The American Conservative

Bush’s low approval ratings are an illustration. Some experienced GOP campaign strategists believe that there is virtually no chance that a Republican can succeed Bush if his approval ratings remain mired in the 30s. The Democratic strategy of investigating administration scandals and policy blunders is calculated to achieve exactly that goal — and the burgeoning controversy over the firings of eight U.S. attorneys has given Democrats in Congress yet another inviting target. ~The Politico

Come to think of it, has the outgoing President’s party ever won the next election when he has approval ratings below 40%?  I don’t think modern approval rating-taking existed before Truman, but we can also see from the fairly lopsided Harding victory in 1920 that unpopular Presidents consistently drag down their succeeding nominees down to defeat.  Relatively more popular Presidents, such as T.R., Coolidge and Reagan, have been able to hand over control to someone from their own party (though not always necessarily their Vice President), which also makes Gore’s inability to match these examples particularly bad. 

All this seems obvious enough, but for some reason much of the commentary on ’08 has been treating the election as if we still lived in the 50-50 nation and it’s anybody’s guess which way the election will go.  All generic polls and common sense tell us that the Democrats will once again do pretty well, barring some catastrophic failure or scandal on their side.  Even if we were not still in Iraq, it seems probable that Mr. Bush’s low approval ratings and the GOP’s generally poor reputation these days will make the GOP nominee this time around a dead man campaigning.   

That once again makes 1920 the more appropriate model for understanding what is likely to happen next year (with all of the obvious caveats about significantly different electorates, circumstances and issues taken into account, lest I be accused of young blogger naivete).  Another comparison would be 1952, which technically included Truman early on in the election but was effectively an election without an incumbent from either party.  In terms of the final margin of victory, 1952 is probably the better comparison than 1920, which saw a massive blowout that does seem unlikely given recent voting patterns.

Clark offers his pessimism as an antidote to any excessive optimism experienced at Charlottesville.  I do have to confess I share Clark’s puzzlement about Prof. Deneen’s reference to people being “wildly optimistic” about human nature.  It is not necessarily true that all or even most people at the conference would share my enthusiasm for active pessimism, but as something of an arch-pessimist I would have thought I would be able to detect if anyone was a believer in the unspotted goodness of mankind.  Perhaps I just wasn’t paying attention, or perhaps I simply drank too much vodka and was no longer discerning much of anything.

One is thrust in the potential position of being un-American, of feeling homeless in America.  I once spent a few hours waiting for a flight with a colleague at an airport, and began explaining to him this argument that modernity included both dominant contemporary political camps, and engaged in a critique of presumptions of individualism, rights-based political theory, thoroughgoing free market economics, and mobility – and he looked at me with growing horror and called me “Anti-American.” And, he was nothing if not a good liberal and a good modernist, although he called himself a conservative. Indeed, nothing brings the Left and Right together quicker than a good critique of modernity. ~Prof. Patrick Deneen

This problem of being “homeless in America” arises only if we continue to believe the myth (and it is to some considerable extent a myth) that we all must be Lockeans to be Americans and to accept the constitutional tradition of our country.  As I have suggested before, Bolingbroke shows us the way to avoid falling into the Lockean ditch while still maintaining our proper respect for the good things in our constitutional inheritance, which, not surprisingly, are the very things the successors of Locke and the Whigs set about ruining as quickly as they could once they held power. 

As for the last point, I can vouch for the truth of it, since there is no one members of the conventional Right would sooner drop-kick than the person who actually values tradition, authority and hierarchy (how gauche!).

