If you want to get the “man on the street” view of Obama’s appeal as it relates to the vexed question of whether he “transcends” race, do you suppose one of the most representative people you could find to determine the breadth and scope of Obama’s appeal would be a “native New Yorker” who “conducts diversity training in her workplace and is a proponent of affirmative action, a position she staked out in college”?  Why not ask Samantha Power whether she thinks Obama might be a decent candidate while you’re at it?  David Axelrod might also be available.

The Post story is almost too precious to believe:

At a campaign event in Tampa last month, she hung on Obama’s every word as he spoke to an adoring crowd packed into the courtyard of the historic Cuban Club of Ybor City. As she listened, race wasn’t in the forefront of her mind, she says later. It usually isn’t, she says.

“Kind of like, if I could compare him to Tiger Woods. When I look at Tiger Woods, I see the best golfer in the world,” she says. “So when I see Barack Obama, I see a strong political candidate. I do not see ‘Oh, that’s a black man running for president, or African American or multiracial black.’ It’s not what comes to mind first. What comes to mind first is: great platform, charismatic, good leader, attractive.”

If race isn’t usually on Ms. Lang’s mind, why would it be when she goes to listen to Obama speak?  If you have a liberal fan of diversity who doesn’t think about race, would putting her in a room with Obama suddenly evoke profound anxiety?  This is ridiculous.  What this article tells us is that coastal liberals who have appropriately liberal views on race support one of the more left-leaning candidates running for President.  If you can find a couple of progressive activists who also like Obama, you can declare it a trend: liberals want to elect other liberals!  It’s a revolution!

Incidentally, have you ever noticed how this universalist language about “transcending” race is as, if not more, condescending as any, since it treats race as something that needs to be “transcended” or “overcome” as if it were some sort of ailment or disease?  In other words, everyone (especially Obama’s supporters) acknowledges that Obama is as popular as he is in spite of his race in one sense, because the favourable reaction to him always deemphasises the identity that he has chosen, to one degree or other at various times in his life, to emphasise rather a lot as his identity.  The people who are most inclined to like Obama seem to take pride in the fact that they think they are being “color blind” about it, but this means that they are embracing their candidate as a symbol of their own universalism while simultaneously devaluing and implicitly disapproving of black Americans who might run for President in some other less “transcendent” way.  You can almost hear them sigh with relief, “Thank goodness he isn’t like those people.  Not that I think about these things much, of course, because that would be wrong.”

Frankly, I do admire Romney’s consistency, it shows professionalism – some candidates don’t even know what talking points their campaigns communicate. However, I’d like to hear Romney’s view on the fact that democratic elections in the Middle East in the past few years have quite legally, and under US-sanctioned balloting, increased the political clout of Hezbollah (Lebanon), Hamas (Palestine), and the Muslim Brotherhood (Egypt). ~George Ajjan

This was a point I didn’t get to in the post where I united two of my favourite hobbyhorses (bashing Romney, mocking people who talk about Islamofascism).  Now I can add two more of my preoccupations to the mix: questioning the wisdom of democratisation in the Near East and rejecting optimism. 

There are three consistent positions one can take on the question of democratisation:

1) Democratisation is good for the peoples of the Near East and is naturally bound to create a more pro-Western, pro-American, pro-Israel Near East (see Turkey for why this one is wrong).

2) Democratisation is probably bad for American and Israeli interests, but must be pursued for the long-term development, security and sanity of the region.  See interwar Europe, Latin America at almost any time in the last 200 years or modern Africa as counter-examples of the rather terrible results when fragile developing democracies are created in inhospitable times and climes, whether they are being established in badly tribally, ethnically or religiously-divided nations or in nations with insufficient experience with the norms and practices of democratic governance.

3) Democratisation is an inherently destabilising and all-around bad idea that is both inappropriate to the nations of the Near East now and for the foreseeable future and fundamentally dangerous to international security.  In this view, the “global democratic revolution” may even be potentially far more dangerous to the peace of the world than global communism.

