The Dish

Matt and Kevin Drum ask Kenneth Baer a simple question. I’m not sure what his answer is.

A reader writes:

Wow, you’re really fitting in. So the continued imprisonment of Genarlow Wilson is now a racial injustice? As an Atlanta resident, I am immensely glad that Thurbert Baker has taken a stand for following the law.  Yes, the original law that resulted in his long sentence should be changed.  Unfortunately, the legislature didn’t make the changes retroactive when they reduced the severity of the law.  And the court that "freed" Wilson doesn’t have the authority to do what it attempted to do.  Thurbert Baker offered Wilson a free and legal way out of jail, with no spot on his record and no sex offender status, pending resolution of the flawed law. Wilson refused. Meanwhile, at least someone in authority is insisting that we adhere to the law and, if it is so obviously bad, change the law in a way that the courts can administer.  All legally.

Relax and watch this play out based on the rule of law. Your shrill reaction will have had nothing to do with it, thank goodness.

Another reader writes:

I agree that the Genarlow Wilson matter is a legal tragedy, but I do not believe it is fueled by racism. The prosecutor is black.

I believe it is largely fueled by the over-the-top, sexist laws that were passed in what started as a laudable attempt to get a handle on the sexual abuse of very young women.

However, the laws were passed with the assumption that any young woman who engages in sex is being preyed upon by an evil, older man, and that assumption is simply disconnected from reality.  It is not always the man’s, or boy’s, fault, and young, and older, women are also capable of what could be judged age inappropriate sexual behavior – whether it is sex at an age that disturbs adults or is predatory sexual behavior with a teenage boy.

I have been pointing this out to many of my very liberal women friends without their agreement or acquiescense for quite some time. Recently, one spontaneously declared that "those laws" were passed to protect women of ten years ago and that women have changed. However, no one is suggesting that the laws be generally overhauled.  Most women want to retain the fantasy upon which the laws are based or, among the more intellectually honest, want the personal, subjective right to put a man in jail if she so decides, after the fact. (Who surrenders social or legal power willingly?)

The Genarlow Wilson was gross and public enough to force the state legislature to change the law, too late for Mr. Wilson.  Why doesn’t the legislature simply amend the new law to make it retroactive?  Because the political will to change the law is not strong enough to overcome the desire to keep the law, and the threat, in place.  The abuse of the sexual assault laws for the purpose of inappropriate retribution is a much, much bigger problem that is socially admitted.  The Duke Lacrosse case highlighted the issue, but is being dismissed by most as a single, rogue prosecutor, and the lying, purjerer is being let off because she apparently has a number of personal and social problems.  Until the laws get changed – a more realistic definition of sexual assault, the admission or relevant information about the participation of the alleged victim and an elemination of excessive sentences (in many jurisdictions, all sexual assault is subject to the same potential sentence, life) and would-be victims who are actually lying are prosecuted, the problem will get worse.

Don’t worry. It’s humorous fiction.

A reader writes:

In your appreciation of Richard Rorty, you applaud what you see as an "Oakeshottian" strain to his political philosophy. But you present this as if it were a last-minute (or at least a last-decade) turn in Rorty’s thinking. I think this understates greatly the extent to which conservatism (of sorts) has informed all of Rorty’s writings, especially in the realms of social thought. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, for example, was composed almost 20 years ago, bringing together ideas that predate that. Indeed, Rorty’s pragmatism at large is predicated upon the idea that there is no universal truth of human nature or justice to which all us living human beings should be compelled to bow — no matter how saintly that ideal may appear to its adherents.  There is no "Book" — Platonic, Biblical, or Marxist — that can account for and control the variety of human desire and Millian "experiments in living."  Rorty’s philosophy emerges from this conviction.

In fact, in his way, Rorty did not believe in philosophy, although he did believe in politics.  He definitely did not believe in revolution, but he did believe in reform.  He did not believe in the possibility of making people better or redeeming human nature, but he did believe in a old-school liberal (and perhaps old-school conservative) sense of progress.  He believed that, given enough freedom, we could "get better" by muddling through and figuring our "what works." Or as Rorty repeatedly put it, "Take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself."

