Alex Massie discusses Obama and Ferraro.  John McWhorter and Megan McArdle talk about a related question.

Michael Barone puts forward the, er, unique idea that the officer corps has become a preserve of left-wing subversion.

Srdja Trifkovic explains the fall of the extremely short-lived Tadic government in Serbia.

Reliable information is a bit hard to come by, but it seems as if the policy of increased Han Chinese colonisation in Tibet has finally run up against a violent popular backlash.  I haven’t anything very insightful to say about this, but it is one of the major foreign affairs stories this week and merits some mention here.

Update: The Economist‘s correspondent reports that repression and violence against a number of monks helped spark the rioting.

Ross makes an important point in his post on the Catopatriotismdebate that I havejoinedwithout an invitation:

The only complicating factor occurs in a case like the United States, where the character of the regime and the character of the people are bound together so tightly that it’s hard to imagine one without the other. The government-country distinction is easier to make in countries where regimes change willy-nilly, and while obviously our regime isn’t identical to the one founded in 1789, our democratic temper – both institutional and cultural – has endured through the transition from a decentralized republic to a mass democracy with a sizable administrative state. So whereas France would still be France if the current Republic were dissolved and a monarchy or a dictatorship took its place, there’s a sense in which imagining an America governed by an emperor or a military junta is a little like imagining a France whose inhabitants no longer speak French.

True enough, the problem is thornier in states (or confederations of states) that have emerged later in the modern era and which have no history or perhaps just a relatively short history under a different regime.  Ross’ remark reminds me of a line from Aurel Kolnai’s autobiography that Americans are technologically the most modern people  in the world, but that we are politically the most anachronistic with our attachments to 18th century forms (if not always their original use or content).  Of course, the anachronism is more apparent than real, but it points to the relative political conservatism of Americans with respect to the maintenance of forms, which is made possible by the general consensus of our political culture that derived from the virtual unanimity of the first generations after independence in support of liberal republicanism.  That is, the nature of the regime we have had has fostered a political culture that values homogenity in political values, which has made the possibility of frequent changes of regime much more remote.  Thanks in part to the expulsion of the most recalcitrant Loyalists, the range of political views that have any chance of mobilising large numbers of people has always been extremely narrow, which has made it possible to perpetuate the false idea that America is a propositional or even an ideological nation in which the definition of being American is somehow tied to the acceptance of certain political views. 

The relative political stability in American history to which Ross refers has made it difficult to imagine an America that did not continue to have a regime more or less like the one we have now that is (at least nominally) defined by the Constitution, and the general consensus, reinforced by education and conditioning by way of the media, has defined the political debate as an argument over the method of governing a liberal republican regime with mass democratic and managerial features.  Even most of the radical critiques of the status quo take for granted that returning to the old liberal republican regime as it existed at some point in the past is the goal.  There are extremely few openly socialist or right-authoritarian people in America, which is a boon in many ways, but it also ensures that an America without the current regime seems literally unthinkable.  It is perhaps even more crucial, given the stakes when it comes to waging war and projecting power around the world, that we understand that American patriotism and American identity are not inseparably tied to the regime and would survive even if this regime were to change even more radically away from its original form. 

Modern unified nation-states in Europe and Asia that were/are cobbled together from many other constituent polities pose a different, but related problem, and post-colonial states in Asia and Africa pose even more vexing problems because of the extreme arbitrariness of boundaries that actually divide more or less existing cultural or tribal regions and/or countries between one or more nation-states.  More on those in a moment. 

