An ongoing review of politics and culture

Written As I Am About To Flee The Country

Noah raises a fair question, but I think it is one that I have already more or less answered when I wrote:

In some sense, these things are theirs, ours, and as I have said before nation-states can create much larger countries on the ruins of local and regional identities that then appear to citizens who have never known anything else to be all part of the same country.

Certainly, I would have been on Cleveland’s side in opposing the annexation of Hawaii, just as I would have been on the side of the opponents of annexing the Philippines, but that doesn’t mean that the patriots we’re talking about could blithely overlook attacks on U.S. citizens on territory that belonged to the United States, and which had belonged to the United States for almost half a century.

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Who's Afraid Of Joe Lieberman?

If they’re wise, a whole lot of people.

Now that we have that lame introduction out of the way, on to the main event. Reihan objected to Scherer’s lament about the content of Lieberman’s McCain endorsement. Reihan said:

And it seems reasonable to argue that the human-rights hawkishness of Clinton-Gore (it was more complicated than that, to be sure) has been discredited by the Iraq debacle. These are all respectable views. Plenty of Democrats have changed their mind — plenty think NAFTA and CAFTA are dangerous giveaways, plenty think we need to sharply reduce our military commitments and use armed force very sparingly, etc. Protectionist isn’t a term of abuse to everyone. Neither is “hyperpartisan.”

Reihan is right about all of this, but it is the tone and the purpose of the remarks that drive Scherer’s reaction. It’s true that protectionist isn’t a term of abuse to everyone, just as some might take isolationist as a badge of honor, but it isn’t true that just anyone can use terms such as protectionist and isolationist against anyone else without expecting a bad reaction. It’s one thing if I say in a mood of celebration, “Ron Paul is an isolationist!” It’s something else if John McCain says, “Ron Paul is an isolationist! The implication when I say it is: “It’s about time!” When McCain says it, it is more along the lines of, “Run for your lives!” It’s the difference between someone comparing you to Charles Lindbergh as a compliment, and someone else using the same comparison as invective. Not everyone would regard the comparison as polemical, because not everyone thinks Lindbergh is a hate figure, but everyone knows that the comparison is usually intended as disparagement and smear. The same goes for labels such as protectionist and isolationist, even though the logical opposites of protection and isolation, insecurity and exposure, could be made to sound much more menacing.

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I Am Not A Nationalist (And Here Are A Few Reasons Why)

Matt and Reihan have made some important points, but I want to press Reihan when he says:

…I think Will Wilkinson is right to suggest that patriotism and nationalism are very closely related if not the same. It so happens that patriotism has mostly positive connotations and that nationalism has mostly negative connotations.

So is patriotism really nationalism in more appealing clothing? Is the attachment to and love of country just nationalism in its passive state, or are they actually opposing sentiments? Why does patriotism have mostly positive connotations? Is it that it has not previously had to face a thoroughgoing critique, and has enjoyed an inappropriate respectability? Might it be the case instead that patriotism mostly has positive connotations because patriotism moves people to do generally admirable and morally justifiable things? Isn’t nationalism’s bad reputation the result of self-described nationalists committing the worst kinds of crimes, oppression and mass murder?

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Plagued By Plages

Wait, James. Perhaps they were referring instead to that important ideology of beach-goers, or, per the OED, one of the candidate’s attachment to ancient regions. You can never be sure what issues will come up in this surprising election. My guess is that Obama just locked up the seaside resort vote after Clinton’s clumsy pander to Texas oil interests.

Identity

One of the most overused and least illuminating phrases in this election cycle is “identity politics.” It is not useful because it can ultimately refer to any kind of politics, since every act of association and every exercise of the franchise is to some significant degree a statement about the people and the kind of nation with which a person identifies. Voters are routinely asked, and routinely express themselves, in terms of which candidates they most identify with, but only some of these identifications do we deem worthy of being called “identity politics,” as if it were less tribal or irrational or reflexive to support a fellow partisan or a fellow ideologue because “he is like me.”

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The Crucial Democratic Reagan Primary

This recent tussle among the Democrats over invoking Reagan—even to make an obviously pro-progressive, pro-Democratic point—reflects the character of the Democratic race and the nature of some of the lukewarm progressive response to Obama that you see expressed in the netroots. Obama cited Reagan as an example of someone who “changed the trajectory of America.” Now, as I understand modern progressive demonology regarding the 1980s, most Democrats agree with this, but often view the change in question negatively. Obama’s use of Reagan here, his rivals’ responses to it, and the criticisms from Democratic pundits and activists all capture quite nicely the main tensions on the Democratic side this election year.

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Undecided

This Chris Hayes report of the mind of the undecided voter (via Peter Suderman’s bloggingheads with Ezra Klein) is amazing to me. Voter irrationality I understand, even when it infuriates me, and voter ignorance is frequently a given, but the completely apolitical thinking of undecided voters just baffles me.

