The American Conservative

Sometime today, Congress will pass Resolution 568, an AIPAC or Israeli sponsored resolution that seeks to tie the President’s hands in negotiations with Iran. The bill will pass overwhelmingly, probably without much debate. MJ Rosenberg describes here the process of getting the bill to the floor, and why there won’t be much debate. The key provision stresses the unacceptibility of Iran having a “nuclear weapons capability”–not, please  note,  actual nuclear weapons (which Iran does not have, and does not seem to want)  but simply the knowledge and technical capacity to enrich uranium. A second one is the unacceptabilty of containment as a means for dealing with the problem of Iran’s nuclear weapons. While other countries in the world, including of course the US,  have relied on containment and deterrence to deal with nuclear armed rivals, Israel wants a regional monopoly on the deadly weapons.

We’ll check back later to see if anything interesting was said during the debate.  While it might be unfair to say that Congress’s sophistication on Mid East matters is aptly reflected by Joe Pitt’s letter to a constituent, an overwhelming interest of most Congressmen is simply not getting on the bad side of AIPAC. One retiring Congressman told me that AIPAC related donations amounted to about $500K each  election cycle–and if one deviates from the line, they are taken away and given to an opponent. It’s enough to generate bipartisan majorities and not much dissent on bills like this.

Interesting that today the RAND  Corporation, cold war realist think tank par excellence, produced this analysis arguing  that an Israeli or American attack on Iran would make a  nuclear armed Iran more likely rather than less. I thought it noteworthy and a bit surprising  that the RAND piece mentioned Iranian distrust of the US, dating from the American overthrow of its  democratically elected government in 1953. We all harbor our grievances and they shape our view of the world, but other countries have them too, and they can be significant.

There has been considerable buzz about the possibility that President Obama will, in part, run for reelection based on his foreign policy successes. David Ignatius of the Washington Post, who is very well plugged in to the White House, published a piece on May 10th entitled “Obama’s foreign policy: Dealing from a position of strength,” which suggests that the Obama team will be able to capitalize on Mitt Romney’s bumper-sticker vision of America’s relationship to the rest of the world. But while it is true that Obama might well shine in comparison to his Republican rival, U.S. foreign policy (to include defense and security policies) is hardly an area that can be cited as a success, and any attempt to do so will create vulnerabilities for the president even if Romney is not well situated to take advantage.

Consider the overall record. Washington continues to be engaged in a highly unpopular and unwinnable war in Afghanistan that promises to continue long after the fuzzy commitment to withdraw all combat troops in 2014, while the Bush doctrine of preemption has been replaced by humanitarian intervention which has created more zones of conflict rather than fewer. “Liberated” Libya continues to be an unstable mess, Egypt continues to drift, and Syria has been pushed towards civil war precisely because the U.S. and other outside forces have acted on their desire to topple Assad “to protect the Syrian people.” Yemen is in serious disarray, Pakistan is creeping towards failed-state status due to the escalation in U.S. drone strikes, and Washington has boots on the ground in at least three countries in Africa. Mexico, a victim of the U.S. War on Drugs, is slipping into chaos. Think for a moment how Americans would react if 49 headless torsos were discovered one morning hanging from the Brooklyn Bridge.
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The American Civil Liberties Union has weighed in on the case of Peter Van Buren, saying his firing from the State Department this year is unconstitutional, as it violates his First Amendment right to free speech  “and creates the appearance of impermissible retaliation for Mr. Van Buren’s criticism of the State Department.”

The aid of the free speech heavyweight couldn’t have come at a better time: Van Buren, the embattled foreign service officer whom the Department moved to fire this year for writing a book and a personal weblog that criticized the reconstruction in Iraq, is fighting to keep his job until at least September, when he was planning to retire anyway. Van Buren has been with the department for almost 24 years.

Signed by Ben Wizner and Kate Wood of the ACLU’s speech, privacy and technology shop, the letter dated May 15 asserts that Van Buren’s book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, and his blog of the same name, are protected speech that has been upheld by the Supreme Court.
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Mortimer Duke: “Tell him the good part.”

