We are not talking about a Mark Rich, an ongoing criminal pardoned by Bill Clinton for indefensible reasons. ~Bill Buckley

That’s right.  We are talking about Mark Rich’s dishonest lawyer.

All this change took a toll on many working Americans, who felt a pervasive sense of uncertainty – a sense that perhaps we were losing our identity, losing our way; perhaps our future would not be as bright as our past.  To some, the early 20th century looked like the beginning of America’s decline. ~Secretary Rice

This is a device that administration officials use all the time.  They take whatever it is they think their critics are saying about *them* and their disastrous policies in the present, use some historical analogy where they purport to find the same argument being used in the past and declare that, just like so-and-so in the 1910s, the pessimists are also wrong today.  This would be convincing if anyone could recall the actual prophets of American decline c. 1900 or 1914 or 1920.  No one was saying such things, since it was clear during these decades that America was going anywhere but into decline.  It is worth remembering that the response to mass immigration then was a thoroughgoing assimilationist view, espoused memorably by Teddy Roosevelt, who was pretty much the antithesis of the current President in all things except their shared fondness for armed conflict.  This is worth noting, since Rice makes TR the centerpiece of her address and the embodiment of her idea of “American Realism.” 

The beginning is not promising:

American Realism is an approach to the world that arises not only from the realities of global politics but from the nature of America’s character: From the fact that we are all united as a people not by a narrow nationalism of blood and soil, but by universal ideals of human freedom and human rights.  We believe that our principles are the greatest source of our power. And we are led into the world as much by our moral ideas as by our material interests.

But this is simply the retrojection of the idealism and utopian nonsense of the Second Inaugural back onto Teddy Roosevelt.  Roosevelt was a nationalist, yes, and an Americanist, but I think few would confuse him with a champion of human freedom and human rights as such.  The man who “used American power to eradicate yellow fever and support public health in the Philippines and in parts of the Americas” also oversaw the brutal crushing of the Filipino insurgency and waged a war against these people for the sake of retaining control over a coaling station in the interests of power projection and securing commerce.  You can argue that Roosevelt was basically right or you can regard him as a dreadful imperialist, but what you cannot do is reinvent the man as George Bush with a moustache. 

It gets worse:

It is for these reasons, and for many others, that America has always been, and will always be, not a status quo power, but a revolutionary power – a nation with New World eyes, that looks at change not as a threat to be feared, but as an opportunity to be seized.

This is crazy.  World powers or aspiring world powers that try to be revolutionary powers destroy themselves.  Look at France, Germany and the Soviet Union.  World powers sustain themselves by being big defenders of the status quo.  In reality, America, Britain and France have traditionally been friends of the status quo since WWI.  The Allies in WWI were dedicated to keeping the geopolitical order under their control.  The revisionists lost, the status quo won.  The same happened in WWII, where the Axis rebelled against the post-Versailles status quo and lost.  The Cold War was the result of the attempt of America, Britain and their allies to ensure that the world’s revolutionary power did not overturn the post-WWII status quo.  The story of the 20th century is in part the story of the failure of global revolution, at least when that revolution is actively promoted by a major power.  No world power that is on top of the heap and wants to stay there encourages revolution.  Indeed, no established government should want to encourage the fires of revolution elsewhere, as they will eventually turn back on the one fanning the flames in unexpected ways.

It keeps getting worse:

It was American Realism that informed the work of American statesmen in the early years of the Cold War – people like Truman and Vandenburg, and Marshall and Acheson, and Kennan and Nitze.  It informed for years later by Kennedy, and Reagan, people who understood that we had to deal with the reality of Soviet power but should never forget the malignant nature of that state’s character.

I feel confident in saying that George Kennan did not belong to this school of realism, if it is realism at all.  To list Kennan as being somehow similar in his foreign policy views to Kennedy seems especially bizarre.

Then there was this remarkable string of statements:

Trade is an engine not only of economic growth, but also of political transformation. Integrating into the global economy helps to open closed societies. It helps new democracies to deliver on the high hopes of their people. And it gives governments a stake in the international system.