You quoted Habermas on Rorty’s autobiographical "Wild Orchids and Trotsky," saying that Rorty believed "philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky’s dream of justice on earth." This is, literally, only half the story.  This is what Rorty believed when he went off to college — namely that there has to be a single all-encompassing vocabulary to connect our private passions (orchids) with our public principles (Trotsky). This was (and is) the ethos of Platonists and Christianists and Marxists alike. And it is a belief that Rorty spent a lifetime disowning and attacking and undermining.  Indeed, it is this disengagement of the private and the public, the personal and the political, that made Rorty so many enemies among the academic left. It is the point of that essay and was the point of his entire academic career.

For most on the right, Rorty is merely a symbol of the country’s slow slide into post-modernism and relativism. You avoid that stupid sticky brush, but still do not give him enough credit. Your political conclusions may have differed, but your underlying commitments are very much the same.  Rorty was a progressive and a liberal, but he was your kind of liberal. And he thought of progress — and how to reach it — in a way that I think even you could applaud.

Agreed. His foundation-less, skeptical liberalism is pretty close to my foundation-less, skeptical conservatism. I wanted to note my differences as well, however. And my view of progress is far more limited than Rorty’s. Oakeshott again – but Rorty was one of the rare liberals who appreciated Oakeshott’s lonely genius.

An important debate, it seems to me. Here’s Rich’s point. Here’s Matt’s. The last few years have moved me far more toward Matt’s position than I would have anticipated:

To me, the overestimation of al-Qaeda’s ability to impose its will upon Iraqis is just of a piece with earlier overestimation of the United States’ ability to impose our will upon Iraqis. This stuff is hard. It’s crucial to recall that the Taliban was not just a religious movement, but also an expression of Pashto nationalism, and that that the Taliban had a lot of trouble expanding into areas where other ethnicities predominated.

The raging and chaotic civil war in Gaza (and incipiently in the West Bank) is hard to deny. Marty Peretz sees the same pattern as Iraq. So here’s a question for Marty: if Arab cultures are completely immune to democratic life, as he has long argued, why does he support the coercive democratization of Iraq with the blood of young Americans? By his own logic, isn’t it doomed to abject failure? And isn’t staying there therefore a fool’s errand? This is one aspect of neoconservative thought on Iraq I still haven’t fully understood (and I was exposed to and often impressed by the frankness of many neocons when it came to the limits of Arab-Muslim political culture). By neoconservative logic, the U.S. has undertaken about the least viable, most intractable, self-defeating task on Planet Earth. Why? Once the WMD rationale was exposed as a delusion, why haven’t neoconservatives cited the pathologies of Arab culture to argue for withdrawal?

I think the answer is that, beneath the surface, they actually believe in American empire – or, at least, the alleged peril of not having an empire – and Iraq is a new staging ground for the empire’s fear-driven expansion. By this, I don’t mean a literal Brit-style occupation of half the globe. I mean the U.S. having the final say in every region of the world. (I’m sure, by the way, that most neocons hope it will also spread democracy and freedom and all those good things. I’m not judging their good intentions, just their judgment and assumptions.) I mean a faith in the unipolar moment becoming the unipolar century. This, I suppose, is where I get off the bus. While I don’t doubt that America may be a largely benign hegemon (although that’s easy for me to say), I’m happy for the world not to be unipolar. I’m content if America is not the dominant power in many regions. I’m fine with China having its own zone of influence, or Russia emerging as a regional power. I really don’t see our moral obligation to save Africans from the consequences of their own awful decisions. This restraint may not always mean freedom and happiness the world over. But it’s not one country’s God-given role to impose and spread such freedom and happiness indefinitely. And if you want to see the evidence that such good intentions do not always lead to freedom and happiness in any case, then please read the paper.

I think that’s where I part company with my neoconservative friends.

