Category Archive

We Americans laugh at the people of India and Pakistan who choose party leaders on the strength of their last names, and then a significant number of us run out to vote for George W. Bush or Hilary Clinton. Benazir Bhutto may be as crooked as Hilary Clinton, but she spoke far better English and was a fine-looking woman, which makes her superior to every female I know in American politics. And, while on this low topic, what man would not follow a pretty air hostess like Sonia Gandhi? Good looks, charm, and an impressive demeanor have always played a part in human affairs, but here in America even our screen idols are monkey-faced women and epicene males. To restore the republic, we should have to undertake a massive program of disenfranchisement, beginning with people who work for or receive benefits from government, moving on to unmarried women, and finishing off with anyone who has seen three films starring Heath Ledger or Brad Pitt. ~Thomas Fleming

Rod responds to John Savage’s critique of what Savage sees as Rod’s undue enthusiasm for Huckabee and excessive willingness to engage or reconcile with the Left.  Inasmuch as this second point repeats canards about crunchy conservatism generally and Rod personally, I don’t agree.  I agree with Mark of Protestant Pontifications that crunchy conservatism is the real version of Brooks’ “conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year,” and I also grant that Huckabee doesn’t have the right answers for these folks and usually isn’t even asking the right questions.  What he does seem to do, and this is where I think many of us find ourselves mildly sympathetic to Huckabee in spite of ourselves, is to gesture in the right direction.   

Savage wrote:

But the way that most crunchy cons look to him [Dreher] alone to define crunchy conservatism is unhealthy, especially when he’s the type who’s easily made to feel apologetic about taking conservative positions, and has an excessive need to just get along and ingratiate himself with the Left. 

As someone who has written a good deal about crunchy conservatism, I grant that crunchy cons and their sympathisers have acknowledged Rod’s role in drawing attention to this kind of conservatism and we have defended him against the more ridiculous and unfair attacks that have been leveled at him, but I question whether the “crunchy cons” have generally looked only to him.  To the extent that they are what he says they are, they were already looking to Kirk, Berry and others before Rod came along to document what they were doing, or they were practicing the kind of conservatism of place, virtue and proportion that Rod was describing in his book without articulating what they were doing.  Were they relying entirely on Rod, or on any single figure, I think that would be unhealthy, but I don’t think that this is what has been happening.  I doubt that Rod has an ”excessive need to just get along and ingratiate himself with the Left.”  If he had, he would not have made such a point of challenging Dallas-area Muslims over the dangers of Islamism, nor would he remain as staunchly pro-life as he has always been.  Those who wish to “get along and ingratiate” themseves with the Left do not typically rail against local Muslims and condemn the iniquity of abortion.     

Savage says:

Dreher is mostly a single-issue “conservative” whose single issue is traditional morality, narrowly construed as being pro-life, anti-promiscuous-sex, and anti-homosexual-unions. 

Rod can speak for himself on this point, and he has, but I would add that this is a strange argument to make against the author of Crunchy Cons, whose most controversial and contested claims involved matters of conservation, consumption and economics.  If he were simply the “single-issue” social conservative described here, Rod and crunchy conservatism would have created little resistance.

The least persuasive part of Savage’s post was this:

I resent that I can hardly defend crunchy conservatism in good conscience from people I meet on non-crunchy blogs, who assume on the basis of the name that crunchy conservatism is just another form of left-wing hippie-ism.

Most of us who have defended crunchy conservatism against its critics have lamented the name, which doesn’t really capture what it is.  Most of us prefer simply to apply the name traditionalist or even neo-traditionalist conservative to what Rod was talking about.  We should not allow such assumptions to be a cause of discouragement.  Who knows what people assume what the name paleoconservatism means?   It is up to paleos, if we insist on using the name, to explain what we are to those who do not yet know.  The same goes for those attracted to the best elements of crunchy conservatism. 

There’s a lot to be said for questioning the cultural conservative bona fides of someone endorsed by Chuck Norris, Ric Flair and Ted Nugent.  Reihan is correct, no doubt, that Huckabee’s embrace of these celebrities fits into a larger appeal to his natural base of supporters (it is probably true that the people who respond most strongly to Huckabee’s mix of populism and social conservatism are also going to be disproportionately fans of celebrities such as these), so that these “macho antics,” as he calls them, serve a kind of symbolic stabilising and reassuring function.  There is also something less forced and ridiculous about Huckabee’s embrace of Chuck Norris, who, lest we forget, is an evangelical Christian (you can visit the “Christian area” of his website here) and is now also a WorldNetDaily columnist, than there is about Giuliani’s newly-discovered faux love of NASCAR.   

P.S.  How is it that no one has made a Huckabee-related Dodgeball joke yet?  “Thank you, Chuck Norris.”  “No, thank you, Governor Huckabee.”  And so on.

Update: GetReligion noted Norris’ Christianity in an earlier post.  Peter Suderman sees the associations as part of “the VH1 effect”: 

This is, in large part, due to the way the pop culture obsessions of previous decades are quickly being recycled into icons of kitsch. Call it the VH1 effect. What was racy, nihilistic, or bloodthirsty in the mid 1980s is now fodder for our generation’s special brand of appreciative snark. Jerry Falwell might have gone nuts over a violent Chuck Norris film during the Reagan era, but the man barely causes shrugs from Tony Perkins in 2007.

Peter’s observation also points to something else more sinister: social conservatives’ apparent willingness to acquiesce in things they regarded as outrageous just twenty years earlier.  Some would call this keeping up with the times, but I should think that social conservatives ought to see it as a series of capitulations.  One result of these repeated capitulations to cultural degeneration is to desperately seek any rallying points that are available, which entails still more compromises.

For those who value their sanity and general peace of mind, NRO has long since ceased to be part of their regular reading, but recently there has been a small hubbub over the objections raised by Mark Shea to this effort at promoting softcore pro-Israel propaganda.  For what it’s worth, the ad ought to be as distasteful to Orthodox Christians, who find any trivialisation or denigration of the Theotokos to be something deplorable.

In response to the criticism, Shea has written:

Now the amazing thing to me is that, of all the things NRO could be doing, they chose to go to bat for *this*. And not just go to bat for it, but claim that criticism of it is an attempt to “turn us against a brave ally”. Because, of course, anything less than uncritical acceptance of anything the Israelis might choose to do–right down to a blasphemous jiggle ad–is endorsement of the idea of pushing Israel into the sea.

Shea is beginning to understand how many of the people at NRO see things. 

In his original post, Shea wrote:

This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder how long American Evangelicals (and even some Catholics) can be snookered by the notion that Israel is something other than a secular nation-state.

That is the real question.  If it is really just a secular nation-state with all that this entails, the religious enthusiasm about it at some point becomes absurd.  That was the point of Shea’s original observation.  The point was not to ”turn us against a brave ally fighting a just war.”  The complete inability to distinguish between critiques of sleazy or offensive “pro-Israel” P.R. and attacks on “a brave ally” is one of the reasons why many so-called “pro-Israel” pundits seem less and less credible all the time.   

Preemptive cultural surrender will be the defining issue of this upcoming election. ~Bill Bennett

First of all, if it were going to be the defining issue of the upcoming election it would need to have a much catchier name than “preemptive cultural surrender.”

Watch McCain pander:

I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles, that’s a decision the American people would have to make, but personally, I prefer someone who I know who has a solid grounding in my faith.

Watch him completely abase himself:

I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.

Whenever I hear the claim that “this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles,” much less that the Constitution “established the United States of America as a Christian nation,” I have to wonder what people are thinking when they say these things.  In McCain’s case, it’s easy: he’s repeating what he thinks primary voters want to hear.  Never in his entire career, so far as I know, has McCain ever held forth on America as a Christian nation.  It would never have occurred to him.  The people who champion this or related ideas have been his adversaries within the GOP. 

