Good news from John Schwenkler: he has secured a teaching job, and he and his wife are expecting their second child in the fall. I’m very pleased for John on both counts. Now if he could just tell us how he managed to get an academic job in this market in philosophy, that would be really interesting.

But again, I don’t think Frum and Brooks and co. want to eliminate the base, they just think it won’t be enough in the future. ~Alex Massie

I’m not sure what Brooks thinks, and these two don’t speak for all of the reformers, but in Frum’s case this is not quite correct. Frum’s post on the significance of Bristol Palin’s marital woes concludes this way:

The socially conservative downscale voter is increasingly becoming a mirage – and a Republican politics based on that mirage will only lead us deeper into the desert.

To be precise, Frum is not exactly arguing for eliminating the base, but is saying that the base as it has been known in the past is evaporating and becoming something else. What he is recommending, as usual, is that the GOP abandon social conservatism before the socially conservative downscale voter abandons them by ceasing to exist. There may be something to this to the extent that rising generations are less likely to marry, or are more likely to marry late or marry and then divorce fairly quickly, and so one might think that they would be less likely to align themselves politically with a party that champions marriage and family (at least rhetorically). The trends he identifies are real, but his conclusions do not necessarily follow. One of the demographic reasons for declining GOP support among 18-29 year olds over the last several cycles is that Millennials are less likely to be white, married and Christian, which are the characteristics that have by and large defined the GOP voting coalition for several decades. Frum places the emphasis on marriage as the most relevant factor, which may or may not be true.

If it is true, it is very far from clear that Frum’s recommendation of dropping social conservative positions is the right one to follow. Ross and Reihan see the same problem, but have proposed an entirely different solution, which is that the GOP should adopt policies to promote and support stable marriages and childbearing. That is, they think the GOP should bother to implement policies that follow through on the rhetoric they have been using for decades. (They would probably not put it quite that way, but I think this is fair.) Their rationale for this is more than electoral strategy, though it is related to that as well, as they see the connections between family instability, lack of education and lower income and recognize the danger to the health of our political system if increasing family instability creates a highly stratified society. They argue for preventing the kind of social and economic stratification that will invariably result if these trends are not checked, whereas Frum essentially accepts that these trends are unfolding and the GOP must find some way to adapt to them. To put it another way, Ross and Reihan are interested in channeling these changes in a constructive fashion, while Frum argues for getting out of the way and going along with them.

One place where Frum’s analysis breaks down entirely is in the assumption that family instability and having children out of wedlock make people less likely to vote for a social conservative platform, when there is good reason to believe that it is precisely the instability and insecurity in private life that attract many voters to a social conservative message. Seeing the effects of chaos around them, these voters crave some semblance of order and an affirmation of norms. This is the perverse and perhaps unsustainable relationship between social disintegration and the politics of social conservatism, and I think it is a lesson to conservatives that the real work of cultural renewal is not primarily to be found in political activism but it is in combating that disintegration directly through local institutions, education and social work.

Social conservative voters have been used to win elections, but their agenda has never taken anything close to priority with the party. Part of this may be because the party’s ability to mobilize social conservative voters depends heavily on the ongoing failure to combat many of the social ills that generate social conservatives’ discontent with the current state of affairs. It may be worth pondering why it is that the period of the last decade where we have seen income stagnation and growing income inequality is also the period during which we have seen the intensification of social conservative rhetoric (if not of actual policies) and the increasing profile of socially conservative candidates inside the GOP who have, a la Huckabee, also started to offer some minimal lip service to downscale voters’ economic concerns.

Somewhere in all of this there may be some way to explain the manic reaction to Sarah Palin among rank-and-file conservatives, as her family possessed both elements of stability and instability that allowed her family life to be presented as both an ideal and as a recognizable, messy reality. Perhaps the conservative excuse-making for her daughter’s behavior was not just politically-motivated opportunism, but prompted recognition of the kind of family disruption that was only too familiar to them from their own families. Palin defenders fixated on class and education differences to explain the typically upscale conservative criticisms directed at her, but perhaps (and this is just speculation) it was actually in the differing experiences of family stability that determined whether someone was favorably inclined or critical. The identity politics that drove people to say, “She’s one of us” allowed her supporters to see her as someone very much like them and perhaps also someone who enjoyed a degree of family stability that they did not. That is, she was someone with whom they could identify, but also someone whom they aspired to imitate. Then again, this may not apply to the Palin phenomenon at all and the reasons for it may be entirely different. On that inconclusive note, I will stop.

