The Washington Timescrunches some numbers on ACU and National Journal ratings for Fred.  The Times makes the relevant point that Bill Frist was actually the more conservative (at least by ACU standards) of the Tennessean U.S. Senators when both men served together.  Of course, instead of being the Great Conservative Hope, Bill Frist is busily running Volpac and backing Fred Thompson.  The reason seems to be, as far as I can tell, that we have seen Bill Frist in action as Senate Majority Leader, and his performance made us long for the days of the staunch conviction and fighting spirit of Bob Dole.  Meanwhile, Fred Thompson got out while the getting was good, before the full onslaught of the Bush Era, and so memories of his time in the Senate are a little more blurry and bound to be suffused with warm, nostalgic feelings for the good old days when real conservatives supposedly roamed the halls of the Senate.  This obviously makes no sense.  The reality is that Frist more naturally fills the “conservative gap” in the GOP presidential field than does Fred, but was so badly compromised by his time running the Senate under Bush and the subsequent loss of the Senate in ’06 that he ceased to be viable.  Thompson, had he remained in the Senate, would be in the exact same position politically.  It is only because he happened to separate himself from the Senate GOP before it went careening to its doom that anyone takes him at all seriously.  In terms of substance, he is actually a less compelling figure for conservatives in terms of his policy views than Bill Frist.  The reality is that Bill Frist, whatever his voting record, was an appalling failure of a conservative leader, which would hardly give anyone much confidence in his endorsement of the leadership potential of old Fred.

The use of National Journal ratings on “ideology” is much less reliable for properly understanding the relative conservatism or liberalism of a politician, since they routinely categorise pro-war, security state policies as conservative and opposition to them as liberal.  The ACU will often count things in similar ways, so that Ron Paul has the absurdly lower rating of 82.3 while Tom Tancredo rates 97.8–they differ principally over the war and the security state.  In NJ ratings, Ron Paul winds up somewhere towards the center on foreign policy because he has opposed most of the Bush Era surveillance and war measures.  Thus, Thompson’s relatively greater “conservatism” on foreign policy as recorded by NJ is slightly misleading if you do not take into account that this means that he is actually among the worse interventionists.  Likewise, his ACU rating is probably inflated by his leanings towards interventionist foreign policy.  His speech in London last week and his association with the Cheney clan confirm this tendency of his, which is probably the single greatest reason to be wary of his candidacy (if and when it is finally declared).

Newsweek‘s latest poll has some interesting numbers.  Keeping in mind how little polls mean and how relatively unreliable polls of merely registered voters are, the poll shows that the four named Republican candidates continue to lose against the three named Democratic candidates, no matter the matchup.  Romney and Fred Thompson fare worse than Giuliani and McCain, but only by a half dozen points or so.  The trends in the primaries right now are moving in the opposite direction: Romney and Thompson are gaining strength, while the others are faltering.  In what seems to be some confirmation of Giuliani’s alleged “crossover” appeal, he performs slightly better among “blue state” respondents than his GOP rivals, but still loses to whichever Democrat is opposing him.  Importantly, Giuliani and McCain both perform noticeably better among red state respondents than Romney and Thompson, which may suggest that the latter two are still not well known enough or, possibly, that their candidacies somehow actually have less appeal in states that voted for Bush than those of their rivals. 

Giuliani partisans will make use of this to show that their guy is the best option for a bad election year.  However, supposing that ’08 is going to be a losing year anyway, which is what all signs at the moment would suggest, wouldn’t Giuliani and his backers want to fail in this primary go-around and be positioned for ’12 with the argument that the GOP failure in ’08 was the result of sticking with the same-old, same-old rhetoric and strategy of a Romney or Thompson nomination?  (This could be a sort of reverse image of Reagan’s return as the presumptive favourite in 1979-80.)  Conversely, might not conservatives actually want a Giuliani nomination as a way to ensure that the drubbing the ticket takes in ’08 is not attributed to the same-old, same-old strategy that the base currently seems to prefer?  Personally, I think all of the four leading GOP candidates would make pretty poor Presidents (for starters, their foreign policy views are all rather wretched or uninformed or both), so in that sense I am pretty indifferent to which bad nominee goes down to defeat.  Romney is a fraud, McCain is a jingoistic madman, Giuliani is a dangerous authoritarian and Fred Thompson now appears to be running more and more as Cheney’s proxy–it is not at all obvious to me that any one of these is the “lesser of two evils” when compared with their counterparts on the other side. 

