Charles Homans recounts the too-brief history of Culture11. As a former contributor, I found it strange to be reading about the site’s demise in a magazine profile. The contrast Homans makes between C11 and Big Hollywood is instructive, and tends to confirm my rather jaundiced view of the inverse relationship between success and quality. Essentially, on one site you would find intelligent cultural criticism, and on the other you would find a lot of the cultural whining that seems especially concentrated among actors who have a political grudge with the rest of their own industry. In the former, there would be smart takes on new films by Suderman, for example, and in the latter you get Dirk Benedict complaining about how feminism corrupted the new BSG or Breitbart going off on another one of his insane rants. One site was challenging, the other flatters its audience’s prejudices. Naturally, the second one survives and thrives.

For the most part, the profile has elicited a number of sympathetic comments, but the comment I found most telling was Dan Riehl’s remark:

I never even heard of this Culture11 site until I read that it was gone. If someone wants to know why it failed, extrapolate that out to other bloggers and web surfers, that was it.

Of course, this has the ring of “no one I know voted for Nixon” as an example of how thoroughly isolated inside a cocoon some conservative bloggers seem to be. It might just be the case that, if someone has never heard of something, this is a function of his interests and the focus of his attention. Then again, if this is any indication of how cut off conservative bloggers tend to be from broader conversations I wouldn’t be surprised if this response is typical. However, it does make the embargo on linking to the site by RedState take on some additional importance. In the profile, David Kuo mentioned that moment as a point of pride, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the decision at RedState not to link to C11 had something to do with the site’s apparent obscurity to other bloggers on the right.

In any case, read Homans’ feature. You can check in on the current blogging of some of the old C11 editors at The American Scene.

Mark Thompson has penned a challenging broadside against skeptics of free trade, including me, and he makes a number of arguments that deserve to be answered. There does not seem to me to be much to the argument that commerce and trade do not weaken distinctions between different local and regional cultures. Clearly, they do, and I think it is clear through the networks of dependence that trade creates that local economies suffer the same atrophying effects as local cultures, all of which expose the people in these localities to greater disruptions when those networks break down or demand dries up. Localists tend to take for granted that dependence on distant centers of wealth and power, which the interdependence at the heart of globalism requires, is antithetical to a decentralized political and economic order. I can imagine why someone might want to reject such a decentralized order, but I simply don’t see how someone maintains that it is compatible with the results of globalist policies.

If regional differences remain in the U.S., they are much less pronounced today than ever before thanks to a combination of mass mobility, technological advance facilitating rapid transport and communication across the continent and shared consumer culture. Minnesotans may not eat fatback and Vermonters may not eat rellenos, but everyone is importing the same pork from the same factory farms in the Midwest, and perhaps the less said about the homogenizing effects of the national Buffalo wing phenomenon the better. We are steadily moving towards the economic, cultural and political monoculture that Thompson claims we are avoiding.

Cultural homogenization on one level has advanced rapidly as transplants relocate from place to place, the highway system has reduced barriers of time and space between different parts of the country and television and radio have steadily eradicated distinctive accents in mass communication, which gradually eliminates them from everyday life as well. At the same time, there has also been fragmentation and dispersion as people have tended towards identifying with others who have similar lifestyles and tastes, so that they can pretend that they belong to non-localized “communities” while becoming steadily more alienated from their actual neighbors. Considering this, Charles Murray’s assumption that the institution of community is somehow being kept “robust and vital” in the current American model is questionable. For Murray, it is necessary to assert:

“Community” can embrace people who are scattered geographically.

This doesn’t seem true at all, but it is the sort of “clarification” that one has to make to defend the model as one that strengthens, rather than enervates, communities.

Thompson is on shakiest ground when he writes:

If a particular industry is so incredibly important to a region or culture, then why can’t that region or culture continue participating in that industry once the primary corporation leaves? Isn’t this, after all, what the whole “Buy Local” movement is about? Why must we only “make things” if we can make fistfuls of money doing it – can’t we “make things” as a hobby? At the very least, can’t we just “make things” on a smaller scale? Put another way, if we believe that it is so important to “make things” to have a vibrant economy, then the way to do that is to, well, “make things.” It’s not to figure out a way to make it profitable to “make things” for sale within our own borders.

