First Nussle, then Ravenel, now Vitter: Giuliani’s political touch seems to have the odd side-effect of getting his staff hired (into a collapsing administration), indicted or implicated in scandal.  In other Giuliani news, Norman Podhoretz himself has been named as a “senior foreign policy advisor.”  Now we know what Giuliani means when he says he wants to “keep us on offense.”  He means it quite literally, as in, “let’s have some more offensive wars.” 

And, as everyone except those living in certain remotes of Malawi must know by now, McCain’s campaign is collapsing.

The Vatican text, which restates the controversial document Dominus Iesus issued by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 2000, says the Church wants to stress the point because some Catholic theologians continue to misunderstand it. ~ABC News (via Rod)

Leave it to the press to take something very simple and almost routine and turn it into a scandal.  I suppose the potential for conflict and controversy makes for a better headline than “Vatican Says Catholic Christianity Is True…Yet Again,” but there is no real potential for that, as there is nothing new being contested. 

Was Dominus Iesusreally all that “controversial”?  I have read it, and I found in it the same position towards other Christian confessions that the Catholic Church has stated quite explicitly since Vatican II, which is normally interpreted by otherwise unfriendly Vatican-watchers as a positive, “liberalising” interpretation.  This new document mostly reiterates some of the basic points and makes plain why confessions that lack apostolic succession are not, well, properly apostolic and therefore do not possess all of the proper marks that would make a church a church.  There is nothing in any of this that a non-Catholic should find at all shocking or disturbing.  If he didn’t already know that the Vatican does not believe him to be fully a part of the Church, he hasn’t been paying enough attention to care about it now.  If I did not have an interest in theology, I would say that it is almost a non-story. 

As an Orthodox Christian, I continue to be puzzled by an ecclesiology that says that the Orthodox Church at once has valid sacraments and apostolic succession, but lacks in the fullness of the truth.  This puzzlement is a case of sharply different understandings of catholicity and ecclesiology generally.  As noted here in the past, as I understand the Orthodox teaching, catholicity requires oneness of mind in doctrine, and unity requires unity of faith, bishop and Eucharist.  Catholics and Orthodox share none of these things.  How the Vatican understands the Orthodox to be in communion (but not full communion) with the Catholic Church at the present time will probably never make sense to me.

That’s the thing about equivocal evidence: People read it through the lens of their pre-existing biases, and the pre-Iraq War biases on the Right (and not only on the Right) were similar to the biases that led the Committee on the Present Danger to overestimate Soviet strength in the 1970s – specifically, a belief that dovish analysts elsewhere in the government were underestimating the capabilities of America’s enemies. In both cases, highly intelligent people got things dramatically wrong, by reading into incomplete evidence and drawing unwarranted conclusions that dovetailed with their own political prejudices. In neither case, I think, do you need to assume duplicity to explain what happened. ~Ross Douthat

This makes a certain amount of sense, but I tend to think that when government officials talk about a “reconstituted” nuclear program and warn about the possibility of “mushroom” clouds on the basis of admittedly “equivocal evidence,” they are still engaged in something that is not terribly ethical.  It also occurs to me that the “highly intelligent” bit is part of the problem–many of these people are highly intelligent (albeit often poorly informed or confused about certain things) and this leads them to believe that they, of all people, could not get something like this wrong, which makes them less cautious than thoroughly duller minds might be.  But leave that aside for the moment. 

If this really boils down to pre-existing biases rather than deception (which I don’t entirely accept myself), that would actually be worse in some ways for Cheney and the foreign policy approach he favours.  Okay, maybe not for Cheney personally, since he would implicated in deceiving the public, but for the brand of interventionist policy he supports it would be a boon to admit the administration’s deceit.  If this is all a question of pre-existing biases colouring perceptions of equivocal evidence, it would mean that the reflexively hawkish, suspicious, shoot-first-and-then-keep-shooting sort of foreign policy recommendations that lead to the Committee on the Present Danger and Iraq war hawks getting things so thoroughly wrong have a pretty poor track record over the past 25 years and should not be taken very seriously in future policy debates.  If future conflicts are going to turn on such questions of intelligence, the tendency to exaggerate threats, fear the worst and support pre-emptive strikes will become less and less persuasive and credible.  This will be a good outcome for the country, but I have to wonder whether it might not be in the interests of interventionists to begin agreeing with the rhetoric about administration lying (all in a “good cause,” of course).  The lies could be pinned on the administration, while the interventionists could claim that they, too, had been misled: “We were only responding in the way we believed was responsible given what the government was reporting about the nature of the threat!  Who knew that they would lead us astray?  We have been tricked!”  Who knows?  The people foolish enough to believe Mr. Bush’s whoppers might just believe this bit of revisionism.

