True patriotism is defined by the boundaries of your affection, not the boundaries of a real or potential political unit: Your country can extend just 20 miles from your home or all the way to Ottawa, depending on your roots, mood, and experiences.  Nationalism can transcend borders as well, but it does so in a much bloodier manner. ~Jesse Walker

On the whole, I agree with this.  Here are some of the main differences between the two things.  One is the difference between the immediate and particular on the one hand and the distant and the abstract on the other.  Another is the difference between the patriot, who typically does not have designs of someone else’s territory, much less justifying those designs on the grounds that the land “really” belongs to his nation.  A Mexican patriot is interested in the welfare of Mexico and has no cause to start fights with anyone, but the irredentist dreaming of Aztlan will have expansionist ambitions that can readily lead to conflict if enough people embrace that goal.  Patriots are typically content to take pride in their own country, while nationalists tend to need to triumph over someone else.  (There can be exceptions, but these seem to be pretty reliable general statements). 

Euskadian patriots could find Basque nationalism to be a threat to their country, and would reject groups such as ETA because they love their country.  That points to something else important: patriots are not necessarily compelled to seek political independence, while for nationalists it is almost a requirement.  Nationalists usually aspire to a state of their own, and nationalist historiography places great emphasis on the periods that included past “national” states as the best periods of specifically national history.  A history of one’s country, however, might include much that nationalist historiography wants to obscure or erase, especially if it involves settlement of the land by other peoples, and a patriot would, I think, be able to acknowledge and take account of these other parts of the story more readily than a nationalist, or rather you can tell the difference between the two positions based on their responses.      

Patriotism entails attachment to and affection for a certain piece of ground and the people who live on it, and it requires you to desire the good of your country.  We can imagine how either a centralising or expansionist nationalist or an invading irredentist could threaten your country and try to divide it with political boundaries on the basis of old historical claims, the ethnic make-up of the population or simply in terms of expansion and conquest.  In those cases, the patriot will defend his piece of ground, but there is no way that I can see that a patriot would ever wish to start a war for any reason.  Nationalists seem often to be on the lookout for pretexts for picking fights, perceiving threats where they don’t exist and exaggerating them when they do.  Countries can straddle political boundaries, but it is usually the mark of the nationalist to want to align political boundaries to include multiple different countries, either in part or in full, within a single state.  Nationalism advances  at the expense of numerous local patriotisms.  (The unification movements in Italy and Germany are good examples of this, and the experience of southern Italy and Sicily at the hands of the liberal nationalists is typical of regions that resist consolidation.)

Reihan has written an interesting post on Jhumpa Lahiri, and now The New Republic has an entire article on her fiction, so it is time that I dusted off my remarks on the film adaptation of her novel, The Namesake, which I started writing months ago but never finished.  I haven’t read the novel, so I can’t comment on how successful Mira Nair’s adaptation is, but I can congratulate Mira Nair on making another outstanding film. (Warning–spoilers follow.)

Given my interests in Indian cinema and Russian literature, you might have thought that I would have seen The Namesakemuch earlier than I did, but in fact I had only found the time to watch it on video when it first came out.  After the first viewing, I had the impression that it was excellent, so excellent indeed that I felt compelled to watch it again soon afterwards.  I still think it is very good and certainly worth watching more than once.  Directed by Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding, Vanity Fair), one of the better directors of our day, The Namesake tells the story of a Bengali family in New York and particularly the story of the relationship between the father, Ashok (Irfan Khan), and his son (Kal Penn), whom he named Gogol after his favourite author.  The son’s name remains a source of constant anxiety and discontent until he finally comes to understand the more personal reason why his father gave him the name.  Those familiar with the BBC miniseries Second Generation will find many of the same themes of the tension between father and child and the strains of assimilation on cultural tradition, but The Namesake, working from the novel of the same title by Jhumpa Lahiri, obviously does not have the King Lear references nor does it touch on the problems of religious intercommunal divisions (though both are focused on the lives of Bengali immigrant families).  The Namesake paints a much more intimate portrait of a small, nuclear family in the New York suburbs.  Again, like Second Generation, the film concludes with the return of one of the parents to Calcutta, which represents a homecoming and also a sort of refuge from the “lonely country” that had nonetheless briefly become the family’s home.

