On the main blog, Freddy noted yesterday that the April 9 movement* was gearing up for its protest against Saakashvili, which has begun in Tbilisi. So far, the riot Freddy predicted has not materialized, and we can hope that it will not. Contrary to what Saakashvili apologists will claim, his Western critics do not want to see the Georgian people suffer, but have long seen his presidency as the disaster for Georgia that it now clearly is. It would be best for Georgia if Saakashvili stepped down, but that would not be his style. Contrary to fears that riots in Moldova would make today’s protests more volatile, which did not make much sense, the protests in Tbilisi appear to be basically peaceful.

If violence does flare up, it is more likely that it will be Saakashvili’s government that will attack the protesters as it did during the protests in late 2007, but perhaps even Saakashvili has learned his lesson from the political backlash and international outcry his heavy-handed actions caused back then. My guess is that the April 9 demand for Saakashvili’s resignation will be ignored by the government, and the opposition lacks a clear alternative leader who can serve as a rallying point for anti-Saakashvili forces.

Crucially, unlike Saakashvili’s predecessor, Eduard Shevardnadze, Saakashvili continues to enjoy strong U.S. backing, this is not going to change anytime soon, and it was mainly the withdrawal of Washington’s approval that pushed Shevardnadze out in ’03. Meanwhile, I suspect that Moscow will leave Saakashvili to twist in the wind for a while and will probably not take any direct actions in the near future to force him out. (That doesn’t necessarily rule out some Russian involvement in funding or supporting today’s protesters, but then “color” revolutionaries would have to grant that turnabout is fair play.) The war Saakashvili escalated is now coming back to haunt him, and he is beginning to pay the price for it. The Kremlin has no need to oust or pressure any further a leader whose domestic political fortunes are already waning.

*The anti-Saakashvili movement has adopted the day commemorating a violent Soviet crackdown of Georgian protesters to link their cause to the memory of the national tragedy of April 9, 1989.

It would have been relatively easy for President Obama to divide the Republican coalition, peeling off less-partisan Republicans with genuine outreach. ~Michael Gerson

This would be an interesting point, except that Obama already did this during the election campaign. The Republicans and right-leaning independents he could reach have already been reached, and they are part of the 60-65% of the population who approve of Obama so far. The remaining Republicans who oppose him are for the most part all those Republicans who are quite partisan if not hard-liners. Andrew and Nate Silver have already made similar observations. What is completely missing from so many of the Republican responses to the Pew survey showing such great “polarization” is any acknowledgment that the roughly two-thirds of Republicans who disapprove of Obama make up not much more than a sizeable minority.

That doesn’t make their views irrelevant, but it does mean that they do not define the national response to the President’s first months in office. Neither can we primarily characterize Obama’s Presidency in terms of partisan polarization. Republicans have been clear from fairly early on that, at least when it comes to domestic policy and budget debates, they have decided on a course of pure rejectionism and the embrace of fiscal austerity. As the minority party, that is their prerogative, and there are good reasons to be skeptical of policies that are vastly increasing the debt (it would help even more to have alternative budgets that don’t invite mockery!), but if a party has opted to go down the rejectionist route it is silly to complain the President is having a polarizing effect as if this were a bad outcome.

If the GOP is to have any chance of reviving anytime soon, it will be by peeling off disillusioned and dissatisfied Obama supporters. Even if Obama were driving people away (so far, there is little evidence for this), the GOP still has to be able to attract them. At present, the GOP’s powers of repulsion remain far greater. So far, everything the GOP has been doing in Congress and in the media has reinforced all the habits that have pushed so many people into Obama’s arms. Shouting fascism and tyranny in ever-louder voices is not going to change this pattern, but will probably ensure that it keeps getting worse for Republicans.

No one outside the Beltway cares whether the post-partisan utopia has been realized, and many of us outside the Beltway understand that Washington does some of its greatest damage when the parties collaborate to give us the worst of both worlds. In the GOP’s worst-case scenario, Obama will become even more unpopular among Republican rank-and-file while the rest of the country remains favorably inclined, which means that Obama will technically become a more “polarizing” figure by Pew’s odd measurements, but this will only widen the considerable gap between how the GOP sees the political landscape and how everyone else sees it. The real danger for the GOP is that the Democrats are in the process of turning the idea of positive polarization around on them, and they might then be able to divide the country and come away with the much larger portion on a more permanent basis.

