Eight U.S. Troops Killed in Afghanistan: Aggressive Attack Shows Insurgents Gaining at AF-PAK Border

It's the big foreign policy story this morning. Both NYT and WaPo have major reports. The fighting took place in the remote eastern section of Afghanistan, in Nurestan province. The news reports describe a brazen offensive featuring tribal militias making cross-border raids. From the Washington Post's report:

The U.S. military said it was not immediately clear how many insurgents were involved in the fighting. The attack involved Taliban fighters and appeared to be led by a local commander of the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin insurgent group, which is run by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former mujaheddin leader during the Soviet war in Afghanistan during the 1980s.

The attack took place in a sparsely populated area of forested mountains near the town of Kamdeysh. The deputy police chief of Nurestan province, Mohammad Farouq, said the insurgents intended to seize control of the Kamdeysh area and that hundreds took part in the fighting. He said more than 20 Afghan soldiers and police have gone missing since the fighting began and may have been taken hostage.

"Americans always want to fight in Afghanistan," said Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, who took credit for the attack by telephone. "If the Americans want to increase their troops, we will increase our fighters as well."

He said the battle began about 6 a.m. Saturday and involved 250 Taliban fighters. He claimed that dozens of American and Afghan soldiers were killed, along with seven Taliban fighters. Mujahid also claimed that the district police chief and intelligence chief were among the hostages, but that could not be confirmed.

I'm reminded of how I felt in November 2006. Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek's liberal but respected foreign policy analyst, published a heavy-duty essay entitled "The Drawdown Option." The piece threw down the gauntlet on the Iraq war. Go all in or get out. My response, amid the frustrations, was to give the U.S. a year to turn things around. We had face over two years of catastrophic danger in the war, and the radical left had long declared the conflict a debacle. I'm not quite there yet on Afghanistan, but the way the media's spinning this conflict - and the way the Obama administration is positioning itself for a cut-and-run -- I may well soon be.

I wrote of the stakes in Afghanistan last week, following a New York Times report indicating that the Mumbai terrorists were gearing up for a new round of conflict. See, "Another Mumbai? Qaeda-Taliban-Lashkar Ready to Strike Again." It turns out that Dan Twining, at Foreign Policy, wrote a report last week as well, "The Stakes in Afghanistan Go Well Beyond Afghanistan":

The problem with the current debate over Afghanistan is that it is too focused on Afghanistan. There is no question that the intrinsic importance of winning wars our country chooses to fight -- to secure objectives that remain as compelling today as they were on September 12, 2001 -- is itself reason for President Obama to put in place a strategy for victory in Afghanistan. But the larger frame has been lost in the din of debate over General McChrystal's leaked assessment, President Obama's intention to ramp up or draw down in Afghanistan, and the legitimacy of the Afghan election. In fact, it is vital for the United States and its allies to recommit to building an Afghan state that can accountably govern its people and defeat the Taliban insurgency -- for reasons that have to do not only with Afghanistan's specific pathologies but with the implications of failure for the wider region and America's place in the international system.

The facts are lost on congressional Democrats and the hardline antiwar left. But as I noted at my report above, a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan will invite another attack on America on the scale of September 11. And both security experts and military personnel agree: "This is a moment in history we must not miss." What's missing is a committed and resolute civilian leadership to see to it that America gets the job done.

*********

UPDATE: There's now a thread at Memeorandum. Jules Crittenden's suggests an "Afghan Tet," which means that the insurgents were in fact decimated, but the press is reporting an American debacle:

Sounds a little like the Taliban would like to pull off an Afghan Tet. Rack up some bad headlines, drive down the poll numbers and panic Congress while the president dithers. You’ll recall that in the original Tet, the Viet Cong and North Vietnam won a Pyrrhic political victory. Though decimated, severely compromed as a fighting force going forward and having failed to hold any ground, they managed to turn American public and political opinion. And won.

Either way, American lives were lost, and the stakes are high, as noted above.

See also, Michelle Malkin, "The Deadly Siege at Kamdeysh." And Weasel Zippers, "Afghanistan: Eight More Heroes Die In Day-Long Taliban Attack ..."

Added: Pamela at Atlas Shrugs links, "EIGHT MORE US SOLDIERS DEAD IN AFGHANISTAN, Obama consults Mother Goose for strategy." Pamela questions not the need for the deployment, but the administration's will to fight it:

Obama has no intention of destroying jihad. He just doesn't. The man grew up in a Muslim country, with a Mulsim father and stepfather and does not reject the Islamic view but prefers it. Hence all the outrech to slaughterers.

So why would I want our most precious resource, our finest Americans, slaughtered in a sloppy, ill-conceived, fairy tale war strategy where our girls and boys can't help but end up dead. Under Obama's reckless, feckless anti-commandership, we have experienced the highest number of deaths in Afghanistan month after month since the inception of the defensive military actions in Islam's war on the US.

Interestingly, but I just saw this yesterday from Diana West, " Losing' Our Way to Victory" (via Baldilocks):

This mission demands a new line of battle around the West itself, one supported by a multilevel strategy in which the purpose of military action is not to nation-build in the Islamic world, but to nation-save in the Western one. Secure the borders, for starters, something "war president" George W. Bush should have done but never did. Eliminate the nuclear capabilities of jihadist nations such as Iran, another thing George W. Bush should have done but never did -- Pakistan's, too. Destroy jihadist actors, camps and havens wherever and whenever needed (the strategy in place and never executed by Bill Clinton in the run-up to 9/11). But not by basing, supplying and supporting a military colossus in Islamic, landlocked Central Asia. It is time, as Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely (USA ret.) first told me last April, to "let Afghanistan go." It is not in our interests to civilize it.

Both Pamela and Diana want to win, but they don't see much sense in trying to nation-build Afghanistan, and especially under a Democratic administration that's uncommitted.

To repeat, I'm not there yet. I'm with Dan Twining above who warns of the larger dangers to the international system found in continued AF-PAK insecurity. We're going to fight, sooner or later. (For more on this, see Let Them Fight or Bring Them Home, "McChrystal's Folly.")

Maybe this president will actually come around to his senses and suppport America, and I'm not saying that to be Pollyanna-ish. At the least, Obama wants to be reelected, and I'm confident -- and as I've said many times already -- success mattters, and increasing progress on the war will keep public support high.

The ball is in the president's court. See, "Success Matters: Public Opinion and the War in Afghanistan."

See also, Common Sense Political Thought, "To Fight or Fold, or Let Fester?"

Shocker! Obama Pentagon to Bury Bush Doctrine

If there's one thing leftists hate more than anything else about the foreign policy of George W. Bush, it was the administration's bold willingness to use force in defense of American interests.

So as the Pentagon prepares for its Quadrennial Defense Review, leftists are getting a chance to demonize the previous administration once more (see, "Bush Preemptive Strike Doctrine Under Review, May Be Discarded"). While it's almost comical that this strategic assessment is being framed as a way to revise U.S. doctrine on preemptive war (since President Obama is the personification of exactly the opposite), you've got to love how Daily Kos represents the Bush administration's foreign policy:

Preemption, that is, initiating a first strike against another nation that appears to be preparing an imminent attack or is already in the process of launching one is not particularly controversial. It's self-defense. And every nation has the right to it. Supporters of preventive war, on the other hand, argue for strategically attacking nations which may, someday, pose a military threat. Preventive war cannot, therefore, be distinguished from a war of aggression, a violation of the most fundamental international law ....

It's this kind of thinking which says it's not only OK but downright prudent to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities to prevent that country from ever building its own nuclear weapons. Moral issues aside, from a strictly utilitarian point of view, such thinking is no different from saying that torturing an enemy soldier is OK: It lets that enemy or a future enemy justify the torture of one's own soldiers. If it's all right for the U.S. to strike preventively at Iran, why isn't it all right for the same to be done by Iran - which during the Cheney-Bush administration had good reason to believe it was under threat of attack?

Despite all the theoretical justifications of preventive war, the neoconservative Cheney-Bush administration made every effort to present the Iraq war as pre-emptive. That was what all those exaggerations and fabrications were about in the run-up to March 2003. Just days before the Bush Doctrine itself was made public, Bush at the United Nations told the lie that the Iraq "regime is a grave and gathering danger."

Ending the Bush Doctrine and the associated policy spin-offs, would not, of course, mean an end to all the perniciousness of American exceptionalism. But it would be a major step in the right direction. Although it would elicit an extended round of shrieks against Obama from the crowd which claims no war America fights can be called aggression, taking that step would improve our national security instead of weakening it as the Bush Doctrine has done.

