Category: The Dish

by Matthew Sitman

Last week Sarah Posner expanded on Ed Kilgore’s argument that the efforts of the Christian right are a big reason for the rise of libertarianism in the United States – and why Robert Draper’s NYT Magazine story on libertarian politics was off the mark:

I do think that non-religious libertarians played a role in elevating some of the Tea Party agenda to the fore of the Republican Party. But Kilgore is right that the Christian right — a movement very much at home in the Tea Party movement, and one which would take up a good deal of space in a Venn diagram of the coalition — made that libertarian-ish conservatism an ideology that could find a comfortable and uncontroversial place in a political party whose electoral fortunes hinge on holding together a coalition of religious conservatives and anti-regulation free marketers.

An essential dogma of the religious right is that government should provide minimal services for and impose minimal demands on the citizenry. Sound familiar? But the reason isn’t, as popular libertarian dogma would have it, because the government should keep its nose out of your business. Dating back to conservative Christian red scares, anti-union and anti-New Deal ideology, and to Christian Reconstructionist framing of the proper role of government in relation to the church, the family, and the individual, these principles emerge from the idea that the secular state is the enemy of a proper Christian ordering of markets, social norms, and family and religious life.

The thrust of Posner’s piece is to express doubts about “the so-called ‘libertarian moment’ that we may or may not be witnessing,” viewing it not as the emergence of anything new, but rather a sleight of hand concealing the religious right’s grip on the Republican Party. Move along everybody, the theocrats are still running the show, is what she and Kilgore seem to be saying. The Tea Party, don’t you know, has more conservative Christians than real libertarians among its ranks. That’s true but beside the point – it only shows that the Republican Party might fail to exploit the emerging libertarian sensibility, especially among younger voters, that Draper describes. And it has absolutely nothing to do with where this sensibility comes from and what issues are driving it.

Posner is right that, historically, the Christian affinity for some libertarian ideas has not been about a principled defense of freedom, but rather anxiety over the government supposedly imposing secular values on ordinary, God-fearing Americans. The rhetoric of limited government really has been used to advance the agenda of the religious right. But what does that have to do with millenials who are fine with pot and gay people and tired of the wars that have marked so much of their lives? Here’s an important passage from early in Draper’s story:

[T]he age group most responsible for delivering Obama his two terms may well become a political wild card over time, in large part because of its libertarian leanings. Raised on the ad hoc communalism of the Internet, disenchanted by the Iraq War, reflexively tolerant of other lifestyles, appalled by government intrusion into their private affairs and increasingly convinced that the Obama economy is rigged against them, the millennials can no longer be regarded as faithful Democrats — and a recent poll confirmed that fully half of voters between ages 18 and 29 are unwedded to either party. Obama has profoundly disappointed many of these voters by shying away from marijuana decriminalization, by leading from behind on same-sex marriage, by trumping the Bush administration on illegal-immigrant deportations and by expanding Bush’s N.S.A. surveillance program.

It’s true that Draper speculates about the fortunes of Rand Paul and the Republican Party, but he made clear that Republicans would need to do some real work to take advantage of the younger generation’s political views – as he put it, “Republicans would seem well positioned to cast themselves as the fresh alternative, though perhaps only if the party first reappraises stances that young voters, in particular, regard as outdated.” The premise of Draper’s article, in other words, is exactly the opposite of everything Posner and Kilgore write – that our libertarian moment exists independent of the Republican party and it’s religiously-based social conservatism. Draper’s point is not that the libertarian moment is a Republican moment, but that younger voters increasingly hold libertarian-leaning positions on a constellation of issues increasingly, and that, just maybe, a figure like Rand Paul can be a vehicle for their aspirations. But even if Paul can’t, these libertarian sentiments exist. They are, in a way, the independent variable in Draper’s story.

Posner’s article is titled “The ‘Libertarian Moment’ Wouldn’t Exist Without Religion” and Kilgore’s “The So-Called ‘Libertarian Moment’ Is Engineered By The Christian Right.” Both get it exactly wrong. Consider Draper’s description of younger voters noted above – what does any of that have to do with an amorphous “religion” or the Christian right, apart from their notable absence? I would love for Posner to explain how support for pot legalization “wouldn’t exist without religion” or for Kilgore to demonstrate how the Christian right “engineered” millenials wariness of the surveillance state, because those are the kinds of issues our libertarian moment is about. If the most interesting thing you can do with all this is rail against the Republican party, you’re missing the point.

(Photo by Randy Robertson)

by Freddie deBoer

Michael B. Kelley thinks he might be! Such a fine line between espionage mastermind and espionage incompetent. Kelley does a deep dive into Snowden’s interviews and, with the help of some very, very willful reading and powerful cognitive dissonance, concludes that Snowden has distributed essential intelligence to those commies in Russia and China.

