I wanted to see what my result would be from this political typology mentioned by Kevin Drum.  According to my answers, I belong to the “Disaffected” group.  This makes a certain amount of sense politically and psychologically, but I think some of the definitions are way off.  For instance:

Disaffecteds have little interest in current events and pay little attention to the news. No single medium or network stands out as a main source.

Perhaps this is true of most of my Disaffected brethren, but I am surprised that this is the case.  Surely, it is only through a close, detailed acquaintance with the impressive mediocrity and worthlessness of the political class that one can become as Disaffected as we are.  In any case, I would rather be Disaffected than Upbeat–how depressing would that be?

Well, my view is predictable—romance is only a good thing if everyone in it is having a good time, which is not true for women who are in romantic relationships with men who beat or rape them.  ~Amanda Marcotte

Of course, one might quibble with the designation “romantic relationship” in the case of rape.

Personally, I will gladly consider Mr. Romney as a candidate in the field of hopefuls and enthusiastically vote for him should he ascend to the nomination next year. I have a gut feeling that I am joined in this regard by at least 80 percent of Republican voters. ~Mark Davis

The numbers among likely voters that I keep banging on about are rather different from Mr. Davis’ generous estimate.  Among likely GOP voters, 40% say they would never consider voting for a Mormon for President, and another 18% are unsure whether they would or not.  It is impossible to know all the reasons why these people are opposed, but we can make a few educated guesses.  In my own case, I can explain my reasons, as I do below. 

First, there are the obvious reasons, some of which I have talked about at some length before. There is the desire to have a candidate to whom you can relate and with whom you can identify.  Mormonism is unfamiliar and alien to the experience of most voters, and it is impossible for Christians to closely identify with someone from that background.  There are many voters for whom a candidate’s faith is a major factor in their voting preferences, and this can become a question of whether or not someone has had the same religious experiences and has the same religious practices as these voters.    

Then there are those voters who believe this is a Christian country, full stop, and therefore it is not desirable and not appropriate for non-Christians to have positions of leadership in that country–call this Christian majoritarianism, if you like.  This attitude apparently becomes more intense when it is the Presidency at stake, rather than a single Senate seat here or there; the Presidency, at least for these people, is a symbol of the nation, and it is not acceptable for them to see that symbol pass into the hands of someone who subscribes to a fundamentally different religion.  There is, of course, the perception among evangelicals and other Christians of Mormonism as a cult in the popular, pejorative sense of that term.  This perception is strengthened by the fact that there are services that are closed to non-Mormons, which will always cause those already suspicious about a religious group to conclude that there must be something nefarious or undesirable going on in these closed sessions (when, of course, nothing of the kind is happening).    

Then there are more visceral reasons and reasons based in ignorance: some voters dislike Mormons in particular because they have only heard bad things about them for as long as they can remember and what they have heard about them is often false or outdated.  I virtually guarantee that some significant portion of intense anti-Mormon sentiment in this country stems from the false belief that the mainline LDS church allows polygamy.  The relative obscurity of the religion combined with its, shall we say, troubled past conspire to make people anxious about its adherents even when there is no objective reason to have any anxiety about Mormons themselves.

For a few voters, and I would class myself among these, the non-Christian character of Mormonism troubles us, and its tremendous theological divergences from what some call the Great Tradition of Christianity mark it as a false religion fundamentally removed in important ways from the religion that has been the core of our civilisation.  For cultural conservatives for whom that Christian heritage is extremely important, it would be quite unhelpful and even damaging to the work of preserving and renewing a Christian culture to rally around a candidate for the most prominent office in the country who does not really believe in that heritage.  Indeed, such a candidate, of necessity because of his religion’s teachings about all other churches, regards the traditions and achievements of some 1,900+ years of post-Apostolic Christianity as an abandonment of the Gospel and a betrayal of the covenant with God, which means that he really must regard the history of most of our civilisation as a massive detour inspired by false doctrine and lies.  If we are in a civilisational conflict, electing a Mormon President is a strange sort of vote of no-confidence in our own history and a repudiation of most of the heritage that at least some of us believe we are fighting to protect (from enemies here and abroad).  To my mind, that declaration of hostility to our own past is far more dangerous and worrisome than the realisation of any of the far-fetched theories of Damon Linker about Mormon theocracy.

For those who regard this as terrible, there is some consolation.  This wave of anti-Mormonism, with all its diverse causes, will not be derailing a particularly good candidate.  Romney’s campaign is so vexed by conventional, run-of-the-mill problems of poor credibility and a bad record that he might belong to the most ordinary suburban evangelical church and still not have a chance in the primaries.

