James says:

The secession of Kosovo is really the forcible removal from Serbia of Russia, and even more importantly Russianness, the ill for which Europe has never found the proper cure, and against which even all attempted counterpoisons have sickeningly failed.

I am writing my next column on Kosovo, so I will hold off on commenting on the separation at too much length, but I would submit to my learned colleague that this makes absolutely no sense, even when taken metaphorically.  Serbia does not suffer from a surfeit of “Russianness,” and even if it did the attempted hiving off of medieval Serbian identity would have nothing to do with it.  As I’m sure James also appreciates, the Serbo-Russian diplomatic and political link is a very modern one and a product of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.  The dissolution of Yugoslavia (and now the attempted partition of Serbia) has reinvigorated and reinforced that link.  It may, but shouldn’t, surprise us to find that Kosovo’s separation will push Serbia even more into Russia’s orbit.  If the “Europeanisation” of Serbia were the goal of supporting Kosovo’s independence, it would not work.  But then I don’t really agree that the Russians aren’t European, so make of that what you will. 

A related point to ponder: the Latin occupation of Constantinople did not make the Byzantines more pro-Latin.

If there is one word that has lost most of its meaning over the last couple of decades, it is the word “responsibility.”  Bill Kristol digs deep into his bad of tricks and comes up with a boilerplate lecture about Republicans as the party of responsible government and Democrats as the feckless opposition.  There was a time when this not only seemed true, but was an accurate assessment of the two parties.  There is something very odd about this, since it was the Democrats, except for their drought of presidential wins, that were the natural party of government for almost six unbroken decades.  This generally allowed the GOP the luxury of channeling most of its energies into electing executives and focusing on foreign policy for much of the Cold War.  It is this area of governing that concerns Kristol, since the fiscal recklessness and domestic policy failures of the current administration would tend to undermine claims of responsibility, and then you realise that it is in foreign policy, the area where the GOP had cultivated a deserved reputation for being responsible and sober-minded, that Republicans have proven themselves to be the most undeserving of wielding power.

After the last seven years, if I were a Democrat I would be amazed at the gall of the first part of Kristol’s claim.  Recklessly irresponsible would be a good way to describe the current administration’s style of governing, and when it was in the majority the Congressional GOP hardly distinguished itself for making hard choices and setting priorities.  The second part–the part about the feckless opposition–is more defensible, but just as misleading for all that.  It is counted as a failure of Democratic leadership that it cannot override presidential vetoes with their slim House majority and basically non-existent Senate majority, but on the Republican side the leadership, both in the White House and the Congress, has been marked by the complete refusal to make choices and the persistent unwillingness to take responsibility for the choices they have made.  None of this is to defend the Democrats, but to drive home the point that rehashed lines about responsible Republican government no longer persuade, because the people advancing them have no credibility as judges of what constitutes responsible or good government and because the party no longer deserves a reputation for probity and weighing the consequences of hard decisions.  

Of course, in the world of Kristol, “responsibility” is defined by the policy goals you pursue and not whether you pursue them prudently, carefully or, well, responsibly.  For example, viewed rationally, invading Iraq without good cause or proper planning for the aftermath is the height of irresponsibility.  Viewed from Kristol’s perspective, invading Iraq is the epitome of responsibility and decisive leadership, while leaving Iraq is inherently irresponsible regardless of whether remaining there makes any sense.  In this view, misrule is responsible government, which is the only thing that explains how someone could have the temerity to suggest that the Republicans were still the party of responsible government.

The Albanians in Kosovo have declared independence, and it seems likely that various Western powers will make a hash of things yet again and recognise Kosovo as a sovereign state.  I will have something to say about this in the future (actually, I expect that I will have a great deal to say about this one way or another), but fornowherearemypreviousposts on Kosovo.

