What's Wrong with the Left? Part IIA -- The Continuity of the Left

When I posted Part II of this series almost two weeks ago (for Part I see here), I was conscious of being dissatisfied with it. But since I didn't really know how to address my dissatisfaction, I planned just to continue on to Part III. Now, after reading the comments on Part II (including Withywindle's post) and thinking about this subject for a while, I've decided to reconsider what I wrote in that post before moving on.

My idea in these "What's Wrong with the Left" posts was to try to get at the deep mental habits that divide liberals from conservatives. I wanted to see if I could do this without merely insulting the left -- without saying, for example, that they're just dumber or more selfish than I am. For someone who has as many objections to modern left-liberalism as I do, that's actually fairly hard.

So I tried to go about it by looking for historical continuities. My idea was that whatever really distinguishes the left from the right at a fundmental level today would be likely also to have been a feature of the left from way back -- probably from the discernible origin of the split between left and right in America. I started by discussing one of my big complaints about the left -- namely, their tendency to formulate negative ideals rather than positive ones -- where I thought I could glimpse some continuity.

Am I deluded to think that such intellectual continuity exists, and can be discerned? In their comments on Part I, David from Photon Courier and stanton both pointed out that liberalism (in the classical sense) is different from modern leftism. I agree with this; the change in the meaning of the word "liberal" has thrown the history of ideological allegiances in America into confusion. Modern liberals, for example, generally support a large role for the state in the economy, exactly the thing to which classical liberals were most vehemently opposed.

But that's an issue of vocabulary. In terms of groups, institutions, and beliefs, I think that the left of circa 1900 (and maybe even before) is the recognizable precursor of the left today. Consider who was on the left in those days: trade unions, social workers, magazines like the Nation and The New Republic, New Englanders, Quakers, Unitarians, Jews, the urban poor, ethnic Scandinavians, ethnic Greeks...and so on and on and on: a striking number of the institutions and groups who were associated with the left in the early twentieth century are still associated with it now. In that sense, the lineage of modern progressives clearly does go back at least to the Progressive Era. People tend to inherit their parents' political tendencies, and most "liberals" today whose families are not recent arrivals in America are probably the literal descedants of people who were on the left, or leaned that way, in the early part of the last century.

So in this series of posts, I'm going to reserve the right to use the terms liberalism, leftism, left-liberalism, progressivism, and left-progressivism more or less interchangeably, simply for the sake of variation.

The terms I'm not going to use are Democrat and Republican, because over the last one hundred and fifty years party allegiance has been less stable than the underlying ideological commitments. In 1860, the Democrats fractured along regional lines, but those regional differences reflected differences in ideology. By 1880 or so, many of the Northern Democrats who had backed Stephen Douglas wound up drifting into the Republican party. In 1912, it was the Republicans who split; that split was occasioned in part by a personal rift between Roosevelt and Taft, but it revealed ideological tensions within the GOP: many of those who voted for T.R. would, two decades later, end up as supporters his cousin Franklin's New Deal coalition. Until the development of a truly national media and greater centralization of power within the two parties, the Republicans and Democrats were much more ideologically heterogeneous than they are today.

Now, I'd be wrong not to acknowledge that there have been discontinuities on the left over the years -- both institutional and ideological. Even to speak of "the Left" is to speak of a complex phenomenon. Last week, there was some interesting debate in the blogosphere about Hillary Clinton's embrace of the term "progressive" at the CNN/YouTube Democratic debate. On one side, Marty Peretz, Jacob Levy and Ross Douthat have argued that early 20th century Progressivism is distinct from the liberalism that has more recently prevailed on the left. All three commentators see the old Progressivism as rather distasteful: Peretz notes its racist, imperialist, and crypto-Communist strains and Levy identifies Progressivism as an elitist philosophy driven by a quasi-deterministic vision of history. Douthat suggests that the left's increasing identification of itself as "pro-science" -- and, in particular, its opposition to any limits on biotechnology -- really does represent a move back toward the older mentality of the self-styled Progressives.

On the other side of the debate, Henry Farrell and Matt Yglesias have argued that liberalism and Progressivism are like apples and oranges: liberalism is a philosophy and Progressivism is a poltical movement. To my mind, though, it's Peretz, Levy and Douthat who are making the more interesting argument. There certainly are different impulses on the left -- tot homines, quot sententiae -- and different tendencies prevail at different times. But if Douthat is right that a more enthusiastically pragmatic and amoral strain is now resurgent on the left, and that that strain reflects the rationalism and pragmatism that were popular on the left in the Progressive Era, then the very possibility of such a resurgence suggests a longstanding continuity. And indeed, my argument in Part II about negative ideals applies at least as well to the leftists of the Progressive era as it does to those "liberals" who were ascendant after World War II.

I acknowledge that the aspects of Progressivism emphasized by Douthat do not, at first blush, seem to accord very neatly with one of my contentions in Part II, namely that the origin of much of the mindset of the American left can be found in reformist Christianity. But this is another topic I'd like to reconsider, and I hope to do so before too long in Part IIB.

Ingmar Bergman, R.I.P. (UPDATED)

I always feel a strange sensation when news comes of the death of an artist or writer whose work I have just been enjoying. Yesterday, I watched Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece Through a Glass Darkly for the first time, and I was dazzled by its depth and brilliance. Today, the world learns that Death -- whom it is impossible not to picture as played by Bengt Ekerot in the Seventh Seal -- has come to collect the celebrated director.

Bergman's work is famously preoccupied with themes of death and the divine, and through his movies he apparently attained a kind of peace with his personal doubts and fears. At any rate, he was (as I was forcefully reminded yesterday) a great artist, and he is now at rest. And if Saint Paul (1 Cor 13:12) is to be believed, Bergman no longer sees "through a glass darkly" but now knows God -- Whom I trust is not a spider -- face to face.

UPDATE 7/31/07: It turns out that Michelangelo Antonioni also died yesterday -- one of those amazing Jefferson/Adams coincidences. Unfortunately, since I don't know Antonioni's work, I can't offer any kind of heartfelt tribute....

Jorge Bush, El Rey Prudente

A proper historian doesn't interpret all past events in light of the present; instead, he rather dottily interprets all present events in the light of his own peculiar obsessions. (I think J. H. Hexter first made this point.) So when I look at current affairs, I tend to think of them through a Tudor-Stuart prism--to see them as recapitulations of the domestic and foreign policy of early modern England. I'm not alone: Lacey Baldwin Smith's textbook of English history, which I'm using for the class I'm now teaching, refers to Elizabeth's relations with Spain as a "Cold War." (Or is he reading the present back rather than the past forward? Anyway, he does call it a Cold War.) So when I look at our intervention in Iraq, I also think of Tudor Europe--but I reverse the protagonists. I think of us as the equivalent of Hapsburg Spain, the worldwide empire that is able to project force halfway across Europe to the Spanish Netherlands, but has to face opponents (Dutch, English, French) who, while much weaker, can apply enough local force to frustrate Hapsburg designs. I also note that Protestant Europe was religiously radical, filled with bubbling zealots eager to cross state lines to volunteer to fight the Spanish; that the Protestant states usually possessed both politiques and zealots, equally hostile to Spanish power, but differing in their methods of opposition; and that all these so-called volunteers could not have fought without the permission of their monarchs. Sound familiar? There are substantial differences, of course--no model will get you too far--but I do think that America's position is structurally similar to Hapsburg Spain's. If you take this model as providing any insight into current foreign policy, some corollaries follow.

1. Spain did not succeed in all its ambitions--it failed to recapture all the Netherlands, it spectacularly failed to conquer England, it failed to capture France for the Catholic Leagues. (And in the long run, of course, it ran itself into the ground economically, not least for spending too much money on the military--always something to keep in mind.) But neither was Spanish policy a complete failure. It did secure the southern portion of the Spanish Netherlands for Spain for a century, and made them permanently Catholic. Furthermore, Spanish military force played a crucial role in forcing Henri IV to convert one final time to Catholicism, and likewise to secure France for Catholicism forever. Spain indeed secured a significant number of its objectives. I think this is a plausible outcome for America now. We have already eliminated the Ba'ath and (probably) al Qaeda as contenders for power in Iraq; even should the Democrats enforce a withdrawal, we may be able to continue as players in the country, perhaps from Kurdish bases. Frustration and partial victory is quite likely.

2. State sponsorship is key. It is now entirely clear exactly how carefully the English government calibrated the flow of English volunteers to the Netherlands, how entirely bogus were their protestations of innocence and incapacity. Likewise, of course, for the Hispano-Italian expedition to Ireland in 1579-80. "We're all soldiers of the king of Spain, we arrived in his ships, but he never gave us permission to come to Ireland. This is all strictly a volunteer effort." This is why I do find the idea that we should regard al Qaeda et al as some sort of non-state actor as bogus. They have state sponsorship: Iranian, Syrian, Saudi, Pakistani. The only way to eliminate terrorism is to eliminate its state sponsors--just as the only way to eliminate English piracy and English volunteerism in the Netherlands was an invasion of England.

3. States often ignore casus belli. Spain and England both had casus belli against each other for years before they actually went to war; both took it as in their interests to allow the other to be a little bit at war with them, and not to respond. A certain number of conservatives fail to grasp this essential point--yes, Iran and Syria are a little bit at war with America, rather obviously. So, less obviously, are Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. It is in our interests, to date, to let them be a little bit at war with us rather than to raise the stakes in our responses. This is elementary realpolitik, and conservatives shouldn't be naive about it. On the other hand, the liberal half of the spectrum doesn't seem to want to believe that these various states are a little at war with us, and that some measured response is in order. But let us put conservative and liberal misapprehensions aside for a moment: the basic point is that we can continue a little bit at war with Iran et al for a long time, perhaps forever, without drifting into outright war, and this may suit the interests of all concerned.

4. Ideology does matter. Ideology forms self-interest; ideology reinforces mutual suspicions; ideology activates crucial minorities, who bring their less zealous compatriots along with them, willy-nilly. The muddled, the traitorous, and the indifferent were the vast majority of sixteenth-century Europe--and the fighting lines still divided by religion, in a process of inevitable, unstoppable radicalization. This, actually, is a cause for pessimism re America's current foreign policy, which assumes that the progressive radicalization of Muslims can be contained. Although it does also indicate that the enduring fracture between Sunni and Sh'ia will continue to be available as a wedge for American policy makers.

5. Our enemies are fragile too. This is an eternal lesson of history--but consider that the English won their confrontation with Spain while skittering near bankruptcy for a decade, with horrible misjudgment of the Irish that provoked a terrible rebelion, and by dint of good fortune in the winds, during the Armada and during later invasion scares. Our enemies are not all-powerful; they have limited resources, and (unless we think Allah fights for them) they will not always be blessed with good fortune. And our carriers will survive a bad storm.

America's Cultural Emissaries

Thanks to NRO's RadioDerb, I found out about this bizarre story. It seems that an Eritrean rebel faction managed to deter more than 3000 Kunama refugees at a camp in northern Ethopia from accepting an offer of resettlement to the U.S. Why did they do it? The usual: the rebels apparently depend on the camp for money and recruits. The interesting part is how they did it: they showed them violent American television shows, including the 1970s miniseries Roots:

"People don't want to be sold as slaves in America," refugee Dawit Feliche, 30, explained matter-of-factly in his dank camp hut. Sensing skepticism, he added gravely, "And they don't want to be killed by your police."

Well no, they wouldn't, would they?

The Kunama refugees are uneducated herdmen, and it might be easy enough to pity their ignorance of what life in the U.S. is really like. But the more I contemplate American cinema, the more convinced I become that Hollywood is routinely generating some of the most effective anti-American propaganda on the planet. Like it or not, the persuasive power of film is immense. Even if we know that a story is fiction, it's almost inevitable that a viewer will be convinced that the background assumptions behind a "realistic" piece of fiction are true -- especially when those assumptions recur in movie after movie and most especially when the viewer has no personal experience of the "real world" in which a film ostensibly takes place. How many of us can say that our perceptions of feudal Japan or ancient Rome don't come largely from the silver screen? If it comes to that, how many of us didn't learn from TV or movies most of what we think we know about present-day American law enforcement, the present-day culture of the American inner cities, and the procedures used in present-day American law courts?

American movies have dominated world cinema since the invention of the medium. Even today, something like 80% of European box-office receipts go to American movies, and between 85 and 95 of the 100 top-grossing films worldwide each year were made in America. Go to virtually any foreign country and look at what's playing in their cinemas: the dominance of Hollywood is not just undeniable, it's breathtaking. That dominance often becomes even more breathtaking when one takes note of what movie people are actually crowding in to see.

So it matters tremendously, in terms of the world's perception of the U.S., that so many Hollywood movies portray an America defined by violence, vulgarity, corruption and inequality.

It's true that Hollywood has always stereotyped us in the eyes of the rest of the world. Our fondness for Westerns led to the perception of Americans as cowboys, and millions of moviegoers around the globe were convinced, even before World War II, that American cities teemed with stylish, fast-talking gangsters. But even if the old movies often portrayed America as more violent than it actually was, there also used to plenty of movies that expressed love for, and idealization of, America.

Spend a few nights watching the offerings at Turner Classic Movies: it's hard to imagine how one wouldn't be attracted to the society portrayed in the films made before and just after World War II. They're full of good-hearted, decent people doing their best to overcome the problems caused by the bad guys and fat cats who are a feature of all societies. As likely as not, someone in the course of the film will express explicit appreciation for the American way of life. By contrast, many modern American films have no real good guys: the police are often indistinguishable from the gangsters. If there are heroes, they tend not to be particularly lovable. Many American movies portray an utterly degraded world, unrelieved by any sense that genuine virtue coexists with vice or that good is fighting the good fight against evil. What's perhaps most disturbing is that this is often as true for the comedies as for the action pictures: it's especially likely to be true for comedies when they have the word "American" in the title. I haven't even mentioned the bad light in which American movies tend to portray the U.S. government, especially in its dealings with other countries. Ditto for American big business.

I realize how fuddy-duddy this all sounds, but I'm actually not talking here about my personal preferences. The fact is, I love dark, disturbing movies whose pessimistic vision of life often confirms my own. But we shouldn't close our eyes to the fact that the movies Hollywood makes are decisively influencing the way the United States is seen around the world. Even if people in other countries know the stories aren't technically real, they know that the movies were made in America. If this is how Americans see our society and ourselves, who is anyone else to judge otherwise?

Dogberry was Dyslexic

I was just grading an essay by a student who is dyslexic, and it suddenly occurred to me, "Dogberry is dyslexic--it's the exact same sort of mixing-up of words." "Cluttering," it seems to be called, making for verbal malaprops as well as spelling mistakes. I'm sure this has occurred to everybody else long ago, but it was an eye-opener for me. Have any actors played Dogberry with dyslexia in mind? How would it change the character? I suddenly think of him as sadder, his obnoxious buffoonery more pitiable. And how many real-life Dogberrys were dyslexic? How much of the contempt of the learned for the half-learned stemmed from miscomprehension of neurological syndromes?

Liberal Education

Or modern education—English literature, American civics. Everything which follows the classical and Renaissance sequence of education I laid out a few blog-posts back. The point of championing classical education is not to junk everything that’s come since, or to say that it’s worthless. I want modernity as well—just placed in the context of tradition, so that children will know where modernity came from, and give it its proper valuation as a component of the whole.

Indeed, I want to emphasize that I want to connect tradition with the present day—to make the point that tradition isn’t dry bones centuries dead, but a vibrant continuity. By all means teach Beloved--a very good novel—but teach it after having taught the Oresteia, so that students will know that it’s part of a very long meditation in the West on the unquiet dead. Be obvious: follow up Homer with Joyce’s Ulysses and Derek Walcott’s Omeros. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” should come after that other Martin Luther, “here I stand, I can do no other,” and that after learning how Ambrose dealt with Theodosius. These should be taught of as part of a continuing conversation, a continuing debate, on virtue and liberty.

I say all this with a keen awareness that modernity, at least from the Enlightenment, has had a somewhat parricidal instinct—to devalue the old, claim universal principles that have no reference to history, to champion blithe amnesia in search of progress. (My definition of modernity starts somewhere between Petrarch and John Locke.) To teach any of this at all opens up the dangerous possibility of encouraging students to recapitulate the casting aside of tradition—but the Enlightenment, liberalism, modernity writ large, are also part of our tradition. (And especially in America.) You can’t be a proper traditionalist without including the antitraditionalist tradition—indeed, cannot be an effective traditionalist without knowing the arguments of modernity. An old irony. And, of course, a modern traditionalist wants to preserve this impulse of radical modernity—both from eating itself up with its own acids, or from falling back to the old traditionalism that was, ultimately, imperfectly free and imperfectly virtuous. Tradition and modernity both have to be preserved, in tension, but hopefully creative tension.

I have always been struck by an image early in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, where our hero dreams that his skin has turned to glass. He tries to pick off this alien implant—and bleeding chunks of flesh come out as well. Rushdie’s image referred to assimilation and the immigrant experience—but I think this is also how a traditionalist should regard modernity. It’s grown into our flesh by now.

