The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply. ~David Brooks

Brooks’ remarks go a long way towards showing just how uninformative that Pew survey result was. The Pew survey offered two possible responses: the U.S. should go its own way or it should mind its own business. Given those choices, the “isolationist” answer seemed attractive to a few more respondents. The “all-time high” level of “isolationist” sentiment was 49%, and the “go our own way” response was 44%. If Brooks is right that both are fueled by reaction against “the educated class,” that means that the views of “the educated class” account for 7% of the population at most, which suggests that the Pew result is misleading.

93% of the public does not really hold radically different views on foreign affairs from those of “the educated class,” but if you took only the superficial, top-line result from the Pew survey you could make such a claim. The more one looks at that survey, the more one finds that the general public and CFR members (who will have to stand in for “the educated class” for the purposes of this discussion) do not differ quite so wildly when it comes to many of the specific questions. There are differences, yes, but when it comes to assessing “major threats” most of the general public and most CFR members agree that Islamic extremist groups, Iran’s nuclear program and international financial instability all pose major threats to the U.S. The general public tends to worry more about China and North Korea, and CFR members tend to worry more about Pakistan, but what the Pew survey results as a whole show is an entire country preoccupied with a multitude of foreign threats. As I have said several times before, ours is not a nation intent on withdrawing from the world or “turning inward.” It is a nation that has been scared half to death by the constant fearmongering of its elites, and the general public has tended to overreact to each episode of fearmongering by embracing ever more aggressive policies.

The Pew report states:

In terms of the possible use of U.S. military force, the public continues to be more supportive than CFR members of taking preemptive action against countries that may threaten the U.S., but have not yet attacked. The public also is much more supportive of using U.S. military force if it were certain that Iran had produced a nuclear weapon. However, there is greater support among foreign policy opinion leaders than the public for using force in response to another scenario – if extremists were poised to take over Pakistan.

In other words, the general public and CFR members seem to differ mainly over where and when to employ military force. As usual, the opposition between unilateralism and multilateralism is a distinction based almost entirely on means and process. What is striking and perhaps rather depressing is the general agreement among members of the general public and the CFR that we are perfectly justified in using such force as and when we deem it necessary. The “populists” are more aggressive and more willing to launch strikes on Iran, but this is only because they have accepted the exaggerated warnings of foreign policy elites that Iran’s nuclear program is a great threat. The “populist” response is more knee-jerk and less attractive to “the educated class,” but the response is the fruit of the propaganda that members of “the educated class” have been spreading for more than a decade.

Scoblete correctly observes that this Frances Townsend statement on Yemen is mostly evidence of partisan opportunism rather than hawkishness as such. However, I agree with Yglesias that out-party partisans regularly make reckless hawkish statements as a way of attacking the other party’s President. It is easy, it seems to have no downside, and it positions the opposition as being “tougher” on national security, which seems to be advantageous almost every cycle. We can understand most Republican criticism of the war in Afghanistan as another expression of this. If Obama more right than wrong on Afghanistan by hawkish standards, he must be failing in Iran or, in this case, Yemen. Naturally, the critics’ answer is either to fault Obama for attempting to do something in Afghanistan or to demand that far more be done in (or to) Iran or Yemen,. or perhaps both.

Like Yglesias, I have been reading Prof. Zelizer’s Arsenal of Democracy, about which I will have more to say in the future, and one thing that has been consistently true over the last sixty years is the fairly regular reliance of the opposition party on outdoing the President’s party in dangerous and irresponsible rhetoric on matters of national security. It is almost always true that this rhetoric is excessively hawkish in one way or another, but it is always a qualified or targeted hawkishness. If the President’s party is sufficiently aggressive in one area, the opposition accuses them of neglecting “more important” national security concerns. Even Obama’s campaign partook of this to a limited degree in emphasizing the importance of Afghanistan against Iraq, but for the most part wisely decided to tap into the public’s weariness with aggressive and combative postures. If the President’s party seems reluctant to intervene the opposition will bash him as timid. This has been the tactic of Obama’s opponents with respect to Iran policy, and now we are hearing the same about Yemen.