It is true that America derives her religious culture from European Christianity, and it is true that Americans have been overwhelmingly Christian all along.  I think this religious heritage should be defended and extolled.  It is an integral part of American cultural identity.  What I really don’t understand is the need to make up these myths that the Republic is founded on “Christian principles” or that you can somehow find this claim in the Constitution.  First of all, these myths are unnecessary.  Second, it is an example of the mistaken drive to locate national and cultural identity in our political institutions and key political texts, when those identities really must be defined in other ways if we are not going to reduce them to ciphers or subordinates part of some political creedalism.   

Wisdom from the matrimonial banquet scene: “Tell them about your degrees and your family, that is very important, but don’t mention your father’s glaucoma.”

My earlier remarks on the matrimonial banquet phenomenon are here. 

Perhaps Steve Clemons should stick to foreign policy.  Affrerement, like adelphopoiesis in Byzantium (the terms mean the same thing), is not what the Boswells of the world would like us to think that it is, namely a medieval stamp of approval for homosexual relations.  Byzantinists understand that ceremonies for adelphopoiesis were not ceremonial approvals of homosexual erotic relationships, which neither secular nor ecclesiastical authorities would have approved, but were instead rites designed to formalise a strong social and emotional bond between men or as a mechanism for adoption.  It is strange that some moderns should have such difficulty imagining such fraternal bonds between friends. 

For the class I will be teaching this fall, I was recently reading one of the books I intend to assign that touches directly on the reflections on the Partition and on the Putnam research on diversity described here (TAC even gets a brief mention in the article).  The book, Twice A Stranger, is an account of the history surrounding the Treaty of Lausanne, the population exchanges of 1923-24 and the experiences of the people who were uprooted as a result (as partly related by still-living survivors of the exchange).  In this book, Bruce Clark challenges the standard liberal anti-Lausanne argument (after having similarly critiqued the nationalist account):

The liberal anti-nationalist myth often suggests that relations were perfectly warm and harmonious and would have remained so if the population exchange had not been imposed as an artificial exercise in segregation.  In fact, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.  As anyone who is familiar with rural society in the Balkans or the Caucasus can testify, things are never that simple.  Warm and cordial business relationships, and personal friendships, can transcend the intercommunal division in surprising ways; but that does not abolish the division–or alter the fact that in the event of a general conflagration, almost everybody tends to seek security behind the walls of his or her own community [italics mine-DL], and life becomes  uncomfortable for those who try to occupy the middle ground. (p. 172)

The connection is that people with whom you identify, whom you consider your “own,” are the people you trust and will rely on in the worst situations.  Armed conflict adds an additional dimension of the pressure to actively side and identify with your community, as well as simultaneously seek shelter and protection from that community.  It occurs to me that this is how it is possible that rampant, violent sectarianism could spring from a pre-invasion Iraq that had relatively decent intercommunal relations, friendships and intermarriages.  Sectarian labels mattered little when conflict did not force people to choose sides, and the lines of the communities were not nearly so sharp when your position on one side or the other was not so significant.  When the chips are down, however, and having people you can trust becomes a matter of survival, sticking with your own is not only the natural, instinctive move but also the one that is actually the most rational under the circumstances.  Self-serving jingo “discoveries” of the damaged social fabric of pre-invasion Iraq have sought to discredit the idea that the source of sectarian violence in Iraq is the spark of the invasion itself, when it was the transformation of the country into a war zone that precipitated the bloodletting that has followed. 

This also highlights the flaws, or at least the limits, of Putnam’s proposed “solution.”  He wants to encourage “more encompassing identities” and a “new, more capacious sense of ‘we’,” which is just swell.  The problem with “more encompassing identities” is that they are usually weaker, more brittle and usually not founded in the natural affinities that would reinforce them.  Being an Iraqi is “more encompassing,” but it is consequently that much less meaningful.  It is “capacious” at the expense of being valued.  The more encompassing an identity becomes, the easier it is for that identity to collapse in on itself.

Harry Potter, in fact, functions something like a Rorschach Blot: In countries around the world, it captures various national anxieties about contemporary culture and international affairs. French intellectuals, for example, debate whether or not Harry Potter indoctrinates youngsters into the orthodoxy of unfettered market capitalism [!]. Some Swedish commentators decry what they perceive as Harry Potter’s Anglo-American vision of bourgeoisie conformity and its affirmation of class and gender inequality. In Turkey, we find a significant discussion of Harry Potter that pivots around issues of Turkish civilizational identity: whether Turkey is part of the West, the East, or a bridge between the two. A few Turkish writers have even asserted that controversies over Harry Potter in the United States demonstrate how Turks are more “Western” than Americans. And in Russia, a country whose concern over international status and prestige becomes more apparent each day, the newspaper Novaya Gazeta created a minor firestorm when it claimed that the film visage of Dobby the House-Elf was a deliberate insult to President Vladimir Putin [bold mine-DL]. ~Daniel Nexon

What is the strange obsession that people have with imputing grandiose cultural significance to the Harry Potter books and films or the popularity of Harry Potter?  Why must everyone constantly be looking for clues as to its political message, or seeking some lesson of political morality from a tale of battling wizards? 

If you look very closely, and really try to see the resemblance, I suppose you can see one, but then you would have to be extremely anxious to find negative portrayals of Putin in a story about adolescent wizards.  What does it say of your own view of the Russian President that you see a similarity between him and an imbecilic, droopy-eyed elf? 

Does it actually make any sense to be offended by this?  Granted, the character in question is a slave and not terribly bright, but he does come across as genuinely good and as someone interested in helping the hero with various (admittedly dimwitted) stunts.  To put it mildly, this is not how Putin’s critics view the man.  On the contrary, his critics concede that he is smart, shrewd and ruthless, but they also regard him as utterly villainous–more Draco than Dobby, to say the least.  For Putin to resemble a character who hates his Death-Eating master is actually a kind of compliment to Putin (the realisation of which will probably lead to a flurry of anti-Potter articles as subtle pro-Putin propaganda).  At the rate these ridiculously politicised readings of Potter are going, we will shortly hear from the Kremlin’s answer to Michael Gerson, Vladislav Surkov, who will assure us that the Order of the Phoenix is actually just a proxy for Boris Berezovsky’s seditious efforts against the Russian government and the depiction of the Ministry of Magic is designed to make Russians lose faith in their government as part of Britain’s grand conspiracy to subvert Russia from within by way of the Potter movie franchise.  Enough is enough.

You might call me a pessimist on the glory of democratic Kurdistan.  Therefore, I am not exactly won over by this sort of talk:

If we rescue Kurdistan, moreover, it does retrieve a sliver of the original hope.

They will be free of Saddam; they will be a Muslim democracy deeply grateful to the United States; they will be a Sunni society that is not hostile to the West; their economy could boom; their freedoms could flourish further. The Turks and the Kurds can become an arc of hope for some Persians who want to live in a free society and lack an obvious regional role model [bold mine-DL]. I fear, alas, that Arab culture is simply immune to modern democratic norms - at least for the foreseeable future. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t discourage democrats or liberals [ed.–so we should discourage them?]; but that we should have no illusions about their viability in Arab society. Mercifully, the Middle East is not all Arab dysfunction. The Turks, the Jews, the Kurds and the Persians offer much hope.

