Ross gets feisty:

In fact, I think Andrew lets Bush off too easily when he says “as a very abstract theological principle, it’s hard for a fellow Christian to disagree” with the President’s contention that “a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom.” On the one hand, there’s nothing “abstract” about that particular Christian principle: The gift of freedom that Christ promises is far more real than anything else in this world, if Christian teaching on the matter is correct. On the other hand, there’s nothing that’s political about that promise, and the attempt to transform God’s promise of freedom through Jesus Christ into a this-world promise of universal democracy is the worst kind of “immanentizing the eschaton” utopian bullshit.

Naturally, I couldn’t agree with Ross’ response totheseitems more, and I have objected to this Bushian-Gersonian liberation theology last year and again in a different form in my column (not online) in the July 16 TAC.  It is exceedingly easy for a Christian to disagree with Mr. Bush’s “theological perspective,” especially when that perspective seems to require spreading the good news of liberty by way of airstrikes and invasions.  It is amazing how much mischief results when you try to square Christian revelation with often antithetical revolutionary principles. 

Immanentist ideologies and substitute religions stand in opposition to the Gospel.  Compared to the liberation from sin and death that Christ has accomplished, how insignificant is political liberty!  This does not mean that the latter is itself undesirable, but that it is hardly the chief priority of God’s salvific plan for man, and it is precisely for the salvation of men from sin and death and not their amelioration of their political status that God became man.  I can think of no worse kind of militant quasi-religiosity than the sort that preaches secular revolution, actively works in such a way as to worsen the situation of the militant’s own co-religionists and justifies the bloodletting that follows by saying, “Deus vult!”

John Heilemann has an article on the collapse of the McCain campaign, which went from slow rot to structural collapse this past week.  It seems as if every day brings a new resignation of top staff members.  With McCain likely headed out of the race sooner rather than later, it’s time to see how some of those reckless predictions of mine are looking.  Just after the midterms, I wrote:

Speaking of McCain and Giuliani, here are my reckless predictions for the 2008 primaries: McCain will implode relatively early, perhaps pre-March, thanks to some episode of his famously explosive temperament mixed with a lack of primary voter support; Giuliani will go nowhere, but not for lack of money to keep trying (he might last past Super Tuesday but not get enough delegates to win the nomination); the Mormon thing will matter enough to see Romney go down to defeat in South Carolina (it seems to me to be a given that he will fare poorly in New Hampshire and Iowa), which will kill his candidacy; Duncan Hunter will do better than people expect, but still go nowhere in the end. 

McCain hasn’t given up yet, but my initial sense of how his campaign would go seems to have been borne out by the meltdown of recent days.  I did not foresee the fundraising difficulties that he has had, but then no one could have expected this.  That is the truly remarkable part of the story: McCain has been blowing money like he’s Mitt Romney, but he didn’t have as much to spend and he hasn’t gotten as much in exchange for it.  He was supposed to be the establishment candidate, but somewhere along the line he forgot to tell the establishment (or, to be more precise, he told them and they told him to take a hike).     

Speaking of Romney, though, he has spent literally all of the money he has raised.  That doesn’t seem like a smart way to run a campaign, but what do I know?  Giuliani continues to poll well, but it is not clear to me how he has spent 72% of his money–what has he been doing with it?  Romney has been throwing money at advertising and organising in Iowa.  Giuliani has been spending freely, but has actually lost ground relative to where he was five months ago.  I stand by my predictions about the failures of their candidacies.  My Duncan Hunter optimism was, shall we say, misplaced.

The wild card in all of this remains, obviously, the elusive non-candidate Fred, who now effectively ties Giuliani in national polls for the top spot in the field.  Fred seems to fit, at least superficially, with what I said nine months ago:

Someone else, I don’t know who just yet, will be the nominee on the GOP side, and he will not fit the model of goopy Republican moderate now being praised as the path to victory. 

Fred will probably make a boring-but-fine, conventional GOP nominee, a sort of “steady as she goes” tribute to boilerplate and stale ideas.  No bold ideas or courageous stands–just a reassuring pat on the back from ol’ Fred as he drinks his lemonade on the porch.  In electoral competitiveness, he will be Bob Dole with a drawl, but he’ll have charisma, too, which means he might get all of 40% of the vote.  He will prove an acceptable fall guy for Republican defeat.