So what follows? I do want a canon of English literature. As noted over at Easily Distracted, our modern English literature canon is itself fairly recent—a revolutionary innovation—only a hundred years old or so! Well, it is a recent tradition. We should have it partly to reinforce Anglo-American political culture against the fissiparous challenge of multiculturalism, but partly as an essential suture to connect the classical tradition with modernity. That is, English literature began as an extended imitation of classical models, but it transformed in time into a more self-contained tradition. (I.e., generations of readers and writers have made reference to Shakespeare without making reference to Shakespeare’s classical sources; the later, monolingual reading of Shakespeare is as important as Shakespeare’s original polylingual readings.) So retain the English canon—and the American canon—as important parts of the tradition, essential ties between Greece and Rome and the present, but not as traditions sufficient in and of themselves. Note, indeed, that buzzwords such as diversity can also be achieved by placing the English and American traditions within the broader Western tradition.

And then, how to teach American liberty? It is a creature of the Enlightenment, (if not just of the Enlightenment,) and contains the sort of universalizing theory that is at some odds with tradition. My answer is Parson Weems. Or at greater length: the traditional attitude to liberty is to love it as incarnated in institutions (parliament, congress), in culture (the national anthem at baseball games), as incarnated in the character of particular, exemplary human beings—to republicanize the imitatio Christi, to praise famous men and set them up as objects of emulation, just as the Greeks and Romans did. I do think that studying the biographies of famous Americans really is the way to go—to have every schoolchild read biographies of Washington and Lincoln, to see how they incorporated liberty, fought for liberty, expressed liberty in their words and actions. Turn liberty from a floating abstraction into the particular features of one man. And add to the list!—I really would put Washington and Lincoln first, but add to taste. I grew up reading children’s biographies of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Cesar Chavez. The point here is the method: make liberty concrete, and not airy principle.

The keynote I would emphasize is, don’t reject modernity, but incorporate it into tradition. Slap down its pretensions to be sufficient in and of itself, but cherish it as an essential part of the Western tradition.

National Self-Importance

Daniel Larison writes that

very few other countries have elections in which foreign policy plays a role as dominant as it does in our presidential elections, and that when they do talk about foreign policy it does not always center around the U.S.

True. But I would also bet that there are few democracies in the world where that nation's relations with the United States play no significant role in determining voters' choices. We may not be central to the concerns of foreigners, but I think we are present in every democracy's political horizons. I don't think this is true of any other nation on earth. We shouldn't be egocentric, but Larison's analysis of America's irrelevance is overstated.

Playdate with Alpheus

Instead of contributing money to Rudolph Dalton Romney, I just bought Catan Histories: Struggle for Rome. Alpheus! Alpheus! Come on over and play!

Classical Education

I’ve been engaged in various debates over the years about canons, and classical educations—not least on Tim Burke’s Easily Distracted blog. Generally, there is a modern attitude to education, which favors imparting information and the ability to learn more than, or without reference at all, to a particular body of texts. I’ve argued against this before; this is a longer version of the argument, where I try to put together a fair number of my principles. (But still too short and hastily done—take this as a first draft.) I’ll even provide a tentative syllabus at the end.

Basic math matters—so do reading and writing, science and foreign language, home economics and shop, and all that practical stuff. Learning how to think and to analyze do also (but more on that later). But the fundamental point of education is moral—to educate our children to be virtuous adults. They shouldn’t just be taught to be moral—the purely practical always has its place—but that should be the focus of their schooling.

But what is the definition of virtue, and how should it be taught? Even if you were to accept my first premise, here is where difficulties obviously develop. We no longer have a thick consensus on virtue, much less on the methods of teaching it. Indeed, the modern focus on the practical and the ability to learn, shorn of specific virtues and canons of texts, is not only an assault on the older ideal of education but also a simple reflection of a cracked consensus. So from here on in, I am obviously going to make assertions not everyone will grant.

I take the necessary virtues to be both moral/religious and civic—Athens and Jerusalem again. That is, our children should be taught to be good in their private lives—pious to God and decent to one another—and to be good citizens in their public lives. These virtues will inevitably run into conflict on occasion, but more often should overlap and reinforce one another; at any rate, both should be taught. Now, for the former I would take the Bible as the essential text, both in itself and as the basis for morality in America—but here the cracked consensus intrudes its wicked way. There is hardly a consensus on the Bible any longer, much less on the manner of its interpretation. I’m therefore going to say that this perforce has to be a matter of private instruction, where parents encourage Bible-reading in their children. And if this fails?—well, the rest of the course of instruction is meant in good part to prepare children/adults for Bible reading.

The other half of the education is for civic virtue—to learn how to be a proper citizen. Now, I don’t think it’s enough just to have a class in civics and memorize the Constitution for one test just prior to forgetting it—to be educated as a citizen. To be a proper citizen, one needs to learn where the idea comes from—what liberty is—and how it’s been defined over the centuries. One needs to know the historical particulars of how the struggle for liberty has succeeded and failed. One needs to know what poems free men compose and what letters free men write. One needs to know the tradition of liberty, in which our present liberty is rooted, from ancient Greece and Rome to the present.

(There’s a whole different blog post on tradition, authority, and pedagogical method that this last paragraph woefully compresses. That is, I follow the traditional view that the ability to create and to analyze is forwarded by learning the best classical texts, assimilating them, and then using them as a base of knowledge for your own endeavors—that knowledge of the best of the past is liberating, not constricting. As I say, I may spell this out at greater length at some other point—though, really, I’d just be restating the educational assumptions of everyone from the Greeks to the teachers of the nineteenth century English public schools.)

Tradition means a focus on the oldest texts of liberty and civic virtue—not only for their importance as representative texts of the foundation of liberty but also because they continued to be read for much of the next two millennia, and are the bases on which all later innovations on the topic of liberty were made. Ideally one should read all the relevant texts over two millennia—but given limited space, one concentrates on the ones that were most influential. And one also takes influence to be a judgment of excellence—the accumulation of judgments of excellence which constitute influence are in themselves an argument to give priority to the old over the new. We read Aristotle not simply because he seems good to us, but because generations of readers thought he was worth reading, a judgment that is in itself a strong argument in his favor.

I will mention here that the tradition of reading these texts was intertwined for more than a thousand years with reading the Bible, and that the tradition of reading of the Bible depended upon a knowledge of these texts. So reading these texts will prepare a student to read the Bible as it has been read, and thus prepare them for a traditional understanding of Biblical virtue. I would prefer the Bible to come first, but late is better than never; and better to read the Bible with this preparation than without it.

Now, this emphasis on tradition also means an emphasis on Latin education. We do, after all, still study the classics—but there is in some ways an overemphasis on the Greek half of the corpus. We are more likely to read Aristotle than Cicero; more likely to read Euripides than Seneca; more likely to read Homer than Virgil. Obviously one cannot argue with the essential worth of these choices---or, obviously, with their influence, as Greece was the inspirer of virtually all that is worthwhile in Roman culture. Yet our bias toward Greece obscures the importance of Roman culture in the tradition of the West. Cicero, after all, first as philosopher, then as rhetorician, letter-writer, and citizen, was the most influential secular figure for a thousand years in the West, not Aristotle. All of Greece was virtually absent for a thousand years, and the stamp was set by Rome. Even after the return of Greece, Latin was still learned before Greek, and the Latin corpus remained the basic framework of culture. In theology, to dart that way for a second, Augustine molded the Western church, not the Greek fathers. (Simplifying, simplifying.) American revolutionaries gave themselves Latin pseudonyms as they wrote letters to the newspapers in the 1760s, not Greek ones. The tradition of the West—of civic virtue, of liberty—is Greek in origin, but the heart was Latin. That needs to be emphasized in any curriculum.

(This emphasis, incidentally, will necessarily give the curriculum a Catholic shading, since Latin culture and Catholicism are so closely intertwined. Works by me; but worth noting.)

What then to read? There isn’t a set corpus—and we are fortunate to have enough of Greek and Latin survive that some flexibility is possible. I would recommend roughly equal weight to Greek and Latin, scattered across the various genres—and follow up with a selection of authors from medieval and Renaissance Europe. I would give preference to the histories, biographies, letters, plays, etc. that inculcate the values of liberty, and give less weight to the philosophy and theology. (Personal preference plays a role here!) I do want to include Augustine—not only for his own influence, but also because he’s the reason so much of the ancient corpus survived, since he argued that good Christians ought to know the secular classics. So here is a preliminary list of suggestions—some with just author’s names, on the presumption that a teacher can select flexibly from their works. Assume that for some of these, selections would be appropriate!

Greek

1. Homer, Iliad
2. Homer, Odyssey
3. Hesiod, Poems
4. Plato, The Death of Socrates
5. Plato, The Republic
6. Aristophanes, Comedies
7. Euripides, Tragedies
8. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War
9. Aristotle, Rhetoric
10. Aristotle, Poetics
11. Demosthenes, Orations
12. Plutarch, Lives
13. Aesop, Fables

Latin

1. Terence, Plays
2. Cicero, Letters
3. Cicero, Of Offices
4. Cicero, Orations
5. Caesar, Gallic Wars
6. Virgil, Aeneid
7. Ovid, Metamorphoses
8. Horace, “Ars Poetica”
9. Tacitus, Histories
10. Seneca, Plays
11. Juvenal, Satires
12. Pliny the Younger, Letters
13. Augustine, City of God

Medieval and Renaissance

1. Boethius, Consolations of Philosophy
2. Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People
3. Aquinas, Summa Theologica
4. Dante, Inferno
5. Boccaccio, Decameron
6. Petrarch, Letters
7. Salutati, Diplomatic Letters
8. Machiavelli, The Prince and The Discourses
9. Erasmus, Miscellaneous!
10. More, Utopia
11. Montaigne, Essays
12. Justus Lipsius, Of Constancy
13. Ben Jonson, Sejanus

There are appalling gaps in all this, of course. No Quintilian! But something of this nature, I think, ought to be in the curriculum of high school and college students.

"None of the Above"?

The main article on Salon.com today is a rather simplistic opinion piece by Thomas Schaller on "Why the Republicans Don't Like their Candidates." Schaller repeats the liberal meme that GOP primary voters are deeply dissatisfied with their choices. He also makes a number of bizarre assertions about the state of play of the race for the Republican nomination, of which his claim that "the backstretch belongs to Romney" is only the most dubious.

Still, Schaller's assertion that Republicans are unhappy with their prospective nominees bears consideration, if only because its repeated so much in the media.

Let's start with the idea that a recent poll has "none of the above" beating out all the Republican candidates, including Fred Thompson, among Republican voters. This "none of the above" business has been zinging around the airwaves and the internet like the ball in a pachinko machine, even though it was just an AP columnist's snappy way of introducing some otherwise uninteresting poll results. One could easily get the impression, from the way the AP-Ipsos poll in question is referred to by opinioneers like Schaller, that "none of the above" topped all the Republican contenders combined, but of course this is not the case. In fact, the truth is incredibly mundane. "None of the above," as defined by the AP wire story, includes Republicans who weren't sure (or wouldn't say) what candidate they wanted to support: 15 percent of total respondents to the question. The proportion of Republicans who actually picked "none" is only 8 percent; the corresponding percentage on the Democratic side in the same poll was 4 percent. So the idea that even a plurality of Republicans in the poll picked "none of the above" isn't just misleading -- it's flat out wrong. (For the AP-Ipsos press release containing the actual poll results in .pdf format, go here: scroll down to question 1b on page 9.)

Schaller also links to a CBS poll from March indicating that more Republicans than Democrats are "dissatisfied" with their primary candidates. Actually, this too is a distortion of the poll results, given that the two options presented to respondents in the poll were "satisfied" and "want more choices." Well, of course lots of Republicans "want more choices;" why wouldn't they? It's true that fewer Democrats than Republicans in the old CBS poll "want more choices," but this is a more a reflection on the overall state of the race than a comment on the candidates themselves.

In the first place, the Democratic race has a single, clear front runner; the only other way to interpret the race at this point is as a battle between two colossi named Clinton and Obama. It's hard to imagine any realistic candidate, with the possible exception of Al Gore, changing this dynamic, so more contenders would only be a distraction, nipping at the ankles of the big dogs and interfering with their chances in the general election. By contrast, the Republican nomination is still up for grabs. Giuliani's been in the lead for a while, but his numbers have dropped somewhat in the face of recent excitement about Fred Thompson. At present, it looks like a three- or four-way race, depending on whether or not one thinks John McCain is down for the count. Given the atmosphere of uncertainty that already prevails on the GOP side, there's no reason not to want more choices. For Republicans, more choices really means more choices.

Second, the Democrats feel good (justifiably) about the prospects for one of their candidates winning election in 2008. Republicans don't. So for Democrats, there's far less incentive to cast about for that magic alternative who can make the party faithful feel assured of victory.

It's true, as the CBS news story about their poll points out, that in the past it was usually Republicans who were "satisfied" while Democrats were the ones who "wanted more choices." This is because the two factors I've just mentioned normally cut the other way. Usually, the nomination race on the Republican side simplifies pretty quickly. Usually, too, the Democrats are more flatly pessimistic about their prospects. The anomaly in the relative "satisifed"/"want more choices" percentages reflects the anomaly of the overall situation.

I know that this is a lot of words to waste on a four-month old poll, but I should add at least one caveat before I move on. Given that the CBS poll was taken in March, it's possible that there's a much simpler explanation for the fact that more Republicans than Democrats "want more choices," to wit: "want more choices" could easily have meant "want Fred Thompson," who hadn't yet made it unambiguous that he was going to declare. In any case, the fact that Republicans "want more choices" is hardly, under any sober analysis, a measure of deep dissatisfaction. Perhaps the smartest observation Schaller makes in his article is when he writes, "It was all so much less complicated when there was an heir apparent. "

Schaller also argues that Republicans are raising less money than Democrats, citing this New York Times story about fund raising totals in the second quarter of this year. Again, let's look at the data. Obama, Clinton and Edwards raised a combined total of $60 million for the primaries. By contrast, Romney, Giuliani and McCain raised $45 million. This is a real difference, but once again it ignores the fact that the outcome of the Republican race is so much less certain. Despite the foreign policy sniping of the past week, the most likely outcome of the Democratic contest is a Clinton-Obama ticket, so that any money donated to those candidates is almost certainly money well spent. By contrast, it's not at all certain that either Romney or Giuliani, will be on their party's ticket at all, and, if they're not, then they won't be holding any high office in the near future. From a cynical point of view, no high office translates into no tangible gratitude for campaign contributions.

It is remarkable, from this point of view, that McCain should be as weak in the money department as he is, but the almost-settled state of the Democratic race has another important consequence where campaign finances are concerned: Clinton and Obama can afford to spend more of their time raising funds; the GOP hopefuls have to spend more time duking it out in the trenches.

Schaller doesn't consider any of this: he's too busy crowing about the alleged unhappiness of Republicans with their "feeble" presidential contenders, and I suppose, given the fundamentally partisan nature of his column, it's silly for me to spend so much time exposing his tenuous approach to the facts. But the myth of Republican dissatisfaction is now widespread and, as far I can tell, there's no data out there to back it up -- I've looked. If anyone who reads this has some good info, I'd love to know about it.

Actually, as a likely voter for whomever the Republican candidate turns out to be, I wonder if I'm not better off letting the myth of Republican dissatisfaction stand. In recent years, Democratic confidence has almost always turned into overconfidence -- with semi-predictable results in the elections of 2000, 2002, and 2004 (but not 2006). From that point of view, maybe it's better to let the left hold on to the belief that Republicans are utterly disunited and in despair.

Chinese Milbloggers

China has milbloggers. Who knew? And how wonderfully unexpected a discovery--that the Chinese military is already debating issues (cautiously) in a public forum, aware that foreigners (Americans!) are listening in, but taking the benefits of open discussion to be worth that cost. In other words, they're behaving like our own society, our own miitary, moving to a model of open self-criticism as a means of self-improvement. This presumably makes them a more dangerous potential foe--and, I hope, a less likely foe, since the shift to a freer, more American mode of discussion ought to make them more like us, period, more able to envisage convergences of interests and ideals. Questions I'm not competent to answer: is the Chinese military blogosphere more or less developed than the rest of the Chinese blogosphere? Are there more Chinese milbloggers than, say, Russian milbloggers? Do they read American milblogs more than they read Japanese or Russian milblogs? Oh, a thousand and one questions, and I doubt I'll ever invest the time to learn the details properly. But it's nice to be surprised with something unsuspected and new.

Andrew Cuomo, Kneecapper

My wife Goldberry forwards me the latest on the shenanigans in Albany. Briefly, the staff of Democratic Governor Eliot Spitzer (and perhaps Spitzer himself) authorized a State Police investigation into whether Republican State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno was using state moneys for personal purposes. Bruno seems to have skated just this side of the rather lax New York State laws--and the effort to use the State Police to investigate skated on the other side of the law. All good political fun. Now, what I find interesting is the bluff, forthright investigation into all this by the Democratic Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo, himself a perpetual candidate for higher office. I suppose I should credit him with simple professional probity--you see a crime, you investigate it. Nevertheless, I can't help but wonder whether he was particularly eager to pursue this particular investigation because it would embarrass, perhaps politically cripple, a great rival in New York Democratic politics. Cui bono?, and all that.