However, the symbolism surrounding the different nominees will affect the narrative told about the election when it is over: if Giuliani were to be nominated but then lost in the general election, this would help to weaken the appeal of the idea that the “big tent” can be an electoral success, while a Romney or Thompson nomination perversely sets up a Giuliani or someone like him for ’12 for a much easier run at the nomination and probably a better chance in the general election after the public has had some time to experience united Democratic governance once again.  Likewise, someone more like a standard conservative Republican candidate (or even someone just pretending to be one) stands a better chance of following the Reagan example of making a respectable, but ultimately failed run at the nomination this time and then returning after four years of Carteresque Obama/Edwards/Clinton rule to the rapturous applause of a grateful nation, etc.  This approach relies on the assumption that any one of the major Democratic candidates would prove to be such a disaster as President in his first term that re-election of the incumbent was far from guaranteed.  Given the major candidates on offer, I think this is a likely outcome, though Mr. Bush has been such a disaster that anyone else, no matter how poorly he performs, might appear brilliant and successful by comparison.

In what appears to be a partial confirmation of the conventional wisdom that I denounced as hallucinatory (because it made absolutely no sense), the poll shows that Republicans would be slightly more likely to vote for Bloomberg than Democrats (24% v. 19%) and it seems that more Democrats are certain (it is “not at all likely”) that they would not vote for Bloomberg than is the case with Republicans (51% for Dems v. 43% of GOP).  This may be a reflection of the attitude I described in one of my posts last week when I said that there would be Democratic resistance to a third-party run out of fears of creating another “Nader” effect that would cost the Democrats the election.  In the end, in any proposed three-way matchup Bloomberg manages to get no more than 14%.  While there is some slightly greater draw from the Republican side, I am surprised at how Bloomberg draws from both sides more or less equally.  This doesn’t make a lot of sense, and so I assume it is a function of people not knowing very much about Bloomberg.  These numbers may reflect the willingness to support any remotely competitive third-party challenge.  These numbers may actually reflect the greater Republican dissatisfaction with their candidates than it does greater Republican interest in a Bloomberg candidacy as such.

If you’re wondering why you haven’t been able to follow all the columns and editorials in the American press denouncing all this homicidal nonsense, it’s because there haven’t been any [bold mine-DL]. And, in that great silence, is a great scandal.

Is there something beyond the solidarity of the decent that ought to have impelled every commentator and editorial page in the U.S. to express unequivocal support for Sir Salman this week? ~Tim Rutten

Something occurs to me as I read this.  The first point has to be that everyone has already taken Salman Rushdie so terribly seriously for decades that many people are perhaps more than a little tired of hearing or talking about him in any context.  Goodness knows I am.  I have some difficulty feeling very sympathetic for someone who, given his background, knew perfectly well that his words would incite the responses they incited and went ahead and wrote them anyway, all the while claiming great victimhood in the process.  Obviously, the man should not be threatened with death for what he writes–that is the bare minimum fundamental to a free society–but one reason you may see fewer excited apologies for Rushdie is that he had to be a fool to write what he wrote, knowing full well what it would mean to Muslims.  Will we still be running around declaring our admiration for Ayaan Hirsi Ali in this fashion thirty years hence?  With any luck, we will have forgotten all about her, just as we may one day be free of having to hear about Salman Rushdie’s ego. 

