, are better off because he tried.

Indwelling of the Nerds

For those who like this sort of thing, this thread is the sort of thing they might like.

The Relevance of ANWR?

Ramesh responds:

I agree that by itself ANWR is not the stuff presidential elections turns on. But widen the lens a little bit and look at energy policy as a whole. A candidate who wanted to allow drilling in ANWR and other restricted areas and opposed increasing energy prices to fight global warming would have, all else equal, a political advantage over a candidate who opposed drilling and supported cap-and-trade. That's what is driving the frustration on the Right with McCain right now, and the political judgment that underlies that frustration seems to me to be correct: He is missing a good opportunity.

Point taken. But McCain's embrace of cap-and-trade didn't happen in a vacuum: It was an attempt, albeit a misguided one, to break with the heads-in-the-sand approach to energy and climate change that far too many conservatives have been taking for far too long. And the right-wing zeal for drilling in ANWR has been part of the problem, not part of the solution: It's licensed conservatives to posture about energy independence while sidestepping the global-warming debate entirely. If the argument for drilling in ANWR were embedded in a broader Jim Manzi-meets-Shellenberger-and-Nordhaus approach to the dual imperatives of cheaper and cleaner energy, then I'd be all for it. But for the most part, that isn't how it's being framed. It's just "drill here, drill now, pay less," full stop. Which is bad policy and bad politics.

The (Ir)relevance of ANWR

Of course we should drill for oil there. And yes, McCain's resistance to doing so is a good small-bore example of what's wrong with his style of reformist conservatism: It deviates from right-wing orthodoxy on boutique issues that please the media (see also campaign-finance reform, tobacco legislation, etc. etc.), rather than issues that connect with actual voters, and draw usable contrasts with the Democrats.

But it's a small-bore example. On the level of policy, drilling in ANWR isn't going to make more than a small dent in America's energy difficulties over the long run. On the level of politics, meanwhile, the idea that pushing for drilling is going to be some sort of major difference-maker in the fall campaign is just silly. And it's the sort of silliness that makes me dread a McCain presidency, frankly, because it will set up a situation in which the debate over the future of conservatism gets defined as a struggle between McCainism on the one hand and Limbaughism on the other, when both are a poor basis for a viable conservative party in America.

The Man and the Medium Have Met

It was only a matter of time.

That's Entertainment!

I don't subscribe to Entertainment Weekly, but I usually manage to read at least every other issue cover-to-cover (I always buy it for plane reading), which is more than I can say for an awful lot of magazines. So I guess I'm basically in the same camp as Tyler Cowen and Seth Roberts, who discuss their EW-love at length here.

Perfect Madness

John Podhoretz nominates this Judith Warner post for the "Repulsive Blog Item of the Year Award." I would second the nomination, but I also think it's worth zeroing in the structure of Warner's post, which reflects the kind of gonzo inanity that's made her a hathetic joy to read for a long time now. The item starts with her reading about hymen restorations among Muslim women in Europe, which in turn inspires her to forage for a Times story she's clipped about father-daughter "purity balls." At which point you think you know where this is going: Toward a "plague on both your houses" attack on the creepiness of Muslim and Christian fixations on female virginity. And if you're a fair-minded reactionary, as I like to fancy myself, you think to yourself: Well, that's a little bit of a stretch, but those purity balls are high on the "ick" factor ...

But then Warner pulls the rug out from under you:

“From this, it’s only a matter of degree to the man in Austria,” I’d scribbled across the first page [of the purity ball story].

"The man in Austria"? Wait for it ...

The “man in Austria,” of course, was 73-year-old Josef Fritzl, who was around that time also making headlines after it was discovered that he had kept his daughter, Elisabeth, 42, locked up in a cellar for 24 years, during which time he’d raped her regularly, and had her bear him seven children.

Yep, that's the Judith Warner I've come to know and love. (Though I still think that Warner's meditation on why her readers shouldn't resent her for having a summer place in Normandy remains in a hathos-inspiring class by itself.)

A Mother's Work

Needless to say, you should check out the entirety of the Atlantic's July/August issue, now online. Since it probably won't get the attention afforded Nick Carr's Google piece, or Hanna Rosin's "American Murder Mystery", let me particularly recommend Sandra Tsing Loh's review essay on women and work, which tackles books by my least favorite feminist (take a bow, Linda Hirshman) and one of my favorite sociologists, Berkeley's Neil Gilbert. Reihan and I draw on some of his work in Grand New Party, but we finished our book before his book appeared - and frankly, that might be for the best, since our gloss on Gilbert is about one-tenth as entertaining as Tsing Loh's.

But don't take it from me: read the whole thing. (I'm happy to report that it even includes a foray into the Sweden wars.)

America Alone

I have to say, I find it somewhat remarkable that the first story the New York Times has deigned to publish on the despicable farce ongoing in Canada - the Steyn affair, I mean - includes almost no analysis of the actual article in question, and indeed seems calculated to leave the reader with the following two impressions: First, that Mark Steyn (and, by extension, the world of "conservative magazines and blogs") belongs to roughly the same universe of public hatemongering as the American Nazi Party, and second, that the First Amendment is a peculiar and quite possibly outdated feature of the American political system, along the lines of, say, the Electoral College or the District of Columbia's lack of congressional representation.

Maybe I'm overreacting. You could also read the piece as the essence of balanced journalism, in which the reporter sets aside all preconceptions - including any preconception in favor of the First Amendment - to craft a studiously neutral take on a hot-button issue. But at the very least it's interesting to imagine how the Times would be covering the Steyn case if he were, say, an earnest atheist a la Sam Harris being brought up for censure by a Mexican "human rights commission" created to protect Catholics from hateful or offensive speech. Slightly differently, I imagine ...

The Google Effect

The thesis Nicholas Carr advances in the latest Atlantic - that the internet is changing our reading and thinking habits, and not necessarily for the better - prompts the following response from Max Boot :

For my part, I haven’t noticed my attention flagging because of the Internet. What I have noticed is that the Internet makes it much easier to produce longer pieces of writing. Google, especially, is invaluable, and not only because it enables anyone to look up obscure facts with a few keystrokes. Another function of Google is less famous but growing in importance for those of us in the book-writing biz — namely its “book” search function. Google has digitized thousands of volumes, allowing researchers to easily find obscure tomes. While no preview is available of many recently published books, and others offer only a “snippet view,” growing numbers of books whose copyright have lapsed are available in “full” search mode, meaning that you can, if you so desire, read the entire book online — or, more likely, print it out.

