Ross says:

Here’s a thought experiment: Suppose John McCain were a member of Opus Dei….Do you think this would earn him media scrutiny, and make a difference in the Presidential race? Do you think it ought to? Your answer, I think, should go a long way toward determining how you think about the case of Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright.

Without pushing the experiment as far as Ross goes in his post, the Opus Dei question seems fairly easy to address.  Sam Brownback was and is a member of Opus Dei, and as far as I know few raised this as a problem or controversy that he needed to address.  It certainly did not become a major controversy.  Granted, Brownback was out of the race before the Iowa caucuses, and I can imagine that his membership might have become the subject of some greater attention had he continued in the race and if he stood a chance of being the nominee, but does Ross think that a candidate’s Opus Dei membership would have actually merited similarly intense media scrutiny?  The people who would have found his membership offensive would have been inveterate anti-Catholics and Dan Brown afficionadoes anyway, and I am going to guess that Ross would have found their objections to Opus Dei unreasonable and overwrought.  

Ross’ other comparison is a bit trickier: “suppose he attended a schismatic Latin-Mass parish which had, among other things, bestowed an award on a Lefebvrite bishop given to anti-Semitic remarks.”  Yes, there would be a media firestorm in that case, but instead of making the candidate politically radioactive it would solidify his support with the people who already identified with him and the things that they think the media are actually trying to attack by going after the candidate.  What I think you would see in that case would be a rallying of Christian conservatives around such a person, just as there was a significant rallying of Christian conservatives around Mel Gibson around the time of the release of The Passion to much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the left.  Many Christian conservatives took criticism of The Passion as an open attack on their religion, and so overlooked anything that might give them pause about Gibson and viewed his demonisation by much of the mainstream press as a broader assault on them.   

Don’t be surprised if the Christian left and progressives respond with the same siege mentality, some of which we are already seeing.  What this means is that when Wright is connected to extreme statements of black liberation theology, people on the left will tend to filter out the most extreme elements and see any criticism of liberation theology as the typical response of the privileged and the majority, while the critics will see the refusal to take account of the militancy as evidence of bad faith and will regard the militancy as proof of the basic craziness of the people who believe these things.  Rod Dreher, who was initially one of the relatively more pro-Obama voices on the right, has become deeplydisillusioned on account of how the entire Wright business has unfolded, and it seems that black liberation theology has had some significant role in that disillusionment. 

This becomes a major obstacle between the two sides of the political spectrum, as both reciprocally accuse one another of “hijacking” Christianity for their own ends (and this may be true in certain cases).  Under the best of circumstances and without the inflammatory rhetoric of Wright, most everyone on the right would view liberation theology as deeply distorted by secular ideological preoccupations and would regard it as an exaggerated form of the worst kinds of Social Gospel-inspired political activism, while it is just the opposite for people on the Christian left who see Social Gospel-inspired activism as evidence of a living faith, and who see liberation theology as an identification of Christ with the least among us to the point of identifying His suffering with theirs and effectively imputing some element of divinity to the oppressed.  Because the people of God were often delivered from the hands of their enemies by means of violence or divinely-willed destruction, some of which echoes through Orthodox hymnography when commemorating the slaughter of the Amalekites or the destruction of the Egyptians, any theology that emphasises (or, as I see it, overemphasises) God’s will with the cause of any particular oppressed group is going to express itself in militant language.    

There is a vast and yawning chasm between these two understandings of how the Gospel relates to political life, and the association of a candidate from the Christian left with some of the most radical expressions of liberation theology (which will always strike orthodox and traditionalist Christians as bordering on, if not crossing over into, madness) only exacerbates the divisions between different kinds of Christians.  The use of religious rhetoric by Democratic candidates suggests that we will have more direct political clashes between two broad rival interpretations of Christianity, which will intensify and deepen the existing political divisions by making campaigns into contests over what kind of Christianity in public debates we are going to have prevail.   