The second point is that this claim of a “great silence” by Mr. Rutten is complete nonsense.  There have been plenty of papers that have been decrying the threats made against Rushdie, just as many people defended the Jyllands-Posten when its editor chose to publish the “Muhammad” cartoons.  More examples could undoubtedly be found, if I were inclined to waste more time tracking them down to disprove Mr. Rutten’s false hyperbole, but if both the Sun-Times and the Chronicle can agree that Britain should stand by its decisison there would seem to almost be a broad consensus across the gamut of mainstream opinion in support of Rushdie’s knighthood, or at least in support of Rushdie’s right to write whatever he might wish to write.  If it has not become a week-long obsession for all media outlets, perhaps this is because the headline, “Innocuous event occurs, Muslims claim deep offense, begin rioting” has become rather predictable and uninteresting.  Why, just today we have two columns rallying to Rushdie’s defense (while complaining about the supposed lack of concern everyone is showing), and I have yet to see anyone in this country saying that Britain should withdraw the knighthood under pressure or justifying the Muslim response to it.  If there really is less commentary on this than on other controversies, perhaps some people don’t say much about a topic because the situation seems so clear that there is no need to say anything else.  Mr. Rutten does understand that there are other things going on that may actually be more important than controversy over Salman Rushdie’s bauble, yes?  

Rutten’s memory of the controversy last year seems distinctly skewed:

You may recall that most of the American news media essentially abandoned Rose and the Danes to the fanatics’ wrath, receding into cowardly silence, as mullah after mullah called for the cartoonists’ death, mobs attacked diplomatic and cultural offices and one Muslim country after another boycotted Danish goods.

Well, no, I don’t recall that exactly, because I’m pretty sure this did not happen, just as I’m pretty sure Rutten doesn’t know what he’s talking about with respect to the response of the American news media to the recent controversy.  The only thing worse than the phoney tolerance and sensitivity that he attacks in his article is the even phonier intolerance against non-existent phoney tolerance.  It’s absolutely right to mock the pretensions of multicultis when you can actually uncover them engaging in pretentious, faux tolerance  of outrageous things.  When the reality seems to contradict this criticism, it comes off as just so much lazy media-bashing.  It would be like my saying, “Why don’t American academics speak out against the absurd attempt by some British academics to boycott Israeli academics?  This is outrageous!”  That would sound pretty good, except that many American academics have spoken out against the boycott.  If I were someone who wanted to engage in some lazy attacks about the inherent anti-Israel bias of the American academy, because this already confirms my prejudices about the academy, I would not bother to have found this out, just as Mr. Rutten seems intent on doing with the media in this country.   

A digression on this business of the proposed boycott of Israeli academics and universities: I can think of few more stupid and counterproductive efforts to a) force policy change in another country and b) advance whatever cause it is the people engaged in this boycott believe they are advancing.  Even if we all agreed that Israeli policy vis-a-vis Palestinians ought to change (and I think it should), what possible good would it accomplish to punish Israeli academics and educational institutions with international boycotts?  Are they the ones setting policy?  Of course they aren’t.  On the contrary, their members may well be among those pushing for different policies of the sort that the would-be boycotting academics want to see adopted.  Punishing Israeli academics for the mistakes or even crimes of the Israeli government is like holding Turkish academics accountable for the repression of the Turkish state, even when that repression is directed against those academics themselves.  It would be like other nations forbidding British scholars from participating in conferences because they oppose the policies of the Blair Government in Iraq, or banning American researchers from their work overseas because of something the Bush administration has done.  This is an insane, unprincipled approach and one that is almost certain to perversely strengthen domestic political support for the policies the boycotters wanted to change, as it also lends to these policies  now the respectability of being associated, in a roundabout way, with the cause of Israeli academic freedom.  Incidentally, why has Tim Rutten not actively denounced this boycott?  Silence is a scandal, or so some pretentious columnist once told me.

Rutten also mentions the higher numbers of journalist deaths during the last few years in the Iraq war than had happened during Vietnam, asking:

Why so little attention to this toll?

So little attention by whom?  Journalists have been paying quite a lot of attention to the deaths of their colleagues in Iraq and around the world in the last few years.  Indeed, it has been one of the distinguishing features of the Iraq war and has been the cause for a fair amount of reporting and commentary in its own right. 

