The Year Turns

Regular posting will resume in the new year. In the meantime, to usher out two thousand and eight, here's a poem for all seasons:

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

Samuel Huntington, RIP

Reihan has an obit for his fellow Stuyvesant alum.

The Implications of Christmas

I admit that there's something a bit dissonant about quoting Christopher Hitchens on Christmas, but I've been meaning to say something about a peculiar passage in his anti-Yuletide burst of spleen, and tonight seems like a proper time to do it:

... Suppose we put the question like this: Imagine that conclusive archaeological and textual evidence emerged to prove that the whole story of the birth, life, and death of Jesus of Nazareth was either a delusion or a fabrication? Suppose the mother had admitted shyly that, in fact, she had fallen pregnant for predictable reasons? Suppose we found the post-Calvary body?

Serious Christians, of the sort I have been debating lately, would have no choice but to consider such news as absolutely calamitous. The light of the world would have gone out; the hope of humanity would have been extinguished. (The same obviously would apply to Muslims who couldn't bear the shock of finding that their prophet was fictional or fraudulent.) But I invite you to consider things more lucidly. If all the official stories of monotheism, from Moses to Mormonism, were to be utterly and finally discredited, we would be exactly where we are now. All the agonizing questions that we face, from the idea of the good life and our duties to each other to the concept of justice and the enigma of existence itself, would be just as difficult and also just as fascinating. It takes a totalitarian mind-set to claim that only one Bronze Age Palestinian revelation or prophecy or text can be our guide through this labyrinth.

I'm not entirely clear on Hitchens' meaning here - whether he means that everything would be the same for himself, and other committed skeptics, in the event that the Christian story was inarguably discredited, or whether he wants to make the more sweeping claim that even if one takes Christianity seriously it has nothing to offer on the Big Questions that hasn't been said and thought and wrestled with elsewhere. Either way, though, I think his claim is self-evidently false - and false in a way that reflects a misunderstanding about what the Christian story really is, at its core, and what lends this particular Palestinian revelation (I believe, for what it's worth, that the Bronze Age ended some time before the birth of Christ) its power two thousand years after the events in question took place.

The Christian story is not, for instance, a theological or philosophical treatise. It's not a set of commands or insights about our moral duties. Nor is it a road map to the good life. It has implications for all of those questions, obviously; certainly, Jesus of Nazareth wasn't exactly silent on "the concept of justice" during his lifetime, and Christians have been deriving theologies, philosophies and codes of conduct from his example ever since. But fundamentally, the Christian story is evidence for a particular idea about the universe: It recounts a series of events that, if real, tells us something profound about the nature of God, and His relationship to His creatures, that we couldn't have been expected to understand or accept in precisely the same way without the Gospel narratives.

Of course a philosopher could have come up with the formulation that God is Love without the assistance of the Gospel According to Saint John, just as Aristarchus of Samos could draw up the heliocentric hypothesis without the assistance of a telescope. But the telescope made a pretty big difference in our understanding of the heavens - and the Gospels, with their claim to bring the nature of God into clearer focus, likewise had a revolutionary impact on how human beings thought about the divine, by making the idea that the Author of the universe actually cares about individual human lives seem much more plausible to first hundreds, then thousands and then millions of people than it had before the evangelists put pen to paper. And just as we would be in a rather different position vis-a-vis our understanding of the universe if all our astronomical evidence were suddenly discredited, the conclusive discrediting of the Gospels would almost certainly provoke a slow-moving revolution in how the world approaches the idea of God.

Any such revolution would affect atheism as well as belief. Consider, for instance, the way in which the dominance of the Christian story has actually sharpened one of the best arrows in the anti-theist's quiver. In Western society, especially, the oft-heard claim that the world is too cruel a place for a good omnipotence to have created derives a great deal of its power, whether implicitly or explicitly, from the person of Christ himself. The God of the New Testament seems more immediate, more personal, and more invested in his creation than He had heretofore revealed Himself to be. But this arguably makes Him seem more culpable for the world's suffering as well. Paradoxically, the God who addresses Job out of the whirlwind is far less vulnerable to complaints about the world's injustice than the God who suffers on the Cross - or the human God who cries in the manger. For many Christians, Christ's suffering provides a partial answer to the problem of theodicy. But for many atheists and agnostics, it only sharpens the question: How can a God who loves mankind enough to die for us allow us to suffer as much as we do?

Take that question away, and all the arguments that spin away from it disappear as well. Which is just one small reason why a world in which nobody had any reason any longer to believe that God had been born in human flesh to a poor Jewish woman in Bethlehem, or died a miserable death on a Roman cross, would be a world in which atheists as well as believers found themselves arguing about life, the universe and everything in very different ways than they do now.

New York, Swing State?

Defending Caroline Kennedy, Michael Kinsley claims that it "is precisely the fear that she would be a formidable candidate, likely to be elected again and again, that is driving Republicans to gin up a phony issue and bully New York Gov. David [Paterson] out of appointing her." As Ramesh notes, the claim that only Republicans object to the idea of making Kennedy a Senator is specious - but even more peculiar is the notion, floated by many of Kennedy's supporters, that New York is the sort of state where liberals should be pining for (and conservatives should be terrified of) a deep-pocketed celebrity candidate to keep the Senate seat in Democratic hands. New York last elected a Republican Senator in 1992; in 2008 it went for Barack Obama by twenty-five points. It's not the safest seat in the country, but it's safe enough that almost any Democrat, once appointed, could expect to be "elected again and again," with or without the Kennedy mystique. Which is all the more reason to pick somebody more impressive than America's Princess for what's probably a long-term job - to look for the next Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in other words, rather than the next Lincoln Chafee.

Moreover, if I were a Republican Senate hopeful, I might actually prefer to run against Caroline Kennedy than against a blandly competent, non-Kennedy liberal politician. Any slight, slight hope a GOP candidate has of winning that seat in the next election depends on Obama's Presidency going very, very badly. And if it is going badly, then painting Senator Kennedy as an underqualified liberal yes-woman appointed to the Senate because of her family name and her connections to the White House - which would, in fact, be the truth - sounds like a pretty good narrative for an insurgent Republican to run on, however many gobs of money she manages to raise.

Doubt, On Stage and Screen

As a follow-up to the previous post, I should note that when I saw Doubt on stage, with Cherry Jones in the lead, I thought it was much more complicted, subtle and serious than A.O. Scott gives it credit for - that it felt like more of a successful argument-generator than a "hermetically sealed melodrama of received thinking, feverishly advancing a set of themes that are the very opposite of provocative." But I haven't seen the film adaptation, and some of the reviews to date suggest that Meryl Streep's interpretation of Sister Aloysius pushes the character, and the story, in a more unsuccessful and caricatured direction. Which is unfortunate, if true, since the material has a lot going for it - or so I thought two years ago, when I wrote the following:

What it does ... more effectively than any work of art I've seen, is dramatize both the weaknesses of old-fashioned, pre-Vatican II Catholicism - the legalism, the occasional cruelty, the seeming heartlessness - and the ways that the 1960s reforms went so quickly wrong, good intentions and all. It dramatizes, as well, the central paradox of the entire sexual abuse scandal, which is that it partook of the worst of both "liberal" and "conservative" Catholicism - the former's sexual permissiveness and contempt for time-tested traditions, rules and safeguards; and the latter's clericalism, its insistence that the hierarchy knew best and the laity should just "pray, pay and obey," its willingness to use authority as a screen for irresponsibility. In the name of freedom and progress and experimentation, priests justified their own sins and those of their fellows; in the name of order and tradition and obedience, their superiors protected them.

My full take on the play (and, inevitably, what it says about the difference between art and agitprop) is here.

How To Make Political Movies

From A.O. Scott's Year in Film roundup:

"Doubt," "The Reader," "Frost/Nixon," "Revolutionary Road" -- all of these transplants from stage or page are impeccably acted, exquisitely production-designed excursions into the recent past. And each one is a hermetically sealed melodrama of received thinking, feverishly advancing a set of themes that are the very opposite of provocative. The suburbs are hell on earth. Richard Nixon was a monster. Literature is good for you. Religious authority is bad. The Nazis too. Kate Winslet is hot.

Why argue? And, for all the shouting and finger pointing that goes on in these films, they exist to be admired, not argued about or with. The interesting movie debates of 2008 were incited by the populist entertainments of summertime, "Wall-E" and "The Dark Knight," contrasting allegories pitched at the anxieties of the moment. Curiously enough, the makers of "Wall-E" took it upon themselves to deny that the film was a parable of environmental devastation as well as a disarmingly sweet love story, while some who commented on "The Dark Knight" pushed the allegorical interpretation as far as it would go, reading the film as a cloaked apologia for -- unless it was a veiled critique of -- President Bush and his policies.

Yes. I wasn't in love with The Dark Knight, but my doubts had less to do with the movie's political and philosophical ambitions than with the mismatch between those ambitions and the requirements of the superhero genre. And leaving the question of the comic-book movie's limits (or lack thereof) aside, Scott has it right - both Christopher Nolan's take on Batman and Pixar's take on consumerism and catastrophe are stellar examples of how to engage with contemporary political debates without falling off into propaganda.

The fact that the two films' stylistic approaches - the one doomy and portentous, the other whimsical and puckish - otherwise couldn't be more different only makes the continuity all the more striking. And Scott puts his finger on what, precisely, that continuity is: Both films seem more interested in being argument-starters than argument-enders. (Last year's Juno had a similar quality, and as I noted in my review, WALL:E is the second recent Pixar movie - after The Incredibles, with its obvious but not too obvious libertarian thread - to pull this trick off.) There's no better goal for a filmmaker who wants to tangle with politically-charged material to aspire to - because if your audience doesn't leave the theater debating the political implications of what they've just seen, then you've produce agitprop, not art.

(This should not be construed, incidentally, as a call for more movies that depict people arguing about politics: One Lions For Lambs was quite enough, thank you.)

The "Insights" of Paul Ehrlich

Yuval Levin flags this footnote from a 2006 speech by Barack Obama's new science adviser, John Holdren; it's attached to a line in which Holdren references the threat that "continuing population growth" poses to human flourishing:

This was the key insight in Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (Ballantine, New York, 1968), as well as one of those in Harrison Brown's prescient earlier book, The Challenge of Man's Future (Viking, New York, 1954). The elementary but discomfiting truth of it may account for the vast amount of ink, paper, and angry energy that has been expended trying in vain to refute it.

It is, I suppose, possible to find a "key insight" about population growth in Ehrlich's book that's anodyne enough to qualify as "elementary" and irrefutable. But there's a pretty good reason that the book is remembered primarily for its mix of hysteria and moral idiocy: When you kick off your argument by predicting that "the battle to feed all of humanity is over," and that "in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now," and then proceed to argue for mass sterilization programs, the quarantine and abandonment of countries too overpopulated to save from total collapse, and various other "triage" methods (honestly, The Population Bomb has to be read to be believed), you pretty much forfeit the right to be praised for your prescience forty years down the line.

Unless, that is, one of your friends goes on to become the science advisor to the President of the United States. As John Tierney notes, Holdren and Ehrlich go way back:

Dr. Holdren, now a physicist at Harvard, was one of the experts in natural resources whom Paul Ehrlich enlisted in his famous bet against the economist Julian Simon during the "energy crisis" of the 1980s. Dr. Simon, who disagreed with environmentalists' predictions of a new "age of scarcity" of natural resources, offered to bet that any natural resource would be cheaper at any date in the future. Dr. Ehrlich accepted the challenge and asked Dr. Holdren, then the co-director of the graduate program in energy and resources at the University of California, Berkeley, and another Berkeley professor, John Harte, for help in choosing which resources would become scarce.

In 1980 Dr. Holdren helped select five metals -- chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten -- and joined Dr. Ehrlich and Dr. Harte in betting $1,000 that those metals would be more expensive ten years later. They turned out to be wrong on all five metals, and had to pay up when the bet came due in 1990.

Now, you could argue that anyone's entitled to a mistake, and that mistakes can be valuable if people learn to become open to ideas that conflict with their preconceptions and ideology. That could be a useful skill in an advisor who's supposed to be presenting the president with a wide range of views. Someone who'd seen how wrong environmentalists had been in ridiculing Dr. Simon's predictions could, in theory, become more open to dissenting from today's environmentalist orthodoxy. But I haven't seen much evidence of such open-mindedness in Dr. Holdren.

Tierney goes on to talk about Holdren's war against Bjorn Lomborg, but honestly I think he's making too much of this: We all know that only Republican Administrations have a problem with politicized science, and since both Obama and his science adviser are Democrats there's really nothing to worry about here.

The Man in the Rubber Mask

Jim Carrey's Yes Man opens today. It's almost certainly lousy. But it's also an excellent opportunity to reflect - with James Parker, the Atlantic's new "Moving Pictures" columnist - on Carrey's peculiarly unnerving style of comedy, and the thread (well, more like a rope) of existential anxiety that runs through his filmography. Here's the piece; here's the videotape:

Caroline On My Mind

While Noam Scheiber does yeoman's work on the subject, Michelle Cottle questions the anti-Caroline backlash:

Of course America does political dynasties: Bayh, Biden, Bush, Clinton, Cuomo, Daley, Dole...If you've got an hour to kill, check out Wikipedia's massive entry on U.S. political families, alphabetically subdivided.

