Category: The Dish

Do the fruits of Rove include the death of bipartisan internationalism in American foreign policy? Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz fear so:

The Bush administration’s brand of international engagement, far from being an aberration, represents a turning point in the historical trajectory of U.S. foreign policy. It is a symptom, as much as a cause, of the unraveling of the liberal internationalist compact that guided the United States for much of the second half of the twentieth century.

The polarization of the United States has dealt a severe blow to the bipartisan compact between power and cooperation. Instead of adhering to the vital center, the country’s elected officials, along with the public, are backing away from the liberal internationalist compact, supporting either U.S. power or international cooperation, but rarely both. … Prominent voices from across the political spectrum have called for the restoration of a robust bipartisan center that can put U.S. grand strategy back on track. … These exhortations are in vain. The halcyon era of liberal internationalism is over; the bipartisan compact between power and partnership has been effectively dismantled.

In retrospect, this may have been a goal of some of the more hard-core neoconservatives all along: to destroy the bipartisan consensus of using force for internationalist ends in the world, and to replace it with raw power, one-party rule at home, and American militarist unipolarity abroad. Today’s Republicans have palpable disdain for sharing power with another party – and almost as much discomfort for allies abroad. The Rove project was an attempt not just to defeat but to destroy the Democratic party at home, by cultural polarization, gerry-mandering, a K-Street monopoly and even abuse of the Justice Department. And the neoconservative project is close to degenerating into a program of constant war-making abroad that can be used in turn to polarize the country still further.

(Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty.)

It’s what Oakeshott called "the pursuit of intimations" or what others call dumb luck. Human progress often comes about by accident, improvisation, random confluences, and unintended consequences. Science is often just as prone to this serendipity as other fields of inquiry. Which is good news for America, at least the America that has so far resisted governmental attempts to regulate and control and rationalize it:

It is not just that hypertension drugs led to Viagra or that angiogenesis drugs led to the treatment of macular degeneration, but that even discoveries we claim come from research are themselves highly accidental. They are the result of undirected tinkering narrated after the fact, when it is dressed up as controlled research. The high rate of failure in scientific research should be sufficient to convince us of the lack of effectiveness in its design. … America’s primary export, it appears, is trial and error, and the innovative knowledge attained in such a way. Trial and error has error in it; and most top-down traditional rational and academic environments do not like the fallibility of "error" and the embarrassment of not quite knowing where they’re going. The U.S. fosters entrepreneurs and creators, not exam-takers, bureaucrats or, worse, deluded economists. So the perceived weakness of the American pupil in conventional studies is where his or her very strength may lie.

Let’s run the gay-check, shall we? No known female companion ever. Brilliant in school. Befriends a despised classmate. Childhood crush on another boy. Morally unsparing. Extremely attuned to and horrified by cruelty. Then this:

Characters in the books often remark that his greatest weakness is his willingness to trust those who may otherwise be considered untrustworthy. This trust is often criticised by those around him but is rarely questioned. He is frequently shown to have a great sense of humour, and often has a whimsical sense about him, especially during conflict, which can often infuriate those who are at odds with him. He is hardly ever impatient, and makes a point of politeness, even to those whom one would consider his enemies. He is a great lover of music, calling it "A magic beyond all we do [at Hogwarts]."

Oh: and he "did things with a wand [the examiner had] never seen before". Ahem.

A reader writes:

It seems to me that your chief purpose in life is to quarrel with the rest of the conservative community – not to end torture. If that latter was your aim (and a much more worthy aim it is) then you wouldn’t cherry-pick quotations the way you did with Jonah Goldberg. Why not show your readers the whole thing:

Sullivan might look to his absolutism on torture for guidance. He takes the principled stand that anything that smacks of torture must be absolutely taboo, even though his assertions on what is and isn’t torture ultimately boil down to his own subjective judgments. In fact, with some caveats, I’ve basically moved to that basic position myself

Jonah is agreeing with you, you jackass. If you were the least bit charitable, you might acknowledge this fact. He is merely noting that different people have different points at which they would personally draw the line and classify something as torture – so he wants to ban any interrogation method that "smacks of torture". Don’t you realize that a united front of conservatives who expressed this opinion forcefully – say in an open letter to the President – might actually make a difference. This is why conservatives like me have been so incensed by your approach to this issue. So far, you have used it for the purpose of moral preening, as a wedge issue to divide conservatives.

I don’t actually think the issue is that complicated.  Whether or not you think X is torture or not and whether you think it may yield useful intelligence or not is irrelevant.  The use of torture or even the apparent use of torture is hurting the image and honour of the United States and thus hurting the war effort on the diplomatic and ideological fronts. It just isn’t worth it. If you would concentrate on getting this message across, I don’t think you would find too many people who would disagree with it.

Well, I have used this argument repeatedly. And I have used others. I think in retrospect that I should have acknowledged Jonah’s concession with a lot more grace than I did. If my work has served to alienate people I need to persuade, then I need an attitude adjustment. I can only offer in defense that no issue has, in my view, hurt the US or the ability to maintain both an international and national consensus on the core morality of the war against Islamist terrorism than America’s embrace of torture. And the ways in which conservatives have sought to deny, obscure or even defend this have appalled and, yes, angered me.

