Perhaps it’s because I’m tired after a three-hour service for the reading of the Passion Gospels, but I’m in more of a contrarian mood than usual.  On the main blog, Freddy notes a string of recent Clinton blunders in foreign policy after saying:

Barack Obama has been justifiably criticized for being vague on foreign policy. But at least he isn’t offending anyone. By contrast, Hillary Clinton, in her determination to grab the Democratic nomination, has hurled principles of international diplomacy out the window.

Obama hasn’t been offending anyone recently, but his comments on Pakistan last year (made around the same time as Tancredo’s “we might nuke Mecca” remarks) drew a rebuke from the State Department and his shot at the Australian contribution to the Iraq war prompted John Howard, then in a political tailspin at home, to engage in a very public argument with Obama.  As I said in my column at the time:

From his widely reported spat with Prime Minister John Howard over Australian troop levels in Iraq to his saber-rattling against an unstable, vulnerable, and strategically critical state, Obama is proving as adept at irritating and unnerving U.S. allies as the Bush administration was in 2002 and 2003. Indeed, together with some incendiary remarks by Rep. Tom Tancredo, Obama’s statements caused such a tumult in U.S.-Pakistan relations that the State Department called on all presidential candidates to refrain from speaking so carelessly about foreign policy.

Add to this Obama’s rather blithe statement during a debate this year that we have “obligations” to defend Kosovo from attack, which is a security guarantee that presidential candidates shouldn’t be making regardless of the policy idea in question, and we begin to see that Obama can be just as careless and sloppy in his foreign policy statements as his current opponent.  More to the point, the dispute with Australia’s government was a pretty sharp criticism that Australia was somehow making a half-hearted or minimal effort, paying no heed to the protestations of the Australian defence minister that Austrlia’s armed forces were pretty much stretched to the max between Iraq, Afghanistan and its other obligations in the Pacific, so this was a more serious episode of effectively mocking an ally’s war effort rather than making a lame joke about the prime minister of an allied country that is not actively involved in ongoing military operations alongside the United States.  Luckily for Obama, Howard is out of office now, so if he should win the election there will not necessarily be much bad blood between him and the government in Canberra, but I have to think that there were more than a few Australians who found his comments fairly insulting and many of them are probably in the Australian military, which is the one military in the world that has been on our side in every major conflict of the last 100 years.  Such was the foreign policy and diplomatic finesse of someone who knows from his extensive experience in southeast Asia about other parts of the world.  It was a minor episode, but potentially a revealing one for what the Obama era of U.S. foreign relations might look like.

In domestic politics, there is a run-off election for Mississippi’s First District after neither candidate received more than 50% of the vote in the special election to replace Rep. Wicker, and Dan argues that this is evidence of GOP doom in the South.  In this case, I think people are making too much out of apparent GOP weakness.  First of all, as I understand it, ballots in the MS-01 special election did not list party affiliation, so it’s possible that many of Childers’ voters did not think of him as the Democratic candidate.  By all accounts Childers has adopted every socially conservative position imaginable, while talking up a brand of economic populism and opposition to the war.  He seems to be a lot like Jim Webb, except he is even more like what some of us might have wanted Jim Webb to be like.  Davis probably comes across to small town and rural Mississippians as the standard-issue suburban Republican, while Childers is one of them; the race has broken down along geographic lines.  It occurs to me that this makes him something of a unique case resulting from unusually good Democratic recruitment paired against pretty bad Republican recruitment, plus a bruising primary battle for the Republicans and lackluster party support for the nominee.  Now it is significant that the NRCC has to fight for this seat at all, since it is notoriously low on cash and has been fighting holding actions in places where Democrats have no business competing.  That does point to the broader weaknesses of the GOP in the House elections this year, but even if Childers should pull off a remarkable upset in the run-off I am very doubtful that the Democrats could hold such seats come November.          

