Here is a man of taste and discretion.

So far as I can tell from parsing this solipsistic flapdoodle, John Updike thinks the New Deal should be judged a great success because FDR was politically skillful enough to persuade Updike’s Dad to become a Democrat. ~Ross Douthat

Ross has this right.  In response to Shlaes’ revisionism (in which she basically argues something rather obvious that I learned from the time I was old enough to understand English–namely that FDR made the Depression longer and worse than it had to be through his New Deal policies), Updike tells a story about the human costs of the Depression, which would be all the more compelling for the “governmment-as-human transaction” model Updike is pushing if Hoover had not also helped to deepen and worsen the Depression through his own economic interventionist policies.  Updike’s story is an interesting portrait of how government-exacerbated crises can work, perversely enough, to instill even greater support for the government: the Depression was so miserable that people became grateful for whatever assistance they could get, even though the very programs they were using were working, on a macro level, to perpetuate their misery.  The popular response to national security crises is much the same: rationally, the public should despise the government that allows major terrorist attacks to succeed on native soil, but every time the public rallies around the very government that dramatically failed them out of a mixture of loyalty, patriotism, fear, dependency and, bizarrely, gratitude. 

Shlaes’ counterargument would be, surely, that the very government intervention that Updike’s father found so appealing on a personal level was part of a raft of destructive policies that stifled any chance at economic recovery prior to the both inflationary and expansive pressures of wartime spending.  Whatever else might be said about the flaws of corporations and the real dangers of concentrated economic power, the solution to economic stagnation is not actually to demonise the “malefactors of great wealth” and tax them at exorbitant rates.  The solution to economic weakness is not actually to tighten the money supply by using the Fed as a blunt instrument to batter and crush what recovery had started coming into 1937.  Updike’s argument is, in miniature, everything that is wrong with old-style left-wing economic thinking: it doesn’t matter whether the policy actually works to alleviate poverty or spur economic activity, provided that the government is supposedly trying to do the “right thing” because government is “ultimately a human transaction.”  (As if commercial exchange is any less a “human” transaction than the coercive extraction and redistribution of resources by the state!  Theft is a human transaction, too.)

It would be interesting if sentimental invocations of family history and changed political preferences could trump all other arguments.  If that were the case, I could discredit interventionist foreign policy just by recounting the political conversion of my ancestors from conservative New Jersey Democrats to dedicated Republicans after WWI.  My dad’s family rejected the Democratic Party because of Wilsonian foreign policy, and they deepened in their hostility to the Democracy during the New Deal years.  They despised FDR, their descendants despised FDR and I grew up despising FDR.  So, I come by my opposition to foreign wars and the welfare state honestly.  My great-great grandfather’s brother even wrote a short pamphlet denouncing the New Deal as unconstitutional (which it was).  I think my ancestors were right to reject these things, because I think they were all very bad for the country, but I also think that there are rational arguments to be made against them that go beyond, “My great-grandmother really disliked Roosevelt.”  Of course, those of us who have to fight against conventional historical interpretation of the last century and the established institutions created by now-mythologised Presidents are compelled to make rational arguments, while their defenders can continue to wax poetic about Ol’ Pappy and the soup kitchen.

I have said many times that this election will be unique, and it will be, and not just in the obvious sense that every event is unique, contingent and unrepeatable.  The same reasons why comparing foreign policy crises to past crises is potentially very misleading and distorting also apply to elections and, well, everything else.  Obviously, differences between any two elections are numerous and significant, and expecting to find the right model for understanding the ’08 election by digging through previous ones is a bit like expecting to know how to handle a foreign policy crisis because you have grown up hearing about Munich.   

2008 will have no perfect comparisons with other elections, as no American presidential election has taken place without any incumbent candidates after two terms of the same presidential administration and over five years of war.  American presidential elections have always either fallen after or before wars, or when they happen during wars the wartime Presidents have been running (always successfully) for re-election or they have decided to retire because of their unpopularity.  The current scenario is new.  There is no clear precedent for what is happening.  That said, there are still better and worse comparisons to be made.  1968 has a certain appeal.  I have occasionally invoked it, proposing a 1968-style crack-up of the GOP over the war, but the more I have thought about it the more I realise that 1952 makes a lot of sense.  The Wilson/Bush, 1920/2008 parallels are very tempting, but 1920 now seems less compelling to me than it once did, since 1920 was a post-war election rather than one taking place during an unpopular war. 

