So, today, this shows up in Gambit, the New Orleans alt-weekly. It’s an item about my broadband situation here in St. Francisville. The writer wants me to contact U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu about my woes:

Enter the senator who has long been a proponent of using federal stimulus funds to expand high-speed Internet access in rural Louisiana. Two years ago, Landrieu (who sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee) steered $49 million to the state to help build broadband networks in St. Landry, St. Martin and Acadia parishes. Last November she railed against Gov. Bobby Jindal for rejecting an $80 million grant to continue extending broadband access to rural areas across the state.

Whether he realized it or not, Dreher — an advocate of bootstrap, do-it-yourself small-government conservatism and a Jindal admirer — seemed to be on Team Landrieu on this issue. “You don’t realize how much our modern way of economic life depends on reliable high-speed Internet service, until you don’t have it,” he told his readers. “Towns and places that don’t have it are going to get left behind, economically.”

I am a Jindal admirer, it’s true, though I don’t get why he rejected money for rural broadband, which is the same to me as building highways, in terms of economic development. It’s not quite right to say that I’m “an advocate of bootstrap, do it yourself small government conservatism,” but whatever. I would like to know more about why the Jindal Administration turned this stuff down. West Feliciana Parish, where I live, really needs economic development. This is such a cool place to live in so many ways; we need to give people the broadband infrastructure they need to do business here. As a tech-savvy friend in Philly snarked to me, about Louisiana, “You may not have your broadband, but you have your dignity.”

Anyway, I learned over breakfast at Bird Man this morning that people in my own neighborhood have broadband fast enough to stream video. The problem, said my friend, is likely in my own house. Julie’s on the phone with our very dear friends at AT&T right now. Will let you know the deal.

Sorry light blogging today. I’ve been out at my brother in law Mike’s interviewing him for the book. It was a hard morning, but, no kidding, a beautiful one. Headed to Baton Rouge now, where I’ll be on a panel the ISI group at LSU is doing on Place and Politics. It’s in the LSU Union building at 7. Come see us!

Later tonight: posts about Nietzsche, and American funeral trends.

Liveblogging the debate. Romney missed an opportunity to go hard at Gingrich for his attacks on him for his Bain Capital background. Perhaps he’s soft-pedaling it because he’s so far ahead in South Carolina, but I expected him to say more than “people can look at my record;” I expected him to punch hard at Gingrich for “anti-capitalist” rhetoric.

Perry and regulations: this is empty rhetoric, and he’s avoiding Bret Baier’s question.

UPDATE: Good question from Gerald Seib about Bain Capital and free enterprise. Romney is answering it with civics-class cliches.

UPDATE.2: Does anybody other than journalists give a rip about negative ads on principle (as distinct from the content of particular negative ads)?

Santorum seems more lively, less rigid and jumpy than in the past. Good attack on Romney on the felon voting issue. Santorum has a position that won’t help him much with conservative voters, but he did a surprisingly good job slapping Romney around for that negative Super PAC ad. Still, the unflappable Romney is not being flapped.

UPDATE.3: Boy, is Gingrich an afterthought in this debate, or what? Ron Paul too. They’ve hardly gotten a word in. The Romneybot just drones on.

UPDATE.4:Lisa Schiffren:

This is sad. Newt doubles down on his mostly outrageous claims about Romneyand Bain. But he couches it in the highly legitimate and important context of whether Mitt can defend his record, and explain what he was doing, financially, in closing many of those companies, because he will be pushed on the issue in the fall.

And then Mitt proves Newt right, by responding with a short version of his resume. Never addresses the core accusation — which he should be able to respond to on the merits.

The problem — Romney is a man of action. He is articulate enough for that. But he is not articulate or analytical enough to make the larger, more abstract, and critical point.

Gingrich on getting 99 weeks of unemployment: “99 weeks is an associate degree.” He indicates that people who have been on unemployment for that long are to blame for their situation. It’s an effective line, rhetorically (the associate degree line, I mean), but is it really the case that someone who has lost his job in this chronically depressed economy is not working after nearly two years because he or she is lazy? I don’t think so.

