The New Humanism

I was reminded of Repsac3, and his merry band at American Nihilist, upon reading Roger Scruton's essay, "The New Humanism":

Like so many modern ideologies, the new humanism seeks to define itself through what it is against rather than what it is for. It is for nothing, or at any rate for nothing in particular. Ever since the Enlightenment there has been a tendency to adopt this negative approach to the human condition, rather than to live out the exacting demands of the Enlightenment morality, which tells us to take responsibility for ourselves and to cease our snivelling. Having shaken off their shackles and discovered that they have not obtained contentment, human beings have a lamentable tendency to believe that they are victims of some alien force, be it aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, capitalism, the priesthood, or simply the belief in God. And the feeling arises that they need only destroy this alien force, and happiness will be served up on a plate, in a garden of pleasures. That, in my view, is why the Enlightenment, which promised the reign of freedom and justice, issued in an unending series of wars.

Repsac3 has declared he's Unitarian, which has been discredited as disguised humanism amenable to atheism. It's nihilism, in other words, pure nothingness, just as Scruton shows.

Heilbrunn on Neoconservatism

I've written two posts now on Jacob Heilbrunn's new book, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (here and here).

I picked up my copy yesterday, and the prologue was a blast!

Heilbrunn spends a good deal of time on the Jewish origins of neoconservatism. He suggests the Jewish background is key to understanding the movement, and that it's not anti-Semitic to analyze neoconservatism in terms of religion. Heilbrunn highlights, for example, acceptable and unacceptable discourses in the debate (it's not okay, for example, to argue that neocons have abandoned that law of Moses and have endangered America's survival - although it's been said).

Here's an excerpt:

The neocons claim to be an intellectual movement with no ethnic component to speak of. But neoconservatism is as much a reflection of Jewish immigrant social resentments and status anxiety as a legitimate movement of ideas. Indeed, however much they may deny it, neoconservatism is in a decisive respect a Jewish phenomenon, reflecting a subset of Jewish concerns. One of the few members of the movement willing to address this has been the British neoconservative Melanie Phillips (herself the author of a controversial book which asserts that radical Muslims have overrun London and have turned it into a base of worldwide operations). Phillips has observed that "neo-conservatism is a quintessentially Jewish project: a resanctification in everyday life of the core values of western civilisation, and the achievement of human potential through virtuous practice. The neo-cons' crucial insight is that public signals through law, custom and tradition are the key to getting people to behave well. And that is a Jewish insight"

And that insight is one of the reasons I'm drawn to the neoconservative project. But I'm not Jewish.

I've thought about this a bit, for I don't myself look at neoconservativism through the lense of faith. I see neoconservatism as more an ideology (although so far Heilbrunn's discussion has avoided that label).

Moreover, despite the slurs, some of the most influential neocons in American foreign policy have been non-Jewish: Bill Bennett, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Michael Novak. Some top neocon heavyweights - President Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, and former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton - aren't Jewish.

Certainly, though, identification with neoconservativism - irrespective of religion - correlates with support for Israel. I think in my case, after September 11, when I really started paying attention to the radical diatribes against American foreign policy, I gravitated toward neoconservative ideology, and its identification with the survival of the Jewish state.

It was natural for me. My main identity as a neoconservative corresponds to the notion of an alienated Cold War liberal who's had an awakening. I voted Democrat in every election from Michael Dukakis in 1988 to Al Gore in 2000. I would have voted for Walter Mondale in 1984, but skipped the election due to my own apathy. I studied international relations as an undergraduate, never questioning America's bipartisan anti-Communist project. Indeed, I absorbed strategic nuclear theory in college under the assumption that the Cold War arms race was far from resolved. Moreover, I knew - early on in my studies - that the Soviet Union indeed threatened America's core interests; and the world correlation of forces, if turned to the Soviets' advantage, would work to the detriment of the U.S. - and even toward the possible destruction of our nation (only one contender would survive the long, twilight engagement with Leninist internationalism ).

Soviet foreign policy was on the march in the 1970s - after America's defeat in Vietnam - and pro-Moscow Marxist insurgencies throughout the Third Word pledged the revolutionary overthrow of the pro-American capitalist classes.

At home, however, I was a Johnson Democrat on civil rights, and I dismissed the Reagan administration's domestic policies as reactionary.

That all changed in time. Throughout the 1990s the Clinton administration was a source of endless frustration, with its casualty sensitivity from Somalia to Kosovo. I was working on my dissertation at the time, researching the domestic sources of underbalancing against the Nazi threat to international security in the 1930s.

I thought, upon starting my career as a teaching political scientist, that American unipolarity was underutilized - that is, U.S. power could be exercised to the advantage of world freedom and security. With great power comes great responsibility. American political debates - "come home America" - ignored the call of history.

America's toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan put to rest the notion of the graveyard of empires, and I was on board with the Bush revolution in foreign affairs. I didn't know it yet, but I was moving into the neoconservative neighborhood.

Some longtime readers will recall that I've just been disgusted with leftist anti-Americanism; that combined with my unapologetic view of American material capabilities to put me in line with pro-victory forces in the debate over American intervention overseas. I voted for George W. Bush in 2004. I started blogging in 2006, not once flinching in the rightness of our cause, nor in my commitment to combatting leftist irrationalism and nihilism.

In any case, I just like the vigor of the neoconservative mission. Heilbrunn, in the prologue to They Knew They Were Right, suggests that adherents have experienced exile without ever reaching the promised land. This creates a missionary faith, and the movement often ends up on the wrong side of traditional American conservatism:

The reason is that the neoconservatives are less intellectuals than prophets. They tend to be men (and women) of an uncompromising temperament who use (and treat) ideas as weapons in a moral struggle, which is why the political class in each party regards them with a mixture of appreciation and apprehension, even loathing.

Loathing sums it up for me, at least in my experience as a pro-victory professor on campus, and as a blogger implacably committed to America's mission in Iraq and the larger global war on transnational terrorism.

It's something of a badge of honor to piss off radical lefties on foreign policy to no end, in any case. I had no idea that I'd embrace the neoconservative label, but it fits just fine, and I'm proud to advance the cause. The United States indeed represents the light of the world, that ultimate good that exists out there in the cosmos. We're not always right, but we - like no other country - have always pushed for betterment though democratization and development, at home and abroad. Current U.S. foreign policy will be vindicated in the sweep of history (and success, near at hand now in Iraq, is irresistable as a force for progressive change).

I make no apologies. This is how I am; this is what I do

See my introductory post, "Welcome to American Power," for more on my ideational groundings. See also James Kirchick's killer essay, "The Anti-Neocon Fervor," on how neoconservatives just unhinge the radicals.

I'll have more thoughts on Heilbrunn's book as they come to me. I'm off to go read right now!

Rovian Islamism? Sullivan Equates Bush Administration, Sarah Palin to Iranian Thuggery!

Recall my post from this morning, "Andrew Sullivan's Anti-Mormon Bigotry"?

Well, Sullivan's up to real nastiness again with, "The Rovian Islamist":

Ahmadinejad's bag of tricks is eerily like that of Karl Rove - the constant use of fear, the exploitation of religion, the demonization of liberals, the deployment of Potemkin symbolism like Sarah Palin ...