Note that Kurdistan is apparently in need of “rescuing.”  From whom?  Oh, yes, the Turks.  But not just the Turks–it is apparently in need of rescue from its own regional overlords.  That makes all this talk about rescuing Kurdistan seem a bit bizarre–if we must rescue Kurdistan from both Turk and Kurd, the “rescue” mission would appear to be as futile and senseless as the “model of transformation” theory.  The statement quoted above is also riddled with the subjunctive, ever the mood of the optimist: these things might happen and it could lead to something better.  Well, okay, there are always many different possibilities, but are any of these proposed outcomes likely?  Optimists are great ones to talk about possibilities, but seem decidedly less curious about finding out which ones are more probable than others.  Supposing that Turks and Kurds can somehow “work it out” and the massing Turkish forces on the northern Iraqi border are just out for a summer hike, isn’t Turkey (at least according to its boosters) already supposedly something like a “regional role model”?  Wasn’t the point of democratising Iraq that it was a predominantly Arab country and would therefore be a beacon (or whatever they were calling it back then) to reformers in other Arab states?  Wasn’t Turkey considered less suitable as a model for reform because Arabs and other non-Turks remembered with some resentment the Ottoman yoke?  Since we’re pretending that Turkey is some sort of free society–unless you want to, you know, speak freely–I suppose we can also pretend that these previous objections never mattered, and that the rest of the region will take inspiration from Turks (whom the other nations dislike or resent) and the Kurds (whom most of the other nations look down on).  Let the rescue begin! 

Additionally, this is a fascinating distinction between Arabs and everybody else, and it is as close to full-on essentialism as I think I have ever seen Sullivan endorse.  (Ross is appropriately skeptical of the promise of the Kurdish Eden.)  I see that Sullivan is talking about “Arab culture,” but he speaks about “Arab culture” as if it were somehow so thoroughly different from the cultures of other Near Eastern peoples as to have no meaningful relationship with them.  Especially when it comes to other largely Muslim nations, this distinction becomes even more tenuous.  What is there about Kurds that makes their culture more amenable to liberal democracy than Arab culture?  The differences are not as great as one might suppose.  It is easy to see why. 

The Kurds’ ”stateless” existence has meant that they, perhaps more than others that have had a national state(s) of their own, have melded and adopted more cultural norms of their neighbours than others.  This is also not simply a question of shared culture among Muslims, but of shared culture among all peoples of the Near East and eastern Mediterranean.  The distinctions between the different nations should certainly not and really cannot be overlooked, but Western observers’ rediscovered confidence in understanding the importance of ethnicity in foreign affairs has become a bit overzealous.  The trouble with Arab culture, as Sullivan seems to be telling it, is that it is the product of Arabs, and there’s simply nothing to be done with Arabs.  The Kurds, on the other hand, well, these are people you can work with….It doesn’t actually make a lot of sense.  Are the structures of Kurdish social and family life so radically different from those of their neighbours that they are not likely to suffer from all of the same political pathologies?  

In the past, certain optimists believed that some of the biggest problems in the Near East were a lack of democracy and the absence of a robust civil society.  Fix those problems, and things would begin going the right way–the region would be transformed!  Now other optimists (haven’t we learned by now to stop being optimistic?) wish to tell us about the Kurdish (or Turkish or “Persian”) exception to the Near Eastern rule.  It turns out, they tell us, that the Near Eastern rule is actually just an Arab rule.  Even though the new proposed “arc of hope” does absolutely nothing to address the original “swamp” question that encouraged all of the original nonsense, and even though it means that the roots of the problem are even deeper and even less easily remedied, if they can be at all, this is supposed to be some consolation.

Sullivan ends his post with a rationale for his position:

It seems to me we should be investing in those places that have a chance, rather than further antagonizing those regions that have yet to develop any politics but violence, paranoia and graft.

Well, all right, but by that standard–at least according to some the latest evidence from Kurdistan–we should be clearing out of Kurdistan.  Indeed, using that standard, we should be investing our resources more heavily in Chile and Thailand than we put into in any country between the Tauros and the Hindu Kush. 

[H]is skepticism toward universalism gives him much in common with forms of multiculturalism today’s conservatives say they oppose. ~Alan Wolfe

I have said pretty much all I intend to say about Wolfe’s original article here, but this item begs for special attention.  Since Wolfe is terribly concerned with originality, it might be worth noting that this criticism of conservative particularism is not new.  There are plenty of fairly universalist people on the right who find particularism offensive for the very reason that it seems to lend support to multiculturalism.  They make points that I have found no more persuasive.  The criticism is not new, and it does not become any more accurate with the passing of time.  The universalist will often refer to religion to shame the particularist, who will often be religious to one degree or another: why, if a religion is in some sense truly universal, how can someone opposed to universalism be religious?  (This is also the essence of Wolfe’s weak point about Kirk and Catholicism.)  Well, he might begin by not deliberately conflating concepts that have nothing to do with each other.  Rational, man-made universalism is misguided both in its hubris and its ahistorical nature.  Revelation will be applicable to all times and places, since it comes from God, Who is eternal and immaterial.    

Those of us who are generally working in the same tradition as Kirk was believe that cultural diversity is a product of historical change.  To a certain extent, traditional conservatives are open to the post-modern critique of Enlightenment rationality, because we find the latter limited, one-sided and defined in such a way as to set man’s reason against his adherence to “irrational” customs and traditions.  (For another rightist who praised diversity and identified uniformity as a preferred trait of the left, Wolfe might read Kuehnelt-Leddihn, whose enthusiasm for Catholicism will not leave him in doubt as to where K-L stood.)  Where particularists and multicultis tend to part ways is over the multicultis’ preference for encouraging and building up every other culture except their own (assuming that they believe that they have a culture of their own).  A conservative particularist is not terribly bothered if there are other cultures that have evolved differently, and he will usually be more aware of the significance of those differences than his universalist rivals.  

The particularist does not share the multicultis’ belief that his culture should have to be undermined or ridiculed to accommodate the cultures of others, and he tends to not think that the most stable and well-ordered polities are not those with the greatest number of different cultures.  In the end, multiculturalism does not offend these conservatives because of its interest in diversity, but because it has no real interest in diversity as such (and these people tend to be embarrassingly ignorant and naive about foreign cultures), only in the subversion of their own cultural norms.  Traditional conservatives accept cultural diversity as the result of natural historical development–it is something that can only be eliminated by coercion and ideology.  Multiculturalists seem interested in using other cultures as means to their own ideological goal of transforming their own society into something entirely different from what it has been.

In short, this point about multiculturalism is not a real criticism of Kirk.  It is not even that interesting of a point.  One might even call it an irritated gesture rather than an idea.

In Canada they have two national languages, but that’s one reason Canada often seems silly. They don’t even know what language they dream in. ~Peggy Noonan

With respect to Ms. Noonan, who has been pretty good, especially on immigration, in the last year or so, this is not right.  To justify our desire for English language, we should not have to run other nations in the process.  Their ways are not our ways, and that is fine.  The important point here should not be that every nation must have one and only one language, but that there should be one official and national language that provides a common means of communication and a source of common identity.  There are fictitious, meaningless nation-states whose linguistic divisions signal a deeper divide of culture, ethnicity and politics.  Take Belgium, for one.  There are others that have a common history and a reason for existing as a common, albeit federal, relatively decentralised, polity that are not the products of accidents of European great power politics or the Treaty of Versailles.  Canada is such a nation.  I understand and appreciate the Quebecois separatist view, but I have long since matured out of the weird American need to belittle the Canadian nation, which, strange as it may sound to American ears, does exist, as if we were so insecure in our own nationality that we needed Canada as our whipping boy to make us feel more American.  An American patriot does not need to disdain Canada to be more at home with who he is.  Canadians will sort out their internal debate on their own.  There is nothing necessarily “silly” about having multiple languages in a polity (it may impractical, but it is not silly–in terms of maintaining the peace, it can be the soul of wisdom in certain situations).  What is silly is pretending that a centralised, uniform nation and a mutiplicity of languages can coexist without any difficulty.

The fall of communism hasn’t created a global community of democracies. It turns out the Russians don’t want to be like us. The Arabs don’t want help from infidels. The Iraqis’ democratic moment has turned into sectarian chaos. The Palestinians have turned theirs into a civil war. ~David Brooks

I am reminded of Sir Steven Runciman’s claim in his history of the Crusades that the the conflict in the late twelfth century leading up through 1204 between the Byzantines and Latins was a good example of how cultural tolerance was most successful when cultures relatively rarely interacted with one another.  Proximity and conflict tend to coincide.  The idea that increased communication, contact and awareness of other peoples would lead to greater integration, unity and acceptance is fantastical.  Greater integration also involves increased pressures caused by close proximity; greater communication includes the possibility of fatal miscommunication.

