In a time deluged by ideology — when everyone is urged to take a side and join the political battle — Shakespeare offers a different message: that the most important and dramatic choices are made in the human soul. Some steps, once taken, cannot be retraced. Some appetites, once freed, become a prison. ~Michael Gerson

I suppose it makes sense that one of the chief participants in unleashing said ideological deluge should now find deep wisdom and insight in Shakespeare.  Pity that he didn’t read more of it when he was still working for the White House.

James has a very interesting and valuable post on optimism.  We agree part of the way, in that we both seem sure that optimism is undesirable, misleading and potentially dangerous.  James goes on to say:

Optimism, in fact, is an attitude, an emotional orientation, a psychological posture, a feeling — a meta-feeling, even, a feeling about feelings, the feeling that we should  feel as if failure is impossible.

I agree that there is such an attitude, or orientation, or posture, or feeling, but I would say that this attitude is the product of an optimistic worldview, rather than the substance of optimism itself.  Just as I insist that we all recognise that pessimism is more than, and indeed quite different from, feeling gloomy and misanthropic, it is important that we understand optimism as a kind of philosophical thought.  Optimism of the kind I am describing, and which I reject utterly, is not simply unsettling cheerfulness and irrepressible giddiness, bad as these may be, but a set of assumptions about the world, human nature and the direction (or non-direction) of history.      

One of my first forays against dread optimism was early last year, when I came across this outstanding Salisbury quote in a Gimson article in The Spectator.  Lord Salisbury said:

The optimist view of politics assumes that there must be some remedy for every political ill, and rather than not find it, will make two hardships to cure one. If all equitable remedies have failed, its votaries take it as proved without argument that the one-sided remedies, which alone are left, must needs succeed. But is not the other view barely possible? Is it not just conceivable that there is no remedy that we can apply for the Irish hatred of ourselves? …May it not, on the contrary, be our incessant doctoring and meddling, awaking the passions now of this party, now of that, raising at every step a fresh crop of resentments by the side of the old growth, that puts off the day when these feelings will decay quietly away and be forgotten?

Optimism is not simply an attitude or a feeling, but an assumption that all problems, in the end, have solutions and that we can know what they are and put them into effect.  It is an assumption that no consequences are final, there is always another day to set things right, that there is always a second chance and that history is moving towards something that we can discern and, even more remarkably, we may be able to accelerate progress towards that end.  The optimist says, “It is never too late,” while the pessimist knows that people are late and they miss what they are seeking, or something else interferes and prevents you from reaching the goal.  Pessimism recognises certain limitations of finite man that do not change; optimism sees human limits as continually expanding and being redefined.  This is not simply an attitude, but a belief about the structure of reality and the nature of history.  Anyone who accepts the reality of the radical contingency of historical change cannot think that history is going in any particular direction.  Anyone who briefly scans the annals of mankind cannot conclude that human reason has the capacity to actually “solve” fundamental problems of our condition, yet this is what an optimist, be he liberal or Marxist or something else, must believe.  According to Dienstag:

Pessimism, to Schopenhauer, means not that our civilization or morality are declining, but rather that human beings are fated to endure a life freighted with problems that are fundamentally unmeliorable.

Optimism is the view that there are ultimately no problems that are unmeliorable (optimists may make a concession with respect to death, but only very grudgingly).  Rather than being filled with burdens to be endured, life may be improved virtually without end in the optimist’s view.  This is far more, and far worse, than endless self-delusion based on excessive cheer and confidence.  It is the assumption that there is good reason to be so cheerful and confident about the future.

In the end, optimism as a philosophical view is an acceptance of the reality of progress.  Here is Dienstag on the struggle between the idea of progress and pessimism:

Finally, the dismissal of pessimism reflects the continuing grip that ideas of progress retain on contemporary consciousness.  Though supposedly slain many times (Lewis Mumford called it the “deadest of dead ideas” in 1932), this beast continues to rise from the ashes for the simple reason that, first, it helps us to make sense of the linear time of our calendar and, second, there is no easy substitute for it.  However much it may be denied in principle, in practice the idea of progress is difficult to displace.  And from that perspective, pessimism is especially bewildering…..Pessimism is a substitute for progress, but it is not a painless one.  In suggesting that we look at time and history differently, it asks us to alter radically our opinion of ourselves and of what we can expect from politics [bold mine-DL].  It does not simply tell us to expect less.  It tells us, in fact, to expect nothing.  This posture, I argue below, is not impossible and not suicidal.  It is neither skeptical (knowing nothing) nor nihilistic (wanting nothing).  It is a distinct account of the human condition that has developed in the shadow of progress–alongside it, as it were–with its own political stance.