All of this reminds me that E.J. Dionne’s thesis that the culture wars are over and religion and culture will be taking a backseat to secular issues this cycle is looking worse and worse all the time, and it seems to be confirming my guess that this presidential race is going to be far more polarising and divisive than those we have had in the recent past.  Consider: who would have thought a year ago that black liberation theology would become a significant point of debate in the presidential race?  What we are seeing growing out of this controversy is a culture clash between the Christian left that is not only accustomed to the militant tone of liberation theology, but which regards radicalism in these matters to be not just admirable but also vitally important, and the Christian and secular right that find either the theology or the politics of the Christian far left deeply inimical to their worldviews.  Secular progressives seem to regard the entire controversy as a manufactured one or as evidence of double standards, but are not as deeply invested in the theological underpinnings of the dispute (and this dispute is assuredly about theological assumptions as much as it is about intemperate political rhetoric).  None of this is really surprising, but it is somewhat remarkable that once again specifically religious questions are dominating the presidential campaign.

Apparently the phrase “special relationship” has disappeared from official British government references to relations between America and Britain.  This is a healthy development for both, since it puts an end to the fiction that London gets any concessions from being in a “special relationship” with Washington and signals to Washington that it cannot assume British support with respect to affairs in Europe or elsewhere, which will compel Washington to engage with other nations on a more direct and even-handed basis.  So long as Washington could always rely on invoking the “special relationship” in cajoling London into doing whatever it wanted, and so long as London felt obliged to acquiesce, lest it be seen as a rejection of Atlanticism, neither government made very good policy that served the interests of both, and more generally the perception of this close link undermined good relations for both with the rest of Europe.  It would have been very much in America’s interest if Britain had refused to go along with the Iraq war, not least since the refusal might have made the war much less politically viable over here, but because Britain felt pressured to retain the “special relationship” with its promises of special access and influence (which resulted in nothing)  that did not happen.  Now that the relationship is no longer officially “special,” it may become a much better working alliance that serves the national interests of both rather than just one or neither.

P.S.  This also helps to correct for the rather ludicrous expectation that Gordon Brown would be embarrassingly “pro-American” (whatever this label was supposed to mean) because he took his holidays in the Northeast.

In the forthcoming issue, Prof. Bacevich offers the conservative case for Obama, which is largely the conservative case for voting on Iraq and nothing else.  In many respects, it mirrors the arguments I was making in 2006 for a Democratic victory in the midterms: hold the GOP accountable, don’t trust their flim-flam on domestic policy and move towards ending the war.  As the last year has shown it is control of the executive that matters far more as a practical matter, so in this sense Bacevich’s argument is potentially even more compelling: unlike the ineffectual House and Senate Democrats, a Democratic President could follow through on getting out of Iraq.  On the other hand, a Democratic President would be able to do many other things that clash directly with at least five of the six points Bacevich lays out in his definition of conservatism.  Unlike the largely symbolic protest of throwing out the Republican majority, which has had essentially no effect on U.S. foreign policy anywhere and which seems not to have driven home the message that most Americans are sick of Iraq, the election of a Democratic President could do real harm to the United States in many other ways, including inaugurating other, post-Iraq imperial adventures in the name of global “leadership.”  The latter would be politically possible for a Democratic President in ways that no Republican will enjoy for decades.  

Americans believed that they were voting for an end to war in 1968, and instead got five more years of direct American involvement and casualties.  If Obama has, as Prof. Bacevich correctly notes, “little affinity for serious realism,” but prefers “internationalist bromides,” he may be unable or unwilling to end the war, or at least he will be unable to end it quickly, since he will be more inclined to heed appeals from the United Nations and European governments not to leave Iraq.  If we know from past experience that the GOP’s promises on domestic social policy are empty, vote-buying rhetoric, why would we assume that Obama’s antiwar message is anything other than a well-crafted appeal to keep antiwar progressives on board?  In essence, the argument for Obama centered around the war is that we should trust that Obama is not conning us, despite the evidence that his foreign policy outlook is fundamentally no different from the people who landed us in this mess, but we should assume that everything else the GOP nominee says is a calculated lie.  Cynicism about the GOP is certainly justified, and I share it completely, but why should we be any less cynical about Obama’s promises?

For some on the antiwar right, backing Obama is a risk worth taking, but I would offer a few additional notes of caution. 

