Deficits Don't Matter?

Here's Yglesias, responding to the complaints from conservatives (and some Democrats) that the stimulus bill is being larded up with spending on possibly-worthy but non-stimulative programs:

... a lot of this stuff whether or not it really "belongs in the stimulus" seems irrelevant to me. If you have a program that actually is worthy, then funding it will make the country better, whether or not it truly "belongs" in the stimulus. If you have a program that's worthy, and that doesn't really belong in the stimulus, and you have a Republican who doesn't think the program is worthy, and he'd be willing to vote for the stimulus if you stripped that program from the bill, then it seems to me that you have a decent case for dropping a worthy program. But if you're Ben Nelson and you think the program is worthy, then why not just support the worthy program? It's true that doing so doesn't fit a perfectly pristine notion of how the legislative process should work, but anytime the process is working in favor of worthy programs rather than crappy ones, that's a lot better than the normal functioning of the legislative process.

Well, sure. This is the basic liberal calculus at the moment: The stimulus bill is thick with non-stimulative spending increases because it's a chance to, well, pass spending increases that Democrats think are worthy. Which is fair enough; they did, after all, thump the GOP two election cycles in a row. But surely even the most deficit-happy liberal ought to worry a little about how all of this is going to be paid for - and by extension, whether a spending binge on existing programs today will make it harder to pass, say, an expensive overhaul of the health care system tomorrow. At some point, barring an economic miracle, the GOP will be able to get at least some traction by playing Ross Perot and arguing against out-of-control spending. Maybe the whole liberal wish list will be passed into law before that happens: As Yglesias says in a subsequent post, it's possible that at a time like this there's no "fixed sum of political capital" for liberals to spend down, and so the thing to do is go for broke, quite literally, instead of trying to prioritize health care reform over Pell Grants, or climate change legislation over Head Start. But there's also a chance that the Democrats will look back on the stimulus bill as an instance where they gained ground in the short run, but at the expense of their longer-term ambitions.

In Defense of Mitch McConnell

Well, sort of. As you might expect, I agree with a lot of Ambinder's caustic remarks about the Minority Leader's recent "whither Republicanism" speech. But McConnell, like all GOP leaders, is in an awfully difficult spot at the moment: He's heading up a party that desperately needs a new direction, but whose most loyal and vocal members want nothing to do with anything that smacks of compromise or centrism. In those circumstances, the thing for Republicans in Washington to do is to talk an awful lot about how conservative principles don't need to change (and they don't, broadly speaking), while eagerly embracing new policy options whenever possible. And here McConnell deserves at least a modicum of credit for coming out in favor of the best of the alternative stimulus plans floating around on the right-of-center - namely, some sort of payroll tax cut, which is precisely the sort of small-government populist, Sam's Club-meets-Cato idea that the GOP ought to be embracing, instead of resisting.

The key for Republicans, as Yuval notes today, is to offer not only opposition to Obamanomics but alternatives as well - but those alternatives needs to sound like something other than the Bush agenda redux, or else there's no point in offering them. And on that front, McConnell's doing a better job that some of his colleagues.

Good News For Narnia

The obvious good news is that the movie franchise will continue post-Prince Caspian, with Fox stepping in after Disney backed out. The not-so-obvious good news is this:

While it looks like both the film's principle cast and director will be clearing some time on their calendars this summer to shoot the picture, some sacrifices had to be made on the budget front to make the project viable. According to the Los Angeles Times, Disney spent some $215 million producing Prince Caspian, and another $175 million on marketing it (the film ended up grossing roughly $419 million worldwide). So, in order to lessen the risk on Dawn Treader, Walden Media and Fox have decided to go halfsies on the third film's slated budget of $140 million.

That sounds like bad news at first. But artistically speaking, at least, a smaller budget may be exactly what the Narnia movies need. I liked Caspian, in certain respects, but it felt like it was made more in self-conscious imitation of Peter Jackson's appropriately-humongous Lord of the Rings films than in the more intimate spirit of C.S. Lewis's novels. Or as I put it in my NR review:

The movie plays up ... every tension it finds in Lewis's novel, and invents several more, creating rivalries (between Peter and Caspian), generating romances (between Susan and Caspian), adding battles (particularly a long set piece in the movie's middle, in which the Old Narnians launch a raid on Miraz's castle), and doubling down on the political intrigue in the Telmarine court. For the most part, the additions serve their purpose, transmuting a somewhat slight children's adventure into a gripping medieval war picture: Braveheart with more magic, or Tolkien with talking squirrels.

But this achievement comes with a price-namely, the evisceration of Lewis's major theme. If The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a story about rebirth and renewal-Aslan resurrected, and spring cracking the ice of an enchanted winter-then Prince Caspian is fundamentally a story about re-enchantment, and the glorious return of the supernatural forces that the Telmarines have repressed. Little of this survives in Adamson's adaptation; it's been pruned away to make room for battles and arguments and longing glances and one-liners. The book's climax, in which the trees and rivers come to life and a wild pagan rout overruns the sterile secularism of Telmarine society, is reduced to a brief battlefield intervention that rips off not one but two scenes in Lord of the Rings. Aslan, too, is reduced to a walk-on role, sweeping in once the body count has climbed and the CGI budget been exhausted to roar a halt to the proceedings. He murmurs about faith, in the voice of Liam Neeson, but he feels less a Christ figure than a strikingly flimsy plot device: Leo ex machina.

The bad news for Narniaphiles is that this may be the only way that C. S. Lewis can plausibly be adapted, given the economics (and biases) of contemporary Hollywood-with the metaphysics downplayed and the Generic Epic elements accentuated, the better to justify the price tag that comes attached to any fantasy film ... But judging from Caspian's middling box-office showing to date, it might be worth considering something different for Voyage of the Dawn Treader and (one hopes) its sequels: half the budget, perhaps, and a little more fidelity to the elements of theme and plot that make Narnia something more than an entertaining but two-dimensional imitation of Tolkien's Middle Earth.

Spending $140 million instead of $215 million isn't quite halving the budget, but it's pretty close. With luck, the result will be richer storytelling, instead of just lousier special effects.

Perspective

From Brad DeLong, part of The Week's impressive new virtual op-ed page:

The current recession may turn into a small depression, and may push global living standards down by five percent for one or two or (we hope not) five years, but that does not erase the gulf between those of us in the globe's middle and upper classes and all human existence prior to the Industrial Revolution. We have reached the frontier of mass material comfort--where we have enough food that we are not painfully hungry, enough clothing that we are not shiveringly cold, enough shelter that we are not distressingly wet, even enough entertainment that we are not bored. We--at least those lucky enough to be in the global middle and upper classes who still cluster around the North Atlantic--have lots and lots of stuff. Our machines and factories have given us the power to get more and more stuff by getting more and more stuff--a self-perpetuating cycle of consumption.

Our goods are not only plentiful but cheap. I am a book addict. Yet even I am fighting hard to spend as great a share of my income on books as Adam Smith did in his day. Back on March 9, 1776 Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations went on sale for the price of 1.8 pounds sterling at a time when the median family made perhaps 30 pounds a year. That one book (admittedly a big book and an expensive one) cost six percent of the median family's annual income. In the United States today, median family income is $50,000 a year and Smith's Wealth of Nations costs $7.95 at Amazon (in the Bantam Classics edition). The 18th Century British family could buy 17 copies of the Wealth of Nations out of its annual income. The American family in 2009 can buy 6,000 copies: a multiplication factor of 350.

Books are not an exceptional category. Today, buttermilk-fried petrale sole with pickled vegetables and parsley mayonnaise, served at Chez Panisse Café, costs the same share of a day-laborer's earnings as the raw ingredients for two big bowls of oatmeal did in the 18th Century. Then there are all the commodities we consume that were essentially priceless in the past. If in 1786 you had wanted to listen to Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro in your house, you probably had to be the Holy Roman Emperor, Archduke of Austria, with a theater in your house--the Palace of Laxenberg. Today, the DVD costs $17.99 at amazon.com. (The multiplication factor for enjoying The Marriage of Figaro in your home is effectively infinite for those not named Josef von Habsburg.)

All true. But the kicker matters, too:

Keynes thought that by today we would have reached a realm of plenty where "We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin."

But no dice. I look around, and all I can say is: not yet, not for a long time to come, and perhaps never ... There is a point at which we say "enough!" to more oat porridge. But all evidence suggests Keynes was wrong: We are simply not built to ever say "enough!" to stuff in general.

That we'll never be satisfied with what we have probably goes without saying. But the most pressing issue, it seems to me, is whether we've reached - or will reach - a point at which all our abundance cushions us against the political consequences of suddenly-diminished expectations. In 1932 or so, the West's porridge-eating past wasn't nearly as far in the rearview mirror as it is today, but a Brad DeLong of the Great Depression could still have marshaled all sorts of statistics to prove that even amid economic crisis, your average Westerner was in vastly better shape than his pre-industrial forefathers. Yet that underlying reality didn't save Europe from a decade in which democratic capitalism was thought to be discredited, and the whole edifice of modern civilization was very nearly torn apart.

Hopefully the world - not only DeLong's North Atlantic cluster, but the developing powers as well - has grown rich enough and stable enough that something like that simply couldn't happen again, no matter how hard the fall and how deep the depression. Hopefully.

Ending or Winning?

There's a lot to agree with in Peter Beinart's piece about Obama's quest to "end" the culture wars - particularly his point that as far as style and symbolism goes, a black liberal may be better-positioned than a white liberal to build the kind of bridges between the secular left and the religious middle that an enduring Democratic majority requires. (In a somewhat similar vein, I suspect the GOP's quest to build a bridge between the religious right and the religious middle would have been better served had George W. Bush been a Catholic rather than an Evangelical - though that's an argument for another day.)

But Beinart's argument is shot through with the characteristic liberal conceit that the culture wars are a one-sided affair, in which right-wing culture warriors start fights and peace-loving liberals try to avoid them. In reality, what makes Obama promising to liberals isn't his potential to "end" culture-war battles - it's his potential ability to win them, by dressing up the policies that Planned Parenthood or the Human Rights Campaign or the ACLU or whomever would like to see in the kind of religiose language and fuzzy talk about consensus that swing voters like to hear. So waiting a day to reverse the ban on overseas funding for groups that provide abortions, for instance, isn't a compromise in the culture wars, or an act of moderation - it's a way of making a victory for the left seem like an act of moderation to people who aren't that invested in the issue. And the same will doubtless hold true when the stem-cell debate comes around, or the next Supreme Court vacancy, or any flashpoint you can think of: Liberals will praise Obama for taking steps to defuse the culture war, but what they'll mean is that he's taking steps to win it.

The Case For A Torture Commission, Cont.

"Enhanced interrogation" yielded crucial intelligence that saved lives, says former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen. No, says the Post's Dan Froomkin, it didn't. Yes, says Thiessen, it did.

Obviously, this debate will never be completely resolved. But neither will it disappear: If it does go away temporarily, you can bet that it will come roaring back eventually, in this administration or in one to come. And I, for one, wouldn't mind getting a lot more information out on the table now - for the next round of debate, if not for this one.

The Church and the Lefebvrists

If you're looking for a more nuanced and detailed take on the Vatican's decision to lift the excommunication of four Society of Saint Pius X bishops than, say, the New York Times provides, I recommend Amy Welborn's roundup and analysis. This bit, especially, distills what I'm assuming is the essence of the reasoning behind Benedict's decision:

The Pope is not stupid. He knows the ins and outs of the SSPX better than any of us and is deeply familiar with the various currents of belief, practice and attitude that run through it. There are virulent anti-Semites in the SSPX. There are near-sedevacantists. There are many who believe that the Second Vatican Council was an illegitimate, invalid council. There are those who believe that the Mass that most of reading this blog go to every Sunday, if not every day, is invalid and that the elements are not consecrated.

But he also knows, particularly in Europe, there are many SSPX adherents who do not share these views and are simply seeking to practice a richer Catholic faith than is available to them in their local regular parish. I think to really understand the whole picture on this, you have to understand the European situation, which in many ways is quite different than it is here.

I think what the Pope knows is that there is going to be a huge degree of self-selection going on over the next few years, as well as some inevitably self-destructive behavior. In short, those who truly want to be union with Rome will do so, and the holdouts will hold out until some fantasy moment occurs in which the Novus Ordo Mass and the Second Vatican Council is repudiated.