I assume this is a sharp bit of polemical rhetoric, or perhaps a joke, because I don’t see how Thompson can’t really understand that depriving a local economy of investment capital makes it impossible for a town or region to just keep “making things.” The communities and regions most adversely affected by the effects of trade agreements are not going to have the time or resources to keep “making things” as they once did, not even on a reduced scale, but either sink into recession or retool entirely to try to pull in other industries.

Localists may not like many of the disruptive effects of “creative destruction,” but I think it is safe to say that we understand the need for incentives and, yes, some profit for economic enterprises to endure. Indeed, I am bit baffled by this entire passage. It is as if those of us critiquing free trade regimes think that people are not self-interested and do not respond to incentives, but that they are all altruists with a built-in overdeveloped sense of solidarity with their neighbors. On the contrary, it is because we know that they are not automatically the latter that there need to be measures that guard against unduly cheap competition from abroad and policies that encourage or reward companies for relocating operations overseas should be resisted. Of course, we are not interested in people making things just to make things as a hobby, nor do I think most of us are interested in people making things that no one is willing to buy at a good price, but we are instead interested in local economies that do not need to rely nearly so much on vast networks of transportation and supply.

For the record, I don’t think the nature of a polity’s trade policies necessarily makes it more or less likely to go to war, just as I don’t believe for a minute that democratization makes states more peaceful. As with democratization, which has tended to intensify and prolong international wars thanks to factors of mass mobilization and total warfare, I think trade policies that create greater interdependence may make small wars by great powers more frequent and they do not make wars between great powers any less likely. Theorists of democratic peace cannot make sense of the war between the two most thoroughly democratic polities of the mid-19th century (the Union and Confederacy), and theorists of an economic liberal peace cannot account for that war between two parts of what had been an enormous free trading zone. One might as well craft a theory of international relations that cannot explain the origins of WWI–such a theory would be essentially useless. If shared economic interests through trade discourage certain conflicts (a British-American war over Venezuela in the 1890s, for instance), they create, widen and escalate others. Europe has not suffered another major continental war since 1945 in large part because it served as the effectively occupied territory of the superpowers for half a century, and continues to live under the protection of U.S. security guarantees, all of which has sublimated European security competition between major states. The fairly artificial and (presumably) temporary U.S. guarantees permitted the creation of the EU, but there is no guarantee that such a trade zone would have precluded warfare or ensures that there will not be renewed warfare in Europe in the future.

On the other hand, part of overseeing the convergence I mentioned earlier involved the maintenance of U.S. hegemony, which has involved several significant foreign wars and numerous smaller military interventions over at least the last thirty years. As Bacevich says in The Limits of Power:

The chief responsibility [of the “indispensable nation”] was to preside over a grand project of political-economic convergence and integration commonly referred to as globalization. In point of fact, however, globalization served as a euphemism for soft, or informal, empire.

Naturally, the focus on global governance came at the expense of local and national security:

Odd as they may seem, these priorities reflected a core principle of national security policy: When it came to defending vital American interests, asserting control over the imperial periphery took precedence over guarding the nation’s own perimeter.

American towns routinely pay the price for the policies of political-economic convergence with respect to trade, and American cities have since paid the price for the policies of imperial management. Not only is globalism antithetical to localism in theory, but the policies that facilitate it are directly or indirectly harmful to American localities themselves.

Cross-posted at Front Porch Republic

Alex Massie had a similar reaction to Stephen Walt’s post on Iran’s nuclear program:

In the end, too much of his argument is based upon the notion that the United States is Really Crazy, which risks leaving Walt making an argument that is the mirror image of the Mad Mullahs are Mad and Cannot Be Trusted Not to Do Mad Things line that often surfaces when Iran is the topic for discussion.

Quite. The part of Walt’s argument that I found the most troubling was this:

Second, we need to explain to Iran that possessing a known nuclear weapons capability is not without its own costs and risks. Today, if a terrorist group somehow obtained a nuclear weapon and then used it, we would not suspect Iran of having provided it and they would face little risk of retaliation. Why not? Because we know they don’t have any weapons right now. But imagine how we might react a decade hence, if we knew that Iran had built a few nuclear weapons and some terrorist group whose agenda was somewhat similar to Iran’s managed to explode a bomb somewhere in the world, or even on American soil? Under those terrible circumstances, Tehran would have to worry a lot about U.S. retaliation, even if it had nothing whatsoever to do with the attack.