Naturally, Republican elites, including Romney, have generally endorsed #1 and have been gradually moving towards #2 as they have begun to count the costs and have been forced to acknowledge that nothing pro-American is emerging in the democratic or quasi-democratic regimes arising in the region.  Those Republicans who once endorsed #1 and have since thrown up their hands in despair do not usually move over to #3, but very frequently retain their powerful faith in democracy as an engine of peace, freedom and development (looking over the hideous history of the most democratic century in history, I really have no idea why they think this).  They are incapable of doubting the virtues of democracy and soon adopt a fourth position, which might be called the Ralph Peters view or the “damn ingrates” position: democratisation in the Near East was a fine and noble idea, and we are fine and noble people for trying to implement it, but those stupid Arabs just couldn’t get their act together, so let’s just kill as many as we can.  This is sometimes hard to distinguish from the advocates of the #1 position, since the #1 folks also tend to be very vocal about killing as many Arabs as possible (see Ledeen and “crappy little country”-against-wall-throwing approach to foreign policy or Rice and “birth pangs of a new Middle East”).  It is amazing to watch the transformation of some of these unbounded optimists, who were not long ago preaching the universality of human dignity, into the most cynically monstrous of amoralists, who now believe that the Iraqis failed us, because they weren’t able to pick up on the fly in a war zone something that takes hundreds of years to nurture, cultivate and develop.  This is a powerful confirmation of the potential evils of optimism: no one is more savage and cruel than an optimist disappointed by the people he was going to save through his naive idealism.

Coming back to Romney, it is intriguing that he at once takes the far-out confrontational posture of a “Gathering Storm” Santorum vis-a-vis Iran, while at the same time listing the Muslim Brotherhood as part of the general jihadi foe that must be fought.  That ends up putting Romney in the odd position of defending the Syrian government as a “moderate Muslim government” as he breathes in, and then implicitly damning them by targeting Hizbullah as another part of the jihadi foe as he breathes out.  Even though the Syrians oppose one part of the “worldwide jihadist effort” in repressing the Brotherhood, we will no doubt be told that they are also part of the “worldwide jihadist effort” because they lend support to Hizbullah, which tends to show just how useless and unwise this sort of rhetoric about a “worldwide jihadist effort” really is.  It is safe to say that anyone who thinks that there is a “worldwide jihadist effort” that includes both the Brotherhood and Hizbullah working for the same goals is playing directly into the hands of those, such as al Qaeda, who want nothing more than to convince as many Sunnis as possible that Washington is intent on indiscriminate war against Muslims everywhere.  Nothing better aids jihadi propaganda that presents them as champions of an Islam besieged all over the world than clumsy, ham-fisted descriptions of a “worldwide jihadist effort” that validates the jihadis’ own description of the nature of the war.  Romney wants us to play the jihadis’ game, and in this he is hardly alone on the right–shouldn’t someone be asking why Romney wants to fight the war on the enemy’s terms?  

Rather than exploiting the cleavages that exist between different kinds of Muslims and different groups of jihadis, as a savvy George Kennan-like foreign policy thinker might propose, the insane plan of leading Republican candidates and the party leadership is to keep reinforcing the image of a monolithic, unified “worldwide jihadist effort.”  The net result of this thinking will be that America will have that many more implacable enemies to fight and we will have missed that many more opportunities to turn jihadi against jihadi and use natural Baathist hostility to the same to our advantage.  Rather than playing on national and sectarian divisions and exploiting opposition between relatively secular Muslims and their religious counterparts, talk of a “worldwide jihadist effort” helps to push these groups into collaboration where none existed before.  Of course, having created this collaboration, it will then be taken as proof by these same clever people that these groups were “inevitably” going to ally with one another because of their fundamental agreement with one another.

So what is it that we think Sarkozy will do — follow the United States blindly into a new war? It seems not. Sarkozy addressed France’s American friends by saying “I want to tell them that France will always be by their side when they need her, but that friendship is also accepting the fact that friends can think differently.” And, of course, under Jacques Chirac’s presidency France did cooperate with the United States in Afghanistan and has cooperated with us broadly on intelligence-sharing and counter-terrorism. So what’s the difference supposed to be? ~Matt Yglesias

Yglesias asks a good question.  The answer is: no significant difference at all.  Americans, their journalists included, think every foreign election has to have something to do with them, and they seem to be interested in those elections mainly for what they tell “us” about the future attitude of the next foreign leader or government towards America.  That’s fine, as far as it goes, but it makes for pretty uninteresting analysis of foreign elections when, unlike the election Germany in 2002 (where Schroeder used his opposition to the war, which his opponent also shared, to save his re-election), the election in France had virtually nothing to do with America, U.S. foreign policy or Franco-American relations.  Read the transcript of the Sarkozy-Royal debate, and you will find scant mention of les Etats-Unis.  That’s because this was a French election about domestic and European policy. 

