France’s lock Sebastien Chabal grimaces during the rugby union World Cup group D match France vs. Ireland, 21 September 2007 at the stade de France in Saint-Denis, outside Paris. By Martin Bureau/AFP/Getty. Watch what Chabal can do here. And hope he never tackles you.
A leading politician from the hard right conservative party in Bavaria makes a provocative proposal: civil marriages should automatically dissolve after seven years, unless renewed by both parties. She’s hot too.
A reader writes:
You wrote:
Now Dixie is consolidated in one party, with no serious competition within it, with all the cultural and sectarian division that entails.
This is the fourth time or so that I’ve seen something like this from you. I know it’s the CW in Washington, but Jesus, man, do you ever read the news from down here?
I live in North Carolina, former Confederate state, home of the Woolworth’s sit-ins, the Oxford lynching, and plenty of other racial strife. Our House delegation is 7-6, majority Democratic (and may swing further that way in 2008), and we have a Democratic governor, and Democratic control over both chambers of the State House. (Yes we have two Republican Senators, but Dole has become rather unpopular statewide, and Burr is generally regarding as not having done much of anything so for.) North Carolina isn’t anomalous in this regard. Despite the Rovian anti-gay insanity in Virginia, the Democratic party remains healthy there. Arkansas and Louisiana retain their populist leanings which, along with growing numbers of urban voters and the still reliably Democratic black vote, keep the Democrats competitive. Hell, even in Texas, where the color blue was close to being removed from boxes of Crayolas, the Democratic party is showing real life.
Yes, there remains a blue dead zone, and it happens to correspond to what one might call the "Wallace states," or Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi. And yes, the GOP has built its strength upon a southern base. But "no serious competition?" Please.
A fair piece. I’m grateful that they can and do use the t-word to describe what has been authorized in America. That makes them better journalists than the NYT, which has allowed the phrases "coercive interrogation" and "enhanced interrogation" and "harsh interrogation" to obscure the truth.
The thought of the man who spoke the Best Movie Line Ever prompted one reader to send me this classic parody:
Matt has an objection to some of the points on polarization made by my reader here:
Though there clearly is a sense in which current American politics is very polarized, there’s another sense in which our levels of polarization are almost trivial compared to 1930s France. We don’t have a substantial revolutionary Communist movement here in the United States, nor a monarchist movement, nor do we have an officer’s corps that’s generally skeptical of civilian command and republican governance. Indeed, even compared to the United States of forty years ago when you had a lot of votes going to George Wallace on a white supremacist platform and substantial intellectual support for the idea of convergence between the Soviet and American economic models, our politics is conducted across a pretty narrow ideological spectrum.
What’s new in America isn’t polarization in that sense, but the rise of partisan polarization organized around two fairly coherent political parties. The good news about this is that it’s mostly an inevitable consequence of the decline of Jim Crow.
Points taken. But doesn’t that make the polarization all the more toxic? Because it’s based less on substantive policy or ideological disagreements than on red/blue identity.
My own substantive positions, for example, are mainly unchanged over the last few years. I’m a low tax, free market, fiscal conservative who likes limited government, and effective use of military power. I find Islamism to be as dangerous an ideology as any I have studied. My critique of the Iraq occupation is less a function of an ideological transformation as the consequence of watching it unfold, and seeing its ineffectiveness in the war against Islamist terror (as well, of course, as the astonishing incompetence with which it has been managed). I can live with RomneyCare; I’m anti-Roe but fine with first trimester legal abortion; I’m against affirmative action; I’m for states’ rights; I’m for entitlement reform; and my support for a gas tax is a consequence of the accumulating evidence on climate change – again, not some ideological shift, an empirically-based adjustment.
But in the context of today’s American politics, I am an apostate, a leftist, a non-conservative, banished from right-wing respectability. Why? Not because I have changed my views; but because I have changed sides. Because I now believe that the Democrats, for all their awfulness, are less of a danger to national security and fiscal sanity and individual freedom and the rule of law than the current Republicans.
Matt’s right. What we have today is almost a purely partisan polarization. But he’s wrong to think that makes it less dangerous or profound. The partisan moniker in America now comes with a variety of deep identity issues attached: regional, sexual, racial, and, increasingly under Bush, religious. Yes, the collapse of Jim Crow is central: the Democrats managed to keep the South in an unwieldy alliance with the Northeast and Midwest for many decades, and prevented the deepest rift in American history from continuing to widen. Now Dixie is consolidated in one party, with no serious competition within it, with all the cultural and sectarian division that entails. We have, I fear, a much milder but equally tenacious form of sectarianism emerging in America as we have in Iraq. This is what Rove and Bush have built. It narrowly won them two elections; it is costing the rest of us a functional, rational politics, and dividing the country irrevocably as our external enemies gather strength.
The Romney campaign asked for volunteers to make their own Romney ads. Slate took up the challenge:
"And I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks, primarily black patronship," – Bill O’Reilly, on a Harlem restaurant. What was he expecting?
Bill Kristol knows that the current strategy in Iraq will not work as it was designed to do. He’s not crazy. The chances of national reconciliation in Iraq have gone backward, not forward, this past year, and the U.S.’s empowerment of anti-Shiite propaganda in Anbar will only isolate Maliki further. The best that can happen is an indefinite occupation of a dismembered Iraq to slow down genocide and make ethnic cleansing more orderly. But even that is a very risky proposition. And the events of last week mean that the Republican party now owns the Iraq occupation more exclusively and deeply than they ever had – and indeed intend to maintain it for another decade.
So what to do? Remember that Kristol’s loyalty to the Republicans often trumps national security. How else to explain his support for the GOP last November, even though a Republican victory would have prevented the surge in the first place and kept Rumsfeld in the Pentagon? One option: Change the subject by launching wars against Syria and Iran, and so polarize the country that the choice is framed as: MoveOn or America? That’s much better than having, you know, an actual debate about the merits of the war in Iraq and the war against Islamist terror. On that, Republicans lose. If the war is far wider and more terrifying, if the enemies can be multiplied and amplified, then the dynamic plays to the advantage of the GOP. It’s for us or against us again.
Remember it doesn’t matter to the current Bush Republicans if they cannot persuade a majority of thie necessity of extending the war to Iran and Syria. They have dropped attempting to persuade a majority on the war. They are concerned only with shoring up their own party, which can enable them to launch new wars before the current presidency ends. Hence the two-pronged agenda for the next few months:
Bush needs to prevent others in his own administration–generals (and some civilian leaders) who have given up on the war, or who are jealous of Petraeus, or both–from undermining Petraeus’s efforts and Bush’s strategy in various subtle ways, which, judging from reports from within the Pentagon, is not a trivial danger. And second, Bush needs to succeed in preventing Iran and Syria from subverting our successes in Iraq. They cannot be allowed to serve as safe havens for the training and transporting of enemy fighters, or as providers of advanced weapons used against our soldiers in Iraq.
I’m not sure what the first thing means unless a purge of any voices within the administration wanting to save what’s left of military preparedness under the strain of the Iraq deployments. Gates and Fallon have been warned. But the second is obvious. They’re trying to prepare their base for new wars, under the guise of winning the current one. This is the game-plan for keeping power.