I happen to agree with this, more or less, which is why I find it so utterly inexplicable that we should persist in our dead-end sanctions policies towards such states as Iran and Cuba.  Were Iran not such an economic mess, Ahmadinejad’s economic populism would have had much less appeal.  Had Cuba been open to American trade, it seems much less likely that the party dictatorship in Havana would be as strong and entrenched as it is today.  At the very least, it would have been compelled, as Beijing has been, to accommodate the creation and creators of wealth.  Instead, the actual policies of this most non-realist of administrations have sought to deepen the isolation of these nations.

Secretary Rice concludes with nauseating cheers for optimism.  What more is there to say?

There are no coronations in America. ~Sen. Sam Brownback

If he thinks this, I’m afraid the good Senator has not been paying much attention to the Republican nominating process for, oh, the last forty years.  In this instance, I wish he were right.  I hope that people in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida do not respond to barrages of advertising and the cheap, lazy rhetoric of fearmongering that Romney offers.  (This would be to hope for something quite unusual.)  It would be outstanding to have a thoroughly competitive nominating process.  It would be fascinating to see what happens when each of the media-crowned top three does not get to have twice as much time in every debate as each of his competitors.  It would be intriguing to see what having qualified, representative, principled candidates leading the field is like.  I can barely remember the last time the GOP had a nominee who possessed all three of these traits. 

Instead, as we can all see, the GOP doesn’t have any of that.  It has the unqualified (Giuliani), the unrepresentative (McCain) and the unprincipled (you know who) leading the way.  Unless someone upends Romney at Ames or at least makes a big splash (better than 25%), the GOP will have a coronation of someone as it pretty much always does.

Jingoism Can Be Fun

In this dispiriting display of pandering and group-think, two notable contrary examples stand out. 

On the Democratic side, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, alone on the stage in voting for the temporary funding bill, declared his determination not to deny arms and protective equipment for the troops his 2002 vote helped send to Iraq — even, he said, if it costs him the nomination.

And on the Republican side, Sen. John McCain of Arizona defended his and the president’s comprehensive and humanitarian approach to immigration — a grace note in what was otherwise a rather discordant pair of ensemble performances. ~David Broder

What do Biden and McCain have in common here?  For one thing, they are both wildly, profoundly out of step with their parties on these questions.  Broder praises these two as examples of resisting “pandering and group-think,” but what this actually means is not that Biden and McCain have taken some bold, independent position, but simply that they have sided with the conventional wisdom of the establishment that a) we cannot “precipitously” withdraw from Iraq and b) we must have comprehensive immigration reform.  In other words, they are engaged in pandering and group-think, but their pandering and group-think are not aimed at their constituents or the parties they propose to lead in the general election as the respective presidential nominees.  Biden is participating in the group-think of the foreign policy establishment, while McCain is pandering to the media and the interests of business.  They pander and conform to the political establishment, rather than to the wishes of the public.  There is always something very distasteful about pandering and groupthink (see Mitt Romney and John Edwards as examples), but at least pandering to the voters has some minimally respectable justification in what is allegedly a representative government.  By contrast, Biden and McCain show themselves to be predictable functionaries of the Washington insider set and they also happen to be wrong on the policies where they differ from their competitors.  That’s quite an achievement.   

What dispirits Broder is actual political difference between the parties and the gall of most of the presidential candidates to speak to their respective constituencies in language that those constituencies will find appealing.  I may also be horrified by most of the GOP field’s easy-going banter about tactical nukes (as should any sane person), but for good or ill these candidates are competing for the support of their party’s base right now and that will inevitably involve candidates from both parties saying things that David Broder will find unrealistic or strange.  This is because David Broder is thoroughly out of touch with the views of most Americans on both Iraq and immigration, just as he is on most issues.

But the dynamic on both sides is trending toward extreme positions that would open the door to an independent or third-party challenge in 2008 aimed at the millions of voters in the center. ~David Broder

I just heard Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos chatting on the ABC Evening News about the collapse of the immigration bill. Their conclusion? It was killed by extremists on both sides: liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans overwhelmed the centrists. It just goes to show that partisan polarization has made America ungovernable. ~Kevin Drum (who vehemently rejects this interpretation)

But together it added up to another example of a polarized political system in which the center could not hold.

