The American Conservative

Until now, short-sighted conservatives have thought of Hispanics as something of a genial caricature of themselves, a caricature that accords with their personal impressions from fleeting encounters with bus-boys, landscapers, and others in service industries. The caricature is that Hispanics are quiet, docile, hard-working, and politically irrelevant people. The ideas of Hispanics themselves on wide-ranging issues–labor rights, immigration, religion, the meaning of family values–were willfully ignored. Sometimes conservatives went so far as to imagine Hispanics as they wanted them to be: “natural Republicans” who have yet to realize this fact. (I suppose that’s why Mexico, which is entirely made up of these “natural Republicans,” resembles Connecticut in so many important ways). ~Chris Roach

Mr. Roach aims even more withering fire at this idea than I did, and he does so with much greater precision and force.

“In other words, Americans understand you’re newcomers to the political arena. But pretty soon it’s time to shut her down and get governing.” ~AP Wire

Via Antiwar

Well, four months and no government later, a skeptic might be forgiven for thinking the exercise of establishing a “unity government” in Iraq rather hopeless. Mr. Bush speaks here as if the Iraqis could form a unity government but have just been dithering because they haven’t been paying enough attention to the situation around them. Some Iraqi politicos are not taking the “Get ‘er done!” exhortations very well:

In the face of growing pressure from the Bush administration for him to step down, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari of Iraq on Wednesday vigorously asserted his right to stay in office and warned the Americans against undue interference in Iraq’s political process.

Of course, Mr. Bush has probably only hardened divisions and made the settlement harder because of this:

Senior Shiite politicians said Tuesday that the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, had weighed in over the weekend, telling the leader of the Shiite bloc that President George W. Bush did not want Jaafari as prime minister. That was the first time the Americans had openly expressed a preference for the occupant of post, the politicians said, and it showed the Bush administration’s acute impatience over the stagnant political process. Relations between Shiite leaders and the Americans have been fraying for months, and reached a crisis point after a bloody assault on a Shiite mosque compound Sunday night by American and Iraqi forces.

That old Jaafari, thinking that Iraqis could chose their own prime minister! What’s next? Iraqi independence? So, what is the problem with Jaafari that Washington would risk upsetting the entire process like this? Well, even though he was duly elected according to the vaunted Iraqi constitution, he was elected by some of the wrong people, the deputies who represent Moqtada al-Sadr’s faction. So, to recap, one militant Shi’ite faction (the bad one) helps a militant Shi’ite to become prime minister and Mr. Bush says that this is unacceptable. Surely the irony of opposing Jaafari’s candidacy in a Shi’ite-majority country in the name of democracy has occurred to some of the sharper minds at the White House. Jaafari may be an awful choice (he almost certainly is), but why go through the whole song and dance of offering representative institutions to these people if they are not going to be allowed to use them? Who exactly does Mr. Bush think he is kidding?

She’s a classic pragmatist, and like all pragmatists her views are, well, pragmatic. And that means that they change over time. ~Anne Applebaum, The Spectator (registration required)

Ms. Applebaum has managed to save “Condi” from being “pigeonholed” with anything so constraining as a consistent set of principles. Why this is supposed to recommend her to us more than if she were an ideologue escapes me. Being the Sandra Day O’Connor of foreign policy is not, from the perspective of conservatives, more desirable than being its Earl Warren. The one is simply the grinning enabler of the other. Being lackey to ideologues is in many respects just as bad, and does not even possess the esteemed excuse of conviction. And what might have once been called gross hypocrisy or “flip-flopping” in those storied days of 2004, if we were speaking of a certain morose Senator from Massachusetts, is proof of Condi’s pragmatism.

Some have even accused Dr. Rice (shocking!) of incompetence as national security advisor:

She was thought not up to the job of negotiating compromises between the administration’s two alpha males, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld.

Perhaps some thought this because of the not-so-subtle turf war that was constantly being played out in the press between the State and Defense Departments and her complete inability to corral the two men into one pen (which was, aside from explaining to Mr. Bush where Iraq is on the map and what a Sunni is, one of her primary functions).

It can’t be repeated often enough: War always brings unintended consequences. Nobody foresaw that the Iraq war would lead to Bush’s claim of intellectual leadership. If we had, there might have been more resistance at the beginning, even from conservatives. ~Joseph Sobran

Personally, I’d rather endure a Bush press conference than see this movie again. ~Steve Sailer

That’s just about the most damning part in a justly brutal review of a horribly overrated and really very silly movie.

