For the fact is that Dicker, like Alan Dershowitz, and like most American Jews, is more committed to the liberal Democratic political agenda than she is to Israel. Unlike evangelicals, these Jews didn’t see Israel’s security trumping everything else [bold mine-DL]. They can’t bring themselves to make common cause with conservative Zionist Christians because they hate the conservative agenda more than they love Israel. ~Abby Wise Schachter, The Weekly Standard

And this is a surprise because…why exactly?  Wouldn’t you expect most people in any group to be more concerned with the politics in their own country as opposed to the national security of a different country, even if these people had strong personal or emotional ties to that country?  Indeed, isn’t it really, really weird that there would be any non-Jewish Americans who make the security of Israel such a top priority?  Even when you can give the reasons why some evangelicals are so concerned about it, it still seems quite strange.  It’s one thing to be concerned about the security of Israel and to take a strong pro-Israel stand, but quite another to make it one of your very top priorities. 

Yglesias gives his take, which exposes very nicely the double game being played by neocon, “pro-Israel” outfits such as the Standard:

The other thing to say is that we once again see conservative Jews berating their much more numerous liberal co-religionists on the grounds that we are failing to manifest dual loyalties, but just try suggesting in print that “pro-Israel” groups are trying to foster a sense of dual loyalties and see how The Weekly Standard reacts to that (the Standard, it seems to me, is actually loyal only to the cause of war and bloodshed rather than any particular nation; though they clearly do prefer Americans or Israelis to be either killing or dying).

That last bit is absolutely right.  For most folks at the Standard, America and Israel seem to me to be just springboards and vehicles for their ideological project.  They would rather keep those vehicles around as long as they can, and so appear at first glance to be interested in protecting both against external threats (though they exaggerate those threats and have horrible answers for how to cope with those threats), but the real security interests of both nations are ultimately pretty much expendable in pursuit of regional or global hegemony respectively. 

Anyway, the question shouldn’t be why Jewish liberals aren’t embracing their domestic political opponents because of a single foreign policy issue, but rather why anyone in his right mind would think that this is the normal or rational thing to do.  Any one issue, no matter how important it may be, is not enough to create the basis for a lasting alliance among normal people.  Ideologues or fanatics for whom there is one and only one issue view things differently, but there are fortunately not as many of these rather abnormal people. 

This is, incidentally, also why every proposed grand alliance of left and right on the Iraq war falls apart almost as soon as it begins, because everyone involved (with a very few exceptions) doesn’t really believe that the war is the single, most important issue that makes everything else irrelevant.  TAC and Antiwar try heroically to give progressive opponents of interventionism their due, but the attention and respect are not typically widely reciprocated, since most antiwar progressives regard antiwar conservatives as being in some ways even worse than the neocons because of our other beliefs not related to the war.  For more than a few antiwar conservatives, the feeling is usually mutual.  This is regrettable from the perspective of trying to upend interventionist foreign policy, but it is also eminently normal.

Eastern Orthodoxy will never, ever, ever take root in the Western soul. At best, it can sprout shallow roots until the next spiritual fad or tent revival comes along. The soul of the West speaks Latin, prays to statues, and fidgets with rosaries. The soul of the West is covered with side altars, wears lace, and sports a lop-sided birretta. And the soul of the West doesn’t particularily care what was done one thousand years ago, or whether such-and-such a practice was precisely what the early Church did. ~ “Pseudo-Iamblichus”

Naturally, I don’t agree.  This is why I try not to speak in terms of “the West” all that often, because it is a definition that has historically not only excluded the Orthodox Christian world, which is an arbitrary and baseless exclusion, but has normally also excluded much of the central and eastern European and Near Eastern Catholic world.  It normally means “everything west of the Oder and north of Rome,” because those liminal zones in southern Italy and Sicily are so troubling to those who would like to define the West exclusively in terms of Latinity. 