First, I should note that it is clearly the American case that the participants in the Cato debate are discussing, even if they are not mentioning it explicitly, not least since the concern over “activist foreign policy” makes no sense in just about any other national context today, so it is in the American context that the government-country distinction needs to be defended most effectively.  In the American case, several things need to be kept in mind.  One is that Americans possessed their respective countries before they possessed their own polities.  Even after the Confederation and then after the beginning of the Federal period, Americans identified with their countries, which had been the colonies and were the states that had broken away from British rule, and tended to self-identify first according to more local or regional identities before they identified themselves as Americans.  Being American at that point was a relatively remote civic identity, and one that defined citizenship in the new federal republic, but in the early republican period patriotic attachment was fixed primarily, though not exclusively, on the home country of New York, Virginia and the like.  Since all of the participants keep bringing up the connection with war, let us consider an example of American war before independence.  Long before independence, militiamen during King William’s War (a.k.a., War of the League of Augsburg) were almost certainly not fighting for the Crown first and foremost, but were fighting to defend their home against attack (or the threat of attack), even though they may have been fighting because of policy set in a capital far from home related to countering Louis XIV’s aggression in the Rhineland.  While this is sometimes overstated in our history books, the series of colonial wars along the western and northern frontiers of the colonies was a contributing factor in creating resentment against British rule, as the distinction between what was in the interest of the colonies and the interest of the British state became increasingly clear.  The rebellion of the 1770s was a direct response the costs being imposed, both fiscal and physical, by state policy, revealing the difference between what the patriots owed to their own countries and what was being demanded of them by the authorities in London.  So, at this point we can say that the government-country distinction was at the heart of the American experience.  As mass democracy has taken hold, and centralism has vitiated or destroyed many more local loyalties, it is harder to keep the distinction clearly in mind, since mass democracy in a centralised nation-state has the effect of compelling citizens to identify collectively with the government that supposedly exists because “we” consent to it and that “we” supposedly control.  Indeed, it is a constant problem when writing about government actions to avoid using the first person plural, because it is so commonplace to refer to what “we” are doing in Iraq, despite the fact that most of “us” want out. 

Returning to the War for Independence, we cannot readily say that everyone who did not back the rebellion in the 1770s was unpatriotic.  Patriots in the same country will have different interpretations of what their obligations to their country require.  This may sound like I’m trying to have it both ways, but it reflects the variety of patriotic loyalty that makes civil strife between neighbours possible; it helps explain how even members of collaborationist regimes believe that they are doing what is necessary to preserve their country from a worse fate.  One group or the other may be wrong about what is best for the country, but both are convinced that they are acting out of loyalty to the country.  One of the reasons why patriotism gets such a bad reputation among intellectuals, particularly liberal and libertarian intellectuals, is that it is wrongly taken for granted that loyalty to the country somehow pre-empts or precludes criticism of and dissent from government policy.  They see how pro-government deamgogues deny their opponents’ patriotism, and so they see patriotism itself as a bludgeon with which to overwhelm critics and quash debate, which mistakes a thing’s abuse for the character of the thing.  

There will be a counter-argument that the boundaries of these countries were still identified with political boundaries, and that patriotic Virginians identified with the Commonwealth government, which would seem to push back against a clear distinction.  First, I should say that while the distinction is great and important, it is difficult to find complete separation between countries and polities in all cases, but this is where the non-American examples are especially useful.

Some months ago, I remarked on a strange distinction that Fred Kaplan made between Iraq and India.  India, unlike Iraq, was a “real country even before the British colonized it,” he said, which prompted me to discuss the problems with how we think about what constitutes an “artificial” vs. a “real” country.  What I wrote then may be useful in thinking about the government-country distinction now:

Of course, it is important to recognise that all modern nation-states are to some extent founded on the ruin and death of other even more real countries that they gobbled up and suppressed, but even so there are nation-states today that actually have meaning for their citizens and many that mean next to nothing at all.  At some point, every nation-state is a contrivance and something imposed, because it seeks to unify any number of polities and peoples who have previously not identified or united with one another. 

That being said, it is also worth noting that at some point the nation-state can gradually fashion a country out of the disparate countries that it has taken over.  So today you can have a French patriot in Provence or Languedoc, despite the long history of distinctive regional identity and the relatively late administrative centralisation of France, even though the centralisation was accomplished first by absolutists and then by nationalists who were in a very real sense “inventing” or imagining a new country and imposing it on the existing countries that already existed.  Where local patriotic attachments are strong, resistance to assimilation to the nation-state can be fierce, and this will be intensified by a distinct question of clashing ethnic or tribal identities.  In general, the patriot will resist incorporation into these larger nation-states, but in later generations after the consolidation the nation-state may have created, albeit through coercion and political homogenisation, a country out of the constituent parts to which patriots now feel an attachment distinct from any tie they may have to the government of that nation-state.

