What’s Wrong with the World

Much ink and many pixels have been spilled in disputations over the nature and significance of neoconservatism, particularly as this tendency appears to be the dominant political motif of the present administration. Much of the discussion has been, well, not so much a discussion as an exchange of incandescent invective, and, when it has not been so intemperate, it has tended towards the obfuscatory, as in the attempt to deny that there actually exists a definable tendency corresponding to the term "neoconservatism". Fortunately, prominent neoconservative Michael Novak has obliged those pining for a succinct exposition of neoconservatism. That interview, however, requires some interpretation; for, like a scriptural text, the story of neoconservatism is not a fit one for private interpretation, particularly the self-interpretations of those who authored it. Unlike a scriptural text, which is best interpreted from within the tradition out of which it arose, neoconservatism is best interpreted by outsiders. After all, is it not the case that we are often understood best by those who are, well, not us?

To this end, I propose to provide an interpretation of select passages from the linked Novak interview, refraining from emotionally-freighted language; imagine the deadpan delivery of Bob Dole, and you will have in mind the intended tone.

Neoconservatism is a topic that has received a fair amount of commentary during the course of the past six years, and seems likely to receive still more, as a lame-duck administration continues to wallow in lameness, the war continues to drag, and the host organism of the neoconservative movement, the Republican Party, hurtles toward the abyss of 2008. Neoconservatism is a topic warranting serious reflection, for while the media and the average American might well content themselves with the knowledge that some neoconservatives promoted a foreign policy that resulted in a Mesopotamian quagmire, the tendency is not one that will be slinking off to die on one of history's ash-heaps anytime soon.

In light of these considerations, it seemed preferable - instead of offering a quick response to a thoughtful comment - to elaborate upon the nature and origins of neoconservatism.

Recent arrests of (qualifiedly) indigenous jihadists, four of whom are Muslims from the former Yugoslavia, and three of whom are illegal immigrants, have failed to stimulate even a simulation of the sort of discussion America must have if it is to secure itself from the depredations of such men. Such a discussion would, of necessity, be liberal in scope, encompassing interrogations of everything from immigration policy to the squalor of a foreign policy which issues in the creation of sharia states along the underbelly of Europe, and brings to power sharia regimes further to the east.

The hawks in Reagan’s administration assured him he couldn’t reason with communists. One adviser, the historian Richard Pipes, told Reagan the Russian mind worked in ways fundamentally different from our own. The peasant mentality of the Russian muzhik, Pipes had written in 1977, held “that cunning and coercion alone ensured survival: one employed cunning when weak, and cunning coupled with coercion when strong. Not to use force when one had it indicated weakness.” Reagan disagreed. Ignoring the advice of hard-liners like Pipes and the neoconservative strategist Richard Perle, Reagan preferred jaw-jaw to war-war. “We must and will engage the Soviets in a dialogue as serious and constructive as possible,” he insisted in a 1984 address. ~Dan McCarthy

There is something very powerful about the idea that it is impossible to reason with an adversary, especially one as genuinely perverse as the Soviets. What is striking about this excerpt from Dan's interesting review of Diggin's book is how this episode of Reagan and Richard Pipes compares with the present administration and its acquiescence in the theories of those who embrace such works as The Arab Mind. Whether it is the muzhiki of Russia or the Arabs, you have to deal with "those people" with a firm hand (i.e., threats, weapons build-ups or military action). One is reminded of the ivory tower rationalisations of mass murder by the fictional Dr. Garrigan from The Last King of Scotland: "This is Africa. You have to meet violence with violence. Anything else, and you're dead." Neoconservatives seem to be of the mind that Dr. Garrigan's approach to problem-solving is applicable on every continent. Perhaps the good doctor would have concluded along with certain latter-day enthusiasts of the ends justifying the means that you must get your hands dirty in a good cause. But I digress.

Cardinal Newman wrote very astutely, if a bit acidly, that it is a misfortune to be self-educated. It may be a misfortune; often it is a joy and a calling. But even where joyous it must always be an exception, unless barbarism is ascendant. In that sense we might almost say of a society which, by lassitude, heresy or avarice, forces many men to become autodidacts: “there is a society oppressed by barbarism.” Upon reading a devastating essay by Larry P. Arnn in the Fall 2006 issue of The Claremont Review of Books, one is left with that distinct impression. Ours is a society oppressed by barbarism. Misfortune will be the lot of Americans for some time to come — at least for those Americans who believe that “education” contains a notion of diligent immersion in, and exploration and veneration of one’s own civilization.

What Arnn — President of Hillsdale College — lays out in some detail is an arraignment of education in America so shattering as to induce the reader to a kind of despondency, followed by, it is to be hoped, a very solid kind of defiance. As Arnn tells it, with subtlety and incision, the agents of barbarism are in the driver’s seat; and the would-be defenders of civilization are reduced by bafflement, misconception, and disarray. Deriving from work by a committee of the President’s Advisory Council, the verdict is grim: “our kindergarten students rank with the best in the world in their knowledge of science and math. For each year that they are subjected to the capable attentions of our public education system, they fall a step behind. By the time they graduate from high school, they rank at the 10th percentile in math internationally, struggling to keep ahead of the unschooled goatherds of the Third World.” It might be added, of course, that a goatherd at age eighteen is probably the master of quite a variety of useful skills, such that his education is, in its own way, quite adequate.

The dilemma:

[UPDATED 12:25 est.]

When Richard Nixon promised an "honorable end" to the Vietnam war it had specific resonance because of Nixon's record as an anti-Communist hawk. Anti-Communists trusted that Nixon understood the real threat of Communism. Hillary may have — until recently — burnished her hawkish credentials, but she's hardly a Democratic Nixon. And her supporters are hardly the war-on-terror equivalent of raging anti-Communists. Does anyone think that Hillary is particularly passionate about the Islamist threat? Is there anything like a Nixon-to-China move she could pull off? And the rest of the Democratic field is far more dovish than Hillary. ~Jonah Goldberg

Against this, Ross makes the important point that the Iraq war is far more unpopular than Vietnam, which may make this “only Nixon could go to China” logic irrelevant. It is true that Iraq is more unpopular in May 2007 than Vietnam was in July 1967. One reason for this greater unpopularity of the Iraq war may be that July 1967 was relatively earlier in the escalation of American involvement in South Vietnam than May 2007 is for the deployment to Iraq. 1967 and 2007 are useful points of comparison as years before presidential elections, but otherwise comparing poll results from these years may be misleading. From the first large-scale American deployment in March 1965 to the time of that poll was obviously a little over two years (even though there had been some level of involvement in South Vietnam going back to before the 1960 election), while we are beyond the four-year mark and, as things are going right now, the war seems likely to continue well beyond Inauguration Day 2009. 2007 for Iraq is actually more directly comparable to 1969, and you will find that a fairly similar percentage of Americans (58%) believed the Vietnam War to be a mistake by October 1969 as now believe the Iraq war to be a mistake (61%). Update: Ross has taken this objection into account in a later post.

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.

In an earlier thread, in which I sought to challenge some of the presumptions and delusions of the economistic modes of analysis that too often shape public policy, a reader commented that mass immigration is the greatest issue confronting the Western world today. It is incontrovertible that immigration is one of the most salient of all the momentous questions that confront us; whether we are considering the disruption of the social fabric, the alteration of the economic patterns and relationships that prevail in our country, the devolution of our political culture, or the immigration-driven presence among us of devotees of the jihad, immigration is implicated in all of these developments. But it seems to me somewhat precipitous to pronounce that immigration is foremost among these issues, in the sense that doing so might be placing proverbial carts before proverbial horses. Rather, or so it seems to me upon reflection, immigration is an element - a critical and integral element, nonetheless - of a broader historical tendency, a tendency often presented to us under the aspects of inevitability and progress. We might even look through the historicism with which we are often confronted, seeing in it merely the masquerade of a doctrine of fate, of the totality to which all of the particulars of our societies are to be sacrificed.

One of the defining characteristics of the age is the slow, seemingly inexorable extrusion of elites and establishments from the societies they purportedly represent and 'serve' - if so quaint and republican a term can even be applied to their work in office. While it is fashionable among conservatives to ridicule John Edward's declarations that we are becoming two Americas, and while Edward's understanding of the emerging divisions among us is surely simplistic, conservatives are mistaken to make such quick resort to mockery and scorn. Disdain may be a sign of unassailable loftiness, of a position that cannot be challenged; it can also be a sign of exhaustion and intellectual torpor, a failure to see beyond the poverty of an expression to the reality to which, however inadequately, it points.

Ward Connerly's American Civil Rights Institute has released an "open letter" pointing out that "under existing laws and policies, the majority of immigrants coming to America will automatically be eligible for race preferences and privileges not provided to the great majority of Americans" and arguing that "any legislation addressing immigration should make explicit that while immigrants and their descendants should be afforded the right to compete fairly and freely in every aspect of American life, they should receive no special benefit on the basis of race, ethnicity or national origin."

What is genuine liberal internationalism? It is neither a naïve idealism that ignores the realities of power nor a crude realism that ignores the power of ideals. ~Michael Lind

Oh, well, that clears things up nicely. There is a little more substance to it. Lind goes on to say:

Enduring international peace is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for liberal democracy. Why? In a world of recurring great-power conflicts or widespread anarchy, concerns about security may force even liberal democracies to sacrifice their freedoms to the imperatives of self-defense. This is what Woodrow Wilson meant when he said that the United States and its allies must make the world "safe for democracy." A world safe for democracy need not be a democratic world. It need only be a world in which democracies like the United States are not forced by recurrent world wars to turn themselves into armed camps.

Obviously, even by this lower standard that Lind sets for Wilson's foreign policy, it was nonetheless a magnificent failure, as the rest of the 20th century was to show. That will never dim the faith of the true followers in the wisdom of Woodrow's vision. Behold:

A world of many, mostly small and nonaggressive nation-states will be less dangerous than one of a few empires battling to carve up the world.

