The American Conservative

Anyone who believes America’s culture wars are behind her should have started out Friday reading The Washington Times.

The headlines on the three top stories on page one read:

“California judges asked to say if they are gay.”

“‘Tebow Bill’ for home-schoolers dies in Virginia Senate panel.”

“Opt-out on birth control defeated in Senate.”

The California judges story dealt with the lately passed Judicial Appointments Demographic Inclusion Act, which mandates a survey of all of the state’s 1,600 judges — to find out how many are homosexual.

Purpose of the law: “Promote and increase the representation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the … judicial branch.”

The questionnaire sent to the judges asked each to identify themselves by race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation.

Forty percent of the judges balked, refusing to reveal their sexual orientation. One percent said they were gay. One percent said they were lesbian. One judge identified himself as transgendered.

Welcome to 21st century America. Read More…

I like to imagine an alternative universe where the mouthpiece for movement conservatism possesses a keen intellect and a mordant wit, instead of being a cretin like Rush Limbaugh (and I’m pulling my punches here for H‘s benefit).

My alt-universe Limbaugh would have eschewed schoolyard taunts and instead of relied on the Sage of Bogue Falaya whose Lost in the Cosmos anticipated Sandra Fluke‘s testimony. Walker Percy wrote,

Western Man is promiscuous because something unprecedented has happened. As a consequence of the scientific and technological revolution, there has occurred a displacement of the real as a consequence of which genital sexuality has come to be seen as the substratum of all human relationships, of friendship, love, and the rest. This displacement has come to pass as a consequence of  a lay misperception of the physicist’s quest for establishing a molecular or energic basis for all interactions and of what is perceived as Freud’s identification of genital sexuality as the ground of all human relationships.

A letter to Dear Abby:
I am a twenty-three-year-old liberated woman who has been on the pill for two years. It’s getting pretty expensive and I think my boyfriend should share half the cost, but I don’t know him well enough to discuss money with him. (emphasis added)

If  Limbaugh had cited Percy instead of channeling any random, dull-witted high school sophomore; then rightwingers like Dana Loesch and William Jacobson wouldn’t have had to waste their energy on lame attempts at damage control.

Update: I edited out an extraneous word that I put in the Percy quote.

Praise be for Sean Stone, Imam of Abrahamic ecumenism, demiurge of the non-doctrine, and patron saint of religious homogenization:

“I am of a Jewish bloodline, a baptized Christian who accepts Christ’s teachings, the Jewish Old Testament and the Holy Koran. I believe there is one God, whether called Allah or Jehovah or whatever you wish to name him. He creates all peoples and religions. I consider myself a Jewish Christian Muslim.”

…

It is almost like I am a criminal for having accepted Islam. I didn’t realize Islamophobia was that deep. People have speculated that I have done this because I am from a spoiled family or that I am lost and trying to find myself. That is ridiculous.

“I don’t care if I get criticized. If I can open up a debate about religion and create some understanding, then it is worth it.”

[link]

All the while, he told AFP his conversion, “is not abandoning Christianity or Judaism.”

Far be it from me or anyone else to doubt Stone’s sincerity. But I think the story gets at one of the problems with the multicultural ethic that conservatives tend not to emphasize, which is its tendency to totalize religious belief within, to borrow a Dreher phrase, a therapeutic moralistic Deism. In the world of a mass culture scion like Stone, the result is a sort of reverse Orientalism – rather than emphasizing the contrast in order to shore up one’s own cultural camp, differences are sufficiently glossed that he can be a member of all three Abrahamic faiths simultaneously, a notion that would probably offend most religious people, Eastern or Western.

Make no mistake, this is a totalitarian ideology. Yet the critique against it makes strange bedfellows. Neocons prefer a Clash of Civilizations-style interpretation, in which someone like Stone would presumably be a trojan horse for multicultural values and, in turn, Islamic domination or something. I would suggest that this isn’t productive, because raising the banner of the Christian West in the face of perceived existential threats has required the same homogenization and politicization of religion in this country. (For more on this subject, stay tuned for D. G. Hart’s piece in the upcoming issue about America and the shift from the private practice of faith to the public performance of it) Thus a thing like the Defense of Marriage Act is considered insufficiently pious by some social conservatives and, to them, a good Christian is compelled to support a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, regardless of one’s 10th Amendment convictions.

