Finally, after all these years of hard work and sacrifice…a break! ~The Writer/Comedian (Bill Murray), The Lost City*

Later this summer, I will have a review of Colin Wells’ Sailing from Byzantium in Chronicles.  Here is the table of contents for the May issue, which has, in addition to many fine meditations on the importance of property rights and the dangers to them, a good Joe Sobran piece on George Will and the state of conservatism and Joseph Fallon’s article on the military buildup for a potential attack on Iran.  The June issue considers the phenomenon of Americanism.  In that issue, Dr. Fleming smashes a number of standard “conservative” idols in his “Establishing Christian America”: 

If America were, in fact, a basically Christian or moral nation, Hollywood would be out of business, and so would most colleges and universities.

Among many other excellent contributions, the June issue also has an article by George Ajjan on the question of “foreign fighters” entering Iraq and Iraqi and American border security. 

TAC has its new May 21 issue out, which is now online.  The following issue will have a piece I have written on neoliberalism (as well as Michael‘s profile of Ron Paul), and the issue after that one should see the beginning of my regular column there.      

*Like The Writer/Comedian, I am kidding about the hard work and sacrifice.

Peter Suderman writes about Ron Paul for NRO (via Michael).

Reihan has a fewresponses to the legions of Fletch-loving maniacs and other critics.

So Republicans will keep winning because Americans are becoming more entrepreneurial and “market-oriented” and because they’re increasingly “saying it’s not all about materaliasm, it’s not all about the pursuit of material things”? It’s hard to imagine a balder description of the essential contradiction at the heart of the GOP coalition, and yet Rove seems unaware that there’s anything contradictory here at all. ~Ross Douthat

This contradiction echoes part of what I was saying earlier today:

The pairings of social democracy/cultural hedonism and economic liberalism/cultural conservatism are extremely weird and abnormal.

There is a way in which the computer chip-empowered people of Rove’s active imagination and the culturally conservative, not-so-materialistic people could get along or prove to be more complementary than I might normally allow.  It is even possible that technology will facilitate a large-scale flourishing of homeschooling, home businesses and some measure of agrarian “return to the land.” This might even be joined together with a religious ethos and a respect for consecrated order, but I wonder whether it is at all likely. 

It is annoying to say, but from what I understand of his thesis Brink Lindsey is right.  Abundance and technology tend to lead to what I would call cultural disintegration and atomistic individualism (he would call this “freedom”) and actively undermine the ethic that says “it’s not all about materialism.”  It may rely on those who are driven to pursue higher goods and it will create the space for people who want to say, “it’s not all about materialism.”  It is quite conceivable that the excesses of the “Age of Abundance” will send sane people running screaming (and making prostrations along the way) back to churches and perhaps even real monasteries (and not merely the MacIntyrean metaphorical monasteries of the home), but this still suggests a sharp tension and even a dialectic between the Mammon voters and the God voters. 

Incidentally, the whole controversy over “crunchy conservatism” and the more general traditional conservative critique of the materialism of capitalist society centers around the basic truth from the Gospels that you cannot serve two masters.  “Fusionism” has been premised to some considerable extent on the assumption that you can do this.  The “fusionists” have been mistaken.

A veil of timidity and euphemism hangs over the entire discussion, which could lead a sleepy reader to miss his meaning altogether. ~Paul Berman

One might say much the same about Berman’s essay on Ramadan, which seems to timidly and euphemistically dance around the edge of saying something bold about Ramadan.  I understand that writing about certain things, especially intellectual movements to which you feel no particular attachment, can be difficult and a writer can sometimes feel as if his own argument is eluding him in the mesh of all the detail (this has to be even more true when the detail runs to 28,000 words), but after slogging through all of it I would have liked to have found out something more interesting than “who is afraid of Tariq Ramadan.”  I now understand who is afraid of him, but I just have no idea why I should really care what Tariq Ramadan thinks (or at least no more of an idea than I had going in).  Update: I also have no idea why I am supposed to be deeply engaged by tactical alliances between Trotskyists and Islamists or the journalistic assault on Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  I suppose these things are “new,” as Berman keeps calling them, but why are they interesting?  After finishing the piece, I can’t really say. 

Also, despite his utmost striving, Berman fails to convince that the influences of fascist or other modern European thought were as formative for Qutb and al-Banna as he and others routinely claim.  To take just one example from the Berman piece:

This was Islamism itself, in its Mussolinian, Third Reichstyle yearning for the final showdown.