Of course, President Bush didn't lie. Virtually all of the major European defense ministries claimed similar intelligence on Iraqi WMD. There was a consensus on the reality of threat, just not what to do about -- especially among countries like France and Russia who were loathe to forfeit their massive oil concessions in Saddam's Iraq should the U.S. fight to uphold the 17 United Nations resolutions the Baghdad regime had long abrogated.

In any case, checking that link at Daily Kos leads to President Bush's speech to the World Body on September 12, 2002: "President's Remarks at the United Nations General Assembly." This passage is especially noteworthy:

The United States has no quarrel with the Iraqi people; they've suffered too long in silent captivity. Liberty for the Iraqi people is a great moral cause, and a great strategic goal. The people of Iraq deserve it; the security of all nations requires it. Free societies do not intimidate through cruelty and conquest, and open societies do not threaten the world with mass murder. The United States supports political and economic liberty in a unified Iraq.

We can harbor no illusions -- and that's important today to remember. Saddam Hussein attacked Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990. He's fired ballistic missiles at Iran and Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Israel. His regime once ordered the killing of every person between the ages of 15 and 70 in certain Kurdish villages in northern Iraq. He has gassed many Iranians, and 40 Iraqi villages.

My nation will work with the U.N. Security Council to meet our common challenge. If Iraq's regime defies us again, the world must move deliberately, decisively to hold Iraq to account. We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions. But the purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council resolutions will be enforced -- the just demands of peace and security will be met -- or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.

Also, see Arthur Borden, "Iraq War's Valid Origins":

President Bush has often invoked the memory of Sept. 11, 2001, to justify the war in Iraq. This is understandable, but the war is widely misunderstood as a result. The conflict was based not solely on the terrorist attacks of 2001 but also on decades of bipartisan consensus on foreign policy.

As President Jimmy Carter phrased it in 1980, "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force." Since that time, every U.S. president has been prepared to protect American interests in the Middle East. Recognizing the risks of Saddam Hussein, President Bill Clinton considered attacking Iraq doubtless for the same reasons as George W. Bush - concluding however that such a war would lack popular support.

The long-term challenge of the Iraqi dictator was his desire to control the vast resources of the Persian Gulf. He rightly saw that the acquisition of a nuclear capability would give him a free hand throughout the region, and a dominant role in the global economy.

This discussion shows that -- from President Bush's own words, to those of military experts on the origins of war in 2003 -- U.S. policy was not only predicated on larger strategic rationales of both human rights and deterrence, but that the administration was indeed working from a longstanding tradition in American foreign policy as well.

But what's especially bothersome is the Daily Kos passage above suggesting "the perniciousness of American exceptionalism." This concept is fundamentally at issue in leftist foreign policy in Washington, and it's the current administration's abandonment of America's foundational uniqueness that is placing Americans and citizens of the world at greater risk than in other other time in decades.

As I've said many times before, it won't be too soon when American voters reject Barack Neville Hussein and his Democratic (Socialist) Party at the ballot box. In the meanwhile, conservatives can gather strength in the increasing indicators showing that the current administration's days are indeed numbered.

Added: See also Common Sense Political Thought, "The Difference Between Theory and Practice."

Fighting to Win: Advocating Total War in the Age of Sacred Terror

In an entry yesterday, I cited Daniel Doron, at the Wall Street Journal, where he argued against Israel's current military strategies:

The massacre of rabbinical students Thursday at a Jerusalem seminary highlights the failure of the powerful Israeli military to stop the assaults of Palestinian terrorists. It also reveals serious deficiencies in Israel's strategy and tactics....

Israeli governments have done little to stop the massive rearmament of Hamas in Gaza with Iranian weapons, bought with Saudi money and transported into Gaza with the connivance of Egypt. Israel did not even press its great ally, the U.S., to lean on Egypt and put an end to this flagrant violation of its peace agreement with Israel -- a peace agreement for which Egypt is rewarded by billions in U.S. aid.

But the worst failures stem from adoption of a no-win strategy....

Israel could achieve military victory by eliminating or incarcerating Hamas's leadership, not two or three a month (so that they are replaceable) but a few hundred at once. By breaking its command structure and its logistical apparatus, Hamas can be rendered inoperative.

But for this to happen, Israel and Western democracies must treat the terrorists' mortal challenge as a war for survival, not as a series of skirmishes. And in war, you must fight to win, by all traditional means.

Now, Doron suggests in his conclusion that Israel should use "all traditional means,'' but that's rather ambiguous. How far should Israel go in defeating the demonic alliance Middle Eastern terrorist organizations intent on the Jewish state's complete and utter annihilation?

Will locking up "a few hundred at once" really stem the unending onslaught of terrorist mayhem facing the nation?

Dana Pico over at Common Sense Political Thought has his doubts, and he's made a powerful argument against Israel's cat-and-mouse limited war doctrine:

The last paragraph is correct, but the preceding one demonstrates Mr. Doron’s intellectual problem; his problem is that he is an educated Western classical liberal....

The current Western classical liberal paradigm for war is fighting to take out the political and military leadership of the enemy, and that’s just what Mr. Doron suggested, “eliminating or incarcerating Hamas’s leadership, not two or three a month . . . but a few hundred at once.” The obvious question to ask is: when was the last time that such a strategy won a war?

The Allies won World War II by killing millions of Germans and Italians and Japanese, to near the point of exterminating their population of fighting-aged men, and by so thoroughly destroying their countries’ infrastructures that no resumption of hostilities was possible. The Germans started it, but it was really the Allies who turned Europe into a charnal house, via concentrated aerial bombardment and massive physical invasion. The Japanese started it, but it was the United States which killed and bombed Japan into submission, so thoroughly beaten that Emperor Hirohito forced a surrender before invasion was necessary. In short, we didn’t just defeat the fascists’ leadership, we didn’t take out several thousand political and military leaders, but we battered their countries into submission.

That concept of war is simply no longer within the boundaries of current Western thinking; we no longer accept the notion of actually destroying a nation in the process of beating it militarily. That kind of thought went out the window beginning in Vietnam, and was gone completely by the time of the two Persian Gulf Wars.

Pico's absolutely correct, and he hits upon an extremely important question: What's the limit of war fighting doctrine in today's long-war against fundamentalist terrorism?

Well, it turns out that Michael Scheuer addresses this question precisely at today's Los Angeles Times, "Break Out the Shock and Awe":

In this age of mindless phrases, such as "out-of-the-box thinking" and "a time for change," another silly phrase -- favored by presidents Bush, Clinton and Bush -- is causing America's defeat in Afghanistan and Iraq. The phrase is "small, light and fast," and it refers to the kind of military that they think we need to have.

"Small, light and fast" means not your grandfather's Army -- far fewer heavy weapons and far less of the ground infantry that made up the conventional forces the United States has always relied on in major wars. Instead, its proponents believe, the U.S. military should rely more on covert operations and special forces to fight counterinsurgencies and irregular wars.

To varying degrees, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama want this as well. Obama, for example, recently called for "more special operations resources along the Afghan-Pakistan border."

But this approach cannot work. One lesson of the last decade is that our leaders' efforts to win wars with the CIA-led clandestine service and U.S. Special Forces in the lead only delivers defeat. We cannot fight a worldwide uprising of radical Islamists with the type of forces once thought most appropriate to suppress rebels on tiny Caribbean islands....

The sad truth is that Washington's increasing over-reliance on clandestine and special forces to fight our enemies is the result of our political class' terror of condemnation by the media, academia, the just-war theorists and the European elite if it uses America's full military power. Notwithstanding the murderous war in the Balkans and the Rwandan genocide, U.S. leaders have bought into the ahistorical assertion that human nature and war today are radically different from and far less bloody than they were in the eras of Alexander and Caesar.

Unwilling to apply full conventional military power against our enemies, American officials instead hope that light forces, counterinsurgency tactics and precision weapons will beat our foes with few casualties, little or no collateral damage -- and no bad publicity.

Well, bunk. Victory is not possible if only covert forces are employed, and presidents from both parties have lied about their effectiveness because they will not tell Americans the politically incorrect truth. The fact is that in this global war against non-uniformed, religiously motivated foes who live with and are supported by their civilian brethren, and who are perfectly willing to use a nuclear device against the U.S., victory is only possible through the use of massive, largely indiscriminate military force.