Conservative localism offers a better path to a more vibrant, tolerant, and diverse public life. There’s a great interview with David Thomas of Pere Ubu where he gets at some of these issues:

“All these monuments and landmarks of the Cleveland we loved and wrote so passionately about, the other side of the curtain of these things, all ceased to exist. They were “urban renewalized” and all that sort of stuff, but to us they still exist, and to us we still see them. That’s what I mean about living in a ghost town. What happens, and this began to happen in 1980, ’81, ’82, is that the real world and the town that you live in, the geography you live in, begin to diverge. They begin to separate. This is, I think, a very common feeling all over the world. It has to do with culture and the alienation of culture and what happens in a society where things become homogenized by the media and various mechanisms. … Wherever you go in the world, people feel the same thing. The world they live in in reality and the world of their spirit, as it were, or their home, no longer occupy the same space and the same time. This has to do maybe with multiculturalism being forced on everybody. You can look at it any number of ways. Mainly, it’s just the alienation of culture.”

David Thomas has some strange ideas, but they make a lot of sense. I would argue that the single biggest piece of evidence for the alienation of culture is the apathy people hold toward democratic participation now that most of its functions have concentrated in the hands of the federal government though. The irony that he contributes to that universal alienation is probably lost on Sean Stone.

When music writers complain about the Grammys it’s like a comedian making a crack about airline food or lines at the DMV. Everybody’s heard it before and there’s not much more to be said; best to leave the subject alone, especially during dinner. But surely I’m not the only one that, when the recording industry guild descends from on high for its yearly ritual of self-congratulation and consumer guidance, can’t seem to shake a few niggling little questions: Who are these people and why do they like Adele so much? Didn’t that Foo Fighters guy used to play drums? Why is Tony Bennett still winning things? Skrillex? Really?

This year’s show was the second most-watched Grammy awards ceremony in history, drawing an astonishing 41 million viewers. The big winners were Adele (top selling album, top selling single of 2011) for top album and single, the Foo Fighters for best rock album and single, Bon Iver for best new artist and “alternative” album, and Kanye West for songs and an album that came out in the waning days of 2010. The nod to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is important because its exclusion last year from an “Album of the Year” nomination was widely derided by critics who saw it as a career-defining album.

To unlock the secrets of the Grammys, dear reader, you must know a few things. First, the Grammys’ granters, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, behave like a pernicious cartel. Second, their stated mission as “the only [emphasis mine] peer-presented award to honor artistic achievement, technical proficiency and overall excellence in the recording industry, without regard to album sales or chart position” is bunkum of the highest order.

Like all cartels, the NARAS depends on its own rarefied position and attempts to circumscribe the market. To join as a voting member, you must prove your status in the commercial recording industry. If the album to which your name is attached is not distributed through “recognized retailers,” you’re ineligible for membership. If you’re working in the digital medium they set the bar higher, you must be credited on twelve tracks on a commercially-released album that has been released through “recognized online music retailers” and be actively promoting your work.

So if that rubric gives you the impression that this group of people is poorly suited for appraising the artistic merits of polka, chiptune or Shostakovich, you’d be right. But the way the Grammies treat American music of all varieties is very telling. This year, the NARAS decided that formerly distinct varieties of regional American music like zydeco, Hawaiian slack-key should all be lumped into a “Regional Roots Music” category. But bluegrass, blues and “Americana” all remain distinct categories, not to mention country which accounts for four awards in itself. This has everything to do with the music industry’s demi-hub Nashville, and the marketability of twang. To be clear, there isn’t anything wrong with where they’ve drawn those distinctions (even though it’s completely arbitrary), but their reasons for doing so have more to do with stimulating sales, not bestowing objective praise upon “artistic achievement, technical proficiency and overall excellence,” as they claim.

Furthermore, the subset of people who profit by the Grammys (mostly record labels, musicians at that level usually see very little of the revenue from album sales) are also the same subset of people who argue for imposing more scarcity in the form of harsher intellectual property regulation. So the same people who attempt to circumscribe the choice of what to listen to in turn beatify their own roster, to their great benefit. Listeners are thus presented with a choice between music as a non-commodity from an online jukebox of infinite variety, and a rigidly circumscribed musical universe purchased at inflated prices from a horrifically inefficient music industry. That’s a losing gamble for the old-school recording industry that the Grammys represent, and venerating the likes of Skrillex will only hasten their demise.