Historically and culturally, Catholics and Orthodox belong to the same Christian civilisation and always have belonged to the same civilisation.  The entirety of Christian civilisation has suffered from the ravages of modernity, revolution and destruction to one degree or another, and both Catholics and Orthodox have battled against these forces with varying degrees of success.  The ignorance of our common civilisation’s overwhelmingly culturally Byzantine and linguistically Greek roots, for example, is an appalling abandonment of an enormous part of the common heritage of all Catholic and Orthodox Christians.  (The Protestants also obviously share in this heritage, but I am not speaking about them in this particular post.)  Ps.-Iamblichus here would like to ignore the profound Greek and Byzantine inheritance that his own church possesses, and so impoverishes his own tradition in a way no less troubling than the common Orthodox refusal to treat St. Augustine as the holy man that he was and that the Sixth Holy Ecumenical Council acknowledged him as being.  If some Orthodox were unwilling to acknowledge their Latin Fathers, they would be dismissing part of Church Tradition for no reason other than anachronistic cultural chauvinism that would have embarrassed even the most self-important Byzantine. 

I don’t want to make this into a Catholic-Orthodox throwdown, since I am perfectly well aware that rehashing arguments that have not been settled by wiser and greater men than I will not advance anyone’s understanding in the least.  This post is not an argument over the rival doctrinal and ecclesiological claims of the two confessions.  There are Orthodox converts who spend too much time lamenting the errors of Catholics and all kinds of other people, and this is not a healthy preoccupation for them to have.  However, the reality is that their misplaced enthusiasm tells us little or nothing about Orthodoxy. 

My point here would be that Ps.-Iamblichus (what a bizarre name for a Catholic to take as his pseudonym!) does his confession no credit at all in the way he has chosen to define “the soul of the West.”  If we are speaking figuratively here about a civilisation’s soul, as I assume we must be, it is very odd that he says that it doesn’t care what was done a thousand years ago, since surely what was done a thousand years ago has more than a little to do with defining what his church was and is and laid the foundations for all of the later accretions that he finds so important (e.g., lace and side altars).  Virtually no practices done today anywhere are precisely what the early Church did, and only a sort of odd liturgical literalist with no sense of the development of Orthodoxy liturgy, for instance, could insist on some absolute first-century standard precision.  Those who do so, if there are any such people, do so against the better judgement of Orthodox scholars and bishops.  Of course, no credible authority, whether episcopal or scholarly, argues for such an understanding of the practical life.  There are, however, liturgical reforms and liturgical deformations, and the same is true in every area of the life of the Church, and understanding the difference is part of spiritual and intellectual discernment.  Nonetheless, the attitude expressed here by Ps.-Iamblichus is odd, since it seems to suggest that he and the “soul of the West” are indifferent to adherence to traditions handed down and received from the Fathers.  This is not true for Catholics, and he does his church no great service by implying that Catholicism lacks in respect for traditional practices.

Presumably, Catholics do not “pray to statues,” which would be idolatry, but pray to the saints represented by those statues for intercession.  How a soul, which is any case a metaphor, can wear lace while also being “covered with side altars” is a metaphysical problem that I leave to better-trained philosophers.  Ps.-Iamblichus’ post gives the impression of a sort of panic that Orthodoxy is somehow sweeping over the land and taking over one Catholic church after another in waves and waves of mass conversions.  This would be a crazy thing to think, since Orthodox Christians in the United States make up one of the smallest religious minorities of all, while Catholics bestride the land like a colossus.  If Eastern Orthodoxy really were nothing more than the spiritual fad in western Europe and the Americas that he makes it out to be (which would seem to contradict Catholic teaching on the subject), why would there be any need to engage in such histrionics?  If Orthodoxy is just a passing fad that will soon disappear from “the West,” Ps.-Iamblichus has nothing to worry about and can return to wearing lace in his side altars in the contented knowledge that no cassocked converts chanting the Damascene’s Odes will be disturbing his Latin prayers to statues.

