The American Conservative

In tonight’s debate McCain lambasted Ron Paul for “isolationism” of the kind that “led to caused WWII.”  Since the topic in question was the war in Iraq, James notes that this was an absurd comparison.  But leave aside how far-fetched the comparison was.  Just consider the thinking behind this.  Interventionists routinely complain that their opponents “blame America first,” but there is no more obvious attempt to blame America for something for which our country was not responsible than the outrageous lie that our “failure” to ratify the Treaty of Versailles or our “failure” to join the League of Nations–the usual charges against American “isolationism”–led to caused WWII.  If this were a true charge, that would be one thing, but it isn’t even accurate. 

Let’s be very clear about this: WWII in Europe came out of revanchism stoked by resentments over the post-WWI settlements and in both Europe and Asia resulted from the territorial revisionism of second-tier powers as they tried to become great powers.  The way that WWI ended and the way the effectively losing side was treated had a significant impact on interwar political developments inside Germany that had nothing to do with U.S. foreign policy during the 1920s and 1930s.  To the extent that America was involved with German affairs during this period, we were attempting to lighten the burden of the reparations and ameliorate the radicalising effects of the Treaty on German public opinion.  Had America belonged to the League of Nations, it would not have made the League any more effective at deterring Japanese aggression in Asia, Italian aggression in Africa or German aggression in Europe.  Furthermore, it is a caricature and a distortion of interwar U.S. foreign policy to refer to it as “isolationist.”  Our government was regularly involved in diplomatic activity, international relief efforts and international renegotiations of the terms of reparations under Versailles.  The Dawes Plan was not the product of an “isolationist” government, whatever you might think of its merits.  The Kellogg-Briand Treaty that “outlawed war” was quite stupid and pointless, but it was not the product of “isolationism.”  When hawks such as McCain complain about “isolationism,” they are complaining about a refusal to send Americans to fight and die in wars that usually have nothing to do with the United States.  By that standard, then, America was “isolationist” in this period, and we should be proud of it.  But by any honest assessment of U.S. foreign policy during this era, “isolationism” is a complete misnomer for what happened under the Harding, Coolidge and even Hoover administrations. 

Update: Via Cilizza, I see that McCain also said something else to Ron Paul, which I must have missed at the time: “We allowed Hitler to come to power with that kind of attitude and appeasement.”  Of course, “we” did not “allow” Hitler to come to power, since Hitler came to power by being appointed Chancellor following elections in which his party won a plurality.  The attitudes and views of foreigners were utterly immaterial to Hitler’s rise to power.  Practically everything McCain said was just plain wrong.

This House has noted the Prime Minister’s remarkable transformation from Stalin to Mr Bean in the past few weeks. ~Vince Cable

Via James Forsyth

While I’m on the topic of pro-Ron Paul open letters, I should note that George Ajjan has written an open letter to Arab-Americans on behalf of Ron Paul.

At the same time, however, there was always a very real danger of identifying – confusing, really – the state with the Kingdom of God. Indeed, the actual history of Roman Orthodox symphonia is a decidedly mixed bag. Our calendar is full of saints who suffered exile and even torture at the hands of the “most pious Christian Emperors” (Athanasius, Chrysostom, and Maximus to name but three). The point is that Orthodox Christians throughout history have lived all over the world under quite diverse political circumstances. While Byzantine symphonia holds an honored place within the history of the Church, one cannot claim with any theological seriousness that this is the only Orthodox political philosophy. ~Clark Carlton

Via Rod

Hold on a minute.  I’m grateful to Prof. Carlton for his advocacy on behalf of Ron Paul, I appreciated his column and I agree that Orthodox Christians are not obliged to endorse a political theology that was fully developed in the ninth century.  I heartily endorse his view that different national cultures are suited to different kinds of political constitutions.  Even if it were possible, an Orthodox monarchy here would be unworkable.  Nonetheless, there are a few problems with the above statement.  First, the idea of symphoneia is predicated on the assumption that the state, even when it is referred to as the “Christ-loving commonwealth,” is clearly distinct from the Church and that it is the Church that foreshadows, anticipates and announces the Kingdom of God here on earth.  Whenever there is a danger of  identifying the state with the Kingdom, this is a result of the breakdown of the proper balance between the state and the Church laid down in the classic expression of the theory of symphoneia in the Epanagoge.  Second, I agree that the practice of symphoneia was not always ideal with respect to the independence of the Church, but the emperors who exiled or brutalised or killed some of the holy Fathers were typically heretical.  St. Athanasios’ greatest quarrels were with the semi-Arian Constantius, though he did also fall out of favour with St. Constantine early on in his career on occasion.  The case of St. Maximos is the most straightforward of the three mentioned–his trial and exile were conducted by officials of Constans II, a monothelete emperor, although technically Maximos was tried on a secular charge of treason for allegedly aiding the Islamic invasion of North Africa (a charge that was never verified or documented).  The treatment of St. John Chrysostom, sent into exile in the Caucasus where he died, is something of an exception to the rule of how Orthodox bishops were treated in the empire.  His deposition and exile had as much to do with the wrangling for influence among the eastern patriarchal sees, particularly the disputes over the alleged Origenism of the Tall Brothers that Patriarch Theophilos stirred up, as it had to do with the empress Eudoxia or the imperial government. 