Sure she'd be skipping a few rungs on the electoral ladder. So did New Jersey's Jon Corzine. So did Virginia's Jim Webb. So did Hillary Clinton, for that matter. And, God help us, there's still an outside chance that Al Franken could pull this thing off in Minnesota. As for her simply being handed this particular seat: Until we do away with the ridiculous gubernatorial-appointment system (a worthy cause Blago may have helped along), anyone who gets this seat will have it handed to him/her.

Let's face it, all rich, well-connected, powerful people kinda think they're entitled to whatever they want. Michael Bloomberg wanted to be Mayor of New York. Jon Corzine wanted to be a Senator--then governor.  Perennial failure George W. Bush wanted to be governor, then President. Arnold and Jesse wanted to be governors. Life is just more fun and opportunity-filled when you're rich and famous. Deal with it.  

Well, look, obviously worse things have happened to American politics than the appointment of Caroline Kennedy to a U.S. Senate seat. But what's at issue here isn't so much dynastic politics, the gubernatorial-appointment system, or the particular entitlement of the rich and well-connected as the intersection of all three: Taken alone, these phenomena are tolerable; taken together, they're noxious enough to deserve at least some pushback. Yet instead, Kennedy's bizarre pseudo-campaign for the New York Senate (conducted amid a major scandal involving another Senate appointment!) has received all sorts of fawning press coverage from a media that still seems starstruck by her father forty-five years after his death.

Again, I can live with legacy politicians, underqualified appointees, and entitled rich people. I just think the Senate can do without an rich, underqualified legacy appointee whose press coverage would lead you to believe that she's a cross between Florence Nightingale, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Princess Diana and Princess Leia. But it looks like that's what we're going to get.

What Would Gore Have Done?

Responding to my reference to Truman and the atomic bomb in my rambling torture post, Ta-Nehisi asks an important question:

[Ross argues] that basically anyone other potential president in Truman's shoes would have done the same thing as Truman. But you simply can't make the same argument about Bush. Indeed, it's not even clear that every potential Republican president would have approved of water-boarding. I think you can fairly argue that Truman was in something of a historical--if not moral--bind. Some people will argue that Bush was also. But for the point Ross makes about Truman to be true of Bush, he would need to prove that Al Gore, and even John McCain, a torture victim himself, would have approved of water-boarding.

Right, and this is the nub of the issue - or one of the nubs, at least. To a large extent, how we think about the Bush Administration's interrogation policies depends on whether we think another president, Democratic or Republican, would have allowed the same sort of tactics in Bush's place. Jane Mayer thinks not, which is why she frames her reporting as a tale of far-right ideologues run amok, making war on American ideals in a fashion that's unprecedented in American history. But you don't have to look hard the history of our foreign policy, from the beginning of the twentieth century down the present day, to see continuities between the policies pursued by past Presidents and the approach the Bush Administration took to torture and/or torture-lite. Yes, the particular moral bind that Harry Truman faced with the atomic bomb was unique, but the logic he followed in that bind - that the potential gains to American security justified the brutal means - was typical of Presidents from William McKinley (whose Filipino counterinsurgency offers an interesting parallel to the Iraq War) down to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Again, I'll quote from Wesley Yang's Dark Side review:

While the struggle to defeat Fascism and Communism were worthy endeavours for which America deserves historical credit, both wars were fought in ways that would have landed American presidents before a war-crimes tribunal, at least according to the human rights standards that Americans have helped to foster, America's struggle against fascism included the only military use of nuclear weapons by any nation and the firebombing of German cities for no strategic purpose other than terrorising civilians; America's war against Communism involved training our client states in the use of assassination and torture - often against very bad men who were torturers and murderers themselves.

Nor did the end of the Cold War put an end to the bipartisan tendency toward placing raison d'etat above the standards of international law and morality that America officially aims to uphold. Ta-Nehisi wonders how President Gore would have handled the post-9/11 world, and in some sense it's obviously an unanswerable question. But it's worth recalling that the Clinton Administration, not the Bushies, pioneered "extraordinary rendition" - and it's worth citing this passage from Richard Clarke's memoir:

The first time I proposed a snatch, in 1993, the White House Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, demanded a meeting with the President to explain how it violated international law. Al Gore belatedly joined the meeting, having just flown overnight from South Africa. Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides for Gore: "Lloyd says this. Dick says that. Gore laughed and said, 'That's a no-brainer. Of course it's a violation of international law, that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.'"

Now imagine that mentality translated into a context - the months after 9/11 - when it was widely believed that the Clinton Administration had been way too timid and way too lawyered-up in its approach to al Qaeda. Is it really plausible to imagine President Gore would have approached these issues like the bearded liberal truth-to-power speaker he became once he lost the White House? Isn't it much, much more likely that he would have become a post-9/11 proponent of a still-more gloves-off approach to terror suspects? (Remember that leading Democrats were briefed, to some extent at least, on what the Bush Administration was doing, and apparently raised no significant objections; indeed, the Post reported that "at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder.")

Now this doesn't mean that a Gore Administration would have signed off on exactly the same interrogation tactics that the Bush Administration permitted, or allowed the same sort of abuses to take place. (Without the invasion of Iraq, too - which might have plausibly happened in a Gore Presidency, but certainly would have been less likely to take place - there would have been no desperate, bloody counterinsurgency for the Gitmo interrogation tactics to migrate into.) Maybe Gore would have drawn the line at waterboarding. Maybe there would have been less of what Conor Friedersdorf describes as "testosterone charged bungling" in the implementation of interrogation protocols. (Though Gore's "go grab his ass" line sounds an awful lot like something you would have heard around Dick Cheney's office ...) Maybe there would have been more focus on what these kind of tactics do to America's reputation, and to the ability of jihadist organizations to recruit new members. And certainly a different, better-managed, less insular and paranoid administration would have done a far better job of being self-critical, making room for dissenting views, correcting abuses and changing course than the current occupants of the White House did.

But as far as the baseline of Bush Administration wrongdoing goes - the decision to take an ends-justify-the-means approach to the interrogation of terror suspects - I do think it needs to be placed in historical context, and treated as an example of the kind of consequentialism that's endemic to modern Presidencies (and to international affairs more generally), rather than as a distinct break with a more idealistic, human-rights-centric American past. That doesn't mean that I'm trying to generate sympathy for the hard, hard lives of John Yoo or Dick Cheney. It just means that if we're going to talk about the current President and his advisors as war criminals - which is how many liberals would have us think about them - we need to follow that logic where it leads: Toward a more wholesale repudiation of how American foreign policy has traditionally been conducted (and how we think about presidents from FDR to Reagan) than I think many liberals would be willing to accept. Put another way: I believe that the Bush Administration's interrogation policy was immoral, in its design and in its execution, but I don't believe it belongs to a category of immorality wholly different from other sorts of moral compromises that American Presidents have made, and will continue to make, for as long as this country remains a great power.

Caroline 2016!

Ben Smith floats the balloon ...

If Caroline Kennedy is appointed to the Senate and wins reelection, and Barack Obama serves two successful terms, Senator Kennedy from New York, into her second term after two high-profile campaigns, having amazed the pundits with her ability to step on and off charter jets in Rochester and be friendly to members of the City Council, will be an automatic top-tier candidate for president.

...and Allahpundit responds:

Sounds good, but if we do it, let's do it the right way -- by electing a completely different Democratic ticket, having the VP resign and Caroline appointed to replace him, and then having the president resign. The Gerald Ford plan, in other words. That way she doesn't have to fatigue herself by campaigning.

Because campaigns, like taxes, are only for the little people ...

Update: But wait - there's more!

Thinking About Torture (III)

Naturally, the day that I suggested that conservatives have intermixed evasion and silence on the interrogation issue was the day that National Review published an editorial on the subject - blasting the Levin-McCain report, and offering a more detailed defense of the Bush Administration's detainee policy than I've read in some time.

I would need something much more detailed, though, to shift my views about the Administration's record on this front. Specifically, I would like a defender of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld approach to interrogation to write an extended review of Mayer's The Dark Side - as a joint review with Jack Goldsmith's The Terror Presidency, perhaps, or with any other book or report that seems relevant - and respond directly and in detail to the narrative she's pieced together, and to the direct and circumstantial evidence she marshals for a connection between the decisions made in the White House and the abuses that happened on the ground. To date, I don't think anything like this has appeared: Maybe I've missed something, but the most substantive critique of Mayer's work that I've seen belongs to Ben Wittes, and amid many criticisms he repeatedly praises the book's reporting, argues that the "larger narrative" she builds is essentially correct, and declares, accurately, that "no decent person can read her account of the CIA's interrogation program without something approaching nausea."

It's true that Mayer's analysis is often partisan and tendentious - you rarely forget that this is a book by a very liberal Democrat - and I think she doesn't reckon sufficiently with why the reactive, law-enforcement-based approach to counterterrorism that many of her sources clearly favor seemed so discredited after 9/11. But her reporting is deep and impressive and frequently horrifying, and the absence of a similarly deep and impressive response from the defenders of the Administration's policies - joined to the way her story dovetails with the one that Goldsmith and others have told - more or less forces me to the conclusion that she has the big picture right, and the Administration's defenders have it wrong.

Bernie Madoff, Stimulus Czar?

One of Tyler Cowen's alter egos gives Ben Bernanke some advice:

What about that guy who set up the phony investment company? Can the Treasury make a new one of those, only bigger? He took money away from people and gave it to charities and the needy and the arts and higher education. That sounds like stimulus so why are we sending him to jail? Wasn't he ahead of the curve?

For more serious stimulus-related commentary, here's Tyler citing a new paper on taxes, spending, and bang for your buck.

Thinking About Torture (II)

Since I quoted extensively from Mark Bowden's 2003 "Dark Art of Interrogation" essay in my last post, I should note that even as the essay suggested a distinction between coercion/torture-lite and torture proper, it was also quite explicit about how blurry the line between the two categories really is, and how easily coercion, if legally sanctioned, can shade into something darker:

It may be clear that coercion is sometimes the right choice, but how does one allow it yet still control it? Sadism is deeply rooted in the human psyche. Every army has its share of soldiers who delight in kicking and beating bound captives. Men in authority tend to abuse it--not all men, but many. As a mass, they should be assumed to lean toward abuse.

... And how does one define "coercion," as opposed to "torture"? If making a man sit in a tiny chair that forces him to hang painfully by his bound hands when he slides forward is okay, then what about applying a little pressure to the base of his neck to aggravate that pain? When does shaking or pushing a prisoner, which can become violent enough to kill or seriously injure a man, cross the line from coercion to torture?

... when the ban is lifted, there is no restraining lazy, incompetent, or sadistic interrogators. As long as it remains illegal to torture, the interrogator who employs coercion must accept the risk. He must be prepared to stand up in court, if necessary, and defend his actions.

I've cherry-picked these quotes; do read the whole thing. As I said, I'm not entirely sure that I agree with Bowden on the last point - if we are going to say that some sort of physical coercion has to be allowed the most extreme circumstances, then part of me thinks that the allowance has to be built into the law in some sense, rather than being "handled with a wink, or even a touch of hypocrisy," as Bowden puts it elsewhere in the piece. But certainly his description of the slippery slope that follows from offering a broad "yes" to torture-lite looks awfully prescient today.

Thinking About Torture

I haven't written anything substantial, ever, about America's treatment of detainees in the War on Terror. There are good reasons for this, and bad ones. Or maybe there's only one reason, and it's probably a bad one - a desire to avoid taking on a fraught and desperately importantly subject without feeling extremely confident about my own views on the subject.

I keep waiting, I think, for somebody else to write a piece about the subject that eloquently captures my own inarticulate mix of anger, uncertainty and guilt about the Bush Administration's interrogation policy, so that I can just point to their argument and say go read that. But so far as I know, nobody has. There's been straightforward outrage, obviously, from many quarters, and then there's been a lot of evasion - especially on the Right, where occasional defenses of torture in extreme scenarios have coexisted with a remarkable silence about the broad writ the Bush Administration seems to have extended to physically-abusive interrogation, and the human costs thereof. But to my knowledge, nobody's written something that captures the sheer muddiness that surrounds my own thinking (such as it is) on the issue.

That muddiness may reflect moral and/or intellectual confusion on my part, since the grounds for straightforward outrage are pretty obvious. There's a great deal of political tendentiousness  woven into Jane Mayer's The Dark Side, for instance, but it's very difficult to come away from her reportage unpersuaded that this Administration's counterterrorism policies exposed significant numbers of people - many guilty, but some innocent - to forms of detention and interrogation that we would almost certainly describe as torture if they were carried out by a lawless or dictatorial regime. For a less vivid but also somewhat less partisan analysis that reaches the same conclusion, you can read the executive summary of the just-released Levin-McCain report. (And of course both Mayer's book and the Armes Services Committee report are just the latest in a line of similar findings, by reporters and government investigations alike.)