Some few of my coreligionists seem to believe they really are 19th century Russian peasants or 6th century Byzantine philosophes. They give their children unpronounceable names, dress in something approximating homespun, fumble with their comboschini while you’re talking to them, memorize Greek and Slavonic prayers they don’t understand, and worry about the spiritual lineages of obscure Balkan startsi. I exaggerate, of course (and certainly not everyone engaging in the above is necessarily a boutique religionist), but you get the idea. ~D. Ian Dalrymple

This is an interesting discussion, and at the conference last weekend there were some Orthodox converts talking about related problems that converts have.  There is always a tendency among and temptation for converts to attempt to make themselves more Orthodox and more ‘correct’ than St. Symeon Stylites, which would be a much less lamentable attitude if they demonstrated any hint of knowing how to do this successfully.  As one of my colleagues at the conference said, “Orthodox people should be normal people.”  By this I think he meant that they should not be engaged in massive affectations of eccentric hyper-piety. 

Now, on the other side, respecting and embracing the cultural and practical habits of the church that you enter into seem to me to not only be appropriate but a vital part of cutting your own will and becoming part of the community that has accepted you.  Most converts in my church do not groan under the use of Slavonic, but there are some who rebel against the use of traditional liturgical languages, couching their own discomfort in dubious appeals to mission.  Those who find Slavonic the most unsatisfying will be the first to cite the example of Sts. Cyril and Methodios as pioneers in encouraging linguistic diversity in the Church, all the while missing out on the substantial irony of this move.  I think those who want to push to Americanise their parishes and hope to create an American Orthodoxy mainly by making Orthodox people become more like Protestants are gravely mistaken and they are stripping their churches of those characteristics that make for the full experience of living Orthodoxy.  The Church is accommodating, but She is not a mystical catering service that will bring and fetch whatever strikes your fancy.  Those who go perhaps a little overboard in embracing the traditions of the Church, while perhaps missing something more important in the process, are at least approaching the Church with the right attitude, which is exactly the opposite of the religious boutique shopper who comes to pick up the latest fashionable item and who says things like, “Oh, the Jesus Prayer is very ‘in’ right now!”  Of course, no one actually says that, and few people consciously approach things this way, but any who find Orthodoxy ‘trendy’ or vaguely ‘New Age’ would be the ones I worry about a lot more (to the extent that I’m worrying about these things, which isn’t much) than the people who get as excited about blinis and the Slavophiles as they do about church services.  

The people who give their children “unpronounceable names” (though most Orthodox names are not really all that unpronounceable) are, I think, to be preferred to those who only grudgingly give their children proper baptismal names and then never use those names again.  If people are memorising prayers they don’t understand, that’s just bizarre.  How can they actually remember them if they don’t know what they’re saying?  What I mean to say is that those who take the time to memorise Otche nash in the Slavonic or Pater hemon in Greek should be able to learn without much added effort which foreign words go with which English words–the same would go for any other prayer.  Adherence to forms, while far from the fullness of experiencing Orthodox life, is a better beginning than a disregard for the forms.  It’s the same way with fasting or even something as great as forgiveness–you will never acquire the spiritual maturity of dispassion if you do not first begin with some minimal discipline, and you will never be able to truly forgive anyone unless you at least begin by uttering the words.  These are lessons in obedience and humility.  They are not ends in themselves, but exist to turn man away from himself and back towards God and towards his brethren.  Those approaching many of the things in the Orthodox Church as exotic accoutrements or as the definition of akribeia will probably end up not appreciating their proper role and their importance for cultivating in us a spirit of metanoia together with the desire to experience fully the abundant life that is in Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

And then I went to a different country and saw how different life could be if we didn’t have the values and the kinds of opportunities that exist in America. ~Mitt Romney

Somehow, I don’t think a two-year mission to France in the 1970s qualifies as an example of seeing how radically different cultural values change life for the worse.  What is this guy’s real problem with the French? 