The problem, of course, is that by create this opening for those SSPX-ers who should be in full communion with the Catholic Church, the Vatican is temporarily empowering Bishop Richard Williamson, Holocaust denier and all-around charmer, who gives every evidence that he shouldn't be - and probably doesn't want to be - back in the fold, but who's instantly become the poster boy for the Pope's decision, and for the Traditionalist community more generally. This is a price worth paying, hopefully, for the sake of closing unnecessary divisions, but the price wouldn't be nearly so steep if the Vatican had a better sense of how to do public relations in a controversial case like this. The average reporter or commentator isn't going to understand the nuances of canon law, the history and background of the SSPX, the context of the excommunications, the status of these bishops post-excommunication, and so forth. What the average journalist does understand, though, is how to write this headline: "Pope Rehabilitates Holocaust-Denying Bishop." And while the potential for bad publicity shouldn't prevent the Vatican from showing mercy to excommunicants when appropriate, it should incentivize wrapping any such mercy in a forceful, detailed, "Catholicism and canon law for dummies" explanation of what such an action doesn't mean: In this case, an endorsement of poisonous anti-semitism and conspiracy theorizing.

And this is exactly what hasn't been forthcoming. Oh, the Papal spokesman said that Williamson's Holocaust-denying remarks were "completely indefensible," and L'Osservatore Romano had an editorial (not yet translated into English, of course) stating that the decision "should not be sullied with unacceptable revisionist opinions and attitudes with regard to the Jews." But in the contemporary media environment, that's not good enough. If the Pope de-excommunicates a Holocaust denier, the Vatican press office should be working around the clock, with press releases flying, to provide context and do damage control. What's more, if the Pope de-excommunicates a Holocaust denier, the Pope himself needs to say something about it, and not just obliquely nod to the decision in his latest homily. Yes, the Church's primary business is saving souls, not public relations - but in this day and age, public relations is part of the business of saving souls. And nobody in Rome, from Benedict on down, seems to have figured that out.

The Teapot Analogy

In response to this post, and the suggestion that even hardened atheists should occasionally feel faint tremors of "maybe God does exist" doubt, several scoffing readers have directed me to Bertrand Russell's famous teapot analogy, which supposedly settles once and for all the question of whether nonbelievers should give any credence to the possibility that God exists:

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.  

This analogy - like its modern descendant, the Flying Spaghetti Monster - makes a great deal of sense if you believe that the idea of God is an absurdity dreamed up by crafty clerics in darkest antiquity and subsequently imposed on the human mind by force and fear, and that it only survives for want of brave souls willing to note how inherently absurd the whole thing is. As you might expect, I see the genesis of religion rather differently: An intuitive belief in some sort of presiding Agent seems to be an extremely common, albeit hardly universal, feature of human nature; this intuition has intersected, historically, with an enormous amount of subjective religious experience; and this intersection (along with, yes, the force of custom and tradition) has produced and sustained the religious traditions that seem to Richard Dawkins and company like so much teapot-worship. The story of our civilization, in particular, is a story in which an extremely large circle of non-insane human beings have perceived themselves to be experiencing an interaction with a being who seems recognizable as the Judeo-Christian God (here I do feel comfortable using the term), rather than merely being taught about Him in Sunday School. I am unaware of anything similar holding true for orbiting pots or flying noodle beasts. And without the persistence of this perceived interaction (and beneath it, the intuitive belief in some kind of God), it's difficult to imagine religious belief playing anything like the role it does in human affairs, no matter how many ancient scriptures there were propping the whole thing up.

This is not to say that humanity's religious experiences and intuitions are anything like a dispositive argument for the existence of God. Certainly, there are all sorts of interesting efforts to explain them without recourse to the hypothesis that they correspond to anything real, and all kinds of reasons to choose atheism over faith. But it is one thing to disbelieve in God; it is quite another to never feel a twinge of doubt about one's own disbelief. And just as the Christian who has never entertained doubts about his faith probably hasn't thought hard enough about the matter, the atheist who perceives the Christian God and the flying spaghetti monster as equally ridiculous hypotheses really needs to get out more often.

Means and Ends

Drawing Che Guevera into the earlier conversation about Irish terrorists, Arab terrorists and counterfactuals, Larison writes:

Lincoln, Wilson and FDR-each of them was responsible for far more deaths and far more destruction than Che Guevara or any of a number of Arab nationalist figures ever was, but two important things separate them in the eyes of the general public: they did not personally kill anyone, and the causes for which their armies killed and destroyed are widely considered to be the just and right ones. That is to say, the exact same moralizing, or rather anti-moralizing, that the ends justify the means that Che used in rationalizing revolutionary violence is employed to praise and sanctify approved figures who authorized much larger slaughters for the "right reasons." [emphasis mine - RD] Not only have sympathetic, shoulder-shrugging, anti-moralizing stories been told about these men, but we have built large physical monuments to them (or at least to two of the three mentioned above), which is rather more troubling in its way than silly people who wear T-shirts or directors who minimize the moral failings of their main characters.

But of course in just-war theory, the ends often do legitimize the means, in some sense at least. Not all means, of course: Some forms of violence are intrinsically immoral, whatever the ends in question. But to employ criteria like "proportionality" and "right intention" in judging a war's justness is to recognize that the morality of a given military campaign depends (among other things) on the objectives it seeks to accomplish, and the context in which it takes place. The consensus surrounding the moral legitimacy of Lincoln and FDR's warmaking flows, in part at least, from precisely this issue of intentions. So does most contemporary criticism of Che Guevera and the Cuban Revolution, which tends to focus on the tyranny that Che and Castro ended up establishing in the revolution's wake, not the moral legitimacy of the revolt itself. And so, for that matter, does the debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which each side is judged, not unreasonably, on their ultimate intentions. Do the Palestinians want sovereignty and self-determination, or do they want to see Israel destroyed? Do the Israelis seek security and a recognition of their nation's right to exist as a Jewish state, or are they still invested in the dream of a Greater Israel? These are not the only questions to keep in mind when assessing the justice of each side's military operations, but they are real and important questions nonetheless.

Of course there's a slippery slope involved whenever you judge means in light of ends, and it's certainly the case that Americans, like most peoples, are too quick to absolve our leaders for wars entered unwisely and prosecuted immorally so long as they seem to work out "in the long run." But the American memory isn't just shaped by a mix of jingoism and consequentialism: The Lincoln-FDR consensus may be mistaken (as Larison obviously believes it to be), but the fact remains that it's driven, at least in part, by a real attempt to make moral distinctions about the conflicts that we've fought, rather than just a rank chauvinism in which our wars are always justified and other people's wars aren't. There's a reason that Lincoln has an enormous memorial and, say, James K. Polk does not; there's a reason that the Washington Mall has a Museum of the American Indian rather than a monument to Philip Sheridan's Plains campaigns; there's a reason that the Spanish-American War and the First World War don't enjoy the kind of "good war" reputations that accrue to the Civil War and World War II; there's a reason that the Korean War is remembered as a more heroic affair than Vietnam, and that our Filipino counterinsurgency isn't remembered at all. The American reckoning with the moral questions that surround our wars is incomplete at best, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist - or that the attempt to distinguish good wars from bad ones on the basis of the ends that we sought isn't a legitimate way to go about making moral judgments.

The Two Losts

From Todd VanDerWerff's meditations on the season premiere:

I suspect when all is said and done that the history of Lost will cleave it pretty neatly into two different shows.

... The great divide falls between the first half of the show's third season and the last half of that season (which roughly matches up with when executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse convinced ABC to let them set a hard end date for the series). Before season three's 13^th episode, "The Man from Tallahassee," the series was much more meandering and much more prone to fits of stupidity. But it was also a show with more time--time for things like visual poetry or narrative tangents that occasionally seemed like dead ends (fans hated season three's "Tricia Tanaka Is Dead," but it was really a fine little piece of television--it just didn't advance the master narrative in any way) ...

But after the network set a firm end date for the show, it became something ever-so-slightly different. Gone were the long, meander-y episodes where we found out why Kate liked horses (and/or killed her dad) for the most part (there was one where we found out why Desmond says "brother" to everyone, but that was the last of an old era). The show became something much more purposeful, taking great strides forward in its narrative and starting to tie seemingly disconnected elements into a larger framework. In addition, the characters started behaving more like real people, no longer forced to do things they wouldn't do in real life in a similar situation by the constraints of a plot that said they couldn't because the show might run 10 seasons, and what would you do then? Most of the series' fans are deeply agnostic that Cuse and Lindelof really had a plan for how the series would run, but the episodes since that back half of season three seem to speak well for the two at least having SOME idea of how this was all going to play out. Plus, while there have been a few clunkers since the back half of season three (most notably season four's "Something Nice Back Home"), the series by and large has reinvigorated itself as one of the best hours of action-packed TV out there, flitting easily between genres, depending on who's got the episode focus that week.

If you like the show, read the whole thing. The division VanDerWerff outlines is real, I think, and the decision to set an end-date has played a big role - as predicted here - in saving the show from the wheel-spinning stagnation that defined most of its third season. For me, though, the real Lost divide will always be between the first two seasons and everything else, rather than between the pre- and post-deadline versions of the show. I'm part of the minority that actually liked the second season, hatch and all, and what I liked about it was the air of dread that still clung to the Island and everything about it - to the Smoke Monster and the Others, the cryptic numbers and the strange visions, the kidnapped children and the Dark Territory, the quarantine signs and the orientation films and all the rest of it. These things are still part of the show, in one sense or another (though many of them are part of plot strands that have been dropped, at least temporarily), but the dread started to leak away with the season-three revelation that the Others were just another bunch of squabbling, pretty-ordinary people with their own set of problems ... and now two seasons later it's all but gone. The show still hasn't explained "why," in Peter Suderman's memorable formulation, but in the course of explaining "what" and "how" it's lost the aura of barely-suppressed terror that clung to the Island in the first two seasons. Its mysteries are still real, but they've been domesticated: For all the apocalyptic overtones, I feel like the show partakes more of Michael Crichton, at this point, than Stephen King.

I like Crichton, of course, and I still like Lost enormously: Thanks to the late-in-Season-3 righting of the ship, it's still one of the best shows on TV, and hopefully will remain one to the end. But now it's a good action-packed sci-fi show, without the element of fear and trembling that kept me riveted through the first forty episodes or so. VanDerWerff misses the first two seasons' "simple moments of visual beauty" and "plot digressions that don't have to be tied into the master plot," and sometimes I do too. But more importantly I miss the dread.

The Auteur Theory

Via Isaac Chotiner, I see that David Carr has a novel theory of the Oscar nominations:

... what's particularly clear this season is that the Academy will reward excellence, no matter if it comes from a big studio or a small independent.

... This year's Top 5 were studio and indie, big and little, broad and very specific. The string that pulls them together is not where the films came from in terms of backing, but where they come from artistically. Each of the films selected for a best-picture nomination ... represents the auteur ideal, in which a director is bankrolled and left pretty much alone. It is no coincidence that these five films were created by directors who also received best-director nominations.

Never before, I'm pretty sure, has the phrase "auteur ideal" been used in conjunction with the work of Ron Howard, so points to Carr for crossing that particular bridge. His broader argument - that the extent to which a given film partakes of "the independent aesthetic" is more important to its Oscar chances these days than whether it meshes with "the tastes of the mass audience" - is pretty obviously true. But what's missing from his analysis is a recognition that rewarding an art-house aesthetic isn't the same thing as rewarding excellence: Mass-market movies can be good movies, and movies made with a narrow, highbrow audience in mind can be mediocre-to-bad. The fact that films like, say, Terms of Endearment or E.T. were studio tentpoles that played to huge audiences didn't mean that they didn't deserve their Oscars; and the fact that Stephen Daldry didn't have much studio interference while making The Reader doesn't make him anything more than a high-toned hack who's good at playing by the current Oscar rules. The Academy should reward excellence wherever it comes from, absolutely. But this year - again, a bad year for movies overall - it rewarded too many of the wrong auteurs.

The Oscars (II)

We disagree about the merits of Revolutionary Road, but for a similarly damning (and more comprehensive) take on this year's nominees, I recommend Chris Orr's burst of spleen.

