Kathryn Jean Lopez raves about Mary Matalin’s publishing outfit, while that noise you hear is the sound of Ross banging his head against a wall.

Update: Lopez seems to refer to Lynne Cheney as “our next First Lady.”  Does Lopez know something the rest of us don’t?

 The conventional wisdom, in essence, holds that running stridently against the war spells political doom for the Democrats. It also holds, however, that running stridently against the war is unnecessary because the Republicans will end the war anyway. Meanwhile, the Republicans are supposed to be doing this for political purposes. These things can’t, however, all be true. ~Matt Yglesias 

Couldn’t it be the case that ending the war would be good politically for the GOP because people instinctively trust them not to be too dovish, but bad for the Dems because people worry they are too soft? I’m not saying this is rational or correct, but it seems perfectly plausible. Moreover, something similar was the case in 1972. People wanted to end the war, but voted for Nixon (who also said he wanted to end the war) instead of McGovern. Could this not be the case today? ~Isaac Chotiner

He has a point.  Yglesias would be right if he said that all these things are logically contradictory, but that in no way prevents them all from reflecting the confused state of public opinion on the war.  In the Democratic field of candidates, it has been the candidates who try to appear generally “strong” on national security (Obama’s call to rule the world being one example of taking a tough posture) who have had the most success advancing their claims that they would end the Iraq war.  In the ever more loopy world of GOP candidates, it has been the candidates who claim that they will end the war (by “winning” it) that have tended to gain the most traction.  It is possible that the only way a Democratic candidate wins while also arguing for an end to the war is by being even more militant about other foreign threats than the Republican candidate.  Obama could say, playing off of his response to Mike Gravel, “We can’t waste any more time in Iraq–we have to get ready to nuke Pakistan!”  Whether this makes sense or not will be immaterial–it will make him look “decisive” and “bold,” which we know from long experience the public values more than “intelligent” and “wise.” 

Even though a significant part of every antiwar argument is that Iraq is bad for our national security, anxious voters may not believe advocates of withdrawal that they actually have a good idea of what is necessary for national security.  Despite the fact that Iraq should have destroyed any confidence the public had in Republican foreign policy ideas for a long time, the Democrats seem to be dogged by the public’s sense that they don’t just oppose wars because they are not efficient or successful, but sometimes even oppose them because they are wrong and stupid.  This is apparently still not a popular position to take.

The difference between this election and 1972 is that one party is clearly not even promising to end the war in the foreseeable future.  The GOP candidates don’t generally talk about “peace with honor,” but instead insist that the war not only can be won, but it must be won.  They have raised Iraq to such a place of centrality and importance in the “war on terror” and in their common ideology that they cannot now abandon the cause without making a mockery of their entire foreign policy position.  It would be as if the Democrats ran in 1952 on a platform of total victory in the Korean War and declared that anyone who wanted an armistice was more or less in league with the communists.  They would have lost by an even larger margin than they did.  1952, not 1972, may be the more appropriate comparison on this particular point.

The GOP’s share of the Hispanic vote dropped in 1988, 1992, and 1996, before rising under Bush. Second of all, you would expect the Republicans to do better and better among Hispanics as the last amnesty receded into the past, and its beneficiaries assimilated and started to move up in the world. ~Ross Douthat

Someone would expect this, I think, if he thought that assimilated, successful immigrants normally have a natural tendency to break with the Democratic voting habits of most new immigrants.  This seems reasonable, but if it were true the GOP would be awash in Greek, Armenian and Asian voters.  Generally speaking, it is not.  Voting for Democrats in many ethnic immigrant communities is just the obvious thing to do, especially for those who come from political traditions that stress some greater measure of social solidarity.  Interestingly, these immigrants often tend to concentrate in large urban areas that either lean or are solidly Democratic, so this traditional preference for Democrats is reinforced by the very process of assimilation.  Further, suburbs are no longer always a reliable Republican stronghold, so it may be that even assimilated, successful immigrants who come out to the suburbs may not so much adopt suburban Republicanism as they will help speed the transformation of many suburbs into Democratic turf.  Inherited cultural and political attitudes are often more determinative of voting patterns than class or income.  The GOP has to be hoping that historical materialism is at least partly true and it has to be hoping that ideas do not, in fact, have many consequences at all (or at least fewer consequences than a nice salary).