The French have many extra holidays, short work weeks, subsidised farmers, artisanal bakers (ah, fond memories of MAPSS final exams are coming back now), abundant cheese production, the occasionally superb film along with a lot of junk, some glorious older architecture, a lot of hideous newer architecture, surprisingly powerful labour unions, a hideous technocratic elite and an absolutely destructive belief in equality combined with waves of poor Muslim and African immigrants, but they also have fewer single-parent families (though they also have far more cohabiting parents), they have an active pro-natal policy and have ruled out same-sex marriage, which the Mitt couldn’t even manage to get people in Massachusetts to do.  They have enough sense not to belong to NATO, which we still haven’t figured out after all these years.  In other words, it’s a very mixed picture with a lot on the debit side (just as is the case in this country), but what exactly was so terrible in Romney’s experience that he has made it a defining part of his outlook that France is his primary example of deprivation and misery?

The genius of FNB politics is that it can make those who diagnose it sound like barking moonbats. ~Rick Perlstein

Why would anyone say that comparing a Nixon commercial to Birth of a Nation makes you sound like a barking moonbat?  Isn’t the connection obvious to everyone?  I think we all remember how powerful the Klan was in Yorba Linda, don’t we?  Yeah.

Perlstein must have some kind of second sight–and way too much time–to come up with this crazy stuff.  This is the same guy who conjured up an elaborate vision of Romney sending coded signals to neo-Nazis and Anglo-Saxonists through his choice of venue at the Henry Ford Museum.  It apparently never occurred to Perlstein that Romney could simply be politically tone-deaf and a little bit dense when it comes to symbolism, but then he didn’t have the advantage of seeing Romney destroy his position in Florida with an ill-chosen invocation of Castro’s favourite slogan.  Perhaps what Romney was really trying to do in reclaiming that slogan for a “free Cuba” was to show his secret support for the continuation of the communist regime, or perhaps he was indirectly admitting to his own lifelong, hidden devotion to communism.   

It is actually possible to find Limbaugh tedious, vacuous and offensive without constructing baroque theories of coded boundary maintenance and cunning psychological manipulation of unconscious prejudices.  There’s nothing clever about what Limbaugh and Coulter do, and no need to dig deep to find out why it has an appeal.  For people who really loathe the politics, the personality and the general worldview of a John Edwards, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, any mockery will do.   

Perlstein says later:

The bonus: His [Nixon’s] charge also revealed liberals as shrieking and hypersensitive.

You see, no one would ever have gotten that idea on their own.

I’ve given Mickey Kaus a hard time lately (and I was so close to getting on bloggingheads, I’m sure), but he has an excellent post on the pro-amnesty media distortions in reporting on immigration policy debate (while also delivering a few more right hooks to Adam Nagourney’s bruised jaw).  We are all fairly familiar with these distortions, beginning with the misleading language that pro-amnesty folks get to call their position “comprehensive,” which implies that opposition to amnesty somehow fails to contend with the entire problem.  Restrictionists and enforcement-first folks are really the ones who take the problem at all seriously, while open borders advocates would like to wave a wand and declare that which has been illegal to now be legal.  Of course, the only thing comprehensive about any of the McCain or Hagel legislation on immigration is the comprehensiveness of the surrender of our borders and country. 

Kaus also makes the crucial point that the Pence plan isn’t a compromise plan, but a scam to sucker restrictionist and pro-enforcement members to back what will effectively be no better than amnesty.  For those who think they wanted Mike Pence to be in a position of leadership in the House, this is the main reason why you should feel relieved that he lost the leadership contest.