It must be PNAC op-ed week.  If you didn’t have enough fun with Kagan/Daalder, Tod Lindberg has arrived to repeat (in The Weekly Standard, of course)the standard “centrist” charge: the evil antiwar liberals are wrongfully attacking the “serious” people in the Democratic foreign policy establishment and the DLC more generally.  “Serious” people such as, oh, maybe Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, whom Lindberg naturally defends against attacks from the blog left.  Of course, disdain for the DLC is also held up as an example of some sort of perfidy, when it is probably the main proof that even the Kossacks can get some things right in spite of themselves.

Lindberg is right about one thing: the DLC isn’t going away, or at least it isn’t going quietly.  They represent a dying ideology that is already unsuited to the times, but they retain enough institutional clout to live on despite this for many years.  The DLC continues to have an outsized influence on Democratic foreign policy thinking, if such a word can used in this context, and its think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, counts as its members several of the Democratic presidential candidates, naturally including Clinton.  If none of the candidates showed up at the latest DLC event, it is not because the candidates have abandoned liberal interventionism, nor have they all repudiated some of the lessons that the DLC taught to the party about appealing to middle-class and “moderate” voters.  On the contrary, the major candidates seem more wedded to the horrid interventionist idea than ever, and the main three candidates have been practically falling over themselves to remind people that they, too, believe in God.  Where the party and the DLC now disagree strongly is over Iraq, and, at least as far as foreign policy goes, they really disagree only over Iraq.  Once the war there is over (as it will be, eventually, one day), the Kossacks and the like may be horrified to discover that New Democrats, or those who have learned to follow in their footsteps, continue to dictate the terms of the debate on foreign policy for the foreseeable future.  This is because, despite all of the whining about “purges” in the Democratic Party, there have not actually been any effective purges of the foreign policy intellectuals who signed on for the Iraq war or who embrace activist foreign policy more generally.   While the Kossacks wield more influence today than in past cycles, they will not be filling out the ranks of a future Democratic administration.  The wonks tied to this foreign policy establishment will be the ones shaping and implementing policy.  In fact, in the future the Kossacks, ever a party-oriented group interested mainly in having Democrats win elections, will almost certainly endorse the bad policies of a “centrist” Democratic President, even if these policies are nothing more than a refined or slightly modified version of what is being done today.  This is a shame, since hardly anyone deserves the blog left’s attacks more than these “centrists.”

Besides being an embodiment of everything that is wrong with foreign policy pundits and elites, the bipartisan interventionist consensus and the profoundly unrepresentative nature of foreign policy “centrism,” the entire Kagan/Daalder op-ed founders on the central problem that it is an argument over how to “sustain broad, bipartisan support for interventions.”  This is strange for a couple reasons.  First, the Obama, Clinton and Edwards campaigns guarantee that the Democrats will continue to support interventionism of one kind or another should their side win in the next election and these campaigns represent strong interventionist strains inside the Democratic Party that are, alas, not going anywhere.  The bipartisan consensus on intervention as such has hardly ever been more robust, despite the disasters this very consensus has brought on our country.  You hardly need to abandon the Security Council to maintain it–indeed, I suspect that any move towards doing so would weaken that consensus considerably, since there are many CFR types and liberal internationalists who would not be interested in this proposal.  Second, it is even more strange since they had just said this:

Throughout its history, America has frequently used force on behalf of principles and tangible interests, and that is not likely to change.  

Presumably, if intervention is a natural expression of America’s acting on behalf of “principles and tangible interests,” there should not have to be a mechanism to sustain bipartisan support for it.  The national interest and fundamental shared political principles ought to dictate that support for the interventionist option will be shared by a broad majority.  If there is such broad support, what is the need for a new mechanism?  The argument for a new mechanism suggests that the broad majority does not exist and the bipartisan consensus has to be maintained against the will of the American people (neither of which would surprise me).  That this kind of policy creates deep and powerful divisions within both parties and splits the country roughly in half (and not strictly along party lines) suggests that it may be an unnatural, abnormal kind of policy, or that it is the sort that is instinctively opposed by large numbers of Americans who do not accept the elite’s definitions of “tangible interests” or their application of force on behalf of these “principles.” 

