I’m not sure it says anything good about Rudy Giuliani, the Republican Party or the country as a whole that he seems more willing to throw his political convictions to the winds on gay marriage than on abortion. ~Ross Douthat

It probably doesn’t say anything good.  What it seems to say is that Giuliani knows he has throw social conservatives a bone somewhere and has chosen to throw them the tiniest, most pathetic bone he could find, which means he thinks they are stupid and easily bought.  What it says about the GOP is that its current presumed “frontrunner” understands that much of the GOP leadership doesn’t care that deeply about these things, and it cares even less about the far more significant moral issue of the day.  What it says about the country may still be up in the air.  It will depend on whether social conservative voters rally around Giuliani, “new fusionist”-style, because he promises give some foreigners a good thwacking.  If they don’t, there is still a lot of hope for this country.  If they do…

I like the optimism explanation. It’s easy to see why folks would refrain from reproduction if they thought their kids had only a broiling, denuded planet full of wretched consumer-zombies living pointless lives in cookie-cutter McMansions and soulless big box strip malls to look forward to. ~Will Wilkinson

Via Ross Douthat

On the other hand, more than a few conservatives who already have children and are having still more certainly fear that their children will have to face exactly this kind of future (and present), which would be one of the reasons why they are so vehemently opposed to most or all of the things Mr. Wilkinson describes.  So that leaves me with something of a puzzle: are Americans optimistic in Mr. Wilkinson’s view because they believe that the future will not be like the dreary consumatopian wasteland that he has painted above, or are they optimistic because they look at the same dreary consumatopian wasteland and see its better qualities?  Or is the key to American optimism (and thus relatively higher birthrate) the active embrace and celebration of said wasteland?

Remember how Putin gave an angry speech at the Munich security conference earlier this year?  Remember how he said the deployment of missile defense systems in central Europe was viewed as a violation of past promises to Russia and was unacceptable?  Oh, how the hegemonists mocked him!  Well, as a result of our insistence on putting that system in Poland and the Czech Republic, now Putin wants to withdraw from the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty, which is only one of the main pillars of European defense and security. 

Naturally, Condi was unhappy–Russia has treaty obligations, she told them!  This is the hegemonist double standard, applied with the same foolishness to Iraq, Iran, etc.: you must follow all of the treaties and international obligations you have made, while we can withdraw from them or thumb our noses at them with impunity.  It’s interesting how international law and treaties become so much more important and crucial to international security when other states violate them.  My suggestion: drop the double standard and regain at least a little credibility when it comes time to demand that other parties live up to their commitments.

And with the country knee-deep in a disastrous war, an opposition party should have no trouble making that case on the merits, instead of whining endlessly about how the GOP needs to play fair and stop questioning their patriotism. ~Ross Douthat

Ross is right that the opposition party should have no trouble making the case on the merits.  It would help if the leaders of the opposition party knew what the merits were, and it wouldn’t hurt if they had party leadership that actually knew what it was doing.  In addition to not whining, pushing back and arguing the case on the merits, the Democrats could take a page from their opponents’ playbook and make the argument why getting out of Iraq is precisely the more patriotic thing to do.  They could also argue that patriotism may sometimes entail courses of action that directly oppose what the state believes is in its own best institutional interest. 

Unfortunately, the party whose leader once said, “You cannot love your country and hate your government” is not prepared to make such an argument.  Because more than a few left-liberals actually do have a more, shall we say, complicated, qualified relationship with patriotic feeling they do not play the patriotism card themselves because they a) don’t necessarily think it’s true or b) cannot speak in the idiom that would make such an appeal credible.  For more than a few of these folks, at least among the elite, patriotism itself really does strike them as chthonic, retrograde and backwards; naturally, they resent accusations of disloyalty (as anyone would), but it seems that enough left-liberals lack the ability to unequivocally express patriotic feeling that they are left with complaining.  Democrats “whine” about having their patriotism impugned, which is reasonable inasmuch as they are actually being falsely attacked, but to successfully counter these attacks they would need to be able to appropriate the full-throated language and imagery of patriotism (much of which their more intellectual friends regard as manipulative and artificial).  This appropriation is something they either will not or cannot do.