I am also on record doubting the distinction Prof. Carlton makes between the Lockean heritage and the Enlightenment heritage of the Continent, but I do agree that there is a sharp tension or even opposition between Lockean assumptions about man and society and those held by the Fathers.  I think Prof. Carlton and I are firmly in agreement in our shared Jeffersonianism and our view that limited government is most desirable from the perspective of a flourishing Orthodox Christianity in America.  It will probably drive some of my readers up the wall, but I fully agree with this statement:

The United States has certainly become a threat to our Orthodox brethren around the world. Witness the US-backed persecution of our brethren in Kosovo and Palestine. Certainly the Christians in Iraq are much worse off now than they were before the US invasion. Furthermore, if current policies continue in place, we will be headed for an inevitable confrontation with a resurgent Russia. Our children and grand-children may be in for another Cold War – only this time we may just be the Evil Empire.   

Rasmussen shows that Huckabee now “leads” Romney 28-25 in Iowa.  Like Obama, his “lead” is still within the margin of error, but as the latest symbol of his tremendous surge of support and Romney’s collapse it is significant (Rasmussen calls it a “stunning change”).  In Rasmussen polling, Huckabee has jumped 12 points during the month of November.  Before too long, pundits who have just finished writing, “Did Romney peak too soon?” analyses may start writing the same thing about Huckabee.  Now it’s time for fun with crosstabs!

There has been a lot of speculation about how Obama’s stronger support among first-time caucus-goers and younger voters, particularly college students, would affect turnout for him on Jan. 3.  (Some have noted that the Christmas holiday break actually works to Obama’s advantage because it spreads out the college students to their hometowns and boosts his representation in each part of the state.)  The assumption has been that younger voters and first-time caucus-goers, who are often the same people, are more unreliable and cannot be expected to show up in sufficient numbers on caucus night.  Romney has a similar problem.  For some inexplicable reason, young voters embrace Romney and prefer him over other candidates by a huge margin (he gets 45% among 18-29 year olds, compared to Giuliani’s 20 and Huckabee’s 15), but in every other age group, except 65+, Romney trails Huckabee by a statistically significant margin.  Huckabee leads among former caucus-goers 30-23, but trails among first-time caucus-goers 29-26; if turnout is going to be as anemic as expected this cycle, Romney may be in more trouble than it appears.  In short, if the students and first-time attendees don’t turn out for Romney, it is much more unlikely that he can win.  It is probably the case that Romney’s support is so high among younger voters because he has saturated their media market and his name recognition is much higher than many of the other candidates, which means that his broad-but-shallow support may be even more shallow than we thought. 

Huckabee also leads among most income groups , and Romney, strangely enough, polls best among <$20K earners (36%).  The only income groups Romney wins are the <$20K and $40-60K earners.  The more "downscale" the voters, the more competitive Romney is with Huckabee, which seems counterintuitive.  Among those earning $60K or more, Huckabee leads Romney by no less than six points.  Huckabee's populism may scare away the donors, but it doesn't seem to trouble the higher earners in Iowa all that much.  (Giuliani receives by far his strongest support among the >$100K earners at 22%, as does Paul at 9%, and so they have more of an effect on this group of voters, which could conceivably have opted for Romney if Giuliani weren’t in the race.)  Huckabee also does respectably well as a second choice at 16%, roughly even with Thompson and Giuliani and just behind Romney (21%). 

Where the Giuliani and Thompson voters (the next two largest blocs) go if either group is unable to reach the minimum level of support in any given district will probably determine the final outcome.  The shared interest of Giuliani and Huckabee in defeating Romney is well-known by now, so an unholy alliance between those two campaigns could be enough to propel Huckabee to victory.  Thompson can help Romney, but at 11% he doesn’t have enough raw numbers to put Romney over the top.  Besides, like Giuliani, his Iowa organisation is woefully weak.  The strength of his organisation may be what saves Romney in the end, if it can bring in enough of the disorganised Thompson and Giuliani voters.  Given Huckabee’s public, slightly harsh sparring with Thompson, it is unlikely that he will be the second choice of many of the latter’s supporters.

