AT THE MOVIES

The only thing more annoying than the annual “ten best” movie lists that critics start churning out around this time of year (and I’ll admit that I devour them, and would gladly write one myself if someone only asked) are the ever-so-pretentious lists of “the best movies that only I, the critic, was wise enough or privileged enough to see this year.” Here’s one such top ten, for instance, that offers up nine films I haven’t seen and one I have — and that one, Spartan, doesn’t exactly recommend the author’s taste in cinema.

Here’s his take: “In a year when fiction films were conspicuously silent about the political moment, David Mamet’s conspiracy thriller about a kidnapped first daughter was a bracing dose of studio-backed subversiveness.” (It’s true — the anti-Bush subtext in these two summer tentpole flicks was pretty well hidden, wasn’t it? God knows it was barely noticeable here.) The review goes on to praise Spartan as “a strange, existential meditation on duty, militarism, and moral choice,” and notes that while “the strange cadence of Mametese and the hermetic staginess can be alienating . . . they are crucial to the director’s efforts to push his movie into the abstract.”

Here’s my rule of thumb: Anytime a critic praises a director for pushing any movie — let alone a low-budget thriller — “into the abstract,” you know you’ve entered the realm of the lousy-but-pretentious, which is not a particularly fun place to spend a Saturday night. I promise you, folks, Spartan is bad — both in the way that only David Mamet can be bad and in a heap of others. The only thing that raises it to the level of “interesting pop culture artifact” is the sheer strangeness of its central conceit, which is almost bizarre enough to merit the price of the Blockbuster rental. I won’t spoil it — but suffice to say, David Mamet thinks Jenna and Barbara should be keeping a weather eye on their Dad . . .

Fortunately, TNR Online also has Chris Orr, my soon-to-be-former Atlantic superior (no conflicts of interest here, sir!), whose DVD reviews are diamonds in the online rough. (I’ve lauded his anti-Spiderman 2 sentiments elsewhere.) Why the deeply mediocre Manohla Dargis got the Times‘s critic gig when there was someone of Chris’s talents available, I’ll never understand. (If only his name were Ma-noh-laaaaaaa . . . light of my life, fire of my . . . whoops, sorry, tangent.)
— Ross

CONSERVATISM IS DEEPLY UNPOPULAR

In mulling over the Social Security crisis-unlike a few folks I admire, I’m convinced that there is one-it occurred to me that conservatism is deeply unpopular. This might sound odd in light of President Bush’s reelection, the endless hand wringing among liberals, and the obliteration of the Democratic Party in the white South. I can imagine liberals thinking, “That’s a kind of unpopularity I could handle.” Well, you’ll soon find out. Republicans are already overreaching, and the stench of corruption will soon lead to electoral gains for Democrats, civil wars, backbiting, and a largely talentless political bench notwithstanding.

But it goes deeper than that. It’s not just that Republican partisans are unpopular. They’re not, or at least not yet. It’s that conservatism, understood loosely as an “ideology of self-reliance,” has failed to make serious inroads since the mid-’90s. It’s still nowhere near a popular majority. This is why conservative politicians are often forced to use deception to advance conservative policy proposals. Take tax cuts, the heart and soul of President Bush’s meager domestic policy. When Bush first came to office, tax cuts were not a particularly high priority for the public. Neverthless, Bush pressed ahead, and the size and distribution of the tax cuts he proposed were, as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have argued, “radically at odds with majority views.” “Crafted language” does the work that ought to be done by argument and persuasion. I don’t agree with Hacker and Pierson on much, but I’m a partisan of majoritarian democracy (part of why I dislike activist judges of all persuasions) and I find this unsettling. Had the administration paid heed to public opinion, not out of slavish deference but out of respect, we would’ve seen a different tax cut, and, with any luck, a sustainable popular majority for conservatism. (McCain, incidentally, could’ve pulled it off, but you already knew that.)

SOCIAL SECURITY AND SELF-RELIANCE: Which leads us to Social Security. It’s not that I agree with Paul Krugman-that the Bush administration’s true intention is to destroy a successful government program precisely because it represents an ideological affront-but, well, Social Security is an affront to the “ideology of self-reliance,” and it fosters dependency. Worse yet, the system, as Laurence Kotlikoff, Kent Smetters and Jagadeesh Gokhale, and others maintain, is badly broken. Consider the following passage from Krugman’s 7 December column:

My favorite example of their three-card-monte logic goes like this: first, they insist that the Social Security system’s current surplus and the trust fund it has been accumulating with that surplus are meaningless. Social Security, they say, isn’t really an independent entity — it’s just part of the federal government.

