Category: The Dish

Here’s an attempt to find a correlation between coalition troops levels and Iraqi violence. It’s hard to find any. But that could merely mean that we never saw anything like the massive force that would have a real impact. I fear merely adding 20,000 troops will be insufficient – within the parameters already tried and already failed. Adding 100,000 would be different. But we don’t have 100,000 easily transferred. Given limited resources, what should we do? Bruce Rolston argues for adding 8,000 more troops to Afghanistan instead. His argument is worth listening to.

A reader writes:

I am a recent and avid reader of your blog who has never written to any political figure before. So why you and why now? I have always considered myself a staunch liberal (i think that affirmative action has a place in society.) Yet, recently I have realized that many of my generation (I am 25) who loved the "liberal" Clinton 90’s believe in low taxes, balanced budgets, and free trade. Combined with a belief in gay rights my "liberalism" sounds not unlike your "conservatism." The kicker is that my foreign policy guru is Fareed Zakaria, former-Reagantite and a longtime friend of yours.

I think that many of my generation are like me; we long for a moderate, fiscally responsible domestic policy while advocating and international and realist foreign policy that will keep us the greatest nation in the world. (Yes, for us, Clinton was most of that.)  Whether you agree with that or not I certainly agree with another of your readers that you may have hit upon a new ideology that defies current definition.

I liked Clintonism (although I don’t like affirmative action). But Clintonism was made possible in part by Gingrich. Clinton before 1994 was not as helpful (apart from the EITC and budget reform). But the reader is right. What I hope to do on the blog in the next few months is chart a new political direction that focuses on sensible small-c conservative reform: of gerrymandering, pork, entitlement excess, corporate welfare, immigration chaos, poor intelligence, and a realist attempt to get Iraq right. Let’s leave the labels behind. There is a lot the vital center can agree on.

A reader writes:

It’s quite depressing. My vote for Jim Webb was my first vote for a Democrat for national office, and I cast my vote knowing that the Dems wouldn’t be any more "small government" than the GOP, but hoping that perhaps the number of centrist Democrats that were being elected would pull them away from the precipice of leftism.  Well, early indicators suggest the Democrats are prepared to do just what they said they’d do (higher taxes, pull away from the war, no new, engaging ideas), while the Republicans, instead of being taught a lesson, are circling the wagons, promoting yet more Bush cronies (Martinez, anyone?) and digging up relics from the past like Lott and Baker to do damage control.  (Who’d have thought that the Bush 41 gang, which once experienced its own revolt from small government conservatives, would now be the lesser of many evils?)

I’m not old enough to remember the early ’70s, but if I had to guess, I’d say that period in American history was a lot like this one for small government types. Both parties were essentially big government. The president was a Republican liberal who tried to pass off bigotry as conservatism and tried to spend his way out of every problem. The nation was involved in an endless war for which there was no solution yet no one would admit as much.  And the only hope small government conservatives had was to hope that the parties would act as a check on one another’s authoritarian impulses and that the country would survive because of gridlock. 

At least back then there was a budding small governmentism on the horizon (Goldwater, Reagan). Now, I fear that there is none. As much as I love Rudy and hope that he’s the next president, even I am forced to admit that he doesn’t come from the same Tory strain as Goldwater and Reagan. And the other likely future POTUS, McCain, has displayed his big government sympathies before. I think America may be entering the sort of period that California and Britain are now experiencing, where the best we can hope for in our leaders is immoderate centrism (Blair, Cameron, Schwarzenegger) that ends up looking a lot more like traditional conservatism in practice, despite not being rooted there in principle.

Not quite "Morning in America," but I suppose we’ll survive.

(Photo of a reincarnated head of Richard Nixon from the great "Futurama," the once and now future cartoon series from Matt Groening et al.)

A case-study in how to get it right. Why can’t the GOP make this a critical issue for the country? Support voter intiatives in each state to reform the system? It seems to me that for the Republicans to cover from their new image as the party of sleaze, they need to do more than re-hire Trent Lott. They should become reformists – of the rotten system. If they backed a ban on pork and a battle against gerry-mandering, they could do well. McCain?

I’ll be reading and signing books this evening at 7 pm at Lambda Rising on Connecticut Avenue just north of Dupont Circle in D.C.

Another sunny day in Dublin, Ireland, 11.19 am.

A reader doesn’t want to cut Goldberg or Limbaugh any slack:

There exists in every organization, whether it be a football team, a business, a political party, or a military, a point at which it is to the individuals folly to continue to subordinate their will in favor of the directives of their individuals.  A quarterback shouldn’t follow his coaches plan to run into the wrong end zone, an administrative assistant should not follow his bosses directions to engage in illegal business practices that will ultimately bankrupt the company, soldiers should not follow orders to round up Jews and send them to the gas chamber, and even generals committed to the idea of civilian control of the military must still at some point do what they can to dissuade their civilian superiors from a disastrous course.