I can understand why this idea is attractive and tempting, but that is no excuse for believing it to be true or finding it to be surprising.  For instance, is anyone surprised by this:

The globalization of trade has sparked nationalistic backlashes.

Of course it has.  Globalisation involves a certain loss of control, a loss of power and, yes, a loss of sovereignty.  That is why a great many people very reasonably object to it.  Those who are interested primarily in securing the interests of their nation are going to take a dim view of a process that inevitably deems the claims of the nation as secondary at best.  Despite everything he has just said, Brooks adds:

It could be we just need to work harder to overcome racism and tribalism.

As if a lack of effort was the problem.  It is in the compulsion to “overcome” boundaries and the hard-working efforts to “overcome” racism and tribalism that the origins of the reactions against these efforts are to be found.  This overcoming, whatever its intent, appears to many people to be an attempt to obliterate their identity, their distinctiveness, their independence after a fashion.  This “overcoming” appears to them to be a conquest by hostile forces.  Nothing has so retarded the gradual change in attitudes of any one people towards other peoples as the concerted efforts of their elites to make them accept other people.  It has in some formal ways hastened technical integration, but ensured that social integration, if it will ever happen, will be deferred for generations. 

Brooks offers a more plausible alternative:

But it could be the dream of integration itself is the problem. It could be that it was like the dream of early communism — a nice dream, but not fit for the way people really are.

And again:

People say they want to live in diverse integrated communities, but what they really want to do is live in homogenous ones, filled with people like themselves.

My impression is that most people say this because they have been trained from the time they were old enough to believe that this was a basic moral truth.  They do not actually see much value in diversity itself, but believe that to deny the value of diversity is to be a bad person.  If they say that diversity is what they want, it is because they have been told that this is what they are supposed to want.  The idea that there is something acceptable, indeed normal and understandable, about this disinterest in diversity is still fairly controversial.  It will take another generation before it is once again entirely unsurprising.

This clan power is one of the main reasons why western democracy does not transplant into Arab societies. They are different. We have seen what has happened in Iraq, where the division between Shia and Sunni Muslim is also hugely important. But even in peaceful, relatively civilised Jordan, attempts to encourage political parties have largely failed because they keep splitting into smaller and smaller units, generally clan based. A Muslim Arab almost always owes far greater loyalty to his cousins than he does to any party or government. ~Peter Hitchens

According to a new study by researchers in the University of Minnesota’s sociology department, Americans are generally positive — even optimistic — about the word ‘diversity,’ but when asked, even those working in the field of race relations have trouble describing diversity’s value and stumble when giving real life examples.

The desire to appear color-blind leads most Americans to prefer the standardized language of diversity-speak when addressing issues of race, rather than the other way around. The researchers conclude that American diversity-speak is a sort of ‘happy talk,’ an upbeat language in which everyone has a place, everyone is welcome and even celebrated. ~University of Minnesota press release

Via Steve Sailer

The best part of the release had to be this finding:

Also regardless of race, Americans’ definition of diversity places white people at the neutral center and all other groups of people as outside contributors.

That should give everyone pause.  Multicultis who believe that they are engaged in anything other than a rather embarrassing tokenism need to reflect on this conception of diversity that everyone seems to share.  Others who claim to prize imagined diversity but lament the disordering consequences of actual diversity should reconsider their embrace of the “happy-talk.”  Obviously, entire books could be written about the absurdity of any group of people constituting a “neutral center.”  No group of people is a “neutral center,” nor should any group of people, however vaguely defined, wish to be.  A “neutral center” is effectively an open space, a blank canvas, a shell without content, waiting to be improved upon and filled by something else.   

Perhaps more valuable for future discussion is this part:

The study also found that most Americans use platitudes when describing diversity. “The topic of race lies outside the realm of polite conversation,” said Bell. “Everyone in the study — regardless of race, political affiliation and even level of rhetorical ability — had real trouble talking about the inequities and injustices that typically accompany diversity in the United States.”

I said that Linker sometimes seems to oppose both political action based on religious conviction and non-political attempts to Catholicize (or Rortyize, or whatever) the culture through proselytization and persuasion. I also said, as I’ve said many times before, that I disagree on both counts: I think that Americans should be free to proselytize privately and that they should feel comfortable using “the levers of politics” (I love how Andrew makes the democratic process sound sinister) to promote policies that spring from religious convictions. And obviously Richard John Neuhaus is interested in doing both; only an idiot would claim otherwise, and I don’t know why Andrew is mistaking me for one. ~Ross Douthat

I am not really qualified to speak about Rorty or the “burning” question (should liberals prefer Rorty or Rawls?) that initially sparked this discussion, but since I have waded into a previous Douthat-Linker exchange I will now offer, unbidden, my probably unwanted comments on this Douthat-Sullivan argument.

I think Ross is probably being too generous here, since I think he might be able to guess why Sullivan is tendentiously attributing the wrong position to him on a question touching on Neuhaus and the intersection of religion and politics.  This has nothing to do with Ross’ earlier statement.  Whenever Neuhaus is mentioned, even in passing, Sullivan’s “theocon” alarm goes off and he begins warning about the heavy yoke of dogmatism.  When someone has spent as much time as Sullivan has in constructing an elaborate web around the myth that “theocons” have helped to turn the Republicans into a “religious party” and a haven for “fundamentalists” (you know, like Bill Kristol), and the central objection he has to “theocons” is that they seek to influence policy (gasp!) according to the lights of their understanding of natural law and revelation (shriek!), no occasion is too small to restate the description of sinister plan {voice quavering with anxiety}: Christians are attempting to…participate in the political process and…direct policies in the direction of their preferences!  Who will save us from this madness? 

A large part of the trouble comes from some of the more slippery definitions that secular critics of the “theocons” use.  We find an example of this in the quote from The Theocons that Ross cites:

The privatization of piety creates social space for every American to worship God as he or she wishes, without state interference. In return for this freedom, believers are expected only to give up the ambition to political rule in the name of their faith - that is, the ambition to bring the whole of social life into conformity with their own inevitably partial and sectarian theological convictions [bold mine-DL].

Two phrases, “political rule in the name of their faith” and “the whole of social life,” do all the work here, but it is never clear what constitutes “political rule” or where privatised piety ends and social life-conforming behaviour begins.  Does political rule here simply refer to established religion, or does it mean any exercise of political influence or power by religious believers?  My impression is that Linker means the latter.  He takes arrangements that most people, religious conservatives included, accept as given (no established religion, religious pluralism and freedom of religion) and then invests this surrender of “ambition to political rule” with a much more restrictive meaning.  Once you have ceded that we should not arrest people for heresy, you must also supposedly cede the right to every other attempt to influence political life.  Once you have yielded an inch on the potentially totalising claims of religion, you are supposed to give up all claims with a social or political dimension.  If you won’t stone the adulteress, don’t bother trying to ”impose” your beliefs on anyone with respect to abortion–you threaten the liberal order if you attempt the latter, because it must inevitably lead to full-on theocracy in the end.   

In Linker’s liberalism, how much “social space” do you get?  Is it a bit like zoning regulations, where you can build up to a certain point but cannot come to close to municipal property?  What is worship?  Is it simply liturgy on Sundays and bedtime prayers, or does man’s religious obligations to God and his fellow men require something in addition to that?  Does the bare minimum of religious life require more than that?  Obviously, any remotely traditional religion requires much more.  Linker’s definition of the proper sphere for religion in a liberal order seems to suggest that most of what traditional religion requires simply in terms of religious obligations is incompatible with that order.  If I understand him correctly, it isn’t simply that religion should stay out of the public square, but that the liberalism of the public square should enter into the religious groups of the society and liberalise them as well, if only to ensure that they stay out of the public square. 

