James asks one of the important questions of our time, and I am here to tell him that he is not alone in his latest display of elitism.  While I cannot claim that I have never watched a Judd Apatow film, it is closer to the truth to say that I have rarely enjoyed them.  In the latest case, my objection to the new movie is not much related to the movie itself, about which I have read almost nothing and care even less, but stems from the constant irritation of seeing stupid advertisements for this movie on every bus in downtown Chicago for the last six weeks that used phrases that were, so I gathered, supposed to play on the theme of the movie.  These included such gems as, “My mom always hated you,” and equally profound sentiments.  Here ends the pop culture-bashing.

The spike in the prices of bread and rice worldwide is certainly very significant, but I wonder if we miss something when we insist on interpreting the ensuing riots and upheaval in terms of democracy vs. dictatorship as Diehl does.  It’s not as if Mubarak’s opposition can magically produce cheaper bread, and any democratic movement that pledges to change underlying economic realities that it cannot actually change will simply confirm in the minds of its own people that democrats are impractical and useless.  The typical demagogic move in circumstances such as these is to declare price controls, which simply succeed in drying up supplies, encouraging hoarding and pushing everything into the black market, but new democratic movements flush with the accomplishment of ousting a dictator (supposing that this happened) would be tempted to make just such a foolish move for fear of being ousted by the hungry population that brought them to power.  What’s not clear to me is why we would want “those hungry for bread [to] join those famished for democracy,” unless the goal is to see havoc unleashed on the streets of Cairo to prove a political point about the problems of dictatorship. 

Now, it’s true that rising food prices can weaken regimes and lead to their eventual overthrow. That does not mean that what follows will necessarily be any better in terms of its treatment of dissidents, and it will not necessarily be better able to address the causes of rising prices.  The price spike is a global phenomenon, driven by high oil prices, and as such can only be affected around the edges by changes in policy in any particular state.  There are fully democratic countries that are being or will be affected severely by the rise in prices, and the resulting discontent will probably be tapped by already existing rebel movements, such as the Naxalites, who are flourishing thanks to the economic disparities and dislocations that existed before this year, to great destabilising effect within India in particular.  There was a general strike called in West Bengal just today protesting the rise in prices (and, yes, I understand that West Bengal has a special fondness for bandhs), and we can expect to see more of this kind of protest in the coming months.  Some of the countries most in danger noted by Foreign Policy are for the most part either democracies or U.S. allies.  The rise in food prices may be bad for dicators, but it is doubly bad for America, since our government happens to subsidise a number of dictators and also has some interest in the stability of major rising powers such as India, and in the stable, peaceful development of large democracies such as Indonesia.  There is another reason for Washington to be concerned: if Washington wants to play the hegemon, it is also going to get part of the blame, rightly or wrongly, when food prices go up around the world. 

Meanwhile, throwing away perfectly good grain on the boondoggle of biofuels in this climate is not just a rip-off to the taxpayer, but seems basically unjust.  There is no chance, of course, of the presidential candidates adjusting relevant energy policy positions.

Clive Crook is talking sense:

Also, the Democratic voters most likely to be offended by Mr Obama’s sympathetic account of their errors are the white working class and they were backing Mrs Clinton anyway.  If and when she drops out, they will have to decide whether to vote for Mr Obama or switch to Mr McCain. Only then will we know how they feel about Mr Obama’s lofty take on their beliefs.

Crook’s assessment is backed up by post-“bitter” Rasmussen polling.  The Rasmussen summary from last week said:

Thirty-seven percent (37%) say that the comments reflect an elitist view of small town America. Forty-eight percent (48%) disagree. Most Clinton voters (57%) believe Obama’s comments reflect an elitist view while Obama voters overwhelmingly reject that notion.

This is another way of saying that the reaction to the remarks themselves was probably muted because the people likely to be put off by these remarks were already inclined to oppose Obama, and many of them may have already thought him to be an elitist.  Add the preferred description to account for Clinton’s supporters to see those remarks as elitist: Obama is the “priest,” the “wine track” candidate, the intellectual, process-oriented reformer, the yuppie, and so on.  The reaction probably has been, “Of course Obama is an elitist–tell me something I don’t know!”

