The American Conservative

Since some liberals have (only half-jokingly) sometimes spoken of Obama in messianic terms, and his childhood associations with Islam have become fodder for discussion, it is probably not helpful to him to talk about him by using Muad’Dib references.  (Link via Yglesias)

He [Buruma] marveled over Ramadan’s mix of anti-globalist fervor and ultra-conservative cultural views. “In American terms,” Buruma remarked, “he is a Noam Chomsky on foreign policy and a Jerry Falwell on social affairs.” ~Paul Berman

So, in other words, he’s rather like…me?  Well, not quite.  For starters, my grandfather did not found the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a piece of information that any cursory introduction to Ramadan always mentions, but which Berman has failed to bring up in the first page and a half of his miniature biography).  Of course, this description of Ramadan doesn’t tell us much about him, since the religion and tradition he wants to conserve are radically different from the religion and tradition that I want to conserve.  Incidentally, Berman does not go into much detail about why Ramadan was denied an entry visa when he tried to come to this country.  It was denied because the government claimed he gave material support to Palestinian terrorists.  Now it may be that the government is wrong, but you would think that something like that would be worth mentioning early on. 

Anyway, there is nothing that strange or marvelous about a combination of social and cultural conservatism and ferocious anti-globalism and anti-imperialism.  Indeed, the two pretty much go hand in hand.  “Don’t Tread On Me” and “mind your own business” are saying more or less the same thing with slightly different emphases.  It is only because of the weird confluence in a few Western countries of the battered remnants of classical liberalism with social and cultural traditionalism (a combination of the interests of capital and cultural capital, you might say) that those who are (at least rhetorically and symbolically) culturally conservative at home endorse the whirlwind of “creative destruction” sweeping over the world and devastating, er, “enriching” everyone else’s cultures.  Perhaps this is because these people see this process as a creation of “our” culture and therefore a demonstration of our culture’s vitality or value, but then they have to ignore that this creation acts rather like a nihilistic parricide against the very culture that raised it up in the first place. 

The more fiercely conservative you are about your religion, your culture, its habits, morals and traditions, the more likely you are to regard all forms of globalism and globalisation–political, economic, cultural–as perverse, destructive and hostile to your “vision of order” and your way of life.  Opposition to hegemonism and globalisation on the one hand and opposition to cultural decay and fragmentation on the other are a natural pair.  Support for their opposites (with some qualifications in the realm of foreign policy) forms another natural pair.  The paleocon combination is the normal, relatively more common conservative response to these phenomena around the world.  The pairings of social democracy/cultural hedonism and economic liberalism/cultural conservatism are extremely weird and abnormal.  It doesn’t actually make sense for people who want to preserve tradition to support international capitalism with the enthusiasm that many conservatives do, and indeed some “conservatives” today not only see the contradiction but decide that they are quite happy to let tradition fall by the wayside for the most part.  That is the outcome of the fraud of “fusionism”: the decision to discard virtue and to start a torrid affair with “economic dynamism.”  The marriage of liberty and virtue that ”fusionism” was supposed to represent and defend did not take account of that ”other woman,” which we might also call “growth.”  For that matter, it doesn’t make much sense for people who believe social solidarity is extremely important to endorse rampant individualism in social and cultural matters.  Both are like patients suffering from ulcers who believe that drinking acid will help with the cure.  These combinations exist only in fully industrialised Western societies and map onto no other alignments anywhere on earth.

In his contribution to the ever-widening discussion of Ghostbusters, Fletch and Reihan’s fun article about the latter, Yglesias wrote:

Mass market comedy, as seen in Hollywood films, strikes me as a pretty good partner for post-Goldwater conservatism. Comedy, to be funny, usually requires the skewering of the powerful in some sense. But the mass culture marketing demands that your product not actually do much to challenge prevailing ideas in the world. It’s a bit of a paradoxical situation, but it nicely mirrors the efforts of a political ideology designed to further entrench the privileges of the country’s wealthy elite and its white Christian majority and somehow do so in the name of anti-elitism.

Ross took umbrage at this and responded:

The idea that white, middle-class Christian Americans, simply by virtue of being part of our country’s “white Christian majority,” never have any legitimate grievances against the American political system has a long and distinguished pedigree on the left.