I’m sorry that people on the left can’t recognize bigotry when they see it. ~Brian O’Dwyer

Mr. O’Dwyer was responding to the report of another MyDD hack trying to find some way to impugn the motives of liberal Christians who criticised Marcotte’s galloping Christomachy.  O’Dwyer apparently gave money to Clinton in the past (he also held a fundraiser for Edwards!), which proves that he was simply doing HRC’s bidding.  Quoth the hack:

It’s simply impossible to believe that it was anything but his loyalty to Clinton that led O’Dwyer to join in the right-wing pile-on.

Yes, if it weren’t for their devotion to Hillary pushing them on to attack poor innocent Amanda, ethnic Catholics would have no trouble with some shrill woman blaspheming against their God in the ugliest terms.  Sure, that’s it!  Keep tearing down the religious left, lefty bloggers–you are sowing more mistrust and resentment on your own side than the “noise machine” could ever manage to do.

Go take a look at my latest article on Putin, Russia and Western opposition to both here.  Also in the magazine, Taki has some choice words for the Saudis, F.J. Sarto writes on Putin’s speech in Munich and John Zmirak also has an outstanding and very funny Screwtape Letters-style piece on immigration.

Romney doesn’t yet have what a top-tier candidates needs, which is a compelling narrative for his candidacy (I didn’t hear it in his announcement speech yesterday). ~Rich Lowry

He doesn’t have a compelling narrative, but he does have a really lame slogan.  Say it with me: “Innovation and transformation!”  Except that transformation is already Obama’s theme.  Perhaps they are timing their appeal to coincide with the release of the new Transformers movie? 

Would that help explain the bizarre setting of Romney’s announcement, where the stage was filled with automobiles–was their presence on stage, in fact, a nod to the Autobots?  But there is a problem here for Romney, already dogged by credibility problems: does he really want to remind people of a story that involves Decepticons?

Romney ’08!

The US was hated during its isolationist periods and under its pacifist presidents. ~Janet Albrechtsen

This isn’t really true.  There is a later claim in this article that Carter was as despised by Europeans as Bush is now, which is simply not the case.  There is a real difference between a sort of cultural condescension towards the rude Yanks, which prevailed in Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, and the loathing of America that we see widespread around the world today.  It has three primary causes.  The first of these is indisputably bad U.S. policies–or at least those policies that virtually everyone else in the world regards as bad and detrimental to their interests.  The second is globalisation, which people around the world experience and perceive as Americanisation in so many areas of life.  They associate, whether fairly or not, all of the difficulties of economic modernisation and rapid change with America, since firms from or associated with our country represent a large part of the financial, commercial and entertainment sectors.  The third is the overwhelming imbalance in military power and the increased tendency since the end of the Cold War to use that power pretty much at the drop of a hat.  Vedrine spoke of the “hyperpower” in the days when Clinton would launch military strikes all over the world seemingly on a whim.  American supremacy was really almost entirely unchallenged in the ’90s, which led to an excess of activist meddling. 

This was precisely not the response to America that prevailed in the interwar period.  In Germany of the 1920s, the slogan was wir amerikanisieren uns (we are Americanising ourselves), because there was a tremendous appreciation in interwar Germany for the technological and economic successes of America.  In one of our most “isolationist” periods, as the ignorant insist on referring to the interwar period, the people we helped defeat in WWI sought to imitate America in most things.  In our pre-WWI days, our Presidents and officials were honoured as great supporters of international law and brokers of peace.  President Cleveland was one of the leading defenders of arbitration as a means of settling disputes; President Roosevelt was feted for his role in negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War.  As Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan received some of the warmest welcomes any of our ministers have ever enjoyed.  Indeed, back in those days, it was our role to hector and berate the British hegemon when it engaged in excessive and destructive policies.  The anti-Britishism (if there is such a word) of Americans during the Boer War would make the Churchill-loving stooges among our modern militarists blush with shame.  Americans used to be the neutral nation that would lecture the great powers of the world on their abuses of the other nations of the world.  Much of what is called anti-Americanism is no different in principle from the opposition that our ancestors expressed to British imperial abuses and aggressions.  Americans were once repelled by displays of hubris and disregard for international law, and so now our government’s displays of the same offend and appall other nations. 

Europeans and others may never have exactly liked us or our culture, but there was a time when they respected us.  As soon as we strode onto the stage as a world power in WWI and began dictating terms, no matter how benevolently or wisely (and often there was too little of both), we began to incur the resentment of other peoples.  Inevitably, as the preeminent political and economic power after WWII, we encountered even more opposition.  There was an attempt, however clumsy at times, to hide that supremacy.  Like Augustus acting as a first among equals, superior only in his personal auctoritas, most of the time America at least attempted to not rub other nations’ noses in their own relative weakness.  In this last ten years or so, Washington has made it its business to insult and degrade as many major powers or former major powers as possible.