Second, Bush remains energized by the power of the presidency. Some presidents complain about the limits of the office. But Bush, despite all the setbacks, retains a capacious view of the job and its possibilities. ~David Brooks

Dan McCarthy, who has reviewed Prof. Lukacs’ excellent George Kennan: A Study in Character for TAC, points us to the WSJ’s reviewer of the same book.  You can read both if you like, but if you’re pressed for time I recommend that you just read Dan’s.  As someone who has read the book and having written a review of it myself (publication to be announced later), I can say with confidence that Joffe does not really do justice to the subject of the study or to the work of the scholar who wrote it. 

Presented with a fascinating character study of an important, learned and serious historian and foreign policy analyst, Joffe takes the predictable route of checking off ideological boxes.  The problem with the review isn’t just that the reviewer gets hung up on Kennan’s lack of enthusiasm for parliamentary democracy in the 1930s (be honest–if you had been around in the 1930s, would you have thought much of parliamentary democratic systems?) and his admiration for certain conservative authoritarian rulers (which is so far from “baffling” that it is baffling that Joffe would find it baffling).  This focus hardly helps to get to the core of the book, which actually has less to do with Kennan’s attitudes towards democracy and dictatorship.  His political views are part of the story, but the brilliance of the book is its illumination of the inner life and, obviously, character of the man.  I don’t want to say more, lest I give away too many of my own thoughts about it. 

In the end, one gets the distinct impression that Joffe does not know, or does not know well, much of anything else that Prof. Lukacs has written, nor does he understand the close affinities between the author and subject that help to explain some elements of the book.  For instance, it is rather relevant that Prof. Lukacs has been a noted anti-anti-communist for decades, but a reader of Joffe’s review would have no idea about any of this.  It is sufficient for a WSJ reviewer to dismiss those lacking in ideological purity.  It is my strong sense that the George Kennan described in Prof. Lukacs’ fine work would not want even the faint praise of someone writing for that paper, since it has become the journalistic center of everything twisted and wrong with American foreign policy thinking in our time.

Bennett and Leibsohn are under the impression that the GOP presidential field is moving away from Mr. Bush on Iraq, and they demand that this stop right now–it’s time for some solidarity with the President, it’s time for a united front!  This ignores the reality of what virtually every candidate (except Ron Paul) has been saying about Iraq.  Glenn Greenwald explains why the GOP presidential field as a whole has no major disagreements with Mr. Bush over Iraq: it is political suicide for someone seeking the GOP nomination to go against the war.  Hence, none of the four leading candidates and only one of the “second-tier” candidates has said anything that expresses opposition to the war.  Oh, yes, Tommy Thompson has his three-point plan, and Brownback has his tri-partition plan, and almost all of them have made remarks about poor planning in the past, but for the most part none of them (except, of course, Ron Paul) has actually done anything to put himself in clear opposition to the administration, much less the war itself. 

It says something about the state of the GOP that many Republican pundits find it plausible to claim that the GOP is insufficiently united in support for the Iraq war, as if the party were suffering from wave after wave of dissenting splinter groups and unduly raucous foreign policy debate.  Perversely, this feeds the Republican “ideological diversity” myth while also enabling pro-war pundits to accuse even the most minor disagreements over tactical plans of undermining the party and the cause.  It stifles dissent while giving the impression that the GOP is overflowing, dangerously so, with a variety of opinions on important policy questions.

Popper more than thumped the table.  He used propaganda techniques to caricature Hegel.  He twisted his ideals into their opposite, attributing to him false motives, denounced him as pathological.  On all major isues dividing Popper and Hegel, I stand with Popper.  Hegel’s theodicy, his premature reconciliation of liberty and power, favored the status quo and represented a long and dangerous German intellectual tradition.  All the same, he was neither totalitarian nor nationalist and deserved a serious critique, not a caricature.  Popper’s attack remains a showpiece of intolerance and narrow-mindedness.  Writing in the midst of a war that would decide civilization’s fate, Popper understandably “did not mince words,” but this should have reinforced, not waived, critical rationalist maxims.  Resorting to manipulation to delegitimize Hegel, Popper betrayed critical rationalism. ~Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902-1945

This biographer is extremely sympathetic to Popper, but he does not make excuses for him when Popper goes off the deep end in his arguments against those whom he regarded as the fonts of totalitarianism.  One need not embrace Hegel to recognise that he is not what Popper made him out to be.