Think of this regime as Cheney and Rove in a police state setting, and you see what's been going on. (Of course, Rove and Cheney live within a democratic system utterly unlike Iran, and there's no evidence they would violate democratic norms as Khamenei just did. But their demagoguery, abuse of the state, dedication to conflict abroad, co-optation of the armed forces, and manipulation of rural and religious voters all have parallels in Red State Iran.) We keep expecting to see some kind of shame or some attempt at rational dialogue. They have nothing but contempt for that kind of talk. If they're going to lie, it's gonna be a Big Lie. Like this sham of an election.

This is a sick, awful man. I will continue blogging on Sullivan's totally bankrupt nihilism.

Spread these posts, readers. This is nothing short of journalistic terrorism. Sullivan's words are intended to injure, even kill, all under the cloak of the First Amendement.

Via Memeorandum.

Added: William Jacobson, "Ahmadinejad Stole The Election, Just Like Bush."

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.

Pity the Sad Legacy of Barack Obama

It's brother Cornel West, at the Guardian U.K., "Our hope and change candidate fell short time and time again. Obama cheerleaders who refused to make him accountable bear some responsibility":

Eight years ago the world was on the brink of a grand celebration: the inauguration of a brilliant and charismatic black president of the United States of America. Today we are on the edge of an abyss: the installation of a mendacious and cathartic white president who will replace him.

This is a depressing decline in the highest office of the most powerful empire in the history of the world. It could easily produce a pervasive cynicism and poisonous nihilism. Is there really any hope for truth and justice in this decadent time? Does America even have the capacity to be honest about itself and come to terms with its self-destructive addiction to money-worship and cowardly xenophobia?

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville – the two great public intellectuals of 19th-century America – wrestled with similar questions and reached the same conclusion as Heraclitus: character is destiny (“sow a character and you reap a destiny”).

The age of Barack Obama may have been our last chance to break from our neoliberal soulcraft. We are rooted in market-driven brands that shun integrity and profit-driven policies that trump public goods. Our “post-integrity” and “post-truth” world is suffocated by entertaining brands and money-making activities that have little or nothing to do with truth, integrity or the long-term survival of the planet. We are witnessing the postmodern version of the full-scale gangsterization of the world.

The reign of Obama did not produce the nightmare of Donald Trump – but it did contribute to it. And those Obama cheerleaders who refused to make him accountable bear some responsibility.

A few of us begged and pleaded with Obama to break with the Wall Street priorities and bail out Main Street. But he followed the advice of his “smart” neoliberal advisers to bail out Wall Street. In March 2009, Obama met with Wall Street leaders. He proclaimed: I stand between you and the pitchforks. I am on your side and I will protect you, he promised them. And not one Wall Street criminal executive went to jail.

We called for the accountability of US torturers of innocent Muslims and the transparency of US drone strikes killing innocent civilians. Obama’s administration told us no civilians had been killed. And then we were told a few had been killed. And then told maybe 65 or so had been killed. Yet when an American civilian, Warren Weinstein, was killed in 2015 there was an immediate press conference with deep apologies and financial compensation. And today we still don’t know how many have had their lives taken away.

We hit the streets again with Black Lives Matter and other groups and went to jail for protesting against police killing black youth. We protested when the Israeli Defense Forces killed more than 2,000 Palestinians (including 550 children) in 50 days. Yet Obama replied with words about the difficult plight of police officers, department investigations (with no police going to jail) and the additional $225m in financial support of the Israeli army. Obama said not a mumbling word about the dead Palestinian children but he did call Baltimore black youth “criminals and thugs”.

In addition, Obama’s education policy unleashed more market forces that closed hundreds of public schools for charter ones. The top 1% got nearly two-thirds of the income growth in eight years even as child poverty, especially black child poverty, remained astronomical. Labor insurgencies in Wisconsin, Seattle and Chicago (vigorously opposed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a close confidant of Obama) were passed over in silence.

In 2009, Obama called New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg an “outstanding mayor”. Yet he overlooked the fact that more than 4 million people were stopped-and-frisked under Bloomberg’s watch. Along with Carl Dix and others, I sat in a jail two years later for protesting these very same policies that Obama ignored when praising Bloomberg.

Yet the mainstream media and academia failed to highlight these painful truths linked to Obama. Instead, most well-paid pundits on TV and radio celebrated the Obama brand. And most black spokespeople shamelessly defended Obama’s silences and crimes in the name of racial symbolism and their own careerism. How hypocritical to see them now speak truth to white power when most went mute in the face of black power. Their moral authority is weak and their newfound militancy is shallow.

More.

PHOTO: That's me and brother Cornel, at Long Beach City College, October 21, 2016.

The Complexity of American Ideology

Some folks might have caught the generally flawed discussion at Forbes this week on "The 25 Most Influential Liberals in the U.S. Media."

Since the Democrats are in power with a new administration, and much of the governing conservative philosophy has been abandoned (by Republicans) or repudiated (by Democrats), it's certainly a worthy effort to pin down not just the top liberal thinkers, but to lay out some kind of liberal philosophy as well.

There's a lot of problems here, however. The first is that no one in American politics really agrees on what liberalism is any more. The second is that Forbes' top 25 is wholly arbitrary and plainly unserious in its effort to really identify a core set of writers and public intellectuals who'd best represent what it means today to be "liberal." According to Forbes:

Broadly, a "liberal" subscribes to some or all of the following: progressive income taxation; universal health care of some kind; opposition to the war in Iraq, and a certain queasiness about the war on terror; an instinctive preference for international diplomacy; the right to gay marriage; a woman's right to an abortion; environmentalism in some Kyoto Protocol-friendly form; and a rejection of the McCain-Palin ticket.

That's fair enough, except the authors needed some kind of qualification for the use of "liberal" in the American context. In history and political philosophy, liberalism has a significantly different foundation than that implied by the welfare-state liberalism that defined the Democratic Party throughout most of the 2oth century.

Traditional liberalism is best referred to as classical liberalism. It's foundations are found in the natural rights and social contract theories of the 17th and 18th centuries, best represented by John Locke and Thomas Jefferson. These thinkers stressed the innate God-given rights of the individual in the state of nature. Key concerns here are life, liberty, and property/happiness, and classical liberals evinced supreme skepticism of governmental power, and thus sought to proscribe the authority of the state, whose ultimate authority was to preserve and protect the natural rights of the individual. Ron Chusid, whose blog is "Liberal Values," discusses the problems of liberal nomenclature:

When I use liberal in the name of this blog, I am referring to liberalism in both its broad historical sense and with consideration of the variations in meaning internationally, as opposed to indicating support for any narrow partisan views. Some have suggested that I use the term classical liberalism instead, but I have preferred to leave this open, not wanting to be concerned about whether any specific views I hold fit into this label. Recent events have also forced me to tolerate more government activity in the economy than I would have previously supported. I have given homage to the birth of classical liberalism, and its stress on both personal and economic liberty, during the enlightenment in the subheading of the blog title.