1968 and 1972 are the other most directly comparable elections.  Richard Cohen goes for the ’72 comparison today and doesn’t seem very persuasive.  He seems caught in the Beltway liberal time-warp on foreign policy, in which the GOP still has credibility on national security and and the Democrats are McGovernites.  As I mentioned in my TAC neoliberalism article out last week, there are no McGovernites among the leading Democratic candidates–quite the contrary.  The only one remotely McGovern-like is Kucinich, and his campaign’s futility is proverbial.  If the Democratic base is so profoundly “isolationist” or whatever it is that their critics imagine them to be, they have a funny way of showing it by rallying behind two of the biggest interventionists on the planet in Clinton and Obama.  Nonetheless, this charge of McGovernism is the deep, irrational fear that Democrats seem to have implanted in their minds, and some of them are unable to shake it.  They cannot imagine a time when, as recently as 1948 or 1944, their party was considered by the great and the good in the establishment to be more credible on matters of national security, according to the perverse definitions of national security used both then and now.  1952 was the year when the GOP began to take over the mantle of foreign policy competence.  After the Kennedy-Johnson interlude, the GOP would go on a 24-year run (with the brief Carter interruption) begun by Eisenhower’s former Vice President, who probably should have won in 1960 anyway.  Republicans were in the White House for 28 of 40 years starting in 1953.  1952 prepared the way for a shift in the reputations of the parties on foreign policy and national security.  It is not guaranteed that 2008 would do the same for the Democrats (indeed, I think the epochal significance of 2008 has probably been overrated), but the primarily GOP-led disaster of Iraq is such that they may appear competent enough by comparison to introduce a permanent shift in public attitudes.    

What about 1968?  Like 1952, 1968 saw the incumbent President step aside because of the war and his own doubts about winning re-election.  Unlike 1968, however, 2008 will not have the incumbent Vice President running in his place.  In this respect, 1952 and 2008 are much more alike.  It can hardly be encouraging to Obama that the last two times a Democratic nominee came directly from Illinois, he lost, and 1952 was the first of these two attempts.  Nonetheless, the dynamic today is entirely reversed: whichever unfortunate victim the GOP picks next winter and spring will likely be the one to reprise the role of Adlai Stevenson losing a landslide to the opposition candidate.

Everybody loves Fred. He has the healing qualities of Gerald Ford and the movie-star appeal of Ronald Reagan. He is relatively moderate on social issues. He has a reputation as a peacemaker and a compromiser. And he has a good sense of humor.

He could be just the partner to bring out Bush’s better nature — or at least be a sensible voice of reason. I could easily imagine him telling the president, “For God’s sake, do not push that button!” — a command I have a hard time hearing Cheney give.

Not only that, Thompson would give the Republicans a platform for running for the presidency — and the president a way out of Iraq without looking like he’s backing down. Bush would be left in better shape on the war and be able to concentrate on AIDS and the environment in hopes of salvaging his legacy. ~Sally Quinn

It’s official.  The waning years of the Bush administration have actually driven some people completely mad.  The psychotic break in this instance is apparently so great that it appears to the author that Fred Thompson appears to have powers of political reconciliation (perhaps he could persuade Mr. Bush to pardon Libby and Cheney, the latter for any crimes he may have committed while in the office, and perfect his Ford-like qualities) and the answer to all of our national ills.  I am pretty sure that this must be a joke (a sort of gallows humour that plays off of the deep depression some Republicans must be feeling at this point), but it really isn’t funny.     

The idea of Republicans replacing Cheney is surreal enough (many of them really like Cheney and think he has done a bang-up job–don’t ask me why), but replacing him with Fred because Fred is significantly different from Cheney is the stuff of hallucinations and fevers.  As a joke, this article doesn’t work, because the change of VPs is not only unbelievable, but also completely pointless.  Why bring in a replacement Cheney when you have the real thing?  Maybe the thinking is that Fred Thompson is Cheney, but without the perpetual scowl! 

Apparently no one told Ms. Quinn that Fred is just as incredibly irresponsible on foreign policy as the Vice President.  She has evidently not heard that Fred is being advised on foreign policy by Liz Cheney, and advised politically by Cheney hanger-on Mary Matalin.  She has apparently missed that he is a leading defender of Cheney’s man, Scooter Libby.  To go to the trouble of removing Cheney from office and replacing him with Fred would be a waste of time for everyone.  Even if successful, Fred would embrace the Cheney way–because Fred thinks that Cheney is basically right on all of the things that most horrify the rest of us.  The downside of this imaginary move is clear: it would put someone just as dangerous as Cheney in a position of power, but because of his geniality Fred could cloak his more nefarious designs under the cover of Southern colloquialisms and awshucksishness.

“It says a lot about his [Fred Thompson’s] character that his ex-wife and ex-girlfriends think he is fabulous,” said Mosbacher. ~The Times

So Fred is winning the ex-wife primary.  How many delegates does that get you at the convention?