Epic Virtues

Trying to think through this whole genre thing some more. I should say that I take there to be a longstanding identity between rhetoric (!) and poetics, where each genre is, among other things, a specific moral vocabulary by which to promote certain virtues in the reader. Simply to begin to think in the vocabulary of a certain genre conditions the reader toward certain moral values and actions--note, for example, the praise and criticism of Pres. Reagan as a "cowboy," which assumes that to apply the moral vocabulary of the Western genre to the Cold War has distinct policy implications in and of itself. The current domestic argument about correct policy toward the War on Terror may also be taken as a question about whether to use the moral vocabulary of the police procedural--Law and Order--or the moral vocabulary of the thriller--24.

Getting back to fantasy, epic, and World War II--as I recollect, there is an argument that Tolkien's use of fantasy is meant to lend itself to an acceptance of the wondrous appearing in everyday life, and ultimately to the acceptance of the wonder of God in everyday life. The moral vocabulary of the fantasy novel is tied in with a sense of divine power and divine providence--and somewhat distinct from the moral vocabulary of the mainstream literary novel, which promotes the more secular virtues of character acting in a world effectively shorn of such divine intervention. (Broad generalization, I know.) I would add to this analysis that Tolkien's use of epic also provides a heroic moral vocabulary--one that persuades the readership that it is both proper and possible to embrace the heroic virtues--that one may speak and act in an elevated fashion, "larger than life," with greater moral capacity than in the low-mimetic moral vocabulary of the modern prose novel. Epic also recognizes that some historical situations are epic, and are properly met by a resort to the epic virtues.

Perhaps I shouldn't get hung up on the question of whether World War II was essentially epic or not. But I would say that a great many people (Churchill not least!) were familiar with the epic moral vocabulary, and thought it should be applied to World War II even as the war was fighting, not least so as to persuade their citizenry to aspire to the epic moral virtues necessary to win such a war. (History, of course, is a different genre, with its own moral vocabulary--yet history can be written in the epic mode.) I would also say that this moral vocabulary was accepted to a remarkably large extent, and that people and nations did act in a remarkably epic fashion--"The Greatest Generation" is not just retrospective hooey. Much of the human race lived in epic mode, still within living memory.

Tolkien and Rowling, by using a mode of epic fantasy, are promoting a moral vocabulary of epic virtues, within a wondrous world implicitly giving divine meaning. By reference to the actual epic events of the twentieth century, they add the argument of history--that such a moral vocabulary is not only desirable, but achievable by actual human beings within history--that we have been heroes, and can be once again.

This, of course, can be said of a great many second-rate fantasy novels--indeed, novels of any sort, which happily resort to epic mode and World War II analogies at the drop of a hat. I do think literary talent, and not just subject matter, has something to do with Tolkien's and Rowling's success. But for all of them, I do think the moral vocabulary they use, and the historical resonances the very use of such vocabulary provides, has something to do with their success.

The Genre of the Holocaust

As a counterpoint to the last post--the Holocaust doesn't seem to have an essential genre. That is, take Elie Wiesel's Night, Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, and Art Spiegelman's Maus. In one, French prose non-fiction seems to be the model; in another, the poetry of Dante's Inferno; in the third, the American comic book. The Holocaust fits equally well into three genres and three national literary traditions. Which I mention briefly either to say that my previous post's thesis is silly, or to say that not all events fit overdeterminedly into genres.

The Genre of World War II

Alan Jacobs has a post (with spoilers) about Harry Potter, arguing about Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter books that

no other works of fantasy – for children or adults – refer to twentieth-century events as overtly and intensely as LOTR and the Potter books do; and second, that no other works of fantasy have generated such widespread and enthusiastic devotion. Might these two facts be related?

I think they are in any number of ways, but I want to try out one thesis: that some historical events in themselves fall into the patterns of certain genres. That is, the basic narrative of World War II strikes me as astonishingly like a fantasy novel--a variety of quarreling, mismatched heroes, some of them rather villainous themselves (Stalin), a comic henchman (Mussolini), a comic hero (De Gaulle), surprise attacks (Barbarossa, Pearl Harbor), endurance of the plucky underdog (Blitz), gestures of nobility on either side (Rommel), battle scenes, villainous underestimations of the heroes, variety of scene and multiple subplots, a Grand Guignol villain who shouts out to the world his dedication to pure evil, and brings the world crashing down around him, a magic weapon delivered to the hero to bring about the denouement, delivered, with delicious irony, by refugees from our Grand Guignol villain, and the cataclysmic overthrow and destruction of our villains. In purely literary terms, this is great stuff! Any fantasy novel imitating this fantastic reality, better than any novel, is bound to do well.

I understand that there are other narratives of World War II--though I do find this one rather compelling. But then I start wondering--are certain events in and of themselves parts of genres? (A more interesting thesis than simply saying that people's perceptions are overdetermined to fit random assortments of facts into genre patterns!) Is World War II naturally epic? I remember there is some wonder as to why World War I produced more great lyric poetry in English than did World War II--was World War I simply less of an epic than World War II, essentially lyric in some ghastly fashion? World War II, rather, seems to have produced novels--Norman Mailer and his cohort. The immediate perception that Tolkien was referring to World War II rather than World War I--a perception, it should be noted, which I believe was shared by people who had experienced both wars--may have something to do with the fact that World War II's epic, fantastic structure made such an identification a more obvious fit.

Perhaps, therefore, the surge of fantastic literature--the resurgence of epic--has something to do with the awareness of fantastic epic as central to the fabric of recent history, not escapism but poetic truth. Potter and Tolkien are not, then, departures from the fantasy genre, but expert, self-aware practitioners of it--their success not their historicism as such, but their awareness of the deep historicity of the fantasy novel as a genre.

This all depends on the assumption that World War II did have an essential structure such as I describe--for which your mileage may vary. A more modest (ugh!) version of the thesis might refer to Anglo-American perceptions of World War II rather than to World War II's essential nature. But even if this particular thesis is hooey, I think one should see some sort of overdetermination in the links of the fantasy genre to World War II.

Unemployment Statistics

A while ago I read (no link, sorry) that half of French unemployment is Muslim, and that this goes a long way to explain why the French are willing to tolerate an economic system with permanent unemployment near 10%--because the ethnic French have a much more tolerable unemployment level of 5% or so. With this in mind, I note the fascinating recent speculation (still no link, sorry) that official American unemployment figures have stayed relatively low (below 5%) during this year of so-so economic growth because those let go are illegal immigrants who never showed up in the employment statistics to begin with. Now, assuming we're going to have a largish pool of illegals for the forseeable future--sadly, a reasonable assumption--this brings up the tantalizing possibility that we are going to have permanently low unemployment statistics, and that the economic cycle will largely manifest itself in the gyrating numbers of illegals employed in America. If we further assume that illegals remain voteless, it brings to mind another fascinating possibility--that the old relation between unemployment and voting behavior may be weakened, or even severed completely, at least for a while. That is, usually recession makes people want to turf the bums in power out--but if citizens are insulated from the effects of unemployment, this may cease to hold. A third possibility is that this will create a permanent incentive for Americans to tolerate illegal immigration--to think that the usefulness of illegals to sop up the pain of unemployment may outweigh the pain of wage competition. I hope this third possibility won't happen, but I toss it out to our readership.

Carl Schmitt Renaissance?

Noted conservative German political philosopher, totally complicit in Nazism and the Nazi regime, still influential among academics right and left--I never heard of the man before this year, and I still haven't read a word of him. Suddenly, I hear of him by two different routes, 1) by reading up on Habermas for professional reasons, and finding out that a great deal of his thought is an argument against Schmitt; and 2) via Alan Wolfe's essay in The New Republic where he darkly discerns a web of neo-Schmittian, anti-democratic and anti-liberal thought among modern American conservatives. Wolfe's specific argument I think is largely hooey--Wolfe isn't a reliable explicator of conservative thought--but these two discoveries are clearly enough data points to make for a theory: there is a Schmittian undertone to much modern political theory, right and left, and it may be growing. (In tandem, I would say, with the recuperation of German academic discourse by the international tradition.) That is, Schmitt is influential via a number of vectors--Strauss, Habermas, Arendt, etc.--and that the growing influence of these post-Schmittians and anti-Schmittians is inevitably going to lead to more reading of the man himself. I suspect that this will not be as simplistic in effect as Wolfe believes--that it will simply lead to growing conservatism and/or anti-democratic thought. After all, Habermas is a man of the left deeply committed to democracy, and he apparently bears the mark of Schmitt. But I do suspect a Schmittian vocabulary will become more common among academics in the next generation, and then make its way out toward the general public.

Update: And in my crawl through The Tank at National Review Online, I found this Schmitt reference. Three data points!

The Clinton Ascendancy Continues

This article in today's Washington Post confirms my suspicions (expressed in mildly ironic fashion in an earlier post) that the present state of the Democratic presidential field is helping no one but Hillary Clinton. Obviously, the heavy demands of all these debates falls disproportionately on the lesser candidates.

Clinton has a huge advantage even over folks like Obama and Edwards because time spent on the debates is less costly for her. Unlike most of her rivals, she's an experienced debater who already has a solid command of the facts and arguments, so preparation is easier for her than for the others. In addition, and more importantly, the opportunity costs of attending all these debates are reduced in her case: she can afford the time away from fund-raising much more easily, both because of her campaign's strong donor base, and also because she's the only candidate who can send someone else to stand in for her at fund-raising events without the potential contributors feeling like they've been shortchanged.

All the non-Clinton candidates are in a terrible bind. Becuase they're not front-runners, they have to show up. But because there are so many of them, they can't really hope to gain traction against Hillary. And if they attack Hillary, it doesn't really hurt her much. If several of them coordinated attacks on her, they might hope to do more damage, but they'd also run a huge risk: somehow I don't think Hillary would take much of a hit politically if all the boys were seen as ganging up on her. If anything, it would stiffen her support among Democratic women.

I think Clinton knows that these frequent debates involving a stageful of candidates are an ideal state of affairs, from her point of view. The other candidates know it too. The Edwards campaign, desperate for traction against Hillary, has been behaving in increasingly comical ways. First, there was Elizabeth Edwards's criticism of Hillary (an illustration that the Edwards campaign realizes how dangerous it is for a man to be seen throwing any significant punches at the former First Lady) and now Edwards has apparently proposed a set of mini-debates among subsets of the Democratic field. He has graciously offered to be in a trio with Hillary and Dennis Kucinich. I won't belabor how this particular arrangement, ostensibly based on Kucinich's objections to a whispered conversation between Edwards and Clinton after the last candidates' forum, is transparently in the strategic interests of no one but Edwards. Good luck with making that happen, John.

Why am I Defending Harry Potter?

As I made clear in an earlier post, I'm not a Harry Potter fan. (In fact, I was initially pretty annoyed, in the way cranky conservatives will be, by the whole phenomenon.) But Carol Ianonne, on NRO's PhiBetaCons blog, really seems to me to be growing more unfair in her latest criticisms of the Potter craze. Responding to Thomas Hibbs, she writes:

Given the enormous, near-universal popularity of the series, reading levels should indeed have risen in the ten years of its creation and consumption. It seems pretty obvious that if many more young people were becoming lovers of reading in general, and not just of the Potter books, and continued on in the habit of reading, that fact should be showing up in a rise in children's reading rates in general.

"Near-universal" popularity still leaves a lot of kids who haven't read the books -- especially when you consider how many of the copies of Rowling's books were sold for adult consumption. Besides, it would be a very welcome things even if the Potter books merely managed to slow the decline of reading. It's impossible to know what would have happened to kids' reading habits without Harry Potter, and it seems, additionally, a little unfair to blame the Potter books for not singlehandedly rescuing literacy among America's youth.

Then there's Ianonne's parting shot:

The popularity of the series comes partly from being popular and being the thing all the young people have to be acquainted with. There is almost a coercive quality about the whole thing, as if any criticism of it, including one's own reservations, is illegitimate.

In the first place, it's a simple truth that everything which is popular is popular in part because of its popularity. Once something has caught on, it attracts people who don't want to feel like they might be missing something. This is true for Virgil and Shakespeare as well as for Harry Potter. Literature would have died long ago if it hadn't managed to rope in people who were basically disinclined to read books.

As for the "coercive" quality of the craze, it seems to me that Ianonne is whining a little. To pile on the cliches: swimming against the tide always makes you feel out of step. But I haven't noticed a demand that we all conform. I haven't read Harry Potter, I've been loudly proclaiming for years that I tried the books, found them shallow, and couldn't get into them -- and I've never felt attacked for this like I routinely do when I express skepticism about global warming or the obesity epidemic. (Incidentally, as my earlier post indicates, I've lately been starting to revise my judgment about the books' shallowness.)

I can't help but wonder whether Iannone isn't running into problems because some (not all!) of her criticisms are, in fact, on the illegitmate side.

South Korean Xenophobia

Daniel Larison notes that

Five years ago, at least 44% of South Koreans had an unfavourable attitude towards the United States, and this year only 58% of South Koreans expressed a “positive” view of the U.S.–only a slight improvement over five years ago, and one that still implies a lot of resentment and dislike. Five years ago, South Korea was among the ten most “anti-American” countries in the world.

I don't think Larison takes sufficient account of the fact that the South Koreans are, well, nuts. I mean, aside from the normal frictions that result from having large numbers of armed foreigners in your midst, friend or foe, they seem more than normally xenophobic, to the point of irrationality. To wit: set aside for the moment the nuclear-armed Stalinist despot on their doorstep, only deterred from immediate invasion of South Korea by the American tripwire--I'll grant the usual nationalist idiocies might make Kim-on-the-street think, "At least he's a fellow Korean, he can't be as bad as all that." But Korea's immediate neighbors are three great powers, China, Japan, and Russia, none of whom has a brilliant record in their treatment of small countries nearby. Do the Koreans really think they can avoid satellite status of one of those three, absent the support of the United States? Do they have no idea how lucky they are to have a protector whose homeland is six thousand miles away?!? Across a honkin' big ocean!?! I don't expect permanent national gratitude (though it would be nice)--I don't expect their estimation of their own national interest will exactly coincide with mine--but sometimes I think the Koreans have the survival instinct of a kakapo parrot.

Turkish Election Results

With almost all the votes now counted in Turkey's parliamentary elections, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has won 47 percent of the vote, up nearly fifteen percentage points from their showing five years ago. The increase in popular support won't make much of a difference in the parliamentary majority, though. In fact, according to CNN, they'll come out 21 seats below what they won in 2002. Nonetheless, they'll have 342 of the 550 seats in the Turkish parliament -- a very comfortable majority.

It's hard for a Westerner to know how to feel about this. Famously, the AKP is less committed than its political rivals to the strict secularist policies that have governed Turkish society since the days of Ataturk. They favor easing Kemalist restrictions on public expressions of Islamic faith (such as the veil), and they draw a great deal of their support from more fundamentalist rural voters and their newly urbanized children. Turkey's prime minister, the leader of the AKP, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was a bit of a Muslim fundamentalist himself in his younger days -- "younger days" meaning the 1990s.

The prevalent suspicion that Erdogan may still be a bit of a crypto-Islamist relies for much of its evidence on statements he has made, or is said to have made, over the years. I think it's fairly well documented (see the Wikipedia article linked to above) that he once said that he asked God for forgiveness every time he was forced to shake a woman's hand. Less secure, I believe, is the claim that he told an audience that were really only two parties in Turkey, the forces of Kemalist secularism and those that wanted political Islam with sharia law.

In normal times, none of this -- not even the AKP's abortive attempt to criminalize adultery or its establishment of "women only" swimming pools in municipalities which it controls -- would be very frightening. It might merely seem as if the extreme secularism of 1923 were now beginning to be moderated. But as it is, with Islamic radicalism on the march throughout the world, the ascendance of Erdogan and his AKP is enough to make many Westerners -- and many Turkish secularists -- pretty uneasy.

But is such uneasiness justified? There's also a fair amount of evidence the huge support for the AKP in recent elections may have less to do with a rising tide of anti-secularism than with a desire for economic modernization and a loosening of the authoritarian strictures of the Turkish state. This New York Times story, for example, seems fairly optimistic, arguing that Turkish liberals -- a term whose precise meaning in the context of Turkish politics the Times fails to clarify -- are backing the AKP because of their desire for Turkish society to become more open and to provide greater services to those left behind by Turkey's robust economic growth. Newsweek points out that Erdogan's government has actually eased restrictions on Turkey's ethnic and religious minorities, and that one of the main issues dividing the AKP from their more secularist rivals is the AKP's strong support for close relations with the West, particularly the European Union, which Erdogan wants to see Turkey join. It's also true that when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, it was one of the secularist parties that was responsible for forcing Erdogan to deny America its desired northern front in that war.

So the rise of the AKP can be seen as a positive phenomenon, indeed as a movement toward mature democracy along the lines of the Christian-Democratic parties that were decisive in the transformation of Europe after World War II. The most encouraging news from Turkey actually comes from public opinion polls like those mentioned in this London Times article: support for the imposition of sharia law has plunged in the last several years, while self-identification as a "citizen of Turkey" rather than as an ethnic Turk or a Muslim has crept modestly upward (though, at 36%, such citizen-first identification is still low by Western standards).

