Ron Paul on Tucker Carlson’s show.

Via Eric Garris

In French parliamentary elections, Sarkozy’s UMP/New Center coalition has received 42% of the vote and is projected to win between 405 and 445 seats out of 577.  As the Economist graphic shows, Sarkozy’s coalition received essentially all of its gains in this cycle from defections from the National Front.  Sarkozy’s “tougher” policies on crime and immigration and Le Pen’s doddering, pathetic attempt to pander to French Muslims combined to virtually obliterate the National Front as a meaningful nationalist alternative to the center-right.  Expectations that Sarkozyism will deliver on its promised reforms will likely be disappointed, despite the genuinely “huge parliamentary majority” the government will command and the large percentage of voters supporting the governing coalition.

Religions thrive when disestablished. ~The Economist

Most of my post is not about this quote, but it was a strange statement and deserved some brief comment.  Some religions thrive when disestablished, while many disestablished religions simply fade away.  Just consider the examples of the Episcopalians, the Congregationalists, the Presbyterians…the list could probably go on.  Religions may or may not do reasonably well under pluralistic, disestablished conditions.  If you take the diversity of religions as evidence of the “thriving” of Religion, disestablishment can only contribute to such “thriving.”  Yet there is no guarantee that the previously established religion will thrive at all.  Indeed, it might weaken and collapse.  It is certain to suffer losses to increased competition and the loss of incentives and state supports, so to speak, that kept its membership at a certain level.  Saying “religions thrive when disestablished” is a bit like saying “monopolies thrive when they are broken up.”   

Now, on to the main subject.  Lexington this week is talking about Bryan Caplan’s “The Myth of the Rational Voter.”  I have my own problems with Caplan’s argument, which tends to identify rationality with a tendency to agree with economists on policy questions.  My view is that this is about as desirable as having voters follow the recommendations of the foreign policy establishment on foreign policy questions.  The ignorance of voters is extremely frustrating and it is at the heart of why mass democracy is a very poor type of regime.  However, foreign and trade policies offer perfect examples of how deference to the expertise of technocrats does not yield the best or wisest policies, but simply yields the policies preferred by the technocrats and the interests they represent.  These happen to be policies that prove to be fairly unpopular with large parts of the population, and they are also policies that appear to the reasonably well-informed voter to be foolish and irrational in their own right.   

I suppose I would like to publish a book in which I argue that voters are irrational unless they agree with the foreign policy prescriptions of Byzantine historians (who better than a student of Byzantium, after all, to guide the foreign affairs of the state with advice on diplomacy and war?), but for some reason I think people might see a flaw in this sort of thinking.  There is no way for someone to disagree with the expert without demonstrating his supposed “irrationality.”  The game is rigged, which is just the way experts like it.   

When Caplan talks about voter “irrationality,” he mostly means voter ignorance and perhaps voter prejudice.  His complaint is not really that voters are actually irrational, but that they do not have a sufficiently solid grasp on complex systems, particularly when it comes to economics.  Because of voter “ignorance” about alleged benefits, say, of free trade or immigration, they are said to have an “anti-foreign bias,” but what this bias actually represents is very often an entirely different set of priorities and values that cannot be tabulated by the economist.  If economic growth were the only good and the only concern of voters with respect to trade or immigration policy, Caplan might have a point about this “bias.”  However, the picture is often complicated by many factors, political, legal and cultural, that are not connected to economic questions at all.  It is the mistake of economists (and the libertarians who love them) to think that voters are hopelessly confused about these matters simply because they come to significantly different conclusions about policy.  Voters may be misinformed about the economics of trade and immigration, and they may not, but many of them are opposed to certain trade or immigration policies for reasons that go beyond the merely economic.

Should a conflict arise between Kosovo and Serbia – which could involve Russia – where stands the United States? ~Clinton Whitehurst

Well, a good place to start would be to make sure that Kosovo is not an independent nation that would be entitled to the member state guarantees of the U.N. Charter.  This would help to ensure that any conflict that does occur would remain an internal Serbian matter and not an occasion for broader international conflict (provided that meddlesome outside powers do not use it as yet another occasion to attack Serbia).

Mr. Whitehurst has one valid point: there’s more to foreign policy than the three I’s (Israel, Iraq and Iran), and the candidates (especially the amateurs who don’t even have an Iraq policy yet) should be forced to address these other questions. 

