The American Conservative

From Edmund Burke to Richard Weaver, conservatives urged respect for a code of chivalry not because they were simply quaint but because chivalry at its best represented a restraint against the sheer brutalization of human life. Nowadays, that conservatism is itself quaint, replaced by a creed that believes just about anything is justified in a state of perpetual emergency, including torture and detention without trial (and at that, without the formality of a congressional suspension of habeas corpus). Would you find a passage like the one below, from Weaver’s 1958 essay “Up From Liberalism,” in a non-paleo conservative publication today?

[Chivalry] insisted that even in war, when maximum strain is placed upon the passions, man may not become an absolute killer. In war there are some considerations which must not be crowded out by hatred and fear. This is true because even your foe has some rights, and these rights you must respect although your present course has his destruction in view. This may seem to some too paradoxical, but let us consider it in terms of an analogy. Modern wars have tended increasingly to resemble lynching parties. A lynching party acts in the belief that the guilt of the victim is absolute and unqualified, and that the only thing that matters is to put him to death immediately. Any means will do: beating, pistol fire, a tree and a rope. Of course this idea is contrary to that of juridical procedure. The law never takes the view that a man’s guilt is so absolute and so completely known that he is not allowed to say a word in his defense. On the contrary, the most atrocious murderer is given police protection and a trial according to the forms of law, with a chance to state his side of the affair.

Weaver knew to what use government and good, patriotic jingos would put war and rumors of war, too:

…the only way that a rigid, centralized control can be maintained is to keep the people living in a mentality of war. One can do this by filling them with desire of conquest, or one can do it by keeping them fearful of a real or imaginary enemy. Then one has a trump card to play on every occasion. If there is any relaxing or any resentment of controls, one has only to invoke “the national security” to silence opposition and even render it disreputable. We in the United States are living under the second of these policies now. The choice appears to lie between chaos and perpetual preparation for war, and the trouble with preparation for war is that it always issues in war. Here again technology steps in to make the dilemma more cruel, since it causes warfare to be increasingly total and nihilistic, and increasingly beyond the power of civilizing influences to absorb.

Even I sometimes find it hard to remember that conservatism used to be a noble thing, before the Bushes and Ashcrofts and Gonzaleses and their pals in the media turned it into something that Weaver and Burke wouldn’t recognize.

If Thomas, Scalia, and Roberts had had their way, our Fourth Amendment rights against warrantless searches would have diminished earlier this week. This editorial from the Roanoke Times is a little crude, but get the principle right. And this part puts the “conservative” justices’ argument in a nutshell:

The court Wednesday ruled 5-3 that police without a warrant may not search a home when a resident expressly denies permission, even if a different resident grants it.

Chief Justice John Roberts joined Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, arguing “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,” unless someone else who lives there says it’s OK.

I suppose not only Roberts but a whole generation of right-wing lawyers starts from a presumption against the rights of the individual — and in favor of government. This is not news, of course, but it’s always dismaying to see this judicial philosophy in action. From the left you get judicial taxation and busing, from the right you get warrantless searches and deference to executive power. Nothing like a Jeffersonian perspective has a voice on the court. But this time, at least, the liberals did the right thing.

Late last year the Lincoln Group, a Pentagon contractor, attracted notoriety for planting pro-American stories in Iraqi newspapers. Now the Defense Department has decided that the Lincoln Group did not violate any of the government’s rules by doing so. Pentagon contractors are free to misrepresent themselves in the foreign press.

That’s bad enough; what’s worse is the pattern of Bush administration subversion of the press here at home, paying journalists like Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher to shill for the president’s legislative agenda and giving White House press privileges to a pseudonymous reporter from a dubious internet news service sympathetic to the administration. That reporter, Jeff Gannon, happened to be a former (or maybe not-so-former) homosexual prostitute and had falsified a military record.