To get out from under the legacy of the Korean debacle, Democratic leaders by the late ’50s were obsessing over a (non-existent) missile gap. Even though Eisenhower and Nixon had won and retained office on the basis of an insane “rollback” strategy, they exposed themselves to such hawkish attacks from Democrats by governing far more responsibly than they had campaigned. They were suffering the consequences of using national security against the party of Truman, and in the end lost out to the rhetorically more aggressive anticommunist in Kennedy. The trouble is that this rhetoric can have debilitating effects on the party in power. Zelizer makes a persuasive case that one of the causes of LBJ’s decision to escalate in Vietnam was his fear of being accused of permitting another “loss” like the “loss” of China.

Zelizer shows clearly that out-party hawkishness combined with proposals to minimize the public’s direct costs from military intervention usually lead to political rewards. Thus Nixon could run and win as a Vietnam hawk who opposed the draft. He opposed the draft because he wanted to create political space to conclude the war later. Perversely, the end of conscription, undoubtedly a good thing, created the long-term political conditions that made interventionist foreign policy politically viable. The outcome of the Gulf War reinforced this. The main idea of what Zelizer calls conservative internationalism is the maintainence of an activist posture abroad while limiting direct American exposure to combat and risk.

One of the complaints one would often see made against Bush was that he did not call on the public to sacrifice for the war effort, which was of course exactly what he would never want to do. The idea is to make waging war and interfering overseas as relatively costless to the public as possible, which makes mobilizing political opposition to interventionism far more difficult. This is another way in which the “surge” was aimed more at eliminating political problems for the administration at home than it was intended to resolve difficult Iraqi political disagreements. Even if the public remained overwhelmingly against the war after the “surge” ended, the decreased violence and reduced casualties made opposition to the war less urgent, less focused and less politically potent.

This applies to fiscal costs as well. Cheney could claim indifference to deficits, for example, not necessarily because he was indifferent to fiscal recklessness, but because he never wanted to make voters feel the pinch of the fiscal cost of the wars. The alliance between tax-cutters and militarists at first seems absurd, but then you realize that it is the sustained resistance to paying for the wars up front that makes the launching of wars more politically possible. It is not because Republican militarists otherwise loathe all government that they oppose higher taxes, but because higher taxes make it more difficult for them to succeed in advancing militaristic policies. Like so many others, they want the government to do things without having to pay for it, because they suspect that the public would not really consider the expense necessary if they had to pay for it right now.

Many times before I have objected to the foreign policy classifications Walter Russell Mead uses when describing different American foreign policy traditions, and this new article is a good example of why I find them so misleading and frequently inaccurate. As a shorthand, the terms can be useful up to a point, but the more I see them used the more I think that they serve to caricature and distort the positions of most of the foreign policy views in question. Is it really true that Bush dissolved the base of “Jacksonian” political support for the war in Iraq by turning it into a democratizing, nation-building mission? On the contrary, practically the only people left in America outside of Washington and New York who still say they support the war in Iraq fit Mead’s “Jacksonian” profile. The Jacksonians were among the first on board and the last to give up on the war. I have discussed the reasons for this before.

Does it really make sense to say that Obama is Jeffersonian? No. If Jeffersonians dissent from a globalist consensus (and for many of us this is correct), Obama is not among the dissenters. Mead is completely wrong when he says that Obama “comes from the old-fashioned Jeffersonian wing of the Democratic Party, and the strategic goal of his foreign policy is to reduce America’s costs and risks overseas by limiting U.S. commitments wherever possible.” Many Obama voters may come from this wing, but he does not. For that matter, Mead is mistaken when he claims that Carter belongs to this wing. Was the man who gave us the Carter Doctrine intent on “limiting U.S. commitments wherever possible”? This is obviously not true. As for Obama, do we really think that someone who has upheld so many of the expansive executive powers grabbed by his predecessor desires to roll back the national security state on civil libertarian grounds? This is ludicrous stuff, and that is the point. Mead apparently has nothing to say about the Obama who actually exists, so he has concocted this easily dismissed “Jeffersonian” Obama. Mead must know better than anyone that a real Jeffersonian would not be able to win the Presidency today, and he can’t have concluded after reading and hearing all of Obama’s foreign policy speeches that the President is a Jeffersonian, so he portrays him this way to serve some other end.