The Oscars

Allow me to quote myself, from the latest issue of National Review:

... the [Christmas] rush is worse for critics than for viewers, since at least half the movies "released" in November and December won't trickle out to non-Manhattan multiplexes until January. (Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, which national publications had to review around its official December 12 release date, probably reached a theater near you some thirty-odd days later.) But I suspect that even filmgoers in Peoria partake of the overwhelm-ment that settles over cinephiles sometime around Christmas -- a time when critics who've devoted dozens of column inches to The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor during the movie industry's fallow months find themselves tackling what are supposed to be the year's best films at capsule length, and when serious moviegoers wander cineplexes in a daze, rambling about whether Mickey Rourke should win Best Actor for The Curious Reader of Revolutionary Doubt.

It's bad for the moviegoers, and it's bad for the movies. Studio executives are a risk-averse lot in the best of times and, faced with the cruel Darwinism of the holiday season, they seem to have decided that the best way to hedge their bets is to green-light films within an ever narrower range. How else to explain this house-of-mirrors movie season: two Clint Eastwood movies released within 40 days of each other; a pair of Oscar-caliber Kate Winslet performances playing against each other in the local art house; and not one or two, but five films about the Holocaust and Nazis playing between mid-October and the New Year.

What does all this conformity and caution get you? It gets you Revolutionary Road. No film in this holiday season checks quite so many Oscar-season boxes: There are A-list stars (Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, together again a decade after they clutched at each other in Titanic), an Academy Award-winning director (Winslet's husband, Sam Mendes), a sterling supporting cast, a handsome mid-century aesthetic, and a semi-famous literary novel as the source material. And no holiday-season film better illustrates the way that such box-checking curdles art.

As it turns out, the Academy nominated neither Eastwood movie and just one of the Nazi films, and ignored Revolutionary Road entirely. And yet the final Best Picture list - save for Slumdog Millionaire, which slipped into the dark-horse slot previously occupied by Juno and Little Miss Sunshine - still looks like a roster of box-checking exercises, and what A.O. Scott memorably termed "hermetically sealed melodrama[s] of received thinking." There were that many of them!

This was, admittedly, a bad year for movies overall, which makes a disappointing Best Picture slate par for the course. I'm not enough of a Dark Knight partisan to get outraged at its exclusion, and while I wish The Wrestler and Rachel Getting Married were occupying the slots filled by The Reader and Frost/Nixon, neither of the former are anywhere near as good as No Country For Old Men - to pick my favorite recent winner - and neither of the latter are anywhere near as bad as, say, Crash. But it's still an uninspiring group of nominees - which is a good reason to pull for Slumdog come Oscar night, even if you think it's overpraised and overrated. I mean, which would you rather see rewarded - Stephen Daldry or Ron Howard being pretentious and high-minded, or Danny Boyle being (as usual) quirky and adventurous?  I think the question answers itself.

Small-Government Egalitarianism?

Speaking of week-old blog posts, here's a provocative argument from Edward Glaeser - one that foreshadows, I suspect, some interesting intra-conservative debates to come.

Roe Turns Thirty-Six

This has been making the rounds already, but it's hard to come up with a better way to mark the occasion:

The Lefty Press in the Age of Obama

In my recent bloggingheads session with Yglesias, I talked a lot about the perils awaiting the progressive mediasphere in an age of liberal dominance - perils with which the conservative mediasphere became, alas, intimately familiar with in the age of Bush. And I meant to link to this post from Ezra Klein, written in the wake of Obama's big dinners with pundits of the right and left, as an example of what I had in mind:

... the important thing Obama could do for the "liberal" media is not have dinner with them. That's good for egos but meaningless for influence. It is, however, well within Obama's power to increase the influence of progressive outlets. Covering the presidency is the central concern of political reportage. And an outlet's ability to cover the presidency can be affected by the favor of the President. If The American Prospect and TPM Cafe and Huffington Post and others of our ilk were given the occasional interview with Obama, and fed useful scoops, that would rapidly increase our readership, our importance in the broader media ecosystem, and the likelihood that members of our outlets would go on to hold key positions in more mainstream institutions. To give just one example, if was understood that Mark Schmitt had more contacts with the Obama crew than Howard Fineman, the Sunday shows would be more likely to turn to Schmitt for analysis. In the long-run, that would be good for both Obama and for progressivism. And he wouldn't even have to waste time watching me chew my dinner.

Now obviously if I worked for The American Prospect or HuffPo I'd be thinking exactly along these lines: It would be absurd for a ideologically-motivated publication to turn down a shot at political influence to preserve its sense of purity. (And I'm all for Mark Schmitt on Meet the Press - or better, as a permanent replacement for David Gergen.) But it's still worth noting that this is roughly how the Bush Administration treated the conservative media - rolling out scoops to partisan outlets, wooing right-wing media types with Presidential face-time, bypassing mainstream outlets in favor of talk radio and Fox News, and so forth. And in the long run, it was good for neither the Bushies nor for conservatism. 

The Pro-Cheney Case For A Torture Commission

As Daniel Larison notes, the one place where Obama explicitly invoked "false choices" in yesterday's speech was his Bush-rebuking reference to "the choice between our safety and our ideals." This comes a week after Evan Thomas and Stuart Taylor attracted a great deal of attention (much of it unfavorable) for a Newsweek cover story arguing that Obama may end up following in Dick Cheney's footsteps on at least some hot-button national security issues - and a week, as well, after Cheney himself told Jim Lehrer that if the Obama Administration doesn't continue "the interrogation program for high-value detainees ... they will, in fact, put the nation at risk." And it comes amid a great deal of intra-liberal debate about how Obama should deal with the outgoing administration's record on detainee treatment: With prosecutions for torture and war crimes? With some sort of "truth and reconcialition" investigative commission? Or - the most likely answer, and the most in keeping with previous American history - by simply doing nothing at all?

One would hardly expect Dick Cheney to endorse his own prosecution. But I think there's a reasonable case that given what I take to be his own premises about the torture debate - that the acts of interrogative violence the administration employed were justified by the stakes involved and the intelligence they produced - the outgoing Vice President should support an investigative commission charged with assessing the consequences of the Bush Administration's detainee policy. Time and again, Cheney has insisted that any gains the U.S. has made in its efforts against Al Qaeda have depended on information from "high-value" detainees like Khalid Sheikh Muhammad or Abu Zubaydah that could only be extracted through extreme measures. But so far, the evidence marshaled to support his contention has been distinctly limited - and most of the insider-ish testimony on the subject, usually filtered through the work of the administration's critics, has tended to support the argument that torture is both morally wrong and largely ineffective. This is a high-stakes debate, to put it mildly. And if Cheney (or any of the many conservatives who share his perspective) believes what says he believes - if he thinks the future security of the United States depends on a willingness to take a consequentialist approach to, say, the waterboarding of leading terrorists - then he ought to be willing to advance a public and detailed case, before an independent commission, that the consequences were and are worth the moral costs.

Obviously the words "public and detailed case" and "Dick Cheney" don't exactly go hand in hand. Obviously the notion that the American Presidency needs to operate secretly in many of these matters is central to the now ex-veep's political worldview. "A lot of the details are still obviously classified," he said, when pressed by Jim Lehrer to describe exactly what sort of information we gained from the "high-value" interrogations, and it's clear that he expects to be offering that answer for many years to come. But at the moment, it also seems clear that by avoiding a deep and detailed public engagement with the argument over torture, he's ensuring that his side will lose it. And based on his own accounting of the stakes involved, he ought to be willing - nay, eager - to compromise his beliefs about what information from the Bush years can and should be made public in the short term in order to win the political argument about whether the administration's policies should be continued.

For many anti-torture voices, of course, it's taken as a given that Cheney doesn't really believe what he says he believes - or at the very least, that on some level he knows that a full and fair airing of the intelligence the Bush Administration gathered from "enhanced interrogation" would not end up vindicating the policy. All of the principled talk about executive power and presidential privilege, in this view of things, is ultimately just a defense mechanism that allows Cheney - and by extension, the country - to avoid coming to grips with the depths of his wrongdoing. Maybe that's so. But I know at least some people in Washington for whom this isn't the case: People who argue, with a reasonable degree of knowledge and no self-justifying incentives, that whatever one thinks about the morality of waterboarding, the Bush Administration's interrogation policies up made a substantial difference in our ability to disrupt al Qaeda in the aftermath of 9/11.

Nothing that's been made public to date has left me convinced that they're right. (And even if they are right, it probably wouldn't change my judgment that the Bush Administration's broader record on detainee policy looks like a moral fiasco.)  But I'm entirely convinced that they're sincere - and I think that any sincere proponent of what the United States did to its high-value detainees should be willing to see those policies defended more fully and publicly than they've been to date. Put another way, anyone who thinks that Dick Cheney will be at least somewhat vindicated by history ought to want him vindicated now, when the vindication would actually make a difference in the policy of the United States government. And an independent commission, charged with assessment, rather than indictment, seems like as reasonable a place as any to start.

A Little Carter, A Little Reagan

The speech, I thought, was a sometimes-dissonant, sometimes-successful attempt to marry expansiveness and sobriety. The language of realism was woven throughout - "our collective failure to make hard choices ... the time has come to set aside childish things ...the challenges we face ... will not be met easily or in a short span of time" - and there was, as Maggie Gallagher put it, an "old-school Protestant" element to much of Obama's rhetoric, from the calls to duty and responsibility, to the promise to marry "hope and virtue," to the praise for the work ethic and criticisms of " those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame." But time and again, Obama pivoted from this theme to the sort of begin-the-world-anew rhetoric that we've come to expect from all our presidents, liberal and conservative alike - promising that hard choices are really false choices, that pragmatism can overcome partisanship, that there's no technological hurdle that Science can't leap, and that all those nameless "cynics" who worry about hubris, overreach and decline don't understand that in the brave new age of Obama, their pessimistic instincts "no longer apply." His description of our straits was sometimes Carteresque, in other words - but his prognosis tilted, inevitably, toward a liberal version of Morning in America.

Which theme is remembered depends on what the future holds, and how Obama governs: It wasn't a speech brilliant enough to write its own page in the history books, a la Kennedy's first inaugural, and so it will be assessed by future generations through the eyes of hindsight, once this presidency has a record against which his opening statement can be judged. For now, it's enough to say that no Presidency in my lifetime has begun with so much promise and peril intermingled, and that every God-fearing American should make it their business to keep Barack Obama in their prayers - today, and for many days to come.

Quote For the Day

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us,
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears have been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, Our God, where we met Thee;
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand.
True to our God,
True to our native land

- James Weldon Johnson, "The Negro National Anthem," 1900

Achieving Our Country

I'll watching the Inauguration of Barack Obama tomorrow the way a good American should: At home, over some sort of brunch, in front of a flat-screen TV. But as a good Washingtonian, I figured I should attend at least one of the weekend's events, so I hiked down to the Lincoln Memorial concert on Sunday, and spent a few hours shivering in the cold just beyond the World War II memorial (that was as close as we could get), watching as various Obama propaganda films gave way to Bono, the Boss, and Beyonce on the Jumbo-tron. I don't know if it was the "least lame president-elect-sanctioned musical event in history"- probably! - but it was disappointingly lame even so, at least from where we stood: Only Garth Brooks (and to a lesser extent Pete Seeger, who closed things out - and set left-wing hearts aflutter - by leading the crowd in a rendition of "This Land Is Your Land"), out of the star-studded roster of performers, seemed to understand that the thing to do when you have hundreds of thousands of freezing spectators is to ham it way, way up, and to confine yourself to songs that make them want to ... shout! Though to be fair, any energy a given performer managed to generate dissipated awfully quickly anyway, thanks to the interminable between-song readings from past Presidents, and past inaugurals, delivered for the most part by second-tier movie stars who really don't have any business quoting Lincoln or Roosevelt. I mean, Denzel Washington and Tom Hanks, fair enough - but did I really need to shiver through a civics lecture from the likes of Jack Black, Ashley Judd and Kal Penn?

