Poulos weighs in with a smart statement:

See, the trouble is that certain types of ‘crunchy cons’ — and this is to the exclusion of compassionate conservatives and Nat. Great. Republicans, who by definition fit in a national membership category — already have meaning in their lives, identities, families, and communities, no Weberian scare quotes about it. They do not need ‘meaning’ imparted to them by some emonationalistic scheme or by some winsome political patriot [bold mine-DL]. They have typically dismissed earthy utopia in very specific terms, often on account of a recognition that utopia means nowhere for a reason. They are good, old fashioned people, and if they’re anything resembling middle class, they’re ‘bourgeois’ in social science terms but hardly ‘identify’ as bourgeois for reasons that should now be obvious. The certain types of crunchy cons to which I refer — and this includes certain types of postmodern conservatives — have no use for crusaderist projects because they don’t like to endure the abstraction of virtues into vague values simply to invent things to have in common with strangers. And, no surprise, they then get attacked for not caring about others, for being isolationists if disinterested in foreign policy or jerks if interested. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t for the anti-crusaders, I fear.

James makes the point concisely.  I will just add that this is why it is a major mistake to confuse this sort of conservatism, which usually derives from religious convictions, with an attempt to make politics into a religion.  They might wish members of a polity were more pious, in the broadest sense of that word, but they do not need politics or political causes to flourish and live meaningful lives.  It is quite literally a conservatism of place, of keeping things in proportion and within limits and of tending to your own fields.  A cultivator, not a crusader, might be the best example of it.

Giuliani’s support in the state is not unimpressive, but it is shallow, and if Iowa is determined by the political/media establishment to be Judgment Day, the probability that Giuliani will win the nomination drops. ~Marc Ambinder

While most observers are focused on the U.S. Congress as it continues to issue new rubber stamps to legitimize Bush’s permanent designs on Iraq, nationalists in the Iraqi parliament — now representing a majority of the body — continue to make progress toward bringing an end to their country’s occupation.

The parliament today passed a binding resolution that will guarantee lawmakers an opportunity to block the extension of the U.N. mandate under which coalition troops now remain in Iraq when it comes up for renewal in December. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose cabinet is dominated by Iraqi separatists, may veto the measure.

The law requires the parliament’s approval of any future extensions of the mandate, which have previously been made by Iraq’s prime minister. It is an enormous development; lawmakers reached in Baghdad today said that they do in fact plan on blocking the extension of the coalition’s mandate when it comes up for renewal six months from now [bold mine-DL]. ~AlterNet

So, if this is all correct, let’s see if we have this straight.  Iraq’s parliament will not grant the extension of the mandate without conditions, such as a timetable for withdrawal, and the Congress recently had passed a bill incorporating a timetable for withdrawal.  Naturally, Mr. Bush vetoed the latter and duly received new legislation sans timetable, which means that Mr. Bush managed to pressure Congress into sending him legislation that put the American position more at odds with the position of a majority of Iraq’s parliament.  “Responsible” people here in America know that having such a timetable is a Bad Thing, because it would “embolden” the enemy and undermine the Iraqi government, while a majority of the would-be representatives of Iraq seem to think that hastening the day when American forces leave their country is a great idea.  It is not entirely clear how long everyone will be able to keep up the charade, but there have been indications that any vote by the Iraqi parliament effectively requesting our departure will be both the final straw and the perfect cover for Republicans who want to get out from under this issue.

Whereas inland the rugged mountains and thick forests marked off one rural community from another and induced a certain isolationism and backwardness that would come to be synonymous with the term ‘Balkan’, the Dalmatian communities were more open and sophisticated. ~Robin Harris, Dubrovnik: A History

Since it first entered modern Western minds during the early stages of the Wars of Yugoslav Succession, Dubrovnik has interested me ever since, but I had only just found this history of the city very recently.  This quote caught my attention and got me to thinking about how we use this language of “openness” to describe certain societies positively and others negatively.  As I have tried to argue previously, like today’s “open society” cultural “openness” may actually have nothing to do with the virtues attributed to it.  Like “open society,” this “openness” may not actually entail genuine openness, but instead may involve a severe closing-off of any number of alternative paths and the gradual elimination of the sources of genuine, indigenous social and cultural diversity.   

