The American Conservative

I have long had a guilty pleasure for Family Guy – in spite of the fact that it wears its loony liberal politics on its sleeve, though even this can occasionally have its moments of brilliance.  In the second episode of this season however they had  the uber-liberal Brian convert overnight into a blind worshiper of Rush Limbaugh.  The episode is absurdly and perniciously premised on the idea that we have a reasoned and substantive political discourse in America today based on the positions represented by Rush Limbaugh and Seth MacFarlane, as though they were Bill Buckley and Arthur Schlessinger.

Now, I would have been just as outraged in the 50s by the suggestion that Buckley and Schlessinger were such, as Dwight Macdonald famously wrote of the premier of National Review “we have long needed a good conservative magazine, we have also long needed a good liberal magazine.”  I am ashamed of myself that I cannot as I write this think of who it was in the conservative pantheon that said things always get progressively worse, perhaps because countless said it.

I bring up this two month old episode of Family Guy after seeing last night’s episode, in which Brian publishes a hugely successful vapid self-help book, a third of which consists of his appearing on Bill Maher, who is clearly made to come across as the hero for showing up the conceited protagonist.  (Go here, here, and here to see just what a miserable cretin Bill Maher really is).  In the Family Guy performance Maher actually made some kind of righteous stand about Darfur – DARFUR!!!!!

I can accept and even take some satisfaction that Buckley and Schlessinger led inevitably to Limbaugh and MacFarlane.  But for the vintage-90s phony radical Bill Maher to be presented in this universe as the jaded wise man above it all is an abomination.

It may be lost on the infra dig sort of Conservative backbencher who lionizes Margaret Thatcher and imagines her to have been some kind of Euroskeptic. But George Osborne, Britain’s Finance Minister (although he is a dreadful socially liberal capitalist and neocon), is a very different creature, the heir to the Osborne baronetcy of Ballentaylor, in County Tipperary, and Ballylemon, in County Waterford. He knows exactly what he is doing in making an offer, which cannot really be refused, to reassert Ascendancy over what has never ceased to be an integral part of the British economy, for decades complete with a currency pegged at whatever happened to be the value of sterling, its almost identical coinage produced by the Royal Mint, as that of many Commonwealth countries still is. As the euro collapses, expect that state of affairs to be restored.

Would we Britons have to do this for anyone else in Euroland? Only if anyone else in Euroland speaks English, has vast family ties to Britain, has always had the right to vote and stand in British elections, has never stopped providing recruits for the British Armed Forces, watches British television, listens to British pop music, has three political parties that are flagrant creatures of British intelligence (just ask Sinn Féin, not that they have been in any position to comment for a long time now) and one of which is openly funded by labor unions headquartered in Britain, and so on, and on, and on, not least including practically total economic integration with Britain, which is why we are making this offer.

They can keep their flag, their anthem, their President, their totemic use of Irish, their metric road signs, and all the rest of it. But someone, somewhere is killing the fatted calf tonight (as it is here). Probably Sir Peter and Lady Osborne, of Ballentaylor, in County Tipperary, and Ballylemon, in County Waterford.

When I first appeared in this august family of blogs nearly a year and a half ago, I was still inclined to give our President the benefit of the doubt about a great many things.  A lot has happened in the last year, and I myself was from many directions moved to almost become a full-blown leftist again before the most pleasant surprise of being invited to return to PostRight.  Allow me then the indulgence of a reconsideration, if not a full blown mea culpa.

I still believe that simply dismissing Obama as “Bush-lite” or whatever version of the same concept is misguided if not exactly false.  The insane thing about the times we live in is that for every Tea Party crazy who thinks Obama is some kind of authoritarian socialist is a leftist (or libertarian, or paleo) who thinks he’s more of a neoliberal than Clinton (or even more neocon than Bush).  For every neocon convinced Obama is an avowed enemy of “American exceptionalism” (whatever that means) and determined to destroy Israel is a radical who thinks he’s a partisan of the empire and more craven to Israel than any President in history.  They can’t both be right, which means, in all probability, that neither can be right.

If Obama’s first political mentor was indeed Frank Davis, who appears to have been a member of the Communist Party into the 50s but to have left long before the teenage Obama knew him, it would seem that Obama’s initial political inclinations were toward a broadly patriotic left that, while owing more to the Popular Front than to historic American socialism, would naturally have led him into the orbit of the larger “democratic left” of that era.  I must add, however, that those on the right who read so much into this stuff are wide of the mark in getting the point of it all – the actual organizations in question were only useful to Obama as steps upward in his political career.

I believe Obama chose to put down roots, such as they were, in Chicago because it was a place that still had a large white (even WASP) working class by which he could hone potential national appeal.  I further believe that in keeping with the vague notions that informed his early political development, he developed a strong dislike for the culture war left and saw it as a major obstacle to any future national revival for the liberal left.  And frankly, this was no doubt informed by his knowledge of what the historic partisans of abortion would have preferred happen to a product of miscegenation such as himself.