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Governor Gary

Speaking as a New Mexican, I think there were two things to say in support of Gary Johnson: he criticised the drug war, and he annoyed Manny Aragon to no end. That’s not entirely fair. He also was absolutely resolute when it came to trying to contain spending. His willingness to veto bills coming from the Roundhouse became a standing joke in the state. He was also absolutely doctrinaire about his project of promoting privatised prisons, which mostly worked to the advantage of the aforementioned Aragon in providing him nice kickbacks from the contractors hired to manage the prisons. Who will forget Wackenhut?

Johnson also presided over the the introduction of the lottery, legal gambling and the rise of the Indian casinos all over the state, which generally appalled the people who voted for him and mainly satisfied the legislature and the pueblos. If bringing tawdriness and exploitation of the poor to your home state are your idea of a good time, Gary Johnson’s governorship was a rollicking success. My impression is that the (very) small Draft Johnson boomlet made about as much sense as the attempt to recruit Chuck Hagel last year. It wasn’t his fault that the largest tax cuts came under his successor, but it is a reminder that there was actually very little that Governor Johnson changed in New Mexico, and most of the things he did change appear to conservatives in the state to be blights on our state.

Using The 2006 Election In The 2008 Election

Where has Fred Siegel been living these past few years? He writes:

Who could be more authentically representative of Rove-era Republicanism than Mike Huckabee, a pioneer-stock evangelical Baptist who wants to reclaim Americans for Christ?

As it happens, I think Huckabee does represent many elements of Bushism, of which his evangelical Christianity is in some ways the least important element (as it was the least important in the actual content of Bushism), but “Rove-era Republicanism” had no interest in reclaiming anything for Christ. “Rove-era Republicanism” was the ultimate expression of the GOP’s habit of exploiting social conservatives for electoral support and then largely ignoring everything they wanted once in power. As a big-government and “compassionate” conservative, Huckabee would be Bush’s heir, at least in domestic policy, and he has all the instincts of Gerson’s activist do-gooding vision of conservatism (i.e., Gerson’s non-conservative agenda).

As Ross points out, however, this has absolutely nothing to do with the lessons of the 2006 elections.

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Branded

James expresses his agitation with the Robertson endorsement of Giuliani and elsewhere notes his frustration with Republican efforts at “redefinition”. I sympathise with both reactions, and I agree that it is surely a bizarre set of priorities that makes a relative handful of jihadis on the other side of the planet seem more appalling and threatening than the institutionalised denigration of human life at home. But those have been the priorities of actual Republican governance for years before there was any hint of a Giuliani candidacy.

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Inquiry

I appreciate Noah’s post on the Beran article. In fact, the article did amaze me, though perhaps it did not really surprise me, in part because I usually expect sharp and interesting articles at City Journal rather than enbarrassing exercises in political mythology. Noah was right to say that the abuse of history is what agitated me so, and if in my response I was a bit too heated it was because I find this particular kind of distortion of history through anachronism and precursorism to be one of the worst things someone studying history can do. Any approach to American history based in the query, “What made it possible for us to enter WWI or WWII?” strikes me as being as misguided and tendentious as the studies of modern German history that read everything that ever happened since the Reformation as one slow, winding road to Dachau. The idea that we can divvy up national histories into partisans of liberty and forces of oppression is one held over from Whig readings of history, which are wrong not simply because they valorise the “wrong” side, but that they must necessarily do violence to the evidence to glorify their preferred party. History should be an exercise in understanding the past, not mutilating it.

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Optimism's Blowback

David Brooks addresses the seeming paradox of Americans who are content in their own lives and deeply anxious about the state of the nation, a subject that we have talked about here before. There are two aspects to this. First of all, there is a large minority of Americans who are still not content in their own lives, and these form the core of support for any populist policies. Those populist policies become truly electorally viable when you have widespread malaise about the “direction” of the country.

The populism has to be relatively modest, but has to address systemic problems that the public finds deeply unacceptable. Indeed, the general level of satisfaction that the majority enjoys may unexpectedly feed into deep frustration and impatience with government failures: the more personal contentment, the higher one’s expectations rise about satisfaction in all areas, and there is nothing more potentially explosive than rising expectations that are dashed by “underperforming” government. As the disparity between personal satisfaction and anxiety about national problems grows, the more inexplicable government’s inability to address those problems becomes in the eyes of many of the otherwise satisfied voters. The so-called “happy” people thus become a driving force behind the public’s disgust with the status quo.

Economic populism becomes rhetorically and psychologically attractive to many voters who might have rejected it only a few years ago, because it taps into attitudes of resentment and disappointment that have been engendered by the excessively optimistic promises of advocates of alternative policies. Cheerleaders for globalisation and international neoliberalism, for instance, have overreached in minimising the costs of their preferred policies, and have created immense distrust as a result. The reaction against these typically overly optimistic claims has been exacerbated by pie-in-the-sky promises of efficacious government action overseas, and the breakdown in competent execution of tasks that have become routine responsibilities of the federal government.

There is also a treacherous trap for a certain presidential candidate to be found in this so-called “happiness gap”:

If one were to advise a candidate about the happiness gap, you’d say: first, don’t try to be inspiring or rely on the pure power of authenticity. In these cynical days, voters are not interested in uplift.