Gingrich had another killer line about Obama: “The best food-stamp president in American history.” Again, red meat for the base, but it’s pretty cruel in my view, given the sustained economic crisis. 40 million Americans are on food stamps now. Does Gingrich really believe that all those new people who started coming onto the rolls after 2008 and the crash want to be there?

I thought Paul’s answer on defense spending in South Carolina was a dodge, trying to make a distinction between “military” and “defense” spending that sounded in his explanation like a distinction without a difference.

UPDATE.5: Why is Paul talking about an “inflation tax”? The inflation rate is what, 3 percent? He sounds like an ideologue, by which I mean someone who is not going to let reality interfere with what he believes. He says we shouldn’t have an income tax at all. Well … that’s a position. But we are not going to have no income tax in this country, and it makes Paul look flaky to assert this.

UPDATE.6: Santorum had a pretty decent answer to Juan Williams’ question about blacks and poverty. Citing a Brookings study, he said that marriage prior to childbearing has a big role to play in keeping people out of poverty. He said that the Obama administration, as a matter of policy, insists that federal programs aimed at preventing teen pregnancy can’t advise kids to favor marriage, rather they have to remain neutral on the question. Said Santorum, “The problem is, neutrality ends in poverty.” That’s a great line. Anybody know if this is true, Santorum’s claim about the Obama rule? Santorum’s is by no means an adequate answer to the actual question, to be sure, but his is a useful point.

There goes Gingrich with the food stamp thing again, blaming Obama for “putting more people on food stamps than any president in American history.” It wasn’t Obama that did it, Gingrich, it was the depression recession. This is food we’re talking about. This is people struggling to feed their families in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And Gingrich is playing racial and cultural politics with it. To listen to Gingrich, you’d think that Obama signed up all those layabouts for food stamps just so he could throw government money at them.

UPDATE.7: I have no clear idea what Ron Paul’s view on the killing of Osama bin Laden is. He’s squirming to explain it. (By the way, did you know that former CIA anti-terror chief Michael Scheuer endorsed Ron Paul?) I appreciate Ron Paul standing up to the rest of them, and the booing audience, on endless war. Gingrich and Romney have said tonight that we have the right to go anywhere and kill people who threaten Americans.

Romney said we have to have a military “so strong that nobody would ever think of testing it.” That’s just cant. Did al-Qaeda attack us on 9/11 because they thought America’s military was weak? Look, Ron Paul is squirrelly and will not be elected president. But listening to these Republicans talk as if there were nothing to be learned from the Iraq and Afghanistan experience is maddening, and deeply worrying.

UPDATE.8: Go Santorum, saying we ought not to give Social Security bennies to millionaires! It sounds ridiculous that that should be a bold statement, but for a presidential candidate to call for a form of means-testing Social Security is something new.

It seems to me that Santorum is having a surprisingly good debate. Gingrich started poorly, but he’s warmed up. It’s been a poor showing for Paul, I’m afraid. He’s seemed addled. Rick Perry isn’t even in the game.

UPDATE.9: Great line from the Economist’s live blog:

This is Jon Huntsman’s best debate by far.

UPDATE.10: Romney had a couple of good zingers against Gingrich on the Super PAC thing, forcing Gingrich to admit that Romney can’t do what he wants him to do, and for calling Gingrich’s anti-Romney Super PAC ad “the biggest hoax since Bigfoot.” I still don’t understand why Romney is not tearing into Gingrich about that ad, unless he figures that he’s got more to lose by drawing attention to it.