I have found this to be in invaluable resource while researching my new history of guerrilla warfare. It used to take me a long time to get books via interlibrary loan, and then the 19th century volumes usually arrived in very poor conditions. Now for nothing more than the cost of the paper and ink I can get printer-fresh copies of General Phil Sheridan’s memoirs, George Macaulay Trevelyan’s classic volumes on Garibaldi, or the Rev. James Gordon’s “History of the Rebellion in Ireland in the Year 1798.” Moreover, if necessary, I can use Google to search for keywords inside the books.

This is a huge and growing boon for scholars or interested readers, and it is the product not of a traditional nonprofit library but of a decidedly profit-making business. Thanks, Google, for making me-and lots of others-smarter. Of course whether readers raised on the Internet will be interested in reading what I or other authors produce is another question.

As the last line suggests, I don't think there's actually necessarily a huge tension between Boot's argument and Carr's thesis; indeed, Carr himself notes that the internet has been "a godsend" to his ability to do research for his writing projects. I've made a related argument in the context of blogs, arguing that the web is very good for certain forms of writing - the highly political and the highly personal chief among them - and very bad for others; by extension, I'd say that the web is very good for certain forms of book-writing (shorter forms on the one hand, and forms that require large amounts of research on the other ) and very bad for others (forms that require large amounts of serious reflection to write, and to read). I think the two books I've written - a short memoir and a short political book - are classic internet-age books, in the sense that they're the sort of books that writers are conditioned to write, and readers are conditioned to expect. (And I say that with neither shame nor satisfaction.) The sort of books that Boot writes - longer works of history, with arguments woven in - are in a more complicated position: As Boot says, it's vastly easier to produce them in the age of Amazon and Google Books, but I suspect that the Google effect that Carr's talking about - the declining patience for long-form, serious, and dense prose - means that the audience for 600-page history books that aren't about a Founding Father is shrinking apace. And the sort of authors whose works tend to stand the test of time - the great novelists and poets, the philosophers and theologians - are getting it from both directions: The Google effect makes it harder to write War and Peace, and harder to read it.

Britney and Mel

This is a story that seems to be crying out for more coverage. (Maybe under a joint Peter Boyer-David Samuels byline?)

Notes Toward a Definition of Conservatism

Two weeks ago, I proferred my definition of (American) conservatism:

...A commitment to the defense of the particular habits, mores and institutions of the United States against those socioeconomic trends that threaten to undermine them, and those political movements (generally on the left, but sometimes on the right) that seek to change them radically in the pursuit of particular ideological goals.

Last week, Tyler Cowen proposed an emendation, for the following reason:

I should not speak for Ross but having read his blog for a while I believe he would prefer a modified definition to allow some of those habits and mores to be judged. Ross circa 1958 for instance need not defend segregation.

And here's his proposed revision:

A realization that we will do best by building on the strengths of the particular habits, mores and institutions of the United States (and other successful nations) rather than trying to reshape the nation radically in the pursuit of particular ideological goals.

I'm of two minds about this critique. On the one hand, yes, I would like my definition of conservatism to allow space for opposition to segregation circa 1958 within its parameters, and in that sense I'm favorably inclined toward Tyler's revision. On the other hand, one of the things I like about my definition is precisely its narrowness and lack of specific ideological content - or put another way, I like the fact that it deliberately doesn't attempt to encompass every political belief that I consider correct, and every political movement that I like to think I would have supported, had I been alive to do so. This is why I'm not all that taken with, say, Russell Kirk's famous ten pillars of conservatism: Not because I disagree with them, exactly, but because they seem like an attempt to define the conservative as one who supports all that is Good and disdains all that is Bad. (I can imagine almost anyone, save a nihilist or a self-proclaimed revolutionary, claiming Kirk's pillars as the basis of their political philosophy, which makes them somewhat less than useful as a tool for taxonomizing political debates.)

Continue reading "Notes Toward a Definition of Conservatism" »

Classic Obama

As evidence that on judicial appointments, his candidate isn't "quite the knee-jerk liberal base-pleaser some want us to believe," Andrew marshals this Daily Kos guest post from 2005, in which Obama defends Russell Feingold's and Pat Leahy's votes to confirm John Roberts to the Supreme Court. And Andrew's right, in a sense: The post is in many respects a brave and thoughtful rebuke to the Kossack, scorched-earth style of politics, and an eloquent defense of the tradition that gives Presidents the benefit of the doubt when they appoint obviously-qualified nominees to the high court.

The only thing undercutting all this bravery is the fact that Obama himself voted against John Roberts, because Obama himself actually agreed with the the liberal base that "too much is at stake here and now, in terms of privacy issues, civil rights, and civil liberties, to give ... Roberts the benefit of the doubt," all those high-minded thoughts notwithstanding. But he wanted the Kossacks - and us - to know that his decision wasn't a knee-jerk one, that it was made in a careful, contemplative fashion, and that he understands (as he always does) why someone else might have come to a different conclusion.

The results are the same, but the style is so much more thoughtful.

The GOP's Anti-Corporate Future?

Provocative thoughts from Peter Suderman.

Gentlemen, Choose Your Issues

Marc writes:

To note the blindly obvious, about 80 percent of what John McCain talks about these days is related to foreign policy or national security. About 80 percent of what Barack Obama talks about these days is related to domestic policy.

For McCain, that 80 percent reflects deference to the reality that John Podhoretz lays out here:

... And so the irony presents itself: With a troubled economy and Democrats ahead on issue after issue, McCain will only reach the presidency in two ways. First, Barack Obama is going to have to do something from now until election day that seriously calls his judgment into question — and I mean something new, not a Jeremiah Wright offshoot. Second, there is Iraq. McCain is going to have no choice but to center his campaign around victory in Iraq — by claiming that the turnaround during the surge has not just created fragile gains but that we are on the verge of actually winning outright in Iraq and that the victory is due almost entirely to him. (Whether that’s true or not is another matter.) That Obama was wrong about the surge, is wrong about where we are now and just how meaningful it will be to secure a victory there, and that these mistakes on Obama’s part raise serious questions about his ability to handle the growing threat from Iran.