And let’s not forget WHIG, the White House Iraq Group, operating out of Cheney’s office and tasked with spinning the press into supporting the Iraq invasion. And of course Scooter Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff (and sometime dirty novelist) who used the press to reveal Valerie Plame’s work for the CIA in an effort to cause problems for her husband, administration (and Iraq War) critic Joseph Wilson. Wilson’s scuttling the Niger-uranium nonsense threatened to undo all WHIG’s hard work. Good thing New York Times reporter Judith Miller was undetered.

We hear a lot about the liberal media, and the press certainly is not culturally conservative. What it is, however, is dangerously accommodating to and uncritical of government. (How many newspapers actually came out against the Iraq War before it began?) The American media are plenty credulous enough to begin with, but the Bush administration has made, by the looks of it, a concerted effort to turn them into outright organs of propaganda.

Over at National Review Online, John Podhoretz is at it again. He’s outraged by Andrew Stuttaford’s temerity in criticizing Tony Blair. To put his limey colleague in his place, Podhoretz resorts to a debating tactic that I have never before seen an adult try to use: Podhoretz boasts of his reading comprehension test scores from elementary school. Well, I’d say that clinches it.

But I wonder why Poddy Minor didn’t call out his SAT scores instead?

Between Jpod and his fellow NROdniks, Blair’s most ardent supporters these days — and for some time now , truth be told — are American pundits. His own countrymen have little use for him, but on this side of the Atlantic Bush’s poodle garners comparison to Charles de Gaulle.

Funny fellow, that Andrew Sullivan. He was grossly wrong about the Iraq War in 2003, when he supported the invasion, and he now acknowledges as much. But even when he knows he’s wrong, he insists he’s right — you see, we critics of the war from the get-go didn’t say that there absolutely positively couldn’t be any WMD there. Sullivan jokes that Paul Krugman must have been clairvoyant. He’s angry at Krugman for writing (per Howard Kurtz):

“Mr. Sullivan used to specialize in denouncing the patriotism and character of anyone who dared to criticize President Bush, whom he lionized. Now he himself has become a critic, not just of Mr. Bush’s policies, but of his personal qualities, too . . .

“If you’re a former worshipful admirer of George W. Bush who now says, as Mr. Sullivan did at Cato, that ‘the people in this administration have no principles,’ you’re taking a courageous stand. If you said the same thing back when Mr. Bush had an 80 percent approval rating, you were blinded by Bush-hatred. If you’re a former hawk who now concedes that the administration exaggerated the threat from Iraq, you’re to be applauded for your open-mindedness. But if you warned three years ago that the administration was hyping the case for war, you were a conspiracy theorist.”

Sullivan isn’t the only formerly pro-war pundit to make excuses by arguing that nobody told him there were categorically no WMD. Words to the effect that “If I’d known then what we know now…” have become practically a mantra in some quarters. So, let’s ask, what did we all know in the spring of 2003?

We all knew that Saddam Hussein had no means of attacking the United States directly. He had no intercontinental ballistic missiles. He had no nuclear weapons. The Bush administration presented nothing that would indicate Saddam had a sophisticated nuclear program, and what evidence it presented suggesting a program of any sort — Niger uranium, anyone? — was nugatory.

There was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons or a biological weapons program that could threaten the United States. There was however the possibility that he still had some chemical weapons, gas shells like those he had used on the Kurds. Could any reasonable person see such devices as a grave danger to the United States? I don’t think so.

Keep this in mind about WMD, a concept that bundles together nuclear devices — which belong in a class by themselves — with chemical and biological weapons: the past decade or so has seen two major WMD terrorist attacks, neither of which killed as many people as the conventional attacks carried out by Timothy McVeigh or the 9/11 hijackers. The 2001 anthrax attacks killed just five people; anthrax dispersed from, say, a cropduster would have been more dangerous, but even that would not have been likely to kill as many people as a conventional Oklahoma City-style bombing. Notice, by the way, that the anthax attacks, a real, confirmed case of WMD terrorism on American soil, remain unsolved. What does it tell us that Bush made invading Iraq a higher priority than pursuing the anthrax case?