The media didn’t marginalize him [Scott Ritter] because he stopped bashing Clinton and started bashing Bush – they marginalized him because everyone who disagreed with him seemed credible, and he didn’t. ~Ross Douthat

I’m all for watching candidates who are capable of “making the other smoothies on stage a little uncomfortable” – I just want those candidates to also be capable of saying something halfway interesting, and maybe even capable of winning some votes as well. ~Ross Douthat

Now, Ross, you can’t tell me that talking about Bin Laden “rolling in his blankets” over the Iraq invasion wasn’t at least halfway interesting.  It would have had to intrigue viewers by making them sit up and ask: “Who’s that old guy talking about Bin Laden’s sleep habits?”  Of course, the substantive point (there was one in there somewhere) was right, albeit redundant, since I imagine only the most die-hard of the “they aren’t reporting the good news from Iraq” brigades believe that Al Qaeda has been weakened by the Iraq war.  A majority of Democrats are fiercely opposed to the Iraq war (far more than Obama or even Edwards), and at least some of them are actually something close to non-interventionist (or they are heading in that direction), but without Gravel and Kucinich those people would be more or less completely unrepresented in their own party’s candidate debates.  Simply by being there, they force the candidates dubbed “major” by the media to take account of the constituencies in their own party that they would be only too happy to ignore.  If these no-hope candidates are monomaniacal and obsessive in the process, they are no less interesting than the pre-packaged, dreary, rehearsed lines of the “respectable” candidates.  Journalists obviously love them because they provide something actually interesting to report on the next day, rather than having to write the boring, “no one said anything of any real importance” copy that normally follows these staged farces.   

From media reports, it seems that Gravel made (perhaps somewhat hyperbolically) at least a few worthwhile points that tended to get obscured by his talk of feeling like a potted plant.  He noted that our sanctions on Iran have accomplished nothing.  He is correct.  He pointed out the relative hypocrisy of demanding nonproliferation from other states while preparing to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons.  Except for Kucinich, no one else on that stage, if he wanted to remain “viable,” could have ever said either of these things.  Those strike me as things that need saying in public debates more often, so if only no-hopers are allowed to say them and introduce them into the debate I say that we need a lot more no-hopers running for President. 

Of other candidates, he said:

Mr. Gravel said he had made that statement before he had the chance to stand with the other candidates a few times. “It’s like going into the Senate,” he said. “You know the first time you get there you’re all excited — ‘My God, how did I ever get here?’ And then, about six months later, you say, ‘How the hell did the rest of them get here?’ ”

Who couldn’t appreciate a candidate who would say this on the record?

Perhaps Gravel seemed less interesting if you watched him live on television, but I, for one, would have been glad to see someone on that stage say that he finds the major Democratic candidates frightening.  Given Obama’s foreign policy speech, Edwards’ little Herzliya gig and Hillary Clinton being, well, Hillary Clinton, it’s fair to say that they are frightening in their foreign policy views.  It’s a sorry state of affairs when the joke candidate from Alaska is just about the only one with the guts or zaniness to say so in a nationally televised forum.

Via Ross at his shiny new Atlantic blog comes this Noam Scheiber piece on phony “populism” and Fred Thompson.  Mr. Scheiber is right that the Americans who are drawn to Fred Thompson’s pickup truck act want “their rich people” to act as they do.  It isn’t as if voters are entirely unaware that they are rallying around millionaires and dynastic heirs.  On the one hand, the rich Republican politicians serve as a kind of goal for aspirational voters who want to make their own fortune; the rich Democratic politicians tend to operate more according to a rather distorted notion of noblesse oblige (hence, Edwards, son of a mill worker, now claims to feel obliged to “help” others succeed as he has–by using the state to compel others to do the helping).  (This, in addition to the nature of the institutions where they are working, may help to explain why privileged upper-middle kids who have enjoyed the best education tend to go overwhelmingly for left-liberal politics and politicians–their politics is at least partly an expression of the debt they feel they owe.)  

Mr. Bush’s brush-clearing doesn’t necessarily endear him to anyone on an egalitarian basis, especially when he is clearing his brush on a gigantic ranch.  It seems to me that these things, even if they were completely fake and done for public consumption, don’t work because they show the rich politician to be “just an ordinary guy” (which he obviously isn’t for one reason or another) but because they show the rich politician as someone who doesn’t have to do his own brush-clearing but who does it anyway.  It elides inequality, which in turn helps the voter forget the vast disparity in power between himself and the politician whom he is about to invest with still more power.  Phony “populism” makes it easier to entrust a politician with great power, because the phony “populism” seems to suggest (though it can often deceive) that the new power will not distance the pol too much from voters.