It may seem counterintuitive that McCain needs to use an unpopular war to get himself elected, but the way things look right now, nothing else is going to get him elected. Yes, he needs to spell out a reform agenda. Yes, he needs to have answers, and fluid ones, on domestic policy matters. But all that is purely defensive, to ensure that Obama’s advantage on matters like those does not grow. In the end, McCain has to make it an election about leadership. And where he has shown leadership is Iraq.

This analysis suggests that McCain's ratio ought to move closer to 60 percent foreign, 40 percent domestic as the campaign progresses - but with the constant awareness that it's the 60 percent on which his campaign will ultimately win, if win it does; the rest is essentially defensive, an arena where McCain can land punches but not a knockout blow. The challenge for Obama is in certain respects thornier, since - precisely because he's in such a strong position overall - he has a host of narratives and issues to choose from. Does he emphasize long-term Democratic goals on health care or the environment, or try to make short-term hay, like Clinton in '92, out of the sagging economy? Should he continue playing the post-partisan healer, or should he take the weakness of the Republican brand as an opportunity to run a harder-edged campaign that might succeed in decimating the GOP? And above all, does he double down on domestic policy, where his edge is enormous, or does he go for the jugular on foreign policy, Yglesias-style, trying make national security a winning issue for a Democratic candidate for the first time in living memory?

Obviously these dilemmas represent a luxury the McCain campaign would love to have. But they're dilemmas nonetheless.

Today's '80s Flashback

Via Vic Matus, George Constanza pitches the McDLT:

McCain and Vitter

Here's another way of looking at the issue of how social conservatives ought to view McCain's 1970s marital misconduct in the year 2008. Last July, I argued that Louisiana's David Vitter ought to resign his office after he more or less admitted to having frequented prostitutes. I stand by that position. However, if David Vitter - having conspicuously failed to resign - were to face off in a Presidential race against Barack Obama, I would be inclined to hold my nose and vote for Vitter. I don't think there's necessarily a contradiction here, any more than I think there would be a contradiction for a culturally-conservative Democrat to simultaneously believe that Bill Clinton ought to have resigned over the Lewinsky affair while declining to regret having voted for Clinton over Bob Dole in '96. Regretting the passing of a particular moral standard does not require one to always vote as if that standard were still in place.

The Character Issue (II)

Matt writes, in response to my thoughts on McCain's divorce:

That's cogently argued. But note that it's a cogently argued brief for the view that cultural conservatives ought to deploy the marital indiscretions of liberal politicians as a political issue while ignoring the indiscretions of conservative politicians. Just note that what looks like hypocrisy from the outside can often have a perfectly coherent explanation to the believers.

I can see how it reads that way, but it wasn't exactly what I meant. If the hypocrisy Matt's describing actually worked, in the sense of moving us closer to a standard in which jilting your wife disqualified you from a political career, I suppose there might be something to be said for it. But it's pretty clear from the whole impeachment debacle that it doesn't: All conservatives did in that case was open themselves up to, well, charges of hypocrisy, leading to a denouement in which one of their own, Bob Livingston, fell on his sword while Bill Clinton got away scot-free. So no, I don't think that "cultural conservatives ought to deploy the marital indiscretions of liberal politicians as a political issue." I think that cultural conservatives ought to criticize public figures of both parties when they behave egregiously in their personal lives, and I think that - all things being equal - they ought to reward politicians who don't abandon their spouses, or dally with interns in the Oval Office, or maintain second families on the side. But all things aren't equal, politics is the art of the possible, the Nelson Rockefeller standard isn't coming back anytime soon - and so again, I don't think that McCain's deplorable conduct in the 1970s justifies voting for Obama.

I should add, just in case it isn't clear, that the reason to have a taboo against electing politicians who have ditched their wives isn't because leaving your wife makes you "morally unfit" for the Oval Office in some absolute sense; I don't think it does. (If I thought so, obviously, that would be a reason not to vote for John McCain.) It's because we want to discourage men from ditching their wives, and closing off certain very public avenues of advancement isn't a bad way to go about discouraging that sort of thing. The point is to deter misbehavior, not to protect the country from the perils of being governed by a rake.

Update: Okay, yes, "scot-free" is a little strong ...

The Character Issue

Nick Beaudrot and Matt Yglesias want to know what I think about John McCain's less-than-heroic treatment of his first wife. Beaudrot writes:

If you think a candidate's behavior in his or her personal life bears relevance to his merits as a Presidential candidate, McCain's dalliances with other women and near gold-digging appear fundamentally disqualifying, roughly on par with anything Rudy Giuliani did to his spouses.

Well, as a card-carrying defender of the Freak Show, I see no reason why McCain's 1970s behavior shouldn't be an issue in the Presidential race; if McCain's beloved high school teacher is relevant to the campaign, then so is his treatment of Carol McCain (and their children). I don't, however, think the comparison to Giuliani quite holds up: Not only because Rudy's callousness was considerably more public than McCain's, but - more importantly - because McCain's first wife has remained friends with him, and supported him politically, which contrasts sharply with Rudy's estrangement from his ex-wife and children. And this difference probably explains why McCain's '70s caddishness hasn't become a big issue in the past, and won't become one in this election cycle: The American people, I expect, will take the view that if the wronged party seems to have forgiven McCain for jilting her, it would be churlish not to do the same.

As for my view of the matter - well, as I've mentioned before, I tend to agree with James Poulos that an America in which politicians had a more difficult time recovering from flagrant private misbehavior would be a better place to live and vote and marry in. It's not that I think an adulterer can't be an effective political leader; it's that I'd like to see the social costs of sexual misconduct go up, at least on the margins, and having certain avenues to prominence closed off to you if you decide to ditch your family and take up with a younger, richer, healthier woman seems like a reasonable cost to impose on would-be divorcees. All of that said, though, we're obviously a long, long way from that state of affairs, and things being what they are, I'm not going to argue that social conservatives should deliver the White House to Obama in order to make a futile protest against the decline of masculine honor among our politicians.

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

McCain-Huckabee?

For TNR's gala veepstakes issue, I run down the pros and cons.

Tony Was Whacked?

A somewhat persuasive, extremely prolix exegesis of the Sopranos finale. (via THND)

Here's a visual aid:

Immortal Longings

Via Andrew, here's John Horgan, contributing to a symposium on the Singularity:

Let's face it. The singularity is a religious rather than a scientific vision. The science-fiction writer Ken MacLeod has dubbed it “the rapture for nerds,” an allusion to the end-time, when Jesus whisks the faithful to heaven and leaves us sinners behind.

