[H]is skepticism toward universalism gives him much in common with forms of multiculturalism today’s conservatives say they oppose. ~Alan Wolfe

I have said pretty much all I intend to say about Wolfe’s original articlehere, but this item begs for special attention.  Since Wolfe is terribly concerned with originality, it might be worth noting that this criticism of conservative particularism is not new.  There are plenty of fairly universalist people on the right who find particularism offensive for the very reason that it seems to lend support to multiculturalism.  They make points that I have found no more persuasive.  The criticism is not new, and it does not become any more accurate with the passing of time.  The universalist will often refer to religion to shame the particularist, who will often be religious to one degree or another: why, if a religion is in some sense truly universal, how can someone opposed to universalism be religious?  (This is also the essence of Wolfe’s weak point about Kirk and Catholicism.)  Well, he might begin by not deliberately conflating concepts that have nothing to do with each other.  Rational, man-made universalism is misguided both in its hubris and its ahistorical nature.  Revelation will be applicable to all times and places, since it comes from God, Who is eternal and immaterial.    

Those of us who are generally working in the same tradition as Kirk was believe that cultural diversity is a product of historical change.  To a certain extent, traditional conservatives are open to the post-modern critique of Enlightenment rationality, because we find the latter limited, one-sided and defined in such a way as to set man’s reason against his adherence to “irrational” customs and traditions.  (For another rightist who praised diversity and identified uniformity as a preferred trait of the left, Wolfe might read Kuehnelt-Leddihn, whose enthusiasm for Catholicism will not leave him in doubt as to where K-L stood.)  Where particularists and multicultis tend to part ways is over the multicultis’ preference for encouraging and building up every other culture except their own (assuming that they believe that they have a culture of their own).  A conservative particularist is not terribly bothered if there are other cultures that have evolved differently, and he will usually be more aware of the significance of those differences than his universalist rivals.  

The particularist does not share the multicultis’ belief that his culture should have to be undermined or ridiculed to accommodate the cultures of others, and he tends to not think that the most stable and well-ordered polities are not those with the greatest number of different cultures.  In the end, multiculturalism does not offend these conservatives because of its interest in diversity, but because it has no real interest in diversity as such (and these people tend to be embarrassingly ignorant and naive about foreign cultures), only in the subversion of their own cultural norms.  Traditional conservatives accept cultural diversity as the result of natural historical development–it is something that can only be eliminated by coercion and ideology.  Multiculturalists seem interested in using other cultures as means to their own ideological goal of transforming their own society into something entirely different from what it has been.

In short, this point about multiculturalism is not a real criticism of Kirk.  It is not even that interesting of a point.  One might even call it an irritated gesture rather than an idea.

A progress report on Iraq will conclude that the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad has not met any of its targets for political, economic and other reform, speeding up the Bush administration’s reckoning on what to do next, a U.S. official said Monday. ~AP

Cue Lugar: “See?!  Benchmarks are never a good idea!”

No one in Iraq is failing to “compromise” because he thinks he can count on an endless American presence. Iraqis are debating core questions of power-sharing and federalism that are the hardest issues for any democracy to settle. ~The Wall Street Journal

There’s an element of truth in this that exposes the larger fraud of the entire project.  Iraqi politicians aren’t failing to compromise because they expect us to be there forever.  They would fail to compromise regardless of whether we were there or not, since the different political factions are not interested in compromise, which is why all of the crucial legislation is stalled and why democracy in Iraq will fail horribly.  These are the hardest issues for a democracy to settle, which is why it is madness to pin our national security and our soldiers’ safety to Iraqi politicians’ abilities to pull together compromise legislation in a situation where such legislation is simply a dream.  Withdrawal should not be premised on the idea that it will facilitate Iraqi political compromise, because that isn’t going to happen (at least not for many, many years).  Withdrawal should happen because it is the right thing to do for our soldiers and for our country.  Remaining in Iraq won’t make Iraqi political reconciliation significantly more likely, and it will cost us.  That is the situation.  Withdrawal soon–with provisions being taken to provide for the security of neighbouring countries and some efforts to provide for the refugee crisis that will be coming–is the best of the bad options.