UPDATE.11: So, who won? Well, look, it was depressing. But aren’t all these debates depressing? I’d say Gingrich had the best night, followed closely by Santorum. Romney, bland and robotic, for the most part. Biggest disappointment was Ron Paul. As for Perry, well, he’s a cartoon, ain’t he? He’s dragging bottom in the polls, and seems to exist now to throw bloody chunks of flesh into the crowd for effect. I must say that I thought Newt was over after Iowa, but to give him credit, he’s kept this thing alive. True, he’s something like 11 points behind Romney in South Carolina, but after tonight’s savaging of Romney by both Santorum and Gingrich, it’s conceivable that Gingrich might pull off an upset — but only if the Santorum vote coalesces behind him. To be fair, Santorum had a pretty good night too; conceivably the anti-Romney vote could coalesce behind him. Tonight’s debate did not clarify who the anti-Romney will be, however. There’s one more debate in South Carolina, on Thursday, two days before the January 21 vote. That showdown is going to be decisive.

This becomes NSFW at the 3:40 mark, when a loutish Alabama fan whips out his wiener and rubs it on the face of an LSU fan passed out drunk in a French Quarter bar. That’s the most disgusting part of this video, but more broadly speaking, it’s sick how these fans stand around this incapacitated drunk for four minutes, abusing him. They should have been trying to help  the poor fool, but instead, they escalated their cruelty.

The penis-wielding Alabama fan is easily recognizable on this video. Somebody is going to find out who he is. And when that happens, it will not be a happy day for that dude. Well, the happy part of his day will last only as long as it takes to drive from Louisiana to Alabama.

From David Remnick’s New Yorker piece last month about Putinism in contemporary Russia:

Putin does not like being lectured to, does he? I asked.

A smile returned to the spokesman’s lips. “Actually, I was coming here in the car listening to the radio,” he said. “Do you know what was the first item on the news? The State Department of the United States expressed its gravest concern about the policy in Russia toward gays!” Peskov was referring to proposed legislation in St. Petersburg that would prohibit “propaganda of sodomy, lesbianism, bisexuality, and transgenderism to minors.” He was in stitches now. “I thought, What is the State Department of the United States doing? With their national debt! With their collapsing economy! With a leak of industry in the country because everything is in a financial bubble! With a nightmare in Afghanistan! With a nightmare in Iraq! With a nightmare in the global economy! And they have a deep concern about gays in Russia. Ha! Ha! So I was really in a very good mood because of this!”

For some reason, this put me in mind of the stance against gay marriage taken by the peak-oil apocalypticist James Howard Kunstler, which he acknowledges is unusual for someone of his demographic (Democrat, Boomer, and, he might have said, ardent secularist and resident of New York State). Why has he taken this view? He explains, in part, here:

I don’t have empirical proof, but I suspect that unsettling such an age-old and fundamental social arrangement will produce strange unanticipated consequences that we are not prepared for. I don’t believe gay marriage is a genuine social justice issue. I think it is a bid for a kind of broad social approbation which does not require ritual enactment in law, and would be socially mischievous to pursue. Civil unions would cover the necessary legal issues. Otherwise, it is a case of unwarranted relativism, a Boomer weakness. Not all conditions or states of being in this world are the same. Some things are on the margins because they are marginal.

 What fascinates me in the debate is the narcissism of Boomers, males especially, who advocate so earnestly in favor of gay marriage. Is it really about the law and social relations, or is it about making yourself feel good?  Is it just more posturing for moral brownie points, for approval?  Is your job and social position or maybe even sense of yourself at stake if you have a differing view?

This past weekend, a visiting friend from Mississippi mentioned for some reason that a former county sheriff had once given a stern drugs lecture at the local high school. He warned the young’uns of the danger of “nutneg.” He meant “nutmeg,” but he kept saying “nutneg.” I love the idea of the nutneg menace (nutneg nenace?), especially because I once overdosed on nutmeg.

Nobody is more easily bored than a high school student, especially one living in a Natchitoches, La., boys dorm in 1984. One of my friends recalled one night that The Anarchists’ Cookbook said that you could get high on nutmeg. Really? You could do this? And it’s perfectly legal? None of us had access to liquor or pot or anything like that, but we could damn sure buy nutmeg. H. and I pedaled our bikes through the rain to the Dixie Dandy supermarket, and padded down the aisle to the McCormick spice display. I remember seeing an RA from the dorm pass by at the end of the aisle as we eyed the coriander, the allspice, the ginger. We felt like criminals.