Having followed Obama’s campaign pretty closely for over a year, I am probably not gauging public reaction to this Wright controversy very accurately.  Except for some of the specific videos, there is literally no new information about Wright that wasn’t available last year, and presumably these videos were available back then as well.  The controversy is even less remarkable to me, since TAChas covered some related matters in the past. 

Of course, I should know that having these statements on camera makes all the difference in a mass media age, and it will probably come as a shock to some people, but none of this stuff–the conspiracy theories, berating the U.S. for supporting the apartheid regime, and so on–really comes as any surprise to me.  Take the typical far left rant, throw in some racial animus, mix, and you will get something like this.  Why is it all that shocking at this point that Obama, who has clearly always been pretty far to the left, is connected to people who are also pretty far to the left?  Because until this point most pundits and journalists had bought into the myth of Obama the Reasonable, the Transcendent World Healer? 

Neither does the “Black Value System” come as a revelation, so to speak, as it seems to be for so many who have just started paying attention to Obama.  I find it particularly remarkable that a leading Romney booster, who went out of her way for months to minimise and downplay Romney’s religion, should be willing to take exception to what Wright has said or what Obama’s church says.  In this conventional view, it should make no difference whether a candidate adheres to doctrines that tens of millions of Americans would regard as blasphemy, but it should matter to us deeply that Obama’s pastor holds some loopy views about the origin of AIDS or expresses radical political views that the candidate at least claims that he does not share.  In other words, if Romney believes in theological falsehoods that are deeply offensive to Christians, it’s not supposed to be relevant to the political process (even though it inevitably was), but if Obama doesn’t believe in appalling things his pastor said it is supposed to be a major political liability for him.  If Wright is “hijacking” Christianity, shouldn’t her response to a Mormon candidate have been even more vehement? 

Scrutinising what Obama believes is fair and proper, but continuing to treat his pastor’s views as if they were his or as if they must have influenced him seems strange, and it imposes a related demand on Obama to distance himself from his church to a degree that was never demanded of Romney or any other candidate.  Frankly, I see this as a kind of bias against a religious convert–Obama is being held more accountable because he chose to join this particular church, while Romney was born into his (and, of course, chose to remain in it), which somehow immunised his beliefs from the same kind of media scrutiny. 

Of course, voters are free to take Obama’s church and its beliefs into account when assessing the candidate, and I would defend the legitimacy of doing that just as I have in previous cases, but the people who were lecturing us just a few months ago about how inappropriate and “un-American” this sort of thing was had best keep quiet on this score if they want to have any credibility.

Finally, someone in that Cato debate is making (a little) sense:

My reservations about George Kateb’s splendid invective against patriotism stem, then, from my fear that he takes the state far too seriously, and fails to realize that it is the state, and not patriotism itself, that is the source of the problem.

Kukathas does preface this, however, by linking patriotism and the state so closely that he is still forced to regard patriotism as an expression of something undesirable:

For the patriot, the state is an institution that has to be taken very seriously. It is difficult to be a patriot and regard one’s state as a construction of no great ethical importance. Equally, it is not possible to take the state seriously and not be at least something of a patriot. Patriotism is a solemn business.

In my view, the state has to be taken seriously because it is a very real institution (or set of institutions) that wields enormous power and one inevitably has to take account of what it does.  To the extent that it possesses legitimacy, there are obligations to obey its laws, but outside of this there are very few obligations to the state.  Most of the things that all of the participants keep attributing to obligations to the state are, in fact, obligations to other things that are being usurped or exploited by the state: loyalty, defense, sacrifice, love.  I would argue that there are many nationalists who invest their states with “great ethical importance,” who see it as the embodiment of the nation and deserving of all the devotion owed to one’s country and people, while patriots tend to see it as a necessary evil or something that must exist at some level but, preferably, with the least concentration of power possible.  Public authority is necessary to maintain some measure of order, and to coordinate a common defense, but beyond these pragmatic ends it is difficult to see much “ethical importance” in something that exists principally to coerce and punish. 