One more time, from the introduction of Elements of the Philosophy of Right:

For Hegel,as for Mill, the function of representative institutions is not to govern, but to advise those who govern, and to determine who it is that governs.  Hegel expects deputies to the Estates to be ordinary citizens, not professional politicians.  One evident reason for this is that he wants the Estates to be close to the people, and to represent its true sentiments; another reason (unstated, but quite evident) is that he does not want the Estates to be politically strong enough to challenge the power of the professionals who actually govern.  But he does not intend the Estates to be powerless either.  In his lectures, Hegel describes a multi-party system in the Estates, and he insists that the government’s ministry must always represent the ‘majority party’; when it ceases to do so, he says, it must resign and a new ministry, representing the majority of the Estates, must take its place….This idea takes the Hegelian constitutional monarchy most of the way toward presently existing parliamentary systems with a nominal hereditary monarch (as in Britain, Holland and Sweden).

And we all know about iron hand of totalitarian terror that Queen Beatrix has.

Later, there is a vitally important point: “Hegel distinguishes between the ‘political state proper’ from the state in the broadest sense, the community as a whole with all its institutions….He regards the state in the latter sense as the individual’s final end [italics mine-DL].”  In other words, as far as a political telos is concerned, Hegel is arguing for a position that is substantially similar to that of Aristotle: the citizen’s end is realised in and through the life of the political community, because man is a political animal and this end is appropriate to his nature.  It is our latter-day, impoverished understanding of what a political community fully means that causes many to mistake the importance these philosophers give to this broader political community for a theoretical endorsement of unlimited governmental power.  A polity is more than its government (thank God!), and there are many philosophers whose political thought will make no sense if we do not keep this distinction in mind.  We may or may not find this account of political life satisfactory, but we are not free to describe it as totalitarian or proto-totalitarian.  It is, by definition, exactly not that, because it assumes that there is more to the political community than the all-encompassing government and party machine.

Speaking of Hegel’s legacy, the editor goes on:

This is the case with traditional images of Hegel as reactionary, absolutist, totalitarian.  Taken literally, of course, these images have been long discredited [italics mine-DL].  Yet in our liberal culture they nevertheless possess a kind of symbolic truth, because they represent this culture’s self-doubts projected with righteous venom into its iconography of the enemy.  Hegel is especially unappealing to that dogmatic kind of liberal who judges past social and political thinkers by the degree to which (it has been decided beforehand) all people of good will must share.  The value of Hegel’s social thought will be better appreciated by those who are willing to question received views, and take a deeper look at the philosophical problems of modern life [bold mine-DL]. 

It is especially rich that defenders of the Popperian caricature believe that they are the ones engaged in the rigorous independent thinking and resistance to “official” interpretations.  The last fifty years of Hegel scholarship, from what I understand, have been filled with the debunking of myths woven by those in thrall to the politically correct interpretations of their own time.  Incidentally, the disparagement and dismissal of many early American heroes on account of their insufficiently enlightened attitudes come from this same instinct to measure past thinkers against present standards and condemn them when they (inevitably) fail to measure up. 

Popper’s view of Hegel was the ideologically-driven modern liberal view of the man for decades, and its perpetuation today is simply a continuation of something not much better than propaganda, which in the Anglo-American world was already more than a little coloured by a dislike for things German.  Popper had a very good argument to make against 20th century historicists who used language about the direction of history–language that everyone knows I abhor, by the way–to justify appalling crimes against their fellow men.  Popper was writing a polemic against totalitarians of his own time, and he was right to do this.  Where he went awry was to try to find roots for the woes of the 20th century in Hegel’s actual thought, among other places, rather than in the ideologically filtered abuses of it. 