————-

The collective failure of the two parties already appears to have stimulated interest in a third-party candidate for president in 2008 whose main promise would be to make Washington work. ~Dan Balz

Balz doesn’t seem to have any particular provisions he’d like to see the bill contain. He just thinks there’s a big “immigration problem” and that congress should “do something” — anything — about it. Most annoyingly of all, he dresses this quintessentially Beltway desire to see legislating qua legislating up in faux populist garb: “to those far removed from the backrooms of Capitol Hill, what happened will fuel cynicism toward a political system that appears incapable of finding ways to resolve the nation’s big challenges.” Why a failure of interest-group logrolling should fuel cynicism, I couldn’t quite say. ~Matt Yglesias

…a piece [Balz’s article] produced with stunning swiftness that nevertheless manages to incorporate every respectable, loaded, portentous goo-goo cliche available ~Mickey Kaus

Via Ross

If any “respectable” journalist wants some greater understanding of why political bloggers tend to look down on “the MSM,” why they tend to be very aggressive against so-called “centrists” and why they are relatively more “extreme” in their politics, just read Dan Balz’s article or David Broder’s column to get a sense of the obnoxious, condescending junk that Americans are expected to accept as “responsible,” mainstream political journalism.  As the bloated, sclerotic heart of establishmentarian “centrism,“ The Washington Post deserves some special criticism for routinely serving up this miserable fare.

As near as I can tell, the complaining of Broder, Balz, Gibson, et al. is that special interests (e.g., pro-immigration lobbyists, the Chamber of Commerce, etc.) failed to force through a bill that most Americans didn’t like and don’t want.  In the “centrist” view, those special interests represent the “center,” because the overall result matches up with the mindless, feel-good “centrist” view that immigration is good and must be encouraged in all forms and at all costs, while the Senators actually representing the interests of their constituents and making coherent, serious criticisms of various provisions of the bill are the “extremists.”  In short, for the “centrist” gang, responsible, detail-oriented policymaking is a danger to the system, while gargantuan, confused, special interest-driven legislation is the salve to the nation’s wounds. 

The result was what you would expect to get from an omnibus bill on something as complex and controversial as immigration legislation.  Had Congress attacked this in a piecemeal fashion, there would not have been so many obstacles preventing its passage.  It is a very good thing, from the restrictionist perspective, that the majority attacked this problem in this way, since it will show the dead-end that is “comprehensive” reform and it should also show the importance of attending to specific problems of immigration reform one at a time.  That will probably make it less likely that pro-amnesty forces will be able to successfully incorporate something like the “Z” visa scam in future legislation.  At the very least, it might require defenders of amnesty to make arguments for this sort of measure without being able to buy votes with other elements of a larger bill, or so we can hope.

It occurs to me that we have a contemporary example of what sort of policy is adopted when “the center” holds and “extremists” of left and right are ignored in policy debate: the Iraq war.  It seems to me that this is not a desirable model to follow.  Perhaps if there were more debate that was more representative of the diversity of opinion in this country, rather than an acceptance of the requirements of a “centrist” consensus focused on passing bad legislation for the sake of comity and collaboration, we would have fewer phenomenally bad policies both at home and abroad.  I know, it’s a lot to ask, but that’s because I’m an unreasonable extremist who wants to loose anarchy upon the world.

Drum is right that Republicans contributed most of the votes that killed the amnesty bill.  That this was in no small measure a result of Republican partisan solidarity against Harry Reid’s parliamentary rigidity and not the result of any serious or principled objection to some of the worst features of the bill is beside the point.  Most of the majority party lined up behind the bill, and most of the minority did not, which is what you would expect for a bill that belongs to the majority party’s legislative priorities and represents something that large parts of the minority party’s constituents oppose fiercely.  There were crucial defections from the Democratic side, among them Byron Dorgan, who may very soon pass Jim Webb as the Senate Democrat I like the most.