In “Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion,” David Gelernter, a Yale computer-science professor and a versatile and prolific public intellectual, makes a provocative claim: Such professions of faith express “belief in . . . a religious idea of enormous, transporting power.” Indeed, he contends that America “is a biblical republic and Americanism a biblical religion.”

This does not in any way detract, Gelernter is quick to clarify, from America’s commitment to religious freedom: Liberty, democracy and equality constitute the American Creed [bold mine-DL]. And Americanism entails a duty to not only realize these universal ideas at home, but to spread them around the world. ~Peter Berkowitz

It’s simply appalling in so many ways that I am at first overwhelmed.  In the first place, the title is a little baffling (why the fourth?), until you realise that he must mean to include Islam as the third great “Western” religion, at which point we can already take it as a given that words mean nothing to the author.  Then there is this bit from his book’s description: 

Gelernter argues that what we have come to call “Americanism” is in fact a secular version of Zionism. Not the Zionism of the ancient Hebrews, but that of the Puritan founders who saw themselves as the new children of Israel, creating a new Jerusalem in a new world. Their faith-based ideals of liberty, equality, and democratic governance had a greater influence on the nation’s founders than the Enlightenment.
 

It is hard to say which is the worse part.  You have this business about “secular Zionism” that is at once religious and not religious  side by side with misrepresentations about ” faith-based ideals of…democratic governance” when referring to 17th century Calvinists along with a New England-centric spin on the whole of American identity, as if the Randolphs, Jeffersons, Morrises, Washingtons, Madisons and Pinckneys of the early republican era were guided by the zeal of New England Puritanism.  Whether or not I dislike many things in the Enlightenment heritage of many of the Whig ideas at the core of the political philosophy of many of the Founders (and I do), I cannot pretend that it played second fiddle to some mythical Zionism.  To the extent that this did exist at all and influenced American political life, the phenomenon he describes has very little to do with the establishment of the Republic and much more to do with the “refounding” or rather destruction of the same in the War.  If this Americanism has as three of its patrons Lincoln, TR and Wilson, the question is not whether it is dangerous (since it clearly is), but whether it has so entered into the mainstream of American politics that it cannot now be expelled. 

If “liberty, democracy and equality” constitute “the American Creed,” I am glad to say that many of the more esteemed Americans in our early history were only two-thirds or even one-third believers in it. 

Then there is another item from the book description:

If America is a religion, it is a religion without a god, and it is a global religion. People who believe in America live all over the world. Its adherents have included oppressed and freedom-loving peoples everywhere—from the patriots of the Greek and Hungarian revolutions to the martyred Chinese dissidents of Tiananmen Square.

I don’t know what to call this except insane.  There was another global godless political religion that sought to spread all over creation.  Perhaps Gelernter has heard of it.  As its fate reminds us, the Lord does not suffer such blasphemies to long endure.  You cannot serve both God and Americanism. 

This claim about the other peoples of the world is also shockingly presumptuous, even for someone of Gelernter’s policy views.  It is as close to someone saying publicly that “inside everyone there is an American trying to get you” as I have ever seen in real life.  This idea is often implied in what many democratists say, and it can be inferred from many of Mr. Bush’s major speeches, but most have the good sense not to say such things quite so bluntly.  Quite obviously, the patriots of the Greek and Hungarian revolutions “believed” in Greece and Hungary, if we must use this language of “believing in” countries.  (The physical places exist whether or not anyone believes in them, and the cultural distinctiveness of Greek and Hungarian would exist whether or not any political revolutionary ever “believed” in a national cause.)  The latter made the mistake of trusting the shaky promises of foolish American “rollback” advocates, but the heroes of 1956 did not “believe in America” or in Americanism.  If they believed in an -ism, it might have been Hungarianism or something like it.  Give Gelernter credit for a certain bizarre consistency: if all it takes to be an American is to buy into a few tired political slogans, anyone who embraces those slogans really must effectively be an American or at least an Americanist.