American liberalism, which precedes even the bastardized liberalism in the Forbes authors' framework, stresses a substantial role for government and the state in promoting civil and political equality and in guaranteeing relative outcomes in economic activity. The Democratic Party through the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson sought to expand government's role in society at the expense of personal liberty, yet maintained national security commitments that would hardly characterize the Democratic political establishment today. Since the Vietnam War, contemporary liberals have sought to rein-in military spending and have resisted the use of force in foreign hostilities. Liberalism today is marked by unlimited "choice" in reproductive health (roughly abortion-on-demand), total separation of church and state, and aggressive affirmative action to promote underqualified minorities. Contemporary liberal are "tax-and-spend" on the economy, and they promote a "root cause" approach to criminal justice that seeks to soften victims' rights in favor of expansive protections for the accused.

The second problem for the Forbes piece is its extremely imprecise selection of the "top 25 liberals." The list positions Paul Krugman and Arianna Huffington at numbers 1 and 2 (and we could quibble with that as mischaracterization, although they're both classic "establishment"). But after that we see a number of personalities we'd normally consider center-left or moderate, such as Fred Hiatt, Hendrik Hertzberg, Thomas Friedman, and Fareed Zakaria.

Most problematic is the inclusion of a number of bloggers on the extreme left of the ideological spectrum. These include Glenn Greenwald, Josh Marshall, Markos Moulitsas, Andrew Sullivan, and Matthew Yglesias (and less so Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein, although the difference compared to the aforementioned is slight). The inclusion of these seven bloggers can be interpreted a number of ways, but for the most part we'd more appropriately refer to them as far-left radicals or secular progressives. Either way, this bunch represents the demands on the contemporary ideological left for extreme change in society's policies, processes, and institutions.

The extreme left goes beyond traditional 20th century Democratic liberalism to call for the repudiation of the hierarchies of the establishment and the overthrow of the most cherished traditional values and assumptions of the people. The radical secular push on gay marriage extremism is a key case in point, as is the tremendous backlash against the aggressive use of state power to combat terrorism domestically and overseas.

In contrast to the Forbes definition, we're not talking here about a "certain queasiness" with the war on terror or the "instinctive preference" for international diplomacy. Today's secular progressives are screaming antiwar absolutists who are now seeking war crimes prosecutions for former GOP leaders who launched wars at home and abroad amid tremendous bipartisan cooperation of the two major parties.

What is more, today's radicals finesse and hide their true ideological project. Andrew Sullivan still clings to the conservative label while pushing the most aggressive (and literally unhinged) attacks on people like George W. Bush and Sarah Palin. On gay marriage particularly - what I've identified as the signal policy of today's progressive nihilism - Sullivan excoriates anyone who disagrees with his position, bitterly denouncing them as "Christianist" - a meaningless term of derision used to attack traditionalists and Republican moralists. As R. Andrew Newman has written:

If you refrain from punching your fist in the air exuberantly over the holiness, the exaltedness, the eye-spinning splendiferousness of same-sex marriage, if you fail to demand this very nanosecond that courts make it the law of the land, Andrew Sullivan knows what you are: a bigot, a hatemonger, a torture-supporter, even a Bush-backer ... You're a "Christianist."

Glenn Greenwald's just as bad on civil liberties, attacking anyone as "Beltway blowhards" or some such epithet of totalizing excoriation (Greenwald has routinely compared former Bush administration officials to Nazi German war criminals prosecuted at Nuremberg). Matthew Yglesias is essentially a Marxist pacificist anti-American who adopts the most extreme-leftist line possible on any of the major issues of the day. Of course, none of these people are identified for the genuine radicalism they represent, which in itself is an indication of how far the American political spectrum has evolved to a solidily leftist orientation. As far-left blogger Steve Benen noted today, in a satirical comment on the increase in Democratic Party identification in 2008:

Obviously, the only appropriate conclusion one should draw from this is that the United States is a center-right nation, and Democrats have to govern in a more conservative fashion if they expect to stay in office.

Actually, Benen confuses America's traditional conservative political culture of individualism and political liberty for ideological orientation. But his sarcasm points to how today's left conceives and advocates a radical secular progressivism as the defining ideological orientation for American politics. This is not John F. Kennedy's Cold War liberalism. This is the totalizing quasi-Marxist project of New Left revolutionaries of the 1960s.

All of this suggests that the term "liberal" is actually not so useful to describe leftist orthodoxy in the age of Obama. The president himself has long been associated with progressive causes and post-structural academic theories. His reincarnation as "pragmatic" is politically expedient and disingenuous. The back and forth cooperative relationship between Barack Obama and today's progressive radicals (Moultisas' anti-Semitic Daily Kos led the Obama campaign's public release of the president's certificate of live birth) is an indication of how established secular progressivism is in the mainstream Democratic Party hierarchy.

Some on the left will naturally dismiss this discussion as "wingnuttery" (they absurdly think they are "the center"), but even top liberal-centrists like Senator Joseph Lieberman have identified today's Democratic Party as hijacked by the hard-left partisans of the netroots fever swamps. Radical progressives are hardly "liberals" according to the traditional conceptions of the term. Folks pushing for what might be identified as a democratic-socialist model (note the small "d") would possess greater analytical clarity, as well as ideological integrity, by coming out as radical secularists rather than some incoherent mix of the leftist-libertarian-progressive labels now regularly used to disguise their repudiation of establishment traditions and moral exceptionalism.

Democratic Denials of Class Warfare

For some reason Dr. Hussein Biobrain has developed an irrational obssession with trying to repudiate the widespread and fundamental understanding of the Democrats as the party of class warfare and economic redistribution.

Of course, even small children learn that leftists glorify the Robin Hood myth that the wealthy are evil and that it's righteous for redistributionist crusaders to transfer wealth from society's most dynamic and innovative to those who are slovenly and less productive. Indeed, by college most students in the liberal arts become familiar with the ideological underpinnings of leftist class warfare through the readings of thinkers from Karl Marks to John Rawls.

In other words, it's a no brainer that Democats can't stand the concentration of wealth and that, IN PARTICULAR, they demonize those who have more at the expense of those who have less. Not only that, the Democratic Party itself has gone through at least three decades of electoral frustration at the presidential level as the party of the poor, the party of class grievance and big government redistributionism. The Bill Clinton administration was universally understood to have advanced a new vision of "neoliberal" Democratic governance that EXPLICITLY repudiated the hard-left Democratic Party constituencies that sought to expand the welfare state and raise taxes on the rich. When President Clinton signed the 1996 welfare reform act into law, top Democratic Party insiders excoriated the administration's "war on the poor."

In 2004, as the Democrats were hoping to recapture the White House, Rick Perlstein cited pollster Mark Penn to argue that the party was hobbled by outdated "appeals to class grievances and attacks upon corporate perfidy" that were becoming "increasingly hollow" amid an economy in which young "wired-workers" saw themselves as the new leaders of a more socially progressive left-wing coalition.

So it's extremely quixotic that Dr. Hussein has written a new post trying to refute this fundamental truth about American politics, in a post entitled, "Assumptions of Class Warfare." Dr. Hussein takes a stab at my postulation of the class warfare assumption:

As Donald explained in a comment to me, he felt no need to explain why Obama's tax plan is class warfare because it's already assumed to be the case. But of course, that's not how arguments work. If I explain why Position A is wrong and someone wants to refute my argument, they don't just get to say "Position A is correct because I assume that Position A is correct." That's just lame and a complete embarrassment to online debates.

