The American Conservative

…and coming to you soon. Andrew Bacevich, Anders Strindberg, Scott McConnell, Stewart Nusbaumer, and Martin van Creveld on the Israel-Lebanon War; W. James Antle looks at Lieberman and the partisan polarization over the war; Wayne Merry warns the U.S. against repeating France and Britain’s Suez follies; Michael Brendan Dougherty offers a Burnhamite take on Guatamalan immigration to the village of Brewster, N.Y.; and the track record of pro-war prognosticators comes under scrutiny from Justin Logan. Taki also discusses the Labanon crisis, while Patrick Buchanan debunks President Bush’s fuzzy notion of “Islamofascism.”

Plus: Steve Sailer reviews “Quinceanera,” Kelly Jane Torrance on Whit Stillman, my review of Jeremy Lott’s In Defense of Hypocrisy, and William Anthony Hay’s take on Boyd Hilton’s A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783-1846.

From Kelly Jane Torrance’s fascinating interview with Mark Helprin (be sure to read the whole thing here):

MH: …I gave a speech that lasted 45 minutes or an hour, followed by a long question period. And one of the questions was about the democracy initiative, about changing Iraq into a democracy, and I am on record as saying—I don’t quite remember exactly, but I said more or less—I think it’s insane. I emphasize it like that, because among other things, if you count intensive language courses I took there in the summer as preparation, I spent almost three years in graduate school at Harvard in Middle Eastern Studies learning about Middle Eastern history, Arabic. And it was very clear to me, from the very beginning, that it’s impossible. If you know anything about Islamic civilization, or about the contemporary Middle East, about the sociology and the anthropology of the people who live there, and their recent history, and their religion, and their motivation and everything, then you realize that it’s not going to happen.

Even if it could be done, I don’t think it’s a desirable goal. Particularly as a Jew, I don’t like missionary work. I’ve had it focused on me, and I don’t like it. Let people be what they want to be. Now that doesn’t mean that we can’t explain what our point of view is. I would never back down from the American ideals, and we should make them known, whatever way we can, but the idea of actually embarking upon—and a crusade is a perfect word for it—a crusade to transform a culture, another culture . . . well, has it ever ended up in anything other than war? When we did it with Japan and Germany, it was after the war. They made on war on us, we hit them, and then we said, Okay, this is what we’re going to do. But the object of the war was not to—even though the propaganda may have said so—was not to change Japan and Germany into democracies. They both were democracies, to a large extent, already, but the object was to check them. My positions on this are complicated, but simple—and they’re all available.

DT: Have you found that your colleagues at places like the Wall Street Journal are unhappy with your criticism?

MH: Yes, I no longer am with the Journal.

DT: Is it because of this? Your thoughts on these issues?

MH: Pretty much, yes…

The Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza looks at recent polling data for signs of whether there’s a Democratic wave coming this November — and, more importantly, how big it might be. Most notable are the results he reports from an NPR poll (undertaken by a Democratic firm, it should be said) of voter sentiment in the 50 most competitive House districts:

By and large, the numbers tracked with the other national polls — although on presidential approval and the generic ballot voters in swing districts were more pro-Bush/pro-Republican than in recent national surveys.

Thirty-one percent of the sample said the country was headed in the right direction while 61 percent said it was off on the wrong track. Forty-one percent approved of the job Bush was doing while 55 percent did not. (Interestingly, 24 percent strongly approved compared to 45 percent who strongly disapproved, a difference that suggests major energy gap between the two party bases.) Forty-eight percent said they would vote for a generic Democratic candidate while 41 percent said they would support a generic Republican.

A 48-41 split on the generic preference question isn’t insuperable, and of course actual incumbents in most cases will outperform the generic party preference question.  The numbers suggest it’ll be close and bloody this November.

NRO’s Corner is all atwitter about Heather Mac Donald’s piece for The American Conservative‘s sympoisum on Left and Right. The NROdniks seem especially exercised about the notion that conservatism nowadays might be crippling itself by alienating atheists and agnostics. For my part, I certainly hope something cripples nationalist “conservatism,” though I don’t think it’s likely to be a lack of appeal to secular folk. After all, religion and nationalism in the United States sometimes appear nearly synonymous. ["What Tocqueville found in America in 1830," Robert Nisbet once wrote, "was in almost equal parts Christian (Puritan specifically) and nationalist. Christ the Redeemer and America the Redeemer Nation existed side by side."]