I understand what Ross means here, and he’s right to scoff (as I think he is) at the implication that the “white Christian majority” somehow rules the roost in this country.  A large part of the Republican coalition exists today because this is untrue and demonstrably so: it is because much of the “white Christian majority” has acquiesced or been made to acquiesce in the losses to cultural liberalism that conservative Christians mobilised politically and began trying to create a political response to these cultural reverses.  Another idea that has enjoyed circulation on the left is the What’s the Matter With Kansas-style complaint that middle and working-class social conservatives act against their own economic self-interest in backing the GOP, which such observers as Thomas Frank deem to be ”irrational” (because voting on something other than economic matters is always ”irrational” to such people).  There is a sense in which it is true that these voters support the GOP despite the damage GOP-backed policies do to their communities, businesses and wages (it is also true that they back the GOP because they have tended to assume, with good reason, that Democratic policies would do more damage), but it is not really possible to complain about aggrieved cultural conservatives who are so alienated by cultural liberalism that they vote against their own best economic interests and also complain that these cultural conservatives enjoy some default hegemonic status because they happen to belong to the demographic entity of “white Christian majority” (which never acts as a cohesive or unified bloc in any way). 

Even so, Ross might sharpen his reply to Yglesias by noting, among other things, that only some parts of the “political ideology” of conservatism are dedicated to defending the interests of the “white Christian majority” (though it is apparently necessary to wrap this in the fluffy, inoffensive language of “Judeo-Christian values” or just “values”), while other, probably more influential parts of today’s political conservative movement are more or less dedicated to that wealthy elite privilege-entrenching Yglesias mentions.  This comes in place of, and at the expense of, the interests of middle and working-class white Christians.  The relatively clever bit of the political movement today is how it manages to convince these people, at least temporarily, that their interests are profoundly implicated by the forging of new free trade pacts, unending mass immigration and perpetual war and all other policies endorsed or tolerated by corporations and the moneyed interest.  More often than not, these constituencies don’t really buy these arguments, but probably think that an alliance with corporate interests and the rest of the open borders lobby is necessary to remain politically competitive and thus allows them to engage in their rearguard political actions against cultural dissolution.  Their disappointment with Mr. Bush is therefore extremely acute, because there has been and continues to be a great deal of working for corporate interests and waging the perpetual war and very little, save perhaps the bizarre Schiavo episode, that seems to have much to do with either the “values” or interests of the white married Christian voters of this country.  These voters made their corrupt bargain in 2000 and again in 2004 and are annoyed that there has been no payoff.  A movie highlighting those tensions and conflicts might be quite interesting, even if it wouldn’t necessarily be very funny.

The foundation published Ramadan’s book To Be a European Muslim in 1999, and it enjoyed a modest success. To Be a European Muslim was regarded as a thoughtful argument for healthy new relations between old-stock non-Muslim Europe and the new-stock immigrant Muslim population. Daniel Pipes in the United States was among the expert observers who offered applause–though, if you visit Pipes’s website, you will see that, ever since his initial review, Pipes has been posting additional remorseful observations about how wrong he was, and what could possibly have gotten into him? ~Paul Berman

Berman’s essay, which is more like a small book, on Tariq Ramadan may or may not be worth reading in full (I have just waded in and I am not sure that I will finish), but this remark about Pipes was interesting.  Pipes is, of course, the embodiment of neocon Arabophobic Islamophilia.  No, I’m not kidding.  When they do not happen to live in the immediate vicinity of the Levant, Islamic fundamentalists have had few better allies–both conscious and unwitting–than neoconservatives.    

Pipes himself peddles all the standard pro-Islamic myths or exaggerations: Islam as “religion of peace,” Islam as guardian of Greek learning in the middle ages, medieval Islamic civilisation as a Golden Age of rationality and tolerance, and so on and so forth.  He is also ardently in favour of attempts to forcibly “reform” the Islamic world from the outside and supports all efforts to crush as many Arab states as possible in the process.  He believes that Islam is essentially good, but has gone awry somewhere and must be pummeled and shaped by outside intervention to return to its pristine goodness.  It is impossible to understand the creation of a word like “Islamofascism” without understanding just how deeply neocons have embraced this myth of the peaceful, enlightened Islamic world and their narrative of a small fraction of that world that has gone astray.  While the word is intended to conflate and confuse multiple, mutually opposed groups and states, this conflation is done for specific policy reasons, one of which is to target all forces hostile to Israel and to create an ideological identifier for all of them.  The word itself implies and its users constantly reiterate that Islam itself is fine and no problem at all; there is nothing inherent in it that should or could lead to what they called “Islamofascism.”  As they are obsessed with telling us (and as Joseph Bottum insists on claiming again now, citing Bernard Lewis), modern jihadis are not just supposed to be theoretically totalitarian but can be tied to 20th century totalitarian ideologies as a matter of intellectual genealogy, and furthermore they will claim that jihadism is a political ideology.  Hence Islamofascism, which is something that a secular audience can more readily grasp.  Last year I proposed an explanation for why neocons do this:

