The American Conservative

It would appear that democracy promotion remains at the heart of the foreign policy vision of at least a few neocons.  Though you might have thought that Iraq (or Lebanon or Palestine or Iran or Bolivia or Venezuela or Bahrain, etc.) would have seemed to show it as a terrible goal for U.S. policy and a source of danger to U.S. interests, the death of the former dictator of Chile, Augusto Pinochet, has reminded them that advancing a policy that directly contradicts U.S. interests (as democracy promotion clearly does) is absolutely vital.  No surprises here, since neoconservatism is first and foremost not about securing American interests, but is interested in using America as a vehicle and a springboard for their revolutionary and power-acquiring goals. 

Here is part of Frum’s post:

For even if there were no US fingerprint on the gun that killed Allende, the episode left behind an enduring resentment and mistrust, a not easily effaced blot on American advocacy of democracy and freedom. The suspicion generated by Chile lingers in Latin America – and through the world – to this day. The US helped Italy and France to beat back even more virulent communist parties in the 1940s and 1950s without violence and dictatorship. Was there really no hope of doing the same in Latin America in the 1970s?

All credit to the Reagan administration for rethinking its axiomatic anticommunism and working to oust Pinochet after 1984. Credit above all to Elliott Abrams, then assistant secretary of state for Latin America and the leading advocate of the anti-Pinochet policy.  

On the cost side of the ledger, consider one prominent example of what Carteresque/neocon support for democracy abroad encouraged: the overthrow of the Shah, resulting in a bloodletting every bit as nasty and cruel as what took place in Chile.  I find myself under the impression that the neocons regard the 1979 Iranian fruits of encouraging domestic political opposition against an authoritarian government as less than desirable.  What can I be thinking?  Another glory of advancing democracy might include the new South Africa.   

No one seriously defends the atrocities of Pinochet’s regime.  They were abominable, and Chileans–not some farce of an international human rights posse–should have held him to account for what he and his regime did.  It is interesting that he does not bring up the brutal and corrupt rule of Alberto Fujimori, who was a harsh despot with only the veneer of democratic legitimacy but also someone who delivered his country from the potentially much worse despotism of the Shining Path.  Had there been a similarly strong push to oust Fujimori in the name of dread democracy, Peru would almost certainly be worse off today.  As it is, the absurdity that is democracy has restored the failed Alan Garcia to power, whose tremendous ineptitude and weakness allowed the Shining Path to flourish in the first place. 

Many conservatives still do, quite rightly, see Pinochet as a preferable alternative to what probably would have been instituted in Chile.  How you see Pinochet is probably closely related to how you see Franco.  If you think Franco a fascist who should have been defeated rather than made into an ally after the war, as at least a few neocons and hangers-on seem to do, Pinochet probably seems equally unacceptable.  If you think it better that a right-authoritarian government that eventually gave way to a more liberal political system won instead of a shaky facade of a democratic republic that masked leftist dictatorship that would have likely spilled still more blood and ruined the country, Pinochet looks like the lesser of two ugly options.  Those who think Hugo Chavez is a legitimate ruler because he is elected will be in the anti-Pinochet camp, and those in the anti-Pinochet camp will be hard-pressed to find reasons to speak in favour of the failed coup attempt against Chavez.  

If the fate of nations and actual people does not concern you terribly, but only the spread of dreadful democracy at whatever cost to those nations and those people, and if U.S. interests are at best secondary, backing or tolerating Pinochet seems like a bad move.  If it is revolutionary ideology that interests you instead, Pinochet was clearly an embarrassment and a liability–how can the global revolution move forward with Pinochet hanging around our necks? 

Should Pinochet have been more Caesar and less Sulla?  Yes, he should have.  Should we, because of Pinochet’s failures and our loose association with his crimes, therefore promote a form of government that is virtually guaranteed to create illiberal democratic despotisms and populist authoritarian dictatorships in various corners of the world?  Well, if we reasoned like small children (Pinochet was a cruel despot, therefore we should promote democracy…even if it empowers worse despots!) we should do exactly that.  If we instead considered the probable outcome of the policy, we would never again utter the word democracy again in the context of foreign policy, except possibly to discourage it.  Instead, Frum opines:

These days Wolfowitz and Abrams are out of fashion, and Kissinger and Nixon are back in vogue. But if those who thought like the first two had exerted more sway in the 1970s and 1980s, and those who thought like the latter less, America’s reputation would shine more brightly today.   