Well, actually, that’s not quite true. Kelley admits that he doesn’t know whether Snowden has done any such thing. He just waits until the long piece’s third-to-last paragraph to make that admission. “Fifteen months after his epic heist, we still don’t know if Snowden was telling the truth when he said he destroyed the tier 3 documents between June 12 (the SCMP leak) and June 23 (the flight to Moscow).” I would call that a fairly important qualifier! I think you’ve buried your lede here, Michael. I mean, if you’re writing a piece about how you think somebody leaked something, but you have a paragraph where you admit that you have no evidence that he in fact leaked that something, you might want to put that up near the top. Just a thought.

Kelley is part of the professional Edward Snowden skepticism circuit, which has kept a lot of “National Security Experts” gainfully employed. (Stimulus!) But Kelley isn’t a part of the knuckle-dragging, “hang his lifeless carcass from the Pentagon flagpole” school of anti-Snowden rhetoric. Instead, he’s part of another class of Snowden critics, the Snowden concern trolls. It’s carrying water for the national security state, just for the sophisticates. In this genre, you cast your aspersions on Snowden, intimate he’s a Russian or Chinese spy, or that he’s been duped by Russian or Chinese spies, or that he’s so deluded he doesn’t know he’s fallen into the trap of the Russians or Chinese. But you do it all while hemming and hawing and giving a little sugar to the people who don’t think we should have a limitless domestic surveillance system. You undermine him and what he’s done, but you do it with a veneer of journalistic objectivity.

But I said that Kelley must think Snowden is the world’s dumbest spy. Here’s Kelley’s thesis: Snowden stole three types of documents, Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3. The first two have a legitimate whistle blowing purpose, and Kelley concedes that someone could steal them out of legitimate civil liberties concerns. But Tier 3, in Kelley’s view, has no legitimate white blowing value, and so the only reason to steal them is to give them to the Russians or the Chinese. Or sell them to the Russians or the Chinese. And Snowden has wound up in… drum roll please… China and Russia.

Now, as Kelley is perfectly aware, it would have been incredibly easy for Snowden to have simply gotten the Tier 3 files and given them to a foreign government. For an encryption and communications expert like Snowden, it would have been no great difficulty to send those files securely online… or, you know, send a flash drive via UPS. That’s part of the great scandal here: that somebody like Snowden had such carte blanche to explore the domestic surveillance files of the NSA, and that he was able to walk out of there with so much information without anyone noticing. Indeed: were I interested in keeping the NSA’s secrets, I’d be a lot more worried about all of the other contractors I don’t know about than I am about the one I do know about. So since he knows Snowden could have easily taken the info and run without ever telling the world, he has to come up with a version where Snowden either legitimately wanted to blow the whistle on the NSA and then also wanted to give intelligence to the Russians and China so he fled there, or where Snowden acted like a whistle blower just to hurt the USA’s legitimacy and fled to Russia and China to share the Tier 3 documents with them.

Both of these are really dumb. If he was both legitimately interested in spreading the word about the NSA’s illegal activities but wanted to also help America’s antagonists, whether for money or any other motive, then he’d have hurt the value of the Tier 3 documents by going public. When you tell the world that you’ve gotten your hands on some explosive documents, and you tell the government agency you took them from what you took, then those files become much less valuable. The espionage value of intelligence that the other side knows you’ve shared is far lower. And if the whistle blowing is all a con as part of an elaborate scheme to hurt the United States, hiding out in China and Russia is the very worst thing he could have done. Does Michael Kelley really think that the Chinese and Russian intelligence services are that bad at their jobs? If this was all some elaborate plan to discredit the United States, would Russia’s spy agencies really say to Snowden, “make sure you hide out in China and Russia– that’ll  add to your credibility with the American people”? How dumb would they and he have to be, if that was the plan? Indeed, the fact that Snowden ended up in those countries makes it much less likely he’s a spy. If he were a spy, he’d have fled someplace way less suspicious.

Given that, by his own admission, Kelley has no evidence that Snowden shared damaging intelligence materials with any other foreign governments, and given that if he were a spy, he’d be doing a terrible job of it, I conclude that in fact Snowden is who he says he is: a whistle blower, one who fled to China and then Russia because he was on the run from an American government that would like very much to throw him in some closet somewhere, preferably in a friendly dictatorship where he could be tortured. Was it a good idea to go to China in the first place? I have no idea. I’ve never been on the run from the world’s most powerful country. And I have no idea what conditions Snowden was under when he grabbed those documents, if he had much choice, or what was on his mind. I do know that he’s in Russia because he’s been trapped there by our government, and that if he’s a spy, he’s gotta be the world’s worst.

by Dish Staff

TNR recently pulled this review by Max Eastman of Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon by from their archives, which purportedly causes Hemingway to track Eastman down in his New York City office and show him just what was under shirt. You can see why:

