So I was going to ignore D’Souza’s apologia pro libro suo (with apologies to Newman), but I happened to come across part IV (!) of his apology and read this amazing line:

So why the bellicose attacks against me? Consider the difficulty now faced by some American conservatives. The right-wing strategy based on the “clash of civilizations” idea first proposed by Samuel Huntington has proven intellectually short-sighted and politically a failure. This is what is so hard for these conservatives to digest.

As Rod Dreher has pointed out about Huntington’s thesis, Huntington was not proposing that we have a clash (that is more Michael Ledeen’s area), but that civilisational difference was and is such that these clashes are likely and the flashpoints of the boundaries between civilisations will be the ones that will precipitate larger, more intractable conflicts because they will be rooted in strong cultural differences than cannot be obviated by political maneuvering, ideological sloganeering or the promise of economic globalisation (this is my synopsis and paraphrasing, but I believe this is the general idea).  These are enduring differences that will cause conflict–foreign policymakers need to understand this and adjust accordingly to the new world.  On this and other things, neoliberals of The New Republic and DLC schools and neocons have absolutely failed to adjust, because they don’t even understand the question, because they are still bound to old formulae appropriate to twenty or forty or sixty years ago, and because they are so far removed from understanding their own civilisation, much less are they aware of what motivates others.  Few who acknowledge the reality of these differences want full-on war with another civilisation (indeed, some of us are even more opposed to such a conflict than those oblivious to the deep-rootedness of these differences), but they do recognise the incompatibility of the “values” of different civilisations. 

The final D’Souza installment actually shows what is so especially funny about Andrew Sullivan’s ludicrous, lengthy attempt to pin D’Souza’s thesis on the rise of “fundamentalism” on the right and the theocon takeover of conservatism: not only does Sullivan show himself to be absurdly overcommitted to the thesis of his own bad book (which I skewer here), such that he is compelled to declare D’Souza an arch-representative of the logical conclusion of a movement that now despises and rejects both D’Souza and Sullivan, but D’Souza in this last installment reveals himself to be a kindred spirit with Sullivan in their common penchant for whiny self-importance and total disregard for the possibility that they experience universal contempt and repudiation because they are wildly, horribly wrong about everything.  No, instead of facing up to that possibility, they think they are enduring the suffering of far-seeing thinkers who challenge rigid orthodoxies and worn-out structures–every criticism is the knout of the oppressor coming down, every voice of opposition an inquisitor coming to take them away to be burned.  To put it mildly, they are both equally mistaken about a great many things, albeit not quite the same things. 

In their common confusion about what conservatism is and what conservatives today represent, they are actually much more like one another than either would care to admit.  The movement has had a bad habit of casting out people who are far better conservatives than the people doing the casting out, but when even the outcasts declare that you have fallen into the ditch of moral and philosophical error you have really had it.  D’Souza has enjoyed much more toleration from his colleagues than Sullivan because the former still supports hegemonic foreign policy and all its terrible works, while Sullivan has at least managed to come around (albeit rather tardily) to seeing the Iraq war as a grave error.  The oft-repeated canard that he did so because of Bush’s opposition to gay marriage, which is not true, would actually be more admirable in a way, since it would at least have been based in some kind of commitment, and certainly more so than the obvious opportunism and ship-abandoning rat act that it really was. 

Amazingly, D’Souza holds that Huntington’s thesis has proved “intellectually short-sighted and politically a failure” at the very moment when even more people on the right who likely had reservations about or objections to Huntington’s ideas are beginning to say that he was really onto something.  If Huntington is one of the “winners” of the Iraq war, so to speak, then D’Souza and, well, Wolfowitz, Bush, Frum, Bennett, Krauthammer, Hanson, Ledeen, Kristol, and Fukuyama, etc. are all obviously the losers.  No wonder that D’Souza should take a shot at Huntington in his final installment, since he must know that Huntington’s thesis of powerful, significant cultural difference between rival civilisations makes the very idea of ecumenical jihad that D’Souza proposes so ridiculous that it will be almost impossible to believe in ten years’ time that anyone ever seriously proposed it.  To say that Huntington’s thesis has been a political failure is to believe that it has been applied to policy somewhere and found wanting, when all of the current administration’s policies to date have been based on the assumptions that there is not only no necessary conflict between different civilisations but that there aren’t even really different civilisations as far as fundamental “values” are concerned.  You don’t attempt to bring freedom and democracy to a people you regard as basically alien to the “values” of your civilisation–you do this only if you believe in an historically ignorant universalism in which all men not only yearn to be free (which might be true, but is irrelevant) but also in which all men are equally capable of acquiring and know how to possess liberty.  No one could want “tribe or religion or whatever” more than freedom!  Oops.