There are two ways one can take this. One is that Walt has exaggerated the reflexive instinct of our government to blame “rogue” states for acts of terrorism, in which case Tehran has fewer reasons to fear being wrongly blamed for acts it does not commit. The example of Iraq would teach them that states targeted by Washington will be attacked no matter what the state of their weapons program is, so Tehran would not have much confidence that the absence of such a program protects it from being blamed or attacked in response to attacks in which it had no hand. The other main possibility is that Walt has described Washington’s likely response very well, which would mean that Tehran has every incentive to build up an arsenal to defend against the inevitable attack that it will face in the event that some other group or state sets off a nuke.

The problem with convincing other states that your government behaves irrationally is that it removes at least some of their constraints on action. Other states will do things that they would otherwise not do on the assumption that our government is fundamentally paranoid and prone to overreaction. Incidentally, this is why the loose talk of “should we nuke Iran now or nuke them later?” during the 2008 campaign (mostly in the Republican debates) was so dangerous. If the Iranian government believes that there is a serious chance that we would use tactical nukes in an unprovoked war against them, building up a deterrent or creating a contingency plan for retaliation after the fact becomes much more attractive to them than it was. These are not the ideas we should want to be encouraging in the minds of any foreign leaders.

Another problem with trying to instill fear in Iran that it will be blamed for WMD terrorist attacks it does not sponsor is that no state is ever going to give away WMDs to a third party anyway. The scenario is not remotely credible, and no one would be more aware of how absurd the scenario is than members of the government being (falsely) accused of doing this. For one thing, there is the risk that the third party will act independently and be tied to your government, which means that the state will bear the consequences for actions it did not authorize. There is no advantage for the state, which bears all the risk in a conflict that it would surely lose, and no state has ever existed that developed a supremely powerful weapon and then willingly let this weapon out of its control. The idea that deterrence cannot work with “rogue” states because they can hand off their weapons to third parties is simply nonsense, and one would think that the role this argument played in providing a rationalization for the Iraq invasion would make us very wary of employing it in any way.

Dave Weigel has a good report on the growing enthusiasm for a future Sanford presidential bid. As Weigel explains, Sanford is managing to draw support from activists in early caucus and primary states, Ron Paul supporters, national donors, and his traditional backers in the Club for Growth. This is a much broader cross-section of the party than Paul was able to draw on, which at first seems bizarre. With respect to policy, it is difficult to find that many major differences between the two. The real difference hinges, of course, on the intensity of Paul’s foreign policy critique, much of which Sanford seems to share in principle, but which he does not discuss on a regular basis.

As Philip Klein correctly observes, Sanford would have to find some happy medium between Paul’s vocal non-interventionist stance and a much more activist foreign policy if he is to keep from being marginalized. Perhaps some consensus could be found in Bacevichian realism, which does not necessarily reject intervention entirely but insists on a much more limited definition of the national interest and a more humble view of American power. Could the “humble” foreign policy Candidate Bush promised in 2000 be the answer? Perhaps, but not if the main line of criticism of Obama’s foreign policy is that he is too conciliatory and too interested in diplomatic engagement. The trouble that the GOP has is that it cannot bring itself to endorse the radical critique of the empire, despite (because of?) the basically anti-conservative nature of the enterprise, and so its members consistently attack the actual practice of a more humble foreign policy as weakness and retreat. In 2000, there was space in the wake of Kosovo for the “humble” foreign policy promise to gain some traction and distinguish the two parties. Looking ahead, I still do not see the space opening up for this view on the right, much as I would like to see it happen. On issue after issue, mainstream conservatives are criticizing the administration for its lack of arrogance and bellicose rhetoric. That doesn’t necessarily preclude them from turning on a dime and “rediscovering” their skepticism of activist foreign policy, but it makes it much harder for their criticism to be taken seriously after a decade of cheerleading for empire.

What is likely to separate a quixotic Huckabee-style campaign from a winning one is very simply funding, and early indications are that Sanford is attracting the interest of the people who spurned Huckabee. This could have the curious effect of once again making economic conservatism, so called, a major factor in defining a future primary field despite the genuinely limited appeal of this part of the coalition. Were Huckabee to run again, Sanford would have to contend with the church networks and legions of evangelical voters who put him over the top in Iowa and who very nearly gave him South Carolina. Without a four-way split vote in S.C. including Thompson, Huckabee likely would have won there and been in a much better position to contest Florida. The most natural profile of a winning nominee is a candidate who emphasizes social conservative themes rather than taking a hard line on fiscal and economic policy. While I think Sanford has a lot to recommend him, I am not at all sure that the excitement he is generating among activists will translate into the kind of turnout he will need all across the South to compete with Huckabee (who also opposed TARP) or one of the more moderate governors.