If a Nazi likes and promotes Wagner, whatever else you might rightly say about Wagner’s attitudes, that does not make Wagner a proto-Nazi or his music proto-Nazi music.  Obviously.  I suppose I am especially annoyed by the Hegel-bashing tradition because it is just one more aspect of the old, wearisome obsession to read all of modern German thought and history as one big prelude to the Nazis (the ultimate example of this was, naturally, on The History Channel, where a program actually stated that if the Romans had not been ambushed in the Teutoberg Forest in AD 9, Hitler would never have come to power!), as if we could not find many more relevant proximate sources specific to the post-unification and post-WWI scene.  It is an attempt at a more sophisticated Goldhagenism, but the idea is the same.  It is itself a kind of essentialism–the sort of thing Popper rightly warned against–inasmuch as it seeks to find something particularly twisted in German culture to explain what happened later, but in the process succeeds in twisting everything to fit the preconceived pattern of some perverse Teutonic state-worship (to which we Anglo-Americans are, of course, immune).  This is a comforting myth that we tell ourselves, as it persuades us that we are somehow inherently less prone to the political and moral insanity of totalitarianism–that sort of thing only happens to other people.  How some parts of the Anglo-American world would love to be able to discredit a culture that did more to create Western civilisation than almost any other, and how better to do this than to smear the philosophical and artistic giants of the German past with the taint of somehow contributing to the rise of Hitler?  Just consider the stupidity of this: nationalists try to appropriate the cultural achievements of their countrymen over the centuries, regardless of whether the creators of the appropriated works would have anything to do with such people, and then it is taken by later observers as proof of their perfidy that some chauvinists have sullied their name by speaking it with admiration.    

At bottom, reading totalitarianism into Hegel’s thought is the worst sort of “precursorism” (interpreting earlier works in the light of what came later, rather than according to their own time and proper meaning) and an old standby of bad teleological historical narrative, those banes of real intellectual history, in which an idea that seems as if it could have led to something that happened later is taken as an inspiration for these later events.  Then there is the old habit of “so-and-so interpreted this thinker this way, therefore the thinker must mean what so-and-so says.”  Two things would have to be demonstrated for this to be a worthwhile point: the person citing the thinker would need to have shown that he understood what the original thinker meant, and this person would have to avoid making interpretations that flatly contradict what the thinker said.  Failure on either point makes the later “follower” of the thinker a bad student and a poor representative of the man’s thought. 

Nietzsche scholars are constantly battling against similar popular misrepresentations, as have scholars of Maistre (who was an important philosopher of science as well as a political thinker) and Bolingbroke, among others.  It makes no sense why a certain batch of interpretations or the tradition derived from them should be given priority if they do not do their subject justice.  If Byzantinists did that, no one would have bothered to say anything after Gibbon, and certainly not after Bury and Ostrogorsky.  Obviously, some interpretive battles will go on forever, but as more scholars dig into the material there will be more interpretations firmly established by the persuasiveness of the arguments and their support in the evidence.  Once well-supported and serious arguments have been made, however, it is not sufficient to go back to the old interpretation, unaltered, and declare that most people who have given the matter much thought don’t know what they’re talking about.

In short, no one remotely familiar with their [Voinovich and Domenici’s] records would consider any of them to be among the Senate’s conservative intellectual giants. On the contrary, they are poll-driven politicians who want to hold on to power, and the polls indicate that many Americans are decidedly unhappy about the direction of the war. ~The Washington Times

No one enjoys good opportunist-bashing more than I do, but this shot at Domenici is particularly odd.  Domenici is not claiming to be a spokesman for conservatism (and with a lifetime ACU rating of 74, no one will be rushing out to label him as one).  That’s a big problem–for conservatives.  The Senate Republican dissenters on Iraq have almost all been politically vulnerable, “moderate” or liberal Republicans, and those who do not exactly fit these categories (such as Hagel and Brownback) have tended to have the least substantive critiques and have offered even less substantive alternatives.  Instead of taking the lead in criticising the President and forcing change, more conservative members in the last Congress and the present one have mostly distinguished themselves as reflexive defenders of the war (their chief complaints, when they have made them, is that the war has not been prosecuted with enough vigour and has not been expanded to enough other countries).  For years conservatives in the GOP have gone out of their way to make sure that people associate this war with the word conservative–despite its having no meaningful connection to conservatism of any recognisable kind–because they have lent it unstinting support.  In highlighting the latest dissenters’ lack of conservative reputations, this simply reinforces this identification.  The war will go from appearing to be a generically Republican war, which is mainly what it is, to a specificially “conservative” one in the public eye.  Editorials such as this one are part of the reason why.  

