The Romneyites and everybody else seem to be terribly annoyed with the Associated Press for running a story about Romney’s ancestors.  When the same evil media run stories on Barack Obama that talk up the fact that he is the “son of a Kenyan goat-herder,” no one assumes that they are hit pieces or attempts to destroy him, even though one might think that referring to someone as the “son of a goat-herder” could hardly be considered complimentary.  Instead, people assume that this is what journalists call “reporting.”  But there is nonetheless a lot of whining about how this is part of the nefarious media conspiracy to get the “conservative” candidate (the language of the article is appaarently “ominous”!), and other moaning about how this is unfair coverage (“disgraceful hit piece”).  Here’s Philip Klein:

But to cite a sermon given by his great-great-grandfather almost a century before he was born in a desperate effort to associate him with the stereotypes people have of his religion, is really a new low for the media.  

But it isn’t a “desperate attempt to associate him with the stereotypes people have of his religion.”  First of all, it doesn’t associate him with those stereotypes.  It plainly states that he, Mitt Romney, has nothing to do with polygamy except through the most distant genealogical connections.  The story does yeoman’s work in exploding those stereotypes and showing them to be a thing of the past as far as the LDS church is concerned.

If I were Mitt Romney, I would be thrilled.  I’m absolutely serious.  Maybe it’s because I don’t like Romney the candidate and I have my strong reservations about a Mormon presidential candidate that I seem to be the only one to see this, but I think this story is great for Romney.  The less Romney says about the specifics and history of his religion, the more he reinforces misunderstandings and prejudices in the public.  Suspicious people begin to think, “He doesn’t want to talk about it because there is something embarrassing or scandalous about his religion–he has something to hide!”  Except that he doesn’t really have anything to hide, but he is acting as if he does.  Rather than proudly talking about it and displaying it as part of the “lustre of our country,” he treats it as if it were something that could damage him.  Maybe he is right to not want to talk about it, since I think opposition to a Mormon candidate goes deeper than misunderstanding (the people most fervently against a Mormon candidate believe they understand Mormonism only too well), but if he is to have any chance of overcoming the tremendous obstacles in front of him he would be better served to say a lot more about it. 

Part of the reason many people are wary of a Mormon candidate is that Mormonism is strange and unfamiliar to them, and every story that makes it seem less strange and more normal the better it will be for Mormon candidates nationally.  It may be that some people know plenty about Mormon doctrines and find them simply unacceptable in a candidate, and these people he will be unable to persuade in any case, but quite a few people probably know next to nothing about Mormonism.  The AP is showing the public that whatever may have happened in the past remains firmly in the past.  This may have the effect of improving Romney’s standing with many voters, in which case Romney critics like me should be the ones complaining about the AP’s obvious pro-Romney bias.  Of course, it would be silly to complain about that, just as it is silly to complain about the conspiracy to take down Mitt Romney.     

If Romney were as smart as his supporters think he is, he would make a big deal about this change in Mormon practice and he would turn it to his advantage.  How could he do that?  By using this family history to reinforce his own understanding of the importance of traditional monogamy for society.  He could say, “As someone whose family members experienced the suffering that other kinds of unions inflict, I am convinced that the best and only marital bond is a lifelong monogamous union between man and wife.”  This has the potential to offend some Mormons, who could see it as an attack on their church’s early leaders, but the upside for Romney here wikth other voters is tremendous.  He could make arguments that monogamy is better for women than polygamy, and use that as a springboard for arguments that various alternatives to traditional monogamy are worse for women than marriage.  He could potentially gain tremendous credit as a cultural conservative in this way (or he would if he were not a monumental fraud of a conservative).  Since it is often an argument against same-sex “marriage” that recognising such unions legally would pave the way for other kinds of “marriage,” such as polygamy, Romney could take this connection up and argue very forcefully that his background as a Mormon gives him special insight into understanding why anything other than the monogamous union of man and woman is wrong.  As the ultimate venture capital turnaround artist, he could take the tremendous political liability of his Mormonism and turn it into something of an asset.  Instead, he chooses to say nothing and play the “separation of church and state” card, which goes over like a lead balloon with his target audience.    

Journalists, doing their jobs as reporters of facts, are explaining things about present-day Mormonism, which is explicitly contrasted with past practices, that many people in this country apparently do not know.  The article gives a quick synopsis of the history of polygamy in Mormonism, which makes it clear that it is no longer accepted.  The story also states quite clearly that for three generations Romney’s family has had nothing to do with the practice.  Anyone who was skeptical of or hostile to Romney because of the false understanding that polygamy remains a modern LDS practice will come away realising that he was terribly wrong and ignorant.  This can only help Romney’s candidacy with poorly informed voters who don’t know very much about Mormonism.  