The rest of his article doesn’t interest me very much, except that it is  noteworthy for being a laundry list of conventional interventionist concerns.  For instance:

Looking elsewhere, we should also ask candidates how they intend to ensure that a politically divided Ukraine continues toward integration with Europe and not move closer to Russia.

This is certainly a different area of foreign policy, but it is a strange question.  Why should any of the candidates want to ensure this?  Why does it actually matter to American citizens whether Ukraine moves toward “integration with Europe” or not?  What if large numbers of Ukrainian citizens, be they Ukrainian nationalists or ethnic Russians or what-have-you, don’t want to integrate with Europe?  Why is it Washington’s business to make that happen?  What does that integration entail?  EU membership?  NATO membership?  Both?  Does it make any sense to incorporate a sharply politically and “ethnically” divided Ukraine into NATO?  Does it make sense to make security commitments to a country that sits on one of Huntington’s “civilisational” fault lines?   (I am skeptical about the civilisational quality of the division between Ukrainians and Russians, but there is certainly something of a real division there.)  Asking these questions would be much more helpful in revealing the foreign policy visions of the different candidates.

Other parts of the article are less illuminating:

Imagine the expression on a candidate’s face if he/she were asked, “What is your position with respect to the United States establishing air bases and stationing personnel in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan?”  

Well, assuming for the moment the unlikely scenario where the candidate is well-informed about the present state of military operations in Central Asia, he would have a perplexed look on his face, since we have already established bases in both of these countries.  We lost our basing rights in Tajikistan.  The latest news is that some Kyrgyz legislators are agitating to remove the base in their country–FYI, Kyrgyz for “Yankee, Go Home” is Yankee Ketsin.  The question gives the impression that this is a hypothetical policy option rather than an ongoing deployment.  It would be like asking the candidate, “Do you think we should deploy American forces to South Korea?”

Many of the answers to Mr. Whitehurst’s questions are already known long before any of the major candidates give their speeches.  The drug war in Colombia will continue, no matter who wins, and the sanctions on Cuba will almost certainly continue.  These are foolish policies, but they have become deeply entrenched and have powerful interests behind them.  Fearmongering about Venezuela will be a feature of any future administration approach to Latin America, though the intensity of this may differ according to candidate, as it provides Washington with an easy scapegoat for things that go “wrong” in Latin America.  Caracas’ connection with Tehran also allows the more belligerent to demagogue Latin America policy as part of opposing Iran.  Increasing ties to India will proceed apace regardless of the election outcome.  This latter development is, for the most part, a good and desirable one. 

Russophobia, which pervades a significant part of our foreign policy establishment, and misguided NATO expansion goals will continue to push Moscow into an increasingly adversarial posture.  Mr. Whitehurst’s Ukraine question is actually mostly redundant, since there is broad consensus that the “Orange Revolution” was good and pro-Western and democratic and that the West should continue to festoon its decaying corpse with ribbons.  As James has noted in a different conversation, holding on to the Georgian satellite will remain part of our set policy (though, unlike James, I see no good reason, whether oil-related or no, for retaining this satellite in the teeth of Russian opposition).

Did anyone read that Gerson article without finding it to be completely ridiculous?  Fallows joins the chorus against it.

Walton never appeared to waver from his opinion that a delay was unwarranted. After 12 prominent law professors filed documents supporting Libby’s request, the judge waved it off as “not something I would expect from a first-year in law school.” ~AP

Obviously, Judge Walton is not familiar with the legal expertise of the legendary jurist Christopher Hitchens!  You do have to have some sympathy for Libby–no one deserves such atrocious champions.

It’s not clear to me why rank criminality necessarily translates into rank expansionism or Greater Nationalism. I thought criminals enjoyed a patchwork mania of multiple passports, crazy quilt borders, and multijurisdictional chaos. Furthermore I can’t imagine how Macedonia, a state desperate to be institutionally mainstreamed into Europe, would tolerate Albanian guerrillism, nor how, frankly, NATO would. ~James Poulos

Criminality doesn’t translate into rank expansionism–rank Albanian expansionism is already there, side by side with Albanian lawlessness.  Here is The Economist, c. 2003, describing the irredentism of a criminal gang:

ONCE again, talk of a Greater Albania—an idea, if it came to fruition, that would cause chaos in the Balkans [bold mine-DL]—is in the air. This time it is the guerrillas of the Albanian National Army (better known by its Albanian-language initials, AKSh) who are trying to spread the word. They want to unite their cousins in Kosovo and elsewhere in Serbia and Montenegro, Greece, Macedonia and Albania proper.   