Then there is this last bit, which is just too funny:

Gelernter also shows that anti-Americanism, particularly the virulent kind that is found today in Europe, is a reaction against this religious conception of America on the part of those who adhere to a rival religion of pacifism and appeasement.

Or it might have something to do with prudential objections to policies that are perceived as dangerous and misguided.  However, as we can all see, that’s obviously far too outlandish of an interpretation, so the “religion of appeasement” explanation will have to do.  Does that mean that anti-Americans in Latin America and the Near East also belong to the broad church of appeasement?  Hugo Chavez, pacifist–you heard it from Gelernter first!  No wonder the description calls the argument “startlingly original.”  I am startled that it even got published.

A GOP victory is not absolutely out of the question, of course, but getting there would take a forward-looking agenda, unparalleled message discipline, a strict focus on the millions of independent voters, an innovative candidate and campaign and a lot of luck.

In other words, don’t bet on it. 

————

A successful Republican candidate in Ohio will have learned how to articulate a culturally conservative message fused with government accountability and economic opportunity specifically tailored to voters in the industrial heartland [bold mine-DL]. Without the support of the anxious working class, Ohio will also turn deep blue. And so will the United States. ~Frank Luntz

Now where have I heard this suggestionbefore? 

It is in the realm of possibility that the GOP could put forward a candidate who could make this sort of pitch to Ohioans and other Midwesterners, but the likely spokesmen for such an appeal are either not running (Pawlenty) or are trailing badly in all polls (Huckabee, The Other Thompson, Hunter).  Fred has been dusting off the old anti-Washington populist lines, but when it comes to policy he seems to offer nothing that could be called, whether as a compliment or criticism, innovative.  Fred’s popularity is the result of a longing for the tried and true path of down-home elite-bashing that has served the GOP, whose leaders are about as elite as they get, so well, but he has never made a name for himself in pushing actual populist policies with respect to trade or economic policy.  A former lobbyist and trial lawyer, Fred is also personally a terrible torch-bearer for the GOP in the Midwest. 

Romney’s message stresses concepts of opportunity and innovation, but his economic views are those of the corporate executive and as master of the downsizing, streamlining “turnaround.”  There is probably no worse candidate for the GOP in Ohio than Romney, who embodies everything about corporate America and Republican free trade policies that a lot of voters in Ohio (and elsewhere)currently despise.  Nominating Romney (which Republicans are not going to do in any case) would be a signal of just how far out of touch the party had become.  His nomination would probably be a prelude to epic political disaster.

Giuliani and McCain poll better in named match-ups with Democratic contenders than the other two “leading” candidates, but on trade and economic policy they have nothing to offer Ohio, Pennsylvania and other Midwestern states.  Leave aside their foreign policy craziness for a moment, and remember (if you somehow had forgotten) that these two are the strongest pro-immigration advocates in the field.  That will not, already does not, play well with Republican voters, and it likely will not play very well with the electorate in Ohio, either.  Needless to say, the state that went for Bush in ’04 at least partly thanks to the gay “marriage” ban referendum is not going to be a good fit for Giuliani. 

The Republicans need to be able to compete in Ohio and Midwestern states like Ohio, and they appear to be gearing up to nominate a candidate that will make them relatively more competitive in either the South (Fred), California (McCain), the Northeast (Giuliani) or nowhere in particular (Romney).  They have apparently learned nothing from the close call in 2004 and the repudiation of 2006.  Quite apart from tone-deafness on the war, many Republicans seem to be of the mind that if they say the words “low unemployment” and “recovery” often enough that it will persuade all those voters who feel real economic insecurity (even though they are employed) that all is well. 

Bill Kristol’s latest exercise in optimism in place of analysis is the latest to mistake economic indicators for political reality.  It might be worth noting that the recession had ended by the middle of 1992, but that didn’t mean much to those still feeling the effects of the recession.  Likewise, we may have been enjoying a reasonably good multi-year recovery, but that raises the questions: good for whom and how widely distributed have the fruits of the recovery been? 

