John Schwenkler, who has written another very insightful post, takes apart that Joe Klein column from another angle, and makes a vital point:

To start, what exactly does it mean for one country to be “greater” then another, let alone for a single country – especially one riddled with all of the sorts of tremendous problems that ours is – to be the “greatest” of them all? What could make such a thing true? How in world would we set ourselves to finding it out?

There are many different kinds of standards for measuring greatness, of course, but even then there is a nationalist impulse to rank and set nations against one another.  The point is not to deny virtues where our country has virtues or to obsess about its flaws, but to acknowledge that every nation has both and it should be the patriot’s business to attend to his country and not dwell on the failures, real or imagined, of other nations. 

Contrary to Yglesias, I don’t think that it is necessarily the “liberal” understanding of patriotism that it is contingent.  This is, in fact, a basic assumption of paleoconservatives and, I think, of pomocons as well.  Indeed, the contingency of our loyalties is what gives them their meaning.  This is also why we generally prefer particularism over universalism and particular identities over grand, abstract and universal ones: one derives from experience, and the other is derived from ideology or theory.  You don’t love your mother because she is the Greatest (even if she is as far as you are concerned) or because she instantiates the form of Motherhood or embodies an abstract principle, but because she is your mother.  Furthermore, a student of Lukacs and Kuehnelt-Leddihn has no problem whatever agreeing with Yglesias when he says, “a cosmopolitan in the real world doesn’t become one by purging himself of particularist affections, rather he multiplies them and recognizes that others have affections of their own and that these sentiments are all owed a certain amount of respect and consideration.”  The patriot has to recognise that each people regards its customs as best and best-suited for them and that each people loves its country just as he loves his country.  This is not simply to say, “How would you like it if a foreign government invaded your country and tried to remake it in its image?”  That’s a useful exercise, but the point is much deeper than a foreign policy Golden Rule.  It is not just that these efforts will fail, but that it is good that they fail, because it is inherently wrong to attempt them.  More to the point, even if it were true that our country is demonstrably “the greatest” in something, I think Chesterton’s famous saying is the key to understanding patriotism and what is wrong with a lot of Americanism: “the patriot boasts not of the largeness of his country, but of its smallness.”  This is related to the patriotism Prof. Lukacs described in his biography of Kennan, the love in spite of, which leads the patriot to love his country even if he finds much of it to be flawed.

Rod is right that Democrats today suffer from the public perception and the stereotype of insufficient patriotism, but as the discussions of the last few weeks have made clear much of this stereotyping has to do with a misunderstanding of what patriotism requires.  If you come to believe that patriotism has something to do with the national security state and power projection overseas, and that failure to support these things with sufficient zeal is “unpatriotic,” this has inevitably stacked any policy debate in favour of intervention, surveillance and increased police powers.  As Lukacs noted in Democracy and Populism, Democrats have been the less nationalistic party for at least the last half century and Republicans have been more so, and in the last half century this seems to have worked to Republicans’ advantage. 

Most of the time when I see the bumper sticker, “peace is patriotic,” I shake my head.  That isn’t because peace isn’t patriotic, because it is pretty much always desirable for one’s country to be at peace, but because the formulation conveys that the person using this phrase feels the need to assert what should be obvious.  (The phrase can potentially obscure the virtue of fighting in self-defense as well.)  The far more damaging part of what some have called the “defensive crouch” is the belief not just that so-and-so is “weak” on national security (which for the last 18 years has meant “unwilling to start unnecessary wars”), but that he is “weak” because he is not as patriotic as his opponent.  That transforms a disagreement about policy into an argument about whether or not the dissenter or opponent is loyal enough to be allowed to participate meaningfully in the discussion.  That is the really appalling thing about Barone’s article, which falsely imputes to Obama and his “academics” a general and total disrespect for the military and those who serve in the military.  Once again, this conflates criticism of certain policies with some supposedly “unpatriotic” contempt.

Thomas Woods makes a point that I agree with entirely:

Racial insensitivity is not as bad as mass murder.  I guess that’s what I’m saying.  Yet the latter is considered a “point of view,” and the former is unforgivable and grounds for character assassination and smears.  The moral universe I inhabit ranks these offenses differently.