Such yearning for transcendence, whether spiritual or technological, is all too understandable. Both as individuals and as a species, we face deadly serious problems, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, poverty, famine, environmental degradation, climate change, resource depletion, and AIDS. Engineers and scientists should be helping us face the world's problems and find solutions to them, rather than indulging in escapist, pseudoscientific fantasies like the singularity.

But the very fact that the Singularity's appeal derives from some of the same impulses that drive religious faith - even as the prophets proclaiming its imminent arrival insist that they're relying on cold hard science - means that you aren't coming to make very much hay by telling the Ray Kurzweils of the world that we need to train our attention on terrorism or nuclear proliferation or famine or climate change instead. Some of the yearning for "transcendence" that the Singularity satisfies might go away in a juster, safer world, but the fundamental yearning it's addressed to - the desire for immortality - wouldn't. Eliminate terrorism and nuclear weapons, and you'll still die. Do away with poverty, clean up the environment, and ensure a fairer distribution of the earth's resources, and you'll still die. Find a cure for AIDS, and not only will you still die, but so will everybody you've cured.

Seen through this lens, telling people that they need to solve all the world's immediate problems before they take up the biggest Problem of all is like telling doctors facing a bubonic-plague outbreak that they can only address themselves to it once they've found a cure for colds, allergies, and stomach flu. Now of course this lens assumes that there could be a cure for death, which is where the issue of pseudoscience enters the picture, and the (im)plausibility of the claims the Singulatarians are making - an issue, I should note, that the substance of Horgan's essay is addressed to. But the mere fact that the Singularity is inherently "escapist," and bears a not-inconsiderable resemblance to Christianity, isn't a problem with the concept. It's the whole point.

The Weakness of Faith

Alan Jacobs, writing in the WSJ:

... I can't universalize my own experience -- but that experience does give me pause when people talk about the immense power of religion to make people do extraordinary things. When people say that they are acting out of religious conviction, I tend to be skeptical; I tend to wonder whether they're not acting as I usually do, out of motives and impulses over which I could paint a thin religious veneer but which are really not religious at all.

Most of today's leading critics of religion are remarkably trusting in these matters. Card-carrying members of the intelligentsia like Mr. Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris would surely be doubtful, even incredulous, if a politician who had illegally seized power claimed that his motives for doing so were purely patriotic; or if a CEO of a drug company explained a sudden drop in prices by professing her undying compassion for those unable to afford her company's products. Discerning a difference between people's professed aims and their real aims is just what intellectuals do.

This point, I think, dovetails nicely with the argument I was making in this post on the disproportionate fear inspired by apocalyptic religious beliefs, whether they're being professed by Pat Robertson or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The proportion of religious believers who insist that their conduct is motivated by the imminent end of the world is vastly larger, so far as I can tell, than the proportion who actually behave in ways designed to hasten the apocalypse, as opposed to advancing some rather-more-worldly interest. Now of course it only takes one such person with a suitcase nuke to do an awful lot of damage - but as I said before, I think such people are sufficiently rare, and sufficiently unlikely to ascend to positions of great power, that they ought to be further down our list of worries than many secularists suppose.

Theodicy Revisited

A reader writes, amid a fascinating comments thread on this post:

From a purely logical point of view, Christianity's free will answer is unassailable: it is only because we have the capacity for evil that good is possible, and without sin there would be no Redemption. QED.

But as you point out the comparative facility of New Yorker writers to make the existence-of-evil argument, it is also grating for the equally well-off to make the free-will counter argument. I have led a pretty sheltered existence, and I've never known true evil, in my bones or in my gut. I have not known real hunger, or real pain. The oh so neat argument of free will seems so cold, so utterly irrelevant, when speaking with, say, a Holocaust survivor who has given up on God after experiencing the camps ... Of course you can point out that it is in that horror that other Holocaust survivors have found a reason to believe in God, but such considerations seem equally useless when talking not about the general presence of evil in the world, but about the precise and unique evils that one person has suffered.

The best Christian answer to the existence-of-evil argument seems to me to be, therefore, not the existence of free will (although, again, it is a perfectly valid response), but the much more concrete reality of Incarnation. God allowed evil to exist but He loves Man so much that He defeated it not just through the abstract (yet essential) gift of free will, but also by embracing His creature's condition and experiencing evil in the same ways.

Of course, from an atheist's perspective, this begs the question: to believe that God mitigated the presence of evil by experiencing and defeating it personally is to believe that God exists. But there is another way to put it: if it were possible to believe simultaneously in the existence of evil and in the existence of a benevolent God, then this benevolent God would have to be the kind of God who is willing to suffer evil alongside His creature and with the same intensity. This seems to me to be a very compelling answer.

The first point - that nobody wants to hear about how the existence of free will requires suffering from someone who hasn't suffered meaningfully themselves - is part of what interests me about the correlation between material comfort and complaints against God for permitting evil to flourish, the rain to fall on the just and unjust alike, and so forth. I've always thought that how you respond to the Christian argument about free will and the necessity of evil depends in large part on how you respond intuitively to the experience of human existence - whether you instinctively regard life, the universe and everything as a Very Good Thing with a certain amount of evil and corruption woven in, or whether you regard human life chiefly as "a business of evenly rationed suffering," as Wood puts it, with the constant possibility that the "truly unbearable" will suddenly consume everything that you hold dear. (Wood employs the evocative term "hellmouth" to describe this all-too-common worst-case scenario, a term he borrows from Norman Rush, who defined it as “the opening up of the mouth of hell right in front of you, without warning, through no fault of your own.”)

Continue reading "Theodicy Revisited" »

The Google Pundit

It's a vice I've no doubt dabbled in from time to time, but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy this Michael Moynihan takedown.

Sympathy For the Clintons

Bill Clinton has not distinguished himself during this campaign, to put it mildly, but this passage from yesterday's Post - flagged by Michael Crowley - seems like it ought to inspire empathy rather than eye-rolling.

Another member of the inner circle described Bill Clinton as coming "unhinged" in the final hours, raising his voice in phone calls with superdelegates, constantly revisiting his wife's options for staying in the race. "He keeps asking me, 'What about so-and-so? What about so-and-so?' " the supporter recalled, saying the former president wanted constant updates on superdelegate moves.