Russell Arben Fox on localism and public schools.

Patrick Deneen on vices.

James Matthew Wilson on the problems of free trade and interdependence.

Susan McWilliams on the social significance of the decline of beer-drinking.

Caleb Stegall on hog killing.

Katherine Dalton’s profile of Indian ecofeminist Vandana Shiva.

Mark Shiffman on the university.

Mark Mitchell on pain.

Jason Peters on the ubiquity of texting.

Patrick Deneen on the importance of a long time horizon.

Jeremy Beer on the state of modern farming.

James Matthew Wilson on religious poetry.

Bill Kauffman on Edward Abbey.

Caleb Stegall on political friendship.

Mark Shiffman on the doctrine of creation.

All this clamoring about the Europeanization of America has not made much sense to me. After all, what can it mean to say, “In short, the more liberal your views, the more Belgian your brain”? Flemish nationalists are liberals in the old European sense rather than the modern American one, and they are Belgians, much as they might not want to remain so. They are also among the most hostile to centralizing tendencies in the EU and Belgium, and they are among the most avid advocates for market-oriented policies modeled on American practices. Someone might say that Flemish nationalist desire to be independent of Belgium proves the point about Belgians, but usually generalizations that don’t apply meaningfully to a large percentage of the population of a country aren’t very good ones. Of course, that’s half the problem with this discussion. Belgian here doesn’t actually refer to anything about the real politics of Belgium or the political views of Belgians relative to America or anywhere else, but simply stands in as a marker for a stereotype of European “statist,” in much the same way the mainstream conservative use of “French” as a pejorative description is supposed to refer to military weakness.

When Frenchmen deride the “Anglo-Saxon” economic model and French opponents of globalization rail against the Americanization of their country, they are usually deemed ridiculous by the same circles who now fret about Europeanization and they are dismissed as nothing more than anti-American cranks. In fact, these “anti-Europeans” may now be finding that they have more interests in common with European critics of globalization than they ever imagined possible. Despite formal support for globalist trade policies, they find themselves in the predicament of much of the North American right defined by George Grant forty years ago:

Those of the ‘right’, who stand by the freedoms of the individual to hold property and for firmer enforcement of our present laws, seem to have hesitation about some of the consequences of modernity, but they do not doubt the central fact of the North American dream–progress through technological advance. It may be indeed that, like most of us, the ‘right’ want it both ways. They want to maintain certain moral customs, freedoms of property and even racial rights which are not in fact compatible with advancing technological civilisation. Be that as it may, the North American ‘right’ believes firmly in technical advance.

It seems to me that globalists would argue that national economies and regulatory schemes will tend to become more like one another as globalization continues, but so far as I can tell there are very few people on the right at the moment criticizing the policies that foster and encourage globalization, which is the process that will lead to the increasing convergence of our economic model and the European economic model insofar as one can generalize about a European model. To the extent that there is a distinctive American model, that distinctiveness will be eroded by globalization (just as the once far more socially democratic western Europe has become more like the U.S. in the last 30 years). Left-liberals in America and the modern center-left in Germany and Britain are simply embracing the full logic of that process both culturally and politically. Those who want to shore up and preserve distinctive national economic and political systems cannot simultaneously endorse the main force erasing differences between national systems.

Here is the basic contradiction at the heart of the American right’s embrace of technological progress and globalist trade policies: the cultural and political values and the economic model that conservatives claim they wish to preserve are necessarily going to be changed by globalization, and this process is going to be quickened by technological change. To a large extent, conservatives will have brought this fate upon themselves with their embrace of the economic (and, through hegemonism, the political) side of globalization. Like their predecessors forty years ago, the American right wants to have it both ways by enjoying the economic benefits of globalization, real or imagined, while insisting that no cultural price has to be paid and no political sacrifices need to be made.

Update: This post is now also up at New Atlanticist.