And I realise that the girl in Dr Noll’s seminar isn’t spouting this stuff about “jihadists” travelling from Iraq to America because she supports Bush. She is just frightened. She is genuinely afraid of all the “terror” warnings, the supposed “jihadists” threats, the red “terror” alerts and the purple alerts and all the other colour-coded instruments of fear. She believes her president, and her president has done Osama bin Laden’s job for him: he has crushed this young woman’s spirit and courage.

But America is not at war. There are no electricity cuts on Valdosta’s warm green campus, with its Spanish style department blocks and its narrow, beautiful church. There is no food rationing. There are no air-raid shelters or bombs or “jihadists” stalking these God-fearing folk. It is the US military that is at war, engaged in an Iraqi conflict that is doing damage of a far more subtle kind to America’s social fabric.

Off campus, I meet a gentle, sensitive man, a Vietnam veteran with two doctor sons. One is a lieutenant colonel, an army medical officer heading back to Baghdad this week for Bush’s “surge”, bravely doing his duty in the face of great danger. The other is a civilian doctor who hates the war. And now the two boys – divided by Iraq – can hardly bring themselves to speak to each other. ~Robert Fisk

Can it really be the case that so many people actually buy this line that the jihadis will “follow us back” to America if “we” withdraw?  I suppose the 75% of Republicans who think Mr. Bush is doing a bang-up job will believe just about any nonsense that the man utters, which is a painful thing to contemplate, since my own family is made up of a lot of Republicans and this means that the odds of some of my relatives buying into Mr. Bush’s cons are very good.  Perhaps one of the reasons people in my extended family continue to get on as well as we do is that we simply don’t talk about Iraq at holidays, so I don’t know just how pervasive the groupthink is.  Nonetheless, if we did talk about it I would like to think that we would be able to remember that we are bound by things more important than our position on this or that policy. 

I am moved to say all this by the last item in Fisk’s column.  That last item is insane.  Brothers, both of them doctors presumably committed to healing and the preservation of life, who will barely speak to each other…because of Iraq?  Imagine having your family torn apart by something as dreadful and hideous as the Iraq war–just consider how ridiculous that is!  From my perspective, it is genuinely difficult to understand how anyone could still be so convinced of the rightness of the war in spite of everything, but I can acknowledge that there are people who have become as firmly entrenched in their view as I have in mine.  Naturally, I think the pro-war doctor is wrong on the war, but both of them are wrong if they allow their positions on the war to poison their relationship.  To sacrifice something real and human to some less immediate political commitment is to commit a kind of impiety. 

Some people will think that I am engaged in hyperbole when I call the war those things, but I really don’t know what other words to use (abomination is one that I have often used).  In any case, I don’t care which side of the war debate people are on–to turn against your brother or cousin or friend because of Mr. Bush’s War is to let the hegemonists win two unjust victories, as they have managed to sever real, healthy, living bonds between two kinsmen or friends by convincing everyone involved that some lousy political question is more important than their affinities and loyalties to one another.  This is to elevate either loyalty or opposition to the state above loyalty to your own, which should almost always take precedence (I would say always, but there are probably exceptional cases that aren’t springing to mind right now that would make such an absolute statement seem a little crazy).  Each time someone puts politics ahead of his blood and his people, the horrid ideologues win another triumph.  If they can divide us against our own flesh, they can conquer any and all of us. 