But “the final showdown” is either implicit or very explicit in every monotheistic religion that concludes with an apocalypse, an end of days or a Day of Judgement.  I doubt very much that Qutb received this idea from fascist thought.  If anything, any familiarity he had with fascist thought would have been added to the Islamic background.  In any case, modern gnostics, such as fascists and the like, derive their political apocalypticism from the religious apocalypticism of which their ideology is a pale secular shadow. 

To bring in a phrase that many conservatives will cite but relatively few conservatives probably understand, the gnostic drive to “immanentise the eschaton” is precisely the attempt to realise an apocalyptic religious goal here below through the creation–often forcible and violent–of a secular equivalent of heaven or Firdaus.  A crucial difference between chiliastic religious movements and modern gnostics on the one hand and Islamists on the other is that it seems that the latter do not believe that they can accelerate or usher in the Day of Judgement.  On the contrary, it seems to me that a salafi has to be almost the opposite of a chiliast or modern gnostic in that he believes the “final showdown,” to use Berman’s phrase, is not in any way under his control.  The salafi may be a religious zealot with a political agenda (though he would not necessarily define the two spheres as being all that separate), but he does not think that he will bring Firdaus to earth.

Here’s some additional confirmation that the Iraq war was built on a foundation of lies and deceit (as if you needed more proof).  I’m waiting for the pro-war propaganda response, which will probably be, “You go to war with the intelligence you fabricate.”

Since some liberals have (only half-jokingly) sometimes spoken of Obama in messianic terms, and his childhood associations with Islam have become fodder for discussion, it is probably not helpful to him to talk about him by using Muad’Dib references.  (Link via Yglesias)

He [Buruma] marveled over Ramadan’s mix of anti-globalist fervor and ultra-conservative cultural views. “In American terms,” Buruma remarked, “he is a Noam Chomsky on foreign policy and a Jerry Falwell on social affairs.” ~Paul Berman

So, in other words, he’s rather like…me?  Well, not quite.  For starters, my grandfather did not found the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a piece of information that any cursory introduction to Ramadan always mentions, but which Berman has failed to bring up in the first page and a half of his miniature biography).  Of course, this description of Ramadan doesn’t tell us much about him, since the religion and tradition he wants to conserve are radically different from the religion and tradition that I want to conserve.  Incidentally, Berman does not go into much detail about why Ramadan was denied an entry visa when he tried to come to this country.  It was denied because the government claimed he gave material support to Palestinian terrorists.  Now it may be that the government is wrong, but you would think that something like that would be worth mentioning early on. 

Anyway, there is nothing that strange or marvelous about a combination of social and cultural conservatism and ferocious anti-globalism and anti-imperialism.  Indeed, the two pretty much go hand in hand.  “Don’t Tread On Me” and “mind your own business” are saying more or less the same thing with slightly different emphases.  It is only because of the weird confluence in a few Western countries of the battered remnants of classical liberalism with social and cultural traditionalism (a combination of the interests of capital and cultural capital, you might say) that those who are (at least rhetorically and symbolically) culturally conservative at home endorse the whirlwind of “creative destruction” sweeping over the world and devastating, er, “enriching” everyone else’s cultures.  Perhaps this is because these people see this process as a creation of “our” culture and therefore a demonstration of our culture’s vitality or value, but then they have to ignore that this creation acts rather like a nihilistic parricide against the very culture that raised it up in the first place. 

The more fiercely conservative you are about your religion, your culture, its habits, morals and traditions, the more likely you are to regard all forms of globalism and globalisation–political, economic, cultural–as perverse, destructive and hostile to your “vision of order” and your way of life.  Opposition to hegemonism and globalisation on the one hand and opposition to cultural decay and fragmentation on the other are a natural pair.  Support for their opposites (with some qualifications in the realm of foreign policy) forms another natural pair.  The paleocon combination is the normal, relatively more common conservative response to these phenomena around the world.  The pairings of social democracy/cultural hedonism and economic liberalism/cultural conservatism are extremely weird and abnormal.  It doesn’t actually make sense for people who want to preserve tradition to support international capitalism with the enthusiasm that many conservatives do, and indeed some “conservatives” today not only see the contradiction but decide that they are quite happy to let tradition fall by the wayside for the most part.  That is the outcome of the fraud of “fusionism”: the decision to discard virtue and to start a torrid affair with “economic dynamism.”  The marriage of liberty and virtue that “fusionism” was supposed to represent and defend did not take account of that “other woman,” which we might also call “growth.”  For that matter, it doesn’t make much sense for people who believe social solidarity is extremely important to endorse rampant individualism in social and cultural matters.  Both are like patients suffering from ulcers who believe that drinking acid will help with the cure.  These combinations exist only in fully industrialised Western societies and map onto no other alignments anywhere on earth.