Historically speaking, religious belief and actual Burkean conservatism have not been so closely aligned. As Robert Nisbet — who was not a believer himself, as I recall — shows in Conservatism: Dream and Reality, it is established, institutional religion that Burkeans have traditionally defended — defended, that is, against radical disestablishmentarian Protestants as well as Jacobin types. Many of the greatest conservative thinkers and leaders of the past have not often been noted for their religious zeal. How religious was John Adams? Burke’s degree of belief and Disraeli’s remain open to question. (Again, they took Christianity seriously as an institutuion, but not necessarily as a body of dogma.) Robert Ingersoll, one of the most noteworthy Republicans of the 19th century, was equally noteworthy and outspoken as an agnostic. The leading New Humanists, Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt, were nonbelievers (though More became increasingly appreciative of Christianity late in life). William Graham Sumner and Albert Jay Nock had both been Episcopal priests but lost their faith and did not write as believers. Mencken, of course, was agnostic. Oakeshott and Weaver were rather idiosyncratic Christians and very far from being Religious Right types. As far as politicians go, Goldwater was spiritual but not religious, and Ronald Reagan did not regularly attend church. Few of these men were professed agnostics — none, by my count, called himself an atheist. Yet all of them were far removed from the religiosity that is central to the political philosophy of such latter-day Christian conservatives as James Dobson and Richard John Neuhaus.

Nisbet wrote in Conservatism: Dream and Reality about the relationship between conservatism and religion:

Religion is acceptable: it is indeed a good thing provided it is not made the base of the intrusion of personal beliefs into the public body of the nation. Doubtless no conservative, in the Burkean sense, has ever lived who could look out on today’s Moral Majority with equanimity, what with its so often brazen and calculated confusion of the secular — as manifested by intrusive laws and constitutional amendments — and the transcendentally religious.

Light posting for the nonce as I hurriedly catch up on a few neglected projects. One of those, my review of Jeremy Lott’s In Defense of Hypocrisy, should be in the next TAC, out in two weeks or so.

Theodore Kaczynski’s belongings are being auctioned off, including his books. His library has a pretty strong collection of Roman and Russian literautre and history — and not as many survivalist handbooks as you might expect. I don’t think I’d find much need for The Mushroom Hunter’s Field Guide, but I could perhaps use a copy of Roman Imperial Coins.

Here’s the link to TAC‘s feature on what, if anything, “left” and “right,” “conservative” and “liberal” mean today.

P.S. That link takes you to the whole symposium as one document. The main page has an index to the individual essays.

A quick but surprisingly useful account from Sidney Blumenthal — “he became scornful of disagreement, parading himself as a moral paragon to whom voters should be privileged to pay deference. The elevation of his sanctimony was accompanied by the loss of his political sense.” Check out the whole piece, which also looks at Connecticut’s pivotal political history. (Link via LRC.)

Joe Lieberman’s loss in Tuesday’s Democratic primary might not be a great blow to President Bush or the GOP — I wish it were, but that Democratic primary voters in one of the more liberal states in the country chose an antiwar candidate over the Bush-kissed incumbent doesn’t necessarily tell us much about how the November elections are going to turn out. Lieberman’s loss is a significant setback for neoconservatives, however, who have long pursued a one-and-a-half party strategy: holding tight reins on the GOP and the conservative movement while maintaining a strategic toehold in the Democratic camp through liberal hawks like Lieberman. Look at how the neocons and their conservative movement echo-chamber are squealing over the implications of Lieberman’s defeat: this means that the Democrats might be on the way — slowly — to becoming a real antiwar party. “[I]t appears to me that the Democratic party is in the process of cementing that it is the ‘peace,’ party” writes one of the contributors to NRO’s symposium on Lieberman’s loss — and the whole symposium goes a long way toward illustrating my point.