During his address to the Turkish parliament, President Obama said:

I know there have been difficulties these last few years. I know that the trust that binds us has been strained, and I know that strain is shared in many places where the Muslim faith is practiced. Let me say this as clearly as I can: the United States is not at war with Islam.

Naturally, this acknowledgment of what some of us call reality proves to Matt Lewis that Obama is “apologizing” to Turks and Muslims the world over, and more than this he is supposedly “breaking the tradition of not criticizing your own country abroad.” If anyone can locate anywhere in this statement where Obama has actually criticized the United States, he should consult a doctor, because it means he can see things that do not exist. Unless Lewis would like to argue that relations with Turkey and the Islamic world as a whole have not been strained, which would be a rather unique interpretation of the last decade, he should target some other part of the speech to criticize. Unless Lewis thinks that we are at war with Islam and would actually like to stand behind this claim, perhaps he should just not speak about these matters.

This is all par for the course for Lewis, a TownHall blogger for whom there is no lame cliche or movement conservative trope that he will not happily repeat. As a good example of this, take his unusually unimaginative attack on Ross Douthat in this bloggingheads segment. Ross, you see, is “what conservatism is if you live in New York City,” the sort favored by those who attend New York cocktail parties (!), and “not part of the conservative movement.” Worst of all, he is someone whom liberals do not automatically dismiss as an idiot. Lewis’ entire criticism is an exercise in the sort of mindless pseudo-sociological analysis that now passes for a lot of intra-conservative argument, according to which anyone whose writings are of interest to people outside the confines of the movement is inherently suspect and untrustworthy. No doubt in years to come Ross will be accused by such towering giants as Lewis of “criticizing his own movement” in so-called “foreign territory” when he acknowledges other realities that movement conservatives find unpleasant, and it will make just as much sense then as his useless attack on the President’s speech in Ankara has made today.

I would always defer to my former boss [Newt Gingrich], if you will, as I was a pup freshman as he was speaker, on issues of foreign policy. ~Gov. Mark Sanford

Via Will at Ordinary Gentlemen

Well, I would say this pretty much puts to rest Reihan’s fears of burgeoning antiwar sentiment on the right. Then again, one might point out that on any number of issues Sanford has not deferred to Gingrich’s judgment. Gingrich quite publicly backed the invasion of Iraq, and just a few weeks back Sanford relayed his objections to the war in Iraq to Michael in his profile of the governor. One assumes that the skepticism he showed regarding the bombing of Yugoslavia made him wary of backing the invasion at the time. As for Gingrich’s view on Kosovo, I don’t think Gingrich was doing much publicly to back the campaign so soon after his resignation, but it is basically unimaginable that he would have been in opposition to it. It’s not just that Sanford defers to Gingrich on North Korea policy, but that he pretends that he would never disagree with him, when we already know that he has agreed with him and the general direction of foreign policy Gingrich et al. represent.

Now I understand that Sanford is a member of the Republican Party, he was appearing on FoxNews, and he might actually want to be elected to another office someday, so I can’t say I am surprised. I suppose I am not so much disappointed in such an embarrassing statement from Sanford as I am depressed that the range of acceptable foreign policy debate in leading Republican circles stretches all the way from “attack them” (it does not really matter which state we’re discussing) to the cliche of “actions, not words.” When Chris Wallace is the one playing the role of the reasonable skeptic of military action to Sanford’s relative belligerence, there is no hope for sane foreign policy taking root in the GOP.

P.S. Yes, Freddy, some people might be a tad disappointed.

