An ongoing review of politics and culture

PJTV Does Gitmo

I’ve had mixed feelings about Pajamas TV since it began. Roger Simon is a real talent, Andrew Klavan often has intelligent points to make, and Glenn Reynolds, a pioneer of the blogosphere, alerts me to a good link I wouldn’t have otherwise seen almost every time that I read his blog. The guy who interviewed me when I appeared on the site was very nice. Instapundit also regularly sends traffic to Megan McArdle, Mickey Kaus, and Radley Balko, so Professor Reynolds and I obviously have overlapping tastes in journalism.

But I am dismayed at some of the content that the folks who run PJTV host on the site. Take the PJTV item that Instapundit teased today. It is a video titled “The Real Guantanamo Bay.” The segment has its merits. I enjoyed seeing some of the faces of men and women serving over there — whatever you think about the existence of Gitmo, it’s a fact that lots of folks serve honorably there. But things start to go downhill when the heavy-handed 9/11 footage is invoked to “remind liberals” that Americans are the actual victims “in all this.”

The most shameful single line in the piece is surely this one:

Maybe we should ship these guys to American prisons. I personally believe that prison should be as unpleasant as humanly possible. Let them bring their prayer rugs and everything. They’re already on their knees five times a day. While they’re at it let’s let them make a few new friends.

But it’s the disingenuous way that the whole debate about Gitmo is rendered that rankles most. The folks who exercise editorial control at PJTV never produce work this shoddy, so they are clearly capable of insisting on better content. I hope they start doing so.

Continetti on Palin

My friend Matt Continetti — one of the smartest journalists I know — has written a smart and thoughtful comment for the Wall Street Journal on the long, difficult road ahead for Sarah Palin if she intends to become a serious presidential contender. Though I don’t agree with Matt in every detail, his basic argument, as I understand it, is:

(1) Palin is polarizing and voters consider her underqualified for national office.

(2) She needs to reintroduce herself to the public as a market-friendly populist who reaches out to the center from a solid conservative base.

(3) High unfavorable ratings aren’t insurmountable. She hasn’t reached truly toxic territory yet.

(4) Effective performances in interviews and debates will go a long way towards correcting her perceived deficiencies.

(5) Palin needs to return to the broad position she embraced in her 2006 gubernatorial campaign, which Matt compares to Bob McDonnell’s 2009 approach.

This is where I disagree with Matt — Palin’s 2006 campaign was a highly idiosyncratic insurgent effort founded in no small part on her support for measures that can’t be described as conservative by the standards of the lower 48. And her central accomplishment in office was to pass a windfall profits tax on oil companies.

(6) But again, Matt offers straightforwardly constructive advice: “But she also might spend less time discussing campaign intrigue and Alaska trivia, and more time outlining how to spur job creation through tax reform,” and, he goes on to suggest, emphasize the downsides of the Democratic agenda.

Matt never suggests that Palin will necessarily take these steps. Rather, he is suggesting that she ought to do so if she intends to win. He has aligned himself with reformers like Mitch Daniels who argue that conservative candidates need to present workable, effective solutions to the various problems facing middle class and working class voters in non-ideological, non-polarizing language. Yet the fact that Matt isn’t unremittingly hostile to Palin is reason enough for many readers to reflexively dismiss his arguments.

I find this pretty depressing, albeit pretty predictable. What’s worse is that this contributes to a tit-for-tat culture that is the enemy of thoughtful, reasoned discussion.

Seven Isn't Just a Name on Seinfeld

1) Math is hard when you learn it inside the American educational system.

2) Interesting stuff from Tim Lee about large organizations. And he is right about exhausted doctors!

3) You’ve probably been underestimating pottery:

In the usual experience of archeologists, inventions flow from mainlands to islands, and small peripheral societies aren’t supposed to contribute revolutionary advances to the rest of the world. It therefore astonished archeologists to discover that the world’s oldest known pottery was made in Japan 12,700 years ago. For the first time in human experience, people had watertight containers readily available in any desired shape. With their new ability to boil or steam food, they gained access to abundant resources that had previously been difficult to use: leafy vegetables, which would burn or dry out if cooked on an open fire; shellfish, which could now be opened easily; and toxic foods like acorns, which could now have their toxins boiled out. Soft-boiled foods could be fed to small children, permitting earlier weaning and more closely spaced babies. Toothless old people, the repositories of information in a preliterate society, could now be fed and live longer. All those momentous consequences of pottery triggered a population explosion, causing Japan’s population to climb from an estimated few thousand to a quarter of a million.