If I had a brother (I don’t–I am an only child), I would hate to think that I would ever turn against him over some political quarrel, even one pertaining to a serious matter of war.  Obviously, I am just about as opposed to this war as anyone can be, but to choose either the War Party or the antiwar folks over your own flesh and blood reveals the far more troubling corruption of our society.  I realise that this would hardly be the first time in our history that relatives and friends have taken opposite sides of a political quarrel, but it seems to me that we may be able to locate the ultimate cause of the repeated defeats of local and particular loyalties at the hands of people spouting universalist and idealist claptrap in this tendency of some people to prefer their “cause” over their kindred in the flesh.

On the Republican side, former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson shook up the field with his announcement that he would consider getting into the presidential race. Thompson is familiar as the actor who plays District Attorney Arthur Branch on NBC’s Law and Order.

Chosen by 12% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters, Thompson is third in the Republican field. He trails former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, at 31%, and Arizona Sen. John McCain, at 22%. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich is at 8%.

Thompson’s support seems to come largely from voters who had supported Giuliani. In the USA TODAY poll taken March 2-4, Giuliani’s standing had been 13 percentage points higher, at 44%. McCain’s support had been 2 points lower then.

Backing for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, widely considered a leading contender, has dropped. He was chosen by 3%, the same as Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback. Romney’s support in early March had been 8%. ~USA Today

So we have managed to determine that some guy most people have never heard of (Thompson) pulled away support from someone most people have heard of (but about whom they know virtually nothing-Giuliani), while some guy nobody has heard of and knows nothing about (Romney) lost support for reasons unknown.  It is on the basis of such “evidence” that the entire world of political commentary is operating in making their bold pronouncements.  It will not be shocking to hear that I think all of this is pretty meaningless, and if anything could have confirmed that the Giuliani boomlet really was an airy bubble just waiting to be popped I think Fred Thompson’s sudden burst of support proved it.  I would love to say that this is proof of how pathetic the Terrible Trio are, but I just don’t buy any of it now.  Strangely, Tommy Thompson’s actual announcement of candidacy did not catapult him to the head of the field–how could that be?  His candidacy was always so compelling.

In fairness, I laughed at people who said that Fred Thompson would be in third place if he entered the race–but here he is, already in third, and he hasn’t even held a press conference at which he defers his announcement!  I acknowledge I will have to eat those words now, though I might still quibble with the idea that he could be in a “strong” third place when he declared.  Anyway, I am eating those words–I obviously underestimated the ease with which a TV actor could become a “credible” presidential candidate without making any effort at all.  This is America, after all, and one of the only people more likely to vault to the front of the presidential field than Fred Thompson (if this man were a U.S.-born citizen) would be Simon Cowell from American Idol.  Yes, voters are horribly irrational and ill-informed–behold the total arbitrariness of the demos and be very afraid.    

I could note that the poll is one of general adults and does not take their status as either registered or likely voters into account, but that would be to give it far too much credibility as a measure of actual future voting intentions of the people who will be doing the voting.  However, I hope that the sheer absurdity of a relatively politically unknown, retired Senator (whether or not people know his name from Law & Order, no non-Tennessean outside the chattering class knows anything about him) bursting onto the scene with 12% support in this poll will demonstrate beyond any doubt that polls approximately nine months from the first voting are so meaningless that they probably shouldn’t even be taken.  This sort of poll-taking rewards and reinforces celebrity and punishes the real candidates who have made significant efforts to build organisations and actually do hard work campaigning by talking to voters and giving speeches and traveling hither and yon.  Fred Thompson’s sudden prominence in the presidential field is an insult to the democratic process, all of the real, declared candidates in the race and to everyone who cares a whit about anything resembling serious political thought.  For those who yearn for the coming of President Camacho from Idiocracy, your dream has just become that much more possible.

Michael Moore, look out. Rick Santorum is getting into the documentary filmmaking business and he’s out to tell ”the other side of the story.”

Less than three months removed from his congressional career, the former Pennsylvania senator said in an interview last week that he is planning two film projects in part to counter what he characterized as the stream of left-wing documentaries coming from Hollywood and independent filmmakers.

The first project, Santorum said, would explore the relationship between radical Islam and the radical leftists in various countries around the world, including Latin America. It would be about an hour in length.

The second would be a longer, broader documentary that he said would aim to ”change the culture of America.” He declined to go into specifics about the proposal.