Now it's true that a great deal of what seems to have been done to detainees arguably falls  into the category of what Mark Bowden, in his post-9/11 Atlantic essay on "The Dark Art of Interrogation," called "torture lite": It's been mostly "stress positions," extreme temperatures, and "smacky-face," not thumbscrews and branding irons. But it's also clear now, in a way that it wasn't when these things were still theoretical to most Americans, that the torture/torture lite distinction gets pretty blurry pretty quickly in practice. It's clear from the deaths suffered in American custody. It's clear from the testimony that Mayer puts together in her book. And it's clear from the outraged response, among conservatives and liberals alike, to the photographs from Abu Ghraib, which were almost all of practices closer to "torture-lite" than outright torture but which met, justly I think, with near-universal condemnation nonetheless. (And while it still may be true that in some sense, the horrors of Abu Ghraib involved individual bad apples running amok, they clearly weren't running all that far amok, since an awful lot the things they photographed themselves doing - maybe not the human pyramids, but the dogs, the hoods, the nudity and so forth - showed up on lists of interrogation techniques approved by the Secretary of Defense himself.)

So as far as the bigger picture goes, then, it seems indisputable that in the name of national security, and with the backing of seemingly dubious interpretations of the laws, this Administration pursued policies that delivered many detainees to physical and mental abuse, and not a few to death. These were wartime measures, yes, but war is not a moral blank check: If you believe that Abu Ghraib constituted a failure of jus in bello, then you have to condemn the decisions that led to Abu Ghraib, which means that you have to condemn the President and his Cabinet.

Given this reality, whence my uncertainty about how to think about the issue? Basically, it stems from the following thought: That while the Bush Administration's policies clearly failed a just-war test, they didn't fail it in quite so new a way as some of their critics suppose ... and moreover, had I been in their shoes I might have failed the test as well. On the first point, I actually have found an essay that captures my sentiments; it's Wesley Yang's review of The Dark Side, in which he writes as follows:

The polemical energy of Mayer's book comes from her outrage at the violation of these values. In her introduction, she characterises the Bush Administration's conduct in the War on Terror as "a quantum leap beyond earlier blots on the country's history and history," and "a dramatic break with the past." She invokes the judgment of the eminent liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, that "no position taken has done more damage to the American reputation in the world - ever."

But Mayer overplays her hand, going on to write that "in fighting to liberate the world from Communism, Fascism and Nazism, and working to ameliorate global ignorance and poverty, America had done more than any nation on earth to abolish torture and other violations of human rights." Here Mayer confuses the fact that America has always supported human rights in principle with the idea that it has always championed them in practice.

The tactics of the New Paradigm, after all, did not have to be invented from whole cloth. After September 11, Cheney turned to the CIA's archives in search of examples that had worked in the past. "He was particularly impressed," Mayer writes, "with the Vietnam War-era Phoenix Program.

"Critics, including military historians, have described it as a programme of state-sanctioned torture and murder. A Pentagon contract study later found that 97 per cent of the Viet Cong it targeted were of negligible importance. But as September 11, inside the CIA, the Phoenix Program served as a model."

Mayer doesn't have another word to say about the Phoenix Program, and her reticence is telling, in a book that is otherwise so exhaustive in the way it details the histories of its major players and the institutional background of the responsible agencies. The Phoenix Program was a CIA-directed operation to interrogate, detain or assassinate a network of Viet Cong insurgents who were themselves torturing and assassinating South Vietnamese officials. A Senate investigation later concluded 20,000 Viet Cong were killed in the process.

Mayer doesn't specify what Cheney took from the Phoenix Program, but he certainly found confirmation that we had done these things before, and on a massive scale. CIA interrogation manuals issued in 1963 and 1983 and used by American client states in the proxy battles of the Cold War in Latin America and elsewhere also listed ways to force a recalcitrant subject to talk. She quotes a historian of the CIA noting that our latter-day torturers not only used those techniques, "they perfected them" - underscoring the fact that they were already there to be perfected.

Mayer is too scrupulous a reporter not to mention these departures from American values. But she is also too committed to a particular narrative - in which America's status as the country that "had done more than any nation on earth to abolish torture and other violations of human rights" has been suddenly hijacked by bad men in the Bush administration - to follow that disclosure to its conclusion.

Which is simply this: America has always remained true to its values - except in the rather numerous instances when it has violated them.

Yang describes this as one of "the genuine paradoxes of power that no nation-state aspiring to global leadership can evade." And indeed, the most compelling and intellectually-consistent condemnations of the Bush Administration have come from precisely those factions - on the left, and also the small-r republican right - who believe that the United States should not aspire to global leadership, because such aspirations require unacceptable compromises with the bloody realities involved in power politics and empire.

For those of us, though, who persist in the belief that some sort of American global leadership is better, for all its inherent problems, than most of the alternatives, Yang's analysis has to be reckoned with in ways that go beyond simply describing Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and the CIA "black sites" as unique affronts to American values. These and other Bush-era sins have to be considered in the context of previous moral compromises that we've found a way to live with.

For instance: The use of the atomic bomb. I think it's very, very difficult to justify Harry Truman's decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki in any kind of plausible just-war framework, and if that's the case then the nuclear destruction of two Japanese cities - and indeed, the tactics employed in our bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan more broadly - represents a "war crime" that makes Abu Ghraib look like a trip to Pleasure Island. (And this obviously has implications for the justice of our entire Cold War nuclear posture as well.) But in so thinking, I also have to agree with Richard Frank's argument that "it is hard to imagine anyone who could have been president at the time (a spectrum that includes FDR, Henry Wallace, William O. Douglas, Harry Truman, and Thomas Dewey) failing to authorize use of the atomic bombs" - in so small part because I find it hard to imagine myself being in Truman's shoes and deciding the matter differently, my beliefs about just-war principle notwithstanding.

The same difficulty obtains where certain forms of torture are concerned. If I find it hard to condemn Harry Truman for incinerating tens of thousands of Japanese civilians, even though I think his decision probably violated the moral framework that should govern the conduct of war, I certainly find it hard to condemn the waterboarding of, say, a Khalid Sheikh Muhammed in the aftermath of an event like 9/11, and with more such attacks presumably in the planning stages. I disagree with Charles Krauthammer, who has called torture in such extreme circumstances a "moral duty"; rather, I would describe it as a kind of immorality that we cannot expect those charged with the public's safety to always and everywhere refrain from. (Perhaps this means, as some have suggested, that we should ban torture, but issue retroactive pardons to an interrogator who crosses the line when confronted with extreme circumstances and high-value targets. But I suspect that this "maybe you'll get retroactive immunity, wink wink" approach probably places too great a burden on the individual interrogator, and that ultimately some kind of mechanism is required whereby the use of extreme measures in extreme circumstances is brought within the law.)

Yet of course the waterboarding of al Qaeda's high command, despite the controversy it's generated, is not in fact the biggest moral problem posed by the Bush Administration's approach to torture and interrogation. The biggest problem is the sheer scope of the physical abuse that was endorsed from on high - the way it was routinized, extended to an ever-larger pool of detainees, and delegated ever-further down the chain of command. Here I'm more comfortable saying straightforwardly that this should never have been allowed - that it should be considered impermissible as well as immoral, and that it should involve disgrace for those responsible, the Cheneys and Rumsfelds as well as the people who actually implemented the techniques that the Vice President's office promoted and the Secretary of Defense signed off on.

But here, too, I have uncertainty, mixed together with guilt, about how strongly to condemn those involved - because in a sense I know that what they were doing was what I wanted to them to do.

Oh, not in every particular: As was often the case with the Bush Administration, I didn't envision many of the stupidities involved (reverse-engineering interrogation from training exercises designed to prepare for ChiCom brainwashing? really?); or the way that the debates over torture would intersect with controversies over executive power, the design of military tribunals, and so forth; or the precise scale and scope that any "torture-lite" program would take on. But I certainly remember how I felt about interrogation in the aftermath of 9/11: I felt that we were all suddenly in a ticking-bomb scenario, that the gloves have to come off, and that all kinds of things needed to be on the table. When Dick Cheney said that we have to work on "the dark side" in the post-9/11 environment, I thought that he was only stating the obvious. When Cofer Black, the CIA man who's depicted, perhaps unfairly, as a blundering fool in Mayer's account, appeared in accounts of Bush's late-2001 cabinet meetings as the guy who said of Al Qaeda, "when we're through with them they will have flies walking across their eyeballs," my instinctive reaction was hell yeah. And when Bowden walked Atlantic readers through the debate over torture-lite, I knew whose side I was on. Read it for yourself:

The word "torture" comes from the Latin verb torquere, "to twist." Webster's New World Dictionary offers the following primary definition: "The inflicting of severe pain to force information and confession, get revenge, etc." Note the adjective "severe," which summons up images of the rack, thumbscrews, gouges, branding irons, burning pits, impaling devices, electric shock, and all the other devilish tools devised by human beings to mutilate and inflict pain on others. All manner of innovative cruelty is still commonplace, particularly in Central and South America, Africa, and the Middle East ...

Then there are methods that, some people argue, fall short of torture. Called "torture lite," these include sleep deprivation, exposure to heat or cold, the use of drugs to cause confusion, rough treatment (slapping, shoving, or shaking), forcing a prisoner to stand for days at a time or to sit in uncomfortable positions, and playing on his fears for himself and his family. Although excruciating for the victim, these tactics generally leave no permanent marks and do no lasting physical harm.

The Geneva Convention makes no distinction: it bans any mistreatment of prisoners. But some nations that are otherwise committed to ending brutality have employed torture lite under what they feel are justifiable circumstances. In 1987 Israel attempted to codify a distinction between torture, which was banned, and "moderate physical pressure," which was permitted in special cases. Indeed, some police officers, soldiers, and intelligence agents who abhor "severe" methods believe that banning all forms of physical pressure would be dangerously naive. Few support the use of physical pressure to extract confessions, especially because victims will often say anything (to the point of falsely incriminating themselves) to put an end to pain. But many veteran interrogators believe that the use of such methods to extract information is justified if it could save lives--whether by forcing an enemy soldier to reveal his army's battlefield positions or forcing terrorists to betray the details of ongoing plots. As these interrogators see it, the well-being of the captive must be weighed against the lives that might be saved by forcing him to talk. A method that produces life-saving information without doing lasting harm to anyone is not just preferable; it appears to be morally sound.

Reading Mayer's book, the recent Senate report, and other sources, it seems clear that this was roughly the logic that motivated much of what was authorized in CIA prisons, in Gitmo, and eventually in a suicide-bomber-raddled Iraq - a logic that convinced figures like Rumsfeld and George Bush that they were stopping short of torture (think of Rumsfeld's dismissive margin comment, as he authorized long-term standing, that he stood for 8-10 hours a day, so why shouldn't prisoners?) even as the the practices they authorized led inexorably to abuse, violence and even death.

Some of the most passionate torture opponents have stated that they never, ever imagined that the Bush Administration would even consider authorizing the sort of interrogation techniques described above, to say nothing of more extreme measures like waterboarding. I was not so innocent, or perhaps I should I say I was more so: If you had listed, in the aftermath of 9/11, most of the things that have been done to prisoners by representatives of the U.S. government, I would have said that of course I expected the Bush Administration to authorize "stress positions," or "slapping, shoving and shaking," or the use of heat and cold to elicit information. After all, there was a war on! I just had no idea - until the pictures came out of Abu Ghraib, and really until I started reading detailed accounts of how detainees were being treated - what these methods could mean in practice, and especially as practiced on a global scale. A term like "stress positions" sounds like one thing when it's sitting, bloodless, on a page; it sounds like something else when somebody dies from it.

Now obviously what I've said with regard to the financial crisis is also true in this arena: With great power comes the responsibility to exercise better judgment than, say, my twenty-three year old, pro-torture-lite self. But with great power comes a lot of pressures as well, starting with great fear: The fear that through inaction you'll be responsible for the deaths of thousands or even millions of the Americans whose lived you were personally charged to protect. This fear ran wild the post-9/11 Bush Administration, with often-appalling consequences, but it wasn't an irrational fear - not then, and now. It doesn't excuse what was done by our government, and in our name, in prisons and detention cells around the world. But anyone who felt the way I felt after 9/11 has to reckon with the fact that what was done in our name was, in some sense, done for us - not with our knowledge, exactly, but arguably with our blessing. I didn't get what I wanted from this administration, but I think you could say with some justification that I got what I asked for. And that awareness undergirds - to return to where I began this rambling post - the mix of anger, uncertainty and guilt that I bring to the current debate over what the Bush Administration has done and failed to do, and how its members should be judged.

The Princess and the Senate

Chris Smith finds a novel way of expressing skepticism about Caroline Kennedy's decision to pursue her birthright an appointment to the U.S. Senate:
 

... the plot has some weaknesses. Perhaps it's still possible to be a different kind of senator, in the Paul Simon-Pat Moynihan mold: a legislator-intellectual, above and in the fray at the same time, who leaves office with his good name intact. Caroline Kennedy's desire to deploy her brains and her celebrity on a grander stage, primarily in service of public education, is admirable. But even if her motives are pure, and even if she's able to navigate the swamp of modern politics, there'd be something sad about seeing her subjected to all the grubby gossiping and money-hustling that the job inevitably entails. We'd be gaining a senator, possibly even a good one. But we'd be losing an icon.