One wants to ask: less dangerous to whom? Everyone? Citizens of the great powers? Citizens of the small states? Who knows? Arguably, the age of a few great world empires was better, in terms of the prevention of armed conflict, for large swathes of Africa and Asia than the last century has been. For Europe, the disappearance of their empires has brought two generations of peace and prosperity (under the admittedly artificial conditions of the Cold War and U.S. protection). For Americans, it has been a decidedly mixed picture.

To put into perspective how a great number of Russians regard their first president and his policies, imagine the governor of Illinois striking a deal with the leaders of New Mexico, Texas, and California and offering them support for their independence in order to oust his personal rival, the president, from the White House and take over the rump United States. Imagine, in addition, that he dissolves the US Congress by sending in tanks, resulting in the deaths of over 150 citizens. These patriotic activities then lead to hyperinflation, wiping out the citizens' personal savings. The economy in now in shambles, and high-tech gives way to raw-material extraction. Silicon Valley infogeeks are escaping to China, Europe, and Brazil. Lucrative businesses are "privatized" and handed over to the president's cronies. His reformist economists attempt to fix the economy by not paying wages - for years. Law enforcement virtually disappears, and US cities become the battlefields of endless gang wars. The life expectancy of men falls to 57 years.

One week before last Christmas, the US State Department fast-tracked four European Bank for Reconstruction and Development projects in Serbia, which consisted of a loan to HVB Banka Serbia; an equity investment in Syntaxis Mezzanine Fund I; an equity investment in South Eastern Energy Capital; and a loan to Danube Group Holding of Serbia, which holds a stake in JKR Natural Resource BV.

The State Department claims that these particular investments "will contribute to a stronger and more integrated economy in the Balkans." Therefore, Section 561 of the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act was suspended. Section 561 would have prevented US executive directors of the EBRD from voting in favor of these initiatives because of the Serbian government's noncompliance with the Hague Tribunal.

Why is the United States so eager to fund these projects?

Presidential candidate George W. Bush, following a Republican playbook scripted in the mid-nineties as the party lurched from defeat to defeat, its ambitious agenda for the housebreaking of the Federal Leviathan stymied by Clinton's deft triangulations, said little about Social Security. As President, he proposed an audacious (within the narrow consensus of American politics) partial privatization of the gargantuan entitlement program, whose unfunded liabilities foretell all manner of political and economic upheavals, scheduled to begin once the pig-in-the-snake of the Baby Boom generation reaches retirement age.

For his admittedly desultory effort, he was rewarded with a political rebuke: failure, and falling poll results. Americans cherish all manner of illusions about the nature and stability of the program, and probably even believe in the unbelievable myth of the Social Security Trust Fund; when presented with the dire facts about the future of the program - which become still more sombre when Medicare is incorporated in the calculations - they make quick resort to magical thinking: it cannot happen; things will work out fine; all things will continue as they have since FDR brought salvation to America.

Curiously, financial markets also appear to indulge in magical thought.

Via Rod Dreher:

Islamic extremists embedded in the United States — posing as Hispanic nationals — are partnering with violent Mexican drug gangs to finance terror networks in the Middle East, according to a Drug Enforcement Administration report.

"Since drug traffickers and terrorists operate in a clandestine environment, both groups utilize similar methodologies to function ... all lend themselves to facilitation and are among the essential elements that may contribute to the successful conclusion of a catastrophic event by terrorists," said the confidential report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times.

The 2005 report outlines an ongoing scheme in which multiple Middle Eastern drug-trafficking and terrorist cells operating in the U.S. fund terror networks overseas, aided by established Mexican cartels with highly sophisticated trafficking routes.

These terrorist groups, or sleeper cells, include people who speak Arabic, Spanish and Hebrew and, for the most part, arouse no suspicion in their communities. (Sara Carter, Washington Times for August 8, 2007)

Now, some of us who have taken the measure of the jihad, perceiving in it the nature of an existential threat to the very substance of our civilization, albeit one which will require time to ripen, have contemplated this very possibility for some time. In fact, we might even asseverate that this possibility suggests itself upon consideration of the entities involved: it is in the nature of clandestine organizations, even those that, like some Islamic groups, observe a decentralized, "leaderless resistance" style of organization, that they not concern themselves overmuch with the objectives of partners. Provided that there is sufficient overlap at the point of meeting, and provided, further, that there exist no immediate and overt conflicts of aim, collaboration can occur. That some nationals of Islamic nations may easily pass themselves off as Latin Americans only adds to the synergy.

Daniel Larison on Sullivan's ridiculous Christianist conspiracy theory:

If they existed, Christianists would be interesting people. They would have to believe at one and the same time that they must make God’s will into the law of the land and enforce Christian doctrine throughout society and be convinced that the best instrument for this goal was the utterly secular, Mammon-serving Republican Party. They would have to be completely fanatical and at the same time completely indifferent that their chosen vehicle of political power was basically hostile to everything they sought to achieve (which is one of the reasons why, despite decades of trying, they have achieved next to nothing). They would have to be able to turn their fanaticism on and off with a readily available switch, which makes them rather less worrisome as the founders of the future theocratic nightmare to come.

Growing up, the harder sort of Protestant fundamentalists were wont to argue that the alliance of the Religious Right with the GOP would end in failure, futility having been its lot. Setting aside the question of what, precisely, Christians should have done when the nation slipped into the cultural centrifuge in the Sixties and Seventies, it is remarkable that what began with a mixture of noble aims and low, political farce should now end in tragedy, as the Christian right fragments, and finds itself increasingly marginalized (or perhaps this marginality is being revealed). The only play left is that of refusal - of the role of GOP 'automatics'. This, at least, would be a beginning.

James Poulos, who blogs at Postmodern Conservative and The American Scene, has, in his own words, taken part-time employment as a critic of "our general cultural retreat into the therapeutic meta-ethics of feeling, emotion, and sense - and away from the ethics of fact, act, and responsibility". Critiquing a NYT article on US-Saudi relations which stated that the American officials had consented to interviews in advance of a diplomatic junket in order to "send a pointed signal of deep frustration", Poulos wrote:

No, ladies and gentlemen. The officials were clearly intent on actually expressing deep frustration that more private American appeals to the Saudis had failed to produce a change in course. (snip) We must cease this constant retreat into meta-narrative. We must insist upon discussing the world where actual actions take place. We must resist the half-conscious urge to make feelings and feints, interpretations and intimations, more important than the behaviors that call them into 'being.' We must stop reading entrails and issuing oracles.

In other words, the US did not send a signal of frustration; they simply expressed it, period. The metanarrative of signals and signs adds nothing but a layer of opaque, baroque ritual, obfuscating what actually transpired.

I want you to consider what it would mean to you, if you learned that a Jim Crow Party were potent and fashionable, and perhaps even ready to shake the political science of our country. Consider that before us stood the menace of a political movement organized upon a principle of subjugation and humiliation of an inferior or benighted class. How would you greet this? How would it strike your sensibility? Or consider what might be your reaction to the appearance of renewed apparatus of subversion, in certain ways analogous to the Communist infiltration of the early 20th century.

I want you to consider them amalgamated: an organized apparatus of subversion ordered toward the subjugation of a class of men.

This, friends, is the Jihad; and it is we who shall be subjugated. For the great honor of Islam is to extend equality to all men; and the great disgrace of the Jihad is to remove it utterly from those who reject the faith.

It is vital to understand the gravity of the situation. Now of course I know that all my friends here understand it perfectly well — else they would not have signed onto a statement of purpose so emphatic as ours. I feel confident, moreover, that even some of our dear right-Liberals, as Zippy long ago described them, are pretty well on-broad with our purpose. I have even discovered, in personal conversation, that indeed a number of flat-out Liberals are in the end sympathetic; in short that though they might bristle at the strictures I would apply to Liberalism, they could still be made to perceive the true threat of the Jihad. In these facts I find great reassurance and even pride. My countrymen, in considerable number and even despite other differences of real depth, are with me in opposition to the Jihad.

There is, in a manner of speaking, a board constituency for a formidable Anti-Jihad Coalition.

And so my question to readers is this: what sort of rhetorical, political, philosophical, even theological principles ought to comprise our strategy against this enemy?

Perhaps some readers will be conversant with a controversy, simmering beneath the surface of our mundane political discourse, concerning a hypothetical/proposed/aborning/fantastical North American Union, modeled after the European Economic Community and entailing similar economic, regulatory, administrative, and legal "harmonizations". The ostensible centerpiece of this union, a 'NAFTA superhighway' bisecting the continent, running from Mexican ports on the Pacific Ocean right through the American heartland to Canada, is said to exist in embryonic form in the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor, a colossal white-elephant boondoggle of the age of globalism. Left-wing and progressive political movements in Canada and Mexico perceive the high-level, international conferences, in which representatives of both government and business participate, as a nascent continental corporatocracy; right-wing populists in America, stinging from the obsession of the American establishment with mass immigration and a New Economy which benefits Wall Street, but not Main Street, perceive in these consultations a plutocratic subversion of national sovereignty. Of course, the principals of these proceedings, who often seem to adopt a "whatever it is, which we're not quite going to say, it isn't what you think it is" posture towards their critics, must exist under the clouds of left and right-populist suspicion arising from growing awareness of the profoundly unrepresentative character of the European Union.

Regardless of one's position on this discrete controversy, it would seem logical - yes? - given the manifest logic of globalization, to contemplate the prospects for deepening integration among the three North American nations. If globalization is what its proponents claim for it, then something akin to what the critics allege either is occurring, or will occur, or is likely to occur, with or without those international junkets for bureaucrats, executive branch appointees, and CEOs from richistan.

One can hardly go wrong with a Chesterton quote, so here is one that gets to the point concerning the phenomenon discussed in my previous post:

It is a negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be a negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one harem.