”Politics and political dialogue has some impact on America but changing the culture has a much bigger impact,” Santorum said about his new role outside the public sector and his push to make documentaries. ”That is what the left is doing and doing it in a big way, producing a lot of left content for Hollywood, and even not just out of Hollywood. Even independent films are now more and more left-wing driven, whether it is Michael Moore or Al Gore.” ~The Morning Call

Okay, you can stop laughing now.  No, really, you can stop. 

This strikes me as a really bad idea, and this isn’t just because I have been such a harsh critic of Santorum on foreign policy.  I don’t object to the suggestion that more conservatives should make documentaries.  Conservatives definitely should make more documentaries, but they should do so because they actually want to be filmmakers and want to tell stories.  They should do this because they have a talent for doing it, which ensures that they will be doing the work that best expresses their particular gifts.  Conservatives should not make documentaries just because that’s what leftists do and we need to counter their propaganda arm with one of our own.  As much as it may stun certain folks to read this, left-wing politics prevails among actors and artists for the same reason that it prevails among most journalists: it is a kind of politics that initially fits very well with the kind of work that these people do, and these professions attract people who already tend to share these beliefs.  Left-wing politics becomes an unquestioned set of common assumptions in these professions over time.  After a while, it is just a given that traditional Christianity is basically bad and dangerous, most or all forms of patriotism are retrograde, government is here to help us, the media exist to improve and reform society and all cultures and religions are OK (except for Christian culture and Christianity and those that bear strong resemblances to traditional Christianity).  I suspect conservatives don’t get into a lot of acting or art or journalism today because they know a few things about all of them: they know that these areas are all full of people who are not like them temperamentally or culturally, there are some strong entrenched forces opposing the sorts of work they would like to do (consider how difficult it was for Robert Duvall to get The Apostle made) and this sort of work strikes them as unattractive because they deem it less practical or less meaningful. 

It is the real-world impracticality of it that is especially discouraging to kids who have artistic ability, love making movies or find writing and reporting fascinating.  The same goes for fiction writing or any kind of writing–this would be my more prosaic explanation for why there are so few Republican or conservative fiction writers running around out there.  Making a living at these things is not only hard (which might not be the main problem), but sometimes it is impossible for a lot of people, and it only becomes more difficult if you have children.  The lifestyle of a journalist or actor in particular would have to put strains on the kind of grounded, family-centered life that I assume most conservatives desire to have to one degree or another.  If these conservatives are traditionally-minded people, they will be thinking a lot about being able to provide for the families they undoubtedly want to have, which means that they will pursue those professions that offer the best prospects for this.  If their parents are also conservative, they will have added pressures to pursue a practical line of work, if only for their own self-sufficiency, to say nothing of supporting a family.  Trying to become an actor is usually so unlikely to provide the means for supporting a family (and not necessarily terribly conducive to starting a stable one) that the uncertainty of it will probably discourage most conservatives, especially conservative men, to follow a different path.  The same goes for music, art, literature, academics, etc.  (Add to this conservatism’s cultivation of reflexive anti-elitism, in which the elite villains are always artists, actors, journalists and academics, and you have an endless feedback loop of increasing conservative hostility to these fields.)  Because the broad base of political conservatism in America is middle and lower-middle class, most conservatives will in their own lives be concerned to pursue stable and relatively well-paying work, which is the definition of what most writing, acting, teaching and reporting are not.  I think there is also a comfort ethic in the middle class that makes middle-class conservatives tend to shy away from professions that might not necessarily be able to provide the level of comfort to which they have become accustomed. 

Since many of the greatest conservative thinkers of the last sixty years were academics, there is nothing inherent about being a scholar that militates against conservatism (and actually a lot about it that I think could encourage this persuasion), but the impracticality of dwelling in the wasteland of graduate school for years (okay, it’s not that bad, but sometimes it can feel like it) seems to be an overwhelming argument against doing it.  As “higher education” (one of the more misleading phrases around today) becomes more and more expensive, the impracticality of continuing it through post-graduate work only increases, especially for those who do not want to take on immense amounts of debt.  Thus among professional and post-graduate students you usually wind up with fairly disproportionate conservative representation in the business and law schools (that’s certainly true here), while the other departments are almost uniformly made up of folks on the left or those who take no strong position one way or another.  Obviously, the more “trendy” fields (e.g., Gender Studies) will have no conservatives at all, since almost all conservatives can barely avoid openly snickering (if they are even trying to avoid this) when such a field is mentioned.  There is nonetheless surely something weird about American conservatives who will gladly cite Chesterton and Muggeridge and Kirk and Weaver but who usually use the words ‘journalist’ and ‘academic’ as insults, but I think most embody this apparent contradiction.  As a matter of description of the state of academia or newsrooms today, it is reasonable to refer to them with a certain open disdain for their obvious left-wing biases, but to rule out these professions (as I think some do) because they are somehow automatically tainted by that bias strikes me as odd.  