Indeed, the endless chirping of certain pundits about ever-higher indexes in the stock market may have the opposite effect of the one intended by the boosters of the “Bush recovery.”  Far from persuading those who are anxious about the state of the economy in their part of the country, it simply reinforces their sense that the interests of finance and corporations do not seem to coincide with their own.  It persuades them that the last few years have been quite good for some, and rather less spectacular for everyone else, which makes them much more receptive to economic populist messages that purport to explain this gap and propose alleged remedies for it.  The mentality that makes Kristol’s article possible is the same one that will send the GOP to an impressive defeat next year.

It isn’t exactly the redeployment Warner and Lugar want.  American forces may not be going to the cooler heights of Kurdistan anytime soon, but it seems likely that some Iraqi parliamentarians will be taking their holidays there.  They did already give up their July vacation time and have still managed to go nowhere with any of the legislative agenda before them.  The worst thing that can be said of the Iraqi parliament is that it is irrelevant whether or not it is in session in August or at any time thereafter.  The final results in terms of legislation and political reconciliation will be roughly the same. 

It should be noted, however, that the Iraqi parliament’s failure to pass any part of its legislative agenda (e.g., de-Baathification law, hydrocarbon law, provincial elections, etc.) is much like the larger Iraqi “failure” to build a functioning self-governing political system: success requires Iraq to be radically different in its ethnic and sectarian makeup from the way that Iraq actually is.  The entire enterprise has been set up to fail, and under these circumstances condemning Iraqi failure or Iraqi stubbornness or whatever it is that opportunistic pols would now like to blame for their failure to serve the interests of the American people is a bit like blaming the rain for being wet.  It may feel good to say it, but it is ridiculous.  The old knock on the Great Society seems applicable here: if you wanted to create a political system designed to maximise communal hatred, violence and non-cooperation, you could not have done much better than the government has done in Iraq.  (This is not to say that democratisation in Iraq could have been done if it had been handled differently, but it might not have resulted in such a terrific explosion of violence and deepening communal resentment.) 

The ’05 elections sharply politicised ethnicity and sectarian identity, encouraging the communalist violence that was already beginning, and the parties that prevailed in those elections reinforced and nurtured those divisions (divisions that are vital for their continued hold on power).  Now the government and parliament, which had its origins in this rather dreadful process, cannot find any consensus and so can pass no major laws, since there is virtually no sufficient minimal degree of common identity and shared priorities among the members.  This is a snapshot of the fatal flaw of Iraq as a “nation-state” that has explained much of its history in the 20th century.  As I’m sure others have said before, since there is no nation in Iraq, there will tend to be a great emphasis on the state as a substitute for a lack of any organic unity or natural affinities.  

In less obviously despotic systems, the state’s role in a multiethnic society is also bound to increase, either in its role of policing communal quarrels or as an instrument used in compelling a certain degree of good relations between different groups and through an institutional apparatus designed to protect minority interests.  It seems plausible that social solidarity will decrease as diversity increases, but it is by no means assured that the state will become either smaller or less intrusive as a result.  Lacking anything else, multiethnic societies will find their common loyalty in the institutions of the state or the state will use those institutions to coerce obedience of the different groups (or these societies will have some combination of the two).  The more “successful” multiethnic states have, in most cases, divvied up power among the different groups in some fashion or have attempted to act as a supposedly unbiased mediator of the different groups’ interests (this is the Austrian model, at least when it actually functioned properly).  Whenever the central state has become too closely identified with one group, the state tends either to resort to repressive measures against the increasingly alienated members of other groups (this has been the case with Iraq), or it will seek (usually in vain) to accommodate the demands of the other ethnicities, which can result in the complete breakup of the state (especially when, after a defeat in war, the central state has lost a large part of its authority with all member nations).  Lost on the democratists, as usual, is any awareness that it is mass democracy itself that makes imitation of the Austrian model all but impossible and makes it more likely that multiethnic societies will tend to suffer the fate of Iraq or Ivory Coast.

Jim Gilmore has dropped out of the presidential race, citing inability to raise funds.  Unlike every other public appearance he has made, he neglected to mention in his announcement that he was governor of Virginia on 9/11. 

And then there were nine.  (We are counting on Fred to get the field back to a nice round 10.)