Neoclassicons

I'm involved, just a teeny-weeny bit, in this flame war Robert Stacy McCain's having with Conor Friedersdorf.

At Stacy's post yesterday, "Conor Friedersdorf vs. Dan Riehl" (on the debate between Friedersdorf and Dan), I left the link to Conor's post, Iran, Twitter, and The American Information Elite." That link goes to the Atlantic, where Freidersdorf's now a "big ideas" blogger. Stacy's been hammering Friedersdorf pretty hard anyway, but even more now that news of the Freidersdorf's Atlantic gig got out.

I've been thinking about writing something about this. So, I might as well comment on Dan's remark earlier on the conservatives schism (David Frum vs. Rush Limbaugh, etc.), when he noted that "To be honest, I wonder if this whole moderation movement isn't simply about purging the social conservatives."

Well, yeah. I'll just say here that Conor Freidersdorf is an Andrew Sullivan myrmidon. As anyone who's followed the recent conservative debates knows, especially in the months since the election, there's been an amalgamation of moderate conservatives, left-libertarians, and unpatriotic paleocons on the postmodern right. I wrote about this (only slightly tongue-in-cheek) the other day, in "What's Up With David Weigel?" From Conor Friederdorf to David Frum, to Daniel Larison to Andrew Sullivan, and then E.D. Kain, there's a movement afoot that wants desperately to be "conservative," but one that is failing miserably.

The reason is simple: These folks, let's loosely call them neoclassical conservatives, or neoclassicons, are driven by an essentially leftist-libertarian domestic policy orientation that is primarily animated by an intense hatred of "theoconservatism." That's the term Andrew Sullivan deploys in his book, The Conservative Soul: Fundamentalism, Freedom, and the Future of the Right. In Sullivan's case in particular, hatred of theoconservatism emerges out of the psycho-sexual torment of his own homosexuality. For a man who has apparently long preached a standard of homosexual monogamy, his own personal moral breakdown into wild sexual excursions of high-risk barebacking and alleged steroidal drug use makes it difficult for reasonable people to take him seriously. Sullivan's own considerably masterful writing, of course, and his ability to put his finger to the pulse of the latest ideological hot buttons, helps to give him some cachet among those on the left looking for some type of pop-legitimacy to their postmodern agenda.

What's striking about all of this is not just how wrong these folks are on most of the main issues of contemporary conservatism, but also how, from my perspsective, the Sullivan-cadres mount their ideological program completely bereft of decency. Andrew Sullivan himself, as is well known, practically lost his mind last year after Sarah Palin's nomination as the GOP presidential running-mate. His attacks on the Palin family have hit bottom and he keeps digging. Beyond that, I routinely see his followers and allies making the most ridiculously unhinged attacks, allegations, and arguments. Conor Friedersdorf put up a totally absurd piece a couple of weeks back, in an essay called, "A Question for War on Terror Hawks." Friedersdorf advocated waterboarding for folks like the suspect in the murder of George Tiller. I took him to task in my post, "Is Waterboarding Worse Than Abortion?," and he left a hopeless comment noting his exception.

E.D. Kain, another neoclassicon who practically worships Sullivan - and not to mention, Daniel Larison - is himself like a confused adolescent, afraid to engage in an intellectual debate with me at this blog. E.D. Kain was once in regular communication with me as the publisher of Neo-Constant, which was described as a blog of "Hard-line neoconservative political commentary, global politics, and foreign policy." Like Andrew Sullivan, E.D. must feel a need to float along the tides of partisan popularity. He's certainly denuded himself of moral standing among those with whom he had previous communications. But that kind of childishness appears to characterize the neoclassicons overall. Recall that Andrew Sullivan attacked Ann Althouse for her simple decision to get married. Why? Jealousy most likely, but also spite for hetersexuals and traditionalists. This is how these guys roll.

And what for? For all intents and purposes these guys have joined the other side. They're not conservative by any sense of the imagination. One doesn't have to be a devout church-goer to be deeply conservative on the issues, and that includes on such starkly moral questions as the right to life for unborn children. One of the most important conserative intellectuals in the last few decades is Robert Bork. And he claims to be just mildly religious (see Bork's, "Hard Truths About the Culture War" for a penetrating expose on the mainstreaming of postmodern radicalism in contemporary public affairs).

Robert Stacy McCain mostly just writes these people off as little men, a bunch of immature pseudo-conservative social climbers. My take is perhaps rougher. From social policy to international affairs, I see these folks in bed with the hardline activists of the nihilist left. On gay marriage to Iraq, there's little that differentiates them. For them to suggest they're "reclaiming" conservativism is preposterous. No smart conservative on today's right would even deign to associate with views like this. Rush Limbaugh is popular for a reason. Mark Levin's Tyranny and Liberty remains at the top of the bestseller lists, and the mainstream press has refused to give him the time of day. David Frum and Sullivan, on the other hand, are feted like they're top political soothsayers of the age. It's a strange thing.

No matter. Analysis of election data, as well as recent polling, indicates how far out on a limb the neoclassicons have placed themselves. The genuine conservatism of folks like Robert Bork, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin will be making a huge comeback in no time. Frankly, the Obama administration's deficit-driven agenda is already being repudiated in public opinion, and former Obama voters are now having remorse.

It's good to put these neoclassicons in there place, of course. Conservatives have to fight for every inch. The media's in the tank for Obama, and Andrew Sulllivan and his stooges are simply seeking a path of least resistance in their hubristic attempt to excommunicate the traditional right-wing from the political spectrum.

I'll have more on this debate in upcoming posts.

Barack Obama's Antiwar Coalition

I've been researching a post on "paleoconservatism," so I'm intrigued to see Philip Giraldi's new essay over at the Huffington Post, "Obama the Conservative Choice."

Giraldi's highlighting Andrew Bacevich and his endorsement of Barack Obama at the American Conservative.

This is a very interesting development, holding considerable significance for the fall election if Obama's the nominee.

Here's a bit from Giraldi:

Many traditional conservatives (not the neocon subspecies) are embarrassed by George Bush and are looking for a way out of the foreign and domestic policy nightmare that he has engineered. They also understand that John McCain would be more of the same or even worse. There is a lively discussion of Barack Obama that is taking place both in the blogosphere and in the media directed at a conservative audience, and much of the discourse is surprisingly receptive to the idea that Obama, though a liberal, could bring about genuine change that will benefit the country. A recent article by Boston University professor and former army officer Andrew Bacevich appeared in The American Conservative magazine and is available on the internet at www.amconmag.com. It is entitled "The Case for Obama" and makes the point that Obama is a candidate that is certainly no conservative, but he is the only real hope to get out of Iraq and also avoid wars of choice in the future. Bacevich rightly sees the Iraq war and its consequences as a truly existential issue for the United States, one that should be front and center for voters in November. Any more adventures of the Iraq type will surely bankrupt the country and destroy what remains of the constitution. Bacevich also notes that the election of John McCain, candidate of the neoconservatives and the war party, would guarantee an unending series of preemptive wars as US security doctrine and would validate the disastrous decisions to invade Iraq and wage an interminable global war on "terrorists." Electing Obama instead would be as close as one could come to making a definitive judgment on the folly of Iraq and everything that it represents, a judgment that is long overdue. Many conservatives would agree that the Obama commitment to leave Iraq is the right way to go and long to return to the days when America only went to war when a vital interest was threatened.

Note Giraldi's conclusion:

Obama for president is beginning to look pretty good to many conservatives and that means that a Barack Obama Administration might actually bridge the gap between right and left, finally bringing together American citizens who are intent on righting the foundering ship of state rather than preserving the status quo. Clinton and McCain represent little more than two nightmarish visions of an out-of-touch political reality that has manifestly failed and should be rejected.