4) Generally I think that celebrity profiles are a waste of time. Seeing one in The New York Times Magazine, you know the writer is going to attempt something that won’t redound to their professional embarrassment among other journalists, so I read this piece on Megan Fox, wondering how the writer would attempt her own Gay Talese feat. What it’s missing is the writer’s insights about what Ms. Fox’s peculiar life tells us about how celebrity is evolving. The subject provides all sorts of opportunities to suggest a theory. She realizes that she doesn’t have any particular acting talent, for example, yet persists in the belief that there isn’t anyone like her. But so what? I feel as though I’ve read what just missed being the rare worthwhile celebrity profile. What is the genre for if not something more than just telling us about some celebrity?

5) “Conservative Inc.” is the most useful new term I’ve seen in months.

6) At a fancy prep school, this happened:

At last week’s assembly, former SBP and current comedian Scott Rogowsky ’03 made the following comment about an adolescent crush of his: “I really mostly liked her because she had huge bazongas.

I trust you can imagine the controversy that ensued, and the backlash. I haven’t any interest in expressing an opinion on the merits, but I do want to congratulate high school student Sarah Sanders, whose opinion piece on the controversy is well written and argued — I’d say it’s of a higher quality than a lot of stuff published in the op-ed pages of major newspapers. This is a particularly impressive feat when the English department is staffed with faculty whose persuasive writing resembles in style the worst features of liberal arts school screeds. As a dictator, I’d like to think that I’d refrain from committing the kinds of atrocities that come from being corrupted by power, but odds are better than not that I’d send Harry Bauld to English teacher re-education camp, where you’re forced to reach Politics and the English Language under harsh compact fluorescent light bulbs for days on end.

7) And you mocked my lyrics.

Ringside Interview -- Taking Aim at the Judge's Scoring

John Hawkins and I just finished Round 2 of our debate. His remarks are here. Mine are here. Please do check them out.

We’re due to go one last round, an opportunity to quickly address outstanding disagreements and write up our conclusions. Prior to penning that entry, I’d like to highlight a couple sections from Mr. Hawkins’ latest, because I think they shed light on the ongoing divisions on the right. I’ll link this post when I compose my final piece, and should Mr. Hawkins desire it, I’d gladly publish any response he has to this entry in particular as a full post here at The American Scene.

It is important to know that Mr. Hawkins and I were discussing the right’s failures during the Bush Administration — specifically, a list I offered in my first post that included:

…profligate spending, the prescription drug benefit, the early management of the Iraq War, No Child Left Behind, the financial industry bailout, the Harriet Meyers nomination, attempts at foolhardy immigration reform, rising deficits, a GOP establishment that lost touch with the grassroots, official corruption, etc.

Mr. Hawkins states that these weren’t cases “where conservative politicians pursued conservative positions and were rejected by the American people.” Quite right! As I’ve written many times, the Bush Administration’s failure doesn’t reflect poorly on conservatism. He goes on to assert that the failures of the Bush era were in fact cases “where conservative politicians were convinced by people of Conor’s ideological temperament to abandon conservative governance, and it led to disaster.” This is a groundless, preposterous assertion.

I didn’t favor any item on that list, save the Iraq War, a conflict I wrongly supported when I though that Saddam Hussein possessed biological weapons. It is a bit unclear who Mr. Hawkins regards as belonging to the same “ideological temperament” as me, but there are plenty of so-called dissident conservatives who opposed all those policies, and it is quite a ludicrous to say that any of them managed, via their blog posts at The American Scene or The American Conservative or Reason, or via Crunchy Cons or Grand New Party, to “convince conservative politicians” to pass No Child Left Behind, or to bailout the financial industry, or to let the deficit grow to epic proportions, or to launch the K Street project, or to cozy up to Jack Abramoff.

Aren’t there several obvious reasons why conservative politicians during the Bush era failed to govern according to the ideological principles they espoused? A student of American politics might cite factors including the median voter theorem, the combination of Rovian political strategy and Bush’s bully pulpit, the influence of moneyed donors on Republican elected officials, or any number of other factors that usually explain why politicians break with principle. For Mr. Hawkins, however, these failures are due to people like me — opinion journalists! — convincing conservative politicians to abandon their principles. A premise that wrongheaded explains the irrational antagonism directed at those regarded as dissidents, and as striking is the degree to which Mr. Hawkins seems unable to distinguish between political moderates on one hand and those who critique the conservative movement for its failings on the other.