Meanwhile, there’s something Childers said that annoyed me, because it reminded me that this is the sort of antiwar argument that really works, and it is one of those arguments that is based on a lot of nonsense.  Childers said:

But that cookie cutter message is not working. How long can you put a round peg into a square hole? Those people have been fighting for centuries [bold mine-DL].

It’s the last sentence that bothered me.  What it does is to make it seem as if foreign conflicts that started more recently would be more amenable to resolution, but obviously the more fresh, the more recent the injuries and wounds the harder it is to settle outstanding questions.  “Those people” are, of course, Sunnis and Shi’ites, I suppose, but any mix of people will do, and this can be applied to every conflict and it will typically be false in almost every instance it is used.  (In the Iraqi case, it is false.)  This is the sort of thing one heard during the ’90s all the time about different ethnic groups in the Balkans (centuries of violence! completely irrational!).  There are two kinds of people who like to perpetuate the myth that “those people have been fighting for centuries”: those who are uninterested in finding out the actual causes of a conflict, for whatever reason, and those who have a stake in making a conflict seem to be essential to one’s identity.  Thus Greek nationalists dusted off Basil II “the Bulgar-slayer” when it was suddenly necessary to start fighting Bulgarians over Macedonia, and Bulgarian nationalists reciprocated by idealising the medieval Bulgar empires and interpreting Bogomilism as an expression of “Bulgarian” resistance to “Greek” religion, but prior to the late nineteenth century Greeks and those who would later become Bulgarians belonged to the same general religious community and had no quarrel with one another at all.  Virtually no two groups today resent and dislike each other more, on the whole, than Turks and Armenians, but they had not been “fighting each other for centuries” when their greatest conflicts erupted.  We do not need ancient rivalries and grudges to explain something like the genocide (whose day of commemoration, incidentally, is today), since its origins are much more immediate and are to be found, again, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Talking about centuries of conflict allows us to ignore proximate causes and a lot of modern history, which is a way of making foreign violence, especially when it is on a massive and horrific scale as the genocide was, seem un-modern and a holdover from some barbaric, dark period to which we have no connection.  It makes perfect sense why this is the one kind of antiwar appeal that has real traction: it makes people feel good about themselves, which is usually what the jingoistic arguments succeed in doing.

When the glorious disciples were enlightened at the washing of their feet before the supper, the impious Judas was darkened by the disease of avarice, and to the lawless judges he betrayed You, the Righteous Judge. Behold, this man because of avarice hanged himself. Flee from the insatiable desire which dared such things against the Master! O Lord Who deals righteously with all, glory to You!

Megan McArdle responds to my earlier post, and clarifies her point enough that I see that we aren’t very far apart on this question.  I mistook Ms. McArdle’s description of what can happen in war, which she correctly says is often far removed from the original causes of the war, for an argument that war crimes are somehow an unavoidable consequence of going to war.  The misinterpretation was mine, and I regret berating her over that, since I have evidently read too much into her remark about Dresden.  However, in the post just before it in which she is responding to Sullivan’s critique, she makes another statement that strikes me as odd:

I said that what the Bush administration has done was not the result of choosing what Glenn Greenwald called an “aggressive” war in Iraq. (To be distinguished, presumably, from the peaceful, passive sorts of wars that other countries have.)

In fact, except for this parenthetical remark, I generally agree with Ms. McArdle in this post as well, but the remark seems unnecessary.  There are aggressors in war, and in the case of Iraq I hope we could agree that our government was that aggressor.  Since aggressive war is itself a crime and a violation of international law, it is reasonable to expect that governments that wage aggressive war will be more likely to ignore legal conventions against other kinds of crimes committed during war.  No one would deny that governments defending against invasion can commit atrocities, but because as the state of the war has been created by the aggressor there is some sense in which all atrocities that take place during the war can be traced back to the aggressor and the aggressor is responsible for them to one degree or another.  Obviously, no state wages “peaceful” or “passive” wars, but not all states wage wars of aggression and I would wager that there is a connection between launching wars of aggression and the frequency of war crimes and other violations of international law.  As the example of Dresden reminds us, though, a state that is responding to another state’s aggression can commit war crimes, which I suppose brings us back to Ms. McArdle’s more recent post.

