If Fred Thompson gets in the race, he would likely vault to a strong third very quickly. ~Tom Bevan

Of course, that would be completely negated by the surprise December entry of Dan Quayle, unless, of course, Elizabeth Dole has the whole thing wrapped up by then.  You know what they say about Liddy Dole and national election campaigns, right?

Have I missed something?  When did the Cult of Thompson (not Tommy) become a powerful force that could conjure up massive political support from thin air?  Who actually believes that Fred Thompson’s candidacy could begin with this much support?  I’m not even sure that Fred Thompson could finish with that much support.   

Is this based on the ongoing polling of a Gingrich candidacy?  Even assuming that Gingrich’s ridiculous 10-15% polling is not simply a function of name recognition at this point, it doesn’t follow that a Fred Thompson or, to name a few other out-of-circulation Republican politicians, a John Engler or Gary Johnson (New Mexico governors could be all the rage in ’08!) is going to become a major contender for the nomination.  Since there is a concern for the GOP about their remaining competitive in the West, Alan Simpson is also relatively unoccupied at the moment, and who can forget the political dynamo that is Murkowski the Elder?  I think Bob Beauprez is also available to seize the moment, as is Fife Symington.  Sure, Fred Thompson argues for Libby to receive a pardon and raises money for his defense fund, but Fife has actually been pardoned after his convicton for bank fraud–top that!       

The Fred Thompson pre-announcement boomlet has actually become more laughable than the pre-announcement Hagel boomlet, if only because Thompson’s boosters are even more unrealistic about their candidate’s political chances.

Ryan Anderson at First Things‘ blog has a good post on Chris Hedges’ awful book, American Fascists, saying some of the same things I wrote in a post on the book about two months ago.  Besides the many obvious problems with Hedges’ strident, unreasonable attack on Christians, there is the more general problem of flinging around the word “fascist” as a term of abuse.  The problem is widespread and does not seem to be in any danger of going away anytime soon.  In that post, I wrote:

If I can overgeneralise a little, left-liberals are liberals who tend to see fascists all around them at home, while neocons are liberals who see fascists everywhere else in the world.  They are two sets of liberals who use the same kind of language, the same warnings, the same lame allusions to mid-twentieth century politics and international affairs and work from roughly the same assumptions about what constitutes the good, liberal democratic alternative.  All of them are preoccupied with finding and combating the new fascism and with preventing the rise and/or success of some supposed echo of Nazism; their shared moment, which they pretend they are always reliving, are the years just before and during WWII.

Politically, that may have been the right tactic, although I’d argue the Gingrich Revolution suggests otherwise. But substantively, it didn’t move the country very far forward at all. Its lasting legacy will be the elevation of counterintuitive argumentation and sardonic detachment in the press corps, but that’s a rather slight mark for a political ideology to make. ~Ezra Klein

It seems hard to disagree with Ezra Klein’s assessment of neoliberalism’s failure, which it certainly was from a progressive perspective.  If I were concerned about most of the things that progressives are, I would have to regard the age of neoliberalism as a long, unpleasant period of liberal collaboration in their own relative marginalisation.  But even from the more narrow perspective of advancing Democratic political fortunes, which I believe was always a central part of its rationale (by making liberalism more pragmatic and responsive to the voters the “paleoliberalism” of earlier decades had alienated), it is hard to see how it was not a colossal failure. 

The problem with the Democratic Party model was not so much its focus on interest group politics, but its increasing lack of interest in considering white ethnic working and middle-class voters to be important interest groups worth serving and its increasing tolerance for culturally radical views that these voters were never going to accept.  The era of neoliberalism was the era of general Republican political ascendancy across the nation (to which Clinton’s two terms were actually something of the odd exception).  With the collapse of the GOP’s power, neoliberalism stands not only discredited with respect to the policy views that it included but also stands discredited as the persuasion that was going to make the Democratic Party competitive again. 

Democrats became competitive again (admittedly in what was already going to be a very bad year for Republicans) when they stopped listening to the neoliberals in certain ways and tapped into opposition to the war, turned to economic populism and mobilised abiding popular resentments against the corporate and economic regime favoured by Red Republicans and New Democrats alike.  They also developed a certain flexibility that had been entirely lacking in previous years, so that they could run somewhat more conservative candidates in conservative districts, demonstrating some understanding of what it would take to become a fully national party once again. 

The one area where neoliberals have had a salutary effect on the Democratic Party is in their awareness of the cultural alienation of Middle America from the “values” of “Blue America.”  Unfortunately, even when a Harold Ford understands this and makes his credentials as a cultural conservative somewhat believable, he seems to think that reflexive militarism and support for the warfare state at home are necessary parts of the same cultural conservative package.  Jim Webb, meanwhile, would appear to bridge at least some part of this cultural divide without feeling obliged to kneel before either corporations or the foreign policy establishment.  For the neoliberals, there seems to have been a belief that there needed to be concessions in all three areas for their ideas to be politically viable.  They were deeply mistaken, and in their collaboration on the neoconservatives’ preferred policies on trade and foreign policy they have shown themselves to be not simply politically useless but also fundamentally wrong on the major policy questions of the day.