It seemed possible that repudiation at the polls in 2006 would chasten the hegemonists, or at least weaken them politically long enough to begin the process of withdrawing from Iraq, but this did not happen.  Their defeat in 2008 may also change nothing.  The 2008 election outcome will not necessarily determine the judgement of later decades on the worthiness or folly of the Iraq war, and even our extrication from Iraq will not mean a turn away from empire, but simply a moment for the supporters of empire to regroup and prepare for the next conflict.  The 1920 election was a crushing repudiation of Wilsonian foreign policy, yet here we are in the twenty-first century still confronting the same madness.  Meanwhile, if the “freedom agenda” has not already been discredited after the empowerment of Hizbullah, the election of Hamas and the creation of a sectarian government in Iraq, I fail to see what Obama’s election could do to drive the point home.  As with Vietnam, there will be dead-enders on Iraq who will never acknowledge that the war was a gross error and a case of profound injustice, and in the decades that followed Vietnam it was not the Vietnam super-hawks, but the doves (who were right about the war) who suffered the gravest political setbacks.  Electing Obama to end the war will politically free the GOP, and the hegemonists in particular, of the consequences of withdrawal, even though these consequences would have been impossible without the original invasion and occupation.  Just as old Vietnam hawks dishonestly waved (and continue to wave) the bloody shirt of the Cambodian genocide to shame and discredit war opponents in later foreign policy debates, there will be post-Iraq accusations not only of the “stab in the back” but also of enabling whatever humanitarian catastrophes may emerge from Iraq in the wake of our departure.  Indeed, this is another case where Obama’s instinct for interventionism will probably prevent withdrawal from Iraq, or will require an immediate re-deployment for the sake of “stopping genocide.”  A hardened realist might wash his, our, hands of Iraq and refuse to be drawn back in; Obama’s foreign policy-as-moral preening would demand another intervention.  Immediately the political debate would be inverted, as progressives suddenly discovered the virtues of interventionist warfare once again and Republicans would be outraged at the “distraction” from our real security threats.     

If there is one thing that has been true about the Iraq war, it has only become less popular over time.  An administration that actually continues the war for several more years will find the public extremely dissatisfied by the time of the 2010 midterms, and the GOP would risk an even deeper humiliation than they stand to suffer in Congressional races this year.  The same political cynicism that Prof. Bacevich correctly identifies in Republican domestic policy promises may eventually prevail over the resistance of ideologues.  While the GOP leadership has identified the party with Iraq, Iraq does not command anything like the unanimity of support in the party that anticommunism once did.  As Iraq erodes public support for the GOP in Congress, the need to find a way out will become acute.  Politically, the GOP has and will have a much greater incentive to cut itself free of Iraq, and McCain’s opportunism over the years, his willingness to turn against his party for the sake of good press and the realist advisors he has in his campaign all suggest the remote possibility of an end to the war, or at the very least a reduction in the numbers of Americans there.  The interventionist Obama seems instinctively drawn towards the consensus of the moment, and the consensus in Washington is that the deployment to Iraq is going to continue for many more years.  Arguably, if we cannot believe anything that the Republicans say about any other kind of policy, we cannot assume that they really intend to stay in Iraq indefinitely.  To the extent that a bipartisan establishment foreign policy consensus exists that will prevent a President from either party from withdrawing from Iraq, the question may be moot anyway. 

All of this is a long way of saying: vote for Obama if you believe it is the best choice for the good of the country that you can make under the circumstances, but don’t be at all surprised when the end to the war he promised does not materialise.

Before democracy can spread further, it must take deeper root where it has already sprouted. It is a basic principle of any military or geopolitical campaign that at some point an advancing force must consolidate its gains before it conquers more territory. ~Larry Diamond

It is doubtful that the further spread of democracy is necessarily the most desirable thing for many of the countries Diamong mentions.  However, supposing that were true, describing the advance of democracy with military metaphors and conceiving of the spread of democracy as if it ought to be part of a “geopolitical campaign” are two almost guaranteed ways to make sure that we see greater resistance and “backsliding” in the future.  The United States ought not to be engaged in such a “geopolitcal campaign” in any case (so I reject the basic assumption of the rest of Diamond’s article), but if supporters of nascent democratic movements around the world are perceived as creating footholds for conquest, even if these are not actual occupations by foreign armies, they will be discredited immediately in the eyes of their countrymen.  Native democrats must be able to make a case in terms intelligible to their countrymen that persuades that democratic government is in the best interests of their country.  In other words, they need to express their democratic views in a patriotic idiom, and anything that lends support to the idea that democratisation is part of a foreign “geopolitcal campaign” will undermine these efforts. 