Randolph Duke: “No matter whether our clients make money or lose money, Duke & Duke get the commissions.”

Mortimer Duke: “Well, what do you think, Valentine?”

Billy Ray Valentine: “Sounds to me like you guys’re a coupla bookies.”

Whenever the topic of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital comes up, I think of that Trading Places scene:

“The issue isn’t that GST collapsed or that its workers lost their jobs. It’s that Romney and Bain Capital made enormous profits on the deal despite the failure of the company,” as Jed Lewison writes at the Daily Kos.

Lewison says further:

Nobody expects every single business to be a success, but how is Mitt Romney’s business motto — tails I win, heads you lose — compatible with free enterprise? If a company he invests in fails, shouldn’t he share in that failure? Isn’t that one of the most basic rules of our economic system?

Of course, the issue is quite a bit more complicated than that.

As I wrote over at U.S. News, the wealth generated by financial engineering, or computational finance, isn’t merely smoke and mirrors, as liberal economists like Brad Delong will concede.

But I suspect a lot of Americans view Bain Capital’s business model in much the same fashion as Billy Ray Valentine. At a gut level, when Americans think of “free enterprise,” they think of someone who built a better mousetrap and got rich. That’s not how Mitt Romney got rich. Mainline fiscal conservatives are all too content to respond to queasiness over private equity by grunting something along the lines of “Capitalism. Shut up.”

During the general election, if Romney truly is capable of the human emotion known as empathy, he’s going to have to do better than rote repetition of the free-market catechism. Team Romney is going to have to figure out how to dispel, in plain terms, the notion that he was a glorified bookie.

I don’t have a theory about “Damsels in Distress,” Whit Stillman’s new movie. The movie is so light and lissome that any theorizing seems much too bulky.

But it is a satire, and a terrific, effective one. Although it takes place in what might seem to be a rarefied and protected world, an elite and pretty college campus–and although the movie’s darkest hints and themes are all resolved through absurdity, as when would-be suicides habitually choose to jump off a campus building which is much too low to do more than break an ankle–the “damsels” feel more contemporary and more embedded in today’s sordid struggles than the characters in “Metropolitan.” (That’s the only other Stillman movie I’ve seen, his first, and the differences stood out to me pretty sharply.) Violet and her determined pack of ingenues move through the world of the “end of men,” the “mancession,” the endless adolescence of the drifting American male. They live in a culture in which men are made stupider but not happier. (In this respect the movie could be considered an anti-“Girls,” responding to some of the same pressures in a completely different way.)

There are all kinds of little joys in “Damsels.” Violet’s speech in favor of cliche, the way she and her friends turn even their cattiest impulses into opportunities for self- and other-improvement, the way the guys around them intellectualize their crudeness. The costume choices are hugely fun, and Greta Gerwig as Violet is a poignant, silly, lovable creation.

I saw this on its last night in DC theaters, so I’m not sure when it will be available where you are. But it really is a delight: a challenge in the form of a self-deprecating joke.

In a recent Washington Post letter to the editor, a Fredericksburg, Va., man remarked that he’d recently felt “flummoxed by Philadelphia.”

Why? Because “The Post’s Sports section reported on the same day three unseemly acts by its athletes or fans.”

This is a perfect example of a feedback loop of confirmation bias: You have a general impression that Philadelphia sports fans are a uniquely violent and disgusting bunch of louts. The old Veterans Stadium had its own jail! They booed Santa Claus! [Fill in your own cliche. Extra points if you mention cheesesteak.]

Media associated with rival franchises provide anecdotal evidence that confirms this impression. Consumers of these anecdotes come to expect such behavior. The floridly angry general managers of rival franchises stoke controversy about such behavior in order to sell tickets. Eventually you reach a point where someone reads about “three unseemly acts” in the same sports section on the same day.