Why then does our iron advocate of straight talk about what things are, our full-sized man, our ferocious realist, go blind and wrap himself up in clouds of juvenile romanticism the moment he crosses the border on his way to a Spanish bullfight? It is of course a commonplace that Hemingway lacks the serene confidence that he is a full-sized man. Most of us too delicately organized babies who grow up to be artists suffer at times from that small inward doubt. But some circumstance seems to have laid upon Hemingway a continual sense of the obligation to put forth evidences of red-blooded masculinity. It must be made obvious not only in the swing of the big shoulders and the clothes he puts on, but in the stride of his prose style and the emotions he permits to come to the surface there. This trait of his character has been strong enough to form the nucleus of a new flavor in English literature, and it has moreover begotten a veritable school of fiction-writers—a literary style, you might say, of wearing false hair on the chest—but, nevertheless, I think it is inadequate to explain the ecstatic adulation with which Hemingway approaches everything connected with the killing of bulls in the bull ring.

Reviewing The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 2: 1923-25, Edward Mendelson offers related insights into Papa’s psyche:

What makes the book revelatory is not its biographical detail but the spacious view it gives of Hemingway’s mind at work in his long, eager, and unguarded letters to boyhood friends. For the past fifty years, ever since his embittered older sister Marcelline reported that their mother had dressed the young Hemingway as a girl and had tried to raise the two of them as twins, and ever since his posthumous novel The Garden of Eden (1986) revealed his androgynous fantasies, the conventional reading of Hemingway explained him away as the product of sexual confusion and category-crossing. This turns out to be as simplifying and crude as the he-man image it supplanted. These letters make clear that both the he-man and the androgynous fantasist were surface expressions of a deeper wish that shaped Hemingway’s life and work, a driving impulse that ultimately had nothing to do with sex.

The wish, Mendelson argues, has to do with the breakdown of heroic male code the young Hemingway upheld, which included belonging to a band of brothers – but which failed as he became an adult, at which point he fantasized that “he could merge instead with a lover”:

Everyone quotes the most obvious examples. A Farewell to Arms: “There isn’t any me. I’m you.” “We’re the same one.” “I want us to be all mixed up.” For Whom the Bell Tolls: “I am thee also now…. You are me now.” “I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other…. I would have us exactly the same.” The Garden of Eden: “Now you can’t tell who is who can you?” (this after the woman enters the man with her hand). Everyone interprets these as gender-crossing, but they express the same wish for dissolution that recurs throughout Hemingway’s letters to his band of brothers, where, in one enthusiastic paragraph after another, he refers to each of them with the single phrase “a male.”

What Hemingway wanted—both as he-man and as androgyne—was a lasting intimate connection that did not require him to be a separate individual person—something no one can have. Virginia Woolf, in a review that infuriated him, perceived the price he paid for his wish. Hemingway’s characters, she said, are like people overheard in a restaurant talking in rapid slang, “because slang is the speech of the herd.” Those who speak it are “seemingly much at their ease, and yet if we look at them a little from the shadow not at their ease at all, and, indeed, terribly afraid of being themselves.”

by Dish Staff

Bryan Appleyard isn’t convinced by Arthur I. Miller’s Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science Is Redefining Contemporary Art, a book based on dozens of interviews with “science-influenced artists and musicians” that heralds “the onset of a new ‘third culture’ in which art and science will, somehow, embrace.” Why he’s skeptical of what Miller calls “art-sci”:

Perhaps the problem is that the very idea of some kind of art-science union is incoherent. Art and science are not separated by misunderstandings or ignorance, they are separated by definition. Art engages with the complexity of human experience, more precisely with that it feels like to be human; science explores the material world in a manner that necessarily ignores all such considerations. In the book the problem with this discontinuity is repeatedly made apparent by scientists who know perfectly well that art cannot impinge in any way on what they do, however enthusiastic certain artists may be. A deal between the two – Miller’s Third Culture – is, therefore, likely to be more of an annexation than a partnership.

The one exception to this might be said to be neuroscience.

This now claims to have access to the physical substrate of our minds, feelings, impulses and so on. And, indeed, Miller does mention Semir Zeki, the genial and entertaining UCL professor who observes the reaction of our brains to works of art. Thanks to Zeki and others, neuroaesthetics is a distinct discipline. But what does any of that mean – that Titian would have been a better painter if he had been stuck in an MRI machine?  Or, in biology, there are those fatuous evolutionary explanations of art as some kind of adaptive mechanism. Maybe but so what? You’re not going to get very far with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon if you persist in seeing it as nothing more than an attempt to propagate Picasso’s genes. The point about art is that it is precisely about those things that science cannot address, those things that make us more than the sum of our (no doubt) adaptive parts.

(Photo of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, via Flickr user gωen)