Update: After thinking about it a little more, I realize that Sanford’s deference to Gingrich is worse than it seemed at first. He isn’t just deferring to him to obscure the non-interventionist streak in his own record, but he is also doing it because governors always feel obliged to defer in this area to supposed wonks. In practical terms, this means that any governor, no matter how good his instincts and no matter how sound his past views, will end up deferring to more interventionist wonks for the simple reason that the GOP is lousy with interventionist wonks and has very few representing another side of the debate. At the risk of exaggerating, I don’t think it’s too much to say that we saw the basic reason for Republican foreign policy dysfunction on display in that one clip: all the most likely potential candidates for presidential office (i.e., governors) end up receiving horrible advice from entrenched wonks, and many of the former don’t know or care enough to recognize how bad the latter are at what they do, and the governors don’t have the confidence to risk pushing back or challenging them even when the wonks say crazy things about attacking North Korea.

The idealism of the paleoconservative cause is simply too burdened by the idealism of its vision. Politics is not a time machine and we are not ever going to travel back to whichever pre-modern, small government existence that many paleos envision. ~E.D. Kain

It’s true that idealism would be quite heavily burdened by idealism, but if we set this odd statement aside I’m still not sure what Kain means. Politics is not a time-machine, nor is anything else, and no one is more keenly aware of the impossibilities of undoing the effects of past changes than the people who lament so much of what has been lost. Central to most traditionalist critiques is the insistence that everything comes with some sacrifice, and that, as I believe Prof. Deneen said at Yale last fall, whenever something appears something else disappears. The two main questions we keep asking are: “Is this the world we want to have?” and “Is X worth the cost?” Typically, our answers are no to both, and because we say no we are said to be doing nothing more than pining for a lost past. It’s as if someone threw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater, and then mocked you for your “idealistic” concern for the baby or, better yet, your nostalgic attachment to the bathwater as if the baby had never existed. This would be a mildly amusing diversionary tactic, if it weren’t so painfully obvious that we are almost always talking about the present predicament and what we owe to those who will live in the future. The strangest thing about the remark quoted above is that Kain knows all this.

Ortega y Gasset said, “The inability to keep the past alive is the truly reactionary feature.” (That is, the true reactionary–in a negative sense–is the one who treats the past as if it is completely dead and cut off from us.) Nothing here below lasts forever, every thing eventually wears out and breaks (unless it is repaired and restored), and everyone dies. Where some of us think that this truth should inspire fidelity, respect and mourning for what has passed, the general attitude today about practically every change seems to be one of celebration and satisfaction. No modern, much less post-modern, person can ever re-enter a world as if the last five hundred (or however many) years never occurred, and were anyone somehow able to do so he would be very confused and disoriented when he arrived.

Instead of silly idealism, Kain refers us to Phillip Blond’s Red Toryproposals, which are challenging and exciting and every bit as “idealistic” as any decentralist and traditionalist arguments here in America, paleo or not, and they are just about as likely to be adopted, which is to say not very likely. I mean, doesn’t Blond know that politics is not a time-machine? It is never going to take us back to the economically decentralized world Blond envisions. What could he possibly be thinking with all of his localist nostalgia and Post Office romanticism? So there!

That is what I might say to Blond if I wanted to dismiss everything he says and avoid seeing the bankruptcy of the vision of globalization he is criticizing, or if I wanted to use him as a foil for my own argument, as if it were somehow discrediting that he had been making these same “idealistic” arguments for years or decades before they became suddenly fashionable. In a pinch, I could also just turn off my brain and call him a socialist, but that is something better left to others. However, I agree with him on almost everything he has been saying over the last few months, so why would I do that?

Blond discusses local finance and subsidiarity at length in both his Prospect piece and his op-ed for The Guardian. Over the last thirty years, you could count on maybe one hand the American journals and institutions on the right that discussed subsidiarity, distributism, and their foundations in Catholic social doctrine, and you could count on probably one or two fingers the journals that discussed and embraced them as something other than historical curiosities and funny details in the life of Chesterton and Belloc. One of these has been, of course, Chronicles, but it is “paleoconservative” and so we can supposedly write it off just like that. This is now the term applied to most anyonewho argues for ethical restraint, conservation, social solidarity, respect for and loyalty to place and sane foreign policy, which is not a bad summary of what paleoconservatives believe, but it is just as often applied to people who would never use it to describe themselves as a way of belittling and marginalizing their very relevant and challenging arguments. There’s no reason that someone couldn’t dismiss Blond in exactly the same way (“he’s a crazy Red Tory!”), and that would be a shame, because Blond is making a lot of sense.