So if that's what it's going to take - absolutely "battering countries into submission" through the application of "massive, largely indiscriminate force" (to borrow from both passages) - then why haven't we done so?

Well, what's not mentioned here - at least not as explicitly as it should be - is the problem of the killing of civilians. Are we ready to employ America's unprecedented military preponderance in wars of total, scorched earth annihilation (and is Israel)?

Obviously not.

Staying with the U.S. case, this is not to say that recent American military victories weren't decisive, for example in Afghanistan and Iraq. They were, but they were incomplete: They were not wars of total annihilation on the scale of the Second World War.

If we're really going to fight our enemies indiscriminately, we need to be ready to kill men, women, and children. We need to be willing to deploy bombing campaigns on the scale of Dresden and Tokyo, and in killing we need to make no distinction between enemy soldiers and enemy civilians.

Are we ready to do this? I don't think so.

But note something here: James McPherson recently reviewed Mark Neely's, The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction at the New York Review of Books (click here).

Neely's making the case that the Civil War was not a total war on the scale of World War II. McPherson takes Neely's argument apart, showing that on most measures rarely has war been as total as the conflict between the states.

But what's useful about McPherson's piece is the elaboration of the total war doctrine itself:

The concept of 'total war' had arisen as a way of describing the horrifying destruction of lives and resources in World War II. The generation of historians who experienced that cataclysm used this phrase to describe the American Civil War as well. That conflict cost more American lives than World War II, even though the United States in 1861 had less than one quarter the population of 1941, and it left large portions of the South looking like bombed-out cities of Europe and Japan.

The Civil War mobilized human and economic resources in the Confederacy and the Union on a scale unmatched by any other event in American history except perhaps World War II. For actual combat duty, the war of 1861-1865 mustered a larger proportion of American manpower than that of 1941-1945. And in another comparison with the global conflagration, the victorious power in the Civil War did all it could to devastate the enemy's economy as well as the morale of its homefront population. Union armies were remarkably successful in this effort. The Civil War wiped out two thirds of the assessed value of the South's livestock, and more than half of its farm machinery - not to mention one quarter of the Confederacy's white men of military age. While Northern wealth increased by 50 percent from 1860 to 1870, Southern wealth decreased by 60 percent.

McPherson uses this discussion to cast initial aspersion on Neely's case that the Civil War was historically limited.

But our purpose here is to consider whether the West stands ready to fight modern wars on this scale of destruction. The United States is more powerful in the absolute sense today than in any time in American history, and our present level of defense spending - at 3.9 percent of GDP - is at comparable historical lows for the post-WWII era.

Obviously, we could rain down exponentially more destruction on our enemies today than in any war Americans have fought in history, and we could afford to as well.

Is that what we want to do?

Personally, I'm all for fighting futher along the continuum toward total war than we are today. But I doubt society is.

We're not likely to achieve the "lasting victory" both Pico and Scheuer recommend unless we engage in the total scale of destruction that McPherson describes.

Until we do, we should not be surprised to see future attacks on the United States of at least the scale of September 11, 2001.

Dana Pico Closes Common Sense Political Thought

My friend Dana has ended his blog. See, "The death of CSPT." Dana emailed to sound me out before he went ahead and pulled the plug. Here's my response:

Close it down only if it's not fun for you, Dana.

I'm sorry you lost Sharon and any others. Would they come back to your blog if you screened commenters? It's the Internet. I went to comment moderation because I had one troll, W. James Casper, who runs a whole blog designed to mock and ridicule me, and now to organize attacks on my employment. Casper always has to have the last word and he's "never wrong", so after allowing him for years I finally started moderation, and my comment section basically died. But I don't blog for the comments. I blog to get my ideas out there. Comments and great commenters are an added bonus, but it's also extra work. So, I'd only close it down if losing a great commentariat is a bummer for you. Otherwise, keep blogging and go with the flow. I love the winter photos, so you'll always have things others would like to read and repost.

Donald

I went over there to check the comments, because Dana said that things had gotten personal at the threads. Folks were making threats and posting real names and workplace information. Here's one comment at this post:

Hube, now you go public with a private email! That is a breach right there.

If you don’t know what you did to out me, that’s on you, Hube. I choose to use my first name on this blog, which both you and Hitchcock arbitrarily revoked. Is this what you call behaving with honor in public.

All I ask of you, and Hitchcock, is that we keep our discourses civil, free from the personal attacks. Apparently that is too much to ask of you, Hube.

So yes, Hube, if the personal attacks continue, in retaliation your identity will then be revealed by me, as you have already done to me. Disagree with me all you want, that is fine, but cease the personal attacks. Do I have to spell out to you what a personal attack is? Perhaps, as a warning, I should point out to you first if you use one. Or just take a look at every Hitchcock post addressed to me – there you will find a million examples. Since Dana has refused to follow through on his requests for civility, ignored by you and Hitchcock, I will act when I am victimized and bullied by you too.

And don’t forget, Dana, your blog is in the public domain. You can certainly maintain your devotion to free speech and simultaneously exert your influence in order to minimize the personal attacks, which certainly contaminate your blog. What has happened to your standards, Dana?

One of the other commenters enters after that to suggest it's not fair to pull Dana into a fight between those two. But actually, it's Dana's house, and Dana has decided that things have deteriorated out of control and he wants to start fresh.

Now, compare that to my stalker and demonic hate blogger Walter James Casper III. That hate-blogger has repeatedly claimed that he started American Nihilist as a joke, but once the blog become the online repository for attacks against my workplace, not once has Walter James Casper rejected the attacks or denounced the hate. To this day commenters there, some of the very people who have launched attacks against me only to get burned, continue to scheme and organize for additional rounds.

If Walter James Casper III had even a shred of the decency as my good friend Dana Pico he'd call it a day at American Nihilist and pull the plug. Casper said it was all supposed to be a joke. Now some commenters have decried Walter James "Costanza" Casper III for his "legalisitic" blogging that has just become a "drag." But Casper is driven by pure hatred. Even after being roundly denounced around the Internet as a clinical stalker and sociopath, he continues his smears and lies for no other purpose but to destroy me. He's even taken his attacks to my personal space, sending threats and taunts via email. Hate-blogger Walter James Casper III should look to the example set by Dana Pico. Sometimes things just get out of control. Dana Pico has denounced the threats and hatred. He's giving it a fresh start on another blog. Walter James Casper should also denounce the threats and hatred and give it up. Retire American Nihilist and start fresh in an effort to salvage any thread of decency that might be left.

PREVIOUSLY: "Continuing Lies by Cowardly Hate-Blogger W. James Casper in Left's Demonic Workplace Intimidation Campaign."

Movies, Moral Clarity, and the Reproduction of Culture

"Not everything has to be a judgment through the prism of 'moral equivalence'."

That's Wordsmith, at my post yesterday, differing with my take on Clint Eastwood's "Letters From Iwo Jima."

Actually, he's right: We don't have to look at everything through a lense of morality, but since the media, Hollywood, and the global film industry will do it for us anyway, it pays to be on guard against the pernicious influence of mass media relativism - doubly so considering the powerful impact movies have on the popular imagination of our younger generations.

With that, I think folks need to read Bill Whittle's essay on Hollywood's reproduction of political culture, "The Workshops of Identity." It's a lengthy piece, but brilliantly explosive in its blatant and triumphant exaltation of American cultural and material power, and of our (providential) exceptionalism. It's also a reminder of our responsibility as a nation not to discard that inheritance:

There was a time when America broadcast its virtues to the world. Films like It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, even Star Wars and Spider-man, were films about common, decent people – Americans, obviously, for we all know that even Luke Skywalker was an Iowa farm boy – who find themselves in dangerous and evil places and whose fundamental decency corrected this wrong in the world and restored a sense of hope and optimism, a sense that we are masters of our own destiny. It is an idea so powerful that even French intellectuals, who seemed then and seem today to be incapable of a single positive or upbeat thought, could watch in wonder and contempt as legions of their countrymen flocked to see them.

Those days have gone. No longer does Hollywood broadcast America’s mythic virtues to the world. No, the flow is reversed now. Now the great creative driving force of Hollywood is to present to America the anti-American hatred of the intellectuals watching in impotent fury out in the rest of the world,

Of the six or seven war movies made during the last few years, all – save one – were spectacular failures. Many were the reasons given for this, but perhaps, someday, while sitting in a hammock in the Cayman Islands, even a studio executive might be just intellectually aware enough to catch a flash of what is obvious to a pharmacist in Des Moines: that maybe, just perhaps, these films failed not because of war weariness or denial or rank stupidity on the part of the American people, but rather – are you sitting down? – that most of the country, unlike Hollywood, has sons and daughters and fathers and brothers in the military and know for first-hand fact that they are not rapists or murderers, hicks, dullards, losers, or broken and victimized children but rather the bravest, the most capable, the most decent and honorable and just plain competent people we have.