Last month, I said something quite similar:

Such is the strange nature of what counts as “controversial” in our discourse: advocating aggressive war, the bombing of civilians, torture and the possible first-strike use of tactical nukes are all considered debatable positions on policy and have all been offered by major candidates for the Presidency either during the campaign or in their previous work, but to engage in intemperate and indeed appalling rhetoric that will actually harm and maim no one is evidence of the need for exclusion from respectable society.  There is something deeply wrong about those priorities that seek to police thought, but which do little or nothing to challenge advocacy for deeply immoral actions.  If the one merits being driven out of the debate, how much more should the other merit even more severe consequences? 

TAC Contributing Editor Jim Pinkerton and David Corn are back in action at bloggingheads.

Dan McCarthy talks about the future of Huckabee and Paul on the main blog.

The obvious starting point of analysis here is that the odds of any American troops dying in a war for the defense of Albania are vanishingly small. And that’s the point. Albania is a small and weak country that one could imagine some neighbor maybe trying to push around with military force. But nobody’s going to want to take on NATO over some beef with Albania. Meanwhile, over the longer term the goal would be to bring the entire Balkans into a common security architecture that could help ensure the peace among all of them.  

Recall that NATO’s great achievement in the 1940s and 50s wasn’t just that it helped face down the Soviets. That was important, of course, but in many ways equally important was that it allowed the various countries of Western Europe to rebuild their militaries without those militaries appearing threatening to other European countries. ~Matt Yglesias

Of course, the odds of the U.S. having to go to war to defend Estonia are much greater, and that is a better example of NATO expansion that is positively dangerous.  The entry of Albania is not necessarily quite so dangerous as it is absurd.  It’s probably true that Albania will not pull us into a war, because no one threatens Albania, and no one is likely to threaten them (the main territorial dispute they have is with Greece, a NATO member, so presumably Albania would not start a war with NATO, either).  Albania will contribute little or nothing to the alliance, except to become a market for weapons systems (which is one of the real reasons for this round of expansion), and in the event that another state did attack Albania Washington would simply pay no attention to its obligations, because it would dawn on most everyone that Americans fighting for Albania is pointless.  Extending defense guarantees that we have no intention of keeping is an inherently bad idea, and I do not believe for a moment that Washington is going to come to Albania’s defense.  Never mind the problem of allying oneself with a government that promotes irredentism and regional instability. 

Now that the USSR is gone and those European militaries have been shrinking, can we please close down the entire shop?  NATO has outlived its usefulness, which this latest round of expansion underscores.  There is no menacing or aggressive power that threatens any of these countries.  I think this is what Krikorian is really getting at: there is no reason why the United States should be guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Albania, or any other Balkan states, because it is of no consequence to us whether Albania and its neighbours are at war.  To the extent that anything happening in Yugoslavia did matter to the West, it was the risk to NATO’s “credibility” that seemed to be invoked most often as the strategic rationale for intervening.  But alliances that serve no purpose don’t need credibility, because they are obsolete.  Nothing could better demonstrate that obsolescence than the incorporation of the land of Enver Hoxha into NATO.

Update: Clark joins the swelling anti-NATO chorus over on @TAC.

Ross says:

I think McCain’s pre-existing popularity makes him more appealing than Dole ever was, but I’m not sure what “Prodigal policy offerings” Kilgore has in mind; so far, the McCain message seems to boil down to his biography, the Surge, and … that’s about it.

Don’t forget that vital issue of earmark reform! 

Seriously, though, I think a heavily biographical campaign is McCain’s best chance, just as it was his best chance during the primaries when his main rival was a technocratic governor who liked to get into the weeds (“the weeds are important,” Romney told us).  Obama has already set up the opposition of past and future, and to the extent that there are many Americans who think the present and future look bleak the candidate who is supposed to represent the past might do quite well.  In the mid-’90s, a bridge to the past had limited appeal outside cultural conservative circles.  Right now the past may be looking pretty good to a lot of voters.  Of course, Clinton tried something similar and failed, so maybe it is a bad idea, but what works with Democratic primary voters and what works with the general electorate may be very different.

Update: Ambinder has more details on the biography campaign.