The point's left unsaid by Giraldi, but it's Clinton and McCain's Iraq authorization votes that tie them together in this "nightmarish vision" that should be rejected.

But what's key here is how Bacevich himself describes the agenda of "conservatives for Obama." Notice, for example, how Bacevich demonizes McCain in classic antiwar style:

Social conservatives counting on McCain to return the nation to the path of righteousness are kidding themselves....

Above all, conservatives who think that a McCain presidency would restore a sense of realism and prudence to U.S. foreign policy are setting themselves up for disappointment. On this score, we should take the senator at his word: his commitment to continuing the most disastrous of President Bush’s misadventures is irrevocable. McCain is determined to remain in Iraq as long as it takes. He is the candidate of the War Party. The election of John McCain would provide a new lease on life to American militarism, while perpetuating the U.S. penchant for global interventionism marketed under the guise of liberation.

Noam Chomsky couldn't have issued a stronger antiwar denunciation!

But Bacevich continues by laying out the "conservative" case for Obama:

So why consider Obama? For one reason only: because this liberal Democrat has promised to end the U.S. combat role in Iraq. Contained within that promise, if fulfilled, lies some modest prospect of a conservative revival.

To appreciate that possibility requires seeing the Iraq War in perspective. As an episode in modern military history, Iraq qualifies at best as a very small war....

As part of the larger global war on terrorism, Iraq has provided a pretext for expanding further the already bloated prerogatives of the presidency. To see the Iraq War as anything but misguided, unnecessary, and an abject failure is to play into the hands of the fear-mongers who insist that when it comes to national security all Americans (members of Congress included) should defer to the judgment of the executive branch. Only the president, we are told, can “keep us safe.” Seeing the war as the debacle it has become refutes that notion and provides a first step toward restoring a semblance of balance among the three branches of government.

Now Bacevich is channeling Glenn Greenwald!

You see, the arguments of "conservatives for Obama" aren't so different from "progressives for Obama," which is why Giraldi can argue that "a Barack Obama Administration might actually bridge the gap between right and left.

Actually, there's not much to bridge. Paleoconservatives have become so reactionary in their opposition to Iraq - and the American national security state - that they've simply tied the loop of the ideological continuum, joining the radical left with the reactionary right in common hatred of the Bush administration's war in Iraq, and GOP nominee-in-waiting John McCain.

In fact, the only thing plausibly new about Bacevich's position is that he's openly rooting for the other side of the traditional liberal/conservative split.

David Frum explains the extreme antiwar positions of the paleoconservatives in his article, "Unpatriotic Conservatives":

From the very beginning of the War on Terror, there has been dissent, and as the war has proceeded to Iraq, the dissent has grown more radical and more vociferous. Perhaps that was to be expected. But here is what never could have been: Some of the leading figures in this antiwar movement call themselves "conservatives."

These conservatives are relatively few in number, but their ambitions are large. They aspire to reinvent conservative ideology: to junk the 50-year-old conservative commitment to defend American interests and values throughout the world — the commitment that inspired the founding of this magazine — in favor of a fearful policy of ignoring threats and appeasing enemies....

The antiwar conservatives aren't satisfied merely to question the wisdom of an Iraq war. Questions are perfectly reasonable, indeed valuable. There is more than one way to wage the war on terror, and thoughtful people will naturally disagree about how best to do it, whether to focus on terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah or on states like Iraq and Iran; and if states, then which state first?

But the antiwar conservatives have gone far, far beyond the advocacy of alternative strategies. They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild conspiracy theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation's enemies.

Frum does not cite Bacevich in the article, as he was writing shortly after the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

But Bacevich's positions criticizing "the new American militarism" are well known, for example, in his books and articles appearing at prominent antiwar websites and publications.

Even far-left bloggers can't get enough of Bacevich's anti-militarist thesis!

Note that Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University, is a graduate of West Point who served in Vietam. His son, also named Andrew J. Bacevich, was killed in Iraq in 2007. (Bacevich wrote about his son's death in a Washington Post essay.)

Credentials like these give a certain authority or gravitas to Bacevich's views, and his service to country and the loss of his son are to be respected.

Nevertheless, the paleoconservative case for Barack Obama's presidential bid further illustrates how undifferentiated is today's antiwar movement.

The history of antiwar opposition to Iraq includes a diverse array of groups. From radical socialists and anarchists to anti-Semitics and paleocons, contemporary opposition to the Iraq war has united left-right fringe elements like never before.

As Victor Davis Hanson indicates:

It is becoming nearly impossible to sort the extreme rhetoric of the antiwar Left from that of the fringe paleo-Right. Both see the Iraqi war through the same lenses: the American effort is bound to fail and is a deep reflection of American pathology.

An anguished Cindy Sheehan calls Bush "the world's biggest terrorist." And she goes on to blame Israel for the death of her son ("Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel").

Her antiwar venom could easily come right out of the mouth of a more calculating David Duke. Perhaps that's why he lauded her anti-Semitism: "Courageously she has gone to Texas near the ranch of President Bush and braved the elements and a hostile Jewish supremacist media."

This odd symbiosis began right after 9/11. Then the lunatic Left mused about the "pure chaos" of the falling "two huge buck teeth" twin towers, lamented that they were more full of Democrats than Republicans, and saw the strike as righteous payback from third-world victims.

The mirror-imaging fundamentalists and censors in turn saw the attack as an angry God's retribution either for an array of our mortal sins or America's tilting toward Israel.

In Iraq, the Left thinks we are unfairly destroying others; the ultra-Right that we are being destroyed ourselves. The former alleges that we are bullying in our global influence, the latter that we are collapsing from our decadence.

But both, in their exasperation at George Bush's insistence on seeing Iraq emerge from the Hussein nightmare years with some sort of constitutional government, have embraced the paranoid style of personal invective.

In other words, when one breaks down all of the various antiwar strains, we see a common denominator of unpatriotic anti-Americanism.

These groups have been explicitly welcomed into the massive multipronged coalition Obama seeks to build, which he sees as nothing less than a full-blown social movement. As Elizabeth Drew notes:

Obama has a big idea: he believes that in order to change Washington ... and to reduce the power of the lobbies and "special interests," he must first build a large coalition—Democrats, independents, Republicans, whoever—to support him in his effort to change things. He has figured out that he cannot make the kinds of changes he's talking about if he has to fight for 51–49 majorities in Congress. Therefore, he's trying to build a broader coalition, and enlist the people who have come out to see him and are getting involved in politics for the first time because of him. If he can hold that force together, members of Congress, including the "old bulls," according to a campaign aide, "will look back home and see that there is a mandate for change." Thus, Obama talks about working "from the bottom up" to bring about change. When he says he will take on the special interests and the lobbies, to him it's not as far-fetched as most jaded Washingtonians think: he intends to do that with the army he's building.

To stress Drew's point once more: Obama seeks mobilize the support of whoever he can get, drawing all factions into his mass political coalition for change.

This coalition, as we can see from this analysis, includes progressives and paleoconservatives, and while different individuals may float in and out of the various factional groupings, the fundamental radical basis of Barack Obama's support is undeniable.

See also, "No Enemies on the Left? Progressives for Barack Obama."

Hat tip: Memeorandum

Uncluttered Conservatism

I've been working and running my kids around today, so I'm just now sitting down to respond to Dan Riehl's commentary on my earlier essay, "Core Values and Foreign Policy.