And no, I’m not convinced by arguments that our intervention in WWI brought about WWII; our role, other than urging France and Britain to mitigate their vengeance, was fairly minor. ~Megan McArdle

It was a minor role, if deciding the outcome of the war was minor.  Here’s the thing: intervening in WWI was fundamentally a terrible mistake because it was not America’s fight and our involvement served no national interest.  It was not wrong primarily because it contributed directly to the creation of the awful post-war settlement and the consequences of that settlement, though it did do that by providing the Allies with the needed manpower to end the war on terms unfavourable to the Central Powers, but because we had no business being in that war.  The consequences of our entry into WWI being what they were, you would have thought that later administrations would not make the same mistakes (no luck there), but it was possible to know that intervention in WWI was wrong in 1917 (and the vast majority of Americans opposed entering the war).  With WWII, once the Japanese attacked and Germany declared war staying out of the war was no longer possible (obviously), which is why Roosevelt’s earlier policies that drew us into the war are so damning of his administration.  As in WWI, the wars in Asia and Europe were not our fights, but Washington saw to it that they became so. 

McArdle continues later:

Libertarians should be inherently more suspicious of the American government’s ability to make things better than other groups–but by the same token, it seems to me that they should be inherently more suspicious of repulsive states such as the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.

All right, be suspicious.  How being more suspicious of Saddam Hussein would lead someone–allegedly on the basis of libertarian principles–to endorse a war of aggression is simply beyond me.  There’s suspicion, and then there’s irrational paranoia.  The idea that Hussein’s regime plausibly posed a threat to this country was fantastical.  The fact that a lot of people shared this fantasy did not make it any more reasonable.  In any case, how do you go from being suspicious of a regime to advocating aggression?  Isn’t the principle of non-aggression supposed to be at the core of libertarianism?  Or has that, too, now ceased to be trendy?

There’s a lot to be said for questioning the cultural conservative bona fides of someone endorsed by Chuck Norris, Ric Flair and Ted Nugent.  Reihan is correct, no doubt, that Huckabee’s embrace of these celebrities fits into a larger appeal to his natural base of supporters (it is probably true that the people who respond most strongly to Huckabee’s mix of populism and social conservatism are also going to be disproportionately fans of celebrities such as these), so that these “macho antics,” as he calls them, serve a kind of symbolic stabilising and reassuring function.  There is also something less forced and ridiculous about Huckabee’s embrace of Chuck Norris, who, lest we forget, is an evangelical Christian (you can visit the “Christian area” of his website here) and is now also a WorldNetDaily columnist, than there is about Giuliani’s newly-discovered faux love of NASCAR.   

P.S.  How is it that no one has made a Huckabee-related Dodgeball joke yet?  “Thank you, Chuck Norris.”  “No, thank you, Governor Huckabee.”  And so on.

Update: GetReligion noted Norris’ Christianity in an earlier post.  Peter Suderman sees the associations as part of “the VH1 effect”: 

This is, in large part, due to the way the pop culture obsessions of previous decades are quickly being recycled into icons of kitsch. Call it the VH1 effect. What was racy, nihilistic, or bloodthirsty in the mid 1980s is now fodder for our generation’s special brand of appreciative snark. Jerry Falwell might have gone nuts over a violent Chuck Norris film during the Reagan era, but the man barely causes shrugs from Tony Perkins in 2007.

Peter’s observation also points to something else more sinister: social conservatives’ apparent willingness to acquiesce in things they regarded as outrageous just twenty years earlier.  Some would call this keeping up with the times, but I should think that social conservatives ought to see it as a series of capitulations.  One result of these repeated capitulations to cultural degeneration is to desperately seek any rallying points that are available, which entails still more compromises.

It is not yet available, and it is rather difficult to get information about its contents, but an interesting new book is coming out next year on Orthodox theology: The Cambridge Companion to Christian Orthodox Theology.  I do know that it will have a submission from Prof. Papanikolaou of Fordham, who recently organised a conference on Orthodox readings of Augustine (whose papers will be published in a volume edited by Papanikolaou and Prof. Demacopoulos) and who has also written a work on the Trinitarian theology of Lossky and Zizioulas, Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism and Divine-Human Communion.  I would have very much liked to attend the Augustine conference, but the timing was no good for me.  Another excellent (and expensive) collection of papers that came out in recent years, unrelated to Prof. Papanikolaou, was the volume Byzantine Orthodoxies, edited by Prof. Louth, which has a wonderful paper on the Arian controversy by Fr. John Behr and another on the Synodikon.