The autumn of 1994 I spent at Messiah College, in Grantham, PA. My family were moving at the time, both the business and the residence, and it seemed better for me to be near to home at such a time. One of my three roommates that semester was a Korean who had been adopted by a Texas family, spoke with a bit of an accent, wore cowboy boots, and chewed tobacco. He was also greatly enamored of the foreign policy writings of George Kennan, considered one of the architects of the policy of containment. This fondness provided fodder for the occasional conversation, and my expression of reservations concerning the judgment of a man who came to perceive in the specific character of American opposition to communism and the Soviet Union a greater threat to the commonweal than the often dissembling anti-anticommunism. Kennan feared the release of the simplifying, reductive passions of a nationalism that would, far from grasping the profounder, historical, geopolitical, and yes, spiritual dimensions of the standoff, construe it as a confrontation of rival ideologies. The Cold War was not merely a matter of geopolitical wrangling and foreign policy; it was a test of national character.

This, in my youth - I was but twenty years old at the time - I did not perceive. I had not yet learned to discriminate between the various tendencies and strands of the American character, to winnow the noble from the base, the prescient from the purblind, the prudent from the foolhardy. And so I thought that anticommunism was anticommunism, and that the imperative thing was that one have opposed communism, that specter of a godless, totalitarian collectivism, stamping on a human face in the name of the future.

The opposition of yours truly to a phenomenon variously described as 'economic centralization', 'globalization', 'managerial capitalism', and 'concentration' is perhaps a curiousity, a seemingly bizarre and incongruous outlier relative to the mainstream of conservative thought. At a minimum, this is the impression I often receive.

However, suppose I were to reformulate the questions posed by our own Steve Burton in a comment in an earlier thread.

Since at least the Enlightenment and perhaps before there has been this notion that our current state of affairs requires the justification of history; or else lacking that the present order is nothing and can be discarded. If injustices were perpetrated against the American Indians, the narrative goes, then the entire present order of private property in America is called into question. If the Hiroshima bombing was immoral, the narrative goes, then entering the war in the first place was unjustified, and indeed the American military and American efforts to defend herself from foreign aggressors is morally suspect generally. If the conditions for a just war were not met in Iraq at the outset, then no obligation to use military power in the present context is metaphysically possible.

Most on the political left and many on the political right buy into this narrative, taking it as true and drawing a conclusion about the major premise from a self-serving reverse-engineering of the proposition. The left likes the idea of invalidating the present regime of private property and of castrating American defense, so therefore the major historical premeses above are true. The right (correctly) resists those conclusions, and therefore (incorrectly) concludes that the major premeses are false. Many on the right conclude that simply agreeing to the major premeses above constitutes "liberalism", as if liberalism is inter alia implied by a particular assessment of the justice of specific historical acts.

It has been fascinating to watch the reevaluation of the virtues of more "organic," tribal society by those supporters of the war who not so many years ago believed that the Iraqis were not motivated by loyalty to "religion or tribe or whatever," but yearned to share in the bounty of modern alienation and freedom. Indeed, a few years ago the suggestion that Iraqis' tribal and sectarian loyalties would come to the fore, especially in a time of crisis, was met with disdain and not-so-veiled hints that the observer was a racist and a cultural relativist at the same time.

I returned home this evening in a state of righteous indignation, for, unlike Daniel Larison and Noah Millman, I am not disposed towards temperate responses to incandescent lunacy.

But then, while walking from the kitchen, I stepped on a one-inch wood staple that had somehow become flattened out, and it penetrated, just above the ball of my right foot, to a depth of half an inch, which left me more irritable than indignant. However, reacquainting myself with that incandescent lunacy has revived my spirits somewhat; and, considering the nature of that lunacy, how could it not?

Today we regard a Northerner circa 1855 who transported, housed, and concealed from authority a fugitive slave as a moral visionary, despite the fact that he was flouting the laws of his time. Is there any morally relevant distinction between that individual and someone today who smuggles a refugee from Zimbabwe into the United States, shelters him in his home, and helps him evade the immigration authorities? (snip) Mike Linksvayer likes to call this system “international apartheid,” and I think there’s a lot of merit to thinking about it in those terms. We regard it as barbaric when a society limits peoples’ economic and social opportunities based on a morally arbitrary characteristic like skin color, as South Africa did until the 1980s, and as the United States did until the 1960s. By and large, our laws no longer discriminate on the basis of race. But where you were born is of no greater moral relevance than the color of your skin. So if it’s wrong to consign someone to second-class citizenship based on skin color, why should we feel any more comfortable about forcing someone to live someplace horrible like Zimbabwe simply because that’s where he happens to have been born? (snip) We would consider it barbaric to permanently exile an American citizen to Zimbabwe, even if he was a hardened criminal. Yet most people don’t think twice about imposing the same penalty on someone from Zimbabwe, based solely on the fact that he had the misfortune of being born there. I’m having an awfully hard time coming up with a moral theory that could justify such a difference in treatment.

Apropos of two recent posts here at WWWtW, and in response to this characteristically unilluminating Will Wilkinson post, Daniel Larison highlights the non-discursive nature of Wilkinson's remarks:

My concluding points in these two cases (Two previous instances, linked in Daniel's piece, in which D.L. observes that Wilkinson is not really arguing anything - Maximos.) were to draw attention to the fact that the points of contention between Mr. Wilkinson and his interlocutors are not disagreements over anything like measurable practical benefits for the world’s poorest or anyone else. They are disagreements between libertarians such as Mr. Wilkinson and conservatives, because the two are sharply, seemingly irreconcilably at odds about basic values. He berates conservatives for privileging the interests of fellow citizens and countrymen (which he finds “morally abhorrent”), but beyond asserting that this act of privileging is wrong he does not give any persuasive reason why this should be so, except to fall back on his assumption that distinguishing between citizen and non-citizen is arbitrary and wrong.

Relatedly, Mr. Lee, incognizant of the follies of his previous post, has more or less done precisely what I said libertarians would do in my comments on Wilkinson, throwing in the hoary old libertarian shibboleth of 'denying social services to the masses of third-world utility-maximizers we are obligated to admit'. It is incumbent upon us to acknowledge that the willed imposition of such Dickensian conditions would be gravely immoral; albeit that denial would be the squaring of the circle - of the rights of Americans to maximize their utility and the rights of the third world migrants to maximize their utility - for the libertarian, for whom citizenship matters, except when it doesn't.

Libertarianism: applied autism.

One of the less edifying features of our current public discourse is the tendency to say "shut up!" by accusing someone of postulating moral equivalence between, say, ourselves and the terrorists who have attacked us.

Now it is doubtless true that many critics of the Administration's follow-up to 9-11 really are attempting to draw a moral equivalence, or even worse, to displace moral blame for the attacks from those who carried them out to someone else. Certainly that is a dominant theme on the political Left, and the "Truther" phenomenon is its natural manifestation. If we are morally to blame then we must be the ones who actually did it, a priori: no matter how much people try to cling to the idea that we are responsible for outcomes rather than for our own acts, nature reasserts herself. The "Truthers" are just being more consistent with the reality of how moral responsibility works than other factions of the "blame America first" mob.

[Note to the paleo Right: if you don't want to be like the Truther Left, then don't be like them. You can choose.]

An interesting discourse on the economics of globalization.

(HT: A Thinking Reed)

While touring the blogosphere rather aimlessly this morning, it seemed as though everything I read was destined to occasion aggravation. The first three articles I happened upon left me 0-for-3 in the reader-satisfaction department. At a suitable level of abstraction, there may even exist a common thread, perhaps something like, 'obliviousness to the obvious.'

The first item, Bradford Plumer's endorsement of a Sentencing Project critique of sentencing guidelines, contained this nugget of incomprehension:

The second striking bit comes when Mauer compares U.S. sentences with those abroad. Burglars now serve an average of 16.2 months in prison in the United States, compared with 5.3 months in Canada and 6.8 months in England.

Hegemonism, the attempt (it should be acknowledged at the outset that the ambitions of the hegemonist can never be fully achieved, save upon mountains of skulls) to provide for the security of one's own nation, not by defending her by means of a military deterrent, alliances, and geopolitical balancing, but by reducing, degrading, subverting, and subordinating other nations to one's own, reducing them to a state of vassalage, is not an expression of patriotism, but its negation. The contemporary conflation of hegemonist policies with a patriotic love of place and people is but one reflection of a profound moral disorder, an ideological deformation of loyalties and obligation that, by nature, are concrete and circumscribed, ethically and geographically.

Patriotism is an almost tangible thing, a love of a man for the very soil (I dare say that he will not call it dirt.) of his homeland; it is an instinctual attachment to the very specificities of his place in the world: its rivers, hills, plains, towns, villages, and irreducibly, the customs, traditions, mores, legends, histories, memories, heroes, villains, and articulated order that make of those natural features a human environment, and not mere physical things. Patriotism, then, is above all a virtue, a mode of piety: a veneration for a certain community of memory and history, a community, moreover, which is not to be confused with those presently living, but receives its very substance from those who now rest from their labours, and hopes to transmit that substance to posterity. Patriotism is a love of neighbour expressed as a democracy of the dead and the as-yet unborn. It is thus particularistic; the nature of the thing excludes the possibility of a universalist patriotism. To combine such terms, and to attempt thereby to conjure a complex meaning from their conjunction, is a fully absurd as to posit square circles.

Unaccountably and inexcusably, I missed James Poulos' response to my August argument (to be found towards the conclusion of the piece) that a man of the character and connections of Alexander Litvinenko (the former Russian intel agent who fell in with Boris Berezovsky and the Chechens, made outlandish and unsubstantiated allegations of Russian complicity in terrorist actions on Russian soil, and got himself whacked by Polonium-210 poisoning, for those keeping score) could reasonably expect to be whacked.

My argument, as quoted by Poulos, was that...

Someone must speak the Derbyshirean hard truth here, which is that someone who makes a name for himself as a defector and associate of a man loathed and wanted on criminal charges in Russia, and as a tacit apologist for the Chechen cause, just is liable to get whacked on someone's orders - or even by freelancers or rogues. Contrary to the idea that the Russian policy, whoever applied it in this case, was unduly concerned with one man, that policy was very much concerned with an entire nation: the pet causes of the West have no purchase in any corridors of power, because they are bad for Russia.