Dan and I don't differ too much on the basics of our conservative beliefs. I see that Dan's working to clear the clutter from what we want to do on the right, for example:

Personally, I'm for the least powerful government we can afford while being able to retain order on our streets, efficient commerce and project power abroad on a case by case basis as some need might warrant. I call that conservative, you may not. Beyond that, I've no strong desire to lock myself into some preconceived concept of a psuedo-ideology that might only constrict my good judgment, or give political opponents another term of art they will try to use to mis-characterize me and misrepresent my thinking.

Frankly, in some ways the Right seems to be becoming as pre-occupied with labels and hyphens as is today's Left. My instincts tell me that can't be good. But I'm not going to dwell on it as my primary interest remains what's small d democratic and most common denominator forms of communication aimed at the average Jane or Joe.

In the spirit of Barry Goldwater, I can advocate the "least powerful government we can afford"; although following both Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, I place stress on the exigencies of national power in a world of predatory states and totalitarian ideologies, so there are both values to weigh and liberties to preserve in designing a robust conservatism for the 21st century.

But note Dan's rejection of the "preoccupation with labels." This is something Robert Stacy McCain mentioned as well in his recent discussion, "Meghan and 'Progressive Republicans'." McCain, for example, rejects the (erstwhile) neoconservative David Brooks because, "Whatever label you slap on Brooks, he is a first-class peddler of 'noble lies', who labors tirelessly to create a myth of American political history that exactly suits his purpose." But rather than jettisoning labels, McCain proposes his own: "I believe that "libertarian populism" offers a winning antidote to the nonsense of 'national greatness' and 'compassionate conservatism' that have led the GOP astray."

The truth is, each one of us, Dan, Stacy, and myself, wants a winning conservatism that promotes freedom and protects life. Perhaps we could all come together under the banner of "uncluttered conservatism," which is just another way for me to say, "Okay, screw the labels and let's get down to some real ideas." What do we want? As I noted at my essay, "Core Values Conservatism," partisans of the right cannot abandon a poltics of human dignity and social traditionalism. We must put families first, through a pro-life agenda that affirms child-rearing and the historic understanding of marriage. We must also support economic policies that are both pro-family and pro-growth (cut taxes, support children), and we mustn't ignore educational reforms that empower families, engender competition, and procure value in learning.

But we must also be populist, and I want to stress this point for Dan in particular. I'm a professor, but I'm not an Ivy League stuffed-shirt academic. When you teach community college, you're in the trenches of the life-challenges of everday people. Two-year college professors are by definition the un-elite. I chose a career in community college teaching because that's where I started my training; and I identify personally with the recent immigrants from all over the world, the students from working-class families who have deep roots in Long Beach, the inner-city students escaping crime and poverty (the great many of whom cannot read), and the Iraq war veterans who are returning from the conflict. This is the real America. These are the "non-traditionals" people forget about when talking about the freshman application "admissions game" that's the rage of the college-ranking crowd. These are the "Wal-Mart" voters who Ross Douthat talks about but with whom he has no contact, ensconsed in the offices of the Atlantic or the New York Times.

So yeah, I can relate to "populist libertarianism" and the "average Jane and Joe."

But let's get some resolve on those cluttering labels. Well, it's interesting that all three of us, Dan, Stacy, and I, are former Democrats. I don't know what exactly caused Dan and Stacy to reject the ideology of the left, but with me it was foreign policy first and foremost, and especially Iraq in 2003. I simply cannot abide antiwar, anti-American ideologies, and that includes those of the left or the faux right. Sure, it's easy to eviscerate the Democratic-left as nihilistic and anti-military, but we have those who are ostensibly conservative who have made common cause with the Firedoglake-Keith Olbermann-MoveOn.org consitutuencies on the collectivist left. In response to last night's post, Daniel Larison at the American Conservative attacked my "so-called core values conservatism" as some empty pro-war immoralism. That's got to be rich, coming from Patrick Buchanan's flagship, the home of "unpatriotic conservatives" in bed with antiwar libertarians and Washington Independent paleo-postmodernists. No doubt we'll soon see Larison hanging out with Justin Raimondo and Cindy Sheehan (but not Sean Penn) at a Bay Area "peace vigil" once the Afghanistan surge kicks into high gear. These people are not conservative. And that's one reason I really admire Robert Stacy McCain's blogging - he's just not worried about the impolitics of calling the AmCon freaks out, and saying "Fuck you, Glenn Greenwald."

In any case, I'm neoconservative, but the label's not as important to me as is a pro-life, pro-family, and pro-victory ideological paradigm that takes moral traditionalism seriously and doesn't skimp on standing up for what's right, both home and abroad. On that score, I'm thinking Dan Riehl's down with the crew, and I'm ready to hang with him, uncluttered, conservative, and cool.

National Review's Unwise Excommunication of Donald Trump

It's a crisis of conservatism, and the splits are more severe than I've seen since --- well, ever.

I thought it was bad in 2008 when John McCain won the nomination. But folks on Twitter are saying they've never seen anything like this.

Here's Laura Ingraham, who's of course a major figure in movement conservatism, at LifeZette, "National Review’s Unwise Pig Pile on Donald Trump":

I think National Review, in its issue dedicated to taking down GOP front-runner Donald Trump, has made a big mistake. With so much on the line for America, how is it smart to close the door to Trump’s voters and to populism in general?

The folks at NR launched a similar effort to excommunicate conservatives in 2003, with a much-hyped cover story titled “Unpatriotic Conservatives.” Back then it was Pat Buchanan and the now-deceased Bob Novak who were the targets. Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, a dear friend, made the case that these men and others who stood against our invasion of Iraq, had “made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements.” In other words, these “disgruntled paleos,” weren’t truly conservative because they opposed the war in Iraq.

As it turned out, of course, that small band of thinkers knew more about what was in the national interest than anyone at National Review or myself, who was also a strong advocate for Operation Iraqi Freedom.

“I never received an apology note,” Buchanan told me on my radio show. “They’re Davos conservatives,” he added, referencing the annual meeting of the world’s elites in Switzerland.

Whatever you think of Trump personally, his supporters are pushing for three big things:

* A return to traditional GOP law and order practices when it comes to illegal immigration.
* A return to a more traditional GOP foreign policy that would put the national interest ahead of globalism.
* A return to a more traditional GOP trade policy that would analyze trade deals from the perspective of the country as a whole and not blindly support any deal — even one negotiated by President Obama.

On each of these issues, Trump's voters are calling for a return to policies that were GOP orthodoxy as recently as the late 1990s.

The matriarch of the conservative movement, Phyllis Schlafly, who likes but isn’t endorsing Trump, put it this way: "I’m not going to tell you that Donald Trump is perfect, or right on everything … but immigration is the top issue today, and he’s the one who made it a front-burner issue."

By refusing to make room for these ideas within conservatism, NR risks creating the impression that the revolution brought about by George W. Bush — in particular, his belief in open borders, his effort to create a permanent U.S. military mission in the Middle East, and his notion that trade can never be regulated, no matter how unfair — is now a permanent part of conservatism that can never be questioned. They are also inviting those who disagree with Bush on those points to leave conservatism and start seeking their allies elsewhere.
This is an absolute disaster for conservatism. It is obvious by now that Bushism — however well-intentioned it may appear on paper — does not work for the average American. It is also clear that Bushism has almost no support within the rank and file of the GOP, much less within the country as a whole. Making the tenets of Bushism into an orthodoxy that conservatives cannot question will cripple conservatism for years to come.