The overall poll movement in the past week seems to have been the result of Obama gaining strength in southeastern Pennsylvania, as he consolidated support in Philadelphia and the suburbs, while Clinton has picked up support in central and western PA.  So what seems to have happened is that, far from people “not caring” about the controversy, the controversy (including Clinton’s lame attempts to portray herself as one of the people) has made the race more sharply polarised in the last week than it had been earlier.  That appears to be what the polling companies are saying, including those that are showing a closer statewide race in recent days. 

32% of Democrats in this Suffolk poll say this his remarks show that he is “out of touch” with rural Pennsylvanian values.  Obviously, that’s nowhere near a majority, but if a third of Democrats in the state believe this it is a problem for Obama in the future.  Certainly, it is still hard to measure the intensity of this sentiment, but it definitely exists.  Literally every one of those Democrats could already have been a Clinton supporter, so the backlash would not necessarily register in head-to-head polling between Clinton and Obama. 

Update: Comparing SUSA’s poll from 4/1 and another from today, the different regional reactions are clear: Obama has picked up six points and Clinton has lost five in SE Pennsylvania; Clinton gained four and Obama lost seven in NW Pennsylvania; Obama lost three in the southwest, and Clinton gained two.  It is northeastern Pennsylvania where Clinton apparently collapsed: she led 71-23 three weeks ago, and is now up just 60-37.  Changes in central Pennsylvania, according to SUSA, were minor.

In addition to continuing his abuse of the word autocracy to describe the governments of Russia and China, Kagan writes this clarifying, horrifying passage:

What right, indeed? Only the liberal creed grants the right–the belief that all men are created equal and have certain inalienable rights that must not be abridged by governments; that governments derive their power and legitimacy only from the consent of the governed and have a duty to protect their citizens’ right to life, liberty, and property. To those who share this liberal faith, foreign policies and even wars that defend these principles, as in Kosovo, can be right even if established international law says they are wrong [bold mone-DL].

This is refreshingly straightforward.  Here is an admission that democratist interventionism is based on an ideological fantasy and has no legal basis at all.  It is revealing that Kagan writes an entire article about the “autocracies” and seems not to notice the irony that they, not the democratic West, are on the side of international law as it actually exists.  If democratists were right that only other kinds of regimes are the revisionist, aggressive ones, this might be less worrisome, but in a world where democracies believe they have a higher calling to violate international law in the name of “rights” the preservation of international order necessarily falls to authoritarian and authoritarian-populist states.  (I would still say that Russian is not undemocratic, but it is illiberal because it is democratic, but authoritarian populist will do for now.)  This is a very undesirable and potentially explosive arrangement.  On one side, you have an ideologically-driven mania that says sovereignty and international law can be compromised whenever certain powers feel (and feel is the right verb here) it necessary to protect “rights,” and on the other hand there are states that now have every incentive not to reform their political systems, because reform has been inextricably associated with foreign subversion and attempts at isolation and encirclement, and have absolutely no incentive to help the West isolate pariah regimes around the world.  On the contrary, they now have every reason to work overtime at subverting and overthrowing democratic and pseudo-democratic, “pro-Western” regimes along their borders, since they see them (correctly) as outposts of a fundamentally hostile ideology. 

Structurally, Russia and China are in the position the U.S. and western Europe were in during the late 1940s with the beginning of containment, while the U.S. and Europe have adopted the revolutionary posture of the USSR and China.  Then, theirs was the supposedly “popular” and definitely militant ideology that transcended borders and sovereignty in the name of “universal values,” while we relied at least partly on the strictures of international law to resist their subversive and expansionist goals.  Back then, our posture was basically defensive and interested in thwarting interference in our affairs.  Even so, containment was used to justify projections of power and interventions all across the globe.  We should not be surprised if we see something similar in coming decades, especially if Washington insists on restarting the Cold War with the Russians with continued NATO expansion.  Of course, when new proxy wars backed by these other states or revolutions against our allies finally do occur, there will be mystification and confusion in Washington as to how this could have happened, since there were supposedly never any provocations to trigger such a response.  In the same fantasy world where NATO has supposedly become less aggressive and Russia more so, and Russian outrage at the latest NATO expansion is supposedly something new, whatever responses these other states have to continuing encroachment and meddling will be treated as unprovoked neo-imperialism and used as the justification for a new round of our own interventions.

