The GQ profile on Obama has some amazing details that probably would, by all rights and normally, relegate him to the world of the laughable also-rans.  For instance, there is this item:

We stopped at a picturesque redbrick general store—“America’s oldest”—to photograph Obama and his family as they bought sandwiches and fudge and played with a puppy. As Obama stood at the counter paying, he looked quizzically at a display of trailer-hitch covers dressed in the guise of moose and turkeys. Turning to the phalanx of cameramen and reporters, Obama bravely wondered, “Who knows what a hitch ball is? This is a hitch-ball cover. We don’t know what a hitch ball is. Anybody know?” A cameraman politely explained that it’s the silver thing on the back of a truck used to tow a trailer. “Oh, I see,” Obama said, looking as if he was doing a mental calculation about whether this was one of those moments the press would use to make it seem like he’s out of touch. It wasn’t exactly President George H. W. Bush marveling over a checkout scanner, but still.

Make it seem like he’s out of touch?  There’s no need for the press to make him seem like anything–he is out of touch.  No one would confuse me with someone who is extremely familiar with pickup trucks, but even I know what this is.  It’s not some piece of arcane cultural knowledge that you acquire only after years of dwelling in deepest Oklahoma or Arkansas.  It is something that you learn when you come across a pickup truck.  No wonder “downscale” Democratic voters don’t relate to Obama–it seems as if he doesn’t even know how to speak their language or understand their world.

“One of the things that I’m going to do when I’m in there,” Obama says with the extreme politeness he turns on when saying something that won’t fully please his interlocutor, “is to look at this faith-based initiative and see how it’s worked and where the money is going. What you don’t want it to be used for is a way of advancing someone’s political agenda and rewarding friends and not rewarding enemies. Know what I mean?” The reverend tightens his lips, nods his head, and gives Obama a fairly unconvincing “mm-hmm.” ~GQ

Of course, what this pastor probably wanted to hear was less of Obama’s transcendent unity piffle and more promises that Obama will be directing more of the rewards to his friends–that is, people such as the pastor and the other “right kinds” of people.  The article describes this as Obama taking an “easy pander” and making it an occasion to tell a “hard truth,” but the trouble Obama seems to be having in this race is that he likes to tell a lot of “hard truths” to voters who haven’t yet committed to supporting him without doing much of the “pandering” first.  (His advocacy for merit pay in the lion’s den of the NEA is typical.)  He wants voters to respect that he has a sense of integrity, but many of the voters first want to hear that he will be looking after their interests in the most mercenary sense.  He wants to campaign as a “change” candidate, but one constant problem with “change” candidates is that most voters actually don’t want their candidates to campaign in this above-it-all, supposedly meritocratic, reformist style.  They want candidates who can deliver the goods to them, while Obama tries to project the appearance of someone who finds the act of doling out the goods offensive and beneath him.  This doling out of rewards is “small” politics, but it is the sort of politics to which most voters respond.  Having asked, “What are you going to do for me?” they don’t want to hear a high-minded answer that we should direct our resources where they are most needed.  They want to hear that their needs are the most important, whether or not this is true, and that their needs have priority over everyone else’s.  The truly cunning campaigner is the one who is able to say this to numerous, mutually antagonistic groups without anyone being able to notice the contradiction.  Obama may want to change some of the things in the current system, but at the rate he’s going he will certainly not be doing it from the White House.

One way to describe Obama is that underneath the inspirational leader who wants to change politics—and upon whom desperate Democrats, Independents, and not a few Republicans are projecting their hopes—is an ambitious, prickly, and occasionally ruthless politician. But underneath that guy is another one, an Obama who’s keenly aware that presidential politics is about timing, and that at this extremely low moment in American political life, there is a need for someone—and he firmly believes that someone is him—to lift up the nation in a way no politician has in nearly half a century. ~GQ

Via Michael Crowley

In other words, underneath the megalomaniac is a con-man, and underneath the con-man is the guy with the delusions of grandeur.  Sounds like a great combination.

How surprising.  Ryan Sager makes another tired pitch for the Giuliani campaign while bashing the rubes of Iowa.  That is so very interest….zzz.