Massie has an earlier post on this question here.

Whether the dumbing down of America or soccer came first is hard to say, but soccer is clearly an important means by which American energy, drive, and competitiveness is being undermined to the point of no return. ~Stephen Webb

Via Massie

No, I don’t think Webb is joking. At least, he says he isn’t joking. An essential element of anti-soccer jeremiads–and Webb actually labels his a jeremiad to make sure you don’t miss his prophetic purpose–is the lack of experience in actually playing soccer. For that matter, if your main experience with the game is watching (or playing in) AYSO matches at the local park, you are not going to think much of it, just as Europeans would not be very impressed if they attended nothing but Little League. At the other end, Americans are usually only exposed to soccer on television during the World Cup, and the U.S. team rarely advances to the final rounds, so most Americans have no rooting interest in a match between, say, Brazil and Germany, and they don’t know who most of the players are, because almost all of them play for European clubs. Having ignored the sport for four years, we Americans find that they are out of the loop in an ongoing conversation that the rest of the world understands perfectly well. Our own continental parochialism stares back at us, and we get annoyed.

Whenever I see or hear an American holding forth on the evils of soccer, one thing that I can rely on is that the person usually has no understanding of the sport, and Webb certainly hasn’t any. The evidence for this is clear in that Webb seems to think that soccer teaches that everyone is a winner. Who on earth has ever played soccer and said, “Yes, this game is geared towards boosting self-esteem!”? That is madness. Practice slide tackling for ten minutes and then tell me this with a straight face.

This lack of understanding is the crucial part in any tiresome exercise in sports nationalism: “Our manly sport has subtlety and form, and it reflects the true nature of the universe, whereas their stupid children’s game is pointless and boring.” The Bollywood film Lagaan actually captures this quite amusingly when Aamir Khan’s character laughs at the British cricketers for playing a glorified version of gilli danda, only to discover later that he knows nothing about the game. Europeans can make the same boredom charge against baseball (and they have), we can say it about soccer or cricket (and we have), and no doubt almost everyone outside Canada has said it about curling (but not, I think, about hockey!).

Indeed, Webb dives right in with the boredom accusation, and goes from there. Ask a foreigner from somewhere other than Japan or Latin America, and he will make the same complaint about baseball–it takes so long for every pitch, and there are these huge stretches where nothing is happening! How can you stupid Americans stand the tedium? Of course, connoisseurs of baseball know that there is almost always something happening or about to happen, because they are paying attention to things that tend to escape casual notice, and they enjoy the rhythm of the game in any case. More to the point, we like it because we have learned to like it by watching and playing it our entire lives, much as football-centric sports cultures have done with their sport. Europeans also tend to find American football boring and incomprehensible, and I’m sure it seems that way to them.

The most ridiculous charge against soccer is its alleged egalitarian ethic. This is not remotely true. The importance of skill and precision in playing soccer is hard to overestimate. Even if it were egalitarian, though, it could hardly be more obsessed with equality than the vicious leveling impulse of that quintessentially American version of car racing, NASCAR. NASCAR is plainly a joke compared to international open-wheel auto racing, partly because of the built-in leveling through all of the restrictions imposed on the cars, and this egalitarian impulse artificially keeps the superior drivers with better engineers stuck in the pack for the entire race.