So that's the jaundiced, slightly frostbitten view of the proceedings. The kinder thing to say is that this was an impressive celebration of left-wing patriotism, the sort of thing this country hasn't seen on such a scale in years or even decades. In an essay for Time last year, Peter Beinart observed, with some accuracy, that "conservatives tend to see patriotism as an inheritance from a glorious past," while "liberals often see it as the promise of a future that redeems the past." The inaugural concert was all about the latter sort: The patriotism of Seeger and Springsteen; of white Hollywood and the black church; of Gene Robinson and the Gay Men's Chorus; and of course the Pope of liberal Christianity himself. (Even Reagan was co-opted to the achieving-our-country theme: They found the most liberal-friendly line in his first inaugural - "how can we love our country and not love our countrymen, and loving them, reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they are sick, and provide opportunities to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory?" - and quoted it amid similar phrases from FDR and JFK, MLK and Lincoln.) I won't say that it was exactly my kind of celebration, but it was the kind of celebration that liberal America has waited an awfully long time to experience. And I would be an ungrateful graduate of many a boyhood Pete Seeger singalong - I know the "radical verses" as well as any Obamaphile - if I didn't feel happy for my left-of-center countrymen in their hour of long-awaited celebration. You can't say that they didn't work awfully hard for it.

More Judeo-Christianity

Razib rounds up the responses to his case against the term "Judeo-Christian." I should note that mine was not intended to be a full-throated defense by any stretch: Any utility the term has is either relatively narrow or extremely broad, and nine times out of ten I'm in favor of emphasizing the distinctions between religious communions, rather than inventing phony, ahistorical ecumenisms. I'm less certain, though, why Razib quite is so hostile to the term. In this post, written in response to mine, he writes that his "main concern as an atheist who lives in a progressively more religiously pluralist society characterized by liberal democratic values is to turn all religions into operational variants of mainline Protestantism," and thus he'd like "to destroy the grand orthopraxic claims which many religions make upon their adherents" and replace them with "casual demands" you see in liberal Protestant denominations. But then isn't a term like "Judeo-Christian," which can be applied lazily and tolerantly to all kinds of groups, arguably perfect for the religious landscape that Razib wants to see? Or put another way, wouldn't a renewed and serious emphasis on the distinctiveness of individual religious traditions, and the intellectual roots thereof, ultimately be the enemy of the kind of casual, mushy Protestantization that he's hoping for? Sure, the people who talk about the "Judeo-Christian tradition" may be doing a disservice to the two faiths' history and traditions, but it seems to me that Razib's goals require believers to cut themselves loose from history and tradition, the better to preserve the pluralist peace.

Indeed, the only real problem with the term for his purposes may be that it isn't intellectually lazy enough - that it doesn't create an umbrella big enough for liberal-Protestantized Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists to huddle under as well. And reading his post again, maybe that's what he's getting at: That we need Christians and Jews to "retain their distinctiveness in at least a notional sense," as he puts it, in order to make other faiths feel comfortable joining the liberal tent - rather than remaining outside out of fear that they'll be swallowed in a Judeo-Christian sea. But ultimately, he does want religious distinctions to be swallowed in a Judeo-Christian (or liberal Protestant) sea: He wants us to emphasize the distinctions between Christians and Jews in the short run, because that's the only way to de-emphasize the distinctions between Muslims and Christians or Jews and Hindus over the long run. No to Judeo-Christianity, in other words, but yes, eventually, to Judeo-Zensufi-Hindianity.

The End of the Bush Presidency

Bob Woodward offers ten lessons to be drawn from the Bush Administration; none, as you might expect, are terribly flattering to our soon-to-be ex-President. Watching Bush's farewell address last night, what struck me above all was how long it's been since he felt like the President. Bush never had the gift of persuasion, the ability to give a State of the Union address or a press conference that left his enemies disarmed, but there was a time when he at least seemed like a leader - like someone consequential, active, and important, whatever one thought of his actions and their consequences. But that air of authority and leadership dissipated somewhere between the failure of Social Security reform and the 2006 midterms, and for the last two years Bush has projected the air of a bystander to history, as though events, and his presidency, were largely out of his hands.

You could imagine a different President passing through the same set of crises - Hurricane Katrina, Iraq's descent into chaos and the post-surge struggle back to some kind of stability, and finally this year's financial crisis - and coming out of them with a reputation as a battler, a man in the arena, a struggler and a doer who put his stamp on his time, even if the time was difficult and his decisions often went awry. But where the events of his second term were concerned, Bush seemed like a supporting player in his own presidency, standing in the wings while other figures - Mike Brown and Michael Chertoff; Donald Rumsfeld and then David Petraeus; Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke - took center stage, striving and erring, claiming opprobrium and credit, and generally overshadowing the man in the West Wing.

It was appropriate, in a sense, that his farewall remarks echoed his expansive Second Inaugural, with its simple (and simplistic) vision of a world divided between freedom and tyranny, and a crusading America advancing the one and defeating the other. He was at home in that rhetoric; he's never seemed at home since. And as Chris Brose suggests, while Bush's vision may have been appropriate to the post-9/11 moment, when the United States needed to be rallied against our foes, it wasn't the right sort of rhetoric for the broader era of terrorism, counterinsurgency, and counter-proliferation in which we find ourselves - and it's been consistently at odds with the gritty challenges of Bush's second term, from the post-invasion struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan to the "uncrackable" problems of Pakistan, Iran and North Korea.

And the fact that Bush never found an idiom with which to address those challenges is one of the bigger reasons why it's hard to imagine his Presidency being redeemed by history, even if the invasion of Iraq is deemed a better choice from the vantage point of 2025 than it's deemed my most today. Maybe - maybe - the gutsy decision to "surge" forces into Iraq in 2007, rather than abandon that country as lost, will make an enormous difference to the future of the Middle East. But even in making that decision, Bush never really claimed ownership of it: He had lost too much credibility, and lacked the capacity to be an advocate for the strategy he'd chosen. The surge was Bush's choice, but the policy belonged to Petraeus and Raymond Odierno, to John McCain and Robert Gates - because the presidency that's just ended seemed like it ended long ago.

Probably and Perhaps

The Christian Science Monitor, on those anti-theist bus ads:

Much of the campaign's initial buzz centered on the assertion that God "probably" doesn't exist. Does this suggest a hedging of bets - a move past atheist dogma? Only partly.

Some organizers wanted a flat "there is no God" statement. Dawkins favored an "almost certainly no God" wording. But Ms. Sherine says that British advertising officials advised that a phrase less absolute and not subject to proof would ensure the ad did not run afoul of the advertising standards authority.

Clearly, the advertising officials have been reading their Joseph Ratzinger:

No one can lay God and the Kingdom on the table before another man; even the believer cannot do it for himself. But however strongly unbelief may feel itself thereby justified it cannot forget the eerie feeling induced by the words "Yet perhaps it is true." That perhaps is the unavoidable temptation which it cannot elude, the temptation in which it, too, in the very act of rejection, has to experience the unrejectability of belief. In other words, both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief, if they do not hide away from themselves and the truth of their being. Neither can quite escape doubt and belief; for the one, faith is present against doubt; for the other through doubt and in the form of doubt. It is the basic pattern of man's destiny only to be allowed to find the finality of his existence in this unceasing rivalry between doubt and belief, temptation and uncertainty. Perhaps in precisely this way doubt, which saves both sides from being shut up in their own worlds, could become the avenue of communication. It prevents both from enjoying complete self-satisfaction; it opens up the believer to the doubter and the doubter to the believer; for one it is his share in the fate of the unbeliever, for the other the form in which belief remains nevertheless a challenge to him.

Somehow, though, I doubt Richard Dawkins would concur.

Hamas, the IRA, and America

In the wake of the barrage from Larison, Massie and McArdle on the subject of the U.S. relationship to the IRA, I will concede that in spite of its official anti-terror posture, Washington treated the Irish Republican cause in ways that one cannot imagine the U.S. government treating the cause of Hamas. (And concede, as well, the limits of my knowledge of the ins-and-outs of the Northern Irish peace process.) But I think there's an oversimplication in Larison's explanation for why this might be so:

This comes back to the point I was making in an earlier assessment of the counterfactual. The IRA was a genuine terrorist group, but it was listed as such by our government most of all because it was a sworn enemy of one of our closest allies. The record seems clear: terrorist groups that are useful to us or harmful to states we officially oppose are given a pass, while those that target us or our allies are condemned in the strongest terms. That's the nature of things in the real world, I suppose, but it is something that none of the reponses to the counterfactual seems to be taking into account. Had things gone very differently in the last century and London and Washington became enemies once more, it is very easy to imagine that the IRA or similar groups would have been made into anti-British proxies of the U.S. government. In the unlikely counterfactual event that an independent Arab Palestine had emerged out of a very different '67 outcome, the official attitude towards the enemies of that state would have depended entirely on U.S.-Palestine relations. All of this is by way of saying that the official opprobrium heaped on Palestinian militants, for example, is primarily a matter of condemning the enemies of an allied state; their use of terrorist tactics is secondary to whether or not they are labeled this.

It's that "entirely" that I don't buy. Yes, pure realpolitik considerations enter into which terrorist organizations are labeled as such and which are not, and which groups the U.S. government works with and which it tries to marginalize. But so do other considerations - including not only ethnic, cultural and religious affinities (and the activity, yes, of domestic pressure groups), but moral considerations as well, and the extent to which the aims and deeds of a given insurrection can be read as being in consonance with American principles. Indeed, Daniel allows as much, later in the same post:

.... nationalist causes start out and end up with co-ethnics being their main sympathizers, and this forms the floor of their support, but when a nationalist cause is growing in strength and has appropriated the rhetoric of liberty (or democracy or some other favorable buzzword) its sympathizers will tend to come from many other groups who identify with the cause in a more abstract way. For that matter, think of the western European response to the Greek War for Independence-Philhellenes and political liberals supported the Greeks almost in spite of who they were, and rallied to the cause because of what they hoped the modern Greeks might become once they were free of the Porte. Obviously, Byron didn't die at Missolonghi because he felt strong ethnic ties to his comrades-in-arms, but because he was a romantic liberal.

Now the Larisonian worldview takes a highly jaundiced attitude toward "buzzwords" like liberty and democracy, and toward romantic liberalism in general, which is all fair enough. Certainly it's true that the American desire to make moral distinctions based on liberal ideals in foreign policy (or to dress up the requirements of realpolitik in idealistic rhetoric) often lends itself to willful self-deception. But even if you think this moralistic tendency is always and everywhere folly, it still has, I think, a great deal of explanatory power when it comes to how the United States regards a Hamas versus how we regarded the IRA: However brutal and extreme the Irish rebels were, it was far easier to see them through a romantic liberal lens, given their aims and ideology, than it is to hold a remotely similar view of the current leadership in Gaza.

Now it's clear that from our World War II and Cold War alliances that the American commitment to romantic liberalism can be compromised, and indeed that Americans can tolerate a high degree of barbarism among our allies, especially in the context of a perceived existential struggle. And to return, for what I swear is the final time, to Walt's original counterfactual, if the hypothetical Jewish Hamas were locked in a death struggle with, say, a terror-sponsoring, anti-American, theocratic occupier, there would undoubtedly be Americans arguing that we should be supporting the Jewish terrorists against the Arab terrorist state. But all things being equal - which is to say, if our hypothetical Palestinian republic bore at least a passing resemblance to the actual-existing Israeli republic, and the fate of the free world didn't seem to hinge on the outcome of the struggle - I have a very hard time to imagine Americans mustering much sympathy for a Jewish group with views, tactics and goals similar to Hamas. And indeed I think that American Jewish groups - the same groups that Stephen Walt holds largely responsible for America's anti-Palestinian bias in our non-counterfactual world - would, for the most part, be at great pains to distance themselves from their theocratic, terroristic co-religionists in the Gaza Strip.

But of course we'll never know.

Christian, Muslim, Jew

Speaking of the Jews, Razib has an interesting post (following up on this post, from last year) attacking the intellectual seriousness of the term "Judeo-Christian." Among other things, he argues that in terms of historical beliefs and practices, it makes more sense to talk about a Judeo-Islamic tradition, with Christianity, trinities and all, as the outlier, than it does to lump the Christians and the Jews together.

Given that the term in question evolved, in part, as a characteristically American form of politeness - a way to make a Jewish minority in a largely-Christian society feel welcomed and at home - I don't think it's a surprise that it's somewhat wanting in the intellectual-rigor department. But I think there are two defenses to be made of it. The first is that it's most often employed in the context of intra-Western debates over secularism, atheism, the culture war, and so forth, rather than in the context of Islam - and in a landscape like the post-Enlightenment West, where traditional religion has often been opposed by secular ideologies of various stripes, Jews and Christians would seem to have enough in common to constitute a Judeo-Christian axis (if you will) that can be reasonably contrasted with worldviews ranging from Comtean positivism to Marxism and National Socialism. (It's not a coincidence that the term "Judeo-Christian" was initially popularized during decades when the latter two ideologies were ascendant.)