The reviews were so neo-con, so homophobic. They couldn’t just go see the movie without trying to over-intellectualize it. ~Zach Snyder

Some Corner readers are not pleased at this pejorative use of neocon, and no wonder.  Virtually every neocon has fallen down in prostration before 300, but the meme of neocon has spread so far and wide and has been associated with such hideous things that it has apparently managed to become the new ‘fascist’ as a catch-all for everything ugly and reprehensible in the world.  Perhaps where someone would have ignorantly said fascist before, now he says neocon.  That sounds about right to me.  Considering the actual neocons’ preference for labeling their enemies fascists and their absurd need to call jihadis Islamofascists, there is no more perfect poetic justice than their name becoming synonymous with the thing they allegedly hate.  When people begin referring to jihadis as Islamoneocons, then the circle will be complete.   

On a slightly related note, for those interested in a serious response to the travesty of history that is 300 Dr. Fleming has some wise words.

How much does Obama want to be considered a solid friend of Israel?  Enough to criticise his billionaire supporter Soros when he attacks U.S. Israel policy and AIPAC.  Meanwhile, Romney continues to battle back from his titanic gaffe among the Cubans.  Isn’t gutless pandering fun?  If this is how these candidates respond to the lobby groups at this early stage in the race, just imagine how they will jump through hoops for them if one of them gets elected.

Before January 31, I hadn’t flown in over two years, and since then I have already been on five flights and will be on at least six eight more before the end of spring quarter.  Friday I fly to Charlottesville for ISI’s conference on liberty, community and place, where I will be meeting several of my blogging and TAC colleagues in person for the first time.  This will be the fourth conference I have attended since October, and there are at least two more before the school year is over.  Perhaps for true conference-going veterans, this is a light load, but for me this is an unusually busy schedule.

While Ross is out of the country, I must protest on his behalf against his and Reihan’s adoption by Mark Satin as representatives of the “radical middle” from the right.  Ross and I may not agree on everything (indeed, I bet we actually disagree on all kinds of things that we don’t write about), but I would insist that he does not really fall under this designation and that it is an insult to associate him with something like this.  In fact, I doubt very much whether anyone (perhaps not even David Brooks!) deserves the dubious honour of being declared a radical one-world squish in quite this way.  Maybe Ross will disagree, but I don’t think he will.   

What is the “radical middle”?  This is part of the definition from Satin’s site:

It’s “radical” because it’s seeking solutions that are holistic and sustainable. It’s “middle” because it accepts that you can’t change people very much.

Well, okay, that’s pretty vague.  At first glance, this sounds a bit like traditional conservatism, but you quickly discover that these people are using words such as “holistic” and “sustainable” simply as foils against their opponents: whatever they are for is holistic and sustainable, and whatever people not of the “radical middle” support is neither.  More concretely, what is this guy talking about?  He is, in fact, mainly describing the pursuit of some sort of globalised nightmare mixed with the “pornography of compassion”:

• One-world citizenship.  A commitment to overarching human values and to a cosmopolitan identity as world citizens.
  
• Business and law.  A recognition that what’s going on in certain boardrooms and law offices today may be more important — and more promising — than what’s going on in the traditional political arena.
  
• Consciousness.  A recognition that values, virtues, attitudes, religion, and culture may have more to do with individual happiness — and social progress — than economic growth.
  
• One-world compassion.  A refusal to accept that the well-being of people in Rumania or Nigeria or Malaysia is any less important than the well-being of people in Arizona.
  
• Ambition, achievement and service.  In the Sixties it was a badge of honor to drop out.  The strategy backfired.  Today most socially committed young people are rushing to become doctors, lawyers, businesspeople, social workers, academics, and that is — or can be — a good thing.

Blech.  Of course, “values” and religion are more important than economic growth and saying that you support “achievement” and “service” is a bit like saying that you are for education and against crime (who exactly is arguing the point?).  When these obvious, basically non-controversial things are combined with all of this other nonsense it becomes a slightly more silly version of Sam Brownback’s already fairly silly worldview.  Throw in the odd reference to Unity08 and you have a real traveling circus of meaningless gestures towards political and policy reform.  Anything that finds its voice in “the words of Vaclav Havel and Tony Blair” (as the original statement had it) can only ever be the enemy of a sane and decent society.