I didn't think it was possible, but in a sense Smith has managed to out-Marcus Ruth Marcus: He's taken her starstruck case that Caroline Kennedy should get a Senate seat handed to her a silver platter because, well, she's an American Princess and turned it into an argument that Kennedy shouldn't take the seat because her fairy princess-y combination of gifts (she's a icon-cum-intellectual, a celebrity brainiac Cinderella, and she has a servant's heart besides) makes her way too good for the job!

(Because if there's a name that screams "too pure for the grubbiness of politics," it's definitely Kennedy ...)

The "Campaign" Begins

America's Princess has decided to claim her inheritance:

Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of an American political dynasty, has decided to pursue the United States Senate seat being vacated by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, a person told of her decision said on Monday.

The decision came after a series of deeply personal and political conversations, in which Ms. Kennedy, whom friends describe as unflashy but determined, wrestled with whether to give up what has been a lifetime of avoiding the spotlight.

Ms. Kennedy will ask Gov. David A. Paterson of New York to consider her for the appointment, according to the person told of her decision. The governor was traveling to Utica today and could not immediately be reached for comment.

If appointed, Ms. Kennedy would fill the seat once held by her uncle, Robert F. Kennedy.

You would think that in the aftermath of l'affaire Blago, a public figure would be wary of having the terms "pursue" and "United States Senate seat" in a sentence that doesn't also include the word "election." But then again, maybe I'm just not thinking like a Kennedy.

Is Planned Parenthood Pro-Life?

If you want a reason why an abortion compromise isn't possible, try this contrast: My idea of a plausible middle ground on the issue requires the overturning of Roe v. Wade, followed by a move toward a system in which abortion is legal but discouraged in, say, the first ten weeks of pregnancy, and basically illegal thereafter. Whereas Will Saletan and Freddie De Boer, both serious-minded pro-choicers, are convinced that a plausible middle ground would involve pragmatic pro-lifers throwing their support (and tax dollars) behind America's largest abortion provider, on the grounds that its commitment to preventing unplanned pregnancy makes Planned Parenthood "the most effective pro-life organization in the history of the world."

There are two things to be said about the latter notion, beyond what I said in my last post (and what John Schwenkler has to say here and here and here). The first is that just because it seems intuitive - to liberals, at least - that Planned Parenthood's efforts at making contraception available and affordable dramatically reduce the abortion rate doesn't necessarily make it so. Here I'd refer you to the extended, years-old argument between Megan (then "Jane Galt," of course) and Peter Northrup on contraception and abortion: Suffice it to say that the link between the availability of Planned Parenthood's services and the abortion rate is, well, non-obvious at best. Indeed, a quick gloss on the state-level data from the 1990s that Megan cited in her debate with Northrup would seem to suggest that the best way to reduce your abortion rate is to straightforwardly make abortions harder to get, through legal restrictions and cultural pressure. After all, liberal, well-off, Planned Parenthood-friendly Massachusetts, had a late-'90s abortion rate roughly twice as high as poor, socially-conservative states like Mississippi, Arkansas and Alabama, and more than three times as high as highly pro-life states like South Dakota and Utah.

Now of course correlation isn't causation, and there are presumably many other factors at work in these state-level numbers than just the legal and cultural climate - racial and ethnic disparities, urban and rural differences, and so forth. But at the very least I'd like to see a lot more rigorous, data-rich analysis on this subject before I'd even concede that Planned Parenthood's preventive efforts do have a bigger impact on the abortion rate than legal and cultural efforts to restrict abortion, let alone that they trim the rate of unintended pregnancies sufficiently to outweigh the organization's efforts to make the procedure as cheap and easy to obtain as possible.

But the deeper point is this: The interaction between public policy and social trends is highly complex, and very difficult to predict, and thus there are any number of policy choices that can be plausibly said bear on the abortion rate, for good or ill. The distribution of contraception is just a small part of the pantomime. Which means that once you take the legal debate over the rights of the unborn out of the picture, and start redefining being pro-life as "pursuing lower abortion rates through policy choices,"  almost any policy preference can be re-cast as "pro-life." Married women tend to have fewer abortions, so clearly ending the marriage penalty was the most pro-life measure of the last fifteen years! But wait: There's evidence that increases in state-level Medicaid funding correlate with lower abortion rates in the short term - so maybe liberal Democrats are real pro-lifers! But wait again: Welfare reform and the economic boom of the 1990s correlated with plunging abortion rates, so maybe free-market conservatives are the real pro-lifers! But wait again: Maybe the abortion rate fell in the 1990s because the sort of women who would have grown up to have abortions were themselves aborted in the post-Roe 1970s ... so people who favor maximizing the abortion rate, paradoxically, turn out to be the real pro-lifers!

You can play this game ad infinitum. If the definition of being pro-life is "desiring the sort of circumstances that tend to reduce the abortion rate," than almost everybody is pro-life, because almost everybody thinks that their favored positions on trade, government spending, tax policy, the minimum wage and so forth will lead to better socioeconomic outcomes overall - and better socioeconomic outcomes overall will probably lead to fewer women seeking abortions. Now I'm obviously happy to have broad debates about public policy, and I certainly think that pro-lifers should be interested in crafting a broadly pro-family politics in addition to seeking a more pro-life legal regime. But the pro-life cause is primarily about issues of law, morality and justice, and if pro-lifers treat the broader pursuit of socioeconomic progress as a substitute for, rather than a complement to, the pursuit of legal protections for the unborn, then they've given up on their movement's raison d'etre to no good effect. Pro-lifers can and should be willing to compromise within the debate about how the law should treat unborn human life, by agreeing to legal regimes that stop short of their ultimate goal. But a "compromise" that involves giving up on that debate entirely in favor of arguments over which domestic-policy interventions will reduce the abortion rate on the demand side is no compromise at all: It would strip the pro-life movement of its purpose, drain it of its idealism, and transform it into an advocacy group for, well, good public policy, which practically every other political movement and organization claims to be already.

My Tax Dollars At Work

Inquiring liberal minds want to know why pro-lifers are eager to have the government stop giving Planned Parenthood hundreds of millions of dollars every year. After all, writes Ezra Klein, "abortion services comprise three percent of the services" that Planned Parenthood delivers, which means that if you cut their funding "you're mainly cutting contraception funding, thus ensuring more unwanted pregnancies and more abortions ... This is how the pro-life movement also becomes, in effect, the pro-herpes movement and the anti-birth control movement."

Just three percent, hmm? Why, that makes it sound like Planned Parenthood almost never performs abortions. Of course, the reality is rather different, as Charlotte Allen noted last year:

The 3 percent pie slice in the 2005-06 financial report, representing 264,943 abortion customers served, can only be described as deliberately misleading.

One way Planned Parenthood massages the numbers to make its abortion business look trivial is to unbundle its services for purposes of counting. Those 10.1 million different medical procedures in the last fiscal year, for instance, were administered to only 3 million clients. An abortion is invariably preceded by a pregnancy test--a separate service in Planned Parenthood's reckoning--and is almost always followed at the organization's clinics by a "going home" packet of contraceptives, which counts as another separate service. Throw in a pelvic exam and a lab test for STDs--you get the picture. In terms of absolute numbers of clients, one in three visited Planned Parenthood for a pregnancy test, and of those, a little under one in three had a Planned Parenthood abortion.

And even if they weren't massaging the numbers - even if their non-abortion business were enormous enough to make that three percent claim legitimate - they would still be performing more than 250,000 abortions a year. That's a 2, a 5, and four zeros - a figure that accounts, by Allen's reckoning, for somewhere north of $100 million in annual revenue for the organization, and that contrasts rather strikingly with the number 1,414, which is how many women the organization referred to an adoption agency in 2004-2005. (They've since stopped even reporting the adoption-referral number, apparently.).

If you're not against abortion, obviously, there's no reason any of this should bother you: Planned Parenthood's commitment to performing hundreds of thousands of low-cost abortions annually is a feature, not a bug. But telling people who are against abortion that they're "pro-herpes" because they don't support channeling three hundred million public dollars a year to America's largest abortion provider is the equivalent of me accusing a fierce and moralizing anti-theist like Sam Harris of being "anti-education" because he doesn't want his tax dollars being used to, say, fund the Catholic school system. The phenomenon of an institution that does good with one hand and evil with another is a familiar one in human history - even Hezbollah does a lot of impressive humanitarian work, I believe - and it does not by any means follow that those who oppose the evil are morally obligated to support the institution anyway just because it does other, less morally problematic things besides.

Petraeus 2012 (But Not How You Think)

Rod Dreher:

... the other day I was part of a conversation in which people were talking about the Blagojevich mess, and I overheard an elderly veteran say, "What we need in this country is a coup. Just bring the military in and straighten things out."

I asked him if he really meant that, and if he understood what he was saying.

"Hell yeah," he said. "Look at 'em." He meant Congress and Wall Street.

I think we'll be hearing a lot more of this in the years to come.

Some of you may have read Charles Dunlap's famous early-1990s piece imagining a military coup d'etat in the near-future United States. (He also participated in a Harper's roundtable on the same theme several years ago.) But even if you have read it, you may not remember - as I did not until I looked it up - the year in which he set his coup scenario.

It was, of course, the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Twelve.

Pragmatism They Can Believe In?

Chris Hayes critiques the Obama-as-pragmatist meme from the left ...

The chief failure of Bushism, according to Sunstein, is not its content but its form. Not the substance of ideology but the fact that he was too wedded to it, too rigid and dogmatic. It's a view widely held in Washington. Many, like Sunstein, have drawn a lesson from the past eight years that is not about the failure of conservatism - neo or otherwise - or the dangers of the particularly toxic ideological disposition of the Bush administration ... No, through a kind of collective category error, they have alighted on a far more general moral to the story: ideology, in any form, is dangerous. "Obama's victory does not signal a shift in ideology in this country," wrote Roger Simon in Politico. "It signals that the American public has grown weary of ideologies." No less an ideologue than Pat Buchanan has come to this same understanding. "If there is a one root cause of the Bush failures," he wrote, "it has been his fatal embrace of ideology."

If "pragmatic" is the highest praise one can offer in DC these days, "ideological" is perhaps the sharpest slur. And it is by this twisted logic that the crimes of the Bush cabinet are laid at the feet of the blogosphere, that the sins of Paul Wolfowitz end up draped upon the slender shoulders of Dennis Kucinich.

... but also holds out hope for it:

Obama could do worse than look to John Dewey, another onetime resident of Hyde Park and the founder of the University of Chicago Laboratory School, which Obama's daughters attend. Dewey developed the work of earlier pragmatists in a particularly fruitful and apposite manner. For him, the crux of pragmatism, and indeed democracy, was a rejection of the knowability of foreordained truths in favor "variability, initiative, innovation, departure from routine, experimentation."

Dewey's pragmatism was reformist, not radical ... Nonetheless, pragmatism requires an openness to the possibility of radical solutions ... Dewey understood that progress demands that the boat be rocked. And his contemporary Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood it as well. "The country needs," Roosevelt said in May 1932, "and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands, bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach."

That is pragmatism we can believe in. Our times demand no less.

And the experimentation will start, of course, with bold, persistent attempts to pour massive amounts of taxpayer money into failing industries, while demanding that said industries begin investing in even-less-profitable ventures than the ones they're currently engaged in! Hurrah! Next up: The Blue Eagle makes a comeback ...

Sorry, sorry. All snark aside, Chris's "optimistic" scenario strikes me as reasonably plausible: After all, a regnant ideological liberalism that cloaks its ideological assumptions in the insistence that it's really pragmatic, results-oriented, and anti-ideological was the default setting for American politics for an awfully long time, and indeed remained the default setting for the political establishment on a great many questions even during the post-Reagan conservative ascendancy. It's pretty easy to imagine the country settling back into a groove that it never completely left.

The big question for progressives, I tend to think, isn't whether Barack Obama ends up draping the language of non-ideological "experimentation" around a succession of proposals that would shift American policy distinctly leftward and make John Dewey smile: He's already done that. It's whether the policy shifts he embraces will go far enough to reconcile progressives to the fact that a "non-ideological" liberalism, in our era as in the earlier liberal ascendancy, requires an ideological Left as its foil. In practice, this means that Obama will probably often end up defining himself against progressivism, rhetorically, even when he's embracing progressive ideas. (See his campaign's extremely effective health-care ads for an example of how this works in practice.) The President-elect's ability to hold his coalition together, then, may depend in no small part on whether the Democratic Party's left wing feels that it's getting enough out of his Presidency in practice to justify playing the bad guy in the narrative Obama will be selling to the country as a whole, in which post-partisan "whatever works" pragmatism triumphs over ideologues of the left and right alike.

Update: Reihan weighs in here.

Gods and Monsters

John Derbyshire takes note of a study showing that large percentages of Americans believe in ghosts, angels, demons, and so forth, and writes:

Nothing very surprising there. It's interesting to note one's own reactions on reading a news item like that. The reaction must, I suppose, be personality-dependendent. It will fall somewhere in a range from:  "I am surrounded by idiots!"  to:  "What an oddball freak I must be!"  (I find myself closer to the latter end of that spectrum.)