To which Poulos responded:

In the end the question is whether the onus is on a country -- Britain, which had just unwillingly hosted a high-profile, exceedingly clumsy, and distressingly inventive assassination -- to figure out precisely how 'official' of a killing it was, or whether, in fact, the onus is on the country -- Russia, from which both perpetrators and victim had come -- to deal with the fallout when the host country rebukes them for an all too useful lack of oversight.

Would the American foreign policy establishment be willing to jettison its geopolitically counterproductive and morally illicit hegemonism with respect to Russia, a hegemonism that not only ties our hands with respect to legitimate threats from disparate Islamic sources, but devalues the legitimate and instinctive patriotic sentiments of other peoples, Russians particularly, but not exclusively, in order to mitigate the Iranian threat? Hear Stratfor:

Via the U.N. Security Council, Russian cooperation can ensure Iran's diplomatic isolation. Russia's past cooperation on Iran's Bushehr nuclear power facility holds the possibility of a Kremlin condemnation of Iran's nuclear ambitions. A denial of Russian weapons transfers to Iran would hugely empower ongoing U.S. efforts to militarily curtail Iranian ambitions. Put simply, Russia has the ability to throw Iran under the American bus -- but it will not do it for free. In exchange, it wants those treaties amended in its favor, and it wants American deference on security questions in the former Soviet Union.

Russia could be encouraged to throw Iran under the American bus. But there is a price, and that price would entail the abandonment of hegemonism.

It isn't altruism or Christian charity or the desire to treat all men equally that fuels big business' backing of open immigration policies. Businessmen admit this in whispers among themselves all the time, and every now and then one of them lets it slip in public. Once in a great while one even has the -- I don't know if the word is 'audacity' or 'foolishness' - to propose a policy which makes this impossible to ignore.

I'll add that it isn't just the price-point of wages which incents business to support as much open immigration of unskilled labor as possible. It isn't as though there isn't enough unskilled labor right here, in the form of our own countrymen. It is just that in addition to being relatively more expensive than immigrant labor in terms of direct wages, these countrymen of ours are also - though one has to be delicate in how one says this, ironically in order to avoid a charge of racism for having the audacity to consider the possibility that our own countrymen are employable even though they are not white - objectively more difficult to employ, leading to greater expense and uncertainty, two things which American capitalism is designed to ruthlessly minimize.

In response to this, I should like to note three things.

First, it is entirely possible that Persian nationalism, in the event of a collapse of the Mullarchy, will require constraints, both by the nature of the case, and in virtue of the fact that, well, we're talking about Central Asia, the womb of horrors. The probability of this would decline, I think, in large part because a large plurality of Iranians have little sympathy for the Islamic regime and its more sanguinary aspirations. In any event, I believe that a nuclear Persia can be deterred. I don't foresee a new era of national martyrdom.

Second, whether one deems it sympathy or 'seeing things from the other guy's perspective', this habit of thought is integral to effective foreign policy-making. Absent this capacity, one cannot effectively anticipate the reactions of the Other, and absent such anticipations, one cannot assess prudentially the probable consequences of various courses of action. We have already witnessed the consequences of this purblind willfulness in Iraq: we will be greeted as liberators, and Iraqis care nothing for tribe, religion and whatever by comparison to Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy! In Persia, were we to somehow engineer or encourage a relatively peaceful transition from the Islamic Republic to.. something else (the Shah? - I cannot predict), we would be swiftly disappointed if we expected the Persians to accept American overlordship, quite apart from the factor of Islam. Their own patriotic sentiments would never permit it.

And that leads to the third point, which is that, for Persians, accession to the nuclear club is perceived as a badge of national honour, as well as a sign of regional status. Beyond that, Peak Oil is real, and if Americans really believe that Persians are going to accept "lights out!" as a legitimate option, merely because America says that Persian ambitions are unacceptable, whether Islamic or not, well, then Americans are nuts. This would represent a massive failure to understand and predict the reactions of the Other, a massive failure of prudential reason. And, off at the margins, is it even licit to compel another society to revert to premodernity, with all of what that would entail? I'd not like to see, let alone make, that argument.

Jeff has been taking some flack for his recent posts, so I think that I should to say a few things on the matter. The argument here is between those who think that the development of an Iranian bomb is absolutely and in all ways unacceptable and those who believe that, ideally undesirable as it is, it is a containable threat. Obviously, I don't accept the former view, and subscribe to the latter. Perhaps even to use the word "threat" concedes something that shouldn't be conceded, since it is actually quite implausible that Iran will be threatening the United States with any nuclear weapons that it might eventually acquire.

Francis Fukuyama, of End of History and the Last Man fame (or infamy, depending upon one's perspective), who has lately expressed second and third thoughts about neoconservatism, is making a great deal of sense where the global (im)balance of power and the temptations thereof are concerned:

But the fundamental problem remains the lopsided distribution of power in the international system. Any country in the same position as the US, even a democracy, would be tempted to exercise its hegemonic power with less and less restraint. America’s founding fathers were motivated by a similar belief that unchecked power, even when democratically legitimated, could be dangerous, which is why they created a constitutional system of internally separated powers to limit the executive.

Such a system does not exist on a global scale today, which may explain how America got into such trouble. A smoother international distribution of power, even in a global system that is less than fully democratic, would pose fewer temptations to abandon the prudent exercise of power.

Second, this is not - though doubtless some will desire to read it in such a manner - an indictment of the United States as uniquely or solely perfidious; it is merely an observation that the numerous fortuities and exceptions of American history do not extend to the realm of character and judgment, ethics and prudence, and that American statesmen (cough, cough) are subject to all of the frailties of human nature. No Constitutional system, exceptional historical pedigree, or ingenious political traditions can ever fully compensate for defects of character, judgment, and morals.

Third, note the reference to the American system of checks and balances.... And meditate upon the melancholy fact that that system has been debauched, ever further, for quite some time now in our history as a nation, such that the executive commands and receives deference never envisioned by the Framers, and exercises powers that those same Framers would have regarded as usurpative and deleterious to republicanism - and that these corruptions are often justified by appeal to the very exercises of hegemonic power that concern Fukuyama. A tight little circle has been established, wherein the exercise of hegemonic power is invoked to justify novel readings of the Constitutional tradition, and these latter deviations are justified by invocation of the "necessity" of hegemony. Heads, you get an empire, not a republic; and tails, you can't have a republic, but they'll give you an empire instead. Or, in other words, lousy foreign policy and Constitutional declension are integral to one another; they are two sides of one clipped coin.

...Just as pointless as the New Fusionism:

What Lindsay, who enthusiastically supported the Iraq war, doesn’t say—or isn’t quoted as saying—is that he hates Paul’s old right and quintessentially libertarian opposition to our foreign policy of global interventionism. Senor Lindsay and his fellow ”modern" libertarians have made their peace with the Empire. As long as they can take drugs, abort fetuses, and sodomize each other to their hearts’ content, he and his Beltway buddies have no problem with the US rampaging over half the earth, regime-changing and taking out “rogue” states at will. As long as it’s a “free market” empire, they’re all in favor of it. (Justin Raimondo, at Taki's Top Drawer.)

Update: It is worth noting that the Other New Fusionism has the advantage of coherence, which the New Fusionism simply lacks, inasmuch as the former combines a utilitarian/hedonist social ethic with a foreign policy utterly utilitarian in essence, wanting as it is for a moral warrant, while the latter attempts, vainly, to combine a substantive social ethic with that same foreign policy. At the meta-level, this is one reason why the social conservatives are not only dupes and suckers, often enough, but almost destined to witness the defeat of their ostensibly highest aspirations: their functional non-negotiables accept all the premises of their substantive adversaries. They have conceded 90% of the debate already.

...May be grasped in the following manner: They treat the question, "How could one be harmed by jihadists, if they and their sympathizers were not present in one's country?" as a sort of Zen koan. Instead of simply accepting the obvious point concerning immigration and subversion on the homefront, they assume that there must exist some hidden depths, and so they set out to derange their sense of reason - and to derange their hearers - by uncovering those hidden depths.

It could unfold, in Zen-fashion, like this.

The master learned in the way of Mahomet posed the question to his rebellious disciple, "How could a people be harmed by an adversary if their adversaries and sympathizers are absent from that people's land?"

The rebellious student returned to his quarters to meditate upon the question, using as aids the collected works of Harry Jaffa and Norman Podhoretz.

The following morning, he returned to the master and answered, "They could be harmed were their adversaries to suborn the treason of someone who would then allow a WMD to be smuggled through an American port."

And the master replied, "O stiff-necked and rebellious pseudo-disciple, were the adversaries to suborn treason, the traitors would be sympathizers. And how could the adversaries suborn treason if they were not even able to contact anyone from among the people? You are overthinking and deranging your reason. The depths lie in the surface. Meditate some more."

On and on this went, until finally, the miserable disciple said, "Master, I have solved the riddle, and the answer is this: the adversaries could harm the people by the fact of their absence, for in the case of such absence, the people would prove themselves as exclusionary and intolerant as their enemies. Discrimination is the greatest evil, the greatest harm, and the people would become like unto their adversaries. This would be their destruction."

Whereupon the master sent the disciple away, on the grounds that he was as yet too foolish to tread the path of wisdom, requiring the purgation of his rebellion before he could learn.

There are no obscure depths to the problem of the jihad and our response thereto; there are questions concerning certain details, but there are really no mysteries, because they do not have to be like us in order for us to be as safe as it is possible to be in this world from them. Moreover, they do not have to be among us, because nondiscrimination is merely the negation of the principle whereby any culture preserves itself as itself, and not a moral imperative in this regard. But instead of common sense, we get all sorts of folderol about "becoming like the terrorists", simply because we dislike the religious and cultural milieu from which they arise.

Neoconservatism: lowering our collective IQ.

Nat Hentoff on the, ahem, interesting Constitutional doctrine of Michael Mukasey:

In a 2004 article in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Mukasey argued that while the Constitution's first 10 amendments (the Bill of Rights) are noble, if you give constitutional prominence to these rights of individuals against the government, "then citizens will feel much less inclined to sacrifice in behalf of their government." (Sacrifice their individual liberties?) In that same article, he added, as the Bush administration also has with regard to these perilous times, that "at least in the first instance," citizens should give the government "the benefit of the doubt." (The most secretive government in our history?)