Obama appears to have succeeded in, at the very least, presiding over the end of the culture war, but what he and indeed most of us did not anticipate is that it would be replaced by something far worse: the Tea Party movement and the inevitable afterbirth of the Birchers of the left.

Early in my ouvere I commented on the quite sharp cover piece in Harper’s comparing Obama to Herbert Hoover, in a quite favorable portrayal of Hoover, and which led me to conclude that this was a good thing.  Though I hold to my fundamental criticism of the piece, which is that there isn’t exactly an FDR on the horizon (for better or worse), it is now clearly evident how a well-meaning technocrat and conciliator can be caught completely flat-footed by the chaos all around him.

In short, Obama is neither raging avenger of the third world of neocon imagination nor slick repackaging of the neocon agenda of radical imagination.  He is a sincere conservative (in the regime sense) reformer who wants to bring about the necessary change to liberalize yet fundamentally preserve the system, but is thwarted by a decadent and militant political class.  The analogy to Gorbachev immediately springs to mind (the last two minutes of this Daily Show clip from last year is a must-see in this connection).  But with the ever-maddening descent of our political and media elite, I am at times made to wonder if Obama is less Gorbachev than the Guangxu Emperor, who wished to bring about a Meiji-style modernization in China only to be put under house arrest by an unbelievably decadent and delusional imperial court that ran China into the ground and ultimately paved the way for Mao.

This is leaving aside, of course, whether this would be a good thing.  But, though I’m not sure I ever doubted it, even if Obama still has a reasonably successful presidency, I must conclude that there will not in the end be a republic that survives of the empire.

I do wish to conclude with a few quick takes on prevailing attitudes among radicals and principled conservatives which continue to irk me:

As for the empire itself, I do believe Obama is primarily motivated by a domestic agenda going back to his early influences, which is more of style than substance – and that to paraphrase Lincoln, if he can pass that agenda and preserve the empire he will, and if he can pass that agenda and dismantle the empire he will.  Whatever his foreign policies may mean in practice, I remain wholly unconvinced that he is in any way a true believer in the doctrines of American hegemony.

On civil liberties, about which I have seen a lot of handwringing, I can honestly say for myself that I never expected him to be good in this area.

I must also say a few words about the Middle East.  I believe that throughout his whole career leading up to the Presidency Obama was a committed believer in the two-state solution, and that his relationships with both leading Palestinian academics and with leading progressive Zionists in Chicago were equally reflective of this.  The rub, however, is that he entered the White House to discover definitively that the two state solution was beyond saving.  I therefore don’t believe that Obama ever seriously believed he could do anything about settlements, that this was just a smoke screen to buy time, and that all he can do now is continue trying to give Netanyahu the rope to hang himself and quietly help euthanize the two-state solution generally.

It was none other than the great Steve Sailer who first made me like the idea of Obama as President when I thought it was preposterous (“Gaullism worked out fairly well in France, and so might Obamaism in America”).  Even Dan had some remarkably optimistic statements in retrospect when it looked like the Democrats were actually learning a few things about where they went wrong.  It was clear by the time Obama was elected that the Democrats had not learned, but it seemed that Obama could work around this.  The midterms made clear that even this was an untenable proposition.

Even if Obama can yet tap into the silent majority and make significant strides in dismantling the empire, what we now know for certain is that both sides of our political establishment have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the last ten years, and down the line that will lead to a revolutionary situation.

This is a rather dated piece I wrote for consideration by the magazine last fall, but it remains very relevant, as I don’t think the apparent passing of the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy means that Anti-Islamism is going away any time soon.  Indeed, among the freshman House Republicans will be Allen West, who gave an impassioned speech about Tours and Lepanto at an event sponsored by Frank Gaffney.

Incidentally, for all my Catholic friends, there is a very simple answer to the question “Did Charles Martel ask why they hate us?” – Charles Martel would never have said that they hate us for our freedom.

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By now it should be practically cliché to speak of applying Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics to the present wave of anti-Muslim hysteria.  Still, there is much that a thoroughgoing exploration can teach us.  Consider one of Hofstadter’s most famous passages:

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self, both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him.  The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry.  Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery.  The Ku Klux Klan imitated the Catholic Church by donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy.  The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through front groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy.

On the most superficial level, one can easily see the projection on to Islam of a universal cosmic struggle in the invocation by less-than-pious Christians to be fighting the same war that was fought at Tours and Lepanto.  Yet it goes deeper, for as Hofstadter also observed:

Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated – if not from the world, at least from the theater of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention.  This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration.

From this can only follow naturally a sense of martyrdom, and it is this martyrdom complex, distinctly in the name of secularism, in which Hofstadter’s projection principle, and the whole paranoid style, is most evident.