News items like this also raise the cog-sci questions that our Mr. Hume is good at:  What do people actually mean by any of this?  Do they actually conduct their lives on the working assumption that the next stranger they meet may be an angel, a ghost, Satan, or a UFO crewman? (Ans: Obviously not.)  How many could give a coherent account of the theory they reject? (Ans: Vanishingly few.)  What does "believe" actually mean in this context? (Ans: Nothing very functional.)

Well, it depends on how you define "functional." I doubt that very many people who believe in angels and devils play an "is he a demon in disguise?" guessing game every time they meet a new co-worker. But having spent a fair bit of time around such people (and, well, being one myself), I'd argue that belief in the existence of supernatural beings does actually tend to exert a not-inconsiderable pull on the way that people interpret and respond to life - both to their ordinary experiences, psychological and otherwise, and to the supernatural/numinous experiences that are reasonably common features of human existence.

Now the relative importance of a belief in supernatural agents, and the extent which it intrudes on day-to-day affairs, depends, as you might expect, on the specifics of the belief system in question, and the particular emphases it places. For instance, Evangelicals and (especially) Pentecostals tend to invoke demonic agency much more frequently than Roman Catholics, at least in my experience (and in the American Catholic Church; things are rather different elsewhere). Thus while Hollywood's exorcists invariably come clothed in priestly habits, actual exorcism-prayer of various sorts - the kind of "spiritual warfare" that freaks Christopher Hitchens out so much - is a far more important part of religious practice among American Pentecostals than among American Papists, for whom the demonic is something you invoke to explain and understand extraordinary experiences, not more mundane body-and-soul crises like, say, alcoholism or drug addiction. (Though of course Catholics frequently invoke saintly agency, which is its own category of supernatural belief, in ways that members of other Christian traditions don't.)

But even extraordinary happenings aren't, well, all that extraordinary. Religious belief exists and persists in part because religious experiences exist and persist - even if they're far from universal, as Derb will be happy to inform you - and in existing and persisting seem to cry out for an explanation. And many of the numinous encounters that people seek to explain, both to others and to themselves, don't fall into the "oneness with the universe" category that gets the students of brain states and meditation so excited: They're often weirder than that, and often darker. Like, say, the childhood experience of the British writer Hilary Mantel:

When Hilary Mantel was seven, she met the devil. Well, not exactly: but she did encounter something so evil that even now she finds it hard to explain what she chanced on in the garden. "I couldn't say I saw it," she says slowly. "I'm talking about something at the very border of sensory experience. I could walk to where it was, could say how high it was and describe the speed at which it moved. But how I got the information, through which sense, I don't know." What Mantel does know is that she felt she had witnessed something she wasn't meant to. "The experience was absolutely destroying, as if my body was falling apart at a cellular level, which expressed itself in intense nausea. The way I rationalised it was that it was the devil. As a Catholic, that was the theology I had at my command." The family home itself was haunted and this presence seemed like "a concentration of things that were going on in the house - the unhappiness of our family and the pressure of secrets and lies."

As her language suggests, belief in the demonic, at the most basic level, is a way of explaining and rationalizing a certain category of human experience. There are other ways to rationalize such things, obviously: If you're a hard-bitten materialist who has a Mantel-style encounter ("It is as high as a child of two. Its depth is a foot, fifteen inches. The air stirs around it, invisibly . . . It has no edges, no mass, no dimension, no shape except the formless; it moves."), you may either find a non-Catholic, non-supernatural way of explaining what you've just experienced, or else simply profess agnosticism about what, if anything, it means. (For a fascinating example in this vein, see the staunch atheist A.J. Ayer on his own near-death experience.) But if you want to understand what, if anything, a person means when he says he believes in demons or angels or ghosts, the simplest baseline answer is this: He means that if confronted with an encounter or an experience that seems demonic or ghostly or angelic and asked to rationalize it, he will be inclined to give credence (like the seven-year-old Mantel) to the possibility that the encounter is, in fact, what it appears to be.

Too Big To Fail, World Edition

Speaking of future foreign policy debates, Ambinder raises a good question:

... Where the discussion isn't going, at least in public,  (or the PR level), is the possibility that the first foreign policy crisis the administration will face will be the complete economic collapse of a large, unstable nation. To be sure, Pakistan is nearly broke, and U.S. policy makers seem to be aware of that; but a worldwide demand crisis could lead to social unrest in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, Singapore, the Ukraine, Japan, Turkey or Egypt (which is facing an internal political crisis of epic proportions already). The U.S. won't have the resources to, say, engineer the rescue of the peso again, or intervene in Asia as in 1997.

The public rhetoric from Team Obama seems to treat history as having ended in early October, which is understandable; the priority right now is on the liquidity crisis, the structure of government and the peopling of the administration and the domestic economy.  Most of the administration's major policy voices don't have the luxury of time to game out scenarios. Now -- it can fairly be said that Treasury nominee Tim Geithner, himself an assistant secretary for international economic affairs during the Clinton administration, is aware of the precarious state demand in certain critical countries, as is Larry Summers.  The question: what's the administration's policy in this area? Which countries can we afford to let fail? Which unstable states would concern us the most? Is there something the U.S. can do, in advance, should do, in advance, to forestall the collapse of other economies?

Today: GM. Tomorrow: the Egypt bailout ...?

The Foreign Policy Debate, Past and Future

Of my various remarks about foreign-policy schools, a reader writes:

I think you're creating all sorts of divisions where none really exist. There is NO substantive division between Democratic realists and Democratic internationalists and not much between them and their likeminded Republican brethren. The predominant strain of thought in American foreign policy since WW 2 has been liberal/internationalist/

realist. It was conceived by Acheson/Marshall/Kennan/Harriman et al. and pursued by every administration, Republican or Democrat, from then until 2000. Separate this from domestic political posturing, and apart from minor shading the policy differences of Acheson, Dulles, Rusk, Kissinger, Shultz and Albright are indiscernible. Essentially, it consisted of enlightened self interest pursued through containment of adversaries; operating through international institutions wherever possible; and the fostering of alliance systems. On the whole it was a fairly respectable endeavor although there was dirty dealing from time to time. Occasionally, the bus would come off the road of course, notably over Vietnam, and Jingoism or the military lobby would get the upper hand, but it seldom lasted long.

 

In 2001 there really was a quantum shift in policy to one of overt interventionism; rejection of traditional international institutions as a problem solving mechanism; disinterest in the views of major allies; open support of the most extreme Israeli positions in the middle east; and the embrace of attempts to export democracy, even if in a somewhat ham handed way. This whole approach was increasingly dominated by domestic political considerations, perhaps that was its original genesis, and it has proved fairly disastrous in almost every respect ...

 

Now with the election of Democratic administration the inevitable reaction has set in and the Republican internationalist/realists are anxious to get back in their traditional groove alongside the folks who think the same way in the Democratic party ... you and Yglesias are quite wrong, this state of affairs is sustainable for a very long time. Any fault lines that appear are far more likely to be between a Lugar and a Cheney than between a Lugar and a Clinton. There are no fault lines between a Daschle and a Clinton. I use these names, but this is not really a matter of personalities despite the media's obsession with people rather than substance.

I think thus is rather like Robert Kagan's suggestion last year that we are all neocons of some sort or another: It emphasizes important commonalities - in this case, among post-WWII internationalists of various sorts, especially during the Cold War - but elides extremely important differences in order to make its case. Saying "the predominant strain of thought in American foreign policy since WW 2 has been liberal/internationalist/realist" is like saying that "the predominant strain of thought in American domestic policy since WW 2 has been liberal/neoliberal/neoconservative." It gets at the important point that policymaking has operated within a more constrained range than many people think, but it obscures the fact that there are very important differences between domestic-policy neoconservatism and domestic-policy liberalism - or between, say, the realist internationalism of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the liberal hawkery of John F. Kennedy. (Just compare this speech to this speech ...) The latter set of differences manifested themselves most notably in our policy toward Indochina - and if your case that the Iraq War represents a unique break with five decades of unbroken foreign-policy consensus requires dismissing the years America spent embroiled in Vietnam as a case where the bus went "off the road" modestly but not for long, you're probably overselling your argument a bit.

Likewise, the fact that two out of the three living "Establishment" foreign-policy hands on my emailer's list - Shultz and Kissinger - publicly supported the invasion of Iraq, which supposedly represented a "quantum shift" away from their steady stewardship and into crypto-Likudnik jingoism, ought to be a tip-off that the landscape of foreign-policy debate is rather more complicated than he suggests. To the extent that there was an over-arching consensus that bound together the (pretty different, in my view) foreign-policy approaches of John Foster Dulles and Henry Kissinger, it vanished with the Cold War, and the last two decades have sent members of every school of thought groping for new guideposts, a state of affairs that's produced strange bedfellows, peculiar political migrations (see Buchanan, Pat, or Hitchens, Christopher) and odd dissonances (compare Charles Krauthammer on Kosovo to Charles Krauthammer on, well, almost every foreign-policy crisis since).  9/11 and the Iraq War magnified this sense of dislocation, in a sense, first by temporarily forging a new interventionist consensus anchored by neoconservatives and liberal hawks and joined by many realists, and then by just as quickly unraveling that consensus, which has now given way to the (theoretically) united front of realists, liberal internationalists and progressives that's on display in the Obama Administration.

Maybe this unity will be permanent: Maybe Robert Gates (who, one might note, has been retained as a reward for his success implementing a strategy vocally championed by ... neoconservatives), Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice will establish a new consensus that lasts for years or decades to come, with neocons chattering their teeth out in the cold. But more likely, it will last right up until the first major foreign-policy crisis of the Obama years, at which point the sort of ideological debates you saw inside the Clinton Administration over issues ranging from Yugoslavia to Osama Bin Laden will flare up in new and different forms. (And no, pace my correspondent, it really isn't that hard to imagine scenarios in which Hillary Clinton and Dick Lugar - or, more aptly, Robert Gates - end up on the opposite sides of an issue.)

How these debates will shake out is anyone's guess. Certainly, it's easy to imagine short term alliances-of-convenience between realists and progressives, and between liberal hawks and out-of-power neocons. But it's also easy to envision debates that push realists and neoconservatives back into one another's arms, or at the very least, forge a new generation of realists who feel uncomfortable in the Democratic Party. Debates over nation-building, say, and humanitarian interventions. Or arguments over counterrorism policy - where, say, a Jack Goldsmith isn't ultimately on the same side as many of the people who have praised him for opposing the excesses of Cheneyism. Or (perhaps most importantly) the long-term debates over national sovereignty and global governance that Gideon Rachman brings up in his latest FT column. Ultimately, all the different sorts of internationalists just aren't on the same side about a lot of very important issues, and I suspect that a host of cleavages that are currently obscured won't take all that long to re-emerge.

Luck, Hard Work and Meritocracy

There's some interesting discussion around David Leonhardt's review of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers - and particularly around this passage:

These two stories about Gladwell are both true, and yet they are also very different. The first personalizes his success. It is the classically American version of his career, in that it gives individual characteristics -- talent, hard work, Horatio Alger-like pluck -- the starring role. The second version doesn't necessarily deny these characteristics, but it does sublimate them. The protagonist is not a singularly talented person who took advantage of opportunities. He is instead a talented person who took advantage of singular opportunities.[...]

Many people, I think, have an instinctual understanding of this idea (even if Gladwell, in the interest of setting his thesis against conventional wisdom, doesn't say so). That's why parents spend so much time worrying about what school their child attends. They don't really believe the child is so infused with greatness that he or she can overcome a bad school, or even an average one. And yet when they look back years later on their child's success -- or their own -- they tend toward explanations that focus on the individual.

One (perhaps obvious) thing that's worth noting here is that meritocracy, whatever its weaknesses, really does inculcate an extremely potent ethic of near-obsessive hard work - and it really does discriminate, in the rewards it bestows, between people who work hard and people who don't. This means that while meritocratic success tends to be inherited, in an important sense - because the whole culture of obsessive hyper-achievement is just that, a culture that some Americans are raised in and steeped in and some aren't - everybody doesn't inherit the same level of success. Getting into the right kind of schools because you have the right kind of parents is generally a necessary condition for ascending the meritocratic ladder, but it isn't a sufficient one; it tends to create a floor for failure, but it doesn't guarantee a ceiling for achievement. And this is true of narrower sorts of luck, as well, whether it's Bill Gates having a computer lab in his high school or Matt Yglesias starting a blog in the early days of the blogosphere: Tens of thousands of people started blogs in 2003 or 2004, but not very many people kept up the damn astonishing blogging pace that Yglesias has maintained ever since.

Thus the importance of the 10,000 hours aspect of Gladwell's argument - and thus, too, the psychological phenomenon Leonhardt is describing. Before you've put in your ten thousand hours (or before your child has done so), it makes sense to focus intently on the preconditions for success, rather than assuming that with enough hard work and talent you or your offspring can overcome any obstacle thrown in your way. But many of those preconditions are set, by definition, early in the life cycle, and the experience of actually succeeding takes place over the course of years of often-grinding work, in which a given meritocrat's work ethic makes a significant difference in how well you do relative to your peer group. (Not as much of a difference as being born a Kennedy, of course, but then again we only have so many fairy princesses ...)