The other major act of WMD terorrism in recent years was of course Aum Shinrikyo’s sarin attack on the Tokyo subway system. That killed twelve people. A gas several hundred times more lethal than cyanide was released in the confined spaces of the busiest subway in the world, and only twelve people died — though thousands were sickened. It’s awful, but it’s not as deadly as many more mundane acts of terrorism. A single suicide bomber can kill more people.

There was no reason to think that Saddam had effective WMD of any kind. If he had, deploying them against the United States would have been difficult, if not impossible, and would have entailed a tremendous risk of retaliation. The administration suggested some pretty cockamamie scenarios in an attempt to make Saddam seem like a threat, warning of aerial drones flying in from offshore and spraying Americans with deadly poisons and diseases. Did anyone believe it at the time?

When I asked supporters of the war in 2003 what was going through their heads, the usual response was to rattle off a list of UN resolutions Saddam had violated. Sometimes they made the ever-so-cute argument that invading wasn’t really a war, because we were already at war as a result of Saddam violating the ceasefire agreement that had ended the first Gulf War.

What I recall from 2003 is this: a great many people, both pro- and antiwar, including myself, expected postwar reconstruction to go pretty smoothly. What they — and I — were less certain about was the progress of the war itself; as soon as it began, though, and U.S. forces sped through miles of desert without opposition, it looked to me as if it would be over in a week. I opposed the war on principle: you don’t invade a country when it poses no threat to you. What I remember believing about the war’s supporters at the time was that beneath their implausible justifications, their real reason for supporting the attack came down to “why not?” They thought it would be easy, they knew — we all knew — Saddam was a bad guy, and maybe it would have led to a democratizing chain reaction in the Middle East. Going to war, I recall thinking at the time, was not something the war’s supporters took very seriously. I think I was right about that.

RNC chief Ken Mehlman seems to be trapped in the closet of 1993. In a piece about the disarray of the Republican agenda — at this point, what can the GOP say beyond “vote for us: better the devil you know!” — the Washington Post quotes Mehlman as saying, “you’re going to have a clear choice between someone … who believes you ought to own your own health care . . . and [others] who have consistently supported more spending, have opposed tax cuts and who oppose patients owning their own health care.”

Is Hillarycare really going to be the issue this November? I’m as much against it as anyone, but here’s some bad news for Mehlman: most Americans don’t believe they “own their own health care.” They would probably tell you, not without justice, that their employers own their health care — those who have health insurance at all, that is.

Which brings us to Allan Carlson’s new piece in the Weekly Standard, “Indentured Families.” Carlson hits the GOP over, inter alia, last year’s tightening of the bankruptcy laws. He writes:

In a nutshell, the new law makes a “clean start” after filing for bankruptcy much more difficult for families with at least one wage earner. Instead, most affected households will find themselves essentially indentured to a bank or credit card bureau, paying off their debt for years to come. “A new form of feudalism,” one critic calls it.

Now, American families don’t exactly save and spend responsibly in the first place, but what causes many of them to capsize outright is — predictably enough — medical expenses. As Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren pointed out in the Washington Post a year ago:

As part of a research study at Harvard University, our researchers interviewed 1,771 Americans in bankruptcy courts across the country. To our surprise, half said that illness or medical bills drove them to bankruptcy. So each year, 2 million Americans — those who file and their dependents — face the double disaster of illness and bankruptcy.

My gut tells me that with regard to bankruptcy laws, lenders, rather than borrowers, should be left holding the bag, on the principle that giving a loan to an insolvent person or household is not really different from any other bad investment. If you want to encourage smart investment — and smart credit — don’t make it unduly easy for creditors to recoup from people who go bankrupt. The ensuing tightening credit would have beneficial effects all around. Lenders can be relied upon, out of their own interest, not to subsidize the spendthrift, which provides a natural brake on the whole cycle of credit, debt, and bankruptcy. If bankruptcy laws are strongly in lenders’ favor, however, they’ll have little to lose from offering overly generous credit and the result is sure to be more lending, more bankruptcy, higher time preference (i.e. more behavior calculated toward the short term), and all sorts of decivilizing consequences.