To defend Lockean philosophy in the name of conservatism is to open the back door to the progressive hordes. ~Prof. Patrick Deneen

Much as I enjoyed the fellowship of the past weekend in Charlottesville, there was a persistent and palpable animosity toward politics and government generally held by many of the participants. For all the talk of community, it was a community bereft of the idea that communities require more than just good feeling, but laws and institutions as well as the willingness on the part of citizens to work publically toward the formation and enactment of the public good and the recognition that such work will result in conflict. There was something of a gauzy sentimentality and even anarchic libertarianism that pervaded the sessions. As much as I admire Wendell Berry, his work does not sufficiently attend to the needs for, and demands of, politics. Indeed, I was struck by the similarity between two camps that otherwise might be thought to be polar opposites – agrarian communitarians and libertarians. Both are wildly optimistic about human nature and the ability of humans to “do their own thing” without the “interference” of politics and government. ~Prof. Patrick Deneen

I heard Prof. Deneen’s talk in Charlottesville, and I was pretty sure there was nothing really troubling in it, but I went back through it again today and made sure.  Since I, anarchopaleo-retroneotradcon populist agrarian Bolingbrokean reactionary that I am, still haven’t found anything all that objectionable in it, and I didn’t notice the “gauzy sentimentality” in the attendees that Prof. Deneen noticed, I assume I am either missing something tremendously important or there has been an unfortunate misunderstanding somewhere.  Yes, there was much talk about Wendell Berry, such that it became the running joke of the conference, but it was not just aimless gushing about the grand old Kentuckian; the references and citations were all, for the most part, part of the defense of rooted, limited and human-scale living. 

The talk itself should have made any neo-Schumpeterian and neo-Schuhmacherian’s heart fill with joy and gladness, and the conference attendees should have reassured everyone that a room could erupt in applause at the mention of Ron Paul’s impending presidential victory and believe in and try to live rooted traditional community life at the same time and that they cheered for Ron Paul because they believed and lived in this way.  (Am I just imposing my own perspective on all the attendees?  I don’t know, but I don’t think so.)  The people who were there despise what the political class calls “politics” because I think they understand that this “politics” has nothing good or positive to do with the immediate political communities to which they belong.  They loathe “government” generally not because they think any and all government is undesirable, but because they believe this kind of government that we have today is significantly and dangerously corrupted.  Prof. Deneen may find in the enthusiasm for Ron Paul an example of precisely the sort of disengagement and lack of realism about politics that he thinks is the problem, but I would suggest that any expression of enthusiasm for a presidential candidate, even an extreme long-shot such as Rep. Paul, demonstrates a strong sense of engagement and perhaps almost undue preoccupation with politics as conventionally defined. 

There is a sense in which D.C. is less of a monstrosity as a city than Las Vegas or Phoenix, engaged in perpetual war with nature as those cities are, but there is also a very real sense in which those places could not thrive without the policies and priorities set in Washington.  Washington is not at war with nature, but it is at war with our America, and so it is not terribly surprising that people who consider themselves patriots regard it with special loathing.  For my part, in my visits to the Georgetown campus and the rest of the metro area, I have found some things to enjoy in the District and its environs, but on the whole I take Kekaumenos’ advice about going to the capital: don’t do it unless you absolutely have to, and leave as quickly as possible.  

Were there libertarians at the conference who had an unfortunately optimistic view of human nature?  Probably.  Did they make up the bulk of the speakers and attendees?  I am doubtful about that.  Are there some romantics who pine for settled communities simply because they like to have things to pine for?  Probably.  But that is not what anyone I met was talking about.  Maybe I didn’t meet enough of the people at the conference.  I would like to suggest, however, that the hostility to politics and government (which I suppose can hardly satisfy a professor of government) that Prof. Deneen encountered there was very far from a desire to live in a world beyond politics.  The ISI folks, as I understand them, view attempts to escape the inevitable realities of politics as fairly insane.  As Chantal Delsol’s book would have it, it is the attempt to eliminate the structures of power (among other things) all together that constitutes one of the grave mistakes of modern Western man.  The existence of power and the existence of disparities of power will be constants in human experience, and so there is the ultimate choice of attempting to constrain and limit the corruption that comes from concentrated power (according to the finest Anglo-American traditions of Bolingbroke, the Country party, the Anti-Federalists, who are the very same people who embody what Prof. Deneen calls the alternative tradition) or acquiescing to various degrees in the monstrosity of the Robinarchy on the grounds that there has to be a government somewhere.  To be against the Robinarchy does not mean that you reject authority or government, much less that you have an optimistic assessment of human nature, but that you would like to see government rightly ordered according to principles of legitimacy, lawfulness and justice. 