How does the AP story begin?  Like this:

While Mitt Romney condemns polygamy and its prior practice by his Mormon church [bold mine-DL], the Republican presidential candidate’s great-grandfather had five wives and at least one of his great-great grandfathers had 12. 

This is at least as interesting as the “Thurmond’s ancestors owned Sharpton’s ancestors” story.  It’s a little weird, yes, but it’s part of the story of American history, and it makes for interesting reading.  This knocks down a prevailing misconception that the LDS church continues to allow and/or mandate polygamy and makes clear that Romney rejects the practice in the first sentence.  The nefarious media conspiracy will have to do a lot better at burying this lede if they want to destroy Romney’s candidacy.  (Of course, if the media wanted to destroy Romney’s candidacy, they need only to ignore him, since publicity is his best ally right now.)

The AP is doing the educating about Mormonism that he cannot afford to do while also running a presidential campaign.  He can apparently not be bothered to do it, and finds it annoying to have to talk about his religion at all.  The story manages to do several things: talk about something interesting and unusual (Romney’s polygamous ancestors) while clearly saying that Romney has nothing to do with his ancestor’s practices or beliefs in this area.  It is like putting up a big, blinking sign that says, “Romney’s own Mormonism isn’t nearly as strange as some of you people probably think it is!”  Romney should send the authors of the piece a fruit basket or something of that sort as a gesture of his appreciation.

Among other issues, Paul also voiced support for abandoning the war on drugs, allowing gold and silver to serve as legal tender, repealing the Seventeenth Amendment” which lets voters directly elect U.S. Senators” and ending the practice of withholding taxes from one’s pay. Instead, taxpayers would have to actually write checks to pay their taxes, a move Paul figured would soon end what he called the present tax-and-spend philosophy of government. ~The Politico

What baffles me, though,  is why Buchanan would ever write such a thing when his own American Conservative magazine has long accused anyone — as Buchanan did Friday — of questioning European resolve and Western European solidarity, as being neocon conspirators and Israeli apologists. ~Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson, yes, Victor Davis Hanson had something positive to say about Pat Buchanan.  Naturally, he couldn’t leave it at that, so he dropped in this final remark, which managed to demonstrate just how poorly he understands the problems of foreign policy today. 

I’m sure it does baffle Hanson that Mr. Buchanan argued that European dependence on U.S. military protection has gone on for too long and has encouraged all the wrong habits in European politics, but I will try to explain.  This argument is entirely consistent with the general view of non-interventionists, America Firsters and some realists who see that many of the nations where we still have large military deployments and defense commitments no longer require us to shield them against foreign threats.  Related to our critique of American interventionism and hegemony is the recognition that many of our allies and satellites no longer need our military protection.  In the late ’50s, continuing to protect South Korea was quite sensible, but by the late ’90s there was no longer the same need for an American deterrent.  Mr. Buchanan’s argument is entirely consistent with our other arguments that, for example, South Korea and Japan can provide for their own defense out of their wealth and their capacity to research and develop advanced technology. 

It is also entirely consistent with the anti-NATO position that many of us have been advancing for years.  NATO is obsolete and should be abolished, and the continuation of the alliance for purposes other than joint defense of western Europe has not only contributed to horrible policy decisions (e.g., Kosovo) but has contributed to the alienation of Russia and the general worsening of relations between America and Europe, since the latter is not going to pull its own weight as long as we keep doing most everything for Europe.  What makes far less sense is to be at once in favour of American hegemony and “leadership” in world affairs and critical of allies that do not have very large military budgets.  If you assume that America should prevent the rise of any potential rival superpowers, as the National Security Strategy of 2002 dictates, keeping Europe down, so to speak, and militarily dependent on us is the thing to do.  If you think that other nations should take care of their own defense and America should only concern itself with its legitimate and just interests, eliminating European dependency on American arms by pulling out of Europe and dismantling NATO makes perfect sense.  Wanting Europe to build up its military forces while also keeping it subordinate is the position that makes no sense at all.  Naturally, that is the position held by the anti-Europeans and, so it would seem, by Hanson as well.  

It is true that the extreme European dependence on American military protection has not only encouraged unrealistic, unsustainable priorities in their domestic politics, but has consequently encouraged the mentality in anti-Europeans, such as Hanson and many other “mainstream” conservative pundits, that Europeans are effectively our tributaries and vassals who must follow our lead in foreign policy in every way.  That is why there is almost never any rational response on the American right to European criticism of Israeli actions, which sometimes actually deserve criticism (shocking, but true!), but always an invocation of the old chestnut of “European anti-Semitism.”  It is also no surprise therefore that the most fervently pro-Israel pundits tend to be the most aggressively anti-European.  