Consider the case of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park.  Late last year the duo got into a highly publicized feud with Comedy Central over the ultimately thwarted airing of images of the Prophet Muhammad.  One can accept that Comedy Central committed itself dishonorably while also speaking frankly of the pathologies animating Parker and Stone.  Anyone familiar with South Park will know it for its fanatically adolescent eagerness to shock all sensibilities, deep animus toward religion, and pro-war libertarian politics.  Regarding all three, they have had a mutual embrace with the creators and partisans of the infamous Muhammad cartoons in Europe.  It is easy to conclude, therefore, that Parker and Stone have been fixated on the Muhammad question out of their own martyrdom complex for the cause of free speech, a classic illustration of Hofstadter’s projection principle.

To trace the roots of such a martyrdom complex in American popular culture, however, demonstrates it to be odder still.  For what is the quintessential case in our popular culture of artists and writers becoming martyrs to the First Amendment?  The Hollywood blacklist, that bizarre episode in which the downfall of a group of well paid hacks, whose most notable expression of their Communism was their contribution as such to World War II propaganda, was somehow plausibly portrayed as the beginning of a fascist revolution in America.  The popularized version of this history is but one product of the universal cosmic struggle against the totally unappeasable total evil called fascism.

Fortunately, there is a totally raw, and therefore highly instructive example of this very old paranoid style projected seamlessly on to the great cosmic struggle against “Islamofascism”.  Paul Berman, the leading American partisan in the last decade for a movement of the left against “Islamofascism”, provides this in his recently published polemic The Flight of the Intellectuals.  After seeing fit to write nearly 30,000 words dissembling the reformist Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan for The New Republic, he felt it necessary to expand this into a barely longer book.

Yet as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have left American liberals so cruelly disillusioned with the armed idealism variously called “liberal internationalism” or “democratic socialism”, Berman has now become an island unto himself.  He bogs himself down in discourses on the contemporary French intellectual scene, for just as by the 1970s there were more true-believing Marxist-Leninists in the American academy than in all the Soviet Union, so today are there more true-believers in armed liberal-left internationalism among the continental philosophes.  As Lee Siegel put it in a devastating review, “he argues his weirdly outdated concepts with such fury because he is really trying to make a case for his own importance.”

It has been argued that Hofstadter’s projection principle applies to no one more uncannily than left-wing watchers of the “radical right” whose tactics of guilt-by-association and threat inflation by dramatic flair mimic McCarthyism in the nth degree.  Berman, however, has seen fit to set his sights beyond assorted libertarian cranks on the home front, and instead brandish this sword in the great anti-fascist crusade against “radical Islam”.  Berman indicts Ramadan because his grandfather was a founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, whose sister party in Palestine was led by the Mufti of Jerusalem who collaborated with Hitler.  Nearly half of The Flight of the Intellectuals dwells on this history, in this midst of which not even half a paragraph is given to the founding of the State of Israel and the controversy surrounding it.

Berman does take the time to acknowledge that the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda are not one and the same, that indeed the latter is an extremist splinter banished by the former for heresy.  For Berman to insist that there is no difference between the two in ends, only in means, is to repeat the radical right trope of yore that social democracy and Marxism-Leninism were divided only by means and not ends, and to encourage the same conceit in the wider public.  This has been extended to mean that the victory by democratic means of the Muslim Brotherhood anywhere in the world is a triumph for the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks.  Indeed, this was quite openly suggested by many when the ruling party of Turkey was the object of much self-righteous outrage after the Gaza flotilla tragedy.  This was as though to have suggested that the election of Ramsay MacDonald meant that Lenin had conquered the British Empire.

Not even the Baron von Ungern-Sternberg would have ever dreamt of thinking such a thing, but this is exactly the view of our self-styled leading “democrat of the left” Paul Berman.  Of course, the Israel lobby can be blamed for a great deal of the prejudice against what may be the Muslim world’s best hope for the peaceful and organic development of democracy.  Berman, however, is by all appearances a sincere believer in the great cosmic struggle of western modernity against Islamofascism, if for most neocons it can be an arduous and thankless task to discern where the former ends and frank partisanship of Israel begins.  Whereas for most of our anti-Islamists the definition of the side of good in the great cosmic struggle consists of a clumsily hobbled brief history of Christendom, Paul Berman has an all too clear conception of the leftist modernity that defines it for him.

But if Berman is an extreme case, his is nonetheless an idiosyncratic rendition of the secular faith, euphemistically called “civil religion” by political scientists, at the heart of the present anti-Muslim hysteria.  Conservatives of another era such as Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet would be absolutely appalled by the protests against violations of the “sacred ground” of the World Trade Center site in the name of this secular faith in American virtue.  Indeed, the neocon propagandist David Gelernter wrote of this “Americanism” as “the fourth great Western religion” – the three being Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism, pointedly excluding Islam.  For here, alas, we have a literal analog in anti-Islamism to the Klan’s priestly vestments: “Ground Zero” as the Holy of Holies, which mere mortals are only fit to reverently encircle at the perimeter.