It is as if foreign journalists had become terribly excited that the outcome of the utterly boring, conventional, domestically-driven 1992 election signalled something meaningful in the area of foreign policy.  Like America, France has an establishment that pursues a certain set of goals overseas regardless of changes in domestic politics, and a qualified Atlanticism will remain part of that establishment perspective so long as one of the major parties holds power.

Mitt Romney’s War: the total conflation of all Islamist movements. Not only is the Muslim Brotherhood not a jihadist organization, but its very lack of jihadiness is what spawned Ayman Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Suffice it to say that there is no caliphate on heaven or earth that will simultaneously satisfy Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, which goes a long way toward explaining why there is no concerted “worldwide jihadist effort” by these groups to establish one. ~Spencer Ackerman
Via Drum

Ackerman is right that Romney’s remarks in the debate make no sense, but they are worse than he thinks.  Not only is there “no caliphate on heaven or earth that will simultaneously satisfy Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood,” Hizbullah presumably wouldn’t even want  a caliphate at all, since the last intertwining of Shi’ism and ideas of having a khalifat as such was in Fatimid Egypt more than a few years ago.  Plus, the Fatimids were Ismailis (though not, strictly speaking, Seveners), and Hizbullah today is from the Imamiyyah or Twelver Shi’ite branch, which makes the likelihood of this predominant strain in Iranian and Lebanese Shi’ism indulging dreams of a restored caliphate in Cairo (where virtually no Shi’ites today dwell) even more remote.  

Not that anyone is keeping score, but I would like to point back to a pre-debate post in which I zeroed in on Romney’s foreign policy and historico-cultural ignorance on display in his speech at Yeshiva University.  In the debate Romney offered up the same “gibberish,” as Drum called it, that he offered in the speech.  Few, if any, have called him on it in the past when he has said ridiculous things about “the enemy,” and so he keeps on repeating them, because they give him the superficial appearance of knowledgeability and understanding.  There are no candidates on the Republican side, except perhaps Ron Paul, who would either know to correct Romney or who would feel any strong desire to do so.  In the view of most of the candidates who were up on that stage Thursday, Hizbullah and Hamas must be our enemies because they are Israel’s enemies, and so any lazy or overbroad concept that unite them all together under a single umbrella term will do. 

For some of the ridiculous candidates (Brownback and Huckabee), and the Rick Santorums of the world, the catch-all idea is “Islamic fascism” or “Islamofascism,” a phrase and a word respectively so stupid that they must win some sort of prize for being the most stupid of the current century.  Romney shares in their profound confusion (or deliberately misleading rhetoric) for the same reason: all these diverse and disparate groups must be brought together under a single, frightening label and they must be made out to be enemies of America, whether or not these descriptions are plausible, true or reasonable.  As has been stated by some of the biggest supporters of the term Islamofascism, its valuelies in its vagueness and its all-purpose application: everyone even nominally Muslim or remotely authoritarian can be classified as an Islamofascist, whether he is a Baathist, a member of al-Ikhwan, or a partisan of Hizbullah.  As May said in September of last year:

The problem, as I see it with using the term “Bin Ladenism”: It can’t be applied to the ideologies of the ruling Iranian mullahs, Saddam Hussein loyalists or other Baathists (e.g. in Syria).

In other words, the word we use to describe our enemies must be meaningless in order to accommodate the maximum number of enemies.  If there were ever a politician who was perfectly suited to an age in which words should be entirely malleable and subject to the political needs of the moment, it would have to be Romney.  Romney and rhetoric about Islamofascism were made for each other.

I’m curious: have I just not noticed books like this before? Or is it really true that there’s a sudden avalanche of popular books extolling the virtues of atheism? ~Kevin Drum