If blue-collar Americans are told that their concerns on immigration, trade, and foreign policy cannot be addressed within the conservative movement, they will look elsewhere — just as they looked elsewhere in the late 1960s after they learned that their problems couldn't be addressed within liberalism. National Review Editor Rich Lowry and his people will be left preaching their narrow doctrine to a smaller and smaller audience.

Back in 2008, another populist was running for president, and ended up winning the Iowa caucuses. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who’s running again in 2016, sympathized with Trump in the NR dust-up. Recalling that the publication also took after him during his primary fight with Arizona Sen. John McCain, he said, "This is a fool-hearty effort … [by] the elitists who live in their own little bubble."

NR is "completely out of touch … [and] represents big business, not the American people," he added, noting NR’s support for the 5,500-page Trans-Pacific Partnership. "Out here in Iowa, they are not representative and their views are not representative."

Of course there is ample room to criticize Trump’s approach and his lapse into sloganeering where substance is needed — as I have done on many occasions. But if NR rejects the Trump voters, it will be reversing the decision by Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, and others to welcome blue-collar voters, Democrats, and independents into the conservative fold. Whatever that means for the country, it will do major damage to conservatism. If the conservative movement devotes itself to defending the legacy of George W. Bush at all costs, it will become irrelevant to the debate over how to make things better for most Americans...

That's gonna leave a mark.

Still more.

Dueling Patriotisms

Are conservatives more patriotic than lefties?

It seems like the answer's straightforward: On the big issues of the day - which I see as the defense of traditional values (like national greatness) and questions of war and peace - conservatives win hands down.

Simply, it's just hard to call yourself a patriot when you're rooting for the other side.

Yet, there's an interesting little kerfuffle on the topic breaking out in the blogosphere, with Peter Wehner at Commentary taking on Joe Klein at Swampland.

Klein's clever, but he's badly outmatched by Wehner on this issue.

Here's Wehner's post:

In a rather stunning sentence that Ramesh Ponnuru flagged over at National Review’s The Corner, Joe Klein, in saying that the “chronic disease among Democrats” is their tendency to talk more about what’s wrong with America than what’s right, wrote this:

This is ironic and weirdly self-defeating, since the liberal message of national improvement is profoundly more optimistic, and patriotic, than the innate conservative pessimism about the perfectibility of human nature.

As Ponnuru points out, can you imagine Klein’s outrage if the charge had been made the other way - that the conservative message of national improvement is more “patriotic” than liberalism?

Read the whole thing, but especially Wehner's knockout blow:

Beyond that, is Klein really prepared to argue that the aim of the institutional strongholds of contemporary liberalism - whether we are talking about the academy or Hollywood or others - is to deepen our love for America and increase our civic devotion and pride? That their efforts will make us a more perfect union? Does Klein believe that during the last several decades liberals rather than conservatives have been more likely to reject cultural relativism and radical multiculturalism? Have liberals rather than conservatives been more vocal in arguing why the United States is better in every way than its totalitarian enemies? Is Ted Kennedy really more patriotic in his “liberal message of national improvement” than Ronald Reagan was in his conservative message of national improvement?

To be sure, patriotism is a complicated matter, as it has many elements to it and tensions within it. It is certainly not the property of any one political party. It is not blind support for America, just as it is not reflexive opposition to America. But what we can say, I think, is that ... part of what it has traditionally meant to be an American is to believe in our most cherished creeds - most especially that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. Patriotism also demands that we hold an honest view of our nation — which, in the case of America, means we should acknowledge our injustices (past and present) even as we acknowledge that, in Allan Bloom’s words, “America tells one story: the unbroken ineluctable progress of freedom and equality.” And of course patriotism requires us to sacrifice for our country, to defend her when she is under assault, and to do what we can to help America live up to her founding ideals.

I like how Wehner notes how patriotism's a complex thing.

Not only should it be "bipartisan property," it's a shame that it's not more so, especially now, when being patriotic for many on the left is spitting on the troops with endless portrayals about how military service-personnel have been "victimized" by the Bush's war policies. That's hardly patriotic, and that's just one example.

But here's Klein's most recent rejoinder to the debate:

Pete Wehner, former chief White House propagandist for the Iraq war, has taken me to task for claiming that liberalism is more optimistic and therefore inherently more patriotic than conservatism. That takes some nerve. He would compare my statement to the constant drumbeat of right-wingnutters questioning the patriotism of those who do not support the Bush Administration's foreign policy foolishness. But I didn't do that at all. I didn't question the patriotism of conservatives: I simply argued that it is more patriotic to be optimistic about the chance that our collective will--that is, the best work of government--will succeed, rather than that it will fail or impinge on freedom.

In others words, it is more patriotic to be in favor of civil rights legislation than to oppose it...to be in favor of social security and medicare than to oppose them...and to hope that the better angels of our legislators--acting in concert, in compromise--will produce a universal health insurance system and an alternative energy plan that we can all be proud of. Conservative skepticism has its place; it can be a valuable corrective when government goes flabby and corrupt or engages in wild neo-colonialist fantasies abroad.

If you read further, you'll see Klein backs off a bit from the private interest versus public purpose contrast.

But as he continues, he buries his own case for the left's patriotism by more vehemently condemning the Bush administration as an unmitigated disaster:

Those who have stood in the path of progress have been wrong far more often than they've been right. And those who spent the past seven years as propagandists for the one of the worst, and needlessly blood-soaked, presidencies in American history, have such a fabulous record of self-righteous wrong-headedness that they needn't be taken seriously at all.

Frankly, for all the problems of the Bush administration, it simply strains credibility to suggest conservative backers for President Bush and the Iraq war are servile "propagandists."

Klein's gone completely the other way: He suggests that it's unpatriotic to back the administration's forward policy of democracy promotion in Iraq. The historical record is actually more in line with the Bush's agenda - from McKinley to Roosevelt to Reagan - than Klein acknowledges.

So, who wins? Perhaps the notion of "bipartisan patriotism" isn't such a possiblity after all.

Photo Credit: New York Times

Charles Johnson, Ron Paul, Stormfront, and Glenn Greenwald

I've forgotten all about Charles Johnson this last couple of months. He may have peaked with the fawning Los Angeles Times piece a while back, but he was doing some serious damage control on his blog following the surprisingly non-fawning New York Times write up sometime thereafter.

But King Charles is looking for "racists" and "Birchers" as intensely as the likes of Keith Olbermann, and in the case of the latter that interest is mainly a periodic one to keep in good graces with the Daily Kos hate-masters. For Charles Johnson, the search for the ever-elusive key to the alleged GOP/white supremacist connection is all consuming. And because of that, this post (a safe Google link here) is extremely fascinating, "Neo-Nazi Sites Love Ron Paul." Here's the Stromfront quotation from King Charles' post:

Polymath
Forum Member
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 3,966

Re: Ron Paul Wins CPAC Poll

There is a Jewish Supremacist hate site called “Little Green Footballs” and this kind of thing drives them crazy, because they PRETEND to be conservatives and when a real conservative and all-American man like Dr. Ron Paul wins so many conservative polls, they go crazy with whining.

These LGF Jews are the most unpatriotic Israeli-first traitors the United States sees in the blogosphere. They are vile and disgusting rats. “Charles Johnson” is the shabbat goy that fronts this obvious Zionist hate site, and even if this “Charles Johnson” moron claims to be Christian, he could care less about Christianity in the Holy Land, which is getting wiped out by Zionists, and it fared far better under the Arabs before the Khazar (Ashkenazi) fakes came to the Middle East.

Now reading this, it's extremely perplexing to figure out the lines of ideological affilation or repudiation.

