The Dish

A striking fact about the November election is that both major party candidates embraced what John Lukacs referred to as “the militarization of the image of the presidency.” Kerry’s use of martial imagery and his “sentimentalization of the military” paralleled that of Bush, though he used it to a different, dovish end. For Kerry and his allies, Bush’s recklessness and his failure to defer to the greater wisdom of the uniformed military represented a repudiation of the authentic military virtues. Bush, in contrast, identified support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with support for the troops. Strength as “commander-in-chief” is once again seen as the signal virtue in a chief executive.

As Lukacs points out, this represents a break.

In the past, even presidents who had once been generals employed civilian manners. They chose not to emphasize their military achievements during their presidential tenure – in accord with the American tradition of the primacy of civilian over military rule.

Lukacs ends his brief polemic with a warning:

When the Roman republic gave way to empire, the new supreme ruler, Augustus chose to name himself not “rex,” king, but “imperator,” from which our words emperor and empire derive, even though its original meaning was more like commander in chief. Thereafter Roman emperors came to depend increasingly on their military. Will our future presidents? Let us doubt it. And yet . . .

It’s easy to dismiss this as alarmist nonsense, and I certainly don’t maintain that the US is heading for a military dictatorship. Far from it. But I am concerned by the fact that the Cassandras, a kind of early warning system for democracy, are few and far between.

Peter Beinart forcefully and persuasively argues that the left ought to embrace a militarized approach to the Terror War, matching conservatives in the never-ending quest for guts and glory. While I’m very sympathetic-I remain emphatically hawkish, and if anything I think we need a larger military-my sense is that we need a credible voice for restraint. American global leadership is the sine qua non of a liberal peace, but the standing army it demands has corrosive effects. Far left critics, in the vein of Chomsky and Zinn, are discredited by their distrust of US intentions, and the same is true of critics on the far right, like Buchanan. We no longer have a Sen. Bob Taft, a man who opposed the internment of Japanese Americans and US military interventions abroad while retaining a belief in the essential decency of he American people. The defenders of internment today represent an obscene caricature of how we’ve gone wrong.

THE TWIN THREATS: These dark thoughts-Merry Christmas, incidentally!- occur to me in light of Andrew’s link to Publius on “The Conservative Case for Outrage.” I wholeheartedly agree that outrage is the only appropriate response to the torture of prisoners, but not because it inflames the Arab street. Outrage is appropriate because any sustained military campaign-particularly a shadowy war against shadowy villains-poses a threat to constitutional democracy. The threat can be contained, and the US has been more successful than most countries, Britain and France included. And yet it’s never easy. Because I’m sympathetic to Heather MacDonald’s call for the aggressive use of data-mining and other surveillance technologies, it’s all the more vital that abuses be rooted out and prosecuted mercilessly. Abu Ghraib, and allegations of torture elsewhere in the secret archipelago of prison camps, pose a threat to this country less immediate but no less real than that posed by the Islamist killers.

THE UN-IMMACULATE AMERICANS: On the pressing question of whether Abu Ghraib represents a devastating setback in the Terror War, and whether being seen as an immaculate force for good in the Arab world is key to American victory, I’m tentatively with the dissenters. Reuel Gerecht made the case in the Weekly Standard back in May. Arab cynicism about American intentions runs very deep. Our self-perception bears no relation to how we’re seen in that part of the world, or almost anywhere else. The true test is whether we can hold elections. Elections will, with any luck, create a dynamic of their own that will end in majoritarian democracy, and, as Gerecht argues, deeply illiberal and anti-American democracy at that. It will, however, kill off Bin Ladenism, and that’s worth firing on all cylinders, ramping up counterinsurgency efforts, and betting the farm.
— Reihan

TOM MENASHI, ROSS EDWARDS, AND HILLARY RODHAM SALAM?: “C’mon, admit it. The three guys filling in for Andrew are Tom Daschle, John Edwards and Hillary Rodham Clinton!” More feedback on the Letters Page.

If there’s one thing “everyone” knows about Christmas, it’s that we celebrate it on December 25th because the early Christians decided to have their holiday piggyback on various pre-existing pagan solstice-related festivals. (The same, of course, is held to be true of Easter, which is supposedly stolen from pagan fertility celebrations.)