Drum cites Dawkins, Harris, Stenger and Hitchens as evidence of the “avalanche.”  Do four books constitute an avalanche?  It seems to me that some similar four or five-year period during the 19th century, which Kuehnelt-Leddihn mocked in Moscow 1979 as the true age of atheism, or the height of the Cold War must have produced as much atheistic printed material as the last five years have.  Did the era of rising political communism somehow manage to produce fewer tracts on behalf of atheism in a similar span of time?  In fact, these four books seem to be remarkable for how few of them there are.  If ever there were a time during the last 17 years when religion and belief in God should be enduring great scrutiny and opposition, it would seem that the last six years would be it.  Yet most people in the West, whether secular or religious, have come to one or more of the following three conclusions: 1) violence in the name of any religion has nothing to do with Religion; 2) crimes committed by religious extremists tell us nothing about the truth of any religion (obviously closely related to #1); 3) their religion may be violent and dangerous, but that doesn’t apply to all religions, especially ours; 4) faith is perfectly reasonable, provided that it doesn’t become all-consuming; 5) faith should be all-consuming, but should stand in opposition to violence; 6) every religion would be fine, provided that it was balanced with a little “enlightenment”; 7) this simply proves that our religion is true and theirs isn’t.  Virtually nobody anywhere has come to the conclusion that says, “There, you see, this just affirms my conviction that God is made-up nonsense.”  No doubt the atheist will say, “This is just another example of the foolishness of crowds and the persistent delusions of the ignorant.”  This is what he would have to say, because it can hardly encourage an atheist that the last few years have not seemed to produce a new generation of fellow non-believers.    

It is also remarkable how generally unrepresentative of the contemporary discourse on faith and God they are.  Of course, being representative of the Zeitgeist is not any measure of truth, but it is worth noting that even the skeptics have become much more skeptical of pure skepticism when it comes to matters divine.  Atheists always exude this aura of the poor, few truth-seekers oppressed by the masses of the deluded, because they are not part of any “avalance,” but normally appear on the scene as isolated little flurries that come quickly to an end. 

Are books dedicated to running down religion and theism as irrational the same as books “extolling the virtues of atheism”?  A book that attacks the existence of God, or rather denies the rationality of belief in God, tells you nothing positive about atheism.  It doesn’t have to, and it isn’t trying to tell you anything about atheism.  The atheist thinks, just as the theist thinks, but with less reason, that he is telling you about the “way things really are.”  An atheist tract is, to the atheist’s mind, like a botanist telling you, “This is what a hydrangea is.”  It assumes that atheism is simply what you would have to end up with if God does not exist.  Atheism offers nothing, but promises that life is pointless.  Not surprising that all this miserable view can manage to produce is four books of any prominence in the span of several years.   

Are these books actually popular?  Yes, Hitchens’ book is currently #3 on Amazon, which shouldn’t be terribly surprising since it just came out last week and has received plenty of press, and Dawkins’ book is still at #25.  The other two are not in the top 100.  What do you want to bet that the same secularists and atheists who bought the books by Dawkins and Harris are also running out to buy Hitchens’ latest?

This is a piece about Thursday night’s Republican presidential debates, but first I would like to note that the media’s fixation with which Republican is the most like Reagan, and who is the next Reagan, and who parts his hair like Reagan, is absurd, and subtly undermining of Republicans, which is why they do it. ~Peggy Noonan

The media’s fixation?  I enjoy the old “the media is out to get us” line as much as anyone, and it can be true, but I am struggling to see this one.  Presumably the party agreed to hold the debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and obviously it was the candidates who have been going out of their way for the past few months (especially the tiresome Mitt Romney) to declare that they are Reagan’s children.  It has been conservative activists who have been actively fretting about the quality of the candidates and the alleged lack of true-blue Reaganites in the field.  Yes, the media has reported these internal divisions and anxieties, perhaps even gleefully, but they are not fabricating the “who’s like Reagan?” narrative out of thin air.  When you can imagine Giuliani responding to what he would like on his hot dog by saying, “Well, as the great and optimistic hero Ronald Reagan might say…mustard and relish,” you know that all of the obsession about Reagan is an expression of the candidates’ understanding that they aren’t very much like Reagan, at least in terms of their effectiveness as candidates, and are doing all that they can to cover up their weaknesses by constantly tying themselves to the great man.  As a result, ironically, the more often they mention Reagan, the more they diminish themselves by calling to mind just how capable and effective Reagan was at articulating his message and how generally bad many of them are at doing the same.  If Reagan was the Great Communicator, Giuliani showed himself to be the Great Stumbler (his answer on Sunnis and Shi’ites was amusing to watch as he painfully called to mind the difference–which he managed to get more or less right, by the way). 

