The one important and thoroughly welcome part of Michael Ignatieff’s essay in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine is its realism. Sure, I think he’s being excessive in describing American global influence as an “empire.” Empires, as I understand them, actually control territory, exploit it, and exercize sovereignty over it. The United States, with a few tiny exceptions, doesn’t do that. It protects its allies; it trades; it polices the seas and skies. It’s far more like the eighteenth century British Empire than the nineteenth, and even then, without actual colonies of any substance. But Ignatieff is surely right to frame the real question as: do we actually have a choice any more? American trade alone makes some sort of international police work essential. The rise of weapons of mass destruction together with lethal terrorism and porous international borders all turn isolationism into a non-starter. The military abdication of most of the other Western countries also makes the United States the enforcer of last resort (remember Bosnia and Kosovo?). Allowing a genocidal nutcase access to nuclear weapons in the most oil-rich part of the globe is simply not something any responsible hegemon can allow – not only for its own security, but for that of the entire world. The question then becomes one between an Empire Lite or an Empire Heavy. I’m more skeptical than some neoconservatives about the feasibility of having troops and civil servants all over the globe, ushering in a new era of democracy. But I’m even more skeptical of the left conservatives and reactionary leftists who believe inaction and retreat is a viable option. We have to find a way between both temptations – case by case, region by region, year by year. This is where the real debate should be: not in hysterical leftwing cries of imperial dictatorship or in paleocon nostalgia for withdrawal, but in the hard, day by day assessment of risks and benefits of specific actions.
EURO-ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: “Hitler’s Nazi regime occupied Europe for four years only. Palestine and the West Bank have been occupied for 40 years.” Thus a minor Labour Party official in Wales. This stuff is getting more and more poisonous.
THE NUNS AS WELL: Forty percent of women religious have experienced some kind of sexual abuse – many at the hands of the Church? Now how will the hierarchy manage to blame this on the homosexuals? No doubt they’ll give it their best shot.
DERBYSHIRE AND RACE: Many of you have taken me to task for being disconcerted by John Derbyshire’s recent comment on National Review that the New Year’s babies born to a lesbian couple in DC and a single black mother in New York should prompt one to “despair.” Let’s leave aside the assumption that a child born into a loving, middle class same-sex couple home is a matter for despair. Derbyshire’s aversion to gay people, freely confessed, celebrated and condoned in National Review, and other venues, is a matter of public record. Was his despair at the black single mother a genuine worry about the state of the black family rather than a simple expression of disdain? I can’t know what’s in Derb’s heart. But I do know that he is extremely frank about what he believes about race. Here’s a recent post-Lott statement of his in National Review:
All American politicians are liars and hypocrites about race, from Democrats like Hillary Clinton posing as champions of the downtrodden black masses while buying a house in the whitest town they can find, to Republicans pretending not to know that (a) many millions of nonblack Americans seriously dislike black people, (b) well-nigh every one of those people votes Republican, and (c) without those votes no Republican would ever win any election above the county level. (Am I being beeped out yet?)
Now what does he really mean by this? I think he means that he agrees with the NAACP and others that the Republican Party is at root a party based on racial hatred. But he doesn’t seem to have a problem with it! His only problem is with those who deny this, and he hints in the piece that his own views about race are too explosive for polite company. Then there’s this odd detail. In National Review again, Derbyshire recently described looking for a place to live in the New York suburbs:
One time we got off the train in a town that was pretty solidly black. It took us about five minutes to figure this out. Then we went back to the railroad station and sat half an hour waiting for the next train.
He justifies this by citing a range of statistics about why black neighborhoods tend to be worse off than others. “Are we racists?” he asks of himself and his wife. “Depends what you mean,” he answers. Then there are the weirdnesses that creep into his writing about race. What does one make of the following statement, for example, also published in National Review:
You understand, I am sure, that when I talk about race, I am talking about blacks and nonblacks, the two races that inhabit the United States.
Huh? Even if you agree with Derb (as I do) that race is not entirely socially constructed, why this obsession with blacks and “non-blacks”? Don’t Asians qualify? Hispanics? Native Americans? All this is simply to say that when you have a record like John Derbyshire’s on race and you voice “despair” at a new-born black child in New York City, there comes a point at which a reasonable reader may eventually cease to give you the benefit of the doubt.
KRUGMAN WINS AGAIN!: The website, “Lying in Ponds,” does an annual survey of who, among the major newspaper columnists, is the most reflexively, viscerally partisan. Paul Krugman’s columns – “a lonely voice of truth in a sea of corruption” – win first prize for the second year in a row. Here’s the summary:
After evaluating all 2,129 columns written by our 37 pundits in 2002, it’s time to draw some conclusions. I’ve stressed all along that Lying in Ponds is attempting to make a distinction between ordinary party preference (there’s nothing wrong with being opinionated or having a political ideology) and excessive partisanship (“blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance”). While it’s obviously difficult to draw a definitive line, the top three pundits in the rankings clearly revealed excessive partisanship by the remarkable consistency of their extremely one-sided commentary throughout the year. The New York Times’ Paul Krugman took the partisanship lead early and lapped the field. In a year in which Mr. Krugman generated lots of buzz and won an award, his 18:1 ratio of negative to positive Republican references and 99 columns without a single substantive deviation from the party line were unmatched in the Lying in Ponds portion of the punditocracy.
The details are fascinating as well. Among the most relentlessly partisan: Mike Kinsley. The most one-sided columns in a newspaper: the Wall Street Journal. The most diverse: the Washington Post.
The Dish 