Most of the op-ed is an argument for replacing the U.N. as font of legitimacy for armed intervention with the ridiculous Concert of Democracies.  It is ridiculous because it is a naked extension of U.S. hegemony and it is an attempt to create a parallel structure that will rubber stamp Washington’s policies, a more enduring version of the Coalition of Small, Easily Intimidated Nations.  Call it the Permanent Council of the Willing, or perhaps, given that legitimacy seems to be decided entirely arbitrarily under the Kagan/Daalder scheme, the Axis of Democracies.  Consider this statement:

Because they share a common view of what constitutes a just order within states, they tend to agree on when the international community has an obligation to intervene. Shared principles provide the foundation for legitimacy.

Obviously, there have been alliances of states that had rather different understandings of a “just order within states” from those of the hegemonists today.  Did their shared principles provide legitimacy for their invasions of other states?  Will future alliances of despotic states be free to determine their the appropriate circumstances for “intervention” based on their “shared principles”?  Or do we suppose that the U.S. and allied European and Asian states get to have one set of rules for themselves–which they get to enforce against themselves and thus never enforce–while judging the other states in the world by a much more rigorous standard? 

There is one other obvious snag, which has already been pointed out elsewhere, and this is that “fellow democrats around the world” do not always or even very often agree with the need for some kind of intervention or, if they do acknowledge the need, they are not willing to endorse the use of force.  Most “fellow democrats around the world” are strongly supportive of the United Nations and the protections provided to them by the U.N. Charterand secured by the UNSC.  Indeed, the only states that usually have an interest in subverting or overthrowing the authority of the U.N. are states engaged in aggression, the promotion of terrorism or the proliferation of nuclear weapons.  These states want looser controls on their freedom of action for themselves internally and in dealings with other states.  They are, of course, quite willing to use the U.N. as a shield or a club when it suits them, but it is the great powers in particular that tend to find international law the most constraining when they are not able to use it as a means of dominating other states. 

In post-Cold War times, cross-border invasions of small, militarily weaker states by their neighbours have usually been met with international intervention and/or condemnation.  Many of the relatively new democratic states are not very strong militarily, and they have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo governing intervention.  (Then there is the small matter of being bound by treaty law to abide by the Charter’s provisions, but never you mind that.)  The “fellow democrats around the world” generally seek to abide by a principle of nonaggression.  “[F]ellow democrats around the world” tend to be the ones who are among the most outraged at what has been done in and to Iraq.  Are they very likely to sign off on another intervention in the future?  Hardly.     

Pushing this a bit further, we can see that relying on the approval of “fellow democrats around the world” would have meant, in the case of Iraq, accepting the objections of Canada, France, Germany and India, four of the “great democracies,” and holding off on the invasion and only proceeding with it with explicit authorisation from the Security Council.  By the standards that Kagan and Daalder are setting for the new Concert, the Iraq war would probably never have happened.  They would be unable to achieve those goals that they deem to be most important.  The Concert is hegemonist in purpose, but it is actually hamstrung by its own obsession with respecting the opinion of democratic governments around the world just as if it were dealing with the Security Council.  If it were true (and it isn’t) that the Security Council is lax in authorising interventions, this Concert would be no better and might even be worse (by “worse,” I mean worse from the perspective of the hegemonists).  Unlike the U.N., the Concert could not be so easily pilloried and mocked by warmongers as an assembly of despots, kings and villains.  To the extent that the democratic status of the member states would lend legitimacy in our own eyes their objections would be that much harder to ignore and reject.  Viewed another way, the Concert approach would mean that the United States would theoretically make actions that the government deemed to be necessary for national security dependent on the approval of some significant number of democratic states, some of which might have moral, strategic or other objections that would nix any proposed action.  If it was ridiculous, as the neocons would have it, to make a matter of national security dependent on corrupt and despotic governments, is it any less ridiculous to make it dependent on relatively decent foreign governments?  According to the pre-war arguments war supporters made, the government is obliged, especially if the security threat is real (as it was not in the case of Iraq), to take “appropriate” action regardless of international law, the positions of other governments or the opinions of other peoples.  The interests of democratic states, or even of the “great democracies,” do not always coincide, nor do they necessarily coincide all that frequently.  The Concert is supposed to work because there is a greater chance of common agreement on the rightness and necessity of taking action in some conflict or crisis, but there is no guarantee whatever that there will be any such agreement.  Most “fellow democrats around the world” think that international law actually exists and means something, while it is fashionable in this country among certain internationalists to doubt its significance or enforceability.  Between these views is a vast chasm that cannot be bridged simply because all the peoples  involved vote for their governments and extend some basic legal protections to citizens. 