For secular people like these prominent neocons, it is horrifying to consider the possibility that some people have motivations that cannot be explained in secular language, because they, lacking in religious imagination of any kind, are at a loss to even begin to really understand what motivates a jihadi.  Even when they acknowledge the supposed goal of Paradise or the religious nature of the duty these people believe themselves to be carrying out, it is always with a certain level of incomprehension, almost as if they cannot really accept that anyone not attached to some intelligible ideology firmly bounded in this world really exists.  Their inability to understand the religious desire for transcendence in some of its most appalling forms stems, I suspect, in no small part from their own depressingly optimistic and immanentist ideology.  Their inability to understand a drive for religious purity and intolerance of other religions as anything other than fascism stems in part from their own reflexive commitments to religious pluralism and a latent or not-so-latent hostility to dogmatic Christianity: everything not on the side of pluralism and “freedom” somehow all gets pushed into a big box called fascism.     

In any case, it is not surprising that Pipes would have had a soft spot for someone like Tariq Ramadan, especially pre-9/11, because in the late ’90s encouraging Muslim immigration into Europe (like encouraging Third World immigration into any Western country) was quite natural for neocons, who were, after all, leading advocates of intervening in the Balkans on behalf of Muslims (no bigoted Westerners were they!) and calling for Turkish entry into the EU.  (The argument for Turkish entry was a twofer for the neocons: they were able to idealise a “democratic” Islamic country while also mocking the small-minded Europeans.)  Just as they have winked and nodded approvingly at Chechen terrorism, they endorsed the entry of mujahideen into Europe for the greater glory of killing Serbs.  Just as it had been fashionable in England to romanticise the Algerian rebel Abd al Qadir because he was killing Frenchmen (though they would take a rather dim view of locals rebelling against their authority some twenty-five years later), it became acceptable to write admiringly about the self-determination of Bosnian and Albanian Muslims.  Neocon outrage against jihadis, such as it is, is really more that of a jilted lover than that of a dedicated foe.  When they lament the jihadi threat, you can almost hear them saying, “Come on, guys, we’ve had such good times together.  Remember when the KLA staged the Racak massacre and we pretended to believe it?  That was great.  We should get the gang back together.”

554 years ago today, Constantinople, the God-guarded City, the Queen of Cities, fell to the assault of the forces of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II.  Three days of pillage and rapine followed.  The Byzantine Empire came to an end after 1,123 years.

Update: Paul Cella has a good commemoration here.  

Second Update: Dr. Trifkovic also has a very good piece on the Fall of Constantinople.

News media world-wide described the event as a step in overcoming Russia’s tragic history. The New York Times called the merger “the symbolic end of Russia’s civil war.” But the reality is far more complicated. Not only are there theological and moral issues at stake, but there is also the suspicion among some that Mr. Putin is building new networks of influence by using the church to reach out to Russian émigré communities all over the world. ~Nadia Kizenko

I imagine that there will be a more proper official response to Prof. Kizenko’s unfortunate article than my various blog posts, but until then I want to say a few more things about this.  People at church on Sunday who had seen the article were upset by this, and they regarded it very poorly.  While Prof. Kizenko may encourage those intent on breaking away from the Russian Orthodox Church, which would be a terrible thing for all, she has certainly not persuaded anyone.  One reason is that her article is so thoroughly inaccurate.  Perhaps she felt the need to give the story a political spin to make it attractive to the editors at WSJ.  Perhaps those editors twisted or manipulated her words to give them the worst possible meaning.  I do not know the full story about that, but what I do know is that Prof. Kizenko has misrepresented or misunderstood central issues and matters of fact in the reconciliation of the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church.  The reality is complicated and the history of the negotiations much more involved and drawn out than she claims, but it is Prof. Kizenko who has opted to tell a simple story of political meddling and “Putin’s acquisition.”

As for the charge that Mr. Putin would like to reach out to emigre communities, I’m sure this is true.  This is hardly some sinister plot.  Many countries often look to build up networks of communication and support with their Diasporan communities abroad, and as I have suggested in the past this probably was a motive of Mr. Putin in supporting the reconciliation.  In any case, his motives in the matter are beside the point.  An important point to be made here is that the emigre communities of the Russian Church Abroad are hardly so large as to constitute a major resource that the oil-rich master of the Kremlin would make much effort to “acquire” it, to use the Journal‘s unfortunate phrase.  Certainly, no one familiar with the Synod would confuse it with having the rather larger financial resources of some other Orthodox jurisdictions.  The gain for Putin and the Moscow Patriarchate in purely wordly terms is very, very small.  Prof. Kizenko’s claim that Moscow now will have access to a “ready-made network of 323 parishes and 20 monasteries in the U.S. alone, and over a million church members in 30 countries [bold mine-DL]” is simply not true.  Would that we had so many parishes and monasteries!  Would that we had so many members!  That would be wonderful news indeed, but it would certainly be news to us.  