What a difference two months make.  On the day of the Wisconsin primary, Obama was leading McCain by twelve in Nevada, and now trails by five.  No doubt everyone will say that this doesn’t matter, but I found the size of the swing and some of the crosstabs to be pretty remarkable.  Nevada is a competitive state this year, and it is considered a toss-up, so Obama’s slide over the last two months, if it is not just a temporary result of the primary fight, is bad news for the Democrats.  Clinton runs even more poorly overall (as she did in February), but Obama retains less Democratic support (just 59% of Democrats say they will back him, and 29% say they will back McCain) while he also picks up some additional Republicans and independents.  The internal movement has been very interesting: in February, 30-39 year olds backed Obama 60-34, and have since flipped and now back McCain 51-47.  Instead of losing all but the 65+, as he did two months ago, McCain now just loses among 40-49 year olds by four and among 18-29 year olds by a wide margin of 24.  Obama now has a 51% unfav rating, which is 13 points higher than it was two months ago.  Obviously, unfav ratings tend to go up over time, but this is a pretty significant change.  The “good” news for Obama is that Clinton’s unfavs are worse (56%).  Meanwhile, McCain’s unfavs have gone down from 53% to 43%.

“A few months ago,” Mr. Brooks concluded, “Mr. Obama was riding his talents. … Now, Democrats are deeply worried their nominee will lose in November.”

Eh, not really. That logic fixates on all of the ammunition that Republicans have at their disposal against Mr. Obama. But it ignores the more basic question of whether voters, upon being exposed to the caricature, will actually buy into it. ~Steve Kornacki

Hope really does spring eternal, doesn’t it?  Consider John Judis’ latest article, in which he seems to confirm Brooks’ description of growing Democratic anxiety:

Meanwhile, Obama’s weaknesses as a general election candidate grow more apparent with each successive primary.  

The main difference is that Judis wrote this after the Pennsylvania results, and Brooks wrote his column before them.  They are otherwise making closely related arguments.  Judis went on to say:

Indeed, if you look at Obama’s vote in Pennsylvania, you begin to see the outlines of the old George McGovern coalition that haunted the Democrats during the ’70s and ’80s, led by college students and minorities. In Pennsylvania, Obama did best in college towns (60 to 40 percent in Penn State’s Centre County) and in heavily black areas like Philadelphia.

 

Its ideology is very liberal. Whereas in the first primaries and caucuses, Obama benefited from being seen as middle-of-the-road or even conservative, he is now receiving his strongest support from voters who see themselves as “very liberal.” In Pennsylvania, he defeated Clinton among “very liberal” voters by 55 to 45 percent, but lost “somewhat conservative” voters by 53 to 47 percent and moderates by 60 to 40 percent. In Wisconsin and Virginia, by contrast, he had done best against Clinton among voters who saw themselves as moderate or somewhat conservative.

 

Obama even seems to be acquiring the religious profile of the old McGovern coalition. In the early primaries and caucuses, Obama did very well among the observant. In Maryland, he defeated Clinton among those who attended religious services weekly by 61 to 31 percent. By contrast, in Pennsylvania, he lost to Clinton among these voters by 58 to 42 percent and did best among voters who never attend religious services, winning them by 56 to 44 percent. There is nothing wrong with winning over voters who are very liberal and who never attend religious services; but if they begin to become Obama’s most fervent base of support, he will have trouble (to say the least) in November.