Over the past year it has been interesting to see reactions to the conservatism of virtue and place (this seems to be the most succinct name for what we are trying to describe) that has been on display at different points.  When traditional conservatism was advanced during the debates over “crunchy conservatism,” all of the talk of virtue and the criticism of megacorporations immediately aroused the suspicions of the enforcers of acceptable fusionism that some sort of lefty statist coup was in the works.  Citing John Lukacs saying negative things about paving over green fields was taken as proof that we wanted to collectivise the farms, or something like that.  Libertarian terror at the prospect of actually living your life in accordance with nature was palpable.  It was the foes of the traditionalists, paleos and “crunchy cons” who wanted to talk about a “partial philosophy of life” and who advanced the idea that politics somehow stops at the voting booth and the government office.  The anarcho-traditionalists, if we want to call them that, were the ones saying that political life is first and foremost concerned with the affairs of the institutions of your local political community and the needs of your family, and these are what ought to take priority.  They were proposing practicing politics as if the Permanent Things (i.e., virtues, among other things) really existed and actually mattered, and you could see the unmitigated horror this induced in every “mainstream conservative.”  

There was an equally harsh reaction in the other direction when the exact same people begin speaking favourably about “front-porch anarchism” and Wendell Berry and Dorothy Day in a slightly different context.  All of a sudden the same people who were a few months earlier supposedly attempting to regulate every aspect of your daily life with supposedly fascist dreams of transcendence were dangerously oblivious to the need for order and stability!  This would be the “gauzy sentimentality” objection Prof. Deneen voiced earlier.  However, I think I can explain how people keep having this mistaken impression.  

The “front-porch anarchist” folks were talking about ”anarchism” with the understanding that this means a rejection of consolidation, concentration and centralisation, a repudiation of war, the extraction of wealth by the state and the exploitation of the land and the people by corporate masters together with a rejection of the trashy culture, the degradation of the human person and the general ugliness of the age.  It is difficult to discern this at first, because the label anarchist is immediately off-putting to most conservatives (as it should be in its normal meaning of bomb-throwing assassins), but what needs to be understood is that these “front-porch anarchists” are irrevocably opposed to the kind of anarchist who believes that destruction is creative, since they are adamantly opposed to the kind of “creative destruction” that requires the destruction of all they love to create the bland, homogenous, dead world that they hate.  From everything I heard in Prof. Deneen’s talk, it seems to me that he and they are in more or less perfect agreement.  What have I missed that I think this?

What would I object to? Well, I thought there was an undertone of something in that talk, and this later post by Professor Deneen makes it explicit. He detects “gauzy sentimentality” in the libertarian and generally anti-statist bent of some of the participants, as well as an overvaulting optimism about human nature. To me, it looks like the statists are the optimists about human nature: they believe that some people, given lordship over others, will not abuse their powers. I would contend that that view holds up neither in theory nor experience: with a very few exceptions, growth of state power comes at the expense of community and civil society. ~Dan McCarthy

I am even shorter on time this morning and there is much to say about this important question, but I will propose the following compromise between Prof. Deneen and my anarchist and agrarian friends: I think I know what Prof. Deneen is talking about, because I used to get the same sense from people who would speak approvingly about anarchism and agrarianism, but I then realised that the traditionalists and conservatives talking about anarchism weren’t really in favour of laissez-faire anything and the agrarians had a profoundly realistic assessment of the virtues and vices of man–which was why they felt so strongly that power and wealth needed to be dispersed as widely as possible and why they believed it was so important to keep man grounded in nature and place that would tend to impose limits on their fallen tendency to excess and sin.  Prof. Deneen is worried about the “gauzy sentimentality” of some of the anarcho-traditionalists (our latest tongue-twisting designation) he met at Charlottesville, but I would submit that there is more gauzy sentimentality in Sam Brownback’s little finger than there was in that entire conference and the two respective visions put forward have nothing do to with each other. 