“All for Jesus. All for Jesus. All for Jesus. All for Jesus,” – Sam Brownback’s stump speech in Iowa.  And some say I exaggerate the sectarian nature of the GOP base. ~Andrew Sullivan

Since Brownback won all of 15% in an unrepresentative straw poll in a state with a fairly sizeable population of very activist evangelicals, you could argue that even if Brownback were the embodiment of the “sectarian” and “fundamentalist” stereotype that Sullivan has laid out in his book and on his blog the significance of such supposedly fundamentalist sectaries for understanding the politics of the “GOP base” is minimal.  Against Brownback’s 15%, you have 31% who voted for a Mormon (the bete noire of the sectarians among us), almost 10% who voted for the decidedly non-sectarian, non-fundamentalist Ron Paul, 13% for Tancredo and 7% for Tommy Thompson–that’s 61% of poll voters who did not join up with the two most explicitly religious conservative candidates at Ames.  In this straw poll, it is fair to assume that the people who respond to Brownback’s rhetorical style are considerably overrepresented when compared with the party at large.  Given that Brownback is one of the least effective and weakest candidates in the field beyond his natural base of support, fundamentalist sectarianism is probably not on the verge of dominating the GOP.

Viewed another way, the quote has nothing to do with so-called “Christianism.”  What should Brownback have said?  “Nothing for Jesus”?  “A tiny bit for Jesus, provided that it falls within the safely defined parameters of the Wall of Separation”?  “Some for Jesus, the rest for me”?  “Jesus is all right, but I am entirely secular and therefore will say nothing unduly religious during this stump speech”?  Perhaps Brownback’s remarks here, like so many things the man says, need some qualification or elaboration, but what do Christians believe except that we should, as one of the prayers in the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom says, dedicate ourselves and “all our lives unto Christ our God”?  For Brownback to say this makes him as “sectarian” as any believing Christian, which is to say that he actually believes Christ’s teachings to be true and compelling.  I generally have no time for Brownback on many policy questions, but this criticism, like Sullivan’s entire categorisation of the Republicans as a “religious party,” is excessive and unfounded.  Perhaps if the GOP actually were something like a religious party, it would not, as an organisation, tolerate nearly so many atrocious policies.  On the contrary, we have something of the worst of both worlds: a thin patina of religiosity masking an agenda of corruption and violence.  This is not the fault of any “Christianism,” but the result of thoroughly secular operatives understanding how to play on the fears and hopes of conservative Christians to win their support and who then proceed to abandon everything these Christians hope to achieve in the political realm.  The proper criticism to be leveled at many Christian conservative leaders and politicians today is not so much that they are grasping or willing to compromise the Faith for power (although some may), but that they are incorrigibly gullible and willing to put their trust in princes who have no use for what Christian conservatives believe except in an election year.

In the end, Romney got 31%, and I guessed he would get 30%, so I’m fairly pleased with the outcome and the prediction as far as that goes.  Huckabee and Brownback both fared better than I expected, racking up the results that I had assigned to Paul and Thompson.  I underestimated Tancredo and ignored poll numbers that suggested he would be a contender here, while I gave too much credit to chatter that Ron Paul might pull off a major coup and Tommy Thompson’s delusions of grandeur.  Thompson will soon be gone, and Hunter’s candidacy has ceased to have much rationale.  John McCain came in next to last, but only because John Cox received fewer votes.  Giuliani was beaten by the non-candidate Fred, both of whom lost to Tommy Thompson.  Romney’s win here isn’t that valuable for him, but considering how miserably the other “major” candidates have been doing it may still be enough to put him over the edge come January.

Isaac Chotiner doesn’t find much to like in the Kaplan article on the Partition, and points us to Pankaj Mishra’s piece in The New Yorker.  Chotiner notes Mishra’s description of Churchill as dyed-in-the-wool imperialist with harsh attitudes towards Indians and says:

Mishra’s more serious point is that by playing up religious divisions, Churchill actively encouraged the rise of political Islam in what is now Pakistan. One could say that this counts as an irony at the expense of those who mention his name every time an “appeaser” questions the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

It would be more ironic, I suppose, if the U.S. government had not been instrumental in promoting political Islam in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1980s and in facilitating the close relations between Pakistani intelligence and the Taliban back when Washington still believed it was more important to be smashing the Northern Alliance and expanding our influence in Central Asia.  Still, I suppose it is a bit ironic that Mr. Bush et al. invoke Churchill, who was always keen to exploit religious differences, since they prefer to lump every potential foe into one, indistinct mass of Islamofascism.