In his contribution to the ever-widening discussion of Ghostbusters, Fletch and Reihan’s fun article about the latter, Yglesias wrote:

Mass market comedy, as seen in Hollywood films, strikes me as a pretty good partner for post-Goldwater conservatism. Comedy, to be funny, usually requires the skewering of the powerful in some sense. But the mass culture marketing demands that your product not actually do much to challenge prevailing ideas in the world. It’s a bit of a paradoxical situation, but it nicely mirrors the efforts of a political ideology designed to further entrench the privileges of the country’s wealthy elite and its white Christian majority and somehow do so in the name of anti-elitism.

Ross took umbrage at this and responded:

The idea that white, middle-class Christian Americans, simply by virtue of being part of our country’s “white Christian majority,” never have any legitimate grievances against the American political system has a long and distinguished pedigree on the left.

I understand what Ross means here, and he’s right to scoff (as I think he is) at the implication that the “white Christian majority” somehow rules the roost in this country.  A large part of the Republican coalition exists today because this is untrue and demonstrably so: it is because much of the “white Christian majority” has acquiesced or been made to acquiesce in the losses to cultural liberalism that conservative Christians mobilised politically and began trying to create a political response to these cultural reverses.  Another idea that has enjoyed circulation on the left is the What’s the Matter With Kansas-style complaint that middle and working-class social conservatives act against their own economic self-interest in backing the GOP, which such observers as Thomas Frank deem to be “irrational” (because voting on something other than economic matters is always “irrational” to such people).  There is a sense in which it is true that these voters support the GOP despite the damage GOP-backed policies do to their communities, businesses and wages (it is also true that they back the GOP because they have tended to assume, with good reason, that Democratic policies would do more damage), but it is not really possible to complain about aggrieved cultural conservatives who are so alienated by cultural liberalism that they vote against their own best economic interests and also complain that these cultural conservatives enjoy some default hegemonic status because they happen to belong to the demographic entity of “white Christian majority” (which never acts as a cohesive or unified bloc in any way). 

Even so, Ross might sharpen his reply to Yglesias by noting, among other things, that only some parts of the “political ideology” of conservatism are dedicated to defending the interests of the “white Christian majority” (though it is apparently necessary to wrap this in the fluffy, inoffensive language of “Judeo-Christian values” or just “values”), while other, probably more influential parts of today’s political conservative movement are more or less dedicated to that wealthy elite privilege-entrenching Yglesias mentions.  This comes in place of, and at the expense of, the interests of middle and working-class white Christians.  The relatively clever bit of the political movement today is how it manages to convince these people, at least temporarily, that their interests are profoundly implicated by the forging of new free trade pacts, unending mass immigration and perpetual war and all other policies endorsed or tolerated by corporations and the moneyed interest.  More often than not, these constituencies don’t really buy these arguments, but probably think that an alliance with corporate interests and the rest of the open borders lobby is necessary to remain politically competitive and thus allows them to engage in their rearguard political actions against cultural dissolution.  Their disappointment with Mr. Bush is therefore extremely acute, because there has been and continues to be a great deal of working for corporate interests and waging the perpetual war and very little, save perhaps the bizarre Schiavo episode, that seems to have much to do with either the “values” or interests of the white married Christian voters of this country.  These voters made their corrupt bargain in 2000 and again in 2004 and are annoyed that there has been no payoff.  A movie highlighting those tensions and conflicts might be quite interesting, even if it wouldn’t necessarily be very funny.