The above quote,opposing the backwards Balkans to sophisticated Dalmatia, annoyed me no little and somewhat, because it represents common conceptions of what constitutes a successful society.  It is, by definition, “open,” and openness is tied to sophistication, because with “openness” allegedly come cosmopolitan attitudes.  Opposed to the cosmopolitan is the native, the provincial and the backwoodsman, and we are all supposed to be able to recognise a cosmopolitan, “open” person by his attitudes towards certain key policies (among them immigration, trade, foreign policy) and by a certain general attitude towards cultural change and exchange. 

My thought, which will need a good deal more elaborating and unpacking, is that most so-called cosmopolitans and friends of “open,” multicultural societies are the most drearily provincial people, both because they are actually largely incurious about much of the rest of the world (because it is filled with hordes of “provincial” rubes) and because their response to difference is to attempt to homogenise everyone else and conform them to the cosmopolitan’s standard.  I am thinking that it is plausible that a “provincial,” “isolationist” sort living up in the mountains, so to speak may at once be the most curious about the rest of the world and also be the least put out by the customs of other men.  Having relatively less contact with the “outside” world than “cosmopolitans,” he is more driven to find out about it, and familiar with his attachment to his own native customs he is more inclined to understand the loyalties of other men.  This may be why those, on both left and right, who pride themselves on their relative enlightenment and progressiveness seem to be continually taken aback and shocked by the persistence and power of attachments to ethnicity and religion around the world: not feeling these strong attachments themselves in any way, they have difficulty imagining them as meaningful factors in society.  Another part of this would be that those who are most inclined to political defenses of multiculturalism are probably least interested in understanding or inquiring into other cultures.  Thus those who express concern for the equality and dignity of Arabs and declare their interest in bringing the benefits of enlightened modernity and democracy to them (at least when they are not lauding the bombing or torture of said Arabs) show little or no interest in promoting any extensive efforts to learn Arabic or to engage in any of the relevant cultural studies.  Control is their goal, not inquiry.  Multiculturalism is a pose an elite Westerner adopts as part of status competition among other Westerners; in a sense, it has nothing to do with the other cultures at all, but uses them as props in the play being performed for a Western audience.

More puzzling, the latest immigration debates don’t even seem to have raised Tancredo’s profile.

By contrast, Ron Paul has been much more successful at using his presidential candidacy to gain a wider hearing for his opposition to the Iraq war — a much less popular position among the Republican faithful than support for a border security fence — and general libertarianism, even if he hasn’t yet gotten much of a bounce in the polls. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has at least earned high marks for his homespun debate performances. ~Jim Antle

Jim’s article covers the troubles of Tancredo’s campaign quite well.  The contrast with Paul is interesting.  Why hasn’t Tancredo’s outspoken stance on immigration garnered the attention Paul’s foreign policy tussle with Giuliani has?  There’s no doubt about the outspokenness of his position, or its popularity with core Republican voters.  In the third debate, he pushed for a moratorium on legal immigration and spoke hopefully about a day in our future when “para continuar en espanol, opprima dos“is no longer heard (or words to that effect).  He made a reasonably solid argument for the cultural and political importance of English as an official language.  At a time when the GOP base is deeply alienated from Mr. Bush and Senate supporters of the amnesty bill who regard the base as “bigots,” it seems as if it would be ideal to be the candidate who declared, as he did last night, that he would not allow George Bush to darken the doorstep of the White House in a Tancredo administration.  Simply as a viscerally appealing protest candidate, Tancredo has to be getting some support and attention, right?  Apparently not.