By the time you reach the end of your career, then, what seems like the defining experience of your life isn't the broad luck of being born in the upper-middle class, or the narrower luck of being in the right place at the right time to join a hedge fund, or start a popular blog, or found a software company. It's the mad, mad treadmill that you've been running on since high school or earlier, the experience of which instills the not-unreasonable sense that despite all your advantages, you really do deserve your success.

Why Liberals Can't Govern

That's the lesson of the Blagejovich affair, right? (And the Rangel case, the William Jefferson scandal, and many more to come, no doubt ...) I mean, it seems like a pretty airtight generalization to me: Liberalism's ideological predisposition to expanding government power inevitably leads to gross corruption, which is why we should only trust conservatives, those flinty stewards of the common weal, to run our public institutions.

Right, Alan Wolfe? Right?

The Case For Caroline?

After allowing that her head tells her to "recoil from political dynasties," Ruth Marcus lets her heart make the case for Senator Kennedy of New York:

At the same time ... it would be silly to imagine that every senator or other person in high office has paid his -- or her -- political dues. A big bundle of cash -- see, for example, Jon Corzine, former Goldman Sachs chairman, former senator from New Jersey, now New Jersey governor -- is helpful for vaulting your way over the drudgery of doing time on the state Senate subcommittee on pensions. Ditto other forms of celebrity -- see, as an example, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Before getting all huffy about Caroline Kennedy's qualifications for the job, let's take a breath and remember Jesse Ventura and Sonny Bono.

Indeed, it's not a bad idea to have some senators who bring different experience to the chamber. Corzine's financial acumen, for instance, helped make him an impressive senator; it's too bad he's not there now as Congress wrestles with the financial crisis. Kennedy would bring to the table a serious understanding of the Constitution -- she's written a book on the subject -- and an expertise on education reform. She hasn't exactly been, to use the dangerous phrase of the woman she might replace, having teas and baking cookies.

I don't know about Jesse Ventura, but I find Schwarzenegger and Sonny Bono's pre-political careers as self-made showbiz entrepreneurs - to say nothing of Jon Corzine's career in finance - much more impressive than anything Caroline Kennedy has ever done. Her life has been dedicated to worthy pursuits, by and large, but most of her accomplishments (fundraising for New York public schools, editing essay collections in honor of her father, etc.) are classic "born on third base" endeavors - laudable enough without being terribly impressive. And all of the names on Marcus's list actually submitted themselves to the democratic process on their way to the Senate, the House, and the California's Governor's Mansion; for an appointment to fill a vacant seat (especially a safe vacant seat), the bar ought to be set a bit higher than "she's more qualified than Sonny Bono."

Here's a more provocative way of thinking about it. Caroline Kennedy is no doubt more prepared - in terms of her base of knowledge about national politics, her comfort with the ways of Washington, etc. - to be a United States Senator than Sarah Palin was to be Vice President. But if you consider where the two women started and stack their subsequent accomplishments against one another, Palin's Alaskan career is roughly six times more impressive than Kennedy's years as a high-minded Manhattan socialite and custodian of her family's good name. That doesn't mean that McCain was wise to pick Palin as his running mate. But if you think he wasn't, then you should definitely hope that the Democratic Party of New York hunts a little longer through its ranks before handing a Senate seat to the editor of The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

As for the rest of Marcus's argument ...

There are any number of intriguing subplots at work here. Her uncle's illness, and the "dream will never die" emotion of having Caroline in place to carry on his work. The don't-mess-with-my-family payback dynamic of putting in for the job to shove aside Andrew Cuomo, her cousin Kerry's former husband.

Imagine, by the way, how Hillary Clinton must be feeling. After all that work, after all those years, she not only lost the presidential nomination to Barack Obama, she now may be yielding her Senate seat to a woman who emerged from the political shadows to give Obama the benediction of the Kennedy legacy.

What really draws me to the notion of Caroline as senator, though, is the modern-fairy-tale quality of it all. Like many women my age -- I'm a few months younger than she -- Caroline has always been part of my consciousness: The lucky little girl with a pony and an impossibly handsome father. The stoic little girl holding her mother's hand at her father's funeral. The sheltered girl, whisked away from a still-grieving country by a mother trying to shield her from prying eyes.

In this fairy tale, Caroline is our tragic national princess. She is not locked away in a tower but chooses, for the most part, to closet herself there. Her mother dies, too young. Her impossibly handsome brother crashes his plane, killing himself, his wife and his sister-in-law. She is the last survivor of her immediate family; she reveals herself only in the measured doses of a person who has always been, will always be, in the public eye.

Then, deciding that Obama is the first candidate with the inspirational appeal of her father, she chooses to abandon her previous, above-it-all detachment from the hurly-burly of politics.

I know it's an emotional -- dare I say "girly"? -- reaction. But what a fitting coda to this modern fairy tale to have the little princess grow up to be a senator.

This is, of course, a pretty good distillation of the case against dynastic politics: Namely, that it transforms the business of republican self-government into a soap opera, in which the public/audience thrills to the "intriguing subplots" involving a President's daughter, a President's wife, and a Governor's son who happens to be the President's daughter's sister's ex-husband ... and sighs, enraptured, at the "fairy tale ending" when the President's daughter grows up to have a Senate seat handed to her as a reward for having endorsed the President-elect. This sort of politics is entertaining to write about, which is one reason why fantasy sagas and Shakespeare are generally more interesting than Washington novels. But after twenty years with the same two families in the White House - which nearly became twenty-four (or twenty-eight) - for a political columnist to endorse a pointless escalation of dynastic politics because it fulfills the fairy-tale mythos her generation spun around a mediocre, tragically-murdered President and his good-looking family isn't "girly"; it's an embarrassment.

Mr. Cao Goes To Washington

Whether or not the "Future is Cao" (oh, John Boehner ...) - and indeed, whether or not the newest Louisiana Congressman has any chance of winning re-election once the Democrats get their act together and put up someone who didn't get caught with an illicit $90,000 in his freezer - I hope that we can all agree with an over-the-moon Reihan that the world would be a better place if the Republican minority included many more politicians like Joseph Cao.

Indeed, I think there's a pretty strong case that the GOP should only nominate Asian-American Catholics from here on out ...

Our Enemy, The Payroll Tax (Revisited)

Incidentally, just because conservatives need to think hard about infrastructure doesn't mean that they necessarily need to embrace infrastructure spending as stimulus. (See Brooks today, for instance.) On the that front, the case for pushing a payroll-tax holiday seems pretty strong to me - but then again, I'm always up for weakening the payroll tax.

10,000 Men of Hapsburg

I've gone all squishy about my youthful monarchism since I left Harvard, but I'm gratified that a new generation of campus conservatives has picked up the baton (or the sceptre?):

Asked to describe himself in three words, the classics concentrator-cum-Undergraduate Council presidential candidate takes a few moments of reflection and replies, "A human being." Roger G. Waite '10-'11 offered only a few words more, "To the best of my knowledge, I am a human being." Then, he leaned back in his chair, silent.

A stereotypical UC presidential candidate he is not, Waite insists. Dressed in an argyle sweater and tie and sporting a full beard that he described as unkempt, Waite is intent on differentiating himself from the system that he and his running mate Alexandra A. Petri '10 hope to overthrow.

... The Waite-Petri campaign is adopting an age-old tradition of using their platform to advocate for the abolition of the Council. There is one caveat, however. "We're going to invite a member of the House of Hapsburg to rule the student body indefinitely instead," Waite says.

"I think that a member of the Royal Family would be in a much stronger position to negotiate with the administration and faculty," he explains. "It's much easier for Harvard to blow off a group of self-important undergrads than it is the House of Hapsburg."

Digging into his jacket pocket, Waite presents a copy of "The Charter of 1650," the document that established the mission and governing structure of the University.

"It says nothing of student governance and nothing about this nonsense of an Undergrad Council," he says.

This plan is part of the campaign's broader goal of returning Harvard to its "founding principles."

Despite the fact that no American university has ever established a hereditary monarchy to rule over the student body, Waite says that this is certainly not an obstacle.

"Harvard is always on the forefront of change. We can set an example," he says.

There's much more in their platform, most of it calculated to set Rod Dreher's heart aflutter. ("They propose to use student activity fees to buy and cultivate arable land to produce foodstuffs ...") Personally, I would prefer to see a Stuart on Harvard's throne - both for wromantic reasons and because the Stuarts are, after all, our rightful monarchs - but it must be allowed that the Hapsburgs were considerably more competent, and the Larry Summers/Charles I parallel probably cuts a little too close for comfort.

Bill Kristol and Big Government

Obviously I sympathize with many of the notes Bill Kristol strikes in his column today. But I think he's ultimately taking the argument too far, to the point where he seems to be suggesting that the modern Right can succeed by disentangling itself from "small government conservatism" entirely - which is as implausible as the notion that the GOP can succeed by ceasing to be the party of social conservatism. (In both cases, you need a baseline of idealism - about the proper role and the proper size of government, in this case - or else America's conservative party will just drift toward me-tooism.) What's needed isn't less small-government conservatism, full stop; rather, it's a smarter, better, more adaptable version of small-government conservatism - one that's more realistic about what can be accomplished in a welfare-state society, perhaps, and savvier about how to go about it, but one that doesn't give up on the central small-is-beautiful premise.

For instance, Kristol writes:

Five Republicans have won the presidency since 1932: Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes. Only Reagan was even close to being a small-government conservative. And he campaigned in 1980 more as a tax-cutter and national-defense-builder-upper, and less as a small-government enthusiast in the mold of the man he had supported -- and who had lost -- in 1964, Barry Goldwater. And Reagan's record as governor and president wasn't a particularly government-slashing one.

Even the G.O.P.'s 1994 Contract With America made only vague promises to eliminate the budget deficit, and proposed no specific cuts in government programs. It focused far more on crime, taxes, welfare reform and government reform. Indeed, the "Republican Revolution" of 1995 imploded primarily because of the Republican Congress's one major small-government-type initiative -- the attempt to "cut" (i.e., restrain the growth of) Medicare. George W. Bush seemed to learn the lesson. Prior to his re-election, he proposed and signed into law popular (and, it turned out, successful) legislation, opposed by small-government conservatives, adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare.

All true, and all important. But the fact that cutting government has proven politically difficult doesn't mean that small-government conservatives should despair, and it certainly doesn't mean that the small government tendency should be marginalized in right-wing politics. Rather, it counsels greater prudence in political salesmanship than some small-governmenteers display, and greater pragmatism and savvy about policy - because when the small government spirit is joined to prudence and savvy, it can actually accomplish quite a bit. As I wrote upon the death of William F. Buckley, the story of the modern GOP is only a story of small-government defeats if you define victory in absolutist terms:

Around the time that Buckley founded National Review, the federal government's share of GDP had been rising steadily for more than thirty years, from 3 percent in 1925 to 18.8 percent in 1962. In the Sixties and early Seventies, it seemed extremely plausible that the United States was a glide path to European-style social democracy. Then came the conservative ascendancy - and thirty years later, in 2001, government's share of GDP stood at ... 18.4 percent of GDP. (It's inched up somewhat, of course, under George W. Bush.) Now obviously there are a variety of reasons why the size of government stopped rising after the Seventies, but far from least among them is the influence that Buckley-style small-government conservatism has wielded over public policy lo these many years. (And remember that he promised to stop history, not to roll it back.)

And a philosophy of small government, properly understood, extends well beyond the immediate size of the government's annual budget to include the hidden welfare state of mandates and regulation - all those corvées that Reihan likes to talk about. Here the small-government Right has gained considerable ground over the period Kristol's talking about; here, too, there are plenty of important arguments conservatives can make that don't require the political suicide involved in a frontal assault on Medicare.

Oh, and about Medicare ... Come what may, some sort of serious small-government thinking is going to be required as Republicans and Democrats alike struggle with the looming entitlement crunch.  Again, this will require prudence and savvy and creativity, and it may require a kind of right-wing class warfare that conservatives are currently uncomfortable with (though we can learn!). But nothing good will come of the entitlement mess for the Right if the GOP becomes indifferent to small-government aspirations and arguments.

Then we come to Kristol's conclusion:

So: If you're a small-government conservative, you'll tend to oppose the bailouts, period. If you more or less accept big government, you'll be open to the government's stepping in to save the financial system, or the auto industry. But you'll tend to favor those policies -- universal tax cuts, offering everyone a chance to refinance his mortgage, relieving auto makers of burdensome regulations -- that, consistent with conservative principles, don't reward irresponsible behavior and don't politicize markets.

Similarly, if you're against big government, you'll oppose a huge public works stimulus package. If you think some government action is inevitable, you might instead point out that the most unambiguous public good is national defense. You might then suggest spending a good chunk of the stimulus on national security -- directing dollars to much-needed and underfunded defense procurement rather than to fanciful green technologies, making sure funds are available for the needed expansion of the Army and Marines before rushing to create make-work civilian jobs. Obama wants to spend much of the stimulus on transportation infrastructure and schools. Fine, but lots of schools and airports seem to me to have been refurbished more recently and more generously than military bases I've visited.

Again, I agree with parts of this. But the first paragraph's claims are too sweeping (for one thing, a smart small-government conservatism should be able to distinguish more explicitly than Kristol does between necessary bailouts and unnecessary ones - which is why the prospect of the auto bailout has been greeted very differently among the smartest libertarian bloggers than the financial bailout was), and the second paragraph's claims are ... well, frustrating is a word that springs to mind.