But let’s clear something else up.  What these pols do with their homey performances is not really populism, phony or otherwise.  Any attempt of a slick Eastern or Californian transplant (such as the Georges Bush and Allen respectively) to play as the down-home country boy has nothing to do with populism, though it may be classed as a kind of symbolic demagoguery.  (The pioneer of Eastern transplantation to the West, T.R. was a progressive and extremely hostile to the trusts, yes, but no one could reasonably confuse him with a populist like Bryan.)  Populism has to have some theoretical connection to empowering or serving the popular interest, which has typically meant the breaking up of concentrated wealth and concentrated power and distributing power more evenly throughout the body politic.  Obviously, the GOP has never really wanted to attack the former and historically has only rarely attacked the latter and has since ceased to attack it at all.  The original party of consolidation makes for a poor vehicle for any kind of populism.  The symbolic demagoguery of pretending to be just like Middle Americans (or enough like them to assuage their doubts) has had to make up the distance between the nature of the party and the desires of its constituents.  On the national level, I think this bridge is finally beginning to strain and break from having to stretch so far and bear so much weight. 

What typically drives liberals crazy about this phony “populism” is the example of men belonging to the historic party of corporations and the moneyed interest hamming it up as one of the common people, when they actually serve entirely different interests.  (This doesn’t mean that Democrats serve substantially different interests these days–it is the success of “third way” politics that the Democracy is equally in hock to corporations.)  What I think many liberals still don’t quite understand is just how powerful and visceral Middle American resentment of overbearing and unaccountable government (especially in its more culturally radical forms) really is.  Republicans have been able to tap into that populist resentment of government intrusiveness for a time, but this was only possible so long as the GOP retained some credibility as being at least a marginally more small-government party.  Once that has vanished, as it assuredly has over the past few years, the GOP finds itself exposed for what it is–a party that purports to represent Middle America despite the reality that its every major policy priority seems almost designed to ruin or harm Middle Americans, the Party of Immigration, Imperialism and Insolvency. 

Not even a funny actor, a red pickup truck and a Southern accent can repair the damage done to the GOP brand.  I think I begin to understand more why many people think Fred Thompson will save the Republicans, but they are still operating according to the culture war rules of the late 20th century.  According to what I am guessing will be the new rules, at least for a little while, the GOP will be forced to defend the expanded warfare-welfare state they have created and embraced, creating temporarily the space for Democrats to position themselves not only as economic populist foes of corporations (which will, of course, simply be an act for most of them) but as the party opposing expansive and intrusive government.  The cultural issues will continue to motivate and influence elections and the GOP will continue to win considerable support for advancing cultural conservatism, at least rhetorically, but without the responsible/limited government leg of the GOP stool cultural conservatism alone cannot keep the GOP standing.  It strikes me that a Giuliani campaign, which can plausibly draw on neither the cultural issues nor the symbolic demagoguery nor a responsible/limited government message, would bring about electoral disaster for Republicans.  Fred Thompson would not do a lot better, but he does at least have that red pickup truck.

I finally saw The Last King of Scotland this week, and Forest Whitaker’s performance in the role of Idi Amin is every bit as good as I had heard that it was.  He was certainly deserving of the Academy Award he received.  He embodied the charisma, paranoia and bombast of the dictator in what seemed to be the right proportions.  It would be too much to say that he made Amin a sympathetic figure, which is not really possible, but he did make him believable and real, and this is a tribute to Whitaker’s acting. 

As many of you will already know by now, the story is told from the perspective of a young, self-indulgent Scottish doctor who has decided to have a bit of an adventure (and to get out of the shadow of his father) by going to Uganda, where he happens to become Amin’s personal physician.  Amin’s enthusiasm for all things Scottish helps the young doctor to ingratiate himself with the dictator, and before long the doctor discovers that he has simply become the big man’s lackey and finds himself trapped in the deadly embrace of the jovial monster.  His powerlessness and vulnerability as the dictator’s lackey is brought home in two episodes: in the first, he pleads uselessly with a furious Amin to not expel the Asian merchants from Uganda, and then has this episode thrown back in his face by Amin when the dictator realises the economic consequences of expelling the merchants:

Amin: “Why didn’t you tell me not to expel the Asians?”

Garrigan: “I did!”

Amin: “But you did not persuade me, Nicholas.  You did not persuade me.”

Of course, the absurdity of trying to persuade a man who routinely has his enemies and critics murdered on the slightest hint of disloyalty is clear.

In future, keep an eye on the new group blog to which I will be contributing.  It is called What’s Wrong With The World, and it is the successor of Enchiridion Militis. 

Update: My first WWWTW post, responding to the first excerpt of Christopher Hitchens’ atheist/anti-religious tract, is now up.

Obama’s delusion, widely shared by Democrats, isn’t nearly as dangerous as the neoconservative delusion still being served up by the Republicans.

It’s still a delusion, nonetheless. ~Robert Robb, The Arizona Republic