For my part, I agree with Ross’ line of thinking that fighting the culture war means actually producing some cultural products (and, no, George Bush action figures and 24 don’t really count), so there is no reason why conservatives should avoid making all sorts of films and getting into every other kind of art.  Arguably, really horrendous first attempts might even be tolerated as the first moves towards creating conservative cultural products, but it would probably be better if certain people didn’t go out of their way to make sure that the first attempts really would be horrendously bad.  Santorum’s effort seems designed to ensure that his attempts will be.    

Indeed, I don’t even object in principle to the suggestion that crazy ueber-jingoes such as Rick Santorum want to make documentaries.  It might be interesting to watch the product of someone obsessed with the military threat from Bolivia.  He could point his camera at menacing-looking Bolivian coca farmers, whose latest crops have been destroyed by defoliant chemicals dropped in the name of the drug war, and document the seething rage and the occasional remarks about the “Yanquis” who have ruined their livelihood.  He could film the crowds of exuberant pro-Morales supporters while a voiceover reads the bizarre words of the Bolivian foreign minister Choquehuanca.  It could be quite powerful stuff.  The underlying message, “These people are sort of crazy,” might even sink in, provided that it was made with subtlety and cleverness.  Why do I think that Rick Santorum is uniquely unsuited to operating in this way?  Gosh, I don’t know.

If put together honestly, a documentary on “the Venezuelan empire” would be very illuminating for all the things that it doesn’t show (rows of Venezuelan tanks rolling through Brasilia, for instance).  Santorum might even discover in the process of making his films that he had been mistaken about certain realities.   

No, it is a really bad idea for two fairly obvious reasons: 1) to the best of my knowledge, Santorum has hardly ever picked up a camera in his life and has no experience in making documentaries or any other kind of film, which makes him one of the last choices for going into this sort of work; 2) the precedent of The Half Hour News Hour.  Who actually thought that the man who brought you weekly torture sessions and constant violence, mixed with bureaucratic office intrigue and bad speechwriting, was going to produce something that was really funny?  As we have seen before, the explicit attempt to provide a “balancing” perspective to genuinely biased productions from the other side of the spectrum always fails.  Part of this may be that the temperament and general outlook of one “side” are probably better suited to certain media and certain kinds of expression than others, and the other part is that any conscious attempt to mimic and offset someone else’s project will almost always come off as stilted, derivative and uninspired…because it is stiled, derivative and uninspired.  If the knock on left-wing documentaries is that they are too politically biased, how on earth does someone make a better documentary by going into the project with the explicit goal of providing an overtly right-wing documentary?  If the problem with these documentaries is that they are poorly done because they are too political (which is what many conservatives will often say), making documentaries for no other purpose than to answer the political arguments of your opponents seems likely to create something potentially rather horrid.  Instead of a documentary, you would end up with something more like a cross between FoxNews reporting and a reality TV show. 

As is the case with anything that involves investigation and learning, it is fair to say that documentary filmmakers who already know the answers to the questions they are about to ask are probably going to miss a lot of important things about their subject.  Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary is apparently well-done (at least in the opinion of some) because in so many places she simply lets evangelicals speak for themselves.  Of course, what she chooses to film and keep in the final cut will reflect her perspective, but probably the most effective and most honest documentaries, like the best fiction writing according to the bromides of creative writing teachers everywhere, show and don’t tell.  Santorum’s project, because of Santorum’s personality, will involve an awful lot of telling and probably not much showing.  In the realm of filmmaking, even in documentaries, there is always plenty of borrowing from other directors, but the filmmaker that states explicitly at the outset, “The Originator is the movie that will provide the answer to James Cameron” usually ends up making a movie that is simply bad.  If Santorum goes out to make the anti-Alexandra Pelosi documentary and calls it “God’s Enemies,” complete with interviews with Abe Foxman and members of Americans for the Separation of Church and State, he will probably create a very bad documentary, just as Joel Surnow produced some really bad comedy by trying to create the anti-Stewart.  (Actually, he succeeded in creating the anti-Stewart in one respect: he created TV personae who were not in the least funny.)

