Almost 36% of Maine respondents say that they are conservatives, and maybe in some ways they are. However, this tells me that the label has no conventional political or policy content for most of these people, but serves a different function. Using the label conveys how they wish to be seen by others. It is a cultural marker that most of these people are using to describe an attitude or disposition that they believe they have or want to have. It does not signal their agreement with movement conservative arguments, and it definitely does not reveal sympathy for a national Republican agenda. To the extent that people still associate the word with prudence, caution and restraint, they are making more of a statement about their personal habits (or what they would like those habits to be) than they are expressing adherence to an ideology. One reason there is such a disconnect between the number of self-identified conservatives and the fairly constant leftward drift of national politics is that people who are effectively saying they have a conservative disposition do not necessarily share the goals of ideological activists bearing the same name. This is most obviously true of “conservative” minorities who are actually ideologically on the left in their voting and beliefs, but it applies to others as well.

Yglesias and Kilgore focus on the high percentage of blacks identifying themselves as conservatives (29%), but the criticism could be applied just as easily to the numbers for any of the other groups. I have sometimes wondered why so many people identify themselves as moderates. This is the second-largest group among whites, and the largest in all of the other groups. These are the people who make up the political center, but in their voting preferences almost all of the people who say that they are moderates vote for Democrats. Moderate is a label people take on to define themselves in opposition to what they regard as extreme and ideological thinking. They want to convey that they are reasonable, tolerant, open-minded people. Self-identifying moderates assume that to adopt one of the other labels is to commit to rigid, inflexible and unreasonable views. Thus you get four out of ten people adopting the moderate label while the overwhelming majority of them votes quite predictably for center-left candidates. Indeed, the moderate label masks how relatively left of center moderate voters tend to be.

I was thinking about the “center-right nation” claim the other day after I saw an item by David Boaz in which he was touting a poll result that Americans preferred smaller government and fewer services to larger government with more services by a hefty 58-38 margin. That sounds impressive until you realize that anyone openly running a sincere campaign for cutting services and shrinking government would not even get 38% of the vote today. People routinely say that they favor fewer government services in the abstract, but they don’t want to eliminate anything that benefits them. Paul Ryan has presented an impressive proposal to balance the budget and essentially eliminate the government’s entitlement liabilities over the long term, but everyone who has looked at it knows immediately that it is a political non-starter. Obviously, one reason why it is a non-starter is that there are simply too many constituencies benefiting from the programs that would be changed by Ryan’s proposal, but another reason is that for at least the last thirty years political conservatives have become steadily worse and worse at persuasion because they have allowed the “center-right nation” myth to make them complacent.

The “center-right nation” story has been something of a curse for conservatives, because it has convinced many of them that the public is automatically and instinctively on their side, and they keep relying on this to provide them with political success. If conservatives recognized that they are not facing a “center-right nation,” they wouldn’t necessarily be able to sell the public on proposals such as Ryan’s, but they would at least understand that they have to persuade a public that does not share their views. They might then realize that the public is not going to reward them simply for showing up and declaring their opposition to the other side.

This framing works very well for defenders of the policy being criticized, as it forces the critics to operate at a double disadvantage. They are first of all reacting to bad policy, which makes their arguments necessarily negative and more easily dismissed for that reason as mere “naysaying,” and second the critics must qualify the beginning of all their arguments with some emphasis on how much they, too, loathe the official enemy in said “war.” This means the critics are reduced to pragmatic and frequently much more complicated critiques that lack the rhetorical and emotional power of the simplistic, ideological line that the government is pushing, and they are reduced to arguments from circumstance, which tend not to pack the same punch as arguments from definition even when the latter are founded on falsehoods or, more often, on far more destructive half-truths.

How about social conservatives make their arguments without bringing God into it? By all means, let faith inform one’s values, but let reason inform one’s public arguments. ~Kathleen Parker

This is the standard Damon Linker line, which has always had the small problem that it doesn’t make sense. That’s not quite fair. It makes sense, provided that the goal is to keep religious people from making public arguments that have any force. Parker, like Linker, would likely deny that this is the goal. In Parker’s case, I expect that this is because she hasn’t thought through the implications. Were we to follow Parker’s model, we would on the one hand need to say that arguments informed by religious teaching are to some degree irrational by definition (use faith over here, but use reason in public, which implies that there is nothing rational about faith or that the two are not complementary). On the other hand, we would also have to say that our public arguments cannot invoke “values,” which are in any case derived from religious teaching and therefore unsuitable to public discourse. Even to the extent that “values” might be allowed, they would have to be “values” that do not conflict with pluralist, liberal “values.” This is the Social Gospel loophole, which permits the use of Christian discourse for left-liberal ends, but which clearly forbids any version or interpretation of Christian teaching that conflicts with these “values.”

The point is not that there are not secular arguments against abortion, to take the example Parker uses, as there clearly are. Secular people on the whole do not seem terribly interested in those arguments, nor do they show any more respect for them than they do to explicitly religious ones, because the issue is not the kind of argument being made but the moral and political conclusions that are being drawn. This may reflect the extent to which different political and philosophical traditions function as little more than tribes that use mutually unintelligible mythologies, in which the answers are all scripted and known before the inquiry begins. All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again….Debates cease to be an exercise in persuasion, and become instead an occasion for performance and expressing identity. Structuralists everywhere will be thrilled.

The point here is that social and religious conservatives should not have to truncate, abbreviate or deny their religious teachings when making public arguments, which is effectively what they would have to do if they are not to refer to God or religious teachings in public discourse. They could not in good conscience do so, but leaving that aside for a moment we should also acknowledge that it puts an undue burden on religious believers to insist that they leave out appeals to their core beliefs, which are or are supposed to be at the center of their understanding of man, society, creation and reason itself. It’s as if you said that liberals can make their arguments, but they must never refer to equality for any reason, but it is even more constricting than that. In the end, what Parker is saying religious conservatives should do is to accept the premises and terms of the debate that are hostile to their side before it begins, and then try to make an argument for their view under those constraints. As a matter of rhetoric and politics, this is a losing proposition. Once you have accepted fundamental assumptions of your opponents (and accepting that one can only use public reason in argument is to concede a fundamental liberal claim), you are merely negotiating the extent of your defeat.