On balance, it doesn't seem like there's any reason for immediate fear. The big question is, ultimately, unanswerable, and it has to do with the reasons why Kemal Ataturk insisted on such thorough secularization of his country in the first place. Kemal seems to have believed that aspects of Islam were, at least in his day, fundamentally incompatible with democracy, progress, and ethnic and religious tolerance, and that faith therefore had to be forced out the public sphere altogether. Many Western conservatives -- the believers in an imminent "war of civilizations" -- hold a more expansive version of this view.

There are those who suspect that from the veil and "women's only" swimming pools it may be only a series of small steps to the re-Islamification of Turkish society. Such an argument strikes me as basically alarmist, but unfortunately, in light of the radicalization of Islam in our time, it is not an argument that anyone can afford to altogether ignore.

On Being a Cut-rate Montaigne

At the crucial moment of composing a blog-post, I don’t always have something excitingly original to say about current events, or history, or philosophy. And I do envision the ideal audience for this blog as including some number of liberal academics, whom I probably cannot persuade to follow my politics at once—but for whom the thought process of a conservative academic might be interesting, enlightening, in some way the prologue to persuasion. So all this egocentricity in my musing has some purpose in mind. (And who knows, I may change tack tomorrow!)

Fading Memories

I used violently to abhor Hillary Clinton. Whitewater, Travelgate, etc. Now I don’t. Intellectually, I know I shouldn’t trust her—I doubt I’ll ever vote for her—but the white heat of passion has faded. I used to say I would never vote for Giuliani for president, because in 2001 he had tried to grab the mayoralty of New York for a third term without benefit of election. Again, the passion has faded, and I can actually see my way to voting for him, although not entirely happily. Does this happen to everybody? (Except Alpheus, who I know is still most unfond of Hillary.) Is this what it’s like for everyone for whom politics is no longer an explosion of the new, but a receding landscape? Or is this just Withywindle and his imperfect memory? And is it justified—should we, in point of fact, care less about what happened fifteen years ago than about the immediate past? I think there’s a case to be made for this sort of progressive amnesia; i.e., a justification of Withywindle’s ways to weverybody.

On the Left – A Withywindlish Interjection

I have my own detailed critique, overlapping in good part with Alpheus’. I’ll try not to horn in while my fellow river is in mid-flood. I’ll mention, however, a passage from Whittaker Chamber’s Witness that struck me with great force when I read it—something like, “I could no longer shut my ears to the sound of human screams.” Now, save for a few saints—George Orwell—most of us suffer from one form or another of selective political deafness to screams. But I think many of our political allegiances derive from an unarticulated, but total, judgment, as to which political constellation is deafer to the sound of human screams. At some point, I became convinced that the left was more deaf than the right—to murders by communists, to murders by third-world nationalists, to any suffering, for in a pinch they valued their quietistic purity, undisturbed by the commission of any morally compromised action in the world—which is to say any action at all—more than they valued human life. (Speaking of Alpheusian continuities between reform Protestantism and the modern left…) It took me a while to work out the implications of that moment of conviction, but eventually it made me a man of the right. I do try to keep my ears open, and not to be too partisanly, selectively deaf from my new vantage point—a constant temptation, wherever you are—but I confess I have seen very little to tempt me to another such moment of conversion, in reverse direction. Lately, the insouciance of the left in the face of the prospect of mutual genocide in Iraq has renewed my horror of their moral deafness. But to swerve away from autobiography—perhaps less infinitely fascinating to other people!—I do think a fair number of our political choices, to left and to right, are made from such instantaneous conversions, these sudden moments of audibility, rather than from a more articulate and drawn-out process of thought.

Dumbledore's Army

I wonder how much Harry Potter will be subject to political appropriation in the decades to come? That is, my moniker is an obvious sign that I take Tolkien as a source of inspiration for my politics and religion, and I’m hardly alone in doing so. I’m most aware of the conservative appropriators of Tolkien, but obviously he is a topic for liberal (especially environmental) invention as well—someone named Withywindle posts on the Democratic Underground! So this indicates my generation, among other things. What will politically minded Harry Potter readers take from this book? I know there’s already a cottage industry of people trying to read their own intellectual inclinations into the book—which will persist? On the conservative side of the ledger, I note that Gordon Brown’s decision not to associate the words “Muslim” and “terrorist” was greeted in the blogosphere with a gleeful cry of “Cornelius Fudge”! I think that if Alpheus and I were two decades younger, this blog might be called “Dumbledore’s Army”—a furtive attempt to save the forces of light from darkness, and from willing (professorial!) blindness to darkness. Hmm, maybe I’ll google-search, and see if such a blog already exists. [Quick blog search.] OK, Dumbledore's Army is a Harry Potter fan site and a rock band, but I don't think yet a political blog.

Grading Essays

My students have real difficulties comprehending the distinction between personal sympathy for a historical figure, and a critique of their effectiveness. (I.e., you can have all the sympathy in the world, and still think said historical figure is pretty darn incompetent.) Some don’t understand the idea of critiquing a person’s effectiveness in promoting (by not so random example) Protestantism or Catholicism, as distinct from a judgment as to which of those religions ought to have been promoted. When reviewing a book, they don’t always distinguish between the presentation of facts and an author’s view. Then objectivity is an idol!—they use it to mean “impartial,” and generally “good.” Whoever presents the correct facts is telling the truth and is right—little sense that facts can be subject to multiple interpretations and emphases, that facts are often the beginning of debate, not the end. This, I suppose, is preferable to some sort of cynical the-fix-is-in view of the writing of history—another popular attitude in other classes—but somehow is missing something. I’m trying to get them to thread the needle—in the few minutes I can spare from presenting the, um, facts.

And their English-language skills are sketchy. I keep on thinking—and telling them—that part of the point of writing these essays is so as to acquire the skills that allow one to write an error-free business memo. (I.e., what I think you need to rise in the white-collar world.) I’m not sure any of them can do that, though some come close.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

I just saw it for the first time—it’s a wonderful movie, deserves the four stars in the movie review books. I won’t go into the plot here, but I’ll note that it’s also a wonderfully skillful piece of British wartime (1943) propaganda, hitting the notes of British moral superiority, class, regional, and imperial unity, the wartime alliance with America, the moderate nastiness of Germans and the especial nastiness of Nazis. By the by, there are some very interesting points, that speak to our own times. One is a set piece of a British official explaining to a German enemy alien in 1939 that even though he probably really is an anti-Nazi, there’s no way of knowing for sure, and that Britain for its own security most intern him—that this will be said German’s contribution to the fight against Hitler. To which the German’s silent reaction is understanding, but neither happiness nor endorsement of this argument. The other is a regular to-do about whether you can continue to be a gentleman in war—whether you must use harsh methods against a ruthless enemy. To this our Colonel Blimp at first vehemently objects—but then is willing to invite our unscrupulous young British soldier to dinner. Just as (this is unstated) he would invite a German officer to dinner, despite his use of unscrupulous wartime methods. The invitation to dinner is both a reluctant acceptance of the need for wartime indecency and, by its own gentlemanly nature, a rebuke of that practice. This is remarkable delicacy and ambiguity, particularly for a piece of wartime propaganda. Bye the bye, our Colonel Blimp has a radio speech censored in 1940 on the grounds that it is too fierce in upholding gentlemanly standards of conduct. To the extent that the radio speech represents the entire movie itself, this is both wonderfully complex, and wonderfully self-revealing and self-critiquing.

Withyblogging on Brief Hiatus

Summer class--papers to grade. Back in a day or two, cross fingers.

Inevitable Potter-blogging

It's strange to think that I'm one of the world's few literate English speakers who isn't spending the day reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. For the past ten years, I've been AWOL from the whole Harry Potter phenomenon. I couldn't get into Sorcerer's Stone back in 1997 (or whenever the craze began), and I've been missing out on the excitement ever since.

It's not that I'm one of that cranky little band of Potter-phobes (the people who really hate the series) nor even one of those people who are suffering from Potter overload. The books just didn't grab me. Just as I couldn't manage to force myself to read the books, I couldn't manage to get too fired up about all the criticisms of Rowling's opus.

Of course, it's been impossible not to absorb a fair amount of Potteriana over the last several years. It's everywhere. I think this must have been what it was like with Homer in Classical Greece or the Bible in Europe just after the Reformation. In the former example, even if you were an illiterate Aetolian goatherd, you still probably knew about Achilles and Hector (a fact which is, incidentally, still true today). And in the latter case, it's probably true that even illiterate rag-and-bone men knew something about Jonah's gourd, Naboth's vineyard, and Lazarus at Dives' gate.

Likewise, I feel as if I know, without even making an effort, all about Dumbledore and Hermione and Severus Snape, about hoarcruxes and Azkaban and exspecto patronum. This stuff forces its way into your skull whether you want it to or not.

So its not as if my Harry Potter indifference springs from sheer ignorance. And, in fact, its actually more ambivalence than apathy. Since I'm temperamentally inclined to opposition, I suppose I've generally sympathized with the Potter-phobes' arguments, if not with their intensity. They have some valid points. Despite Rowling's brilliant imagination, clever plotting and a Dickensian genius for names, the writing (in the fifty or sixty pages I've read) seemed pretty flat; I get the sense (though I'm much less competent to judge here) that this same flatness may extend to some of the major characters. And it also seems to be true (again, as far I can tell without having read the books!) that Rowling has, to some extent, pandered to her readers instead of challenging them (see the first link, above; but see also below). Of course, it's important to remember that this started out as a series for children: a lot of what bothers critics of Potter seems to be the fact that adults have latched onto the books so enthusiastically.

There's a huge debate over whether the Potter series will spark a renaissance in kids' reading, with arguments and evidence on both sides. My own suspicion is that it won't, for most kids. A lot of the Pottermania seems to be driven by its sheer ubiquity, by the fact that everyone is reading these books, or writing about them (as in my case), or otherwise making them a part of their lives. Until some author or publisher can engineer another avalanche of popularity around a single book, I think the slide in novel-reading by the young is doomed to continue as TV, video games, the pressures of schoolwork, and the dreaded internet continue their implacable advance.

So you can see, I'm not what'd you'd call a Potter enthusiast. And yet, and yet, and yet.... Rowling's achievement has been impressive: seven books totalling -- what? -- more than three thousand pages, lavish with colorful detail. The idea of having not only the main character but the level of books themselves "grow up" along with their readers was sheer brilliance -- and I gather this final installment may make some various serious emotional and spiritual demands on its audience, thus seriously mitigating one of the criticisms I mentioned above.

And finally -- and for me, most crucially -- Rowling seems to love language. Even if she isn't, herself, a master of English prose, her skill with nomenclature clearly indicate that she understands the beauty and power of the English tongue: a thing English-speaking readers will respond to as long as our common speech endures. And it's not only the power of English she admires. As a classicist, I have to give props to Rowling's allegiance to Latin and Greek. Latin and, to a lesser extent, the Romance languages seem to be as much of an influence as English in her inventions of names. I especially like the names of Draco Malfoy ("Snake Badfaith") and his father Lucius -- that most suspicious of Latin praenomina, attached to such ruthless figures as Sulla and Catiline.

And how can I thank Rowling enough for having her books translated into Latin and ancient Greek (though I gather there remains some faint mystery as to whether Rowling herself was behind the latter decision)?

Rowling's devotion to the Greeks appears to be no shallow thing. I suspect that she has even been inspired, to some small extent, by the modern Greeks. This morning, when my girlfriend's copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows arrived, she pointed out to me the epigraph, a choral passage from Aeschylus's Libation-bearers about the terrible cost involved in defeating the "evil within." (This is accompanied by a second epigraph from William Penn's Fruits of Solitude.) Trust me: Bobby Kennedy may have quoted the Agamemnon at Jack's funeral, but only someone who's pretty hardcore quotes the Choephoroi. By the way, this epigraph pretty much confirmed to my satisfaction all the speculation that this book will involve a lot of soul-searching, and a whole lot of blood.

I still doubt whether Deathly Hallows will turn young readers on to Greek tragedy, but if I start hearing that the seventh book lives up to the promise of its epigraph, then -- who knows? -- even I, someday, may have to try to read these books after all.

What Wrong with the Left? Part II -- The Vision Thing

In Part I of this series, I noted that Part II would owe an intellectual debt to G.K. Chesterton. I should also point out that, for a long time now, my co-blogger Withywindle has been trying to convince me that a deep identity exists between reformist Christianity and modern liberalism. I've often resisted the idea, but a great deal of what follows is based on the assumption that he's right.

***

Over the years, many conservatives have accused the left of being stuck in a naive Enlightenment mindset that posits the perfectability of humankind. According to those theorists, many aspects of liberalism that baffle conservatives can be explained in terms of a fundamental mistake about human nature that denies man's inherent and ineradicable evil. By contrast, according to this critique, conservatism more correctly understands the tragedy of man's estate.

There may be some truth to this. Certainly the history of liberalism includes some simpleminded questing after utopias (take the left's flirtation with Communism, for instance). But, in my experience, articulate modern liberals do not actually believe in any straightforward version of the proposition that people can be made to be perfectly good, nor do they really believe in utopia at all. They believe, they say, in the much more justifiable position that society has to be bettered and wrongs have to be righted. This, of course, is something that conservatives with an ounce of decency should also believe in.

I'm willing to stipulate that liberals aren't pursuing some gauzy vision of human perfection. What I want to suggest here, in fact, is that one of the problems with the Left is that they're often not pursuing a well-defined ideal at all.The attitude of modern American liberalism is, I think, pretty well foreshadowed by J.R. Lowell's stirring abolitionist poem, The Present Crisis, which seems to argue that social progress has a direction but no final destination (save perhaps in Heaven):

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;
Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key.

The relevant section of the poem -- roughly its second half -- is too long to quote in its entirety, but Lowell argues that God continually tests his people with new wrongs, new evils to be overcome. Past triumphs over wrong may inspire us (as in the case of the original Pilgrims), but they don't necessary get us any closer to absolute good:

Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime;—
Was the Mayflower launched by cowards, steered by men behind their time?
Turn those tracks toward Past or Future, that made Plymouth Rock sublime?

They were men of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts,
Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past's;
But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking thathath made us free,
Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee
The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them across the sea.

Here, I think, we may see a religious prefiguration of modern secular progressivism. It does not expect utopia -- quite the reverse. Instead, the fact that there will always be evils in society demands a constant reexamination and revision of the status quo. The permanence of evil requires that good people should be forever engaged in new struggles to seek it out and confront it.

The conservative mindset, by contrast, suspect that disruptions of the status quo is likely to make things worse or, at least, to introduce new evils with which we are less prepared to deal. Conservatives believe that humanity's best hope is to cobble together a relatively stable state of affairs that will minimize or mitigate human evil over the long term. Conservatives, in my experience, worry a lot about what such a state of affairs should look like. This makes sense, because such a state of affairs is, in fact, the conservative "ideal."

Liberals, meanwhile, view conservatives' desire for a stable albeit imperfect status quo as something basically immoral -- "a compromise with sin," to quote Lowell once more. Even if thoughtful liberals don't believe that progress can culminate in perfection, they do believe that anything other than the moral progress of society is, by their lights, just as bad as moral regress.

So the progressive impulse, as I've described it, is essentially negative. It does not ultimately depend on a specific vision of the good society, just on the need to identify and combat evil. This may explain why so much left-wing rhetoric consists solely of attacks on the right, and why, in recent decades, utopia as described by liberals has often been a strangely desolate place. The best example of such a utopia may be the one described in John Lennon's "Imagine," which has become a sort of left-liberal anthem since it was released in 1971. The lyrics are too well known to quote, and they focus on the absence of perceived obstacles to human happiness: no heaven, no hell, no countries, nothing to kill or die for, no religion, no possessions, and no need for greed or hunger. By comparison, Lennon gives us only a very hazy idea of what his perfect world will actually look like: all the people will live for today, live in peace, and share all the world. That's it, and the positive vision, such as it is, is obviously secondary to the negations that begin each stanza. The plan that a more skeptical Lennon had demanded to see in "Revolution" is not provided here. The song is less a blueprint for a better future than a list of monsters that need to be overcome.

Lowell, his Puritan abolitionist colleagues, and even the equally Puritan proto-feminists described in Henry James's The Bostonians would all have been horrified to learn that religion itself (as opposed to the idea of an established church) would eventually become one more social evil that the left would undertake to weaken or abolish. But this was the logical outcome of an ideology that has dedicated itself to uprooting, one by one, those forces in society that interfered with human happiness. Nevertheless, even if modern progressivism is no longer particularly congenial to religion, the religious origins of progressivism are still visible in the same "great Impulse" that gives progressivism its name: the need for forward motion and the absolute refusal to allow apparent backsliding once an evil has already been recognized and attacked.