My book isn’t like Dinesh’s latest book. It isn’t like any Ann Coulter book. It isn’t what the Amazon description says or what the Economist claims it is. Or what Frank Rich imagines it is. It is a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care. ~Jonah Goldberg on his forthcoming book, Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton

Goldberg was responding to the strange Timothy Noah piece that speculated that the reason why Goldberg’s book keeps getting delayed is that it is running up against the “post-election Zeitgeist shift.”  Goldberg proposes the rational answer that he has had, well, lots of other things to do and it simply hasn’t been finished yet.  Even if that weren’t the case, book publishing is notoriously slow and unpredictable and delays can happen for all kinds of reasons that normally have nothing to do with content or the public mood.  Byzantinists have been waiting for years to see John Haldon’s new revisionist interpretation of Iconoclasm, and it hasn’t come out yet.  This is probably not because his publisher decided that there was a big upsurge in public hostility to Iconoclasm.

Even so, unless Goldberg produces a masterpiece of scholarship in fascism studies and political philosophy, I am doubtful that he will be making a “very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care.”  Ezra Klein has fun with this rather excessive statement.  First of all, it is arguably the case that another, far greater NR contributor of the past, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, has already more or less advanced the core of any argument linking left-liberalism to fascism to the extent that he has thoroughly defined leftism and classified communism, fascism and mass democracy as embodiments of the principles of 1789 in his classics Leftism Revisited (the updated version of Leftism) and Liberty or Equality?  Why is it that I think that someone who senses latent fascism in Rod Dreher’s book will not do as good of a job in analysing the subject as the great man K-L?  I just have a feeling. 

The traditional knock on any suggested overlap between left-liberalism and fascism is that fascism is supposedly a reactionary, anti-1789 force, while K-L has done generally very good work exploding that myth (and Stanley Payne’s work on fascism specifically further explodes the image of fascism as reactionary or counter-revolutionary).  It is quite possible to make an argument that left-liberalism and fascism do share in the principles of 1789 and essentially possess the same view of human nature as something malleable and perfectible (although they may have fairly different ideas of what the perfected, new man should look and act like), but K-L and others made arguments like this for decades.  Old Right critics of the New Deal noticed and pointed out the blatantly obvious similarities between FDR’s economic policies and those of Mussolini–how bitterly ironic it is that the New Dealers could somehow accuse their foreign policy opponents of sympathies for fascism that they possessed to a much, much greater degree!    

Because K-L was a right-liberal, I think his one blind spot was his confidence that classical liberalism of the post-1867 Austrian type was fundamentally different from the ideologies he was condemning.  He connected the identitarian and totalitarian aspects of communism, fascism and democracy through their common inheritance of the principles of 1789 and their other common features, but the right liberals in Austria, Germany and elsewhere inherited just the same principles as their ideological cousins.  In their centralism, “rationalism,” nationalism and hostility to Christianity (at least in any institutional, established or Catholic form), the right-liberals of the 19th century were in many respects the forerunners of collectivist nationalism in Germany, Austria and Italy.  (They are “right-liberals” only to the extent that they are less collectivist, egalitarian and democratic than some of their fellows–their liberalism did and always will place them on the left.)  Looking at it in terms of voting patterns, we see that Freisinnigen and National Liberals became German nationalist and Nazi voters.  (In his earlier work, K-L stressed the Protestantism of these voters, but he should have emphasised more the reduction of their religion to a vague Herrgott piety that was easily compatible with the exaltation of state and people.) 