The insane anti-Europeanism of the last five years, which reached its most fevered pitch in 2002-03, has been a product of this extraordinary and unhealthy imbalance of hard power between two roughly economically comparable parts of the Western world, as American supremacy has engendered resentment of European “ingratitude” and fostered European resentment of American hubris.  We paleos have objected to anti-Europeanism because it has generally been an irrational, chauvinistic response of hegemonists who believe that America is “owed” servile support from its allies, which only underscores how unhealthy the entire structure of American military and political hegemony really is.  Doubting French or German “resolve” in 2002-03 usually involved making insulting references to a lack of a French martial spirit (this about the people that routinely and successfully waged war for centuries before the United States existed) or ignoring actual German support for antiterrorist operations in Afghanistan, Djibouti and elsewhere.  We objected to doubting European resolve in the case of the Iraq debate because, for one thing, the drive to invade Iraq really had nothing to do with collective security or the security interests of America or Europe.  European resolve to aid us in fighting Al Qaeda was never actually in doubt, but because neocons and their hangers-on made Iraq the litmus test for allied solidarity their resolve and solidarity were suddenly questionable because some refused to go along with what was always a terrible idea.  European opposition to the invasion did not demonstrate their lack of resolve or weakness, but instead usually demonstrated their superior judgement and good sense.  That has to be something that really burns up the people who enjoyed spitting in the face of our ancestral countries–those Europeans, whom they had derided so much and so often as pathetic and worthless, had possessed more foresight and wisdom than they had.  

It is not possible to accomplish anything for very long with other sovereign states if our government always assumes that European deference and obedience are virtually automatically required for every major policy decision.  Even if the policy is a good one, other states will resist being dictated to on the principle that they do not answer to Washington.  We paleos have objected to anti-Europeanism because it has insisted on an unrealistic subordination of allied interests to what our government perceives to be our own, and because it has shown a sickening disrespect for the nations that belong to the heart of our common civilisation.  There should be some more basic respect for our European cousins because we are part of the same civilisation, even if many of the people in those countries also fail to appreciate and defend the heritage of their civilisation, be it religious or cultural.  

Anti-European hate is particularly destructive and ultimately harmful to American interests, as it encourages the Europeans to go into international political opposition against us at a time when both they and we can least afford it.  Multipolarity on our terms is one thing, but a multipolar world where all the other poles have joined together against us is something else entirely.  Europe’s failure to stem the tide of large migrations and settlements of Muslims, to take one example, will have catastrophic effects on our future relations with European states, but by fostering anti-Americanism through the maintenance of the unhealthy relationship of hegemon and servant and through crude displays of anti-Europeanism we will be helping to push them into the embrace of the people who will destroy them.  It is bizarre that those who are often most animated about the threat from jihadis are also the ones with the least understanding that we need the Europeans, including the Russians, to fight them, but Hanson and the neocon anti-Europeans and Russophobes have been preoccupied for years with bashing Europe and provoking Russia.   

When American Conservative writers and editors have objected to vilifying European allies, especially over extremely bad policy decisions such as invading Iraq, they do not engage in a full-on apology for everything that Europe is and does.  In our cultural and religious attitudes, paleos are more removed from the European elite than are many secular Republicans, so we hardly share the lifestyle or outlook of many Europeans.  In political matters, most of us on the paleo side are far more hostile to the European Union and all its works than are many others on the American right, who seem to think that its swallowing up sovereign nation-states into a bureaucratic federation is not terribly worrying (of if some do find it worrying they don’t talk about it very often).  The only people who loathe the works of Brussels more than we do are probably the Flemish nationalists.  We are consequently much more sympathetic to anti-federalist and nationalist forces that try to resist the annihilation of these nation-states, while the “respectable” American right is only too happy to join in the chorus denouncing any opponents of the Union as bigots, racists, etc.  (This is true whether the opponents of the Union are what they are accused of being or not–again, it is striking the right pose that matters here.)  For some of the same reasons that we criticise the EU, we are skeptical of or hostile to “free trade” arrangements that diminish American sovereignty and control over our trade policy, while certain advocates of open borders and free trade on the American right are fundamentally more in agreement with the EU model.  Being critical of Europeans is not the same thing as reflexive anti-Europeanism, but then people who usually cannot distinguish between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism would not be able to understand that very well.   

TAC‘s writers have usually been advancing this same general view of the need to end excessive American commitments overseas when they reject anti-Europeanism.  We argue for ending these commitments because we believe that it is no longer in the American interest to keep bearing almost all the costs for other rich countries’ defense.  It is also true that this defense has had an enervating and debilitating effect on European foreign policy views.  Take away that luxury of a relative lack of responsibility, and Europeans would probably become much more interested in confronting regional threats on their own, which would relieve America of taking up those responsibilities as if they were our own.  We want Europe to shoulder its own defense so that America can devote her resources elsewhere.  What exactly is the hegemonist right’s reason for wanting a European military build-up?  Is it to have European soldiers serve as the Gurkhas of their empire?  It doesn’t really make that much sense when you get right down to it, but I suppose the effect of freeing up a few more brigades from guard duty in Europe and Asia would allow for a few more invasions than would otherwise be possible. 

