“Iowa, for good reason, for constitutional reasons, for reasons related to the Lord, should be the first caucus and primary,” Richardson, New Mexico’s governor, said at the Northwest Iowa Labor Council Picnic. ~Des Moines Register

Via Zengerle

Knowing our governor, you almost have to think that it was a big joke at the expense of the current nominating system.  After all, many of the current system’s defenders do sometimes talk as if God and the Constitution both mandated Iowan primacy in American presidential politics.  Then again, knowing our governor, I would guess that this was a classic example of Richardson telling the audience whatever it was he thought they wanted to hear.  He threw in the Constitution and God to cover all the bases–it’s patriotic and religious and absolutely sycophantic.  If he were speaking to a group of die-hard war supporters, he might have said that keeping Iowa in first place was essential to defeating jihadism.

Via Greenwald, I see that Fred “The Surge” Kagan has gone completely mad.  In an article called “The Gettysburg Of This War,” Kagan writes about (wait for it) the President’s surprise trip to Anbar (which, Kagan tells us, “should have surprised no one who was paying attention.”), about which he has this to say:

If ever there was a sign that we have turned a corner in the fight against both al Qaeda in Iraq and the Sunni insurgency, this was it.

Yes, friends, he did say that.  Turned a corner!  Viewed another way, one might conclude from the location of the visit that Baghdad and even the Green Zone have become so dangerous that the President dared not go there.  Kagan continues:

It should be recognized as at least the Gettysburg of this war [bold mine-DL], to the extent that counterinsurgencies can have such turning points. Less than a year ago, it was common wisdom and the conclusion of the Marine intelligence community in Anbar that the province and its people were hopelessly lost.

Of course, last year it did seem hopelessly lost, and barring the remarkable change in local attitudes that did, in fact, happen it would have remained so.  The Marines don’t throw in the towel unless things are genuinely hopeless.  What changed was an extraordinary shift in local opinion against putative “Al Qaeda” elements.  Some of this was facilitated by U.S. forces before the “surge” began (as those paying attention already knew), but it was essentially a move by insurgents to side with their enemy (our armed forces) against an even worse enemy.  Kagan dismisses all of this and more, of course, which is how he can say cracked things about Gettysburg and turning corners.  Then again, I suppose if I were prominently associated with authoring some form of the “surge” plan, as Kagan is, I might look for anything that would vindicate what I had advocated.

The Poston a “surge” showcase.

If you can’t get enough of Brookings members’ NYT op-eds on Iraq, here’s another one.  Not very surprisingly, it basically cannot deny the overwhelming problems:

Unfortunately, at the moment the political paralysis seems to be a more powerful force than the military momentum, and progress in security is unsustainable without sectarian compromise among Iraq’s Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiites. The country remains very violent, and the economy rather stagnant.

In the end, the authors are forced to say:

Given the continuing violence, and the absence of political progress, Iraq is not now on a trajectory toward sustainable stability — and America is not yet on a clear path to an exit strategy.

Not much more than a month ago, O’Hanlon and Pollack wrote:

As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

It seems plain to me that the two statements flatly contradict each other, or at least the latest article undermines a main claim of the earlier op-ed.  I suppose there could be “potential” for sustainable stability, and still Iraq might not yet be on a “trajectory” towards sustainable stability, but the implication of the earlier statement is that there is a real likelihood of success and the implication of the later statement is that things generally look quite bad despite some marginal improvements here and there.  Somehow I don’t expect this item to be cited by excited war supporters as the latest revelation of the Oracle.  Somehow I expect that it will be very carefully ignored, but then I’m an awful cynic.