Those mainstream conservative pundits and activists who talk up their concern about illegal immigration seem to be drifting towards Romney or the approaching Fred Thompson juggernaut.  The conservative media may mention his candidacy from time to time, and restrictionist writers will discuss his campaign respectfully, but he is not receiving the spontaneous burst of free media or Internet support that Paul has enjoyed.  I can think of five likely reasons, some of which Jim mentions or alludes to.  First, MSM sources and liberal blogs and talk shows have absolutely no interest in playing up a hard-line restrictionist candidacy, since this is the part of the GOP that all of them despise, and on immigration they naturally sympathise with Giuliani, McCain, Huckabee and Brownback, whereas they tend to sympathise more with Paul or any Republican who shows independence from Bush on Iraq.  Next, Tancredo has not had any prominent “good television” moments in which he faced off with another candidate, which in turn means that his contributions get ignored by soundbite-obsessed, conflict-oriented news reporting.  Also, while it is a burning issue inside the GOP, immigration remains a relatively lower priority for the country as a whole relative to foreign policy and Iraq–a foreign policy debate in the GOP primaries is intrinsically more newsworthy and politically interesting to reporters than Tancredo’s fight against mass immigration.  Fourth, restrictionists are fewer in number online and are not pushing Tancredo’s candidacy as hard as Paul’s online fans are pushing his.  (This online buzz may ultimately be irrelevant when it comes time to vote, but it is helping to make Paul a more widely-known candidate.)  Finally, Tancredo’s debate performances until last night were dismal and hardly the stuff around which one builds a successful insurgent campaign. 

Jim notes the poor debate performances, including last night among them.  I had started to think that he had been improving since the first two, but this is not actually saying very much.  He seems to suffer occasionally from what I will dub Gilmore’s Disease: the need to summarise the entirety of his career, political philosophy and life goals in response to almost any question, regardless of its content. 

The sixth reason why Tancredo is not breaking out from the pack on the issue is that Romney has rather fraudulently, but effectively, filled the leading spot as opponent of the amnesty bill, and Tancredo has to trip over Hunter, Gilmore and Paul in the back of the pack.  Unlike Paul on foreign policy, he cannot stand out as the sole voice of reason on his single issue.  There are many other competing voices claiming, some quite plausibly, that they also oppose amnesty.  He also has to struggle to get any speaking time, and as the now-famous “talk clock” shows he is losing the battle to get out his message.  Only the unfortunate Tommy Thompson fared worse in terms of the amount of time he had to speak.  How is it possible that any candidate only gets to speak for five and three quarters minutes during a two-hour debate?  That’s absurd.

Just as democracies do not make war on each other, they do not point nuclear warheads in each other’s direction. ~The Economist

This, of course, is utter rot.  Democracies do make war on each other.  They have done so before, and as more nations become democratic it is inevitable that it will happen in the future.  The second part is particularly absurd.  If Pakistan became a genuine liberal democracy tomorrow, does anyone believe that it would not “point” its nuclear weapons at India?  This is a question of perceived strategic necessity–nations with weak or smaller conventional forces will rely on nuclear deterrents to check foreign threats, and they will target perceived enemies that have made their hostility clear.  This remark about democracies and nuclear weapons is like saying that France and Germany, both states with constitutions and universal suffrage in 1914, could not possibly have been preparing for war with each other.  It is a fantasy about the virtues of democracy and one that will only become more dangerous with time.  Does anyone believe that a liberal democratic regime in Moscow would have responded to the anti-Russian moves of the last 10 years with significantly less suspicion and wariness?  The responses of governments to perceived threats have less to do with regime type than they have to do with the prevailing foreign policy faction in influential positions in the government.  If “hawks” and nationalists are ascendant, democracy is no guarantee that a less belligerent, confrontational policy will result.  Indeed, democracy combined with a consensus political culture of “hawkishness” and nationalism often has explosive, terrible consequences.

France would never have targeted America with its nuclear weapons because…wait for it…France is an ally of the United States.  Russia has been, or at least could have been, a real ally of the West.  Russia has been led to believe with increasing frequency that both Washington and Brussels regard it as a serious and growing threat.  Finally, after the last provocation of proposing the missile defense system into central Europe, Moscow has pushed back hard in a tragic and futile worsening of relations.  Western governments are not solely to blame for this dramatic souring between Russia and the West, but they have contributed more than their share.

