Month: March 2006

This creepy transcript from ABC News of a pre-release interview with Jill Carroll helps explain some things. The release was obviously designed as a propaganda weapon to get Carroll to publicly back the Mujahideen – and get their message across. She does so in the tape; and she was very careful not to say anything else in her first debriefing after her captivity. Her release may also have been a way to bolster Sunni negotiations with Shiites in the formation of a national unity government. I don’t know any more about Carroll, except the glowing references from those people who knew her well before the kidnapping. We will find out more in due course. But it’s wise not to jump to conclusions about what someone says when they have a gun even metaphorically pointed in their back. Give her freedom and time. And be glad she is alive.

(Photo: Baghdad TV/APTN)

A reader writes about my defense of elitist conservatism. He argues – provocatively – that the prerequisite for the right’s new populist tone is the left’s deconstruction of authority and reason in the 1960s and 1970s:

"Yes, it was those deconstructionists who attacked not only elites, but the ontological conception of a ‚Äòprivileged position,‚Äô which is the idea that some people may have access to better, more complete information (and better culture) and thus their point of view ought to have more weight. Their zeal to dismantle the notion of ‘great books’ and ‘great thought’ as reflecting a stultifying, ‘white-male’ and oppressive ideology was completely successful. Not only did it open up the way for African studies and gay identity (a few of the benefits, I concede), it also destroyed such ‘cultured’ institutions as objective TV news journalism, ‘high’ culture entertainment, and contemporary literature. Now instead we have Hannity and Colms, American Idol, and the personal blog.

The effect of this philosophical shift to dismantle any ‘elite’ position has been so successful, that throughout the ’90s and the naughts, the fundamentalist crowd have been adopting it as well, and quite successfully too. They attack these earlier liberals back as now being the ‘elites.’ This why they talk about the ‘east-coast MSM elite’ and the ‘liberal elites’ in Hollywood and elsewhere. The strategy is to cast these former iconoclasts and now being the new Republican Guard. You see this strategy to adopt deconstructionist tactics being specifically adopted in the religious quarters, for example in the debate on Creationism (i.e., ‘Intelligent Design’). Their argument to ‘teach the controversy’ is lifted verbatim from Gerald Graff, the deconstructionist English professor who used controversy as another method for ‘deconstructing’ a privileged position. (Thankfully, the field of science remains pretty firmly reliant on the privileged position of objective research and empiricism.)

As a liberal who grew up immersed in this deconstructionist thinking of the ‚Äò80s (and who now finds myself adopting classicist and formalist values that would seem in opposition to that), I have to admit that there is value in the deconstructionist enterprise but I believe these deconstructionists were totally blindsided by not thinking through their position ‚Äì by not realizing that anything can become the new Republican Guard ripe for deconstruction, even Deconstruction. Their failure to find a philosophical justification for creating some kind of legitimate ontological ‘grounding’ ‚Äì some way to justify a privileged position ‚Äì is their biggest failure and quite possibly the reason that both Liberalism and Republicanism is in the mess we see today.

Yes, Andrew ‚Äì your Christianists have become the new deconstructionist Relativists, willing to deconstruct empirical evidence (Darwinism, WMDs, the data in global climate change) and elite knowledge (budget analysis from the OMB) and in fact any shared, political middle-ground in order to promote the cherished value-system of their minority. Just as liberal deconstructionists destroyed the philosophical underpinnings of true Liberalism in the ’80s, which also once was great philosophy based on positive values, these new deconstructionists are doing the same to Conservativism. It is ‘American Idol’ Conservativism, and Bush is the leader of their pack."

I think the reader has a point here, except that some on the right, specifically those trying to resurrect natural law, share the reader’s analysis, if not his prescription. My own view is that there can be only one real grounding for a politics: and that is reason exercized within the constraints of an inherited historical tradition. By "reason," I simply mean that deployed in Socrates’ dialogues, where mere opinion evolves gradually into reason by conversation and argument. That reason is sturdy enough to provide a coherent defense of elite institutions in a mass society. And you only have to read the Federalist Papers to see it in action. By "tradition," I mean the inherited Anglo-American idea of individual liberty, protected by constitutional forms and institutions. I see no reason why this cannot be defended today, using the reason deployed by Socrates and Plato. And that’s what my book is trying to do.