I believe the political currents in America are more unpredictable today than at any time in modern history. We are experiencing a political re-orientation, a redefining and moving toward a new political center of gravity. This movement is bigger than both parties. The need to solve problems and meet challenges is overtaking the ideological debates of the last three decades—as it should. ~Chuck Hagel

There are three things that bother me about Chuck Hagel’s statement.  First, he treats the debates of the “last three decades” as “ideological,” which would suggest to me that he thinks they have no bearing on the real world and properly should have nothing to do with government.  This seems to me to be rather similar to the treatment some journalists and most secular people give to the intersection of religion and politics: religion is this thing that is unconnected to “real life” that intrudes and creates a number of difficulties for those trying to “solve problems” or “resolve conflicts” or whatever it is that these people believe political work should achieve.  For them, religion is an ideology and religion is one of the main problems to be managed in any given society. 

We already know that Chuck Hagel has a low opinion of religion’s role in history, so it bears asking whether he thinks religious conservatives have had a net negative impact on American politics over the last three decades (why only three? why not six or four?)?   What “ideological debates” is he referring to, and what pragmatic policymaking does he think should have replaced them?

The second thing about the statement that bothers me is that it implies that no one in the last thirty years either tried or succeeded in solving any of the problems identified by voters as matters of concern, as if we have been living in a world of fantasy for 30 years from which Hagel (and Unity08?) will save us.  It as if anti-tax activists were not trying to solve the problem of excessive government and anemic economic activity.  Were/are some anti-tax people actually ideological about their commitment to lower taxes?  Yes.  Does that mean that a fight over the level of taxation is simply an “ideological debate”?  Obviously not.  The same might be said about any number of other policy debates over the last thirty years. 

The third thing that bothers me is this use of the word “ideological.”  For pragmatists, as Hagel likes to portray himself as being, any strongly held belief, no matter its nature or form, is ideological, while ideology is really properly defined by its abstract quality and its tendency to reduce complex realities to extremely simple yes/no questions.  This is the flashcard approach to political thought, and it has unfortunately been greatly encouraged by the rise of televised media and the constraints television will always put on any exchange.  (In theory, given their greater space, online publications and blogs should produce a higher level of discourse than the old ha yah na approach, but it is still quite rare to find.) 

Ideology is the stuff of party programs and bullet-point lists (Russell Kirk’s lack of a “programmatic” list of “actionable” items, which so annoyed Frank Meyer, was typical of the man who spoke of conservatism as anti-ideology); it is the lifeblood of the revolutionary and the activist.  Not everyone who argues from definition and invokes high principle is engaged in ideological debate, but to listen to Hagel you would think that the last thirty years has seen nothing but this sort of “ideological debate.”  It has certainly seen its fair share of ideology, but another crucial quality of ideology is the ideologues’ complete lack of interest in debate.  Conformity and submission are the goals of ideology, not persuasion, truth or understanding.  A debate implies at least some minimal engagement with the opposition and an exchange of views.  Ideologues can really only manage to recite slogans (sometimes these are slogans dressed up in very elaborate phrases) and issue denunciations.

But plainly voters judge presidential candidates first and foremost by party ID and general policy preferences, and secondarily by personality traits. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I do it too. Don’t let dumb poll questions persuade you otherwise. ~Kevin Drum

Drum is mostly right, though I think he overstates the importance of policy preferences for determining voting preferences.  Policy is a distant second to factors of identity.  This can be as simple as party identification, or it can be layered with many different symbolic elements in a candidate’s campaign to which voters respond.  An important thing to take away from this is that American electoral politics is actually “tribal” and it is based in voters’ sense of identity.  The candidate himself may add a personal appeal on top of this, or he can detract from it by having a very poor campaigning style, but a weak candidate appealing to the symbolism that can be embraced by the majority will usually win over a hyper-charismatic figure who lacks the symbolic connections to the voters.  

For example, I would guess that relatively few voters know, and even fewer care, about the details of Sam Brownback’s actual views on the Iraq war.  Many conservatives, aided by the tendentious Andrew Sullivan, as well as Republican and Romneyite bloggers, will now claim that Brownback is “antiwar” because he quibbles with the new battle plan, and they will actively oppose his candidacy because of this perception that he is somehow “weak” and “not one of us” on a question pertaining to the war.  Only indirectly is the actual policy question involved in the decisionmaking here.  The policy issue could be anything at all–what matters to these voters is not the substance of the issue, about which they know little or nothing, but the image of party loyalty or lack of party loyalty.  (Incidentally, this is also why McCain, who is the most reliably conservative of the Terrible Trio, for whatever that’s worth, suffers so much at the hands of activists.)  In other words, solidarity with other Republicans, the tribal “us,” is far more important in determining who is a “good” candidate on the war and who is lousy.  The response to Lieberman among progressives is exactly the same.