The aspect of the story I found particularly powerful was the problems attached with marrying within the community.  After the death of his father and the alienation of his white girlfriend that results from preparation for the funeral rites, the main character, Gogol, or Nikhil (his shubh nam), as he prefers to be known once he becomes an adult, is re-introduced to a Bengali woman whom he had met years before, Moshumi, whose condescending attitude towards all things American was matched only by her anti-social, bookworm habits.  Moshumi has transformed herself during her time in France, becoming both an accomplished academic and more of a worldly, ‘liberated’ woman.  Gogol is taken in by her sensuality, and to a large degree because of their shared Bengali heritage they wed quickly.  Too quickly, as it turns out, as Moshumi falls back into her libertine ways and has an affair with an old French boyfriend.  When she admits the affair to him, she says, “Maybe it isn’t enough that we’re both Bengali.”  As he says, that wasn’t why he married her, but the pressure to marry within the community created the conditions for an unusually bad marriage that had been undertaken for the wrong reasons.  This struck me as the most poignant moment in the story.

In their last meeting before his father’s death, Ashok tells Gogol why he had given him the name of the Russian author.  He tells the story of reading Gogol’s The Overcoat on the way to visit his grandfather by train, and of the train wreck that had nearly killed him.  Gogol asks if his father thinks of the accident when he thinks of him, and Ashok says, “Not at all.  Because every day since then has been a gift.”  Naming his son after the eccentric and brilliant 19th century writer had been his tribute to his own survival during that accident; it had been his gift to his son.  When Gogol was graduating from high school, his father had given him a book of Gogol’s short stories, which the son had ignored until after his marriage had failed, only to discover it at the last party to be held at the family house before his mother went home to Calcutta.  The dedication read, “The man who gave you his name, from the man who gave you your name.”  Finally, Gogol was reconciled to what his father had intended by giving him that name–a celebration of his survival and of his love.

As usual, I agree with Steve Clemons’ take on Cuba policy.  But then he asked this question, and it wasn’t really rhetorical:

If serious conservatives can say this, why can’t the serious Dems running for the White House?

I’m sure Mr. Clemons knows the reasons, but let me give two of them in response: those serious conservatives aren’t running for President, and they aren’t going public and on the record with their complaints about Cuba policy.  Presidential candidates will get few rewards for taking an anti-sanctions position, and they will receive intense criticism and probably lose a lot of votes.  The Cuban-American community is divided in its opinions on the sanctions policy, but that doesn’t mean that all sides of the debate are equal in their political influence.  To the extent that Democratic candidates are still worried about appearing “weak” with respect to foreign affairs, they will not want to go too far out on a limb in support of opening up trade with what is still a despotic regime, and Republican candidates are under pressure both from voters and from ideologues who believe that any accommodation with such regimes is inherently wrong.  Probably unintentionally, Mike Huckabee summed up his changed position on Cuba sanctions best, “What changed was I’m running for President.”  One of the reasons why the debate is so lopsided and why the political advantages are all on the side of the status quo is that the serious conservatives (and probably plenty of other people) who talk privately to Steve Clemons aren’t going to attach their names to a call for lifting the sanctions.  Unfortunately, there is little political incentive for making smart and sound policy.  Far from being easy to change, Cuba policy is probably one of the more difficult things to change.  If it were easy to change a policy because of its irrationality and counterproductive effects, the sanctions on Cuba would have been lifted 17 years ago when the Soviet Union vanished.

That bit of Goldfarbian idiocy below was prompted by reaction to this bit of Max Boot foolishness*:

Just as Islamist militants were emboldened by the Soviet Union’s retreat from Afghanistan in 1989, so they would be encouraged by our premature departure from Iraq.

As Yglesias notes, what happened after the withdrawal is fairly relevant.  Yes, Bin Laden boasted about the withdrawal of the Soviets, so what did he do?  Within the space of a few years, he had decided that it was time to start targeting…the main Western patron of the mujahideen!  That sure showed Moscow what was what.  Of course, the reasons he gave for doing this were related to the presence of U.S. forces in his home country and he used that presence to rally supporters behind him, just as today he and his ilk use the ongoing occupation of Iraq to rally support to their cause.  So it is not really all that obvious that the answer is therefore to occupy Iraq indefinitely.