Ross follows up on thedebateoverhislatest Atlantic piece on future Democratic electoral prospects, and he explains quite clearly what he means by populism and how his reform ideas relate to it.  I think Ross’ analysis of electoral trends makes sense, which is why I wrote in defense of it.  However, I am actually sympathetic to those, such as Will Wilkinson, who do not like the substance of the policy proposals endorsed by economic populists, as I do not care for many of them myself.  I disagree with some libertarian critics of this populism, to the extent that they even allow that it actually exists, concerning some specific areas of policy and more general assumptions about the legitimacy of the claims of national sovereignty and national interest.  While I have some right-populist inclinations in matters of trade and immigration and I have a very old-fashioned Bolingbrokean-Jeffersonian hostility to concetrated wealth and power, which makes for some common anti-corporate ground with more conventional left-populists, in practice I am not that much of a populist.  You will not see me voting for Edwards-style populism or “compassionate” conservatism or “Sam’s Club Republicanism” now or ever.  For that matter, I neither shop at Sam’s Club, nor am I a Republican, so that makes me a pretty unlikely supporter of this sort of politics, since I rather rather regard the former as a symptom of moral and economic disorder and regard the latter as, well, not my favourite organisation.  Yet I still do recognise that there are people who might just go for such reformism, and these really are the sorts of people the GOP needs to win over and keep if it wants to remain competitive going forward.   

As I have made abundantly clear over the years, I am a small-government constitutionalist and a Ron Paul man, which puts me in a fairly small group.  (I am also very sympathetic to corporatist ideas of solidarity and a conservationist ethic, which may put me in an even smaller subset of this group.)  Despite an appreciation for some of the aspects of corporatism, the kind of economic intervention by the state on offer these days leaves me completely cold.  (Non-intervention is very often the wise course, in foreign policy as in domestic affairs.)  However, my preferences do not really give me the luxury to pretend that people in this country are not looking for some sort of intervention by the state in the field of health care, because they plainly are.  You hear this anecdotally from friends and colleagues, and you see it backed up in polling.  The desire is there, and the main dispute seems to be over whether you have a mostly state-run or a more state capitalist-run program.  Mike Huckabee talks vaguely about having a solution that involves none of the above, but he is typically blissfully free of specifics when he says this.  (Based on anecdotal impressions, I would say that young, educated professionals might be even more worried about health care than many other groups, but I wouldn’t press that too far.)  These people are acting on the assumption that the U.S. government is “their” government (if only!) and that it exists to provide them with certain things they need, or at the very least to provide them with the “opportunity” to acquire what they need. 

At this point, someone usually says something saccharine about empowerment, which is usually where they finally lose me, since it is never the government’s role to empower its citizens.  This idea of government empowering people is the root of all swindles.  Indeed, citizens’ power stands in an inverse relationship with that of the government,and the government never “gives back” the power it has taken.  The more “empowerment” we have, the more servility we have.  This is naturally not a popular view (for confirmation, see the political history of the 20th century or just the 1964 presidential election), and it is not one that is normally associated with populism, though I think a case could be made that it is the ultimate populist view, insofar as it is one that places the best interests of the people ahead of popular enthusiasms.  It is the view most consonant with a decentralist understanding of political liberty, and such an arrangement would ultimately be far better for the common good, a humane, sane way of life and the flourishing of more self-supporting communities. 

As George Grant observed forty years ago, though, political decentralisation without economic decentralisation is simply submission to corporate oligarchy, which I think he regarded as worse than a living Hell (in which case, he would have been too generous).  Consequently, he was known as the “Red Tory” for his harsh criticism of the dissolving acid that capitalism and technology poured on social bonds.  Also, the Loyalist and Anglo-Canadian Conservative tradition never knew the reflexive hostility to state action that our political tradition initially did, and strangely enough Canada now enjoys more effective decentralisation in certain respects than we do (even though it also has more in the way of government services).

All of this got me to thinking about how strange it is that the Democrats have become the party of the economic populists, since they have historically been the less nationalist of the two parties and appear to be in no danger of changing, yet this kind of populism almost always goes with a strong dose of nationalism.  Most economic populist complaints today focus on a few general areas: free trade, the effects of globalisation (e.g., outsourcing, etc.), related government favouritism for corporate interests and immigration.  The Washington-New York political elite is largely in agreement that free trade, globalisation, state capitalism and mass immigration are fundamentally desirable.  There may be disagreements about how to manage them, but there is only minority support for rejecting or opposing any of them on a large scale.  (This is still true in the current presidential fields.)  You would expect the historic party of labour to be more concerned about immigration, but as chance would have it, they are also the historic party of immigrants.  You would expect the more nationalist party to be more skeptical of free trade and globalisation, but they are also the party of corporations.  On each issue where populists might gain traction, the party leadership has tended to reject the populist position and endorse the globalist one, because their true corporate masters desire it.  This remains true.  What is striking today is the extent to which Democratic candidates are willing to buck corporate America at least a little when it comes to free trade, which suggests that the populist critique of free trade and globalisation, which was smothered during the incredibly boring, issue-free 2000 election, might break through this time and cause a change in the political landscape.