Charles Johnson wants to destroy the tea party movement as an extremist neo-Nazi falange. But this Stormfront guy -- if that's who he really is -- is smearing King Charles with the worst anti-Semitic hatred. Which itself goes to show, frankly, that the tea partiers have absolutely nothing in common with such legitimate hate groups.

It's ridiculous, but that's not all. Glenn Greenwald, the radical leftists who claims to be a constitutional libertarian, has a post up today claiming that the original tea party activists were "Paulbots." See, "The GOP's "Small Government" Tea Party Fraud":

There's a major political fraud underway: the GOP is once again donning their libertarian, limited-government masks in order to re-invent itself and, more important, to co-opt the energy and passion of the Ron-Paul-faction that spawned and sustains the "tea party" movement. The Party that spat contempt at Paul during the Bush years and was diametrically opposed to most of his platform now pretends to share his views. Standard-issue Republicans and Ron Paul libertarians are as incompatible as two factions can be -- recall that the most celebrated right-wing moment of the 2008 presidential campaign was when Rudy Giuliani all but accused Paul of being an America-hating Terrorist-lover for daring to suggest that America's conduct might contribute to Islamic radicalism -- yet the Republicans, aided by the media, are pretending that this is one unified, harmonious, "small government" political movement.

The Right is petrified that this fraud will be exposed and is thus bending over backwards to sustain the myth. Paul was not only invited to be a featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference but also won its presidential straw poll. Sarah Palin endorsed Ron Paul's son in the Kentucky Senate race. National Review is lavishly praising Paul, while Ann Coulter "felt compelled [in her CPAC speech] to give a shout out to Paul-mania, saying she agreed with everything he stands for outside of foreign policy -- a statement met with cheers." Glenn Beck -- who literally cheered for the Wall Street bailout and Bush's endlessly expanding surveillance state -- now parades around as though he shares the libertarians' contempt for them. Red State's Erick Erickson, defending the new so-called conservative "manifesto," touts the need for Congress to be confined to the express powers of Article I, Section 8, all while lauding a GOP Congress that supported countless intrusive laws -- from federalized restrictions on assisted suicide, marriage, gambling, abortion and drugs to intervention in Terri Schiavo's end-of-life state court proceeding -- nowhere to be found in that Constitutional clause. With the GOP out of power, Fox News suddenly started featuring anti-government libertarians such as John Stossel and Reason Magazine commentators, whereas, when Bush was in power, there was no government power too expanded or limitless for Fox propagandists to praise.

A long quote, I know. But the context is needed when reading Greenwald's next passage:

These fault lines began to emerge when Sarah Palin earlier this month delivered the keynote speech to the national tea party conference in Nashville, and stood there spitting out one platitude after the next which Paul-led libertarians despise: from neoconservative war-loving dogma and veneration of Israel to glorification of "War on Terror" domestic powers and the need of the state to enforce Palin's own religious and cultural values. Neocons (who still overwhelmingly dominate the GOP) and Paul-led libertarians are arch enemies, and the social conservatives on whom the GOP depends are barely viewed with greater affection. Sarah Palin and Ron Paul are about as far apart on most issues as one can get; the "tea party movement" can't possibly be about supporting each of their worldviews. Moreover, the GOP leadership is currently promising Wall Street even more loyal subservience than Democrats have given in exchange for support, thus bolstering the government/corporate axis which libertarians find so repugnant. And Coulter's manipulative claim that she "agrees with everything [Paul] stands for outside of foreign policy" is laughable; aside from the fact that "foreign policy" is a rather large issue in our political debates (Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia), they were on exactly the opposite sides of the most intense domestic controversies of the Bush era: torture, military commissions, habeas corpus, Guantanamo, CIA secrecy, telecom immunity, and warrantless eavesdropping.

Now you can really see the ideological lines coming back together. Charles Johnson hates the tea parties, and links them to neo-Nazi Ron Paul websites. Glenn Greenwald hates the tea parties BECAUSE he thinks the movement's trying to co-opt Ron Paul. It's amorphous, but I'll tell you: I've been to dozens of tea parties, political rallies, and protests over the last year, and the only place I saw a major Ron Paul (antiwar) contingent was at the communist ANSWER demonstration at the Wilshire Federal Building last October. Indeed, the folks from Antiwar.com were marching, and their organizer, Nick Hankoff, commented at my report.

So folks can now figure out where they'd like to draw up ideological lines: Would you prefer to be associated with the leftist/Ron Paul/Stormfront strange-bedfellows alliance (that in fact includes all of these folks, C.J, Greenwald, and Ron Paul) or with Sarah Palin and the tea parties? For despite Greenwald's long list of indicators suggesting that the tea party movement is going all in for Ron Paul and his protege, it's foreign policy that'll be the dividing line. Ann Coulter said it best, and I noticed this over the weekend: "she agreed with everything he stands for outside of foreign policy." Exactly!

And pay special attention to Greenwald's excoriation of the "neocons." Stormfront folks hate the neocons (for their support of Israel). But Sarah Palin's a neoconservative hero, as I've long noted. And that makes it easy to figure which side of the ideological line you'll find me. Genuine conservatives favor a strong national defense, for without security, all of our freedoms here at home are at risk.

Noxious Anti-Americanism and New Secessionist Theories

You're the biggest coward in the blogosphere. That delete key is the only thing you got going for you, and you know it.

The e-mail came yesterday. It's from Mike Tuggle ("Old Rebel") of the secessionist Rebellion-Dixienet blog. Old Rebel cross-posts at Conservative Heritage Times; his essay, "What was America?, discusses his current anger.

Considering my penchant for long and unproductive flame wars, I'm probably more a glutton for punishment than a coward!

Anyway, I'm indulging Old Rebel here as part of a broader analysis of hate-based secessionism and its surprising links to the "liberaltarian" post-conservative movement. I've ignored the secessionists - and thus Old Rebel - because these people are noxious fringe elements. Yeah, I deleted Old Soldier because I consider him an annoying troll and anti-American whose movement is in bed with the worst of the radical left BDS troop-hating contingents (literally, as it turns out). The occasion for yesterday's slur quoted at top was my deleting of his comment at my post, "July 4th: More Than Just an American Holiday..." That essay cites Willliam Bennett at the Wall Street Journal, where Bennett quotes Abraham Lincoln on the Declaration of Independence. Recall that the secessionists hate Lincoln. Old Rebel probably has a poster of John Wilkes Booth in his office.

Its straightforward to me, but Lincoln-bashing and talk of secession is fringe material. When Rick Perry made his recent gaffe on secession I ignored it as intemperate red meat for his Texas electoral base. There's nothing wrong with federalist devolution and greater reliance on the 10th Amendment. But outright secessionist talk will get you nowhere in national politics. And that's why folks like Old Rebel, and the paleoconservatives at Pat Buchanan's flagship American Conservative, are marginal at best.

That said, note that Ilya Somin, at Volokh Conspiracy, made an interesting argument about the new secessionism yesterday, "The Declaration of Independence and the Case for Non-Ethnic Secession":

One of the striking differences between the American Revolution and most modern independence movements is that the former was not based on ethnic or nationalistic justifications. Nowhere does the Declaration state that Americans have a right to independence because they are a distinct "people" or culture. They couldn't assert any such claim because the majority of the American population consisted of members of the same ethnic groups (English and Scots) as the majority of Britons.