Speculation about Tim Pawlenty as McCain’s running mate continues, and while he brings many of the things that a VP choice ought to bring (political talent, readiness to govern, influence in a potential swing state, Midwestern Catholic reform governor–think Tommy Thompson, but charismatic) he suffers from some of the same problems with the right that McCain does.  This isn’t entirely surprising (any Republican governing in Minnesota is going to fail some litmus tests), and helps explain why Pawlenty and McCain have become allies, but I’m not sure that Pawlenty would help McCain with the conservatives already put off by McCain.  Some of them are unreachable by McCain, and some of them are hung up on the oddest things (if drug reimportation appears to you to be an evil liberal plot, you are part of a very small minority), but those who can be won over will not necessarily be entirely reassured by Pawlenty.  Someone described as a “little too green” (something that undoubtedly makes him even more of a political asset in the general election) does not help a presidential nominee whose environmental policy views distress many in his party.  It would be an intriguing pick, mainly because he is seen as such a McCain loyalist that he would seem to be the last person McCain would pick, since selecting him doesn’t gain McCain any boost within the party.  Then again, given some of the horrifying or laughable alternatives that have been mentioned, the Republicans could do a lot worse than McCain-Pawlenty.

The recent flap over the Obama campaign office that had a Cuban flag with the image of Che Guevara on one of its walls has generated more reaction, and this Jacoby column is fairly sensible on this subject, but what all of this has made me remember is how brilliant and important Andy Garcia’s The Lost City was, partly because it portrayed Che as the thug that he was.  It was a beautiful and eminently fair-minded film that conveyed a fine anti-totalitarian, anti-ideological message because it portrayed accurately the costs imposed on a people and a family by totalising, idelogical revolution.  For those who haven’t read my take on the movie before, I reviewedThe Lost City at greater length last May.  Here is an interesting interview with Garcia about the making of the film.

Unfortunately, Obama has one of the better positions on Cuba policy of all the major candidates, and things like this, while minor, do nothing to make advancing changes in Cuba policy any easier.

Independent voters have been marginalised over the past decade. Armies of partisans have marched over the political battlefield. Elections have been much more about energising the faithful than reaching out to wavering voters. The 2004 election was the electoral equivalent of the Somme—trench warfare between the blue army and the red army enlivened by the occasional daring raid.

There are growing signs that this era of American politics is coming to a close. ~The Economist

The “signs” are that Schwarzenegger is popular, Bush is not, Powell is undecided about how he will vote and Barone is speculating that this new era is beginning.  That’s really about all the evidence Lexington assembles for this claim.  Meanwhile, the people who identify as independents are supposedly “pragmatic, anti-ideological and results-oriented.”  Is there some secret international pundit regulation that requires people to use these three descriptors (or versions of them) for political independents?  I have already explained why this description is a lot of nonsense, since you find when you dig a bit deeper that they are the least “pragmatic” of all, since they seem to be allergic to everything that actually goes into legislation and political coalition-building.  Besides, these descriptions are not very useful–how many people volunteer that they are impractical ideologues who are uninterested in results?  Who wouldn’t describe himself as being “pragmatic, anti-ideological and results-oriented”?  

Pundits and journalists prefer to describe independents in this way because it allows them to make a critique of the parties and their agendas in the guise of describing a political phenomenon, which in turn feeds in to a commonly-heard journalistic lie that America is deeply divided and polarised and that what we need more of is bipartisanship.  Obama and McCain are media favourites because their candidacies have been founded to a large degree on this lie that we have had too little cooperation across party lines, and that these candidates represent a chance to “unite” us.  Ignored in all of this is that the two worst policies of the last seven years, the war in Iraq and “comprehensive immigration reform,” have been thoroughly bipartisan affairs combining the worst instincts and interests of both party establishments. 