This is one reason why political efforts such as Unity08 will go nowhere and really should go nowhere.  Premised on a related false assumption that most voters don’t care about divisive issues and don’t agree with the two parties’ attention to their respective “bases,” Unity08 believes that the center is unrepresented in American politics and that the system is held hostage by the “extremists” in both parties.  This is patently false.  Ask a Republican voter if he thinks his party leadership is held hostage by restrictionist forces in the party “base” and watch him either laugh bitterly or weep in frustration.  Rarely has elite bipartisan consensus been more powerful and more stifling than it is today, and Unity08 diagnoses the problem as a lack of partisanship and difference! 

Rarely has our politics been more celebrity-centered, personality-driven and less issue-oriented than today, and yet the same boring “good government” centrists will probably hold up the poll results Drum mentions as proof that voters are concerned more with character than issues.  They just want a good guy!  It doesn’t matter what he believes!  Well, if it doesn’t matter to most voters what an honest candidate believes, something like Unity08 suddenly appears to be a credible operation. 

But even this claim about voters preferring honesty is clearly untrue.  No one in politics is more honest than Ron Paul, and virtually no one in the current presidential field is more shady than Giuliani, yet their respective standings in the polls do not reflect this supposedly deep desire on the part of voters for honesty.  For his supporters, Romney’s deceit is almost a political asset.  

These claims about issues and partisanship are all part of the centrist trick, part of which is to convince as many people as possible that a focus on issues can only be divisive and negative, both of which are supposedly bad and contribute to a “poisonous” political atmosphere.  For the centrist, no disagreement is so fundamental or real that it cannot be massaged into consensus, which means that they think that any strong disagreements must be manufactured and encouraged by party leaders for narrow advantage.  If you actually think that party and issues are not terribly important to voters, you will very easily fall into a habit of thinking that partisanship and strong disagreement over policy are the problems in our politics and you will start to think that these “problems” are things that the voters despise.  But you would be wrong to think this.

But to have a different position than the president’s on a war doesn’t qualify anyone to be an anti-war candidate. ~Chuck Hagel

You can say that again!  Oh, yes, Hagel did say it again just today in his non-announcement announcement.  It serves the arguments of antiwar commentators to turn Hagel into an antiwar candidate, and Republican hacks would like nothing better than to be able to frame every mild disagreement over tactics into a question of treason or loyalty, but neither interpretation does justice to the man’s actual views.  Justin Raimondo writes in another praise-filled column on Hagel:

Hagel insists he’s not an “antiwar” candidate, but this is precisely what I mean about the effective stereotyping of all opposition to the neocons’ foreign policy: critiques of the war not steeped in either pacifism or blame-America-first leftism are simply inconceivable.

It’s true that this stereotyping exists and has a pernicious influence on the debate, but that’s not what Hagel means when he says he’s not an antiwar candidate.  He means, “I am not opposed to this or, for that matter, any other war.”  Since he has never said that he does oppose the war and goes out of his way, as he did today, to reiterate that he doesn’t oppose it, it is odd that anyone could think that he does.  Like other critics of how the administration is waging the war, he quibbles with their methods, tactics and decisionmaking, but he does not object to the project itself nor does he really reject the foreign policy paradigm that is behind the war.  He doesn’t oppose interventionism and is not an anti-interventionist, so how can he inject anti-interventionist arguments into the debate? 

I appreciate Mr. Raimondo’s acknowledgement of the criticism that I and others have made about Hagel’s foreign policy and other views.  (Libertarians will be amused to see my perspective referred to as a libertarian one, which they and I would both heartily deny, but no matter.)  If he sees all these flaws and wants to embrace someone he calls a Republican “realist,” I can see how that makes a certain amount of political sense.  It was very good to see Mr. Raimondo write at length about Ron Paul in some of the rest of the column.  When Rep. Paul gets into the race, then we will have an antiwar candidate and more than just an antiwar candidate: a candidate who actually believes in adhering to the Constitution strictly, reducing the size and scope and power of government and defending liberty by actually defending it against its foremost antagonist, which is the central government, rather than airily talking about its defense while making the state ever more powerful through intrusive laws at home and unjust wars abroad.