Then there is a more pragmatic question: why have there been setbacks?  The simplest answer is that democratically constituted governments frequently fail or evolve naturally into authoritarian, ethnic/tribal majoritarian or sectarian regimes in modernising states.  The spread of democracy has suffered setbacks because democracy often gives rise to corrupt or ineffectual government, and this tendency is greatest in those countries that have the weakest traditions of representative government.  Diamond’s prescription is a laundry list of the near-impossible:

Emerging democracies must demonstrate that they can solve their governance problems and meet their citizens’ expectations for freedom, justice, a better life, and a fairer society. If democracies do not more effectively contain crime and corruption, generate economic growth, relieve economic inequality, and secure freedom and the rule of law, people will eventually lose faith and turn to authoritarian alternatives.

In other words, emerging democracies must work miracles and live up to the utterly unrealistic billing democracy has been given by its Western proponents.  Pragmatically, in the present era, two things take precedence over all of the others: securing the rule of law and creating the conditions for economic growth, mainly through secure property and contract rights and a judiciary that is likely to enforce those rights free from political interference.  The other goals are either extremely long-term (containing corruption) or may be pie-in-the-sky objectives in some rapidly modernising states.  One sure way to help emerging democracies meet their citizens’ expectations is to make clear that citizens shouldn’t expect very much.  The less Westerners and democrats around the world deify democracy, the better its chances of enduring failures and mistakes.  The less we lie about its potential to foster social and international peace, the better grasp everyone will have of what democracy can and cannot do.  Democracy is simply a vehicle for the social and political pathologies of a people, and so it is only as good, peaceful or rational as its participants (which, given our fallen state, is to say not much of any of these), and if a people does not have the habits necessary to self-government its democratic experiment will become one form of despotism or another naturally enough.  That is the natural result of democracy.  What should amaze us is that it does not happen more often.  Of course, the reason it doesn’t happen more often is that many of the successful “democratic” states have built-in liberal, constitutional and definitely un-democratic safeguards that prevent democracy from reaching its full bloom in despotism.  Indeed, most of the desirable things we associate with what we all lazily call “democracy” are the products of other institutional features that have little or nothing to do with popular participation in the selection of governors, the myth of popular sovereignty or the fiction of government by consent.  The peoples in successful “democratic” states thrive and remain reasonably more free in spite of the democratic elements of their governments.

Just so we’re clear, when Roger Cohen “raises” the issue of Obama’s half-brother in China, he is doing to ward off the inevitable Republican smear machine’s attacks, but when anyone not blatantly shilling for Obama “reminds” anyone about his diverse family connections it is obviously an effort to…smear Obama.  Got it?  Cohen justifies his column this way:

I’ve been thinking about this because not enough has been written about Obama’s family.

That’s right.  If only someone would have made some effort to write about Obama’s family, the difficult task would not fall to Roger Cohen.  Maybe this someone could have written a book.  (What makes even less sense about all this is that Cohen obviously knows about the book and even remarks on it later in the column.)  Now, in fairness, Cohen is finally responding to the danger I was describing in past months that comes from his fans’ fixation on Obama’s diverse background.  But to say that “more needs to be written,” when lengthy discussions of Obama’s biography have been included in every single candidate profile and half of the news stories about him, is really another way of saying, “We Obama-boosting pundits need to start framing Obama’s biography in ways that will guard against the obvious criticism that we now know is coming.”  A smarter move would have been to emphasise the American part of Obama’s biography.  Less interesting as a topic of cafe conversation?  Undoubtedly, but politically much better for Obama.  Well, it’s too late for that now, so it’s time to put a good spin on what Cohen and other pro-Obama pundits assumed was an obvious asset that is already becoming a liability, and so we get this new column. 