Having said all this, I suppose you might think that I would find the Concert a potentially attractive idea.  It might conceivbably serve as a more effective check against intervention than the current system.  Even so, the Concert is a terrible idea, since it is a transparent effort to the defeat the purpose of international law in the name of providing some supposed global order.  To the extent that it is an attempt institutionalise past serial aggression in the name of “human rights” and democracy, it is an abomination that ought to be rejected completely.

Let’s review the membership of Obama’s growing militarist fan club: Kagan, Peretz, Giuliani, the Post and even The Wall Street Journaleditorial page.  Anyone who thinks Obama represents some meaningful departure from the foreign policy insanity of the last six years is kidding himself.    

Update:  Somehow I overlooked the bit at the end of the Kagan/Daalder op-ed that tells us that Daalder is an unpaid advisor to the Obama campaign.  This makes perfect sense.  Kagan likes Obama’s foreign policy, which is fairly crazy, and Daalder is probably one of the people who helped put the finishing touches on the craziness.  They really do belong together.  The only thing that is incongruous in all of this is Obama’s continuing opposition to the war in Iraq, which neither Kagan nor Daalder shared in the beginning.

Coming so soon after the War Party’s O’Hanlon/Pollack op-ed swoon, this Kagan/Daalder op-ed may be more excitement than the average jingo can handle.  I suppose this would be an example of some of the precious bipartisanship that has become so scarce in Washington.  Better yet, it must be more evidence that “Even The Liberal Brookings Institute” has begun to come around on the question of the circumstances of when the government should use force overseas.  Why, Daalder’s co-written an op-ed with one of the Kagans in favour of interventionism!  On the editorial page of The Washington Post!  In the popular conservative imagination, the Post is only slightly to “the right” of The Nation, so this must be a significant blow to the forces of defeatocracy (or whatever they call it).  Bill Kristol’s next column practically writes itself.  That would all be the case, except that Ivo Daalder, like those “far leftie” colleagues of his, is a rabid interventionist now, and he has been for years.  The Brookings Institute, that redoubt of peacenik radicalism, is one of the most staid, establishment consensus think tanks out there.  If they are out there flacking for the war or interventionist foreign policy generally, it is not surprising in the least.     

It has been fascinating to watch the war supporters’ excitement around the O’Hanlon/Pollack op-ed, which continues today with Barone.  Shorter Barone: “Why, look, a brief blip in public opinion in a less antiwar direction!  Why, look, an op-ed about Iraq that is not completely filled with predictions of doom!  Things are looking up!  The Democrats are in trouble now!”  Like Continetti’s article yesterday, Barone recites the Tale of Nancy Boyda, which seems likely to become the regularly cited piece of evidence in every indictment of antiwar views from now on.  The Tale recounts Boyda’s “refusal” to hear positive news from Iraq.  Now, not only do the media not report the “good news,” but antiwar politicians won’t even stand to listen to it–that will be the theme. 

What is striking about it is that it does not represent the nature of the debate at all.  It has hardly been the characteristic trait of the antiwar side of the debate to ignore evidence that did not match with our views.  Recently, I have seen many people talking about how antiwar pols and war opponents are “deeply invested” in seeing the war end badly, which, besides being insulting, is a stupid charge to make.  If the Iraq war comes to anything resembling a decent, stable conclusion (i.e., if Iraq were almost nothing like what it is today), a great many war opponents, including myself, would actually be relieved.  We would marvel at how, in spite of the chronic lack of proper support and supply, the epic incompetence of the government, the unceasing dishonesty of the political class and the completely adverse conditions in Iraq, the outcome was not as bad as we feared.  It is, of course, because we are not so foolishly optimistic to believe, yet again, in the false hopes and misleading promises of the government and its cheerleaders that we do not expect such an outcome. 