By granting the close bond between patriotism and the state, the very bond that all the participants see as the source of so many problems, Kukathas has once again given credit to a connection that does not exist.  They are describing a species of statism, which various states have deliberately confused with patriotism to their advantage, and many people accept this confusion of terms.  Those who are inclined to be critical of the state take it for granted that patriotism is a pillar of the state, and those who have patriotic sentiments believe that they must submit to the state far too often in order to be truly patriotic.  This confusion comes from the failure to use the proper names for things.

Responding to that Kateb essay against patriotism, Walter Berns begins:

What he might better have done here is to have distinguished between loving, or pledging allegiance to, a democracy or a monarchy, or, with a view to our current situation, a liberal democracy or any of the forms of tyranny. This, surely, is the decisive issue in an appropriate analysis of patriotism.

Prof. Berns’ distinction is a useful one for thinking about the circumstances that would require the patriot to turn against his government for the love of country, but it seems to me that beginning this way simply reinforces the problem with Kateb’s original argument that conflated state and country.  To say that it is “the decisive issue” in talking about patriotism is to give the game away except in those lands where some suitably liberal democratic regime happens to exist.  This makes patriotism hinge on the regime type in power at any particular time, which both flatters liberal democracy as the only regime type in which a desirable patriotism can exist (a profoundly dangerous and ahistorical assumption) and makes patriotic sentiment the equivalent of a vice whenever it is felt by anyone who happens to live under an illiberal or non-democratic regime.  It seems to me that this sort of conflation opens the door to exactly the dangers of an activist foreign policy Kateb warned against, since this would involve demonising the patriotic loyalty of anyone who lives under a foreign illiberal regime and make a virtue of of their treason against their country in the name of “liberating” it (with the aid of the benevolent hegemon, of course).  It would also entail glorifying the patriotism of democratic peoples as inherently self-justifying: we can be patriotic because our form of government is best, and our form of government is best because it is our form of government.  The confusion of regime and country leads to a host of such errors and needs to be nipped in the bud.

This confusion continues in Berns’ next paragraph:

It is significant that Aristotle did not number patriotism among the virtues — courage, for example, or prudence, justice, magnanimity — probably because he knew that it should be praised or fostered only in the case of a country that deserved to be loved. And not all countries, or regimes, deserve to be loved.

Now, wait a minute.  It is true that not all regimes deserve to be loved–it is questionable whether anyone should ever love any regime–but this is related to the justice of the regime.  To say that there are countries that do not deserve to be loved is to create another version of the two-tiered hierarchy of countries mentioned above, as if it were right for the Iowan but not for the Eritrean to love his country (or vice versa).  “A patriot does not boast of the largeness of his country, but of its smallness,” Chesterton said through one of his characters in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and likewise a patriot loves his country as a whole, including its flaws, not in the absence of them.  It is possible that a foreigner might find many other lands unloveable, but they are not his lands.  Not only can no one find any country that does not have at least some people who love it (and if we confuse countries with officially recognised nation-states, we make another mistake in thinking about what a country is), but it is impossible to imagine an inhabited country that is “undeserving” of love.  Indeed, the whole language of deserving muddles things, for who or what can be said to deserve love?  Love is gratuitous and freely given, not something given to the deserving alone (or else there would be very, very few loved things in this world).

Berns then takes a turn that is in some ways even more unfortunate than Kateb’s broadside against all patriotism:

In a word, the patriotic Clay loved the idea of his country, or its principles.

Please, no ideas of countries!  This is very troubling.  Berns then goes on to divide this patriotism of the idea from the patriotism of the soil and solidarity with one’s people.  In other words, the only way that Berns wants to defend patriotism is by hollowing it out into the meaningless propositional variety. 

Berns concludes with the same confusion with which he began:

One prominent American university professor (Martha Nussbaum) suggests that the times require that people get rid of patriotism and, to that end, become citizens of the world and lovers of humanity, and thereby protect all those desirable human rights. But humanity does not have a government (or an army), and there is not reason to believe that, if it did have a government, it would be lovable.

This final sentence is right, and it also has little or nothing to do with patriotism.