I like to think that if my wife were on the verge of being eliminated from a Presidential primary campaign that she'd very nearly won, I'd be "constantly revisiting" her options, demanding "constant updates" on her chances, and maybe even raising my voice from time to time. That doesn't sound like a man coming "unhinged"; that sounds like a man who has his priorities in order.

A History of Theodicy

Inspired by James Wood's latest litany of eloquent complaints against the God in whom he doesn't believe, here's something I'd like to see: A history of popular theodicy, tracing the influence of the "argument from the existence of evil" against belief in God (or the Christian God, at least) throughout the course of Western history. It's my impression - and it's only an impression, which is why I'd like to see someone do the necessary intellectual spadework to refute it or back it up - that this argument has gained increasing currency even as our material conditions have dramatically improved; which is to say, the less suffering a particular population experiences, the more likely the suffering it does experience will be cited as evidence against the existence of a benevolent deity. (Or put another way, you're more likely to hear New Yorker writers wax indignant about how the existence of human misery precludes their believing in God than you are to hear the same argument from people in slightly less comfortable positions.)

I can think of various reasons why this might be so. There's the correlation-causation possibility: Atheism in general has become more prevalent as material conditions have improved in the West and science has demystified large swathes of the natural world, and since the problem of evil is one of the stronger arguments for atheism, you'd expect it to be cited more often in a more atheistic age. (Wood gestures at this notion in his essay when he remarks that "nowadays, theodicy always has a wary eye on the theological exit: this makes no sense, therefore I will have to reject the idea of God. But there was no such exit before about 1700, at the very earliest.") Or it could have something to do with mass media and instantaneous communication, which expand (and emphasize, since if it bleeds it leads) the range of tragedies that educated people are exposed to on a daily basis. (Wood opens his essay, tellingly, by reading off a roll of tragic headlines from a single copy of the New York Times.) It could have something to do with the scale of inhumanity that modern technology makes possible: Thus the reasonably-convincing argument, for instance, that the experience of two world wars and the Holocaust has been a crucial factor in Europe's abandonment of God. Or it could reflect something inherent in our psychology, which makes suffering seem like more of an absolute injustice the less we actually experience it.

I don't know the answer, or even if the thesis is correct - but I'd love to see someone investigate the question.

Hillary Bows Out

"If only she'd done this weeks ago," Matt writes. I take his point: It would probably been better for the party if Hillary had conceded defeat somewhat earlier (though there would have been the potential embarrassment of having the presumptive-nominee lose primaries to a rival who'd dropped out), or at the very least campaigned less fiercely against Obama once his victory became a near-certainty, and certainly her non-concession speech on Tuesday night was bizarre and faintly pathological. But I think that once a few months have gone by, at least some of outrage that Hillary Clinton has generated among liberal pundits by campaigning to the bitter end in a race that she ended up losing by just over a hundred pledged delegates and roughly half a percent of the popular vote will seem, in hindsight, faintly hysterical.

Obama and Abortion

Wise words from Noah Millman:

I don’t know if I’ve said this before, but Doug Kmiec would do well to admit that he has backed a ticket that will be absolutely uncompromising in its support for abortion rights. There is no chance whatsoever that Obama will make the slightest gesture in the direction of moderation on this question, and there is no chance that any appointments to the court will not be litmus tested on this question. Bank on it. He showed no inclination to do so before, and now he has powerful political reasons to be absolutely doctrinaire on this question. There are other places where he can bend – gun rights is, I think, the most likely and the most important – but not here. Yes, that gives a (mild) advantage to McCain on this question, but Obama cannot afford heterodoxy here.

In terms of the (thin) hope that the Democratic Party might move toward the center on abortion, I don't think there's any question that Hillary Clinton would have been a better bet than Obama. If nothing else, there's no way he can ever give a speech like this to a family planning group.

Also, there's much more in Noah's post, so read the whole thing.

The Clintons and Me

Over at the Current, I attempt a meditation on how growing up in the Clinton era has shaped my view of them, and of American politics more generally - for good or possibly for ill.

My Rejection of Liberalism

One of Andrew's correspondents writes, of this post:

It seems to me inevitable that if you employ what amounts to a religious test for your politics, that the same logic would justify a political test for your religion. If the two are so tightly fused that they become indistinguishable -- if the liberal compromise of acknowledging politics as a sphere to itself, with, in a sense, its own reasons and discourse, is essentially rejected -- then how could it be otherwise?

You see this rejection of liberalism, in the best and truest sense of the word, when people like Ross Douthat use language like this: "...a legislator who happens to support deeply-immoral measures..." I for one think there is a meaningful distinction between being pro-choice and supporting abortion, between allowing others to make choices we find morally problematic and actually urging or even demanding others make those choices. I sincerely believe that there are few things more moral, decent, humane, and dare I say Christian than refraining from using the coercive power of the state to punish those who do not agree with every tenet of your moral system. This is not "relativism" -- this is an ethic of restraint when it comes to politics.

A question for the emailer: Are there any "deeply-immoral" measures that a legislator could support that would merit some sort of sanction from his pastor or bishop? Was, for instance, the Archbishop of New Orleans betraying liberalism's "moral, decent and humane" line between church and state when he denied communion to diehard segregationists? If the answer is yes, I applaud your consistency even as I deplore your theory of the Church's proper role in politics. If the answer is no, then what we disagree about is not whether we should refrain from "using the coercive power of the state to punish those who do not agree with every tenet of [my] moral system" (I advocated no such thing, needless to say), but how deeply-immoral a measure has to be before supporting it would become grounds for the denial of communion. In other words, we have a disagreement about (surprise!) the nature of abortion - whether, like other acts of violence, it's the sort of crime that the civil as well as the moral law should sanction, or whether it's a sin along the lines of gossip, say, or sloth, which the civil authorities can't and shouldn't regulate - not some deep theory of church-state separation that involves a "rejection of liberalism" on my part.

And yes, all of this should go without saying.