But maybe, just maybe, everyone is wrong. (via GetReligion)

As a Christian, I should add that the notion of “stealing” the dates of the pagan holidays (and their holly boughs, mistletoe, and all the rest of the trimmings) never particularly bothered me. A VIP (very intelligent priest) in my New Haven parish once put it this way: “The Church’s way is to include — and to sift.”

Merry Christmas to all . . .

— Ross

Everyone — including Andrew, below — is debating the meaning of poll numbers that show a post-election slip in public support for the Iraq War (or, more specifically, for fighting the war in the first place, since most people still want to finish the job . . . whatever that may mean). Kevin Drum sees it as part of a general post-Mission Accomplished decline in pro-invasion sentiment, which is fair enough — but as David Adesnik rightly notes, the numbers had either flatlined or were declining very slowly during the run-up to election day, and they’ve gone south much faster since Bush won re-election. So there’s clearly something more going on here.

Josh Marshall’s argument (Andrew has the money quote) that Bush supporters had to indulge in a little cognitive dissonance about the war in order to stand by their man does sound like a smarter take . . . but I’d like to meet some of these hypothetical self-deluding Bush voters before I endorse it.

IT’S THE COVERAGE, STUPID: What’s more likely, I think, is that the media coverage has shifted since the end of the election, and that people’s attention patterns are shifting accordingly. A lot of conservatives howled that the press was playing up bad news from Iraq in order to take down Bush, and there were probably some cases where this was true (the Al Qaaqaa kerfluffle, at the very least, seemed like an attemped media “October Surprise”). But in the larger scheme of things, what really happened during the election sprint was that the political coverage drove the Iraq coverage off the front pages — which meant, in turn, that most people stopped paying attention to the news from the Middle East.

This would explain why attitudes toward the war were largely frozen in place from primary season, really, until election day (check out Drum’s chart) . . . people simply weren’t thinking about Iraq, except maybe as a campaign issue. Now, however, there aren’t any more stories about Bush pressing the flesh in Ohio, or the Swift Vets coming out with another ad, or Kerry flubbing the names of Red Sox players — and so Iraq is once again the country’s biggest news story. And the more people pay attention to what’s happening there, I suspect, the less the war seems like a good idea.

STICKING WITH IT: Of course, believing the war was a mistake (as I do) doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be in it to win it. The question is how . . . and fortunately, Michael Ledeen has the answer. The way to bring democracy to Iraq, you see, is to bring democracy to Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. Piece of cake! Sign me up!

I’m being unfair, I know . . . but the trouble with Ledeen is that he always seems to have one idea (“democratic revolution”) about what to do, and very few ideas about how to do it. He writes:

No, we can only win in Iraq if we fully engage in the terror war, which means using our most lethal weapon – freedom – against the terror masters, all of them. The peoples of Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia are restive, they look to us for political support. Why have we not endorsed the call for political referenda in Syria and Iran? Why are we so (rightly and honorably) supportive of free elections in the Ukraine, while remaining silent about – or, in the disgraceful case of outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell, openly hostile to – free elections in Iran and Syria? Why are we not advancing both our values and our interests in the war against the terror masters?

This is a masterpiece of vagueness. Freedom is a potent weapon, I’ll grant you (and also a “messy” one, as Donald Rumsfeld can attest), but how, exactly, is it to be unleashed in the Greater Middle East? Does Ledeen really think that if the U.S. starts publicly calling for a democratic revolt in the streets of Tehran and Damascus (not to mention Saudi Arabia, where the results would probably not be to our liking), our diplomatic power is going to make the mullahs and Ba’athists magically melt away? Or does he really mean that we should first call for free elections, and then put boots on the ground to make it happen?

Either way, I wish he would be more explicit in his intentions and more detailed in his plans. It’s not as if we have excess diplomatic capital to play with these days — let alone excess armored divisions.

Slower, please.