Too often, when domestic-policy debates come up, conservatives are far too eager to change the subject: The public says education; the Right say "let's talk about capital-gains tax cuts." The public says health care; the Right says "let's talk about terrorism." The public says infrastructure; the Right says ... "let's refurbish military bases"?? Apparently so.

There are very, very good reasons to think that the United States has a serious problem with aging transportation infrastructure, which happens to be an area where government by necessity has a substantial role to play. It would behoove conservatives, then, to join the debate over how to modernize our infrastructure - as, to their credit, some are - rather than just ceding the field completely to Barack Obama. Whereas trying to turn a conversation about highways, roads and rail into an conversation about why we need to spend more money on the military seems like a good way to convince Americans that the Right is pretty much only interested in talking about warfare and taxation, no matter what else happens to be on the country's mind.

Update: See Yuval in Kristol's defense.

Man Gave Names To All The Animals

This Telegraph story is headlined "words associated with Christianity and British history taken out of children's dictionary," but the purge of animal names from the (admittedly only 10,000-word) Oxford Junior Dictionary seems just as disquieting as the disappearance of words like minister, monastery, monk, and nun. Here's some of what's out:

adder, ass, beaver, boar, budgerigar, bullock, cheetah, colt, corgi, cygnet, doe, drake, ferret, gerbil, goldfish, guinea pig, hamster, heron, herring, kingfisher, lark, leopard, lobster, magpie, minnow, mussel, newt, otter, ox, oyster, panther, pelican, piglet, plaice, poodle, porcupine, porpoise, raven, spaniel, starling, stoat, stork, terrapin, thrush, weasel, wren.

And here's some of what's in:

Blog, broadband, MP3 player, voicemail, attachment, database, export, chatroom, bullet point, cut and paste, analogue

Celebrity, tolerant, vandalism, negotiate, interdependent, creep, citizenship, childhood, conflict, common sense, debate, EU, drought, brainy, boisterous, cautionary tale, bilingual, bungee jumping, committee, compulsory, cope, democratic, allergic, biodegradable, emotion, dyslexic, donate, endangered, Euro

Apparatus, food chain, incisor, square number, trapezium, alliteration, colloquial, idiom, curriculum, classify, chronological, block graph

I mean, fair enough about "budgerigar" and "boisterous." But there's something awfully depressing about the idea that the word "database" is more relevant to your average British ten-year-old than the word "guinea pig."

Litmus Tests

To my comment that pro-lifers have spent most of their political capital over the last decade working within the Roe/Casey framework to push very modest restrictions on abortion, Conor Friedersdorf writes:

... pro-lifers have often made the compromises that Ross articulates insofar as they have focused on those issues. But are pro-life voters willing to elect politicians who favor legal abortion, but also support "modest state-level restrictions, from parental notification laws to waiting periods to bans on what we see as the grisliest forms of abortion"? My sense is that when it comes to politicians they are willing to support, pro-lifers aren't willing to back anyone like that.

Well, I suppose it depends on the pro-lifer. But there are plenty of politicians who fit Conor's description who've succeeded in Republican politics (and no doubt won more than a few pro-life votes along the way): I'm thinking of figures ranging from Kay Bailey Hutchison to Robert Ehrlich, from Jim Gilmore to Tom Ridge, to name just a few. (And that's to say nothing of straightforward pro-choice purists - ahem - Mitt Romney circa 2002.) Pro-lifers have worked hard to impose a litmus test, however modest - Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush were not exactly pro-life crusaders - for presidential and vice-presidential picks, because those are the offices with the power to shape the Supreme Court. But when you go down a level, to the GOP's senatorial and gubernatorial office-holders and candidates - the land where Specters and Murkowskis roam - it's hard to see much evidence that the party is being held prisoner by an unbending, litmus-test-obsessed pro-life movement.

A Movement That Can - And Cannot - Compromise

I have an op-ed in today's Times on what will be a familiar theme to most of my readers: The pro-life movement and the possibility of an abortion compromise.

Weekend Readings

Andy Ferguson on the attempt to reboot the National Museum of American History.

The University Bookman's "regionalism" issue.

Frum on George Packer.

Brooks and TNR on Obama's education choices.

Cato Unbound debates the roots of the economic crisis; Tyler Cowen chimes in.

And of course, the entire December issue of the Atlantic.

The Grand Duke's Last Veto

Oh, and speaking of those old aristocrats ... sometimes they can still get things right.

(h/t: Rod Dreher)

The Shooting of Brian Beutler

A first-person account, with Ta-Nehisi as his interlocutor:

Great Power, Great Responsibility

Last week, both Ta-Nehisi and Megan had posts on the dubiousness of the search for villains in our current economic mess, when the fault may lie less with specific nefarious actors - whether on Wall Street or in Washington - than with ourselves as a people, and with the desires and impulses and stupidities of a mass capitalist society. Henry Blodget makes a related argument in the just-out December issue of our magazine, arguing that "the interaction of human psychology with a market economy practically ensures that [bubbles] will form," and that the mass pursuit of rational self-interest is the only real culprit for our present woes.

In one sense, I agree with these arguments, and indeed I've made similarly-themed arguments myself. But it's also worth noting that saying "we're all to blame" for what's happened doesn't exclude the possibility that some people, and some kinds of people, are more to blame than others - because some people have greater responsibilities than others, and all mistakes are not created equal.

Blodget, for instance, runs through a typical housing bubble scenario - somebody buys a house late in the game and loses his shirt - and argues that almost everybody involved, from the homebuyer to the real-estate agent to the mortgage broker to the people on Wall Street and Washington who enabled the whole thing were making the same kind of mistakes, and indeed, were acting "just the way you would expect them to act under the circumstances." Now in a sense, this is convincing. But at a same time, our hypothetical homebuyer had very different responsibilities than a hypothetical Wall Street banker. His decision to buy at the height of the bubble put him at risk to lose, say, tens of thousands of dollars and perhaps the roof over his head. Those are high stakes, obviously, but they're high stakes for him and for his family. Whereas the risky decisions being made the people running, say, Citibank had serious consequences for millions of people, in America and around the world. And this distinction ought to matter, both to how people should be expected to behave, and how they should be judged.

So yes, the mistakes made at the top of the American economic and political pyramid might have been the same kind of mistakes made by people in the middle and the bottom, and might have been motivated by the same logic, and the same psychology. But they were made by people who had a far, far larger responsibility than the average American to be careful, and risk-averse and, dare one say it, wise ... by people who, for the most part, came from the upper rungs of the meritocracy, with advantages arguably unparalleled in the history of the world ... and thus by people whose risk-taking mistakes were worse than those made by the average homeowner or investor, because it should have been their business to be safer.

I don't often plug my first book, Privilege, but I think it's worth mentioning here because when you read about how the American leadership class acquitted itself at Citibank, or on Wall Street in general, I think you can see the dark side of meritocracy at work - the same dark side that shadows an instititution like Harvard, where a job in investment banking became, for a time, the summum bonum of meritocratic life. The mistakes that our elites made, and that led us to this pass, have their roots in flaws common to all elites, in all times and places - hubris, arrogance, insulation from the costs of their decisions, and so forth. But they also have their roots in flaws that I think are somewhat more particular to this elite, and this time and place. Flaws like an overweening faith in technology's capacity to master contingency, a widespread assumption that the future doesn't have much to learn from the past, and above all a peculiar combination of smartest-guys-in-the-room entitlement (don't worry, we deserve to be moving millions of dollars around on the basis of totally speculative models, because we got really high SAT scores) and ferocious, grasping competitiveness (because making ten million dollars isn't enough if somebody else from your Ivy League class is making more!). It's a combination, at its worst, that marries the kind of vaulting, religion-of-success ambitions (and attendant status anxieties) that you'd expect from a self-made man to the obnoxious entitlement you'd expect from a to-the-manor-born elite - without the sense of proportion and limits, of the possibility of tragedy and the inevitability of human fallibility, that a real self-made man would presumably gain from starting life at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder (as opposed to the upper-middle class, where most meritocrats starts) ... and without, as well, the sense of history, duty, self-restraint, noblesse oblige and so forth that the old aristocrats were supposed to aspire to.

Now every elite has its own unique flaws, obviously, and every elite has the capacity to steer the country it leads into some sort of disaster or another. Those old aristocrats were discredited, finally and forever, by the slaughter of World War I, a debacle that makes our current economic meltdown look like a stroll in the Tuileries, and that owed a great deal to a poisonous intersection of chivalric fantasies and gross stupidity - a confluence of qualities to which our meritocratic elite, one assumes, is relatively immune.  And it may be that cultivating your elite through meritocracy is like government by, for and of the people - the worst possible sort of system, except for all the others.

But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't pause a moment, amid the current wreckage, to ponder what went wrong with this elite, here and now, and how its particular sins helped produced this particular crisis. This elite, which is also my elite, and whose vices are very much my own as well: I'm just fortunate than in journalism, as opposed to finance, the fate of the world's economy doesn't usually ride on your decisions. (Though if it did, I suppose we'd have more of a chance at that bailout ...)

The Kids Are (Comparatively) Pro-Life

Over at Secular Right - which I intend to read, er, religiously, though I'd rather its creators were expending their energy on a less self-segregated platform - Razib/David Hume wonders if there's any empirical evidence for the contention that the younger generation is more pro-gay but also more pro-life than their elders, and then conjures up with some data from the General Social Survey that supports the proposition:

Making the question about "abortion on demand" arguably tilts the overall results in a pro-life direction, but the intergenerational trend is notable no matter what. Other data I've seen - for instance, this Pew survey of "millenials" - suggests something slightly more modest: That teens and twentysomethings are no less pro-life than their elders, even though they're more socially liberal most other fronts. The deeper question, of course, is why this should be so - why are social conservatives holding their ground (and maybe gaining some) on abortion even as the country moves leftward on the nest of issues surrounding sexual orientation?

There are lots of possible answers, but the simplest one probably has to do with the nature of a liberal society, the kind of arguments that find traction in a liberal regime - and the kind that don't. Here I think it's worth quoting from an essay Peter Berkowitz wrote for Policy Review in 2005; he's talking about the Supreme Court's jurisprudence, but his arguments apply as well, or even better, to shifts in public opinion:

On the touchstone issues, the Court has given a substance to equality in freedom that has extended the protected sphere of individual choice and has expanded the privileged range of individuals who enjoy it. This in turn has prepared the way for further extension and expansion. The Court has done so in the face of respectable alternative interpretations of the substance of equality in freedom, which stress the social costs of expanding choice, particularly the damage done to the material and moral preconditions for maintaining a society of free individuals. Both interpretations of the substance of equality in freedom -- that which focuses on releasing individuals from fetters and that which concentrates on the need to restrain individuals and prepare them for the responsibilities of freedom -- belong to the liberal tradition. Yet in the contest between them, the liberal spirit naturally prefers measures that enlarge the realm of individual autonomy or promote a more egalitarian society over those that seek to contain the social costs of those measures and to conserve the background conditions that keep autonomy from deteriorating into anarchy.

But this tendency has very different implications for the debate over abortion than the debate over same-sex marriage. On abortion, it's unclear which side the "liberal spirit" should favor:

... we refer to conservatives on the abortion question as pro-life and progressives as pro-choice, yet both camps are pro-personal freedom. Proponents of a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy defend the personal freedom of women in the form of their interest in maintaining control over their bodies and their lives. Woman can enjoy neither freedom to live their lives as they see fit nor equality in politics and the marketplace, pro-choicers argue, if they must unwillingly carry a fetus to term and bear the burden of an unwanted pregnancy.

But conservative opponents of abortion also invoke personal freedom. They emphasize the rights of the unborn child -- who, they contend, is a living person in the morally relevant sense. While they do not reject a woman's right to control her body and determine the shape of her future, they do maintain that the unborn child's right to life supersedes it. Alternatively, conservatives invoke the freedom connected to federalism and self-government, arguing that justices of the United States Supreme Court, with no foundation in the Constitution, have invented abortion rights, thereby imperiously deciding a moral question that the Constitution leaves to the free choice of the people through their democratically elected state legislatures. Powerful conservative voices do oppose abortion on religious grounds, out of belief that the unborn child is an embodied soul, that is, even in the earliest stages of development, a unique human being. But when they participate in the public debate, the pronounced tendency of conservative opponents of abortion is to make their case in the language of freedom. This is certainly true when they sit on the United States Supreme Court.

Contrary to Professor Laurence Tribe, who famously argued that it presented a clash of absolutes, the public debate over abortion reveals a clash of competing interpretations of freedom. Or rather, it presents a tendency on the part of partisans to absolutize competing imperatives that arise out of a shared belief in the fundamental importance of freedom.

By contrast, Berkowitz notes, "is it is more difficult to translate arguments against same-sex marriage into the language of freedom," and the debate over gay marriage and gay rights tends to pit "liberal principles and goods on one side against some other kinds of principles and goods on the other." And in a liberal society, advancing "principles and goods" that partake of pre-liberal, non-liberal or illiberal premises is almost always a losing fight in the long run, because "the rights in terms of which the liberal tradition defines freedom are essentially expansive in nature, steadily eroding the limits on individual choice established by law and custom." This leads Berkowitz to conclude that "should the issue find its way to the Supreme Court, the ability of proponents of same-sex marriage to make their case straightforwardly in the language of freedom and the inability of opponents to frame their legitimate concerns in that language will likely result in same-sex marriage's being enshrined in the supreme law of the land." Whether he's right about that or not - and it's certainly been true in many state courts - I'm pretty sure his logic applies in spades to the court of public opinion.