But Then Come Those Drawbacks

Via Djerejian I came across this:

But there also should be concerns on the right. On its current track, the emotional branding of the Republican Party among the young will soon be similar to Metamucil. The party’s emphasis on spending restraint and limited government may be substantively important, but these themes are hardly morally inspiring. And the Iraq war is a serious drawback among younger voters — except, of course, among those 20-somethings with buzz cuts who actually fight the war.

For whom it is, I suppose, an enormous boost to their attachment to the Republican Party? What does one make of statements like this?

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Limited Incursions

In the past, I have noted how uneven Washington’s treatment of two Near Eastern allies has been. When Israel embarked on its war against Hizbullah, which quickly turned into a war against all of Lebanon, Washington backed Israel to the hilt. (It seems plausible that Washington even urged Israel to take action, but however it happened the support was clearly there.) For many months PKK members have been operating inside Iraqi Kurdistan, and they have been unimpeded either because the KRG cannot control them or because it will not control them. I assume the former is the case, just as it was the case in Lebanon. Washington’s support has been slow in coming and grudging. Turkey has genuine security concerns, and they have been ignored for far too long. However, even though Turkey has a legitimate claim to launch reprisals, it is not clear that this would be a wise thing to do at the present time.

As the Lebanon case reminds us, even widely supported, “limited” incursions can quickly turn into something else all together. As the Lebanon war revealed the limitations of fighting such forces with conventional means, a Turkish incursion into northern Iraq will likely have the same disappointing—to the Turks—results. It will either escalate and widen to the detriment of all concerned, or it will settle into a desultory Turkish occupation of part of Iraq, which can only destabilise Kurdistan as a whole and push more Kurds towards PKK-like militancy.

What may begin as an allegedly limited, targeted response, and one that can be genuinely justified, will in all likelihood turn into a more general conflict against Kurds. Another potential, though less likely, problem is that the Iranians, who also have the same complaints about violent Iraq-based Kurdish militants, will use a Turkish incursion as a justification for one of their own. Kurdish reprisals against Turkomen in the Kirkuk area could also very well follow a Turkish incursion, providing Ankara and Turkish nationalists generally with a pretext for broader intervention. The possibility of a Turkish offensive triggering a more general conflict seems quite real. If Mr. Bush can persuade Ankara not to undertake a major offensive, he will deserve some credit for heading off what could be a disaster for all parties.

This Region Isn't Big Enough For The Two Of Us

Last week, Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice criticized Iran’s “emboldened foreign policy” and “hegemonic aspirations,” while asserting that the U.S. will continue to be engaged on economic, political and security issues in the Middle East. “We are there to stay,” she declared. ~Time

Some hegemonic aspirations are apparently supposed to be worse than others. Secretary Rice would like to make our hegemony in the region seem like a natural and appropriate pursuit of our interests, and cast the Iranian pursuit of regional hegemony as monstrous, when there are conceivably legitimate interests motivating both states. Set aside for the moment the obvious point that Iran’s ambitions in the Near East are basically less ambitious and less presumptuous than U.S. foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere from the 1820s on, and don’t notice, if you are able, that we are proposing to deny the obvious regional power influence over a region on the other side of the planet while simultaneously complaining about their boldness. Some people might call that hubris, but put that to the side for the present.

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A Matter For Historians

Whether the massacres of up to 1.5 million Armenians in eastern Anatolia in 1915 constitute “genocide,” as a nonbinding House resolution declares, is a matter for historians. ~The Wall Street Journal

I have said before how tired I am of this sort of dodge. The purpose of these evasions is simply to declare the past irrelevant and history the province of academics. As these people see it, it should neither inform public policy or public discourse nor be treated seriously. In a way this is worse than distorting or misusing the past as the active denialists do: this declares the past off limits for use or understanding in the present. Except, of course, when these very same people want to invoke the “lessons of history” c. 1975 or 1938 to justify their latest foreign boondoggle. In those cases, History must be acknowledged and followed, and we must march in the direction shown by History.

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Sammy Be Good

Richard Spencer, assistant editor at TAC and contributor at the excellent group blog Exit Strategies, makes some good points about the foreign policy implications of Brownback’s speech at the Values Voters forum. Brownback once again restated his claim that America’s greatness is dependent on its “goodness.” Brownback has traditionally associated such goodness with international do-gooding and wrong-righting.

Spencer wrote:

Implicit in Brownback’s comments is his notion that we can treat the rest of the world – particularly those states and groups that threaten us – just like we treat those down-and-out criminals with hearts of gold. Our foreign policy will be therapeutic – once our enemies recognize that we’re good and that we’re here to help, they’ll shape up, become our friend, and happily be integrated into our benign world order.

These are some of these same therapeutic impulses in the foreign policy statements of Brownback’s political cousin and rival Huckabee and the general mawkishness of Mr. Bush’s vision of armed, crusading “compassionate” conservatism. Brownback is known as an advocate of prison reform, as the context of his latest remarks remind us, and so perhaps shares in his own way a view of other nation-states as “prisons” whose inmates must be treated humanely.

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