Rather, the justification for American independence was the need to escape oppression by the British government - the "repeated injuries and usurpations" enumerated in the text - and to establish a government that would more fully protect the rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The very same rationale for independence could just as easily have been used to justify secession by, say, the City of London, which was more heavily taxed and politically oppressed than the American colonies were. Indeed, the Declaration suggests that secession or revolution is justified "whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends" [emphasis added]. The implication is that the case for independence is entirely distinct from any nationalistic or ethnic considerations.

By contrast, modern international law, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights assigns a right of "self-determination" only to "peoples," usually understood to mean groups with a distinctive common culture and ethnicity. If the American Revolution was justified, the ICCPR's approach is probably wrong. At the very least, secession should also be considered permissible where undertaken to escape repression by the preexisting central government ....

The case for allowing non-ethnic secession in cases where it is used to escape brutal repression strikes me as overwhelming. More controversial is the case for allowing it in situations where a group seeks to secede merely because they believe they can establish a better government than the status quo, even if the latter is not unusually oppressive ... For now, I will only suggest that the example of the American Revolution and other similar situations provides a strong argument for allowing non-ethnic secession in cases where it is used to escape a repressive central government.

Somin's discussion raises two questions for Old Rebel and the new secessionists: The first is whether the current U.S. governmental regime is so repressive as to justify secession. Somin notes that Taiwan's independence from China is easily justified in light of the Beijing regime's slaughter of millions of its own people. That's not the case in the U.S., and never has been. Thus the degree of repression is vital to the discussion, and normative opinion on support for the constitutional regime in the U.S. weighs heavily against Old Rebel's movement (and helps explains why these folks are truly fringe).

The second is the racial "ethnic" component. Are the new secessionist motivated by race? It's always a touchy question, since slavery and states' rights were the twin issues breaking the country in two in the 19th century. For the new secessionists, we simply need to note that the same people who are arguing for secession today are associated with some of the vile anti-Semitics in current debates U.S. policy at home and abroad. See, for example, Peter Wehner, "Pat Buchanan’s Latest anti-Semitic Outburst"; Ron Radosh, "Pat Buchanan: Still an anti-Semite"; and Joshua Muravchik, "Patrick J. Buchanan and the Jews." It's hard not to be wary of these paleocon secessionists when they continue to be flagged as propagating the most disgusting ideologies of hatred.

Indeed, one reason Old Rebel is so fired up at this blog is because I've been hammering Daniel Larison of the American Conservative (see Daniel Larison, 'Prefab Conservative'). My primary issue is Larison's endless jihad against the "evil" neocons. But it's also a matter of ridicule for his alliance with the Andrew Sullivan myrimidons at Ordinary Gentlemen. I've identified these folks as "neoclassicons." That may be too generous a term, especially if deep down this alliance is really composed of unpatriotic racists and anti-Semitics. Note that if we recall that American democracy promotion abroad does indeed support the interests of both Jews and non-white Third World populations, then the paleocon hatred of robust internationalism is all that more understandable.

Daniel Larison, for example, wrote a post in January called "My “Noxious” Views." There he defends himself against Jamie Kirchick's essay, "Ron Paul’s Real Politics: The Case of Daniel Larison." But note that Larison posted a 4th of July essay yesterday that gives us an insightful take on how awful these people are. At that piece Larison links to an attack on Ruben Navarette, Jr. Check the post for the details, but Larison's completely extraneous discussion of Navarette's immigrant background is a sure giveway to his repudiation of neocons as outside the paleocon ethnic sensibility:

Perhaps this is a problem that third-generation Americans like Mr. Navarette and even more recent arrivals have: lacking anything more substantial to connect them to their country and their national identity, they must latch on to the superficial loyalties of support for this or that government endeavour.

Reference to Rubin Navarette's "third-generation" status is completely irrelevant to a discussion of his ideas. But for Larison and paleocon America-bashers like him, it's a revealing indicator again that at base, the new secessionists may indeed be anti-Semitic white supremacists. If so, their views are rightly condemned as being not just wrong, but reprehensible.

*********

ADDENDUM: I have some other good blogger friends who have travelled at the edges of the same ideological circles (and the League of the South). But I see clear differences in that these people are smart, consistent, and they don't hate - they don't hate minorities and they don't hate Israel. From my perspective, the new secessionism is noxious. Forget such talk and strengthen the national government with Goldwater/"Core-Values" conservatism, which includes a central stand for a robust national security policy of moral clarity and exceptionalism.

And for me, this is what the new secessionism would imply, from the Wall Street Journal, "Divided We Stand":

A notable prophet for a coming age of smallness was the diplomat and historian George Kennan, a steward of the American Century with an uncanny ability to see past the seemingly-frozen geopolitical arrangements of the day. Kennan always believed that Soviet power would “run its course,” as he predicted back in 1951, just as the Cold War was getting under way, and again shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed, he suggested that a similar fate might await the United States. America has become a “monster country,” afflicted by a swollen bureaucracy and “the hubris of inordinate size,” he wrote in his 1993 book, “Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy.” Things might work better, he suggested, if the nation was “decentralized into something like a dozen constituent republics, absorbing not only the powers of the existing states but a considerable part of those of the present federal establishment.”

Kennan’s genius was to foresee that matters might take on an organic, a bottom-up, life of their own, especially in a society as dynamic and as creative as America. His spirit, the spirit of an anti-federalist modernist, can be glimpsed in an intriguing “mega-region” initiative encompassing greater San Diego County, next-door Imperial County and, to the immediate south of the U.S. border, Northern Baja, Mexico. Elected officials representing all three participating areas recently unveiled “Cali Baja, a Bi-National Mega-Region,” as the “international marketing brand” for the project.

The idea is to create a global economic powerhouse by combining San Diego’s proven abilities in scientific research and development with Imperial County’s abundance of inexpensive land and availability of water rights and Northern Baja’s manufacturing base, low labor costs and ability to supply the San Diego area with electricity during peak-use terms. Bilingualism, too, is a key—with the aim for all children on both sides of the border to be fluent in both English and Spanish. The project director is Christina Luhn, a Kansas native, historian and former staffer on the National Security Council in Ronald Reagan’s White House in the mid-1980s. Contemporary America as a unit of governance may be too big, even the perpetually-troubled state of California may be too big, she told me, by way of saying that the political and economic future may belong to the megaregions of the planet. Her conviction is that large systems tend not to endure—“they break apart, there’s chaos, and at some point, new things form,” she said.

I don't need a "Cali-Baja." We practically have that already in California, where roughly one-third of the population is Latino and leading left-wing organzations like La Raza continue their work to destroy the United States. It's interesting, though, that we are seeing a de facto alliance between racist interest groups like La Raza an the unpatriotic anti-Semitic paleocons who truly hate America.

Surrendering Reason to Hate?

Rick Moran's morning essay made me think about what I do as an online commentator.

The piece is a lengthy discourse on the craft of blogging. Moran explains his motives and development as an online writer, discussing some of the ups and downs of the trade. Of particular note is his discussion of partisan flame wars and the demonization of the other. Moran is introspective:

If my blog attracted only those who usually agreed with me and thought I was the bee’s knees when it came to commentary, blogging would be a marvelous daily exercise. But there is another side to blogging that most of us never talk about; the relentless, daily pounding of negativism, hurtful epithets, and outright spewing hatred that arrives in the form of comments and emails from the other side as well as other blogs linking and posting on something I’ve written.

We all like to think of ourselves as having thick skins and that such criticism rolls off our backs and never affects us. This is the macho element in blogging, one of its more unattractive and dishonest aspects. In this, some of us feel obligated to give back in kind, something I have done on too many occasions to count. Yes, I regret it. And believe me, I have often been the initiator of such ugliness.