Not that we can't have assumptions in arguments, but this is the KEY assumption. This is the primary assumption that I was attacking in my original post. Yet Donald has now used it twice as the basis for his entire argument.

All of this is true. But what's interesting is Dr. Hussein's attempt to berate and belittle on the use of THIS analytical assumptions. The truth is that assumptions are basic to theory building and poltical analysis. It's not just that we can have them "in arguments," but that it's totally and embarassingly stupid to repudiate them so openly, especially one like Democratic class warfare which is irrevocably ingrained in the American consciousness. Indeed, Dr. Hussein's whole program to destroy a cental assumption like this one violates basic principles of clear thinking and rigorous deduction:

This is a view shared by Isaac AsimovIsaac Asimov. In Understanding Physics, Asimov spoke of theories as "arguments" where one deduces a "scheme" or model. Arguments or theories always begin with some premises—"arbitrary elements" as Hawking calls them (see above)—which are here described as "assumptions". An assumption according to Asimov is

something accepted without proof, and it is incorrect to speak of an assumption as either true or false, since there is no way of proving it to be either (If there were, it would no longer be an assumption). It is better to consider assumptions as either useful or useless, depending on whether deductions made from them corresponded to reality ...

So note here, an assumption really is something that is neither positively true nor positively false.

In Dr. Hussein's case, it's demonstrably hare-brained, frankly, to work so feverishly to rebut something that top personalities in his own party long-ago accepted - from President Bill Clinton on down - as a fundamental failure of Democratic ideology.

Now, if Dr. Hussein's trying to prove that President Barack Obama's never used EXPLICITY USED the words "class warfare," that would be another matter. But that's not all he's doing. Dr. Hussein's arguing that the notion of class warfare itself is a strawman "that conservatives invented years ago." In other words, Dr. Hussein rejects the notion that today's Democratic Party is in fact ENGAGING IN class warfare. In response my earlier post showing how President Obama's own statements have deliberately and shamelessly mined the vein of class warfare, Dr. Hussein writes:

I can see how these could be interpreted as remarks against the upper-class, they sound much more like attacks on Republicans and their policies. Obama's not saying that the rich were evil for receiving tax cuts.

So as you can see, Dr. Hussein can only focus on what the president actually said. He can't disprove the assumption of Democratic class warfare, because assumptions are not subject to falsification. All he can do is show that the president didn't call anyone evil. Of course, Obama can let his proxies do that, since when the president attacks the rich for seeking to "transfer wealth" and for refusing "to invest" in the American future, that's the explicit dog-whistle code language that sends the radical leftists to the barricades.

What this whole exchange demonstrates is the larger truth abouth the Democratic Party and the radical left.

The party and its key constituencies are divided existentially on questions of basic identity. Their political program is not in doubt, which is of course the current move in fiscal policy that marks the largest budgetary expansion in American history.

President Obama, the Liar-in-Chief, is himself embarking on a campaign to fight his political opponents using rhetoric that is "carefully calibrated to blur such big government activism." On the other hand, some of the party's constituencies include neo-progressive Marxists who outwardly and proudly advocate a return to Kennedy-era top marginal tax rates of 91 percent on the wealthy.

Now THAT'S class warfare!

However, very few Democratic partisans are willing to come right out and admit they are class warriors, which is why Dr. Hussein's working endlessly but hopelessly to tamp down what is clearly an objective truth, in other words, a basic assumption of American life. The Democrats are now fighting a class war. They are proposing the biggest budget in American history, raising taxes on the affluent, and attempting to sell this fiscal extremism as "fairness."

Of course, this is fundamentally dishonest.

That shouldn't be surprising in Dr. Hussein's case. The man's truly a deviant liar and a despicable partisan malcontent. Excoriating conservatives and Republicans as the scum of the earth makes his world go 'round, and if he has to lie, cheat, steal, and distort to advocate his program of godless postmodern nihilism, that's what he'll do.

As always, don't listen to a word of it. These people have no virtue whatsoever.

See also, Larry Kudlow, "Obama Declares War on Investors, Entrepreneurs, Businesses, and More."

Crestfallen Repsac3 Fails Miserably in Gambit to Flip Conservatives Against the Target of His Obsessions

Well, it was an all-too obvious attempt to make wine out of sour grapes, but hey, the drama's quite entertaining.

ICYMI, here's the background from yesterday morning, "Walter James Casper, Hate-Troll and Pathological Liar, Lamely Tries to Score Political Points With Hilarious Make-Believe Abomination."

For some reason depraved stalker Repsac3 thought he'd be able to get Robert Stacy McCain --- and perhaps other conservatives as well --- to denounce me after I suggested the idiot back the f-k off. Oh well, style points for the junior high school drama queen with this headline, "I Defy Anyone to Defend or in any way Justify This Creepy Threat by Donald Kent Douglas."

Um, not sure here, but Ima hazard that this counts as defiance:

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, @repsac3 gotta troll. http://t.co/TGo5mJBB2H via @AmPowerBlog
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) January 11, 2014

And boy, I think Ima cry after seeing poor old Reppy with the sads:

One can only tell the truth. Whether other people hear it or continue believing (or telling) lies after you do is up to them.
— J. Casper (@repsac3) January 11, 2014

Yes, one can only tell the truth --- a lesson the lying psycho hasn't learned quite yet, obviously. See, "Bwahaha! Robert Stacy McCain Eviscerates Egghead Avatar Hate-Troll Walter James Casper III."

Repsac3 has established literally a miles-deep reservoir of ill will. It's simply astounding how he convinced himself he could flip people against me. And what's even more funny is that I don't really care. Truth floats to the top. And once again, Walter James Casper's hard-left nihilism has him flailing under the waves, gasping for breath. Meanwhile, American Power's moral clarity is bursting bubbles out of the water. Poor Casper. A loser and regressive dolt. Great lulz though, heh.

What's Wrong With Rod Dreher?

A few weeks back Robert Stacy McCain wrote an extremely interesting post umasking Rod Dreher, the "crunchy conservative," for his abject surrender to the forces of postmodern cultural nihilism.

More on that below. For now, it turns out that Dreher, in the wake of his recent gay marriage debate with Damon Linker and Andrew Sullivan, has a new essay at Real Clear Politics discussing the "tyranny of liberalism" in contemporary culture (where he cites the new book by James Kalb). The article's generally a pleasure to read. It lays out clearly Kalb's case for leftist cultural totalitarianism, but I'm taken back by the conclusion:

Conservatives find it hard to articulate a case for traditional marriage in terms acceptable in liberal rights discourse, as well as in the shallow rhetoric of contemporary debate. Defending traditional marriage requires burrowing deep into the meaning of the human person, sex, gender, society and law - and that's just for starters. Life in community is a mysterious and complex thing that cannot be radically remade to suit a preferred outcome.

"If you can redefine [marriage] so that the sex of the parties has nothing to do with it, then you can redefine anything in human life any way you want," Kalb told me in an interview. "Man becomes the artifact of whoever is in power."

This, I think, is what scares ordinary people the most about the swift attempt to kick the foundation out from under traditional marriage. They intuit that there is something, well, tyrannical in the idea that virtually overnight, the long-settled meaning of marriage could change in a vast social experiment without historical precedent - and that any attempt to resist this radicalization stands condemned as God-intoxicated bigotry.