Domenici is also a strange target of the wrath of the Times for another reason.  Domenici changed his position on the amnesty bill to a vote against the cloture motion that the Times and most conservatives also wanted to defeat.  In other words, he responded to the outcry from his constituents and conservative activists by embracing their view of the bill and ended up voting the right way, helping to send the bill down to a crushing defeat.  Obviously, he did this for self-interested, purely electoral reasons–he fears voter backlash come next year.  Even so, I don’t remember a Times editorial singling out Domenici and the other vote-switchers for rank opportunism and pandering back then.  The Weekly Standard had plenty to say about the Senators who turned against the amnesty bill that the magazine supported, but that’s because the magazine’s editors were angry at the former allies who had defected to the other side. 

The Times is chastising someone who effectively came around their position on the recent legislation and pointing out Domenici’s responsiveness to his constituents as a bad thing worthy of mockery.  Meanwhile, the steadfast duo of McLieberman never wavers, never blinks, never listens to the voters, and that is supposed to inspire admiration?  We have some remnants of a republican government, so there is something to be said for not always heeding the desires of the crowd, but by design representatives should represent their constituents and Senators should, at least originally, represent the interests of their states.  To consistently fail in this representation is to have failed in the basic duty of an elected official.  The Times would like more members of Congress to shirk their responsibilities and ignore their constituents more often, at least when it comes to the war.  On immigration, they will continue to think that the populist backlash was a just and legitimate exercise in self-government.  You really can’t have it both ways.  Domenici is an opportunist, but it was thanks to opportunists like him that amnesty was defeated.  The war will one day be brought to an end through the efforts of other similarly “flexible” politicians.

It’s important to be at least somewhat grounded in reality about what is significant about the defeatist posture taken by Mr. Lugar et. al. — and what is business as usual for a certain type of Republican. Anyone who remembers Mr. Voinovich’s emotional attack against John Bolton (Mr. Voinovich later reversed himself) or his ramblings in response to radio talk-show host Sean Hannity’s factual questions about his support (subsequently reversed) for the failed Senate immigration bill understands that he’s hardly a thinking man’s conservative in the mold of the late Sen. Robert Taft. ~The Washington Times

Now, according to some, being like “Mr. Republican” is irrelevant to the current challenges that Americans face–at least if it means adopting a sane foreign policy!  Apparently he is good enough for jingoes when they can try to use his name as a club with which to beat dissenting Republicans.

Alex Massie says some of the things that need to be said about this Andy McCarthy post, which was a response to Amir Taheri’s op-ed, in which Taheri wrote:

Since 1960, the Turkish army has staged a coup once every 10 years, either to curb the radical left or to stop the Islamist right from seizing control of the state.

Not only could one fairly describe AKP as “socially and religiously conservative”–which they certainly are relative to the CHP or the Turkish nationalists–but in any relative positioning of the different parties on the left-right spectrum you would be compelled to describe AKP as effectively center-right relative to the secular leftists and nationalists.  It is conventional in portrayals of political party alignments to place nationalist parties on the far right, which tends to increase confusion about how religious parties can actually be, and usually are, to the right of modern nationalists, especially when it comes matters of family law and traditional morality. 

Suffice it to say, you can refer to AKP in a Turkish context as being on “the right,” provided that you do not think that this automatically means that the AKP is just Christian Democracy with a headscarf (as some EU-expanding fools would argue).  Islamists will come in different shades.  There are the hooded Hamas-style radicals, there are more austere Deobandi reactionaries of the Taliban model and there are relatively less violent conservatives, such as the AKP so far (the catch-all, rather misleading term “Islamist” only tells us so much).  In a related way, you can imagine a reformist “Christian socialism” of the left (Tolstoy) and reformist one of the right (Slavophiles, Dostoevsky, Dollfuss, etc.) and another one dedicated to violent revolutionary action (e.g., Thomas Muentzer). 

In the Turkish case, it is reasonable to define Islamists as being on “the right” of Turkish politics, since Kemalism was most definitely a left-wing revolutionary nationalist movement that was constantly working to overthrow and outlaw remnants of the old order.   Thinking of the Kemalists as the effective guardians of Turkish “conservatism,” as McCarthy’s post implies, is to identify conservatism with the defense of whichever status quo power elite currently holds the reins.  In this view, Islamists in Turkey can’t be conservative or rightist because they are against the status quo, which is, of course, arranged in such a way as to favour a secular leftist nationalist elite.  If we wanted to think of conservatism that way (I don’t care to), we would definitely have to think about “the right” as something other than conservatism. 