At APSA, Prof. Patrick Deneen had a critique of Prof. Dienstag’s Pessimism, which I have discussed many times before, and of philosophical pessimism itself.   He said:

Memory and hope, Christopher Lasch argued – and not pessimism – are the proper antidotes to optimism.

I agree with this, or at least I almost agree.  Pessimism seems to me to be the antidote to the poison of optimism, and then memory and hope function as the proper nourishment that human nature needs to flourish.  Even if undiluted pessimism is a poison of its own, and I might grant that it is in its most extreme despair of any meaning in life, St. John of Damascus said of his heresiological work that it is necessary to make use of poisons to create antidotes. 

I have said many times that the virtue of hope has nothing to do with optimism, and Christians who routinely mistake hope for optimism are very badly confused about what hope is and what they are supposed to be hoping for in this life.  Indeed, to hope for salvation in Christ is almost the opposite of the optimist’s view.  The optimist says, “I will be saved, and I can save myself.”  The Christian says, “I may yet be saved, if it be God’s will.”  Hope and optimism are in fact antithetical, which reinforces my sense that optimism is as vicious as hope is virtuous.  Optimism is as demonic as hope is divine.

My own view is that the pessimists are as close to being right as secular philosophers are likely to be, but that in their denial even of the hope of salvation and their denial of all meaning they have missed the heart of why they are right about so many of their other observations.  They have seen clearly through the vanity of this world and the promises of those who would seek to realise some kind of salvation here below, and we would all be better off if there were more people inclined to see these promises as the hollow deceptions that they are.  However, the only possible pessimism that escapes the ultimate emptiness of this secular pessimism (the pessimists would see it not as emptiness, but as possibility) is a Christian pessimism that understands that redemption is still possible, but it is not one that can be fulfilled in this world.

On the nature of the U.S.-Israel relationship in last summer’s disastrous war in Lebanon, for example, I disagree with their denial of responsibility on Washington’s part — the original impulse to take some form of action may have come from the Israeli leadership, but as I made clear at the time, it was hard to avoid the suspicion that the scale and objectives of the operation became defined by Washington, and they were plainly goals for which Israel had not prepared its forces. ~Tony Karon

Indeed, it is surprising that Profs. Mearsheimer and Walt would argue that Washington was not at least partly responsible for the Lebanon debacle, since the war in Lebanon–and the U.S. political class’s virtually unanimous support for it–seems to me to serve as a principal example of how the Lobby’s definition of U.S. and Israeli interests skews and shapes U.S. policymaking in ways that are actually detrimental to the interests of both states.  The way that the war in Lebanon was cast in much of the U.S. media–very simply as Iran and Syria’s proxy war against Israel and Israel’s purely righteous retaliation against this proxy war–had a lot to do with Lobby influence in creating an impressive bipartisan consensus here that everything Israel does can be described as “self-defense” and a similarly broad consensus that Iranian influence in the Near East is the great danger of our time.   