McCain and the Bush Legacy

If, as I suggested yesterday, any rehabilitation of George W. Bush depends on 1) the post-2006 turnaround in Iraq continuing and 2) his getting credit for it, then I wonder whether a McCain victory in November would raise the chances that Bush's reputation will improve once he leaves office - as Bill Kristol, among others, has argued - or diminish them. To my mind, the biggest reason to expect that over the long run Bush won't get much credit for the turnaround in Iraq, assuming it persists, is that by late '06 he had become so (deservedly) unpopular that the selling of the new Iraq policy essentially had to be outsourced to other figures - John McCain chief among them. And if the Arizona Senator is elected President on the strength of his support for the Surge (while insisting that he had the right Iraq policy all along and Bush only came to it reluctantly, and when it was almost too late), then the election results will reinforce an already-existing narrative that associates the policy more with McCain than with Bush. Whereas if Barack Obama is elected President, after attacking the Surge and proposing a swift and complete withdrawal instead, and then finds himself - as I suspect he will - continuing the Bush approach (a very, very gradual drawdown) rather than taking the path he's advocated on the campaign trail, it may throw into relief for posterity Bush's ownership of what, with any luck, will be remembered as the best decision of his Presidency.

Progress

I thought this, from Ezra Klein, was a nice frame for the evening:

Towards the end of the 1967 movie "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," Dr. John Wane Prentice, played by Sydney Poitier, sits down with his fiance's white father, played by Spencer Tracy. "Have you given any thought to the problems your children will have?" Tracy asks. "Yes, and they'll have some...[But] Joey feels that all of our children will be President of the United States," replies Poitier. "How do you feel about that?" asks Tracy, looking skeptically at the black man in front of him. "I'd settle for Secretary of State," Poitier laughs.

... here we are, almost exactly 40 years after theatergoers heard that exchange. The last two Secretaries of State were African-American and, as of tonight, the next president may well be a black man. John Prentice's children would probably still be in their late-30s. They could still grow up to be cabinet officials or even presidents, but they would not necessarily be trailblazers.

Congratulations, Senator Obama.

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

Diary of a Superdelegate

A glimpse into a world that ended last night.

Listening to Levin

The McCain campaign chooses wisely.

Redeeming Dubya (III)

While I'm on the subject of Bush's possible rehabilitation, I should link to this Jonathan Rauch piece from October of last year, in which he argued that one way to judge a President is by how long it takes his successors to unwind his mistakes. In the current Administration's case, he suggested that "Bush’s successors will have one useful ally: Bush himself," since on at least some fronts - most notably Iraq - the President has attempted to be a "self-unwinder."

Now obviously a record of unwinding one's own mistakes is rather different from a record of success, and if Bush does succeed - as seems increasingly plausible - in finally delivering a fragile-but-improving situation in Iraq to his successor, that won't be an achievement that vindicates the initial decision to invade. But provisionally, at least, it's worth noting that way that Bush has attempted to unwind himself on Iraq has been more impressive, and provided more grist for a potential rehabilitation, than a simple volte-face would have. If Bush had taken the Baker-Hamilton Commission's advice, for instance, and the security situation had gradually improved thereafter, the obvious historical narrative would have been that Bush led America into a disaster, and then had to turn things over to the grown-ups and let them lead us out. But by instead choosing a course-correction - the Surge - that had very little institutional support within American political circles, Bush assumed ownership of subsequent events in a way that most politicians seeking to undo their blunders don't have the opportunity to do. And should Iraq reach some sort of democratic stability over the long run, it's very easy to see how Bush's decision to double down rather than pulling out could become one of the high points of a larger narrative that paints him as a visionary.

Again, to emphasize, I wouldn't agree with this narrative, not least because I think the standards for success in a war of choice (or a war of pre-emption, or however you want to describe our decision to invade Iraq) have to be considerably more stringent than the standards for success in a war of survival or self-defense - and finally getting to some sort of modest stability in post-Saddam Iraq (which is by no means assured) after four years of carnage and tens of thousands of deaths doesn't pass muster on this count. So when Victor Davis Hanson, for instance, argues that our blunders in this conflict have parallels in previous American wars, I think what's missing from his argument is an acknowledgment that Iraq has to be judged differently from World War II or Korea because our grounds for going to war in this case were considerably weaker.

But based on how American history tends to end up being written, I wouldn't be all that surprised to wake up in 2035 and find that Hanson's point of view, rather than mine, ended up carrying the day.

Photo by the World Economic Forum used under a Creative Commons license.

Matters of Life and Death

I agree with E.J. Dionne that whatever one thinks of the question of denying communion to pro-choice Catholic politicians, denying communion to Catholic citizens who express support for pro-choice Catholics politicians is a very, very bad idea. There is a crucial distinction between voting for a deeply-immoral measure as a legislator, and voting for a legislator who happens to support deeply-immoral measures; the former is never justifiable, but the latter course of action may well be, depending on the set of issues at stake in the election. Here I would cite these remarks from Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput, which Andrew called "metaphorically weird," but which (naturally enough) I found nicely phrased and essentially correct:

So can a Catholic in good conscience vote for a pro-choice candidate? The answer is: I can’t, and I won’t. But I do know some serious Catholics— people whom I admire—who may. I think their reasoning is mistaken, but at least they sincerely struggle with the abortion issue, and it causes them real pain. And most important: They don’t keep quiet about it; they don’t give up; they keep lobbying their party and their representatives to change their pro-abortion views and protect the unborn. Catholics can vote for pro-choice candidates if they vote for them despite—not because of—their pro-choice views.

But [Catholics who support pro-choice candidates] also need a compelling proportionate reason to justify it. What is a “proportionate” reason when it comes to the abortion issue? It’s the kind of reason we will be able to explain, with a clean heart, to the victims of abortion when we meet them face to face in the next life—which we most certainly will. If we’re confident that these victims will accept our motives as something more than an alibi, then we can proceed.

What this implies, I think, is that a pro-lifer can in good conscience support a pro-choice candidate only for reasons that go directly to issues of life and death on a scale proportionate to the scale of the abortion industry as licensed by Roe v. Wade. I think that this calculus points toward a distinction between foreign and domestic policy debates, with the former, as a general rule, offering much more plausible grounds for casting a vote for a pro-choice politician than the latter. In debates over foreign affairs, voters are asked to pass judgment on policies that often lead directly to the death of innocents on a large scale; the same simply cannot be said of most domestic controversies, at least in the contemporary United States, which is why the abortion issue weighs so heavily (and rightfully so) on the consciences of Catholic voters. Obviously many liberals would claim otherwise - i.e. a vote against S-CHIP is a vote to let thousands of children die! - but I think those arguments become very strained very quickly, especially when they're expanded to include putatively "life and death" issues like education, say, or the health of the labor movement.