A few months ago, Obama’s wonderfully “globalised” personal history had a narcotic effect on political writers on the coasts, but these days it is becoming clear that being regarded as “globalised” may not be an asset in a country where a majority regards globalisation to have been, on the whole, harmful to them.  If Romney was the face of economic globalisation, Obama has become the personification of the cultural side of globalisation, thanks in no small part to the constant agitation of his supporters that people see him this way.  When this is presented to an electorate anxious about economic dislocation and cultural change, I can think of few things that would be potentially more damaging for a candidate.

The dangers of this to Obama, who was already likely to have difficulty generating broad appeal because of the identitarian aspects of mass democracy, have been obvious for a long time.  As I said in November:

What Ignatieff said, and what Cohen is arguing, exposes Obama to a rather fierce backlash if people begin to believe it: having “internationalism in the veins” may imply some kind of hybridity that reduces the person’s connection to his country (this is the “vaguely French” attack against Kerry taken to the nth degree), and simultaneolusly identifies a policy perspective with ‘otherness’, which unwittingly hints that this “internationalism” is not really fully American.  Many of the arguments advanced in Obama’s favour along these lines are rather recklessly identifying in Obama things that I am not sure that he would even say about himself.  Armed with quotes about his being a “globalised leader,” you can just imagine what his opponents would say in a tough general election fight.  Obama’s actual policy positions on immigration, for example, will be hard enough for him to overcome in a general election (should it somehow come to that) without foreign observers taking about how agreeable he is to foreigners.  The attack ads write themselves. Remember Kerry’s ill-fated boast about all of the foreign leaders who supported his election? This does not play well in most parts of America.

Cohen, who has been blissfully oblivious to this problem in his past pro-Obama columns, suddenly worries:

But you can already see the headlines: Obama has brother in China! You can hear the whisperings about a polygamous father.

Really?  I have heard and read more about Romney’s great-great grandparents along these lines than I have ever heard anyone “whispering” about the senior Obama.  Of course, as Cohen must understand, once he has raised these things in a neutral or positive context he has introduced them into the discussion.  He and those pro-Obama pundits like him who keep obsessing on this aspect of Obama have made it fair game.  They are the ones, just as much as people who insist on mentioning Obama’s middle name, who seem preoccupied with this part of the candidate, almost to the exclusion of everything else, and they are among the first to be scandalised that someone has not responded with the same rapt glee that they have.  You could count the number of people who knew about his half-brother Mark, aside from people who have made the effort to buy and read his first book, in the low thousands before this column–now it is front and center on the New York Times op-ed page.  With enthusiasts like this, Obama doens’t need critics.

But, not to worry, Cohen tells us.  Why?  Well, unlike four years ago the voters are not going to fall for this sort of rhetorical attack again:

But things are different. Less fearful, Americans are less willing to be manipulated. They’ve backed Obama this far in part because they’re sick of the narrow American exceptionalism of Bush’s divisive rule.

Of course, it then becomes rather important to consider who “they” are.  Essentially, the voters who are most inclined to see Obama’s diverse background as a problem, rather than as an exhibit of multiculturalism in action (or, more precisely, who see multiculturalism in action as the problem), are also the ones who haven’t supported him in the nominating contest, and some of them within the Democratic Party seem unwilling to support him in the general as well.  I don’t know where Cohen gets the idea that Americans are less fearful.  On the contrary, anxiety and fear are greater now than perhaps anytime since 2003, even if the fear is not caused by the conventional terrorism alarmism that worked in the past.  If voters were less easily manipulated today by the “politics of fear” (a redundant phrase, since everyone casts electoral choices in terms of fear and danger), Clinton’s “3 a.m.” ad would have had little or no effect whatever.

Cohen also misunderstands the consequences of the psychology of the public over current economic woes:

Never before have U.S. fortunes been so tied to the world’s. Americans see that. When your mortgage is packaged into some ingenious security that’s sold to a German bank before the scheme unravels and you lose your house, the globe looks smaller.

People who say things like this seem to think that the globe’s “smaller” appearance will not lead to a backlash agains international economic ties and against symbols of interdependence.  How you interpret the world getting “smaller” in this way is to a large extent the way to tell whether you are what Brooks called a “progressive globalist” or a “populist nationalist.”  Those who regard this as a generally desirable, even laudable, development are the globalists, which leaves the other 60-70% of the population who are to one degree or another uneasy or unhappy about one or more aspects of the globalists’ preferred policies and their general cultural outlook.  Obama gets the globalist vote of the high-income and highly educated professional class, and he wins globalist sympathies in both parties, but except for his less-than-persuasive (and possibly entirely dishonest) opposition to certain elements of NAFTA he shows no ability to relate to the concerns of the “populist nationalists” who form a much larger bloc of voters in both parties.