Prof. Deneen is also rightly concerned to stress that men are not angels and need laws and institutions.  He would find that most of the people there, I believe, are actually far more in agreement with him than a lot of more conventional “conservatives” and libertarians who do embrace Reaganesque, Paine-quoting optimism, a belief in progress and the possibility of improving human nature.  What they do insist on, though, is that the laws of an abusive central state are actually destructive of respect for law and authority itself, and that the institutions of a centralised state are the enemy of natural and intermediary institutions that function to protect human liberty and the communities that make that liberty possible in the first place.  Now I really must go, as I am already late for Armenian.

Because you are all dying to know what other words Armenian and Hindi share, I will tell you another one.  Reading Namus (yes, I’m still reading Namus ever so slowly), I came across the colloquial expression ghalat chari, which is apparently still used in Armenia today and which is basically an imperative phrase that means, “Don’t do something wrong/bad.”  The word sounded familiar to my Bollywood-trained ears, and sure enough my first intuition that ghalat was the same as galat in Hindi was confirmed when I checked my Hindi dictionary.  To someone hearing it pronounced in Hindi for the first (or even the fifth or sixth) time, it sounds an awful lot like ghaland, but that is not actually what they’re saying, much as zarur (of course) comes out sounding to English-speakers (or at least to me) as zerul. 

Language bleg: Does anyone happen to know which language galat originally comes from?  Arabic, maybe? 

Update: Yes, it does come originally from Arabic.

It’s not much of an oversimplification to say that the blue-collar Democrats tend to see elections as an arena for defending their interests, and the upscale voters see them as an opportunity to affirm their values. ~Ron Brownstein

Via Ross Douthat

This would help explain why Obama, whose entire campaign platform as of right now is, “Hope is good,” apparently wins over a lot of the latter and few of the others.  Upscale voters apparently like hope, while blue-collar voters are apparently not so astonishingly gullible.  More basically, a politician who complains that politics is about power more than it is about principle, while nice to listen to, reveals himself to meat-and-potatoes, blue-collar voters to be well-meaning but hopeless as someone who will secure for them the spoils they expect.  The quote in Brownstein’s article from the union rep was telling:

But familiarity alone may not solve Obama’s blue-collar challenge. Rick Gale, the president of the firefighters’ Wisconsin affiliate, was shaking his head after Obama’s reform-heavy message to the union convention. “In my view, that’s really not a message for our guys,” Gale said. “They’re really not afraid of politics.” 

The high-minded reformer act comes across as someone who either a) thinks he is better than the people he is claiming to represent, which usually doesn’t win a lot of sympathy, or b) hasn’t got the grit and skill in delivering the goods.  He laments that power is at the heart of politics, when his constituents instinctively understand that power is being contested and these contests determine whether they or some other group gets the appropriate share of that power.  If your guy doesn’t win the contest for you and yours, what did you elect him to do?  Talk about the virtues of bipartisanship?  Not likely.   

Amusingly, the Real Obama–the one who voted against CAFTA, allegedly against his better instincts, and the one who worked as a ”community organizer” in Hyde Park–is possibly the sort of guy blue-collar Democrats probably would want to support despite Obama’s own thoroughly privileged background.  However, through some bizarre contortion of reality two wealthy lawyers who have both been prior to 2006 New Democrat boosters of free trade, “education” and “empowerment” as the solution to everyone’s economic anxieties have become the tribunes of blue-collar Democrats.  (Clinton basically remains on the New Democrat bandwagon even now.)  Strangely, perhaps as part of the project to make Obama into a “viable” candidate, Obama has been a great one for talking about the virtue of education in ways that make progressives physically ill, while he has allowed Edwards to be the one to position himself as a supposed economic populist. 

Update: Bradford Plumer at TNR gives a more detailed picture of just why Obamania is not contagious with organised labour, including this gem:

Clinton gets far and away the loudest applause line of the entire conference when she declares that she will soon introduce legislation to give “meaningful access to contractor payroll records.”   