When I try to persuade liberals of some point of view that I hold, I often run aground precisely because they cannot conceive of how "going backward" could ever be justified. The danger of radical Islam does not permit any temporary diminution, however small, of anyone's civil liberties. Changed social attitudes cannot justify the scaling back and elimination of affirmative action programs. Progressives have trouble accepting the possibility that the messy nature of human reality may require policies, and even principles, to evolve in different directions at different times. I'm arguing here that this is because they're always trying to steer a course away from things they've identified as wrong. That's why they keep attacking the same bogeymen, even if those bogeymen are long since dead, and why new bogeymen (like radical Islam) are correspondingly hard for them to reckon with.

***

I said in Part I that I wanted to avoid psychologizing liberals; I didn't want to treat liberalism as a form of mental illness. Some people -- particularly liberals themselves -- might object that to describe progressivism as an irrational residue of religious feeling isn't very different. And they might have a point. I'm sure liberals would also argue that their commitment to change has been vindicated by history. Lowell's "stalwart old iconoclasts" made the world better by struggling against people who doubted it could be made better in the ways those inconoclasts were proposing. Many values and institutions that conservatives now want to defend were indeed once the pipe dreams of people who thought like progressives. And those pipe dreams were often purely negative -- the elimination of this or that particular problem that conservatives didn't believe could be eliminated without serious costs. To a large extent, I acknowledge all this.

But I would argue that the old iconoclasts were at their most successful when their vision of the future was clearest, even if that did mean believing in foolish utopias. Martin Luther King's dream was to a large extent a positive ideal explicitly grounded in the positive ideals of the Founding Fathers -- "deeply rooted in the American dream," as he himself said -- which had not been fully realized. And King's dream has been undermined to the extent that the civil rights movement, and especially its epigonoi, have focused not on the ideal itself but on the persistence, however exiguous, of the evils that once were serious obstacles to the realization of that dream.

I'll pause here for reasons of length, and invite comments and criticisms. I'm not at all sure whether what I've tried to argue here is convincing, but I hope it's at least coherent and provocative. Part III of this series of ruminations (tentatively titled "The Abnormal as Normative") probably won't appear until early next week.

What's Wrong with the Left? Part I -- Introduction

This will be the first of a series of posts that asks the question, What's Wrong with the Left?

I should acknowledge at the outset a debt to G.K. Chesterton. I'm not a Chestertonian, but he seems to keep coming up in my blog posts (here, for instance, and here). He was spectacularly mistaken about many things, but, as is usually the way of things, the same intellectual audacity that tripped him into gross errors also guided him to some amazing insights. Anyway, I didn't consciously choose the title of this series as an echo of Chesterton's What's Wrong with the World?, but since Part II of this series will present a version of that book's thesis, I wanted to dispel (not least in my own mind) any fear that I might merely be committing plagiarism.

And so to business. As a conservative, I spend a fair amount of intellectual effort in trying to understand the Left. Where are they coming from? What, fundamentally, differentiates their world-view from mine? How can they hold positions that seem to me so obviously foolish and immoral? Where, if at all, do we agree?

These are not idle questions. If I don't ask them, I fail to justify my own views while at the same time abandoning any hope of persuading the opposition. Any person who has participated in many discussions between conservatives and liberals knows that such discussions are more likely than not to end in frustration. Even if the words never get said, one can see them in the eyes of the disputants: How can you be so stupid? What in the hell is wrong with you?

The irritation or anger that usually gives birth to these questions often leads them to be answered (out loud or, more often, to oneself) by some form of cheap shot. Maybe the other guy is a moron, lacking my intellectual resources or deep reserves of life experience. Maybe the other guy is driven by some unhealthy psychological impulse: his political beliefs arise from envy, or fear, or -- a current favorite -- sexual frustration. Maybe the other guy is selfish, or evil, and secretly knows that the views he's advocating in fact only advance the interest of some small clique to which he belongs. If he's a politician, maybe he's actually corrupt. And so on.

In particular cases, such cheap-shot explanations may even be true. A particular interlocutor may simply be dull-witted. Or ignorant. Or twisted by deep-seated hate. Or a mindless parrot of views absorbed from someone else. But fundamentally these answers are missing something. In the first place, it should be clear that in the present War of Ideas between Left and Right in America (and in the West generally), it cannot be the case that every individual on the opposing side holds the views he holds for the same personal reasons. You cannot dismiss an ideology with a list of ad hominem attacks that can be applied at need to the people who subscribe to it.

Furthermore, even if ad hominem arguments are based on true propositions in particular cases, it should be obvious that many people who believe exactly what I believe are also subject to similar, and equally true, attacks. There are plenty of stupid conservatives, evil conservatives, and sick conservatives, but I don't think that ruins the larger ideological package called conservatism. If I want to attack left-liberalism (and I do!), then I have to attack it as an ideology. I have to say what intellectual misconceptions or misapprehensions underlay that ideology. And I have to do so as precisely as possible, without mystification, so that even a child could understand.

In short, the aim of this series will be to expose some of the fundamental intellectual errors upon which I believe much of liberalism is built. It's an absurdly ambitious aim, I know, and one in which I've had several more illustrious and competent predecessors. But a blogger's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a blog for?

Coming soon: Part II -- The Vision Thing.

Liberal and Conservative Influences and Appropriations

And then the grandchildren quarrel about who Grand-pa really would have liked--is Lionel Trilling more on the liberal side or the conservative? How about Orwell? Raymond Aron or Camus? Different political factions contest to be declared the rightful heirs of figures with ambiguous inheritances. Orwell is clearly a man of the left on many--most?--issues, but it seems to me that conservatives are more interested in appropriating him than are liberals, and that the fact of their relatively uncontested interest is itself some sort sort of proof that they are right to appropriate him. Trilling still influences someone like Azar Nafisi--but how many on the left this side of Teheran care that much about Trilling? I think that if there is an answer, it comes down on the side of who spends the most effort trying to appropriate an intellectual figure for their own tradition.

Now, the common thread in these examples is that they are liberals being appropriated by conservatives. Does the reverse happen much? Jonah Goldberg would say that liberals by dint of their philosophical principles have no sense of tradition, hence are uninterested in their own past, much less that of others--and I suspect he may have a point. But then we do have the notorious Tim Burke appropriating Edmund Burke for his own ends, so it's not impossible for liberals to appropriate conservative figures. But is he typical? Does the mainstream of the liberal tradition to much such appropriation of conservatives? I don't think so, but I don't know so. Thoughts by any readers eagerly welcomed.

Comix Snark-blogging

I owe to Tim Burke the discovery of the dubious world of snark-blogging about comix--a while ago he put up a link to Dave's Long Box, and from there I have discovered just how many web-pages there are devoted to sarcastic, affectionate reviews of comix past and present. As a recovering comix addict, I must say this has had a terrible affect on my wallet. But still, the joy of all this is really far more one of reading the snarkery than the original comix--which continue to have much wretchedness. Now, for Tim and any other possible comix-afficionado reading this blog, I want to provide a link to the most impressive piece of snarkery I have discovered yet--Paul O'Brien at The X-Axis, reviewing Uncanny X-Men #439. This, I gather, was part of a completely pretentious, and not very successful, attempt to retell the Romeo and Juliet story in the X-men mythos. O'Brien reviews this travesty in iambic pentameter. It's very funny. A short sample:

And then they drone on for another five
Godawful pages of quite subtext-free
Bad dialogue which someone must have thought
Was beautiful, poetic and all that
But actually is painful to the eyes.
"You're like a winged messenger from heaven."
"Love doesn't ask permission, it demands
Obedience." Please Jesus, make it stop.

You'll notice this is rather good iambic pentameter, as these things go. Go read.

On the Confederate Flag

Recantation and renunciation—good for the soul, and very powerful assurances that you will not commit similar crimes again. Willy Brandt fell on his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto; that provides an assurance that Germany will not turn Nazi again—an assurance that Japan, for example, has not provided. But should one require such recantation, apology for past evils? Let us take the Confederate flag as an example.

So as a good Lincoln Republican, I am whole-heartedly on the side of Lincoln and Union, take the Confederate flag to be a symbol of evil and treason, think it ought to be removed from every state flag and private home in the south, and think that every Southerner ought to specifically acknowledge the evil meanings of the flag, and renounce them. This not just for the good of their souls, but to prevent any recrudescence of Jim Crow, rebellion, slavery, etc. The Confederate flag ought to be denounced, so should any toleration of Confederate sympathizers, toleration of the tolerators, etc. etc.

But then I am a conservative and a Republican, and I am not unaware that a substantial part of my political coalition includes Southerners who are deeply attached to the Confederate flag—indeed, who have a certain attachment to the various evils it represents. I am also aware that they currently support many of the same political projects that I do, and that a loud denunciation of the Confederate flag on my part will fracture our coalition, and render it ineffective. I am also aware that denunciations of the Confederate flag on the part of the left/Democrats is not purely a matter of Kantian imperatives, but also deliberately done precisely so as to cause this fracture—and, more precisely, to be a tactic to oppose various good causes, such as the repeal of affirmative action, by (falsely) tarring it with the brush of the Confederacy. Then there is the gently, sweetly argument—that the rather self-deceptive Southern argument that the Confederate flag represents regional pride rather than slavery or racism ought to be met with sweet acquiescence, in hopes that it will woo Southerners actually to believe this fable, and so lead them away from attachment to the South’s peculiar evils. These facts do provide prudential moral imperatives for refraining from a loud and constant denunciation of the flag, for refraining from demanding recantation and renunciation on the part of Southerners.

I have had this conflict of the categorical imperative versus prudential considerations in my mind for a while now. But recently, I’ve been trying to think about this a bit more from the point of view of white Southerners. (It can take a surprisingly long while to consider undertaking such exercises in empathy.) Let us consider someone—a Daniel Larison, say—who is a fervent supporter of the Old South. In their eyes—and let us grant some moral weight to their perceptions, however misguided—Lincoln was a tyrant, the Union flag is steeped in the blood of hundreds of thousands of righteous Southerners, America has constructed a national narrative that has made the Southerners villains twice over (1860s, 1960s), and the current political and social consensus of America is, and has been since 1865, considerably at variance from the Southern political and social consensus. And the Union flag flies highest in every Southern flagpole, Southerners swear allegiance to an America they believe to have done them great and repeated evils, the penny has Lincoln, the Lincoln Memorial memorializes him in our nation’s capital, and their sons and daughters fight in disproportionate numbers to protect an America that is most unSouthern.

What renunciation of the Confederate flag can sear a truly Southern soul half so much as saying the Pledge of Allegiance? Do Southerners still jib at singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic? Well, we should pay attention to what they no longer sing:

Oh, I'm a good old Rebel
Now that's just what I am.
For this Yankee nation
I do not give a damn.
I'm glad I fought agin her,
I only wish we'd won.
I ain't asked any pardon
For anything I've done.

I hates the yankee nation
And everything they do,
I hates the declaration
Of independence, too;
I hates the glorious union-
’tis dripping with our blood-
And I hates their striped banner,
I fought it all I could.

I confess I do not have a settled answer on this issue. The categorical imperative to demand renunciation of evil should never be put entirely to one side—and I recognize the moral infirmities attending my prudential silences. But I do also think the categorical imperative may be fit more for saints than humans, and that perhaps, recognizing human frailty, we should acknowledge the power of Southern silence and Southern allegiance to the American flag, and not demand of them as well that they give up the Confederate flag. I don’t outright say this is what should be done—but I think this consideration ought to be part of the argument.

Now, some of this post is a response to Tim Burke’s desire over at Easily Distracted that supporters of the Iraq War should recant their mistakes before he’s willing to engage in dialogue with them. I don’t think the Iraq War was a mistake, hence have no plans on recantation—but this post is a long-winded way of saying that I’m not sure that he should demand recantation as a precondition of talking. I think it may be applying an inhuman standard to frail humans. We talked with Germans before Brandt, and we talk with Japanese now—demanding prior recantations before talk is not our practice, and I think that may be morally justified.

I suppose I would add to this that my own animus is directed more at the Democratic Party and the left for a variety of recantations they have failed to make—a denunciation of Al Sharpton is my favorite example as a moral necessity. I do think a categorical moral imperative still calls for such a renunciation—to speak nothing of a renunciation of the various evils of communism, say, in which the fellow-traveling of far too much of the democratic left was and is deeply complicit. (The latter I take to be at least as great a stain on the left as the memory of the Confederacy is on the right.) But at the same time, perhaps it is inhuman to expect such a recantation. Certainly I think it is possible to engage in dialogue with the left, and a search for political and moral consensus, even absent such recantation. We will be deeply morally riven, absent mutual recantations on both sides—but not so much as to be speechless toward one another.

The Pleasures of Anachronism

I feel like I ought to post something on the Phillies' becoming the first team in professional sports to lose 10,000 games. But what's really got me excited is the trailer I just saw for 10,000 B.C., a film from "writer"/director Roland Emmerich that should do for Neolithic paleontology what his earlier film, The Day After Tomorrow, did for climate science.

We don't know much about what life was like in 10,000 B.C., but we know it looked nothing like this. I gather Emmerich wanted to rip off Mel Gibson's Apocalypto without having to make any weenie gestures toward (pre)historical accuracy. More power to him. Every child has reflected, in his or her little heart, on what a shame it is that human civilization didn't get underway until all the really big, scary beasts had died off or been hunted into extinction. Now, thanks to Emmerich, we can have the best of both worlds: mammoths building pyramids and primitive, half-clad women fighting saber-tooth tigers with bronze weapons. God bless him. This is what Hollywood is for.

And God bless him, most of all, for not calling it 10,000 B.C.E.

Comment over at Easily Distracted

I have a comment over at Easily Distracted, responding at length to Tim Burke on things Iraq-related. Based on past performance, it'll take a few hours for the comments to get moderated and appear on his blog, so here they are:

Ah, my cue. First, I should thank you for a temperate exposition of your views. Doubtless there will continue to be political incommensurates involved in our respective political views. I feel an urge to reply—I will try not to be too repetitious, or touch too much on the areas clearly beyond a meeting of minds.

1) I do think you are still engaged in some jiggering of the terms of debate. That is, you define the consistent opposition you could respect as a simpleminded advocacy for unrestrained executive power at home and brutal imperialism abroad. I can define a consistent opposition I respect as a view of the constitution as a suicide pact and feebleminded pacifism abroad. I think the second view somewhat closer to accuracy than the former, but I also think it possible to consider that a consistent and respectable opposition may share many of my principles, to differ in their emphases, to have a gravely flawed policy—indeed, a morally culpable one—but as a consequence of their prudential judgment rather than of their basic principles. If you like, although both are crucially on the wrong side of the Iraq War debate, I consider Sen. Biden no less principled than Rep. Kucinich simply because he has a more complex thought process.

2) People are partisans who defend their own—this is a surprise? Astonishingly, I have a blog-post from a little while ago that touches on this subject. I advocate some combination of partisan advocacy and advocacy for the polis as a whole—in the case you are alluding to, the conviction of Libby should be recognized as parallel to the impeachment of Pres. Clinton, both recognized as deserved, and Libby’s guilt should no longer be contested after his conviction by twelve good men and true. This is my belief; it is not the belief of enough conservatives (and, yes, it does discredit them); but it is also the belief of people such as Andy McCarthy, who is regularly given a pulpit to announce his belief at the National Review Online (NRO)—which does in turn lend credit both to NRO and to the conservative movement writ large. Incidentally, Pres. Bush’s decision to commute rather than to pardon does also include him as a member of the camp that acknowledges Libby’s guilt.

3) You have indeed anticipated some possible ripostes as regards your LA Times story on Iraq; I thank you for extending the courtesy. As regards your take-away point: you are of course correct that it is difficult to engage in a war where the entire population must be considered a potential enemy, you must engage in some considerable brutality to win a counter-insurgency, and you are the foreign occupier. Impossible? When I look at, say, the Philippines War, the South African War, and the Malay War, it seems to me that many of the same difficulties applied, and these wars ended with some success for the occupiers. (I recognize that these are habitually cited by pro-war rhetors of a historical bent; the recurrence to them as examples does not in itself invalidate their exemplary value.) I do also think that outlasting an enemy has greater effects on weary populations than you do—that the Iraqi silent majority will be willing to acquiesce to an American-supported government because we are persistent, just as they will be willing to acquiesce to al-Qaeda or to a Sh’ia equivalent if they are persistent. Persistence can equal brutality, but does not have to.

Now, a major nub here is “liberal democracy”—but let us take South Africa as having ended up as a white liberal democracy under British auspices, take note of the Breaker Morant sequence, and consider that a brutal counter-insurgency does not inevitably prevent reconciliation and liberal democracy. Is such a sequence unlikely in Iraq? I fear so, and always have. I continue to believe the overwhelmingly likely alternative to establishing liberal democracy in the Muslim world will be civilizational warfare, mass bloodshed, (including much American,) and the breaking of nations, and that it is worth considerable persistence to avoid so terrible a future. But even if we cannot achieve liberal democracy in Iraq, there are other goals in mind—Iraqs we can prevent, if not Iraqs we can create; political constellations the Iraqis will not follow, even if they do not love us. We have almost certainly prevented by this point a resurgence of Baathist Iraq; we are nearly done preventing the possibility of an al Qaeda Iraq. If we leave now, we are faced with the possibility that we will have midwifed a Hezbollah Iraq. This I would take as considerably less than ideal—but since I take the instability of pre-war Iraq to have resulted in good measure from the fragility of a minority-Sunni regime, we will at least have left behind us an Iraq with one cause for foreign adventurism removed. If by no means complete success, it will also be a far distance from complete failure.