Many modern conservatives will look at Parker’s statement and agree with it, because, as Rod reminds us of MacIntyre’s observation, “in America, all political arguments are among conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals.” This is true even of a great many religious conservatives, which is why time and again when religious conservatives are challenged in this way the best response many of them can muster is that “they have a right” to free speech and religious liberty. Indeed they do, but that is not nearly powerful enough and once again accepts–as most public pro-life rhetoric already does–that we must speak in terms of individual autonomy and individual rights. Perhaps that is the most telling thing of all, in that it acknowledges that we do not recognize appeals to God or obligations to God as being in any way authoritative, but we invest appeals to the self and the rights of the self with tremendous weight, which is a function of a culture that is egocentric and decidedly not theocentric.

“Congress voted yesterday to provide our troops with the funding and flexibility they need to protect our country,” Bush said in a statement Friday.

“Rather than mandate arbitrary timetables for troop withdrawals or micromanage our military commanders, this legislation enables our servicemen and women to follow the judgment of commanders on the ground,” he added. ~AFP

Once again, a mutant strain of Vietnam Syndrome has come to dominate the debate over the war.  Disillusioned Vietnam hawks have told a story about Vietnam that suits the interests of many groups, so it has become something of a consensus view.  According to this story, it was terrible micromanagers from Washington who doomed an otherwise “winnable” conflict to ultimate failure.  Because, you see, it was the White House selecting bombing targets, and not the collapse of ARVN, that led to the collapse of South Vietnam.  Mr. Bush decided long ago that no one would confuse him for a President who was extremely familiar with the details of his own war, and has made a fetish of his own hands-off approach to the war.  He is the Decider who prefers to defer to those under his command. 

Ever since 1975, it has been the mantra of most politicians, especially Republican politicians, that they will follow the judgements of military commanders during wartime and will essentially cede most decisionmaking to these commanders (all the better to wash their hands of whatever comes out of the conflict, I suppose).  Critics of the President, particularly Democratic members of Congress, have decided that their best course of action is to get into a contest with Mr. Bush to see who can follow the “commanders on the ground” more assiduously.  Mr. Bush’s failure, as Obama will tell us, is that he does not pay attention to the situation “on the ground,” while Mr. Bush will retort that he will not tolerate politicians (which apparently does not include himself) meddling in these affairs.  When it comes to a choice between Congress and the “commanders,” as Mr. Bush memorably told us not long ago, he is “the commander guy.” 

Obama has a point, as far as it goes, since Mr. Bush’s obliviousness is now proverbial, but speaking about “the ground” in Iraq has moved beyond an appeal to realism and a desire to measure results in the real world to a convenient trope that allows antiwar Democrats the room to claim that they are actually more hard-headed and tough-minded than Mr. Bush with respect to winning the war.  This approach may be quite appealing to some presidential candidates, since it seems to make it possible to be antiwar and in favour of a more vigorous, “effective” war at the same time.  It is understandable why everyone now wants to fixate on the reality “on the ground,” since so many of the tactical and administrative errors of the first four years have been a product of the administration’s old hostility to empirical evidence, history and any expertise that might contradict received ideological maxims, but the phrase itself has become a cliche–so much so that Mr. Bush has embraced it–and it has ceased to mean very much.  Indeed, “commanders on the ground” and “situation on the ground” are fast approaching the meaninglessness of such stock phrases as “support the troops,” “cut and run” and, everyone’s favourite, “we’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.” 

These phrases no longer refer to any actual coherent policy position, nor do they really refer back to anything in reality.  They are slogans used to say something in a less direct, but even more effective way.  When you want to say, “The administration is incompetent,” you say, “The President is ignoring the situation on the ground.”  Charges of incompetence are a dime a dozen in government, but this other accusation conveys the special quality of Mr. Bush’s incompetence–he is ignoring the situation on the ground.  That sounds much worse for Bush, which is why Democrats prefer to say this. 

Likewise, when you want to say, “We’re going to keep fighting this war forever,” you say, “We are following the advice of the commanders on the ground.”  It doesn’t matter what the advice of the commanders might actually be.  It doesn’t even matter whether the politicians actually follow that advice.  The commanders might unanimously call for withdrawal, but what matters is the attitude of the politician who expresses his respect and support for the decisions of the “commanders on the ground.”  This shows that he has the requisite hawkishness to be taken seriously on national security by people in the establishment. 

When you want to say, “Bow before the President,” you say, “Support the troops.”  We can tell this is the case because the phrase is quite often invoked at those moments when critics say something against the President.  Since virtually no one is saying anything against the troops, calls to “support the troops” might seem redundant, except that the phrase has next to nothing to do with the troops any longer.  There are uses of the phrase that may refer to actual troops, but very often this is almost incidental.  When you want to say, “I want to continue this war forever and ever,” you say, “We’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.”  Fighting forever is what this phrase logically entails, because it implies that “they” will attack us “here” if we stop fighting “over there,” which means that we can never be safe unless we keep fighting “over there” against “them.”  Instead of saying something as crazy as that, it is much better to cast the entire conflict in strictly defensive terms.    

So there is an obsession with this “ground” on which the commanders are operating and with which Mr. Bush has virtually no acquaintance.  Since Mr. Bush was once a National Guard aviator, perhaps his lack of attachment to “the ground” is understandable.  It seems to me that all the other commanders–those on the sea, for instance–must be feeling terribly hedged in and micromanaged, since it is only the “commanders on the ground” who are given this much flexibility and leeway.

Mitt Romney’s War: the total conflation of all Islamist movements. Not only is the Muslim Brotherhood not a jihadist organization, but its very lack of jihadiness is what spawned Ayman Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Suffice it to say that there is no caliphate on heaven or earth that will simultaneously satisfy Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, which goes a long way toward explaining why there is no concerted “worldwide jihadist effort” by these groups to establish one. ~Spencer Ackerman
Via Drum

Ackerman is right that Romney’s remarks in the debate make no sense, but they are worse than he thinks.  Not only is there “no caliphate on heaven or earth that will simultaneously satisfy Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood,” Hizbullah presumably wouldn’t even want  a caliphate at all, since the last intertwining of Shi’ism and ideas of having a khalifat as such was in Fatimid Egypt more than a few years ago.  Plus, the Fatimids were Ismailis (though not, strictly speaking, Seveners), and Hizbullah today is from the Imamiyyah or Twelver Shi’ite branch, which makes the likelihood of this predominant strain in Iranian and Lebanese Shi’ism indulging dreams of a restored caliphate in Cairo (where virtually no Shi’ites today dwell) even more remote.  