Elsewhere in the same exchange, I assert that the right would do well to practice “tolerance of dissent and engaging dissenters on the merits of their arguments, rather than heretic-hunting or accusations of disloyalty/bad-faith.” Mr. Hawkins responds, “Does that same standard EVER, EVER, EVER get applied to people like David Brooks, David Frum, or for that matter, Conor Friedersdorf? Why do the people who get accused of being racists, xenophobes, and too dumb to understand politics always have to be the ones who forgive while the same blockheads who never learn from their mistakes insist on getting their way again?” This causes Mark Thompson at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen to note, “The first punch in the combination on racism and xenophobia hits home hard – it’s tough to earn someone’s trust if you’re making claims like that about them.”

In fact, this paints another inaccurate portrait of dissident conservatives. Where have David Frum, David Brooks, or I — or any of the other dissidents with whom we’re familiar — claimed that folks on the right who disagree with us are racists and xenophobes? For my part, I’ve explicitly written that figures as diverse as Rush Limbaugh, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin aren’t racists in the space of the last couple weeks!

And while Mr. Brooks, Mr. Frum and I are an odd trio to lump together, insofar as we disagree on so many things, we’re also united in routinely disagreeing with others on the right about politics without claiming that our interlocutors are “too dumb to understand politics.” Orthodox movement conservatives tell themselves that they’re constantly put upon by elite interlocutors who regard them as stupid, but the fact of the matter is that folks like Mark Levin, Dan Riehl and Sean Hannity are the ones who almost constantly claim that dissidents are “too dumb to understand politics,” going so far as to explicitly call us naive useful idiots. Mercilessly mocking us by marshaling the most insulting ad hominem attacks imaginable are a constant feature of their rhetoric, yet their audiences are convinced that it is they who are put upon by Inside the Beltway elites who regard them as idiots. Even in the instances where they are correct, they’re invariably thinking about the wrong elites.

One last point. I concluded my recent entry by addressing a bunch of disparate points that came up in round one. In response to Mr. Hawkins assertion that the right is in some ways better off than it’s ever been before due to the rise of conservative media, I write, “When it comes to news and opinion media outlets, I’d argue that quality matters, and that the right still lags markedly behind the left when it comes to the quality of the journalism it produces — is there any publication on the right, for example, that even approaches the quality of writing and reporting one finds every week in The New Yorker?”

Here is how Mark Thompson characterizes my remark:

This sequence puts Hawkins on the ropes, and Conor looks poised for the knockout. But just before the bell rings, Conor runs out of steam and throws a few weak punches denigrating the quality of the conservative media as compared to the quality of the explicitly liberal media. This series of punches misses because it’s not clearly tied with the theme of the rest of Conor’s argument and Conor lacked the time at the end of the post to set this line of argument up properly. The truncated resulting argument thus comes off as unconvincing and quite likely as a gratuitous shot at conservatives that Hawkins will no doubt use heavily to his advantage in the final round.

Still, the first 3/4 of Conor’s round were near-flawless and landed some clear hay-makers, where Hawkins’ round was inconsistent despite landing some solid blows. Friedersdorf wins the second round of a tough fight. After two rounds, I have it scored 19-all. However, had Conor left out the last paragraph, Hawkins may well have suffered a knock-down that would have left the round 10-8.

If I understand correctly, Mr. Thompson finds my arguments sufficiently persuasive on the merits that I scored a near knockout, but quite apart from its substance, regards the fact that I dare mention the right’s media deficiency as so unpalatable to conservative ears, regardless of its truth, that we’re basically tied in the debate. This is a suboptimal way of evaluating a battle of ideas, and it suggests that Mr. Thompson may be experiencing the soft bigotry of low expectations when he puts himself inside the mind of our audience. Perhaps if I persist in refusing to even consider the merits of certain arguments due to misguided ideological orthodoxy, I’ll one day find myself in a debate where I get to score points even though I’m wrong because my interlocutor made the mistake of saying something true but unpalatable. As yet, I’ve never benefited from that kind of victory.

Links

— Ann Friedman on health care and abortion (see especially her last paragraph, which points out an error in my analysis), disagreeing with my post yesterday, and presumably some of what William Saletan says.

— Imogen Heap does Thriller.

— When disgruntled newspaper editors attack.

— I always enjoy Glenn Loury versus John McWhorter.

Whose Jews?

The decision by the Court of Appeal in this case was wrong on its face. The student would face no obstacle to admission if her mother had undergone an orthodox rather than a progressive conversion. That’s not discrimination based on ethnicity but on religious practice. The chief executive of Liberal Judaism, Rabbi Danny Rich, admits as much in the article when he says the JFS is “selecting applicants on the basis of religious politics.” That’s not an ethnic criterion. The only question is whether a religious school is allowed to favor one religious denomination over another, which seems pretty clearly to be the case.