In 2004, torture and beheadings were the norm in Iraq and America was still stunned by the bloated bodies floating through flooded New Orleans [bold mine-DL]. ~Michael Crowley

Now I know that some parts of New Orleans weren’t exactly a picnic before Katrina, but I’m pretty sure the flooding and the general disaster took place in the summer of ’05 following Mr. Bush’s re-election.  What’s strange about this is that Katrina wasn’t that long ago, but all of the failures of the Bush administration are here being shoved into the first term, as if to drive home the perversity of Bush’s re-election.  As much as I agree with much of Crowley’s article, this jumped out at me as not just obviously wrong, but bizarrely so.  After all, who could forget when Katrina hit New Orleans?   

It would make the argument that voters care more about character than issues (a generalisation I endorse, by the way) much stronger if you could show that the public ignored both the folly of Iraq and the disaster of the government’s post-Katrina response and put Bush back in office, except that the first time that Americans went to the polls for federal elections after Katrina was in 2006.  Don’t get me wrong–there was more than enough incompetence in the first term to prove the point that a majority will back a terrible incumbent on “character.”  The picture is complicated a bit by the fact that Bush won re-election by one of the smallest margins for a sitting President on record, but he did still win when he had no business doing so. 

In presidential elections, I do think character tends to trump issues, and this is something that I don’t like admitting, because it makes the worst parts of politics–the “atmospherics,” the trivia, the obsession with biography–into the most important parts, while the things most important to governing are given short shrift.  This is a reminder that most of the people complaining most loudly that the media is ignoring “the issues” and focusing on trivia are really just saying that they want to hear about “the issues” to the exclusion of everything else, which makes them unlike a large number of voters.  (This also makes clear that when journalists claim that this kind of trivia matters to the public, they aren’t just engaged in self-serving rhetoric.)  No one can explain why McCain and Huckabee were the most viable Republican candidates if we believe that “issues” are decisive and take precedence–one candidate had no “issues” except the “surge,” and the other one had the FairTax and that was about it.  The biggest failure among the major GOP candidates was the ueber-wonk who was thrilled at the prospect of laying out his policy proposals in PowerPoint format.  It’s true that there are “issues”-oriented voters, quite a few of them, but they are consistently outnumbered by the others.

Behold, the Bridegroom is coming at midnight. * Blessed is the servant He shall find awake. * But the one He shall find neglectful will not be worthy of Him. * Beware, therefore, O my soul! Do not fall into a deep slumber,* lest you be delivered to death and the door of the Kingdom be closed to you. * Watch instead, and cry out: * Holy, Holy, Holy art Thou, O God. * Through the intercession of the Theotokos, have mercy on us!

By raising Lazarus from the dead before Thy passion, Thou didst confirm the universal resurrection, 0 Christ God! Like the children with the branches of victory, we cry out to Thee, O Vanquisher of Death: Hosanna in the highest! Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord!

Sullivan quotes Peter Rollins:

Fundamentalism can be understood as a particular way of believing one’s beliefs rather than referring to the actual content of one’s beliefs.

It can be described as holding a belief system is such a way that it mutually excludes all other systems, rejecting other views in direct proportion to how much they differ from one’s own [bold mine-DL]. In contrast, the a/theistic approach can be seen as a form of disbelieving what one believes, or rather, believing IN God while remaining dubious concerning what one believes ABOUT God (a distinction that fundamentalism is unable to maintain). This does not actually contradict the idea of orthodoxy but rather allow us to understand it in a new light…

If we define “fundamentalism” this way, we would necessarily classify all religious systems that have any authoritative doctrinal definitions as fundamentalist.  When Judaism teaches that God is one, it doesn’t mean that God can also be many (even though there are names for God that are in a plural form); the most basic belief of monotheism excludes that which flatly contradicts it.  (The Church defends the paradox of Trinitarianism on the assumption that God is one, and that the Trinity does not imply many gods.)  In other words, every kind of religious orthodoxy would have to be classed as fundamentalist, which makes the term so broad and ahistorical that it’s not clear to me how it even describes something either within or against any traditional religion.  With this definition, every form of traditional Christianity would be defined as fundamentalist.  Even though Sullivan has usually applied the term fundamentalist far too broadly, I doubt that he really wants to use such an expansive definition. 