That brings me to Mitt Romney.  Yes, Romney is smooth and, to the untrained eye, almost human.  In the superficial world of television debates, he will always “do well” in some sense, because he is a master of appearance over substance.  I will be willing to grant that Romney gained the most from last night’s debate, even though he did not necessarily perform as well as some of the others, because he made no obvious mistakes (except for being a treacly and obnoxious politician who reinvents his views when it is convenient) while his two major rivals came away looking unimpressive (Giuliani) or like a crotchety old man who hasn’t had his dinner yet (McCain). 

If Nixon’s infamous five o’clock shadow and sweat were allegedly his undoing on television, McCain’s glowering face will have to be his.  Not for him M. Royal’s coleres tres saines et tresutile–he was just grumpy.  That isn’t necessarily a negative in my view, since we could stand to have more grumpy and passionate candidates and fewer prefabricated candidate dolls who utter trite phrases (guess which one I mean), but the public typically responds poorly to these displays.   

Did Romney really help his chances at the nomination that much?  He may have, but his chances of getting the nomination have always been so poor (there’s the Mormonism and then there’s his record) that improving on those chances doesn’t necessarily mean that much.

Having had a little time to think about it, and taking my obvious pro-Ron Paul sentiment into account, I think the four best performers tonight were certainly Hunter, Huckabee, Gilmore and Paul.  In terms of actual policy views, Hunter managed to make himself less interesting to me with his frequent turn to jingoism.  This will probably only help him in the primaries.  Paul performed well, and made the most of limited opportunities he was given, but his absolutely right focus on foreign policy and civil liberties is probably not going to pull in a lot of votes. 

For those who have not seen a lot of him, Romney probably seemed to put on a good show, but no one can really buy what this guy is selling.  His entire persona annoys me at this point.  Perhaps I am too negative, but if that is what wins debates it is a sad day indeed.  He merits maybe fifth or sixth place.  McCain performed competently, probably earning fifth or sixth place overall, but he by no means dominated, despite being given all the time in the world.  Giuliani fared pretty poorly, all things considered, and could not cease mentioning Reagan in virtually every answer.  Virtually everyone did this, but Giuliani’s constant Reagan talk was embarrassing.  Thompson was fairly effective on policy questions and handled the format all right, but just didn’t put together a complete performance.  He repeated himself on how many things he had vetoed, which didn’t help.  Unfortunately, Tancredo did pretty badly.  I wouldn’t be surprised if he is out before Ames.

Update: I should add that there was virtually nothing in this crowd that is going to persuade people alienated by Bush.  The only one to diverge from Bush on foreign policy was Dr. Paul, and he did so capably, but the overwhelming impression the other nine gave to the uncommitted and disaffected was that the basic feature of the Bush administration that most offends them, its foreign policy, will remain fundamentally unchanged.  In the contest between the tired, cranky interventionists and the smoother interventionists, the latter will win.  There is no evidence of substantial change or an appreciably new direction.  It’s like watching the Democrats in 1988.

McCain looks and sounds old and bitter, Thompson (Tommy) comes off sounding very well-versed on issues but needs to work on delivery, Hunter appears more polished, Romney continues to sound like a robot, Brownback sounds insipid.  Huckabee is siding with the military’s expertise, but otherwise has conventional foreign policy answer.  Gilmore goes out of his way to bow before the shrine of Reagan.  Ron Paul waves the flag of non-intervention and “humble” foreign policy!  He is talking about the Constitution!

McCain’s delivery is sometimes broken and stilted, but he’s hitting all of his points.  Tancredo refers to Ahmadinejad as a “gentleman” in a standard pro-Israel answer.  His delivery was not very sharp.  Giuliani makes Iranian nuclear weapons an entirely personalised issue about Ahmadinejad (dutifully invokes Reagan).  Gilmore dodges a chance to bash Romney (missed opportunity, if you ask me) on his Bin Laden quote.  Gilmore does speak convincingly.  Romney backpedals like a fiend to escape his gaffe.  The Politico questions are not terribly good so far.  Romney engages in shameless Reagan invocation.  Huckabee makes a pretty good conservationist appeal.  Tancredo continues to stumble.  Duncan Hunter calls himself a “compassionate conservative” and then engages in obnoxious sabre-rattling against Iran.  Paul knocks the role of government question out of the park.  Giuliani manages to make a point that he doesn’t really care about the repeal of Roe when he could have just gone along with the crowd.  Gilmore advances a strong pro-life message.  Thompson argues for a federalist solution.  Romney repeats his lame conversion story, and continues to be unpersuasive. 