Formula One has its drawbacks as a spectator sport when some teams are reliably better than the rest of the field. This is the case thanks to greater funding, better technology and better drivers hired through greater funding, but that ought to be a certain kind of conservative’s favorite organization of a sport: some benefit from built-in advantages that others can’t have, and life isn’t fair. The Ferrari and McLaren teams will always tend to make mincemeat out of the other teams, and that’s just the way it is. Yankees fans will be able to appreciate this arrangement, but it is an awfully strange one for an overwhelmingly European racing league to have. Aren’t all these Europeans obsessed with egalitarianism, or is the complaint against them this week that their societies are too stratified and class conscious? Or is it both? I must check my anti-European memos more often.

Of course, sport is supposed to represent a world in which instant morality prevails and fair competition is the rule, which is why all decent human beings hate the Yankees, just as everyone got extremely tired of Schumacher’s seemingly endless string of championships. The point is this: if you spend enough time at it, you can find the flaws and virtues in every kind of competition, and you can invest this or that sport with some allegedly definitive national or cultural characteristics that embody vitality or decadence. If done as a kind of light-hearted ribbing, it can be quite fun, but when offered as some kind of deadly serious cultural criticism it is dreadful.

Susan McWilliams on Nadya Suleman and our national difficulty with living within our means.

Bill Kauffman’s introduction on the regionalism issue of University Bookman.

Mark Mitchell on the conflict between virtue and a consumption-driven economy.

Stewart Lundy on conservatism and the art of living.

Jeremy Beer’s remembrance of his farming grandfather, originally published in TAC in the 1/12 issue of this year.

Jason Peters on efficiency and knowledge.

Ross has been picked up as the new op-ed columnist at The New York Times. Congratulations to him on the new job. The NYT has made a smart choice, and as always I am looking forward to reading what Ross has to say.

Update: I would just add that I hope this means that The Atlantic will now provide Reihan an individual blog platform to fill the gap Ross will leave behind.

Chris Cornell’s new album, Scream, has finally come out, and my copy just arrived today. It’s about time. From some of the videos I had already seen and on account of the album’s producer, I knew that the sound was going to be very different from most of Cornell’s other music, but for the most part I don’t buy the claim popular among some old Soundgarden fans that Cornell has “sold out.”

Update: To each his own, of course, but David Polansky goes too far when he calls Cornell “execrable.” What is it with that word? It seems to be cropping up quite often lately. Even if Cornell’s alt-rock career with Soundgarden and Audioslave (or Temple of the Dog) is not to your liking, which I can understand easily enough if you didn’t grow up in the ’90s, his solo work in Euphoria Morning and Carry On does not deserve this sort of contempt.

And, yes, the last time I checked, I am human.

Don’t they [the Obama administration] understand that you have to start your term in office by making it clear that people will pay a price if they cross you? ~Stephen Walt

One of the reasons I have not portrayed this controversy as a test of the administration’s will in challenging the status quo is that the Freeman appointment was apparently never the President’s idea and Blair did not consult the White House about the appointment. If initial reports are correct, DNI Blair made the appointment on his own, so the White House probably preferred dropping Freeman rather than mounting a fight to defend someone they had not selected.

That said, Obama has never been inclined to challenge the establishment consensus in foreign policy since he entered national politics, and this has been especially true with respect to Israel. This is why he supported the Lebanon war and the incursion into Gaza, why he abased himself before AIPAC last year, why he distanced himself from Brzezinski’s mild defense of Walt and Mearsheimer about as quickly as humanly possible, and why in principle he remains committed to using any and all means to prevent Iran from acquiring nukes. Despite all of that, many of the usual suspects were still obsessed with spinning everything Obama said or did in the most negative way possible. The Freeman appointment drew nearly as much criticism from left as from the right because there were quite a few Obama supporters who had already defended his record on Israel, and so they took advantage of the reported fact that Freeman was not Obama’s idea. They could tear down Freeman without necessarily having to contradict their previous assessments of Obama. Had it just been the same people who had been raving madly about Obama’s dinner with Said and his friendship with Rashid Khalidi all last year, I am guessing the administration might have been able to put up with or ignore the controversy, but it was the presence of several Obama defenders in the ranks of Freeman’s critics that kept the controversy from being dismissed as nothing more than partisan hackery. In the event, it was ideological hackery, which is apparently still taken quite seriously.