Not that anyone is keeping score, but I would like to point back to a pre-debate post in which I zeroed in on Romney’s foreign policy and historico-cultural ignorance on display in his speech at Yeshiva University.  In the debate Romney offered up the same “gibberish,” as Drum called it, that he offered in the speech.  Few, if any, have called him on it in the past when he has said ridiculous things about “the enemy,” and so he keeps on repeating them, because they give him the superficial appearance of knowledgeability and understanding.  There are no candidates on the Republican side, except perhaps Ron Paul, who would either know to correct Romney or who would feel any strong desire to do so.  In the view of most of the candidates who were up on that stage Thursday, Hizbullah and Hamas must be our enemies because they are Israel’s enemies, and so any lazy or overbroad concept that unite them all together under a single umbrella term will do. 

For some of the ridiculous candidates (Brownback and Huckabee), and the Rick Santorums of the world, the catch-all idea is “Islamic fascism” or “Islamofascism,” a phrase and a word respectively so stupid that they must win some sort of prize for being the most stupid of the current century.  Romney shares in their profound confusion (or deliberately misleading rhetoric) for the same reason: all these diverse and disparate groups must be brought together under a single, frightening label and they must be made out to be enemies of America, whether or not these descriptions are plausible, true or reasonable.  As has been stated by some of the biggest supporters of the term Islamofascism, its value lies in its vagueness and its all-purpose application: everyone even nominally Muslim or remotely authoritarian can be classified as an Islamofascist, whether he is a Baathist, a member of al-Ikhwan, or a partisan of Hizbullah.  As May said in September of last year:

The problem, as I see it with using the term “Bin Ladenism”: It can’t be applied to the ideologies of the ruling Iranian mullahs, Saddam Hussein loyalists or other Baathists (e.g. in Syria).

In other words, the word we use to describe our enemies must be meaningless in order to accommodate the maximum number of enemies.  If there were ever a politician who was perfectly suited to an age in which words should be entirely malleable and subject to the political needs of the moment, it would have to be Romney.  Romney and rhetoric about Islamofascism were made for each other.

The strategy of deploying charged and hyper-aggressive language is now evident: First intimidate one’s targets, then coerce them–into conformity or silence. And do it always under the banner of free speech and democracy. ~Daniel Henninger

Quite unintentionally, Mr. Henninger has just described the editorial policy of The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard and National Review.  It is amazing to me that someone at a newspaper whose editors and contributors have engaged in plenty of destructive and often false commentary about their political enemies would have the gall to lecture bloggers on intimidation, coercion and the silencing of opponents.  Sometimes I think that half the reason the WSJ op-ed page exists is to try to intimidate and silence opponents, particularly those on the right with whom they disagree; the same goes for the others, only more so.  Bloggers may speak harshly to their interlocutors and targets and call it democratic activism, but at least we do not launch invasions and cheer on organised slaughter in the name of freedom and democracy–that dubious honour belongs to Mr. Henninger and his ilk.

Speaking of “doublespeak” and general two-facedness, nothing captures it better than a columnist at an establishment rag such as the Journal pretending that bloggers have the monopoly on aggressive hostility towards political opponents.  If I write in a bitter, withering tone in many posts, I learned it from reading the Journal’s editorials as a boy–these were always laced with irony and also quite frequently with contempt for their subjects.  Yes, the blogosphere is far less restrained, and particularly in comment sections this becomes quite dreadful at some sites, and I am certainly strongly in favour of restraint, but any attempt to dictate a “code” to bloggers is an attempt to control them and limit their influence.  That would almost have to be the point of inventing such a thing, and the only beneficiaries of limiting their influence are the establishment media, the political class and the administration.  Looking at it that way, it seems to be a very bad idea.

Bloggers are notoriously combative and often seem unusually “angry” to the refined, calm columnists and media watchers, because many of us, unlike them, actually have opinions that do not resemble weak tea.  Having gagged on years and years of their spoon-fed pablum, we spit it back in their face and they discover that they don’t like it at all.  Sometimes we’re angry, and sometimes we’re simply calling establishment pundits and media outlets on their flaws in a particularly pointed and critical way that these people can only interpret as a “screed” or an expression of crazed rage.  What I despise is the pretense put forward by establishment figures and institutions that they hold the keys to the definitions of moderation and reasonableness.  Their insipid policy views are half the reason so many of us are so agitated about the state of affairs today.

I run what I am proud to say is a pretty clean and respectful house here at Eunomia, so I know it is possible to create a healthy atmosphere of combative back and forth that does not have to degenerate into mudslinging and insults.  If other bloggers fail to do that, that is their mistake, but I find the idea of a general code for bloggers (especially one sanctioned by the king of verbal abuse and intimidation, O’Reilly) to be ridiculous.  There is a lot of invective and criticism and obvious hostility to various hacks, villains and tyrants who deserve that hostility here at my blog.  If I were to subscribe to this bizarre code, I would basically have to stop writing 85% of what I write because of rule #2 alone:

We won’t say anything online that we wouldn’t say in person.

I find such a restriction completely unrealistic and inappropriate.  In person, I actually try to be diplomatic and seek to avoid harsh exchanges of words or even intense disagreements.  I do this for the sake of civility, and because I am not inclined as a matter of temperament to getting into shouting matches with people face to face.  FoxNews, which has perfected the medium of the shout-fest that is supposedly a “news” or “opinion” show, would not want to have someone like me on.

I have read that Jefferson was much the same way: he could write vituperative polemics against his political foes, but would be the image of civility in person.  As it should be.  The early satirists of the Opposition wrote things about Walpole and the Robinarchy, albeit they often had to write about them indirectly, that they would probably never have said in person to Walpole and his fellows.  Written invective will be the outlet for a society choking under the imposed constraints of political correctness and thought crimes.  The more consolidated major corporate media become, and the more autocratic the government becomes, the greater the demand will be for increasingly unfettered expression to rebel against these things.  To take away that outlet, or to try to say that there is something deeply wrong with that written invective will be to ensure that there are explosions of outrage elsewhere in society.