The foundation published Ramadan’s book To Be a European Muslim in 1999, and it enjoyed a modest success. To Be a European Muslim was regarded as a thoughtful argument for healthy new relations between old-stock non-Muslim Europe and the new-stock immigrant Muslim population. Daniel Pipes in the United States was among the expert observers who offered applause–though, if you visit Pipes’s website, you will see that, ever since his initial review, Pipes has been posting additional remorseful observations about how wrong he was, and what could possibly have gotten into him? ~Paul Berman

Berman’s essay, which is more like a small book, on Tariq Ramadan may or may not be worth reading in full (I have just waded in and I am not sure that I will finish), but this remark about Pipes was interesting.  Pipes is, of course, the embodiment of neocon Arabophobic Islamophilia.  No, I’m not kidding.  When they do not happen to live in the immediate vicinity of the Levant, Islamic fundamentalists have had few better allies–both conscious and unwitting–than neoconservatives.    

Pipes himself peddles all the standard pro-Islamic myths or exaggerations: Islam as “religion of peace,” Islam as guardian of Greek learning in the middle ages, medieval Islamic civilisation as a Golden Age of rationality and tolerance, and so on and so forth.  He is also ardently in favour of attempts to forcibly “reform” the Islamic world from the outside and supports all efforts to crush as many Arab states as possible in the process.  He believes that Islam is essentially good, but has gone awry somewhere and must be pummeled and shaped by outside intervention to return to its pristine goodness.  It is impossible to understand the creation of a word like “Islamofascism” without understanding just how deeply neocons have embraced this myth of the peaceful, enlightened Islamic world and their narrative of a small fraction of that world that has gone astray.  While the word is intended to conflate and confuse multiple, mutually opposed groups and states, this conflation is done for specific policy reasons, one of which is to target all forces hostile to Israel and to create an ideological identifier for all of them.  The word itself implies and its users constantly reiterate that Islam itself is fine and no problem at all; there is nothing inherent in it that should or could lead to what they called “Islamofascism.”  As they are obsessed with telling us (and as Joseph Bottum insists on claiming again now, citing Bernard Lewis), modern jihadis are not just supposed to be theoretically totalitarian but can be tied to 20th century totalitarian ideologies as a matter of intellectual genealogy, and furthermore they will claim that jihadism is a political ideology.  Hence Islamofascism, which is something that a secular audience can more readily grasp.  Last year I proposed an explanation for why neocons do this:

For secular people like these prominent neocons, it is horrifying to consider the possibility that some people have motivations that cannot be explained in secular language, because they, lacking in religious imagination of any kind, are at a loss to even begin to really understand what motivates a jihadi.  Even when they acknowledge the supposed goal of Paradise or the religious nature of the duty these people believe themselves to be carrying out, it is always with a certain level of incomprehension, almost as if they cannot really accept that anyone not attached to some intelligible ideology firmly bounded in this world really exists.  Their inability to understand the religious desire for transcendence in some of its most appalling forms stems, I suspect, in no small part from their own depressingly optimistic and immanentist ideology.  Their inability to understand a drive for religious purity and intolerance of other religions as anything other than fascism stems in part from their own reflexive commitments to religious pluralism and a latent or not-so-latent hostility to dogmatic Christianity: everything not on the side of pluralism and “freedom” somehow all gets pushed into a big box called fascism.     

In any case, it is not surprising that Pipes would have had a soft spot for someone like Tariq Ramadan, especially pre-9/11, because in the late ’90s encouraging Muslim immigration into Europe (like encouraging Third World immigration into any Western country) was quite natural for neocons, who were, after all, leading advocates of intervening in the Balkans on behalf of Muslims (no bigoted Westerners were they!) and calling for Turkish entry into the EU.  (The argument for Turkish entry was a twofer for the neocons: they were able to idealise a “democratic” Islamic country while also mocking the small-minded Europeans.)  Just as they have winked and nodded approvingly at Chechen terrorism, they endorsed the entry of mujahideen into Europe for the greater glory of killing Serbs.  Just as it had been fashionable in England to romanticise the Algerian rebel Abd al Qadir because he was killing Frenchmen (though they would take a rather dim view of locals rebelling against their authority some twenty-five years later), it became acceptable to write admiringly about the self-determination of Bosnian and Albanian Muslims.  Neocon outrage against jihadis, such as it is, is really more that of a jilted lover than that of a dedicated foe.  When they lament the jihadi threat, you can almost hear them saying, “Come on, guys, we’ve had such good times together.  Remember when the KLA staged the Racak massacre and we pretended to believe it?  That was great.  We should get the gang back together.”