Throw Islam into the mix, obviously, and the term makes less immediate sense. Razib allows that self-consciously modernized faiths like Reform Judaism and liberal Protestantism have more in common with one another than either does with contemporary Islam, but he makes the case that "Rabbinical Judaism, the dominant form of Judaism between 500 to 1800, resembles Islam much more than Christianity," and that even the Judaizing tendencies in post-Reformation Christianity don't create a practical affinity with Judaism comparable to the similarities between how Muslims and Jews worship the God of Abraham.

His brief is plausibly argued (though he glosses rather quickly over the implications of the  Maimonidean-Scholastic connection), so let me just offer one possible response: Namely, that you could arguably rest a case for a deeper Judeo-Christian than Judeo-Muslim affinity on how the junior religion relates to the parent faith. Both Christianity and Islam are essentially supersessionist, obviously, but I suspect that the Christian decision to swallow the Hebrew Bible whole into its scripture - and to preserve, rather than elide, Jesus' own obvious self-understanding as a Jew - ultimately creates deeper grounds for dialogue than does Islam's insistence that the narrative of the Hebrew scriptures was deliberately corrupted and required correction from Muhammed.

Put another way, Christian tradition seems to have more respect for the essential integrity and God-givenness of pre-Christian Judaism than does Islamic tradition. This makes it difficult to imagine a Muslim version of the sort of rethinking of what, precisely, supersessionism means than we've seen from Evangelicals and Catholics in this century - a rethinking that's been crucial for the development of Judeo-Christian dialogue. And by the same token, there's no equivalent in the foundational narrative of Islam to the striking Jewishness of Jesus, a quality which would seem to make Jewish engagement with the Gospel narratives - and Christian engagement with that engagement - more plausible and intellectually fruitful in the long run than Jewish engagement with the figure of Muhammed.

Admittedly, though, these suggestion are entirely provisional, and perhaps hopelessly timebound. The potential for fruitful Jewish-Christian dialogue was not readily apparent, to put it mildly, during many periods of Christian history; there were periods when Jewish-Islamic dialogue was in better shape that it is today; and it may be that Muslim-Jewish dialogue in, say the 24th century will look a lot like Christian-Jewish dialogue does at present, the various scriptural tumbling blocks notwithstanding. And if that dialogue is taking place between religious scholars in a peaceful Israel and Palestine, I'll be delighted to have my theory disproven.

Race and The Israel Lobby

Freddie deBoer emails:

It seems to me, from reading your blog post and from watching your Bloggingheads with Matt Yglesias, that part of your problem with The Israel Lobby is that, intentionally or not, it mimics certain anti-Semitic tropes. Isn't that exactly, though, the kind of argument that has been directed at conservatives regarding race, to their great consternation? With issues like affimative action or similar, conservatives have been accused of being near-racists, like racists, arguing in similar ways to racists.... And over and over again, conservatives have replied that nuance matters, context matters, intent matters, details matter. Surely the same is true when it comes to criticizing Israel and accusations of anti-Semitism. If nothing else, your opinion reinforces the notion that, when it comes to Israel, we don't play by the usual rules, and everyone has to be a little careful, not say too much, not go too far from the conventional path. That's not a good thing, I don't think.

It's a fair issue to raise. To be clear, I don't think that Walt and Mearsheimer are mimicking anti-Semitic tropes intentionally; I think they're doing so obtusely, in the course of a tendentious and simplistic argument about the roots of U.S. foreign policy. And precisely because I think their argument is tendentious, simplistic and wrong, I'm less interested in defending them against charges of anti-semitism than I am in defending conservatives - with whose arguments I generally agree - against what I see as dubious charges of racism. Maybe that's unfair or hypocritical on my part. Certainly if you think that Walt and Mearsheimer are the victims of a suffocating and dangerous atmosphere of lockstep philo-Zionism in the American intelligentsia, then it makes sense to defend their right to raise questions regardless of whether their answers make sense. But I tend to see them more as the beneficiaries, in terms of book sales and media attention, of a calculated decision to take a highly-polemical approach to a hot-button topic; I think they received plenty of respectful, not-at-all-vitriolic criticism from prominent papers and reviewers; and I think they ultimately did a disservice to the points where I'm in agreement with them, and to the broader cause of a better American foreign policy, by couching arguments against, say, the invasion of Iraq or Israel's settlement policy in the West Bank in terms that were unlikely to convince anyone not already persuaded. So I'm not inclined to see them as figures in desperate need of defense.

It's also worth noting that "race card" debates takes place in a different political context than "anti-Semitism card" debates. In today's America, there simply aren't any major political actors taking explicitly racist/segregationist positions, and in recent national elections the race debate has largely moved beyond even the arguments over racially-charged issues like busing, affirmative action and crime, and into the realm of symbolism and subliminal messaging. The debate over Israel, on the other hand, takes place in a context in which explicit anti-Semitism - anti-Semitism as policy, that is, and with at least a somewhat eliminationist edge - is a live and potent political force. The racist tropes that the McCain campaign stood accused of dabbling in - the black male as sexual aggressor, and so forth - are the stuff of underground white supremacist literature and subconscious suburbanite anxieties. But the anti-Semitic tropes that Walt and Mearsheimer stood accused of dabbling in are the stuff of everyday rhetoric in large swathes of the Islamic world, and they're essential to the public worldview of Israel's immediate political enemies. I'm not sure how much difference this reality should make in how carefully one treads around this nest of issues - versus how much care you take to, say, avoid putting a black politician in an ad with a white woman - but certainly it should make some difference.

The Walt Counterfactual, Revisited

Megan speaks up in its defense - arguing, inter alia, that the rump, terrorist-run Jewish Gaza in Stephen Walt's hypothetical would still have a potent lobby in the United States for the same reason that there's long been sympathy among Irish-Americans for the interests of the stateless, terror-producing members of the IRA. She also suggests that the influence of the Israel lobby in the United States is best explained by ethnic affinities - not only the ethnic loyalties of Jewish-Americans, but the quasi-ethnic affinities of "evangelical Christians who think of themselves as in some way descended from the ten tribes of Israel."  

To the first point, I actually think the Irish example tends to weaken Walt's counterfactual.   The major point of the thought experiment was Walt's insinuation that a Jewish Hamas wouldn't be denounced as terrorists in Washington the way the Arab Hamas gets denounced - because of the influence of the Israel Lobby, presumably. And the example of Northern Ireland suggests precisely the opposite. Yes, even a stateless, terrorism-prone Jewish group in the Holy Land would doubtless have sympathizers in the United States, just as the Irish Republican Army did in the 1970s and '80s. But despite the sympathies of some Irish Americans for the rebels in Northern Ireland, and the dalliances of the occasional American politician with Gerry Adams and Co., the IRA was on the State Department's list of, yes, terrorist organizations until the Good Friday Accords. And it's pretty easy to imagine how the American government would have responded if Catholic nationalists had taken power in a swathe of Northern Ireland and started launching missiles across the Irish Sea into Scottish and English townships. (It's also worth noting, as long as we're drawing analogies, that the IRA's charter was just slightly less objectionable than Hamas's ...)

To the broader point about the roots of America's affinity for Israel, I suppose I agree to some extent with Megan's suggestion that "we are the Israel lobby, to a greater or a lesser extent - all Americans who think of themselves as more like the Israelis than the Palestinians." (This is, of course, one of the reasons why it doesn't make sense to analyze American support for Israel primarily or exclusively in terms of the machinations of a lobby - unless you're interested in giving the whole thing a conspiratorial gloss, that is.) But as to why many Americans - be they Evangelicals or whomever - think of themselves as more like Israelis than Palestinians, I'm largely in agreement with a friend, who writes of Megan's post:

Evangelical Christians' identification with Israel is not an "ethnic affinity." For starters, evangelical Christians do not actually believe they are descended from the ten tribes of Israel. (I suppose Mormons believe that, but they are a negligible fraction of Israel's supporters in America.) Is it not obvious that the affinity of evangelical Christians for Israel is religious and cultural?
 
And this business about how "almost all Americans see Israelis as sharing a common European cultural heritage that the Palestinians do not" because of something "rooted deeply in our genes" like "our selfish alleles"?  Maybe the identification with Israel as being part of a common cultural heritage is rooted deeply in -- oh, I don't know -- our common cultural heritage: Like that Israel actually is part of Western civilization, is a child of European cultural and political traditions, and belongs to the family of liberal democracies while Hamas is a theocratic terrorist organization bent on destroying Western civilization, or at least its influence in their neighborhood.
 
The answer to Stephen Walt's query is obviously "Yes" -- but not only because in his hypothetical scenario the Israel Lobby would not exist. It's also because American support of Israel, and even the Israel Lobby's support of Israel, is not unconditional, but based on these religious, cultural, and political affinities and principles. AIPAC and similar folks opposed those Jews who refused to evacuate Gaza to make way for a Palestinian state -- and those Jews were not nearly the lunatics and terrorists that Walt describes in his hypothetical.
 
Now, precisely because of cultural reasons, I don't think Walt's scenario would ever come to pass -- for cultural reasons, too, the Jewish refugees from Arab lands behave nothing like the Arab refugees from Israel -- but if it did, of course the United States would denounce the Jewish Hamas that Walt imagines. I would too.

Finally, to Megan's follow-up post on the merits of The Israel Lobby, I would just reiterate a point I made in my recent Bloggingheads session with Matt Yglesias: I don't think that critics of AIPAC's influence on American foreign policy, and the America-Israel relationship more generally, are serving their cause by expending a lot of energy sticking up for a lousy book about the subject - especially, as in Megan's case, when they themselves admit that it's a lousy book - just because its authors were subjected to unfair attacks along the way to fame and sales figures beyond the dreams of the average IR theorist.  

Hope Is Not A Strategy

Bradley Burston, via Jeffrey Goldberg:

In recent days, however, Israeli moderates and the center-left have been faced a new and bizarrely troubling thought: What if this most denounced of wars actually does some good?

Lurking at the margins, are signs that this war may have positive downstream effects for Israel, and for Palestinian peace prospects as well. Much of this hinges on the effect it may ultimately have on Iran and its satraps. In fact, viewed against the report that the Bush administration forbade an Israeli air strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, the war, as horrible as many of its direct results have been, may actually serve to break the momentum of the Iranian juggernaut. What can safely be assumed, is that if Iranian influence continues to grow in the Holy Land, peace prospects will be extinguished for years to come.

As if to emphasize the ambivalence that Israelis feel, polls have shown a large majority supporting the war, but only a tiny percentage believing that the offensive will achieve even the limited goal of ending Palestinian rocket fire into Israel.

A week ago I remarked on the inevitable murkiness of just-war theory, but this strikes me as a case where the murk isn't that murky after all: If you think that a given military operation has a lousy chance of achieving its most immediate and tangible objective, you shouldn't support it based on the hope that it might achieve "positive downstream effects" on regional politics. Military force is a blunt instrument, and as such it's well-suited to the pursuit of goals - turning back aggression, preventing genocide, destroying weapons programs, etc. - in which effectiveness tends to be correlated with the amount of force employed, and the success or failure of a given operation can be judged, within reasonable limits, in the short run. But if you move beyond short-term objectives - which is to say, beyond strictly military objectives - thinks get very dicey very quickly: The future is wildly unpredictable, warfare inevitably multiplies unintended consequences, and the difficulty involved assessing whether, say, the curbing of Iranian influence is worth the risk of Somalia-by-the-Sea ought to strongly tip the scales against going to war with the former objective in mind. The Gaza incursion has moral legitimacy, to my mind, if and only if it's approached primarily as an operation aimed at protecting the inhabitants of southern Israel against attacks from the terrorist-run statelet next door; once you start using hypothetical "downstream" consequences as your main justification for war, you're entering a realm in which war almost certainly shouldn't be justified at all.