“Ron Paul’s speaking to people like me,” Barbara Hagan, a former New Hampshire state representative and mother of seven, says one recent evening before dinner in the Manchester Radisson. “He’s an honorable man. He’s a hardworking man. I want my party back. I want my country back, and I want the U.S. out of Iraq.”

——————

“I like to think of myself as a Barry Goldwater conservative,” he [Ron Paul’s New Hampshire Campaign Coordinator Jared Chicoine] says. “When I think of the 1960s, I think of conservatism. People say, ‘Reagan, Reagan, Reagan,’ but what about Goldwater? That’s why I consider myself a paleo-conservative.”

—————-

Why all the work for such a long-shot candidate? “I think [Paul’s campaign] should refocus conservatives about what it means to be conservative,” Chicoine says. “We have to be about more than preemptive warfare.” ~The Washington Post

To me, a shockingly large and diverse group of B List Republicans — Huckabee, Brownback, Tancredo, and even in their ways Paul and Thompson — are more impressive than the official “big three.” They all seemed to me to come much closer than Giuliani, McCain, or Romney to be coming at things from a principled, coherent point of view.  The top contenders are all “Reagan! Terror! Bush! Terror! Reagan! Terreagan!” and weirdly busy running away from their actual records. ~Matt Yglesias

I don’t see how Darfur liberals can be so blithely indifferent to a looming genocide in Iraq that we have precipitated, while urging intervening to mitigate one elsewhere. ~Andrew Sullivan

I don’t understand how there can be any coherence in this combination of positions, either, but then it seems clear to me that the inconsistency in their foreign policy is their desire to intervene in Darfur and not the desire to leave Iraq.  Iraq should show to all the dangers of intervention, whether these dangers are all foreseeable or not, and it should make everyone realise that interventionists are rolling the dice with the fate of entire peoples when they say that we have an “obligation” to act.  That realisation should make us even more skeptical and resistant to appeals to “do something” about Darfur or any other crisis around the world, as we should realise that every intervention carries with it the potential for unleashing a genocide or at the very least tremendous destruction and bloodshed.  Where there is one genocide, an intervention may create two or it may create some other unexpected or unmanageable situation.   

If we believe we are making things better by entering into someone else’s war or invading someone else’s country, it seems clear to me that we have not thought about the question enough.  It is almost certain that such actions almost never make the lives of most of the people in that country substantially, measurably better.  For every one successful intervention there are probably five failures, and these failures tend to have massive, negative consequences.  This is probably too generous to interventionism.   

For instance, intervention in the Balkans in 1995 resulted in the ethnic cleansing of the Krajina.  Perhaps that would have happened whether or not we actively supported Operation Storm, and perhaps it wouldn’t have, but in the event our government was at least indirectly party to the very sort of crime that our intervention was supposedly trying to stop.  (Krajinan Serb refugees remain refugees in Serbia to this day.)  There is, so far as I know, still no Save Krajina Coalition filled with drippy liberal actors and Sam Brownbacks, because the victims of that ethnic cleansing were the wrong kind of people.  If the plight of people is not on television or in news magazines, it might as well not exist for our politicians and media.  In 1999 in Kosovo, NATO’s intervention directly caused the mass exodus of Albanian civilians from what had become the war zone, creating a humanitarian crisis where none had existed before.  Upon the “successful” completion of the campaign, the Serbs of Kosovo were exposed to the retribution and ethnic cleansing of the now-victorious Albanians.  The original small-scale counterinsurgency within Yugoslavia’s own borders was turned into a regional disaster and the intervention contributed to actual ethnic cleansing where there had been none before. 