A commonality in the paranoid style that went unexplored by Hofstadter can help explain why this phenomenon has emerged now, nearly a decade after the September 11 attacks, when al-Qaeda is increasingly irrelevant.  Similarly, Joe McCarthy came on to the scene at the very time the American Communist Party was in precipitous and irreversible decline, and well after the major prosecutions of Soviet spies at the start of the Cold War.  For a large segment of the population, there is great anxiety over the fact that 9/11 has not proven to be the day that “changed everything”, leading to the desperate scramble to reassert the holiness of all that it represents in the civic religion of American nationalism.  What we are witnessing, therefore, is a popular revanchist uprising of anxiety over the decline and fall of the American empire, akin to the Lost Generation in Britain or the revolt of the pied noirs in France, marking the last days of those empires.

This has already been evident in the bulk of the Tea Party movement, whose most often heard grievance is that there is a war on many fronts against “American exceptionalism”.  How this rather obscure Marxist concept became the creed of the American right is incredible to contemplate, but it is nevertheless the logical outcome of the inverted Marxism-Leninism we call neoconservatism.  It is hardly unusual therefore that an impeccable democratic socialist like Paul Berman should be one of the most articulate spokesmen for the paranoid style of anti-Islamism.  It is less odd still that the secular faith which the neoconservatives regard to be “the fourth great western religion” is the militant world-redemptive creed whose pathologies they project on to the Islamic faith.

I must say this has been the most frustrating and delusional conceit I have seen in principled conservative circles in the last year.  You can go here for a good dissembling of this fantasy’s most vociferous advocate.

I was pleased therefore to see Scott’s recent article on the subject.  But even he seems to take a misguidedly benighted view of the tea parties, as implied by the notion that they have been merely co-opted by the neocons.  I would argue, to the contrary, that the Tea Party movement is in fact fundamentally neocon in its first principles.

This is in evidence by the most frequent complaint heard at Tea Party rallies, about the war against “American exceptionalism” – how this rather obscure Marxist concept became the religion of the American right is a topic for another day and perhaps another author.  My long-time readers may recall my invoking this article, the last ever published by Irving Kristol, which I consider a smoking gun in understanding neoconservatism.  He laid out frankly his arriving at the conclusion in the 1950s that European welfare states were unfit to destroy communism and extend the global democratic revolution, and therefore it must be done by some sort of military-industrial complex heavy “democratic capitalism”.

It is the deep internalization of this narrative on a mass level that has led to hysterical and even violent opposition to the health care bill and indeed anything that could remotely make America more like a European welfare state.  Those who find this far-fetched would do well to consider that this is the why so many neocons became newspaper columnists, reaching all the way into small local papers and thus able to exert tremendous influence on mass consciousness.  And to those clinging to the contrary “welfare-warfare state” formula eager to see in the Tea Parties a movement of principle, I will just say that it is no less intellectually lazy to believe that an activist mass movement has altruistically emerged to fight for austerity than it is to reduce it to racist hatred of Obama.

The best way one can understand the Tea Party movement, therefore, is by drawing an analogy to reactionary mass movements that emerged in the twilight of European Imperialism, perhaps most notably the partisans of Algerie Francaise.  There may also be something to be said for the argument of Peter Beinart, for all its insipid attacks on the “isolationist” bogey, about the pattern of domestic nativist anxiety that led to the Klan after World War I and McCarthyism after World War II.  The former’s relevance to recent anti-Muslim hysteria is obvious enough, but the latter may be the most instructive.  The debate about the tea party among principled conservative bears a stunning likeness to the debate on the old right over McCarthy.

In any event, how any of this might possibly be interpreted as the basis of a new antiwar movement requires the maximum of either self-deception or hallucinogens.

Remember, in light of the October 31 outrage, that Tariq Aziz is to be sent to the gallows specifically as a Christian who waged war on the Islamists who, thanks to Bush and Blair, now control Iraq. Sent to the gallows: the only man left who could ever have told the whole story of America’s dirty war in Iraq.

Bush and Blair never knew that there were Christians in Iraq. Even now, they probably assume that they are recent converts served by American missionaries who have only arrived since 2003. We also shore up the regime in Egypt. By contrast, the Presidency and half the parliamentary seats are reserved for Christians in Lebanon, a state under constant existential threat from the Israeli bombardment in furtherance of Ben-Gurion’s claim to all territory south of the Litani. There are Christian-majority provinces, and Christian festivals as public holidays, in Syria, and both Armenians and Assyrians have reserved parliamentary representation in Iran. Christians founded, and continue to provide considerable support for, the PFLP and DFLP, whatever else may be said about those organizations. Are they fighting an Islamic holy war? Is Hanan Ashrawi? Was Yasser Arafat’s mother-in-law (his wife converted to Islam for inheritance purposes)? Is Helen Thomas? Or is that simply not the nature of the Palestinian, and the Lebanese, struggle at all?