P.S.  Yglesias writes in response to Boot:

But to argue that Mikhail Gorbachev should have continued the occupation of Afghanistan indefinitely in order to prevent a terrorist attack in Manhattan twelve years later is absurd.

That is absurd, but slightly less absurd than Goldfarb’s implication that Gorbachev should have continued the occupation of Afghanistan indefinitely to prevent terrorist attacks committed by people completely unrelated to the war in Afghanistan.

* I should add that it is the entire op-ed that is foolish, and not necessarily this particular line.

But still, there is no doubt that the mujahideen followed the Red Army back to Moscow after the war. The slaughter at Beslan, the apartment bombings in Moscow–there have been any number of terrorist acts perpetrated on Russian soil by people who fought against the Red Army in Afghanistan [bold mine-DL]. ~Michael Goldfarb

The Chechens weren’t fighting against the Red Army in Afghanistan.  This is why I tend not to read The Weekly Standard‘s blog very often, because it is just full of nonsense.  It may come as some surprise to Goldfarb, but Chechnya belonged to the Soviet Union, Chechens were Soviets and it is more likely that there were ethnically Chechen conscripts in the Red Army fighting on the Soviet side than Chechens fighting alongside the mujahideen in Afghanistan.  Foreign mujahideen fighting with the Afghans were overwhelmingly Arab and Pakistani.  Indeed, until the Chechen wars opened Chechnya to the influence of jihadis, Chechen separatism was principally a case of post-Soviet ethnonationalism and backlash fueled by long-standing resentment against the mass slaughter and relocation of Chechens that Stalin had carried out decades before.  The radical Islamicisation of the Chechen cause, typified by the rise of the bloody terrorist Shamil Basayev (ethnically Chechen, born in Chechnya) as one of the leaders of the Chechens (whose adopted name was meant to invoke Shamil, the major guerrilla leader against Tsarist Russia from the 19th century), has not stopped many of Goldfarb’s confreres and others making excuses for Chechen terrorism.  But to say that the Chechen terrorism of the late 1990s and early 2000s was some kind of blowback for the war in Afghanistan (or even more incredibly that withdrawal from Afghanistan is what invited Chechen terrorism) reflects just staggering ignorance.  There have been individuals, such as Khattab, who had fought in Afghanistan and who also fought with the Chechens, but the terrorist acts Goldfarb refers to were carried out by Chechens.

P.S. Another rather obvious point is that Chechen terrorism is a vicious part of the rebellion against Russian control of Chechnya and a response (not a legitimate one, but a response all the same) to the well-known brutal policies that Moscow has used to repress the rebellion there.  Russian brutality in Chechnya does offer a model for pacifying an insurgency, but it requires tactics that Americans would not and should not contemplate.

Update: Goldfarb also writes in this post:

And there’s no doubt that the shift in Chechnya from nationalist to religious-based opposition to Russian rule was heavily influenced by the success of the jihadists in Afghanistan.

Actually, it was heavily influenced by the influx of Saudi money and Arab volunteers.  You can argue that the radicalisation of the Chechen cause in some sense parallels the response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but you can’t argue that the radicalised native Chechens who committed these atrocities were “people who fought against the Red Army in Afghanistan.”  If anything, Beslan, the hostage-taking at the Moscow theater and the apartment bombings are all evidence of the terrible cost of persisting in a policy of occupation.  Indeed, the Soviet experience after withdrawing from Afghanistan might have provided a model for Russian policy towards Chechnya.  The lesson seems clear: refusal to yield control of territory will result in terrorist acts, while withdrawal has no particularly noticeable after-effects for the state that withdraws that happen because of the withdrawal.

Second Update: Goldfarb responds:

Thanks for the geography lesson, Dan. But I was vaguely aware of this fact. I was referring to people who fought in Afghanistan, like say Abu Omar al-Saif, and later took their jihad to Chechnya.