It is so tempting to praise the famous discipline of the Republican coalition of the past few years, from Bush to Delay to Rush, as a critical component of what felt like great strength and success.  But the failure to recognize that line where individuals needed to press back against the direction of their leaders was also an essential component of why so many of their actions resulted in catastrophe.

There is no easy guideline for when you need to stop being a team player who just tows the line and become a conscientious dissenter. But individuals who follow orders well past that point should definitely be considered lackeys, hypocrites, complicit accomplices, or worse.

Ideological lickspittle, perhaps?

Well, that seems to be the president’s determination in Iraq, according to the Guardian. Will 20,000 more troops in Baghdad be enough? I doubt it. Just enough troops to lose … again? Let’s hope not. Diplomatic outreach to Iran and Syria or a regional summit? I cannot imagine Cheney signing off on that, but anything else is a sign that the administration is still in denial about the gravity of the situation. Money quote from "a former senior administration official":

"Bush has said ‘no’ to withdrawal, so what else do you have? The Baker report will be a set of ideas, more realistic than in the past, that can be used as political tools. What they’re going to say is: lower the goals, forget about the democracy crap, put more resources in, do it."

(Photo of General Abizaid: Alex Wong/Getty.)

A reader adds:

I do think that you get to the point regarding your reader’s comments about playing on a team. Many self-styled conservative pundits are not quite being honest about their membership on the Republican team. They play without their jerseys. The line many of these people take (I am sure that examples abound online) is that ‘we support the Republicans because they are conservative’ when the truth is ‘we support the Republicans because we are Republicans’. In my view this is the core dishonesty embedded in the National Review, Limbaugh, Hewitt, O‚ÄôReilly, Coulter, etc that makes people like you and John Cole and others so very angry. And of course they are all angry at you, because you and others are pointing to the wide play of daylight between principled conservatism and the Republican movement.

That just about sums it up, I think. It certainly helps explain the intensity of the anger on both sides.

Jason Kuznicki hs a very elegant and persuasive criticism of part of my book on his blog, "Positive Liberty." The conservatism I sketch is very suspicious of what might be called "natural law." My main skepticism is toward the natural law Thomists who want to rest current morality on arguments deduced from medieval and Greek teleology and biology. And Kuznicki doesn’t disagree on this. But he argues that the natural law of Jefferson and Adams survives in much better shape:

[T]he classical liberal idea of natural law was not the product of one man or a small group hoping to reshape all of human society according to some grandiose philosophical vision. Divided government and religious freedom were attempted only out of desperation, when all else had failed, in the exhaustion that came from centuries of religious warfare in Europe. They were putative natural laws, yes — but they were not the kind of greedy, reductionist, dogmatic natural laws that we have seen in the meantime.

Further, wherever these ideas have been given a fair trial, they have brought peace, liberty, and prosperity. The very fact that we are still discussing Jefferson’s formulation today, and that the United States is still formally founded upon it, is ample demonstration of the practical value of natural law in the classical liberal tradition.

In Kuznicki’s first two sentences, you have perhaps a reconciliation between Jefferson’s natural law and Oakeshott’s conservatism. If you think of the natural law as a product of a tradition above all, then you have a conservative grounding of a form of liberalism. But it also has force as an idea in its own right, and is based on a concept of God that is weak enough and broad enough that it might be seen as achievable in a diverse modernity:

To the founders, nature’s God was the deity of every religion — and of none. Nature’s God was present wherever religionists of any faith showed decency and kindness toward their fellow man; nature’s God was absent when the faithful were cruel, intolerant, or uncharitable. Nature’s God demanded that every one of us come to Him on our own terms, not under threat of compulsion. Why not? Because it is impossible to imagine a God who wanted compelled, inauthentic, grudgingly given prayers.

I wonder if that is entirely true, though. Many have imagined many such Gods. The great temptation of all belief is to lean toward indoctrination and even coercion in its implementation. Some Gods do compel submission (this is at the core of the struggle within Islam, is it not?). And Kuznicki’s back-up argument is simply that this idea of natural law has stood up pretty well over the centuries, has made for a happy and productive society. But that too is very close to an Oakeshottian defense of Western liberty as well.

I still believe Oakeshott’s defense is more sustainable. But Kuznicki reveals one of the weaker points in my case. I can see, in other words, where I have given too short shrift in the book to the Jeffersonian idea of a nature’s God as the source of divided government and individual liberty. I’m grateful for the extra perspective.