There are cases where resentment of America is purely irrational and our country is being made the scapegoat of local problems, but so much of “anti-Americanism” today is entirely within our power as a nation to reduce by ceasing the destructive, obnoxious and exploitative policies that provoke these resentments.  There will always be a certain level of resentment that goes with being a wealthy and powerful country, but how we make use of our wealth and power can make all the difference in blunting that resentment or increasing it and sharpening it into violent hostility.

Matt Yglesias describes the dynamic of Romney’s many political woes pretty succinctly:

The trouble, as I see it, has to do with Romney’s convenient conversion to social conservatism over the past two years or so. One assumes that to win, Romney is going to need to talk about his newfound commitment to abortion-banning and gay-hating and the most obvious way to do that would be within the context of talking about his deep Christian faith and so forth. But while that might work great for a Protestant or a Catholic, I don’t think it goes over so well if your deep faith is something most Christians consider weird and, indeed, not really Christian.

Similarly, it’s hard to do the standard JFK-style “my faith is not an issue” thing if you’re simultaneously trying to convince politically mobilized Christian traditionalists that you’re the candidate for them. It seems to me that this winds up being a very difficult sweet spot to locate.

I have come to pretty much the same conclusion in my“occasional”postingon this topic.  Romney’s campaign has managed to cook up a real witch’s brew of political liabilities.  Even if he could magically fast-forward to the nomination and fight the general election now, Republicans would have to be fools to bet on him to win it all.  There is the obvious opportunism and pandering of the last two years, which makes him seem power-hungry and unscrupulous, mixed with an opportunistic embrace of a religious politics that puts off many moderate and secular voters by making him appear willing to adopt what they regard as hard-line and even dangerous views for the sake of personal power.  Then there is an attempt to soft-pedal his own little-known religion, because even he knows that it is a political problem, while nonetheless claiming that his “faith” is central and essential to the religious politics that he wants to practice (so central that he doesn’t want to talk about it in any detail).  He wants to be able to talk about “enduring values,” as he did in his speech yesterday, without anyone paying close attention to the fact that his values have been about as enduring as the fall fashion lines.  He wants you to know that he believes in God, but he doesn’t want anyone to peer too closely at what sort of God he believes in.  This will go over like a lead balloon in the retail politics atmosphere of the Granite State.  People there are experienced in this sort of thing and can usually spot fakes a mile off.  It should be fun to watch. 

Now to that ABC/Post poll to which Mr. Yglesias referred.  35% say (question 44c) they are “less likely” to vote for someone if he is a Mormon (this apparently climbs to 39% among Republicans), while 61% say that it wouldn’t make any difference.  As a percentage, this is fairly consistent with the Bloomberg poll showing 37% who would not vote for a Mormon and the Rasmussen poll that had 43% who would never vote for a Mormon.  Roughly four out of ten Americans have some significant resistance to the idea of a Mormon President.  In Kennedy’s time, the resistance to a Catholic President was, I recall reading somewhere, roughly half as great as a percentage of the population, and he won a squeaker of an election thanks to a little help from his friends in Chicago and Texas.  Should he somehow magically get the nomination, Romney would face even greater resistance nationally than Kennedy did and presumably does not have nearly as many mob and local power broker connections with which to steal a close election.   

The phrasing of the poll questions seem important to shaping our perception of how big of a problem Romney’s Mormonism is, and I think it probably has an impact on the results as well.  Yglesias takes the 35% “less likely” figure to mean that it is a problem, but not insurmountable, while I think the Rasmussen figure of 43% “never consider” figure suggests strong and unyielding resistance.  It is possible that opposition to a Mormon candidate might be more changeable than I am assuming, but typically these sorts of strong prejudices don’t vanish in the course of a year and a half.     

Rasmussen asked, “would you ever consider voting for a [fill in the blank] candidate?”  Given a question this wide-open, which doesn’t even force the participant to commit to actually voting for a Mormon if he doesn’t want to make that commitment, you might think that the results would be less anti-Mormon.  After all, it just asks whether you would ever consider voting for such a person–implying that it might be in twenty years and not the next election when you finally do so–and even then the resistance to Mormonism remains intense and distributed throughout the population.  