Even in America, most Evangelicals do not use the Scofield Reference Bible or take it at all seriously. Anywhere else, such as here in Britain, it is hard to obtain. (The Left Behind series has no British distributor, since it has no conceivable British audience.) But their attitude to Levantine Christianity is much like their attitude to the Sub-Apostolic Fathers: they either do not know, or do not want to know, about entirely matter-of-fact descriptions of all things “Romish” existing during the lifetimes of the Apostles and providing the context that the New Testament text presupposes. Nor do they wish to be confronted with the entirely matter-of-fact existence of communities of that kind which have been present continuously for two thousand years, right there in the Bible Lands.

Christian communities that go all the way back to the Day of Pentecost are problematic enough in themselves for them, without those communities’ having become, at best, Anglican or Lutheran rather than, say, Baptist, and far more commonly Latin Catholic or Maronite, Greek Orthodox or Melkite, Syrian Orthodox or Syrian Catholic, Armenian Orthodox or Armenian Catholic. As part of Evangelicalism’s general upward trend in educational terms, Evangelical theology is increasingly looking beyond the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to its earlier and more cerebral roots, and thus to a place within the older, broader and deeper Tradition. Approaches to the Middle East are starting to reflect this shift.

But most churchgoers, and indeed most clergy, are not academic theologians. So, for the most part, the attitude continues to be essentially the same as that which has since the nineteenth century maintained the completely made-up Garden Tomb because those who invented it did not like the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and did not want people to know about it.

Well, the midterm elections are over and the GOP is feeling revitalized. Conservatives of all stripes are confidently declaring that, “The American people have spoken.” Count me as one who has no idea what they just said. These election results leave me utterly perplexed. Perhaps I would be less confused if I embraced the maxim, “All politics is local.” Such a view certainly saves one the trouble of looking for larger trends. Alas, in a nation where the national government has a say in almost every sphere of our lives, and the economy is in the doldrums from sea to shining sea, I cannot take such a view seriously. Nonetheless, I remain unable to discern a meaningful pattern to these results.

The GOP was rebuked in 2006 and 2008 because of its failed policies. Yet they were given a second chance without first admitting their mistakes – apart, I suppose, from acknowledging that they engaged in too much generic “spending.” I am certainly not alone in assuming that the results on Nov. 2nd were more about the public’s frustration with Obama’s failure to turn the economy around than its confidence that John Boehner can do better.

Still, the aggregate results don’t tell me much. The exit polls show some weird anomalies. In my own beloved home state of Washington, for example, we see that voters under 50 swung for the Republican candidate Dino Rossi (in fact, 11 percent of 2008 Obama voters in the Evergreen State pulled the lever for the Republican senatorial candidate this year). Yet, among those older than 65, Murray did better this year than Obama two years ago. Why on earth would a milquetoast establishment Republican do so well among younger voters – “younger” defined as those between 30 and 50, I haven’t seen results for those under 30, but I assume they went heavily for Murray— without seeing a similar gain among senior citizens? I would spend more time thinking about this, but it appears that Washington was an outlier here. I haven’t yet found another state in which the GOP candidate did better among those under 50 than among those over 65. Not even Rand Paul, who surely benefitted disproportionally from young activists, can make such a claim. Granted, I don’t have much trust in the accuracy of exit polls, but for the time being they are the best data we have on this election.

Unless the dramatically different election results in recent years were entirely driven by turnout trends, big swings suggest that we’ve entered a new era of weak partisan attachments. This is totally at odds with the view held by most political scientists, who, with a few prominent exceptions, tend to accept the proposition that the public is more polarized along partisan lines now than in any period in recent memory. I furthermore tend to agree with the position that most self-described “independent voters” are really just partisans who don’t want to admit their partisanship. In reality, those who describe themselves as “independents who lean toward one party” are usually more firm in their partisan attachments than self-described “weak partisans.” Genuine independents are actually rather rare. I therefore don’t give much weight to the opinion that “swing voters” are the key variable in any election. So what’s going on?

Things are further confused by the “Tea Party” candidates – whatever the heck those are. Some of them won big (Paul), whereas others performed, sometimes surprisingly, poorly (O’Donnell, Angle). Now everyone can decide for themselves whether the Tea Party is good for the GOP based on their personal preferences. I guess that’s good news for professional pontificators with an ax to grind, but a challenge for those of us who genuinely want to sort it all out.