In practice, this means I'm much more sympathetic to a pro-life Catholic who's supporting Barack Obama in order to vote against the life-and-death consequences of American interventionism, in Iraq and elsewhere - even though I'm skeptical about the merits of that particular calculus - than I am to a pro-life Catholic who's voting for Obama because he thinks the distribution of the American tax burden conflicts with Catholic social thought. Or again, even as I disagreed with their assessment, I would have been much more sympathetic to a pro-life Mondale voter who took the view that Ronald Reagan's foreign policy was raising the risk of thermonuclear war above and beyond any reasonable or acceptable level than to a pro-life Mondalenik who thought Reagan wasn't doing enough to maintain the "preferential option for the poor" that Catholic social teaching calls for.

Note, too, that this is a separate question from the issue of whether casting a pro-life vote actually has any chance to produce pro-life policies, or whether the dream of overturning Roe is essentially hopeless, and the alliance between pro-lifers and the GOP essentially fruitless. I can certainly imagine a circumstance in which the impossibility of the pro-life cause makes it plausible to vote for a pro-choice candidate with a clear conscience even when grave matters aren't at stake, but as I've argued before, I think we're some distance from that state of affairs.

Who's Afraid of the Millenarians?

I am no great admirer of the apocalyptic style in religion or politics, but I would find Ian McEwan's essay on the clear and pressing danger posed by end-time thinking vastly more persuasive if he didn't crown his argument with this passage:

Within living memory we have come very close to extinguishing our civilisation when, in October 1962, Soviet ships carrying nuclear warheads to installations in Cuba confronted a blockade by the US Navy, and the world waited to discover whether Nikita Khrushchev would order his convoy home. It is remarkable how little of that terrifying event survives in public memory, in modern folklore. In the vast literature the Cuban missile crisis has spawned - military, political, diplomatic - there is very little on its effect at the time on ordinary lives, in homes, school, and the workplace, on the fear and widespread numb incomprehension in the population at large. That fear has not passed into the national narrative, here, or anywhere else as vividly as you might expect. As Spencer Weart put it: "When the crisis ended, most people turned their attention away as swiftly as a child who lifts up a rock, sees something slimy underneath, and drops the rock back." Perhaps the assassination of President Kennedy the following year helped obscure the folk memory of the missile crisis. His murder in Dallas became a marker in the history of instantaneous globalised news transmission - a huge proportion of the world's population seemed to be able to recall where they were when they heard the news. Conflating these two events, Christopher Hitchens opened an essay on the Cuban missile crisis with the words - "Like everyone else of my generation, I can remember exactly where I was standing and what I was doing on the day that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy nearly killed me." Heaven did not beckon during those tense hours of the crisis. Instead, as Hitchens observes, "It brought the world to the best view it has had yet of the gates of hell."

I began with the idea of photography as the inventory of mortality, and I will end with a photograph of a group death. It shows fierce flames and smoke rising from a building in Waco, Texas, at the end of a 51-day siege in 1993. The group inside was the Branch Davidians, an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventists. Its leader, David Koresh, was a man steeped in biblical, end-time theology, convinced that America was Babylon, the agent of Satan, come in the form of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the FBI to destroy the Sabbath-keeping remnant, who would emerge from the cleansing, suicidal fire to witness the dawn of a new Kingdom ... In that grim inferno, children, their mothers, and other followers died. Even more died two years later when Timothy McVeigh, exacting revenge against the government for its attack on Waco, committed his slaughter in Oklahoma City. It is not for nothing that one of the symptoms in a developing psychosis, noted and described by psychiatrists, is "religiosity".

So here we have three anecdotes. In the first instance, the world is brought to the brink of thermonuclear destruction by a pair of none-too-religious politicians and their advisers, influenced in their decision-making by a combination of old-fashioned power politics and secular fantasies of global revolution. In the second instance, a religious fanatic who appears to have posed a danger only to the small group of men and women taken in by his mix of spiritual and sexual charisma dies, along with his followers, amid a botched and legally-dubious assault by one of the law-enforcement arms of a secular government. In the third case, a political fanatic of no discernible religious beliefs perpetrates a gruesome act of mass murder, with the aim of punishing the same government for its conduct in the second instance. None of the three offers a particular compelling testament to the dangers of religious millenarianism, as opposed to other motivations for potentially lethal conduct, whether on the level of states or individuals.

Now obviously there are more dangerous religious madmen in the world than David Koresh, and obviously McEwan is on firm ground when he argues that some of the various great crimes of history have been rooted in apocalyptic hopes and fears. But his own anecdotes offer a useful reminder that worldly motivations tend to play a vastly larger role in war and terrorism and similar evils than do spurious prophecies of an imminent Armageddon or dumb misreadings of the Book of Revelation. This is true even among religious believers: From Crusaders trying to conquer the Holy Land to contemporary jihadis hoping to restore the Caliphate, from Woodrow Wilson trying to make the world safe for democracy to George W. Bush trying to, well, make the world safe for democracy, religiously-motivated political actors are much more likely to believe that God wants them to pursue a particular geopolitical objective than they are to assume that He wants them to ring in the actual End of History with a hail of bombs (or suicide bombers). People whose fondest wish is to hasten end of the world can be dangerous, no doubt, and perhaps one such fanatic will yet succeed in ringing in the apocalypse with a suitcase nuke or a vial of Captain Trips. But in general, such people tend not to advance to positions where they can do world-historical damage. Which is why the worst crimes, well-meaning and otherwise, usually aren't committed by the millenarians who keep a good secularist like McEwan up at night; they're committed by rational actors, religious and secular alike, who want to change the world we live in, rather than bring it to an end, and fail to count the fatal cost of pursuing their ambitions.

Small Is Beautiful

Jim Manzi raises an eyebrow at Jon Corzine's plan to punish his political enemies improve government efficiency by forcing New Jersey's small towns to merge into larger ones.

The One-Term Pledge That Wasn't

The scoop of the day belongs to our own Marc Ambinder.

Underestimating Sex

So I looked at the box office numbers this morning, saw that the unbearable (and unbearably long) Sex and the City movie had taken in $55 million, and thought to myself: Good - a deservedly below-expectations showing. They were probably hoping for $70-80 million.

