Glenn Greenwald has a pointed, smart post about the responses to his call to oust Blue Dog Democrats from the party.  One of the observations he made that applies equally well to the mentality in both parties was this:

Blind, uncritical allegiance to one’s Party — and to all of its officials — is the defining attribute of a tolerant, enlightened, and savvy progressive, and is the very heart of a healthy democracy. Those who diverge from absolute Party loyalty are Stalinists.

Replace “tolerant, enlightened and savvy progressive” with “prudent, wise and loyal conservative” and you might just as easily be talking about the experience of conservatives in the Bush Era.  Something that the defenders of party loyalty seem never to be able to grasp is that loyalty is a mutual obligation.  It is not only something that supporters are supposed to give to their party, but it is something that party leaders owe to the people who put them and keep them in their positions.  Bizarrely, it is those on the left who most want to pursue a real progressive agenda who are criticized for imitating the sort of lock-step partisan loyalty to political leadership that typified the Bush years, while those who are content to enable and collaborate in the worst abuses of the administration are the pragmatic and reasonable ones.  This is the absurd, imaginary world in which Ron Paul and Russ Feingold are extremists and Joe Lieberman and John McCain are “centrists”–no wonder the arguments defending that world make no sense.       

What is especially strange about the conventional wisdom Greenwald is attacking is the idea that being antiwar hurts Democratic candidates in the country at large.  Nancy Boyda of KS-02 is allegedly one of the most vulnerable first-term Democratic House members and this is supposedly because of her opposition to the “surge,” yet she has high approval ratings and a good chance of being re-elected in what has normally been a fairly reliable Republican district until two years ago.  Both Travis Childers and Don Cazayoux campaigned and won as antiwar Democrats in the Deep South.  The national Democratic leadership continues to cower and refuses to pressure the administration on the war, and in their defense you will hear arguments about the need to protect conservative Democratic candidates in competitive districts.  However, when it comes to the Iraq war the problem is not so much Blue Dogs who are worried about their re-election as it is a party leadership worried about placating Washington establishment opinion. 

Cross-posted at The Daily Dish

The most remarkable part of Rich Lowry’s column today was this line:

Berlin at times sounded as much like Obama’s coming-out party as the candidate of a transnational progressivism — in which global norms are more important than sovereign nations — as his audition as commander-in-chief.

What struck me about this passage was its implicit pretense that McCain and the administration Lowry et al. have supported dutifully for years are not similarly transnational.  For reasons I outlined yesterday, Republicans are able to use nationalist language and symbolism to their advantage, but to the extent that “transnational progressivism” is defined by endorsing the idea that “global norms are more important than sovereign nations” most of the leadership of both parties, including the current Republican nominee, can be described in the same terms. 

The illegal war against Yugoslavia in 1999 had the pretext of invoking human rights and prevention of genocide, and the illegal invasion of Iraq was technically based on the implementation of old U.N. Security Council resolutions.  Global norms and global governance, such as they were, took precedence over state sovereignty, and they both obviously had the support of John McCain.  That is not the same as saying that these were the real reasons for these wars, but the public justifcation for both was essentially that “global norms are more important than sovereign nations.”  What Lowry’s column does is to remind us of just how conventional and established Obama’s sort of foreign policy is, and why it is going to represent very little in the way of change from the status quo.  Far from being the first transnational President, Obama will simply be continuing the bipartisan foreign policy consensus according to which the sovereignty of other states can be compromised at any time in the name of “global norms” and hegemonic interests.

Cross-posted at The Daily Dish

Speaking of the “surge,” I heartily recommend my TAC colleague Kelley Vlahos’ post on the “surge”-as-Republican loyalty test, but I would just add that there is nothing terribly new about this test.  From the moment that the plan was announced, it became an article of faith among the tiresome enforcers of movement and party purity that any elected Republican who expressed any doubts or qualifications of support, no matter what they were, were to be denounced and targetedfor primary challenges.  Hugh Hewitt was only the most vocal and obnoxious of the movement conservatives who insisted on applying this strangest of litmus tests in the wake of the ’06 electoral debacle in an effort to make the GOP more or less unequivocally a party identified with the Iraq war and with nothing else. 