There is a reason why all major Democratic, and more than a few Republican, candidates kept mentioning indebtedness to foreign countries and energy independence.  It wasn’t necessarily because they intended to do anything about either of these, but because they know that most people don’t want to hear about inextricable interdependence but want ways to extricate America from such dependence, and a lot of them absolutely hate the status quo of relying on so many imports and having so much of our debt held by non-Americans.  This is not a people in the mood for bridge-building, but moat-building and bridge-raising.

Cohen quotes Obama’s Muslim uncle (remember, Cohen is helping Obama!):

My Islam is a hybrid, a mix of elements, including my Christian schooling and even some African ways. Many values have dissolved in me.

That is not reassuring to very many.  Globalisation puts many Americans (and many others around the world) on guard because of its capacity for mixing things and creating hybridity.  For most people, having many values dissolving inside of them is not desirable, but rather a sign of profound confusion and disorientation.  Most people don’t want values that dissolve and mix together–dissolution of one kind or another is usually one of the things they are trying to combat with their embrace of whichever “values” they take as their own.  Indeed, the dissolving effects the processes of globalisation have on one’s cultural values are some of the things that make most people so wary of it, in part because it does provide them with cheaper goods and greater variety.  The profusion of choices, the plentiful options that globalists believe is the obvious argument in favour of globalisation, strike people who wish to preserve their cultural values as a constant barrage of threats.  I think it is fair to say that globalists literally cannot understand this, or when they grasp it they immediately dismiss it as ridiculous, but it is the fundamental fact that drives anti-globalisation politics here and everywhere around the world.

Noting a report by Dan Drezner, Alex Massie points out that Richard Holbrooke is apparently suffering from some kind of nervous breakdown:

I have it on good authority that, not only does the former UN ambassador believe that he’ll be Secretary of State if either Clinton or Obama wins, he genuinely thinks he’ll have a comparable position if McCain wins.

This is clearly nonsense, since an Obama campaign that floats stories about appointing Lugar won’t end up selecting one of Clinton’s arch–lackeys  Then again, given how utterly awful all three candidates’ Balkan policy seems to be it can’t be entirely ruled out.  There are a great many people for whom the word “disaster” doesn’t come to mind when they hear the name Richard Holbrooke, so the fact that Holbrooke’s record in the Balkans is appalling will not count against him. 

I don’t want to beat the Hagee/Wright theme to death, but Jim Antle’s post deserves a response.  Jim writes:

But Hagee’s marginal views probably aren’t going to influence McCain. His relatively mainstream views — broad social conservatism and sympathy for Israel, regardless of whatever baggage he may bring to both positions personally — will. Hagee’s views are a legitimate campaign issue, but there is no evidence McCain opposes abortion or is pro-Israel because of Hagee’s end times theology. Wright’s views, in the event that Obama actually shares them, are disqualifying on their face.

This is true, though I think saying that Hagee has “sympathy for Israel” tends to understate what Hagee’s policy views are and how strongly he holds them, and it is clear that McCain supports the same kind of hard-line military and security policies Hagee endorses because McCain generally just likes hard-line military and security policies.  The easier treatment of McCain comes from the greater familiarity with him: he is a known quantity, and we know that he has little time for religious arguments of any kind, so there is no temptation to read Hagee’s views into McCain’s.  Obama is not as well-defined, so whatever can be used to fill in the gaps will be used.  Indeed, the typical argument on McCain’s behalf is that everyone knows that he’s a militarist, so his association with like-minded people shouldn’t surprise us.  Leave aside whether these views are themselves actually appalling (they are)–they are old news, so there’s no reason to dwell on them.  That seems to be what many people are saying.  