If we want to let someone else decide these things for us, I suppose we can always turn to the pundits, who are required to have a firm opinion on everything. Matt Lewis boldly declared that that the 2010 elections represent a revival of “serious conservatism.” He then backed up his assertion by pointing out that, uh, Ronald Reagan read quite a few books in the 1960s. Lewis is confident that the new crop of Republicans will be on par with that towering intellectual giant (and no, I’m not kidding) Jack Kemp. Well, at least I can now say that, for the first time ever, I agree with something Lewis has written.

Sometime next year we’ll have access to individual polling data that will let us parse it all out. By that time, of course, most people will have moved on. In the meantime, you can count me as confused.

MINT-AND-CORN COUNTRY, INDIANA — One of the more trivial effects of my grandfather’s passing this summer is that I have the opportunity to peruse copies of TIME and Newsweek as his subscriptions follow him toward earthly cessation. (Presumably, he’s able to read them still, for surely Purgatory is the final and ultimate postmortem destination of such middlebrow publications.) Somewhat to my surprise, thumbing through Newsweek, I found myself nodding my head broadly in agreement with Robert J. Samuelson, who in “High-Speed Pork” calls out the Obama Administration for its positively daft endorsement of high-speed passenger rail.

Let me first be clear about something: I’m not inherently opposed to passenger rail. I’m elated to see this addition to TAC, believe that when done properly rail transportation is morally superior to the mechanical Jacobin, and happily rode the Metro (to which I had to drive a mile *grumble*Stupid suburbia*grumble*) frequently when I resided inside the Beltway. But, as Samuelson notes, what the Obama Administration proposes is not well-planned, economical, and sensible infrastructure: Like the McRib, it’s quick-service pork — except that the McRib costs significantly less (clogged arteries notwithstanding) and is much rarer than federal fiscal foibles:

What would we get for this huge investment?

Not much. Here’s what we wouldn’t get: any meaningful reduction in traffic congestion, greenhouse gas emissions, air travel, oil consumption or imports. Nada, zip. If you can do fourth-grade math, you can understand why.

High-speed inter-city trains (not commuter lines) travel at up to 250 miles per hour and are most competitive with planes and cars over distances of fewer than 500 miles. In a report on high-speed rail, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service examined the 12 corridors of 500 miles or fewer with the most daily air traffic in 2007. Los Angeles to San Francisco led the list with 13,838 passengers; altogether, daily air passengers in these 12 corridors totaled 52,934. If all of them hypothetically switched to trains, the total number of daily airline passengers, about 2 million, would drop only 2.5 percent. Any fuel savings would be less than that; even trains need energy.

Indeed, inter-city trains — at whatever speed — target such a small part of total travel that the changes in oil use, congestion or greenhouse gases must be microscopic. Every day, about 140 million Americans go to work, with about 85 percent driving an average of 25 minutes (three-quarters drive alone, 10 percent carpool). Even assuming 250,000 high-speed rail passengers, there would be no visible effect on routine commuting, let alone personal driving. In the Northeast Corridor, with about 45 million people, Amtrak’s daily ridership is 28,500. If its trains shut down tomorrow, no one except the affected passengers would notice.

Rather to my dismay, if not disgust, I find myself in agreement with Ohio governor-elect John “Don’t Blame Me for Lehman Brothers” Kasich (No Taft, he!), who, not yet inaugurated, “sent letters Monday to both out-going Gov. Ted Strickland and President Obama, asking the former to terminate current 3C [passenger-rail project] engineering contracts and the latter to either make provisions for the $400 million to be used to support ‘other vital transportation infrastructure projects’ in Ohio or, if that’s not possible, use it to reduce the federal government’s $1.4 trillion deficit”. Bravo!

When Kasich refers to “other vital infrastructure projects”, he specifically means upgrades to highways (No Republican is perfect.) and to freight rail! Callooh callay! I grew up, and still reside, in a town in rural Indiana where rail was once king, with one hundred and twenty-five trains coming through in a twenty-four hour period at the apogee of the rail era, and I see what become of this place when, amongst other things, long-haul trucks usurped freight’s throne, so I have a certain bias toward rail. Having spent enough time on perpetually under-construction, always-dominated-by-semis highways has confirmed my suspicious regarding the superiority of the train over the truck.

About a decade ago, I was at the Starke County 4-H Fair, conversing with the Republican candidate for state senate at the time. I have no idea what directed our brief discussion to rail at this point in my life, but for years, I’ve carried with me something that he noted: A supporter of his, a bigger player in trucking in the area, had confided to him something to the effect of “I run a trucking business, and I know that it would hurt my business, but we need to bring rail back. Losing rail just killed us.” Something simple, just an anecdote, but so poignant in its honesty.