Anyone who would like a contemporary example of how separatist nationalism and widespread criminality can go hand in hand need only look at the Djukanovic regime in Montenegro. 

Macedonia is desperate to be “mainstreamed” into Europe, despite the humiliations such “mainstreaming” imposes.  This is why it has put up with European interference on behalf of the Albanian guerrillas who have already started rebellions there in the very recent past.  The Economist reminds us:

In 2001 Macedonia went to the brink of civil war when a guerrilla army sprang out of the ranks of the ethnic Albanians who make up 25% of the population. 

And, from a few years back, here is a description of the political situation:

In contrast, militant ethnic Albanians in neighbouring Macedonia love the idea of boosting municipal power. Indeed, a big increase in municipal authority was the price that Albanian nationalist fighters, closely tied to their cousins in Kosovo [bold mine-DL], extracted for laying down their arms in 2001. Devolution was the centrepiece of a settlement, brokered by the European Union, which stemmed an incipient war.

The standard Western media narrative (poor, suffering Albanian Muslims being oppressed by nasty Orthodox Slavs) has been applied to Macedonia for years (by The Economist as much as by any operation), and attempts by the Macedonian government to restore order to the western parts of their country have been greeted with a stream of anti-Skopje propaganda and outside agitation on behalf of Albanian guerrillas.  NATO has a strange history of “tolerating” Albanian guerrillas.  The pogroms that took place in Kosovo under their noses a few years back are reminder enough of that.  As we all know, NATO has an even stranger history of providing them with air support.  If James means that it makes no sense that the EU and NATO should encourage these sorts of things, I am entirely in agreement.  If he means that they do not, in fact, encourage these things, I’m afraid I cannot really concur.

James is right that Hungary will probably not start agitating to acquire the Vojvodina at the present time, but there is certainly no guarantee that the Hungarians in the Vojvodina will not start agitating for ever-greater autonomy or some other arrangement that will remove them from Belgrade’s control in the event of Kosovo’s independence.  Everyone else has left the old Yugoslavian party–why not the Hungarians?  Meanwhile, Hungarian liberal nationalists, such as Orban Viktor, have already tried to find clever ways to achieve a kind of Hungarian national unity inside the EU structure without recourse to territorial annexation and all of the grief that entails by passing the controversial Status Law that would extend protections to ethnic Hungarians from neighbouring states.  Slovakia and Romania have been furious about this legislation, as well they might, since both states systematically discriminate against their Hungarian minorities (which might be why the Hungarian minorities in those countries could be interested in a different arrangement!).  The point is that there are serious ethnic minority grievances in Slovakia and Romania, and Hungarian nationalists interested in appealing to those minorities.  Ethnic nationalism is very much alive in central and eastern Europe, and there is nothing that will guarantee that it will not lead to attempts in the future to revise the existing borders.  It is something that anyone who wants to begin redrawing the map is well-advised to consider very carefully.  The modern history of European map revisions has not exactly been a happy one, and there is no reason to think that repeating Wilsonian errors in the 21st century will have significantly different outcomes.

Obviously, Serbia is against Kosovo independence.  Bulgaria has expressed strong concerns about the dangers of destabilisation, specifically saying that a unilateral declaration of independence would have such a destabilising effect “on northern Kosovo, but also in southern Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and all of southeastern Europe.”  If many of the governments in the region take such a view, even those that have basically accepted Washington’s line on Kosovo (as Bulgaria has), does this not suggest that destabilisation of the region is a serious danger, whether or not Kosovo’s independence is declared unilaterally or arranged through the U.N.? 

In the end, I think James and I will end up being more or less on the same page as far as practical policy recommendations, because he correctly recognises the importance of a good relationship with Russia and he seems willing to acknowlegde how potentially damaging support for Kosovo independence would be to such a relationship.  In the end, Kosovo independence cannot be worth damaging that relationship, especially when the consequences of that independence for the rest of the Balkans may be very grim.

Kanan Makiya described the Baath system in Iraq as a “republic of fear.” Such regimes are bellicose by design: they can be counted upon to wage war against their peoples and their neighbors. These dictatorships turn their subjects into what Natan Sharansky has called “fear societies.” Our obligation, in such cases, should be self-evident. ~Martin Kramer

Really?  Why is it our obligation, and what makes it self-evident?  An obligation to whom?  Based on what?  If the best that could be hoped for in a post-Hussein Iraq was the sort of “multi-polar” nightmare we have before us, what exactly was our “self-evident” obligation?