This is, like so many things, a lesson that I take from the conflict in Iraq. As many war supporters pointed out, then and now, there were all sorts of positive developments that could have flowed from Saddam Hussein's ouster. And over the long haul, some of them still might come to pass, despite the toll the war has taken. But the pre-war debate revolved around weapons of mass destruction for a reason: It was "the one reason everyone could agree on," as Paul Wolfowitz famously put it, because it was the one reason for war that was premised on an immediate and tangible military objective - disarm a bad guy before he uses his weapons against you - and that didn't depend on long-range hypotheticals about Arab democratization, an Iran-Syria domino effect, a weak horse/strong horse dynamic, and so forth. Strip away Saddam's (supposed) rearmament and the imminent threat it (supposedly) posed, and the fact that you had nine other "here's why this might be a good idea" reasons for war did not a strong-enough justication for war make. Military conflict is simultaneously too grave and too unpredictable to be entered into if your primary objective depends upon a chain of hypothetical second-order consequences stretching across months and years.

This doesn't mean that you shouldn't consider the long run as well as the short run, and political as well as strictly military objectives, when you're making the decision for or against the use of force. In the case of Gaza, as many people have pointed out, it's easy to imagine a scenario in which Israel attains its short-term security objectives at the expense of the chances for a long-term peace, and the war ends up being judged a failure on long-term grounds even if it seems to succeed in the shorter run. But while plausible short-term military objectives aren't always a sufficient condition for going to war, I do think they're a necessary one - and if you think, as the Israeli people apparently do, that those objectives can't be attained, then you probably shouldn't be supporting the war in the first place.

Update: Though to be fair to the Israelis in the poll, it's possible that they believe that completely "ending Palestinian rocket fire" is impossible, but that dramatically limiting such fire (which would be a legitimate, short-term military objective as well) is possible, and they support the war more on those grounds than because they have high hopes for "positive downstream effects" where Iran and the peace process are concerned.

Infrastructure To Nowhere

I'm a great believer in the idea that the United States needs to spend more money on our aging infrastructure, which makes me one of those conservatives who are at least faintly hopeful that the Obama Administration will use the short-term atmosphere of crisis as an opportunity to push through some smart long-term investments. But I'm also someone who grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, whose downtown is in many respects a monument to the failures of a particular era of urban planning, and then spent four years at college in Boston in the midst of the Big Dig era. Which means that I don't find these cautionary passages that Tyler Cowen culls from a 2002 book on Japan all that surprising:

Few have questioned why Japan's supposed "cities of the future" are unable to do something as basic as burying telephone wires; why gigantic construction boondoggles scar the countryside (roads leading nowhere in the mountains, rivers encased in U-shaped chutes); why wetlands are cemented over for no reason...or why Kyoto and Nara were turned into concrete jungles...

Led by bureaucrats on automatic pilot, the nation has carried certain policies -- namely construction -- to extremes that would be comical were they not also at times terrifying...

Dozens of government agencies owe their existence solely to thinking up new ways of sculpting the earth.  Planned spending on public works for the decade 1995-2005 will come to an astronomical...$6.2 trillion, three to four times more than what the United States, with twenty times the land area and more than double the population, will spend on public construction in the same period.

...from an economic point of view the majority of the civil-engineering works do not address real needs.  All those dams and bridges are built by the bureaucracy, for the bureaucracy, at public expense.

...The construction industry here is so powerful that Japanese commentators often describe their country as doken kokka, a "construction state."...the millions of jobs supported by construction are not jobs created by real growth but "make work," paid for by government handouts. These are filled by people who could have been employed in services, software, and other advanced industries.

The good news is that the next generation of urban planners in the United States are unlikely to make precisely these kinds of mistakes - based on their likely reading lists, at least. The bad news is there's undoubtedly a whole new set of mistakes out there, just waiting to be made.

Armaggedon's Choices (II)

On the "would Reagan have nuked Russia" question, a foreign-policy guru friend emails the following:

The likelihood of a President facing a truly existential, all-or-nothing decision to launch an annihilative strike against the Soviet Union ... was generally understood to be extremely slim, especially once the Soviets began fielding survivable nuclear forces capable of reliably reaching the U.S. Homeland. Far more likely - and indeed central to the course and, probably, outcome of the Cold War - was that a President would face the question of whether to employ deliberately limited nuclear strikes or conventional force (that might potentially implicate nuclear forces on either side) in response to some form of Warsaw Pact aggression. The core strategy of the Atlantic Alliance once the Soviets achieved intercontinental strike capabilities was Flexible Response - the capabilities and willingness to use varying levels of force, both conventional and nuclear, to deter Pact aggression and coercion and, if necessary, to impose costs upon the Bloc that would render whatever political objectives they were trying to achieve not worth the cost.  Because of the generally overwhelming conventional and non-nuclear superiority of Warsaw Pact forces for the duration of the Cold War (even in 1988, after the introduction of Revolution in Military Affairs-inspired weaponry and technologies, SACEUR General Bernard Rogers admitted that NATO forces would not be able to withstand a Pact offensive for more than a few weeks), it was NATO that necessarily relied upon the threat of resorting to nuclear weapons for its security.  Thus it was the Soviets who took a (kind of - their definition of "first" was quite elastic) "no first use" pledge, while NATO never did, always keeping the nuclear option open - and credibly so. 

Indeed, one of the key events in the Cold War was precisely a kind of speaking by deeds that the United States would resort to use of nuclear weapons through the crucial emplacement of the Pershing missiles in Europe in response to the Soviet deployment of the SS-20s. This was considered essential because the Soviets were perceived to be able to negate the credibility of U.S. strategic retaliatory forces by their own forces (thus essentially negating U.S. and allied strategic forces directed at the USSR itself), while also having potential theater (meaning European) supremacy due to their conventional advantages and their intermediate-range SS-20s.  The U.S. and allied decision to go forward with the Pershing deployments was the strongest signal possible that the U.S. and NATO would wage a war including nuclear weapons within the theater, meaning that NATO would go to the nuclear level on the ladder of escalation if necessary in response to Pact aggression.              

So the real question was: Would the President go across ... the "firebreak" from conventional to nuclear forces?  (This is a very, very different question than: Would the President let them all go in response to a total Soviet first strike?)  I think the answer has to be yes - that essentially every President in the Cold War would have done so.  The whole infrastructure of the United States - military, political/diplomatic (via NATO commitments, both formal and informal), intelligence, et cetera - were prepared to go nuclear, if need be.  The President was expected to, by his people, by his bureaucracies, by his allies - and, most importantly, perhaps, by the Soviets, who had to have a sense of the resolve of the United States from their sources, both public and private.  Even Jimmy Carter, our most liberal Cold War President, was the one to order the initial push to put the Pershings in.  He also signed off on Presidential Directive 59, drafted by William Odom, which pushed rationalized targeting policies for nuclear forces - a sign of seriousness.  

A more economical explanation for these kinds of retroactive pronouncements about never using nuclear weapons (McNamara has made similar claims regarding his advice to President Johnson) is that they take what was always a somewhat ambiguous posture (there were never strict triplines for nuclear use, for instance) and combine it with a desire to rehabilitate (McNamara) or apotheosize (Reagan) the image.  A more realistic and morally serious approach is to understand that we were deadly in earnest about our willingness to use nuclear weapons, the Soviets believed us, and so they never were able to cow Western Europe and Northeast Asia into submission.   

Finally, these retroactive statements that nuclear use was never seriously contemplated have very deleterious repercussions for future deterrence ... If countries don't believe the U.S. will ever use nuclear weapons, then these weapons lose any real effectiveness as deterrents. This would be a tragic development, and it would be the most likely route to their eventual use. 

Neuhaus, Ctd.

The wizards at TNR have exhumed my long-ago back-and-forth with Damon Linker.  

Armageddon's Choices

Ron Rosenbaum, on the "Letter of Last Resort":

At this very moment, miles beneath the surface of the ocean, there is a British nuclear submarine carrying powerful ICBMs (nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles). In the control room of the sub, the Daily Mail reports, "there is a safe attached to a control room floor. Inside that, there is an inner safe. And inside that sits a letter. It is addressed to the submarine commander and it is from the Prime Minister. In that letter, Gordon Brown conveys the most awesome decision of his political career ... and none of us is ever likely to know what he decided."

The decision? Whether or not to fire the sub's missiles, capable of causing genocidal devastation in retaliation for an attack that would--should the safe and the letter need to be opened--have already visited nuclear destruction on Great Britain. The letter containing the prime minister's posthumous decision (assuming he would have been vaporized by the initial attack on the homeland) is known as the Last Resort Letter.

Rosenbaum's piece reminded me of a striking passage from William F. Buckley's posthumous The Reagan I Knew, which I've been reading for a forthcoming essay. Buckley is describing the speech he gave at National Review's 30th anniversary dinner, with Reagan in attendance:

Dwelling on it years later, I was prompted finally to explore what I said and its larger meaning. My purpose here is philosophical and historical. I had acted for many years, indeed most of the world had done so, on a premise which I celebrated that night as the primary agent for United States independence from the Soviet threat. We were safe (I said) because Reagan was Reagan, meaning, in this instance, a non-ambiguist on the critical question of deterrence. What I said in as many words, dressed for the party, was that Reagan would, if he had to, pull the nuclear trigger.

Twenty years after saying that, in the most exalted circumstances, in the presence of the man I was talking about, I changed my mind. Whether that change will in any way influence policy in the years ahead can't be said. But you may agree on the importance, to this author, at any rate, of the revised thinking. Mr. Reagan is not here to tell us - and I doubt that he told anyone his circle - that the critical moment having arrived, he would in fact not have deployed our great bombs, never mind what the Soviet Union had done.

"Why?" I heard Henry Kissinger say one night when the conundrum was discussed. "After all, what's the use?"

Neuhaus and Liberalism

Damon Linker:

In his obituary for Richard John Neuhaus, Douthat claims, in response to some nameless silly person (who just happens to be me), that Neuhaus was dedicated to reconciling Christianity with the liberal tradition. I suspect that will sound pretty odd to those familiar with Neuhaus' role in arming the conservative side of the culture war with arguments intended to decimate liberalism. But then everything begins to make sense once you follow the link that Douthat supplies with his statement, which brings you to a Neuhaus article on "The Liberalism of John Paul II." Oh, that liberal tradition. The liberalism that traces American democratic ideas not to the Enlightenment but to medieval Christendom. The liberalism that believes (in Neuhaus' words, written in 1984) that "only a transcendent, a religious, vision can turn this society from a disaster and toward the fulfillment of its destiny" as a "sacred enterprise." The liberalism that holds (in Neuhaus' words, written in 1997) that the American experiment "may well be ending . . . under the iron rule of the 'separation of church and state.'" The liberalism that espouses the Manichean view that one of the country's two major political parties, the nation's media, and its courts--and perhaps 52.9 percent of the American people--are in the grip of a bloodthirsty "culture of death" that needs to be combated by champions of the "culture of life," who just so happen to make their home in the country's other major political party. That's the liberalism of John Paul II and Richard John Neuhaus.

And therein lies Neuhaus' greatest ideological innovation. Rather than maintaining that the religious right should replace liberal politics with some other, religiously grounded form of political association, he insisted that, properly understood, liberal politics is (or once was, or should be--on this he was often unclear) a religiously grounded form of political association. Viewed in this way, the Pope, Neuhaus himself, and their Protestant friends (like Pat Robertson, Chuck Colson, James Dobson, Ralph Reed, and Karl Rove) become America's true liberals, while all those millions of Americans on the right and left who prefer a more mundane form of politics (and who in nearly every other context are considered liberals of the classical or modern variety) become the antagonists the true liberal tradition.

Damon and I have been round and round on these questions many times before (though unfortunately our major exchange has vanished into the maw of TNR's archives), so I'll be brief. Basically, if you set aside the tendentiousness, there's truth to what he says above. Neuhaus argued that the American constitutional order, and the form of liberalism it embodies, "is premised upon moral truths secured by religion," to quote from his essay on John Paul II and the liberal tradition. Moreover, he believed that the modern left's emphasis on the separation of religion and politics (as opposed to church and state) ran toward illiberalism, and that the left-wing promotion of legalized abortion and euthanasia amounted to a frontal assault on essentially liberal principles - human rights and human dignity and so forth. These are not uncontroversial views, to put it mildly, and they certainly made him a conservative in the modern political landscape. But they are views have deep roots in Anglo-American political history - the notion that liberalism's basic premises depend in some sense upon religion, in particular, is as old as Hobbes and Locke - and as such they properly belong within the big tent of the American liberal tradition, rather than outside it. And a liberal tradition that cannot find, within its many mansions, room for Neuhaus (and, yes, for John Paul II as well), is a liberalism that any Christian worth his salt should think twice for before subscribing to.