The numbers of members worldwide in Synod parishes come to something like 150,000 people.  News stories are frequently inflating the number of parishioners in our churches.  Certainly, if there are so many of us in America alone, it is remarkable that our representation in the greater Chicago area–one of our archdiocesan centers–should be limited to our cathedral and one modest parish.  The ROCOR parish directory is available to anyone who would care to peruse it.  There you will find that, counting parishes and monasteries together, there are only 111 Russian Orthodox Church Abroad churches, monasteries and hermitages in the United States, roughly one third as many as Prof. Kizenko claimed.  In the rest of the world, including what were the ROCOR parishes in Russia, there are 126 listed churches and monasteries outside the U.S., bringing the global total to 237.

More worrisome and dangerous is the hint that there is something suspect about the loyalty of Russian Orthodox, as if they take their orders from the Kremlin.  This sort of argument is absurd when it is applied to Catholics, it is absurd when applied to Mormons, and it is absurd when it is applied to us.  Priests are being cast as agents of political influence, and Orthodox parishes are being made out to be conduits of Moscow’s power.  This is shameful and untrue.  This would be insulting enough, but it also revives ugly and tiresome stereotypes about the Orthodox that we are unacceptably submissive to state control or that state authorities have some undue control over the operations of the Church.  The hoary charge of Caesaropapism lurks just out of view, and with it the claim that we are not much more than “the emperor’s men” or, in this case, “Putin’s men.”  Such compromises have happened occasionally, rarely, in the history of the Church during times of great trials.  Many of the heretical emperors exercised such excessive interference in the affairs of the Church, but this has been so far from the normal state of affairs that it is amazing that this stereotype has endured.

Select presidential candidates respond to a query from The Jerusalem Post about how they understand the importance of the U.S.-Israel strategic relationship.  McCain does his best to leap to the front with an exuberant endorsement of Israel as an ally (you have to admire the “sacred soil” line, considering McCain’s general dislike of religious conservatives here and around the world), and Romney works in his “caliphate” shtick–who can forget that Hizbullah dream of a caliphate?  Clinton avoids these more spirited efforts, but puts in a respectable amount of abasement (nice touch with the nihilism reference).  Obama does his best to keep up, but he will continue to be dogged by his stubborn insistence on referring to Palestinians as if they were human.  Richardson says all the “right” things, and even manages to work in a New Mexico reference!

After falling over himself to declare his utmost devotion, Brownback makes sure to throw in at the end: “To be sure, Israel has problems and difficulties, and my support for any particular Israeli policy or government would not be unconditional.”  He makes sure to end on a variant of his boilerplate slogan: “However, my administration would always reaffirm that at its heart Israel is good, and because of that, Israel can help America and the world be great.”  It was bad enough when he used this sort of saccharine talk about America alone, but if this is going to be a characteristic of a Brownback foreign policy I think we could probably do without it.

Consider Iraq. The split among conservatives has widened since Saddam was toppled in the spring of 2003. Traditional realists continue to put their trust in containment, and reject nation-building on the grounds that we lack both a moral obligation and the requisite knowledge of Arabic, Iraqi culture and politics, and Islam. Supporters of the war still argue that, in an age of mega-terror, planting the seeds of liberty and democracy in the Muslim Middle East is a reasonable response to the poverty, illiteracy, authoritarianism, violence and religious fanaticism that plagues the region. ~Peter Berkowitz

From these sentences, I would conclude that Mr. Berkowitz doesn’t like this latter group at all and enjoys making their position sound even more ridiculous than it is.  Somehow, I don’t think that’s the case, but he certainly makes the supporters of the war sound preposterous. 

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We cannot acquiesce in independence movements where independence means a return to savagery or Communist domination. ~Sen. Barry Goldwater

Earlier today I had written a fairly lengthy commentary on this item taken from a 1961 National Review Goldwater essay, but my browser cut out on me at an inopportune moment and all of it (plus the time I had spent writing it) was lost.  What follows will be a shorter, more pointed version of what I was going to say. Read More…

The Republicans gave up a lot to get Kennedy, particularly in agreeing to “Z” visas that would allow the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants already in the United States to stay as legal residents and eventually seek citizenship. ~Fred Barnes