Brownback gives a fairly solid defense of fusionism.  McCain continues to make his points strongly, but he still sounds awfully old.  Hunter pitches his defense credentials.  Ron Paul makes some solid points on defense and foreign policy.  Romney blathers about separation of church and state and segues into religious freedom.  Huckabee somehow manages to get hung up on explaining the importance of faith in politics. 

Good grief, Romney is horribly cloying.  How can the other candidates stand it?  Brownback makes a decent point about religion in the public square.  Hunter pitches his border control credentials.  Gilmore handles a question about Karl Rove fairly capably.  So far Hunter and Gilmore are performing the best, and McCain is doing decently.  Thompson has the best record of accomplishment, and he is making sense about the need for new ideas, and he is beginning to sound more confident.  Tancredo throws down the gauntlet on immigration.  McCain gives pat answer for “comprehensive” reform.  Romney is weak on ESCR, Brownback naturally takes a strong line against.  McCain supports funding for ESCR.  Ron Paul gives the constitutionalist answer! 

Surprisingly, Romney embraces his health care bill.  McCain continues to be the only one who talks about spending.  Romney makes a strong point on having no taxes on dividends and capital gains.  Gilmore talks up his elimination of the car tax (which Virginians who had to balance the state budget probably aren’t so excited about).  Hunter hits free trade deals.  Ron Paul pushes for sound money! 

Blech–Brownback talks about compassionate and aggressive foreign policy.  Giuliani engages in a totally shameless invocation of Reagan.  Brownback blathers about “Big Ideas” that guarantee Republican victory–they are more clueless than I thought.  Huckabee makes an unexpected protectionist and anti-corporate point.  Tancredo continues to do poorly.  Romney makes shameless plug of his Olympics experience in the context of talking about an ID card for aliens.  Ron Paul strongly repudiates that, and Tancredo backs him up.  Everyone dodges the Libby question except for Gilmore, who actually gives a decent answer.  Tancredo pathetically uses the Libby item to shill for Ramos and Compean.               

Brownback continues to defend the Schiavo intervention.  McCain gives a smarter answer.  Giuliani basically dodges the question.  Hunter goes out of his way to defend the intervention.

What’s unsettling about McCain’s revival of the talk of a League of Democracies is that U.S. foreign policy for the last six years has been so far out there that his proposal sounds like the product of a relatively reasonable and sane mind.  That’s how bad things are.  Under normal circumstances, McCain’s idea would be written off as loopy, the establishment equivalent of warning about black helicopters, but our foreign policy has run so far off the rails that an overtly pro-interventionist alliance aimed at attacking other countries somehow seems more consultative and friendly and reasonable.  “In the next war, we won’t be fighting alongside Estonians and Mongolians–we’ll have the Brazilians with us!”  Perhaps that’s the thinking.  The “coalition of the willing” was one of the greatest, most embarrassing flops of all time for a superpower, so perhaps an institutionalised “coalition of governments based on the will of the people” will do a bit better when the time comes to attack without provocation yet another small, overmatched country.  I await the counterargument from proponents of unfettered independent national action who do not want to have to justify themselves before the representatives of decadent Belgium and lascivious Brazil (or whatever their objections would be). 

Yglesias points out some of the main flaws with the proposal (for one thing, he says that the leading Non-Aligned Movement states would likely have nothing to do with this transparent hegemonist ploy), and Bob Wright suggests that neocon enthusiasm for a League is a way of creating a new Cold War (that sounds right) by pointedly excluding all those powers and regions that the neocons seem intent on fomenting conflict with in the first place.  It seems to me that it is simply a larger version of the new NATO, which theoretically requires members to be at least passably democratic states (but entertains applications from Albania and Georgia) and which is no longer constrained by anything so limited as its founding treaty or the strategic imperatives of guarding against a threat from the east that no longer exists.  It now practically serves as the international armed forces of the hegemony, provided that the mission can somehow be related to the “war on terror.”  The League represents a move beyond this: to create a permanent institutional basis for international meddling wherever the “democratic nations” (read America and Britain) believe it is necessary.  Since many of the fledgling democracies around the world are relatively poor and need development assistance (controlled by the IMF and World Bank, which are effectively controlled by Washington), their collaboration with any League effort is almost guaranteed.  The tricky part comes when industrialised and modernising democratic states are involved.  Nigeria, Mexico, Brazil, India, Argentina, Bangladesh (which is more or less democratic most of the time) and Indonesia together have a huge number of people and some considerable natural resources, and their politics are nowadays are decidedly not in harmony with the goals of McCain and the neocons or even with the Washington establishment in general.  There is nothing to stop them from making a NAM-style league of democracies that directly repudiates any Washington-backed League’s claim to represent democracies around the world, and it seems likely that someone would either use their position within the NAM or would create something parallel with it to voice their opposition. 