Blond writes:

However the global trade in credit and finance became one vast private sector monopoly where all market tiers were abolished in favour of a single homogenous conduit down which all credit and capital flowed. The trouble is that as soon as the world’s supply of asset-leveraged credit was threatened by a group of people being unable to pay their debts, the entire system shut down and the present meltdown began. In point of fact it looks as though the path to globalisation merely exchanged one form of state-engendered national monopoly for an international private monopoly founded on extreme speculation [bold mine-DL].

It is here that a financial variant of subsidiarity could have kicked in and avoided both statist inertia and the casino of monopoly capitalism. For why can we not have a subsidiarity of capital? Surely the task now is to avoid the cartels of both market and state and create a genuinely autonomous range of intermediate associations that can hold intermediate amounts of capital that we need to have loans and a life [bold mine-DL]. Why should the house or flat that you or I buy in Clacton or Cardiff be securitised and risked at the highest level of the market? Far better to have a local system of credit that is attuned to the local economy, so that ability to pay and the asset value of what is purchased are both more acutely aligned to the local economic base.

As some of us noticed during the inane “debate” over the bailout last fall, local and regional banks had by and large not fallen prey to the overleveraging that was destroying many of the major financial institutions, they complained that their irresponsible, larger competitors were being rescued from their own mistakes, and they wanted no part of the bailout because they didn’t need it. Of course, the idea that we should (gasp) interfere in The Market to build up a system of local and tiered finance rather than an overly concentrated, globalized one would be met with the same dismissive response, “Don’t you know that times have changed?” George Grant observed a long time ago that if small-government conservatives in America succeeded in shrinking the federal government and restoring state sovereignty, this would clear the way for domination by corporate oligarchy unless it was accompanied by economic decentralization. Of course, anytime someone suggests creating a more decentralized economy, he is dubbed a socialist who wants to meddle with the glorious Market, as if the current predicament resulted from anything other than collusion between centralized power and concentrated wealth. This is the false choice that defenders of the status quo love to present as a way to paralyze and halt any attempt at making sane reforms, and it is enormously helpful to them to write off as “idealists” those few who have been arguing for political and economic decentralization for decades. Since we are not going back to “an agrarian society or a totally localized economy,” and since we all know this, why are we spending any time successfully demolishing strawmen that represent the views of virtually no one alive today?

Cross-posted at Front Porch Republic

Rod recommended this David Klinghoffer post, which points us to the latter’s column in The Jerusalem Post that makes the following argument:

Elementally, there are two different personality types here. Where you come down reveals a lot not just about your politics – though political views flow from it – but about the orientation of your soul.

Zero-sum personalities often resent the rich and the gifted and may succumb to a temptation to punish them. Anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiments are a frequent consequence. Ex-nihilo personalities have no reason to resent Jews or Israel.

A nation populated by ex-nihilo types would see Israel as the embodiment of virtues its own citizens deem crucial to their happiness and prosperity. For America, abandoning Israel would mean rejecting values that have been key to our identity as a powerhouse of creative and commercial leadership. In simple terms, it’s bad for business [bold mine-DL].

That is the Israel test, in which Americans have a greater stake in choosing rightly than we do in any calculus based on the questionable premise that the United States must have a democratic ally precisely in the space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

You start to see why Israel divides free-market America from socialist Western Europe [bold mine-DL], and pro-business, anti-tax conservatives from those left-liberals, including some Jews, who would use government power to press the “rich” further and further to support the rest of us.

No, actually, I don’t, because the thesis of The Israel Test makes no sense. Let’s think about this. If we believe Gilder, the author of The Israel Test, secular sympathy for a socialist state increases in proportion to one’s hostility to redistributive and socialist views. This is an outlandish effort to impose unbearably great significance on a single state, which isn’t doing the state or its citizens any favors, and it doesn’t even remotely match up to the contours of political divisions over Israel here or anywhere in the West. It cannot begin to account for small-government conservatives who don’t like foreign aid and entangling alliances, it leaves no room for liberal hawks who want universal health care, and of course it cannot make sense of progressives and realists who are critical of Israel in the context of ongoing, ultimately unconditional support. The list could go on.