My Cliopatria post on David Halberstam’s final article is here.

[H]is skepticism toward universalism gives him much in common with forms of multiculturalism today’s conservatives say they oppose. ~Alan Wolfe

I have said pretty much all I intend to say about Wolfe’s original articlehere, but this item begs for special attention.  Since Wolfe is terribly concerned with originality, it might be worth noting that this criticism of conservative particularism is not new.  There are plenty of fairly universalist people on the right who find particularism offensive for the very reason that it seems to lend support to multiculturalism.  They make points that I have found no more persuasive.  The criticism is not new, and it does not become any more accurate with the passing of time.  The universalist will often refer to religion to shame the particularist, who will often be religious to one degree or another: why, if a religion is in some sense truly universal, how can someone opposed to universalism be religious?  (This is also the essence of Wolfe’s weak point about Kirk and Catholicism.)  Well, he might begin by not deliberately conflating concepts that have nothing to do with each other.  Rational, man-made universalism is misguided both in its hubris and its ahistorical nature.  Revelation will be applicable to all times and places, since it comes from God, Who is eternal and immaterial.    

Those of us who are generally working in the same tradition as Kirk was believe that cultural diversity is a product of historical change.  To a certain extent, traditional conservatives are open to the post-modern critique of Enlightenment rationality, because we find the latter limited, one-sided and defined in such a way as to set man’s reason against his adherence to “irrational” customs and traditions.  (For another rightist who praised diversity and identified uniformity as a preferred trait of the left, Wolfe might read Kuehnelt-Leddihn, whose enthusiasm for Catholicism will not leave him in doubt as to where K-L stood.)  Where particularists and multicultis tend to part ways is over the multicultis’ preference for encouraging and building up every other culture except their own (assuming that they believe that they have a culture of their own).  A conservative particularist is not terribly bothered if there are other cultures that have evolved differently, and he will usually be more aware of the significance of those differences than his universalist rivals.  

The particularist does not share the multicultis’ belief that his culture should have to be undermined or ridiculed to accommodate the cultures of others, and he tends to not think that the most stable and well-ordered polities are not those with the greatest number of different cultures.  In the end, multiculturalism does not offend these conservatives because of its interest in diversity, but because it has no real interest in diversity as such (and these people tend to be embarrassingly ignorant and naive about foreign cultures), only in the subversion of their own cultural norms.  Traditional conservatives accept cultural diversity as the result of natural historical development–it is something that can only be eliminated by coercion and ideology.  Multiculturalists seem interested in using other cultures as means to their own ideological goal of transforming their own society into something entirely different from what it has been.

In short, this point about multiculturalism is not a real criticism of Kirk.  It is not even that interesting of a point.  One might even call it an irritated gesture rather than an idea.

A progress report on Iraq will conclude that the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad has not met any of its targets for political, economic and other reform, speeding up the Bush administration’s reckoning on what to do next, a U.S. official said Monday. ~AP

Cue Lugar: “See?!  Benchmarks are never a good idea!”

No one in Iraq is failing to “compromise” because he thinks he can count on an endless American presence. Iraqis are debating core questions of power-sharing and federalism that are the hardest issues for any democracy to settle. ~The Wall Street Journal

There’s an element of truth in this that exposes the larger fraud of the entire project.  Iraqi politicians aren’t failing to compromise because they expect us to be there forever.  They would fail to compromise regardless of whether we were there or not, since the different political factions are not interested in compromise, which is why all of the crucial legislation is stalled and why democracy in Iraq will fail horribly.  These are the hardest issues for a democracy to settle, which is why it is madness to pin our national security and our soldiers’ safety to Iraqi politicians’ abilities to pull together compromise legislation in a situation where such legislation is simply a dream.  Withdrawal should not be premised on the idea that it will facilitate Iraqi political compromise, because that isn’t going to happen (at least not for many, many years).  Withdrawal should happen because it is the right thing to do for our soldiers and for our country.  Remaining in Iraq won’t make Iraqi political reconciliation significantly more likely, and it will cost us.  That is the situation.  Withdrawal soon–with provisions being taken to provide for the security of neighbouring countries and some efforts to provide for the refugee crisis that will be coming–is the best of the bad options.

One more time, from the introduction of Elements of the Philosophy of Right:

For Hegel,as for Mill, the function of representative institutions is not to govern, but to advise those who govern, and to determine who it is that governs.  Hegel expects deputies to the Estates to be ordinary citizens, not professional politicians.  One evident reason for this is that he wants the Estates to be close to the people, and to represent its true sentiments; another reason (unstated, but quite evident) is that he does not want the Estates to be politically strong enough to challenge the power of the professionals who actually govern.  But he does not intend the Estates to be powerless either.  In his lectures, Hegel describes a multi-party system in the Estates, and he insists that the government’s ministry must always represent the ‘majority party’; when it ceases to do so, he says, it must resign and a new ministry, representing the majority of the Estates, must take its place….This idea takes the Hegelian constitutional monarchy most of the way toward presently existing parliamentary systems with a nominal hereditary monarch (as in Britain, Holland and Sweden).