As I was reading this article, it occurred to me that Steve Sailer’s new article on affordable family formation and the marriage and baby gaps is a very useful tool for debunking the idea that a new era is about to dawn.  Sailer’s argument, which he had advanced before in the magazine and elsewhere, is that there are demographic patterns of marriage and settlement that strongly correlate with voting preferences.  Essentially, people are voting their interests and their interests are determined to a high degree by structural factors of the cost of living and the affordability of home ownership, which have in turn affected decisions about marriage and children that again appear to align with voting preferences very frequently.  Here is one key part of the article:

The culture wars between Red and Blue States are driven in large part by these objective differences in how family-friendly they are, financially speaking. For example, according to ACCRA, a nonprofit organization that measures the cost of living so corporations can adjust the salaries of employees they relocate, the liberal San Francisco-Oakland area is twice as expensive as the conservative Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. The BestPlaces.net calculator reports, “To maintain the same standard of living, your salary of $100,000 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, California could decrease to $49,708 in Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, Texas.”

Not surprisingly, the San Francisco area is popular with people who don’t need a big backyard for their kids, such as homosexuals and childless couples, while North Texas attracts families from across America. San Francisco is very Democratic, while the Metroplex is quite Republican.

Why? The simplest explanation is that GOP “family values” resound more in states where people can more afford to have families. In parts of the country where “Families can be easily supported, more Persons marry, and earlier in Life.” And where it is economical to buy a house with a yard in a neighborhood with a decent public school, you will generally find more conservatives. It’s a stereotype that marriage, mortgage, and kids make people more conservative, but, like most stereotypes, it’s reasonably true. You’ll find fewer Republicans in places where family formation is expensive. Where fewer people can form families, Republican candidates making speeches about family values just sound irrelevant or irritating.

The arrow of causality points in both directions. Some family-oriented people move to more affordable states in order to marry and have children, while people uninterested in marriage and children move in the opposite direction to enjoy adult lifestyles. This population swapping just makes the electorate more divided by geography rather than tipping the national balance toward one party.

While you can imagine how increases in cost of living and housing prices nationwide and consequently worsening in the affordability of home ownership and family formation would begin shifting the electorate against the Republicans, it’s not clear that this is happening or happening so rapidly that it is going to break the electoral deadlock between the two sides in which independents are also aligning with one party or the other.  The weakening dollar and high energy prices obviously ultimately work to the detriment of long-term Republican fortunes, but may not influence this cycle as much.  To the extent that they are, in fact, “pragmatic,” independents will judge the two major candidates according to their own interests, and they will split between the two in ways not terribly different from before.  It’s possible that one or the other party could benefit from intangible qualities of its candidate, and independents seem to be particularly susceptible to candidacies based on personality and biography, but for there to be a realignment election of the sort that will break us out of the evenly-divided pattern in presidential voting we would have to be experiencing significant economic woes that directly affect these factors of cost of living and home ownership.  But if housing prices continue dropping nationwide, that could portend a return of the same evenly-divided political map of past cycles after a brief moment of Democratic resurgence. 

Obviously, one shouldn’t be too reductionist about this and assume that these patterns alone drive voting preferences, and all the political fundamentals point towards another strong Democratic year, at least in Congressional races, but these patterns offer important evidence to challenge the idea that a new political era is dawning and make clear that the partisan split, such as it is, is the result of different constituencies and their divergent interests.  Of course, both Obama and McCain understand that their respective parties represent different constituencies and their domestic policy agendas reflect that to some extent.   

If you insist on being that party-killing skeptic, it either means you’re a Washington cynic, supporting the worst elements of Clinton’s campaign, or you’re cluelessly out of step with the sway of the culture. ~John Dickerson

For my part, I have to plead “cluelessly out of step” and proud of it.  Of course, when I see people acting like lemmings, I am relieved to be “out of step.”

At ISI’s web journal, First Principles, my review of John Lukacs’ George Kennan is available online.  Here is an excerpt:

There was not for Kennan the rude identification with the broad mass of the people that Lukacs marks as the defining trait of nationalism, but rather the tie to country and land that was for him most significant in determining his loyalties and strong sense of duty. This distance from “the people” seems to have been in one sense temperamental—Kennan was not a man who relished crowds—and in another sense philosophical and political. Coming of age in the 1920s and ’30s, Kennan developed a “distaste for democracy,” and his convictions during this period “involved a critique of parliamentarism and democracy.” In retrospect, some of his enthusiasms for authoritarian and corporatist regimes, whether of Austria or Portugal, may seem misplaced, but if ever there were a time when popular government revealed itself in all its weaknesses, fecklessness, and potential for degeneration it was probably during these decades. Certainly in our own time we could stand to have more Kennanesque skepticism of the virtues of democracy and less unchecked enthusiasm for its wonder-working powers.