I have no problem if some folks want to applaud Hagel’s criticisms and acknowledge that he has at least dissented a little bit from the party line, but let’s not get carried away.  I also have no problem if some want to support his candidacy, if and when it ever comes into existence, provided that they understand that he is not an antiwar candidate and represents pretty much standard-issue Republican Party political establishment views on everything from immigration to foreign policy to trade.  Chuck Hagel is a party man in the Party of Immigration, Imperialism and Insolvency, so Hagel supporters should consider themselves forewarned.  You may as well support Sam Brownback–you would be getting almost exactly the same thing.  When Hagel does do something really impressive, then we can start praising him.  Until then, the unseemly gushing over someone who isn’t even on our side in the debate and who makes a point of distancing himself from our positions is bizarre.  Rick Santorum has also dissented from the administration on foreign policy, albeit in the opposite direction of ever-crazier and more dangerous ideas, but his status as an “outspoken” critic alone shouldn’t recommend him to us.

And Allen Weh, the chairman of the New Mexico Republican Party, told McClatchy News that he twice sought Karl Rove’s help — the first time via a liaison, the second time in person — in getting David Iglesias, the state’s U.S. attorney, fired for failing to indict Democrats. “He’s gone,” he claims Mr. Rove said. ~Paul Krugman, The New York Times

I’m sorry, but it’s episodes like this that make me yawn when I hear about this scandal.  Trust me, nothing would please me more than to see Alberto Gonzales go down in flames from a fire that he started, and any self-inflicted scandal that could batter and humiliate this administration even more would be a great thing, but if New Mexico Republicans are complaining about a U.S. Attorney’s failure to indict New Mexico Democrats the complaints are almost certainly valid.  There almost certainly was election tampering in 2000 and 2004.  In some counties, the dead are regularly among the most reliable voters.

While it is supremely rich that Republican partisans now complain about the “politicisation of justice” when Libby is convicted for breaking the law, after the administration had just engaged in what an outside observer would probably regard as a much greater politicisation of justice, I have a hard time getting worked up over the fate of someone, such as Iglesias, who might very well have been overlooking the corruption of the Democratic machine in New Mexico if he wanted to have a future in state politics.  Going after Vigil is one thing, since his corruption was too egregious even for the Democrats in the state to ignore.  But if he went after the entire apparatus, he could forget about running for statewide office again.

Maybe that’s not the case.  Maybe Iglesias really is the principled, decent public servant that his friends say that he is.  Maybe Iglesias was pushed out because he refused to become a party tool and refused to engage in political witch-hunts.  In New Mexico, it is always safer to assume that there are a lot of corrupt pols who are getting off scot-free with a wink and a nod from the attorneys with local connections.  That is how New Mexican politics has worked for years, and I wouldn’t assume that anything has changed.

New Mexico has a culture of political corruption, and the Democratic Party has been the party in power for seven decades, which can only reinforce this culture.  It would not surprise me that there were many Democratic officials in New Mexico who deserved to be investigated and indicted for corruption, vote-rigging or other crimes.  We are coming off of one of the bigger bribery scandals in recent state history (a case, it is true, that Iglesias did bring to trial).  Attorney General Patricia Madrid was probably complicit in or indifferent to the abuses going on under her nose, and she actively meddled in the federal investigation by indicting federally immunised witnesses.  So far as I know, despite evidence that she was possibly personally implicated in aspects of the corruption cases under investigation, Iglesias never seriously looked into her involvement.  News reports to this effect probably hurt her politically and may have been the reason why she lost the race for Wilson’s House seat, but there were no real legal consequences for her because of these reports.  While her official intervention in the case might very well have been proof of Ms. Madrid’s now-legendary stupidity (she was famously flummoxed for about twenty seconds by the question of whether she supported raising taxes) rather than of her malicious intent to derail corruption prosecutions, it is representative of what passes for New Mexican government.

Since there were several other U.S. Attorneys removed at the same time, and probably for much the same reason, a pattern of improper politicisation does seem to emerge.  However, using examples from New Mexico is probably not the wisest thing for Democrats who want to portray this purely as an issue of Republican corruption.  Democrats in New Mexico do not want the national media crawling all over the state looking into the question of corruption.  Referring to New Mexico examples in this scandal only weakens and undermines the general case against Gonzales and the administration.

In reality, Obama provides a disturbing test of the best-case scenario of whether America can indeed move beyond race. He inherited his father’s penetrating intelligence; was raised mostly by his loving liberal white grandparents in multiracial, laid-back Hawaii, where America’s normal race rules never applied; and received a superb private school education. And yet, at least through age 33 when he wrote Dreams from My Father, he found solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against his mother’s race. ~Steve Sailer

The excerpt from Mr. Sailer’s long piece on Obama, which is sure to cause great agitation among Obama fans everywhere, gets to the heart of the strange appeal that Obama apparently has (I say apparently, because I confess that I still do not entirely understand how it works) and shows that appeal to be false.  To the extent that I do understand this appeal, it is that he somehow “transcends” racial divisions and antipathies by being the son of two races, thereby uniting difference, harmonising discord and smoothly blending together the two peoples.  For some people, this is not just a possibly nice idea, but a solution to the Fundamental Problem of America.  For people of a certain generation and conventional political views, the state of “race relations” bothers them so much that they are constantly forced to talk in vague, euphemistic terms about how this country is founded on ideas and propositions and by fulfilling the “promise” of those ideas and propositions all major problems of race relations will be solved.   