Georgetown Professor Patrick Deneen, objecting to the term "environment", on the grounds that it establishes an untenable dualism of man and the stuff of the physical world, which is then conceptualized as existing as the raw material of utilitarian pursuits, thereby begetting the political dualism according to which one is either for people or for the planet (or some part of it), writes:

It's worth reflecting on why we have so readily embraced the term "environment" but utterly eschew the word "nature." Nature, of course, is the "normative" term of Aristotelianism: it is a standard and represents a limitation. Humans are creatures of and in nature. We are subject to its laws and to its strictures. Nature is not separate from us; we are natural creatures (special ones - political animals - but animals nonetheless). To employ the word "nature" would mean a fundamental reconceptualization of the relationship of humans to the world with which we live. Rather than either extending human mastery over our "environment" or attempting to stamp out the contagion of humanity, to re-claim the language of nature would require us to change our fundamental conception of a proper way of living well. Living as conscious natural creatures in nature requires the careful negotiation between use and respect, alteration and recognition of limits to manipulation, and thus calls for the virtues of prudence and self-governance. Neither of these virtues are particularly valued in the "environmental" movement, whether that advanced by corporate America in the effort to continue our growth economy of itinerant vandals or the violent anti-humanism of radical environmentalists. Until we reacquaint ourselves with the language, and more importantly, the reality of nature, we will continue in our current condition of human-environmental dualism.

All theological language aside, the dichotomy between the virulent misanthropy of some environmentalists and the pave-and-industrialize everything (or at least regard-the-prospect-with-sanguinity) mentality of some conservatives is not merely philosophically dubious, but politically unfeasible, quite apart from the possible (probable) wrongheadedness of certain contemporary environmental policy nostrums. Conservatives could attempt to orient these sensibilities in virtuous directions, or they could yield to inertia, allowing the corporatists and haters of mankind to define the debate.

I'll not be making any wagers. It is not without reason that the conservative persuasion has been deemed the stupid one.

With the much ballyhooed "Rose Revolution" of 2003 spluttering onward to its (frankly foreordained) ignominious and inglorious denouement, it might be worthwhile, by means of a little study in contrasts, to examine the bottom line of that Eurasian Hegemony which is the grand object of American foreign policy. To consider, that it is say, the point where the truncheon meets the skull of the dissident.

To foreshorten a long story involving indigenous post-Soviet political corruption, State Department and Soros-funded NGOs, and the pipeline politics of Central Asia and the Caucasus, suffice it to say that November of 2003 witnessed Georgian parliamentary elections, in which the party of then-incumbent president Eduard Shevardnadze initially claimed victory. This result was contested, by means of alternative ballot counts and exit polls, media campaigns, and street demonstrations, by the opposition, unified, per United States direction, around the candidacy of Mikhail Saakashvili - himself an American-trained lawyer. In the intervening four years, Saakashvili has assumed the authoritarian mantle that so disenthralled Georgians and - superficially at least - the United States with this predecessor.

But this is only part of the story. The backstory is much more interesting than even this (at least for those of us with a strange fascination for the politics of the region).

It's taken me a little while to get around to blogging this myself. By this time it is no longer the hottest news. But I have to admit to being still astonished, still shaking my head.

As far as I know, this is a first: The National Right to Life Committee is officially endorsing a candidate who has recently (as in, last week) said that he doesn't think abortion should be illegal. Let that sink in for a minute.

"What is Iran? Iran is nothing but some mountains and some plains, some earth and some water. A true Muslim cannot love a country--any country. For his love is reserved only for his Creator. We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world."

The trouble, however, is that the quote appears to be utterly bogus. Taheri claims that the quote is found in a book published under the name of Khomeini (the title of which I've not be able to track down), except that library queries here and abroad return no books by that title. Neither do book dealers in Iran know anything of it. Searches of Khomeini's speeches, utterances, and fatwas likewise reveal nothing akin to the quotation.

Podhoretz does have another quotation in this vein, attributed to former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the wealthiest, most worldly men of the regime, which suggests that such inflammatory rhetoric is for public consumption, and not a statement of geopolitical first principles. Like Andrew Sullivan, from whose blog I learned of this little datum, however, I am not convinced that accurate attributions and rigorous prudential reasoning are of paramount importance to those calling for a new theatre in their Fourth World War.

Presented with only the minimalist observation that access to energy resources has long been a crucial component of American foreign policy, that the significance of this component is increasing under the combined pressures of globalization and development, stagnating or declining production, and the emergence of 'sovereign wealth' policies in certain major energy exporting nations, portending an epoch of decreased stability and more frequent military deployments, consider the following essay entitled, Preparing for a Life After Oil.

Some readers might discern a slight reductionist tendency in the analysis, but this ought not be permitted to occlude the reality that energy policy is a linchpin of the foreign policy consensus that unites Democrats and Republicans, whatever the fulminations of public rhetoric might seem to indicate. The comments section also 'has it all', running the gamut from cranky lefties to intemperate exchanges over abiotic oil theory.

(HT: Patrick Deneen.)

I've done very little thinking about health care policy. I realize that it is important, but every time I've attempted to think about it I've just glazed over. It isn't even that it is intrinsically uninteresting: as a key human concern in the modern world where technology, morality, life and death come together I am hard pressed to think of another subject that objectively ought to be more interesting.

But I haven't thought about it much.

Nevertheless it is a subject of enough importance that you can't help but encounter it periodically if you regularly read blogs with political and social content. And it seems to me that there are any number of quite distinct things which are entangled together in discussions about health care.

One thing to realize is that on average insurance is a lousy deal, on purpose, and that is a good thing. Much like Las Vegas and Atlantic City, it is designed to be a lousy deal on average. That is pretty much its central point. The risks insurance cover are small in probability, but large in terms of financial (and other) consequences. So when we buy insurance we intentionally pay more than we are statistically likely to pay if we didn't buy insurance; but we are protected against catastrophic loss. That is pretty much the whole point to it: when we buy insurance we are betting against the house and hoping to lose. And it is worth it.

You can find it here.

(Full disclosure: Hunter, who is presently Director of Strategic Planning at Houston Baptist University, was my grad assistant at Baylor for two years [2003-05], and will be graduating with his PhD in religion, politics & society on December 15).

I cannot hope to approach the aptness of Srdja Trifkovic's own title, Kosovo as a Symbol of Anti-Postmodernism, and so I have not tried. Nevertheless, the essay is a masterful summation of the significance this little piece of Balkan territory holds in the not-so-playful scheme of signifiers regnant in the West. Selected excerpts follow.

Blissfully unaware of the cultural tectonic shift that has taken place in “the West,” many Serbian political leaders, analysts and institutions in their contacts with the Western elite class keep invoking four sets of arguments in support of their position that Kosovo ought to remain part of Serbia:
1. Historical: Kosovo was the heartland of the Serbian medieval state;
2. Cultural: in Kosovo there are many priceless monuments of Serbian art and architecture that define Serbia’s contribution to the common European heritage;
3. Spiritual: Kosovo is “Serbia’s Jerusalem”;
4. Civilizational: Kosovo should not fall to the insurgent jihad.

Not that American politicians are likely to take notice - to do so would be to indulge in nativism, or worse - notwithstanding the present saliency of the illegal immigration question. For, you must understand, it is one thing to take cognizance of the deleterious effects of illegal immigration - though even this is fraught with innumerable pitfalls of wrongthought - and quite another to notice that even legal immigration may alter the political and culture landscape in ways undesirable to the natives. Why, nations are arbitary constructs, mere temporary congealments of transient market relations, or invidious attempts to exclude and oppress The Other. What right have the 'natives' -a meaningless term, anyway - to keep something - which is nothing, really - to themselves? The audacity!

Not that American politicians are likely to notice then, that demographic change married to ethnic politicking has resulted in the ouster of John Howard, former Australian Prime Minister and Friend of Bush. After all, the dominant liberal world-picture cultivates habits of blindness, reality, including correlations between ethnicity and culture, or ethnicity and political proclivities, being a blasphemy against the solemn dignity of the Idea.

It was inevitable that, with the vaulting of Mike Huckabee into the top tier of GOP presidential contenders, the rhetorical knives would be drawn. Huckabee was never one of the anointed candidates of the GOP establishment, and espouses a version of the now-discredited "Compassionate Conservatism" that has proven so disastrous under Bush; beyond that, there are the facts that several of his announced policy positions alienate key factions within the GOP establishment, that he was rather liberal and imprudent in granting clemency to ne'er-do-wells, and that he demonized - prior to his recent 'conversion' to the cause of immigration reform - advocates of immigration enforcement as hard-hearted bigots acting contrary to the highest ethical dogmas of Christianity.

There is more to the matter, though, than this. There is also the GOP's very own dialect of class warfare.

Recent developments in the Republican presidential campaign have afforded the establishment right the opportunity to articulate its vision of order within the conservative movement, occasioning the curious spectacle of a movement which has played the people-against-the-elites card for generations suddenly lauding expertise, credentials, and the cultivated minority. There is, of course, a place for such things in any conservatism worthy of the name; the crucial things are that the elites and their substantive traditions be identified correctly, and that corrupt, false, and degraded pretenders to authority be exposed. One does not read Babbit, Weaver, or Kirk and develop a leveling sensibility; neither, though, does one acquire a sense that the characteristic modern forms of authority, being invested in value-neutral technique, are legitimate.

National Review, however, has recently telegraphed that, perhaps, that most venerable of traditional authorities is no longer quite so welcome as it once was.

I have been stricken speechless by the following textbook excerpt concerning the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq:

This is directly out of my 6th grade sister's history book. (And she has a test over it tomorrow.) "At the beginning of the twenty-first century, terrorism became a major threat to world peace. In 2003, U.S. military forces invaded Iraq. They were sent to prevent Iraq from using chemical and biological weapons. ... The United States has protected innocent civilians or helped bring peace to a war-torn region."

People, Places and Change: An Introduction to World Studies
Holt, Rinehart and Winston
page 103 (From Ryan Hainlen, posted by Karen DeCoster over at
Lew Rockwell's
site.