It is a given that countries such as Russia, Venezuela and Bolivia would not belong to the League of Democracies, not because they are not democratic, because all three are rather obnoxiously democratic, but because their democracies are not sufficiently liberal.  It will not be long before “democracy” in this context will be defined to mean “constitutional republican democracy with a ‘free-market’ economy ruled by managerial elites in conjunction with corporate interests.”  So it should actually be called the Managerial League, or something equally uninspiring.  Also, it is specifically in order to make possible international action without a Russian or Chinese veto that neocons and others want this League, so including Russia would defeat the entire purpose of the League, part of which would almost certainly be to contain, threaten and harrass Russia. 

I understand why internationalists fed up with the U.N. want to create a leaner, meaner U.N. that doesn’t have to take account of the reality that at least a third of the world’s population doesn’t live under democratic rule.  Presumably such a League would try to avoid the structural flaws of U.N. permanent member vetoes that hobble any real collective security action, which in turn would mean that any non-member or member state that makes the mistake of getting on the wrong side of a majority of the League would probably be targeted for another round of “liberation.”  I don’t see how any of this actually serves the American interest or the interests of the other states that would called upon to participate in the League’s many ill-advised adventures, but then maybe that’s because it doesn’t serve the interests of most people.

One dinnertime chat does not a ticket make, though it would certainly confirm my impression that Chuck Hagel is less a principled anti-war conservative than an unprincipled attention-whore. (And I say this as someone who would like to see a principled anti-war conservative in the ’08 race – and one who’s a little more plausible than Ron Paul.)  ~Ross Douthat

I was going to write about this earlier today, but for a moment my inspiration departed from me when I thought: continuing to talk about this tiresome politician is exactly what he wants, and I don’t feel like giving Hagel what he wants.  Then I thought over it a little more after seeing Ross’ post and decided I would add a couple remarks, if only to drive home for the last time why I don’t much care for Hagel. 

Ross is absolutely right about Hagel.  Hagel is not a principled antiwar conservative.  He isn’t an unprincipled antiwar conservative.  He’s not an antiwar conservative, period, since he would have to oppose the war to be against it, as I have been saying for some time.  On some things (e.g., immigration), he’s not all that terribly conservative, while we’re at it, but that’s not the point.  He has been doing all this because he wants attention.  Does he have some strong reservations and objections to the way Mr. Bush has run the war?  Sure.  As an internationalist realist hawk, he is bound to be upset at seeing internationalist hawkishness discredited as badly as Iraq has discredited it.  That doesn’t mean that he is the tribune of the antiwar right or antiwar voters generally.  I am no longer of the mind that he might be an acceptable, more electable “compromise” candidate for antiwar voters.  Playing footsie with Bloomberg, who would be obnoxious to the right for all the reasons Giuliani is and who has no obvious or prominent foreign policy position of any kind, is the ultimate pursuit of media chatter for its own sake.

I would say something in defense of the “plausibility” of Ron Paul.  Ron Paul is a good candidate who holds policy views that are, unfortunately, not shared by probably 70-85% of his party (I’m probably being generous in putting it so low).  He is not a “plausible” candidate as an antiwar conservative/libertarian because it is not possible to be against the Iraq war and be politically viable at any important level in the Republican Party today.  Asking for a more plausible antiwar conservative than Ron Paul is to ask that the internal politics of the GOP were radically different, that the vast majority of conservative voters was not deeply inured to a failed policy and that the overwhelming majority of conservative pundits and activists did not vehemently demonise any and all conservatives (including Hagel and even Brownback) who strayed from the party line on Iraq even a little.  I sympathise with wanting all these things, because I want them, too.  I would also like a palatial villa in Tuscany and a summer home in the Alps, but it aint happening, and the reason why it isn’t happening in the GOP primaries hasn’t got anything to do with Ron Paul himself.