God is sovereign over all, and it is the role of Christianity, for example, to be concerned with the whole man and the whole of society, and this for Linker seems to be the major problem.  Any political role is, of course, entirely out of the question, and this would eventually proscribe even proselytising, since proselytism is simply the imposition of the “inevitably partial” and “sectarian” convictions of one religion on adherents of another partial view.  If everyone has his privatised piety sealed off from all attempts to change society, it seems to me that even conversions would be a potential source of trouble, since religious conversions will generate social change.  (Ross says that Linker rejects going this far.)   

In Linker’s privatised piety, if taken to an extreme, Christians would presumably not even live according to the tenets of their faith, because this would be an attempt to bring the whole of their lives, which take place in political society, into conformity with their sectarian convictions.  This could have troubling second and third-order effects, such as “disturbing” patriarchal notions of marriage or veritably “medieval” attitudes towards homosexuality.  It is as if revealed religion were concerned with the whole of life!  It is as if Christianity required men to commit themselves and “all their lives” to Christ God.  Clearly, this is dangerous and subversive stuff–before you know it, they might want to start talking about it in the schools! 

A less extreme form of Linkerian privatised piety would have an allowance for consenting adults to practice their religion, provided that it never went outside the home and did not interfere with the proper, “rational” upbringing of children.  You wouldn’t want to inculcate all sorts of “anti-social” attitudes into your children by teaching them regressive ideas about traditional gender roles or sexual morality.  Christopher Hitchens’ dream of a bureaucrat rescuing children from the “child abuse” of religious education is not far away here.

As the sociologist Manuel Castells generalized, “Elites are cosmopolitan, people are local.” People with university values favor intermingling. People with neighborhood values favor assimilation.

What’s made the clashes so poisonous is that many members of the educated class don’t even recognize that they are facing a rival philosophy. Many of them assume that anybody who disagrees with them on immigration and such must be driven by racism, insecurity or some primitive atavism. This smug attitude sends members of the communal, nationalistic side into fits of alienation and prickly defensiveness. It’s what makes many of them, in turn, so unpleasant. ~David Brooks

I like the sociologist’s generalisation, since it seems to suggest that elites aren’t actually people.  It also suggests that ”elites” have to be conditioned to accept rootlessness and ”cosmopolitan” attitudes, as these are the farthest things from normal.  This would help explain how they manage to hold such strange views about the world and their fellow citizens.  Of course, this idea of town v. gown as the explanation for our political conflicts is a reprise of Brooks’ opposition between so-called “progressive globalists” and “populist-nationalists.”  Generally, I think he describes the division correctly, though I don’t necessarily buy the prog-globs’ self-description of themselves as being “cosmopolitan.”  Many of them are not cosmopolitan in the sense that they are genuinely “open” to or curious about other cultures and peoples.  They espouse universal ideals and values, so what need is there to trouble themselves with foreign traditions that should be cast aside in favour of these values?  They are convinced that no one could actually prefer their own customs and religion to the exciting world of individualistic self-definition and anomie.  According to this view, all people naturally desire what we already have.  We are the mountain, and Muhammad will, must, come to us.  A more unpleasant and hateful idea is difficult to imagine. 

They are cosmopolitan in reaction against the definitions of their own native culture, but many of them usually find very little of value in foreign cultures that extends beyond exotic food and textiles.  They are the ones alienated from their homes, but they cannot truly be at home anywhere else, either.  Trying to belong to the whole world, they find no place for themselves anywhere.  This makes them rather obnoxious and domineering, as they seek to make everyone else just as rootless as they are–and so they advance policies of “openness” and “integration” that are aimed at nothing so much as breaking down cultural, ethnic and religious lines and dis-integrating nations.  This sort of cosmopolitanism is almost entirely negative.  In the West, it comes partly from a rebellion against any distinctive forms of Western and Christian identity and partly from an attempt to identify the creations of our civilisation with the universal aspirations of all people.  These are the people who never think that they are harming other people by attacking their cultures and traditions–it is always an emancipation.  “Look, we are making you more open and worldly!  You should thank us!”  The natural, normal reaction of most people to throw things and shout abuse at such “benefactors” is the “unpleasantness” that Brooks describes.  (Unmentioned in this discussion of a conflict of “values” is the deeply undemocratic nature of the bill that was almost foisted upon the country and the tyrannical refusal up till now to enforce the laws of the land–you don’t have to be a “neighbourhood” guy to see what is wrong with these things.) 

As for being unpleasant, there is nothing quite so unpleasant as the rich, Eastern transplant legacy frat boy telling the people of this country that they don’t want to do what’s right for America.  What would he or any other member of the elite know about America?  Except for political campaigning, changing planes or vacationing at their enormous ranches and ski lodges, these people hardly venture out into the interior of this country.  Whether they are in business or government, such “cosmopolitan” people have the cosmopolitanism of having been to two dozen airports where they encounter the same globalised junk pseudo-culture wherever they go.  These are the sort of people who don’t just fly over the interior because it is quicker–they truly don’t want to go to any of the places between the coasts.  This is generally fine by the rest of us, since we wouldn’t want them to visit anyway.

These people are legitimately cosmopolitan in that they would like to think that they are not citizens of any particular place.  To be a “citizen of the world” is the epitome of meaningless, oceanic detachment from your origins and your home.  It has never been clear to me why someone should become more like this the more educated he becomes, since the more education you have the more likely it is that you realise how wildly abnormal this sort of detachment is.  Perhaps I take this view because I am a product of many (maybe too many!) years of formal education and have somehow not bought into this nonsense about “openness.”  It is a little story that globalists tell to flatter themselves with the idea that they are more “open” and inquisitive and interested in the rest of the world, but mostly they just want to make the rest of the world as bland, self-referential and provincial as Manhattan and D.C.

It’s even making a difference at the ballot box. Liberals have spent much of the past six years straining to cut into the GOP’s advantage among religious voters. But when the Democrats finally shattered the Republican majority in the 2006 midterms, it was their consolidation of the secular vote that helped put them over the top. Despite all their efforts to close the God gap, the Democrats managed barely any gains among frequent churchgoers last November—but their share of the vote among Americans who never attend church at all leaped to 67 percent, from 55 percent in 2002. ~Ross Douthat

This would suggest that, for all of Obama’s “righteous wind” and John Edwards’ “faith-belief,” the Democratic Party is geared to become more aggressively secularist in the coming years than it has been.

This is the strangest thing I have seen in a long time (via Crooked Timber and Yglesias):

A case in point is the following. The GSS folk actually made the mistake of asking the following question as part of their science module:

Now, does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth?

Here we go. Now what follows is real social science data folks. No joking around:

Earth around sun 73.6%
Sun around earth 18.3%
Don’t Know 8.0%
Refused 0.1%

————

Among those who were up to date with seventeenth-century Galilean basic science, they actually dared to ask the follow-up question: 

How long does it take for the Earth to go around the Sun: one day, one month, or one year?

One day 19.0%
One month 1.1%
One year 71.2%
Other time period 0.1%
Don’t Know 8.5%
Refused 0.1%

I suppose the ignorance here shouldn’t really surprise me.  The historical ignorance of the average American is proverbial, so why should anyone be shocked that a fifth of the population displays such ignorance here?  I would agree that this is the kind of basic knowledge that one learns in, oh, elementary school, but, if high school graduates don’t necessarily know when the Civil War happened or where America is on a map, why should 25% being clueless about heliocentrism strike us as being all that remarkable? 

But where does this come from?  Where do these people live?  Have they never seen a diorama of the solar system?  Have they never read about the formation of planets?  Did no one ever tell them about Kepler and elliptical orbits? 