There's an interesting philosophical argument among conservatives, especially of a traditionalist bent, about whether the anti-abortion movement, by advancing their arguments in liberal, rights-based terms, has essentially conceded too much to their opponents, and framed the debate in a manner that makes it impossible to win. I think the lesson of the debate over same-sex marriage, where the non-liberal argument started from a position of seemingly unassailable strength but has more or less crumbled over less than a generation of debate, is that pro-lifers are playing the best hand they possibly can. (For a more thorough go-round on this point, see this old exchange between Larison, Millman and myself, in which I quote the same Berkowitz essay; blog long enough, and you'll always come round to the same topics again.)

The Wire's Politics

Earlier this week, Jonah Goldberg brought up a perennial favorite topic around these parts, arguing that as much as David Simon's show was beloved by liberals, it was actually a powerful indictment of a liberal-run urban bureaucracy, and a corrective to various self-serving liberal myths about race, poverty, and crime. In a sense, that's all true! But as we ponder The Wire's crypto-conservatism, or lack thereof, it's worth quoting Simon himself (from an Atlantic comments thread, no less):

Writing to affirm what people are saying about my faith in individuals to rebel against rigged systems and exert for dignity, while at the same time doubtful that the institutions of a capital-obsessed oligarchy will reform themselves short of outright economic depression (New Deal, the rise of collective bargaining) or systemic moral failure that actually threatens middle-class lives (Vietnam and the resulting, though brief commitment to rethinking our brutal foreign-policy footprints around the world). The Wire is dissent; it argues that our systems are no longer viable for the greater good of the most, that America is no longer operating as a utilitarian and democratic experiment. If you are not comfortable with that notion, you won't agree with some of the tonalities of the show. I would argue that people comfortable with the economic and political trends in the United States right now -- and thinking that the nation and its institutions are equipped to respond meaningfully to the problems depicted with some care and accuracy on The Wire (we reported each season fresh, we did not write solely from memory) -- well, perhaps they're playing with the tuning knobs when the back of the appliance is in flames.

... If The Wire is too pessimistic about the future of the American empire -- and I've read my Toynbee and Chomsky, so I actually think a darker vision could be credibly argued -- no one will be more pleased than me as I am, well, American. Right now, though, I'm just proud to see serious people arguing about a television drama; there's some pride in that.

In terms of David Simon's personal politics, then, it's pretty clear that his critique of modern American liberalism is coming from a Naomi Klein-style place, or somewhere still more radical, rather than an Edward Banfield-type place. It's a testament to the genius of the show that its depiction of Baltimore (and by extension, America) offers fodder for liberal, conservative, leftist and libertarian readings - much like reality itself! In this sense, The Wire is the rarest and most precious of beasts: A work of art that's intensely political but rarely devolves into agitprop. But to the extent that any specific political vision undergirds its portrait of contemporary America, that vision is radical and revolutionary - though shot through with despair - rather than conservative.

Learning From (Recent) History

James Poulos, on the lessons of Iraq:

Of course, people get antsy when you won't cough up a grand ideology to match your grand strategy, but that's sort of the point; and now I'll make what looks like an about-face and suggest that, for someone not tethered to realism or neoconservatism as a matter of ideological principle, the Iraq war was not terribly chastening, even if it was formative, because some of us suspected from the beginning that there was really only one Iraq, and that the perfect storm of possibility, capability, timing, interest, and passion developed there in a way that simply won't appear in any other country any time soon -- especially given the way Iraq went down. Yes, for a minute there it looked like we could tip the extremely weak and craven regime in Damascus out of power, but in all the really serious cases -- North Korea, Iran, Burma, or even Zimbabwe or Sudan or Somalia or Pakistan or Venezuela or Cuba! -- the Iraq model of foreign policy simply won't, because it can't, apply. Iraq was a world-historical one-off that should offer a host of wisdom about what sort of businesses the US should and shouldn't be in. But in the main I think the "lessons learned" in Iraq are ones we already knew or should have known, and that includes the lessons that could have made the occupation of Iraq far more successful.

I think this is somewhat too pat. For one thing, in almost any crisis the benefits of hindsight make many of the lessons look like things "we already knew or should have known." (Unless you're in Robert Rubinesque denial, that is.) More importantly, the phrase "a host of wisdom about what sort of businesses the US should and shouldn't be in" seems to me to need a great deal of unpacking to be useful, because there's all kinds of disagreement about exactly what sort of businesses have been discredited by the Iraq invasion. The fact that the whole kit-and-caboodle of the Iraq situation - pre-emptive or preventive war, WMD, oil, Saddam's defiance of the UN, the costs of the sanctions regime, the post-9/11 environment - won't recur doesn't mean that aspects of the Iraq situation won't recur in future crises, and it's vitally important to decide what, specifically, we mean when we talk about the lessons of Iraq.

For instance, suppose that in the aftermath of some future crisis or flashpoint, we find ourselves debating a Robert Kagan-style proposal for a multinational (but inevitably American-led) force to police the more volatile parts of Pakistan - or, to take a similar idea floated by a liberal hawk, Thomas Friedman's pre-9/11 proposal for a NATO police operation in the West Bank. In assessing such a course, it makes a big difference whether the lesson of Iraq is that the United States shouldn't undertake major military operations, period, absent an immediate casus belli .... or that Western militaries shouldn't undertake the occupation of Islamic countries, specifically .... or that the U.S. shouldn't undertake military actions in the Islamic world, or anywhere else, without the support of a NATO or UN-style body ... or that the U.S. shouldn't undertake military action in the Islamic world if it doesn't have a State Department-approved plan of occupation ... or that it shouldn't undertake military action if incompetents like George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld are running the show ... and so on down a pretty long list of options.

My own (provisional) view is that the Iraq War tells us a great deal about the limits/costs of using large-scale military force in situations where the stakes are vastly higher for our opponents than for ourselves, a great deal about America's ability, or lack thereof, to transform dysfunctional societies through occupation, a fair amount about the limits of pro-democracy sentiment as a north star for policymaking, and a fair amount about the limits of American power, period. I think it tells us less than many liberals and conservatives think about the particular incompetence of Bush's war cabinet (though clearly it tells us something on that score!), less than many liberals (and some realists) think about the importance of international organizations and their utility for crisis management in high-stakes situations, and less than many progressives and paleoconservatives think about whether the U.S. should radically scale down its involvement in Middle Eastern politics, and more broadly abandon its informal-empire commitments around the world.

These lessons inform my critique of the current range of foreign policy thinking on the Right - namely, that it's too trigger-happy when it comes to proposing sending American troops abroad, and too apt to overestimate America's ability to do sixteen different things before breakfast. (Thus I'm basically with Eli Lake about the Pax Americana, for instance, without being with Max Boot about Georgia, or Kagan about occupying Waziristan.) But as I hope the foregoing suggests, it's possible to think that the Iraq War offers "a host of wisdom about what sort of businesses the US should and shouldn't be in" and come to completely different conclusions than the ones I've drawn about what that wisdom is. 

A Hamiltonian By Any Name ...

Per the criticisms from Poulos and Larison, I should say that I was playing along with Walter Russell Mead's division of the American foreign policy tradition into Wilsonian, Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian and Jacksonian strains, rather than endorsing it, and I agree that it runs into all sorts of difficulties very quickly - not least of which is the question of whether any of the three worthies not named Wilson are really the best figureheads for the viewpoints their names are being associated with.

But this is not to say that the underlying viewpoints aren't important. Here I want to disagree somewhat with David Brooks, an actual self-described Hamiltonian (albeit in a slightly different context), who has a column today on the possible foreign-policy continuities between the second Bush term and the Obama Administration - and specifically the way the lessons learned during the Bush years about nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq might translate into "multidisciplinary security and development campaigns" and efforts that focus less on "killing the enemy" than on "repairing the zones of chaos where enemies grow and breed." With this in mind, he writes:

Some theoreticians may still talk about Platonic concepts like realism and neoconservatism, but the actual foreign policy doctrine of the future will be hammered out in a bottom-up process as the U.S. and its allies use their varied tools to build government capacity in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, the Philippines and beyond.

I don't actually think this is true. Or rather, I don't think it's that much more true now than in the recent past. Certainly, there are some theatres, from the Phillipines to Mongolia, in which American foreign policy is and ought to be defined by a spirit of pragmatic improvisation disconnected from any Platonic theory of foreign affairs. (Or rather, disconnected from any theory save the consensus that America should be playing an informally imperial role around the globe, promoting stability, development and the national interest with a combination of hard and soft power - which is itself a theoretical prism through which to view world affairs.) And yes, of course, Platonic theories don't provide perfect answers to most dilemmas, which is why they don't always survive contact with actual world events - just ask Condoleezza Rice!

But high-level foreign-policy arguments matter even so, After all, any significant "multidisciplinary security and development campaign" requires at least some top-down theoretical presuppositions to start doing its bottom-up work. And the hardest questions likely to face American policymakers in the next four-to-eight years won't be questions like whether to send a hundred State Department advisers to the Phillipines, or dispatch five hundred Marines and a "civilian corps" of nation-builders to a war-wracked Liberia - cases where we can afford to experiment with various bottom-up improvisations, because the stakes (for us, at least) are relatively low.

They may be questions related to our existing efforts to "repair the zones of chaos" in Iraq and Afghanistan, where some answers have emerged (over years, and at cost) from the bottom up. But they're just as likely to be questions like whether we should plan to contain a nuclear Iran or pre-empt Tehran before it gets the bomb; or whether we should just send humanitarian aid to Russia's neighbors if they're attacked by Moscow or send them Stinger missiles too - or whether, to take up the subject of Robert Kagan's column this morning, we should pursue sanctions against Pakistan in an effort to convince them to accept an international peacekeeping force  to police and pacify western Pakistan.

These are not questions that can be answered through a "bottom-up process," and they're questions where competing theoretical frameworks produce significantly different answers. (The same was true with many of the biggest questions in the Clinton era: What was the "bottom-up" answer to how to deal with Slobodan Milosevic, or how to respond to an ongoing genocide in Rwanda?) What Brooks is describing in his column - an emerging consensus on counterinsurgency and nation-building, based on the American military's on-the-ground experience in Iraq and Afghanistan - is a positive development, and it's a good thing that this consensus seems likely to carry over into the Obama Administration. But it won't absolve Obama of the responsibility to tackle dilemmas that can't be resolved by asking "What Would H.R. McMaster Do?"

Surviving In A Terrorized Hotel

This Jeff Goldberg post is the most interesting thing I've read today, and it makes me think that he should write an entire article or book on related themes - a kind of first-person version of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, with all the examples culled from his own travels.

(And yes, Goldberg, I expect a cut of the book deal ...)

Quantum of Solace

I finally saw Daniel Craig's second Bond outing over Thanksgiving, and I was going to write a post about how I didn't quite understand why people were so cool to it - but then I went back and found this piece by Moriarty of Aintitcoolnews, which more or less sums up my own feelings on the matter. Especially the line about how Mathieu Almaric was essentially playing Roman Polanski, and this part:

... I don't miss the fetishistic museum piece touches of the series at all. I don't miss Q branch. I don't miss the Moneypenny banter. I don't miss the breezy "let's have a chat" style M briefings. Honestly... there are 20-something Bond films in that style, and like most Bond films, I've seen every film more than once. Some of them, I've seen many times. That adds up. I think it's safe to say if you count individual viewings, I've seen something like 180 James Bond films in my lifetime. All with that same rhythm and style and the same cast sadly growing older while James Bond mysteriously hovers around the same age in one of the weirdest continuity choices in franchise history. Like I said, I don't miss the formula of it all. And frankly, if the Daniel Craig era never quite gets back to that, I'm perfectly happy. I wouldn't mind at all. They made those movies. Lots and lots and lots of those movies. When I look over at the shelf of my office where every single one of those 20-something other Bond films are, the last DVD release that was the tricked-out-but-still-not-HD transfer, it's this huge stack, all the same, all rigidly adhering to that formula.

"And I enjoyed those films," Moriarty adds. So did I: I spent many a teenage Saturday afternoon sprawled in front of the Bond marathon that seemed to be running permanently on TBS in those days, watching Moonraker or Diamonds Are Forever or Live and Let Die. But if I want to see that Bond - the Bond, in Anthony Lane's turn of phrase, who inspired middle-aged men to wonder "how it was that their wristwatches merely told the time rather than spewing out metal ticker tape or magnetically unzipping the back of a woman's dress" - I can turn to any one of twenty-odd movies. The Daniel Craig era is trying to do something else with the character, and while I think that something else pretty clearly has its limits - Quantum of Solace was essentially parasitic on the final act of Casino Royale, and you can't have Bond lose a woman he loves every third movie or so just to keep him in a state of inner turmoil - for now it's a pretty damn enjoyable ride.