If you want to find a cause for why this has received less attention, look to the usual suspects who actively vilify all of journalism as the repository of disloyalty and anti-patriotism and who consistently inspire in their audiences contempt for news reporting by complaining about its insufficiently pro-war content.  Can you imagine the outcry against “the MSM” if they were to spend a lot of time focusing on the deaths of journalists in Iraq?  You can almost imagine some Hugh Hewitt clone, if not the master himself, saying, “Serves ’em right for refusing to report all the good news in Iraq!”  We would see a lot of commentary talking about how these stories about journalists’ deaths are proof of why the media are undermining the war effort, and that this “explains” why the journalists are subverting the cause out of loyalty to their fellow journalists.  The thinking here would be that if the war is getting journalists killed, this would give journalists some special incentive to help end the war.  Any media critic would immediately recognise the absurdity of this, since it has been the major media that have made sure to make the possibility of withdrawing from Iraq seem absolutely crazy and irresponsible, but that wouldn’t matter to those who are already invested in the idea that all journalists in this country yearn for our defeat.  Additional coverage of the deaths of journalists would simply confirm this prejudice.

These are the voters torn between their distrust for government and their desire for economic security – and they’re the people the GOP needs to find a new way to reach, and fast. ~Ross Douthat

This sounds familiar, and it also makes a good deal of sense.  As I have said before:

So-called “lower-middle reformism” is a necessary element for GOP success–it may not be a sufficient element. 

The numbers Ross offers in his post are fairly jaw-dropping.  The shifts of “lower-middle” voters towards the Dems that took place between 2004 and 2006 are large and impressive.  A party dedicated to at least some mild economic populism, anti-imperialism and social conservatism would very probably thrive in this atmosphere.  Having largely ceded the first two to the Democrats by default (thus ensuring that the Democrats need not deliver in either area), Republicans are flirting with the idea of throwing the third out as well in the strange view that their adoption of a pose of Santorumesque far-sightedness and “leadership” (a.k.a., ignoring your consituents) and the embrace of deeply unpopular policies are the secrets to electoral victory.  After all, it worked so well for Santorum, why not duplicate his strategy on a national level?

Personal surveillance was conducted on Anderson and three of his staff members, including Brit Hume, now with Fox News, for two months in 1972 after Anderson wrote of the administration’s “tilt toward Pakistan.” ~The Washington Post

Via Jason Zengerle

This is beyond bizarre.  Was it supposed to be a state secret in 1972 that America “tilted” towards Pakistan, a member of CENTO whose 1971 war effort we had supported?  Was it also unknown to the general public in 1972 that Nixon had gone to China, Pakistan’s principal ally and sponsor?  For their next trick, the CIA could have kept an eye on all those infiltrators who had been leaking information about a “special relationship” with some country called Britain.

I’m not sure we can make too much from the argument that the country has chosen the Southerner five times out of seven in the modern era. Seven is a very small sample! And several of the examples — like when Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford in 1976 — are much more easily attributed to historical context. ~Marc Ambinder

This seems right to me.  Leave aside for now the silliness of counting an Eastern transplant such as Bush as a representative of the South.  This was part of the reason why I insisted on pointing out the sheer lack of elected Southern Presidents between 1849 1850 and 1965.  For those keeping track at home, there were exactly two Presidents who took over because of the deaths of their predecessors who hailed from Confederate states at the time they took office (Wilson was a Virginian by birth, but didn’t live there for very long), and there was only one other who was elected while hailing from below the technical Mason-Dixon line.  That would be Harry Truman, who was about as Southern as I am Kenyan–and who only enjoyed his position as incumbent President because of FDR’s demise.  Untimely Yankee President deaths put more Southerners (very broadly defined) into the White House than voters did for over a century.  Until 1964, no one from the states that made up the Old Confederacy was actually elected to that position since Young Hickory Zachary Taylor  That is rather staggering when you think about it (of course, it can be readily explained by the greater population of the Northern states, the War, Reconstruction, etc.).  