Are you feeling excited yet?  Meanwhile, John Boehner also showed up at the same conference and managed to make himself unusually unpopular by recycling administration lies on Iraq.  Good thinking, John!  So that would probably be a good example of the GOP not developing anything that even hints at lower-middle reformism.  This might just have some political consequences with these workers.

And since Ross and Reihan are finding a Strange New Respect for Buchananism (or whatever passes for “paleoconservatism” these days) I should say that I’m reminded of a point Ramesh made years ago in his article on Buchanan. “Conservatives tend to place a lot of emphasis, maybe too much, on the idea that ideas have consequences,” Ponnuru wrote. “They hoist their ideas up the flagpole and then see who salutes. Buchananism puts its idealized social base first, and lets it drive everything else.” This sounds quite a bit like what’s going on with Lower-Middle-Reformism.

The late Sam Francis must be smiling from wherever he is (I have my hunches on where that might be) knowing that his Middle American Radicalism is getting a fresh coat of paint. ~Jonah Goldberg

Tom Piatak joins in the enfilading fire aimed at Goldberg’s obnoxious post.  Reihan responds in a fashion that is far more good natured and generous than the post deserves.  I have every intention of drawing out just how many things are wrong with Goldberg’s post (I suspect I will have some help in this department), but for now a few simple points.  No one does more flagpole-raising and salute-demanding than people at NR, whose last remaining productive function (besides flacking for the warfare state) seems to be the enforcement of ideological purity whenever it is challenged by a crunchy con, an anti-imperialist, neopopulist or, well, anyone resembling a traditional conservative.  Right around this same time last year Goldberg bestirred himself to write off, if not write out, Rod Dreher and anything remotely resembling a conservatism of place and virtue.  Idiotically, this champion of rootless, Wal-Mart America has decided that the advocates for “Sam’s Club Republicans” are the latest batch of dissidents to beat down and skewer with not-so-subtle efforts to associate them (however implausibly) with the ideas of Dr. Francis.  He did the same to another young blogger from the other side of the spectrum, Matt Yglesias, who had the temerity to state certain obvious truths about the influence of hawkish pro-Israel people on the political process and the politics of foreign policy.  Goldberg replied by noting the similarity between the views of Yglesias and Lindbergh, as if this were an innocent observation intended to further debate. 

From my perspective, there is actually nothing wrong with being associated with Dr. Francis or Col. Lindbergh, since both were honourable, patriotic and admirable men, and if modern observers come to similar conclusions or express similar views as they did it is probably because these gentlemen were substantially in the right in their own time.  However, the intent of someone at NR invoking their names is clear: it is to demonise, discredit and defame those being so compared, because their names have been (unjustly) tainted with the vicious smears of earlier ideological enforcers.  Why make these comparisons?  Because the one engaged in the demonisation knows he cannot actually take on his adversaries in legitimate debate, but must always resort to the cheap, heavy-handed tactics of a commissar. 

To the end of exerting control over the collapsing movement they have helped to ruin, the ideological enforcers will be perfectly happy to appear otherwise very flexible, pragmatic, empirical and politically savvy, and they will be champions of a supposed mild reasonableness that happens to coincide perfectly with agreement with their own positions.  In this view, other people “idealise” and “romanticise” things, whereas they are supposedly the epitome of cautious, grounded common sense.  It would be a clever rhetorical move, were it not so utterly transparent and weak.

Some might have ”hunches” about the fate of Goldberg’s soul, but then charitable and decent people do not speculate about the eternal damnation of their political opponents as Goldberg was clearly trying to do.

If Dr. Francis were ever to be bothered to follow the ins and outs of blog fights, which I imagine he would have considered a waste of time and energy, he would probably be smiling at this one if only because it would have confirmed his low opinion of the modern National Review.  Goldberg’s latest certainly does provoke laughter, if not smiles.  If Ross and Reihan have developed a “Strange New Respect” for certain paleos, including myself, that might have something to do with certain paleos treating their ideas (even the Big ones) with respect rather than tut-tutting and pretty blatantly attempting to tar them in the eyes of “respectable” conservatives through association with someone widely loathed in the “mainstream” but who was a brilliant political analyst and an unjustly maligned figure.  More later.