And perhaps, just perhaps, it might enter that navel-gazing, self-centered, dim little brain to reflect that the one war movie that did out-of-the-park business was the one that showed the Marines as the good guys, winning on the battlefield, defending their people and their culture against long odds and full of the heroism and sacrifice that used to be so commonplace in this city… even if the Marines in question wore loincloths and funny helmets and advanced with spears and round shields.

If America simply led the world military to the degree that it does today, well, that would simply be historical. That it should have both economic and military might, and use them so much more often for good than for ill, would unique and awe-inspiring. That it could couple military and economic strength with such leadership in science and medicine is simply unheard of in the annals of history, and for it to be the military, economic, scientific and cultural beacon that is is not only unheard of, it simply almost defies imagining – would, in fact, defy imagining to anyone who had not grown up in it, as we have, and seen it with their own eyes.

I have said all of that simply to say this: I know my people and I study our history. The single thing that makes America so exceptional is the belief of its people in American exceptionalism. It is a simple cause and effect relationship, easy to understand from using your own common sense and the examples in your own life. The confident and the bold do bold and confident things. The shameful and self-loathing? Not so much. And Hollywood as it exists today is using all of its vast talent to turn us from the former into the latter.

America is not just a cauldron, but a reactor. From all over the earth, men and women have risked their lives to immerse themselves in this great experiment in freedom and individuality, and the results, by any measure, have produced more goodness, more security, more prosperity and more raw happiness than society or combination of societies in history.

Stars, like our sun, are reactors too: the tremendous, monumental energies and pressures they generate would blow them to pieces in a millisecond, but for one thing… the immense gravity that holds these fiery atoms together and strikes the balance of force and pressure that creates all the light and life in the universe.

The American reactor of individuality and freedom of expression would also fly apart too, but for one thing: the deep love of country that has bound it together and liberated the best of the human spirit. Destroy that love of country and the idea of America – for that is what she is, in the end… simply an idea of freedom and the pursuit of happiness – eliminate that binding love and the reactor will explode. And when it does, there will be no more light – no more medicine, no more art and poetry, no more iPhones and MRI scanners and jet travel, no more Fifth and First Amendment rights, no more security and peace… in fact, no more hot running water.

Readers should absorb the whole thing, here.

This is probably the best essay I've read on American exceptionalism and the primacy of morality in culture. And in reading this, readers can see why I take issue with Tim, my commenter at the post, who says:

Donald: I believe, truly, that there is room for war films that are both triumphant and morally ambiguous. You're sounding a bit grandpa-ish here. By the way, what's wrong with showing something from another perspective? Isn't that one of the goals of art?

Bill Whittle's essay above provides the answers for Tim that in my sense shouldn't be so elusive.

What's Become of Conservatism?

Some time ago I removed "neocon" from my Twitter profile. I'm still neoconservative, though.

"American Power" retains its founding epigram at top, "Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education — from a neoconservative perspective!"

I wouldn't change it even if I knew how, lol. (Blogger's templates are completely changed and I haven't bothered to figure them out, although it's not a big deal, heh.)

I mention this not because attacks on neoconservatives are new (paleocons have despised neocons like forever). What's new is how the most fervent supporters of President Trump have taken to attacking Bill Kristol-style neocons with a fervor that's even more fanatical than what's reserved for the radical left. Why? I guess #MAGA conservatives not only see no difference between neocons and radical leftists, but they're absolutely livid at the perceived treason of those taking the moniker of a "right-winger" while (allegedly) simultaneously working for the destruction of the movement from within.

Longtime readers know that my neoconservativism has been genuine in a number of ways: For one, simply, it's really a "new conservatism" for me, as I was a registered Democrat until the 2004 presidential election — a Truman Democrat, but still. Moreover, I'm ideologically neoconservative across the board, on domestic and foreign policy, and not someone who glommed onto the movement as a rah-rah cheerleader for the (then popular) Iraq war and an ambitious and muscular foreign policy during the G.W. Bush administration. Frankly, most so-called conservatives or erstwhile bandwagoning "neoconservatives" would hardly recognize names like Irving Howe and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. It was Irving Kristol who famously defined a neoconservative as "a liberal who'd been mugged by reality."

There's a long pedigree there. I myself have never worried at being attacked as a "closet leftist" or "pseudo conservative" because I've never tried to prove anything to anyone who's purportedly on the right. My writing, blogging, tweeting, and teaching speak for themselves. That said, I've embraced Donald Trump not so much because he's a conservative ideologue (he's clearly and emphatically not) but because he stands up and fights for what he believes in, and what he believes in mostly and so clearly is America and the interests of Americans. If that puts me at odds with "genuine" conservatives, like Jonah Goldberg and the cruise-ship right-wing, so be it.

It's complicated being a neocon Trump supporter these days, heh.

So, why all these pixels to hash out some defense of my persuasions? Well, mostly because I'm disgusted with all the latest bickering, infighting, and hatred I've been seeing on the right. It's ugly and not flattering to those engaged in it, and it's besmirching the reputations of some serious institutions out there. The newfangled populist right flagship "American Greatness" comes to mind. I like the website. Victor Davis Hanson publishes there, and he's among the smartest, most principled conservatives working today (and no spring chicken of the movement at that). But American Greatness is in the business of settling scores, it seems, and policing the right for ideological purity. And it's unbecoming, to put it mildly.

Exhibit A is this over-the-top Trumpist-nationalist manifesto seen there earlier this week, "Death of The Weekly Standard Signals Rebirth of the Right." It's authored by Chris Buskirk, who's the publisher and editor of the website. I don't know Chris Buskirk. I've been involved in what's sometimes called "movement conservatism" for about a decade now, and I've never heard of the guy. Maybe he's paid his dues. I have no idea. But he's certainly got some ax to grind, or he's got something to prove, or you pick your neologism. Here's the first parts from the article, which might be labeled a screed:

Death of The Weekly Standard Signals Rebirth of the Right https://t.co/FnlbRrZeC0 pic.twitter.com/UdD1wRnHcz

— American Greatness (@theamgreatness) December 17, 2018

Neoconservatism is dead, long live American conservatism. That’s what I thought when I learned The Weekly Standard would be shuttered by longtime owner Clarity Media. The Standard was a creature of a particular time and place—the 1990s, the Bush-Clinton ascendancy, and Washington, D.C.’s insular, self-referential political class. As such, it never really fit within the broad flow of historic American conservatism. It was always, and intentionally, something different. So perhaps the magazine’s opposition to Donald Trump, his voters, and the America First agenda should come as no surprise.

Max Boot described the magazine as “a redoubt of neoconservatism” in 2002 and he was right. If the National Review of the 1970s and ’80s was the journal of Reaganism, The Weekly Standard carried the banner of Bushism. But the Bushes never carried the Reagan mantle and were never conservatives. They were always blithely unconstrained by any identifiable political philosophy other than the unwavering belief that they should run the country. They represented nothing so much as the mid-20th-century country club set that was content to see the size and scope of government expand as long as they got a piece of the action. And The Weekly Standard was there every step of the way, advocating so-called big-government conservatism at home and moral imperialism abroad. All of it failed. The Bush Administration was discredited by its failed policies and incompetence so it was just a matter of time before the chief organ of Bushism failed too.

But the life and death of The Weekly Standard is really the story of the death and rebirth of American conservatism, which is nothing more than the modern political expression of America’s founding principles.

As with other more virulent forms of Left-liberal politics, the neoconservatives maintain a sense of aristocratic entitlement to rule despite having killed almost everything they touched. It is their combination of titanic hubris and priggish moralism that is behind their aggressive advocacy of endless foreign wars and meddling in the internal affairs of other countries. For The Weekly Standard, it made sense to send thousands of Americans to their deaths defending Iraq’s borders, but they wouldn’t lift a finger to protect our own. As the real world results of their misadventures came home to roost, conservatives realized that The Weekly Standard didn’t represent them.