In addition to Washington’s role in exacerbating the war in Lebanon, a clear demonstration of Lobby influence was in its control of the public debate about the campaign.  (We routinely heard how “the American people” support Israel, but few bother to wonder why this support remains as strong as it does.)  This public relations offensive was led by numerous denunciations of the idea of proportionality in the commentary pages of major newspapers, reliable anti-Vatican criticism from prominent pro-Israel Catholics and Christians, Rev. John Hagee’s declaration that the bombing of Lebanon was a “miracle of God” (Hagee is now the head of Christians United for Israel, which aspires to mobilise pro-Israel evangelicals and wield AIPAC-like influence), the U.S. Ambassador’s statement that “we are all Israelis now,” Secretary Rice’s infamous “birth pangs” quip, and on and on.  Obviously, this was not all coordinated or synchronised, as critics of Mearsheimer and Walt accuse them (falsely) of claiming about Lobby activities, but resulted from the shared objectives of numerous different interest groups in this country in boosting for Israel.  (The crucial point of the argument against the Lobby is that these interest groups that belong to it are highly unrepresentative of the interests of most Americans, and not surprisingly they advocate policies that serve their narrow interests rather than U.S. national interest.)  It was, of course, technically possible to speak out against the rampant anti-Lebanonism that swept the country last summer (which was wrapped up in the nicest qualifications), but you didn’t find many people doing it, and certainly not many politicians and foreign policy intellectuals. 

I agree with Mr. Karon that some of this response is ingrained and habitual now.  It is mixed up to some extent with our own nationalists’ paranoia about so-called “Islamofascism,” and it dovetails nicely with the goals of hegemonists in the Near East.  Then again, most hegemonists are themselves very keenly pro-Israel and are as interested in U.S. regional hegemony in the Near East for the sake of Israel’s security (as they understand it) as they are for reasons of projecting U.S. power, and it seems likely that they not only see no conflict between the two priorities but assume that the two are quite complementary.  In any case, reflexive support for Israel obviously gets constant reinforcement from the media and politicians, which is how it became reflexive in the first place, and the coverage and commentary in this country on the war in Lebanon were perfect examples of how “the Lobby” works.

I hadn’t seen this until today, but I think it sums up nicely everything that is wrong with our foreign policy establishment today:

On the second point, Quiggin is trying to frame the debate by using the Very Scary Terms “aggressive war” or “non-defensive” war.  Aggressive to whom? One state’s “aggressive” or “non-defensive” war is another state’s “defensive” or “prudential” action.

Of course.  The Japanese invasions of East Asia were really just defensive (and were part of an effort to free East Asia from perfidious colonialism!), after all, and who’s to say whether the invasion of Poland was really aggression?  The German government said that the other side had fired first, and who are you going to believe?  Come to think of it, one state’s experience of brutal conquest is another state’s war of liberation.  

During WWI, Germans cultivated the “ideas of 1914,” chief among them being the belief that they were engaged in a purely defensive war.  They would be pleased to know that Drezner would agree with them.  Likewise, our invasion of Mexico was really just “retaliation” for Mexican “aggression,” and our conquest of the Philippines was a “prudential” response to the crazy Filipino notion that they should have an independent country, which was clearly a very dangerous idea for them to have.  Hundreds of thousands of them had to die before they learned to stop being so aggressive.

Below are belated links to many articles that will be of interest to regular Eunomia readers: 

Now online from recent TAC issues:

From the current online issue: Prof. Kurth’s fine article on the effects of demographic change on foreign policy and international order, Nicholas von Hoffmann on Clinton, Michael on the Christian Zionists of CUFI, Paul Belien on the effects of past immigration amnesties in the Netherlands, Claude Salhani on Chinese electronic and satellite warfare and Pat Buchanan on the “ideological war.” 

From the previous issue: John O’Sullivan on immigration politics, Caleb Stegall‘s much-discussed review of Deep Economy, Paul Robinson on the “surge,” and James Bovard on legal challenges to administration detention and torture policies.  I have previously mentioned Michael’s article on Rick Santorum and William Lind‘s argument for rapprochement with Iran, but I’ll list them again anyway.

New in the last couple of weeks at the Chronicles’ site:

Dr. Trifkovic has a new article on the demographic impact of current immigration levels, another on Pakistan, another on Kosovo, and another on the current situation in Iraq.  Mr. Buchanan writes on U.S. de-industrialisation, and writes here on the Newark killings and here on Karl Rove.  Paul Craig Roberts writes on China and U.S. media hyping “the China threat.”  From the August issue, Fr. Hugh Barbour has an article on Josef Pieper and liberality as the basis of culture.  Here is Tom Piatak on Harvey Mansfield’s “Straussian piffle.”