As if this were not damning enough in the eyes of foreign policy thinkers, he adds the coup de grace by making the (inevitable) Carter comparison. Unquestionably, Carter’s foreign policy record was largely disastrous, so it will not do to remember that Carter was a relatively moderate Southern Democrat firmly in the liberal internationalist mainstream. If his party was generally in a more “Jeffersonian” mood after Vietnam, Carter did not follow his party down that road. Obama has certainly not gone this route, and even Mead is forced to acknowledge that Obama’s approach far more resembles that of Nixonian realists than that of the Jeffersonians whom McGovern represented. However, in order to keep this tottering argument from collapsing Mead is reduced to claiming that detente is an example of Jeffersonian foreign policy!

If there is one thing Obama has no interest in, it is in dissenting from the consensus that holds that increasing global interdependence and close American involvement in greater global integration are desirable things. The so-called “Hamiltonian” position that “a strong national government and a strong military should pursue a realist global policy and that the government can and should promote economic development and the interests of American business at home and abroad” fits Obama far better, but to describe him this way would not help Mead portray Obama as the weak ditherer that he seems to want to describe.

P.S. Obama has a Wilsonian streak, but this doesn’t mean very much. Every internationalist of the last thirty years has something of a Wilsonian streak. No one would believe that Obama fits Mead’s definition of Wilsonian, which states that Wilsonians see “the promotion of democracy and human rights as the core elements of American grand strategy.” Even fair observers of the first year of the Obama administration could not conclude that he has prioritized these things in his handling of foreign policy.

P.P.S. Mead’s bad analysis is made more annoying when he hides his indictment of Obama as a potential Carter-like failure behind unconvincing praise of Obama’s “great dignity and courage” and his claims that we need a foreign policy vision of restraint and caution more than ever. This is an effective way of pretending to admire “Jeffersonian” foreign policy while making it easy to blame “Jeffersonian” policy for the failures of other foreign policy traditions.

As I mentioned yesterday, the only political tide that seems to be rising is the public’s increasing support for military action against Iran. Via Scoblete comes this new Rasmussen poll confirming that assessment:

Seventy percent (70%) of voters believe it is more important to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons than it is to prevent war between Israel and Iran. That’s up 18 points from July 2008. Twenty-two percent (22%) say preventing war between the two nations is more important.

There is nothing that has actually happened in the last year and a half that would explain this jump in pro-war sentiment. As Giraldi notes on the main blog, the story that claimed Iran was at the stage of building detonators for nuclear weapons was complete nonsense. Nonetheless, false stories such as this one combined with a constant drumbeat for sanctions and bombing are bound to push public opinion in the wrong direction.

Support for war with Iran is, of course, most concentrated among Republicans and self-described conservatives. 79% of Republicans believe that the U.N.’s response to Iran’s nuclear program has not been aggressive enough. Just 9% of Republicans believe it has been too aggressive. Conservatives take the same view 77-6%. 74% of Republicans believe preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon is more important than preventing war between Israel and Iran, and just 19% believe the opposite. The numbers for conservatives are identical. 66% of Republicans believe the U.S. should aid Israel in the event that it attacks Iran, and just 23% believe we should “do nothing.” Among conservatives, the numbers are 65-26.

So there is a minority in the GOP and among conservatives that does not want war with Iran, but it is not very large and we know it is poorly represented among national Republican figures and members of Congress. The political right as it exists right now overwhelmingly favors a war with Iran. Launching such a war, or allowing such a war to be launched, is one of the greatest dangers to U.S. interests and security, and support it has only been intensifying. This is what non-interventionists and conservative realists need to spend their time opposing.