For the class I will be teaching this fall, I was recently reading one of the books I intend to assign that touches directly on the reflections on the Partition and on the Putnam research on diversity described here (TACeven gets a brief mention in the article).  The book, Twice A Stranger,is an account of the history surrounding the Treaty of Lausanne, the population exchanges of 1923-24 and the experiences of the people who were uprooted as a result (as partly related by still-living survivors of the exchange).  In this book, Bruce Clark challenges the standard liberal anti-Lausanne argument (after having similarly critiqued the nationalist account):

The liberal anti-nationalist myth often suggests that relations were perfectly warm and harmonious and would have remained so if the population exchange had not been imposed as an artificial exercise in segregation.  In fact, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.  As anyone who is familiar with rural society in the Balkans or the Caucasus can testify, things are never that simple.  Warm and cordial business relationships, and personal friendships, can transcend the intercommunal division in surprising ways; but that does not abolish the division–or alter the fact that in the event of a general conflagration, almost everybody tends to seek security behind the walls of his or her own community [italics mine-DL], and life becomes  uncomfortable for those who try to occupy the middle ground. (p. 172)

The connection is that people with whom you identify, whom you consider your “own,” are the people you trust and will rely on in the worst situations.  Armed conflict adds an additional dimension of the pressure to actively side and identify with your community, as well as simultaneously seek shelter and protection from that community.  It occurs to me that this is how it is possible that rampant, violent sectarianism could spring from a pre-invasion Iraq that had relatively decent intercommunal relations, friendships and intermarriages.  Sectarian labels mattered little when conflict did not force people to choose sides, and the lines of the communities were not nearly so sharp when your position on one side or the other was not so significant.  When the chips are down, however, and having people you can trust becomes a matter of survival, sticking with your own is not only the natural, instinctive move but also the one that is actually the most rational under the circumstances.  Self-serving jingo “discoveries” of the damaged social fabric of pre-invasion Iraq have sought to discredit the idea that the source of sectarian violence in Iraq is the spark of the invasion itself, when it was the transformation of the country into a war zone that precipitated the bloodletting that has followed. 

This also highlights the flaws, or at least the limits, of Putnam’s proposed “solution.”  He wants to encourage “more encompassing identities” and a “new, more capacious sense of ‘we’,” which is just swell.  The problem with “more encompassing identities” is that they are usually weaker, more brittle and usually not founded in the natural affinities that would reinforce them.  Being an Iraqi is “more encompassing,” but it is consequently that much less meaningful.  It is “capacious” at the expense of being valued.  The more encompassing an identity becomes, the easier it is for that identity to collapse in on itself.

Cathy Young is worried about “a generation that is being taught to see national greatness in a bully state that inspires fear abroad and tramples the individual at home.”  Surprisingly, she isn’t talking about the College Republicans, and the “bully state” she mentions is not the U.S. government.  She refers instead to Russian youths who belong to a group called Nashi, and the state is the Russian Federation (which has not, strangely enough for a bully state that spreads fear abroad, invaded even one other country in the last 15 years).  From her description, this group sounds as if it has many of the vices that would be associated with any group of nationalists.  It isn’t clear why it merits this much attention.  Think about it: Putin theoretically has at his disposal the entire military, intelligence and internal security apparatus of the Russian government, so how on earth could a band of occasionally thuggish nationalist youths be of greater concern to someone who opposes Putin?  

If you want to get exercised about the treatment of Estonia (whose own government’s removal of a Soviet war memorial started the whole fracas), you might focus on the massive cyber-war waged against E-stonia rather than the bussed-in protesters who threw rocks at an embassy.  But there’s no anti-Nazi cachet in that.  Drawing attention to Russian cyber-warfare would emphasise that these are not just some dusty bunch of old commie-Nazis, but represent something different.  Writing an article about “Putin’s young brownshirts” is much catchier, because it allows the audience to avoid thinking. 

Presumably Ms. Young is no more of a fan of our own President-worshipping, “national greatness” chauvinist, rights-trampling and Constitution-shredding types in this country, but when I read things like this I am tempted to ask: “Why does this matter?”  Or, more to the point, I am compelled to reply: “Why do you suppose a generation who grew up in chaos would rally around an authoritarian populist who shakes his fist defiantly at foreigners and seeks to restore national prestige?  Could it be that incredibly bad U.S. Russia policy, the follies of Russian liberals and the rampant criminality of the ’90s taught a generation that the liberalism being offered them was designed to ruin and humiliate their country?”  It’s a bit like the growing revolt of my generation against the GOP because of its failures and corruption, but multiplied by a factor of ten.   