As to American attitudes and behavior toward Iraqis—it should be noted first that I believe the context is the Sunni provinces, where indeed a vast majority of the inhabitants were hostile, but that the dynamic there is quite distinct from the dynamic in the Sh’ia provinces. (Not paradise with the Sh’ia, but universal suspicion is not quite the order of the day.) There is some difference between (rational) universal suspicion, and simply opening up fire on everyone you see. Secondly, even taking most of the accusations against Americans at face value—which I do not—it would still be difficult for Americans to come remotely close to al Qaeda barbarities. The fact that a significant number of Sunnis are now co-belligerents against al Qaeda argues very strongly that Iraqis do not regard us as morally equivalent to al Qaeda, or even close.

4) I find a little peculiar your claim that there has been no clear statement of victory or defeat on the part of the Bush administration and its supporters. Victory is the establishment of a stable liberal democracy in Iraq. Defeat is withdrawal under enemy fire, without that objective achieved, and the consequent descent of the Middle East into a genocidal maelstrom. This seems clear to me.

5) On national willpower: the Green-Lantern argument is, of course, a caricature. The argument is a middle-ground: that willpower is a nontrivial part of warmaking, and that it is not everything. The argument that willpower is trivial seems to me to fly in the evidence of all history. One can argue for that willpower is significant without embracing the military doctrine of Imperial Japan.

6) “Personality cult,” as I have mentioned before, is nonsensical on a great many levels. I mentioned before that FDR is probably the only president to have had anything approaching a personality cult; the phrase is particularly odd coming after Pres. Bush’s disastrous foray into immigration reform, which aroused an overwhelming wave of political and personal opposition to the president on the part of his core supporters. To say “personality cult on selected issues” is somehow to miss the point of the phrase.

7) And, no, I still believe the invasion of Iraq was and is correct policy, and I do not believe the Republican Party to have behaved outside the mainstream of democratic politics. I don’t feel inclined to satisfy your desire for a show-trial apology, and it is an unpleasantly Bolshevist desire on your part. Until you bring out the rats, I’m not about to say that 2 + 2 = 5.

How Cagey is Hillary Clinton?

One thing has been bothering me for a couple of days about the exchanges between Hillary Clinton and John Edwards in Detroit that were picked up by Fox News microphones: I can't figure out why Hillary is so eager to agree with Edwards that the size of the Democratic debates should be reduced. After all, Hillary is the clear front-runner, the heir apparent to the Democratic nomination. If anything, having non-starters like Kucinich, Dodd, and Gravel on the stage only makes her (the sole woman) look more unique. If anything, it prevents real potential challengers like Obama and Edwards from getting traction. Under these conditions, even Obama has more trouble presenting himself as the alternative. Edwards tends to fade into the background blur of candidates of who aren't Hillary.

So why would Hillary profess interest in Edwards's proposal? She's nothing if not a shrewd campaigner. One likely answer is that my analysis is wrong and that Hillary and her people actually feel like the plethora of opposition candidates are reducing her stature and eroding her appeal. But I'm so convinced that's a misreading of the effect of the eight-person debates that I can't believe a politician as sharp as Hillary would buy into that line of thinking. Another, even more likely, possibility is that Hillary was just agreeing with Edwards because she didn't want to disagree with him. This is a Clinton we're dealing with, after all. If there's one thing Bill knew in his bones, it's that it hardly ever hurts to tell people what they want to hear.

Related to this second possibility is a third possibility, and it's my favorite, because it involves the deep, subtle deception and ceaseless strategizing that I tend to believe guides everything the Clintons do and say. Consider the video of the event in question and notice the following facts:

(1) Edwards's remarks to Hillary are mostly made while a voice over the loudspeaker is announcing the candidates; he had good reason to believe that the podium microphones weren't turned on yet. Hillary's remarks to Edwards come when the introductions have ceased. Hillary also speaks louder -- Edwards had whispered in her ear -- and is more easily picked up by the microphones.

(2) Hillary actually follows Edwards back toward his podium to reassert her support for limiting the size of debates, saying that she "thought there had been an effort by our campaigns to do that...our guys should talk." Hillary continues to speak unconcernedly in the presence of Kucinich and Obama until Edwards walks away.

Is it possible that Hillary wanted her conversation with Edwards to be overheard? Certainly the coverage given to this story and the angry reactions from campaigns like those of Kucinich and Dodd have virtually guaranteed that the size of the debates will not be limited anytime soon. Edwards has received most of the criticism as the one making the proposal, and Hillary helped this process along by sloughing the blame onto Edwards.

So is Hillary cagey enough to have orchestrated a result that would make Edwards look bad while guaranteeing the result she wanted? Maybe I'm just paranoid, but with a Clinton one never can tell....

Beautiful words

Robert Hayden, splendid poet, is now in my mind. So a poem of his:

Frederick Douglass

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

Words, Words

My understanding of how words work in politics derives in good part from my understanding of the history of Biblical exegesis. That is, you have one text—many parts of which contradict one another, and the interpretation thereof depending on how much emphasis you place on one part of the text, ultimately to the exclusion of others. Slightly differently put, the Bible—Christianity—is a matter of multiple, overlapping ideals, with tension points rising over which ideal gets ultimate precedence. So, for example, predestination and free will derive authority from different texts of the Bible, can jog along in relative harmony, but if you push any particular text hard, suddenly you’ve got Protestants and Catholics killing each other over a difference in emphasis. And this model works for a great deal of politics—overlapping ideals, and tension points revealed in what you choose to emphasize, which indicate which ideal, in a pinch, you’ll go with.

In domestic politics, the obvious example is “pro-choice” and “pro-life”—all sides presumably in favor of choice and life, but the shorthand slogan conveying quite accurately which ideal gets preference in a pinch. “Peace” and “freedom” are for me at least as significant a dyad—ideals that all Americans presumably favor in combination, but still constituting a significant choice. Peace, after all, does not require freedom—it can be a peaceful submission to tyranny domestic or foreign—and freedom certainly does not require peace, may need to be fought for to maintain—and if we believe Machiavelli, has a certain bellicose dynamic. I do believe a certain message is being sent by the use of Peace or Freedom as your one-word slogan—and Peace says that how desirable freedom is, it is not your core value. Hence, I confess, I react in my heart with contempt, and as a politically active citizen with distrust, whenever I see peace bandied about as a slogan, a bumper sticker, what have you.

Now, perhaps I am overreading. (Surely not!) But I think that this is something that we all do, both in our readings of other people’s slogans, and in the slogans we choose to cry out. It may not be completely articulated to ourselves, but neither do I think it is completely unconscious.

Lady Bird, RIP

Lord's brought home His ladybird,
His roadside gardener ...

(with apologies to Robert Hayden)

Thirty-five years without Lyndon! I can imagine him at the Pearly Gates, saying "What took you so long?" And she'll ask him, "Why were you in such a hurry?" "No good reason," he'll say. "Here, let me show you the way to the gardens." And then he'll take her hand, and they'll go walking in together.

On Wolfe, On Kirk

Alan Wolfe, after engaging in a somewhat dubious hit job on Russell Kirk, has now proffered a condensation of his critique. Other people have already addressed themselves to this-notably Ross Douthat--but I think it’s worth attempting to address his claims as well. (Like Douthat, I am no particular fan of Kirk, but I do find Wolfe’s approach wanting.

I’d like to mention first a certain disingenousness in Wolfe’s approach, in that he spent a great deal of time attacking Kirk’s character, was soundly parried on the subject over at the National Review Online, and then claimed that “my task was to write about his works, not his life.” In fact, Wolfe was engaging in a standard trope of rhetoric—the attack on Kirk’s character as a way of discrediting his thought—and at the National Review they concentrated first, quite properly, on defending Kirk’s character, as a sine qua none for defending his thought. This was legitimate procedure on both sides—we can, do, and should, judge ideas in part by the character of their protagonists. Wolfe’s attempt to discredit Kirk’s character is perfectly standard; his attempt to deny what he was attempting to do is less creditable.

Now, as to Wolfe’s points, as condensed by himself, re Kirk:

(1) his decision to treat only left-wing ideas as ideological is itself ideological

This turns on the definition of ideology. One definition of ideology is an attempt (by human beings) to propound a systematic, organized collection of ideas, generally with a normative intent to be applied to the world as it is; the other is more generic, and refers to any set of beliefs. Both usages have some currency. Kirk I take to have meant the former—and therefore to distinguish self-avowed attempts by men to change the world by rationally consistent precepts from the acceptance of God’s revelation, for which neither system nor reason is needed to justify it. I believe the original Enlightenment left would have made a similar distinction between ideology and religion. Wolfe is using the second definition—latter-day academic, taxonomic, descriptive rather than normative. The difference in usage of the word “ideology” is all that is at issue—and it is not to Wolfe’s credit that he does not make the small attempt necessary to understand that this is what is at issue.

(2) his characterization of leftwing ideology as marked by infallibility and universality stands in contradiction to his respect for Catholicism, which believes in both.

Kirk, I believe, objected to infallibility and universality as applied to claims of the human mind—not of truths handed down by divine revelation. Wolfe refers to religion as “ideology”—but this is a secular presumption, assuming religion to be nothing but human invention, which cannot be squared with a serious attempt to work out Kirk’s thought. Kirk did not think God had an ideology; neither did he think that God’s infallible universality was to be condemned. Again, I believe this is fairly clear in Kirk’s thought.

(3) his reverence for the Constitution cannot be reconciled with the Constitution's separation of church and state, not, at least, when Kirk simultaneously insists that religion is a necessary prop of social order.

Religion can prop the social order without being legally established; a nation can be religious without being a theocracy. Kirk presumably took religion as the essential ghost in the constitutional machine. My sense is that most Americans thought this until after World War II, and that if Wolfe disagrees with this, his argument is not with Kirk specifically, but the American understanding of religion and the constitution throughout most of the republic’s history.

(4) his conviction that Southern slave-holders were virtuous men is difficult to square with their love for and defense of slavery;

This is only a problem if one’s definition of virtue begins and ends with one’s attitude toward slavery. If one acknowledges more than one scale of virtue in the world, than the difficulty disappears. I would indeed criticize Kirk’s sense of proportion—and say he made too little of Randolph’s slaveholding—but that is not the same thing as saying it is impossible to conceive of Randolph as virtuous, at the end of the day.

(5) his dismissal of the very notion of human rights would have made it difficult for him to find slavery a moral evil even had he bothered to discuss it.

The abolitionists managed to condemn slavery as an unchristian sin without resorting to the modern-day vocabulary of human rights; I think Kirk and William Wilberforce could have managed a common vocabulary, and even a common moral universe.

(6) his notion that conservatives are pragmatists contains no explanation of why pragmatists are generally liberal.

This is particularly annoying. The philosophical school of pragmatists adopted the name because they used a pragmatic technique with reference to a specialized set of philosophical issues, particularly those relating to epistemology; Kirk’s pragmatists were generally pragmatic in their approach to the particularities of the world. Each use of the word has a particular context and lineage. Why aren’t the Liberal Democrats of Japan identical to the Liberal Democrats of Russia, and why are neither of them particularly liberal or democratic by American standards? Because their relations to one another are far more loose and distant than the accident of converging nomenclature indicates.

(7) his defense of capitalism is in tension with his passion for tradition.

Tension can be fruitful—see “liberal democracy” for another forced union that survives its tensions. However, Anglo-American tradition has also been increasingly free-market and capitalist for the last three-to-four centuries; our customs are capitalist to an astonishing extent; and one can in our culture, perhaps uniquely, legitimately defend a (tense) union of the two.

(8) his case for religion is never accompanied by an argument on behalf of any particular religion, even though he does offer a discussion of why Judaism and Hellenism are inferior to Christianity.

Kirk was arguing for the acceptance of a basic belief in religion and eternal truths; in a country where there is no consensus on this first step, argument as to which specific religion provides the correct truths is beside the point. Wolfe sees a great necessity for denominational commitment on Kirk’s part—but I fail to see why Kirk’s thought requires that he wear his denomination on his sleeve.

(9) his worship of John C. Calhoun's conservatism fails to appreciate how radical Calhoun was when he opted for slavery over country.

I believe that Calhoun also articulated the idea that South Carolina was his country, and that South Carolina was older than the United States.

(10) his sympathetic comments on Lionel Trilling conspicuously overlook the fact that Trilling was attacking him.

Kirk praised the best in Trilling, and overlooked the worst in him. How does this condemn Kirk?

(11) his skepticism toward universalism gives him much in common with forms of multiculturalism today's conservatives say they oppose.

Kirk was a skeptic toward universalist systems originating in the human mind, not toward divine universalism. There are important points of contact between some conservativms and some multiculturalism—their common hostility to the Enlightenment is not trivial—but the divine universalism, the faith in permanent things, of a Kirk makes for a great divide from multiculturalism.

Immigration II

This is too long to be a comment ...

I do not agree with "One of the peculiar features of America has always been the fact that it has been defined not by blood nor even by habits but by a set of ideals." No, any nation, including America, includes as part of its definition both blood and habit--Daniel Larison spoke to this issue last year. Of what he said, I find most cogent this:

in such a statement lies a contempt for the historic America and the peoples who have comprised the historic America, as if any group of people from anywhere might have gathered together and created the same kind of country. It expresses an indifference to inherited culture that would be incredible for a conservative to utter. It assumes that the people who arrived today have the same claim and the same stake in this country as people whose ancestors have lived here for almost four centuries–this is deeply wrong. It does make a difference and it should make a difference whether your family arrived in 1607 or 1997–and it does not matter where you are coming from.

Mr. Forsyth objects to Mr. Buchanan’s call for American identity to be rooted in “blood, soil, history and heroes.” I confess to being perplexed as to why this call should actually be controversial. Yes, I know why many people think it is controversial, but their position makes no sense. No real national identity of any kind, and certainly none that ever lasted, has ever endured without being solidly based in these things. Indeed, what else could our national identity plausibly be rooted in? Most Americans today do not hold to the political philosophy of the Founders in their attitudes towards consolidated government and their preference for the rule of law over the rule of men. This is unfortunate, but it will happen in the course of time that peoples adopt different and even diametrically opposed political creeds. .... I cannot countenance a definition of national identity that makes one’s loyalty to a political position the basis for belonging to the nation. I want no part of any “ideological,” “credal” or “proposition” nation–you cannot love a proposition.

There is nothing more artificial, more insubstantial and more dangerous than categorising a nation according to ideology–this is to make honest disagreement over political principles a betrayal of the nation itself. It is to make dissent into a kind of treason; it is to make fidelity to older traditions that contradict the reigning ideology a mark of disloyalty to the nation. Fundamentally it is also to confuse ideas for concrete realities and to give them the loyalty we owe to real things. It is to ignore the concrete realities of kin and place and our memory of our kin and place down through the centuries for the sake of abstractions. This sort of thinking may very well make it easier for people to enter the country, but it makes it impossible to say any longer what kind of country it is, where it came from or who we are as a people.

Now, I have not quoted here Larison's attack on Lincoln, and loyalty for the Old South, which is where the blood-and-custom nationalism takes you if unmelded with any sort of credal nationalism. But I do find much of this true--and the warning that a credal nationalism turns dissent into treason quite apt. I do take America to be a different sort of nation--because a universal creed is an irreducible element, not because it is the whole thing. America is sufficiently a universal creed that it can overcome the bonds of kinship sufficiently to prefer, say, the liberation of black slaves, and their incorporation as citizens, to the preservation of slaveowning by kinfolk. But America is also grandfathers and greatgrandfathers, Ringling Brothers and Emily Dickinson, baseball and hot dogs--and, yes, the love of goddam rebel Southerners because they are kinfolk--love so fierce we will not let them go, will not let them do wrong, and will take them back into the Union to have their say in the management of our country. That's not how you treat ex-traitors; it's how you treat family.

Because America is not just a credal nation--because America's creed was born in the politics, religion, and customs of transplanted Englishmen--proper immigration policy must make due obeisance to America's non-credal character. Anyone can become American--can intermarry with nativeborn Americans, and thus have their children share kindred with old Americans as well--but to become American means to adopt a complex of customs rooted in more than creed, and it is signficantly more difficult to adopt these customs when one does not initially share religion or race. (I am also dubious that the American Creed can ever fully transcend its cultural matrix.) It takes generations. American immigration policy should prefer those whom it is easier to assimilate into the American custom and kindred--and race, religion, and every other marker that sets off man from man are legitimate and desirable as discriminators in immigration policy. They should not be ironclad walls--America's history proves that its credal aspects provide a means (if not a guarantee) by which to assimilate all humanity. But creed is not enough, either as a definition of nation or a guide to immigration policy.

This does not speak directly to the question of whether the American Creed is Original and Immutable, or a Living Constitution. I will say that I believe kin and custom help stabilize the American Creed, and that immigration uncontrolled by any sense of kin or custom will, I think, result in a far more changeable take on the American Creed.