Apart from this, however, the British courts are imposing a Christian view of religion on Jews. Christianity is a universal religion that takes no account of ethnicity. In Judaism, however, religion is inseparable from a particular “chosen people,” ethnic Jews. By forcing British Jews to accept a distinction between religion and ethnicity, Britain is unabashedly Christianizing them.

An American court probably would not impose a similar decision. (The fact that this is a state school, let alone that there is even a Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, indicates that Britain lacks the same tradition opposing religious establishments — though of course the Chief Rabbi is no longer exactly the Archpriest of the Jews in England.) The U.S. Constitution requires more deference to religious beliefs and institutions. But an interesting question is to what extent the American government can regulate religious institutions that, directly or indirectly, receive public funds. Regulations like this one, which purports only to require a state-funded institution to follow a secular law, may implicate religious belief — and that might sometimes make public support for religious institutions self-defeating.

An update…

Four Items, A La Carte

1) Over at Right Wing News, John Hawkins and I are having a debate that flows from the prompt, “How would you advise the right going forward?” Round One is now up. His entry is here. My own take is here. I’d love to get feedback from The American Scene’s readers, so do give the entries a read, and have at it in comments.

2) Mathew Continetti reinforces my belief that it is wise to limit one’s stay in Washington DC, lest you’re tempted to start writing nonsense like this, embarrassing yourself in the process. Populist leaders have held very modest views of government, Continetti writes, name-checking Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan and Ronald Reagan.

And Palin? Time and again, she has run against elites who, in her view, are ignoring the public interest. She overthrew a three-term incumbent mayor of Wasilla because he wasn’t as conservative as the people he represented. She used sales tax revenues and bond issues to help the town grow into a thriving suburb. She knocked off a Republican energy commissioner, a Republican attorney general, and an incumbent Republican governor because she felt that they were helping themselves and their friends and not the Alaskan people. As governor, she passed a sweeping ethics reform, changed the tax code so Alaskans got their fair share of oil revenues, and introduced competition and transparency into the construction of a natural gas pipeline.

When you find yourself lauding a politician for “using sales tax revenues and bond issues” as mayor to help their municipality grow, it’s a pretty good sign that your case is laughably thin. Is there any mayor in America who doesn’t use sales tax revenue for that purpose? How is “using local bond issues” evidence of populist cred? Next we’ll learn that she presided over City Council meetings where any citizen could rise to a podium and speak their mind!

Mr. Continetti’s language might also lead readers to imagine that a natural gas pipeline has been built in Alaska, thanks in part to Sarah Palin, but actually construction on the project hasn’t even begun. My understanding is that she worked on issuing a contract for the project, not its construction. You’d think that competition in bidding would be termed “a basic responsibility of competent officials operating under any governing philosophy” as opposed to “populism.”

Overall, it’s just a terrible piece — check out what Mr. Continetti thinks a populist approach to health care entails — though I suppose it’s becoming fairer everyday to call Mr. Continetti “the intellectual force behind Palinism.” Talk about damning with faint praise. My least favorite emotion is embarrassment for others. It is particularly unpleasant when a guy with an agile mind and writerly talent finds himself lacking the intellectual integrity to do good work.

3) Kerry Howley profiles Kathleen Parker — an interesting, well-written piece.

4) The estimable Ann Friedman, an exceptional writer and thinker, excoriates Democrats for adding a provision to the health care bill that prohibits federal funding for abortion.

What precisely does the amendment do?

The amendment will prohibit federal funds for abortion services in the public option. It also prohibits individuals who receive affordability credits from purchasing a plan that provides elective abortions. However, it allows individuals, both who receive affordability credits and who do not, to separately purchase with their own funds plans that cover elective abortions. It also clarifies that private plans may still offer elective abortions.

Ms. Friedman writes:

This isn’t just about how the money is allocated or what workarounds exist. This has me so incredibly infuriated because it further segregates abortion as something different, off the menu of regular health care. It is a huge backward step in the battle to convey — not just politically but to women in their everyday lives — that reproductive health care is normal and necessary, and must be there if (or, more accurately, when) you need it.

This also sets apart women’s rights from the Democratic/progressive/whatever agenda. As something expendable. But fundamental rights for women are not peripheral. They are core. And not just because of so-called progressive values. In a political sense, too: Seeing as how the Democratic Party relies on women voters to win elections, you would think they would have come around to this no-brainer by now.

It’s pretty cramped underneath this bus, what with 50 percent of Americans down here.

A couple thoughts:

a) The bigger role the federal government takes in funding health care, the more you’re going to see politicians interfering in matters that would otherwise be left to doctors and patients, and the more controversial these battles are going to become among the public. This seems obvious to me, but I never see progressive writers worrying about it.