If the trust fund is meaningless, by the way, that Greenspan-sponsored tax increase in the 1980’s was nothing but an exercise in class warfare: taxes on working-class Americans went up, taxes on the affluent went down, and the workers have nothing to show for their sacrifice.

But never mind: the same people who claim that Social Security isn’t an independent entity when it runs surpluses also insist that late next decade, when the benefit payments start to exceed the payroll tax receipts, this will represent a crisis — you see, Social Security has its own dedicated financing, and therefore must stand on its own.

There’s another way of reading this. (1) This part is true. (2) Yes, the Greenspan-sponsored tax increase was an exercise in class warfare, and that’s a bad thing. (3) No, it’s still not an independent entity. Social Security, and Medicare, will represent an ever-increasing share of the federal budget, thus stymieing efforts to address unforeseen social calamities (a zombie plague, for example) and crowding out private investment and other good stuff.

A fully funded Social Security system, like the one proposed by Edward Prescott, has tremendous conservative appeal. So does the Smetters/Gokhale proposal. Neither proposal will ever see the light of day. Kotlikoff might be best on the merits, but it’s also a longshot. Phillip Longman floated my favorite reform-which looks politically viable to boot-last month. Predictably, the Bush administration is contemplating a series of half-assed “reforms” that are likely to make matters worse. In doing so, the administration will yet again discredit the “ideology of self-reliance.” One wonders if Bush is a sleeper agent for the Socialist International.

SO WHAT NEXT?:
To set this right, we need Menashi in the White House, with Daniel Drezner as USTR. We also need a new ideological synthesis. (Call me Commissar.) Start with “demand-side conservatism” as described by Rauch. Then throw in a dash of Longmanian natalism and Douthatian social conservatism, leavened by Sullivanian–Oakeshottian sympathies, Muellerian fiscal “Reaganism,” and a healthy dose of Gerechtian pax Americana. Before you know it, you’ll have an earth-shatteringly excellent governing philosophy that would restore American greatness and make the world a better place for the children.

Never forget that Wu-Tang is for the children. R.I.P.

‘OW, FEET FEET FEET FEET’: I just wanted to mention that few things in life are more entertaining than listening to “Get Low” (Clean Version). It’s literally incomprehensible nonsense, and I mean
that in the best sense.
— Reihan

‘TAKE AND TAKE AND TAKE’

Steve’s post has led me to brood. Back in December 2000, Henry Siegman made the following observation about the Palestinian negotiating position:

Palestinian insistence on Israel’s withdrawal from the entire West Bank and Gaza is not evidence of Palestinian irrationality or diabolism. The withdrawal they ask for, even if fully accommodated by Israel, would leave Palestinians with about 20 percent of the original mandate divided by the United Nations in 1947; Israel would have about 80 percent. The popular Israeli notion that Israel is expected ”to give and give” while Palestinians only ”take and take” is a self-serving distortion of reality.

Observers continue to believe that “Israel’s withdrawal from the entire West Bank and Gaza” is the end-state envisioned by the mainstream Palestinian leadership. That is almost certainly false. There’s a reason the Palestinian Authority hasn’t explicitly defined its territorial redlines. If a Palestinian state is in fact established in the entire West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian political entrepreneurs, like the articulate and ambitious Michael Tarazi, will see it as an opening gambit in a bid for a binational state. And any imaginable binational state, at least for the next few decades, would represent a repudiation of the Zionist project-to create a refuge and homeland for the Jewish people.