The conservative and neoconservative reaction illustrates something else as well: support for Bush and his war, as many other observers have remarked, is indeed their criterion for distinguishing friends from enemies. Lieberman is a friend. Lamont is an enemy, and is therefore construed as being hard left. Stop and think about that for a minute: Lamont is a successful businessman. He is not Cynthia McKinney. The only way anyone can believe he is loony left or far left or hard left is if being antiwar is itself proof of loony / far / hard leftiness.

Several of the contributors to The American Conservative‘s recent symposium on the meaning of Left and Right (which goes on-line Thursday) made this point. Justin Raimondo for one. Scott McConnell too. It’s a fact pretty well established by now. I should add one twist, however: neocons will tell you that it is possible to be an antiwar conservative — as long as you don’t act on your conviction or speak out about it. Even in his infamous “Unpatriotic Conservatives” hit piece, David Frum allowed that there could be some good antiwar conservatives. They’re just the ones who meekly go along with whatever the warmongers want. (Fun fact: I hear on pretty good authority that there were at least two antiwar people on staff at the Weekly Standard at the time of the invasion. And of course, Neal Freeman has given us some insight into the NR circle. Notice, however, that none of these people thought the war was important enough to speak out against it publicly when doing so might have made a difference, either in ’03 when the war was launched or before the ’04 elections. Party and movement loyalty trumped.)

It’s not unreasonable that the war should be so polarizing. Its proponents evidently do believe that Saddam posed a threat to the United States and that by invading Iraq the United States would be combatting terrorism rather than incubating it. And those of us who are against the war have thought from the very beginning that this view is unsupported by any evidence or probable line of reasoning and that by attacking and occupying a country that posed no threat, the United States would only exposing be itself to more terrorism while at the same time bringing about the deaths of untold thousands of innocent Iraqis and thousands (so far) of U.S. troops. Those are high stakes either way, and behind the two sides are very different ways of seeing the world and seeing U.S. power.

Not only is it not surprising that the war has been as polarizing as it has, but it also is not surprising that the polarization has broken down the way that it has. At least since Vietnam, and really going back some years earlier, most conservatives have been committed militarists and nationalists. Conservatives over the past five decades have frequently talked about government’s incompetence and excessive spending — but virtually never have they applied these criticisms to the military, certainly not in a sustained and systematic fashion. It would hardly be going too far to say that the military has been an object of veneration. Similarly, but to a slightly lesser degree, American military expansionism and interventionism have been supported by conservatives to a far greater degree than they have been supported by anyone else. Again, this is an old story. The one major exception to conservative foreign-policy bloodlust was the anomalous period in the mid-to-late ’90s when Republicans weren’t keen to get into Kosovo and bomb Serbia. Today, there’s some hestitation on the Right about getting into Darfur and other African sinkholes, although some the Christian Right — Sam Brownback in the Senate and Frank Wolf in the House come to mind — seem about as eager to do so as anyone on the Left.

There is no antiwar Right, at least not beyond the very limited number of contributors to and readers of magazines like Chronicles and The American Conservative. We could all fit into a college football stadium and still have plenty of seats to spare. There is, to be sure, a conservative intellectual tradition critical of war and militarism that outshines anything the belligerent Right or neoconservatives can offer. To one extent or another, Richard Weaver, Robert Nisbet, Michael Oakeshott, John Lukacs, and Russell Kirk are all in the anti-militarist camp. Up to a point, right-wing militarists can be brought around to the side of peace and nonintervention by showing them that the best conservative arguments are against was, especially total war, and a quasi-imperial foreign policy. But the number of conservatives who are smart enough to understand such arguments, or interested enough to listen, is very small indeed.

It gets steadily harder to deny that militarism is the sine qua non of “conservatism” as it is actually practiced in America. So perhaps Lieberman’s bedfellows are not so strange as they might appear, regardless of whether Lamont or any of the rest of us who oppose this stupid bloody war are “far Left” or not.

I had the same reaction David Franke did when I saw Byron York’s NRO scarepiece about the threat of Democrats impeaching President Bush: that’s one more reason to vote for ‘em. A big one.

Meanwhile, in addition to running as an independent “Democrat” (that’s Joespeak for “Republican”) for the Senate in Connecticut, maybe Loserman should hedge his bets by running as the GOP’s write-in candidate for Tom DeLay’s Texas congressional seat, too.