Having procured the nutmeg, we wheeled back to Bossier Hall. In front of a small group of young scholars gathered in my room, H. and I ingested a couple of spoonfuls of nutmeg each. It was hideous, like eating spiced dirt. I cut mine with Equal, but it barely helped. We sat around waiting to get high. An hour passed. Nothing happened. Finally the guys all drifted back to their rooms, and I went to bed.

The next morning H.’s roommate stood over me, shaking me awake. “Get up, H. is really sick!” he said. I ran down the hall, and found H. curled up in a ball on the top bunk. “I feel horrible,” he moaned.

“I feel okay,” I said. Then passed out. I tried to stand, but fainted again.

We had to make our way down four floors’ worth of stairs to the dorm office so the nurse could examine us and give us an excuse to miss class. It was like holding on to the rails of a cruise ship in a hurricane. Slowly, slowly, we inched our way down. The nurse saw us. Our eyes were glassy. She pronounced it a “virus,” and sent us back to bed.

I woke up at six that night, and again at midnight, that time with a room full of fellow 16 and 17 year old guys staring at me. And I was okay. But aside from a missed day of class, there was no fun in it, and for a week after that, it was like I was peeing Old Spice. I seem to recall that someone subsequently laid his hands on a copy of The Anarchists Cookbook, and discovered that we nitwits had eaten way, way too much of it. You watch: one of these days I’m going to quaff from a mug of egg nog, and have a flashback.

Nutneg. I don’t recommend it. Turns out Wayne Austin, writing in the Atlantic, had his own nutneg experience. Excerpt:

Perhaps my dosage was too low, or my nutmeg too desiccated. I did go through an early giddy phase, when everything seemed immensely amusing—including the shingles on my neighbor’s house—and I felt a slight floating sensation when walking around the neighborhood. But mostly I just felt out of sorts for a couple of days. When I tried to write, my words sometimes became unmoored from my thoughts, though to be fair, this happens even without the influence of nutmeg.

I’d say stick with snorting fenugreek. I hear that will blow your mind.

Via The Browser, here’s a gorgeous John Jeremiah Sullivan essay from a 2004 issue of GQ, in which he reports on his trip to a Christian Woodstock. Sullivan was a born-again as a teenager but fell away from the practice of faith. He might have gone to this thing to make fun of the lameness of Christian rock music — he has nothing good to say about it — but he met some young country dudes from West Virginia, and was taken by them, and by the people he saw at the festival. Excerpt:

I suspect that on some level—say, the conscious one—I didn’t want to be noticing what I noticed as we went. But I’ve been to a lot of huge public events in this country during the past five years, writing about sports or whatever, and one thing they all had in common was this weird implicit enmity that American males, in particular, seem to carry around with them much of the time. Call it a laughable generalization, fine, but if you spend enough late afternoons in stadium concourses, you feel it, something darker than machismo. Something a little wounded, and a little sneering, and just plain ready for bad things to happen. It wasn’t here. It was just…not. I looked for it, and I couldn’t find it. In the three days I spent at Creation, I saw not one fight, heard not one word spoken in anger, felt at no time even mildly harassed, and in fact met many people who were exceptionally kind. I realize they were all of the same race, all believed the same stuff, and weren’t drinking, but there were also 100,000 of them. What’s that about?

Why this peace? These West Virginia guys he hangs with, they’re hillbillies, and rough, and kind of dangerous. You can imagine that these were the kind of men who first followed the Nazarene rabbi.

Later, after talking about his own years as a Christian, and his falling-away, Sullivan writes:

My problem is not that I dream I’m in hell or that Mole is at the window. It isn’t that I feel psychologically harmed. It isn’t even that I feel like a sucker for having bought it all. It’s that I love Jesus Christ.