I read Bob Kagan and I don’t see why he logically doesn’t support American enmeshment in or occupation of almost the entire world. For him, this search-and-rescue-mankind mission gives America meaning. For me, America’s meaning lies not in its control of the world, but in its search for individual freedom, away from the old world, and its proof that constitutional democracy is the best system we have. When the world threatens that democracy and that constitution, or that democracy as it has been established among our allies and friends, we should act, sometimes proactively, sometimes swiftly, often with solid alliances, sometimes with military power. But when any lack of total control is interpreted as a threat, when we are committed to occupying a restive, ungrateful, toxic brew of religious and political hatred for the indefinite future as a price for "security" or "freedom", then we obviously need to rethink. If the occupation had gone swimmingly in Iraq, then envisaging a few thousand residual troops for the indefinite future as a geo-strategic act of support, is a fine idea. But after this occupation and in this global struggle, what we’re envisaging is an imperial outpost for decades ahead – a permanent casus belli between us and every Islamist on the planet. I think we have to be firm on this point: no. Unless we want to become Israel. And please don’t give me that crap that somehow if we leave there, they’ll follow us home. They’ve already followed us home.  They can now. They always will be able to target us in the modern world. The question is simply whether ineptly occupying a country that even the Brits couldn’t pacify makes us less or more safe. I don’t see how any sentient observer of the last five years can believe it has made us more safe. It has certainly made us less free.

In other words, my difference with the neocons has emerged more fully in my mind in the past few years: I can see why the burden of running the globe may not, at some point, be worth the trade-off. They seem to think that more Americans in uniform in more places can only be good. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not favoring isolationism. There will be many times and places where the U.S. needs to maintain a presence – and a credible threat of military force – for world stability and peace. I can see the rationale for overwhelming superiority in fire-power, in a strong navy, in m issile defense, in bases across the globe in friendly countries. But occupying the Middle East for the rest of our lifetimes? You’ve got to be kidding me. If that’s the agenda, can we please say so and let the public thrash it out? For my part, I can’t for the life of me see how keeping thousands of troops in Iraq for the indefinite future serves our national interest. At this point, I also don’t see what right we have to be there. Assuming we will be there for ever – as the Bush administration’s plans for bases and a mega-embassy indicate – is a form of imperialism. In so far as Iraq’s insurgents oppose this, they have a point.

(Photo: David Furst/Getty.)

Planet Earth – as John Derbyshire’s id imagines it.

My relief was premature. If Genarlow Wilson were white, I’d bet he’d be free.

Jon Rauch reviews David Blankenhorn’s latest and most ambitious attempt to argue against extending the rights and responsibilities of civil marriage to gay couples. They’re both moderate social conservatives. As Jon concedes with typical civic spirit:

As I read, I made note of points on which he and I agree. I soon found myself running out of paper. Marriage, we both believe, is a vital institution, not just equal to competing family arrangements from society’s point of view but preferable; it is an institution embedded in society, not a mere contract between individuals; it is social, not just legal, and so cannot be twisted like a pretzel by court order; it has (almost) everywhere and always been heterosexual and entwined with procreation, and should be. Gay marriage, we both believe, is a significant change that entails risk (though we assess the risks very differently); but gay marriage, we also believe, is a supporting character in the much larger drama of shifting social values. We agree that heterosexuals, not homosexuals, will determine marriage’s fate and have handled matrimony pretty poorly without any gay help. And we agree that children, on average (please note the qualifier), do best when raised by their biological mother and father, though he makes more sweeping claims on that score than I would. That is a great deal of common ground, which makes it all the more interesting that we come out in utterly different places and that gay marriage, in some ways, turns out to be the least of our disagreements.

As always with Jon, the whole thing is worth reading and pondering at leisure.

A reader responds to the news report that amazingly was not in the Onion:

The next item on the GAY AGENDA is clear: we MUST obtain the plans for this bomb and blow it up in the largest city in every red state!  Let’s all meet at the usual top-secret, undisclosed location. Sorry, Mary Cheney, you’re not invited.