… And if you weren’t depressed enough by the awards themselves, enjoy Buzzfeed’s round-up of “Who is Paul McCartney?” tweets.

Yesterday I attended a debate hosted by the American Enterprise Institute and the America’s Future Foundation with the timely named motion, “Are Libertarians Part of the Conservative Movement?” Speaking for the case that libertarianism is a distinct political philosophy from conservatism was Matt Welch, editor in chief at Reason. Speaking for the case that libertarians are part of the conservative movement was Jonah Goldberg, author of the New York Times bestseller Liberal Fascism and columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Read More…

One of the stupidest lines of commentary following Obama’s opposition SOPA and PIPA was that, while it showed how in-touch he was with the generation raised on free content, it wasn’t going to play well among the media industry scions who fund the Democratic Party. The assumption behind this kind of thinking is that Hollywood would punish the President for his insufficient piety toward the internet lockdown lobby by taking their money to politicians whose totalitarian tendencies were more overt. But it begs the question, to whom exactly? Republicans? Please, they’d sooner eat at Bob Evans. Aside from stool pigeons like Bob Goodlatte and Lamars Smith and Alexander, it’s hard to find an ear sympathetic to Big Content in the party that’s constantly grousing about the mainstream media. The Bush administration saw no major intellectual property protection measures enacted save for one at the very end of his term that created a copyright czar (who were the Republican sponsors of that House bill? Surprise! Goodlatte and Smith.). And say, how’s that cabinet-level line to the RIAA working out?

Seriously though, if I were Zach Horowitz or Edgar Bronfman I’d be pretty pleased with Obama’s job performance. Mere hours after Wikipedia, Reddit, Google and thousands of other websites participated in an online protest against SOPA, and four days after Obama announced his own opposition to the bill, news hit the wires that the long arm of the law finally caught up with Megaupload after a two-year international investigation headed up by the FBI and Justice Department, and the takedown has already had collateral effects. More broadly, domain name seizures are now more frequent than ever and he signed on to a global intellectual property enforcement treaty for which he claims Senate ratification is unnecessary.

Essentially ACTA imposes the terms of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act on the participating nations, other than that there are a lot of grey areas in the treaty (a good explanation as to what it could actually do can be found here). Because ACTA’s terms are more or less congruent with current US law, Obama claims he doesn’t need to put it to a Senate vote. For this reason, Darrell Issa has described ACTA as “more dangerous than SOPA” in that it subverts congressional authority to regulate foreign trade and intellectual property.

At The Atlantic, Alexander Fumas explains some of the objections to ACTA:

… It is worth noting that the negotiations throughout most of the process were highly secret with negotiators forced to sign non-disclosure agreements, a fact that, according to one cable, made even some of the negotiating parties uncomfortable. There were few avenues for public or civil-society input. Meanwhile many U.S. based multinational corporations and their interest groups, including the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, Sony, and Time Warner were consulted via formal USTR advisory boards.

Have a look at the list of signatories and two things will become abundantly clear. First, this treaty is not about counterfeiting because the major countries with counterfeiting problems have not signed it, namely China, Indonesia and others in southeast Asia. Second, the majority of the signatories are countries with a robust market for American entertainment; Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and the EU, which lends credence to the idea that the treaty was crafted for the sake of Hollywood and large media conglomerates.

Europeans are already quite upset about it.

As for Obama’s promise to veto SOPA and PIPA, which are merely tabled not defeated, contre the jubilant internet’s chest-thumping, well, Obama said he wouldn’t detain Americans indefinitely without due process either.

Tuesday marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birth. Does the author of Hard Times still matter amid our own 21st century hardships? Theodore Dalrymple argues in TAC that he very much does.

So Rod’s clarifying moment is muddy once more. For all the talk about how the Komen Foundation was “bullied” by the left, the episode resembles the Netflix/Qwikster debacle of last year; especially since Komen recently employed (via Memeorandum) Ari Fleischer who “drilled prospective candidates [for a PR position] during their interviews on how they would handle the controversy about Komen’s relationship with Planned Parenthood.” Nothing says “competence” like a Bush II alumni.