Thinking about the differences between “compassionate conservatism” and “crunchy” conservatism this week, I proposed thinking about the differences between Sam Brownback and Caleb Stegall.  I think these examples do summarise quite well the differences between the two “positions” (though Caleb will always appropriately insist that he considers himself simply to be a traditional conservative).  Brownback seems to be a very earnest, serious and faithful man.  I have given him so much grief over the months because I disagree with many of his policy proposals and because many of his policy priorities seem to me to be perfect examples of what happens when sincere conservatives, especially religious conservatives, have become disconnected from constitutionalism and a sense of proportion and scale.  It seems to me that Brownback’s activist goals come from an abstract defense of Life and a generic commitment to “compassion.”  For Brownback, it is appropriate to use federal power to intervene on behalf of Life, whether this means intervening on behalf of Terri Schiavo or intervening in Darfur, because the support for abstract Life everywhere compels him to disregard any number of normal distinctions.  He does not ask whether the government should be doing something, or whether there is another, more local authority that might be capable of handling the question, but apparently simply asks what the compassionate thing to do would be in this or that case.  Inevitably, the “compassionate” thing is almost always to intervene and “do something.”  Instead of asking, “What is my relationship to these people?” Brownback always assumes a profound obligation to aid everyone everywhere.  This has the zaniness of Obama’s foreign policy (which might be dubbed, in keeping with his favourite phrases, ”quiet imperialism”), but with a social conservative spin.  Rather than minding your own business being the root of justice, Brownback theoretically wants us to mind everyone’s business for the sake of preserving Life and being “compassionate.”

Inasmuch as “crunchy” conservatives are simply a kind of Kirkian traditionalist, the difference between Brownback’s view and a traditionalist view is fairly simple: Kirk returned to his ancestral village and stayed in his native place, specifically rejecting calls for crusading overseas as surely as he rejected all “armed doctrines,” while Brownback has effectively said that our “goodness” as a nation depends on what we do in Sudan and Congo.      

Poulos weighs in with a smart statement:

See, the trouble is that certain types of ‘crunchy cons’ — and this is to the exclusion of compassionate conservatives and Nat. Great. Republicans, who by definition fit in a national membership category — already have meaning in their lives, identities, families, and communities, no Weberian scare quotes about it. They do not need ‘meaning’ imparted to them by some emonationalistic scheme or by some winsome political patriot [bold mine-DL]. They have typically dismissed earthy utopia in very specific terms, often on account of a recognition that utopia means nowhere for a reason. They are good, old fashioned people, and if they’re anything resembling middle class, they’re ‘bourgeois’ in social science terms but hardly ‘identify’ as bourgeois for reasons that should now be obvious. The certain types of crunchy cons to which I refer — and this includes certain types of postmodern conservatives — have no use for crusaderist projects because they don’t like to endure the abstraction of virtues into vague values simply to invent things to have in common with strangers. And, no surprise, they then get attacked for not caring about others, for being isolationists if disinterested in foreign policy or jerks if interested. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t for the anti-crusaders, I fear.

James makes the point concisely.  I will just add that this is why it is a major mistake to confuse this sort of conservatism, which usually derives from religious convictions, with an attempt to make politics into a religion.  They might wish members of a polity were more pious, in the broadest sense of that word, but they do not need politics or political causes to flourish and live meaningful lives.  It is quite literally a conservatism of place, of keeping things in proportion and within limits and of tending to your own fields.  A cultivator, not a crusader, might be the best example of it. 

 I was focusing my comments at Rod and his Crunchy Conservatism (or at least my reading of it), which does share with compassionate conservatism many fundamental assumptions about the nature of “mainstream” conservatism as well as of the proper role of government and politics. ~Jonah Goldberg

Since my earlier remarks were too “otherworldly,” let me address this a bit more concretely.  This claim of shared assumptions is simply wrong.  It is another example of Goldberg’s exceedingly poor reading of the book.  One part of the ”crunchy” con critique is that mainstream conservatism is too materialistic.  He does manage to get that much right.  Compassionate conservatives say nothing about this.  Whether or not you agree with the “crunchy” con view, the two have nothing to do with each other.  “Crunchy” cons, both in the book and at the blog, tended to be skeptical of or hostile to development plans that came at the expense of the environment, historic buildings and the local community’s interests.  Compassionate conservatives are almost entirely unconcerned about this, though they will occasionally talk about conservation.  “Crunchy” cons find the the way that some on the right make a fetish out of the market and economic goods to be deeply misguided, as it seems to neglect man’s spiritual life and his obligations to transcendent moral order.  Compassionate conservatives are sometimes religious and use religious language, but their answer is not one of changing habits, cultivating virtue and building communities–if anything, they assume that this is already being done–but to “rally the armies of compassion” using federal cash.  It is the weak political answer to an extensive cultural problem, which makes it an entirely different sort of idea.  I’m sure Goldberg doesn’t understand how someone can object to a culture of consumption and self-indulgence without being a statist.  This is the essence of the problem of mainstream conservatism: mainstream conservatives seem to think that anything that criticises the degrading and uprooting effects of capitalism must therefore be proposing some state-led intervention, as if that were the only answer in a free society.  Obviously, the book proposes little or nothing by way of calls for regulation.  At several points, I believe you will find that Rod rejects the association between a desire to remedy a problem and reliance on the government to be part of the remedy. 

At bottom “crunchy” conservatism is cultural conservatism that tries to fight the culture war by actually living out a way of life dedicated to the practice of virtue and restraint.  Goldberg, he of the “partial philosophy of life,” wants nothing to do with this.  ”Crunchy” conservatism assumes that our vision and imagination of a good, well-ordered society matters a great deal more than the tax structure or funneling subsidies to charities.  It does not share compassionate conservatism’s assumptions about the “role of government,” since it does not propose much in the way of a role for government to remedy the ills it describes.  It does not see government activism accomplishing very much when it comes to shoring up local communities and families, and it sees a great deal of harm in collaboration between public authorities and corporations.  Compassionate conservatism seems to have been an attempt to put a moderately social conservative spin on welfarism and use religious language to justify the continued centralisation of power in Washington.  ”Crunchy” conservatism and the people in the book described as “crunchy” conservatives have nothing to do with any of that.  The difference between the two is the difference between Sam Brownback and Caleb Stegall.  If Goldberg doesn’t see the difference there, that is his problem, not ours.          

Jeff makes an important observation before he gives the citation from the always insightful Prof. Bacevich. Jeff writes:

That strategy of openness has been structured around the imperatives of economic growth and expansion, on the assumption that the construction of an integrated global order will ensure not only the economic preeminence of the United States, but her geopolitical preeminence.

It is interesting that Jeff should bring up this discussion of a “strategy of openness,” since Fareed Zakaria has come out this week with an affirmation of key elements of that strategy as the appropriate post-Bush strategy for the United States.  In other words, the policy establishment will continue business as usual, minus the glaring incompetence of management.  This has the feel, as all paeans to “open society” have, of whistling past the graveyard. 

Read the rest of this entry »

But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you’re a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right. So I say you’ve got to cap with a number. ~Bill O’Reilly

Now, is O’Reilly really saying that we need to defend the precious white, Christian, male power structure against a foreign onslaught, as his critics are suggesting? Or is he just saying, rather clumsily, that the “far-left” sees open immigration as a way to socially engineer America as we know it - which they perceive as dominated by a pernicious, patriarchal, Anglo-Saxon power structure - out of existence, as part of their “hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go” agenda? I think it’s ambiguous, and it seems at least as likely that he’s caricaturing lefty views as that he’s expressing his deep, dark Christofascist fantasties [sic]. ~Ross Douthat

First of all, I don’t think Bill O’Reilly would ever use the phrase “power structure” as part of his self-identification.  The O’Reillys of the world do not use phrases like “power structure” to express their own views.  “Power structure” is a phrase that academics–liberal academics whom the O’Reillys hate–would use to describe the organisation of a society.  It would be like Sean Hannity using the phrase “cultural appropriation” or Rush Limbaugh speaking about “othering” or “anomie.“  These are phrases and ideas that simply aren’t normally used by bombastic GOP talking heads, or if they are they are used ironically and with contempt.  It seems fairly clear that O’Reilly is talking here about what he thinks open borders supporters really want, and not about what he fears they want.  I say this because I don’t think O’Reilly cares much at all about said “power structure,” which is to say he’s not terribly concerned about white American Christians, their culture or their interests, but he knows that it is popular among these viewers to side with them on immigration.  