It’s fun how he speaks of this in terms of fashion, as if it were a product of the changing of the seasons rather than a direct consequence of the magnificent failure of neocon delusions.  No, this year, realism is simply in!  Wolfowitz and Abrams have just been pushed aside by a finicky public–it isn’t that their avowed policy has brought shame and ruin upon us.  This is because, I suppose, the second round of the Wolfowitzian approach has instead burnished and added to the glory of the name of the United States. 

I suppose when the national reputation is in flames, it does give off a certain illumination.  In the dull flickering of the fire that daily consumes our good name and the lives of American soldiers, you can just make out the neocons running off into the darkness to hide from the consequences of their actions and policies.

Republican Rep. Henry Bonilla (TX-23) lost his run-off election.  I believe that makes for a nice even 30 lost seats this year.  Nothing like kicking the Red Republicans when they’re down. 

Perhaps now Mr. Rodriguez, the victor, can bring the kind of expertise and ability that his fellow Texas Democrat Silvestre Reyes has already been bringing to the House.  At the very least, he probably couldn’t be any worse.

In Superman Returns, it’s doubly problematic, because the script has given him a romantic foil, Lois’s boyfriend, who is constantly risking his life – the mark of a real hero – to save Lois and her child. Whereas Superman risks . . . um . . . well, okay, there’s some kryptonite thrown in, and he almost dies from it, but in every other situation Lois’s boyfriend comes across as the guy we really ought to be rooting for, and Superman as the annoying interloper showing up to save the day at no risk to himself. ~Ross Douthat

I only recently saw the movie myself, having been uninterested in the remake/sequel/whatever when it first came out.  I only grudgingly rented it when I was in a mood for what I assumed would be a pair of bad comic book movies (I also watched the third X-Men again to give it a second chance, but it remains as terrible as ever).  Going into it with extremely low expectations (the clips I had seen last year were just awful), I was surprised that it wasn’t nearly as terrible as I thought it would be.  You may call this damning with faint praise, but I came away with a much higher estimation of the entire movie than I ever thought I would. 

A lot of people, including Ross, are giving Kate Bosworth an awfully hard time.  She did not dazzle or distinguish herself, but she did a perfectly acceptable job.  For some reason, I kept thinking of her as the poor man’s Rachel McAdams (Michael will probably be horrified by this comparison). 

Is the entire story completely predictable?  Yes.  But you already knew that.  It’s a Superman movie.  Superman wins, Luthor loses, and his old ambiguous, tortured relationship with Lois Lane goes back to being ambiguous and tortured.  You are never surprised or deeply moved, but you didn’t go to see a Superman flick looking for surprises or a moving experience.  You go to see the whole “faster than a speeding bullet, can leap a tall building in a single bound” bit.  Naturally.  Had the new Superman taken the “Wonderman” route and thrown the new boyfriend into outer space, well, that would have at least been different…but everyone would be very upset that they had made Superman into just another jealous ex-lover.  People like Superman because he isn’t human and has no really good reason to intervene, yet he deigns to hang around and help anyway.  People who want deeply human, complex, flawed and slightly crazy superheroes (count me in) are Batman fans to the end.  People who want the simple and pure straight arrow as their superhero go for Superman.  This is probably a good measure for someone’s tendency towards either pessimism or optimism, but I won’t dwell on that here. 

But maybe we’ve all been looking at Superman Returns the wrong way.  Maybe Superman shouldn’t be the one we pay attention to.  Maybe he is the foil.  Maybe the entire movie was a way for James Marsden to play someone genuinely heroic and redeem his career from the unfortunate interlude as the eternally worthless Cyclops in the X-Men movies.  By setting him up against Superman, the superhero of superheroes, his Richard White character comes across as that much more impressive.  It’s almost enough to keep you from cheering when Marsden/Cyclops is vaporised by the Phoenix when you start watching X-Men III.  Almost.

Kevin Drum and Digby are annoyed by a recent Jeff Greenfield segment about Obama’s wardrobe in which he compares the junior Senator’s style in New Hampshire to that of…Ahmadinejad!  Greenfield is probably mockingly rebelling against the Obama overkill that has flooded the airwaves and filled the commentariat by taking the Obama obsession to “wretched excess,” as he called it.  In other words, he is saying: you journalists are embarrassing yourselves with this adulation of a political nonentity, so let me show you how ridiculous the Obama fixation can get.  You want to draw comparisons with Middle Eastern rulers?  I’ll go one better and make a trivial fashion comparison with a Middle Eastern ruler! 