The big political news today has been Rep. Parker Griffith’s party-switching:

Mr. Griffith, a lifelong Democrat whose victory in his Huntsville-area district last year helped the party hold a seat in an increasingly conservative district, said he was surprised by the party’s legislative focus this year on health-care and climate-change legislation. And he was miffed by the Obama administration’s decision not to deploy a missile-defense system in Eastern Europe; much research for that system takes place in his district [bold mine-DL].

This last item might help make sense of a move that otherwise seems to make little sense. The missile defense decision directly and adversely affected his district, or at least it deprived the district of federal money that it was receiving, and it was not a decision that Griffith could have reasonably expected to happen. Almost until it happened, there was little reason to think that Obama would pull the plug on the project. One of the fair criticisms of the decision was that it was taken without much consultation with the Polish and Czech governments, and it is even more likely that members of Congress whose districts were going to benefit from the construction of the system were not alerted to the decision. Griffith could have felt that he was blindsided by a decision that would put him in a difficult position come next fall, as he would be identified with an administration that had killed a project that would have brought some gvernment largesse to his voters. On top of this, he might have actually thought the missile defense system was a good idea.

As important as the pieces of domestic legislation are, it doesn’t make sense that Griffith would bolt because the leadership was pushing ahead with these bills. Obviously, Griffith had to know what the priorities on the Democrats’ domestic agenda were going to be. It also had to be clear that he was not going to suffer any retribution from his leadership or the DCCC for breaking with the leadership on major pieces of legislation, because he had not suffered any thus far. Climate change and health care legislation could not have surprised him, and he wasn’t under pressure to vote for any legislation that would jeopardize his re-election. Party-switching would be a much more understandable response from someone like Teague in southern New Mexico, whose carbon tax vote may doom him next year, but it seems a strange thing for a “lifelong Democrat” to do when he is not even forced to vote for bills that will prove controversial.

It makes more sense that Griffith went over to the GOP to protest a decision that cut his district out of some unnecessary, wasteful “defense” spending. That means that the GOP has just brought in a new member whose adherence to their party came about because of a desire for earmarks for his district and support for a misguided, unnecessary and provocative military program. It seems that he joined the right party.

If a Republican member of Congress so much as whispers criticism of Obama’s Afghanistan policy, or even comes right out and says we ought to withdraw and start tending to our own problems, Larison is right in there assuring us that he (or she) doesn’t mean it, can’t mean it, and is merely “pretending” to mean it, because, you see, they deviate on some other point, or just because they’re modern conservatives, who can’t, after all, be anything less than bloodthirsty monsters. ~Justin Raimondo

I would say that this debate is getting tiresome, but it would be giving it too much credit to call it a debate. On one side of the argument, I explain why certain new Republican opponents of the war in Afghanistan seem to be far worse militarists and interventionists than the administration they are reflexively and opportunistically opposing, and in response Raimondo makes a weak joke about Andrew Sullivan. This is the sort of hyperbolic, unpersuasive, insulting style that Raimondo has practiced for years, but it has normally been tethered to something resembling a principled argument. In this case, Raimondo dispensed with substantive argument early on and has relied entirely on outrage.

There was a time when it was still acceptable to acknowledge that opponents of a particular war were nonetheless deeply mistaken about foreign policy generally. Pointing out that some latecomers to the antiwar movement held dangerous ideas was once considered a service to the causes of non-intervention and peace. Raimondo cannot stop harping on Sullivan’s appalling pro-war views from five or six years ago, long after Sullivan publicly abandoned them, but the rest of us must never question the antiwar credentials of anyone Raimondo has chosen to defend. It was once considered valuable to emphasize the full record and views of politicians whom antiwar activists had enthusiastically (and sometimes mistakenly) embraced. Apparently, none of that can get in the way of falsely proclaiming another rebirth of the Old Right, which has been reborn by Raimondo’s count at least five times in the last decade. The flaw in constantly announcing the Old Right’s revival, like the flaw in optimism itself, is that it simply does not take account of reality, and it leads to severe disappointment when the optimistic delusion vanishes and reality intrudes once again.