If standing for liberty in the world makes me a dissident, I
wear that title with pride. ~President George W. Bush

The event at which Mr. Bush was speaking and the entire theme of Mr. Bush endorsing the work of dissidents in repressive countries highlight just how absurd it is to have someone like Mr. Bush giving this speech.  This is a President who, along with his administration and its supporters, has routinely insulted, misrepresented and smeared critics and dissidents who oppose his policies.  He does not really respect dissent and has no interest in the actual arguments of those who disagree with him.  He has virtually nothing in common with political dissidents as such.

The communists had an imperial ideology that claimed to know the directions of history [bold mine-DL]. But in the end, it was overpowered by ordinary people who wanted to live their lives, and worship their God, and speak the truth to their children. ~President George W. Bush

The irony of Bush’s statement here–mocking the ideological determinism of the communists in a speech bristling with references to the certain judgements and direction of history–is simply overwhelming.  If I thought his speechwriters capable of it, I would say that they put this line in there as part of an inside joke at Mr. Bush’s expense. 

Mr. Bush’s Prague speech lays out plainly that he thinks modern history is the story of the progressive advance of freedom.  He is horribly wrong, but that isn’t my point.  He believes, as he insists at several points, that it is “inevitable” that freedom will triumph.  This is a deterministic and ideological statement.  There is nothing inevitable in history.  It is a mark of actual human freedom–our free will–that ensures that there is no sure or straight or inevitable path of development for any one nation, much less for the whole world.  Indeed, if freedom were the inevitable outcome that cannot be denied, there would never really be much need to work for it, cultivate it or fight on its behalf.  It would just happen spontaneously.  Strangely, this is what pro-war ideologues believed would occur in post-invasion Iraq, yet the drive to invade was also fueled by the revolutionary desire to “liberate” and the missionary desire to spread “freedom.”  These are the people who believe that everyone is naturally free but is everywhere in chains and that it is their, our, obligation to break those chains to “restore” people to their natural state.  This consequently turns into a chaotic mess, since people are not naturally free and political freedom is not some spontaneously occuring weed that sprouts out of the ground. 

Why is it that the people who are most intent on spreading an ideology feel compelled to tell others that their ideology is the natural and unavoidable conclusion to which all people must eventually come?  If the claims of inevitability were true and if the truths being preached were actually “self-evident,” every nation would embrace them without any prompting from anyone else.  Yet that does not happen.  So why this talk of inevitability?  It is to soften resistance and weaken the resolve to oppose what others very much wish to oppose.  It is an ideologue’s version of “we will bury you.”  Like Agent Smith in The Matrix, Mr. Bush is saying, “The future is our time.”  As we have seen in Pessimism, however, those who invoke the future do so to legitimise the injustices they are committing in the present.

Still, some argue that a safer goal would be stability, especially in the Middle East. The problem is that pursuing stability at the expense of liberty does not lead to peace — it leads to September the 11th, 2001. ~President George W. Bush

That sounds an awful lot like saying that America “invited” the 9/11 attacks by pursuing “stability.”  But it would be terribly wrong of him to say something like that!  We know, because Rudy Giuliani said so.

Which explanation of the causes of 9/11 makes more sense?  Were the hijackers, particularly the 15 Saudis, objecting to Washington’s backing of the Saudi regime, or were they instead objecting to the American presence in the Gulf and our other Near Eastern policies?  Was Al Qaeda motivated by the lack of freedom in Saudi Arabia, or by something else? 

If Mr. Bush wants to invoke the causes of 9/11 to justify his foreign policy, he and his allies would need to be able to defend the claim that it was the pursuit of stability (which they have certainly abandoned) at the expense of democratic reform that led to the attacks.  Otherwise, this is not much more than some cheap demagoguery.

Part of a good relationship is the ability to talk openly about our
disagreements. ~President George W. Bush

Via Belgravia Dispatch

Of course, that only works one way.  When other governments talk openly about their disagreements with our policies, it is always deemed to be anti-Americanism and the encouragement of the forces of darkness.