The Rasmussen poll shows more anti-Mormonism than either the recent Post or USA Today polls.  This is a function of the differences in the sample groups, as I mentioned the other day, but it is also happening because the way the Rasmussen poll is asked allows a maximum number of respondents to confirm their anti-Mormon sentiments.  Given the chance, likely voters (who are the only kind of poll respondents who really matter as far as elections are concerned) express profound resistance to the idea of a Mormon candidate.  Is that purely abstract and based in misinformation such that an actual Mormon candidate talking about what Mormons actually believe could reduce that resistance?  Possibly.  But the resistance is simply too high.  There isn’t enough time for Romney to win people over to both an acceptance of Mormonism as more or less normal and convince them that he is the right candidate for President, especially if he avoids the subject as often as he possibly can.    

USA Today asked if you would vote for a qualified person who “happened to be one of the following.”  This poll was, like the Post poll, a national sample of adults, rather than Rasmussen’s survey of likely voters.  The qualification that the candidate is qualified and that phrasing of “happened to be” probably improve the results across the board.  Only 24% said they wouldn’t vote for a Mormon candidate, which is still nothing to sneeze at, but it is much more favourable to Romney than most other polls on this topic.  By saying “happened to be,” the pollster gives the impression that these things are well and truly incidental to the identity of this qualified candidate.  That will probably encourage people to ignore these factors in a hypothetical situation when they might, in reality, take them more seriously.  Indeed, the nature of these sorts of prejudices would be such that many of the respondents might think that there would never be a qualified [fill in the blank] candidate, because these people regard [fill in the blank] as inherently unqualified for the job.

Now that Romney has officially announced, I suppose he won’t turn around and go home now.  That really would be the better move for him, since not even the most stellar candidate could overcome the political obstacles he faces and he isn’t that great of a candidate anyway.

It [the unipolar world] is world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.

And this certainly has nothing in common with democracy. Because, as you know, democracy is the power of the majority in light of the interests and opinions of the minority.

Incidentally, Russia – we – are constantly being taught about democracy. But for some reason those who teach us do not want to learn themselves.

I consider that the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today’s world. And this is not only because if there was individual leadership in today’s – and precisely in today’s – world, then the military, political and economic resources would not suffice. What is even more important is that the model itself is flawed because at its basis there is and can be no moral foundations for modern civilisation. ~Russian President Vladimir Putin

First of all, it is actually rather stunning to hear a head of state from any country put forward an argument of this relative complexity.  To listen to our politicians babble generically about “freedom” or “stability” or “terrorism” is to come away with the impression that their audience is a mob of cretins (or they think that their audience is a mob of cretins) incapable of understanding thorough and elaborate analysis of geopolitics.  As I read Putin’s speech, I am also struck by how relatively reasonable it is.  He complains of NATO expansion and the betrayals of past promises not to station forces in the new member states–as well he might–and he repeatedly insists on the importance of respecting international law. 

Compared with Cheney’s needlessly provocative Vilnius speech in which he hectored the Russians primarily for their internal affairs (whatever you may think of them, they are the Russians’ business and not really ours), Putin’s objections to American hegemony and interventionism address a problem that is properly international in nature and they do so in a way that actually echoes much of what the rest of the world’s governments think.  If this were not the President of Russia saying this, but the Secretary-General of the U.N. or the British Prime Minister, it would be much more difficult to hide behind tired Russophobia and cliches about resurgent authoritarianism.  There would have to be at least some minimal attempt to address what the speech contained.    

To read the headlines about the speech, you would think that he had been banging on the podium with his footwear, but instead you find someone explaining, much as our European allies tried to do some years back, that unipolar domination is practically impossible and ruinous for any state that attempts it.  This is actually true, and it is also valuable advice that Washington would be foolish to dismiss in a fit of pride and anger.

What else did Putin say that has so offended some people?  He said:

We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state’s legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations.

There has certainly been disdain for international law, and when there has been attention paid to it it has been the most selective, tendentious kind of reading of the law to fit policies, such as the invasion of Iraq, that had already been decided upon.  Today American politicians square off over who is more willing to launch an illegal war on Iran–where exactly has Putin erred in saying what he has said?  The United States government does impose itself on other nations in a variety of ways, this is wrong and it is causing inevitable backlash that is harmful to all parties. 

And what else?  He said:

People are trying to transform the OSCE into a vulgar instrument designed to promote the foreign policy interests of one or a group of countries.

This is undoubtedly true in their completely biased and lopsided work related to the Ukrainian and Georgian elections–the so-called “revolutions” of 2004 and 2003 respectively. 

Mr. Putin’s speech is an early warning alarm and, I think, an attempt to make Washington see reason.  That the speech is, of course, self-serving to some degree and coming from the mouth of an elected authoritarian populist with rather dubious moral authority is really neither here nor there.  Putin was saying what most allied governments have been saying in less direct ways and what most friendly (or formerly friendly) nations have been thinking and saying about our government for years. 