This ideal Obama does not have all the “baggage” of resentment politics that most white voters find so unattractive in the self-appointed spokesmen for the black community, and can at the same time somehow win the crowd at Selma more convincingly than any Northerner has ever been able to do while also winning the admiration of white pundits and voters alike.  But, as his memoir tells it, this image is not who Obama actually is, and thank goodness for that.  Let me explain.  The image that has been presented to the public about Obama is so entirely unreal and unbelievable, and I think this is an important part of why some people are so enthusiastic about his image and the candidacy built on that image.  It is because the image is so unreal and unbelievable that people who like what they see in it embrace it even more zealously: the viability of Obama’s candidacy, such as it is, is not proof so much of progress but of apparently widespread frustration with a lack of any meaningful improvement in the state of race relations.  If there was real, abundant comity in America between races, Obama’s candidacy–and the myth surrounding it–would be unnecessary and would not generate the kind of enthusiasm that it is generating in certain quarters.      

It must be that this image of the ideal Obama fills some need for a great many people.  Why they have that need, I am unsure, but many do seem to have an abiding need to find someone who will “bridge” the divide between races in this country.  In any case, it is worth being reminded that Obama is nothing like the transcendent unifier of all that some people desperately want him to be, because no living man is anything like that and, strangely enough, to view Obama in this way is to view him as something either more or less than a man.  This would be to give a politician either way too much credit or to do an injustice to a real, complex human being who happens to have dreadful leftist politics.  The first is folly, and the second is a serious mistake. 

This image is the product of the pouring of other people’s hopes and dreams into the empty vessel that Obama has been for at least these last many months since he started campaigning.  The media and his admirers have made him into a political sensation because they have made him into what they want him to be, rather than what he actually is.  He has obliged, because in doing so he has catapulted himself into contention for the highest office in the land, and the actual Obama is nothing if not ambitious.  Frankly, it would be much more interesting to know more about the real Obama, the one now so scrupulously hidden from view, and it is a shame that he wants to run on a platform of platitudes and promote uninspired, rehashed conventional left-liberalism.  Like Mitt Romney, who has for his part put on the mask he thinks he needs to wear to advance in GOP politics, Obama has invented himself anew (and he has been working on this new self since he came onto the national stage) and tried to sell himself as the great problem-solver, the figure who will “transform” the country and its politics.  Like Mitt Romney, he will fail when it becomes evident just how false this new self is. 

Given the man’s truly radical background, he might really shake up the political scene one way or another if he ran as himself.  But, then, of course, he would have no realistic chance of becoming President, and that, as we have discovered, is something that he has been aiming at for quite some time.  In the end, this widely-adored public image is the true inauthenticity of Barack Obama, because it is a product of the fantasy that the media would like to create about the progress and improvement in race relations that they apparently need to believe has happened.  It remains to be seen whether enough Democrats will tire of the fantasy before the primaries are concluded, but the fantasy does no justice to Obama’s political skills or the political realities of this country.  It is almost as if to say, “Obama would never have a chance if we did not weave some preposterous but highly attractive myth around him,” which is, in the end, a disservice to the man his admirers and boosters claim to support.

But the effort to marginalize, even demonize, Christian conservatives is unworthy of anyone who considers himself a member of the political movement that is trying to preserve the American tradition. ~Steven Warshawsky

Mr. Warshawsky makes many smart points, some of which I’ve touched upon in my numerous posts against skeptical and secular conservatives, and he represents part of what may be the beginning of a backlash against the hyperventilating of members of what Warshawsky calls the “atheist wing” of the movement.  The hyperventilating continues here.  Of course, in terms of total numbers, it is more like an “atheist feather” than a whole wing, but it is a useful designation as any (though it will be greeted with outrage by Sullivan, Vicar of Doubt and Defender of the Quite Possibly Untrue Faith).  Consider these sentences from near the beginning of Christopher Orlet’s piece in the New English Review:

But I, for one, am not so ready to concede that atheism is “against our reason.” Historically I have had the theologians on my side.