Darfur liberals will argue, somewhat implausibly, that it would be a simple matter to stop the janjaweed and end the killing in Darfur.   (Joe Biden, hardly an opponent of the Iraq war, also seems to hold this view.)  The people who endlessly (and rightly) ridicule “Cakewalk” Adelman and his ilk for pre-war predictions about Iraq have a strange confidence that things will go more smoothly in Darfur.  You know, like they did in Kosovo.  (It is only by comparison with Iraq, mind you, that Kosovo seems now to be anything other than a massive blunder and inexcusable waste.)  Adminstration critics correctly cite our general ignorance about Iraqi society and culture as a major, probably fatal, flaw with any attempt to intervene there, but general ignorance about the Sudan is vastly greater.  Virtually no one who is not a specialist in the region knows anything about the tribes of western Sudan, the politics of the different rebel groups or the details of the fundamental problems at the heart of the fighting, which are control of land and access to water.  Any involvement would certainly have to be largely that of air support for rebel groups, who are themselves stained with atrocities of their own, and would encourage the gradual disintegration of the Sudan as a state, creating a very large failed state.  All the arguments against intervening in Iraq apply to the Sudan with equal force, to which we may add yet another: we have no quarrel at all with Arabs in the Sudan.  It is the same kind of rhetoric and logic used by liberal humanitarian interventionists that helped to pull us into Iraq.  It needs to be fought wherever it is found, whether it is offered by Darfur liberals or by supposedly non-crusading, sober-minded conservatives who write things like this (via Ross):

I mean going in — guns blazing if necessary — for truth and justice. I am quite serious about this. The United States should mount a serious effort to bring civilization (yes, “Civilization”) to those parts of Africa that are in Hobbesian despair. We should enlist any nation, institution or organization — especially multinational corporations and evangelical churches as well as average African citizens — interested in permanently helping Africa join the 21st century. This might mean that Harvard would have to cut back on courses about transgender construction workers. And it might mean that some churches would have to spend more time feeding starving people than pronouncing on American presidential candidates.

We should spend billions upon billions doing it. We should put American troops in harm’s way. We should not be surprised that Americans will die doing the right thing. We should not be squeamish, either, about the fact that (mostly white) Americans will kill some black Africans in the process. Yes, this would be a display of arrogance of historic proportions, even a crusade [bold mine-DL]. But it wouldn’t be a military one. On one hand, this cannot be merely an armed invasion, but on the other hand it must not be some UN initiative which just shuffles poverty around. This would be America and its allies doing right as we see it.

Yes, this would seem imperial, for there would certainly be wars declared against us. French writers would break their pencils in defiance of the American Empire. Kofi Annan would need a pacemaker. Pat Buchanan would move to Canada. But being imperial is not necessarily a bad thing. The British Empire decided unilaterally that the global practice of slavery was a crime against God and man, and they set out to stop it. They didn’t care about the “sovereignty” of other nations when it came to an evil institution. They didn’t care about the “rule of international law,” they made law with the barrel of a cannon.

While I have specific criticisms for all of them, my common critique of Bushian compassionate conservatism, Brooksian National Greatness, Buchanism [sic] and Crunchy Conservatism is the common sense of crusade to all of them. There are times for crusades, to be sure. But I don’t think conservatism should ever be redefined as one lest it become just another populist fever. And I’ll go a step further. The reason Bush pushed me toward libertarianism is because I think any agenda built on the logic of the crusade is either doomed to failure or destined to be very un-conservative. It’s in the nature of things that you will always leave some children behind. ~Jonah Goldberg

This does help to explain a few things.  Ross makes many of the right points, and I would add just a few more.  If you think (wrongly) that Buchananism and “crunchy” conservatism have something to do with crusading and redefining conservatism as a crusade, and you regard crusading as foolish and un-conservative (which is exactly the sort of thing that Buchananites/paleos say about “neo-Jacobin” democratists and Wilsonian foreign policy all the time), you will tend to look down on Buchananism and “crunchy conservatism.”  You have completely misunderstood the things you are criticising, but at least there’s a kind of internal consistency in the “common critique” being made.  It might help clarify matters if there were any sense from the critic about what the proper non-crusading conservatism might look like.  Ross proposes an explanation:

Andrew argued that Bush has gone wrong by being too Brooksian, Jonah suggests that Bush has gone wrong by steering too close to Crunchy Condom (and a Pat Buchananesque “conservatism of the heart,” for that matter), and the upshot for both Andrew and Jonah is that the reform-conservatives have been discredited, and only a purer small-government conservatism retains any credibility [bold mine-DL]. If innovation gave us Bush, then innovation must be a bad idea.
  