Reihan shows his usual wisdom and insight in his diavlog rant against Eliot Spitzer, whom he correctly describes as someone who has been a “creep” (and “scuzzbucket”) for a very long time.

Rod dubs the comparison between Wright and Hagee a “false equivalence,” which is true.  The two cases aren’t equivalent.  Hagee’s connection to McCain and McCain’s embrace of Hagee are much worse and shouldn’t be equated directly to Obama’s relationship with Wright.  Wright is a pastor at the end of his career, whereas Hagee is a major political operator in his own right with many friends on the Hill.  He is therefore someone deserving of much more scrutiny for the appalling views he holds, and the same goes for politicians who ally themselves with him.  Hagee runs a significant lobbying organisation dedicated to hard-line military and foreign policy in the Near East and his positions are premised at least partly on apocalypticism.  These are matters that have a great deal more relevance to the election of the next President than whether Jeremiah Wright has bizarre ideas with which Obama claims to disagree.  Yet, of course, it is because of his foreign policy views that Hagee is not subjected to the same kind of scrutiny, just as his political allies are let off the hook.  The unstated attitude seems to be, “Sure, he hates Catholics, but he likes Israel in his own way, doesn’t want to withdraw from Iraq and does want to bomb Iran, and that’s what matters.”  Militarism apparently covers a multitude of sins.

Where Obama’s religion should really concern voters is in his embrace of the Social Gospel and the implications this has for his understanding of the role of government.  It is legitimate if voters want to question his church’s theology or not vote for him because of his membership in this particular church (or in the UCC generally), but it seems rather strange to hold Obama accountable for a pastor when he explicitly disavows the pastor’s outrageous views while allowing McCain to accept Hagee’s endorsement without much fuss, despite the fact that Hagee has endorsed McCain because they share the same dangerous views about policy.  People worry that Obama holds the extreme views of his pastor, when there is ample evidence in his own record that he already holds views of the far left, but most seem unmoved at the prospect that McCain agrees on policy with an avowedly fanatical man despite his obvious disbelief in the religious ideas that motivate Hagee to take the policy positions that he does.   

P.S.  Obviously, I am going easy on McCain and letting him off the hook!

Jim Antle writes:

That Obama was not aware of Wright’s statements until he began his presidential campaign is a bit hard to believe, and any evidence that Obama was in fact present for controversial sermons or speeches could be damaging. It’s also hard to believe that this statement would be enough to end the controversy if it was a Republican attending, say, John Hagee’s church.

That may be, but the example of Hagee specifically is an interesting one, since it seems clear that the media have shown relatively little interest in making much out of McCain’s acceptance of Hagee’s endorsement, just as the mainstream media showed relatively little interest when Huckabee did attend John Hagee’s church in the weeks leading up to Iowa as part of his effort to bid for evangelical votes (which, as we know, boosted him to victory in the caucuses).  Huckabee was the media darling at the time, and so he escaped without much negative coverage, just as McCain is the eternal media darling whose failures and pandering will always be described as unfortunate-but-necessary deviations from his glorious reformist purity.  Because Huckabee was the insurgent and the long-shot, his association directly with Hagee’s church was scarcely noticed outside of conservative Catholic circles.  Since the media’s favourite in McCain had essentially won the nomination by the time Hagee endorsed him and no one thought that McCain shared Hagee’s religious views, there was no strong impulse to rake McCain over the coals because of this. 

This fits in with a broader pattern of media treatment of McCain’s relationship with evangelicals.  Since journalists know that he doesn’t like them and doesn’t identify with them, his acceptance of Hagee’s endorsement and his commencement address at Liberty are written off as shameless but unavoidable instances of pandering that they assume he despises doing.  They have made him into their heroic Republican who bucks the party base, so any episode when he embraces the base it is interpreted as insincere and meaningless.  In this way, McCain can pander to evangelicals in this way and not lose credibility in the eyes of journalists, while Romney could engage in equally unpersuasive contortions of principle and be deemed nothing other than a fraud (which ties in to resentments against Romney because he abandoned his former social liberalism to become an implausible culture warrior).  