Of course, how many times have we been told about the impending corner that will soon be turned and the “good progress” we have been making, only to see Iraq get progressively worse?  When Baghdad is getting a few hours of electricity per day and other parts of the country are cutting off Baghdad from their power plants in order to provide for their own needs, the O’Hanlon/Pollack tours of Ramadi and Ghazaliya are, at best, of marginal importance.  When the Iraqi parliament is incapable of passing any law of consequence that might provide for some political settlement that could at least lessen the fighting, optimistic reporting from Tal Afar (where there was another suicide bombing not too long ago) should hardly impress anyone.  That it seems to have deeply impressed a number of prominent war supporters is more an indictment of their judgement than it is of O’Hanlon’s and Pollack’s own credibility. 

This is something that is deeply troubling about war supporters’ handling of evidence from the very beginning: they seem to have no sense of what is significant and what is irrelevant or marginal.  For them, if a bomb goes off in the parliament building and a school is re-opened, these are events that they seem to think are of political–and therefore journalistic–importance.  Hence the constant lament about the “failure” to report the “good news.”  In this view, to focus on the former and “ignore” the latter, as if the resources of news agenices were infinite, is to express bias.  Well, I suppose it is a bias of a sort–it is a bias in favour of covering important stories rather than unimportant ones.  The O’Hanlon/Pollack op-ed offers war supporters the kind of reporting they prefer: anecdotal, impressionistic, experiential and therefore often unverifiable, and above all the describing of things that are of lesser importance (or things already known for some time) and treating them as evidence of a meaningful change or a new trend that you, the idiot public, have yet to take fully into account.   

You will recall the recent craze among some on the right for a revival of teaching military history.  One day, these enthusiasts will (mistakenly) tell you how much more vastly significant a few days of battle were than whole decades that preceded it, contrary to the flim-flam from all those miserable academics.  Then they or their colleagues will come back the next day and complain that the lousy liberal journalists are reporting about primarily military and political events.  “They’re not writing feel-good stories about repaired soccer fields and kite-flying!  Obviously they hate all that is good and true.”  Something is amiss there.

Perhaps having learned their lesson from embarrassing cheerleading like this, war supporters are now once more keen to show that they are very much focused on security and any reports of declining civilian casualties.  Wasn’t it the standard talking point back in the spring that a surge in casualties was proof that the “surge” was working (because it was proof that the insurgents were desperate)?  If that was true then (which is doubtful), a decline in civilian casualties would be a sign that the insurgents are calm, relaxed and not even bothered to launch as many attacks–except, of course, that they are launching more attacks and often more devastating attacks than ever before.  In the end, the O’Hanlon/Pollack op-ed doesn’t tell us much at all, because the most relevant factors determining whether security and stability will be established in Iraq are precisely those that cannot be observed while strolling, without body armour, down the streets of Ramadi, because that is no longer where the main security problem is.  It is like going to a building that had already mostly burned down before the fire was extinguished, taking a good look around at the sopping wet wreckage and declaring, “Yes, sir, the fire is certainly out here!  We can therefore safely say that the danger of fire everywhere else in the country is also less than it was.”

Alex Massie points to this item from a Cheney television appearance:

“I’m totally neutral in the upcoming presidential contest. I will support the Republican nominee. And the fact that others have signed on with Fred or John McCain or Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, they’re all good men. I hope one of them is the next president of the United States. But I haven’t gotten involved in any of those efforts.”

Clearly, Cheney understands that Fred needs no last or other names, since his fame and reputation are already legend.  After all, he has…delayed the announcement that he will be entering the race until September and basically done none of the work needed to build a campaign organisation.  The Cheney-Fred connection becomes more clear by the day.