For years, neoconservatives undermined and discredited the work of conservatives from Lincoln to Reagan who held to a set of common principles and a common sense understanding that America is for Americans and it is the job of government to protect the rights and interests of the American people—and only the American people. But over the past few years, Bill Kristol became more transparent about his real beliefs. For example, he let us know in a tweet that he “Obviously strongly prefer(s) normal democratic and constitutional politics. But if it comes to it, prefer the deep state to the Trump state” and in another that, “The GOP tax bill’s bringing out my inner socialist.” The point is that Kristol and the Standard’s attachment to conservative principles was always provisional and transactional. The Republican Party and the conservative movement were a temporary vehicle for their personal and policy agendas. Now, Kristol and others have moved on in search of a new host organism.

That’s because the world of Beltway neoconservatism of which the Standard was the arch example is only partially about ideas, it’s also about power and more especially about privilege—and that means sinecures. That’s a nice way of saying that it’s what people hate about politics, that it often becomes self-serving and careerist rather than about the American ideal of building and maintaining the institutions of government that allow the individual, the family, and the church to thrive...

There's more at the link, but you get the idea.

While I can agree with some of the attacks here on elitism and stupid establishment sinecures, the attack on "moral imperialism abroad" might as well have been written by Patrick Buchanan, if not Lew Rockwell. It's stupid. Who would ever argue that President Ronald Reagan failed to espouse a moral American foreign policy, which by virtue of its overwhelming materialist power and geographic stretch has been long characterized as a practical American imperialism by such august scholars as the historian Paul Kennedy and the late political scientist Chalmers Johnson (even in his pre-paleonservative days)?

Besides, it's just personal and nasty. Which brings me to this really ugly kerfuffle of the last few days seen on Twitter, featuring American Greatness feature writer Julie Kelly and National Review's David French and his wife Nancy. You can get up to speed by clicking through at the tweet below, but in short, this is the politics of personal destruction plain and simple, and in my experience it's been the ghouls on the left who've mastered this kind of no-hold-barred ideological combat (and now the so-called new wave warriors of the populist right). See also the Resurgent, "David French Defends Wife on Twitter," and "Julie Kelly of American Greatness Attacks a Victim of Sexual Abuse Because Trump."

I told @DavidAFrench to ignore her characterization of me, until I was finally able to admit the pain of her lies. Both @julie_kelly2 and my pedophile equated 'victims' as 'lovers.' I do not fear anyone who uses the language of the sex predator to score political points. https://t.co/tjkpTDfEGn

— Nancy French (@NancyAFrench) December 18, 2018

So what has become of conservatism? Is a conservative someone who's a populist-nationalist, tough on trade type with "blood and soil" proclivities? Or is a conservative really just the old hardcore free-market libertarian with the social ethos of the old Ward Cleaver suburban cultural demographic?

Actually, it's neither of these things nowadays, if a look around at the right's contemporary ideological battlespace is any clue. It's Trump über alles these days. And that includes a lot of hatin' on those who haven't drunk the Kool-Aid. To be a "true" conservative you basically have to hate the "cruise ship" establishment crowd that's reigned in D.C. for a couple of decades now. But hey, forget small government ideology. I mean, what's that? President Trump recently said that he couldn't care less about the size of the federal budget, because "I won’t be here" when it blows up. I guess being "conservative" now is more about who you hate than what you stand for.

These debates over ideological purity come and go. We had a big schism on the right after Barack Obama was elected in 2008. We had more of that in 2012 when so-called "faux-conservative" Mitt Romney won the GOP nomination that year. Donald Trump's unpredictable victory in 2016 produced perhaps the most vociferous ideological schism of all. It's rather tiring to me, but then, I've been but a minor figure at the margins of the movement, it turns out. And when push comes to shove, being a political activist or operative isn't my first job: I'm a professor and teacher of politics first (and a father and family man); a blogger and ideological political combatant second.

But whenever these schisms over ideology break out I always refer to my favorite book on what it means to be a conservative, Barry Goldwater's 1960 masterpiece, The Conscience of a Conservative. What sticks out most for me in that book is Goldwater's unabashed and robust defense of the conservative ideal as epitomized as human freedom. And to achieve that human freedom --- the essential liberty of mankind --- government must be limited and reduced to its core functions, providing public order, basic public goods, most especially the vital protection of our nation's security against external enemies. Interestingly, Goldwater's last chapter is "The Soviet Menace," where he writes:

And still the awful truth remains: We can establish the domestic conditions for maximizing freedom, along the lines I have indicated [in the book's previous chapters], and yet become slaves. We can do this by losing the Cold War to the Soviet Union.

It's interesting to me, then, to finish by highlighting that the true "conscience of a conservative" is to be deeply concerned with America's forward moral role in the world, because by only making national security a core prerequisite for securing conservative ideals can a genuine and true "right wing" ideological program at home succeed. This isn't, therefore, the kind of ideology of the folks at American Greatness or other acolytes of the war on the cruise-ship elites. There are some great current conservative voices that might seem to be in the camp of the Chris Buskirks and Julie Kellys --- like the inimitable Kurt Schlichter, for example --- but they're not really, for they're distinctive in their strong moral advocacy for American economic and military power, and for a unabashed support for America's many forward strategic missions currently in operation around the world.

So with that I conclude. We have a strong and powerful current of conservative ideological belief on which to draw. For me it's less about being a "neocon" than being for a unique American philosophy of exceptionalism worth defending. A true exceptionalism as an ideal different from other so-called conservative countries. It's a frontier exceptionalism that's pure and most conducive to human freedom. And it's a conservatism that need not tear others down in vicious bursts of online ugliness nor a conservatism that wants to roll up the drawbridge, turning its back to the problems of the world. It's the conservatism of both ideals and action, and of standing as the beacon for right and a light unto others, at home and abroad.

That's what I believe.

Liberaltarianism and Intellectual Dishonesty

Robert Stacy McCain has proved once again that he's one of the most important conservative writers working today.

In "The Luxury of 'Liberaltarianism'," Robert mercilessly pulls the mask off the alliance between leftists and libertarians, which I've long thought has been one of the most intellectually bankrupt and ideologically decrepit marriages in recent political history. Here's the key passage attacking "liberaltarianism":

The problem with this concept was never really on the part of liberals, except insofar as they either (a) misunderstood libertarianism, or (b) simply lied about their openness to libertarian ideas. Confusion and deceit among liberals is a given. But the liberals always knew what they wanted from such a transaction: Elect more Democrats.

What did the libertarians want from the transaction? It is here that the ridiculous folly of the enterprise is found. Most of the Will Wilkinson types are intellectuals who are embarrassed by what Hunter S. Thompson called the "Rotarian" instincts of the Republican Party. That flag-waving God-mom-and-apple-pie stuff just doesn't light a fire under the American intellectual class, which is not now, nor has it ever been, enamored of religion, patriotism and "family values."

As a political impulse, the sort of libertarianism that scoffs at creationism and traditional marriage wields limited influence, because it appeals chiefly to a dissenting sect of the intelligentsia. It's a sort of free-market heresy of progressivism, with no significant popular following nor any real prospect of gaining one, because most Ordinary Americans who strongly believe in economic freedom are deeply traditionalist. And most anti-traditionalists - the feminists, the gay militants, the "world peace" utopians - are deeply committed to the statist economic vision of the Democratic Party.

There's much more at the link, and I can't provide much value-added to the essay. My point here is to flesh out a little more the fundamental pathology of liberaltarianism, which is intellectual dishonesty.

My point of departure, as readers might have guessed, is Mark Thompson and his blogging buddies at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen. Thompson's a self-proclaimed libertarian, and his cohorts at the blog are all over each other with intellectual glad-handing and backslapping on their bright ideas on atheism, gay marriage, humanitarian intervention, neoconservativism, and God knows what else. This cabal might well be aspiring to develop some newfangled "postmodern conservatism," but it's really all the same, as far as I can see.

An animating force for the paradigm seems to be the resistance to tradition and universal morality. This can be seen in the excursions on atheism at the blog, where we see commentary suggesting that since there's no possibility for the falsification of God's existence, those of religoius faith are essentially "lunatics" for proposing an alternative theory of evolution in Intelligent Design. Or we can see this in the virtually unhinged attacks on neoconservatives and the war in Iraq, where E.D. Kain excoriates the Bush administration for "invading countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan in order to democratize them ..." Never mind that the origins of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq emerged out of vastly different contexts - with varying methodologies of strategic justification - the overall animus toward the forward use of state power places this "libertarian-progressive" agenda firmly in the nihilist camp of the "world peace" utopians Robert Stacy McCain mentions above.