Furthermore, in the twisted world of our foreign policy debates Hagee is counted as something of a mainstream Republican figure.  He attends AIPAC’s conferences as a speaker and he is someone who is taken seriously as the leader of an increasingly influential “pro-Israel” evangelical lobby.  It is inconceivable that Wright would receive praise from someone like Joe Lieberman as a “man of God”, and it is also difficult to imagine that if Wright had described a war, including the bombardment of innocent civilians, as a “miracle from God”–as Hagee did during the war in Lebanon–that he would be regarded as anything other than a fanatic.  Because Hagee takes the right views on Israel and glorifies the killing of Arab civilians, he becomes an acceptable figure in the national debate, while Wright is supposed to be relegated to the lunatic fringe, and this in part because he does not defend the policies leading to the mistreatment of Palestinians.  Indeed, this is one place where Obama has made clear time and again that he does not share his pastor’s concerns about such injustices all that often, and that he is quite independent of Wright’s influence when the time came to endorse the disproportionate response of Israel against Lebanon.  Wright has said false, hateful and dreadful things, but to my knowledge he has not publicly gloried in the killing of innocents or endorsed excessive, disproportionate uses of force as Hagee and Obama have respectively done.  Such is the strange nature of what counts as “controversial” in our discourse: advocating aggressive war, the bombing of civilians, torture and the possible first-strike use of tactical nukes are all considered debatable positions on policy and have all been offered by major candidates for the Presidency either during the campaign or in their previous work, but to engage in intemperate and indeed appalling rhetoric that will actually harm and maim no one is evidence of the need for exclusion from respectable society.  There is something deeply wrong about those priorities that seek to police thought, but which do little or nothing to challenge advocacy for deeply immoral actions.  If the one merits being driven out of the debate, how much more should the other merit even more severe consequences? 

Conservatives are accustomed to a double standard being applied in the press that favours black churches and disadvantages white evangelical ones, especially during political campaigns, but we really are seeing the reverse of that in these two cases.  Part of the reason for the reversal is that the sudden surge in interest in Obama’s church is part of the larger adjustment of the mainstream media away from its generally hands-off, fawning treatment of the candidate.  None of this information was secret, nor was it hard to find, but until recently there was little desire to draw attention to anything that might decisively throw the race to Clinton.  However, the surge in negative coverage now that Obama has an essentially unassailable pledged delegate lead may end up pushing more superdelegates to Clinton and make the nomination more difficult to acquire.

Update: Michael profiled Christians United for Israel last August.

Leave it to Michael Gerson to make me write a second pro-Obama post in one day.  But first, a digression.  Gerson writes:

John McCain’s nomination was assured by the success of the surge he had consistently advocated, against intense opposition.

This is ludicrous.  McCain was the frontrunner in the spring of 2007, long before anyone could have reasonably claimed that the “surge” had done anything (not that many pundits didn’t make outlandish claims), and there was in any case never any doubt in the Republican rank-and-file that the “surge” was the right thing to do.  On the contrary, if McCain’s nomination was ever assured it was assured by the collapse of his only real national rival, Mitt Romney, under the waves of the Huckaboom, whose beginning had literally nothing to do with the war in Iraq. 

Gerson points to Obama’s hedging on the war prior to his election to the Senate, which is accurate enough (part of the “fairy tale” Bill Clinton decried, for which he was widely denounced), and his rather un-heroic opposition once in the Senate.  This is unfortunately the truth of Obama’s rather timid, not audacious, Senate career.  Had Russ Feingold run for President, as he had once contemplated before ruling out a campaign, he would have gone nowhere, as we all know, despite his far more consistent and principled antiwar and civil libertarian stand against both Iraq and the PATRIOT Act.  But all of this does not vindicate the profound cynicism of Wehner and Gerson.  McCain showed no political courage in supporting the “surge.”  As a matter of GOP primary politics, anyone who showed the least bit of doubt about the efficacy of escalation failed utterly, and McCain has never been one, contrary to the legend, to let scruples get in the way of ambition.  Despite his lackluster efforts in the Senate, his lack of leadership on the war once in office and his virtually indistinguishable position from that of Hillary Clinton on withdrawal, there has always been more risk involved in opposing an ongoing war–no matter how meekly–than in endorsing the status quo.