Trads are on the losing side of this argument, at least in the short run, given the cultural conditioning of latter-day Americans. Still, it is instructive to ponder the fate of modern Western societies that have cast out the biblical god as the source of moral reality. Wrote eminent historian Paul Johnson, "The history of modern times is in great part the history of how that vacuum has been filled."

For those fearful of despotism, it is not a happy tale.

This is poppycock. 

"Trads," which is short for "traditionalists," don't have problems "articulating a case" for the historical and normative foundations of marriage. In fact, huge majorities in Iowa and nationally not only discern the stark cultural revisionism in the left's hegemonic same-sex marriage discourse, but they reject it as well. See my recent essay at Pajamas Media for more on that, "An Attack on Traditional Marriage in Iowa." 

The problem for Dreher is he's totalitarian himself. In his debate with Linker and Sullivan, he was easily pigeonholed as a bigot because he apparently rejects loving same-sex partnerships altogether, not just gay marriage. But note that the data show that that position violates popular sensibilities just as much as does the left's gay marriage extremism.

Conservatives have no reason to fear the "tyranny of liberalism." We live in a democracy of majority rights under the rule of law. The Iowa Supreme Court's ruling last week was deeply flawed on the both the merits and the result. But what's worse is for allegedly "crunchy cons" to throw in the towel on the penultimate battle of today's culture wars, the right's "hill to die on." In any case, here's Robert's conclusion at his post taking down Dreher: 

We are now a mere 18 months from Labor Day 2010, when that climactic political battle will be fully engaged. There a lot of important work to be done -- and done now, over the next three to six months -- if there is to be any hope of anything but the abomination of desolation. Our utter destruction is at hand unless good men rally to the colors, and we no longer have the luxury of indulging in these petty playground feuds and the children who enjoy them.

To the extent that conservatives need a philosopher now, I'd say we need to be studying Sun-Tzu.

If Rod Dreher wants to join Andrew Sullivan and David Brock (yes, I said "Brock," not "Brooks") in the ranks of the vaunting army outside the camp, let him go over and be gone. But don't sit pouting inside the camp, giving aid and comfort to the adversary by your demoralizing pronouncements. If that stuff is going to be tolerated among conservatives, there won't be enough left of a constitutional republic after Nov. 3 for anyone to bother trying to "conserve" it, and no hope at all that it might be restored.

As always, I'll have more on this in upcoming posts ...

Neoconservative Rebirth

Jacob Heilbrunn's column today argues that the neoconservative movement is regrouping with the appointment of John Podhoretz at the new editor of Commentary Magazine:

For several years, the conventional wisdom has been that neoconservatism is on the skids. Vice President Dick Cheney has been sidelined while Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice flexes her diplomatic muscles, and old neocon standbys such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith have largely disappeared from view. But the movement isn't dead yet. As shown by the announcement this week of former New York Post editorial page editor John Podhoretz's appointment to head the flagship neoconservative journal Commentary, the movement may be battered, but it is not going away. If anything, it is regrouping.

At the moment, the future of neoconservatism hangs on its unspoken system of dynastic succession, in which the top posts of the movement are handed off to the sons of its leaders. A second generation is taking over from the first to lead the crusade against the liberal traitors at home and the terrorists abroad.

Like William Kristol, who edits the influential right-wing journal the Weekly Standard, Podhoretz is the son of neoconservative eminences. Kristol's father, Irving, was editor of the old neocon journal the Public Interest and helped create the movement's network in Washington; his mother, Gertrude Himmelfarb, was a conservative cultural critic and prominent advocate of Victorian morality.

In Podhoretz's case, his mother, Midge Decter, is a trustee of the right-wing Heritage Foundation and has written several books decrying feminism. His brother-in-law, Elliot Abrams, who played a leading role in the Iran-Contra affair, is a staffer on the National Security Council responsible for the Mideast and democratization programs.
But in this galaxy of notables, it is Podhoretz's father, Norman, who looms largest. Norman, now 77, is the patriarch of the neocon movement. An advisor to presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani, a prominent advocate of bombing Iran, author of the bestselling book "World War IV" and himself the editor of Commentary for four decades, he exemplifies the intensely intellectual and combative first generation of neoconservatives.

A scholarship student at Columbia University who resented what he called the "WASP patriciate," Norman Podhoretz studied under the literary scholar Lionel Trilling and initially made his name by denouncing Jack Kerouac and the Beat movement in the late 1950s. His mentor at Commentary was Elliot Cohen, a former Trotskyist turned virulent anti-communist. After Cohen committed suicide in 1959, Podhoretz was named editor at age 30.

At first, Podhoretz turned against such mentors as Trilling and embraced the left. His memoir, "Making It," made matters worse by revealing his lust for success. The snobbish New York intelligentsia snubbed him.

But in the late 1960s, Podhoretz took yet another turn. Disgusted by what he viewed as the anti-Americanism of the antiwar movement, he moved sharply to the right. Under his leadership, Commentary defended Israel, denounced the Soviet Union and opposed affirmative action. Its articles helped Daniel Patrick Moynihan and then Jeane Kirkpatrick become U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations. Podhoretz was riding high.

For the hawkish Podhoretz, who had been raised on the Cold War and had written articles about Mikhail Gorbachev with such titles as "The Fantasy of Soviet Collapse," the end of the Soviet Union came as a shock. The neocons were reduced to gadflies as President Clinton won two terms in the 1990s.

With 9/11, Podhoretz and the neocon movement were revitalized. But it is the sons who will carry forth the standard in coming years.

John Podhoretz will undoubtedly seek to update his magazine, which has lost many of its readers. The younger Podhoretz epitomizes the ethos of the new generation; he has spent much of his time as a critic of pop culture, writing about films and television. If his father wrote books with such titles as "Ex-Friends" - about intellectual grandees such as Hannah Arendt - John Podhoretz's memoir, "Hell of a Ride," was about watching the antics of interns working for George H.W. Bush. Unlike his father's generation, John Podhoretz's has never really rebelled. As a result, it is not made up of disaffected liberals but of people who have been attracted to the right from the beginning. They have never flirted with the left but have been groomed to battle it.

And so Podhoretz has been tapped to continue the war against liberalism and to rejuvenate the magazine that played such a key role in the history of neoconservatism. After the debacle of the Iraq war, it will be a stiff challenge. Unless, of course, Giuliani wins the presidency. Then all bets are off, and an article in Commentary may once again be the ticket to a United Nations appointment, not to mention a Cabinet post.

While John Podhoretz may have been groomed under the aegis of his father, I would argue a whole new generation of 9/11 neoconservatives - born of the outrage against the left's demonization of the United States in the early Bush years - will grow and prosper in the years ahead.

Neoconservatism offers a compelling alternative to the nihilism of the contemporary left, and the moral clarity of the movement - in both domestic and international life - provides a vital foundation for the conservative policy agenda going forward.

For Commentary's announcement of Podhoretz's appointment as editor, click here.

Plus, be sure to see my initial post at American Power, which provides a nice primer on the power of neoconservative ideals.

See also, Irving Kristol, "The Neoconservative Persuasion."