Still, there are many bloggers on both the right and left who shame me with their equanimity in the face of the most virulent and nasty personal attacks. Ed Morrissey comes to mind on the right. The folks at Crooked Timber and Obsidian Wings on the left are generally cool in the face of such criticism as well.

But this is not a confessional post where I recognize my sins and ask forgiveness. I am what I am and doubt I will change. Rather, it is my intent to highlight the fact that despite my predilection for using violent language in my defense or to ridicule my political opponents, I have always granted them a certain rough integrity in their beliefs – that they are wrongheaded not evil; that they are arrogant and stupid, not unpatriotic or that they hate America.

Read the whole thing at the link (as well as the great additional resources, here and here). There's some conjecture as to whether longitudinally politics is nastier today than, say, 100 years ago. But one of the essay's payoffs is the (sort-of) suggestion of what-goes-around-comes-around for partisan attack-masters:

Those who accuse all liberals of being unpatriotic or un-American perhaps have no cause to grumble when an equally malicious lie like “racist” is directed at them. But having such an epithet tossed in my direction – especially as it has been done recently – I find to be reflective of a mindset that is terrified of open debate and thus resorts to twisting semantics in order to obscure a flawed critique. They can’t argue the issues so the magic word is applied and debate instantly ceases.

I think the conclusion here - that weaknesses in rational argumentation are remedied by resort to argumentum ad hominem - is basically right, although I'd suggest that the point about arguing that "all liberals" are unpatriotic (or pacifist, or irreligious, etc.), needs a bit of elaboration.

I started blogging precisely to combat the anti-Americanism and postmodern nihilism that had infected debates on America's post-9/11 foreign policy. At first I was a bit surprised when attacked as "racist" (or fascist, or Nazi, or neocon warmonger, etc.). But I soon realized, seriously, that these were people who would do me physical harm if they had the chance, or at least some have said.

But I differ in debate from my antagonists in that I seek to maintain a morality of reason in argumentation. Sometimes I'm sloppy by attacking the "left" in general, but when I deploy terms like "nihilist" it's in the descriptive, analytical sense, rather than as an effort to inflict emotional or psychological pain. In other words, there's a ontological basis to my partisan repudiations. I seek to understand and explain what's underlying the postmodern hatred of the anti-everything sensibilities of the American left.

For example, I'm coming around to fuller understanding of the notion of secular demonology.

While certainly both sides engage in extremist attacks on the other, there appears to be a difference in the attack culture of central players in the partisan debates. Folks like those at Daily Kos and Firedoglake, for example, are the netroots base of the Democratic Party, people who are embraced and recruited in the partisan battles of left-wing establishment politics. This is not true on the right, for the most part. While I'm sure some comment threads at major conservative blogs get out of hand on occasion, it is not the explicit policy of conservatives to demonize their foes (while Daily Kos openly advocates it).

The most recent outburst of left-wing demonization involved last week's shootings at Unitarian Universalist Church in Tennessee. The leftists became positively unglued, seeing in Jim David Adkisson a footsoldier of conservative hatred. The actions of a lone, unstable killer became the basis for smearing the entire GOP universe.

Elizabeth Scalia discusses how Adkisson's case illuminates our frequent descents into partisan recrimination:

Initial reports were that Adkisson had “problems with Christians.” Later reports suggested he also had “problems” with “the liberal movement” and with gays. Predictably, people on both the right and left immediately staked out claims of victimhood and identified each other as the true culprits upon whom both blame and condemnation must rain down. “They” inspired Adkisson to kill those worshipers, no, to kill those progressives, no, to kill those … those …

Those human beings.

If you’re wondering who “they” is, “they” is us, losing a little more of our shared humanity every day, as we increasingly insulate ourselves away from the “others” who do not hold the same worldview as we do. We label ourselves as belonging to some respectable group of believers, or agnostics, or liberals, or conservatives, and we live, work, socialize, and blog — as much as life will allow — amongst our “respectable” peers, in our “respectable” echo chambers. We label the “others” as disrespectable and then commence disrespecting.

It begins with name-calling, which seems so innocuous, so sandbox. Well, name-calling is infantile behavior, but it is hardly innocuous. As marijuana is to heroin, name-calling is to diminished humanity — the gateway. It begins the whole process of dehumanization. Call someone a name and they immediately become “less human” to you, and the less human they seem, the easier they are to hate and to destroy. A “fetus,” after all, is easier to destroy than a “baby.”

Thus, George W. Bush is “Chimpy McHitler.” Hillary Clinton is “a pig in a pantsuit.” Barack Obama is “O-Bambi.” Cindy McCain, who has exhibited some courage and laudable compassion in her life, is reduced to a “pill-popping beer-frau,” and so forth. From there it is smooth sailing down an ever-descending river of hatred, until we are incapable of seeing anything good in the “other,” both because we have willfully hardened our hearts, and because our hate — especially when it is supported by a group of like minds — feels safe and inviolable.

Recently I asked rabid Bush-haters if they could manage to say “one good thing” about the president. Predictably, they could not.

They are capable of sarcasm: “One good thing is he will die someday.” “One good thing is that he can’t serve three terms.” Once, when pressed, someone sneered: “He managed to marry a librarian who could read and explain books to him.”

Scalia notes that both sides do it - both sides are unwilling to find that "one good thing" to say about their political enemies. They're ready to "surrender reason to hate."

While I don't disagree altogether, it seems that most of the recent examples of surrendering to hate can be found on the left, for example following the deaths of Tim Russert, Jesse Helms, and Tony Snow. Robert Novak's announcement last week of illness offered another opportunity for left-wing demonization.

In contrast, when Senator Edward Kennedy was rushed to the hospital in May, to be diagnosed with a brain tumor, I found nothing but well-wishing across the conservative blogosphere.

Ben Johnson offered an explanation for all of this in "Kennedy's Illness, and the Left's." At base, for Johnson, there appears to be a deficit of the soul on the left, an absence of divine grace. This gap removes a prohibitive moral restraint in left-wing partisans and preconditions them to cheer the pain, suffering, and demise of conservatives.

I've gone even further in suggesting that Marxist ideology - which guides the class conscious, anti-imperialist project of contemporary "progressives" - provides leftists with a doctrine of hatred, a political demonology to drive the dehumanization campaigns against their opponents:

As a kind of universal secular Church, Marxism succeeded, in a historically unprecedented way, in satisfying the ideological, political, and psychological needs of marginalized and alienated intellectuals scattered all over the world. It became the first secular Umma of intellectuals....

Marxism has always been little more than pseudo-universalism, a false promise of intellectual and moral universalism, for an exclusive ideology, by definition, cannot be universalistic. Far from a symbolic design for human fellowship and peaceful coexistence of societies, cultures, and civilizations, Marxism rests on the assumption of radical evil and also on the quest for enemies.

This quest for enemies consumes far left-wing partisans. It is an endless search seeking to delegitimize and dehumanize those who would threaten the safety of a secular, redistributionist world of exclusive false brotherhood and psychological security.

This is why I think there are variations in the propensity to surrender to hate. The left's psychopolitical agenda is "clothed in darkness." It is this very difficult for them to find that "one good thing" about those with whom they differ.

Barack Obama and the Political Psychology of Race

John Judis has a great new piece on the political psychology of racial resentment, as it relates to Barack Obama's presidential bid, at the New Republic:

The issue of race is the longest-lasting cleavage in American politics. It is also perhaps the least understood. The open exploitation of racist sentiment by vote-hungry politicians was for centuries a durable American tradition. More recently, race has assumed a subtle, often unspoken form during campaign season, as Republicans have sought white votes by slyly associating their Democratic opponents with controversial black figures like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, or with topics--welfare, crime, federal funding for "midnight basketball"--that many voters identify with African Americans.