Jim Antle adds his latest response to the discussion of pro-lifers and the GOP.  Bringing it back to where it all started, Jim agrees with Ross on the original point of contention and says:

And I agree with Douthat that antiwar conservatives who are hoping that a Democratic president will fundamentally change U.S. foreign policy [bold mine-DL] are engaged in more wishful thinking than the most optimistic pro-lifer.

Certainly when put that way, it is hard to object to the conclusion, and on this point they’ll get no argument from me, but I do want to remind everyone that this isn’t what Prof. Bacevich said, and no one else in this recent debate on abortion has suggested anything of the kind.  The hope that Bacevich has put in Obama is of such a minimal, grudging kind that it has been somewhat misleading to call the article an endorsement.  Better than most, Bacevich understands the extent of the institutional support for the empire, and he understands that support for it transcends party lines, so he would not expect fundamental change from any future administration.  Indeed, his original article is so filled with caveats about the flaws of Obama’s foreign policy that it is absolutely clear that absolutely everything hinges on his pledge to get most of our forces out of Iraq:

So why consider Obama? For one reason only: because this liberal Democrat has promised to end the U.S. combat role in Iraq. Contained within that promise, if fulfilled, lies some modest prospect of a conservative revival.

On Obama’s foreign policy, he says quite bluntly:

When it comes to foreign policy, Obama’s habit of spouting internationalist bromides suggests little affinity for serious realism. His views are those of a conventional liberal. Nor has Obama expressed any interest in shrinking the presidency to its pre-imperial proportions. He does not cite Calvin Coolidge among his role models. And however inspiring, Obama’s speeches are unlikely to make much of a dent in the culture. The next generation will continue to take its cues from Hollywood rather than from the Oval Office.

Beyond Iraq, Bacevich offers this suggestion: 

Yet if Obama does become the nation’s 44th president, his election will constitute something approaching a definitive judgment of the Iraq War. As such, his ascent to the presidency will implicitly call into question the habits and expectations that propelled the United States into that war in the first place. Matters hitherto consigned to the political margin will become subject to close examination. Here, rather than in Obama’s age or race, lies the possibility of his being a truly transformative presidency.

One of my objections to this argument is that Obama’s “internationalist bromides” and “the habits and expectations that propelled the United States into that war in the first place” are all part of the same thing, and implicitly calling something into question is not nearly enough to dislodge these habits.  A President who does not come away from the Iraq war years with a much more limited vision of the scope and reach of American power (and Obama clearly has not come to this conclusion) is potentially more dangerous than even the hot-headed old man who thinks that we are winning.

Is there any evidence that most, or even a singficant chunk, of Obama’s supporters are academics? ~Jonathan Chait

Chait asks in response to this Barone column.  Considering that he has received something in the neighbourhood of 14 million votes (including all caucus and disqualified states), that would be an awful lot of academics if they constituted a large percentage of his support.  Even if there are that many graduate degree-holders running around out there, there are probably still a lot fewer full-time academics.  Besides, this isn’t a mystery.  We have exit polls that can give us some rough idea of how many Obama supporters have post-graduate educations and how many do not.  Furthermore, we have all talked to death the “beer-track”/”wine-track,” working class/creative class divisions among these voters. 

What does Barone mean when he says “academic” anyway?  As near as I can tell, his category of “academics” includes college students, whom we already knew disproportionately supported Obama in these elections, and seems to extend to upscale voters as well.  Barone writes:

In state after state, we have seen Obama do extraordinarily well in academic and state capital enclaves. In state after state, we have seen Clinton do extraordinarily well in enclaves dominated by Jacksonians. 

We knew that Obama gets a lot of his support from professionals, students and young people, all of whom are going to be concentrated in “academic and state capital enclaves.”  We also already knew that Obama was winning the endorsements of many public sector unions.  Clinton’s relative strength among downscale white voters, particularly the Scots-Irish and Midwestern ethnic communities from southern and eastern Europe, is not news, either.  So besides being redundant where it is even somewhat correct, this talk of “academics” and “Jacksonians” creates categories so broad and imprecise as to be meaningless.  (By the way, why do people frequently apply the name “Jacksonian” to things that have no meaningful connection to Andrew Jackson, except for, in this case, the accident of similar ethnic background?)