Ackerman Wants Bush Dead, Not to Mention a New Counterinsurgency Plan

I've received an e-mail notification from the Center for Independent Media directing me to Spencer Ackerman's new piece at the Washington Independent, "Recasting the War on Terrorism: A Progressive Coalition Wants Obama to Be More Than the Anti-Bush."

First thoughts?

Well, no shit Sherlock, if you'll pardon the expression. I don't normally resort to urban slang, but since Ackerman's a wannabe punk hipster with a supremely disgusting repertoire of profanity, so I'm sure readers will understand.

For the substantive record, Ackerman should be known by his words, for example this passage from July:

The Iraq war is and has always been an obscenity, a filthy lie born of avarice and lust for power masquerading as virtue. This is what imperialism looks like. But the age of empire is over. The same hubris that led Bush into the Iraq disaster led him to miscalculate, again and again, over how to entrench it. But now he is impotent, unable to impose his will, and the nakedness of his attempted imposition has led the American and the Iraqi peoples to wake up and end his nightmare. May his war-crimes prosecutor be Iraqi; may his judge be American; and may he die in the Hague.

I wrote of Ackerman's post at the time:

This is the highest stage of moral relativist anti-Americanism, topped-off with a flourish of abject secular demonology.

And given our potty-mouthed Flophouse freak's piece today, delivered to me via my blog profile contact-information (the editors really need to check my archives before sending stuff out to American Power), I have no reason to suspect Ackerman's abandoned his nihilism. He writes, for example:

Buoyed by high expectations for the first year of Barack Obama’s administration, an informal coalition of progressive national-security and civil-liberties experts are urging the president-elect to redefine the war on terrorism.

Eight years of the Bush administration’s approach to counterterrorism have yielded two open-ended and bloody wars; a massively expanded security apparatus, and spending on defense far outpacing outlays on domestic programs, even during a crisis-plagued economy.

Yet while liberals have spent much of this time opposing the Bush administration’s agenda, many of their proposals for Obama go beyond merely rolling back President George W. Bush’s policies — withdrawing from Iraq, shuttering the Guantanamo Bay detention complex, abolishing torture — to offer new areas of emphasis, like stabilizing Afghanistan, an Arab-Israeli peace and a re-envisioned balance between security and liberty.

Through white papers delivered to the Obama transition team, new reports and interviews with reporters, this loose affiliation of progressives is saying it has a real opportunity to recast the U.S. effort against terrorism in fundamental ways.

Consistent with the broader progressive agenda of achieving global security through multilateral cooperation, economic development and respect for human rights, the past few days have seen a series of proposals urging rejection of the Bush administration’s militarism. To the degree these various progressive groups have a concerted goal, it’s to influence the transition with specific liberal ideas for new directions in the war on terrorism.

You can see why one might hardly be dumbstruck in reading this, given the quadrillions of bytes of BDS spewed over the last eight years of the current adminstration.

But more than that, MSM reporting is even highlighting the building leftist backlash to Obama's centrism. For example, today's Los Angeles Times reports that the antiwar left is worried that Obama's selling out the antiwar surrender enthusiasts to the "people who supported the war from the beginning," a reference to folks like Senator Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

The left wants nothing less than the utter emasculation of American power, with increasing "multilateralism" the buzzword for legitimizing the extreme globalist internationalism of the contemporary left. The flaky imprimatur of the "Washington Independent" does nothing to sanitize the disastrously relativist agenda of Ackerman's "loose affiliation of progressives."

The truth is we're losing in Afghanistan right now because of the weak-kneed nature of the current multinational force. As Michael Yon wrote last week, de facto victory is at hand in Iraq, notwithstanding the likelihood of the odd deadenders mounting spasms of nihilist mayhem on the Iraqi people. But Afghanistan needs an infusion of resolve, not a progressive coalition of the sniveling:

A new president will soon begin to make critical decisions about Iraq and Afghanistan, the economic crisis at home, and countless other matters. While the Iraq war began, then boiled, and finally cooled before President-elect Obama will be sworn into office on January 20, 2009, the Afghanistan-Pakistan spectacle is just getting started. He was always a fierce opponent of our involvement in Iraq. And, as with so many Democrats in the Senate, he argued frequently, during the campaign, that we should have been focused on Afghanistan all along, because it is the real incubator of the international terrorist threat. Timing being everything, our new president will get his wish. Afghanistan now moves to center stage. The conflicts in Afghanistan and between Afghanistan and Pakistan have the simmering potential to overshadow anything we’ve seen in Iraq. Here are a few things I hope he understands:

Our enemies are winning. The enemies know it. We know it. Who are they? The Taliban, with its deep local roots, is enemy number one. Al-Qaeda is hanging around to make trouble. Some Paks, who don’t want to see a thriving Pushtun state on their border, are our enemies. They fund and shelter the Taliban even though we rely on them to help us defeat it. Nothing is straightforward in this part of the world. We have other enemies in Afghanistan who hate the Taliban.

Most of our allies are not very helpful. With the exception of the British, Canadians, Dutch, and a few others such as the Aussies, we are not fighting this with an “A-team” of international allies. With a few exceptions, our allies on the ground are comprised of several dozen countries that mostly refuse to fight. The bulk of NATO amounts to little more than a “Taliban piñata.” The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is proving nearly worthless and provides no credible threat to armed opposition groups (AOGs) in Afghanistan. Most of the NATO member countries seem to break out in a cold sweat at the mere mention of “Taliban.” They piled in when the war looked easy and largely humanitarian. But now that it’s getting harder and more dangerous, they would like to pile out.

To ensure that we have influence over the outcome, we need more soldiers in Afghanistan, and fast. They need to be U.S. forces, British, Canadian, and Aussie; we cannot depend on NATO in general and they don’t know how to fight anyway. Unless President-elect Obama knows some kind of magic spell, he will not be able to persuade most NATO countries to do the right thing. Springtime 2009 will likely bring very heavy fighting in Afghanistan. We will not have credible negotiating positions while we remain outgunned by a bunch of old rifles and dinged-up RPGs.

Yon pinpoints the resources needed to finish the job: more firepower and the will to use it - something not likely to be realized with the progressives' mushy calls to "legitimize" a beefed up deployment through the utopian defense bureaucracies of "NATO countries."

The leftists will continue to wet their shorts as long as the coming Obama administration makes concessions to the realities of military power.

The fact that the same people who pushed for an American defeat in Iraq are now hoping to "multilateralize" the deployment in Afghanistan shows that Obama is indeed moving right, and this in turn is one of the most reassuring signs that Obama's earlier campaign pledges were largely junk fodder for the masses, and that perhaps he's actually shortened the daylight between his ill-considered antiwar nonsense and the precepts of actual foreign policy responsibility.

That same responsibility, of course, is something of which Spencer Ackerman knows nothing.

Miracle of Life: The Action-Packed Days of Unborn Babies

The abortion debate is picking up again today. It turns out that John Sides is spreading the same half-truths on public opinion and abortion that I debunked previously (see, "Majority of Americans Identify as 'Pro-Life'").

At issue are the recent polls by Pew and Gallup finding a majority of Americans as pro-life. As I pointed out earlier, the recent data confirm a decade-old decline among those who identify as pro-choice. The findings are bothersome to the lefties, especially "scholarly" Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money. Lemieux has dismissed the results as "outliers," despite the fact that Gallup has been asking the same question since 1995, and the data clearly indicate a decreasing proportion of Americans supporting abortion over time. Pew's data do so as well as indicated by the questionnaire page.