Perhaps if I didn’t believe in conservatism’s core decency I would not be as angered by its slide into indecency. That’s where the bad attitude comes from. But it shouldn’t cloud the effort to stop this evil, with as many allies as we can muster.

"We’ve got to find a way to be more inclusive. Christianity is all about inclusiveness. It’s built around the most profound act of love in human history, isn’t it" – Rudy Giuliani, among the Christianists this morning.

Chicago, Illinois, 5.48 pm.

I hesitate to re-enter an area of discussion which, given my own intrepid experience of trying to foment a sane discussion of The Bell Curve over a decade ago, you’d think I’d know to avoid by now. But I find it fascinating, and one of the areas in which science is, I believe, going to challenge many assumptions of right-thinking liberalism. The comments of Richard Watson have revived discussion of the subject and you can find the conventional left-liberal view here, echoed by Crooked Timber. In general, when I read scientific accounts that include passages like the following, my eyes roll when they don’t glaze over:

While acknowledging that science is often used for positive purposes, including ones that benefit communities of color, social justice advocates must remain vigilant. All technologies, including new genetic technologies, develop in a political, economic and social context, says Patricia Berne of the Center for Genetics and Society, a public affairs nonprofit based in Oakland, California. "The broader political left has not really grappled with the ways these technologies affect our claim to resources, our claim to rights, and the well-being of our communities," she notes.

Vigilance? Against science? Who knew? Left-liberals, of course, like the use of DNA to exonerate innocent suspects but they’re not so happy when this kind of thing happens:

DNA led to the 2004 conviction of an African American suspected of multiple serial murders in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Initially, police sought a white suspect, based on eyewitness testimony and the assumption that most serial killers are Caucasian. But the case took a turn when a technology firm, DNA Print Genomics, offered to analyze the sample from the crime scene. Their test concluded that the suspect was "85 percent sub-Saharan African and 15 percent Native American" and therefore medium- to dark-skinned black, not white.

Hold on a minute. If race is entirely a social construct, how can DNA reveal it? The answer, of course, is that it isn’t just a social construct all the way down. Our DNA is inherited; and that inheritance has complex patterns. You can, of course, define these patterns any way you like. And crude racial categories are not in any way supported by the data. But sophisticated, subtle DNA differences that can indeed reflect a constellation of factors in a human being can be seen in some respects as a racial category. And we can tell someone’s genealogy from their DNA. The best layman’s guide to this I’ve read recently is in a NYT piece two years ago. Check it out. The critical bottom line:

A 2002 study by scientists at the University of Southern California and Stanford showed that if a sample of people from around the world are sorted by computer into five groups on the basis of genetic similarity, the groups that emerge are native to Europe, East Asia, Africa, America and Australasia – more or less the major races of traditional anthropology… The billion or so of the world’s people of largely European descent have a set of genetic variants in common that are collectively rare in everyone else; they are a race. At a smaller scale, three million Basques do as well; so they are a race as well. Race is merely a shorthand that enables us to speak sensibly, though with no great precision, about genetic rather than cultural or political differences.

As I’ve noted, the variations within some of these groups are larger than many of the variations between them. But that race does in some way exist as an essential fact of human nature – that these differences render the assumption of an utterly homogeneous human race bogus – seems to me indisputable. The social and political ramifications of this deserve a different and deeper treatment – as does the IQ discussion as it relates to this. But that race exists in nature seems to me to be as obvious as the fact that genealogy exists in nature. We need vigilance against abuse of the truth, not against the truth itself.

Clive Crook provides some sobering analysis:

The dollar’s gradual decline — welcome in itself, as part of a needed adjustment of international economic imbalances — creates a background of steady inflationary pressure. The currency’s slide threatens at any moment to become a sudden plunge, and if that happens the Fed’s duty to guard against inflation will conflict with its desire to stabilize output and employment. An oil price that now stands at nearly $90 a barrel does nothing to ease the Fed’s inflation worries. And another big complication is the risk that what may start as a mild recession will reinforce itself — again through the housing market. Distressed debtors and foreclosures are already on the rise and the economy is still strong. What would a downturn do to those housing market numbers, and how would they then feed back on the broader economy?

If the economy slides, the prospects for the Republicans next November seem to me to come close to dire.

"When the story of humankind and its intellect has gone to its end, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and begetter takes it seriously–as though the world’s axis turned in its midst. But if we could communicate with the gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself. There is nothing so reprehensible and unimportant in nature that it would not immediately swell up like a balloon at the slightest puff of this power of knowing. And just as every porter wants to have an admirer, so even the proudest of men, the philosopher, supposes that he sees on all sides the eyes of the universe telescopically focused upon his action and thought," – Friedrich Nietzsche.

A liberal quandary: do I like my craft beers cheap or do I want to increase production of ethanol?