On the other hand, I don’t think it’s that strange of an interpretation of the open borders position.  Actual Republican advocates of open borders–for example, those on the right who hold the WSJ immigration and border security position–who want to declare, “There shall be open borders,” are clearly not just indifferent to whatever dominant culture exists in this country, but they are plainly hostile to any politics that espouses loyalty to cultural and religious traditions and identities that supersede or take priority over economic motives and economic efficiencies.  These loyalties can be a drag on productivity when they encourage feelings of patriotism and national identity, which can be a problem for those whose loyalties are to themselves as individuals, the moneyed interest or the profits of multinationals.  When forced to choose between the bottom line and the border, these are the people who will choose the bottom line.  As Henninger made clear earlier this week, it’s all about the money market. 

They are indifferent to what these traditions and identities are–they just know that they are annoying baggage to be dispensed with as soon as possible.  What the open borders crowd knows is that loyalties to tradition and cultural identity potentially hamper “growth,” cultivate the desire for belonging and exclusion and erect boundaries between nations that can make the free flow of goods and services more difficult.  Wherever there are cultural conservatives, they are the enemy of the open borders, globalisation crowd.  (This is why I have argued before that it is the natural conservative response to regard policies of globalisation as hostile and threatening.)  It happens that the cultural conservatives of this country are predominantly white and Christian, so this is what our latter-day Freisinnigen have decided ought to be undermined.  (Incidentally, anyone who thinks that introducing large numbers of Latin Americans into the United States threatens the existence of “patriarchy” doesn’t know what he’s talking about–those who are most keenly interested in women’s rights might reconsider importing cultural habits that tend to be inimical to women’s emancipation.) 

These open borders folks are the people who speak contemptuously of cultural conservatives for daring to want to conserve their own culture.  Retaining this or that culture, rather than just letting “creative destruction” work its magic of demographic and social upheaval, may introduce barriers to economic activity and it will certainly hinder the “free movement of labour” that economic efficiency may require.  There are other open borders advocates who are multiculturalists, who at the very least have no strong attachment to Anglo-American and/or Euro-American culture and many of whom are positively glad to introduce any number of cultures and languages into the country.  That this does and will continue to result in social and political fragmentation detrimental to everyone in the country is not their pressing concern.  These are the sorts of people O’Reilly was referring to, but what he failed to mention, probably because it is not a popular thing to say, is just how many people among American elites in business share multiculti goals in subverting the culture that white Christian conservatives are trying, however haphazardly, to protect and preserve.   

So Republicans will keep winning because Americans are becoming more entrepreneurial and “market-oriented” and because they’re increasingly “saying it’s not all about materaliasm, it’s not all about the pursuit of material things”? It’s hard to imagine a balder description of the essential contradiction at the heart of the GOP coalition, and yet Rove seems unaware that there’s anything contradictory here at all. ~Ross Douthat

This contradiction echoes part of what I was saying earlier today:

The pairings of social democracy/cultural hedonism and economic liberalism/cultural conservatism are extremely weird and abnormal.

There is a way in which the computer chip-empowered people of Rove’s active imagination and the culturally conservative, not-so-materialistic people could get along or prove to be more complementary than I might normally allow.  It is even possible that technology will facilitate a large-scale flourishing of homeschooling, home businesses and some measure of agrarian ”return to the land.” This might even be joined together with a religious ethos and a respect for consecrated order, but I wonder whether it is at all likely. 

It is annoying to say, but from what I understand of his thesis Brink Lindsey is right.  Abundance and technology tend to lead to what I would call cultural disintegration and atomistic individualism (he would call this “freedom”) and actively undermine the ethic that says “it’s not all about materialism.”  It may rely on those who are driven to pursue higher goods and it will create the space for people who want to say, “it’s not all about materialism.”  It is quite conceivable that the excesses of the “Age of Abundance” will send sane people running screaming (and making prostrations along the way) back to churches and perhaps even real monasteries (and not merely the MacIntyrean metaphorical monasteries of the home), but this still suggests a sharp tension and even a dialectic between the Mammon voters and the God voters. 

Incidentally, the whole controversy over “crunchy conservatism” and the more general traditional conservative critique of the materialism of capitalist society centers around the basic truth from the Gospels that you cannot serve two masters.  “Fusionism” has been premised to some considerable extent on the assumption that you can do this.  The “fusionists” have been mistaken.

He [Buruma] marveled over Ramadan’s mix of anti-globalist fervor and ultra-conservative cultural views. “In American terms,” Buruma remarked, “he is a Noam Chomsky on foreign policy and a Jerry Falwell on social affairs.” ~Paul Berman

So, in other words, he’s rather like…me?  Well, not quite.  For starters, my grandfather did not found the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a piece of information that any cursory introduction to Ramadan always mentions, but which Berman has failed to bring up in the first page and a half of his miniature biography).  Of course, this description of Ramadan doesn’t tell us much about him, since the religion and tradition he wants to conserve are radically different from the religion and tradition that I want to conserve.  Incidentally, Berman does not go into much detail about why Ramadan was denied an entry visa when he tried to come to this country.  It was denied because the government claimed he gave material support to Palestinian terrorists.  Now it may be that the government is wrong, but you would think that something like that would be worth mentioning early on. 

Anyway, there is nothing that strange or marvelous about a combination of social and cultural conservatism and ferocious anti-globalism and anti-imperialism.  Indeed, the two pretty much go hand in hand.  “Don’t Tread On Me” and “mind your own business” are saying more or less the same thing with slightly different emphases.  It is only because of the weird confluence in a few Western countries of the battered remnants of classical liberalism with social and cultural traditionalism (a combination of the interests of capital and cultural capital, you might say) that those who are (at least rhetorically and symbolically) culturally conservative at home endorse the whirlwind of “creative destruction” sweeping over the world and devastating, er, “enriching” everyone else’s cultures.  Perhaps this is because these people see this process as a creation of “our” culture and therefore a demonstration of our culture’s vitality or value, but then they have to ignore that this creation acts rather like a nihilistic parricide against the very culture that raised it up in the first place. 

The more fiercely conservative you are about your religion, your culture, its habits, morals and traditions, the more likely you are to regard all forms of globalism and globalisation–political, economic, cultural–as perverse, destructive and hostile to your “vision of order” and your way of life.  Opposition to hegemonism and globalisation on the one hand and opposition to cultural decay and fragmentation on the other are a natural pair.  Support for their opposites (with some qualifications in the realm of foreign policy) forms another natural pair.  The paleocon combination is the normal, relatively more common conservative response to these phenomena around the world.  The pairings of social democracy/cultural hedonism and economic liberalism/cultural conservatism are extremely weird and abnormal.  It doesn’t actually make sense for people who want to preserve tradition to support international capitalism with the enthusiasm that many conservatives do, and indeed some “conservatives” today not only see the contradiction but decide that they are quite happy to let tradition fall by the wayside for the most part.  That is the outcome of the fraud of “fusionism”: the decision to discard virtue and to start a torrid affair with “economic dynamism.”  The marriage of liberty and virtue that ”fusionism” was supposed to represent and defend did not take account of that ”other woman,” which we might also call “growth.”  For that matter, it doesn’t make much sense for people who believe social solidarity is extremely important to endorse rampant individualism in social and cultural matters.  Both are like patients suffering from ulcers who believe that drinking acid will help with the cure.  These combinations exist only in fully industrialised Western societies and map onto no other alignments anywhere on earth.  