Hanson’s analysis in this post seems to allow for two options: you can be polemically and hatefully anti-European or you can never say anything critical of Europeans.  To be against anti-Europeanism while also criticising European policy choices is simply beyond his understanding, and no wonder.  Happily, the editors at TAC and paleos generally are able to consider problems of foreign policy in all their complexity and can offer analysis that describes the flaws of allied states without spouting off with self-righteous lectures about their perfidy and moral corruption.  We think getting the policy right for the American interest is actually more important than striking the right ideological and moral pose, which is why it is purely accidental that Hanson has managed to come to the same conclusion about European dependence than Mr. Buchanan has

Apparently, they never even get that far:

The women of Tecalpulco, Mexico, want the U.S. government to enforce its immigration laws because they want to force their husbands to come back home from working illegally in the United States. 
They have created an English-language Web page where they identify themselves as the “wetback wives” and broadcast their pleas, both to their men and to the U.S. government. 
“To the United States government — close the border, send our men home to us, even if you must deport them (only treat them in a humane manner — please do not hurt them),” it reads. 
In poignant public messages to their husbands, the women talk about their children who feel abandoned, and worry that the men have forsaken their families for other women and for the American lifestyle.

Er, so how does this fit into the “compassionate conservative” mantra exactly?  Where exactly are the happy, pious, family-oriented deeply Catholic Republican-voting families of Wall Street Journal myth?   

This news item is such a shock to the system of some open borders advocates that it seems to be shaking their faith in creative destruction itself.  But what did Kudlow think “creative destruction” meant?  It doesn’t refer to the rough-and-tumble world of competition, hostile takeovers and “downsizing” alone, but to the social and other effects of “rational” economic decisions (what the economists and their followers like to euphemistically call “externalities”).  It refers to the uprooting of communities, the scattering of peoples, the division of families, the neglect of children, the disregarding of solemn vows, the ruin of the landscape, the perversion of man’s labour.  It is not too much to say that one cannot be a social conservative, as Kudlow describes himself, if he is effectively indifferent to these things or positively in favour of them.  Perhaps even someone as rabidly pro-business as Kudlow could be persuaded that mass immigration is bad in many ways for the social fabric of the home countries and the host countries alike?  I won’t be holding my breath, but it is interesting that this news seems to have caught him off guard and actually given him pause.  If the real effects of mass immigration can make Kudlow stop and think, the open borders lobby may be headed for a fall.   

Incidentally, it doesn’t help his credibility that Sam Brownback shows absolutely no awareness of the fundamental contradiction between his socially conservative views on the family and his laissez-faire approach to immigration policy.

I must be doing something right.  One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers has declaredone of my recent posts, to which Sullivan linked, to be “conservative humbug.”  Unfortunately, in his haste to declare my view humbug he seems to have read in that post a claim that I did not make and don’t actually believe.  The Sullivan reader writes:

I find it difficult to stomach this kind of conservative humbug, that Modernity is anti-spiritual. Western society is the mechanism that allows groups like the Pentacostalists (and cosmos-loving atheists, and Wiccans, Buddhists, et al.) to exist. It is the ground in which they survive. What seems to irritate some conservatives is the fact that they cannot impose their will upon all of society and poison the soil which succors them. If anything, and the USA is the exemplar of this, modern Western society is besotted with spirituality. 

You cannot drive down a street in the greater Los Angeles area, a zone of the country supposedly noted for its secular ways, without encountering churches, synagogues, mosques, reading rooms, meditation centers, Scientology storefronts and other physical manifestations of the “higher” realms. Spiritual desert, bah! It’s an earthly garden of a thousand blooms.

I have had many things to say against modernity and even more against those who think there is virtue in modernism in most areas of life, but one thing I have not said and do not really hold is that “Modernity is anti-spiritual.”  Modernity is anti-traditional and possibly is inherently anti-Orthodox, but it is certainly not anti-spiritual.  I also don’t think I ever used the phrase “spiritual desert,” nor did I imply the existence of such a desert.  There is a spiritual desert in this country, but it is assuredly broken up by numerous oases.  As spiritual deserts go, it is much better than many.  Still, I defy someone to find anything remotely related to such claims in the post in question.  