'Tis a Gay Gala Day

Drudge is currently headlining the fact that August 9th will see Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards face off in America's first "gay debate." Not that there's anything wrong with that....

Or is there? I'm not really sure. On the one hand, politics has always involved pandering to various constituencies, so one could argue that this is nothing new. On the other hand, there's something that always made me uncomfortable about the LBGT movement: it's the first major instance I can think of of a group of Americans trying to constitute themselves as a distinct cultural identity. Even as society has grown more and more accepting of homosexuality, a certain segment of the gay population has worked harder and harder to see themselves as "other." Having a "gay debate" seems like another step toward institutionalizing a permanent distinction in our culture between gay and straight. I'm open to being convinced otherwise, though.

Prediction: John Edwards will either be asked about, or will mention, Ann Coulter.

Second prediction: In this debate, John Edwards will not mention Mary Cheney.

Immigration and Americanism

The thrice-weekly WebTV show "What's Your Problem," featuring political debates between National Review's Jonah Goldberg and The New Republic's Peter Beinart, is easily one of the best things on the internet. Today's offering, a conversation about whether some conservatives are justified in their concerns about large-scale Mexican immigration, is especially good. (Here's the link to the same show at tnr.com; registration is required but the video seems to work a little better than at the NRO site.)

As usual, the level of debate is high, but about half of the way through, Beinart says something especially important. Conservatives, says Beinart, tend to assume that Americanism or American-ness should be static and that immigrants should adapt themselves to it. Liberals, by contrast, are willing to imagine an America in which Hispanic culture has redefined the culture of America as a whole.

Unfortunately, Beinart doesn't specify exactly what he means by culture, and Goldberg doesn't press him. I have a feeling he thinks he means tortillas and ranchera music, since he mentions the fact that the southwest has always been more culturally akin to Mexico. But if so, then he isn't really facing up to the conservative argument. If conservatives feel threatened, it's not because we don't want to learn how to pronounce the names of new types of food. It's because we worry about whether the waves of immigrants pouring across our southern border actually share our values. By the same token, I think Beinart's statement about liberals' willingness to allow immigrants to "redefine Americanism" reveals more than he means it to reveal.

One of the peculiar features of America has always been the fact that it has been defined not by blood nor even by habits but by a set of ideals. One of the most notable statements of this fact was in G.K. Chesterton's 1922 essay, "What is America?" America, as Chesterton points out, is not really a nation but a creed. This idea, of course is older than Chesterton and has had a flourishing life, especially among conservatives, ever since. David Gelernter has recently published a book in which he calls Americanism "the fourth great Western religion."

It is precisely the terms of this American creed that conservatives do not want to change; and it is precisely those terms that conservatives suspect liberals of wanting to subvert when they (liberals) support large-scale illegal immigration. (Many conservatives cite, in this connection, an essay by Mexican political scientist named Fredo Arias-King.)

The problem, of course, is that the terms of the creed have never been set in stone; there is no magisterium to teach us what we, as Americans, ought to believe. We have some sacred texts, like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, Washington's Farewell Address, Lincoln's Second Inaugural, and so on. But these are all subject to some interpretation, and conservatives (like me) also tend to suspect that liberals are trying to destroy the significance of those texts through eisagesis or oblivion. So the American creed exists largely in the minds of the citizenry. Liberals have tried hard to change minds, but this has gotten them only so far. Lots of folks on the right now think they're trying to change the citizenry itself.

But to what end? Arias-King and others claim that what liberals really want is a slow-motion coup by America's elites and that mass immigration of Mexicans brings into the U.S. a large population who are used to viewing government in terms of hierarchical patronage relationships and are therefore willing to be quiet and take orders from their betters. There may well be something to this -- and certainly skepticism about democracy seems to be a thread tying together various tendencies in contemporary leftism -- but would most liberals admit that this is their goal, even in the privacy of their own heads? I doubt it.

So the immigration debate comes back to a question that I really want to hear answered by liberals, namely, what do you want America to be? Does the process of revising and redefining America have an endpoint -- is it based upon a fixed ideal -- or is there to be permanent revolution, ceaseless change forever? And if there is no fixed ideal, what defines whether or not a particular change is good? If it's wrong to resist the "redefinition" of Americanism, then someone should at least be specific about why it's good for Americanism to be revised.

Blogroll Philosophy, Withywindlish Conservatism

I'm interested enough in social conservatives, paleocons, academic conservatives of all stripes, etc., that (by the technological grace of Alpheus) there are several links to blogs like Eunomia on this blogroll. I should mention that these blogs also include several positions I very strongly disagree with, and find morally repugnant; I will mention particularly their various shades of "Anti-Zionism," which are diametrically opposed to my political stance. I also find these blogs well-written, interesting, and quite articulate and persuasive in their defense of positions I abhor. (And of the positions which I do not.) I may get into the relevant issues in later posts. However, I do want to note that while I am engaged in civil dialogue with these blogs, the links to them by no means constitute endorsement of their views. This is perhaps an obvious point in relation to my blog links to liberal blogs; but I also want to establish it in reference to the conservative blogs listed here.

Hedonistic Violence

As I continue to muddle through this issue … yes, the tribute that vice pays to virtue means that the pornography of violence (not to coin a phrase) generally justifies itself by moral means. The equivalent of pornography—the out-and-out love of violence—confines itself to, well, snuff films I suppose, but then the ballet-of-violence school of movies—Hong Kong action movies, Quentin Tarantino and his epigones, Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, etc.—though even these latter claim some redeeming moral importance, I suppose.

So let us acknowledge a gray area where individual judgment legitimately differs as to whether the moral justification of a particular representation of violence is specious or not. If the standard of taste is not absolute in providing distinctions, I think some discriminations are still possible.

I think what I am trying to fumble toward is a link between the desacralization of the world, the replacement of religion with consumption and hedonism, and the shift of violence from the sacred to consumption. That is, in all sorts of aspects of human life, early modern Europe sees a desacralization of the world—a demoralization, a deritualization—and its replacement slowly over the centuries with a secular world, shorn of religious meaning and ritual, either meaningless, or with the meaning provided by each individual—a liberal world, philosophically speaking—a world where, increasingly, the satisfaction of individual desire, hedonism, and consumerism provide the only meaning; where a religion or a fetish is made of consumerism. (This critique, I think, unites Catholic traditionalists and the Frankfurt School.) It is the detachment of violence from a moral, ritual framework, and its attachment merely to the satisfaction of hedonist consumerism, that particularly revolts—partly because such hedonist consumerism in itself revolts, and partly because violence is itself revolting, and can only be justified by a moral, ritual framework. The disgustingness of such violence is akin to the disgustingness of pornography in that both are desacralized, hedonized variants of what properly should be moralized and ritualized. The recoil from hedonistic violence implies a lingering memory of the propriety, even perhaps the desirability, of sacred violence.

How then to distinguish a true homage to sacred violence from a consumerist mockery thereof? I would say that the association of violence and the cash nexus—that disembedding locus of modernity—is a good warning sign. Violence for sale—paying to go to a violent movie—is a good sign of separation from an actual moral, ritual basis. So, too, is paying for sex; so, too, to channel Martin Luther, is paying for an indulgence; so, too, to channel a Tory duke, is paying to receive a baronetcy. Cash value, to a very considerable extent, obliterates moral values.

But it is hedonism’s affront to virtu as well as to virtue that appalls. Let us recollect, with a tip of the hat to Strauss and other neo-Aristotelians, that we are a secular, Machiavellian republic and society at least as much as a moral one; that violence is among other things a rhetorical act, prudential in nature; and that the republic is among other things a collective act of violence by the citizenry to establish their sovereignty, unjustified by anything more than the mere existence of the republic. (Those of you who don’t recollect this, now you know!) Now, just as the republic can become a commercial republic, (see Pocock and eighteenth-century British political thought), so civic, republican violence can operate through a cash nexus—if commercial, violent art serves as epideictic rhetoric to forward civic violence among the citizenry, it can be justified on civic grounds, (High Noon,) if not necessarily within a (religious) moral framework. Here, then, the question is not so much hedonism vs. moral frameworks, as hedonism vs. civic engagement; that the artistic representation of violence wanders both from an avowal of civic virtues, and from the effect of inculcating civic violence—that Clockwork Orange inspires (or is feared to inspire) gang ultraviolence, but not, say, soldierly virtues; or alternately, that it inspires nothing but couch potato hedonistic enjoyment of violence shorn of action. (That is to say, violent movies that inspire the wrong sort of violence in the audience, and violent movies that inspire no violence at all in their audience, are both unmoored from the justifications of civic violence.) So even if we allow the possibility of deritualized, secular violence, its unmooring from the civic virtues still leaves it odious.

These two lines of critique are in some tension with one another—as are virtu and virtue—but I think they provide some purchase with which to critique the massive effusions of violent art that pretend toward an homage to virtue.

The Political Brain, or, Why We Hate the Voters

Today's L.A. Times has a piece on Dr. Drew Westen, a newly-minted celebrity on the left. Westen is a brain researcher, and he's done some experiments with brain scans that seem to reveal that emotion, not reason, may be decisive in certain kinds of political decision making.

How's that for a shocker? Of course, this is not what's garnering Dr. Westen invitations to "Take Back America" conferences and glowing tributes from the likes of Howard Dean. In his just-published book, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, Westen argues that his research holds special import for Democrats, who have to abandon their dispassionate and rational style of political campaigning and approach the public in the way that Republicans do. Republicans, according to Westen, already recognize the role of raw emotion in political decision-making and target their appeals directly to the limbic centers in the soft underbelly of the voters' brains.

Many leading liberals have rushed to embrace this thesis -- one for which, as far as I can tell without having read the book, Westen offers only anecdotal evidence. Westen's joyous reception on the left comes as no great surprise. People always want to believe that when they fail, it's because they were too high-minded. In addition, for as long I can remember, liberals have made a version of Westen's argument: when the voters fail to vote for them, it's because the voters are just not as mature as they are.

Now, it's certainly true that Democrats have sometimes failed to express the proper level of passion in the political arena. Michael Dukakis probably not have responded to the question about his wife's hypothetical rape and murder as if he had been asked about farm subsidies, but that's ancient history. Westen and his supporters correctly note that John Kerry's campaign was a little heavy on "nuance" at the expense of passion. But the Democrats didn't choose Kerry in 2004 because they loved him; they chose him because they were pretty sure that most Americans wouldn't go for the more emotional stylings of Howard Dean. In recent years, in fact, the real challenge for Democrats has not been their failure to connect with the electorate at the emotional level, but the need for them to conceal from most voters the intensity and nature of their political passions.

Given this, it's no surprise that Westen's main piece of advice to Democrats seems to be that they should engage in more negative campaigning. This, after all, is a way of stirring up voters' emotions against the other guy and keeping the focus off of oneself. Again, is this a new insight? Have Democrats failed to go negative in recent years? I seem to remember an ad in 2000 in which George Bush's failure to sign a hate-crimes bill was equated to two racists' dragging a black man to death behind a pickup truck. I usually changed channels; that ad was just too cerebral for me.

But Democrats still like to believe that if they lose elections, it's because they're not manipulating the voters' emotions as cynically as the wicked Republicans. Ultimately, if Westen is proving anything about "the political brain," it's that the best way to get an audience among the politically committed is still by telling people exactly what they want to hear.

World of Wonders

The result are in on the new list of the world's seven wonders. Apart from the Great Wall (which rightly topped the voting), the Taj Mahal, and Chichen Itza, I was a bit puzzled by the results. Unless one postulates the existence of a Latin American voting bloc, I find it hard to see how the statue of Christ in Rio de Janeiro and Machu Picchu both made the list. Is Rio's Christ a greater wonder than the Statue of Liberty? Is Machu Picchu more impressive than the inhumanly splendid ruins of Angkor Wat? Likewise, how is Petra (which made the list) more awesome than Hagia Sophia (which didn't)?

I admit that I was gratified to see that dubious candidates like Stonehenge and the Sydney Opera house didn't manage to muscle their way into the top seven. They may have been the oldest and newest candidates respectively, but in terms of the amazement they inspire in me, they rank somewhere below the Nashville Parthenon, Coit Tower and the Brooklyn Bridge. Stonehenge, incidentally, is also less wondrous, on the whole, than the even older stone-age temples and hypogeum on Malta. Relatively few people have ever heard of the Maltese sites, and fewer still would go out of their way to see them.

And that fact, I think, reveals the real obscenity of the Seven Wonders contest. There were only twenty "contestants," and it was fairly obvious that the less photographed -- or less photographable -- wonders, like the Alhambra or the Kiyomizu Temple or even Angkor, never had much of a chance. The contest was not really an opportunity to compare various jewels created by different human civilizations over the ages with the aim of better appreciating the virtues of each. Instead, it was a combination of tourist-think and American Idol. Had there been a hundred finalists, or different categories (temple, tomb, statue etc.) then voters might have been likely to be introduced to places and things they had never heard of.

For the fact is, to make an obvious but underappreciated point, that all the impact of the phrase "seven wonders of the world" ought to be in its absurdity, and in particular in the absurdity of the first word. Wonder is a state of mind, one of the most neglected and pleasurable of emotions. It is an achievement not just of the object but of the observer. To a properly educated person, there are dozens, hundreds, thousands upon thousands of wonders in the world. The trick is never to stop seeing with fresh eyes, to see the products of human civilization in all their resonant richness, their inherent strangeness, their eternal newness.

And yet we are drawn compulsively to the celebrated, which is to say, the familiar. Thus the spectacle of tourists flocking to the Mona Lisa, ignoring en route all the equally great masterpieces that they have never seen before. Visitors to the Sistine Chapel point their camcorders at the famous ceiling and ignore the Peruginos and Botticellis that are closer to eye level and which they haven't seen reproduced and even parodied a hundred times. From this point of view, I suppose I should be well pleased to see that Machu Picchu, Chichen Itza and Petra beat out the Eiffel Tower. I like to think that something in the idea of strange cities in inaccessible places, lost to time, may have been what fired people's imaginations.

UPDATE: Alas, it seems that what Machu Picchu and Petra had going for them was energetic get-out-the-vote campaigns by the Peruvian government and the Jordanian royal family, respectively. So much for the romance of lost cities!

On Violent Entertainment

Timothy Burke writes on the history of violent entertainment, with reference to Harold Schechter’s Savage Pastimes, Burke I think accepting the critique that the media of our own age is not more violent than entertainment generally has been in Western history, with the brief exception of a partial idyll in America just after World War II. Now, I generally do endorse the idea that we live in an age of brass, but I want here to provide some more specific commentaries/critiques—which, be it noted, are based basically on Burke’s rendition of Schechter, and the book description at Amazon to which Burke links.

1) I confess to a general suspicion of people who argue “we never were innocent.” I do think a great deal of such argumentation is meant to abet corruption—to justify it, by saying it doesn’t matter, since there is no innocence to preserve. For a literary evocation of this tendency, I remain stunned by Henry James’ What Maisie Knew; Nabokov’s Lolita also explores the theme memorably. I’m not an expert on the subject, and doubtless never will be; but I remain suspicious of the structure of the argument. I suppose I think (hope?) another historian, faithful to the facts at hand, could write a book emphasizing the relative innocence and peacefulness of entertainment in the past. At any rate, I reserve judgment as to the accuracy of Schecter’s interpretation of the past on this meta-ground.

2) Schechter and Burke seem to argue that the long history of violent entertainment matters for our judgment of the present; I’m not sure that it does. Or when I say “our,” I mean “the ordinary citizen.” Why should it particularly matter here and now that toy guillotines were handed out to moppets in Bordeaux in 1825? If the personal memory of Americans now goes no farther back than the 1940s and 1950s, why shouldn’t that horizon matter more?—most?—almost entirely? A decline over the course of a lifetime matters more for most people than a stability over centuries—and I’m not sure I think that’s wrong. Perhaps a professional historian should know such things—perhaps a professional historian as a civically engaged intellectual should write such things to a popular audience—but to what purpose? The tale of long-term decline is at worst a useful history, and at best may have a sufficient truth. In essence, it’s a just-so story—“it was so in my childhood, hence always so.” Why upset this useful history? Ibsen is useful here to argue both sides of the question: Kantian truth-tellers may quote The Enemy of the People; Unamunesque storytellers may refer to The Wild Duck.

3) I do think there is a history of gentility, of childhood innocence, that goes back at least to the Puritan theories of childrearing in the seventeenth-century, (and I just read a bit in More’s Utopia where he says Utopians don’t slaughter animals, because it will harden their souls to much; some sense of the negative effects of committing violence on all human beings in that passage,) winds its way into Anglo-American gentle and mercantile culture in the eighteenth century, and is broadly influential, arguably hegemonic, in those countries from the nineteenth century through at least the mid-twentieth. Indeed, in the recent attempts to banish all violence from childhood play, one might argue that aspects of it are more intense than ever. This may not be the entire story of violence and entertainment in childhood, but I think it was there, opposed to toy guillotines and sideshows with considerable effect, and an essential part of the history. Schechter may do justice to this in his book; but the description thereof sounds as if it underplays the importance of this tradition.