–Ross

Publius asks the hard questions about conservatives and torture. I couldn’t agree more.
— Andrew

Here’s his explanation of declining war-support in polls:

I think that many Bush supporters simply couldn’t take stock of the full measure of the screw-up in Iraq during the election because doing so would have conflicted their support for President Bush. Iraq and the war on terror so defined this election that support for the war and the president who led us into it simply couldn’t be pried apart.
Perhaps it wasn’t so internalized. During the slugfest of the campaign supporting Bush just meant supporting the war and this is what people told pollsters when they were asked, because one question was almost a proxy for the other.
You can even do a thought experiment by imagining how many conservatives during election season would have been so staunch in their support for the war if it were being fought under a President Gore or a President Clinton. The question all but answers itself.

Well, some of us who backed Bush in 2000 and also backed the war in 2001 and 2002 did try and pry the two issues apart. And the reason I narrowly backed Kerry is that I wanted us to win the war; and had a hard time maintaining minimal confidence in the current leadership. I wonder if that judgment has now sunk in more generally, as pre-election partisanship subsides. We’ll see, won’t we?

Victor Davis Hanson’s defense of Donald Rumsfeld is, as usual, full of his usual insights and perspective. But he ducks the main complaints. The most important is that the war immediately after the fall of Baghdad was seriously under-manned, and that this was obvious from the beginning. Hanson’s defense is that the humber of troops is not as important as their successful deployment. But surely, the lack of troops did a couple of terribly damaging things: it prevented the occupying forces from getting a monopoly of violence across the country, emboldened the Baathist/Jihadist resistance, and alienated many Iraqis who could not understand why the greatest super-power’s main achievement in Iraq was the initiation of chaos and insecurity. Both these undermined our objectives, were pointed out in time, and could have been rectified. Rummy refused to do anything, and, indeed, minimized with criminal glibness the disaster brewing. Secondly, Hanson suggests that there’s no evidence that it was Rumsfeld’s dcision to disband the Iraqi army. But that’s irrelevant. Rumsfeld is ultimately responsible for the war. If Bremer called for the disbandment of the Baathist army and Rumsfeld objected, that army would still be intact. Bremer, remember, worked for Rumsfeld. If Rumsfeld had been over-ruled on such a critical matter, he should have quit. He didn’t. He remains responsible. The Bush people can look the word “responsible” up in the dictionary if they need to.

HANSON ON TROOPS: Then Hanson seems to withdraw the too-few-troops argument, and complains that we don’t have enough! Of course, the reason we don’t have enough is … Bill Clinton! Four years after this president took office in a campaign against a man, Al Gore, who urged troop increases, and three years after 9/11, Bush remains adamant that our military is big enough. But Hanson won’t brook any criticism of this administration in this respect:

In truth, the real troop problem transcends Iraq. Our shortages are caused by a military that was slashed after the Cold War and still hasn’t properly recouped to meet the global demands of the war against Islamic fascism – resulting in rotation nightmares, National Guard emergencies, and stop-order controversies… In reality, [Rumsfeld] has carefully allotted troops in Iraq because he has few to spare elsewhere – and all for reasons beyond his control. If Senator Lott or kindred pundits first show us exactly where the money is to come from to enlarge the military (tax hikes, cuts in new Medicare entitlements, or budgetary freezes?), and, second, that Mr. Rumsfeld opposes expanding our defense budget – “No, President Bush, I don’t need any more money, since the Clinton formula was about right for our present responsibilities” – then he should be held responsible. So far that has not happened.

Well, we do know that this president has ruled out any increase in troop levels globally. That was one reason I supported Kerry over Bush in the last election. If Rumsfeld wanted more, and believes more are essential, why is he still serving a president who rules that out? In Hanson’s universe, no one in the administration is responsible for this. Why? How on earth are we supposed to effect a generational democratic shift in Iraq with barely any troops? The more you read the defenders of the conduct of this war, the more you realize they have perfected the art of the Bush people: always shift the blame elsewhere, always attack your critics, never take responsibility.

OH, AND … : No mention of the fact that Rumsfeld has presided over a military that has been found guilty of umpteen violations of basic ethical procedures observed by the U.S. military for generations. He has presided over the de facto suspension of the Geneva Conventions, the torturing-to-death of at least five prisoners, and possibly close to 30. The scale and scope of the abuse – hundreds of incidents of the most appalling torture across all theaters and all services – is unprecedented. Isn’t this the Sec Def’s responsibility? Or do we have to endure another sickening right-wing attack on the International Red Cross as some kind of excuse?