Is it possible to imagine a similar span of time in which no one from the states making up the United States, c. 1865, had won the Presidency for 100 years?  Of course it isn’t.  Consider where most declared presidential candidates come from in each cycle: only a handful come from Southern states.  Lately, they have enjoyed success for specific, explicable reasons (it seems to me that Bush v. Gore had more to do with the 2000 election outcome than anti-Yankee sentiment, especially since both candidates were technically Southerners).  Complaining about this would be a bit like someone complaining in 1911 that the sinister New York-Ohio axis had dominated American politics for decades (from 1877 until 1913, every President but one–Benjamin Harrison–came from one of these two states), which would be to ignore all of the reasons why these were centers of political power for the two parties.  Only with Woodrow Wilson were we finally “freed” from the grinding oppression of New York and Ohio, and that didn’t exactly work out all that well for the country.  

The 2008 field alone practically guarantees Yankee domination for years to come.  The Dems have one Southerner running and the GOP has a potential of three, if Fred will deign to grace us with his lofty presence.  This is actually backwards from the way it should be if the parties wanted to maximise their chances: the Dems need to be running relatively more Southerners and the GOP needs relatively fewer such candidates.  The South is more or less a lock for the GOP in any case, not because they only respond to Southern candidates or refuse to vote for Yankees (which is an unsupportable thesis), but because they prefer GOP candidates who will talk to them in their idiom (even if it is done in a condescending, “I have to please the rubes” way) and pay lip service to their concerns.  Granted, the GOP mostly just pays lip service to their concerns, but lip service is sometimes enough to keep voters loyal.  It works with Democrats and black voters, so why not Republicans and Southern whites?

Indeed, the Founders didn’t really anticipate parties at all. But they did expect what Alexander Hamilton called “factions,” recognizing that our democratic republic couldn’t work without them. ~Jonah Goldberg

Well, yes and no.  Putting it as Goldberg has put it gives the somewhat incorrect impression that the Founders saw faction as something necessary and perhaps even good.  In fact, they believed factions were necessary to republican government only insofar as they were unavoidable.  The Federalists took it as a given that factions would exist, because they recognised a variety of competing interests in any society determined by wealth, habits, region, religion and so on.  They believed it was necessary to harness what they regarded as a potentially very pernicious human inclination to factionalism and division and regulate the competition of interests through the balances of mixed government.  In this they participating in a long British tradition of seeking to check and oppose the influence of faction on the workings of government.  Hatred of faction suffuses 18th century radical Whig and Tory thought alike, and our Founders inherited this.  Most everyone could agree that faction was inescapable, but most also recognised that it was a threat to republican government, and they were not wrong about this.  That does not mean that we should run towards the dismal swamps of Bloomberg, Broder and Obama (to take three examples of people who have never encountered a saccharine appeal to bipartisanship they didn’t like), where we are all united in our supreme contempt for conviction and our deep disdain for difference.  On the insanity of this Bloombergism, this Obamaian “transformation” of our politics, and probably only on this, Goldberg and I agree. 

Mixed government was supposed to provide for the healthy coordination and balancing of all interests of the commonwealth and needed to be governed by those who placed a higher priority on the interests of the whole.  The purpose of Federalist No. 10 was to argue that the proposed federal union would provide a “republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government,” namely those of faction, because the authors of The Federalist were convinced that faction, left unchecked, would wreck any republic.  Arguably, the Federalists had the solution completely backwards.  They managed to create a system in which the power of faction was exaggerated by concentrating more power in the center and bringing the clash of diverse interests into the federal government, ultimately to the detriment of the Union and the common good.  The viability of an extensive republic–a key element of the Federalist position–was all but disproven in the next century.  Expansion introduced and exacerbated the very factionalism that the extensive republic was supposed to curb.  Instead of weakening the power of factions, expansion consolidated the interests of huge regions into blocs and pitted them against one another in a contest with high stakes.  The increased incentives for preeminence and power offered by the territories acquired through expansion ensured that the spirit of party would reach the point where the Union was no longer workable as a Union and had to either break apart or be reduced to a consolidated state.  In all of this, American liberty was the loser, partly because the Federalists actually underestimated the dangers of faction in the political system they were constructing.  As it turns out, faction is actually much less dangerous in a highly decentralised system, since the “disease” of faction is less easily spread. 