The question is not, as the incredibly overrated Tom Friedman puts it, “why do remarks like these play so well in Russia today?”  (Anyone could answer that question, as Friedman does by discovering that Russians are not all together happy about being encircled and threatened by NATO expanion–you don’t say!)  The question is: how, beyond the last round of NATO expansion in 2002, has Mr. Bush managed to so profoundly alienate the government that was the first to offer its support to us after 9/11, and how is it that the appropriate and mutually beneficial cooperation between our two countries has been so grievously jeopardised by six years of pointed confrontation and insults? 

The U.S. pursuit of setting up pro-American satellites and attempts thereby to gain access to oil and gas resources outside Russia have undoubtedly exacerbated Russian resentment over NATO.  These things have made that expansion appear to be one part of a larger plan of encirclement and power projection into Asia.  The introduction of the anti-missile system into NATO states that joined in the 1996 round would be a basic violation of the assurances given to Moscow that made that round of (unwise) accession possible, and it represents yet another needless provocation.  American meddling in Ukraine, Georgia and central Asia has contributed to Russia’s sense of being hemmed in.  The tacit encouragement given to the Chechen cause by the U.S. government in the past and Washington’s indifference to Chechen terrorism against Russian civilians have helped convince the Russians that Washington would like to see Russia weakened and divided.  Harping about Russian internal political affairs, as Vice President Cheney insisted on doing on Russia’s very doorstep, was a slap in the face. 

Having poked and stabbed the bear in its cage, the bear-baiters are outraged that the bear has become angry and combative–even though the only goal of such bear-baiters is to make the bear angry.  Naturally, the solution of the bear-baiters to these displays of combativeness will be to squeeze it into a smaller cage, put more chains on it and stab it some more.  This approach to Russia encourages all of the worst tendencies in Russian politics. 

Anyone familiar with Russian history, or indeed the history of any large territorial state, could tell you that the presence of a credible foreign enemy encourages the consolidation of power in the center and the strengthening of authoritarian rule.  Those who claim to despise Putin’s authoritarianism and who therefore want to isolate and bludgeon Russia until it embraces an “acceptable” kind of liberalisation are even sabotaging their own supposed goals of “reform” (not that I believe these are the goals of those who want “liberalisation” or “reform”).  They are simply strengthening the desire in Russia to have a strong authoritarian nationalist leader who will resist perceived foreign depredations against that country.  Americans would respond and have responded in much the same way to perceived threats, so it should hardly be beyond our understanding to grasp this basic idea.  Putin will leave office in a couple years, but the damage the interventionists and Russophobes will have helped to do to the future of Russian politics will last long after he is gone.  Then, after they have finished doing their destructive work, these neo-Orientalist Slavophobes will look skywards and wonder aloud, “Why do the Russians always keep returning to authoritarianism?  What is wrong with them?”

There are two other reasons why Putin’s speech has especially aggravated some Americans, primarily those in upper reaches of Republican and conservative media: first, it was Putin who said it, and there is a desperate need to perpetuate anti-Putin sentiment to make confrontation with Russia more popular; second, Putin’s speech represents the biggest rhetorical backlash yet against the world of the “unipolar moment” celebrated by the likes of Charles Krauthammer.  Krauthammer chirped back then that there was no coalition of opposing forces combining against the American hegemon–we were enjoying an unprecedented unipolarity that had not called forth a countervailing set of forces to balance our supremacy.  That brief moment of consequence-free supremacy has come to an end.  Putin’s speech represents both a warning and the first signs of pushback.  Russians do not want a confrontation with the West, and neither Russia nor the West can afford to waste our time and energy rehashing old rivalries (indeed, the fact that most of us still feel comfortable treating Russia as if it were not a part of the West is a good sign that we are a very long way from burying these old rivalries).

Tom Piatak has an excellent article at VDare reviewing the new collection of Sam Francis’ essays and columns, Shots Fired, in which he talks about a number of Dr. Francis’ observations.  He concludes:

But even if it does not appear at the moment that the Middle American Radicals are about to charge over the hill to the rescue, like the 7^th cavalry, there is no reason to give up the fight. The issues Sam identified as important—opposing the dispossession of the middle class and “dismantling the warfare-welfare state, controlling immigration, reversing the erosion of national sovereignty, withdrawing from the pursuit of a globalist-imperialist foreign policy, and restoring a Eurocentric cultural order“— are real and important. Because of their importance, these issues will endure.

And one day, if we are lucky, attract a political champion on a par with their intellectual champion, Sam Francis.