Unbelievable.

Srdja Trifkovic has posted another excellent commentary on the most recent American machinations towards the establishment of an independent Kosovo, another jihadist narco-state lying in the soft underbelly of Europe. Concerning the possible Serbian response to an American-supported unilateral declaration of independence - a blockade, suspension of diplomatic relations with the conspiring nations, and a possible forcible partition of the Serbian enclaves, with a retention of sovereign claims over the remainder - Trifkovic writes:

Serbia’s response will have a limited impact on the countries outside the region, but that will not be the end of the story. Russia, China and India, and dozens of Asian and African countries with secessionist problems—including South Africa and the most populous predominantly Muslim country, Indonesia—will deem the move illegal and invalid. The theory that outside powers can award part of a state’s sovereign territory to a violent ethnic or religious minority, only if that minority is able to provoke a violent government response and secure a “humanitarian” intervention from abroad, would put in question the borders of at least two-dozen states.

First, a more methodological point concerning skepticism of contemporary capitalism and the power exercised by its characteristic entities, courtesy of Stratfor's analysis of the Chinese acquisition of a $5 billion stake in Morgan Stanley:

The purchase of $5 billion stake in Morgan Stanley by China's new sovereign fund, the China Investment Corp., was announced Dec. 19. This is the third strategic linkup with an influential U.S. financial major in exchange for an infusion of Chinese cash and mainland business opportunities. The U.S. Congress typically kicks up a fuss each time a Chinese or other foreign company bids for a strategic U.S. asset, but so far not for U.S. banks. Since financial services companies wield significant economic and geopolitical power,(emphasis mine) it probably is only a matter of time before Congress speaks up about such purchases.

...the U.S. banking lobby has a very sophisticated and successful lobbying presence in Washington. It is active in Congress and with regulatory agencies such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., where it works to reduce regulatory burdens for the U.S. finance industry. The lobby's influence is clearly seen in the shaping of the federal government response to rising foreclosures on subprime mortgages.

Ultimately, however, U.S. oil and financial services companies both wield significant economic and geopolitical power.(emphasis mine) So it is only a matter of time, most likely within the next year, before Congress picks up the theme of these huge foreign acquisitions in America's most successful finance players.

And it's not me saying this; it's an outfit the accuracy of which influential people rely upon for decisionmaking purposes.

Wither the Republican party in the aftermath of the Iowa caucuses? The party mandarins are aghast at the success of Huckabee, and talk radio personalities are excoriating their own listeners, on the grounds that, by supporting Huckabee, they have ceased to actually vote conservatively. While I am not predisposed to political prognostication, I believe that it would be instructive to spend a few moments analyzing the background to this apoplectic reaction to moderate doses of quite possibly toothless - as I have argued previously - populism. The issues implicated in the controversy, though superficially insubstantial (Huckabee appears to be a compassionate conservative in the mould of Bush, his deviations from GOP orthodoxy are marginal matters of emphasis in most instances, and those rhetorical tropes which have drawn criticism are too slight to merit the weight of the opprobrium they have elicited.), have precipitated a tipping of hands on the part of the custodians of Republican orthodoxy.

Consider the following contributions to National Review's Symposium on the Iowa Caucuses:

According to the Club for Growth, Huckabee takes “profoundly anti-growth positions on taxes, spending, and government regulation.” For Huckabee to succeed where Robertson and Buchanan failed, one of two things must happen. Either he must mislead GOP voters into thinking that he is an economic conservative, or those voters must stop caring. Either way, a Huckabee victory would be very bad news for conservatism as we know it. (John J. Pitney, Jr.)

Huckabee is a fringe Republican, and does not represent the conservative movement on economic policy, domestic programs, law and order, and foreign policy. It is hard to imagine a candidate so out of step with most in the conservative movement assuming the stage in Minnesota in eight months as its leader. (Pat Toomey, of the Club for Growth)

From last night's debate:

Translation: Hillary Clinton has remained the same unchanging agent of change since 1973.

Treating people as things is where most evil starts, and employees are real people not things. As real people employees have human natures, and human nature isn't Kantian universalism or Nietzschean will-to-power or whatever: human nature is social, human beings are raised by mothers and fathers in families, and not everyone is a father at all let alone is everyone equally a father all at the same time. To hire a father is to hire a person who has primary responsibility for materially providing for his family; such a hiring is a different kind of thing from hiring a teenager to mow the lawn or hiring an older mother with an empty nest looking for some extra cash to spend on the grandkids.

Employment as an institution which treats a father of five as a fungible productivity unit equivalent to a bachelor, or a single woman, or even a wife and mother, is a deliberate institutionalization of inhumanity. Deliberate institutionalization of inhumanity is a moral evil, so the institutionalization of equal pay for equal work is immoral.

That doesn't imply that in every case a woman should make less money than a man, or any such risible extrapolation. It doesn't mean that a family-man slacker should draw more pay than a diligent spinster. Human beings being what they are, exceptional circumstances are common and varied, judgement of individual circumstances is always required, and few things are more inhuman than "zero tolerance" categorical rules about the nuts and bolts of everyday life as actually lived.

But as some kind of categorical employment imperative backed by the force of law, the concept of equal pay for equal work is fundamentally inhuman and immoral. There is a basic difference between treating people as human beings with inherent dignity and treating them as interchangeable fungible productivity units, despite how amusing it is to say "fungible productivity unit".

I understand the objections: it is presently illegal to hire and set pay based on marital status and children, it is difficult to get employers to do the right thing, if fathers are morally entitled to greater pay - a living wage - than those who do not have the garnering of a living wage as their natural duty, well, capitalism as presently consitituted is going to lock fathers out of the workplace, fragment jobs into contract work and piecemeal jobs, and hire the cheapest workers. I get all that.

So much the worse for how things are presently constituted.

(Note: Linked Website Contains Profanity)

While there is some justice to the observation that Chesterton romanticized the medieval peasantry - though even this observation can be, and has been, overstated - the notion that economic decentralization and its logical correlate, political decentralization, (whether one wishes to refer to this as old-fashioned American federalism, or, more philosophically, subsidiarity) are exercises in wild-eyed, Jacobinical romanticism is - to put a blunt point on the matter - nonsensical. While I've scant interest in unfolding a lengthy disquisition on the inviability of proposed energy alternatives, suffice it to state that the beginning of the end of the Era of Cheap Energy, with all that cheap energy has made possible, is nigh upon us, if it has not yet dawned. Globalization itself, though it manifestly presupposes cheap energy, promises a steady increase in the costs of energy, and has already occasioned the weakening of Big Oil as a geopolitical force; declining reserves, and the strategic nature of such resources, have precipitated a renewed movement to declare such resources 'strategic', and to shepherd them as forms of sovereign wealth, as opposed to commodities to be auctioned off to multinationals. Even, that is to state, if Peak Oil has not yet come to pass - though it must, in time, if it has not already - there will be exerted a steady upward pressure on energy prices; recessions may develop, but the economies of the world are predicated upon ceaseless expansion, meaning that anything necessary will be undertaken to stimulate Growth, that god of the age. And Growth demands energy; and energy is finite, and certainly only renewable at levels far below the plenitude to which we have become accustomed, and on the presupposition of which our societies constructed.

Herewith, therefore, James Kunstler on the absurdity of our growth-economy and its consequences:

A reader sent me a passle of recent clippings last week from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It contained one story after another about the perceived need to build more highways in order to maintain "economic growth" (and incidentally about the "foolishness" of public transit). I understood that to mean the need to keep the suburban development system going, since that has been the real main source of the Sunbelt's prosperity the past 60-odd years. They cannot imagine an economy that is based on anything besides new subdivisions, freeway extensions, new car sales, and Nascar spectacles. The Sunbelt, therefore, will be ground-zero for all the disappointment emanating from this cultural disaster, and probably also ground-zero for the political mischief that will ensue from lost fortunes and crushed hopes.

Update: Apparently Gov. Huckabee changed his mind two days ago on the smoking ban. (HT: M.Z. Forrest in the combox)

This just in: (HT: Crunchy Cons)

"You don't like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag," Huckabee said at a Myrtle Beach campaign event. "In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell them what to do with the pole, that's what we'd do."

Later, in Florence, he repeated the remarks. "I know what would happen if somebody comes to my state in Arkansas and tells us what to do, it doesn't matter what it is, tell us how to run our schools, tell us how to raise our kids, tell us what to do with our flag — you want to come tell us what to do with the flag, we'd tell them what to do with the pole."

In August 2007, Governor Huckabee said he supported a nationwide smoking ban. Juxtaposing these two commitments, what would Huckabee do with someone who wants to smoke tobacco rolled in the Confederate Flag?

One exhibit among many in such an inquest might be James Bowman's American Spectator essay lambasting John McCain as a man lacking in the loyalty department. While I'm scarcely a fan of John McCain, the ambitious politician, questioning his loyalty and, by necessary implication, as loyalty is a component of honour, his integrity as well, strikes me as desperate and desperately misguided.

In context, the accusation is even worse:

But there are other parts of his record that bring him closer to the news media and (not, of course, coincidentally) the Democratic Party's presidential candidates in his understanding of honor. For such people, as Mr. Stephens says, "if it means anything at all to them, it seems to be mainly in the sense of the good opinion of America's traditional friends, many of whom opposed the Iraq venture from the start."

As an example, I would mention the countenance and the credibility that the senator's animadversions on "torture" by the Bush administration give to America's enemies, for whom the t-word is an invaluable propaganda tool. An essential element of honor has always been loyalty, and loyalty has never been Senator McCain's strongest suit. Rather, he has always been proud of being a "maverick" -- a man who likes to be thought of as one whose friends and comrades are less important to him than his own exquisite conscience.

In recent weeks, observers of left and right have been expressing great consternation over the increasing penetration of American capitalism by foreign sovereign wealth funds, which in a few notable instances, have ridden to the rescue of American financial institutions enfeebled by various exotic forms of speculation, which, for that matter, ought to be distinguished from responsible investing. A partial tally, given by Andrew Leonard in a piece in Salon, reads as follows:

# Citigroup: $7.5 billion from Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and $6.88 billion from Government Investment Corp. of Singapore.