NOVAK ON RUMSFELD: But Rummy’s own self-defense is just as revealing as Hanson’s. If you read Bob Novak’s column today, it’s hard not to see Rumsfeld’s flunkies or Rummy himself doing some energetic spinning. Here’s the key paragraph:

Rumsfeld is often bracketed with the neocons, but that is incorrect. In a long political career that dates back to his election to Congress in 1962, he has not even been associated with the traditional conservative movement. In the run-up to the attack on Iraq, he was not aggressively pressing intervention by force of arms, but instead was shaping a military response to fit President Bush’s command.

Translation from Rummy: “This is Bush’s war, not mine. I never really wanted it. I don’t believe in the democratic transformation of the Middle East. I don’t want to shift gears from my lean, mean fighting machine concept to one of a military that has to be big enough to impose a new order on societies where liberty has never had deep roots. I’m just taking orders.” You can either see this as true (my view) – in which case, Rumsfeld really is the wrong man for the president’s Wilsonian agenda. Or you can see this as disloyal spin: in which case, Rummy has lost confidence in the war he was obliged to run. In either case, he should resign. This war is too important to have the wrong man in the job or someone who disagrees with its basic rationale.

— Andrew

Christopher Caldwell paints a dire portrait of Holland. Theo van Gogh’s murder at the hands of Islamists has shattered the multicultural consensus, and the country is in the grip of what might be called a 1930s moment. Political certainties have been undermined. Populist resentment of foreign-born Muslims, many of whom have built a kind of authoritarian counterculture in the home of “post-Christian” avant-garde tolerance, resonates widely. The threat of low-level civil war hangs overhead as outspoken opponents of the Islamists surround themselves with armed guards. It makes you think America’s woes are pretty damn manageable.

This is the nightmare flipside of the West’s acquiescence in tyranny outside its own charmed circle. President Bush, whatever else you may think of him, has broken with this, if only out of necessity. For many in Europe, this acquiescence has, bizarrely, become a source of moral vanity. These dictatorships we can’t hope to understand, their sovereignty sacrosanct, beget chauvinism and desperate poverty, which in turn begets the emigration of spiritually battered, xenophobic, and occasionally violent people. The chickens are coming home to roost.

Sasha Polakow-Suransky, a good friend, approached the issue from a very different angle two and a half years ago in The American Prospect. See what you think.

THEORY OF GRAMBO: I’ve been puzzling over Whatevs.org. I’ve been struggling to understand exactly why this website is so transcendently dope. Is it the endless hilarity? Of course, that’s a part of it, but there’s something else. Consider that celebrity gossip has long been seen as the province of women. Because said gossip is central to Grambo’s beat, you can say there’s something “feminine” about his work. At the same time, he clearly lusts after a wide array of “gamtastic” celebrity stunners, as evidenced by the many salacious snapshots that pepper Grambo’s electric prose. This is classically coded as “masculine.” His synthetic language-call it the “Grammar of Grambo,” “Gramboese”-represents an unlikely fusion of girlish tween-speak and frat-boy argot. He represents The D with a ferocity unmatched by the most formidable Kabbage Patch Piru or Ujima Village Blood, and yet I understand him to be a college-educated advertising executive. What gives?

I’ve determined that Whatevs.org represents a sustained assault on our collective mind-state, and that it threatens to reverse the technicization of the lifeworld, in the process obliterating industrial civilization and restoring the planet to a prelapsarian state, when man lived peacefully with dinosaurs in “clans” not unlike the “Clan of the Cave Bear.” The process is, by this point, irreversible.