Those who are sympathetic to the idea that Obama represents a break with the past may be both heartened and terrified by this.  On the one hand, this evidence could be used to rebut my claim that Obama seems to be an old-fashioned liberal with respect to much of domestic policy.  One could argue that he has to appear to be more to the left than he “really” is, because that is where his primary coalition is, and he will eventually, to use Kaus’ word, pivot to the center as all nominees supposedly have to do in the summer, and more importantly would not govern in the manner of a progressive.  Besides, you might add, his health care plan puts him to the right of Clinton on that issue.  You could push this more and say that he is doing exactly what I said he would have to do, shoring up his support on the left, because this had been weak earlier in the primaries when he was talking up unity, bipartisanship and reconciliation, and that he will later turn out to be the coalition-expanding, independent-attracting dynamo that many hoped/feared he would be.  Then again, the demographic profile of his coalition for most of the primaries has actually remained pretty constant, and to the extent that it has changed it has only grown more predictably liberal over time, which suggests that even if I am wrong about the content of Obama’s liberalism his coalition of supporters may end up identifying him in the public mind with their politics and thus make him less electable. 

Whether you buy the “Greater New England” thesis that explains Obama’s success in such places as Wisconsin and Iowa, he seems to prevail in primaries in those almost entirely white states where there has been a particularly strong progresstive tradition in the politics of those states, so the electoral limitations of a candidate identified with this coalition seem clear.  Technically, the composition of his coalition and the content of Obama’s liberalism are distinct matters, but if his primary coalition is liberal or very liberal this will tend to draw attention to those areas where Obama is more liberal than Clinton and will cause people to neglect those instances when he is moving to her right (for instance, on Social Security to the endless aggravation of Paul Krugman).  Of course, perception counts for a great deal, and if Obama becomes identified with the profile of his voters, as McGovern (who was personally more conservative than Obama) was, as a practical matter it won’t make any difference whether he is actually neoliberal or “centrist” on a number of things, because he will be perceived according to the views of those who support him rather than his own stated positions one way or another. 

This is perhaps the same reason why so many on the left became convinced that George W. Bush was some great right-winger, since his primary coalition in the fight with McCain was made up of the most conservative members of the GOP and may also help explain why conservatives embraced him as “one of their own,” despite plentiful evidence to the contrary, out of resistance to McCain’s campaign.  The images forged during primary battles do not disappear quickly (hence McCain remains in the fantasies of the media the reasonable, moderate Republican!), and the opposing party has every incentive to exaggerate the “extremism” of the nominee.  I still think my earlier assessment makes sense based on what Obama has said about policy, but perhaps we on the right are mistaking episodes of necessary primary pandering to a voting coalition for Obama’s convictions and that Obama would govern as a liberal every bit as much as Bush has governed as a conservative, which is to say not much. 

Whether or not Obama really is as far to the left as I think him to be, the profile of Obama primary voters will reinforce that image throughout the year.  That is really why Pennsylvania will be so damaging to him.  It isn’t just that certain demographic groups in Pennsylvania voted against him by large margins, though that isn’t a good sign for general election performance, but it is the impression the rest of the country gets from the results is that he appeals to a fairly small part of the country and to people whose ideological persuasion is not shared by all that many Americans.  He runs the risk of being pigeonholed as Huckabee was, except that this is happening much later in the process.  What happened in Pennsylvania will end up, in a somewhat circular fashion, ensuring that the pattern of voting in Pennsylvania will occur again in November, because the Pennsylvania results seem to confirm the limits of Obama’s appeal and can then be used and re-used frequently to characterise Obama as past Democratic nominees have been characterised.  In Iowa Obama once boasted that every place he visits becomes Obama country, but after spending the better part of the last six weeks in Pennsylvania this obviously didn’t happen.  The results came back almost as if they had been generated by a computer program that plugged in the demographics of the state and ran an equation based on Ohio’s voting.  Everyone knew that Obama wasn’t going to win in Pennsylvania, but the sheer intractability of the demographic groups who didn’t vote for him is what has to worry those who want to see the Democrats win the White House in the general election.