Goldberg’s argument will probably end up making a certain amount of historical sense, because he will largely be echoing what other students of this question have already said.  I suspect he will have to do some fancy footwork to exonerate much of the late 19th century right-liberal tradition and pin fascism entirely on “left-liberalism,” since I assume from his past writings that he has zero sympathy for much in the European conservative tradition that opposed all such manifestations of liberalism.  In any case, all of this material has not only been covered before but has been thoroughly and fairly extensively covered.

The bigger problem with this project, it seems to me, is that it simply turns around against the liberals the old Marxist and liberal habit of trying to discredit an opponent by calling him a fascist.  I don’t actually disagree that left-liberalism and fascism do share certain characteristics, just as I wouldn’t disagree that neoconservatism (a species of left-liberalism as far as I’m concerned) shares certain characteristics with fascism.  Both of these seem to me to be empirically demonstrable claims.  As a matter of historical interest and understanding, such observations might be useful.  As political commentary, I have to admit they usually wind up sounding pretty tendentious.  They do not come across as thoughtful, even if the author does make such observations thoughtfully. 

Once you have affiliated your enemies’ ideas with fascism, you have moved that bit closer to saying that your enemies’ ideas are more or less inherently illegitimate and dangerous.  It is still possible, though not very common, to espouse sympathies for certain elements of communism without being driven into the wilderness, but for fascism this is simply impossible.  To link someone’s views with fascism is to attempt to damn them irreparably.  It’s true that many leftists and liberals have often done this and still do this all the time, but it used to be a mark of the restraint and prudence of conservatives that we did not generally engage in the same sort of quasi-intellectual smearing.

Steve Sailer has an interesting excerpt from Dreams From My Father about Obama’s encounter with one of his half-brothers.  I thought the most telling moment in their exchange was when Obama asks if his half-brother has any desire to settle back in Kenya, and the half-brother matter-of-factly answers, “No, I mean, there’s not much work for a physicist, is there, in a country where the average person doesn’t have a telephone.”  This answer was perfectly reasonable, but showed how completely differently the two men viewed one of their ancestral countries. 

At the same time, the exchange shows a remarkable difference between two mixed-race men from the same family, one of whom has no real interest in “finding” or reconnecting with his Kenyan heritage and one of whom defines himself to some large degree by that heritage.  Of course, it’s possible to find that difference in any family, but the two really were equal and opposite.  What struck me reading the exchange is how much more I could identify with Obama’s perspective than I could with his half-brother’s.  Then again, the half-brother had to grow up with the drunken Barack Obama Sr., and Obama never did, so it’s a little more understandable that the former would have fewer fond associations with his ancestry and the old country. 

All the same, people basically uninterested in who they are and where they are from make no sense to me–if that were really who Obama was and what he represented, I would probably dislike him even more than I do.  To be cut off from your ancestors and to feel as if you owe them nothing seems to me to make a person somehow less complete.

He [Giuliani] has the same attitude towards the unborn that Canadians have toward baby seals. ~Jonah Goldberg

At bloggingheads, Ezra Klein and Will Wilkinson have an amusing discussion of the evils of post-graduate school in the context of the flaws of neoliberalism.  (Quoth Wilkinson: “Take that, Mickey Kaus!”)  I particularly liked Wilkinson’s description of people reaching tenure as being “beaten down.”  That certainly can be true, but I think it is probably more true of people who specialise in philosophy, which is just about the worst academic field for someone who actually wants to get a job.  The second worst is probably Byzantine history.

So Mubarak and the ruling party in Egypt rammed through constitutional changes and are giving the public and opposition almost no time to get a handle on these changes before they are put up for referendum.  This is the point when interventionists of various stripes begin yelping that we must “do something” or complaining that we “haven’t done enough” or hitting the administration for hypocrisy on democracy promotion.  The last point is fair, to the extent that the administration still maintains the fiction that it cares about whether and how Arabs vote, but it has been steadily backing away from its “reform” impulses for months. 

Abu Aardvark (a.k.a., Marc Lynch) notes the rise of “Baathism on the Nile,” which isn’t very surprising, and Kevin Drum pitches in with the predictable complaint:

You will be unsurprised to learn that U.S. reponse has been virtually nonexistent, yet more evidence that George Bush’s commitment to democracy promotion was never anything more than a nice sounding slogan.