Well, it seemed as if you needed it, Mike.  As I acknowledged, there were some Arabs who had previously fought in Afghanistan and then fought alongside the Chechens.  But that isn’t the same as committing acts of terrorism on Russian soil, which is what Goldfarb said they had done, when on the whole these were the acts carried out by Basayev and ethnic Chechens.  There are individual exceptions to this rule (mostly on the financing end), but the implication of Goldfarb’s original post was that these attacks were the result of withdrawing from Afghanistan (hence the title “they follow you home”), when they are, in fact, a result of continuing to control Chechnya.  Had there been no Chechen war, and no brutal repression of Chechnya, none of those attacks would have happened in any case.  In other words, the mujahideen who had fought in Afghanistan would have had absolutely no interest in striking at targets in Moscow or anywhere else in Russia but for an entirely new, different conflict involving Russia and a Muslim population.  Goldfarb has found a coincidence and thinks he has discovered something significant.  There is no reason to think that Basayev would not have employed terrorist tactics had no mujahideen from the war in Afghanistan ever set foot in Chechnya.  The example Goldfarb cites is simply evidence that jihadis tend to go wherever Muslims are fighting and not that “they follow you home.”       

Finally, I should also add that saying that “the mujahideen followed the Red Army back to Moscow after the war” is a statement that invites derision and misinterpretation, since the vast majority of mujahideen in Afghanistan were Afghans or Pashtuns from the Pakistani side, who stayed right where they were when the war was over, which suggests that the vast majority of insurgents and terrorists in Iraq would either stay in Iraq or return to their home countries.  A handful of die-hard jihadis who bounce from one firefight to the next would move on to the next conflict, and conceivably they might even target Western interests, but you can’t make decisions about a war policy based on what some handful of the most fanatical people will or will not do; given the depth of their fanaticism, they aren’t going to stop fighting and plotting attacks under any circumstances.  U.S. foreign policy cannot be dependent on the what the Al-Saifs and Khattabs of the world might theoretically do ten or fifteen years in the future.  It certainly makes no sense to use their example as part of an argument for prolonging a conflict that we know to have a radicalising effect.  To state the obvious, for every Al-Saif that may be killed through the continuation of a war there are a dozen more ready to take his place because of the ongoing war. 

Had Goldfarb said what he can actually support–that there were a handful of Arab mujahideen who later went to Chechnya–there would have been nothing objectionable in it, but then it also wouldn’t support the notion that “they follow you home.”

Now we all know that McCain likes T.R. and thinks he is like Churchill, but this new campaign ad takes things a bit far.  Besides, it doesn’t really work that well, since more screen time is devoted to two dead politicians than to the one who is actually running for office.  (It’s also possible that the comparison between the two famous men and McCain works to McCain’s disadvantage.)  By comparison, the heavy-handed “American President Americans have been waiting for” ad was much better as an advertisement for the candidate.

Ross responds to the paleoonslaught.  I would also point to Dan’s direct response to Ross’ argument as the starting point for my own reply.  Dan writes:

Bacevich has the better of the argument, at least as regards abortion. The GOP has had opportunities to overturn Roe before—at any point when Republicans controlled the House, Senate, and White House, Congress could have restricted the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction over abortion using the powers invested in the legislative branch by Article III of the Constitution, overturning Roe at a stroke. Perhaps they were right not to do so: the powers of Article III, Section 2 have rarely been used in such a manner, and the precedent could easily have boomeranged against conservatives once the Democrats took Congress. Nevertheless, if the GOP were as adamantly pro-life as pro-lifers are encouraged to believe it is, the Republican Congress could have voided Roe any time between 2003 and 2007.

This is really the heart of the matter.  For decades the GOP kept luring pro-life voters to the polls by saying, “We just need the majority in Congress and control of the White House, and then you’ll see things change.”  So these people faithfully turned out every time for candidates, some of them quite mediocre and undeserving, and finally gave the GOP the unified government it had said it needed, and in return they received nothing more than they had under Reagan at the beginning.  It was also obviously during this time that the GOP was wasting all of its time and energy launching and defending the war in Iraq, while scarcely being able to expend an ounce of political capital on anything important to pro-life conservatives.  (Oh, wait, I forgot-Schiavo!)  The question of priorities is relevant here. 