I have spent, as I am sure many of you have, a lot of time in and around Hispanic culture. I don’t mean this in the sense of, “I’ve run in to some Hispanic people from time to time,” but rather in the sense of having gone frequently into their homes and partaken in their life stories. And whether Mexican, Cuban, Guatemalan, or other, I have found that they share many things in common.

They are tireless and dedicated workers. They have dedication to their families – to the principle of family – that would put us all to shame. They are highly religious people, who take their religion (most often Catholicism) very seriously. They keep their head down and go about their business. These are, in other words, Republican voters. ~Leon Wolf, Enchiridion Militis

Before I start on the potentially tangential point of whether these immigrants are in some sense potential “Republican voters,” I should note in fairness that my colleague, Leon Wolf, does argue later in the post for enforcement of the law:

All of that said, I am still a law and order guy. And, I support wholeheartedly any proposal that makes breaking the law more difficult, and more effectively deters lawbreaking in general. Bottom line: I support the Sensenbrenner proposal.

Mr. Wolf’s other points, some of which I am going to disagree with, will have to wait for another post.

Even though I grew up in New Mexico, I won’t pretend that I have spent a lot of time “in and around Hispanic culture,” except insofar as that culture permeates the general culture of New Mexico. I went to school with a fair few Hispanic kids, and we played on the same basketball team, and for the first seven years of formal schooling I went through mandatory Spanish language classes (and this was at private school), but I’m not going to kid anyone that I had close involvement with “Hispanic culture.” In school, we learned as much, if not more, about Spanish colonialism than we did about English colonialism, and our derivative cuisine was a constant reminder that we lived in Nuevo Mexico, but most of what we did learn about the Spanish and Mexican periods made the arrival of Gen. Kearny in 1846 seem like an unmitigated blessing for New Mexico. To my mind, the entry en masse of millions upon millions of Latin Americans seems to be quite plainly a reversal of that change and the introduction of the political habits and mentalities of peoples whose political systems are, in terms of constitutional republicanism, hopelessly flawed. If we want the broken political systems that drive these people out of their countries eventually reproduced here in miniature, we should keep having them come in at the present rate.

No one would challenge the work ethic of most of the people in question, nor necessarily their dedication to family and religion, which are elements of the debate that have always struck me as quite beside the point. Quite aside from the broader questions of assimilating new immigrants and whether or not we should reward illegal immigrants in some sense for having come here illegally, which are the central questions, there is the assumption that Hispanic immigrants should make good GOP voters because they are dedicated to work, family and faith. This assumption seems to be a case of believing something because it should be the case rather than believing something because it is true.
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It occurred to me that I have been approaching Walter Russell Mead’s characterisation of the “Jacksonians” the wrong way around. Perhaps, I thought to myself, he does not mean the label quite so literally as I have insisted on taking it. Maybe the modern-day “Jacksonians” aren’t supposed to have anything to do with the original Jacksonian politics or Andrew Jackson himself. But it would be a mistake to think this. Far from serving as a generic symbol, Jackson the man is the wellspring of this entire style of politics.

Mead’s Jacksonians are “new” Jacksonians in the sense that this Jacksonianism has expanded beyond its original Anglo-Celtic Democratic base and its “code” has been adopted by Americans from various ethnicities. The modern Jacksonians make up a community of shared values: honour, equality, individualism (and associated “self-fulfillment”) balanced with a certain social and moral conservatism, courage, and, rather bizarrely, a free-spending, status-seeking “financial esprit.” Except for the last point (on which more in a moment), there is some connection here with historic Jacksonians in that these people did resent hierarchies and authorities, except that the language of self-fulfillment would have little to do with the values of the hardy Scots-Irish Protestants Mead refers to (these were folk for whom self-fulfillment, had the phrase then existed, would have been a sin).

On “financial esprit,” Mead says this:

While the Jacksonian believes in hard work, he or she also believes that credit is a right and that money, especially borrowed money, is less a sacred trust than a means for self-discovery and expression. Although previous generations lacked the faculties for consumer credit that Americans enjoy at the end of the twentieth century, many Americans have always assumed that they have a right to spend money on their appearance, on purchases that affirm their status. The strict Jacksonian code of honor does not enjoin what others see as financial probity. What it demands, rather, is a daring and entrepreneurial spirit. Credit is seen less as an obligation than as an opportunity. Jacksonians have always supported loose monetary policy and looser bankruptcy laws.