The radio host interviewing Romney in this video, Jan Mickelson, raises some of the same objections to Romney’s “wall of separation” logic that I assumed conservative Christians would be making all along.  Here you have someone who wants to run as a religious conservative, but who won’t talk about his religion, and who explicitly denies that his religion is connected to his candidacy (except insofar as it allows him to portray himself as a “person of faith”).  When Romney endorses Kennedy’s handling of his Catholicism, Mickelson responds: “the pro-life community here in Iowa call him [Kennedy] a cafeteria Catholic.”  In other words, you aren’t likely to win over religious conservatives by running away from or ignoring your religion (even if it is a religion that said conservatives may not care for).  Romney then goes on to say that he isn’t there to talk about “a religion or the principles of a religion,” but at the same time he wants to trade on the points of agreement that he has with religious, particularly Christian, conservatives, who hold the views on life that they do, at least in part, because of their religious teachings.  Romney wants to make distinctions that make it possible for him to maintain this balance, while the religious conservatives whose votes he needs and whose votes he is presumably trying to win don’t accept the validity of these distinctions.  Indeed, to the extent that they think they are real distinctions and not merely rhetorical dodges, they believe them to be misguided or perfidious.

During one of the ad breaks (while the camera kept rolling), Mickelson says: “I think you’re make a big mistake when you distance yourself from your faith.”  (As it happens, I agree with Mickelson’s point here.)  Part of Romney’s response: “There are Mormons in the leadership of my church who are pro-choice.”  I’m not sure why he feels compelled to mention this, since it clouds the issue for his potential supporters.  If Mormon church teaching permits the possibility of Mormons being pro-choice (and I’d grant that it does), Romney’s fidelity to his Mormonism will hardly reassure pro-life conservatives, since it is no way guarantees that he would remain pro-life as a matter of policy, but his awkward handling of questions pertaining to his religion gives the impression that he doesn’t think it should even be part of the debate.  He could turn this to his advantage by saying, “My church’s teachings do not require me to be politically pro-life, but I have taken this position anyway (or at least made a mildly convincing pander to that effect), so you should look at the political position I have taken and not dwell on what my church does or does not permit.”  That would be the smart way to handle it, but this is not how he handled it.  Instead, he seems offended that people keep talking about his religion.  He continues to give the impression that he finds it embarrassing or unsuitable for public conversation, as if to say, “The public square has nothing religious in it, and that’s the way I’d like to keep it, thanks very much.”

Mickelson catches him on this and, it seems to me, nails him to the wall as far as many religious conservatives are concerned: “When you bifurcate politics from religion, and you have this hermetically-sealed….you make a political category over here and a spiritual one over here.”  Shortly after this, Romney said, “My religion is for me and how I live my life.”  Perhaps that is a view of religion that most Americans share, but it is not a popular one among religious conservatives.

This is great.  In this one rather long YouTube video (via Eric Kleefeld) lie the seeds of doom for Mitt Romney’s campaign.

Update: To clarify, I don’t necessarily think that this one video will wreck his campaign, but watching Romney attempt to square the circle of running as a “person of faith” who doesn’t want to talk about his religion because he isn’t running “as a Mormon” while saying that his opposition to abortion is a secular position is devastating to the rationale for his candidacy.  Brownback, Huckabee et al. have just had their prayers answered. 

Second Update: This exchange may help to convince people that he is, in fact, a human being who gets frustrated and angry because of criticism rather than a robot or mannequin.  This could help him win more voters who are not strongly opposed to Romney’s Mormonism, but who might find his normal plastic demeanour off-putting.  It is also fascinating to see Romney run up against hard-line strict constructionists and have no idea how to handle their views.  It’s as if he’s never even heard of the idea that judicial review is a usurpation (in fairness to him, he probably never has).

Separately, Rasmussen shows that only 35% of Republican voters think Romney is conservative, and only 54% of Republicans have a favourable view of the man.  Only McCain among the big four has worse fav/unfav numbers.  If Romney were to somehow win the nomination, GOP voters would probably be pretty unenthusiastic about his candidacy.

Update: Kleefeld receives word from Romney’s campaign manager on why the Romney campaign put this video on YouTube:

Because it shows Governor Romney standing his ground and making his case to an interviewer that took him head-on over the issues. He is confident and engaging during a tough inquiry. Folks who have seen the video says it is Governor Romney at his best, so we felt others should have the chance to see it.

This is Romney at his best?  I can’t say that I am surprised to hear that, but I find it curious that his campaign manager would be claiming it.  This episode is potentially very bad for Romney, so it is bizarre that his people would be spreading it around the Web deliberately.