# Morgan Stanley: $5 billion from China Investment Corp.

# Merrill-Lynch: $5 billion from Singapore's Temasek Holdings, $6.5 from Kuwait Investment Authority, $2 billion from Korean Investment Corp.

# Bear Stearns: $1 billion from China Investment Corp.

# UBS: $10 billion from the Government Investment Corp. of Singapore.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say freer markets lost the day. The root of Wall Street's woes leads back directly to their own strategic missteps, greed, speculation-run-amok, and lack of appropriate supervision. The brightest minds in finance had exactly what they wanted, a playground where the monitors were looking the other way, and they blew it. When the China Investment Corp. pumps in $5 billion to Morgan Stanley, we are not witnessing the triumph of state capitalism, but rather, the embarrassing, humiliating failure of Reagan-Thatcher style unregulated capitalism. So now the U.S. buys Chinese toys at Wal-Mart, and China uses the resulting cash to buy American banks. Hey, anything's fair in love and war and free markets.

After weighing many considerations, I've decided to support Senator John McCain for President of the United States. Although I was leaning towards Governor Mitt Romney (see my First Things blog piece on the Romney candidacy here), I have become convinced that in a general election Senator McCain stands a better chance of defeating either Senator Hillary Clinton or Senator Barack Obama. An Obama v. Romney general election, in my opinion, would be disastrous for the Republican Party's future with the African-American community: it would pit the winsome, intelligent, and quick on his feet Senator Obama, an African-American, against the successful and intelligent, though robotic, Governor Romney, whose church had prohibited blacks from holding its priesthood until 1978. I know that that is deeply unfair to the former Massachusetts governor, whose personal and professional record on civil rights is impeccable. It is also unfair to the millions of Latter-Day Saints around the world, many of whom are people of color. But, whether we like it or not, that's the reality of our political culture and the sort of onslaught that Governor Romney and the Republican Party should expect to face if there is an Obama v. Romney presidential contest, IMHO.

My other reasons for supporting McCain are largely reflected in the arguments found in the National Review Online articles by Notre Dame law professor, Gerard Bradley, and Susan B. Anthony List treasurer, Frank Cannon.

Via Rod Dreher, Charlie Savage's latest report on the Bush administration's imperial fetish for signing statements. Apparently, The Decider felt that the strictures of the latest defense authorization act (or whatever term is used to designate those things) impugned the sovereign majesty of his office, and so issued the now de rigeur signing statements expressing his own judgment as to the permissible contours of the law. Law, despite what one may believe - and I pause to note Willmoore Kendall's position that the Constitution creates a system of legislative supremacy, if only the Congress would use it - only becomes law when the executive deems it law. It is the universalization and inversion of Carl Schmidt's theory of sovereignty: no longer is the sovereign he who decides upon the exception, the unusual, chaotic disruption of normal politics; instead, sovereign is he who decides that anything can be an exception - and gets away with it.

Rod writes:

Specifically, Bush has said he won't be bound by provisions in the Defense bill he signed forbidding the expenditure of funds to build permanent bases in Iraq. He also said he won't be bound by Congress's direction that the US is not to control Iraq's oil. Moreover, he has reserved the right not to act on other provisions of the law that would mandate establishing a commission to investigate waste, fraud and abuse in military contracts, as well as another to strengthen whistle-blower protection. Finally, he reserves the right to decide whether or not he's going to enforce a requirement that the president explain in writing when intelligence agencies refuse to provide documents to the two armed services committees in Congress.

I know that it might be said that my comments are uncharitable and offered in a derisive tone. To this, all I can state is that I'd owe charity to a president, but not a quasi-emperor, of whose pretensions I can only speak derisively.

Patrick Deneen has posted an intriguing analysis of the walk-away culture emerging in the wreckage of the collapse of the mortgage debt pyramid. Referencing this article on the new business of 'walking away', which discusses the rising trend and summarizes the animating ethos thusly:

If banks can make "business decisions" to ignore risks, to lend money with no down payment, and fire people at at the first sign of trouble without any remorse, why shouldn't consumers be able to do the same?

Perhaps during the Pope's U. S. visit in April Obama will buy airtime and announce that he plans to eradicate original sin.

Obama's message: I will end the politics of division by attractively stipulating the correctness of my views and thus implying that those who don't agree are ugly and want to perpetuate the politics of division. It's a version of what I labeled several years ago as the "passive aggressive tyranny trick."

According to Noemie Emery, in a brief but muddled piece over at The Weekly Standard, it seems that “the ideological right is filled with a vast, free-floating fury that can't find a target upon which to dump all this ire,” because . . . well, basically because some of us are still suspicious of McCain.

It is a bizarre polemic which, in order to appeal for unity behind a shaky candidate, calls upon hackneyed Leftist smears to disparage whole chunks of that candidate’s party. Thanks for that. Thanks, also, for the rehearsal of exactly the same tissue of mendacities and ill will that greeted Reagan and the 1994 Revolution from our beloved Liberals. Angry irrational bigots, those Reagan and Gingrich voters: cretins and fire-eaters and coddlers of fascists — how many times have we heard this innuendo from the Left?

Well it rings even more hollow and false from someone on the Right.

As my friend Leon Wolf noted, Ms. Emery once announced that she would sooner vote for Joe Lieberman than Sam Brownback; now she presumes to lecture Conservatives on what Republican unity should look like — and even hauls poor Sam Brownback into the train of her shoddy argument!

The answer to this is really quite simple: This is the primary season; McCain has a commanding lead, but he is not yet the assured nominee; there is no inherent dishonor or disloyalty in still opposing him, voting against him, even working for his defeat. I repeat: we are talking about the GOP primary race. This is precisely the time to hash this stuff out.

Most of this pack of bigots possessed by “vast, free-floating fury,” looking for a sensitive soul like Johnny Mac upon which to “dump all [its] ire” — a group which those of us less agitated and embittered call “Conservatives” — will certainly come around and support McCain in November. You know that. I know that. Even Ms. Emery probably knows that.

There is no question but that the air is filled with hyperbole. Tension, excitement and genuine uncertainty tend to invite that. But few things are more dispiriting, and more suggestive of a fundamental pettiness, than the spectacle of right-wingers opportunistically embracing some of the worst rhetorical conceits of the Left.

I want, at some level beneath that at which my conscious political reasoning occurs, to like John McCain - to like him in the sense that I could support his candidacy, or at least reconcile myself to it. His personal narrative is compelling, though I might admit to being tired of hearing about events which lost their salience before I entered primary school. His opposition to the attempts of the Bush administration to normalize torture as an element of American policy is heroic. Even the idea of the much-reviled campaign-finance-reform legislation holds its appeal for me. In execution, the legislation has been an abomination, so much so that one suspects that the stated intentions were merely a noble lie cloaking the actual intentions; but the idea of draining the DC swamps of the corrupting influence of various malefactors of wealth - well, that's a wonderful idea, if it entails shutting down K Street, and eliminating the corrupt and corrupting revolving door between business, lobbying, and government work. I'll give McCain begrudging credit for the idea, at least.

I find, however, that my opposition to McCain's candidacy becomes more profound by the day. I can state, of a certainty, as I once stated of Guiliani, that I will not vote for McCain, even if a gun is placed to my temple - be it the metaphorical gun of "the terrorists are coming!" or a literal gun.

That oleaginous, unctious, self-serving discredit to evangelicals everywhere, Michael Gerson, has unburdened himself of a panegyric to John McCain, in the process hymning McCain's fidelity to the cause of mass immigration. It's compassionate; it's mean to oppose it, and so forth.

James Poulos takes umbrage at Gerson's rhetorical transgressions, and progresses to the heart of the problem with Gersonism:

The big problem with Gerson’s ‘moral internationalism’ is not that it has a big heart or a goofy smile. The big problem is that it’s inimical to citizenship. Gerson and his ilk long for the day that Americans don’t get a better shake in life just because they’re Americans. The moral outrage aimed at people against amnesty would, I guarantee you, magically rematerialize if amnesty were granted and the border sealed. All those excluded people! Moral internationalism, at Gersonian levels, is dedicated to the notion that politics is, at best, an imperfect means to a perfect end, and, at worst, an impediment. But, ironically, in believing that citizenship is only good insofar as it secures access to moral goods, moral internationalists fail to understand that exclusive citizenship is a moral good in and of itself. Because, among other reasons, when citizenship becomes meaningless, political rule still somehow thrives, and commodious living grows perilously contingent when political liberty dies.

So, in answer to Will Wilkinson in Poulos' comments, yes Americans ought to get a better shake in life from other Americans; the abstract form in which Wilkinson poses the question is literally meaningless, since it evacuates the context of subjects and agency. The logical implication of Gersonism and libertarianism (as Wilkinson understands it) is simply that nations ought not to exist, on moral grounds. And that returns us to Poulos' point about 'commodious living', a phrase which sounds a little Hobbesian to me, but, well, never mind: the likliest alternatives to citizenship arrangements in nation-states run the gamut from bureaucratic empires on the EU paradigm to a world in which many of the privileges and immunities once attached to citizenship are transferred to economic entities. The corporate expense account and employee's handbook as charter of liberties. Libertarianism and compassionate conservatism: recreating feudalism for the postmodern age.

This is very sad.

One of the more pestilential elements of the atmosphere of modernity is a tendency to substitute for the actualities of things - for example, the concrete society into which one was born, say, the ancien regime - fantasies, phantasms, and illusions that faintly resemble those realities, but are, in reality, utopias - no-places. This aspect of modernity can manifest itself in virtually any corner of the human experience, though the specifically political seems to exert an especial attraction. Nevertheless, the tendency toward abstraction and fantasy can deform any discipline or practice, even those that are ostensibly tethered to quantifiable realities. And while the consequences may not be as sanguinary as those of the overtly political ideologies, they are no less real.