Whereas Larison imputes Goldberg’s thoughts as necessarily vapid, swimming in the mainstream of American culture as they are. ~Koz

Perhaps Koz has misunderstood me somewhere.  It is true that Goldberg’s frequent TV chatter and “timewasters” at The Corner make him seem rather less than a serious observer of the political and cultural scene, but we are talking about blogging after all and that is not really why I agreed with Alterman’s assessment that Goldberg has turned to intellectually bankrupt “movement shtick.”  I agreed with Alterman’s assessment because I think this is an accurate observation about the shallowness and, yes, vapidity of what passes for mainstream conservative intellectual activity today.  Goldberg seems to embody those things to a remarkable degree and much more than, say, Ramesh Ponnuru or John Derbyshire, for example, who routinely show that they can engage in actual debate without resorting to lazy name-calling and guilt by association; they have some ideas of their own, and they can defend and explain them through something called “argument.” 

It is possible that Goldberg’s forthcoming book will demonstrate that there is more to Goldberg today than someone who engages in little more than posturing and rather heavy-handed attacks in which he tars his enemies with what he would consider to be particularly nasty associations and labels.  His obnoxious slaps at Ross and Reihan, who are probably on his side on many issues, are par for the course–he doesn’t know how to respond to or critique any idea, regardless of what it is, without resorting to these methods, because he doesn’t seem to know how to handle ideas except as ciphers of movement loyalty or disloyalty.  I suppose every political movement will have these people, but these people will not normally be taken as people with something interesting to say.  The problem with the movement today is that Goldbergian shtick, which is basically the striking of the politically appropriate pose and the uttering of the politically appropriate word, is widespread and a surprisingly large number of conservative pundits engage in it in the mistaken belief that this is the same as making demonstrative arguments.  Most of modern conservatism operates in two rhetorical modes: panegyric (hurray for Romney [or whomever we are praising this week]!) and invective (down with the evil-cons!).  Everyone else uses these modes as well (I am a big fan of invective myself), but at least some are also capable of demonstrative reasoning. 

If paleocons and leftists find themselves to be in agreement about certain things, especially about the debating tactics of Jonah Goldberg, this is because he uses the same tactics against both and both groups find these tactics to be cheap, weak and unpersuasive.  Of course, he isn’t trying to persuade, but to reinforce collapsing ideological structures–that tends to confirm the picture of intellectual weakness that Alterman and I and others have been describing. 

What I found especially unconvincing about Koz’s critique was this bit:

This last [about swimming in the mainstream of American culture] is a paleocon trope that I wish more of them could see for themselves, since the paleocons often have very useful cultural commentary, but no accountability for any of it. Being a paleo means never having to say you’re sorry. If they had been in charge, the problem (whatever problem it is) would have never happened in the first place. This is good as far as it goes, but it means that we have to retreat into our own personal little Barbie and Ken dollhouse where we have total fiat over our environment.

I don’t really know what this last line even means, but I assume it is another form of the usual criticism of supposed paleo “quietism” or withdrawal from the arena.  It is surely the only time “Barbie and Ken dollhouse” has been used in the same paragraph with paleoconservatism.  It also isn’t really about whether we paleos are in charge of anything.  We are certainly capable of mistakes and faulty judgements, but where I think we differ from other conservative “factions” and other Americans, to the extent that you can generalise about a group as genuinely diverse in perspectives as paleos actually are, is that we retain more strongly a recognition of the limits, needs and purpose of human nature, we seem to remember history more keenly, we instinctively refuse to trust governments regardless of which people run them, and we are less inclined to justify moral abominations when they are committed by our government or by people in our society (perhaps because we are not in positions of influence or power and do not feel compelled to justify the unjustifiable to retain those positions).  If speaking out against what the critic believes to be rank immorality or injustice is disqualified because the critic is somehow “unaccountable” because he is so marginalised or otherwise uninfluential that he has virtually nothing to lose when he is mistaken in his criticism, then I suppose I plead guilty to being “unaccountable” in this way.  If it means that we are not somehow  just as obliged to pay respect to truth and acknowledge when we have been wrong, I reject this categorically.  What would it be like to have “accountable” cultural critics?  How are they currently not being held to account?  When those cultural critics say something like, “The family is the central institution of society and must be strengthened by actively discouraging divorce and encouraging traditional Christianity,” are they being “unaccountable”?  

Koz says that “being paleo means never having to say you’re sorry,” which I might be inclined to spin as a compliment meaning that paleos never have anything for which they should be sorry.  But obviously that is not his meaning.  It means that paleos should feel bad that they keep more or less accurately pointing out the grievous dangers to this country long before these evils become obvious to everyone else, while no one pays any attention to the paleos and instead listens to the impressive frauds who continue to bungle everything and fail their country on a regular basis.  Perhaps it means that we should feel contrite that we opposed the war before it was trendy to do so. 

On the contrary, it is not being paleo that allows you to go along without ever admitting being wrong.  It might be the case that no one would notice even if we did get things horribly wrong, but I would like to think that paleos would have the integrity to acknowledge those errors, not least because they are well aware of the terrible evils that come from pride and vanity, which are the two passions that usually prevent men from facing up to their mistakes.  Politicians and many professional pundits seem to enjoy this luxury of never having to say that they’re sorry, because they for the most part are unaccountable for their errors, even though the policies carried out partly because of their errors usually have many more disastrous consequences for the commonwealth and the world. 

All this said, the gullibility of some people in the antiwar movement that Faye Tunney’s letters were genuine or “eloquent” (!) has been as stunning as the particularly pathetic de rigueur outrage that the Iranians are holding a woman captive.  As for those letters and her interview, the big giveaway for me (besides the obviously staged nature of her “confession” as Tunney stares at what must have been her cue card or script) was the frequent use of the word “compassionate,” as if the Iranian propagandists were trying to find the English word that most epitomises the opposite of what most Westerners associate with the Tehran government.  As for the other phenomenon, we are supposed to simultaneously think the Iranians brutes for capturing the woman sailor, while deploring a mother’s lack of willingness to fight to the death for (allegedly) the sake of Iraqi territorial integrity, while actively pretending that there is nothing at all strange about sending a mother on patrol in potentially dangerous waters. 