Incidentally, from early on in the controversy I thought it was mistaken to frame support for Freeman as a matter of changing U.S. policy, when this is exactly the last thing that the appointment represented. On this point, some of his defenders got a bit ahead of themselves in declaring victory, and some made tactical mistakes in not pushing back more specifically on the Saudi and Chinese questions. Once Freeman’s appointment became seen a test of how the administration would be perceived on its approach to the Near East, rather than judged as a matter of intelligence analysis apart from policy (where Freeman’s predecessors and colleagues all insisted that he would be outstanding for the post), the outcome was more or less inevitable.

All of this is a drawn-out way of saying that the administration probably doesn’t see this as an episode where it has failed to punish people who crossed them, but as a controversy they did not want to have and were glad to be rid of as soon as they could. Because Obama has no intention of challenging the status quo, he doesn’t really see the defenders of the status quo as his enemies, even though they just dealt his administration a politically damaging blow.

Update: The NYT Washington bureau chief explainsthe lack of coverage:

The bureau chief argued that Freeman wasn’t a “high enough appointment to go nuts over in a big way,” and offered up a challenge: “Go Google his predecessor and see how much coverage he got.”

Well, this was exactly my point when this entire business began. No one paid attention to Freeman’s predecessors, their views or their ties, because the position, while important to some extent, was not nearly so crucial or influential as his critics made it out to be. Indeed, as Ackerman has argued, the chairman of NIC had become relatively less important under the previous administration than the position had been earlier. As Andrew notes, the different treatment Freeman received is significant in itself, because it says something about the reason for the controversy (hint: it is not because of a lack of sensitivity to the plight of Tibetan rioters!*), and might have merited some coverage for that reason, but the bureau chief’s remark helps drive home how unimportant and indeed irrelevant the appointment was as a matter of setting administration policy. This helps to make clear just how hysterical, obsessive and ideological the reaction to his appointment was.

* One of the supposedly damning things that Freeman has said in connection with Tibet is that last year’s riots in Lhasa were “race riots.” Well, they were riots, and they targeted Chinese businessmen and residents whom local Tibetans saw as an intrusive colonial presence, and the Tibetan rioters were ethnically different from the Han Chinese whom they were assaulting. When something similar happens in an American city, it is not all that unusual to refer to it as a race riot. Call it an ethnic riot if you prefer. What is so remarkable about the reaction to this quote is that almost everyone in the U.S. feels obliged to treat every episode of unrest in China through the narrow filter of anti-government activism, when the resentments and conflicts in last year’s riots, while stoked by Chinese colonial policy and provoked by mistreatment of some Tibetan monks, are the product of much more mundane majority resentments of successful minorities. If these riots had happened against Chinese merchants in Indonesia, remarking on the ethnic dimension of the conflict would hardly be something controversial.

Second Update: Regarding the now-infamous quote from the listserv regarding Tiananmen Square, here is some background:

Blair and others countered that the e-mail was taken out of context, and that Freeman was not describing his own views but what he referred to as “the dominant view in China.”

One member of the listserv who did not wish to be identified said that Freeman’s e-mail came in the context of an extended conversation about what lessons the Chinese leadership took from the Tiananmen Square events, and that Freeman himself has always regarded the events as a “tragedy.”

Anyone who has participated in such listservs and other online discussions can imagine how one statement made during the course of a running debate with others, if it were taken in isolation, might give the wrong impression about what you believe about a certain subject. More to the point, when it came to action, as Fallows has already related, Freeman actually worked to help individuals in China. Here is Sidney Rittenberg’s testimony:

To my knowledge–and from personal experience–Chas Freeman as DCM [Deputy Chief of Mission, #2 to the Ambassador] in Beijing was a stalwart supporter of human rights who helped many individuals in need. Not political bluster, but intelligent and courageous action. He is strong in both wisdom and integrity.