Dresden would have been unthinkable in 1939; by the time it happened, anything was justifiable if it saved Allied soldiers. ~Megan McArdle

McArdle uses an unusually bad example to back up an unfortunate position.  Of course, it is true when you opt to bomb civilian centers, especially in an indiscriminate, fire-bombing way, that you have at that time chosen to commit war crimes, and it is also true that people who have reconciled themselves to the mass slaughter of civilians have chosen to justify pretty much anything in the name of fighting the enemy.  It does not follow that because you have gone to war against another state that you have therefore necessarily embarked on a course that requires you to engage in those war crimes.  The choice to commit those crimes comes later, and that choice becomes inevitable only if those crimes are absolutely necessary to achieve victory.  In fact, such crimes tend to stand out for just how utterly unnecessary and excessive they are.  If you accept the inhuman calculations of total war and unconditional surrender, you might say that war crimes are inevitable, but if you really accept the logic of total war you don’t believe that there is anything done in war that violates morality or law, because total war is the practical negation of both.  The category “war crime” presupposes a distinction between combatants and non-combatants that total war effaces, so one either repudiates total war as immoral and an invitation to the commission of war crimes as a matter of policy, which it is, or one should cease to speak of war crimes.   

Even so, the example is almost uniquely bad to make McArdle’s case.  Dresden was not an effort to try to “save Allied soldiers,” the dubious justification that is also usually given for the vaporisation and incineration of hundreds of thousands of Japanese, but was very definitely and consciously an exercise in inflicting terror on the civilian population and was purely a punitive raid conducted under the catch-all of “strategic bombing.”  No strategic goals were advanced in burning the people of Dresden alive (not that this would have made it less of a war crime had some such goal been advanced in some way), and we should never pretend that Dresden was anything other than a bombing carried out to satisfy a vendetta in the most horrifying way imaginable.

Some Obamacons have an irritating tendency to want to reduce the opposition of other conservatives to their champion to the question of race, as if it it’s otherwise inconceivable that those on the right would tend to prefer, given the choices, the less left-leaning candidate in the Democratic race. 

Thus, Sullivan wrote this evening:

Pennsylvania has barely elected a black or a female politician to state-wide office. But you know what tends to count most: race. There’s a reason Pat Buchanan has warmed to Clinton [bold mine-DL].

There is a reason, and it is the same reason why Mr. Buchanan reacted so strongly against the Clintons in ’92, which is his cultural conservatism.  However much he objected and still objects to the Clintons, he objects to the Obamas even more and for the same reasons.  There is no mystery here, but some Obamacons seem to have an interest in ignoring the actual reasons that Obama’s conservative critics give and want to impute to them prejudices that they do not have and flatly reject.  There are reasons Andrew Sullivan supports Obama, and the reasons are the ones that he has given in public.  I would think he would extend this courtesy to those he is criticising, since he had to defend himself repeatedly that his turn against the war in Iraq was not driven by anything other than his changed view on the war.         

One of the things that many conservatives have had to realise in the last 15 months is that Clinton and her husband really were from “a different kind of Democrats,” and Obama has been reminding them, us, what the Clintons were moving away from.  That doesn’t mean that they have become acceptable or desirable in themselves, because they haven’t.  This is the great irony of the entire campaign: Obama increasingly seems to represent a throwback to bygone days of an older liberalism, while it appears as if the Clintons have tried to learn, if only for self-seeking, tactical reasons (about this you’ll get no argument from me), to avoid the pitfalls of that tradition.  Because of the war, antiwar conservatives have found themselves gravitating towards Obama because he is supposed to represent something different from the hawkish “centrist” views that dominated the Democratic Party for the last decade or so, but as I have tried to stress again and again this is not so.  The one thing that some of the neoliberals got wrong, foreign policy, was the one thing Obama has chosen to imitate for the most part, while ignoring or discounting the neoliberal domestic policy shifts that were, in fact, reasonably successful.  This is also why, from an entirely different perspective, neoliberals such as Kaus are frustrated with Obama acting and speaking as if he were in a “time warp.”  