But let’s actually think about this for a moment.  Does anyone over here actually want free and competitive elections that would almost certainly be won by the Muslim Brotherhood?  Freedom and democracy sound lovely to most people, but in practice introducing them into certain contexts winds up producing death squads and terror.  We should be very glad that Mr. Bush has reduced his commitment to democracy promotion to the level of nice-sounding slogans.  We would be even more glad if he stopped talking about it at all!  Commitment to full-fledged democratisation in the Near East is fairly crazy, and it has only been after several years of bitter disappointments that the administration has been forced to acknowledge, in deeds if not in words, that it was not a terribly good idea.  The reality of actual democracy promotion in the Near East has meant the increased power of Hizbullah, the Hamas government (which no one knows what to do with now that it’s there) and the farcical Shi’ite sectarian coalition of Maliki.  Thank goodness that we will at least be spared any such “successes” in Egypt.  Indeed, can anyone tell me why we think the internal affairs of Egypt are either our business or our concern?

But he [Fred Thompson] has one advantage over the former governor: He didn’t just come to these positions over the last year or so, in a “Road to Des Moines” conversion. ~Ryan Sager

No one would be more thrilled than I to see Romney’s campaign abruptly collapse into a shambles, but Sager’s analysis, as usual, leaves a lot to be desired.  Let’s start with basic facts.  Fred Thompson ran as a pro-choice candidate in both of his runs for office.  Our man in Tennessee, A.C. Kleinheider, has the goods (via Evangelicals for Mitt).  If Thompson has had a Romney-like change of mind, it would have to have happened in the last five years, which would put him in basically the same spot Romney is in.  Perhaps he could claim that his conversion predated his campaign maneuvering, since he had not given much thought to a presidential run prior to this year, which is something that Romney cannot claim.  If Thompson were still pro-choice, then I really wouldn’t be able to understand the Fred Thompson buzz.  Have things reached such a point where the new definition of “the next Ronald Reagan” is “some second-rate actor”?

The biggest problem with all of this is the idea that Fred Thompson is some kind of political hot commodity who will blow away the weaker members of the field.  Politically speaking, he has about as much influence and clout as Joe Scarborough.  No offense to Scarborough, but if he were to run for President he would not be in any danger of overtaking the majority of the field.  Thompson may have a little more name recognition, or at least face recognition, than most of his lower-level competitors, but he has absolutely no rationale for his candidacy that could not be applied equally to one of the second-tier candidates.  As Kaus noted, quite correctly, Thompson doesn’t really bring anything to the table.  In terms of accomplishments and tenure in the Senate, Thompson is a sort of balding, male version of Hillary Clinton.  Comparatively, Tommy Thompson, whose candidacy induces snickers in all of us, probably should be taken much more seriously as an experienced, successful reformist governor from a political battleground region, but for reasons unknown he is relegated to that dark and dreary corner of the presidential field where he doesn’t even get mentioned in most discussions of the candidates.  Of course his candidacy is ridiculous, not least because he has been out of real political circulation for years, but then so is the would-be candidacy of Fred Thompson.

Sager does acknowledge some of Thompson’s flaws, and notes:

Third, while Mr. Thompson has an actor’s flair for talking plain and talking tough, it’s not entirely clear what qualifies him to lead a nation at war with worldwide Islamic fundamentalism.

That’s very true, but then it isn’t at all clear what qualifies Giuliani to do the very same thing, yet for some reason large numbers of people are convinced that he is qualified in some mysterious way.

Why would Ryan Sager, besides his habit of poor political analysis, buy into the Fred Thompson myth even a little bit?  My bet is that he would encourage anything that would help torpedo one of the declared social conservative candidates in the race.  Even though Romney is a fraud, he is a fraud pretending to be a social conservative, and Ryan Sager regards social-cons as the cause of Republican defeat and conservative woes generally, and so it is quite understandable that Sager would look to encourage anything that might help knock off one of the putative social conservative candidates currently in the race.

Query: does anyone know off-hand what Fred Thompson’s views on amnesty and immigration policy are?  He left the Senate just after Mr. Bush had already started floating an amnesty proposal, so he may not be on the record about it.