Kramer says later:

If they’re not made free, they’ll destroy us; but if they’re made free too quickly, they might destroy themselves, and take us with them.

If we must use such vague generalisations, here’s another idea: whether or not “they” are free does not really matter to “us,” provided that “we” stop being closely involved in “their” affairs.  “They” do not have it in “their” power to destroy “us.”  Even if “they” destroy “themselves,” “they” do not have the means to take “us” down with “them.”  This, like so many of Prof. Lewis’ policy recommendations in the Near East, is just so much malarkey.  Mr. Kramer would seem to support the same policy goals based on exactly the same flawed premises.  It is only by comparison with Mr. Bush’s mad Prague speech in which he preaches the inevitability of freedom’s triumph that it seems at all grounded in a realistic appraisal of regional politics.

I would never have associated the actions for which he was convicted with his character. ~Henry Kissinger on Libby

That’s interesting.  I suppose it is the point of having character witnesses to provide some evidence that, despite the man’s obvious guilt of this crime, he is presumably not normally the sort who goes around breaking the law.  However, it would have really helped Libby in the sentencing phase if he had expressed remorse for breaking the law and if his public advocates had been a bit more circumspect in their arguments on his behalf.  Not surprisingly, the old “perjury is just a technicality” and “there is no underlying crime” lines advanced by more than a few Libby defenders were not likely to endear a judge to the defendant.

My favourite of the excerpted letters has to be the one where the writer assures us that Libby cares about his friends for “who they are.”  How reassuring!

In keeping with a proud tradition of not placing too much importance on most pop culture products and arguing vehemently against reading political messages in the plotlines of space operas, I had steered clear of the ever–wideningcircle of arguments over the political “message” of Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up (I should mention at this point that I have not seen this movie).  There is a part of me that would like to encourage left-of-center movie reviewers to see every cinematic depiction of normal human behaviour as a coded conservative propaganda effort, thus reinforcing the association of normality with conservatism that any supposed propaganda effort would be trying to achieve.  This saves conservatives some of the trouble in actually producing our own films, as it attributes the production of films in which conservatives had no role to our supposedly vast network of Hollywood influence.  In addition to being very amusing, because it is so obviously contrary to fact, this serves to increase the public perception that such-and-such a popular, entertaining movie is “conservative.”  It also gives conservative movie reviewers things to write about, as they attempt to perceive the hidden references to Burke in The Bourne Supremacy*. 

For the most part, however, I find this sort of movie criticism annoying because it is so obviously wrong and compels everyone to label quite arbitrarily different pieces of art, television and film according to mostly inappropriate or misleading political categories.  Instead of appreciating Pan’s Labyrinth as a work of magical realism, it seems as if everyone felt compelled to show off his anti-fascist credentials by talking up the supposed political lessons of the film.  Instead of trying to understand, say, the New Caprica sequence in Battlestar Galactica as an interesting attempt to tell a different side of a war story there was no shortage of observers who wanted to make it into a commentary on Iraq.  Interpretations of 300 were similarly obsessed with either its horrible Orientalism or its supposedly subversive attack on Bush.  I suppose there could be and are political messages worked into all sorts of stories (I am more sympathetic to interpreting Apocalypto as a conservative morality play, which is far less speculative given the well-known politics of the director), but I suppose I have never quite understood why this becomes the basis for criticising the story or, more dramatically, rejecting it outright.  This is my general rule of thumb: the less overt and clear the political references, the better the work of art.  If you can very readily glean a political message from a film (at least any film not explicitly intended as propaganda), it is probably not terribly well made and probably not worth watching.  Take V for Vendetta, for instance–please!  

There have been some cases where Hollywood studio politics clearly clashed with the marketing and release of films that had potentially very un-P.C. implications, resulting in their narrow release and fairly dismal box office receipts (and possibly contributing a little to their later critical acclaim).  Children of Men and Idiocracy were two films that, even in the Cuaronised version of the Children of Men plotline, seem to have conveyed messages that so horrified their respective studios that the studios seem to have tried to sabotage their success.  Both films pointed towards–probably unwittingly for the most part–the issues of “birth dearth” and demographic collapse that might be taken as encouragement for a natalist politics, and Idiocracy also had the “bad” taste to clearly put intelligence and heredity at the center of its story.     

*In case anyone couldn’t tell, this is not a serious example.