Isn’t it perfectly possible that 10 or 20 years from now, a president will come along who the left likes even less than George W. Bush, or that abortion will be less popular than it is now among voters, or that an influential political minority will turn against contraception, or that a majority of people or Congressmen will make some decision about health care funding that progressives find abhorrent? Even now, the American electorate and progressives aren’t perfectly aligned on all sorts of matters relating to health care. You’d think that as a result, the left would favor giving money to folks too poor to afford health care, so that they could spend it any way they wish, rather than pushing a public option that is subject to a political process where they’ll inevitably lose some battles. After all, abortion is unarguably something that the vast majority of Americans see as something “different than regular health care.” Whether they are right or wrong, it is unrealistic to imagine that the political process won’t reflect that widespread belief.

b) There are many women in the United States who oppose abortion, and if asked would agree that federal money shouldn’t fund it, so the assertion that the amendment throws 50 percent of the population under the bus isn’t accurate, unless one takes the position that these anti-abortion women are suffering from false consciousness.

c) Abortion isn’t an issue that I write about with any regularity. I’ve agonized over it at various times, never reaching any conclusion with which I am comfortable. My dearest friends include people who’ve come to dramatically different conclusions. They’ve done so in good faith. I can’t fault any of them for it, though obviously at least some of them are wrong on an issue with grave implications for millions of people, whatever turns out to be objectively right.

The unknowable thing for me is when human life begins, when it is morally required to protect it, etc. Intuitively, it seems wrong — though not implausible — to say that human life starts at conception. Likewise, I’d be deeply troubled by killing a fetus as 8 months. But where do you draw the line? I can’t prove when life begins, or whether or not God exists, or whether my intuitions about the kinds of life that require protecting are even correct, or any number of other questions that might make the abortion issue an easy one, rather than the most difficult political issue in America. My uncertainty makes me loathe to impose a legally binding answer on other people, so you’ll never see me in a pro-life rally — but the same uncertainty makes me deeply uncomfortable with abortion, insofar as my personal take is that uncertainty in life or death circumstances calls for erring on the side of caution.

That’s why I’ve always taken great care to never be in a position where I inadvertently conceive a child, and why if I ever were in that position, I’d rather dramatically reorganize my life forever than see the abortion even of a child I wish I hadn’t helped conceive. So you can see why I’d feel uncomfortable with the notion of my tax dollars being used to fund abortions — just as I am presently uncomfortable that my tax dollars are used to fund the death penalty — and wish that they weren’t, even as I strongly support all sorts of reproductive health care for women, including abortions in cases when the life of the mother is at risk. The counterargument, of course, is that some folks would object on moral grounds to vaccines, or birth control, or Viagra, or medicine that was tested on animals. Should they be able to veto federal spending?

5) I argue with Andy McCarthy here.

5 Items, Zero Spin

1) My letter to Jonah Goldberg is as yet unanswered. Should that change, I hope the response reflects his genuinely held convictions, rather than his efforts to “do his part“ in the spin wars.

2) Johann Hari’s Slate piece on Ayn Rand is just the latest example of a journalist who writes about the extraordinarily popular author but it utterly unable to understand her appeal. Perhaps someone should figure out precisely why so many Americans regard her as someone with valuable insights. I’ll happily submit to an interview on that subject. Meanwhile see here for a smart Ayn Rand critique. (Via Rod Dreher)

3) This is easily the best piece on Michael Bloomberg’s re-election.

4) “If there were no War on Drugs, I sincerely believe that within a single generation, there would be no perceptible “crisis in black America,” and this book shows much of why that’s true. The War on Drugs turns whole neighborhoods against the cops—with no discernible benefit after more than 30 years.” — John McWhorter, recommending the book Snitch.

5) Aztec warriors, enamored by the iridescence of humming birds, sometimes contrived to outfit themselves in ankle length hummingbird feather coats, so that striding into the slanting sunlight of late afternoon they’d shimmer like otherworldly apparitions. How depressing that the most likely contemporary application of this knowledge involves pay per view “wrestling.”

Open Letters, Etc.

1) I knew I’d like that guy who threw punches in the Washington Post newsroom! (Also, if you’ve never read Gene Weingarten before, marvel at this.

2) I’ve written an open letter to Jonah Goldberg.

3) Reihan deserves better than to be juxtaposed next to nonsensical Facebook commenters.

4) Thanks to Maine voters, gay people in the state will be legally prohibited from making state sanctioned commitments to lifetime monogamy. This is billed as a conservative victory.