Howard Dean generated a great deal of enthusiasm in 2003-04 because of his newfound opposition to the Iraq war, and it was undeniably his very convenient antiwar view that propelled him to the top tier of candidates, but it would not have been unduly pessimistic to draw attention to Dean’s statements endorsing preventive war, his complaint that the problem with the Iraq war was that it had distracted us from the “real” threat of Iran or even to deny Dean’s antiwar credibility entirely. Joshua Frank wrote this for Antiwar.com four years ago:

Howard Dean’s “antiwar” convictions haven’t vanished – they never existed to begin with.

How depressing! Oh, yes, he was also right. By 2005, it was no longer necessary to ignore the reality that Dean’s antiwar convictions were temporary and driven by immediate political needs. As Dean was a New Democrat and “centrist” hawk, Dean’s role as the tribune of the antiwar left never made much sense. Evidently, we have not reached a point when we can acknowledge that the same applies to some of the new opponents of the war in Afghanistan. If we could at least acknowledge that several of these brand-new Republican opponents of the war in Afghanistan are motived almost entirely by opportunism and partisanship, and that they have no interest in a restrained and limited foreign policy, we could at least move on to arguing the relative merits of different Afghanistan plans, including plans for withdrawal. Instead, we are treated to the farce of calling an advocate of unlimited war in Afghanistan an antiwar Republican.

The “go big or go home” position is a crazy, maximalist hawkish position. It is simutaneously anti-administration without being critical of the military or U.S. hegemony, and it is designed to allow Republicans to criticize the administration for mistakes on foreign policy while maintaining the absurd claim that Obama is not “tough” and hawkish enough. Chaffetz in particular favors going home only because he does not think the administration will sign off on suitably brutal, devastating tactics. Chaffetz has effectively imitated the Sharon-Olmert position on Gaza, and Raimondo has been applauding it. After all, Chaffetz favors a withdrawal, and that’s good enough. Never mind the details of his argument or the readiness to inflict massive damage on the place in the future!

When Raimondo was preparing Chuck Hagelfor canonization in early 2007, I was therereminding everyonethat Hagel had voted for the Iraq war and supported the bombing of Yugoslavia. Hagel retired from the Senate after his abortive presidential bid, and the latest new savior of the antiwar right vanished from the scene. Raimondo was one of the most prolific evangelists on behalf of Hagel-as-antiwar-champion, and his analysis proved to be awesomely wrong.

The Hagel episode has not stopped him from adopting and cheering on practically every politician who occasionally says something he likes, only to turn around a few months later to express his disgust with the same politician for “betraying” the cause. When all together too many non-interventionists and realists were celebrating Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war as proof that U.S. foreign policy as a whole might begin changing significantly, I pointed out that Obama was a devoted liberal internationalist with a very activist and ambitious foreign policy vision. Now that this has become undeniable to all but the most fanatical of hawks, the people who gave Obama far too much credit last year now desperately search out new political heroes whose foreign policy views are no better and are, in fact, far worse than anything coming out of the current administration. For the record, Chaffetz does not say that we should be “tending to our own problems,” unless one wants to define “taking out” Iran’s nuclear program as “tending to our own problems.” Raimondo has never addressed this point regarding Chaffetz’s dangerous Iran policy views, perhaps because he knows there is nothing he can say.

The reality is that the public is becoming somewhat less comfortable with an aggressive foreign policy, but it is still only too willing to back military action against vilified states that pose little or no threat to the United States. More and more of the public is not aligned with the political right at all, and this is primarily what accounts for changes in public opinion on matters of war and foreign policy. On the right, the devotion to aggressive foreign policy has, if anything, become much worse among politicians and activists, and at least as far as we can tell from polls there has not been a dramatic change among rank-and-file conservatives. There has certainly been no great clamoring for an end to the Afghanistan war in deepest-red Utah.