To state that something is orthodox is to exclude in one way or another those things that disagree with it.  The very name orthodoxy, right opinion, implies that there is something wrong or false that it opposes.  In one sense, exclusion is the wrong way to think about it, since it is not orthodoxy that is partial, limited or sectarian, but those teachings that mistakenly take one part of orthodoxy for the whole or obsess on one particular formulation to the exclusion of others. 

If Christ is the Incarnate Word, He is not merely divine nor merely human; the latter views are necessarily excluded by affirming the central tenet of Christianity.  The Resurrection is real, in which case salvation is possible, or it is a metaphor and a nice story and there is no salvation.  At some point, even in a revelation that celebrates paradox as the Gospel does, affirming one thing will rule out others.  Orthodoxy, and I am speaking now specifically of Orthodox Christianity, does not reject allegory or mystery or unknowing, but includes all of these things, while at the same time being able to engage in positive theology that points towards divine reality in a correct way.  God in Himself is incomphrensible, but can be known inasmuch as He has revealed Himself to us, and that knowledge is a reliable guide to understanding something about God.  Everyone has personal doubts, but to make a virtue out of doubting, as Rollins seems to do, is to strike at the certain hope that the Gospel offers.   

If Rollins were talking about apophaticism here, that would be one thing, but he isn’t.  He isn’t saying that definitions are never exhaustive of God’s existence, and that God can never be fully described because He is unknowable in Himself and infinite.  (Incidentally, even apophaticism relies on claims that exclude other, contrary claims, i.e., that God is finite, knowable, etc.)  Rollins is saying that affirming X and rejecting its contrary in Y is fundamentalist.  So now even logic and rationality are fundamentalist.  He is also saying that making any authoritative statement about God is fundamentalist.  Conceivably, if someone held that he could know God in His essence through rational means (which is the heresy of Eunomios–no relation to this blog), or that a doctrinal definition told us everything about God that there was to know, that person would be a fundamentalist, but then he would also be a heretic.  In Rollins’ view, we could not exclude this heresy as contrary to Orthodoxy without becoming fundamentalists, but, in fact, the ability to exclude such views is the way that Orthodoxy remains a living, dynamic tradition and does not become simply a list of claims and rules but remains a vivifying, enlightening experience of the Life of God.  Arguably, fundamentalism could be defined as the kind of religion that is satisfied with the bare minimum of definitions and rules and never looks beyond them.  But that is also far too sweeping and not really accurate, since there are virtually no people in history, including people who called themselves fundamentalists, who believed in this fashion.

As I have noted before, people in Kentucky seem unusually hostile to Obama, and far more so than in any other border state, so Kentucky may represent an extreme case of surging anti-Obama sentiment.  Obama’s general election polling in Kentucky cratered post-Wright, so Kentuckians seem to respond strongly to all of these Obama controversies.  Nonetheless, it seems worth noting that in Democratic primary polling by SUSA, Obama has lost significant ground in the past two weeks and now trails Clinton statewide by 36 in a poll conducted 4/12-4/14.  SUSA sums up the change:

Compared to an identical SurveyUSA tracking poll released two weeks ago, Obama has lost ground among men and women, young and old, conservatives and moderates. In Western KY, Clinton had led by 30, now leads by 43. In Eastern KY, Clinton had led by 52, now leads by 63. in North Central KY, Clinton had led by 30, now leads by 39. In greater Louisville, Clinton had led by 12, now leads by 16. 

But remember, folks, no one cares about what Obama said and Obama is gaining ground daily! 

Update: Their Indiana polling for the Democratic primary, conducted 4/11-4/13, shows the same slippage:

Compared to an identical SurveyUSA poll released two weeks ago, Clinton is up 3 points, Obama is down 4 points. Clinton had led by 9 at the beginning of April, leads by 16 mid-month.

Of course, everyone seems to be forgetting that ARG Pennsylvania poll that showed a 20-point swing to Clinton and against Obama in one week.