Are Philly athletes and fans really this bad?
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The recent publication of the fourth long volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson demonstrates how much even the relatively recent printed past has almost totally disappeared from current consciousness.

Consider the 1958-1964 period covered by Caro’s current narrative, an era which might reasonably be called the political peak of Cold War liberalism, in which Caro focuses on the political maneuvers leading to Kennedy’s nomination and Johnson’s difficult years in the vice presidency. Many people have argued that the major political decisions made during the 1960s largely shaped modern America, but it is equally true that the political decisions described in Caro’s volume largely shaped those same 1960s. Yet what determined the political tide of those years and which media narratives shaped those decisions? Read More…

Most of the coverage of Mitt Romney’s big speech this weekend described a warming relationship between the presidential candidate and a Christian right whose enthusiasm he badly needs.

Delivering a commencement speech at the Moral Majority’s finishing school, that academe of “modesty” standards, room inspections, R-rated movie bans, and no kissin’ bearing the Orwellian cognomen “Liberty,” Romney did his best to avoid talking about the biggest point of contention between himself and his audience; his Mormon faith.

Romney’s speech was no Kennedyesque reassurance that he wouldn’t be taking orders from church authorities. It was a lot of pablum about values alongside a gay marriage applause line and shout-out to Chick-fil-A (the chicken sandwich of choice for evangelicals), albeit delivered with considerably more finesse than he’s shown so far this campaign season.
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In Spring 2002, as the war in Afghanistan was entering what appeared to be its mopping-up phase, the political theorist Michael Walzer asked, “Can there be a decent Left?” The question, of course, was rhetorical. Although Walzer hoped that there could be a decent Left, he suggested that existing Left was indecent because of its opposition to preventive war in Central Asia. In order to recover its decency, Walzer argued, the Left would need to reconcile itself to a signature policy of the Right: the application of American military power not only to the Taliban, but also to an array of targets including Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

How different things look now. After a decade of futile war, the question is not whether the Left should overcome its resistance to a militarized foreign policy and the national-security state that is inseparable from it. On the contrary, many of the criticisms that Walzer dismissed as indecent look awfully prescient. Instead, the question is whether resources for challenging them survive on the Right. Can there be a decent Right?

The wisdom and justice of particular alliances or operations is not the issue. Rather, it is the ideology of “American exceptionalism” according to which all that the United States does is good, and all the good that is done has its source in the United States. From the French Revolution through the Cold War, conservatives resisted the delusion that any nation, class, or individual is the unique representative and judge of the human race. That is the principle on which a decent Right depends.

But can there be a decent Right in the 21 Century? Do we have anything to learn from the classical conservatism that waged a long, losing struggle against egalitarianism, capitalism, and secularism? Is the Right only about reaction? Or is there a modern, perhaps a postpostmodern conservatism, suitable to this democratic age?

Those are the questions I’ll try to think through on State of the Union. I am grateful to The American Conservative for giving me the opportunity  to do so in collaboration with such an impressive roster of bloggers. To paraphrase Walzer’s challenge to his comrades: the Right has an old and honorable history, and has gotten some (not all) important things right. But the failures of the last decade–on foreign policy, on the economy, on the fruitless culture war — suggest that it’s time to begin again.

Let’s start today.

Over the next several days I’ll be pointing out some of the new features of the website. Having yesterday given an account of State of the Union, the group blog your eyes are taking in this very moment, now I direct your attention to what might be called the site’s Easter egg, Millman’s Shakesblog. This is a project Noah Millman had quietly pursued for some time; today it has a home at TAC, helping to anchor and augment our cultural coverage. (You can find a feed of the Shakesblog on our Arts and Letters page, which also presents book reviews and cultural pieces from the magazine and elsewhere on the site.)

Noah’s latest addition to the Shakesblog — which, as the name suggests, often recurs to the Bard, but isn’t exclusively about him — is a review of “Time Stands Still,” Donald Margulies’s play about emotional as well as physical “collateral damage” from the Iraq War.