On the specific question of Afghanistan, I am persuaded for the moment that the proposed plan is still the best means available for concluding the war there soon, and it stands a far better chance of prosecuting the war with as little damage to the civilian population as possible. I respect those non-interventionists and realists who take a different view, and Prof. Bacevich may be right when he says that the plan is “folly.” It seems to me that we do owe some measure of security to the people whose country our war has damaged, and it seems possible that our military can provide that before leaving. There are serious arguments that say I am wrong, and I will be addressing those in future. Raimondo’s arguments are not among them. What I do know for certain is that warmongers who want us out of Afghanistan just so that we can plunge the Near East into hell for years to come with an attack on Iran must be resisted at every turn.

Raimondo is right about one thing: I am a pessimist. I’m not sure how anyone with a Christian understanding of fallen human nature and human finitude could be anything other than a pessimist. This helps to guard against political fantasies regardless of their source or content. That includes the recurring fantasy that the return of the Old Right is just around the corner whenever some Republican pol wants to make a splash in the media by taking a position that is at odds with everything he has ever said before on the subject.

A couple weeks ago, I discussed the Pew survey that found a high level of “isolationist” sentiment, and I recapitulated my arguments in the interview I had with The Economist. As I have said several times before, the headline result is very misleading. The more one looks at the survey results, the less meaningful the “isolationist” result becomes.

According to the same survey, 14% of the general public would like the U.S. leadership role to be that of a “single world leader,” which is the highest percentage in the last 16 years of surveys, and there are still 19% who believe the U.S. should be the most active leader. Just 11% say that the U.S. should have no leadership role. The public at large (57%) is more likely than members of the Council on Foreign Relations (49%) to say that the U.S. should remain the world’s sole superpower. 52% still say that preemptive military force can be justified often or sometimes, which is considerably lower than it used to be but nonetheless depressingly high after everything that has happened in Iraq. 63% of the public favor using force against Iran if it acquired a nuclear weapon, and 79% of Republicans favor using force against Iran under those circumstances. 39% of Republicans believe defense spending should be increased. There are more respondents than ever who say the U.S. should “mind its own business,” but this does not mean very much when so many of the same respondents think that attacking Iran has something to do with minding our own business.

So it is highly doubtful that there is a “broader anti-interventionist trend,” however much we might like there to be one. Rep. Chaffetz has not “found it necessary to express skepticism” regarding the war in Afghanistan. He has chosen this path because he thinks we are wasting time and resources there and must instead move quickly to attack Iran. As he stated quite plainly:

We must not allow them to achieve nuclear capabilities. I fear the current administration is giving them precisely what they need . . . time. The time to take out this threat is now.

If there is any rising tide out there right now, it is the rising tide of irrational fear of an Iranian “threat.” Iran’s nuclear program is now seen as a “major threat” by 72% of respondents, which is a significant increase from 61% four years ago. Meanwhile, this dangerous sentiment is stoked by some of the very people we are now supposed to accept as spokesmen for the antiwar right and non-interventionism.

Justin Raimondo detects yet another death of neoconservatism and yet another resurgence of non-interventionism on the right. Asusual, he takes isolated examples, misinterprets them and then grossly exaggerates their importance. It is great news that many Tea Party protesters support something like a non-interventionist foreign policy. As many of them were originally Ron Paul supporters, just as I was, it makes sense that quite a few of them do support this. It would be even better news if there were any reason to believe that most of the Republican Party and conservative movement shared their foreign policy views. The very thing that Raimondo cites as evidence of this, namely the criticism Tea Partiers are receiving from Frum’s neoconservatives, is proof that it is not so.

