Noonan

She sees, I think, the degeneracy of the party she supports and the unseriousness of large swathes of the other party. In ordinary times, this might be par for the course. But when we face the fiscal crisis of a massive generational shift and the growing threat of Islamo-terrorism, it isn’t good enough. Part of me wants McCain to be defeated as a Republican nominee by the forces that have helped bring us to this point. Then we can have a centrist reformer who does not even have to lip-sync respect for the elements that have helped destroy a coherent conservatism and a united country. And he would be the most formidable third-party candidate in a very long time. And part of me sees him as the only way to rescue the Republicans from what they have become. It will be their choice. And it will be an interesting one.

McCain and Immigration

As often, Ross Douthat makes a good point about where the Republican base is on the issue of immigration. But his anecdote makes me uneasy:

I was on Nantucket this weekend, where I went to the 7 PM Spanish-language mass on Nantucket (as did Teresa Heinz Kerry, who I had earlier spotted riding a tandem bicycle with her long-faced husband), and afterward my friends met me in the dusk outside, and as we stood there chatting a guy in a beat-up van cruised by, stuck his head out the window, and asked what was going on in the church.
"It’s the Spanish-language service," one of my friends said.
"Well, they oughta learn English already," the guy said, and drove off.

Ross uses this moment as an opportunity to lambaste McCain for not catering to the sentiments of the man in the pick-up truck. But are not those sentiments ugly? Does Ross believe the church should cease providing Spanish-speaking masses? Does he think the church is somehow wrong in this? It may be that McCain is wrong-headed on the immigration issue. But either you stand up to nativist prejudice or you don’t. This Ross seems to equate with "moral vanity". How about plain "morality"? Or inclusion? And what, remind me, is so wrong with that?

The Right Becomes The Left

A reader makes this sharp observation:

When you linked to The Marketing of Evil, what caught my eye was the similarity between the subtext of this book and modern liberalism.

John Kenneth Galbraith, a man best described as "brilliantly wrong," burst on the scene with "The Affluent Society." TAS basically argued that the American people were well-meaning sheep. In their naivete, Americans would fall for any kind of slick advertising. JKG believed you could sell just about anything to the American people if you used enough bells and whistles. He wanted to show Americans the man behind the curtain so we would get on our knees, thank him for his wisdom and get behind increased government spending and excess at the hands of President Adlai Stevenson. That he was empirically wrong was of little consquence to him.

The Marketing of Evil doesn’t have the same goals as JKG. They would settle for Americans clamoring to overturn Roe, pretending gay people don’t exist and put the sexual revolution genie back in the bottle. But they don’t think the American people actually want Roe/gays/sexual freedom – we’re just naive sheep that follow the loudest bells, brightest colors and most pleasant whistles. And just like JKG, they will eventually be proven wrong – this is what the American people want. Americans may argue about how fast we are going "there," but our intellectual journeys aren’t the product of slick marketing. But just as JKG couldn’t comprehend why Americans favored a proven leader of men like Ike over the scholarly Adlai, the supporters of this tome cannot comprehend that America has chosen liberty over "traditional" morality.

A political movement is decadent when it starts describing the voters as duped sheep. And if the far right believes that Americans want to return to an era with gay people in the closet or jail, abortion banned, and contraception unavailable, they may soon be in for an electoral shock.

“Cockroaches”

That is the term used by Michelle Malkin to describe her political opponents. I described it as a mark of incivility. A reader comments that I am missing the deeper resonance:

What is disturbing is when incivility moves to dehumanization. One need look no further than Rwanda to see the cockroach invective in play. The Hutus commonly referred to the Tutsis as "inyenzi," literally meaning cockroach. Though I’m certain that people like Malkin aren’t about to go on a machete waltz, the fact that political debate has devolved from disagreement to dehumanization is not a good sign. No good can come out of dehumanizing someone on the basis of politics. In my opinion it’s a sign of some kind of atavistic psychosis. Or, to put it better, as Cormac McCarthy said in Blood Meridian, "All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage."

I wonder if Malkin would agree to withdraw the description, or issue some form of regret for it. We all occasionally say things we do not mean. Perhaps she will reconsider.