I hadn’t thought much about the Komen Foundation before their recent PR fiasco, but I am inherently suspicious of big organizations and they are a giant in the breast cancer industry. That they peddle awareness with pink buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken and a pink-ribboned NFL only increases my skepticism. Barbara Ehrenreich (who was diagnosed with breast cancer several years ago) skewered the culture promoted by organizations such as Komen in her book Bright-Sided(reviewed in TAC here):

The first thing I discovered as I waded out into the relevant sites is that not everyone views the disease with horror and dread. Instead, the appropriate attitude is upbeat and even eagerly acquisitive . . . There are between two and three million American women in various stages of breast cancer treatment, who, along with anxious relatives, make up a significant market for all things breast cancer related. Bears, for example: I identified four distinct lines, or species, of these creatures, including . . . the Nick and Nora Wish Upon a Star Bear, which was available . . . at the Komen Foundation Web site’s “marketplace.”

And bears are only the tip, so to speak, of the cornucopia of pink-ribbon-themed breast cancer products. . . “Awareness” beats secrecy and stigma, of course, but I couldn’t help noticing that the existential space in which a friend had earnestly advised me to “confront [my] mortality” bore a striking resemblance to the mall.

Brad Birzer has a superb series running at CatholicVote.org, “Bearers of the Word,” in which he interviews such thinkers and artists such as Gerald Russello, Jef Murray, and (coming soon) Mike Church. He was kind, and reckless, enough to interview me for the most recent installment, which can be found here. I discuss the seemingly fading Catholic voice in American life and the dangers of absorption in politics, while suggesting a few bright lights and looking at the future of the faith in in what threatens to be a monolithically liberal world.

How the Church can go on spiritually is clear enough, but what can the institution and way of life mean in such a world? I don’t have an answer, but readers may find the discussion of some interest.

Perhaps out of fear of a grassroots insurrection, six conservative senators sent a letter to Harry Reid today expressing a newfound concern about the PROTECT IP Act.

Via Lachlan Markay at The Foundry:

Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), John Cornyn (R-TX), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Tom Coburn (R-OK), sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) on Friday expressing their concerns.

The letter, whose signatories include the ranking Republicans on the Budget, Finance, and Judiciary Committees, warns of “breaches in cybersecurity, damaging the integrity of the Internet, costly and burdensome litigation, and dilution of First Amendment rights” could result from passage of the hotly-contested PROTECT IP Act.

Still, the Senators didn’t go so far as to actually condemn the legislation, they just say it deserves further scrutiny. They do, however, explicitly mention the “large number of constituents and other stakeholders with vocal concerns about the potential unintended consequences of the proposed legislation.”

Sens. Rand Paul and Jerry Moran have voiced opposition to the bill in the past, but these six heavyweights voicing their reservations represents a horse of another color. The floor debate on this one should be really interesting (it comes up on Jan. 24th, for the C-SPAN crowd), and there’s definitely a conservative case to be made against the bill – it could force companies to stop doing business without due process, it’s anti-competitive and blatantly violates free speech. But opposition to the bill isn’t just principled, it’s also good politics – grassroots opponents to SOPA and PROTECT IP are proving to be numerous and extremely vocal, especially among the Tea Party. Not only that, but with all the Hollywood money being funneled into the Democratic Party, Harry Reid can’t afford to look less than solicitous of their interests.

As Matt Lewis noted today, important philosophical battles are going on on the right today, especially compared to the left.

While Democrats are essentially falling lockstep behind President Obama, Republicans are engaging in some very important philosophical debates. For example, the rise of Ron Paul demonstrates that the GOP includes both hawks and a large number of non-interventionists. The schism over Bain Capital demonstrates the cleavage between the big business wing of the Republican Party and the more populist conservative strain.

I suppose the SOPA/PROTECT IP debate falls roughly within the latter. But in this case the populist conservatives are aligned with some of the biggest and most innovative tech companies including Google, Facebook and Twitter. Passing SOPA wouldn’t be a victory for free markets, it would be a victory for the narrow special interests that pushed for it.