Now, with Barack Obama inching closer to the Democratic nomination, race looms yet again as a central factor in American politics. Already, race has played a key part in the Democratic primary, almost certainly hurting Obama among swaths of voters in states like New Jersey, Ohio, and, most recently, Pennsylvania. If he manages to win the nomination anyway--and it appears he will--race seems likely to play an even larger role in the general election.

What role, exactly, will that be? No one knows for sure, but the field of political psychology offers some clues. In recent years, scholars have been combining experimental findings with survey data to explain how race has remained a factor in American elections--even when politicians earnestly deny that it plays any part at all. In 2001, Princeton political scientist Tali Mendelberg summarized this research in a pathbreaking book, The Race Card. Her provocative analysis is hotly debated and far from conclusive; political psychology, after all, is not a hard science. Still, her ideas and those of other academics help to shed light on what has happened so far in the primaries and what might unfold once Obama wraps up the nomination. Their findings suggest that racism remains deeply embedded within the psyche of the American electorate--so deep that many voters may not even be aware of their own feelings on the subject. Yet, while political psychology offers a sobering sense of the difficulties that lie ahead for Obama, it also offers something else: lessons for how the country's first viable black presidential candidate might overcome the obstacles he faces.

Judis writes from the left of the spectrum, but he's even-handed.

I studied racial politics and psychology in some detail in the 1990s (prior to teaching an upper-division course on Black Politics).

I'm a conservative on these issues, but I never underestimate lingering racial bigotry in the country.

I may have mentioned previously that I pumped gas at the local Chevron station when I was at Fresno State (a great job, frankly, for the study time, even if it didn't pay well). When I moved to Santa Barbara I worked for a time at the Chevron filling station downtown, on the weekends, for less than a year while I started my graduate program.

I'll never forget one Saturday morning in Santa Barbara, when my boss - the owner - was working around the station with a couple of his handymen, and three stereotypical poor black women drove up in a really old, beat-up station-wagon. They looked like prostitutes: Lots of makeup, loose, low-cut blouses, with long fingernails and smoking cigarettes. They were lost and asked to see a city map. The boss helped them to a map posted at the window, and they lingered a little before heading down the road, the exhaust spewing out the back of their thrasher of a wagon. I stood near the boss and his buddies while they watched the women drive off. They were laughing, and the boss says, "I love black women. I wish we could still own a few." The other two guys thought this was the funniest thing since blackface, and they were all slapping themselves on their knees in hilarity.

I couldn't help thinking how damned stupid these men were, frankly, given my own background. I wondered if they had any clue as to issues of, say, the politics of "high yellow" racial mixing! I walked away, and talked it over with my wife (then fiancee) later that day. We agreed, you're always going to have some ignorant crackers, but views like these - in my own experience - are an extreme minority. That's not to say that bigotry and discrimination are not a prolbem, or that they're unhurtful. But as a long-time student who worked his way up from community college to a Ph.D. from the University of California, I can attest personally to how committed are those in the educational system to upward racial mobility. In industry, sure, we see lingering patterns of discrimination, but affirmative outreach programs in the corporate sector are extremely advanced, the norm even. It's too bad, really, that we now often focus on racial access to the exclusion of excellence (with some added racial hate-mongering, but more on that in later posts).

As for racial resentment in politics today, I'm thinking back to one of the readings I assigned when I taught my class back in 1999: Earl Black and Merle Black, Politics and Society in the South. The book's a classic in the study of black politics and civil rights. Black and Black offer a very perceptive model of progressive racial intergration, operationalized as black movement through three "belts" of the traditional white society "color line":

Black Americans have confronted massive discrimination in each of three broad categories. Controversies in the outer color line have concerned the "segregated position of Negroes in the public arena"; disputes in the intermediate color line have focused on "economic subordination and opportunity restriction"; and tensions in the innermost ring have involved white acceptance of blacks in intimate friendships and private associations.

Black and Black draw here on the research of Herbert Blumer, and his early essay, "The Future of the Color Line," which is discussed more recently in Lawrence Bobo's research essay, "Prejudice as Group Position: Microfoundations of a Sociological Approach to Racism and Race Relations."

In election '08, Americans - who this week in the Democratic primaries are turning out to see Barack Obama in record numbers - are close to breaking the highest barrier to the outer ring of blacks in the political system, if Obama's elected in November. Moreover, blacks have made incredible strides in all sectors of the American economy since the civil rights movement, so much so that the most important but under-discussed fact of black life in America today is the expansive black American middle class.

Even on the "innermost ring" of the color line, blacks today are integrating into "intimate friendships" as never before, and public opinion is more open to the interracial marriages than at any time in American history.

As I've noted before, one of the great benefits of Obama's presidential campaign is that it provides the country the greatest opportunity in the post-civil rights era to really openly discuss race, and for Americans to vote their greatest hopes and fears concerning the nation's most longstanding division.

More research will sort out the fine points of this year's voting patterns, but Judis notes that economic class - not racial animus - is most likely the biggest impediment to electing a black president this year:

What, then, can the political psychology of race tell us about the current primaries and the coming general election...?

One indication is the exit polls. The percentage of voters who backed Hillary Clinton (or, earlier, John Edwards) while saying that the "race of the candidates" was "important" in deciding their vote is a fair proxy for the percentage of primary voters who were disinclined to support Obama because he is black. That number topped 9 percent in New Jersey; in Ohio and Pennsylvania, two crucial swing states, it was more than 11 percent. And that's among Democratic primary voters, who are, on average, more liberal than the Democrats who vote in general elections.

Obama's connection with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, which exploded into the news after the Ohio primary, may do lasting damage to his candidacy by undermining his attempt to transcend race. Wright's words tie Obama to the stereotype of the angry, hostile--and also unpatriotic--black who is seen as hating both whites and white America. Wright turns Obama into a "black candidate" like Jackson or Sharpton. And, as a black candidate, Obama falls prey to a set of stereotypes about black politicians.

Some of these have to do with abilities. A 1995 study found that voters believe black politicians "lack competence on major issues." Other stereotypes relate to ideology. Several studies have shown that if subjects compare a black and white candidate with roughly equal political positions, they will nevertheless see the black candidate as more liberal. Obama is already vulnerable to charges of inexperience, and, after Wright surfaced, he fell prey to an ideological stereotype as well. Whereas he benefited in the initial primaries and caucuses from being seen as middleof-the-road or even conservative, his strongest support has recently come from more liberal voters. In Pennsylvania, he defeated Clinton among voters who classified themselves as "very liberal" by 55 to 45 percent, but he lost "somewhat conservative" voters by 53 to 47 percent and moderates by 60 to 40 percent. In a national Pew poll, Obama's support among "very liberal" voters jumped seven points between January and May, while his support among "moderates" dropped by two points....

If Obama wins the Democratic nomination, he should be able to inherit the white women who backed Hillary Clinton. As political psychologists have shown, these voters should be largely amenable to his candidacy. He should also continue to enjoy an advantage among white professionals. But Obama is likely to continue having trouble with white working-class voters in the Midwest--voters who tend to score high on racial resentment and implicit association tests and who, arguably, decided the 2004 election with their votes in Ohio.

So, there is some racial resentment there, but overall, given the cult-like phenomenon that's already emerged around the Illinois Senator, the question's not likely whether the country's ready to elect a black president. The question is whether people want this black man.

The fall campaign will put that question to the test.

More later!