Ahmadinejad’s “family values” line works so well rhetorically because so many people in the West know just how crazy it is to have women on patrol and in potential combat zones, but you wouldn’t have heard a single pundit, particularly none on the right, say peep about this.  Virtually every conservative pundit has learned to mechanically utter the set phrase, “our servicemen and women,” and they all know that right-thinking people no longer make a great fuss about having women in what could potentially be combat situations.  Why, that’s the sort of thing Jim Webb used to do (as George Allen so lamely tried to argue in ’06), and if there’s one thing that unites conventional conservative pundits it is reflexive opposition to whatever Jim Webb believed or believes.  Naturally, Sullivan still distinguishes himself with the most asinine comment about the entire affair:

The only downside for Ahmadinejad was his ugly, stupid statement about women servicemembers. But it may go down well with the D’Souzaite masses in the Middle East.

D’Souzaite masses?  The masses in the Middle East are probably not likely to identify with a secular Westernised intellectual with a Portugese last name–just guessing! 

The remark wasn’t ugly or stupid, except to a utopian egalitarian who thinks that mothers should be sent to the front lines (apparently because they have nothing better to do, such as, say, raise their children).  It was a valid observation made for completely cynical, self-serving purposes by a demagogue who cares no more about “family values” necessarily than he actually cares about destroying Israel; these are useful things for him to say to play to the sentiments of the crowd and embarrass the foreigners (which also works as a crowd-pleaser in pretty much every country), but Ahmadinejad must fundamentally be a survivor and a smart manipulator if he has lasted as long as he has and climbed to the position where he is. 

Had the Iranians taken an extreme opposite route and executed the fifteen as spies or for whatever other made-up charge they could think of, that woman’s child would grow up to tell people, “My mother died to keep the Shatt al-Arab under the control of the Iraqi ‘government’ controlled by Iranian influence.”  And there are actually a lot of people, at least over here, who think that would be a worthwhile sacrifice, and they would say as much, right before they decry the breakdown of the family.

Note on the use of language: many people have referred to the detainees as hostages, which doesn’t have much difference in the way of real meaning historically from detainee, but it carries with it strong emotional and moral connotations.  To detain someone sounds vaguely legal or appropriate (thus when pro-administration flacks speak of the torture of prisoners, they always speak of “treatment of detainees” rather than, say, ”abuse of hostages”), while to take a hostage sounds aggressive and vicious, because we have become accustomed to thinking of hostage-taking as relating to terrorists or bank robbers taking civilians hostage during their attacks (or as the main target of their attacks).  However, applying this sense of hostage to captured soldiers or sailors is perverse and ridiculous, much as it was idiotic how every media report referred to the “kidnapping” of Israeli soldiers in the summer of last year, as if the captured soldiers had been picked up after school by a strange man offering them candy.

Tradition is another name for contingency. ~Andrew Sullivan

While I really don’t want to be too pedantic, this is ridiculous conceptual confusion.  Nothing new about that in Sullivan’s writing, I know, but this is a particularly bad example of dismissing an important concept (tradition) by completely misunderstanding what it is.  Tradition is contingent, historically, culturally, even to some extent geographically, but that does not mean tradition = contingency.  That would be like saying that history = contingency. 

This would also be like saying, “Sunlight is just another name for warmth.”  You couldn’t get away with saying something that silly, except perhaps in a poem, but I wonder whether everyone would be equally aware of just how silly this statement is.  You cannot take an attribute, make it into a substantive and then say that this substantive is identical with the thing that it modified when it was an attribute.   

This is to take a quality of a thing, even one of its major qualities, and confuse it for the thing itself.  This is to make an attribute the equal of its substance, which is a fundamental confusion of categories.  It is neo-Barlaamism, and we all know why Barlaam was wrong, don’t we?  Well, Sullivan probably doesn’t.

This was a political show trial, and partisans of Joe Wilson will use the guilty verdict to declare vindication. ~James Taranto

Needless to say, perhaps, Fox’s Alan Colmes did a pathetic job of challenging Coulter’s flimsy defense. The whole segment was a show trial in reverse. ~Michael Crowley

I don’t know whether this represents some sort of trend in atrocious uses of language, but it is interesting that both of these ridiculous statements appeared on the same day.  The first refers, of course, to the Libby conviction, and the other to an appearance by Ann Coulter on Hannity & Colmes. 

You can believe that Fitzgerald’s prosecution was driven by political or personal vendetta, as some would like to believe, and you can believe that this case should never have been brought to trial.  I disagree fundamentally with both of these views, since I think that obstructing justice and perjury are wrong regardless of why someone does it (lots of Republicans used to believe the same thing) and that such crimes should be prosecuted if the charges can be proven, but it is possible to hold these other views without becoming a squawking buffoon.  James Taranto, as usual, bounds across that line and never looks back when he calls this a “political show trial,” demonstrating either his tremendous ignorance or his utter corruption of mind.   

A political show trial has a very definite meaning.  These were trials conducted during the Purges of the 1930s whose outcomes were predetermined by the Party and Stalin and therefore whose entire procedure was purely for “show.”  Hence the name.  (Incidentally, Republicans were very eager to talk about ”purges” during the Connecticut Senate primary last year, invoking a word chiefly associated with Bolshevik terror in the context of a domestic election, once again showing themselves to be unfit to comment on anything.)  These trials had no logic or purpose, except to provide a certain veneer of public legitimacy for the deposition of prominent Party men (including top figures such as Zinoviev and Kamenev) that paved the way for their exile, execution and elimination from the historical record.  Unless I have misunderstood the sentences for violations of federal perjury and obstruction of justice statutes, Libby does not stand in much danger of summary execution by NKVD operatives or their equivalent.  He has not been fraudulently charged with crimes he didn’t commit as a way of covering up a purely political prosecution.  The court will not “request” his suicide, nor will his picture be artificially scrubbed out from all official records.  Indeed, we all know that he is going to go scot-free with a pardon, because we are not ruled by laws but by particularly venal and self-serving men, so please spare me the whinging about how Libby is the victim of neo-Stalinist jurisprudence.  This is not only an insult to the millions of victims of Stalinism, but is an insult to the intelligence of the audience.  It is also particularly rich to read complaints about politicised justice coming from the pages of the right’s Pravda, which never thinks that anything the administration does in matters of national security or other policy is as heavily politicised as it obviously is. 