But this is absurd.  He hasn’t had “the theologians” on his side, historically or otherwise, since the entire enterprise of theology is the use of reason to make the ways of God known to man.  If believers assumed that reason was somehow naturally inclined to atheism, theology would never have come into existence in any religion.  It is precisely because Christian believers consider our Faith to be the most rational thing and in perfect agreement with the workings of reason that Christians took over and adapted Greek ontology, metaphysics and logic for the purposes of discoursing about the nature and works of God.  Mr. Orlet cherry-picks from Luther at his most anti-intellectual and somehow thinks he has proven his blatantly false claim, while ignoring the other two thousand years of Christian theology and philosophy.  Can the “skeptical” conservatives begin to see why their religious friends do not take their complaints very seriously?

What is one going to do with an article that begins so poorly?  I suppose we must soldier on, if only to get to the more ridiculous bits that come later.  Posing the question to Edmund Burke, whose quote about the innate quality of man’s religiosity opens the article, Mr. Orlet asks:

What then would Burke have made of his spiritual and intellectual heirs who have recently and publicly emerged from the closet of skepticism, and thereby suffered the enmity of the so-called fundies and theocons?

It is hard to say what Burke would have said, since the situation would probably have seemed very strange to him, but he might have said that it is not surprising that people so egregiously ungrateful to their ancestors and disdainful of the religious inheritance these ancestors received, added to and then passed on have been met with less than warm enthusiasm among those who believe that we have obligations to the dead and those not yet born.  This is where the Burkean conservative looks at the atheist and sees an impious fool–impious not really because he rejects God, but rather because he rejects the established customs and centuries-long traditions of his ancestors and thus cuts himself off from the contract binding past, present and future.  He separates himself from the great continuity and wisdom of the tradition, even though, as Kirk said, conservatives believe that the individual is foolish and the species wise. 

From Burke’s mildly religious perspective, he would probably marvel at these people, who are neither oppressed nor actually marginalised by anyone, complaining as if they have all suffered the fate of Giordano Bruno or Mennochio, the hero of Carlo Ginsburg’s cheese book.  Let’s be specific.  Who has “suffered the enmity of the so-called fundies and theocons”?  Mr. Orlet tells us:

We’re talking about a Who’s Who of conservative writers and pundits: Stephen Chapman, Theodore Dalrymple, John Derbyshire, Heather MacDonald, Andrew Stuttaford and James Taranto.

With the exception of James Taranto, who is obnoxious for any number of other reasons, I generally like the writing and work of all of these people.  Several of them have had articles appear in a magazine, The American Conservative, to which I have also contributed, and I am proud that TAC welcomes smart commentary from so many widely varying perspectives.  Thus Ms. Mac Donald and I have both ridiculed Mr. Bush’s vacuous “freedom is God’s gift to humanity” propaganda, but from entirely different perspectives and with somewhat different arguments.  The irony is that she does not seem to care that Mr. Bush may be simply using and exploiting Christians’ beliefs when he drags God into his awful foreign policy decisions.  Nor does she seem concerned that his conception of God is so far removed from that of traditional Christianity as to make the indictment against Mr. Bush irrelevant to her criticism of religious conservatives generally. 

When these writers make smart, well-formed arguments and present copious amounts of evidence to back up their claims, as they often will, they are among the better pundits in mainstream conservatism.  Mac Donald’s work on immigration, Chapman’s columns on civil liberties and Derbyshire’s blasts against Intelligent Design are breaths of fresh air after choking on the miasma of “nation of immigrants” pablum, panegyrics for the unitary executive and muddle-headed enthusiasm for pseudo-science that fill so much conservative commentary today.  Obviously, almost all of them are at prominent conservative or at least vaguely right-leaning journals and newspapers, where they have bigger and more prominent platforms than many a religious conservative, most of whom must be satisfied to eke out a living in the “provinces” of the movement.  It is like people living at the courts in Rome and Constantinople complaining that they lack the tremendous access to power and prestige afforded the monks at St. Sava’s in Palestine.  It is ludicrous, and I am frankly tired of hearing some of them whine about how the mean theocons have made their lives unpleasant.  I should emphasise that it has only been some of these people, as far as I know, who have complained at any great length about the perverse influence of religion on modern conservatism.  What have been the consequences?  Has anyone been fired from his or her position?  Has anyone even attempted to force them into the political or professional wilderness?  The answer to both of these questions is plainly “no.”   