Over at American Spectator‘s blog, they have been having a livelyconversation about the role of anti-Mormonism in Romney’s defeat.  As I have argued for months, it was always going to be a significant factor (resistance to a Mormon presidential candidate is widespread and can be found in every demographic), but I have noted that we can’t possibly know how much of a factor it was in each state given the limited information provided to us by exit polling.  We can know who did and did not vote for Romney, but we cannot discern why unless voters make a point of telling us.  There is nothing, however, in those same exit polls that shows that anti-Mormonism had little or no role–we simply can’t know without more specific surveys being done. 

Today, Christopher Orlet, who wrote the column that started the debate, said:

While we may like to think it was Romney’s flip-flopping that did him in (most conservatives WISH McCain would flip flop on immigration, etc), the emails I’ve been receiving tell a different, more sinister tale.

Now Mr. Orlet is free to regard these sentiments as sinister if he wishes, but I have some difficulty understanding why not voting for Romney because he has a different religion is inherently more sinister than not voting for him because he does not share your policy views (or appears to be unreliable in his defense of your preferred policies).  I think you could make a compelling case that it is much more reasonable to reject a candidate who does not share fundamental assumptions about God and creation than it is to reject him because he fails to match every policy preference you have.  The former are obviously much weightier, more significant beliefs than whether you support a particular kind of legislation.  Someone will object that these other things have no place in political debate, but so long as our political debates involve questions of ethics and morality (as they do) it is hard to say that core assumptions about the universe and its Creator are irrelevant, when these may and often will have consequences for how we understand the moral law.  Moreover, at the core of our civilisation is the understanding that God and creation are radically different (which is why, among other things, the mystery of the Incarnation is so profound and amazing), which means that religions that deny or minimise that radical difference understand neither God nor creation properly.  It seems to me that religious conservatives, if they are taking these things seriously, cannot dismiss disagreements over such fundamental things as irrelevant or outside the realm of appropriate political debate.  

After all, if your faith informs your “values,” it has to matter to you to some degree what your faith teaches, and so it ought to be a legitimate thing for voters to scrutinise and, if they disagree with it, to reject.  It should also be considered legitimate for voters to bear in mind the teachings of a candidate’s religion if that religion deems the voter’s religion to be false or corrupted, or if the candidate’s religion makes claims about sacred figures in your religion that seem blasphemous or insulting.  Pluralism and disestablishment do not require you to be willing to support someone who regards you as an apostate or infidel so long as he has the “right values.”  Rather by definition, someone who necessarily rejects your religion as a distortion of the truth cannot have “the right values” from your perspective.   

Along these lines, it is difficult to see how judging candidates accordingly is “sinister.”  Many religious conservatives, probably including some who are leery of Christians who refused to vote for Romney, likely see no problem in claiming that atheists fundamentally misunderstand reality and that this can have consequences for their judgements in this world, and that regardless of that they prefer candidates who profess belief in God.  Scant few of those who lament the presence of anti-Mormonism in the ’08 election are prepared, I suspect, to declare that the 60-odd percent who would refuse to vote for an atheist are similarly “sinister.”

The culinary camps have become so balkanized that some factions consider interdietary dating taboo. ~The New York Times

It was encouraging to find that fasting restrictions were not as off-putting to the dietary isolationists (if we can call them that) as other reasons.  Among the couples I have known, the woman’s dietary preferences have won out pretty much every time, especially when it is a case of ethically-inspired veganism.  After lenten seasons, I have had enough quasi-veganism to last me a long time, so I always marvel at other Orthodox who are vegan or vegetarian year-round.