The Banality of "The Banality of 'The Banality of Evil'"

Even more annoying than the people who yammer on about “the banality of evil” are those who obsessively denounce the idea. “Oh, the banality of ‘the banality of evil,'" someone will say, exasperated that he alone holds people accountable while everyone else denies our capacity for moral choice and excuses mass atrocity. However banal the original insight might be, the comeback — that people make choices for which they are morally responsible — far outdoes it. Yet Ron Rosenbaum has been building this case for at least ten years. In 1999, he wrote that the banality cliché is “a sophisticated form of denial … Not denying the crime but denying the full criminality of the perpetrators.” Last week he repeated the charge. But one would think that a decade of cogitation would yield a more compelling argument than this:

Either one knows what one is doing is evil or one does not. If one knows and does it anyway, one is evil, not some special subcategory of evil. If one doesn’t know, one is ignorant, and not evil. But genuine ignorance is rare when evil is going on.

Read more…

Presidential Politics

Ross Douthat writes:

When people pine for third parties, they usually have a fantasy presidential candidate in mind — a Colin Powell or a Michael Bloomberg, riding in to save us from partisanship and corruption.

But presidential elections are the place where the two-party system seems more necessary than ever. The office of the presidency has become so potent and so polarizing — part priest-king, part ritual scapegoat — that chief executives need to represent the broadest possible coalition to have any chance of success.

I submit that the best recent presidential leadership we’ve experienced came when Bill Clinton’s presidency was weakened by scandal and the Newt Gingrich orchestrated takeover of Congress — whereas the era of unified Republican government under George W. Bush and unified Democratic government under Barack Obama are turning out to be far worse for the country.

Were a Colin Powell or a Michael Bloomberg elected president I don’t know how they’d fare — perhaps the times I’ve cited are merely evidence in favor of divided government — but I’d rather risk an independent POTUS not getting very much done than see a president with a large, supportive coalition in Congress rapidly implementing lots of ill-conceived policies.

The Metaphorical Equivalent of War

I actually understand why Ross’s latest column is getting so much negative commentary. No, of course he doesn’t think we should be engaged in a holy war against Islam . . . in any literal sense. But that just points up the peculiarity of the military metaphors – “fronts” and “foes” and “appeasement” and so forth – without which, basically, the column wouldn’t exist.

Here’s the key question: in what sense does the Catholic overture to Anglicans in any way constitute building a “united front” “against” Islam? What does that even mean, really?

I think what’s going on here is that Catholic assumptions about how a religious community should be organized are simply being assumed, and these are driving the analysis. The Catholic Church is a rarity among global religions in being organized in a heirarchical manner modeled, originally, on a military organization (the Roman Empire). That’s not the way most Protestant denominations, or Rabbinic Judaism, or Sunni Islam, or Hinduism, or most other religions around the world are organized. But it’s pretty central to Catholicism – precisely because of that contrast.

If you look at the world that way, then it might make perfect sense to say that, if you perceive a rising threat (feel free to frame Islam as a “competitor” rather than a “foe” – it doesn’t actually change anything important for my purposes) then one needs to strengthen one’s own hand. Inasmuch as the Pope understands himself to be the proper leader of the entire Christian community, albeit not acknowledged as such by a substantial portion thereof, and inasmuch as he understands that form of organization to be vital to the mundane success of that community, then it is entirely logical for him to say something to the effect of “in times like these, we need to all get under one banner as much as possible; if that means bending where we can plausibly bend, so be it, and if that means offending those who choose not to join us, so be it as well.” But that says more about the nature of his world view than it does about its validity.

Why, after all, is it necessarily the case that unity under a single leader makes it more likely that Christianity as such will survive and thrive when faced with a resurgent Islam? No doubt Christianity is competing with Islam for converts – certainly in Asia and Africa. No doubt Christian communities are engaged in actual violent conflict with Islamic communities in many parts of the world – as well as being subject to more or less oppressive rule in some countries where Islam predominates. No doubt there are pastors of various denominations in Europe who fear for the future when they compare the average age and regularity of attendance of their congregations to those of the mosques down the block. But the argument that the response to this situation should be “unity under the leadership of the Pope” needs to be made, not assumed. It seems at least as plausible to me that a decentralized religious culture is more conducive to rapid growth and more likely to respond effectively to diverse challenges from without and within.

If Ross knows that Pope Benedict was actually thinking about the challenge from Islam when he planned his move against the Anglicans, then that’s the story – and that’s reporting. But as written, the column seems merely to assume that this was his thinking – and, furthermore, to assume that this thinking was correct, without actually making an argument for the latter.

Metaphors are wonderful things – unparalleled, really, as tools of communication. But for that very reason of their natural persuasiveness, they have to be carefully examined to make sure the implied equivalencies are actually there. This holds not only in metaphorical wars, but in real ones. See, for instance, the “soft underbelly” of the Axis supposedly located somewhere in the vicinity of Sicily.