No doubt many of the young nationalists Ms. Young mentions here are making standard nationalist errors: you can see the reflexive attachment to the state, the confusion of government and country, the conflation of patriotic love and nationalist hatred, and the overcompensation for an awareness of vulnerability with bluster and tough talk.  Above all, the source of this nationalist zeal is a sense of rage caused by past humiliations and the focus of that rage on those who are believed to have been responsible for that humiliation.  It occurs to me that if the popularity of authoritarian nationalism in another country disturbs you, you would want to be someone who very actively denounces all of your own state’s policies that contribute to the fear, anger and resentment that fuel that nationalism.  Perhaps that will be Ms. Young’s next column.  For somereason, I won’t be holding my breath.

India was also a real country before the British colonized it, whereas Iraq was a colonial contrivance from the outset. ~Fred Kaplan

Keeping the human losses of the Partition in mind as many throw around ideas of how to decentralise or partition Iraq is something worth doing, and much of Kaplan’s article makes for interesting reading, but I had to marvel at this statement.  Which India does Kaplan mean?  I don’t object to making distinctions between polities that have meaning for their inhabitants and those that have little or none–this is a significant difference between what we can call “artificial” states and “real” ones.  It is the difference between largely fictitious, failing states, such as Bosnia or Somalia, and more “real,” successful ones, such as a Slovenia or a Thailand.  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.  A crucial difference between successes and failures may be related to who is engaged in the contrivance.  With Iraq, the contrivance was largely introduced from outside, the product of gutting the Ottoman Empire and the need for an additional place on which to fob off another Hashemite on the locals.  In India’s case, the contrivance was less sudden, slightly less arbitrary and done with the participation of more of the people.  A longer experience of empire had fashioned a greater sense of identity and solidarity than could have been the case in Iraq.   

Still, Kaplan is attributing a pre-existing “reality,” unity and identity to “India” that certainly did not extend across all or even much of what is today’s India.  This may seem to be tangential to the main argument, but it is actually the crux of the issue.  What makes a state “real” and how it becomes “real” (i.e., able to inspire loyalty and something with which its members identify) are the two basic questions for Iraq today.   

It is significant that the modern nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, is heavily, though not exclusively, North Indian in its definition of Hindutva and in its electoral support.  The preeminent place of the Hindi language is also representative of the connection between North Indian culture and the definition of national identity.  (Hochdeutsch played a similar role in unified Germany, and likewise the Tuscan dialect in Italy.)  While it is possible to speak of a shared Indian civilisation in which all of the Subcontinent (including Pakistan) participates, I think it goes too far to say that “India” was a “real country” in the way Kaplan means it.  In a political sense, and as a matter of the self-identification of people living there, it was no such thing.  “India” was mostly an administrative fiction or more appropriately, as Metternich might have put it, a geographical expression in, say, 1800. 

The regions, polities, cultures and communities with which people identified (and this is true of so many places) were not on such a grand, abstract scale.  This is normal, and it even applied to our own country in the nineteenth century.  Our country, which Kaplan might grant possessed a certain reality, was a number of countries and a number of states bound together in a political federation.  In India, colonial-era railways served and increased political centralisation and more closely connected different parts of the Subcontinent; the shared experience of colonial domination also helped to forge a political-national identity across communities and regions.  Arguably, the numerous, more “real” countries of the Subcontinent were subordinated to the construction of a nation-state, which follows to some extent the model of modernisation and centralisation in Germany and Italy. 

It is true that the Mughals ruled over an expansive stretch of the Subcontinent prior to the arrival of the EIC (and it was a stretch that continued to expand up through the late eighteenth century), and it is true that the last Mughal emperor became a symbolic figurehead associated with nascent anti-colonialist “nationalism” during the Mutiny, but there are large parts of modern India (much of the Deccan, for example) where Mughal writ never ran (and where British influence took longer to be established).  Political fragmentation and weakness (the Peacock Throne didn’t up and leave Delhi on its own!) were the norm prior to colonisation, and it was the centralising, organising activity of British colonialism that created an administrative unit out of a number of very different regions, cultures, languages and polities.  Colonisation brought about administrative and political unification of a number of countries and states (which, I would hasten to add, are also not the same things), and also created the conditions for the forging of something closer to a shared identity.  There are two ways to look at this question: either the British colonisers stayed too briefly in Africa and the Near East to achieve the same results that they did in India, or they did tremendous violence to the many more “real” places and polities out of which they created what became India and Pakistan.  As the violent history after Partition suggests, war has a major role in building up nation-states as “real” states and inculcating shared national identity (which is why so many nationalists are typically very favourably disposed towards war, as they see it, to some extent correctly, as a glue for a variety of peoples who might otherwise see fewer and fewer reasons to remain in political union).