But what's especially bothersome about these folks is the confused intellectualism on questions of moral right. It's almost stomach-churning to read E.D. Kain's comments on Israel following this week's election: "Israel, once lively with the dream of the original idealists who founded it, has over the years become increasingly militarized, entrenched, and anti-Democratic." This is not much different from the commentary on Israel one finds at the neo-Stalinist Firedoglake. E.D. Kain, of course, has problems with intellectual integrity, as I've already noted, and he joins Mark Thompson in a left-libertarian hall of shame on that score.

It should be no surprise that these folks find inspiration in the ravings of Andrew Sullivan, whose recent libertarian strain led him to suggest that, "Yes, Michael Phelps took a few hits from a bong at a party ... does anyone think that smoking pot would give him an unfair advantage in the pool? Please. When on earth are we going to grow up as a culture?" I guess "growing up" as a culture would mean that the majority of Americans would have to kowtow to the radical libertarian demands for same-sex marriage, which is a big agenda for the "young turks" of the right for whom "the real respectability of a solid argument is preferable to the worthless respectability one gets" by advocating for "more humane" positions on some of the most hot-button social issues of the day.

There is, in sum, a pure cowardice to liberaltarianism that's frankly revolting. But more than that, there's a fundamental ideological incoherence, if not outright stupidity. Scott Payne writes that he's moved "to question the overall usefulness of political labels ... Is anyone ever really “conservative” or “liberal” or “libertarian” all the time, ad infinitum?" Perhaps it never occurred to Scott that to be ideological is by definition to evince a consistent or coherent pattern of beliefs across a range of political issues. If one is not coherent in such a way, it makes little sense to make the case for a new ideological paradigm, for at any time when inconvenient facts or uncomfortable moral truths intrude upon the groundings of a particulary ideological framework, one could simply jettison any pretension of intellectual consistenty, not to mention moral right.

And in fact, that's pretty much what these folks are doing. As Victor Davis Hanson argued last week with reference to the hysterical ideological jockeying of Andrew Sullivan:

I am absolutely baffled how and why someone like this can continue to be taken seriously: for weeks he peddled vicious, absolutely false rumors that Sarah Palin did not deliver her recent child. On the eve of Iraq, (he now seems to suggest that he was brainwashed by, yes, those sneaky neo-cons), he blathered on with blood and guts rhetoric, mixed with fawning references to Bush, and embraced apocalyptic threats, including the advocacy of using nuclear weapons against Saddam should the anthrax attacks be connected to him. He seems not merely to support any incumbent President, but to deify them, and can go from encomia about the rightwing Bush to praise of leftwing Obama without thought of contradiction. In the summer before 9/11 he was in the major news outlets, trying to save his career after accused (accurately as he confirmed) of trafficking anonymously in the sexual want ads as an HIV-positive would-be participant in the unmentionable. (In other words, someone who was caught in a well-publicized scandal about which he confirmed its main details, without much sensitivity to human fraility, helped to spread false information about a potential VP designed to ruin her reputation.) At some point, one would think such a suspect individual would have been ostracized by sane people—or indeed perhaps he already has.

This seems to be common among liberaltarians, or postmodern conservatives, however we might identify them. E.D. Kain gave the finger to a deep-bench of neoconservative writers whom he'd asked for analytical contributions - at no charge - when he deleted his online magazine, "NeoConstant," without the decency of a courtesy notification. Mark Thompson has the gall to applaud the strategic rationality of Hamas (with an obligatory attack on Israeli's actions as "self-defeating"), and then when questioned about his argument, he cowardly throws his hands up and pleads that "I honestly don't know - or pretend to know - the answer to the situation ..."

There are a lot more issues here to be hashed out (and certainly genuine libertarian ideology may have multiple strains). But in my view, it's frankly inconceivable in terms of developing a coherent ideology to see libertarian thinkers align with nihilist antiwar leftists in opposition to a forward-based and morally-robust American foreign policy, and then watch these same wannabe ideologues align with the neo-Stalinist forces of International ANSWER in protesting - whether on the street or online - the political and moral preferences of a majority of Californians who exercized their basic political rights to protect marriage traditionalism through the interest group-system and the ballot box.

Observing and monitoring the program of this unholy alliance of left-libertarianism has truly been one of the most eye-opening, and deeply troubling, experiences of my political lifetime.

The Elites Have Unmasked Themselves and Declared War

President Trump has been permanently banned from Twitter, and most other "unsocial" media platforms. 

The left is bringing on the civil war for which they keep blaming the other side. It's not going well.

At AoSHQ, "Lee Smith: The Elites Have Unmasked Themselves and Declared War." 

Here's Smith's essay, originally published at the Epoch Times:

When a regime sanctions the political violence of one faction against another, events like Wednesday’s bloody skirmishes at the Capitol are a foregone conclusion. Presumably the country’s corporate, political, and cultural elite assumed that after four years of trying to humiliate and unseat President Donald Trump that his supporters would simply accept their continued degradation, impoverishment, and disenfranchisement. Or maybe they thought that with their allied press and social media obscuring reality, no one would notice they were waging war on Americans.

Details of Wednesday’s events are still unfolding. In places, protestors overran police. A Capitol Police officer died of injuries suffered while holding off protestors and others were reportedly injured. Elsewhere it seems that law enforcement welcomed Trump supporters into the Capitol and posed for pictures with them. No doubt there were agents provocateurs among the MAGA crowd, but Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by a Capitol Hill policeman when she tried to crawl through a window, wasn’t with Antifa. She proudly supported Trump, as she proudly served her country, doing four tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq.

No one in the building the 15-year Air Force veteran entered illegally can explain why America is still committed to those strategically pointless wars.

Neither can anyone on the Democratic or Republican side rationally justify why large parts of the country are still under coronavirus lockdowns—public health measures draining Americans’ life savings and, as importantly, their hope—to fight an illness with a 99.7 percent survival rate.

No one can say why the senior FBI, CIA, Justice Department, Pentagon, and State Department officials from the Obama administration who plotted against Trump’s White House before he was inaugurated are still at liberty, and why some have been named to the incoming Joe Biden administration.

Nor can the representatives of the American people explain to them why the lights went out in half a dozen states election night with Trump holding commanding leads and came back on hours later with Biden in front in all six.

But don’t blame the people sent to Washington for the fate and fortune of the Americans they’re supposed to represent. Rep Liz Cheney says Trump is at fault for Wednesday’s unrest. “The president formed the mob, the president incited the mob, the president addressed the mob,” she said. The Wyoming Congresswoman is one of the staunchest supporters of the Afghanistan war, begun when her father was George W. Bush’s vice president. To hand down a war from one generation to the next is the sign of a careless and depraved elite.

Trump’s former Defense Secretary James Mattis also blames Trump. “His use of the Presidency to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice,” wrote the retired Marine General. In June, he defended the Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots that caused billions of dollars in damage across the country and left dozens dead, including law enforcement officers. Those protests, said Mattis, “are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values.”

Both parties within the Beltway are joined in their attacks on Trump because partisan identity—Democrat and Republican—is no longer relevant in U.S. politics. It’s the Country Party, currently represented by Trump, vs the Establishment Party, representing the interests of an oligarchy anchored by Big Tech and owing its power, wealth, and prestige to its access to cheap Chinese labor and China’s growing consumer market.

The establishment party protects its protestors because they are the instruments weaponized to target Trump supporters. “Protestors should not let up,” vice president elect Kamala Harris said of the summer’s violence. “There needs to be unrest in the streets as long as there’s unrest in our lives,” said Rep Ayanna Pressley. “I just don’t even know why there aren’t uprisings all over the country,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

It is not hypocrisy that corporations like Bank of America and Coca-Cola that issued statements in support of the summer riots were quick to denounce Wednesday’s protests. Nor is it hypocrisy that the activists who took over parts of a Senate office building to protest the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh were celebrated while Biden and the press labeled the people who broke into a federal building Wednesday domestic terrorists. It is not hypocrisy for the establishment to draw a sharp divide allies and enemies, but just evidence that they are at war with the party of the country.

History, simple common sense, tells that when one side shoots at the other, the side taking incoming has two choices: surrender or shoot back. There is little doubt the party of the establishment will use the events on the Hill to implement further measures to punish the party of the country, for they would use any pretext—a respiratory illness, for example—to serve those ends. But now they can no longer be sure how the party of the country will respond.