What did I say?  I referred on numerous occasions to immorality and cultural decadence or, in one place, to “rampant immorality” and in another to “trashy popular culture.”  Perhaps the reader will be able to persuade me that Los Angeles (or any other major metro area) does not have more than its fair share of all these things, but I doubt it.  Perhaps the reader will disagree with what traditional Christianity would deem to be immoral, but that is an entirely different question.  What did I want to see as the remedies?  “Moral renewal” and “cultural regeneration” were my exact words.  Of course, those phrases call forth a number of questions (whose culture? what morality?), but since I took it as a given that my readers would understand that I meant the regeneration of a traditional Christian culture and a renewal of traditional Christian morality I did not go into greater detail about what I meant. 

Modernisation does not automatically equal secularisation and “de-spiritualisation” as such.  Islamic revivalist movements of the last three hundred years, Christian fundamentalist movements of at least the last one hundred years or so, Tenri-kyo and Soka Gakkai originating in 19th century Japan, the enthusiasts for Hindutva in India, Mormonism, and the “progressive” Christianities of liberation theology and feminist theology, to take a few well-known examples, are all products of the modern age and are themselves modern.  “Modernity” is not all of one thing or all of another, but refers broadly to a mentality of self-determination and an orientation towards the self, and it also refers to a culture in which religious and political authorities have been stripped of their traditional claims to deference and obedience.  This is certainly not an exhaustive definition of an extremely complex subject.  Many modern religious movements, even those that stress quite seriously their fidelity to religious tradition, are based on the fairly anti-traditional assumption that it is acceptable to redefine, reorganise or refound a religious traditon.  In modern cultures, change and innovation often possess a predominantly positive meaning, such that even traditionalists and fundamentalists find themselves using the language of newness, dynamism, and choice, much to the annoyance of people like me.   

Obviously, critics of pluralism and ecumenism have no doubt that the modern world is beset by a rather staggering number of religious and other beliefs.  Some of these critics regard this great number of beliefs as the evidence of the inherent undesirability of pluralism, while others are content to stake their own claims in a pluralistic society.  Since I actually tend to lean towards the latter, one will be hard-pressed to find in me much of an enemy of the wide variety of religious expression in this country.  As an Orthodox Christian, I do not regard the claims of these other religions as true claims, and I think it is a crucial part of religious discourse in this country to state these oppositions and contradictions as flatly and plainly as possible.  Ecumenism offends me, for example, to the extent that it declares doctrine to be irrelevant to the proceedings and sees inherited truths as barriers to union to be removed rather than serious obligations that must be paid the proper respect.  Today being the Sunday of Orthodoxy, it is rather fitting that there is an opportunity to note the freedom afforded to the Orthodox in this country to gather for services today for the  reading of the Synodikon to remember and re-enact the condemnations of many old heresies (Demetrios of Lampe, this means you!), and to acknowledge that it is far better that the Orthodox are free to do this in a country that is overwhelmingly non-Orthodox.       

Intellectually sloppy models, in which we ignore truth and privilege some supposed underlying unity of all religious beliefs (as Romney would very much like to do), do seem to appear in the modern age with far greater frequency than in previous periods in human history.  This is not because these fundamentally ecumenist models are any more compelling than they have been in the past, but because it was not until the Enlightenment’s attempted emptying of religious doctrines of their claims to being the embodiment of absolute truths that it was even conceivable that vying religious truth-claims could be reduced to the category of opinion.  To the extent that religious doctrine and traditional religion in the modern age truly have been devalued and marginalised in social, political and cultural life, the mentality and culture of modernity are hostile to traditional religion and are very supportive of every wind of doctrine and vague “spirituality” that might work to undermine the role and the claims of our civilisation’s religion.  Modernity anti-spiritual?  Far from it.  It is all together too spiritual, like the ages of the Gnostics and Neoplatonists, and not grounded enough in an incarnate Faith.

But when Governor Romney talks about these issues, he throws in something else we don’t expect: a call for tolerance. And in so doing, he isn’t just telling us what we want to hear, despite Larison’s claims to the contrary.

——————

But he doesn’t. Even after months of taking flak from both sides–the misguided conservatives who claim he isn’t conservative enough and the radical homosexuals who will never forgive him for steadfastly fighting their push to redefine marriage–he still keeps using the same message: Marriage is for a man and a woman but that does not excuse us from our obligation to tolerate everybody.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just boil it down? Wouldn’t it be easier to simply inveigh against “those people?” To claim that he was wrong even to utter the word “tolerance” in 1994 or anytime since? Surely it would. Yet he sticks to this more complicated message. ~Charles Mitchell, Evangelicals for Mitt