There are many problems with this argument, not least of which is that about a fifth of Hispanics in America are Protestants, mostly evangelical Pentecostals and Baptists. Almost all of Bush’s political gains among Hispanics have come from this group, which gave him 44 percent of their vote in 2000 and 56 percent in 2004. Hispanic Protestants tend to be conservative on social policy.  And many conservatives, I’d be willing to bet, would feel more cultural affinity with Hispanic Baptists in their church pews than they would with Huntington’s colleagues in the Harvard faculty lounge. ~Michael Gerson

This is amusing to read.  Gerson knocks anti-immigration populists as “lowbrow,” but wants to stir the populist pot against pointy-headed academics by pushing a crude evangelical identity politics that will supposedly unite Anglos and Latinos in their shared derision for scholars.  Gerson joins naked anti-intellectualism to anti-patriotic policy proposals.  An inspiring combination!  His motto might be, “We’re ignorant and transnational.”

Note that Gerson doesn’t tell us about the four-fifths of Hispanics who aren’t Protestant.  He doesn’t tell us what their politics are like, nor does he tell us about the cultural values they possess, because he probably knows, or at least guesses, that this information would be distinctly unhelpful to the cause of selling out his country.  The final lines, deploring national chauvinism, might have some credibility if they did not come from a former speechwriter of an administration that has masterfully honed the rhetoric of national chauvinism for the purposes of promoting aggressive warfare.  About that rather un-Christian behaviour, Gerson naturally never has anything to say.

The new conservative media infrastructure is ideally suited to rapid-response punditry and rallying the base, but it’s not really an alternative to the major cultural institutions—the big dailies, networks, universities, and Hollywood studios. Talk-show hosts and bloggers criticize the mainstream media’s excesses, but rarely do any reporting of their own. Conservative think tanks provide a corrective to Ivy League liberalism, but aren’t in the business of actually educating undergraduates and churning out Ph.D.s [bold mine-DL]. The O’Reilly Factor can give a right-leaning movie a much-needed boost, but aside from a few outliers like The Passion of the Christ, it isn’t clear that Hollywood has become any more hospitable to conservative values and themes in the last decade or so. ~Ross Douthat

This is from a review of South Park Conservatives Ross wrote a few weeks ago last year.  His conversation with Henry Farrell pointed me to it, and this quote in particular struck me as being very right.  A few weeks ago I had made some similar remarks:

If anyone wants an explanation for why the academy is dominated by the left and why the youngest cohort of voters has gone even more overwhelmingly for the Democrats than usual, you need look no further than precisely this sort of professional cop-out, giving up on educating the next generation for the sake of the easy, cheap and ephemeral victories of politics.  Every conservative out there complains about the declining standards of education, the ruin of the academy, the politicisation of the classroom and on and on, but what happens when it comes time to step up and do some of the educating themselves?  They go to law school to get a “useful” degree, or go into politics or some other field where the “prospects” for the future are better, and then wonder how the media, academia, the arts and cinema have all been taken over by people who loathe everything they believe.   

The creation of these parallel institutions, such as they are, has had the somewhat predictable effect of reducing incentives for conservatives to persevere in the various hearts of cultural darkness and also has tended to make sure that conservatives are less relevant to much of the discourse today in any number of fields that were ceded and abandoned decades ago.  Were modern conservatives such great “theocrats” as some parts of the left accuse them of being, you would think that they would dominate the seminaries and divinity schools around the nation, but the opposite is usually the case.  Were conservatives in fact as medieval as their progressive adversaries believe them to be, you might think that they would dominate medieval history, but the opposite is usually the case.  History departments were once redoubts of reaction, and nowadays almost the opposite extreme is true.  This is perplexing, since you might think conservative-minded people would be very keen to learn about their history and traditions and so pass them down and reproduce them, but with baffling regularity they entrust the keeping of the faith and the preservation of memory to those who are less inclined to venerate traditional forms and those who may be more interested in subverting and debunking than understanding.  There has been a recent flurry of arguments in favour of reviving the study of military history, which is a very good idea, but even when that study revives there will not be many conservatives doing the scholarship, because the academy has already been deemed enemy territory.

I don’t think finding a connection between this and the Iraq war makes much sense. What you see here is a glimpse of the other side of the cultural abyss, in which the control of women - their bodies and their souls - by brutal patriarchal fundamentalists is the norm. It’s evil. ~Andrew Sullivan

I think what is most amazing to me is that this doesn’t take place in some tent in the middle of the desert or a stone hut [bold mine-DL]. These people are not dressed in tribal garb — they are wearing jeans and t-shirts and the whole thing takes place in a street in what appears to be a modern town. It isn’t the Moqtada al Sadr brigade or Al Qaeda extremists —it’s not part of the civil war although according to the article, many Iraqis are trying to rationalize it as such. This is nothing but barbaric patriarchal violence perpetrated by our alleged allies, the Kurds, toward a teen-age girl…~Digby

What is lacking in both of these responses is any sense of just how crazy it always was to think that Iraq was well-suited for anything like modern democratic government, when this takes place in Kurdistan, alleged bastion of enlightenment (at least according to the pro-Kurdish pundits in the West).  Leave aside for a moment the incompatibility with an Islamic society–what of the incompatibility with a tribal one, such as that of Kurdish Yezidis, who are not even Muslim?  Of course, there’s nothing surprising that the Yezidis are wearing modern clothing.  It is a quaint, silly idea that cultural habits and mentalities are somehow required to be linked to this or that economic or material condition.   

To offer a slightly different perspective, let me ask this question: what part of this episode do Westerners find more troubling?  Is it the stoning, the brutal killing of the girl, or is it the idea that there should be social control over interpersonal relationships and sharp social separation between religious groups?  Some might say that the two are bound up with each other and would argue that the stoning is simply a product of the latter.  That’s reasonable.  Yet if the punishment for this transgression was not execution, but was one of ostracism or some other means of shaming, what is the outsider’s real, principled objection to it?  That people should be allowed to love and marry whomever they like?  To the mind of anyone in a traditional society, this is insane and a recipe for the annihilation of small groups.  Indeed, all things considered, it is a fairly strange idea.  In any case, it is the Yezidis’ marginal, minority status in an Islamic sea that helps explain why they are so ferocious and brutal in their insistence on maintaining the boundaries of their group.  This is part of the more general collapse of security to the extent that this and things like this will happen more and more as different sects are forced to turn to self-help and customary law to govern their part of the country.  It is part of the war to the extent that the war was the cause for unleashing the revival of sectarian identity as a particularly important element in everyday life.         

The GOP’s share of the Hispanic vote dropped in 1988, 1992, and 1996, before rising under Bush. Second of all, you would expect the Republicans to do better and better among Hispanics as the last amnesty receded into the past, and its beneficiaries assimilated and started to move up in the world. ~Ross Douthat

Someone would expect this, I think, if he thought that assimilated, successful immigrants normally have a natural tendency to break with the Democratic voting habits of most new immigrants.  This seems reasonable, but if it were true the GOP would be awash in Greek, Armenian and Asian voters.  Generally speaking, it is not.  Voting for Democrats in many ethnic immigrant communities is just the obvious thing to do, especially for those who come from political traditions that stress some greater measure of social solidarity.  Interestingly, these immigrants often tend to concentrate in large urban areas that either lean or are solidly Democratic, so this traditional preference for Democrats is reinforced by the very process of assimilation.  Further, suburbs are no longer always a reliable Republican stronghold, so it may be that even assimilated, successful immigrants who come out to the suburbs may not so much adopt suburban Republicanism as they will help speed the transformation of many suburbs into Democratic turf.  Inherited cultural and political attitudes are often more determinative of voting patterns than class or income.  The GOP has to be hoping that historical materialism is at least partly true and it has to be hoping that ideas do not, in fact, have many consequences at all (or at least fewer consequences than a nice salary).