For more on the Linker critique of Neuhaus's work, Noah Millman and Russell Arben Fox have characteristically thought-provoking musings. And for anyone interested in passing a fuller judgment on Neuhaus' thought, and its relationship with the liberal tradition, I recommend going to the horse's mouth: To the above-mentioned essay on JPII and liberalism; to Neuhaus's fascinating exchange with Stanley Fish on religion's compatibility with liberal democracy (and vice versa); to his rebuke to the theonomist temptation; to his recent lecture on "Our American Babylon" (which forms the basis, I believe, of what will be a posthumously published book); and to many other places as well. Whatever one's opinion of Neuhaus's political and theological commitments (and here I think Damon would agree), his writings ought to be required reading for anyone concerned with religion, politics, and the first principles (or "first things") that undergird the two - and he deserves as wide an audience, if not a wider one, in death as he enjoyed in life.

Richard John Neuhaus, RIP

I only met him twice, but he was a mentor nonetheless. My family migrated through Christianity when I was young: I was baptized Episcopalian, attended Evangelical and Pentecostal churches, and became a Catholic, with the rest of my family, when I was seventeen - leaving me not quite an adult convert, but not a cradle Catholic either. I read the usual books along the way - Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and so forth. And I read Neuhaus. Every young writer, I imagine, has their first intellectual magazine, whose essays and articles are devoured all the more greedily for being slightly over one's head. Mine was First Things. I don't know exactly when my family began subscribing, but I know it was before we became Catholics - and I know that long before I could quite figure out exactly what, say, Rene Girard meant when he talked about mimesis and the crucifixion, I was reading Neuhaus' sprawling "Public Square" column every month. I would call it a proto-blog, that feature, with its mix of long and short material, and its cover-the-waterfront feel, but that does it an injustice: The very best bloggers strain and fail to achieve the mix of range and rigor that seemed effortless for Neuhaus, and the ease with which he moved between esoteric theological disputes and the latest culture-war fracas. Richard Dawkins likes to say that Charles Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Month after month, issue after issue, Richard John Neuhaus - through his writing, and also through the writers he cultivated - demonstrated to my adolescent and early-twentysomething self that it was possible to be an intellectually fulfilled Christian.

The Bush years produced many spasms of hysteria: Among the silliest was the notion that Neuhaus and his intellectual circle represented some sort of grave and reactionary threat to liberal democracy. In reality, Neuhaus as an archetypal post-Vatican II figure, whose deepest intellectual interests lay in finding compatibilities and building bridges - between Jews and Christians, Protestants and Catholics, faith and the free market, and above all between Christianity and liberalism. His chief political cause, the pro-life movement, he always saw as a continuation of his years as a civil rights activist (and man of the Left); it's entirely appropriate that what I take to be his final Public Square, in the January First Things, kicked off with a discussion of "The Pro-Life Movement as the Politics of the 1960s." Even his magazine's most apocalyptic moment - the famous "End of Democracy" symposium, a few years after Planned Parenthood v. Casey was handed down - doubled as a passionate brief for constitutionalism and democratic self-government, and a defense, however excessive, of a particular interpretation of American liberalism against the usurpations of meritocracy. No modern intellectual did so much to make the case for the compatibility between Christian belief and liberal democratic politics - and in the future, when the two have parted ways (as I suspect they will) more completely than at present, both Christians and liberals will look back on the synthesis he argued for with nostalgia, and regret.

As with any intellectual, the system of thought that he developed had its weaknesses: A tendency to overemphasize consistency and underestimate tensions within institutions and causes he believed in, whether it was the Church he served as a priest, the Evangelical-Catholic rapprochement he labored to cultivate, or the conservative movement that he eventually joined (or that joined him, perhaps more aptly). And as with any deep thinker who doubled as a polemicist, sometimes the darts went awry, or the barbs substituted for the deeper engagement that a subject deserved, and his attachment to political causes sometimes limited the scope of his discernment. But these are things that can be said of all us who scribble for a living, and few of us can match the things that Richard John Neuhaus did right: The depth and skill in argument, the breadth of subjects covered, and the verve with which he wrote. And above all, the spirit of urgency that permeated his work - the sense that the controversies with which he concerned himself really mattered, in an everyday sense but in a cosmic one as well. At their best, his essays and arguments achieved a grace to which all religious authors should aspire: They not only conveyed the sense that Richard John Neuhaus, priest and author, cared about the issues of the age, but that God Himself cared about them as well.

Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei.

War: What Is It Good For?

Yesterday, Matt Yglesias offered a thoughtful attempt to put his skepticism about Israel's Gaza incursion in the context of the lessons he's drawn from the Iraq War:

I've been thinking back on some of the online disputes I've been having about Israel's attack on Gaza, and it occurred to me that what's missing from a lot of this is context. Not further context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but further context on the use of force in general ... over the past five years I've changed a lot of my thinking about national security policy and war and peace in general. I was skeptical of the merits of Israel's attack on Lebanon, skeptical about Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia, skeptical about Georgia's attack on South Ossetia, and skeptical about Russia's furious counter-attack on Georgia. Long story short, I'm strongly inclined to believe that political actors are much too eager to believe that the aggressive use of military force will accomplish their objectives, and also inclined to believe that political actors are much too eager to believe that bloodshed is morally justifiable.

These are lessons I've drawn from recent history as well, which is one reason why I'm skeptical about Israel's Gaza incursion. (Sharpening my skepticism is the fact that Max Boot, whose enthusiasm for the use of military force seems largely undiminished by the events of the last five years, is waxing skeptical as well.) Certainly, almost everything I've read suggests that this post, from Noah Millman, gets the likely consequences more or less correct:

If I had to predict, I'd say the invasion will be a mixed success in tactical terms, with Israel successfully liquidating a number of Hamas leaders and much physical infrastructure. Whether the Qassams stop falling entirely or not, Hamas will be operationally weakened for some time. I would not bet on Hamas losing control of the territory - and Israel had better hope Hamas does not lose control, lest she find Somalia on her doorstep. Nor would I bet on Kadima's political gambit working; it didn't work for Labor in 1996, after all. As for the more extravagant rationales being floated - this will strengthen Fatah in the West Bank? Or will strike a blow against Iranian prestige? Or is actually a dry run for an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities - the less said the better. The tangible achievements from this war, and the great loss of life among the Palestinians may, at best, be a short respite from Qassam fire.

See Rich Lowry, as well, on a similar theme. It's important to note, though, that this sobering calculus still leaves Noah as a lukewarm supporter of the incursion. The rest of his analysis is very much worth reading: Essentially, he argues that military operations that improve Israeli security in the short term (and only in the short term) are a necessary part of Israel's only plausible long-term strategy: "A fighting retreat from the bulk of the territories won in 1967." Operation Cast Lead, in his view, "is intended to provide cover for the reelection of a center-left coalition that will stage a unilateral withdrawal from much of the West Bank ... That's what the war is about, strategically: providing Israel's government with domestic and international cover for the next phase of unilateral retreat from its post-1967 positions to more defensible ones."

Well, here's hoping. One core problem facing Israel, obviously, is that short-term attempts to increase its security tend to undercut long-term hopes of a negotiated settlement. The other core problem is that the hope of a negotiated settlement seems further out of reach than ever. Consider how Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, neither of them exactly given to support for Israeli intransigence, characterize the current situation:

... The graver problem today is on the Palestinian side. If one strips away the institutional veneer--Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization, various secular political groupings, the Palestinian Authority--what is left is largely empty shells with neither an agreed-upon program nor recognized leadership. The national movement, once embodied by Fatah and Arafat, is adrift. From its vestiges, the Islamist movement Hamas has flourished and, amid the flurry of negotiations between Abbas and Olmert over a putative albeit wholly theoretical deal, it cannot have escaped notice that the more practical and meaningful negotiations have been between Israel and Hamas--over a cease-fire, for example. Still, the Islamist movement cannot, any more than Fatah, claim to represent the Palestinian people or to be empowered to negotiate on their behalf. The rift between the two organizations, most visibly manifested in the increasingly deep split between the West Bank and Gaza, makes a two-state solution harder to achieve. Israel long complained it had no Palestinian partner and, at the outset, the complaint had the feel of a pretext. Increasingly, it has the ring of truth.

Among Palestinians, moreover, the prize of statehood is losing its luster. The two-state solution today matters most to those who matter least, the political and economic elite whose positions, attained thanks to the malpractices of the Palestinian Authority, would be enhanced by acquiring a state. To many others, the dividends of such a solution--a state in Gaza and much of the West Bank--risk being outweighed by the sacrifices: forsaking any self-defense capacity, tolerating Israeli security intrusion, renouncing the refugees' right of return, and compromising on Jerusalem.

Arafat embraced the two-state solution and sold it to his people. It took him fifteen years--from 1973 to 1988--to turn it from an act of betrayal and high treason to what most of his people saw as the culmination of the Palestinian national movement. He did so with a militancy his successors lack and which seemed to both defy and negate the concessions such a solution entailed. He exhibited perpetual defiance, which was one of the many reasons why the US and Israel distrusted him even in the best of times, and why Palestinians continued to be drawn to him even at the worst of them. With his passing, it is hard to see who among his heirs can acquiesce in the necessary compromises and still pull off a solution.

A certain amount of left-of-center commentary at the moment seems to proceed from the premise distilled by Ezra Klein as follows: "What comes now is the long wait until Israel recognizes that it must negotiate with Hamas, just as it did with Arafat." Presumably Malley and Agha have sympathy with this view. But look at the world through the lens suggested by their own analysis: Even if Israel were willing to negotiate seriously with Hamas, and Hamas were simultaneously strong enough and sufficiently open to compromise to be a plausible negotiating partner for Israel, how strong is the broader Palestinian incentive to work toward a negotiated two-state solution? Israel is already engaged in a "fighting retreat," as Noah puts it, and a great many Israelis - the current Prime Minister included - argue that the Zionist project cannot survive in a long term, for political and demographic reasons, without a viable, independent Palestine next door. If I were a Palestinian, I'd be inclined to see time as being on my people's side: Not because I'd necessarily prefer the quixotic quest for Israel's destruction to the goal of "peace and prosperity" through compromise, but because I'd have reason to think that with time, patience and endurance I might be able to achieve either a two-state compromise on still better terms than what's on the table at the moment (and let's face it, a state consisting of the West Bank and Gaza is never going to be the most viable entity in world history, whether economically or politically), or a one-state settlement that destroys Israel's identity as a Jewish state, even if it doesn't destroy Israel outright. Yes, waiting things out comes at a heavy short-term cost to the Palestinian people, but if you've waited sixty years and you feel like your enemy is finally in retreat, there's a not-irrational case for waiting longer still.

In the face of such a calculus, what's Israel to do? The answer is simultaneously simple and impossible: In the midst of a hotly-contested domestic political scene, they need to balance their short-term security concerns (all those rockets flying out of Gaza, in this case) against a twofold long-term goal - the need to incentivize Palestinians to stay within hailing distance of the negotiating table (which is awfully hard to do when you're smashing through their cities in pursuit of Hamas rocketeers), and the need to act unilaterally, in the absence of a plausible negotiating partner, to preserve their state's long-term viability in the face of the looming demographic time bomb (which is awfully hard to do, as Israel has discovered in the wake of the Gaza pull-out, without compromising your short-term security). And it's the Kobayashi Maru-style impossibility of all this that makes something like the Gaza incursion so hard to analyze: It seems like a bad idea, but within the constraints that Israeli leaders operate under it's possible that it's the worst option except for all the others.

The Israel Lobby And Its Critics

Of Walt and Mearsheimer, Daniel Larison writes:

Without refighting the battles over The Israel Lobby all over again, I'll say this much. Whatever the flaws of the essay, it was far from "lousy," and the book addressed and fixed many of the flaws in the original essay. It is true that the book did not take into account the role of other Near Eastern governments and their lobbies (from my perspective, more attention to the complementary influence of pro-Turkish and pro-Israel lobbies would have made their claims stronger), but if you want to talk about farragoes of oversimplification and half-truths I could recommend any one of a dozen reviews and columns that misrepresented and distorted the claims of the authors in the sloppiest and most tendentious ways. The reception of the essay and the book was irrational in the extreme, and did more to validate main parts of their thesis than anything they could have written or demonstrated.