Also at issue is question wording, which is alleged to be "vague." Sides touches on that angle in particular. After a long review of the data he concludes:

Simply put, the Pew and Gallup findings obscure far more than they reveal ... both Pew and Gallup employ vague questions that do not easily map onto actual policy debates. Once more precise data are employed, it becomes clear that opinion strongly depends on the circumstances under which the abortion would occur.

In fact, however, the surveys are quite specific, as I noted previously.

Perhaps Lemieux and Sides want pollsters to ask, say, "do you support abortion in the case of a promiscuous 17 year-old mother of two?" Or, "do you support abortion in the case of a 19 year-old college student with three previous abortions but who now claims rape to garner more sympathy for her irresponsibility"? Don't laugh. These are by no means outlandish circumstances. Indeed, pro-abortion extremism is on the rise: Recall that Planned Parenthood has refused to report statutory rape during abortion consultations for minors, and the Texas legislature has moved to decriminalize infanticide.

Poll respondents are not dumb, in any case. When Gallup asks, should abortion be legal under any circumstances; legal under certain circumtances; or illegal under all circumstances, respondents have no difficulty thinking through the implications of the questions.

But if the leftists insist that both Pew and Gallup are methodologically flawed, that's their play. I mean, sure, it's true that a bare majority of 53 percent supports Roe v. Wade in the Gallup poll. Yet, that's hardly robust given the fact that Americans are considered less supportive of the pro-choice position since Barack Obama assumed the presidency. Leftists, frankly, are simply in denial about the public's growing skepticism of the abortion-on-demand agenda.

In a related note, the New York Times reports that President Obama called for dialogue on abortion in his commencement address at Notre Dame. And the Washington Post has the text of Obama's speech.

I'll simply close with a reminder on the bottom line on abortion: It kills. Leftists continue to spin slanderous tales about how conservatives are determined to suppress the rights of women. But what they rarely discuss are questions of sanctity of life - and that's because it's an argument they just can't win.

I just read an astonishing essay at Psychology Today on the science of fetal development in the earliest stages of pregnancy.

The title of the article is indicative: "A Fateful First Act: The Action-Packed Days a Baby Spends in Utero Influence Her Emotional and Physical Makeup for Years to Come."

The essay recounts the science showing that even within the first 40 days of pregnancy, the development of a fetus is powerfully influenced by environmental factors like environmental noise and the mother's oxygen levels. Difficulties in a fetus' brain development could later have consequences for cognitive impairment and susceptibility to disease. What is most interesting about the story is how scientists conceive of a fetus not just as a living organism, but as a developing person; and thus such a consensus makes even more grisly the arguments suggesting that fetuses are "brain dead" or other such nihilism we hear routinely among abortion-rights absolutists (for example, right here).

Note this passage from the Psychology Today piece:

Until recently, doctors believed that the journey from fertilized egg to baby followed unwavering genetic instructions. But a flood of new studies reveals that fetal development is a complicated duet between the baby's genes and the messages it receives from its mother. Based on those signals, the fetus chooses one path over another, often resulting in long-term changes—to the structure of its kidneys, say, or how sensitive its brain will be to the chemical dopamine, which plays a role in mood, motivation, and reward.

This new science of fetal programming, which investigates how in utero influences cause physiological changes that can linger into later life, is producing clues to mysterious disorders such as autism and schizophrenia, as well as evidence of the very early effects of stress and toxins. Scientists still don't know all the hows and whys of these fetal cues, but the when is very clear: earlier than we ever thought.

A Delicate Project

Our first nine months resonate for the next 70 or 80 years because the fetal enterprise is so enormously ambitious. In just 270 days, a single cell becomes trillions of diverse and specialized cells—that's more cells than there are galaxies in the universe. As in any construction project, events unfold in a highly coordinated sequence. Each cell not only has its own job to do, it spurs other cells to action—sending out chemical signals that tell its neighbors to divide like crazy or to self-destruct. So when something goes wrong it can set off a domino effect. Cells might not travel to their intended destination, or they might stop multiplying too soon, or, in the case of brain cells, they might fail to establish the right interconnections.

"We pass more biological milestones before we're born than at any other time in our lives," says Peter Nathanielsz, director of the Center for Pregnancy and Newborn Research at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. "If we do not pass them correctly, there is a price to pay."

Well, we can't pass those biological milestones if the little lives of these human miracles are destroyed. And thus the obliteration of the moral soul is the ultimate "price to pay" among pro-choice extremists.

From conception to term, abortion is murder. Our goodness as a society rests on how we protect the unborn.

How to Become a Successful Conservative Blogger

I signed up for Facebook this week, and the first thing that a couple of "friends" said upon congratulating me was, "how you have time to do all this, maintain a great blog, and still teach is somewhat beyond me," and "just don't neglect the blog :) ..."

LOL!

Well, I'm on Easter break this week, so I've had time to get out to the Orange County Tea Party and to blog all about it, among other things. However, my term papers are due next week, so blogging will be lighter in the next few weeks! (And not only that: My wife's a sweetie who lets me blog more than I should!)

I also received a general question from Lance Burri about building blog traffic. Lance was basically wondering about the best way to get hits, from other bloggers, from Glenn Reynolds, or what? I don't know for sure, but I thought this might be a good time to take stock and throw out some thoughts and suggestions from my own experience blogging this last year-and-a-half since I launched American Power, as my second blog, in October 2007.

Mainly, I'm just going to add a couple of points in response to two recent blog posts on how to be a successful blogger and conservative writer online: Robert Stacy McCain's, "How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog in Less Than a Year," and John Hawkins', "How to Become a Full Time Conservative Blogger/Columnist."

Regular readers may have read Stacy's essay previously, as I've been applying a number of the "rules" he lays out therein, especially the "Rule 5" hottness method combined with massive "Rule 2" reach-around blogging. It's been a lot of fun, and it's going to continue. But there are limits, and that's why folks who are serious about being a successful blogger should also look over John's piece's carefully. He notes, for example:

Let me ... be very honest about something else: this is an over-saturated field. There is an abundance of talented, conservative writers out there competing for eyeballs and most of the successful people in this business aren't interested in helping them along. Moreover, the famous people that are interested in helping out fledgling conservative writers have so many people competing for their attention, that it's difficult to get them to help you.

That's strikes me as a pretty fair point, and actually political science research indicates that there's a tremendous "gatekeeper" effect to the blogoshpere, since by nature of "network" effects and hierarchies of prestige, blogging newcomers find tremendously high barriers to entry to a successful (and possibly materially lucrative) blogging career (for more on this, see "Blogging Politics: Network Effects and the Hierarchy of Success").

All of this gatekeeping can be extremely frustrating for those trying to break into the conservative blogosphere AND hoping to make an impact. And to be clear, in my experience, people who blog are hungry for exposure, so those who quit or just scale down operations have probably realized the limits of opportunity available to them.

But John notes a couple of interesting points at the essay, especially the notion that "it's not what you know, it's who you know ..."