Mr. Mitchell’s post was fascinating to read.  Mr. Mitchell replies to my earlier post, which had criticised Romney for pandering (among other things), by saying that Romney can’t possibly be pandering to evangelicals, and this is because he expresses support for non-discrimination and tolerance for homosexuals.  This is just about as plausible as Rick Perlstein’s claim that Romney chose the Henry Ford Museum as his launch site because it supposedly sent a coded nativist, pro-Nazi message to all of the nativist pro-Nazis he needs to get to win in the primaries.  Both are arguments about Romney and pandering, and both badly misunderstand how pandering works.  Mr. Mitchell’s argument assumes that a “complicated” message cannot be one aimed at pandering to any particular group, because apparently pandering can only be in simple, unvarnished terms of hostility to the target group’s enemies.  Perlstein goes for the opposite extreme: Romney panders through symbolic appeals so subtle and far-fetched that almost no one could pick them up.  Let me propose a happy middle ground between these alternative views of pandering: “complicated” messages are likely to be used for pandering to many groups all at the same time, and symbolic appeals are best and most effective when they are clear and unmistakable nods to a particular group.   

Mr. Mitchell’s response is very interesting.  Rather than taking the repeated talk of tolerance for homosexuals as proof of Romney’s indelible moderate Republican background and more evidence that he isn’t really the full-blown social conservative he claims to be now, Mr. Mitchell believes that this confirms that Romney is taking a principled stand not just on same-sex “marriage” (which might be his one position that is least vulnerable to charges of absolutely rank opportunism) but on everything else about which Romney has been accused of opportunism and pandering.  The logic here seems to be that Romney never insincerely strikes pose for political benefit, because Romney doesn’t reinvent all of his positions.  Mr. Mitchell has offered this observation as an absolute refutation of the accusation of pandering, when it tells us instead that Romney is trying to have it both ways: he wants to convince social conservatives that he is one of them without losing his appeal to moderates.  He wants to send all the right signals–by saying all the right things–to conservatives while also dropping hints to moderates that, whatever his views about same-sex marriage, he isn’t some backwoods fanatic…like the evangelicals whose votes he is trying to win by declaring his opposition to same-sex marriage.  This is similar to Mr. Bush’s nods to evangelicals combined with a supposedly less-threatening style of religious conservative vision (“compassionate conservatism”) that would put at ease swing voters concerned about religious fundamentalism. 

Mr. Mitchell seems to be admitting that Romney is trying to have it both ways with a “complicated” message when it comes to attitudes towards homosexuality, but he takes this as yet another reason to think that Romney is sincere about his “conversion” on life issues.  Apparently, a “real” pandering pol trying to win over evangelical voters would be even more egregious in his pandering than Romney, and he would throw in “extreme” lines about the abomination of homosexuality to convince people that he is really hard-core.  Why do I find this explanation unconvincing?  Presumably, Mr. Mitchell can similarly explain away Romney’s flip-flopping on campaign finance reform or tax policy or gun control or…well, there are so many that it’s getting hard to keep track of them.    

Whatever else might be said about this defense of Romney, I’m not sure that this is exactly the kind of argument that will endear Romney to evangelicals.  “See, he isn’t simply pandering to evangelicals–unlike those people, he doesn’t call for repression and injustice!”  This is an argument that seems to draw on Andrew Sullivan’s stereotype of conservative Christians as repressive authoritarian fanatics or Gary Rosen’s idea of the same as “authoritarian bullies,” but I don’t quite understand how it makes Romney more credible to the conservative Christians to whom he is trying to appeal.  By all means, I encourage Romney’s supporters to continue defending him with arguments that seem to be calculated to put off a large part of his target audience.

In an interview, Mr. [Duncan] Hunter, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee and a supporter of Mr. Bush’s plan to send more troops to Iraq, said the need for a strong national defense was the centerpiece of his speech. That defense, he argued, should include cracking down on illegal immigration, building a wall along the Mexican border and renegotiating foreign trade deals to protect American manufacturing. “We are losing the arsenal of the democracy,” he said.

But several people at the council meeting said his stance on trade alienated the business wing of the Republican Party, compounding his substantial fund-raising challenges. ~The New York Times

How incredible that the antidote to what ails the Republicans can be found in the words of a famous Democrat. In his tragic run for the presidency in 1968, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy said, “Some men see things as they are and say, ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’ ” The magnificent poetry of that challenge — to do more and to do better — is at the core of who we are as a society, what we want for America and for ourselves. Here is the reason why the Republican Party has faded from relevance in the past two years.

Despite its many problems, the United States remains a nation of dreamers. The American psyche is genetically wired to see possibilities. Faith in the future is in our DNA. It’s why we historically vote for the more positive, hopeful, upbeat candidates. ~Frank Luntz

It is pretty incredible.  In fact, I don’t believe it for a minute.  As I have said before, Republicans who invoke RFK are certainly not conservative, because the answer to RFK’s (and Shaw’s) “why not?” question is blindingly obvious, and I don’t know how the GOP could begin its recovery by engaging in even greater utopian fantasising than it already has over the past few years.  As I wrote back in January:

RFK’s quote of Shaw should horrify conservatives, and if Mr. Bush can be said to be following RFK’s lead conservatives should be horrified by Mr. Bush.   