Those of us on the right, and I count myself among them, became strongly invested in hostility to the Clintons because they represented the legacy of the cultural left from the ’60s and ’70s (and they really did and do represent this), and cultural conservatives had defined themselves to a great extent by opposition to the social changes wrought during those decades.  However, the portrayal of the Clintons as ultra left-wingers obscured how much they did, in fact, differ from the actual ultra left-wingers.  In one sense, this has always made them more dangerous, because they offer a more politically viable kind of liberalism, but it has also opened them up to the progressive rebellion that now will almost certainly destroy their machine and their grip on the party.  As strange as it sounds, the Clintons represent the kind of liberalism that conservatives can at least live with, even if it still drives them up the wall, while the Obamas represent a liberalism that is much less accommodating to conservative views in its content, regardless of how accommodating its messenger seems to be. 

For this and other reasons, I think that Obamacons are making a mistake, and they are compounding it with the attitude some of them are showing towards conservatives, including antiwar conservatives, who have not “come to Obama.”  Until recently, it is one that I have been willing to criticise pretty mildly, but there is an unpleasant undercurrent to the phenomenon that suggests that those who do not likewise embrace the new era must be hung up on Obama’s race, as if there were no other reasons to oppose him, when it is fair to say that his supporters seem to be at least as preoccupied with it as, if not more so than, everyone else.  So even if the arguments made on behalf of Obama are sometimes strikingly superficial, it is instead his opponents who are deemed racist even though they are the ones advancing arguments against his policy views.  This has become a pretty intolerable double standard, and it is one that Obama’s boosters have been applying too often.

Jonathan Martin at Politico is now arguing something very similar to what I said almost two months ago.  Martin wrote today:

An Obama vs McCain race could be one of the most divisive in our history.  Race will be a major factor in the divide, of course, but so will age and culture.   

Strangely, he titles his post “the great unspoken,” but surely people have been talking about this and polling on this throughout the campaign, and the factor of race in this election has been discussed so often that it makes no sense to say that it is “the unspeakable” to talk about voters who simply won’t accept Obama’s candidacy because of his race.  It was so “unspeakable” that Obama was addressing it directly at the San Francisco fundraiser where he made his recent blunder.  Usually this is dismissed as unfortunate but electorally irrelevant, on the rather precious grounds that these people would never vote for a Democrat anyway, when polling among Democrats seems to show this to be false.  

Back in February, I said:

If the “healing” in question is more intangible and concerns a change in attitudes, I submit that Obama’s election could very easily have exactly the opposite effect.  Race, like ethnicity, becomes especially divisive in a community when it is politicised (and it is as divisive as it is because it is frequently politicised), because the contestation for power takes on additional, charged connotations of the status of an entire group of people.  The outcome of the election takes on added importance: one outcome represents a breakthrough and an elevation of status, and another represents repudiation.  When that is combined with ideological baggage that draws in larger national debates on policy, either outcome can be even more explosive.  To draw on a recent example, the charge of a stolen election in Kenya became an occasion for ethnic violence because the election was contested by members of the two major ethnic groups.  To crudely oversimplify, the Luos perceived the (rigged) election loss as one more in a long line of injustices they had suffered, and the Kikuyus saw the possibility of a Luo coming to power as a threat to their status.  Democracy is inherently identitarian, and elections are contestations over which groups will hold more power than others in practice, so particularly in countries with strong racial or ethnic group identities the notion that a country is going to promote reconciliation through the election of someone identified with a minority group is probably mistaken.  So I think we underestimate the potential for this year’s election to be an unusually divisive contest, and its aftermath may be even more so regardless of the outcome. 

Some people got hung up on my use of Kenya as an example of what I was talking about, and that example is, of course, not strictly comparable to our situation, but the principle is the same.  I think this will be compounded by the intensely biographical and personality-centered nature of the general election contest, which is perhaps even more true for Obama than for McCain, so that Obama’s personal victory or defeat will have become so freighted with other meanings that the election campaign and its aftermath could be much more contentious than any we have seen in decades.  It might have one salutary effect, which is that it will make clear just how many people engage in identity politics and that it is a more or less inescapable part of mass democracy.  It might even cause people to take a more skeptical or critical view of the virtues of mass democracy, and that’s always a welcome development.  However, the bitterness the campaign may engender in the process may be quite damaging to political debate in the future.