The relevant point to be made is not that Islamists are not conservative or on “the right” in some sense.  Relative to their competitors, they are.  The point would be that the entire nature of politics in Islamic countries is such that the largely secularised West should naturally sympathise and ally itself with the political left, because what the conservatives in the Islamic world want to have–to say nothing of radicals or reactionaries–is the preservation and building up of their traditions and religion, which may be quite antithetical to what Westerners would like to see in those countries.  

This is yet another reason why democratisation in the Islamic world is a very bad idea.  It will have the effect, as universal suffrage in Europe did, of empowering the more religious and, generally, more illiberal voters who will favour religious or religious-themed parties.  If liberalisation in the Islamic world were the ultimate goal, democratisation would be the last thing you would encourage. 

The West has also gone so far to the left, culturally and politically, relative to traditional societies elsewhere in the world that even Western reactionaries, including myself, would seem startlingly left-wing in them.  Western reactionaries tend to differentiate themselves from the other 95% of Westerners in regarding this general shift to the left as a largely bad development that has had a few positive side-effects.  Many self-styled Western conservatives tend to think things have gone along more or less all right, except perhaps for the last forty years or so, as this has been the time when there were a few undesirable changes.  Some Western liberals, at least in this country, apparently often live in fear that a homegrown Taliban is just around the corner, a Jaysh al Mahdi lurking behind every megachurch.  The odds of the latter are poor. 

Of course, a strong case could be made that Western conservatives have a certain common interest with Islamic conservatives insofar as it involves our minding our own business and leaving them to mind theirs.  The globalists are hostile to any and all settled ways of life, except for their own inherently destabilising and unsettling one, and so are the natural political opponents of cultural and religious conservatives everywhere.  That does not mean that conservatives in the West are necessarily going to like most of the things conservatives in Asia and the Near East want to protect, or that we all have, a la D’Souza, numerous overlapping interests that compel us to join forces against the godless. 

Many people in the West don’t like Turkish Islamism, and our governments find that they can usually work much better with the Kemalists.  (Turkish opposition to the war in Iraq was a bitter disappointment for Washington, but then Washington has understood nothing about Turkey’s view of its national interests for years.)  Even so, we don’t get to define political alignments based on how cooperative, effectively pro-U.S. or Westernised a group is.  Still, let’s be clear about something: it will be very bad for Turkey if AKP increases its hold on the country, and this would be true even if (or perhaps especially if) this comes about through “peaceful democratic change.”  AKP is Exhibit A for why full democratisation in the Islamic world is a bad idea both for the West and for the Islamic countries involved.

Far more bizarrely, there have been no outraged protests on behalf of the slighted Malinese, Bangladeshis and Indonesians in response to Taheri’s opening reference to this bit of Turkish chauvinism:

Talk to Turks of any political persuasion and you are sure to hear how proud they are that Turkey is “the only democracy in the Muslim world.”  

It is also worth noting that Republican critics of the antiwar movement have no problem acknowledginging that Islamists are on the political right when it helps them to highlight the reflexive anti-Western alliances of antiwar leftists.  This criticism makes a certain amount of sense, but its significance for labeling the political alignment of Islamists seems to have eluded McCarthy here.

Potential Spoilers Below 

If I’m mistaken and there have been movies in which Islamists where the bad guys, please let me know. ~Michael Fumento

How about True Lies?  Granted, this was a very bad movie (it had Schwarzenneger and Tom Arnold in it, after all), but it was a success at the time and made very explicit that the nuclear terrorists were doing what they were doing for plain jihadi reasons.  It was a movie that made jihadis the villains even before 9/11 had happened–does that count for anything?  How about A Mighty Heart, whose entire raison d’etre is an act of violence carried out by jihadis?  How about World Trade Center?  The story is not principally about the terrorists, but obviously the jihadis are the villains of the piece.  Or Flight 93?  Did I miss something?  Does anyone really think that we have actually been completely lacking in these sorts of movies?  Against these, yes, you will also have the case of The Sum Of All Fears (also a terrible, terrible movie) where jihadis were replaced with a much more universally hated, and non-existent, neo-Nazi threat.  This is ridiculous political correctness and a crazy obsession with long-dead Nazism, but if you think we are at war with “Islamofascists” should it really matter to you whether Hollywood emphasises the Islamic side or the fascist side?