4) I think a distinction needs to be made between the depiction of violence, and the enjoyment thereof. Now, the latter generally justifies itself by pretending simply to be the former, but that doesn’t prevent the moderately acute observer from telling the difference between the two. The song “Tom Dooley” mentions a murder, but it doesn’t go on for six loving stanzas of Jack-the-Ripper details; to think of it as a slasher flick, avant la lettre, is somehow to miss something important. Likewise, to regard the Passion of Christ, whether in the middle ages or in Mel Gibson, as simply an orgy of violence, is very much to miss the point; that is a depiction of violence to bring home the tragedy of the killing of a man, and the Son of God—violence depicted very much for a purpose, rather than for entertainment. One might as well compare Lear to Saw--not undoable, but again missing very large points. Even gladiatorial combats had their origin as funerary rituals—at least to begin with, the entertaining aspect wasn’t central. And the death of villains is a satisfaction of the desire of justice and safety—I recollect at this point an article on reading the Oz books, where the article’s author emphasized how important it was to his young children that Mombi was dead, and would never come back. This, I think, is not a corrupt/natural desire for violence on the part of a child, but a natural desire for safety/justice. This, too, should be distinguished from a “savage pastime.”

5) What I think the critique centers on in fact—although there is some confusion by the participants—is on purposeless violence, meant merely to titillate. Public executions, after all, whether drawing and quartering or the guillotine, were meant to guarantee public morality and punish violators thereof, and to impress the power and righteousness of the state on all witnesses; that some witnesses might take enjoyment from the punishment—or even be encouraged to take such enjoyment—was not central to such events. Purposeful violence, and artistic depictions of violence, were acceptable so long as they had moral purpose. The trouble proceeds rather from immoral/amoral depictions of violence, done merely to gratify the depraved mind. For this, I think, one can still read some sort of decline-and-fall narrative. The general secularization of the world—something I would date in high culture particularly to 1600-1800—and draining of moral purpose from both actions and art in the secular world, makes violent entertainment more and more subject to the temptation to be violent without moral purpose. At the same time, and perhaps not unrelated, the Enlightenment shift toward humane treatment (Beccaria) or at least the thought that violence need not visibly advertise itself to maintain the social order, meant that the display of violence could less-and-less plead the justification of necessity, and instead shifted to a justification of mere desire and entertainment. The fading of necessary, moral violence leads to a double legacy—Beccaria, and the promotion of childhood innocence on the one hand, and de Sade, and the slasher film on the other. If we accept that there has been a continuing temptation to indulge in sadistic entertainment, and that it is not unprecedented, I think it is not out of court to claim that our resistance to such entertainment has progressively weakened, and that we indulge in violence as mere entertainment more and more—certainly in the last two generations, and perhaps in the last three centuries. But whether one takes this decline-and-fall narrative as given or not, I do think the critique does center, and ought to, not on violent entertainment, full stop, but on violent entertainment shorn of moral justification beyond the appeal to base emotions.

Ethanol, genetic engineering, and independence from oil

Ethanol extraction efficiency should continue to improve. What if we add genetic engineering of corn and sugar to the mix?--posit some bioengineering that increases the amount of extractable fuel per acre of crop, and also renders said crops more easily convertible into fuel. Surely the combination should make vegetable oil (!) commercial at some point in the next few decades. And once that happens, won't we have begun the process of emancipation from oil, the petrostates, and, indeed fossil fuel? It's difficult to believe that ethanol is anything more than an agrosubsidy boondoggle--but I begin to think there are real possibilities there.

Brittle Petrostates

Chief among the evil-doers of the world are Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela; much of their evildoing comes from a flood of money arising from high oil prices. This I take to be comforting: I think the Julian Simon bet on the falling price of commodities holds for oil in the medium and long terms, and that the spigot will run dry on these countries sooner or later. The different political dysfunctions of these countries mean that Russia, Iran, and Venezuela are each in their own way failing to invest in their oil industry, thus further curtailing their future profits, and thus rendering them even less threatening. So long as a timely airstrike keeps Iran from getting a nuclear bomb in the immediate future--a rather big if--we have little to fear from these petrostates. The exception, I think, is Saudi Arabia, whose vast reserves render it a threat of a different order, and whose willingness to allow oil production be undertaken by private enterprise means that its oil industry invests in itself rationally. The subsidy of the Wahabi Jihad will not end soon; Russian maximalism, Sh'ia expansionism, and Chavez' amateur-hour Mussolini impersonation will.

China, therefore, remains the long-term threat--a rival, perhaps enemy, whose fortune is built on human capital, not on oil. And North Korea remains a horrible wild card--a nuclear menace that requires no oil, or even an economy above slave labor. These threats will endure--but the others, I think, are time-limited.

Arms Races

William McNeill’s The Pursuit of Power, as I recollect, has a fascinating chapter about how private-sector arms-manufacturers drove the late nineteenth century arms race; how their technological prowess and economic might rivaled, and often surpassed, the government armories of Europe—and were thus a somber comment on the possible results of the efficiencies of free enterprise. It strikes me that the arms race between America and the terror-states bears some resemblance to this century-old model—that the military establishments of North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, etc., by cooperating with one another and dividing the labor of research into missiles, A-bombs, etc., bear some resemblance to Krupp and Thyssen, while America, dependent on the more unitary directives and secrecy of the Pentagon, bears some resemblance to the Woolwich Armory. We’re supposed to think the reverse—that our free enterprise arms system is more nimble than the state military complexes of our opponents—but as I look at behemoths like Lockheed and Boeing, and the horrifyingly quick advances of our opponents, I wonder if the historical analogies to be drawn are comforting.

Loving America

Mark Krikorian and Rod Dreher have been discussing why they love America; Krikorian astutely notes that what you love about America aligns with your political persuasion. I think these discussions slightly miss the point. I love America not by what I think as an adult, but because I was taught to as a child. I don’t think my parents went out of their way to say “Love your country!” when I was growing up, but they gave me children’s books of American history and biographies of the presidents (and of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Cesar Chavez!) as some of my earliest reading material. My father told me the history of the United States as a bedtime story. What I was told by my parents, and what I read, wasn’t uncritical of America, but it assumed the basic goodness of the United States, both in the past and in the present, and it assumed that I was part of that story—that America was my country. By the by, some of my ancestors fought in the American Revolution, although most arrived in America much later; I also knew both facts at a fairly early age—and if the earlier gave me a sense of family attachment to the creation of America, the latter gave me no sense of being less American. I grew up near Grant’s Tomb, and I visited the Statue of Liberty, so my everyday geography was bound up with icons of America. In all this, the idea of America as mine (by blood, by community—the palecon persuasion) and America as a proposition nation (of liberty, of the constitution—the neocon persuasion) were simply bound up together, with no thought that I ought to choose between the two. I simply was American and loved America.

Now, growing up in liberal New York City did mean that I am divorced from a fair number of everyday patriotic rituals. I don’t know proper flag care; I’ve never properly memorized the Pledge of Allegiance or the National Anthem; and my instinctive habit is still to maintain an ironic “sophisticated” distance from unabashed heart-on-your-sleeve love of country. Yet I don’t think anyone in my largely liberal high-school said they hated America, or even that they didn’t care about it, or were indifferent. I think I first encountered such sentiments in Swarthmore College—signs either of concentrated leftism, or of a change in mood on the left. It was my shock and my anger then that made me realize how much I loved my country—but realization and adult articulation is different from the love itself. That came to me as an unthinking child.

I don’t quite know how my upbringing compares with everyone else’s. I suspect I read more history than most other children, that my upbringing was less overtly patriotic than for most Americans in our nation’s history, that it was essentially a liberal variant on the national consensus of love of country, and that somehow too many of my left-liberal peers failed to acquire that basic love of country. But I do know that because I learned to love America before I learned to think that I was terribly dependent on what my parents thought and said, and on the books I read—that anything I heard or read would have formed me and given me my instinctive emotions. This is why I think the role of teachers and parents is so terribly important—because we are none of us free-floating minds, and our political persuasions are not simply the result of ratiocination, but rather in origin the regurgitation of our first catechisms. As an adult, I have thought my way to different reasons to love America, but I could not have thought my way to a love of America that is as natural as drawing breath.

The Cindy Sheehan Style Manual

She's back. Goody.

I know that many of us, in the course of Cindy's retirement, have asked, like the Psalmist, "How long, O Lord?" Thirty-six days, it turns out. I think I speak for all of us right-thinking people when I say that the absence of Cindy Sheehan from our national life for the last month has left a silence in heaven, and a hole in our hearts.

Well, that's all over. And I realized, as I read Cindy's proud declaration of intent to resume her rightful place as conscience of the left, that what I had missed most was her way with words -- the rich, supple prose with its intricate rhythms and unexpected flashes of wit. I found myself wishing that I could write (let alone think) so well. I know all of you out there know what I mean. You're nodding your heads right now, thinking, "Yes; me too...me too."

Well, as my small contribution to the internet's vast supply of free but oh-so-valuable content, I'd like to share a handful of the most important writing tips that I've gleaned from the writings of Mother Sheehan after long hours of patient, impassioned study. And what better way to illustrate these tips than with our heroine's latest posting over at the DailyKos?

Tip #1: Use capitalization to indicate the Presence of Evil.

BushCo is a no-brainer. But one should also use capital letters for Fascism, Sheeple, Fascist Ruling Elite, Evil Empire (i.e., America) and Criminal BushCo and the Complicit Congress.

Of course, capitals should still be used for words like Constitution, War Between the States and I. Scooter Libby. Please note that we no longer refer to the Civil War, LincolnCo's Fascist term for its War of Aggression.

***Test your understanding of the proper Use of capital Letters on the following sentence. What words aren't capitalized that should be? (No fair peeking at Cindy's Daily Kos post!)

I have a dream of the detention centers that George has built and
filled being instead filled with orange clad neo-cons and neo-connettes.

If you guessed "Orange Clad" should be capitalized, you're right!

Tip #2: Always use quotation marks to indicate metaphors.

Otherwise, BushCo and the Ruling Fascist Elite might be able to persuade the deluded Sheeple that you mean every word literally. Thus:

It is about time us “peasants” (in the eyes of the
Fascist Ruling Elite) march on DC with our
“pitchforks” of righteous anger and our “torches” of
truth to demand the ouster of BushCo.

Likewise, when you speaking of Nancy Pelosi whip[ping] the Democratic caucus into shape, you should place quotation marks around the word: "whip." Nancy does not actually use a literal, physical whip. Not outside the privacy of her own home, anyway.

***Test your understanding of quotation marks with the following sentence. What word or words are missing their quotation marks? (Again, no fair peeking!)

The Rev is still in Individual Ready Reserve so the Air Force believes it is within its parameters to pursue the charges, although every “Officer and Gentleman(woman)” should be protesting the atrocious mistakes in the Middle East. After The Rev’s hearing on July 12th, (in Macon, GA) he is going to begin a symbolic walk from the Reverend Martin Luther King’s grave (Atlanta, GA) to DC---I am going to be there for him and to begin the march, but I am not going to make it symbolic.

This is almost too easy. The first occurrence of the word symbolic should have quotation marks. Because the walk is only symbolic in a non-literal sense. If the walk's symbolism were literal, then the walk itself would not be literal, and the word walk would be used by itself with quotation marks. The second occurrence of the word symbolic does not need quotation marks, because symbolic is being used here in its literal sense. Cindy is not actually going to "walk."

Tip #3: Nothing conveys seriousness like alliteration.

Really, this hardly needs saying. I believe we've already mentioned Criminal BushCo and the Complicit Congress. Consider also:

the slaughter in Iraq sorrowfully surges

Note also that Cindy is playing here on "the surge," which is what BushCo and the Fascists are calling the troop escalation. She's that good a writer. She can blend alliteration with other verbal tours de force. For example:

the straw that broke my camel’s back of exhausted ennui

This is the most perfect combination of words ever produced in English, although it would be even better if there were quotation marks around straw and camel's back.

Tip #4: Good writing involves all five senses.

Let's start with the obvious one, hearing.

nary a “baaaah” from the Sheeple in Congress

Sheeple go "baaaah." Get it?

Then there's sight:

the blatant audacity of George commuting Scooter’s sentence (he’s not ruling out a full pardon ---and you know he will) has dragged me kicking and screaming back in

But it's pulling the other three senses that's trickier. Cindy does it with ease.

I have had to bite my tongue---HARD

OW! I felt that. Did you? And since it's the tongue we're talking about, we can taste the blood, too.

we knew that it was not enough and that Mr. Fitzgerald would delve deeper into the feces infested executive branch

Can your mind's nose smell the executive branch? Ick.

That's probably a good place to stop. Welcome back, Cindy! God willing, BushCo's evil designs can still be thwarted.

And again, grateful readers: no charge.

Bush's Libby mistake

So President Bush has decided to commute Scooter Libby's prison sentence while leaving his conviction and fines in place. Not having immersed myself in the details of Libby's testimony, I have no idea whether or not Libby really committed what a normal person would understand as perjury. I'm willing to believe the numerous conservative commentators who say he almost certainly didn't, so I don't have any particular problem with the commutation. Then again, I'm also willing to believe that Libby did, as the jury found, perjure himself. So I wouldn't have any particular problem with letting the sentence stand either.

What I do have a problem with is the ineptness of the administration's approach to the commutation. Once again, the instincts of Bush and his people have been to approach the decision in a cautious, split-the difference spirit. This might, conceivably be someone's attempt to do justice, but it sure is bad politics.

Bush and his staff must have realized that the commutation would set off a feeding frenzy among Democrats and in the major media. It was inevitable that Bush would be accused of partisanship, of caving in to Cheney & co., and of interfering with the due process of the courts. Given this, I find incomprehensible the mealy-mouthed tone of Bush's statement: "Both critics and defenders of this investigation have made important points....I respect the jury's verdict....My decision to commute his prison sentence leaves in place a harsh punishment for Mr. Libby." Fitzgerald is praised and Richard Armitage, though alluded to obliquely, is not named.

Who will appreciate all this exquisite balance? If Bush is not righting a manifest injustice, then he is merely intervening in the judicial process on behalf of an associate or playing to a narrow audience of Libby's vocal supporters. Thus, most Americans who don't see this commutation as raw partisanship will see it as a form of cronyism. Indeed, Bush's failure to use the commutation as an opportunity (a "teachable moment") to clarify the misunderstandings that have surrounded the CIA leak case in the press will mean that the administations critics will be able to slide this new fact into their existing narrative, and it will be all too easy to argue that Libby, who did the administration's bidding or acted on its behalf, is now receiving a sordid reward for his loyalty.

If Bush had really attacked the investigation or highlighted the myths that surround the Plame affair, the press would have had to report that fact. But as is so often the case in politics, I expect that the studied evenhandedness of Bush's statement will be regarded in public eye primarily as an expression of halfheartedness -- or of shame.

FDR in Context

Amity Shlaes has a taste of her hit-piece on FDR in an article in the Wall Street Journal. Now, some aspects of her critique are unoriginal. Indeed, I seem to recollect that the first biography I read of FDR, while in many ways admiring, was rather clear on the limited effectiveness of his New Deal policies as an aid toward recovery. (The standard history also acknowledges that Hoover was a partial interventionist--the usual story is that his political preconceptions, and the inhibitory preconceptions of his party, prevented him from attempting thorough-going interventionism, not that he was a complete laissez-faire type.) The hit-piece on FDR, in other words, is to some extent attacking a straw-man--a serious and knowledgeable defender of FDR already knows his flaws and limitations.

What is missing from the article--I can't speak of her book--is the worldwide inability by democratic governments of any political stripe to recover from the New Deal. Certainly the British, with a rather different political constellation (including, be it noted, a generally conservative government through the 1930s), could not devise a way out of the mire; no one I think had a good answer. To use the Great Depression as some sort of partisan axe for modern policy battles strikes me as somewhat beside the point--many different policies were tried, all of them modified by compromise to local political exigencies, and none of them completely worked. (Only the inadvertent Keynesianism of rearmament and wartime spending really provided a solution.) If a conservative should have a particular lesson to draw from the New Deal, I would suggest it is that no government policy--not even "staying out of the way"--necessarily provides a cure to economic difficulties.

As for FDR's central economic legacy, I think it is in that peculiarly conservative institution of Social Security. He drew the sting of revolution in the United States, by providing the populace writ large an economic interest in the survival of the republic--and this by the relatively undamaging means of a retirement benefit rather than a more direct intervention in the economy. At the same time, he attached the populace to the federal government--providing a perpetual motor of interest and sympathy for the expansion of the federal government within the republic. Conservatives generally oppose the second effect, but (I think) forget the continuing anti-revolutionary value of the first one, and how bound up the two effects are with one another.

And Shlaes dismisses far too quickly what was most important--"Roosevelt's radio voice may have inspired--yes." No, I don't think that emphasis is wrong. I don't know that any policy nostrum by the government would have cured the Great Depression, but I do think that the republic might have fallen if the people ceased to love it. FDR made himself a beloved icon of the government, and thereby preserved the people's affections for the republic. Could it have survived without him? We don't know. What we do know is that it did survive through him. For this, all Americans of any political stripe owe him a debt of gratitude.