If his disdain for evangelical leaders is anything like what it used to be, McCain probably laughs at Hagee in private.  My larger problem with the way most of the coverage of McCain’s embrace of Hagee is that something like Hagee’s full-throated support of bombing Lebanon (which is just the most prominent of his belligerent utterances) escapes censure, despite the fact that this strikes me as a far more morally troubling and dangerous kind of view.  There actually is a difference between railing against injustices, insanely imaginary or not, and glorying in bloodshed, and it’s a very odd situation where the latter is considered the less controversial thing.  The former may be self-defeating, absurd and ignorant, but it doesn’t endorse injustices in war and treat them as wondrous.  In short, I suppose what really troubles me is that Hagee is regarded as an acceptable and “mainstream” figure not in spite of his dangerous and extreme views as they relate to foreign policy, but precisely because of those views, such that these views can be described without irony as “mainstream.”  The controversy about Hagee, to the extent that there has been that much, pertains mostly to his sectarianism, which gives priority to the wrong thing. 

As for Wright, there’s no question that he has had a significant influence on Obama, while McCain has no personal ties to Hagee.  It would not be difficult to imagine that Obama holds views that are far to the left of most Americans, and it is likely that these views are brimming with resentment and with what a broad swathe of the middle and right of the spectrum would deem “anti-Americanism,” and yet he might still not be so far to the left that he shares the views that Wright expressed in those videos.  That is, Obama could be telling the truth about his rejection of these statements, and could at the same time have embraced views that he regards as reasonable and moderate in comparison that would nonetheless seem barking mad to the majority of voters.  But to pursue this line of inquiry would involve focusing on Obama’s own actual leftism, rather than trying to tie him to his pastor’s statements.  The Wright business can be a useful episode if it becomes an occasion to look at what Obama actually does believe that puts him far to the left, but the extent and content of his leftism can’t be assumed simply through the words of his mentor, and insofar as the focus on Wright is aimed at putting the pastor’s words in Obama’s mouth or engaging in a lot of sloppy “must have” reasoning, as in “he must have picked up his pastor’s ideas about this,” it is misguided.

Besides, what do we take away from these stories?  The lesson of the Hagee-McCain story is that McCain favours militaristic policies in the Near East, which is not exactly news but should serve as a reminder of the dangers of a McCain administration.  The lesson of the Wright story, such as it is, is that Obama travels in far-left circles and was influenced by people on the far left, which is no more newsworthy than the other story and, for those who have followed the campaign, perhaps less so.  I take the point that there are many people, exposed as they have been to the glowing media portrayal of Obama to date, who are less familiar with this information who are going to be surprised by this “revelation,” but what this means is that poorly-informed voters who were being poorly served by the media were introduced to the reality that Obama really is a big leftist and would have been one had Jeremiah Wright never made any of the statements in the now-infamous videos.  I grant you that this is politically significant, and because it potentially represents a radical reevaluation of the candidate by many of the people, Republicans and independents, who have formed part of his coalition it is worth covering extensively.  Even so, I detect an imbalance in the response to these stories: the Wright story is clearly being pushed because the mainstream media are now overreacting to their embarrassingly biased coverage of Obama’s campaign, and so having ignored Obama’s leftist record for 14 months they are latching on to the story about Wright.  There may be a second lesson to the story: campaigns that live substantially by rhetoric are uniquely vulnerable to being undone by association with the rhetoric of supporters.