Update: This last point was intended to be tongue-in-cheek.  I was also mistaken and responded too quickly before reading carefully.  Mr. Fumento does make a point of specifically excluding pre-9/11 movies and 9/11-related movies.  Having excluded them, he is right that there are fewer movies that portray jihadis as the villains.  That exclusionary move seems a bit strange, though, since 9/11 is the iconic moment of jihadi terrorism.  Excluding movies related to the most immediately significant jihadi terrorist attack and then complaining about a lack of movies showing jihadi villains are odd moves to make.  If I ruled out Schindler’s List and Life Is Beautiful , I could also make a claim that Hollywood seems to have stopped caring about the Holocaust and no longer makes movies about it.  That wouldn’t make a lot of sense.  

The rest of Frumento’s response strikes me as a little bizarre.  Live Free Or Die Hard, which I happened to see this weekend, is possibly the most effective antiterrorist movie of the last several years.  It feeds off of 24‘s fixation with computer technology and the ability of terrorists to wreak havoc through hacking into networks controlling infrastructure, and includes a 24-style Steven Saunders disgruntled former operative storyline that naturally will heighten the public’s anxiety about the potential sources of terrorism.  It has Willis’ John McClane as an American everyman who nonetheless performs insane acts of derring-do (many of which would be immediately fatal or disabling in reality) out of devotion to his work as a cop and his family.  You couldn’t have put together more of a crowd-pleasing hero with the cause of antiterrorism. 

Jack Bauer naturally strikes people as somewhat inhuman and brutal, because that is what his character is–here John McClane makes antiterrorism into the work of the guy who feels compelled to do the right thing because he happens to be the only guy available.

The movie is very focused on the threat of terrorism, while being very dismissive of government competence.  This lends support to the most alarmist arguments stressing vulnerabilities to attack.  I almost expect someone to criticise the movie for glorifying and supporting the national security state and, per a Dana Stevens review, at least partially endorsing the policies of George Bush. 

Fumento adds this bit of Freudian slippage:

Meanwhile one of the few good guys in the movie, the head of the FBI team that aids our hero John McCain [bold mine-DL], looks decidedly Arabic. 

As much as I’m sure McCain would like to be confused with Bruce Willis–his poll ratings would improve–that’s not the character’s name.  It’s worth noting that the character to which Fumento refers is also obviously powerless, mostly clueless and pretty much useless throughout the film.

From the introduction of Elements of the Philosophy of Right (pp. ix):

There were always those, however, who insisted that Hegel was fundamentally a theorist of the modern constitutional state, emphasizing in the state most of the same features which win the approval of Hegel’s liberal critics.  This was always the position of the Hegelian ‘centre’, including Hegel’s own students and most direct nineteenth-century followers [bold mine-DL].  This more sympathetic tradition in Hegel scholarship has reasserted itself decisively since the middle of the century, to such an extent that there is now a virtual consensus [bold mine-DL] among knowledgeable scholars that the earlier images of Hegel, as philosopher of the reactionary Prussian restoration and forerunner of modern totalitarianism, are simply wrong [bold mine-DL], whether they are viewed as accounts of Hegel’s attitude towards Prussian politics or as broader philosophical interpretations of his theory of state [bold mine-DL].

For what it’s worth, here’s another argument that Hegel was not a totalitarian. 

The point in all of this is to make clear that the popular, Popperian reading of Hegel as proto-totalitarian is wrong.  It is legitimate and appropriate to point this out when others repeat such a claim about Hegel.  For the time being, this is the last thing that I will say about this ridiculous controversy.

Onto a more fun topic: The Rick Santorum Follies!  Newsweek interviewed Santorum, and he had plenty of things to say about the war.  He begins:

Americans are frustrated with the prosecution of this war. They don’t understand why we’re in it. They don’t see any reason to continue the fight and instead of going out there and arguing more clearly than the administration has to this point, and putting this in the proper perspective for the American public, [the Republicans] have decided to join the other side and abandon ship. I think that’s absolutely irresponsible and will come back to haunt us as a party. 

Right.  It will haunt the GOP that it is breaking with Bush at this late date, and not that it remained steadfastly loyal to him for years.  Note that Santorum doesn’t actually say that there is anything wrong with the prosecution of the war or with the war itself, but simply with the marketing of it.  Better communication is what is really needed to change popular attitudes!  This is like the thinking that says the U.S. government just needs better public diplomacy, because there couldn’t be anything wrong with state policies. 