Dan re-states the issue this way:

Bacevich is not denying any of that, of course, and Douthat simply avoids the tough question implied in Bacevich’s article: what exactly can we expect from overturning Roe, and is whatever hoped-for good is to be achieved enough to justify voting for a candidate—McCain—who will perpetuate one unjust and disastrous war and probably start a few more? 

So here Dan is staking out a different position from the one Ross describes: even if it were likely that McCain would appoint another anti-Roe justice and the Court would then overturn Roe very quickly, that still may not justify supporting McCain because of his backing of an unjust war.  However, I certainly am doubtful that McCain would appoint such a justice, or that any nominally anti-Roe justice he appointed would hold to that view when it matters.  What sort of justice do we really expect McCain to appoint, when it is a question of satisfying social conservatives he probably doesn’t need to appease any longer (especially if he is going to be just a one-term President) or winning the approval of his media admirers and former Senate colleagues?  What sort of justice does Ross expect a 55-seat, combative Democratic majority Senate to confirm? 

Ross and Dan both talk about Justice Kennedy, but there was another vote to uphold Roe in 1992 that has so far gone unmentioned.  The tenure of Sandra Day O’Connor is a cautionary tale for all those who trust rather too much in certain judges (while ironically distrusting the judiciary as an institution at the same time).  When nominated, she was presented (misleadingly) as an anti-Roe justice, but proved to be nothing of the kind.  That may or may not happen with Roberts and Alito, but it’s worth noting that one of the things that made Roberts a clear favourite for the first Court appointment was his relative lack of a paper trail.  Indeed, I guessed that Bush would pick him because of this Souteresque quality. 

Part of my skepticism of Bush’s justices and McCain is simply the result of my pessimism, which I think is well-founded especially when it relates to government.  I assume that those seeking power in one form or another will exploit the hopes of others in order to get it, and will then do only as much for those others as is necessary to retain power, and in the case of lifetime appointments to the Court the justices don’t have to do anything to retain the unchecked and arbitrary power they now possess.  At the same time, I don’t think that John Roberts sat before the Judiciary Committee and perjured himself when he said that he thought that Roe was the “settled law of the land” and then went on to say, “There’s nothing in my personal views that would prevent me from fully and faithfully applying that precedent.”  To expect that Roberts is a reliable anti-Roe vote is ultimately to believe him to be a liar, in which case it is not clear why anyone would trust him one way or the other. 

A stronger, long-term argument is the one Dan made in his original, excellent article:

The blame for the Republican loss of Congress and the damage it inflicted upon the pro-life movement rests not with antiwar paleoconservatives but with Hitchcock’s friends the neocons. (Hitchcock praises The Weekly Standard in his “Catholic Right” essay.) “The pro-life movement was at least temporarily derailed in 2006 by the strong public backlash against the war in Iraq,” he writes. That’s exactly right: the Iraq War, not Joe Sobran’s support for Jim Webb, cost the Republicans Congress and derailed the pro-life movement. And who gave us the Iraq War?

Where are the expanding Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress coming from?  They are coming from, in large part, a backlash against the war.  That is not the only reason, and the GOP cannot assume that ending the war would be a panacea for its unpopularity, but it is the largest millstone around their collective neck.  So long as the GOP is so deeply unpopular and associated with the Iraq war and the entire foreign policy paradigm that led to that war, it will not even be in a position to confirm the sorts of justices Ross wants, much less “returning control over abortion law to the hands of the voting public,” which I agree with Ross “remains a necessary goal for any pro-life, socially-conservative politics that takes itself seriously as a change agent in American life.”  