Now it’s true that if you are an academic and you’re voting for one of the two Democrats, you are probably for Obama, since academics or academics-in-training will tend to fit the Obama voter profile in multiple ways: younger, professional, (too) many years of education, urban, probably secular.  They will also be more inclined to identify with someone whose intellectual style is more familiar and agreeable to them.  It helps that he has at least briefly been an instructor, and his biography pushes all the right buttons.  That much is true, but it’s hardly a revelation at this point.   

Barone becomes almost comical when he describes Jacksonians, as if they were some Melanesian tribe that he has been studying for National Geographic:

Jacksonians, in contrast, place a high value on the virtues of the warrior and little value on the work of academics and public employees. They have, in historian David Hackett Fischer’s phrase, a notion of natural liberty: People should be allowed to do what they want, subject to the demands of honor.  If someone infringes on that liberty, beware: The Jacksonian attitude is, “If you attack my family or my country, I’ll kill you.”

Of course, a lot of people who are public sector employees also believe this.  They are called soldiers. 

Then Barone just starts lying:

His standard campaign statements on Iraq seem to suggest that all honor should go to the opponents of the war and none to the brave men and women who have waged it.

That’s simply not true.  He has said:

Our men and women in uniform are performing heroically around the world in some of the most difficult conditions imaginable.

And:

And it’s about honoring our veterans by giving them the respect and dignity they deserve and the care and benefits they have earned.

He says these sorts of things all the time.  Barone should know that, and it’s ridiculous for him to make such a claim when the evidence to the contrary is just a click away. 

It is also not terribly convincing when Barone says:

Go back to 1995, and look at the polls that showed that most Americans would support Colin Powell for president. I don’t think you’ll find any evidence of resistance by Jacksonian voters to the Powell candidacy.

That’s because Powell didn’t run and no votes were cast for or against him, and certainly not in a straight-up one-on-one race such as we have had the past two months.  You can’t find evidence for it, because polling is probably pretty unreliable on this question even today and may have been even more so 13 years ago.

There are probably some people with Scots-Irish Democratic backgrounds who will be drawn to McCain because of his military service, but speaking as someone with such a family background I can say with confidence that “Jacksonians” don’t necessarily support McCain.  The academic in me can’t rationalise a path to backing Obama, either, but in my case it isn’t because he lacks some intangible fighting spirit.  If anything, he is too willing to use force or endorse its use when it is unnecessary or misguided.  Meanwhile, the “Jacksonian” side fears that McCain will bog us down in so many conflicts that it will expose our country to grave dangers that we will have much greater difficulty warding off.

As I started reading this Joe Klein column, I kept expecting him to start saying that Obama’s “patriotism problem” was one of perception, and that Obama was being falsely characterised by his enemies obsessed with flag pins and demonstrative hand-over-heart enthusiasm.  Klein could then go on to describe how Obama’s foes were crafting a narrative out of meaningless, isolated incidents and making use of Wright, Obama’s wife and the rest to portray the candidate in the worst light.  Instead, Klein basically agrees that Obama seems to be insufficiently patriotic, or at least doesn’t make enough of a show of it:

This is a chronic disease among Democrats, who tend to talk more about what’s wrong with America than what’s right. When Ronald Reagan touted “Morning in America” in the 1980s, Dick Gephardt famously countered that it was near midnight “and getting darker all the time.” This is ironic and weirdly self-defeating, since the liberal message of national improvement is profoundly more optimistic, and patriotic, than the innate conservative pessimism about the perfectibility of human nature. Obama’s hopemongering is about as American as a message can get — although, in the end, it is mostly about our ability to transcend our imperfections rather than the effortless brilliance of our diversity, informality and freedom-propelled creativity.

I agree that it seems ironic that self-described conservatives act like optimistic liberals, and liberals often appear to play the role of the dour pessimist, but this misses the point that everyone involved in the debate peddles optimism to some degree.  (It is one of my long-running complaints against many mainstream Republicans and conservatives, typified by Limbaugh, that they portray optimism as some kind of conservative view, when it is one of the least conservative things in the world.)  Suitably pessimistic conservatives may point to structures in the world or in human nature and say, “This cannot be fixed; this is just the way things are in this world.”  The liberal optimist will point to various problems and complain that they haven’t been solved; he will lament the “crisis” in this or that part of the country, and demand that something be done, because he fundamentally believes that virtually every problem can be solved.  So the liberal’s rhetoric comes across as “negative,” because it is critical of existing flaws in a given system, but it is anything but pessimistic. 