John Tabin is right: Sullivan is wrong to call AmSpec paleocon.  To its credit, AmSpec has various perspectives in it, including some paleo or at least paleo-friendly articles, but criticising bad, tendentious neocon readings of history does not in and of itself make anyone or anything paleocon.  But Sullivan is especially wrong to call it that because of this review of Kagan’s Dangerous Nation.  As Mr. Tabin correctly points out, Angelo Codevilla is wildly, intensely hawkish and hegemonist; he is one of those people who will bear the label imperialist as a badge of honour.  No one who has any sense of the various factions and arguments on the American right would ever confuse a Codevilla piece with anything related to paleos.  The Codevilla piece is mostly unobjectionable, which I find shocking to admit, since I normally feel myself breaking out in hives on those occasions when I have read Codevilla in the past.  It turns out that Kagan has written such a terrible book about American history and foreign policy that it even offends the historical sensibilities of a Claremont man.  That takes some real doing.   

Update: In case the absurdity of the paleo-Codevilla equation wasn’t completely obvious, here is the assessment of the elder Pod of Codevilla and the “superhawks”:

On the Right though it obviously is, this neighborhood of superhawks is as distant from the precincts of paleoconservatism as it is from the redoubts of the anti-American Left.

So I’m watching Pan’s Labyrinth at long last, and two things occur to me: Guillermo del Toro is not a subtle director, and that stupid flying mantis-like bug is really annoying.  He She doesn’t have the panache and personality of a Master Flea.  He She just keeps chirping.  I don’t like it.

Since smart people I respect seem to think so much of this VDH column, it seems necessary to point out some of the more fantastically crazy things Hanson says in that column:

Few believed that it was a tragedy brought on by an aggressive Germany; fought heroically by amateur French, British, and American soldiers who defeated the professionalism and skill of the German army (the most lethal land force that had yet appeared); and was a result of two different and largely antithetical visions of Europe. No one dared accept that the post-bellum failure to invade Germany, occupy Berlin, and demonstrate the utter lunacy of German militarism had caused World War II; the problem was that the victorious allies had been too mean rather than too fickle.

Yes, few believe these things, because these things are not true.  WWI wasn’t principally a tragedy brought on by an aggressive Germany.  It was the result of combined Austrian meddling, Russian folly, British hesitation and German diffidence.  The problem with Berlin in the July crisis was its passivity in guiding its allies’ policies, not in its aggressiveness.  German “aggressiveness” in the Schlieffen Plan was an unavoidable result of being encircled by the Franco-Russian alliance.  Blame that on stupid Wilhelmine Weltpolitik and the decision to drop the connection with Russia, which you certainly can do, but spare us the lectures about German aggression.  The two antithetical visions of Europe to which Hanson refers were the vision in which the Entente powers continued to dominate most of the world and the vision in which Germany would be permitted to join them as a first-rank power.  Scary!  It never ceases to amaze me how people can look at the vastly stronger, more powerful alliance in the Entente and see in it some poor victim of overmighty Germany and the allies that it had to carry for the duration. 

Hanson’s “On to Berlin!” idea is stunning.  To believe that this was even possible, much less desirable, by the time the Ludendorff offensive failed is to be quite wrong.  It was possible to occupy Paris because Napoleon had been beaten in the field, but the treatment of the defeated party ensured that it was incorporated into the system of European powers and not treated with the harshness that its aggression might have seemed to merit.  Not only does Hanson find the “Carthaginian peace” imposed on Germany lacking as a punishment, but he seems to think that humiliating and grinding the Germans under the boot even more would have stamped out German nationalism.  This is shockingly wrong.  What was the German response to the Napoleonic invasions and occupations?  It was in part the creation and cultivation of German nationalism.  Does anyone think, supposing it was actually possible to do (and the American public would never have tolerated prolonging the war to capture Berlin), that occupying Germany in the 1920s would have created a less bitter, less resentful, less nationalistic, less revanchist Germany?  Does anyone think that a liberal democratic constitution imposed by the Allied sword directly would have been more acceptable to German nationalists than the one adopted by Germans after the Armistice?  This would only have delayed the resumption of hostilities, but it would have ensured that the revenge meted out by the Germans on those who had occupied their country would have been even more severe.  This is a perfect example of the problem with Hanson’s whole view: whatever the problem, it could have been solved by the application of even more force.

As a young fogey who supports the aspirations of whippersnapper bloggers (isn’t that a redundant description?) to trouble the more esteemed and well-known pundits, I point you to the blog of Matt Zeitlin:

I’m a high school student in Oakland, California. I have zero qualifications to write about anything of importance besides the fact that I have a computer, internet access and spend too much time reading. I am Mickey Kaus’ Worst Nightmare.  

In the way it is often used, whippersnapper carries the connotation of obstreperous youths showing no respect to their elders, and this is how Kaus has used it, but the word often actually refers to someone of no importance (at least in the eyes of the person labeling him a whippersnapper) presuming to have a certain importance.  It is in one sense a perfect word to use for all bloggers, who are, in the grand scheme of things, pretty insignificant and who also presume to hold forth on matters great and small, but it might just as well be applied to all columnists and pundits.  An important part of good blogging, it seems to me, involves reminding better-known pundits and columnists that they are not necessarily all that important and authoritative and that they have no monopoly on driving the debate.