And that, of course, is why I don't have a high-paying job in a Hollywood studio.

Redeeming Dubya (II)

I think Daniel Larison is misconstruing the point I was making in this piece on Bush's potential rehabilitation. I wrote:

... for history’s judgment to turn favorable, America’s intervention in Iraq eventually needs to come out looking like a success story rather than a folly.

This seems improbable, to put it mildly. But the crucial word here is eventually. The Bush administration has often seemed bent on vindicating, in the short run and by force of arms, Francis Fukuyama’s famous long-term prediction that liberal democracy will ultimately triumph. Now Bush’s hopes for vindication depend on the Middle East’s following a gradual, Fukuyaman track toward free markets, democratic government, and the “end of history.” And just as crucially, they depend on American troops’ staying in Iraq for as long as it takes for that to happen. If these events come to pass—if the Iraq of 2038 or so is stable, democratic, and at peace with its neighbors, and if American troops have maintained a constant presence in the country—no one should be surprised to hear hawkish liberals as well as conservatives taking up the idea that George W. Bush deserves a great deal of the credit.

To which Larison responds:

There is something a bit strange about this paragraph. If Bush’s hopes for vindication rest on the old long-term evolution towards the triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism, which will, if we believe Fukuyama, happen because there are no viable rival doctrines or systems that can compete with these things, and the attempt to force that vindication through the war in Iraq was the wrong way to promote this, how exactly does it aid in Bush’s vindication over the long term to keep American forces in Iraq? Either Fukuyama’s long-term argument about the effects of modernisation is basically correct, in which case the U.S. does not need to maintain a neo-colonial steward role in shepherding Iraq towards continued modernisation, or it isn’t, which raises the prospect that liberal democracy and capitalism will not endure in Iraq without a perpetual American presence propping up an alien and artificial system that will collapse as soon as we leave. The latter alternatve is neither realistic nor desirable, and the former theory is almost certainly false, but in either case vindication by Fukuyama’s long-term theory necessarily means that a continued U.S. presence is unnecessary, just as the war was actually unnecessary in the first place on the terms most favourable to Fukuyama’s original argument, or Fukuyama is wrong and our forces will have to stay there indefinitely, which is not a politically or militarily viable possibility.

I may not have expressed myself as precisely as I should have. My point was not that the combination of a gradual upward ascent in Iraqi affairs (which I consider a stronger possibility than Larison does, being more sympathetic to the Fukuyaman thesis and more encouraged by recent developments in Iraq than he) and a long-lasting American presence in that country would actually vindicate Bush's decision to invade that country; it was that the combination of favorable developments in Iraq and a constant U.S. military presence would provide grist for the American tendency to take the credit for good long-range outcomes and ignore the blunders and crimes along the way. (Hence my remark later in the piece that "if LBJ or Nixon had only found a way to prop up South Vietnam until the 1990s, they might have been forgiven the outrageous cost in blood and treasure, and remembered as Trumanesque heroes rather than as goats," which was emphatically not intended as a vindication of either President's Vietnam policy.) As I said, I think this tendency is generally a bad one, not least because it often rests on logical fallacies of the sort that Larison takes apart above. But that doesn't mean it won't be potent enough to redeem the seemingly unredeemable reputation of our current President.

Remembering Robert Jordan

Last summer I recommended an essay by Mark Oppenheimer on the virtues of the "medium town," which appeared in a journal he'd co-founded called the New Haven Review of Books - a "medium town" answer to the decline of book reviewing, consisting of literary essays by Elm City natives. Now I'm pleased to recommend the second issue as well, not least because they asked me - a New Havenite in exile - to contribute a piece on the late fantasy author Robert Jordan, who was once upon a time my favorite living novelist.

While I'm at it, I should also recommend the NHRB website, where every Monday they're trying to publish a short review of an unfairly neglected book - as well as this profile of the review and its founders, which appeared in my (former) hometown rag.

The Dog That Didn't Bark

Todd Purdum on Bill Clinton, in the forthcoming Vanity Fair:

Over the last few years, aides have winced at repeated tabloid reports about Clinton’s episodic friendship and occasional dinners out with Belinda Stronach, a twice-divorced billionaire auto-parts heiress and member of the Canadian Parliament 20 years his junior, or at more recent high-end Hollywood dinner-party gossip that Clinton has been seen visiting with the actress Gina Gershon in California. There has been talk of a female friend in Chappaqua, a woman in a bar at a meeting of the Aspen Institute, and a public sighting of Clinton, Bing, and a ravishing entourage in a New York elevator that, a former Clinton aide told me, led a business leader who saw them to say: I don’t know what the guy was doing, but it was so clear that it was just no good.

None of these wisps of smoke have produced a public fire. But four former Clinton aides told me that, about 18 months ago, one of the president’s former assistants, who still advises him on political matters, had heard so many complaints about such reports from Clinton supporters around the country that he felt compelled to try to conduct what one of these aides called an “intervention,” because, the aide believed, “Clinton was apparently seeing a lot of women on the road.” The would-be intercessor was rebuffed by people around Clinton before ever getting an audience with the former president, and another aide told me that the effort was not well received by either Bill or Hillary Clinton and that some Hillarylanders, in particular, were in denial about the continuing political risks that Bill’s behavior might pose.

It's interesting that Purdum and VF are coming out with this piece now, with Hillary Clinton's campaign more or less finished, since this sort of gossip has been in circulation for a while - to the point where if you'd asked me nine months ago to list the major roadblocks to Hillary's near-inevitable nomination, I would have put her husband's possible tomcatting right up there with her Iraq War vote. In the event, the Big He did end up having an impact on the race, but it was public gaffes that mattered, not his private vices. I'm not sure what to make of the lack of coverage on this front: It could suggest that there's vastly more smoke than fire where Clinton's post-Presidential priapism is concerned; it could suggest that Clinton's handlers are really, really good at putting out the fires in question (though it doesn't sound that way from Purdum's piece); or it could suggest a conspiracy of silence on the part of the media, based on the fear that pulling the trigger on such stories could get them accused of gossip-mongering or invading the Clintons' privacy. (If the third possibility is the correct one, it's a pretty remarkable testament to the MSM's ability to keep the lid on a story, even in the age of Drudge and TMZ and Gawker Stalker ...)

Photo by Flickr user Franz88 used under a Creative Commons license.