The entire segment was, I am almost certain, a big joke that lefty bloggers seem not to have gotten at all.  Haven’t these people ever watched Greenfield before?  He does these tongue-in-cheek bits all the time.  Good grief, if we can’t all laugh at the inanity of the Obama coverage right now, imagine how oppressive and dreary the next year will be!  If Obama is half as smooth as everyone says he is, he probably would laugh if he saw something like this.  “I don’t look anything like Ahmadinejad–I don’t have a beard,” he would joke.  Meanwhile the blog left throws a conniption fit.  No wonder some people think Obama is a big step up for the Democrats–he doesn’t seem to respond to these sorts of barbs and satire the way liberals often do. 

Besides, talking about the man’s clothes is rather fitting.  After all, since Obama flourishes by dint of his entirely superficial “hope and unity” spiel, why can’t observers make an issue out of something as superficial as clothing?  If his middle name invokes Saddam Hussein in the American mind, it seems only fair to other Near Eastern leaders that his dress should remind us of the wild Iranian.  If he could get a different haircut, he might be able to mimic Kim Jong Il and go for the axis of evil hat trick.    

Drum complains that this report shows the frivolity of the cable news channels, who have so much time on their hands that they wind up broadcasting the stupidest of things.  (They do broadcast the stupidest of things, but it isn’t clear that this is necessarily one of them.)  Whereas bloggers who comment on the time-filling cable news channels are, I’m sure, being deeply serious by pointing out the frivolity of cable news.

Digby sees it all as part of a sinister right-wing plot to unman or otherwise discredit Obama and other Democrats by focusing on questions of fashion, since no one in the media has ever paid attention to, say, Condi’s keen fashion sense.  Here is the Post on the Secretary of State last year:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived at the Wiesbaden Army Airfield on Wednesday dressed all in black. She was wearing a black skirt that hit just above the knee, and it was topped with a black coat that fell to mid-calf. The coat, with its seven gold buttons running down the front and its band collar, called to mind a Marine’s dress uniform or the “save humanity” ensemble worn by Keanu Reeves in “The Matrix.”

As Rice walked out to greet the troops, the coat blew open in a rather swashbuckling way to reveal the top of a pair of knee-high boots. The boots had a high, slender heel that is not particularly practical. But it is a popular silhouette because it tends to elongate and flatter the leg. In short, the boots are sexy.

Rice boldly eschewed the typical fare chosen by powerful American women on the world stage. She was not wearing a bland suit with a loose-fitting skirt and short boxy jacket with a pair of sensible pumps. She did not cloak her power in photogenic hues, a feminine brooch and a non-threatening aesthetic. Rice looked as though she was prepared to talk tough, knock heads and do a freeze-frame “Matrix” jump kick if necessary. Who wouldn’t give her ensemble a double take — all the while hoping not to rub her the wrong way?

Rice’s coat and boots speak of sex and power — such a volatile combination, and one that in political circles rarely leads to anything but scandal. When looking at the image of Rice in Wiesbaden, the mind searches for ways to put it all into context. It turns to fiction, to caricature. To shadowy daydreams. Dominatrix! It is as though sex and power can only co-exist in a fantasy. When a woman combines them in the real world, stubborn stereotypes have her power devolving into a form that is purely sexual.  

So, which is worse: being compared to Ahmadinejad or Keanu Reeves?  I don’t know about you, but I’d say that’s a tough call.  Just consider how idiotic the image conjured up here really is.  Picture, if you can, Condi the Dominatrix.  Would that she were actually so effective at commanding the respect and attention of the men around her! 

Back to Obama.  It isn’t as if right-wingers really want to stop Obama from running in ’08.  Go ahead–it will be hilarious!  Mark down an Obama-led ticket in the “historic defeats” column. 

Separately, as a confirmed political cynic, I look forward to watching the Optimism Express that is Obama’s campaign derail and plunge into the ravine of harsh political reality.  I swear, if I hear one more JFK comparison….We need a few mocking comparisons to Ahmadinejad to keep everyone from getting a little too carried away with someone who is a political nonentity, has accomplished nothing, whose every stump speech is the essence of vacuity (“Americans want unity!  Americans want a fresh start!”) and whose politics are as unrepresentative of the nation as a whole as anyone in office today.

My Enchiridion colleague Paul Cella has written a very smart post on patriotism, which includes the following:

This is why I say Universalism narrows, despite its claim to do the opposite: the whole vast organic tangle of attachments, memories, prescriptions, and intuitions, which are conjured by the word “country,” and which inspire such songs of love as our patriotic ones, and which become the seedbed of our national patriotic rituals, is contracted into a set of stock phrases of political discourse. No political discourse, no matter how sensitive, no matter how inspired, no matter how comprehensive, can possibly capture even a fragment of the living tradition that is within a man when he reflects on his country. Reality is too vast for words. Ideologies have their uses, of course, but they must always be abbreviations of reality.