Right now, the internecine spats on the right are far deeper, nastier and stranger than anything on the left. Or maybe I’m looking at it from a skewed perspective. ~Andrew Sullivan

He is responding to Yglesias’ remarks on the unsurprising news that progressives are dominating in terms of online activism, organisation and activity.  Sullivan is missing the point here.  Yglesias isn’t particularly talking about people who have foreign policy disagreements.  He is talking about the demographic profile of the Democratic Party, which is, not surprisingly, rather more diverse than the GOP in most ways (don’t even get me started on Republican ideological diversity).  Despite the best efforts of the Mehlmans and Martinezes to make the GOP “relevant” to constituencies that don’t care much for Republican policies, the GOP’s core demographic remains and presumably will remain for the foreseeable future middle-class, married white voters with families.  Progressives lack this relative uniformity of background and interests, and so would need to be mobilised around policy issues and common enemies.  To put it another way, the wine and cheesers in New England may not have much in common socially or culturally with workers in the Midwest, but they are all interested–for different reasons–in having the government do similar things and also have a common loathing for the way Republicans have run things.  That is partly why the “netroots” are so preoccupied with what Jonathan Chait called propagandising: mobilising the shared opposition to Bush, the GOP and the Iraq war is a key factor uniting virtually all Democrats, so the “netroots” are trying to emphasise these things that such disparate groups have in common.

Online organising and advocacy are innovations that progressives have largely started during the Bush years.  It makes sense: it is a technology that does consolidate scattered audiences and more or less continuously communicate messages to allies, and this would seem to be especially valuable for those who have mostly lacked a populist megaphone of their own and whose geographical centers of strength are scattered around the edges of the country.  It also provides an outlet for those progressives who live in Republican-dominated states and who otherwise have few practical means to shape the debate.

As I have already mentioned, Poulos’ post is outstanding.  In addition to pointing out the virtues and significance of deliberative rhetoric and its function in channeling political and legal conflict into peaceful forms of disputation, James cuts right to, and through, the heart of one of the more dreadful rhetorical tropes of certain conservative pundits of an empire-friendly bent: the frequent pairing of the “Unionist” assault on the Confederacy with the war against the Axis, in particular the fight against Nazi Germany, as if they were comparable in any meaningful way.  The only real point of comparison is that both wars were waged by the United States government and both resulted in victories for that government–after that, they are not all that similar.  I will return to the first point later, but let me say something about this pairing first. 

There are some obvious problems with this from the start.  The “Unionist” war against the South was fought in contravention of the Constitution (though, quite naturally, it was fought “in the name of” the Constitution, as so many usurpations ever after have been justified) and represented the concentrated effort by an assembly of polities to invade and conquer another.  WWII, whatever one wants to argue about the policies leading up to it and the negative effects that it had on the country (and there were more than a few), was nonetheless a constitutional, declared war fought as a response to an attack on American territory.  The opponents fought by the United States government in the two wars were scarcely comparable in ideological and political terms.  Where one sought to withdraw peaceably from a political arrangement, inasmuch as this was permitted, the other sought to expand its territory by conquering, suppressing and dominating all the nations around it.  One represented a social and political order that was, if anything, attempting to retain some combination of aristocratic and agrarian republican structures out of a profound respect for past precedents and classical models (which is, ironically, one of the reasons why Hanson, a classicist, hates the Old South so much), while the other was a rude, modernising revolutionary force that idolised the future.  At the risk of some oversimplification, the progressive Yankee nationalist could only see in the Southron his antithesis, the embodiment of virtually everything he wanted (and tried) to purge from his country, while the progressive 20th century New Dealer confronted in fascism a hostile variant of his own progressive nationalist managerial statism.  Mass democratic nationalism coupled with the beginnings of a managerial state found itself warring against an ideology with which it had a little too much affinity for some people’s comfort.  As Kuehnelt-Leddihn said of democracy, fascism and communism more generally, the intensity of the hostility between these different systems was that of a family feud, not one of diametrically opposed extremes.  The similarities between these different centralised, managerial statisms may help explain why fascism elicits so much more powerful emotional negative reactions from everyone across the spectrum, as if to overcompensate for these similarities through extra denunciation.    

James quotes from Fred Thompson:

Hansen writes [that’s Victor Davis Hanson we’re talking about here, sic; get out your copyeditors, NR-JP], “The hundred years of talking about slavery was not as important as two days at Gettysburg. The success or failure of Normandy affected Hitler more in an hour than had years of pleading with him in the 1930s.” If for no other reason than that we want to avoid war whenever we can, universities should at least offer the option of studying it.