More than that, however, Republicans who invoke RFK’s quote as the remedy to their ills would show themselves to be deeply confused about why they lost.  Luntz’s reference to the RFK quote suggests that he thinks the GOP lost because they ceased being irrationally optimistic, upbeat and utopian, when most of the reaction against the Bush Era GOP across the spectrum occurred because the GOP had become entirely unrealistic in its utopian aspirations and only too happy to dream a dream of a new world that those in the “reality-based community” could not hope to understand.  Normal people look at the odd people who say these things, and then they look at the disasters unfolding in the real world, and they conclude that utopian dreamers are extremely dangerous people to have in power.     

GOP defeat occurred not because, contra Romney, people had lost faith in government.  Good grief, if anything people have had an abiding faith in government–their discontent of last year was an expression of frustration with the ineffective management of a government in which they have only too much faith!  Contrary to Obama’s view of politics, the GOP did not lose because their politicians have been too cynical and too lacking in hope.  If anything, there has been all together too much trust in the good intentions of Presidents, not nearly enough cynicism and far too much talk about hope in politics in the last decade in both parties, and especially in the current administration.

Luntz’s analysis gets everything almost completely backwards.  I don’t think Americans really are a nation of dreamers.  This is such an oft-repeated line that we all let it pass without objection, but I don’t think that it’s true for most Americans (except to the degree that all people everywhere have aspirations and seek to fulfill them, which would be like saying that we are a nation of humans).  We have a tendency to produce more than our fair share of the wild-and-wooly utopian set, who think that they can restructure human nature or solve ancient and inscrutable riddles of earthly existence, but the broad majority of the nation is actually pragmatic and concerned about visible, immediate problems.   

What baffles me about Luntz’s article is that he really ought to know better, at least when it comes to citing the example of disaffected voters from the ’92 cycle.  He worked on Buchanan’s campaign in the primaries and then worked for Perot.  The Perot voters of yore, like the Buchanan voters before them (some of them were the same people), were not dippy utopians who dream of ushering in an age of sunshine and bunny rabbits–or whatever it is that optimists want.  They were much more like Disaffected voters, who are like the voters that responded to Buchanan’s clarion call about the culture war and the raw deal of NAFTA or Perot’s warnings about a “giant sucking sound” enthusiastically.  Many of the Upbeat, NAFTA-loving, “don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” sort voted for Clinton.  I guess that might prove that at least a plurality of voters buys into this sort of political optimism, so it might be a winning approach of a sort, but if we are trying to understand why these Perot voters revolted against the GOP establishment in 1992 (and, to some extent, in 1996) we will not find our answer coming from RFK.  If we are trying to understand why the GOP lost in 2006 and how they can recover, we will likewise not discover anything in RFK’s remark.

It’s too early to claim victory just yet; the operation is just two weeks old. ~Patrick Ruffini

The dreary thing about Ruffini’s article is not its predictability.  There is no surprise that a Townhall columnist and one of Hewitt’s co-bloggers is a booster for the surge.  The dreary thing about it is not its insipid boasting about a decline in violence.  This is also unsurprising.  Still, it speaks volumes about how horrible things were just weeks ago that it is now a pro-war talking point that thousands are no longer being murdered with impunity every month.  Only hundreds are dying horrible deaths, which means things are basically under control!  Ruffini is here to bring the good news: conditions have gone from insanely nightmarish to merely horrific. 

Even with a 70% drop in murders, you still have stunning numbers of murders when the monthly total is north of 3,000.  It is progress of a kind, but it seems to me extremely odd that surge supporters are so quick to start claiming successes based on the most preliminary results, especially when the lull in violence might simply be the lull before another storm. 

Ruffini’s view here is the same kind of view that inspired such contempt for opponents of the war in May 2003 after the ‘Mission Accomplished’ moment.  Because huge problems had not yet arisen by then, we were assured that they were likely not going to arise–the supporters of the war had been “vindicated.”  Of course, when things began to go very badly the premature declarations of success and easy triumph looked unusually stupid.  At the very least, you would think supporters of the surge would keep their cards close to the vest on this one after having had so many setbacks and disappointments.  The more the boosters build up early progress, the more untenable their position will be when that early progress disappears. 

How can I be so pessimistic?  Well, first, I am a pessimist.  But it’s easy to be pessimistic here–just look at the overall trend of the security situation in Iraq, which has consistently tended to become worse.  Until that overall pattern is broken for a lengthy period of time, brief lulls are not only misleading but are actually insignificant. 