Or it could be that Grambo, by reversing our deep structure polarities, heightening the contradictions, and making a mockery of our binary loboto-brainwaves-urban/rural, highbrow/lowbrow, master/slave, hightop/lowtop, Portman/Knightley-will hasten the Millennium, which is to say the Apocalypse. Either way, I suggest you wear a hat. Bovs on your tees, tchotchmikas. Bovs on your respective tees.
— Reihan

In a recent essay on humility, Christopher Caldwell reminded readers of the Jonathan Franzen brouhaha. When Oprah vaulted The Corrections into the sales stratosphere by recommending it to her loyal army of viewers, Franzen, clumsily and haltingly but with no malice, thought out loud about what commercial success means for a writer “in the high-art literary tradition.” Critics blasted Franzen for elitism, and one couldn’t help but be sympathetic. But in a very neat pamphlet, Revolt of the Masscult, Chris Lehmann wonders why. At what point did we identify market imperatives with cultural democracy? Lehmann is an egalitarian of the left, and yet he raises serious questions for conservatives.

Is it fair to say that Hollywood is giving “the people” exactly what they want? By criticizing the entertainment-industrial complex for its excesses while cheering robust increases in shareholder value-all the while watching Desperate Housewives-are conservatives engaging in rank hypocrisy? By now, Thomas Frank has turned this line of attack into a cottage industry, and with good reason: there’s something to it.

FREE THE CULTURE: For Frank, at least, the “culture war” is so much posturing, a sideshow. The real struggle is class struggle. Lehmann, I believe, would like to see a politically engaged criticism that sees through the false populism of “popular culture,” more a transmission belt designed to maximize profits than a truly “popular” phenomenon.

Conservatives ought to take a different route. Recognize that the culture industry is an industry, no more evil than the others, but no less so. Media conglomerates are as opportunistic as the rest. Unchecked, Hollywood’s coarsening influence is a problem, and something should be done about it. Rather than go down the route of censorship and intimidation, the best move-very much in tune with the best conservative instincts-would be to democratize the culture. Break the stranglehold of Big Media by reversing copyright laws that stifle free expression. Strengthen the hand of the innovative entrepreneurs behind peer-to-peer networks, spread-spectrum radio, and other technologies that have the potential to restore creative power to individuals and communities. Over time, you’ll see a more diverse media culture that will be far more in tune with-here it comes-our shared values. Larry Lessig‘s notion of a “free culture” has a lot to offer conservatives vexed by the cultural hegemony of a narrow corporate elite.

ODE TO ENLIGHTENED DESPOTISM: One has to wonder-why are conservative Republicans kowtowing to Big Media? The obvious, and largely correct answer, boils down to political economy. Campaign contributions make a difference. So does ignorance or indifference. Industry flacks line the corridors of K Street, but congressional staffers aren’t being harassed by deep-pocketed Lessig epigones, so why bother exploring alternatives?

This is cynical, but it approximates reality. Still, it begs the question: Why wouldn’t conservative Republicans tether themselves to emergent technologies? Big Media incumbents have deep pockets now, and yet that directly derives from an industrial policy gamed to their benefit. Besides, those deep pockets tend to benefit liberals. Is it crazy to cut them loose, relying on, I don’t know, contribution from oil and gas companies to tide you over while you cultivate smaller, nimbler media outfits by creating a framework for open competition?

For that to happen, you have to be far-sighted, and you need centralized corruption rather than decentralized corruption. (Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny wrote the book on this stuff.) If Karl Rove really could quash the hopes and dreams of every two-bit state legislator, he might be able to maximize the take from saps and suckers.

As Nixonian as this sounds, an Enlightened Despot could do a lot of good for the Republicans or the Democrats. She could expel the MoveOn.org gang from the Democrats and the Starve-the-Beasters from the Republicans. (“Who’d be left?” The rest of the country minus a few thousand rich people.) That or we could think about effective campaign finance reform.
— Reihan

Left2Right, the blog for left-wing academics who don’t like Bush — they have a lot of contributors, needless to say — started out annoying but intermittently amusing (amusing enough, in fact, that I’ve been writing a brief article about the site). Of late, though, they’re mainly just annoying-without-any-qualifiers, as my colleague Nate Littlefield ably points out.

You know you’ve gone wrong when you’re trying to score points against the Right, and you only end up ticking off Brad DeLong.
— Ross

Cheer up, Blue America! Sure, your birth rates may be a tad lower than in the glowing-like-an-expectant mother Red States . . . but at least you aren’t Russia!

Nicholas Eberstadt, demographer-to-the-stars, reports.
— Ross