Back then, even such reliable pro-war Senators as John Warner and Sam Brownback were chastised for advocating surrender, and it was during this phase when Chuck Hagel (who had voted to authorize the war and had kept his complaints about the war muted until the midterms) was declared to be persona non grata at the White House.  Even Romney’s modest wait-and-see approach for most of 2007 was turned into a liability for him on the eve of the Florida primary, when McCain shamelessly lied about what Romney’s position had been.  Something that I think most analysts of the recent debate over the “surge” have missed is why McCain is sticking so doggedly to arguing over who was right a year and a half ago: it was his use of the “surge” to break Romney in the primaries that paved the way for his nomination, and I expect that he believes that he can ride this issue all the way through the general election by using it just as unscrupulously against Obama as he did against his main primary rival.  The press will allow this to happen, because it is now commonly accepted wisdom that “McCain was right about the surge,” which somehow gives him license to distort his opponents’ views while officially retaining credibility on matters of national security.   

Cross-posted at The Daily Dish

The American Prospect has assembled a number of assessments of the reasons why violence in Iraq has declined relatively over the past year and a half.  Lost in the frequent back-and-forth over whether John McCain understands what the “surge” was or whether he knows when the Anbar Awakening happened (answers: apparently not and no) is the more basic point, made here by Matthew Duss, that the Anbar model has succeeded for the time being by pursuing the opposite of a sound counterinsurgency:

The “Anbar strategy” which is the center-piece of the surge violates a central tenet of counterinsurgency doctrine in that it does not redirect political authority toward the central government [bold mine-DL]. The deals that have been made are between Sunni tribal militias and U.S. forces, not the Iraqi government. There are still an estimated 90,000 Sunni militia members expecting government jobs, and little sign that the Shia-controlled Iraqi government intends to provide them. It’s true that security is a prerequisite for state-building, but if that security only comes at the expense of the legitimacy of the state we’re supposedly trying to build, then we have an entirely new problem on our hands.

This is one reason why the fabled “bottom-up” reconciliation–which was never a reconciliation at all, but a temporary alliance of convenience that avoided reconciling disaffected Sunnis to the Baghdad government–has never been a promising way to establish an enduring political settlement.  This is significant for a couple of reasons.  First, the “bottom-up” reconciliation became a standard line of war supporters when it became clear that reconciliation at the level of the national government was not forthcoming and was unlikely to be for a long time.  Focusing on this was, first and foremost, an attempt to change the subject and ignore that the political goals of the “surge” had always been unrealistic, which was what had informed the views of so many of the plan’s opponents and which is the key reason why the “surge” on the administration’s own terms has not succeeded.

Meanwhile, the horrific attacks in Baghdad and Kirkuk offer a reminder why so-called “conditions-based” withdrawals are forever subject to revision and why timetables that can be revised by such contingencies are meaningless.  Tying withdrawal to conditions in Iraq places U.S. policy at the mercy of the worst elements in Iraq, which gives these elements every incentive to persist in trying to sow discord and engage in spectacular acts of violence.  Besides being seized on by war supporters as evidence that Iraq is not yet stable enough to permit a U.S. withdrawal (after having cited these same sorts of attacks last year as proof that the “surge” was working and terrorist groups were becoming desperate), they expose the position of contingent withdrawal to one of the strongest criticisms against it, which is that it allows American policy to be dictated by whichever group wishes to foment chaos and disorder.  If the Iraq policy debate is “converging” towards a “conditions-based” withdrawal consensus, in the wake of these latest bombings this is the equivalent of saying that there is a consensus for remaining in Iraq more or less indefinitely.  Both candidates have committed the U.S. to ensure an elusive Iraqi stability that we have so far been able to advance only by undermining its long-term chances, which is to say that they have committed our forces to remain there for the foreseeable future.