No, the dreary thing about this article (besides excessive use of metaphors about holes and mallets) is that Ruffini works on the assumption that the surge is somehow fundamentally different from previous attempts to “clear, hold and build.”  Right now the clearing is apparently going as well as can be expected (considering the new plan is a half-measure with insufficient means to realise the outsized goals of its supporters), but the unavoidable flaw with the plan is that it entrusts the “holding” to an Iraqi army and Iraqi government that are not really reliable.  Placing great hopes in such a plan is bound to lead to disappointment and a bitter backlash against the administration.  Those who support the war and want to continue it until some nebulous “victory” are doing their cause and Mr. Bush an enormous disservice by continuing to cheer on this particular plan, when the plan will most likely not bring us any closer to that “victory” or permanently reduce the violence or, more importantly, the militias’ ability to engage in violence.  At present militia non-activity is taken as proof of success, when what matters is that the plan break these militias and strip them of their ability to wield political power on the street through the gun and the power drill.  It seems improbable that this one plan in a few months will achieve what four years of other efforts have not. 

If I were a war supporter advising the administration, the GOP and their talking head supporters, I would tell them to stop talking up the results of the surge.  The surge will achieve success only by radically lowering the bar for what constitutes success.  This would, of course, be seen as more of the same cynical manipulation of the public at which this administration excels, but it would have the effect of preventing a massive hemorrhage of support for the war in the event that the surge does not succeed.  For those who believe the Iraq war possessed fundamental importance for our national security, investing the surge with so much importance is a weird kind of self-sabotage.  This is either some kind of face-saving, “well, we tried really hard, but now we have to leave” approach or it demonstrates just how far out some war supporters are that they think Victory really hinges on this one plan.

Ruffini’s bio says that he is “an online strategist dedicated to helping Republicans and conservatives achieve dominance in a networked era.”  If his assessment of current military strategy is any reflection on his ability to think strategically about “achieving dominance” online for the GOP and conservatives, I don’t think the Kossacks will have to stay up nights worrying about the tough competition.

And by the way, the “Department of Peace” already exists. It’s called the “U.S. Department of State”. ~Kos

It’s a tough call, and I can’t claim to know the man’s entire “corpus,” but this is perhaps the most idiotic thing Kos has written.  There are plenty of reasons for mocking a Department of Peace, whether it is proposed by Dennis Kucinich (a respectable antiwar Congressman who was assuredly the worst mayor of Cleveland ever) or Max Boot (a neo-imperialist hack of no great distinction), who has written:

An urgent priority is to create a Department of Peace to match the capabilities of our Department of War (a.k.a. the Department of Defense). We’ve gotten very good at conventional military operations, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but we’re very weak when it comes to rebuilding war-torn societies. Admittedly this is a difficult job for anyone, but we make it all the harder because of a lack of institutional capacity. Neither the Pentagon nor the State Department nor the U.S. Agency for International Development is really geared up for this important assignment. The result is that much of the burden is unfairly placed on our men and women in uniform.

In other words, it’s hard to be imperialistic when you don’t have the right kind of agencies to build imperial administration, er, nations.  However, as easy as it is to mock Dept. of Peace proposals, which ought to horrify everyone with the Orwellian creepiness of having a government department dedicated to such a noble and high goal (can’t you just picture a Department of Freedom or Department of Love or a Department of Happiness coming soon after Peace?) for which government is uniquely unsuited to realise, Kos’ statement is infinitely more foolish.  First of all, it buys into Foggy Bottom’s self-presented image as the vehicle of reasonable and just foreign policy, when that is exactly what State is not.  State is presently just another means that internationalists and hegemonists wish to use to project power and meddle in the affairs of other countries.  It is not the preferred department of neocons because their methods of power projection involve the blunt (invasion) and the hamfisted (bombing), but that simply means that the meddlesome interventionists at State are not quite as dense as the neocons.  They actually want to make sure that U.S. hegemony endures and doesn’t flame out in some glorious failure of a misguided war–they are, if anything, more threatening to the legitimate “America First”-style national interest because they can pose as being far more reasonable and because they are far more subtle in advancing their goals.  The State Department is, I’m sorry to say, a department full of busybodies who make their business every year–as mandated by Congress–to sit in judgement over every other nation on earth and rate their human rights progress and their freedom of religion and so forth, which creates tremendous resentment against the presumption of our government.  As small and relatively weak as their department is it possesses disproportionate clout abroad because it is perceived to be the reasonable and accommodating face of American government.  They represent the scalpels of empire where the Pentagon represents the sledgehammers, but their goals are the same, and their goals are certainly not peace in any sense that I or Kos would understand.