If we are going to take the long view, the best hope for putting together an electoral majority that will advance the pro-life cause would be either to decouple the pro-life cause from a party committed to perpetuating illegal, foreign wars or to decouple that party from its support for such wars.  So long as they are joined together, not only will pro-life priorities take a very remote backseat to interventionist concerns (as social conservatives have always taken a backseat to the national security crowd) but pro-lifers will remain closely associated with and connected to profoundly unpopular policies.  That doesn’t even touch the question of the philosophical incoherence of the people who preach the dignity of every human life while endorsing, tacitly or not, secret prisons, torture and aggressive war.  McCain’s success would solidify this alliance between pro-lifers and interventionists, which might very easily break apart in the event of GOP defeat in the presidential race.  That is, if you like, the long-term pro-life argument for voting against McCain.    

Update: As always, Ross responds thoughtfully.  I regret if I gave the wrong impression about the occasion of Roberts’ quoted statements on Roe, which Reihan also noted were at his confirmation hearing for a seat on a federal appeals court.  Because it was an appeals court position, Ross argues:

A federal judge can’t overturn a precedent without more or less guaranteeing that he’ll be reversed on appeal, so there’s no reason not to promise to faithfully apply it; a Supreme Court Justice, by contrast, can change long-settled law if he deems it necessary.

Certainly, there would have been no reason to have expected Roberts as an appeals court judge to overturn Roe, since Ross is quite correct that such a decision would almost certainly be reversed later (by a Supreme Court full of Republican appointees), but I can think of at least one reason why someone being confirmed to a position on a federal court would say that he might overturn the precedent or modify it.  First, he might believe that Roe is bad constitutional law, and would say so when asked.  I do understand that confirmation hearings are very political, and it would have been unwise of Roberts in the context of the political atmosphere of 2005 during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings to have bluntly declared, “I’ll overturn Roe the first chance I get!”  The Republican majority in the Senate was not all that great, so avoiding confrontation made sense.  That was the era of the Democratic threat of filibustering judicial nominations, so discretion on the part of nominees is understandable.  However, if you say that it is a “settled as a precedent of the court,” that seems to be very much like saying it is the “settled law of the land.”  Settled implies that it is not open to being revisited or revised.  Now perhaps there is some important distinction between these two phrases that I am missing, but they sound awfully similar.  It’s true that the statement is anodyne, but that doesn’t mean that it lacks significance.  It is true that Roberts did not reiterate the statement about his “personal views,” which then makes you wonder why he felt compelled to say it the first time. 

Also, I can understand that many nominees don’t want to speculate about how they might rule on a certain kind of case, not least because the particulars of each case are important factors in how judges make their rulings.  But then that is why you really shouldn’t expect a Republican nominee to any federal court to give such a blanket endorsement of the authority of Roe as Roberts has given in the past.  Indeed, we are supposed to take Roberts’ less absolute affirmation of Roe‘s authority in his Supreme Court confirmation testimony as a good sign, while reading the tea leaves of what we reasonably assume are his personal convictions.  Those would be the same convictions that just a few years ago would not prevent him “from fully and faithfully applying that precedent,” but now we trust that they are going to have a significant influence on how he rules in the future.

Incidentally, this parsing of judicial nominees’ phrases, as if they were oracular utterances that carry predictions of fortune and doom, should remind everyone how completely crazy our system has become.  It is the concentration of power in the Court and the presumption that it has some authority over state law that are the root problems, both of which predate Roe and go far beyond the debate over abortion, but that is definitely a discussion for another time. 

Second Update: By way of comparison, how Scalia answered (or avoided answering) similar questions is instructive.

The 3/24 issue of TAC is online with a good cover piece by John Derbyshire on U.S. Africa policy and the inefficacy of development aid. That’s the good news.  In the same issue, I have a column laying out what a Medvedev presidency will mean for U.S.-Russian relations.  The bad news is that, as if on cue, Mr. Bush makes a point of antagonising the Russians and ensuring that the last year of his administration will be remembered for its unusually poor decisionmaking.  James doesn’t like it.

Not everyone share’s Mr. McCain’s view that the defeat in Vietnam was a “disgrace,” or that the result of a war carried out “Not In My Name” nonetheless has bearing on the worth of one’s country. ~Bret Stephens

I should hope that no one shares the view that the outcome of a war has bearing on the worth of one’s country.  That’s crazy.  The idea that your country becomes less worthy if it loses a war or withdraws from a pointless conflict is terrible.  Why, it sounds dangerously anti-American.