Now to the other example.  While I might theoretically enjoy comparisons of Hannity & Colmes to Stalinist purges, if only to show the relatively greater intellectual integrity of the latter, when someone is silly enough to refer to a cable talk show as a show trial, whether it is in “reverse” or not, it becomes immediately clear how wrong this use of language is.  Most of us do not, I think, make pithy comparisons between certain things we happen to dislike and, say, concentration camps, gas chambers or mass graves.  You don’t usually hear someone say, “Boy, this week’s Meet The Press was a sort of journalistic Kristallnacht–only in reverse!”  I leave it to my readers to puzzle out what “show trial in reverse” even means, but I think it prompts the promulgation of Larison’s First Law of Political Commentary (not to be confused with the Laws of Foreign Policy Commentary): unless you are referring specifically to a contemporary case of politically motivated kangaroo courts that serve as a pretext for the exile and/or execution of political enemies, you never get to compare anything in present-day domestic politics to a show trial; first-time violators should be prohibited from speaking about domestic politics for a period of not less than ten years; repeat offenders are banned for life.

Tough is fine. Even some of Ann’s over-the-top jokes can be written off as just that– jokes. But you can’t write off every hateful, politically damaging crack as a-O.K. simply because that Ann’s a jokester. I, for one, am proud that there are Middle Easterners, gay men and women, and other minorities for whom conservatism is an ideology that empowers. Don’t they get enough crap from our lefty colleagues for “leaving the plantation?” Why should they be subjected to more from one of their supposed allies?

Ours is not the ideology of identity politics and knee-jerk, manufactured outrage that serve political ends, not people [bold mine-DL].  But it is an ideology that should seek to serve everyone, regardless of color or sexual orientation. ~Mary Katharine Ham

There are Middle Easterners “for whom conservatism is an ideology that empowers”?  Perhaps she means that there are Arab Christians and Muslims in this country who subscribe to certain conservative ideas?  I don’t know, because the statement is horribly unclear.  But that isn’t the main thing that’s wrong with this statement.  You already know what I’m going to object to: this dreary, careless use of the word ideology. 

Conservatism is not an ideology, or rather it should be said that the conservative mind rebels and casts out every ideology.  There is undoubtedly some sort of ideology masquerading as conservative thought in this country, and Townhall’s bloggers routinely give it expression.  Anyone who wants to know why the rising new generation is fleeing the right as if they were fleeing the plague needs only peruse the ramblings of Hewitt and Co. to understand why so many Americans are running away from the proponents of the cult of the Presidency and reflexive endorsement of military action.  More than that, any sane person would be right to flee from any group of people that speaks quite openly about their “ideology,” since there is no surer sign of dangerously mindless politics than a politics governed by an inflexible ideology.  Nothing could be more alien to the conservative tradition, yet such is the low state of conservatism that many of the prominent outlets for supposedly conservative opinion will have no difficulty speaking of “conservative ideology” as if it were the most natural thing.  In the end, it is that habit of mind, which Coulter shares, that is far, far more damaging to conservatism and to the reputation of the political right in this country than any crude joke that Coulter could tell.  Predictably, in spite of the movement’s far more egregious problems of groupthink and often shocking automatic deference to President, the blog right has bestirred itself to declare that it is horrified by Coulter’s latest bomb. 

The people who wanted to go to the wall for Danish free speech, because it poked a finger in the eye of Muslims who presumed to dictate to other people what they could and couldn’t say and draw about Muhammad, are the same people who now feign or, worse, genuinely feel ashamed by Coulter’s joke.  This is pathetic.  I would be absolutely in favour of nothing but polite political discourse in which no one ever used ad hominem attacks and slurs (which would mean that many  columnists would suffer drastic reductions in output), but since we have nothing like that discourse this precious cherry-picking of this particular use of a slur is simply ridiculous.    

In rushing about denouncing Coulter these Republican bloggers legitimise every attempt to control and regulate speech through stigma and ostracism, even when the entire edifice of modern speech taboos exists solely to declare certain quite traditionally conservative convictions automatically unacceptable.  You don’t get to talk about states’ rights except in highly qualified ways, because otherwise you might be a racist.  Don’t say anything favourable about Germans in any context ever, and don’t question the absolute necessity of entering WWII, because if you did you might be an anti-Semite.  Whatever you do, don’t suggest that the successes of European civilisation had anything to do with the Europeans themselves, or you will have really gone where no one is supposed to go.      

Every conservative is compelled by the force of social stigma to speak about things he regards as morally repugnant, such as homosexuality, while using only the most vague euphemisms.  He feels obligated to qualify every statement of opposition to, say, same-sex “marriage” by declaring his lack of “homophobia” (which, literally, means “fear of the same,” which is a nonsense), when it is obvious to everyone in the debate that one of the first reasons why same-sex “marriage” seems so objectionable is that it is an endorsement of a kind of sexual relationship that most conservatives regard as fundamentally disordered and immoral.  That most conservatives can only rarely or meekly say this in public is a sign of how cowed by these speech controls many of them have become, and the more prominent they are the more submissive they become, lest they jeopardise their growing audience with anything so offensive as giving their true opinion of something.  In this respect Coulter is slightly unusual among the national pundits, since much of her appeal is in being deliberately provocative by saying things that she and everyone else knows are now “off limits.”  Who agreed that they should be off limits?  Primarily, people on the left decided that they should be and the right went along with all of them to remain “respectable,” because so many on the right had already bought into the self-loathing view that they really had held disreputable opinions in the past that needed to be excised from the discourse–along with any of their colleagues who made the mistake of making the wrong kind of statement.  Such are the repressions of an “open society” that is open to one, bland, generic consenus view from which you dissent only at your social, political and professional peril.  The conservative feels compelled by these same stigmas to refrain from calling homosexuality an abomination, which is what any honest Christian conservative has to call it, and to never on any account lend any substance to the impression that conservatives object to anything related to homosexuality because it is related to homosexuality, but always for some other reason.  Mitt Romney objects to same-sex “marriage” ”for the children,” where a much more honest statement would make an objection because of the nature of the relationship itself.     