As Ross himself has pointed out, this is pretty cheeky of Sullivan, since Sullivan is in favour of a fairly large, intrusive and powerful government, and it is my impression that roughly the same thing could be said of Goldberg.  Criticism of these “reform” conservatisms gives the impression of some dedication to a pristine small-government vision (Goldberg at least spares us Sullivan’s repeated mentions of Goldwater), but the rest of the time that dedication is hard to find.  What all four of the conservatisms mentioned above seem to have in common (indeed maybe just about the only thing all four share) is that they are kinds of conservatism not endorsed by one Jonah Goldberg.  They may have some things in common (as I think Buchananism/paleoconservatism and “crunchy” conservatism do) or they may be completely different, but one thing that binds them all together is that they annoy this critic.  There might be reasons to object to parts of one or all of them, but there is no reason to think of all four of them as being related by a spirit of crusade, not least since only one among them–the “national greatness” one–makes any proposals that might be considered crusaderish.

Let’s remember that this latest discussion started when Rod said, quite reasonably, that conservatives overlooked Bush’s flaws and supported him when he was popular and have now started to bail out when he no longer commands the same levels of support.  Rod was saying that most conservatives had been enablers to one degree or another of Bush’s excesses and could not play the victim by complaining about all of the things that Bush had done to them.  This seems true.  Goldberg didn’t have much to say in response to this, and so resorted to complaining about the alleged deep affinities between Rod’s neo-traditionalism and “compassionate conservatism.”

Ross picks up on an important problem:

If Jonah wants to attack the utopian strain in contemporary conservative thought, why is he wasting his time on the putative links between No Child Left Behind, Rod Dreher, and Pat Buchanan’s “conservatism of the heart”?

Well, the cynic in me would say that he isn’t actually interested in attacking the utopian strain in contemporary conservative thought, but simply adopts this pose as a tactic to reposition himself as the real conservative whenever he comes across an argument by another conservative that he doesn’t like.  Yesterday he was concerned about crypto-fascist sacralisation of politics, today he is concerned about utopianism, and tomorrow he will be concerned about excessive populism, and he will somehow manage to discern one or all of these in everyone with whom he already disagrees on practical policy.  The one consistent theme seems to be that he is being progressively pushed in an ever-more libertarian direction, but even here the “libertarianism” in question is simply a shorthand for whatever it is that his current opponent does not support.  

To answer the question, it is not at all clear why Goldberg would be concerned with attacking the utopianism of Rod Dreher, when Rod specifically said in the “manifesto” of Crunchy Cons:

5. A conservatism that does not recognize the need for restraint, for limits, and for humility is neither helpful to individuals and society nor, ultimately, conservative….

6. A good rule of thumb: Small and Local and Old and Particular are to be preferred over Big and Global and New and Abstract.

Obviously, the errors of the Bush administration are related to rejecting or not heeding exactly these sorts of ideas.  Big, new and abstract are words that apply quite well to the character of Mr. Bush’s policies, and his policies might be taken as the main exhibits used to prove the truth of the statement quoted above.  The departures from humility and restraint are obvious to all.  Whether or not Mr. Bush’s disdain for restraint and humility has any connection to compassionate conservatism is a subject for another day.  What should be clear is that being a “crunchy” con in no way undermines or weakens criticism of administration policies.  On the contrary, it is on the basis of the principles laid out in that book that “crunchy” cons should be among the leading critics of the administration.  Goldberg’s response fails on every level. 

Looking through the book, one will be struck by the complete lack of anything that might resemble utopianism.  The only kind of crusading spirit that might be reasonably detected in its pages is one that, as in the original meaning of the actual Crusades, involves asceticism, repentance and pilgrimage.  This has to do with living a life of virtue inspired by religious faith.  Strictly speaking, it has no connection to political crusades of any kind.  Indeed, one of the principal complaints Rod made in Crunchy Cons was that conservatives had subordinated their principles to party political priorities–it was the temptations of power and the requirements of supporting the party in power that had contributed to conservative confusion.  If anyone was embarking on political crusading of a kind, it was the loyal party men willing to cut whatever deals they needed to cut to keep the GOP in the majority.