Why? There are two reasons: (1) I want to cooperate in the defeat of Hillary Clinton; (2) I think Barack Obama will be a weaker general election candidate in a race against John McCain, who I am supporting. The second reason may appear at the present counterintuitive, for Obama's rock star status seems almost transcendent. But I don't believe it will last. Obama's weaknesses will be isolated and amplified in a general election campaign in which his opponent will not be restrained or intimidated by the identity-politics land mines that permeate the road to the Democratic nomination.

So, I encourage all Texas independents and Republicans to cross-over and vote for Senator Obama.

fake christians
by luvnews
In this amazing interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, the retired NBA all-star, Charles Barkley, opines on politics, calling conservatives "fake Christians." Once nicknamed the "round mound of rebound," Sir Charles says of these Christians that "they are not supposed to judge other people, but they are the most hypocritical judge of people we have in this country." After announcing that he is prochoice and pro-gay marriage, he promises to run for governor of Alabama in 2014. He would have a much better chance running for the Pope of Greenwich Village (see here).

I can scarcely imagine such a short appearing on American television, and that for a variety of reasons, none of which reflect well on this side of the pond. Via John Medaille.

So weary, in fact, that I'm not going to vex both myself and any readers by dredging up the countless essays Andrew McCarthy, Glenn Greenwald, and others have written on the subject. Those interested in familiarizing themselves with the contours of the debate will know where to find them.

I am surfeited with the cloying antics of the actors in this kabuki theater because, to a certain degree, the entire debate is an exercise in missing the point. The old FISA act has become cumbersome owing to advances in communications technology, resulting, among other things, in the transcendent absurdity that the law technically requires a warrant for surveillance of a call placed by jihadist A in Pakistan to jihadist B in Lebanon, if for some reason the call happens to be routed through the United States. This, however, is a comparatively minor issue, and everyone concurs on the necessity of a legal remedy. The real action is taking place in the debates over the surveillance powers the executive branch and its apologists assert are necessary to the safety and security of the American people, and the integrity of intelligence gathering itself. The surveillance, it is said, must be warrantless, at least until it is expedient to secure ex post facto legitimation, and companies complicit in the violation of the existing law must be immunized for those actions. Yawn.

If one were to distill this controversy down to its essentials, the respective positions would hold that, on the one hand, telecommunications technology is now wireless, mobile, and disposable, and that legions of jihadists are even now among us, conspiring to bring about our demise, and, on the other, that the threat has been exaggerated, and that the powers asserted by the executive threaten constitutional protections and immunities. It would seem that, in response to this issue of great import, the establishment is inclined to cede such powers to the executive, although the obstreperous remain opposed.

It may be surmised that this legitimate complaint about bloat in the Army's officer corps is not solely about a disproportionate ratio of officers to enlisted men -

In most armies, there are about seven officers to 100 enlisted men, or an officer-to-enlisted ratio of 7 percent (as low as 5 percent in the German army of World War II). In the U.S. Army today, that ratio stands at more than 15 percent (19 percent by some calculations).

In fact, it is not too much to say that there is a fight going on for the soul of the Army today, between the old guard of the Big Army, fighting budget battles to preserve expensive and only marginally useful programs such as the Future Combat System, who see the future of the Army revolving around major conventional wars; and the Small Army of bright young company, battalion, and even brigade commanders, who understand that most of our future wars will look a lot more like Iraq, and who are developing the skills, tactics and equipment to fight them.

You may split your sides, convulsing in derisive laughter at this example of unself-conscious feminist bathos.

Tackiness aside, there is something sweet and sincere about it. It was probably put together by a nice middle-aged white lady after she finished putting up some felt banners at church.

The Albanian rump state in the Serbian secessionist province of Kosovo, in reality nothing more than a satrapy of the European Union, on Sunday declared unilateral independence via a declaration likely composed by apparatchiks at our own State Department. The news scarcely came as a surprise to me, inasmuch as Western policy has not only been fixed, but has tended to exhibit a peculiar inertia; even policies obviously deleterious to the medium and long-term interests of the West, policies worse even than crimes - mistakes, in the words of Srdja Trifkovic - will be persisted in, perhaps precisely because of their very perversity. Such is the cause of independence for the Albanians of Kosovo, a territory which is kept from the roster of failed states solely by the presence of NATO forces and American and EU diplomatic functionaries, who provide the modicum of stability that the Kosovo Liberation Army, a band of brigands and terrorists, could never provide. The sordid reality of Kosovo is that of a mafia state ridden through with jihadists, flesh merchants, gun smugglers, drug runners, and irredentists nostalgic for the halcyon days of the Ottoman Empire, when Albanian and Bosnian Muslims were the local jackboots trampling the necks of Balkan Christians - all right under the noses of NATO and the EU. In point of fact, given that the ostensible rationale for the illegal intervention in 1999 was the prevention of ethnic cleansing, and given that Western security forces simply looked the other way as their wards largely cleansed the province of its Serbian population, a longstanding ambition of the local Albanians, one might be forgiven for speculating that these seemingly negative aspects of the situation are features, and not bugs, for America and the EU.

However, let us take a few steps back from the exigencies of the situation, which, with the massive street demonstrations in Serbia against the declaration and the Western endorsement thereof, has now escalated to an attack on the American embassy in Belgrade.

Nathan Origer has posted what is, to my mind, an interesting comment in an older thread on Kosovo as a symbol of postmodern geopolitics:

If, in fact, cultural attachment serves as a justifiable defense of keeping Kosovo attached to Serbia, as Serbians attest, ought not we to contemplate that, prior to Serbian conquest of the land (which occurred rather later than the third century, as Uros asserts), present-day Kosovo, then Dardania, remained a stronghold of the Illryian peoples who, additional to provide some of the ancestry of our Southern Slavic friends, likely are the primary ancestors of the Albanians, including those of Kosovo, and, thus, that, particularly because the Albanian Kosovars make up a super-majority of the population of their new state, these modern-day Illyrians, Muslim or Catholic, deserve just as much as the Illyro-Slavic Serbs (who, of course, identify as Southern Slavs, rather than Illyro-Slavs as I have, perhaps unnecessarily, dubbed them) to control their ancient homeland?

John Zmirak on 'tenured fascists', a satire that works on multiple levels. Do yourself a favour, and go read it.

William F. Buckley, founder of National Review, man of letters, and an outsized influence upon Postwar conservatism in America, has died:

I’m devastated to report that our dear friend, mentor, leader, and founder William F. Buckley Jr., died this morning in his study in Stamford, Connecticut.

He died while at work; if he had been given a choice on how to depart this world, I suspect that would have been exactly it. At home, still devoted to the war of ideas.

As you might expect, we’ll have much more to say here and in NR in the coming days and weeks and months. For now: Thank you, Bill. God bless you, now with your dear Pat. Our deepest condolences to Christopher and the rest of the Buckley family. And our fervent prayer that we continue to do WFB’s life’s work justice.

I propose, simply, to expose what I regard as an extraordinarily irresponsible educational attitude that, under the protective label 'academic freedom,' has produced one of the most extraordinary incongruities of our time: the institution that derives its moral and financial support from Christian individualists and then addresses itself to the task of persuading the sons of these supporters to be atheistic socialists.

The famous exchange, in which Vidal clearly went trolling for what Buckley threatened, in my opinion. It is also worth noting that even the deterioration of the exchange exhibits a higher degree of cultivation than virtually anything one finds on our contemporary 'talking heads' programs, with the exception of the BBC's Hard Talk.

I hope that I may be forgiven yet another post concerning William F. Buckley, but I cannot offer effective resistance to the temptation. Many eloquent and affecting remembrances have been published today, and as I have not had the experience of employment in the offices of some conservative publication or other, I am irresistibly drawn to the testimonials of those who have had that experience.

My acquaintance with Buckley's writing, and National review, dates to the Autumn of 1991, a time when, perhaps, NR was no longer what it once was, though even then echoes of that storied past could still be heard. My father, an old-school conservative, noticing my developing interest in politics proper, and thinking it better that I read the political reporting in a conservative publication instead of Newsweek, took me to a newsstand and purchased me a copy of NR. My father had been a subscriber to NR through the Sixties, drifting away only when work and family responsibilities deprived him of the luxury of reading such things. Like Justin Raimondo, I often delved into an issue with a dictionary near to hand. National Review was still a philosophically diverse publication in those days, and this enabled me to discover the wealth of traditionalist, paleoconservative, and yes, even libertarian writings which held their positions in the conservative firmament.

Even though the relationship of my conservatism to Buckley's enterprise may therefore be tenuous, a matter of a father's small intellectual gift to a son, it nonetheless feels as though a chapter, perhaps a volume, of conservative history has ended. That Buckley passed at a time of general conservative disorientation seems symbolic.

I have another reason for adding to the burden of Buckley posts on this day, and that is something that relates to that deconstructionist, socialist faculty adviser mentioned earlier: at a time in my life when, finally liberated from my teenage cross of being bookish and intellectual at a time of life when this was a serious social liability, I was in peril of becoming a supercilious elitist, contemptuous of those uninterested in the life of the mind, my adviser set me straight. Details are inconsequential, of course, but the point is that my adviser, also a Christian, wished to inculcate the imperatives of charity, generosity, and humility. And, reading the recollections of Rod Dreher, John Miller, Dean Abbott, and Joe Sobran, I see, not, of course, that I should compare myself to Buckley (lest anyone think such a thing), but the exemplification of what my adviser wished to teach me. As Sobran wrote, upon learning of Buckley's emphysema, "I learned a lot of things from Bill Buckley, but the best thing he taught me was how to be a Christian."

I hope, that when accounts are published of Buckley's life and work, accounts which endeavour to situate him within both Postwar conservatism and the internecine struggles which have left conservatism debilitated, the role of simple friendship and charity in his decisions will be duly noted. Taki's remembrance is apposite in this regard; while Buckley's judgment, like that of every man, cannot be considered irreproachable, we should note that he was often loyal, sometimes to a fault (and his friendship with Taki does not count as a fault). This, I'd venture, is the real reason behind some of the judgments we might question. If one is going to err, doing so on the side of friendship is not a bad way to go about it. It is probably the best way, and one fundamentally conservative.