Credit is a right? Borrowed money as a means for self-discovery and expression? Do these phrases sound as if they apply to 19th century Democrats? If these sorts of people have supported looser monetary policy at certain times, it was often to get out from under farm debt and their creditors in the financial institutions. That is not self-discovery and expression, but a matter of avoiding going broke. I suspect that if Jacksonians of that sort exist today, they are the sort of people who do not like debt and avoid it whenever possible. It is certainly not something they would seek to acquire status symbols.

It is difficult to overestimate how wrong this identification of the credit-happy, overspending middle-class Americans of today with Jacksonian sentiments is. One point on which Jeffersonians and Jacksonians agreed, and one on which the Jacksonians were even more intense and polemical than their forebears, was the hostility to credit, banks and “stock-jobbers” and all forms of exchange connected to speculation, paper and interest. Jackson’s attack on the Second Bank was a major symbol of this hostility, but it is one that re-emerges throughout nineteenth and early twentieth century history: the Populists, the Grange, the silverites and their spokesman in William Jennings Bryan were all, in their different ways, continuing this resistance to “bank-rule” and the rule of financial elites. In this they shared much with the socially conservative rural populists of Europe, who viewed city folk and their equivalent of “bank-rule” with the same distrust. Prodigality through easy credit is as far removed from these sorts of people as anything can be.

In the end, Mead is describing a very real phenomenon in American politics, but I don’t think the name works at all on any number of points. Yes, you can find certain similarities between Jacksonians then and Mead’s “Jacksonians” (but then honour and courage are values that could be shared by people of various persuasions), but much of what you can identify in historic Jacksonians is lacking in Mead’s modern equivalent. This is why I would reiterate that the people Mead seems to be describing are Middle Americans and many of them fall under the category of Francis’ Middle American Radicals. If these terms are more vague, they have the advantage of not reading the interests of modern middle-class Americans into those of 19th century Jacksonians and concluding that the two groups are essentially the same after having imposed the values of the modern group on the group in the past.

By their own lights, Jacksonians are populists (and “profoundly suspicious of elites,” according to Mead); unselfconsciously patriotic or nationalistic; and deeply religious, with a tendency toward fundamentalism and its emphasis on the individual’s relationship with God. Country music is their quintessential cultural expression.

They admire self-sufficiency, but unlike Jeffersonian libertarians, Jacksonians are not averse to finding a positive role for government as long as it fights on the right side of the cultural divide. “Jacksonians believe that government should do everything in its power to promote the well-being – political, moral, economic – of the folk community,” Mead writes. The military is part of that community: “When it comes to Big Government, Jeffersonians worry more about the military than about anything else. But for Jacksonians, spending money on the military is one of the best things governments do.” ~Daniel McCarthy

Mr. McCarthy does a fine job in this article explaining Mead’s idea of foreign policy “Jacksonians” and the foreign policy “Age of Jackson” we seem to be in, and I have no argument with Mr. McCarthy’s presentation of Mead’s idea. But, as I have in the past, I am perplexed by the use of the term Jacksonian to describe the foreign policy or indeed overall political view under discussion. I don’t pretend to have special insight into the career or presidency of Andrew Jackson, but it puzzles me that he has been associated with the aggressive, militant sort of foreign policy that he has been. Perhaps the trouble I am having with the distinction between Jeffersonians and Jacksonians is that, historically, these were in many cases the same people or the latter were the sons of the former.

Rude democratisation, the rise of the Democracy and the disappearance of the old Democratic-Republicans introduced obvious changes, but in most things Jackson was committed to roughly the same persuasion as the Jeffersonians before him and he governed in many respects as Jefferson did (whether or not that style of government contradicted clear principles of republicanism). Ascribing a more militant attitude to the Jacksonians seems to fit the administration of Young Hickory (James Polk) rather than Old Hickory, so we might call them Polkians. But even that is not quite right.

Some might argue that Polk only flourished in the political atmosphere that Jackson’s politics created, and that may be true, but we see in Polk not the aggressive and nationalistic demagogue who might be associated with Mead’s idea of Jacksonian populist nationalism but instead a retiring realist who pursued diplomatic solutions before resorting to force and someone who went to war only to achieve tangible and vital objectives in the national interest. If Jackson was a military man and personally combative, and even if he sympathised with his fellow Tennesseans in old Texico, his policy was generally and wisely irenic, as was that of his successor. The president properly associated with this stuff, for good or ill, is probably Lincoln or TR. Don’t lay it at Jackson’s feet.