This seems to show that Santorum has learned nothing since his defeat in November.  Then, as now, he thinks that the reason why the public is tiring of the war is simply that it doesn’t “get it” the way he does.  I suppose we have all had similar feelings about things where the overwhelming majority is against what we think is the right thing.  Certainly, having majority support is not in itself proof of a policy’s merits.  However, when a policy loses public support it is usually because there is something basically wrong with them that requires you to either fix or scrap the policy.

He continues:

It’s not a pretty time. You have a leader of your party who refuses to go out and identify the enemy. So when you go out there and do what I did in my race, you get your hat handed to you because people think you are to the right of the president.

Sure, that’s it!  Mr. Bush has been too cautious and reserved in his rhetoric about jihadis and his political opponents.  Santorum never seems to consider the possibility that his defense of the war was not what caused him to lose.  There were pro-war incumbents who just barely won (though Pennsylvania was always going to be a very bad state for the GOP last year).  The problem was less that Santorum appeared to be on “Bush’s right,” but that his “gathering storm” speeches seemed to be the product of a hallucinating mind.  While Pennsylvania voters were concerned about a number of priorities in addition to the war, Santorum talked about foreign policy an awful lot for a Senate election.  In a purple state, he had the burden of being a very strong social conservative.  Instead of showing how his style of social conservative reformism had led him to support different pieces of popular legislation that went beyond the usual “hot-button” life and sexual morality issues, his sabre-rattling confirmed every bad stereotype that could be imagined about religious conservatives.  He also saidbizarre, battythings about foreign policy in the process.  Warning urgently about the Bolivian-Venezuelan threat to Argentina is not usually the way to win votes in Scranton, no matter what your other positions are. 

He concludes:

The people behind the plot in Great Britain were not poor or oppressed Middle Easterners. It is not oppression. It is not imperialism. It is an ideology.

No, they were relatively well-to-do professional Middle Easterners.  The exact reasons for the attack, as far as I know, remain unknown.  The choice of target does not suggest any obvious symbolism, but seemed theoretically designed to inflict mass casualties and induce general terror for the sake of doing it.  Some have floated the idea that it was retaliation for Rushdie’s knighthood; others assume, not entirely unreasonably, some connection to Iraq.  It was probably some combination of these, along with more general feelings of resentment, alienation and rage.  Someone can have an ideology and be combating what he regards as oppression and imperialism.  Imperialism may exist, and an ideology will be created to combat it.  Imperialism may inflame an ideology that already existed, giving it new significance, a new enemy and a new cause.  Also, just because the people willing to carry out terrorist attacks are not themselves poor or oppressed doesn’t necessarily mean that they are not acting because some other people with whom they sympathise are poor and oppressed.  19th century anarchist bomb-throwers didn’t have to be, and often weren’t, rebellious wage-slaves or serfs turning against their oppressors directly.  Terrorists can be motivated by, or can claim to be motivated by, the suffering of others even though they are themselves relatively well-off.  Indeed, a certain amount of relatively higher social status and education is often required for someone to become a really ferocious radical.  The educated people who enjoy a slightly better quality of life in a community are often historically the ones agitating for change and joining in revolutions and revolutionary societies, because they have been raised with or have had access to radical ideas that they then feel obliged to put into practice.  To say that there is such a thing as jihadism and to know that the origins of it existed long before the creation of Israel or U.S. intervention in the Near East do not allow you to ignore that these other things may contribute to the appeal of jihadism.  Such things often have multiple causes.  It is important not to rule out any of the possible causes because they might undermine our own political preoccupations.  Occupation of Muslim countries does not explain everything, but it explains something.  A doctrine of jihad within Islam predating the modern period is part of the story, and an important part, but it is not the whole story.  There are some causes of jihadism that are beyond our control, which means that changes in policy will not necessarily eliminate jihadi threats thereafter, but if changes in policy can weaken the appeal of jihadism and make that threat less significant they should not be rejected before they have even been considered.  It is the insistence on attributing purely ideological motives to jihadis, as if there could be no other explanation, that makes Santorum’s analysis so unpersuasive.