“The latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose.” I can barely write that. He was the most beautiful dude. Forget the Epistles, forget all the bullying stuff that came later. Look at what He said. Read The Jefferson Bible. Or better yet, read The Logia of Yeshua, by Guy Davenport and Benjamin Urrutia, an unadorned translation of all the sayings ascribed to Jesus that modern scholars deem authentic. There’s your man. His breakthrough was the aestheticization of weakness. Not in what conquers, not in glory, but in what’s fragile and what suffers—there lies sanity. And salvation. “Let anyone who has power renounce it,” he said. “Your father is compassionate to all, as you should be.” That’s how He talked, to those who knew Him.

Why should He vex me? Why is His ghost not friendlier? Why can’t I just be a good Enlightenment child and see in His life a sustaining example of what we can be, as a species?

Because once you’ve known Him as God, it’s hard to find comfort in the man. The sheer sensation of life that comes with a total, all-pervading notion of being—the pulse of consequence one projects onto even the humblest things—the pull of that won’t slacken.

And one has doubts about one’s doubts.

This whole account seems in some respects like a footnote to “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Remember this?:

“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead,” The Misfit continued, “and He shouldn’t have done it. He shown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,” he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.

“Maybe He didn’t raise the dead,” the old lady mumbled, not knowing what she was saying and feeling so dizzy that she sank down in the ditch with her legs twisted under her.

“I wasn’t there so I can’t say He didn’t,” The Misfit said. “I wisht I had of been there,” he said, hitting the ground with his fist. “It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would of known. Listen lady,” he said in a high voice, “if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn’t be like I am now.”

His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children !” She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.

So, things are not good today on Planet Michael Brendan Dougherty — you did read his excellent TAC piece, didn’t you? — for Jon Huntsman has abandoned his quixotic presidential campaign. Why did he flop, given that he’s very conservative on most things conservatives care about? I can’t sum it up better than Byron York:

A number of Jon Huntsman’s core positions were deeply conservative.  His pro-growth economic plan was nearly everything the Wall Street Journal editorial page could have wanted.  He was strongly pro-life.  Strongly Second Amendment.  Yet conservative Republicans stayed away from his candidacy in droves, and the few people who were attracted to the Huntsman campaign were moderate Republicans, independents, Democrats — and the media.

Why?  Huntsman’s problem was that, whatever his position on some key issues, he sent out political and cultural signals that screamed NPR, and not Fox News, that screamed liberal, and not conservative. Even though conservatives agreed with Huntsman on many things, they instinctively sensed he wasn’t their guy.  It wasn’t hard for them to figure out.

After reading MBD’s piece, I thought, “This Huntsman sounds like a guy I could get behind.” But every time I saw him on TV, it was all-meh-all-the-time. He doesn’t have the shiny glaze of pure smarm that Romney does, but he does have the Romney aloofness. That’s not a deal killer for me — but hey, I’m a right-winger who listens to NPR — but I can see why it would have done him no good among GOP primary voters.

More seriously, as MBD has tirelessly pointed out — check out his Twitter feed today — Huntsman’s actual record, and his actual policy positions, are very conservative! His image, however, was as a coastal-friendly moderate, something he did nothing to dispel. Plus, as I said, he was a dud on the stump, and that’s nobody’s fault but his own.

I don’t want to let Huntsman off the hook for the crappy campaign he ran, but this is an opportunity to grinch about something that ticks me off. Sometimes the cultural politics and the image politics of contemporary conservatism can be so frustrating. Why does it count against Huntsman that he’s a proven conservative, but one to whom liberals and moderates will listen? Why do we seem to love our candidates only insofar as liberals hate them? Why do we place so much value on candidates who hate the right things, who make the right enemies? Why are we embarrassed by, or at least suspicious of, certain accomplishments?