But it should come as no surprise that at least some of these people have earned the enmity of “so-called fundies and theocons”!  For starters, they call their religious allies things like “fundie” and “theocon,” both of which are obviously disparaging terms intended to reduce intelligent positions with which they disagree into easily dismissed caricatures.  (Mr. Orlet has already shown that he prefers to keep his argument superficial and light as well by stating right away that he thinks theism and reason have historically always been at odds.)  Next, some will attack religious conservatives, often with great vehemence, as people who have somehow done terrible violence to the content of conservatism (as if it was religion, and not galloping ideological commitments to militaristic foreign policy and expansion of government, that had distorted or changed conservatism in recent years).  This is always a charged statement to make about any other conservatives, and it had better have something behind more than the fact that the critic is an atheist and doesn’t believe all this God-talk nonsense anyway.  It is unseemly that these skeptics and atheists have suddenly discovered their voice at the very moment when everyone and his brother seems to have a book out blaming Republican political woes and conservative disarray on the role of religious conservatives in the most dishonest campaign of scapegoating I have seen in many years.  It certainly doesn’t help when there seems to be an assumption among at least a few of the “skeptical” conservatives that their position is the natural and obvious one that conservatives ought to take, and that the connection with religion, or more specifically Christianity, is bad for conservatism.  This is not the plea of the persecuted dissident for toleration, but the demand of the ideological cadre for a takeover of the entire operation at the expense (obviously) of the religious-cons whose views they loathe so. 

The only trouble is that the religious-cons are not the wicked establishment that the heroic skeptical rebels are trying to overthrow.  Far from being a great and all-powerful force ruling over the movement, religious-cons are actually much more like the Kansan fellow behind a certain curtain who could put on an impressive show.  Much like religious conservative leaders, who enjoy boasting about their access and their influence far out of proportion to what they actually achieve in policy terms, he was able to convince people who were willing to believe in the display of power that he was much more powerful and mighty than he really was.  The heroic rebels are not so much engaged in a struggle to liberate the conservative mind as they are simply engaged in conservative fratricide as a way of pushing views they dislike even farther out to the margins than they already actually are.  It annoys the skeptical conservatives that many pundits and intellectuals pay lip service to Christianity or religious “values” as things important to the conservative movement, but what they never seem to grasp is that so much of this is nothing more than lip service.  It is weird how anyone could come away from the last six years and think that conservatism had been too much pervaded by the teachings of the Lord!

Mr. Orlet then goes on to say something that is categorically untrue:

This, and MacDonald’s earlier piece for The American Conservative, led to many loud catcalls for her excommunication from the communion of conservative Republicans.

One need only go back through the NRO archives to prove this false.  Many loud catcalls?  From whom?  How many?  How loud?  Mr. Orlet doesn’t say, and no wonder.  The response to her article was so low-volume that you could hear a door hinge squeak.  NR, ever that engine of ideological purges, bent over backwards to appease, flatter and butter-up Ms. Mac Donald.  Every criticism was prefaced by a paragraph of how much the critic liked and admired Ms. Mac Donald, and how she was just the best.  Her, I’m sorry to say, rather commonplace and predictable objections to revealed religion were treated as if they were the utterances of one of the Muses herself.  You see, there are deviationists on important things, such as the Iraq war, and they must be roundly denounced in the strongest possible way (“unpatriotic,” etc.), but those who deny the existence of God are typically sporting folks from the metropole with whom one can laugh about the mad evangelicals over cocktails.  There’s no need to turn your backs on people who reject the Creator, but those who reject the empire are clearly a bunch of lunatics. 

It’s true, most of her interlocutors there and elsewhere disagreed with her claims and her atheism (no surprises there), but far from calling for her “excommunication” many of the participants in the conversation almost seemed anxious to accelerate her on the path to conservative sainthood, so great was their praise of her.  Rather than simply ignoring her, as might be done to those whom conservatives wanted to shun and drive out, all of us from the various conservative factions engaged with her arguments; I found the arguments severely wanting, but there was never really any question in my mind of declaring her persona non grata (as if I were in any position to declare anything of the kind!).  I did question how it was possible to be a conservative while being an atheist, and I think it is a legitimate question, but when even Santayana makes it into The Conservative Mind I am inclined not to harp on the question as much as I could. 

Never has a dissident received a less stinging rebuke and correction than Ms. Mac Donald did at the hands of the First Things and National Review crowd.  This kid glove treatment is striking for what it said about the participants themselves and their perceptions of what was at stake in responding to Mac Donald: while some of her respondents are religious people, they seem to have endorsed the idea that numerous conservative pundits and intellectuals are not and they concluded that they risked alienating large numbers of these folks if they savaged Mac Donald in the way that they would denounce and belittle traditional conservatives talking about agrarianism or antiwar conservatives.  For them, Mac Donald represented a large number of their current allies, while other dissidents from consensus positions within the movement about, say, corporations or interventionism were of no consequence and could be run off without a second thought.  Going against God, or tolerating those who did, was easy; going against corporations or the foreign policy establishment would have required real conviction. 