A large portion of modern wars erupted because aggressive tyrannies believed that their democratic opponents were soft and weak. ~Joshua Muravchik

Except for the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Crimean War, the War of Secession, the Franco-Austrian War (1859) and the other Wars of Italian Unification, the War of the Triple Alliance (South America), Franco-Prussian War, the Russo-Turkish Wars, the War of the Pacific (South America), the Boer War, the Spanish-American War, the Russo-Japanese War, the Sino-Japanese Wars, the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, WWI, the Spanish Civil War, Suez, Vietnam, Panama, the Bosnian War, NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, the First and Second Congo Wars and the invasion of Iraq, Muravchik’s generalisation holds up pretty well.

What a contrast between some in the West and the Arab papers in their respective reactions to Gaza and the Hamas violence. The former blame Bush, blame the US, or blame Israel for the civil war, the latter blame the extremists in Hamas and the Palestinians themselves.

From a paper in Lebanon:  “[The Palestinians] have nearly lost their homeland, and the only ones to blame are those who wielded weapons in order to wrench it from the enemy, but have lost their way. The fedayeen have become the murderers of their own comrades-in-arms…”

From Saudi Arabia, “By means of Hamas’s takeover in Gaza, the Iran-Syria axis has managed to destroy the Mecca agreement, to sabotage the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and to block the role of Saudi Arabia, which had become the regional authority [handling] the hotspots in the [Middle East], namely Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine.”

And from Egypt: “What is happening in Gaza, and the emergence of the Hamas’s Islamic emirate there, can only be described as an earthquake, and not only for the Palestinians… The impact of this Islamic emirate on our Arab world will not be like that [caused by] the emergence of the Taliban Emirate, [for] it is more dangerous, to the point where it will [threaten] Arab security.” (translations from Memri.org)

Now contrast all that with Jimmy Carter’s blaming of George Bush for the upheaval in Gaza or, say, Robert Scheer’s paean to Hamas: “By contrast, the religious zealots who later formed the Hamas organization were more focused on spiritual probity and tended far more closely to the needs of their impoverished brethren in Gaza and the West Bank. As with Hezbollah in Lebanon – and that other Iranian-backed Islamist movement, the Shiites who now control Iraq – the religious movements, both Shiite- and Sunni-based, cornered the market on purity of purpose as opposed to rank opportunism. That is precisely why these fiercely anti-Western movements have been able to turn the favorite fig leaf of U.S. neo-colonialism, the slogans of democracy and elections, against the United States by winning popular elections.” ~Victor Davis Hanson

In fairness to the Western papers, they engage in this sort of parochial criticism because they are aware that this is the sort of foreign affairs analysis that the public wants (“what’s it got to do with us?”) and this is the main sort of analysis that most American and Western journalists are interested in doing (“why should we care about it unless it impacts us?”).  Put this down to an incurious, self-absorbed public, most of which thinks “it’s all about us,” if they give it much thought, and you can also pin this on journalists who write copy that they want to see sell papers, so they write stories with the proper spin that will catch and hold the public’s interest.  How many Americans would read a headline that says, “More foreigners keep killing each other in totally inexplicable and distant conflict”?  Not many.  How many would pick the paper that says, “Civil war in Palestine; Democrats blame Bush for failure of Middle East peace process”?  Obviously, many more.  Do accuracy and perspective go out the window in the process?  Of course, but the responsibility for that lies at least as much with the public as with the papers. This stifling parochial sense that all events revolve around “us” and “we” the Americans are somehow responsible for everything that goes wrong elsewhere in the world stems from the presumption that “we” have–or should have–some role in every conflict and crisis around the world.  If that’s true, it becomes incumbent on “us” to analyse every crisis in terms of what “we” ought to do and what “we” have failed to and what “we” did wrong.  Hegemonists claim world leadership and then complain when everyone else expects them to deliver the goods, but just watch them explode at the suggestion that “we” should not be the “leaders” of the world or that other peoples in the world are responsible for their own futures. 

What Hanson seems to miss, unsurprisingly, is that the self-serving accounts from Arab papers in nearby states and the Scheer article are complementary in explaining more of the full story.  Naturally, many factions in Lebanon, secular despots in Egypt and the Saudi monarchy all have vested interests in denouncing Hamas–they would do so even if they were not allied with Washington–because Hamas represents a style of Islamic politics that threatens their own power in their own countries.  The Lebanese article faults Hamas and Fatah for fighting each other, which might be taken as not much more than a standard nationalist denunciation of fratricide.  Note the Saudi emphasis on the “Iran-Syria axis,” which is a natural villain for the Saudis to blame things on, since they already dislike and fear said axis.  It is essential, therefore, for these interested parties to detach the cause of Hamas from the cause of Palestine, since the latter still has resonance for many Arabs, and to show that Hamas has actually destroyed the chances of the Palestinians to have their own state.  That this seems to accord with the reality of the situation is a happy coincidence for these outside observers.  