 

Navigating Past Nihilism

Back during the racist Pale Scot episode, BJKeefe rejected David Horowitz's equation of leftist ideologies with the doctrines of epistemological nihilism. Of course such references are common, so I responded in the comments:

The left has recycled Soviet Marxism-Leninism, giving a pass to the murder of 100s of millions. When those apologies for totalitarianism --- what leftist refer to as "actually existing socialism" --- become a defense of a failed ideology, all you have left is utter nothingness, hence nihilism.

In response, BJ babbled something about my attempting to "twist the definition of nihilism to fit your own preconceived notions."

Well, actually not, according to Merriam-Webster:

1a : a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless b : a doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths.

2a : a doctrine or belief that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake independent of any constructive program or possibility b capitalized : the program of a 19th century Russian party advocating revolutionary reform and using terrorism and assassination

I tend to focus on the rejection of moralism (1b), which is clear in my longstanding discussion of the anarcho-socialist and the neo-communist left, but also the left's ideology of death and destruction (2b).

No doubt there's a long body of Western philosophy that examines the impact of nihilism on scientific developments and social thought. Thus, folks into these more refined discourses on nihilism --- that to which I suspect BJKeefe alludes, but does not elaborate --- may find the discussion from Sean Kelly interesting, at New York Times, "Navigating Past Nihilism":

“Nihilism stands at the door,” wrote Nietzsche. “Whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?” The year was 1885 or 1886, and Nietzsche was writing in a notebook whose contents were not intended for publication. The discussion of nihilism ─ the sense that it is no longer obvious what our most fundamental commitments are, or what matters in a life of distinction and worth, the sense that the world is an abyss of meaning rather than its God-given preserve ─ finds no sustained treatment in the works that Nietzsche prepared for publication during his lifetime. But a few years earlier, in 1882, the German philosopher had already published a possible answer to the question of nihilism’s ultimate source. “God is dead,” Nietzsche wrote in a famous passage from “The Gay Science.” “God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

There is much debate about the meaning of Nietzsche’s famous claim, and I will not attempt to settle that scholarly dispute here. But at least one of the things that Nietzsche could have meant is that the social role that the Judeo-Christian God plays in our culture is radically different from the one he has traditionally played in prior epochs of the West. For it used to be the case in the European Middle Ages for example ─ that the mainstream of society was grounded so firmly in its Christian beliefs that someone who did not share those beliefs could therefore not be taken seriously as living an even potentially admirable life. Indeed, a life outside the Church was not only execrable but condemnable, and in certain periods of European history it invited a close encounter with a burning pyre.

Whatever role religion plays in our society today, it is not this one. For today’s religious believers feel strong social pressure to admit that someone who doesn’t share their religious belief might nevertheless be living a life worthy of their admiration. That is not to say that every religious believer accepts this constraint. But to the extent that they do not, then society now rightly condemns them as dangerous religious fanatics rather than sanctioning them as scions of the Church or mosque. God is dead, therefore, in a very particular sense. He no longer plays his traditional social role of organizing us around a commitment to a single right way to live. Nihilism is one state a culture may reach when it no longer has a unique and agreed upon social ground.

More at the link, but that sounds fair enough to me, if a bit minimalist. Basically, societies that have lost an agreed upon consensus of the appropriate, of the boundaries of social mores and values, have become nihilist in the sense Sean Kelly offers. It's not just a matter of religious faith but the social construction of moral right and political order. To the extent today that radicals attack traditional values as extreme --- attacks on proponents of heterosexual marriage, for example --- we've clearly lost a good deal of the decency that derives from a more fundamental set of commitments. The left not only rejects those commitments, but is intent to literally destroy those who stand in the way. Recall Diana West's essay following the passage of Prop 8 in 2008: "The State is Being Set." And the left's dishonesty and anti-intellectualism continued in the federal courts. See Michelle's, "Judicial activism + far Left radical activism = Courtroom intimidation."

And of course this is true in so many other areas, on issues of war and peace, the science of climate change, and the existence of Israel. The anti-intellectual foundations of the today's left --- foundations that are in essence nihilist as discussed --- are destroying individuals and societies. Melanie Phillips' book covers much of this ground as well: The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power.

Back over at Kelly's essay, the discussion assesses whether societies can reach accomodation over values, perhaps so that the ideal of faith in God is not the sine qua non for a life of virtue. Specifically, we could reject the notion that non-believers are automatically nihilist, and Kelly cites the great American novelist Herman Melville for inspiration. So yes, the debate might continue. But for me it's not so much faith per se, but that of commitment itself to the pursuit of the good, and what we've seen repeatedly is how the left rejects that goodness, and when leftists can't win fair and square they resort to dishonestly, intimidation and violence. As Kelly notes earlier in the essay: "The threat of nihilism is the threat that freedom from the constraint of agreed upon norms opens up new possibilities in the culture only through its fundamentally destabilizing force."

And one of those agreed commitments is that we treat those of different races with respect --- that is, we don't abuse them with racist attacks and, even worse, defend those attacks with the most reprehensible evasions and distortions of truth imaginable. But unfortunately, that's the going program at RepRacist3's dungeon of nihilist hatred, where folks there think of me as the opposite of albino Johnny Winter. Nope, no colorblindness at RepRacist3's stalking nihilist asshat central:

These are bad people, well outside the accepted normative commitments of decency and right in society.

The Case for Conservatism and Ideas

Remember when Gabriel over at Ace of Spades said "if you're anything like me, [this is] really going to make you mad"? He was talking about how pissed-off he gets at widespread and despicable left-wing extremism and inanity.

It seems like I've been getting angrier every day, frankly, at the sheer vacuity that's so common among those who are supposed to be the highly acclaimed opinion-setters of the Democratic left.

An outstanding case in point is the recent entry from "Kathy G" at Matthew Yglesias' page, "Are "Ideas" the Cure to What Ails Conservatism?." Here's the introduction, plus a couple of key passages:

Lately, we've heard a lot about how conservatives are allegedly "out of ideas." Lack of ideas is supposedly the reason conservatives have recently been losing a slew of elections and scoring low ratings in public opinion polls, and why George Bush is the most hated president since the final days of Richard Nixon. What conservatives need, say some, are "new ideas." That's the ticket! Then their fortunes, currently in such spectacular free fall, will rally once again and stage a dramatic comeback.

I confess that talk of ideas in the context of American electoral politics long puzzled me....

Then I finally got it. By "ideas," by and large the pundits seem to mean a boutique-y marketing of a political agenda to the policy-making elites. As the historian David Greenberg once wrote, the main task of the Heritage Foundation (and I would argue, of other think tanks as well) is to "flood politicians and editorialists with ready-made policies and easy-to-digest talking points." Many political "ideas" amount to changing the packaging, but not the basic product. Old wine in new bottles and all that. Because I don't believe there really are any big "new ideas" in politics. It's just the same old ideas dressed up in a fancy new set of clothes.

For example, an old idea that conservatives have is that markets pretty much always work better than the public sector. So they thought up school vouchers as a way to strengthen the private school system and weaken the public school system. They don't like government programs, so they've been trying, for years now, to privatize Social Security. They don't like progressive taxation, so they've advocated a flat tax. And on and on.

Conservative "ideas" tend to amount to policies that transfer resources out of the public sector and into private hands. On the other side of the coin, liberal "ideas" do the reverse: they take money out of private hands and put it into the public sector, for the purpose of helping the less advantaged or solving social problems. Often, liberal "new ideas" take the form of new government programs. For example, several years ago when Tim Russert asked Rahm Emanuel what the Democrats' "new ideas" were, Emanuel mentioned enacting universal health care, significantly increasing subsidies so that more people can attend college, and creating a national institute for science and technology research.

The distribution of money and power in our society is basically what liberals and conservatives fight over. Liberals tend to want the money and power to be more equally shared, while conservatives want it to be concentrated in the hands of the corporations and the rich. But it's considered rude to speak publicly of things so vulgar as money and power, so when attempting to persuade elites, both sides find it helpful to talk about "ideas." That makes these things a lot more comfortable for all concerned -- we can all pretend that we're have a high-minded debate about ideals, instead of a grubby, down-and-dirty fight about power.

Greenberg noted that "In American politics, liberalism and radicalism have been the preferred ideologies of the intellectuals." With the glut of liberal intellectuals around, coming up with "ideas" -- new programs and policies -- has not been much of a problem for the left. Those ideas may not have been fashionable, and some of them -- like universal health care, for example -- are very, very old. But "ideas" have always been there.