Conservatives assume, or should assume, that some “problems” have no solution, and so tend to be less interested in worrying about things that they don’t think can be fixed anyway.  Because liberals tend to believe that things can be significantly improved, if not necessarily perfected, they are constantly busy alerting everyone to all the things that could be made better.  This constant obsession with improvement may have something to do with these reports of the greater average unhappiness of liberals.  Meliorism seems not to improve one’s mood.  I should note that The Economist article makes the same errors of associating satisfaction with your quality of life or contentment with the status quo with optimism, when they really have nothing to do with each other.  Optimism is not a belief that your life is good or that contemporary society is fair and decent (the latter sentiment is extremely common among conservatives, and frequently absent among liberals); it is a belief that all things will perpetually get better over time.  There may be something to the idea perceiving deep structural inequalities in society contributes to a feeling of powerlessness, which probably could be depressing, but on the whole most liberals assume that even deep structural problems can be changed through government action.  I would guess that liberals tend to be more unhappy because they are certain that significant improvement (however they define that) is possible, but they find themselves continually thwarted and frustrated.  To the extent that most conservatives are not activists and are not striving to change much of anything, the potential for this frustration is not nearly as great. 

Certainly, there is something a bit odd about accusing Obama of any kind of pessimism, but you hear this often enough from Obama’s mainstream Republican critics.  He and his wife are just so negative, they will say.  Never mind that the overwhelming majority of the man’s campaign is so overflowing with great expectations for the future that it threatens to drown us all in a flash flood of hope.  If Obama’s aides understand that the Wright controversy was mostly about the pastor’s “anti-Americanism,” they have hit on the heart of the problem.  But Democrats don’t want to get into a race to see which candidate can be more cloyingly Americanist.  McCain will win that competition, and it won’t be that close.  That’s why Obama has to steer clear of clumsy Americanist pandering (think John “Reporting For Duty” Kerry) while also avoiding the pitfalls set out for him by his own supporters that he is the personification of globalised America.

Jim Antle has written a smart, balanced post on Israel and Palestine, and I agree with a lot of what he has said.  To the extent that I think there is any conflict between being paleo and being pro-Israel, it is in the degree to which being pro-Israel entails support for the United States enabling an ally to continue to pursue policies that seem unjust, plainly detrimental to its long-term welfare in the region and also harmful to America’s reputation and interests elsewhere in the region.  More to the point, I think it should be a general rule for paleos and for anyone who wants to adhere to the advice in Washington’s Farewell Address about passionate attachments to other countries to not align oneself as pro-this or that country.  It would make no more sense if the United States had a decidedly pro-Syrian or pro-Iranian bias when it came to making policy in the region.  One of the things that would help the entire debate over policy towards Israel and Israeli policies would be to stop speaking of the opposing perspectives as pro- and anti-Israel or pro- and anti-Palestinian, when one of the problems here as elsewhere is the impulse to align our government’s policies too closely with one side or another in a foreign conflict.  It is pretty much inevitable that people are going to have some sentimental attachments to different nations, but these must be kept in check, which is why this language of being pro-this or anti-that is not helping at all.

Philip Klein expresses his reservations about some critics of Israel.  I’d like to add a few remarks to clarify my views on all of this.  For the reasons stated above, I would not call myself pro-Israel, nor would I call myself anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian.  In my view, their conflict is such a minor one and of such little relevance to the United States that I sometimes find it hard to believe that our government is as bogged down in it as it is.  Israel and America have common interests, but they are scarcely greater than those that we have in common with many friendly states, and the strategic value of the alliance seems to me to be much less than most Americans believe.  Over the long term, Israeli dependence on American aid and American backing is crippling and stunting its internal development and its pursuit of normal relations with all of its neighbours, which it will eventually have to establish.  States that Washington clutches to its bosom have a mixed record when it comes to their own prosperity and well-being.  I might call this is the “real” pro-Israel view, since I think it stands a chance of being much better for the people who actually live in Israel, but as I just said I am not interested in how pro-Israel a policy is, but whether it makes sense for America.  The relationship in its current form doesn’t seem to do very much for America.  Then again, Washington is in the habit of maintaining all sorts of essentially permanent alliances that have long since ceased to serve any useful function (see NATO), but which we don’t end for reasons of inertia, institutional vested interests, and misguided ambitions and fears.  There are, or should be, no permanent alliances, only permanent interests, and it should not be nearly so controversial to say that the interests of our two states are diverging and that it is a mistake to keep pretending that they are extremely similar. 