Dave Weigel addressesmy response to his article.  He is right that Paul’s actual voters placed a high priority on opposing the war and President Bush, but I was trying to make the point that most antiwar and anti-Bush voters were voting for pro-war, pro-Bush candidates because they placed a low priority on the policies where Rep. Paul differed from the administration.  It’s true that Paul alone had the credibility to rally Republicans disaffected by the Bush administration, but what the election returns showed was an electorate that rewarded such remarkable Bush lackeys as McCain for their alleged “independence.”  In such an atmosphere, it made sense to try to exploit the weaknesses of the leading Republicans, who all had remarkably poor records on immigration policy.  Yes, Paul “should have” claimed the rest of the anti-Bush and antiwar voters, and “should have” won the votes that went to McCain, but it wasn’t for lack of trying that Paul didn’t get their support.  McCain wasn’t making a restrictionist or a “sick of Bush?” of argument, but he still won remarkably large percentages of both constituencies.  As a matter of simple arithmetic, there were more votes to be had in a campaign geared towards restrictionism than one geared towards an antiwar appeal.  Of course, he “should” have had the antiwar vote to himself, but that assumes that antiwar Republicans are going to vote for candidates who were actually against the war.  They didn’t, and there is nothing he could do about that.  His campaign could have focused monomaniacally on foreign policy, but that would probably have yielded no more votes than the campaign he actually ran.  I would love it if American voters cared that much about foreign policy, but they simply don’t.  30% of Republicans may oppose the war, but they don’t vote based on that view.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I find the idea that patriotism is somehow a “petty” loyalty, in particular a “petty loyalty to clumps of soil,” to be very wrong, insofar as this description is intended to describe this loyalty as somehow base or mean or limited, and therefore the cause of greater evils.  It seems to me that the great evils that Kukathas and Kateb attach to patriotism do not derive from “petty loyalty to clumps of soil,” but from abstract loyalties to ludicrous lists of universal rights that must be realised no matter how much blood is spilled in the effort or to national ambitions that have no relationship to reality.  The petty-soil-clump-lovers are not the cause of the great calamities of mass slaughter and destruction that so disillusion the learned contributors to the Cato debate, but are, on the contrary, the only alternative to the destructive ideologies that promote the killing of others for their own benefit.

Missing from my earlier discussions of patriotism has been a clear explanation of Prof. Lukacs’ important distinction and opposition between patriotism and nationalism.  As I said in my review of his recent book, George Kennan: A Study of Character:

The distinction—indeed opposition—between patriotism and nationalism is all-important here, for patriotism, according to Lukacs, “is the love of one’s land and its history” (which Kennan possessed in abundance), “while nationalism is a viscous cement that binds formless masses together.”

In his About Historical Factors (1968), included in the ISI Lukacs reader Remembered Past, Prof. Lukacs discusses the origins of nationalism:

While nationality, national ambitions, and national consciousness are discernible early in European history, nationalism, like the modern nation-state, is a more recent phenomenon, the result of the growing social homogenization of certain European peoples and the development of their historical consciousness–or, to put it perhaps in two other words in intellectual shorthand, democracy and romanticism. 

Lukacs also cited Orwell’s distinction between patriotism and nationalism:

By “patriotism” I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one…has no wish to force upon other people.  Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally.  Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.  The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unity in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

I would add that it is typical of those individualists who confuse patriotism with nationalism that they think patriotism is antithetical to the individual, because they have mistaken it for this collectivist power-grab.  

After citing Orwell, Lukacs added:

During the nineteenth century nationalism became an ideology: the older patriotic sentiments were often replaced by ideological nationalism.  As Duff Cooper wrote, the jingo nationalist “is always the first to denounce his fellow countrymen as traitors”–a statement worthy of Dr. Johnson.  Adolf Hitler was to incarnate this tendency in the twentieth century..  “By the time I was fifteen” (in 1904), he wrote in Mein Kampf, “I understood the difference between dynastic patriotism and folkish nationalism, even then I was interested only in the latter….Germany could be safeguarded only by the destruction of Austria [Hitler’s native country]….[T]he national sentiment is in no sense identical with dynasties or with patriotism.”

What was startling and new in the twentieth century was the emergence of a certain antipatriotism in the name of nationalism.  In 1809 the peasant Andreas Hofer led the patriotic resistance of Tyrolean Austrians against Napoleon’s Frenchmen and their Bavarian allies; in 1938 a Tyrolean by the same name became Hitler’s Gauleiter.  Before and during World War II throughout Europe, “Nationalist” or “National Opposition” were often the names of those movements, blocs, and parties who worked against the legitimate governments of their countries, usually favoring an alignment of their country with Nazi Germany, and at times even the military occupation of their country by the latter.  Of course, there have always been all kinds of people, from traitors through ideological revolutionaries to persecuted minorities, who would welcome the occupation of their countries by another power.  But what is remarkable is the appearance of such tendencies in the form of a certain ideological nationalism, which was the result not only of modern nationalistic indoctrinaton but also of those conditions of modern society which make it possible for many people to be nationalists without being patriots [italics mine-DL].

There is more say about this, but for now I’ll let Lukacs’ words speak for themselves.