And we all know about iron hand of totalitarian terror that Queen Beatrix has.

Later, there is a vitally important point: “Hegel distinguishes between the ‘political state proper’ from the state in the broadest sense, the community as a whole with all its institutions….He regards the state in the latter sense as the individual’s final end [italics mine-DL].”  In other words, as far as a political telos is concerned, Hegel is arguing for a position that is substantially similar to that of Aristotle: the citizen’s end is realised in and through the life of the political community, because man is a political animal and this end is appropriate to his nature.  It is our latter-day, impoverished understanding of what a political community fully means that causes many to mistake the importance these philosophers give to this broader political community for a theoretical endorsement of unlimited governmental power.  A polity is more than its government (thank God!), and there are many philosophers whose political thought will make no sense if we do not keep this distinction in mind.  We may or may not find this account of political life satisfactory, but we are not free to describe it as totalitarian or proto-totalitarian.  It is, by definition, exactly not that, because it assumes that there is more to the political community than the all-encompassing government and party machine.

Speaking of Hegel’s legacy, the editor goes on:

This is the case with traditional images of Hegel as reactionary, absolutist, totalitarian.  Taken literally, of course, these images have been long discredited [italics mine-DL].  Yet in our liberal culture they nevertheless possess a kind of symbolic truth, because they represent this culture’s self-doubts projected with righteous venom into its iconography of the enemy.  Hegel is especially unappealing to that dogmatic kind of liberal who judges past social and political thinkers by the degree to which (it has been decided beforehand) all people of good will must share.  The value of Hegel’s social thought will be better appreciated by those who are willing to question received views, and take a deeper look at the philosophical problems of modern life [bold mine-DL]. 

It is especially rich that defenders of the Popperian caricature believe that they are the ones engaged in the rigorous independent thinking and resistance to “official” interpretations.  The last fifty years of Hegel scholarship, from what I understand, have been filled with the debunking of myths woven by those in thrall to the politically correct interpretations of their own time.  Incidentally, the disparagement and dismissal of many early American heroes on account of their insufficiently enlightened attitudes come from this same instinct to measure past thinkers against present standards and condemn them when they (inevitably) fail to measure up. 

Popper’s view of Hegel was the ideologically-driven modern liberal view of the man for decades, and its perpetuation today is simply a continuation of something not much better than propaganda, which in the Anglo-American world was already more than a little coloured by a dislike for things German.  Popper had a very good argument to make against 20th century historicists who used language about the direction of history–language that everyone knows I abhor, by the way–to justify appalling crimes against their fellow men.  Popper was writing a polemic against totalitarians of his own time, and he was right to do this.  Where he went awry was to try to find roots for the woes of the 20th century in Hegel’s actual thought, among other places, rather than in the ideologically filtered abuses of it. 

If a Nazi likes and promotes Wagner, whatever else you might rightly say about Wagner’s attitudes, that does not make Wagner a proto-Nazi or his music proto-Nazi music.  Obviously.  I suppose I am especially annoyed by the Hegel-bashing tradition because it is just one more aspect of the old, wearisome obsession to read all of modern German thought and history as one big prelude to the Nazis (the ultimate example of this was, naturally, on The History Channel, where a program actually stated that if the Romans had not been ambushed in the Teutoberg Forest in AD 9, Hitler would never have come to power!), as if we could not find many more relevant proximate sources specific to the post-unification and post-WWI scene.  It is an attempt at a more sophisticated Goldhagenism, but the idea is the same.  It is itself a kind of essentialism–the sort of thing Popper rightly warned against–inasmuch as it seeks to find something particularly twisted in German culture to explain what happened later, but in the process succeeds in twisting everything to fit the preconceived pattern of some perverse Teutonic state-worship (to which we Anglo-Americans are, of course, immune).  This is a comforting myth that we tell ourselves, as it persuades us that we are somehow inherently less prone to the political and moral insanity of totalitarianism–that sort of thing only happens to other people.  How some parts of the Anglo-American world would love to be able to discredit a culture that did more to create Western civilisation than almost any other, and how better to do this than to smear the philosophical and artistic giants of the German past with the taint of somehow contributing to the rise of Hitler?  Just consider the stupidity of this: nationalists try to appropriate the cultural achievements of their countrymen over the centuries, regardless of whether the creators of the appropriated works would have anything to do with such people, and then it is taken by later observers as proof of their perfidy that some chauvinists have sullied their name by speaking it with admiration.    