HAS THE WINDOW CLOSED?: Why is that? As Siegman suggests, the sense that an 80-20 split would represent a grave injustice will not vanish into thin air. Ironically enough, Siegman, in this passage, is offering solace to hawkish elements in Israel who oppose any territorial concessions. Those hawkish elements, in turn, have rendered a viable two-state solution impossible through support for the settler movement. Under conditions of liberal democracy, disentangling Arab and Jewish communities in the West Bank is unimaginable. It would require the sustained use of armed force against either Israeli citizens or the mass expulsion of Palestinians, or both in varying degrees of intensity. If the Palestinians ever reject terrorist violence, the moral-ethical claim to citizenship in a binational democratic state will be virtually unanswerable, whether friends of Israel (myself included) like it or not. In such a state, the right of return, long Israel’s raison d’etre, will be scrapped, or it will be enshrined alongside a right of return for Palestinian refugees. A populist Palestinian political culture, spines stiffened by political “victory,” will revolt against perceived economic and social inequalities. Finally, Israeli Jews will find themselves strangers in their own country.

This is not to say I oppose efforts in the direction of a two-state solution. It would, to my mind, be vastly preferable to a binational state. But I worry that the window has closed. Maybe it was possible twenty years ago, or even ten years ago. Not now. When Siegman and others try to convince you that if only Israel would make reasonable concessions everything would work itself out, think again.

I seriously hope I’m wrong. I wish those of you who think so the best of luck. Funnily enough, there’s a town in southern Lebanon called “Reihan,” and I think it was some kind of terrorist den. Not sure what to make of that. I have also heard that my name means “Sweet Basil,” which would be a good name for an R&B album. (Or an R&G album, in which case I’d use the moniker “Hash Brown.”)
— Reihan

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“The danger that people feel here is coming from terrorists and insurgents who are trying to destroy the possibility of this country becoming a democracy. Now where do we stand in that fight? We stand on the side of the democrats against the terrorists. And so when people say to me, ‘Well look at the difficulties, look at the challenges,’ I say, ‘Well, what’s the source of that challenge?’ The source of that challenge is a wicked, destructive attempt to stop this man, this lady, all these people from Iraq, who want to decide their own future in a democratic way, having that opportunity. And where should the rest of the world stand? To say, ‘Well, that’s your problem, go and look after it,’ or, ‘You’re better off with Saddam Hussein running the country’ – as if the only choice they should have in the world is a choice between a brutal dictator killing hundreds of thousands of people or terrorists and insurgents. There is another choice for Iraq – the choice is democracy, the choice is freedom – and our job is to help them get there because that’s what they want. Sometimes when I see some of the reporting of what’s happening in Iraq in the rest of the world, I just feel that people should understand how precious what has been created here is.” – Tony Blair, telling it like it is.
— Andrew

A FETUS AMONG US

Rich Lowry’s latest column, I think, offers the best round-up yet of the strange abortion-related knots the press has tied itself into while reporting the horrible Kansas murder/kidnapping. (Or fetusnapping, if you prefer.)

Money passage:

During the coverage of the crime, the status of the Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s unborn girl steadily changed. All at once on AOL News during the weekend, there were headlines tracking events in the case: “Woman Slain, Fetus Stolen”; “Woman Arrested, Baby Returned in Bizarre Murder”; “Infant in Good Health.” Note how a “fetus” — something for which American law and culture has very little respect — was somehow instantly transformed into a “baby” and “infant” — for which we have the highest respect. By what strange alchemy does that happen?

An AP story effected this magic transition all in one sentence: “Authorities said Montgomery, 36, confessed to strangling Bobbie Jo Stinnett of Skidmore, Mo., on Thursday, cutting out the fetus and taking the baby back to Kansas.” At one point, when Montgomery was still at large, an Amber Alert went out about the Stinnett girl, putting news organizations in the strange position of reporting such an alert for what many of them were still calling a “fetus.”

Given that fetuses are routinely destroyed in America (and legally can be destroyed up to the point of delivery), it was odd to see such an uproar about the welfare of one. Indeed, it is tempting to say that from a pure legal point of view, Lisa Montgomery simply killed the wrong victim, taking the life of the mom instead of the fetus . . .

Incidentally, the headline of the three-days-old Times story linked to above reads: “Baby Found in Kansas Is Thought to Be That of Slain Woman.” Yesterday, the Times ran a story about similar crimes around the country. It’s headline? “Fetus Cases Show Signs of Similarity.”

Then again, as we all know, at the heart of the freedom of the press lies the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Or something like that.