Not that I’m altogether on Carlson’s side. There are good reasons to be skeptical of the efficacy of pro-family policies even setting aside for a moment objections to them in principle. But even when Mehlman employs free-market rhetoric and Carlson praises Teddy Roosevelt and the family welfare legacy of FDR, it’s not hard to figure out whom enemies of Leviathan should prefer.

If I were in the Senate, I wouldn’t vote for it. Not that Bush doesn’t deserve censure, but the Senate’s hands aren’t much cleaner than his. There’s something silly about a mugger calling an arsonist a criminal, even if it’s true.

Maybe a good way around that would be to censure Sen. Pat Roberts along with Bush. After all, Senator McCarthy (Joe, that is) was condemned over less.

It’s mildly ironic that neocons like Don Feder and Junior Podhoretz dislike “V for Vendetta” so much. They wouldn’t have any reservations about, say, a Kurdish vigililante who went around blowing up Saddam’s palaces and assassinating Baathists, would they? They’re always hot on the trail of Islamo-fascism. But a film about old-style Euro-fascism has them up in arms.

Maybe it’s because these European fascists are British, not German. The fascists must always be German, Arab, Russian, or (if you’re John Derbyshire), Irish. They cannot be British.

I wasn’t eager to see “V for Vendetta,” but someone who calls his blog the Tory Anarchist can hardly fail to go see the movie that has the Wall Street Journal talking about anarchism. A similar sense of duty — I wanted to popularize Richard Weaver’s idea of the Great Stereopticon by tying it in with the “Matrix” movies — had led me to see two of the Wachowskis’ last three movies, some four hours or so of my life that I will never get back.

Glamourized sadism is an apt description of the Wachowkis’ last few flicks, and that’s what I expected from “V” as well. (Even though they were only adapting the script from Alan Moore’s comic book.) But I was pleasantly surprised. There’s nothing profound about “V,” but the characters have at least half a dimension more than those of the average Hollywood blockbuster. The same can be said, more mutedly, about the film’s social commentary — it’s very heavy-handed in places, but as a middlebrow political thriller it’s better than most.

Hugo Weaving, behind a Guy Fawkes mask throughout, manages to make the title character believable within the framework of the story; he’s not Batman. Stephen Rea, as the basically decent investigator Finch trying to catch the terrorist, comes off plausibly as well. Natalie Portman’s thespian abilities I’ve always had some doubts about (I’m thinking “Closer” as much as “Star Wars”), and her turn as V’s accomplice Evey doesn’t go far toward dispelling them, but here at least she doesn’t draw attention to her limited range. The most convincing character of all is Prothero (played by Roger Allam), a sort of British Bill O’Reilly on steroids — perhaps literally.

Leon Hadar discusses the political context of the film (and reviewers’ reactions) and quotes this spot-on remark from The Economist:

as for the dystopian fable, only fans of detention centres, torture, unfettered government surveillance, screaming-mad television pundits and laws against alternative lifestyles will find anything here that could possibly offend.

Liberals, except the doubly odious “responsible” kind, will like the film because it’s politically correct: the evil government is right-wing and vaguely Christian, its victims seem to be mostly homosexuals. Jeffersonians will like it simply because there’s a little rebellion here. Bush loyalists will hate it for the idea that anti-terrorism and good old fashioned law-and-order can ever go too far. But of course, they can, and readily do, which is one reason “V for Vendetta,” for all its oversimplifications, is a timely movie. It’s also well made, and should entertain even unsympathetic viewers who don’t get too hung up on its exaggerations.

Edit:  I should have credited the comic book to both Alan Moore and David Lloyd, especially since artist Lloyd apparently came up with the Guy Fawkes motif.

Young people frequently ask me what the next big thing is going to be. Should they be listening to Spiggy Topes? Maybe Zeigeist from Sweden? Plausibly; but Malcolm McLaren has tipped Cansei de Ser Sexy (“Bored of Being Sexy” in Portuguese) of Sao Paolo, Brazil, which sounds about right, particularly “Music is My Hot Hot Sex.” “This Month, Day 10″ is also excellent.