While I opened up, figuratively speaking, with both barrels against Ms. Mac Donald’s spurious claims about the nature of modern conservatism (in which there is, she says, a “crippling” reliance on religion) and also against her atheism, I do not recall urging her anathematisation.  Indeed, if pressed I suspect Mr. Orlet will have a hard time coming up with even a handful of catcalls, loud or otherwise, calling for Ms. Mac Donald to be expelled from “respectable” (or even marginal) conservative company.  She is in no danger of any expulsion, because, as she herself has said, probably half of the pundits covertly share her views, thus proving that the core of her complaint about conservatism (i.e., it is too religious) is unfortunately based on the most superficial analysis of a few rhetorical and symbolic nods to religious voters.  The martyrology of Heather Mac Donald will have to wait for another day.

Mr. Orlet says in his closing remarks: “Conservatives have, in a sense, made a deal with the diety [sic]…”  But we know this to also be untrue, since Mike Huckabee has been languishing in the polls for weeks.

But Catholics are big on the whole hierarchy thing. ~Jonah Goldberg

It’s a right-wing shibboleth that Jesus’ phrase “judge not lest ye be judged” should be ignored, because after all it’s only an excuse people use for not doing what we (the good people, the religious in-group) know to be the right thing. ~Mike Potemra

Yes, as you can see, just as Sullivan and Sager have told us, Christianity has deeply pervaded the upper echelons of the conservative movement and suffused conservative pundits’ every thought.  What insight!  What profundity!  Ahem. 

In fairness, Goldberg was more or less defending the role of Catholic teaching authority against the burblings of Hannity, who has apparently decided that some elements of Humanae Vitaeare less important to him than others and feels compelled to say as much publicly.  As Hannity sees it (see here for video), this is okay because he went to seminary and studied Latin and theology (in fact, these are excellent reasons why his public views should be scrutinised even more closely and held to an even higher standard, since he theoretically ought to know better than the average layman why he should not publicly contradict church authority).  In his fairly disrespectful exchange with one Rev. Thomas Euteneuer, Hannity manages to distinguish himself as being even more loathsome than we already thought he was.  Watch as he actually equates contraception with natural birth regulation.  For his next trick, he will equate aggressive war with self-defense.  Oh, wait, he’s already done that one. 

Perhaps the most appalling thing, besides flinging scandal in the face of a priest as a means to diminish church authority (Donatist, thy name is Hannity), is the way in which Hannity rationalises his support for contraception as being the lesser of two evils, which suggests that his lessons in moral theology at whichever seminary he allegedly attended did not take.  It is “better” to use contraception rather than have an abortion only in a purely utilitarian sort of analysis, which at once degrades the people involved and embraces an act contrary to nature by accepting that the only alternative to this is another evil.  At once, Hannity affirms his contempt for created nature, his lack of discernment and his effective denial of the realistic possibility of the cultivation of continence among non-Catholics, which seems to this non-Catholic to contradict the very idea of ius gentium. 

Mr. Potemra’s comment was also a strange one worth noting, since I don’t assume that it is a “right-wing shibboleth” that we ignore Dominical commands.  If there were such a shibboleth, it would need to be destroyed right now.  It also has nothing to do with whether “we” are “the good people” and it is not, in fact, what “we” know that matters, but rather it concerns what the authoritative interpretation of Scripture shows us to be the truth, which we Christians are in turn called to declare to the world.  When conservatives object to the flippant invocation of this verse, they are objecting to people using it precisely the way in which Hannity was using it: as a shield against doctrinal and moral correction.  It is remarkable that a verse that implies that God alone is Judge–which is in its way a terrifying and humbling thing to understand–can be taken as a kind of “get out of jail free” card for sinners, when its plain meaning is entirely the opposite.  If God alone is Judge, and if He has called us to be perfect and if He has given us the Way to perfection, this makes lapses and errors even more serious than they would be otherwise.  Fortunately, God is all-merciful at the same time, but then that mercy is found in exhortation, reproach, command and chastisement.  So, too, are those entrusted with the care of God’s people called to love them just as God loves them. 

When the verse is coupled to exhortations to not be “judgemental” (which is code for accepting anything and everything), it is the people who hide behind that verse to defend their errors and lapses who abuse or ignore the actual content of the verse.  The verse’s meaning is at least twofold: it drives home the point that God is Judge, and it is not your place to judge the state of another man’s soul or his righteousness (or lack thereof), while also inculcating a sense of humility that every man should be concerned first with putting out the fire in his own house before he begins quibbling over his neighbour’s broken windows.  Distinct from all of this on the one hand is indifference to sin and error, which most of the people who invoke this verse defensively possess, and moral discernment, which is something to which all are called to practice.  Offering a brother reproof in a spirit of charity or challenging a member of your confession who openly contradicts the Faith in public is not only entirely different from passing judgement on him, but the latter in particular is aimed both at the correction and lifting up of the fellow Christian who has fallen into the ditch and at the instruction of the rest of the flock who may be tempted by the bad example set by the one who has fallen into an error.