As Ross said last week, the Pew numbers on white evangelical support for the major presidential candidates do show that McCain appears to be running poorly among these voters when compared to the support Bush received at this time four years ago.  Then again, according to a Post survey earlier in the year McCain was running ahead of Bush’s mid-2004 support among white evangelicals and was on track to replicate the latter’s overwhelming majority with this core constituency.  If the Pew numbers are right, the drop in evangelical support for McCain seems to be part of the generic “enthusiasm gap” between the two candidates, but in any case this has never translated into greater white evangelical support for Obama.  Instead, we are seeing white evangelical voters become part of the sizeable undecided vote, which may mean that McCain is failing to win them over, but it is certainly not the case that they are in danger of being “mesmerized” by Obama.  Indeed, Mr. Bass is simply wrong when he says that Obama fares better with these voters than Kerry did.       

One reason why the fear (or hope, depending on who you are) of Obama making inroads among white evangelicals is overblown is made clear by Obama’s embrace of a form of the faith-based initiative.  There is an assumption that this move will appeal to some religious voters who are normally wary of Democratic candidates, but even if this is so it will not meaningfully increase Obama’s share of the white evangelical vote.  To the extent that this initiative was welcomed by evangelicals when Bush proposed it, Bush’s own religious identification with evangelical voters reassured them that government support would not necessarily mean any change in how these people ran their charities and organizations.  Among more conservative evangelicals, the response to the initiative was much more hostile, however, because there was the reasonable fear that government rules would follow the acceptance of federal money, and among the most conservative critics of then-Gov. Bush the initative was viewed as a way for government to co-opt and undermine private and religious charities.  Those fears and criticisms are sure to increase if an Obama administration works to implement his faith-based proposal, and my guess is that they will tend to drive those undecided white evangelicals to McCain and motivate them to oppose Obama’s election with much more energy and enthusiasm than they would have ever been able to muster for McCain. 

Cross-posted at The Daily Dish

At The American Scene, my colleague Peter Suderman has some interesting remarks on Obama’s cosmopolitanism that James Poulos and I critiqued last week.  Peter doesn’t think the phrase “citizen of the world” has much importance one way or the other, and characterized Obama’s use of it as an expression of this “trendy sentiment”:

a mildly left-leaning liberal anti-nationalism that suggests that, while one might identify as an American, that shouldn’t be the outer limit of one’s identity group.

That raises a different question apart from whether the phrase is objectionable, and this is whether holding to “a mildly left-leaning liberal anti-nationalism” can be electorally successful in a presidential race when pitted against an opponent who seems intent on deploying nationalist-Americanist rhetoric, even if this rhetoric is designed to compensate for his [i.e., the opponent’s] otherwise abysmal, aimless campaign.  One of the many important observations John Lukacs has made about nationalism is its role in the presidential politics of the United States, and he has speculated that the reason why Republicans tend to prevail in these contests in the postwar era is that they represent the more nationalist of the two major parties.  Post-1968, this was usually defined in terms of national security policies, and we saw a resurgence of this again after 9/11, and this also relied heavily on the use of nationalist language and imagery apart from any substantive policy disagreements.  While both parties are split between what Brooks has called “populist nationalists” and “progressive globalists,” the Republicans remain, at least when it comes to their supporters, the relatively more populist-nationalist party. 

Not surprisingly, it is on trade policy where this is least true (ask Duncan Hunter) and where there is a much larger constituency for a populist-nationalist candidate, which is what has made Obama’s support for most free trade agreements (except when campaigning in Ohio) an intriguing case of how Obama has accommodated himself quite readily to global trade neoliberalism over the objections and complaints of many progressives.  Regarding Obama and trade, Peter adds:

Seems to me it’s pretty tough to tout a citizen-of-the-world ethos while fighting to make it more difficult to interact with our neighbors in the global economy.

Yet this is why it seems to me that the phrase and the general themes of the Berlin speech, in which every kind of wall comes crashing down, are unusually ill-suited for an American public anxious about the effects of globalization, because Obama clearly is endorsing economic globalization and to the extent that he is making nods towards “free and fair trade” he is framing it in terms of lifting up the poorest regions of the world. 