For example: I find that I am more bothered than perhaps I should be by that fathead Newt Gingrich’s crude assaults on Mitt Romney for his ability to speak French. I know, I know, he’s appealing to prejudice by painting Romney as a la-de-da, and besides, you will never fail in American (or British) politics by trashing the French. This is embarrassing, though. Admittedly, I engaged in some frog-bashing in the run-up to the Iraq War, and however much I regret that now, I hope that I respected the difference between disagreeing with the French government’s position, and despising France. Granted, I’m one of the small but dedicated number of conservative American Francophiles — bonjour messieurs Manzi, Frum, et Murray! — and I do come from south Louisiana, so take this opinion for what it’s worth, but here it is: I hold hating France and the French to be a sign of cultural backwardness. Much like hating Jews, I find hating the French to be not really about hating specific traits in the French, but rather hating excellence, especially in cultural matters. It’s about hating elitism, by which I mean despising excellence and achievement of a certain kind, usually cultural. Yes, of course the French are proud people, but they have so much to be proud of! Charles Murray decided he admired the French because they are the Americans of Europe. Excerpt:

As time went on, something struck me (besides realizing what a good time I was having). I have loved Europe everywhere I’ve been, but there was something oddly different about the French, and I finally figured it out: The French are Europe’s Americans. Describe the French, and you’re usually describing Americans.

Take the notorious French attachment to their own language. The French aren’t like the Germans, Dutch, and Scandinavians, whose English is often so perfect that their corporate executives can (and sometimes do) conduct their work in English even among themselves. The French think that the French language is special and helps define who they are, and want to hear French spoken in their own country. As an American who goes silently berserk whenever I hear “Press one for English,” I have no problem with that. Do you?

We complain that the French are infuriatingly certain of the superiority of things French. True–and it is a kind of pride that is rare in today’s Europe. A few years ago I published a book called Human Accomplishment that was largely a paean to the brilliance of the European legacy. When I lectured on the book before European audiences, I discovered that my listeners did not enjoy hearing me recite their story; but were embarrassed. They had bought into the notion that Western civilization–i.e., European civilization–has been a source of evil rather than a font of the greatest achievements in human history. I have never given that lecture in France, but I bet you wouldn’t catch a French audience reacting that way (except, perhaps, for an audience of intellectuals). The French are just as chauvinistically proud of their artists, scientists, and inventors as the stereotype has it. And as the stereotype of Americans has us.

We complain that, in foreign affairs, the French go their own way, ignoring the interests of everyone else when it suits their purposes. Well, yes. Like us.

I probably shouldn’t have mentioned geopolitics, because I’m talking about French people and American people, not about the policies of de Gaulle or Chirac. But after reading non-French accounts saying that French counterterrorism units are the best in the world, and seeing the scarily kick-ass troops who patrol the grounds of the Louvre, I am no longer laughing at jokes about French fecklessness in the war on terror. And after seeing a few of the World War I cenotaphs that may be found in almost any French town, and having counted the names of the dead and estimated just what proportion of the town’s male population they must have represented, I am no longer laughing at jokes about French courage.

So, much to my surprise–for I did laugh at those jokes before–I’ve become a Francophile. But it’s not as if I’ve fallen in love with some exotic foreign culture. The French are stubbornly independent, think theirs is the world’s greatest culture, do the things they do best better than anyone else, are irritatingly proud as a people but warm and helpful as individuals.

Remind you of anyone we know?

OK, look, I’m not asking you to admire the French, or the British, or the Irish, or anybody else. What I’m saying is that knee-jerk hatred of the French is a sign of anti-intellectualism, and anti-elitism of the worst kind. Conservatives are supposed to admire elitism, not in the sense of endorsing privilege for the sake of privilege, but in the sense of admiring excellence. Granted, crude Francophobia is far from the same thing as Jew-hatred, which has had incomparably worse historical repercussions for Jewish people and for civilization — please be clear that I’m not making an equivalence here! — but still, as a thought experiment, imagine how disgusting we’d find it if Gingrich trashed Romney for speaking Hebrew? For that matter, imagine how offensive it would strike us if Gingrich featured a clip of Romney speaking Spanish (as George W. Bush actually can do, and did do in public) as a sign of that he’s Not One Of Us.