WASP Guilt

In this silly review of George Gilder’s The Israel Test, Scott McConnell takes Gilder’s explicit arguments to be symptomatic of deeper psychological scars. He suggests that an embarrassing moment during Gilder’s adolescence explains why Gilder would be politically supportive of Israel. Indeed, for McConnell it explains why any WASP would be pro-Israel:

While trying to impress an older girl, his summer tutor in Greek, he blurted out something mildly anti-Semitic. The young woman dryly replied that she was in fact “a New York Jew.” Gilder was mortified. He relates that he has never quite gotten over the episode. It is the kind of thing a sensitive person might long remember. Variations on this pattern are not uncommon in affluent WASP circles to this day: guilt or embarrassment at some stupid but essentially trivial episode of social anti-Semitism serve as a spur for fervent embrace of Likud-style Zionism. Atonement. It would not be surprising if a similar process helped to shape George W. Bush’s mentality.

What Gilder had said to the girl was a reply to her question about how he liked studying at Exeter. “Echoing sentiments I had heard both at home and at school,” Gilder recalls, “I responded, ‘Exeter’s fine, except that there are too many New York Jews.’” Gilder briefly describes how his embarrassment taught him something about resentment and social grace:

Rather than recognizing my shortcomings and inferiority and resolving to overcome them in the future, I had blamed the people who had outperformed me. I had let envy rush in and usurp understanding and admiration. I had succumbed to the lamest of all the world’s excuses for failure — blame the victor. I would pay by losing the respect of this woman I then cared about more than any other.

Instead of leaving it at this commonplace but worthwhile moral lesson, McConnell thinks the “New York Jew” episode overshadows and “animates” the entire argument of Gilder’s book. According to Gilder, it spurred him to be more open-minded. But McConnell thinks the “incident” filled Gilder with such overwhelming guilt that he became a self-hating shill for the Israel lobby. And that some similar social faux pas probably explains the Bush Doctrine and the invasion of Iraq. Who is it, again, who regards these events as “essentially trivial”?

This seems deeply weird, but it’s not hard to play armchair psychologist with McConnell, too. It is obvious to him why Jews would like Israel, but WASPs? What on earth could possibly lead a self-respecting white Anglo-Saxon Protestant to admire a Jewish state when, in McConnell’s view, ethnonationalism would command otherwise? So McConnell invents a sort of false consciousness, a “WASP guilt,” to explain it. It’s a mean-spirited slur, of course. Critics of Israel have long alleged that Israel’s supporters seek to silence debate by leveling overblown accusations of anti-Semitism at them, but McConnell now insists that non-Jewish supporters of Israel must be self-hating Uncle Toms. “This sequence might be amusing if the real-life consequences were less sinister,” as McConnell puts it. But apart from that, one wonders what seething resentments lurk behind McConnell’s strange worldview. What traumatic event in the boyhood days of Scott McConnell can explain it?

News of My Disappearance Has Been Mildly Exaggerated

To those of you who have written to ask or have been wondering in silence the answer is, yes, the combination of finishing a dissertation while planning for a cross-country move and a new job and also welcoming another son into my family (born in the living room, no less) has ground to a halt what little was left of my bloggy momentum. There is, though, a piece of mine in the latest New Atlantis in which I offer a Burkean’s lament over the death of conventional wisdom, focusing on – what else? – the science and pseudo-science of food, as well as a review in the November TAC of Susan Brewer’s Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq, which I liked quite a lot. I was, however, quite frustrated by Brewer’s unwillingness to face down the consequences of her research for the traditional hagiography of one Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

Least satisfying of all is Brewer’s claim—made in both the introduction and the conclusion, and in each case entirely without argument—that even deceitful state propaganda can be tolerable if the cause is sufficiently noble. Brewer notes at the start that she believes World War II—“a legitimate war,” she calls it—fits this billing. She supplements this diagnosis with her attempt to distinguish the “censorship, exaggeration, and lies” relied on by the likes of the Bush administration from the “strategy of truth” adopted by FDR. But the facts make it hard to sustain such an interpretation: from Brewer’s own account, Roosevelt lied to the public about his intended policies as he ran for a third term in 1940, censored news reports that were deemed insufficiently optimistic, and of course sent 180,000 Japanese Americans to concentration camps. (“Pioneer communities” was the official term.) Even the truth-telling strategy Brewer champions was itself an advertising move, based on the recognition that “too much salesmanship” on the part of the Office of War might turn people off, while more “straightforward and practical” instructions on what to do and believe would “regain public confidence in official propaganda.” If the cartoonish film and poster campaigns of the Wilson administration are the point of comparison, then the Iraq War’s salesmen come off rather well, too. But that doesn’t change the fact that in each case the public was being dishonestly sold a war by men who would barely have to sacrifice, much less fight and die, to implement their preferred policies.