Klein concludes:

I fear that the pushback by Israel’s critics is slowly but surely creating an environment in which anti-Semitic views are becoming acceptable as long as they are framed within a discussion of Israel and are said to arise from sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians.

This fear seems to me to be misplaced, at least when it comes to the debate in the United States, for a couple of reasons.  First of all, the stigma against anti-Semitic views is as strong today as it has ever been.  These views are not becoming more acceptable; they are not sneaking in under the radar.  No one of any consequence tolerates such views, and essentially every public critic of the U.S.-Israel relationship and Israeli policies makes a point of stating up front that he repudiates and condemns anti-Semitism.  Unless, of course, one insists on labeling anything remotely critical of the influence of “pro-Israel” groups and individuals as anti-Semitic or reminiscent of the ideas of Henry Ford, in which case it will appear as if anti-Semitic views are becoming more acceptable because perfectly reasonable and mainstream views are being classified as anti-Semitic.  This has to do much more with reading in old tropes into arguments that have an entirely different purpose and different context than it does with critical arguments employing old tropes.  When utterly mainstream figures are denounced with some vehemence for alleged anti-Semitism, whether we are speaking of Mearsheimer and Walt or McPeak, people begin to tune out the accusation because it is so clearly being used as a political bludgeon and nothing more.  None of those men even claims to be “anti-Israel,” yet they have now been frequently attacked as anti-Semites, and it has reached such a pass that conventionally pro-Israel politicians receive no credit for the positions they actually take and are treated as suspects who need to justify themselves if they once made the “mistake” of speaking of Palestinian suffering when other people were around.  When the position of the utterly pro-Israel Barack Obama can be seriously doubted, despite taking every conventional view that is expected of national politicians (as a matter of record, he holds literally the same policy views as George Bush with respect to Israel), the search for “anti-Israel” Americans has clearly spun out of control.  In theory, all of that could make people much less likely to take notice of actual anti-Semitism when it does appear, because we have heard voices crying, “Wolf!” so many times for so long that a lot of people have stopped paying attention.  I would submit that if anything is creating an environment in which anti-Semitism can flourish, it is the overuse of the charge and the rather obvious uses of the charge for intra-party or partisan political ends.   

P.S. Klein also wrote:

Today, the argument is that wealthy Jewish donors from New York City influence politicians in both parties, and no politician is willing to challenge them on Israel.

But to the extent that this is part of the argument today at all, it is actually a very, very small part of the argument.  That isn’t the argument of The Israel Lobby, and that isn’t really the argument that McPeak was making, either.  The quote from McPeak that caused such a stir was clumsy and imprecise at worst, which didn’t stop people from attacking him for being “bigoted,” for which there is no evidence whatever.  Of course, there are some of these donors in New York City, which Wesley Clark once had the misfortune to mention in public, thereby ensuring the demise of his already long-shot presidential campaign, but the broader observation that it is political suicide to go against voters all over the country who have strong feelings about Israel, many of them Christians, is so right that it would be unremarkable to say it if we did indeed have “an open and honest debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”  Obviously, it is true that politicians dare not challenge the status quo on Israel, and a number of interest groups have a lot to do with that.  Yet routinely “pro-Israel” voices react with horror when someone notes the broad institutional support current policy has and the power that “pro-Israel” groups and individuals wield in keeping that policy in place.  Rarely do people react with such outrage at the observation that their preferred position is institutionally well-entrenched and supported by a broad political consensus.  It’s almost as if they know how flimsy the rationale for the policy is and are afraid that it will evaporate if anyone looks at it too closely.