Meanwhile, Scheer does not seem to be addressing responsibility for the civil war among Palestinians, but is instead explaining how Hamas gained a following and came to power.  The inconvenient reality that Hamas did come to power through elections encouraged (stupidly) by Washington cannot be harumphed away, much as Hanson might like to do so.  Scheer’s explanation of the appeal of Hamas and Hizbullah, while not exhaustive, is more or less accurate, since it was the relative lack of corruption and zeal of Hamas and Hizbullah that won them a following against the more corrupt Fatah and ineffective Arab nationalists who were unsuccessfully fighting against Israel for decades.  Hizbullah’s network of social services is a smart system of patronage that wins them loyalists and a social base that makes them that much harder to uproot and disband.  It is quite possible to describe the reality of this without saying anything good about it.  These methods have been successful in empowering these two groups–it is normally the ugliness, brutality and violence of these groups to which Westerners principally object, and not their means of retaining loyalty among their local constituencies.

Iran’s relationship with Hezbollah and Hamas is unique, and uniquely aggressive. ~James Poulos

I don’t know that this debate is really contributing much to a better understanding of what to do with respect to Iran policy, but let me just offer one more rejoinder.  Iran’s relationship with Hizbullah and Hamas is unique, provided that we don’t count Syria as having a fairly similar relationship with both groups (plus, if certain reports are to be believed, a relationship with Fatah al-Islam).  Iran’s relationship with these multiple proxy armies would be unique, if elements of the Pakistani government weren’t simultaneously backing proxies in both Afghanistan and Kashmir.  In some capacity, our government has given tacit or open support to Mujahideen-e-Khalq and Jundullah as part of the opposition to Tehran (and Jundullah is based, of course, at least partly in Pakistan). 

I have less trouble with people describing something as a unique threat when it actually appears to be a unique threat.  My initial objection to the Stephens article that started all of this was a) the statement was inaccurate and b) if this was the only thing a boatful of alleged policymakers and putative experts on Iran could agree on, there is not only nothing like a consensus on a viable Iran policy, but also the one thing that “everyone” can agree on is probably a myth.  Finally, it seemed clear enough that even the consensus of the people described in the original article was one that was ultimately biased towards intervention, despite the fact that many of the attendees did not advocate intervention. 

Acknowledging the existence of a reported threat profoundly weakens arguments against intervention, because to believe that weak states on the opposite side of the planet pose some meaningful threat to our national security is to have given away 9/10 of the debate.  This is the assumption that has to be challenged at every step, because it is such an obviously bad assumption.  The principal conceptual failure of war opponents before the invasion was to grant the reality of the Iraqi threat and the uniqueness of Hussein’s menace.  There was not much of a threat and his menace was far from unique, yet it was the combination of the two that supposedly demanded action.  I don’t know how we can even begin to have “intellectual probity and policy as clear as it is responsible” when we begin from such a confused starting place as talking about a regime’s “uniquely aggressive” foreign policy when it does not have such a policy.  James and I both want clear and responsible foreign policy, but if we do not insist on being precise in our language and fastidious with the details it is just a hop, skip and a jump to talk of smoking guns in the form of mushroom clouds.

So there is a sizeable base of socially traditionalist, economically populist voters to be had. Unfortunately, the partisanship scolds invariably cater to exactly the opposite demographic: elites who favor free trade, open immigration, cutting entitlements, and social tolerance. ~Jonathan Chait

Think of it this way: we have large numbers of voters interested in a sort of Webb-Dobbs-Buchanan worldview and, on the other side, an endless supply of tiresome Obamas telling us that we just need to put aside our differences, work together and have hope.  No wonder the public is disenchanted!  The “centrists” who want to move beyond partisanship are actually interested in overrepresenting still more those views and interests that are already overrepresented in this country.

This clan power is one of the main reasons why western democracy does not transplant into Arab societies. They are different. We have seen what has happened in Iraq, where the division between Shia and Sunni Muslim is also hugely important. But even in peaceful, relatively civilised Jordan, attempts to encourage political parties have largely failed because they keep splitting into smaller and smaller units, generally clan based. A Muslim Arab almost always owes far greater loyalty to his cousins than he does to any party or government. ~Peter Hitchens