There is an additional reason why the “centrism” of “independents” is such a fraud: it is premised on the bizarre, almost inexplicable belief that the two parties in this country have both become extremist.  They are obviously at odds, but only in the way that brothers in the same family are rivals with each other for preeminence in the family.  If the Founders were here and had to describe our system of government, they would be hard pressed to label it as something other than an oligarchy.  On any number of controversial major policy issues, the actual differences between the major parties are so miniscule that they are hardly worth mentioning.  The parties do not reflect consensus on these matters–they construct this consensus, or rather impose it on the majority that effectively goes unrepresented as a result.  The areas where there is the greatest cultural and political disagreement are those that have been ceded to the courts’ jurisdiction.  If the people in the country are deeply, sharply divided, on a broad range of issues the party establishments are very comfortable with collaborating and agreeing with one another.  Immigration is one of the issues that starkly illuminates the division between Republican party leaders and their constituents, but this divide between the parties as institutions and those whom the parties claim to represent happens again and again.

Yglesias points to this Romney nonsense and makes some good points.  Part of the presentation is hilarious (and disturbing in its ignorance), as he describes the goals of “terror groups” with “common enemies and common goals.”  One of these common goals is:

Eliminate Israel and defeat the Modernity.

Is the Modernity related to the Singularity?  Is it the name of a band?  If you take away the definite article, the statement is reduced to absurdity (and its connection with hostility to Israel is bizarre anyway, as if the two “goals” were intimately related), because then it becomes “defeat modernity,” which is to say literally, “they want to defeat the present time.”  But they live in the present time, so they would also be defeating themselves, which seems unproductive. 

Clearly, “the Modernity” doesn’t mean anything.  Yes, taken abstractly, “modernity” (not capitalised) entails a number of habits and attitudes, and many of the habits of Western modernity are quite alien to the habits of Islamic modernity (obviously) and modern Muslims of a certain stripe are especially put out by Western modernity and the works of modern Westerners.  To say that they want to “defeat the Modernity” is like saying that this was the goal of the Ottomans or the Self-Strengthening Movement or any of the anti-Western forces in the rest of the world that sought to appropriate certain elements of modern understanding and technique for their own purposes. 

This is all worth getting into a little bit, because as much as anti-modern reactionaries such as I will talk about the evils of modernity, taken in the abstract, there is no one modernity and I think reactionaries understand this perhaps better than some.  When some of us refer generically to “modernity,” we are referring very specifically to the effects of certain philosophical and political ideas within Western civilisation over the past 300-500 years.  Modernity really does mean something else in other parts of the world.  

There are modern mentalities significantly different from medieval ones, and there are postmodern mentalities different from the modern.  Despite much heavy breathing about jihadi “medievalism,” Salafist jihadis are not interested in the reality of the world of medieval Islam, because so much of this period is filled with periods of anarchy, defeat and religious change that they would not want to return to in any case.  Not entirely unlike the most radical Reformers, the only thing worth returning to is the pristine, original period at the very beginning.  Everything after that is decline and corruption.  Once religion has been part of history for too long, the thinking has seemed to be, it is sullied by its contact with people and their efforts to reproduce and interpret the religion.  Such people are interested in an imaginary reconstruction of what pure Islam must have been like, while at the same time relying on all of the traditional foundations that, according to their own criticism, would have to be the product of later, degenerate ages if they admitted the reality of historical change and evolution of doctrine.  This is the perfect expression of a modern mind and a typical characteristic of “mass man”: the one who does not understand the system in which he lives, does not know how it came about, wants to overthrow this or that part of it and yet believes at the same time that he is entitled to the continued flow of benefits from the very structures he wants to destroy. 

Yglesias makes sense when he says:

Nor does asserting that Islamism writ large represents an attempt to “defeat the Modernity” seem like an especially cool, calm effort to face reality. Indeed, if we were faced with a genuinely anti-modern movement — an Islamic version of the Amish, say — we presumably wouldn’t need to have any quarrel with people like that or anything in particular to fear from them.