As James Joyner has noted, McCain takes essentially the same positions and is even more ardent in his support of free trade agreements than Obama, so it might seem as if there is no danger to Obama here.  However, because of the reputations of the two parties, because of a perception that Democrats are more inclined to “a mildly left-leaning liberal anti-nationalism,” there is greater risk for Obama in adopting positions that clash with populist impulses in his own party and in the general electorate. 

Cross-posted at The Daily Dish

They may have been unaware of it, but Matt and Ross have stumbled upon some old Orthodox Church wisdom in their rejection of fourth marriages.  While even second marriages were discouraged by the Orthodox Church, particularly in the Byzantine era, the canons did permit some flexibility and oikonomia in practice, and third marriages were allowed in extreme cases where a couple could produce no heir or in the event of a spouse’s death.  Fourth marriages, however, were utterly beyond the pale, and this applied to the emperor just as it did to everyone else. 

Leo VI had married three times without producing any offspring, which threw the succession into doubt, but the canons strictly forbad marrying a fourth time for any reason.  The emperor’s concubine, Zoe Karbonopsina, gave birth to the future heir, Constantine, but even this did not lead to a compromise, but instead resulted in the emperor being banned from the Great Church.  Once Patriarch Nicholas Mystikos, who had opposed the marriage, had been deposed, oikonomia prevailed again, but the ensuing rivalry between the factions of the two patriarchs disrupted ecclesiastical and political life in Constantinople for more than a decade. 

Cross-posted at The Daily Dish

Gregory Scoblete outlines a number of ways that Obama could adopt foreign policy views he will never adopt to reassure wary antiwar voters.  This was perhaps the most striking:

He could, for instance, echo the arguments made by Edward Luttwak from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the British magazine Prospect, and argue that “We devote far too much attention to the Middle East, a mostly stagnant region where almost nothing is created….” Rather, he wrote, “with neither invasions nor friendly engagements, the peoples of the Middle East should finally be allowed to have their own history.”

Virtually no one in Washington would want to go anywhere near endorsing Luttwak’s argument for benign neglect, and certainly it is not a view that will be embraced by a candidate who already has to persuade the political class, the media and the voters that his election is an acceptable risk.  This has always been the limit imposed on Obama’s candidacy, imposed as much by the candidate himself as it has been by others, which is that a younger, less experienced relative newcomer to the national political scene was never going to be able to pursue a genuinely transformative agenda in the area of U.S. policy that most desperately needs it, namely foreign policy.  There are three straightforward reasons for this.  Overcoming concerns about a lack of foreign policy experience necessarily requires defending most of the status quo.  Every Democratic nominee will be targeted with claims that he is the new McGovern and so has to eschew any radical breaks with most established policies.  Most importantly, the Obama who gave the recent speech in Berlin and spoke to the Global Affairs Council in Chicago last year clearly has no intention of transforming the American role in the world, exceptperhapsto expand it.

It isn’t clear what the point of Scoblete’s exercise in advising Obama is except to remind antiwar voters that Obama does not generally hold non-interventionist views and instead has always argued “within the status quo” and framed his positions as the best way to advance American “leadership” in the Near East and throughot the world.  Even so, Scoblete’s recommendations are interesting in that they remind all of us how little actually separates McCain and Obama when it comes to foreign policy when compared to truly transformative alternative policy views. 

Cross-posted at The Daily Dish

Of course, this is pure nonsense.  Maistre hated scientists most of all?  He was a philosopher of science and wrote a serious critique of the materialism of Bacon, so to say that he hated scientists is absurd.  Meanwhile, no one with an iota of understanding about modern American conservatism could confuse its views with anything Maistre said, and you can be fairly sure that mainstream conservatism today has no relationship with his thought given that most mainstream American conservatives, to their discredit, find Maistre to be horrible.  Maistre was, like Burke, a fierce opponent of the Revolution, but unlike Burke he was also a leading Counter-Enlightenment figure.  Many, if not most, mainstream conservatives today prefer to define themselves ultimately as classical liberals, and they find most of European conservatism to be more offensive to them than they do American liberalism or, if they are pressed, they will treat them as two sides of the same coin. 

My earlier Eunomia posts on Maistre are here and here.