So Publisher’s Weekly has reviewed Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism and given it generally good marks.  It is a brief review (located all the way at the bottom of the page), and the points that it highlights mostly sound like a conventional right-liberal/conservative analysis of fascism.  I don’t say that dismissively.  I think right-liberal and conservative analyses of fascism that identify it as a leftist ideology are absolutely right, but this is also not a terribly new interpretation.  Recognising the similarities between American progressive eugenics and Nazi eugenics or between the New Deal and fascist corporatism is all well and good (as we all know, the latter derives from Old Right critiques of Roosevelt), and if these things can be popularised more that will be a real contribution.  I remain skeptical that it will make the kind of fine distinctions that such a subject needs, but then I am hardly a Goldberg fan.  Still, goodness knows that it can’t hurt to acquaint a modern audience with a somewhat more rigorous understanding of fascism in an era where such nonsense words as Islamofascism prevail.   

If the book does describe JFK’s “cult of personality” as something that “reeks of fascist political theater,” as the review claims, I think Goldberg will have a hard time making that claim stick.  The Fuehrerprinzip and a cult based around the Leader are defining elements of fascism, but what really distinguishes fascist cults of personality is the staged mass “political liturgy.”  Unless we keep that distinction in mind, there is nothing to distinguish democratic, communist or authoritarian cults of personality from the fascist version.    

From what the review tells me, it is pretty much what I expected.  Back in March I wrote:

Goldberg’s argument will probably end up making a certain amount of historical sense, because he will largely be echoing what other students of this question have already said. 

There may be something new in the book that makes it the “very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care” that Goldberg has said that it is.  He has said that previous writers “never carried the argument out as far as I have in the American context nor, needless to say, have they accounted for more recent American politics.”  For that reason I will gladly take up the challenge, even though I think my criticisms of the book–based on the description available to the public–have already been among the more informed and, for the most part, among the more generous.

But Georgia, on the other hand, presents a set of dilemmas which are lesser in scope, which have a smaller impact on U.S. policy because of the willingness of much of the U.S. media to ignore developments in Georgia which do not suit dominant U.S. paradigms and ambitions. Of course, objectively speaking, the geopolitical risks and moral embarrassments involved in supporting the Saakashvili regime in Georgia should be condemned more than those involved in supporting Musharraf because they are to a great extent gratuitous: they are not compelled by truly vital U.S. interests.

The risks for the U.S. in Georgia are essentially twofold. The first is already occurring: the Saakashvili administration could become so authoritarian at home that it will reduce the entire U.S. democracy promotion agenda in the former Soviet Union to a farce. The second is much more serious: It is that faced with growing domestic discontent, Saakashvili will seek to rally the nation behind him through an attack on one of the two Russian-backed separatist territories, Abkhazia or (more likely) South Ossetia. The president could gamble that faced with the humiliation of seeing a favored client crushed by Russia, the U.S. will feel impelled to come to Georgia’s aid.

If Saakashvili ever does make that grave decision, it will be the last one he makes as Georgian president. For in practical military terms, there is almost nothing that the U.S. could or would do to help Georgia in these circumstances. Nonetheless, this would indeed represent a humiliation for the U.S., as well as a very great and totally unnecessary crisis in U.S.-Russian relations. It would also have serious implications for Russian behavior in other areas of truly vital U.S. interest, like Iran.

Fortunately, in the case of Georgia the danger of this happening is to some extent mitigated by the fact that—at least judging by the remarks of European officials—recent events have made it much less likely that Georgia will join NATO. Therefore one reason for Russian hostility to Georgia will fade, or at least not grow further.

Above all, Georgia illustrates a fundamental historical truth about client states: a great power should only adopt them when it has no other choice to defend vital interests, or when they are strong enough to act as an effective buffer against a real enemy. Pakistan meets the first of these criteria; Georgia meets neither. Georgia might qualify as at least an important interest if there were a real chance of the energy of Central Asia (and not just Azerbaijan) flowing through Georgia to the West. But for a long time to come, a mixture of geographical reality, legal ambiguity, and Russian, Iranian and Chinese power seems almost certain to prevent this from happening. ~Anatol Lieven

Via James Poulos

James has his own thoughts on Georgia here.