Quite right.  Islamic fundamentalism is, like all fundamentalisms of the last four or five hundred years, actually quite modern in its repudiation of inherited institutions, customs and the accretions of time.  Romney’s description of the “conservative view” of the conflict we are in seems as if it is the half-digested musings of someone (or his staff) who doesn’t actually know anything about these things but has learned the proper buzzwords.  One of the favourite words of many on the right these days is modernity, which they apparently embrace in all its folly and which is supposed to be the thing we are fighting to defend against “medieval” outsiders.  The absurdity of putatively traditionalist people lauding the virtues of modernity, which is right up there with conservatives calling themselves classical liberals on the list of things that annoy me greatly, should be clear to all.

But Thompson, Allen said, is “resonating with people” because he espouses the “realization that all wisdom’s not in Washington — in fact, little wisdom’s in Washington.” ~The Hill

Fred would certainly know this, since he has spent plenty of his life in and around Washington.  Of course, if little wisdom is in Washington, what exactly does Fred have to offer?  His impeccable Hollywood, outsider credentials?

In 1971, John Kerry told a Senate committee that “We found [in Vietnam that] most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy.” Now it is accepted on both sides of the aisle that the Vietnamese desire and deserve political freedom. There is bipartisan recognition that freedom is a universal human aspiration. ~Brendan Miniter

Consider Kerry’s point: communism and democracy both claim to offer equality, freedom and some measure of justice, and both of them say many of the same kinds of things about people’s government and the will of the people.  Much of this is fairly superficial, but for people who had limited experience, if any, with either system the differences might very well have been obscure.  For the average peasant or townsman in Vietnam, the differences probably would have seemed irrelevant–what mattered was who threatened his home, his means of supporting himself and his way of life as he understood it.  In Vietnam, c. 1965-71, would the average Vietnamese nationalist, for example, have been terribly concerned or aware of the differences?  More to the point, would he have cared?  Would he have not, as a nationalist, sided with the revolutionary force dedicated to national independence and unification or indeed anything not associated with yet another foreign power?  As we all ought to understand perfectly well in this country, nationalism frequently trumps the desire for freedom.  That doesn’t mean that the desire doesn’t exist, but that there are often stronger, more meaningful desires out there. 

We are confronted in Miniter’s column with the utterly irrelevant observation that all people want freedom.  Yes, in some sense, all people want freedom for themselves, but there are surprisingly few who can stand other people to have it in equal measure.  In some cases, this is because they lack a complete appreciation for what freedom entails; in other cases, it is because the extension of equal freedom to all in every circumstance is crazy and socially destructive.  We place prudential limits on the freedom of some rather than others all the time based on common sense, experience and priorities that have nothing to do with freedom. 

In any case, aspiring and acquiring are hardly the same thing, and keeping freedom is even trickier and apparently a very rare skill.  That an aspiration for freedom has nothing to do with the content of Kerry’s quote should be obvious.  Whether or not people in Vietnam, or Congo or Zimbabwe “deserve” freedom is almost beside the point.  Suppose that we all agree that they “deserve” it and even “desire” it–then what?  Is it on to Harare with the 82nd Airborne?  Perhaps subvert the government by backing the MDC?  Even if that “succeeds” in toppling the government and introducing reformers into positions of power, why does anyone think that the proper institutions that safeguard liberty would be created?  If it can be done, it is for the people in other countries to do it for themselves.  Indeed, that is the surest way to make sure that it is founded on organically evolved institutions that are consistent with the habits and mentality of that people.  That takes an enormous amount of time, perhaps many generations, and if blatant, public assistance from a foreign power makes the work of reformers in other countries  more difficult that assistance isn’t really assistance at all, but precisely the kind of moral posturing at which contributors to The Wall Street Journal excel. 

The easiest way to expose liberal democracy–and here I mean a genuine representative, constitutional and popular government, not the fraudulent oligarchies that Washington backs in every corner of the world–to dire threats from nationalist and sectarian backlash is by associating with foreigners and unbelievers, which simply confirms everything that these people believe about anything to do with freedom: that it is designed by foreigners as a way to rob and exploit their country, impose puppet governments on them and corrupt their national traditions.