The "lousiness" question is a subjective one, obviously, where Daniel and I will have to agree to disagree. As for the rebuttals to the book - well, yes, many of them achieved the same level of oversimplification that The Israel Lobby achieved, albeit usually at a more manageable length and with fewer appeals to scholarly authority. But there's a danger in taking the near-universal criticism that Walt and Mearsheimer earned as evidence that their thesis was essentially correct: Sometimes you get near-universally drubbed because the world has gone wildly wrong, but more often it's because you have. In this vein, I would recommend the reviews the book received from Leslie Gelb in the Times Book Review, from Walter Russell Mead in Foreign Affairs, and especially (given his politics) from Daniel Lazare in The Nation - all of them essentially respectful and non-hysterical, and all of them deeply, deeply critical.

The best defense of Walt and Mearsheimer is that they were engaging in deliberately polemical effort, with no regard for evenhandedness or nuance, because only a polemical treatment of the topic could provide an appropriate corrective to the one-sidedness of the broader American media conversation about Israel. But for two men who take themselves seriously as scholars, this doesn't seem like much a defense to me, not least because their polemical style - and the extent to which it did, in fact, echo tropes of classical anti-Semitism, however innocently or unintentionally - had the predictable effect of undercutting the non-polemical aspects of their argument, and preventing precisely the sort of serious debate they claimed to be interested in having.

The Church and the Morning After Pill

Regarding this post, Rod Dreher asks:

Ross Douthat faces a fascinating (to me) dilemma: the Vatican officially says one thing about the morning-after pill, but Ross believes that the Vatican has reached an incorrect conclusion based on a misunderstanding of reproductive science.

Ross is a Catholic. If a friend said to him that she wants to take the morning-after pill, but is concerned that it might be the moral equivalent of an abortion, so she wanted his recommendation -- what would he be morally obliged to advise?

It seems to me from the Church's perspective, if he advised his friend to take the pill, he would be committing a sin. But what if you, like Ross, honestly believe the Church has erred on the facts? Is an orthodox Catholic -- that is, a Catholic who actually believes that his conscience is bound by the teachings of the Church -- therefore required to counsel what the Church counsels, even if he thinks in good faith that the Church has fundamentally erred? Isn't an orthodox Catholic required, moreover, to believe that the Church teaches truth in matters of faith and morals, and that despite the appearance of error, the individual Catholic is, in fact, wrong?

An orthodox Catholic is required to believe that the Church teaches truly in matters of faith and morals. He is not required to believe that the Church teaches truly in matters of science; indeed, the Church does not have "teachings," properly understood, on scientific questions.  Where the two intersect - well, there things get a bit dicey. My sense of that matter is that I am bound to accept the Church's moral judgment that the taking of innocent human life at any stage from conception to natural death is a grave evil (and would not have become a Catholic if I did not), but that I am not bound to accept a Vatican document's summary of where the science stands regarding whether the morning-after pill does in fact take a life, by preventing implantation of a fertilized embryo. And therefore, to take up Rod's hypothetical, if someone contemplating taking the morning-after pill asked for my opinion on the matter, I would tell them that I've seen no persuasive evidence that suggests that emergency contraception is anything save, well, contraception - whose use is sinful according to Catholic teaching, obviously, but not nearly so gravely sinful as abortion. That doesn't mean I would urge them to go take it: It just means that if they asked me if I thought it was an abortifacent, I'd feel obliged to say no.

A Jewish Gaza?

Having praised the new Foreign Policy site, let me welcome them to the blogosphere by taking exception to this hypothetical from new-minted FP blogger Stephen Walt, which has been mentioned favorably by Yglesias and Klein as an example of the sort of daring thought that mainstream op-ed pages fail to publish:

Here's a thought experiment:

Imagine that Egypt, Jordan, and Syria had won the Six Day War, leading to a massive exodus of Jews from the territory of Israel. Imagine that the victorious Arab states had eventually decided to permit the Palestinians to establish a state of their own on the territory of the former Jewish state. (That's unlikely, of course, but this is a thought experiment). Imagine that a million or so Jews had ended up as stateless refugees confined to that narrow enclave known as the Gaza Strip. Then imagine that a group of hardline Orthodox Jews took over control of that territory and organized a resistance movement. They also steadfastly refused to recognize the new Palestinian state, arguing that its creation was illegal and that their expulsion from Israel was unjust. Imagine that they obtained backing from sympathizers around the world and that they began to smuggle weapons into the territory. Then imagine that they started firing at Palestinian towns and villages and refused to stop despite continued reprisals and civilian casualties.

Here's the question: would the United States be denouncing those Jews in Gaza as "terrorists" and encouraging the Palestinian state to use overwhelming force against them?

The odd thing is that by Walt's own account, the answer would seem to be "Yes," since presumably the rump Orthodox Gaza - run, perhaps, by Verbover Jews - wouldn't have an all-powerful lobby shaping U.S. policy and public opinion to its specifications. Or am I missing something?

More seriously, this analogy - which Chris Brose critiques elsewhere on the FP site, and which comes complete with the staggering insinuation that the recent bombardment of Israeli towns (as opposed to, say, this business) is the only reason why the United States treats Hamas as a terrorist (sorry, "terrorist") organization - is a reminder of why when I say that the American Right needs a new realism, I really do mean a new realism, because so many of the old realists have failed to distinguish themselves in the debates of the decade just passed. That failure is the subject for an essay, rather than a blog post, but for now let me just say that on the one hand, you had figures in the broad realist firmament (from Henry Kissinger to George Will to Chuck Hagel) lining up to support the invasion of Iraq at a time when the Bush Administration could have used a serious critique from the right (and then acquitting themselves less-than-impressively, in Hagel's case especially, in the debate over what to do with Iraq once things had fallen apart) ... while on the other hand you had figures like Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer deciding that the best way to promote legitimately important "realist" ideas (like, say, that America should be pushing Israel harder to abandon the West Bank settlements, and that American Jews ought to play a more constructive role on this front) was to wrap them up in a farrago of oversimplifications and half-truths, ride the ensuing attention up the bestseller list, and then cry "persecution!" when anyone called them on it.

I admit to some professional bias here, since The Israel Lobby opens with a none-too-veiled insinuation that the Atlantic, which commissioned the original essay and then declined to publish it, did so out of fear of a potential backlash from the Jews the Israel Lobby. I wasn't privy to the editorial decision-making surrounding the piece, so I'm speaking only for myself when I say that we almost certainly rejected the essay because it was lousy - because the analysis it provided on a subject of great moment was indefensibly slanted and wrapped in frankly conspiratorial thinking. Buried within that analysis was the kernel of a good point, which might have made for a good essay in different hands - just as a foreign-policy realism in general might have had a more constructive impact on public debate in the Bush Era (and it did have a constructive impact, I should allow, in many arenas) had it not been associated with such fundamentally unserious figures as Chuck Hagel and, well, the authors of The Israel Lobby.

Abortion and the Morning After Pill

Everything that I've read on the subject suggests that Will Saletan has it right, and the Vatican has it wrong.

A New Foreign Policy

If you haven't already checked it out - starting with Shadow Government, a loyal-opposition blog featuring Peter Feaver, Philip Zelikow, and my good friend Christian Brose, and continuing down an impressive new blogroll and main site - then you've missed the DC wonkosphere event of the New Year. (Well, so far.)

Just War and Modern Warfare

This Peter Hitchens line seems to offer a tidy distillation of the moral case that's been advanced around the blogosphere against Israel's tactical approach to the war in Gaza:

Terrorist attacks on Israel are indeed revolting and indefensible. But the bombing of densely populated areas, however accurate, is certain to cause the deaths of many innocents.

How then can it be defended? In what important way is it different from Arab murders of Israeli women and children?

One is directly deliberate. The other is accidental but unavoidable. I wouldn't say that was a specially important distinction, especially if you are a victim of it.

On the one hand, there's an important implicit point here - namely, that the moral distinction between accidentally killing civilians in pursuit of a legitimate military objective and deliberately killing civilians is much murkier in practice than in theory; that the term "unavoidable" can be employed to cover a multitude of sins; and that numbers do matter, and the more civilian deaths a military operation "unavoidably" causes, the more one should be skeptical about its justice. These are things that conservative just-war theorists, especially, would do well to keep in mind, not least because they tend to share a political coalition with thinkers and writers whose understanding of morality and war runs in a more utilitarian direction. (For instance: If you believe in just-war theory but find yourself using it to justify almost every single major policy decision the United States has ever made in wartime - as some conservatives are wont to do - then you're probably stretching your moral theory to covers things that shouldn't be covered.)

On the other hand, though, the explicit logic of Hitchens' argument has the potential to vitiate just-war theory entirely - or else reduce it to a gentlemen's agreement suited to 18th century battlefields and not much else. If highly-targeted bombing raids in densely-populated areas in the pursuit of explicitly military objectives are inherently morally illegitimate because they inevitably leads to civilian casualties, then what about house-to-house fighting in densely-populated areas? Doesn't that inevitably produce civilian casualties as well? (Answer: Yes.) Doesn't Hitchens' logic require saying, then, that any sort of significant urban military campaign is morally indistinguishable from straightforward butchery of civilians - or if a distinction exists, it's not "specially important"?

If so, he's taking just-war theory to a place so narrow, and so close to pacifism, that it ceases to have any practical application to modern warcraft. Now maybe that's where it should be taken. There's a not-unreasonable case that modern warfare by its very nature - because of military technology, urbanization, mass mobilization, the collapse of the distinction between civilians and soldiers, the rise of non-state actors, and so on and so forth - has left traditional just war theory in a state of crisis from which it's unlikely to recover. And if the theory is in crisis, then there's something to be said for Christians, in particular, withdrawing toward the more absolute presumption toward nonviolence suggested in the Gospels.

My own view, though, is that just war theory has always been in crisis, and that modernity has only heightened the contradictions - because almost all of the standards the theory sets are so malleable in practice, and so difficult to apply consistently to the complexity of war and statecraft. Consider the Catechism's definition: Who gets to define what sort of harm is "lasting, grave, and certain" enough to justify going to war? Who decides when all means of preventing conflict "have been shown to be impractical or ineffective"? Doesn't almost everybody enter a war convinced they have "serious prospects of success"? Isn't every party to a war convinced that their actions won't "produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated"? I'm being a bit glib, obviously, since serious thinkers have drilled down on all of these questions - but the fact remains that on a case by case basis, a shared commitment to just war theory doesn't guarantee anything like a consensus on the justice of a given war or operation.

This doesn't make the theory useless by any stretch, but it's useful primarily because it provides a broad framework of restraint: If you're thinking about questions of justice, you're less likely to commit an injustice, even if no perfect consensus exists on the distinction between a licit campaign and an illicit one. But for the framework to have the desired restraining effect on statesmen and warmakers, it has to marry practicality to idealism, and strike enough of a balance between the two to make it seem applicable to real-world crises. And if it's important not to stretch the theory to justify any goal or end you seek, it's also important not to narrow it to the point where it seems so unrealistic and disconnected from the realities of war that policymakers will feel comfortable ignoring it. Which is why I find the widespread tendency to label Israel's current tactics as unjust - as opposed to labeling the war as a whole unwise, and unjust in its unwisdom - to be a somewhat troubling development: If you find yourself saying that a modern state cannot take the fight to a terrorist regime if doing so unavoidably involves civilian casualties, you're advancing a theory of jus in bello that no state can accept - and ultimately, I suspect, you're giving ammunition to the side of the debate that wants to do away with moral restraint in the struggle against terrorism entirely.

The Backlog

To kick off the year, here are a few things I might have blogged about over the last week or so, had I maintained the impressive Christmas-season pace achieved by many of my peers (or any pace at all, really).

Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias ponder whether the newspaper business could have done more to save itself.

David Frum and Alan Jacobs ponder the decline of literature.

The New York Times ponders the decline of moviegoing.

Ta-Nehisi Coates ponders racial politics and Roland Burris.

George Packers ponders inauguration poetry - and then ponders it again, in response to a response from Ta-Nehisi.

Jim Webb ponders prison reform - and good for him, provisionally, even though Virginia Republicans will give him hell for it.

And to answer the question of the day: I would love to run into a primate while shopping for groceries, but I recognize that may be a minority taste. (Plus, there's the slippery-slope problem ...)