Update: Going a bit more into the presentation of modern-day “Jacksonians,” I find the label less and less compelling. For instance, in the pull-quote above there are two claims: in the modern “Jacksonian” view, the government should do everything in its power to promote the well-being of the “folk community” and money is no object when it comes to military spending. The contrast is supposed to be with a limited Jeffersonian state, but historic Jacksonians likewise wanted a small, constrained constitutional government that did very little.

The modern “Jacksonians” are really Sam Francis’ Middle American Radicals, with whom the actual Jacksonians of the 1830s and 1840s would have much less in common than this theory holds. Do these two attitudes towards the government have any basis in Jackson’s policies, or those of his successors? The man who inflated the size of the standing army to gigantic proportions was Lincoln. By contrast, military spending in the antebellum period was, of course, extremely limited.

The proponents of an activist government that would work for “internal improvements” were Jackson’s bitter enemies. Jackson used his power as president to break the Bank, because the Bank was a source of tremendous power for precisely those interests that believed in a more active and involved federal government. Arguably, it might ultimately be in the best interests of the MARs to adopt the real Jacksonian politics, but that is not the sort of politics they have adopted. I implore everyone, don’t lay the preferences of the New Right, whatever their merits or flaws, at Jackson’s door. It’s simply not true.

Someone get Daniel Henninger a chair. He is swooning so much over Mr. Bush’s recent speech in Wheeling, West Virginia that he might faint (I was passing through Wheeling last week at just the same time that Mr. Bush was there, but managed not to swoon). This is a speech where Mr. Bush refers to himself as Educator-in-Chief (quick, someone call Lynne Cheney and tell her that the President wants to federalise education!…oh, that’s right, never mind). This is supposed to be real a barn-burner of a speech. All I can say is that I have to assume Mr. Henninger’s enthusiasm for it comes from the way it was delivered and not what Mr. Bush actually said.

Thus spake the Educator-in-Chief:

And it’s fine that people forget the lessons [of 9/11]. But one of my jobs is to constantly remind people of the lessons.

So as chief Educator, he thinks it is a good thing for his students (known in free countries as citizens) to forget the lessons of experience…so he can re-teach them to the students? I suppose that’s a sort of job security for the Educator-in-Chief, and the short memories and short attention span of the American public guarantee that the Educator-in-Chief will have something to do.

Here he says something true:

In other words, you want your President out there making sure that his words are credible.

Indeed we do. Yet Mr. Bush keeps talking just as he always has.

Then he says something silly:

I believe liberty is a universal thought. It’s not an American thought, it is a universal thought. And if you believe that, then you ought to take great comfort and joy in helping others realize the benefits of liberty. The way I put it is, there is an Almighty God. One of the greatest gifts of that Almighty God is the desire for people to be free, is freedom. And therefore — (applause) — and therefore, this country and the world ought to say, how can we help you remain free? What can we do to help you realize the blessings of liberty?

Liberty can mean one of a few things: it can be the state of dispassion and freedom from attachment that a virtuous man realises; it can be deliverance from the rule of the passions and demons through the grace of God; it can be a legal guarantee that you will not be arbitrarily detained, your property seized or your home searched without just cause, and that you will be left unmolested by the authorities in the way prescribed by law. It is fundamentally a state, not a “thought.” In the first two senses of moral or spiritual freedom, it is potentially available to all, but in the third sense it is limited to those societies that have developed the habits, institutions and laws that must exist for this state to exist. Many people can imagine or think of an idea of liberty, and many have, which does not mean that the experience of liberty is or will ever be available to all. There is every reason to believe that the idea of liberty on offer from Mr. Bush, which seems to differ scarcely from self-will and indulgence, directly contradicts the moral and spiritual kinds of liberty that should take precedence in any event, and which often directly undermine the restraint and discipline required for the practice of ordered liberty. The desire to be free in the sense that Mr. Bush means likely does not come from God, but from the other alternative source. For a more elaborate explanation, see The Possessed.
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Basically, Linker sets out to prove that Neuhaus is a would-be theocrat bent on Christianizing America by force – but lacking significant evidence for that point of view, he settles for proving that Neuhaus is . . . a Roman Catholic. ~Ross Douthat

That sums it up pretty well.