At the moment, Ron Paul is getting a hearing on fiscal and economic policy because it suits both party and movement to pretend that the GOP values fiscal responsibility and limited government. We know that the party does not value these things, but it is a start. It is on these issues that Tea Party protesters and the rest of the movement are finding common ground. That is fine as far as it goes, but movement conservatives are fixated on questions of spending in order to avoid taking any responsibility for the foreign policy they have endorsed for years. Like Pawlenty, who is now trying to appeal to Tea Party sentiments by suddenly adopting the positions they favor, these conservatives blame Republican collapse on excessive spending and corruption. They are reacting to what they believe was the lesson of the 2006 and 2008 elections. The only trouble is that they have learned the wrong lesson. As ever, the war in Iraq and the GOP’s other foreign policy mistakes are never mentioned, and just like Pawlenty they continue to believe that invading Iraq was the right thing to do.

What Raimondo seems unable to grasp is that Republicans and movement conservatives are encouraging and tolerating Tea Party protesters in spite of their foreign policy views, which they know they can safely ignore anyway. The attacks on their foreign policy views by Frum et al. are a desperate bid to make them seem unacceptable to party and movement leaders in order to derail Tea Party advocacy of libertarian and small-government conservative economic and domestic policies. Why do Frum et al. focus on the Tea Party protesters’ foreign policy views and their support for Ron Paul? They do this because they are reasonably sure that most Republicans and conservatives see these things as liabilities. It is not true that the only thing that matters to Frum et al. is foreign policy. Most of what Frum has been doing for the last several years and the purpose of his website have been to move the GOP and the movement to the left on most domestic policies.

On foreign policy, Frum and his colleagues are not at odds with the rest of the right, and they know it. It is on domestic policy where they are on the margins and have relatively little influence at the moment, and so they are trying to undermine their opponents in domestic policy debates by drawing attention to foreign policy views that the Tea Partiers hold and which most on the right seems not to hold. It is the equivalent of “centrist” Democrats c. 2003-04 using progressives’ foreign policy views against them, but the difference is that the “centrists” in the GOP have the majority of the party on their side when it comes to foreign policy. That is lamentable and disastrous, as the recent elections have shown, but it is the way things are at present. At the moment, neoconservative domestic policy arguments are out of favor, but there is scarce evidence that their foreign policy arguments are unpopular among Republicans and conservatives. When even some of the “antiwar” Republicans on Afghanistan vote for imposing sanctions on Iran and wish to launch a war against Iran, it would appear that neoconservatism is not nearly as politically weak as we would like it to be.

There have been quite a fewinterestingposts andcolumns about Avatar in the last few days, so I thought I would revive my bad habit of discussing film commentaries without having seen the movie in question. What most caught my attention in the responses to the film was Ross’ discussion of the role of pantheism:

Instead, “Avatar” is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.

From everything I have read about Avatar, this is not the most remarkable and theologically subversive aspect of the story. Some reviews have mentioned in passing where the word avatar comes from, noting that it is the Sanskrit word used to refer to a deity that has taken human (or animal) form. The great Hindu epic cycles revolve around such avatars, chief among them Rama. In Sanskrit, the word means “descent,” and its equivalent in Christian theological language would be sunkatabasis, which means condescension. The interesting thing about the word’s use in this film is the implication that the human who takes on the form of one of the aliens is actually vastly superior to the kind of being his mind is inhabiting, and that he is willingly lowering himself to their level. In the end, he decides to protect them against others of his own kind, but this is not all that different from the idea of a deity manifesting himself to defeat the demonic forces that are menacing his people.

The humans in the story are raised up above the aliens, and their use of avatars gives them something of a god-like quality, and it seems as if the depiction of them as “crude, one-dimensional native stereotypes” helps maintain this difference very well. We see this in sci-fi stories all the time: well-meaning human visitors must come to the aid of the noble, spiritually enlightened but ultimately more primitive, somewhat helpless people who are being threatened by the exploitative humans and/or their allies. One of the first to come to mind, and one of the most obnoxious, treacly paeans to the virtues of liberal humanitarian interventionism, is Star Trek: Insurrection, whose basic storyline seems almost identical to that of Avatar.

Otherwise, the film seems to be a major studio version of Captain Planet, complete with blue-skinned heroes and devotion to Gaia, or a more technologically-savvy version of Princess Mononoke.