For example, it is said that Capitalism is a part of the American creed, and as such should be part of the object of our patriotic affections. But I do not love Capitalism, and never will. I see its uses, and sometimes I suspect that it is merely a term we use to denote “the way things are,” but in any case I shall never love it. And indeed, there are times when this passion of Indignation has risen in me with great fury against it — usually when Capitalism has made a dark alliance with darker forces to oppress my home, as when, for example, a local homeowner must jump through a hundred bureaucratic hoops to remove a dead tree that threatens his house, while the large developer can remove a whole copse of trees with impunity. Small property is fettered; capitalist collectivism is emancipated. The vulnerability of the American South to these dark alliances is acute; and I confess that there are moments when I feel that nothing is so great a threat to my home as these. There are parts of the South which have been so tortured by Capitalism, so visited with unthinking ugliness, that one can feel only hatred — a hatred for the devil and his works. This is the passion inspired at times by Capitalism.

But of course, Capitalism is primarily a matter for adjudication by reason; the place for passion is small. Ugliness is certainly not the greatest evil, and anyway Socialism has far outdone Capitalism in producing ugliness. But if someone tells me that Capitalism must be included in my patriotic love, I will simply answer: “you do not know what patriotism is.”

I strongly agree with almost all of this, and I am reminded of Philippe Beneton’s remark in Equality by Default to the effect that “no one would die for the free market.”  This seems to me perfectly true (or at least so generally true that the strange exceptions would only confirm it), and it reminds us that we may or may not value the free market but we do not love it (neither, it seems to me as it does to Paul, should we hate it except to the degree that it harms what we love).  We may or may not enjoy and appreciate the market for what it does, but we love our country for what it is, which is above all our own place, a beloved place with which we are closely bound by time and memory. 

The fate of Iraq — and the future of both America and the West [!]– is increasingly in the hands of one man, a man increasingly being isolated by the media and the Establishment in his belief that only victory will do. Alone like Reagan, one hopes that with his core convictions on the line George W. Bush will remember the trials of Ronald Reagan and the gritty positive attitude that epitomized Reagan’s leadership, a leadership that led to eventual — and spectacular — triumph in so many areas. ~Jeffrey Lord

As we all know, Mr. Bush is never completely alone in his dedication to the Iraq war.  Barney is behind him all the way. 

My favourite part of this panegyric was the suggestion that the subversives trying to undermine Mr. Bush were the ones who were isolating him from sources of information that might bolster his belief in victory.  It is hardly a closely kept secret that keeping Mr. Bush in his hermetically-sealed bubble of ignorance has been the tried and true method of war supporters and interventionists from Day One.  Now that some other voices are beginning to penetrate this bubble, it is a conspiracy from within to force the President to go against his own policy by stopping all of the information that would reassure him that victory in Iraq is certain from reaching him.  Riiight.

Then, as primary day approached, Bennie noticed a change in his opponent’s language. Brownback never used to mention abortion on the campaign trail. Now he was publicly pronouncing himself an abortion opponent. When primary day rolled around in early August, Bennie ran up an impressive 36 percent of the vote to Brownback’s 48. But he was still furious, believing Brownback had swiped the nomination by aping his positions. “I knew how I stood,” he told me. “I didn’t know how he stood.” ~Noam Scheiber, The New Republic

Mr. Bennie’s comment might well become the unflattering motto for Sam Brownback’s career.  The story, as Scheiber tells it anyway, is one of how Brownback discovered his pro-life convictions in a moment of political peril.  This has the feel of George Bush’s South Carolina conversion when he discovered how terribly conservative he was when it was convenient to be such a thing, and it makes me assume that Brownback’s commitment on these issues may not be as straightforward as I would have originally thought.  Maybe people only care how Brownback has voted, and when it comes to the votes he has been reliably pro-life, but in its way the tale of Brownback’s ”conversion” is more worrisome than Romney’s.  Neither of them has much of a realistic chance at the nomination, but social conservatives cannot be terribly excited to have a Massachusetts governor and Bob Dole’s successor as their chief representatives in the upcoming race.  There is an opening here for Tancredo, who could say, “I believe we should protect the unborn and the border.”  Romney and Brownback cannot say the same.