Armenian immigrants are on average quite successful in commerce wherever they live, but almost the exact opposite coalition of political forces sympathizes with Armenians today as embraces a fervently and conventionally “pro-Israel” view. Would anyone seriously argue that it is “bad for business” or a rejection of “values that have been key to our identity as a powerhouse of creative and commercial leadership” if Washington continues to side with Ankara and Baku rather than Yerevan over every issue? Indeed, many people in the energy sector would argue that going against Baku and favoring Yerevan would be bad for our actual oil business. Even the strained, overdone strategic argument for the alliance with Israel has some semblance of truth to it; The Israel Test as presented here seems to have little or none. Even the rather exaggerated “civilizational” argument for Israel has some basis in reality.

The second part of Klinghoffer’s column does have some interesting reflections on the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, but it seems to me where the earlier part of the column went badly awry and where Gilder apparently also erred was in the conflation of the divine act of creation with human creativity and ingenuity. The latter imitates the former, but it is not the same kind of act. Properly speaking, there are no “ex nihilo personalities,” because people cannot create ex nihilo. As the old joke has it, God tells the scientist to make his own dirt before he can use it to create life.

This Yglesias post on the FPI conference on Afghanistan reminds me that Robert Stacy McCain was completely wrong when he made this prediction. My response back in October holds up pretty well, and we’re just getting started with this administration:

He is, however, quite wrong when he says that foreign policy differences will fade in significance in the coming years. To the extent that Obama is relatively hawkish on most things except Iraq, which Republican hawks deny for electoral reasons now but will rediscover once he is in power, we will see exactly the same splits between the hawks who side with the Obama administration’s interventions in (name a few countries where we have no business being) and the conservatives who do not believe these interventions to be in the national interest. It will be very much like what we saw in the 1990s. Mainstream, “responsible” and “realist” conservatives and Republicans will support Obama’s actions, and a significant but largely uninfluential minority on the right will protest against them. All of the bogus arguments war supporters have trotted out for years to justify the Iraq debacle will be turned around on them, and most of them will end up backing the next intervention to halt a “genocide,” “liberate” another country or stop weapons proliferation. They will delight in the frustration of the antiwar left and praise the bipartisan consensus in favor of American hegemony.

I would like to be able to say that this is a result of my far-seeing powers of prediction and insight, but anyone who followed my election predictions know that I have no such powers. It was fairly simple to make this claim seven months ago, and it could have been made long before that, because on policy substance it has been clear for a very long time that neoconservatives were largely pleased with Obama’s foreign policy views. Once you set aside election-year hackery and partisan spin, neoconservatives have never made a secret of their sympathy for Obama’s interventionist vision. It was also obvious that neoconservatives would make this move, because, as Yglesias says, this is more or less exactly how they responded to Clinton’s activist foreign policy. This suits liberal hawks and the center-left of the foreign policy world just fine, because neoconservatives are ultimately the ones they are willing to do business with and they regard the mass of Jacksonian nationalists and non-interventionists on the right and the anti-imperialists on the left as the far worse alternative.

Bullet dodged, John! The Cutler trade to Chicago is depressing news for me as a Denver fan (remember, I may have grown up in New Mexico, but I was born in Denver), but it can only be good news for Bears fans, who have been waiting for a first-class quarterback longer than I have been alive. Now they have one. Meanwhile, the Jets management can ponder their perpetual second-rate status after they cut the best quarterback they had in the last 30 years to hire a has-been as a one-year replacement.

Following John’s heroic lead, we here at Eunomia (both Caleb d’Anvers and I) are trying to do our part to reduce the global menace of blogospheric emissions. While Eunomia continued to have unsustainable levels of production in March, there are reasons to hope that April will see clear reductions as part of the collective effort to avert the consequences of our current posting crisis.

P.S. And, yes, Jim, I think we all got it.