At bottom, reading totalitarianism into Hegel’s thought is the worst sort of “precursorism” (interpreting earlier works in the light of what came later, rather than according to their own time and proper meaning) and an old standby of bad teleological historical narrative, those banes of real intellectual history, in which an idea that seems as if it could have led to something that happened later is taken as an inspiration for these later events.  Then there is the old habit of “so-and-so interpreted this thinker this way, therefore the thinker must mean what so-and-so says.”  Two things would have to be demonstrated for this to be a worthwhile point: the person citing the thinker would need to have shown that he understood what the original thinker meant, and this person would have to avoid making interpretations that flatly contradict what the thinker said.  Failure on either point makes the later “follower” of the thinker a bad student and a poor representative of the man’s thought. 

Nietzsche scholars are constantly battling against similar popular misrepresentations, as have scholars of Maistre (who was an important philosopher of science as well as a political thinker) and Bolingbroke, among others.  It makes no sense why a certain batch of interpretations or the tradition derived from them should be given priority if they do not do their subject justice.  If Byzantinists did that, no one would have bothered to say anything after Gibbon, and certainly not after Bury and Ostrogorsky.  Obviously, some interpretive battles will go on forever, but as more scholars dig into the material there will be more interpretations firmly established by the persuasiveness of the arguments and their support in the evidence.  Once well-supported and serious arguments have been made, however, it is not sufficient to go back to the old interpretation, unaltered, and declare that most people who have given the matter much thought don’t know what they’re talking about.

In short, no one remotely familiar with their [Voinovich and Domenici’s] records would consider any of them to be among the Senate’s conservative intellectual giants. On the contrary, they are poll-driven politicians who want to hold on to power, and the polls indicate that many Americans are decidedly unhappy about the direction of the war. ~The Washington Times

No one enjoys good opportunist-bashing more than I do, but this shot at Domenici is particularly odd.  Domenici is not claiming to be a spokesman for conservatism (and with a lifetime ACU rating of 74, no one will be rushing out to label him as one).  That’s a big problem–for conservatives.  The Senate Republican dissenters on Iraq have almost all been politically vulnerable, “moderate” or liberal Republicans, and those who do not exactly fit these categories (such as Hagel and Brownback) have tended to have the least substantive critiques and have offered even less substantive alternatives.  Instead of taking the lead in criticising the President and forcing change, more conservative members in the last Congress and the present one have mostly distinguished themselves as reflexive defenders of the war (their chief complaints, when they have made them, is that the war has not been prosecuted with enough vigour and has not been expanded to enough other countries).  For years conservatives in the GOP have gone out of their way to make sure that people associate this war with the word conservative–despite its having no meaningful connection to conservatism of any recognisable kind–because they have lent it unstinting support.  In highlighting the latest dissenters’ lack of conservative reputations, this simply reinforces this identification.  The war will go from appearing to be a generically Republican war, which is mainly what it is, to a specificially “conservative” one in the public eye.  Editorials such as this one are part of the reason why.  

Domenici is also a strange target of the wrath of the Times for another reason.  Domenici changed his position on the amnesty bill to a vote against the cloture motion that the Times and most conservatives also wanted to defeat.  In other words, he responded to the outcry from his constituents and conservative activists by embracing their view of the bill and ended up voting the right way, helping to send the bill down to a crushing defeat.  Obviously, he did this for self-interested, purely electoral reasons–he fears voter backlash come next year.  Even so, I don’t remember a Times editorial singling out Domenici and the other vote-switchers for rank opportunism and pandering back then.  The Weekly Standard had plenty to say about the Senators who turned against the amnesty bill that the magazine supported, but that’s because the magazine’s editors were angry at the former allies who had defected to the other side. 

The Times is chastising someone who effectively came around their position on the recent legislation and pointing out Domenici’s responsiveness to his constituents as a bad thing worthy of mockery.  Meanwhile, the steadfast duo of McLieberman never wavers, never blinks, never listens to the voters, and that is supposed to inspire admiration?  We have some remnants of a republican government, so there is something to be said for not always heeding the desires of the crowd, but by design representatives should represent their constituents and Senators should, at least originally, represent the interests of their states.  To consistently fail in this representation is to have failed in the basic duty of an elected official.  The Times would like more members of Congress to shirk their responsibilities and ignore their constituents more often, at least when it comes to the war.  On immigration, they will continue to think that the populist backlash was a just and legitimate exercise in self-government.  You really can’t have it both ways.  Domenici is an opportunist, but it was thanks to opportunists like him that amnesty was defeated.  The war will one day be brought to an end through the efforts of other similarly “flexible” politicians.