Victor Davis Hanson channels the rage of the Republican base after last week’s pro-immigration demonstrations. I do favor secure borders, and see no reason why we shouldn’t make a much bigger effort to control them – in America and Iraq. But I don’t favor criminalizing eleven million often hard-working people in this country and those who help and employ them. A better fence and a guestworker program seem to me to be the obvious rational solution – phased in simultaneously. But if the emotions are anywhere near as high-pitched as VDH claims, such a solution will be impossible. Especially in an election year.

Jonathan Rauch elaborates.

"[F]or every Westerner who calls for the destruction of Islam in order to defend the Western status-quo, there is another Westerner who agitates for change in Islam because has a Muslim friend who has been hurt by what passes for Islam, or has a glimpse (in Hafiz, perhaps in Ibn Rushd), of what Islam could be; and as such, is upset by what Islam today is not. I believe that there are many in the West capable of recognizing beauty — and they have recognized the beauty that Islam was in the hands of Rumi, and also have recognized the potential of that beauty in Islam today, in Muslims today. This is another way of saying that I believe there are many in the West who are driven by the humanity of the Muslim, who faces daily in Iraq, in Punjab, in subversive mosques in Europe, the inhumanity of a utilitarian death theology," РAli Eteraz, on his reformist-Muslim blog.

Here’s an interesting quote in a damning National Journal piece about what the president knew in the run-up to the Iraq war about the aluminum tube issue:

"Presidential knowledge was the ball game," says a former senior government official outside the White House who was personally familiar with the damage-control effort. "The mission was to insulate the president. It was about making it appear that he wasn’t in the know. You could do that on Niger. You couldn’t do that with the tubes."

A "a former senior government official outside the White House who was personally familiar with the damage-control effort"? Your suspicions in an email, please. My question: when and for what will Colin Powell eventually tell what he knows?

A reader writes:

"In your blog recently you have been pointing out how far removed the Christianists are from the religious attitudes of the Founding Fathers. This is all very true, but I think there is another dimension to this shift that you are missing.
The Founding Fathers were not very representative of Americans in the late eighteenth century. During that time period, the country was rocked by a number of fundamentalist religious revivals, in both the North and the South. So in their detached Deism, Jefferson, Adams, and the like were really unrepresentative in their own time.
I think the Founders recognized this, and this is why the Constitution tried to check the power of democracy as much as possible, by limiting the right to vote, by having the assemblies elect Senators, and by having the electoral college choose the President. The Founders didn’t want the Bible-Thumpers in their midst making the important decisions. In case white male voters started transferring their "irrational" religious beliefs to the ballot box, the Founders could ensure that these other safeguards would prevent them from having their way.
Of course, in the intervening centuries, the democratic process has become much more inclusive. Now the people elect their own Senators, and the electoral college is little more than an archaic formality. The natural consequence of this is that the group of people whose religious enthusiasm the Founders once sought to exclude are now moving to the front and center of the political process. This is the price of democracy in a predominantly Christian land with a strong tradition of evangelicalism. And this is exactly the price the Founders hoped to avoid."

The founders, in other words, were elitists. You bet they were. You can see the imprint throughout the constitution, which is a republican, rather than democratic, achievement. And they were often conservative elitists, trying to restrain the impulses of democratic majorities, especially when conjoined to religious appeals. Remember when conservatism was like that? Miss it? Me too.

Does anyone act less like a judge than Antonin Scalia?

"Hello. I’m a post-patriotic progressive. I believe that nation-states like the USA are obsolete and indeed immoral. I abhor and denounce the bigotry of ‘citizenism’ – the idea that the American government should favor the interests of the 300 million citizens of the US over those of the other 5.7 billion people on earth. I oppose policing and fencing the border, just as I oppose any measure that would threaten the inalienable human right of foreign nationals to sneak into the US without our government’s knowledge or permission. And whenever I see an American flag, it creeps me out because it seems, well, fascistic," – Michael Lind, satirizing the people with whom he must sometimes form alliances.