So now there is great moaning and lamenting about Ann Coulter’s joke on the “respectable” right.  Somehow the blog right cannot summon up similar anguish for all the other things about so much modern conservative commentary that are even more off-putting to reasonable people who are just coming to the world of political ideas.  They will continue to write off, shun or exclude any number of their colleagues, whether or not these colleagues are particularly valuable contributors, and wonder how it is that they lost the culture wars in the process.  Of course, the people who define and control language control the debate and thereby control the outcome of the debate.  Each delimiting of what is acceptable and unacceptable is an exercise in power, and each time the right cedes control of that delimiting and definition to its foes the more likely it is that the right will lose more and more of the debates that have already been rigged by all of the things that they will no longer be allowed to say.      

Turning to another questionable claim, let us look again at what Ms. Ham wrote:

Ours is not the ideology of identity politics and knee-jerk, manufactured outrage that serve political ends, not people.

I know it is one of the standard talking points on the right to say that we are against “identity politics.”  Identity politics is what other, bad people do.  Yeah.  Of course, all political mobilisation against this or that statement or event is “manufactured” to some extent and the outrage that this mobilisation produces is always to some degree “artificial,” because any effort to organise politically is something artificial.  It doesn’t just spring out of the ground or come together through some organic process of congealing.  People align themselves with one another, identify with one another and rally around cherished symbols and institutions when they are attacked because they see these things as being part of their identity.  People are political animals, but that does not mean that all political action is a purely spontaneous expression of our nature.  People will form political associations and create political cultures that are more or less in accordance with human nature, and those that are most in harmony with our nature will tend to flourish by encouraging human flourishing, but the work of making a political culture is very much one of artifice and construction.  For at least one good reason and at least one less coherent reason, conservatives have tended to reflexively react very negatively against anything that smacks of postmodernity and deconstruction.  The good reason is that deconstruction and most pomo efforts are aimed at subverting and overthrowing the norms of Western society that conservatives wish to preserve, starting with the meaning of words and moving on from there to criticism and dismantling of entire institutions and habits of thought.  The less coherent reason for objecting to this is the idea that if this or that identity is constructed it is therefore not real or not important and can therefore be dismantled and chucked onto the scrapheap.  It is as if we were to embrace the pomo view that no one before the pomos ever knew that identity and meaning were constructed, as if people for thousands of years could have missed their own constructions of identity, and insist that we must defend full-on essentialism or embrace total critique.  But this is silly.  Once something is constructed, it exists and has significance, and to believe that identity is constructed is to believe that collapsing cultures can be reconstructed and reinvested with meaning.  To engage in identity politics is to attempt to make use of the identity to which you have adhered yourself as part of the ongoing process of construction.    

Everyone practices identity politics.  When Christians, including myself, went after Marcotte for her bigotry (which was bigotry), they were engaged in identity politics.  When Southerners defend the battle flag as a symbol of their heritage and identity as Southerners, they are engaged in identity politics just as surely as black politicians are engaged in identity politics when they demand slavery reparations.  This myth of people who are not engaged in such politics or who are not motivated by their attachments and loyalties simply has nothing to do with real human beings and how they interact with each other.  Some kinds of identity politics are obviously worse and more destructive than others.  Eliminationist nationalisms are clearly evil and premised on finding meaning for themselves only through the annihilation of other peoples, while there can be cultural and constitutive nationalisms that generally provide meaning and solidarity for people who may desperately need it.  However, to ”object” to someone’s position because it is a form of identity politics is like objecting to a writer’s book because he uses words.

Personally I can’t see what’s wrong with “jihadist.” That’s what these guys are doing: making jihad. As Randall points out, there are just too many differences with fascism. Fascism was atheist; jihadis are devout. Fascism was nationalist; jihadis want the whole world under one rule. Fascism was blood-and-soil racist; Islam is (in theory, at least) oblivious to distinctions of race. As Randall also points out, sticking the word “fascism” on the phenomenon just reinforces the silly idea, which already has too much currency, that nothing much important happened in the world before the 20th century.

If we do go with “Islamo-fascist,” though, then considering that Hugo Chavez, at the U.N. the other day, pretty much lined up with the blighters, we should start referring to him and his pal Castro as “Hispano-fascists.” (No insult intended here to the memory of the late Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who, though he used them when he had to, didn’t much care for fascists. He didn’t much care for anything that had appeared later than about A.D. 1600.) ~John Derbyshire

Via ParaPundit

I’m surprised that I managed to miss Derbyshire’s take on Islamofascism (and his delightful remarks about Franco), since the topic was something of a brief obsession of mine (my readers may disagree with the “brief” part of that description), so I’m grateful to Randall Parker for pointing out this article and for the link to one of my recent anti-Hanson posts.  Mr. Parker’s arguments against the fascism comparisons can be found here.

As angry as we may get at the blasphemies of artists, we absolutely must object to this capitulation on the part of the Germans in the face of Islamofascism (yeah, I used the word: what is fascism as a tactic — as distinct from a political philosophy — if not using the threat of violence to suppress speech you don’t like?). ~Rod Dreher

Now I agree with Rod that giving in to intimidation from outraged Muslims, even over something as obnoxious as Neuenfels’ anti-religious artistic license, is unacceptable.  It is another attempt to dictate what non-Muslims can say about anything pertaining to Islam, but unfortunately this time it has been successful, as the offending performance has been cancelled on account of the threats it provoked.  So on the substance of the matter, Rod and I agree. 

But then there’s that old “Islamofascism” again.  Here I can at least see why someone might choose to call the use of intimidation and threats of violence fascist tactics, but there is nothing particularly fascist about these kinds of tactics.  These are the tactics of most practitioners of “direct action” in the 20th century West (e.g., syndicalists, the New Left), the tactics of the “propaganda of the deed” of 19th and 20th century anarchists and the tactics of fanatics the world over–it is the threat and use of violence to achieve a political objective, in this case the suppression of someone else’s speech, which is, when directed against civilians (as this assuredly was), the very definition of terrorism. 