Put simply, Obama defends his friends. Ideas are utterly beside the point. If his friends have ideas that are abhorrent, or deeply injurious to his political supporters, or the American people at large, then tough toenails for his supporters and for the American people. ~Paul Rosenberg

As strange as it may sound coming from me, I think this is quite unfair to Obama. It is certainly not true, and it misreads why he is hanging on to Geithner. (By the way, the preoccupation some people on the left have with Obama’s friendship with Rick Warren is almost as bizarre and obsessive as complaints about Obama’s friendship with Rashid Khalidi.) It was typical of Bush to retain his friends and loyalists regardless of the political cost, and this was a habit that was undoubtedly reinforced by the man’s impressive obliviousness to the real world outside his bubble, but this has been the least of Obama’s problems. While it may not be any more flattering than Rosenberg’s assessment, the truth is very different.

Ideas are not beside the point for Obama, but ideas are principally a means to another end, which is Obama’s advancement, so he will use whichever ideas seem to serve that end. This is what his admirers refer to as pragmatism, and which I tend not to find very edifying, but it is how he has been able to rise so quickly. Very plainly, Obama does not protect his friends, but he will promote and defend those whom the establishment embraces and approves. On the contrary, it is his friends, mentors and close associates who seem to be among the most expendable, and they are the ones he tends to drop when they become liabilities. Allies and supporters who continue to be useful are retained. Warren has been useful to Obama because he conveys an impression of moderation and their relationship is supposed to convey Obama’s willingness to engage and understand evangelical Christians. The latter is not real, which is why the connection with Warren is so useful. As I said two and a half years ago:

All of this is supposed to show us that Obama is thoughtful, rather than callous, profound rather than predictable, but it does not. It is the tactic of the man who says, “I appreciate your point of view,” when in fact he does not appreciate it and wants to neutralise your criticism by deflecting the question in an entirely different direction.

Geithner’s presence in the administration represents its acceptance of “centrism” in economics and it is supposed to defend against the charge that the administration is embracing some sort of radical agenda. Above all, Obama keeps Geithner in place because he accepts continuing the collusion between government and the financial sector that Geithner and the decisions he made support. As I wrote in the February issue of Chronicles:

From what we can gather so far, Obama’s Treasury Department is likely to be even more active in intervening in the financial sector. As head of the New York Federal Reserve, Obama’s nominee for treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, endorsed each of Secretary Henry Paulson’s and Chairman Ben Bernanke’s bailout decisions, and Obama himself supported the bailout legislation in the early fall. One of the consequences of the bailout debate in the months since the financial crisis became particularly acute has been that the Democratic Party, already reconciled to financial interests during the Clinton years, has become even more closely allied to Wall Street.

For all of the newfound loathing for Geithner in the country*, he is simply the face of the very same bankrupt establishment, “centrist” forces who oversaw the unfolding of the crisis and crafted the ill-advised, ruinous TARP, which so many people continue to find just as wanting today as we did six months ago. Obama stands by Geithner for two very easily understood reasons: Geithner remains one of the main public faces of the failed establishment that Obama has spent his national career accommodating, and to do anything other than stand by one of his senior Cabinet members this early in his administration would mean political disaster for him. Obama has become trapped by his own accommodationist instincts, as the policies and personnel that the establishment embraces prove to be deeply flawed. Obama does not tend to break with establishment conventions, which significantly limits his ability to break with figures such as Geithner after they have already received the establishment seal of approval.

* It is worth remembering that when Geithner’s name was leaked as the nominee for Treasury, the market rallied amid strangely high hopes that he, the protege of Summers, was Wall Street’s sort of Treasury Secretary. That assessment might very well be right in a narrow sense, but that never meant that he was going to be a good Treasury Secretary. In the last few months, as he has replayed Paulson’s Greatest Hits, not even the markets have much confidence in him. In fairness to Geithner, he still has no confirmed deputies to help him, and many of the deputy posts still lack nominees. The already-labyrinthine vetting process, which has undoubtedly become even more excruciating for the vetted after the embarrassments in January, continues to hold up these basic appointments.

As some already know, I will be attending my graduation ceremony tomorrow where I will be receiving my Ph.D. Blogging will resume on Monday, when I will catch up on delinquent BSG blogging after the finale and return to proper Front Porch Republic posting. My thanks to all of my readers and colleagues who have supported me as I worked on the dissertation.

One of the stranger things in recent weeks has been Matt Yglesias’ preoccupation with mockingpeopleconcerned about the inflationary effects of the Fed’s grossly irresponsible, inflationary policies. It’s true that inflationary policies will help debtors, because these policies will ruin the value of the dollar. Perhaps there would be less reason to be concerned about 1970s-era problems if the central bank weren’t making the same disastrous moves made in the 1970s.