What all of this tells me is that most of the criticism of Freeman on matters related to China was premature at best and was made without knowing very much about him, his views or his career. As to the questions of conflict of interest, the IG investigation would have resolved them one way or the other, but instead of waiting for an impartial and professional assessment of these matters the critics piled on with what were likely to have proved to be entirely baseless insinuations about Freeman’s integrity and accusations of working for foreign governments. As usual, character assassins typically reveal more about themselves than about the person they try to destroy.

We’ll all think about this episode for a while. ~James Fallows

As much as I would like to think that Mr. Fallows is right about this, I don’t think this is true. If most people bring up this unhappy episode again, it will be as a cautionary tale to make clear to anyone who wants to serve in government in any important post that merit, qualifications and reputation count for nothing if you do not check off the right ideological boxes. There will be a few who will refer back to this episode as another example of how distorted and warped our policy debate is, but this won’t matter very much. A qualified professional has been inexcusably dragged through the mud to satisfy a bunch of hypocrites, and in return I fully expect that we will get queries as to why we don’t have a better quality of foreign policy realists–you know, the sort who keep their mouths shut about anything controversial and do what they’re told. Then a few years down the road we will wonder why there were not any contrarian and independent minds challenging consensus views that proved to be completely wrong, and then, and perhaps only then, we will look back on this episode and understand how that came about.

In the end, this has been a contestation of power, and the defenders of the status quo won and actually won pretty easily. For all of the pleasant ideas about a changing political landscape and the rise of alternative voices in the debate over U.S. policy in the Near East, all it took to sink a non-confirmable intelligence appointment who had the full confidence of the Director of National Intelligence was a couple of weeks of public whining by a band of petulant, ill-informed hacks. Some may still think about this episode in the days to come, but on the whole “we” will forget, and that is perhaps the most depressing thing about it. The controversy will not elicit a backlash, but will instead change nothing.

Not to get pulled back too much into the Freeman controversy, which I would prefer to see resolved sooner than later, but I did want to comment on Leon Hadar’s post on the main blog. One of the things that Freeman critics have suddenly (re)discovered is their deep concern for human rights violations in China, which would seem to mean that state policy that cultivates a strong relationship with Beijing of the sort that Freeman has endorsed for decades is cynical and maybe even amoral. As Dr. Hadar reminds us, Israel pursues such a relationship just as our government does, and just as it did with apartheid-era South Africa when the two states shared many of the same international enemies and Western critics. It is Israel’s prerogative to pursue diplomatic relations that it believes serve its national interest, and I would expect them to do nothing else, but there is something strange about holding Freeman to a standard on these matters to which his critics have never held the Israeli government. One does not want to impugn motives, but it’s almost as if protestations about Freeman’s views on Tiananmen Square and other Chinese matters are themselves opportunistic and cynical. This would be shocking indeed.

Now it is true that some of Freeman’s defenders have over-generalized when describing his critics, and so have left themselves open to the silly but rhetorically effective taunts of, “Oh yeah, what about Human Rights Watch?” Yes, what about Human Rights Watch? Despite the fact that the organization does not presume to speak on Freeman’s qualifications as an intelligence analyst, which is the most relevant issue at hand, the sudden vesting of HRW with great moral authority by the standard “pro-Israel” crowd is surreal. This is the same organization whose reports on the war in Lebanon were denounced as anti-Semitic, among other slurs, and whose credibility is constantly attacked by these very same people when it describes the abuses committed in Israeli military actions. That is part of the reason for the polemical usage of HRW in this case as a way of saying “even Human Rights Watch is against this appointment, and you all know how much we hate Human Rights Watch,” but most of the critics have zero credibility in this matter. Indeed, under other circumstances, if HRW claimed something to be true they would almost immediately assume that it was false. The people who mocked the idea of proportionality and dismissed reports of civilian casualties and war crimes in Lebanon (and Gaza) cannot expect to be taken seriously when they suddenly pose as allies of the human rights activists, whom they previously attacked and insulted and whom they are now using to serve an entirely different agenda.

Update: As you all know by now, Freeman has withdrawn and issued a statement. Here is an excerpt:

The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors.

That sounds about right.