— Ross Douthat

WE DON’T NEED NO EDUCATION

Oxblog and Matt Yglesias are wondering about the idea of making college education near-universal, and particularly the ramifications of such a move for the American workforce — i.e., would you have over-educated people slumming it in menial jobs, or would we end up with a European-style system, with high unemployment and immigrants imported to do the work that well-educated Americans look down on? (The latter sounds a lot like California to me . . .)

I’d pose a different question, though. Suppose you tried to universalize college education — how many people would actually go for it? At present, a little over a quarter of all Americans have college degrees, and around half try college for a while but never graduate. No doubt a lot of these people drop out, or never go, for financial reasons, and having government-subsidized college tuition would certainly raise both matriculation and graduation rates appreciably. But I’m not sure the rates would be raised to anywhere near universal levels. I think that many, many people drop out or don’t go to college because they don’t want to go . . . because they’ve spent a dozen years in school, they don’t like school, and they want to get out into the world and start making money.

I saw a fair amount of this urge even among my friends and neighbors, and I come from a culture where the necessity of “going-to-college” is hammered into you starting in the cradle, if not earlier. I guess you could try to replicate the obsessed-with-admissions climate of East Coast suburbia in working class communities around the country, but I’m not sure that’s either feasible or desirable. Or you could get around it by mandating college attendance, they way we mandate elementary and secondary school. But given that college-aged kids are generally considered adults, not minors (except for that pesky alcohol prohibition), I’m not sure forcing them to attend school is going to fly — at least not in the freedom-loving U.S.A.

Finally, a faintly politically incorrect question: Isn’t it possible that there’s a significant segment of the American population that simply wouldn’t benefit from going to college? I’m no IQ-determinist, but it seems like forcing some people into an extra four years of schooling might run, rather quickly, into a problem of diminishing returns. (Especially since I suspect that what America really needs are better elementary schools, not more emphasis on higher education.)

— Ross Douthat

WHAT RUMSFELD MEANS

David Ignatius seems to be missing something about the debate over Rumsfeld’s future, calling him “a convenient scapegoat” for the administration’s mistakes in Iraq. But why, on the heels of an electoral victory that vindicated the president’s Iraq policy, would Republicans be trying to save face? For the victors, post-election recriminations are about the future rather than the past — and Rumsfeld is associated with a particular post-election agenda. As Bill Kristol, who initiated the anti-Rumsfeld movement, said of the secretary: “His theory about the military is at odds with the president’s geopolitical strategy. He wants this light, transformed military, but we’ve got to win a real war, which involves using a lot of troops and building a nation, and that’s at the core of the president’s strategy for rebuilding the Middle East.” As Ignatius sees it, the debate over troop levels “is partly a rear-action battle against Rumseld’s ideas about military ‘transformation.’ Advocates of the old, heavyweight Army have never forgiven Rummy for advocating lighter, more mobile forces, but Rumsfeld was correct.” Evidently, however, not everyone agrees. As Andrew put it:

Rumsfeld came into the Pentagon with an admirable agenda of forcing the military to become leaner, to maximise the use of technology and to move away from the large numbers and heavy armaments of the past. But his wars showed that the old methods were still valid.

So Rumsfeld’s critics “see a clear mismatch between America’s goals and its means” and “recognize in Rumsfeld an obstacle to victory rather than an asset.” Whatever the details regarding armor in Iraq, the fact remains that Rumsfeld favors air power and light forces rather than large numbers of armored troops. This leads, some argue, to American deployments unprepared for the security situation on the ground. But it also means an American military ill-equipped for political reconstruction and nation-building, the sort of democracy-promoting missions Rumsfeld doesn’t like. “Donald Rumsfeld has articulated a strategy of nation-building ‘lite,’ involving a rapid transition to local control and a tough-love policy that leaves locals to find their own way toward good government and democracy,” Francis Fukuyama has written. “This is a dubious approach, at least if one cares about the final outcome.” So it’s not surprising that those who want the U.S. to promote democracy or rebuild failing states would like a future administration Rumsfeld-free. And it also explains why Rumsfeld isn’t simply a scapegoat for the president: On nation-building and democracy, Bush and Rumsfeld disagree.

P.S. Matt Yglesias suggests that liberals might want to join what has been, until now, a debate among conservatives about the future of the military and U.S. foreign policy. Otherwise, they cede the issues to the right.
–Steven Menashi