All of which raises some natural questions: Are there circumstances in which state officials are permitted to lie, suppress non-strategic facts, or otherwise distort the truth in the service of an official agenda can be licit? If so, what circumstances are those? And more generally, what sorts of threats might be posed to a democracy by its government’s ability to exploit its inherent authority by functioning as a sort of advertising agency for itself?

Surveying the Right

UPDATE: Link fixed. Sorry!

Given my recent work on The GOP Speaks — 26 entries now posted, and more to come — I found this survey of conservative Republicans fascinating, and consistent with the answers I’ve been getting from GOP county chairmen.

It is a must-read for everyone engaged in the conversation about the future of conservatism.

Especially noteworthy:

1) It is wrongheaded and counterproductive to ascribe ideological opposition to President Obama to his race.

2) Talk radio and FOX News are so tremendously influential among the most dedicated movement conservatives that it is creating an alternate reality of ill-conceived paranoia — those who regard this stuff as hilarious, amoral entertainment underestimate the harm it causes.

3) It’s time for the right to start dis-aggregating the entities that make up “the media.” Treating it as a single antagonistic collective working in concert to thwart conservative ends is rendering conservatives unable to understand reality. That even sophisticated if sometimes blinkered media critics like Andrew Breitbart fall into this trap is not reassuring.

How the Law Works

I’m going to relate some information I learned at a dinner party earlier tonight. I’ve yet to corroborate it. My hope is that readers can point out any errors in the story as I’ve heard it, and help me to think through its ramifications.

Here goes, as told to me.

In Delaware, when a corporate board of directors issues an order, it is compelled by law to sign and date it, else the action taken is legally invalid. So say that the board of directors wants to sell stock held by the company. It isn’t enough that it acknowledges having approved the sale of stock. Each board member who favors selling the stock must actually sign a dated statement to that effect.

The law is intended to prevent CEOs from abusing their power. The idea is that CEOs were taking controversial actions, and persuading their boards of directors to rubber stamp them after the fact. Legislators assumed that board members willing to validate actions ex post facto would be less willing to sign backdated documents to fraudulently corroborate that permission was given.

This came up in a conversation about the amount that law associates at corporate firms are paid. The person telling the story was trying to give an example of how a first year associate might add value to the firm and its clients. In this case, the first year associate knew about this Delaware law. It empowered the firm to check up on a corporation — I don’t know whether it was a client or the adversary of a client — to see whether or their board of directors complied with this regulation. As the story was told to me, the firm had mistakenly neglected to date certain orders that validated actions it took. These weren’t cases of the CEO seeking ex post facto approval for controversial actions, but it was nevertheless the case that certain significant actions taken by the firm were technically invalid.

If all this is accurate, it strikes me as an excellent example of how a seemingly reasonable regulation, passed with the best intentions, can contribute to a legal regime so complicated that we wind up in a society where it makes sense to pay many lawyers hundreds of dollars an hour to navigate it, and where the law is less effective at encouraging fair play as it is at maximizing the advantage held by the folks who are able to hire the best attorneys.

Does this strike folks as sound, factually and analytically?

Paramilitary Groups, Riots on the Streets of New York City

The estimable Richard Rabinowitz has another history exhibit on display at the New-York Historical Society. The subject is Abraham Lincoln’s first visit to New York. This is a fascinating tidbit from the review in The New York Times:

Lincoln’s supporters formed an organization, the Wide Awakes, with its own paramilitary uniforms and songs. In 1860 30,000 Wide Awakes marched in a five-hour torchlight parade through New York City streets; one of their torches, amazingly, is on display here.

And later in the same piece:

…in July 1863, that war of words turned bloody. A telegram from the Republican financier John Jay to Lincoln announced, “Our City is at the mercy of a mob.” In four days of riots, partly inspired by opposition to military conscription and its exemptions for the wealthy, looting and destruction were aimed not only at Republicans like Greeley but also at black New Yorkers. The Colored Orphan Asylum was pillaged and burned, and the Colored Sailors’ Home was attacked. An order from Lincoln (displayed here), following close on the heels of the battle at Gettysburg, declared martial law.

Calm was restored, but with 120 dead and 2,000 injured, the exhibition notes, it was “the worst civil disorder in the nation’s history — except for the Civil War itself.”

Useful perspective next time someone says that the nation is as polarized as it’s ever been.