Conservatives have had more of a challenge along these lines. For one thing, once upon a time there were very few conservative American intellectuals. As Greenberg points out, "So insignificant was conservatism a half-century ago that Lionel Trilling could claim there were no true conservative ideas in our culture, only 'irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.''' But it's not only that conservatives tend to attract fewer eggheads to their cause; while it's easy to frame a new government program as an idea, it's much harder to make dismantling such a program sound like an idea.

Half a century ago, at the dawn of the conservative movement, conservatives faced another, even deeper problem: their political aims were viewed with distaste by many of the elites -- policymakers, middle- and high-brow journalists -- that they were trying to appeal to. Racism and class warfare have an ugly edge to them, after all. So it was all the more important that conservatives come up with some high-minded "ideas" to sanitize their more controversial and unsavory goals.

In this respect, Milton Friedman was God's gift to the conservative movement. Friedman was a great economist and a world-class intellectual who, like the conservatives, believed in a radically deregulated state and in free markets as the best (or least bad) solution to virtually every social or political problem. Better yet, his ideology implied that screwing over the working class was not only the most economically efficient way to run our society, but conformed to the highest ideals of cosmic justice.

Eureka! in Friedman-style economics, conservatives had at last found their "ideas." Friedman-omics provided the figleaf of intellectual respectability which covered the moral depravity of much of their politics. Friedmanesque ideologues began to prevail in economics departments across the country, so many of the policy elites the conservatives sought to influence were already thoroughly schooled in the "magic of the market." Economics-based appeals flattered the elites by making them feel smart, and also by implying that their worldly success was entirely deserved, earned by the dint of their hard work and "human capital," and not by the luck of the draw of what class they happened to be born into.

No doubt that, once conservatives captured the policymakers and the elite opinion-making journals like The New Republic, it became much easier to get their policies enacted. Why, all the right-thinking people were united in their belief that dismantling the welfare state was the way to go; it was so uncool, so déclassé, so retro to believe otherwise. Only those dirty f**king hippies at The Nation would disagree.

It's a mistake, though, to believe that conservatives, or liberals, win elections because of "ideas." I've long believed that the power of "ideas" in politics to be way overrated...

There's lots more at the post, but the basic gist really does confirm the left's pedestrian logic that conservatism can be broken-down to economic greed. This is truly a case of postmodern reductionist nihilism.

This reductionism to be expected or lamented - as Matthew Yglesias is a trained philosopher, from Harvard - so either he completely endorses "Kathy G's" essential claim that ideational progess has reached some final endpoint - that debates on ideas are really just jockeying to better package archaic notions of static right or justice - or his break from blogging's ending up totally giving away the store.

As Captain Ed notes in a post tonight on conservatism, dicussions of the philosophy of ideas really need to begin with first principles. The Captain gets right into a discussion of such basic points of classical conservatism as the notion of limited government, and he goes on to suggest, essentially, that calls for being "compassionate" ineluctably tend to expand the scope of government, rather than limit its reach and protect the rights of the individual.

This is good, but according to "Kathy G's" basic point, conservatism versus liberalism's alleged to be more about the distribution of wealth and social obligation. Certainly there's that element in ideological debates over equity and opportunity, but that's not a first principle in the sense of ideological fundamentals (conservatives, in wanting to limit the state, essentially keep property rights as basic to human freedom, and thus to be conservative is accordingly to limit the confiscatory power of goverment, which inherently threatens liberty).

So, when we talk about political ideologies, when we get down to first prerequisites, the key concern is the pace and scope of change.

Liberals and conservatives can be placed along a continuum of ideological orientations as those positions correlate to demands on the pace and reach of social transformation. The continuum is more complicated if we include the major ideological concepts of radicals, liberals, moderates, conservatives, and reactionaries. We move from left to right when discussing these terms, and the further to the left one places oneself on the spectrum the more radical (essentially revolutionary) is the degree of change (contemporary groups like the Stalinist International ANSWER would be placed at the extreme left).

At the other end of the continuum are the forces of reaction, who are opposed to change in its own right, and who would like to take society back to an earlier period in history - indeed, some of the extremist fringes of reaction often seek some kind of millenarian utopianism, often identified in racialist terms (Germany's Nazi Party, and its obsession with early Germanic mysticism or Teutonic Aryanism, is the obvious example of such extreme right-wing millenarianism, but even today's neo-confederate ideology can be characterized as such to some degree).

Everyday conservatives, on the other hand, support incremental change in the social order, changes that reflect custom and traditions preserved through the ages, but accepting of progress when the preservation of human, universal right is at stake.

Thus it's extremely simple and condescending to refer to modern conservatives as a bunch of "Archie Bunkers," crass simpletons insistent on holding their place greedily in some placement of lumpen working class identity.

But note further the language deployed by "Kathy G": Conservatives are seen as promoting markets to weaken the social realm, to "transfer" resources out of the "public sector into public hands." Nothing better illustrates the mindset of today's American left-wing than its orientation toward society's wealth. The "public sector" does not produce resources - private markets do. This is not an argument against governmental intervention or a strong state, for as economists like Douglass North have shown, private markets can become too anarchic and Darwinian in the absence of legal frameworks of regulatory and institutional norms.

The contemporary left, as seen in countless blog posts and articles in journals like the American Prospect, advocates a dramatically interventionist domestic agenda, one that seeks to move the United States more toward the European social democratic model, and with leftist calls for trade protection and multilateralism in interanational security, modern day "progressives" have shifted even closer to the radical position on the continuum than left-liberals of the 1970s and 1980s.

What's interesting is how "Kathy G's" notion of "ideas" consists essentially of expanding the ways to enhance state power and increase distribution. Indeed, those things she lists as novel (and moral) - Emanuel's universal health care, greater subsidies to education, and money for R&D in science and technology - are not new.

The fact is that conservatives are not out of ideas. Greater reliance on markets has shown in recent decades to be a far superior approach to expanding fairness and opportunity than have been efforts to resurrect the paternalistic liberalism of the great society. Take social policy, for example. In the last twelve years the notion driving anti-poverty policy is that people should work rather than rely on the state for support. That is, the traditional solutions to poverty as supporting workfare over welfare, and liberating the classic individualism of self-sufficiency, has been far superior to straight cash handouts to the poor or disadvantaged.

Take social policy further, the GOP can be faulted for not pushing well-enough an incentive-based approach to helping the poor. Society needs to find ways to provide incentives for purposive behavior, like getting kids to school on time, establishing consistent patterns of attendance, or paying the rent on time. We are seeing some "incentive-based" programs at the state level, for example, in the "Pathways to Rewards" initiatives, currently being used in cities like Chicago. Programs like this, also used to assist to the poor transitioning to work, have shown real results.

In international relations one of the most powerful ideas offered this season is the notion of the league of democracies. Think about it: John McCain has borrowed strands from both sides of the political spectrum in offering a new and different approach to great-power organization compared to anything we're seeing from the Democratic candidates. This is fresh thinking, seeking the establishment of international institutions that can be unshackled from the 60-year straightjacket of the United Nations, to work toward a new concert of interests working together among the great powers to effect real change internationally, either independently of existing multilateral organizations, or in tandem with them when traditional power politics doesn't impede cooperation.

Leftist foreign policy writers and bloggers routinely attack to notion of a concert of democratic powers, frankly, because it really is new, and it would shake up the radical shibboleths that American power needs to be restrained and "legitimized" by suffocating it within overlapping institutions and norms of a liberal international order.

I imagine I could go on - precisely because there are so many good ideas! But wait! Social Security privatization? We need it, but it won't be coming soon, not because it's a bad idea, but because the safety net of America's social democratic state is indeed entrenched. President Bush was onto something with his calls for private retirement accounts, as part of his vision toward reorienting American politics to an "opportunity society." If a Democratic president, say, Bill Clinton, had proposed such a program, we might not see the same kind of vitriol and utter demonization that we see in the type of commentary found in the "Kathy G" essay.

But let me close with Milton Freidman, since "Kathy G" makes him out as a foil for evil conservative venality. In the YouTube below, Freidman leaves far-left talk show host Phil Donahue utterly helpless, completely flummoxed in his inability to respond to the simple logic of market rationality:

Liberals and conservatives fight over way more than the "distribution of money and power."

In addition to the rationality of markets - and the personal moral authority of individual responsibilty - conservatives respect tradition as the way societies preserve historical goodness and, frankly, the divine right guaranteeing that all men are created equal.

In a post discussing far left-wing foreign policy, Mere Rhetoric suggested that "spoiled liberal Ivy kids are not ready to talk to adults yet."

I'd add that they're not ready to talk like political philosophers either.