My hometown is not only a former railroad town: We still have one not-so-busy line, which the Town owns, and we’re host to a popular train museum that offers rides on Saturdays (that happen to pass my family’s farm, where Grandpa resided ‘til his passing, and where I’ll soon be living and nurturing my anarcho-agrarian tendencies). And I’m fortunate enough to be in a position, professionally, in which I can attempt to help to bring more rail traffic and more rail-dependent industry to the area. But I digress; what is relevant about my hometown’s railroading past and present is something posted on the Hoosier Valley Railroad Museum’s Website. About one-third of the way down this page, a damning chart provides some interesting information: Data from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics and USDOT (2005) tell us that although rail is responsible already for forty percent of U.S. freight ton-miles, compared to trucking’s thirty percent, rail consumes only eight percent of energy, compared to an astounding sixty-five percent by trucks. Such inefficiency is deplorable, not to mention environmentally inexcusable. Don’t forget the economic benefits of rail, either — or that replacing significant levels of truck traffic on the highways with freight trains has the potential to make our roads safer for motorists and their passengers, diminishes congestion, and drastically decreases the pulverizing damage massive eighteen-wheelers do to the pavement (and the concomitant costs).

Perhaps most important of all for cultural conservatives, rail can help to level the playing field for the “Flyover States”, bringing new economic vitality to communities desiccated by wave after wave of suburbanization so God-awfully subsidized by the federal government via long-standing transportation-funding policies (the unpleasant half of Kasich’s request). Plenty of folk’ll still drive off to Walmart because they truly cannot afford to shop from the smaller hometown grocer, as will a good number who value the supposedly disappearing middle-class lifestyle (of keeping up with the Joneses) enough to prioritize the new LCD (or whichever high-tech incarnation of idiot box is in vogue presently) over new helmets for the local Little League (Damn right I’m pulling at the heart strings like that!), but more than preaching the virtues and long-term benefits of shopping locally, what is needed to keep money circulating at home is the presence of more better jobs that do not require that people commute forty, sixty, even eighty miles. When stopping at the not-so-local hypermarket, finding a spot in the asphalt ocean, and inevitably buying things that you wouldn’t buy were you not besieged by apparent deals becomes less convenient, and when Joe Six-Pack is earning that paycheck three blocks from Jim’s Supermarket and Hank’s Hardware, he just may be more inclined to give his earnings to his old high-school classmates, rather than making a special trip to deposit his earnings with the Menard family or the Waltons, whose respective colossuses stood between the plant and the porch before the local factory re-opened adjacent to the new team track. (I pretend not to own plants or crystal balls possessed of essomenic powers whereby I can foresee such things, but anecdotal evidence and common sense suggest that I may be on to something here, at least in cases when Jim’s and Hank’s are sufficiently responsive to their customers’ needs — but that’s an excessive digression.)

The Obama Administration has not completely disregarded freight rail, offering TIGER moneys for rail improvements, entering public-private partnerships to update parts of the rail system, but their screw-ups here are, minimally, two-fold: Prioritizing funding for passenger rail over freight-rail expansion, and suggesting that “Improving miles of track in advance of a high-speed rail network also smooths the way for more efficient rail shipping” , despite that “fast passenger trains are not compatible with slow freight trains on the same track.” Bridges are inconsequential: We’re building an entire transportation system to nowhere!

Rail advocacy can and should very much be a conservative cause, provided that we’re not supporting it for the sake thereof. Much good can be said about forms of passenger rail, particularly commuter-rail and public-transit systems. Unsurprisingly, President Obama’s take on the issue is inimical to conservatism — perhaps, in part, because of his desire to adimpleate his campaign war chest with contributions from the “creative class” who stand to benefit from high-sped passenger rail and anything else that helps them to avoid becoming rooted —; almost remarkably, John Kasich’s tune isn’t too far off-pitch. Good for Ohio. Here’s hoping that others, like California, Florida, and New York — not exactly in good fiscal shape and “already lobbying that funds returned from states like Ohio or Wisconsin … would be re-allocated to rail corridors where true high-speed trains reaching sustained speeds of 135 mph or more, still far slower than Euro-style or Chinese trains that routinely clock speeds of 220 mph or more, can proceed” — learn from this Midwestern common sense. Let’s hope that Mr. Obama does.

This came as quite a surprise, and I should begin by thanking Dan and the rest of the editors for their generosity.

It’s been quite a year, plenty of assumptions from the past period on this blog may have turned upside-down, and I’m also getting a book published soon! I definitely have a lot I want to say just in terms of reflecting on all that, but there’s also the inconvenience of my being out of town for most of this first week back. I’ll do what I can this week, but its good to be blogging again!!!