It’s safe, I guess, to piss on the French, because no Anglo mobs are going to storm the La Madeleine chain in strip malls nationwide. Here in Louisiana, though, within living memory (though just barely), anti-French prejudice had real and deeply damaging cultural effects. In the 1920s, the state constitution was changed to forbid teaching in any language other than English in public schools. There are lots of stories of Cajun children being punished for speaking French. Knowing the history of what was done to French speakers, and French people, in this state by the English-speaking majority ought to make one bristle at contemporary Francophobia.

If we were living in the aftermath of the French Revolution, or the Napoleonic Wars, I could easily understand Americans, especially American conservatives, having negative feelings toward the French as a people and as a nation. But today? Really? What do we have to fear or loathe from Bernard-Henri Levy’s pelt?

In this post, Peter Lawler explores the types of Francophobia and Francophilia in America today. For me, admiring France and French culture is almost entirely about admiring people who have mastered the art of living, and savoring, in ways that we Americans ought to aspire to do. But it’s a bit of this:

There’s a second kind of French envy that’s much less common: It is found among certain very admirable American traditionalist Catholics, many of whom are shaped in some measure by the “after virtue” philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre. Only the most individualistic currents of European thought, beginning with the Protestant dissenter Puritans, got to America. So from the very beginning America lacked what it takes to have genuine political or spiritual community. And then America morphed into being the most imperial of the modern nation-states–out to dominate the world with its particularly brutal form of capitalism. Lately we’ve been unjustly invading countries to protect our oil and to make everyone become democratic individualists just like us. There’s little to no hope for America. But Christendom–the way of life that existed in the Europe prior to the nation-state–might rise from the ruins of Europe. There’s even hope, in Europe, in what’s left of the Christian Democratic parties and in the universalistic, postnational aspirations of the EU.

This is overdone. “Little or no hope for America”? And I know of no conservative, traditionalist or not, who looks to the EU for a workable future, in large part because its mechanisms do tend to suppress the local and the particular, which is France’s glory, for the sake of the universal. But I take Lawler’s general point, in the rest of his post, that American trads who look to France and French Catholicism as a model are making the same mistake as American Evangelicals who read Lewis and Tolkien and mistake their views for the reality of life in contemporary Britain.

I do not therefore want to make a defense of the specifics of French politics and the French way of life. I don’t have enough knowledge to do so. I would only say, as someone who has visited France on a number of occasions, and who learned a lot about God from French cathedrals, about aesthetic excellence from French art, architecture, and food, and about the good life from French joie de vivre, that the knee-jerk French-hatred one often sees on the American right is cheap, embarrassing, and foolish, as is hysterical anti-Americanism in France. Still, one can hardly imagine that a French presidential politician would be seen as culturally inauthentic and unworthy of leadership because of his ability to speak English. Even hardcore French anti-Americans aren’t that stupid.

UPDATE: Thought experiment — it’s Saturday night in Louisiana, you’ve got a pocket full of money, and are ready to hit the town. Would you rather be in Monroe or Lafayette? Explain your choice.

UPDATE.2: Don’t miss this comment from the thread below:

I think our politics have become irrational and unexplainable because there is really no difference between the mainstream factions in both parties, but we desperately want to believe there still is to avoid cognitive dissonance. So we invent all of these ridiculous claims (like Obama is a socialist who is soft on terrorism) to keep the dream alive. And this has been happening for decades, but perhaps we are nearing the crescendo of this post-modern political theater of the absurd? Which president eliminated/reformed the old welfare system? Which president repealed the key regulation that paved the way for the current mess in the banking system? Which president signed NAFTA into law paving the way for destruction of middle-class jobs? Clinton, Clinton, Clinton. Who has dramatically increased drone attacks? Who killed Bin Laden? Who has watched-over the ever decreasing civil-liberties of American citizens? Who appoints Wall Street insiders to all high profile positions of influence in his administration? Obama, Obama, Obama, Obama. The fact is that recent Democratic Presidents (Clinton and Obama) have been better conservatives than the recent Republican presidents. It is all very confusing. Real conservatives don’t like Romney because he isn’t one. Quite frankly, I have no idea what he is. But if I had to guess he is and will be a corporatist, just like Obama. And what I mean by that is Obama, like Romney, know full well who controls the power in this country and they will act in their interests (not ours) to maintain their positions in a self-serving way. The only thing that will change if Romney beats Obama is the skin color of our president.