Fascists used terror, but there is nothing especially fascistic, rather than Jacobin, communist, democratic or anarchist, about terror.  Evidently fascism seems to be the word many people really want to use when talking about these people.  I don’t know whether this is a result of neverending conditioning that fascism was the Worst Thing Ever to which all bad things must hereafter be compared (in this, fascism plays a secular role similar to that of Arianism in medieval heresiology as a kind of archetypal evil, an Urboese I suppose you might call it in German, to which all later evil doctrines must be compared of necessity as each new enemy is simply a recapitulation of the errors of that doctrine) or if we simply lack the vocabulary to describe succinctly the contempt we feel for this particular foe.  But it seems clear that those who want to use fascism to refer to jihadis and Muslim intimidation more generally very much want to convey the magnitude of their hostility by using one of the most , albeit constantly overused, demon-words we have at our disposal.  I understand that desire, but fascism became the universally hated thing that it is both through what fascists did and through the effective thoroughgoing demonisation of anything associated with it by the fascists’ enemies.  In the same way, jihadis and jihadism, and perhaps Islam itself, could acquire the same reputation and their name will become a curse to those who speak it because of what they have done, but this will never happen if we continually fall back on our references to fascism and implausibly identify the jihadis as the Islamic branch of that ideology or as people inclined to use “fascist tactics.” 

The longer we keep talking about and thinking of these people as fascists, we give them something of a free pass by not using the names proper to them and instead rely on old names from another time.  Had their enemies treated fascists in this way, applying old terms to them rather than demonising their own name, there would likely have been a great deal of propaganda about the fascists as some new form of absolutism and absurd neologisms would have had to be created to talk about the threat of the Germanoabsolutists. 

If there were a need, as in the old heresiology, to use these labels as a way of understanding something new and foreign–interpreting Bogomils as new Messalians or Manichees, for instance–it would be one thing, but jihadis and Islam are hardly a new arrival on the scene and have their own names appropriate to them.  They employ terrorist tactics, which is not something relatively new for jihadis, and are quite outrageous enough in their own right without needing to be compared to any other villains from our history.

First, the general idea of “fascism” — the creation of a centralized authoritarian state to enforce blanket obedience to a reactionary, all-encompassing ideology — fits well the aims of contemporary Islamism that openly demands implementation of sharia law and the return to a Pan-Islamic and theocratic caliphate.

In addition, Islamists, as is true of all fascists, privilege their own particular creed of true believers by harkening back to a lost, pristine past, in which the devout were once uncorrupted by modernism. ~Victor Davis Hanson, National Review

Back to basics.  Jihadi basics: jihadis (a.k.a., Islamists) are Islamic reactionaries; they are a product of modernity but are anti-modern; they do want to bring back the Caliphate, which makes them as un-fascist as Novalis was for romanticising the medieval papacy.  Fascist basics: fascists are not reactionary in any meaningful sense, since they are above all an ideology dedicated to modernisation, the new, the future, the creation of the “New Order” and the new man; they are modernisers and are not anti-modern; they are a mass movement with no attachments or sympathies with the ancien regime or its partisans; they are not the heirs of Counter-Revolutionary rightist politics, but a mass revolutionary nationalist movement, none of which has anything to do with being “reactionary” in any sense beyond the purely pejorative way in which that term is bandied about by progressives who use it as if it were an insult.  More Fascist basics: fascists did not want to recreate a pristine order taken from the past, though they did want to restore their nations to what they believed had been past glories, but instead wanted to regenerate their nations and see them born anew.  Their emphasis on newness, modernism, futurism puts them starkly at odds with any real reactionaries.  Fascism’s palingenetic urge has next to nothing to do with reviving an old order; Nazis would borrow certain symbols and ideas from the German medieval past, but they had no intention of recreating the Empire of the Hohenstaufens, much less the Holy Roman Empire, which would have offended them in its cosmopolitan and Catholic nature.  In brief, if jihadis are Islamic reactionaries, which they are, they cannot be Islamic fascists.  Pick one or the other, if you must, but for goodness’ sake stop confusing the two–as Hanson always, always does.

Then there is the canard of generic fascist anti-Semitism as proof of the connection:

Because fascism is born out of insecurity and the sense of failure, hatred for Jews is de rigueur [sic].

Of course it is important to note here that Italian Fascism initially had no anti-Semitic impulses (unlike National Socialism, it did not originate out of the charged atmosphere of the struggle between Habsburg liberalism and various nationalisms that frequently focused on Jewish support for liberalism as a way of discrediting it and simultaneously of finding a political reason to despise Jews), and in the 1920s had Jewish supporters, which makes even more sense when you understand that Fascism claimed to be–and was–a revolutionary, modernising movement of the sort to which Jewish intellectuals are frequently drawn.  Judenhass in Islam is as old as Islam itself; it needs no comparing with the obsessions of the Nazis, because it has its own sources and its own very simple, religious reasons.  The similarity here is noteworthy, but ultimately superficial, as Islam and fascism also both view traditional Christianity with contempt, though the former does so rather more than the latter.  The point is simply this: adherents of totalising worldviews naturally regard those who do not belong to their worldviews as enemies.

Then there is Hanson’s historical error:

Second, fascism thrives best in a once proud, recently humbled, but now ascendant, people.

This is misleading and simplistic.  Sociologically, fascism thrives in nations that are late-comers in modernisation (Payne refers to them as second-tier modernising nations, I believe) but which are actually potentially on the verge of becoming major powers.  Their former humiliation is irrelevant–Italy was on the winning side in WWI, for all the good it did them, as was Japan, which had only gone from victory to victory in the international arena since the Meiji Restoration.  Resentment and overconfidence alike can encourage militarism–which is actually a far better term for what Japan represented anyway. 

The jihadi impulse is far more elemental; for them, it is simply the fulfillment of religious obligation to struggle for Islam and bring the world into submission to Islam.  Rain or shine, victory or defeat, no matter what has happened in the recent or distant past, the jihadi will persist in the struggle (and, incidentally, it is because of the nature of the word jihad that Mein Kampf would be called jihadi in some parts of the world).  In fact, there is no question of any Muslim nations being in the “ascendant” where the jihadis find their most willing recruits, as there are no “ascendant” Muslim nations even remotely on par with the modernising nation-states that bred fascist movements–it is typically in the nations that have been on the receiving end of defeats for as long as anyone can remember that the jihadis do best.

So anyone who speaks about “reactionary fascism” or “religious fascism” doesn’t know what he’s talking about, since there are no such things.  You can, of course, despise all reactionaries and despise all fascists, but you must understand that they not the same and have next to nothing in common.  For my part, as a reactionary, I won’t stand for the association, since fascism represents the antithesis of everything I believe.