My time this morning is limited, but now that Caroline Glick has picked up this unfortunate “unity is fascist” meme from Goldberg, it seems as if something needs to be said about how wrong this is.  It isn’t that fascists didn’t make an obsession out of unity–they did–but this same claim can also be applied to nationalists, communists (remember “workers of the world, unite!”, anyone?), social democrats, liberal democrats, Christians and Muslims (and, I’d wager, almost any political philosophy and revealed religion).  Social solidarity is a kind of unity, but that does not make the labour unions and Catholic social workers who pursue this solidarity into fascists.  One can trace back Obama-like hostility to apragmosyne all the way to Pericles, who insisted in his Funeral Oration that citizens could not rightly neglect the affairs of the city and be concerned only with their own affairs.  I eagerly await the sequel, Athenian Democratic Fascism.  But obviously this is not meaningful analysis.  After all, the troubling thing about what Pericles said is not that it is fascist, since that is absurd, but that it is fundamentally democratic.  Likewise, that is what should bother people about Michelle Obama’s absurd call to political mobilisation, which concluded with the line, “Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”  A certain kind of democrat will not stand for voter apathy, lack of participation, and lack of active involvement in “the people’s” government.  Naturally, those who value liberty find this appalling, which is another reminder that democracy and liberty are typically antithetical, and the more you have of one the less you are likely to have of the other.  So why would anyone think that this has something to do with fascism?       

Goldberg said:

Unity by itself has no moral worth whatsoever. The only value of unity is strength, strength in numbers–and, again, that is a fascist value. That’s the symbolism of the fasces, the bundle of sticks that in combination are invincible. Rape gangs and lynch mobs? Unified. The mafia? Unified. The SS? They had unity coming out the yinyang. Meanwhile, Socrates, Jesus, Thomas More, and an endless line of nameless souls were dispatched from this earth in the name of unity.

In fact, no, these particular people were dispatched because they were condemned as dangerous atheists, blasphemers or rebels.  Socrates dispatched himself in obedience to the law of the city, and Thomas More was executed because he would not accommodate the religious revolution carried out by his king.  From the perspective of Catholics in England, Thomas More was dispatched in the name of schism and division.  In each case, and in many of the cases of the “nameless souls,” it was not a question of unity, but of conformity, which is to say obedience, but particularly in the case of the Lord, Whose Passion and Resurrection we glorify this week, it was a case of giving Himself up out of supreme obedience to God, in part to show the disobedience of those in authority.  Arguably, the Sanhedrin condemned Christ because they feared that the people would unite behind Him, but that is very different from saying that they condemned Him in the name of unity. 

There are, in fact, other values to be found in unity besides strength, which is why non-fascists might also prize it, and strength need not be defined only in terms of coercion and mob justice.  Obviously, out of context and taken abstractly, unity may or may not be desirable, which is all the more reason why Glick’s abuse of Michelle Obama’s statement in context is all the worse.  

People may be unified for a great many different things, and it is the objective for which they are uniting that matters.  From a Christian perspective, unity is first and foremost not just a Christian value, but a basic principle of theology, ecclesiology and ethics.  Though overused by ecumenists, ut unum sint (that they may be one) is one of the most important prayers offered by the Lord, as we in the Orthodox Church remember and celebrate this week.  Foremost among the things that unity, true unity, is supposed to represent is love and communion. 

Political religions, including fascism, offer a false, denuded form of unity that comes from collective action to celebrate and worship oneself or one’s people rather than finding unity in God, and it would be tragic to pretend that unity “by itself” is somehow necessarily fascist because it can be concerned only with strength.  Clearly, in the case of the Obamas, the unity being called for is not a fascist value, but a left-liberal democratic value, which is quite enough of a problem on its own.