Rusty Reno explores a major fault line in American conservatism, vis-a-vis the Wall Street Journal’s recent fulminations against Rick Santorum’s proposed raising of the child tax credit. Excerpt:

Yes, we need incentives to work, incentives to invest and save, and the free market philosophy represented by the Wall Street Journal gets frustrated with liberals who imagine that entrepreneurs automatically take risks and create jobs. The frustration is merited. When it comes to productive economic behavior, we need the encouragement of knowing that we can keep most of our earnings. But the same holds for other important human activities. We need incentives to be generous, which is why we have tax deduction for charitable donations.

Having and raising children? By supposing that families “just happen,” the editors of the Wall Street Journal show themselves to be as naïve about social capital as liberals are about financial capital. No, families don’t just happen, as we are discovering in the demographic decline in some countries in Europe, a decline that would characterize American society were our culture not renewed by immigrants who have yet to turn marriage and children into lifestyle choices. When incentives for women to work and disincentives for men to marry constellate with rising costs for the care and education of children, to which are added all sorts of changed social attitudes toward child-bearing and parenting, you’ll get what any good economic theorist would predict, which is fewer children.

But there’s the rub. When the editors of the Wall Street Journal say that a tax credit designed to encourage and support men and women who have children “merely rewards taxpayers who have children over those who don’t,” they are saying, in effect, that there is no important difference between having and not having children, at least no difference that our society should care about. Get people to save, work and invest? Yes, government should definitely have policies to encourage thatbehavior. But marry and have children? No, those are just private decisions that government has no business encouraging. Let the invisible hand of the social free marketplace decide!

It is at this point that I see a fundamental agreement between free market libertarians and postmodern relativists.

Read the whole thing.  Rusty says he doesn’t think the GOP will be able to form a governing consensus if it remains loyal to this free-market fundamentalism. He may be right, but among Republican voters, people have gotten so accustomed to deferring to Eighties-vintage free-market shibboleths that even questioning how well market libertarianism works for families is considered dabbling in class warfare.

A friend who, I think, would describe himself as a moderate Democrat, writes to say he cannot for the life of him understand why so many conservatives dislike Romney from a policy standpoint. On style and character, my friend gets it; he says Romney is wholly smarmy. But on policy? Romney is a by-the-books Republican. So what gives? My friend can’t figure out why any Republican finds Romney so detestable that they would go all-in for an “unelectable” Republican like Santorum or Gingrich.

I confess I don’t understand this either. I find Romney very tough to take on a personal level, but on policy, the things I generally dislike about his positions are the things I dislike about the positions of all the GOP presidential hopefuls (save for Ron Paul) — in particular, the fiscal unrealism and foreign policy aggression. As I explained in an e-mail to my Democratic friend, I’d think more highly of the prospect of Republican leadership if that crew — again, Paul excepted — had shown any sign at all of having learned from the huge economic and national security mistakes of the Bush years.

This is why I don’t understand Obama panic on the Right. I run into conservatives all the time who really do believe that Obama’s re-election is an existential threat to the United States. If they’re talking about debt crashing the economy, well, okay — but I can see absolutely no reason to believe that the Republicans would be any more responsible on this front than the Democrats (again, see 2001-2009). I don’t care for Obama’s governance either, but how, exactly, has he been anything other than an anodyne Democrat? He has been a big disappointment to the Left on civil liberties, on Wall Street reform, and even to an extent on foreign policy. Aside from Obamacare, where, exactly, are the attributes that make the continuance of his government an existential threat to America? Or is that the story Republican partisans have to tell themselves to stomach voting for the uninspiring field of candidates they have?

Anyway, the latest Fox News poll suggests that Republicans nationwide are starting to submit to the fact that love him or loathe him, Romney is inevitable.