James credits these assessments as more or less correct (“nothing in this sequence is untrue or inaccurate”), but says also that they miss certain important distinctions that he describes thus:

One is that between Gettysburg and Normandy. Another is between Hanson’s hour of decisive bloodshed and Fred’s hoped-for ideal of eternally postponed bloodshed. And the third is between pleading and studying.

James notes many of the key differences between the wars being mentioned in the same breath.  However, I must very respectfully disagree with my learned associate on the accuracy of the Hanson remarks that Thompson quoted.  On a slightly pedantic level, I would note that Gettysburg was a battle of three days and it was the third, final day that rather made all the difference in making it into a decisive defeat for the Army of Northern Virginia rather than an inconclusive draw.  This might not be such a major objection, except that it was the decisiveness of the battle that lends it its special significance as a “turning point” in the history of the war and so gives it whatever greater importance as an event that it possesses.  It does not exactly help the cause of reviving military history studies to state inaccurately a key detail of one of the best-known battles in American history.  A little less pedantic is the objection to the apparent interpretation (very common for Americans to make) that Normandy was somehow on par with Gettysburg’s significance in the War of Secession by being the decisive turning point in WWII, when that honour really must, for better or worse, belong to Stalingrad.  A more substantive point is that, as a matter of history, the Battle of Gettysburg is not “more important” than the hundred years of debate that preceded it.  If you tried to take that attitude into an American history class today or at any time in the past as a student, you would not do very well.  With respect to the outcome of the war, the battle was an extremely significant event that brought about a sizeable change in the course of the war by ending the Confederacy’s attempts to take the war into the North and hastening ultimate Confederate defeat.  Battles can and do change the course of events in dramatic ways (see Gaugamela, Actium, Yarmuk), because wars are events of profound transformation and wars turn in no small part on the outcome of battles, but this does not make them “more important” than the decades of political argument and struggle that paved the way for the war to happen in the first place.  It is just this sort of talk that can give the study of histoire evenementielle a bad name. 

Some of its partisans rightly want to emphasise that events can be decisive and that history is contingent on events, and they then get entirely carried away by elevating these events into a category of greater significancee than the mundane, plodding periods of peace and the very real structures of institutions and the mentalities of nations.  It is as if some of these partisans cannot argue for the significance of war as a transformative force in history without implicitly (or, in this case, explicitly) devaluing everything outside of war.  Just behind this language of greater importance is the notion that it would have been better to “resolve” the conflicts that these wars “solved” earlier…by means of an earlier war.  Far from seeing war as a catastrophic failure and a great enemy of civilisation, those making this kind of argument see it as a sort of quick fix, a simple answer to very knotty questions.  It declares animosity towards brokered deals, compromises and all of the accommodations that must be made for political life to continue without violent interruption.  The opponents of this approach will quite often attribute to them a tendency to offer simplistic answers, because that is very often the kind of answer they are offering–not because they are fools, but because they really think the answer is that simple. 

The threads of life over the course of decades in all their complexity jumble into something very much like a Gordian Knot, and these folks seem rather too eager to cut right through with a sword.   Behind this is an impatience with deliberation, an intolerance for fussing about with argument and, well, a dislike for basically everything that we know of as politics.  One is reminded of Gladiator‘s version of Commodus speaking to the hero: “You are a man who knows what it is to command.  You give your orders, the orders are obeyed, and the battle is won.  But these senators, they scheme and squabble, flatter, deceive.  Maximus, we must save Rome from the politicians.”  So, actually, I think there is quite a lot wrong with Hanson’s statement as quoted by Thompson. 

Thompson himself is right that universities should provide courses in military history, which would, of course, require more institutional support for hiring those with interests in military history.  Part of the reason why there is less interest and less support for those working in this area is that it is seen as being heavily focused on institutions (the military being the main one) and events, which are two kinds of historical research that are not exactly tickets to success and prominence in the discipline today.  They are not popular or fashionable because I think they are viewed as approaches that neglect too many things, unduly privilege discrete events and resemble a little too much the “one damn thing after another” school.  This may be an unfair judgement in certain ways, but because of this atmosphere that makes it that much more important that military historians adapt to at least some contemporary expectations in paying attention to social and cultural dimensions of warfare (and good military historians do exactly this).  We are caught in something of a vicious cycle, where relatively few are being trained to study these things because the study of them in the past has been seen to be lacking, which is hardly helped by proponents of reviving the study of military history making bold statements about the vastly greater importance of single decisive events.

James Poulos has a masterful post on the importance of rhetorical combat and puts the renewed calls for the study of military history into some perspective.  Any post that coherently ties together mentions of Henry Clay and The Untouchables has to win some sort of special award for creativity.