Because the longer Brownback goes on, the more you sense a distinct lack of passion for standard Iowa fare like agriculture policy or the budget. Compared with the previous speaker, local Congressman Steve King, he’s not even worked up about Iraq. What Sam Brownback clearly wants to talk about–what he thinks people need to know about–are the issues you might store in a mental file called “Judgment Day.” The Judgment Day file begins with standard culture-war causes like gay marriage and abortion. But it is a sprawling file, and, before long, it sprawls to such far-flung locales as Sudan and the Congo, where Brownback wants to stop genocide and human trafficking. “We’re a great nation,” Brownback says. His voice is still composed, but now there’s a firmness that wasn’t there before. “And I believe, in my heart, that for our greatness to continue, our goodness must continue.” ~Noam Scheiber, The New Republic

Someone who thinks that “our goodness” has anything to do with what happens in Congo is not someone who should hold any position of power in this country.  Indeed, I think there might be something seriously wrong with someone who believes such a thing.  Read Scheiber’s whole article, which is now available for free, and I think you will find Brownback more than a little odd.

Greg Pollowitz, very definitely missing Sixers, informs me that Steve Young is the great-great-great grandson of Bringham [sic] Young.

But I bet everyone who watches Monday Night football knows that. ~Kathryn Jean Lopez

Yes, I suppose we did already know that about Steve Young.  Those of us who grew up with WAC/Mountain West college football against BYU also know that the name is Brigham Young.

But it is true that Young’s first name is frequently pronounced as if it were spelled Bringham, which is what reminded me of the old and very anti-Mormon joke I heard when I was younger.  It went something like this:

Q: What did Brigham Young say about women?

A: “I don’t care how you bring’em, just bring’em young.”

It’s a terrible joke, I know.  (I have discovered that it was originally an old Rodney Dangerfield line–that helps explain why it was so bad.)  But that is just the tip of the iceberg of the sort of grassroots anti-Mormonism you will encounter when Romney starts his campaign.

The head of the pack is a dangerous place for a Democrat to be. Democrats excel in cannibalizing their front-runners. Just ask those who were knocked out in the primary season (Lyndon Johnson, Ed Muskie and Howard Dean) or those who limped from the ring after 15 rounds (Walter Mondale and Al Gore). ~Thomas Edsall, The New York Times

But “Democrats” didn’t cannibalise these so-called front-runners–Vietnam and voters did.  Johnson dropped out because the war had become such a massive liability that he could not campaign as a war president.  Muskie lost his momentum for rather more bizarre reasons (nobody likes a crybaby, or so the conventional wisdom held).   The idea that Dean was ever anything other than an insurgent is funny in itself (how quickly we forget!), but nobody else exactly tore Dean down–he failed to build up enough support to win any of the early contests and so failed to build any greater momentum.  Kerry had been considered, for what reason I will never fully understand, the most formidable in the field, and in the end primary voters went for him over Dean.  The accepted establishment insider candidate won–surprise, surprise!  A whole field of Democrats desperately wanted to “cannibalise” Kerry (and I bet they wish they had succeeded), but they were unable to do so.  The myth of the wildly unpredictable and fractious Democrats only goes so far.  In most years, they are as ploddingly predictable as the GOP.  It flatters the Democrats’ sense of themselves as the party of “the people” to think that their contests are more responsive to a diverse electorate, but 1984 is probably just about the lone modern exception to fairly boring contests that were settled early in the election year. 

There were heady days in late 2003 and early 2004 when those of us looking high and low for someone to beat Bush were enthusiastic (almost certainly too enthusiastic) about the crazy doctor’s chances because he was actually, truly against the Iraq war.  He didn’t think it should be fought better or that we should, God forbid, send more Americans to fight in Iraq, but that it was a tremendously bad policy and needed to be ended.  What a refreshing thing that was to hear!  Of course, he had literally nothing else to say, and then he got a bit excited after one of his primary losses and gave that unfortunate speech.  The speech was never as bad as the media made it out to be, but what the media created (and the Dean boomlet was heavily media-driven) it can and will also destroy.   

Then there is this notion that Mondale and Gore emerged only after long and “bruising” (this is the word that journalists always use) primary battles.  This has some real truth in Mondale’s case, where he had two fairly strong competitors who picked off a number of important states going into the spring, but with Gore and Bradley it was really all over by February (Gore was running against Bill Bradley, after all, so how could it have been any different?).  Bradley kept hanging around for some time after New Hampshire, but there was never much doubt that the nomination was Gore’s once Bradley failed to win there.  If 2000 was a 15-round slugfest (weren’t boxing matches only 12 rounds long by that time?), I wonder what Edsall would liken a genuinely competitive fight for a nomination to.