Now, obviously, folks need to know something significant about politics to blog successfully, but other than just plugging away and getting noticed at Memeorandum or Google, it nice to have people higher up the network hierarchy helping you gain attention and opportunities. Over this last six months I owe a great deal of thanks to Rick Moran of Right Wing Nut House. Rick's the Chicago editor at Pajamas Media, and I've published about an article a month since last October, and it's been both a lot of fun, as well as a chance to build some credibility as a top blogger.

And I say that with modesty. Actually, I still pretty much think of myself as a "9th tier" blogger, toiling away in obscurity, to whom no one pays attention. People like that just like to write, and a few hits every day and a comment or two is life-affirming. 9th tier blogging gets old, though, especially since most people crave recognition, as I mentioned above. So bloggers have to find a way to get noticed, and there's quite a bit folks can do on that score, so there's no need for discouragement as long as someone is willing to work hard.

So let me offer my own list of suggestions, adding a little perspective to what both Stacy and John have done already:

1) COMMITMENT: Don't kid yourself that you're going to become the next Michelle Malkin after publishing a couple of week's worth of Blogspot essays; and don't expect to make a fortune anytime soon. I've been blogging for three years, and I still average less than 1000 hits a day. I get thousands of visitors on some days, but that's often because Michelle or Glenn Reynolds has thrown traffic my way. It takes a long time to get noticed, and that's often after you've networked and made connections. My sense is that someone who works hard and puts out consistently good content will develop a readership. Some of those reading will have connections and will promote your blog. So, perseverance and output have to be first in order of importance to the successful blogging life. For some perspective on this, notice how Ann Althouse blogs. Blogging is her life and passion, and her means of communication and expression. She's now marrying a man she met through blogging. She's interesting and she's made a commmunity. Althouse is an outstanding model of success for up and coming bloggers.

2) BLOGGERS AND MASS MEDIA: In the beginning, the blogs I read were those of prominent people, academics like Daniel Drezner or media personalities like Virginia Postrel. Folks like this have written books and built name recognition prior to becoming popular bloggers. That kind of experience provides credibility and exposure. But prior establishment in the media's not available for everyone. I can't stand the views of Markos Moultisas, but he's a good example of someone who started a blog, Daily Kos, and who became successful and branched out into other media. Kos is a now television news talking head, and while Daily Kos' popularity has declined after the blog achieved most it set out to do with the election of Barack Obama, Moulitsas himself is going to be around for awhile. He's written two books and he's a regular on Sunday talk shows and in print media like Newsweek. No matter what you think of the guy, he's had success blogging that's worth emulation. Thus, many blogging neophytes might think of blogging as entree into a career in more traditional media. For example, check out my friend Doug at Political Pistachio. Doug started blogging because he wanted to be a published writer. He had the sense the blogging would get him productive and get his work into circulation. Now Doug's developed a popular Blog Talk Radio program, and he's been interviewing some of the most important conservatives working today. He has dreams to win a gig as an AM radio star one day. Doug's example provides a sense of synergy that comes with blogging, but he's also an example of someone with a passion who's turned blogging and radio into his life's work. That's what it takes to build a repuation and success.

3) DON'T BE SHY ABOUT SELF-PROMOTION: Although I've had the most fun with Stacy's "Rule 5" promotional tool (do some babe blogging), it's actually "Rule 1" that's been even more helpful: You've got to put yourself out into the realm without excessive worry of social niceties. Oh sure, be respectful and polite, but don't be afraid of forwarding your work to people who are essentially strangers. If you're writing on military issues of social welfare policies, shop your posts to people who write and have expertise in those areas. I probably wouldn't have gotten a couple of "Instalanches" had I not sent my posts to Glenn Reynolds. He probably gets hundreds of e-mails a day, but he must have liked something I had found and posted it at his blog. It's momentary attention, but it's confirmation and encouragement. Michelle Malkin likes readers to send her tips and blog posts, and she's really generous in publishing content provided by conservatives in the blogging community. I'm doing that a lot more myself, and I've published guest essays from readers at the blog. I too get e-mails from bloggers or journalists shopping their stuff for American Power, even big name people, so it just ends up as a form of networking. Thus, again, don't be shy about it (Stacy calls it "shameless blogwhoring"!).

4) DO ORIGINAL REPORTING: This last week I had a good amount of success with my posting on the "Orange County Tax Day Tea Party." That post was my first outing as a "photo-blogging" journalist. I've been wanting to do some photo-blogging for a while. Great influences here are Zombie Time and Looking at the Left. I first noticed the tremendous importance of photo-blogging as citizens' journalism during the campaign. Bloggers are going to publish stories and pictures that the left-wing media establishment won't touch. Hence, photo-journalism is not only on the wave of the media future, it's a tremendous opportunity for people to get out into the public realm, to interact and find stories that are in demand. If you're working on an exclusive story, and one with a particular angle, that's bound to generate some attention. Pump up the conservative volume!

5) LOVE WHAT YOU ARE DOING: For me, I'm simply combining my career as a professor of political science, and my love of politics, with blogging. Blogging has become a part of what I do. Frankly, I'm not so much interested in scholarly publishing, although because I maintain professional currency with the literature, I can blog on anything from the most sophisticated academic studies in international relations to the most ordinary stories in the news and popular culture. My enthusiasm comes and goes. Sometimes blogging's an addiction, but sometimes it feels like a chore. That's going to happen, so balancing the online life with all the other responsibilities is challenging. But you can't be successful unless you're willing to elevate the blog to a central place in your personality and being. It's back to my "Rule 1" above. Have commitment, and make it fun and personal. But also have a healthy understanding of the consequences of your work. As John Althouse Cohen put it recently, "Assume that anything you write will be seen by your family or your employer or your prospective employer or anyone. And once you publish it, it will never go away." The best way to approach that advice is to believe in what your write, and take full responsiblity for what you put on the page. Sometimes folks have asked me, "don't you worry about backlash as a conservative academic?" At first I did. For a year I held back my opinions, and I'm positive my blogging was worse for it. Say what you want and be ready to stand and fight for your principles. People will respect you for it, and you'll carve out a niche as someone of honesty, integrity, and true values.

*****

A FINAL NOTE: Take care for your safety and your family's safety as a blogger. In an announcement on his advertising program, Tiger Hawk mentioned the need to maintain his anonymity: "I have made many friends through blogging, and I have no reason to believe that anybody out there would do me harm."

Actually, I do.

If you battle the left, if you expose the secular progressives for the licentious nihilism that they're all about, they'll want to kill you. Look at what happens to any prominent conservative when they make public appearances, like Tom Tancredo at the University of North Carolina last week, and you'll realize that leftists have no concern for your safety nor your rights. As David Horowitz wrote yesterday, "Conservative speakers now have bodyguards when they visit universities."

I watch my back, especially when I'm on my campus, where I'm known publically by name and reputation as a conservative writer and activist. I also don't post personal information about my family online. I've been stalked by those who can't stand what I write, for example, one blogger found my home address by researching property tax records and used that to threaten me and my family. If you speak truth to power, you'll make some enemies, but be not afraid. The brighter your light of moral clarity, the more vicious will be the pushback from the totalitarians on the left. Be true to yourself and put truth and values first and foremost in what you do. I'm confident those who combine diligence with talent can make it as a successful blogger.