Marco Rubio for President? Come on, he would be an Affirmative Action candidate. But do the Republicans really want to become, as they have long shown signs of wanting to become, the party of illegal immigration amnesties and of the erosion of the status of English? If so, then the Democrats would doubtless be delighted both at the massive black turnout against such things and at the mass defections of blue-collar whites against them. The Republicans seem to think that their partial success in attracting Italians who found that their local Democratic Parties were already being run by and for the Irish can be repeated with Hispanics who find that their local Democratic Parties are already being run by and for the blacks. Well, they know what they have to do. Oh, and Rubio does not come from a “refugee” community. The Cubans in Miami are economic migrants, as well as supporters of the restoration of Cuba as she existed before 1959, a drug den and brothel for the American superrich, run by the Mafia. “Conservative”?

About as “conservative”, in fact, as the thoroughly unsuccessful Tea Party, now reduced to claiming as its own successful candidates whom it had previously disowned. One of its few genuine successes was in Utah, and even there Bob Bennett would have been re-elected, and thus returned to considerable prominence in the Republican Caucus, if he had run as an Independent. Bennett, a former Mormon chaplain in the Army National Guard and married into LDS royalty, was not “conservative” enough for the Tea Party, which has also indicated its intention to go after Orrin Hatch, a Mormon bishop, in 2012. The Tea Party’s only definition of a “conservative” is a supporter of some undefined combination of zero taxation with lavish military spending, the continuation of Medicare, and the continuation of Social Security. Moral issues, conventionally defined, have nothing to do with it. For all the faults of those who put both the “Grand” and the “Old” into “Grand Old Party”, thank goodness that their Tea Party enemies did so much worse than predicted or presupposed by Fox and by its London talking heads.

For, on both sides of the Atlantic and at every point on what still purports to be the political spectrum, the media love the Tea Party, because the Tea Party confirms their every prejudice about the lower middle class in provincial America. The coverage is an extended, elaborate form of laughter. That is as true of Fox as it is of anyone else. Indeed, almost the whole of Fox’s output is a very extended and very elaborate form of laughter at the lower middle class in provincial America. Meanwhile, I am told that the Republican Party, feeling that the joke has now worn off, will be moving towards open primaries, and towards the delegate-splitting employed by the Democrats in Presidential primaries, in order to prevent any real takeover by what was, after all, the electorally unsuccessful Tea Party.

The electorally unsuccessful Tea Party? Yes, indeed. The Tea Party had a bad night and the GOP Establishment had a good one. Not a single Tea Party pick-up in the House would not have gone to any old Republican this year. In the Senate, although it is now claiming more, the Tea Party managed precisely three: one who had won the seat as soon as he had won the Republican primary, another who faced divided opposition, and a third whose supporters mistakenly believed that they were voting for his father; those last will rue the day that they sent Ayn Rand to the Senate. Meanwhile, Lisa Murkowski will be caucusing with the Republicans, with all that that entails for that caucus. Had Sarah Palin not owed John McCain the biggest favor of her life, then she would have endorsed J. D. Hayworth, he would have won the closed primary in Arizona, McCain would have gone back to his roots and his record, and the Independent third of Arizona’s voters would have put him right where Murkowski is now.

Where is the party of Republican calls for Europe to revert to pre-1914 borders and thus end World War One? Of those Republicans who resisted entry into World War Two until America was actually attacked by either side? Of Eisenhower’s ending of the Korean War, his even-handed approach to Israel and the Palestinians, his non-intervention in Indo-China, and his denunciation of the military-industrial complex? Of Nixon’s suspension of the draft, his pursuit of détente with China, and the ending of the Vietnam War by him and by Ford, an old stalwart of the America First Committee? Of Reagan’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 1983, and of his initiation of nuclear arms reduction in Europe? Of James Baker’s call to “lay aside, once and for all, the unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel” and to “foreswear annexation, stop settlement activity”? Of Republican opposition to the global trigger-happiness of the Clinton Administration? And of Bush the Younger’s removal of American troops from Saudi Arabia after 9/11, thus ensuring that there has been no further attack on American soil?

With the determined reporting of a nonexistent Tea Party landslide (in reality, the GOP old school did so well that Lincoln Chafee won Governor of Rhode Island), possibly the last opportunity that Fox and talk radio will permit is presented by the possibility of ratifying the latest START in this session. In that case, some lame duck. Over to you, Dick Lugar (voted for it last time), Bob Corker (voted for it last time), Johnny Isakson (voted for it last time), George Voinovich (retiring), Bob Bennett (retiring, because forced out by the Tea Party), Lisa Murkowski, Olympia Snowe, Orrin Hatch, Jon Kyl, Susan Collins, Lindsey Graham (we live in hope), Judd Gregg, Mark Kirk and Scott Brown. Yes, Scott Brown. Would that not be too, too delicious? Why, he and Graham might even bring John McCain with them. We really do live in hope.

Every Republican on that list who is not retiring, and one who is, the Tea Party has been after you, or will be after you, or both. Yes, Scott Brown, that does include you. It is time for you all to remind your party that it needs you a lot more than you need it. Voting for START in this session is the ideal opportunity to send the message.