ConservativeHome understands that Shadow Defence Secretary Liam Fox has been ordered to tone down his neoconservative views and row in behind William Hague’s line on the war in Iraq and the threat posed by Iran. ~ConservativeHome

Nothing was more politically valuable to the beginning of Mr. Bush’s War than to have reliable British support, and nothing was more practically important for Blair’s participation in the war than the complete capitulation of the Opposition under Duncan-Smith to the invasion.  If the Tories begin siding with the British people and start opposing the war they should never have backed, they will be helping to hasten the day when it will become clear that our withdrawal from Iraq is the best option left to us.  Predictably, the NROniks are upset.

Do these overbroad claims for the necessity of religion suggest that the theocons are running scared? Perhaps.

Up to half of the conservative writers and thinkers whom I know are non-believers. And yet because of the rule that one may never ever question claims made on behalf of faith, they remain in the closet. At some point, however, they may emerge to challenge the idea that without religion, personal and social anarchy looms.

8) If you are 18 and figuring out what course of study to pursue for the next 4 years what changes would you make to your educational path now that you have some hindsight?

I would study a lot more history. Thanks to my college’s refusal to tell its ignorant students what an educated person should know-heaven forbid that it actually exercise intellectual authority!-I was required to study no history and didn’t know enough to do so on my own. ~Heather Mac Donald

Okay, for those who are in danger of being all “Mac Donalded” out, I have just one more thing to say about Ms. Mac Donald’s review before I turn to other things.  The juxtaposition of the remark about theocons arguing for the necessity of religion and Ms. Mac Donald’s admitted lack of study of history caught my attention.  It struck me that her admitted lack of a proper education in history, which she laudably wishes to remedy, might explain a lot about Ms. Mac Donald’s atheism. 

Atheists are great ones for posing what they think are really baffling conundrums for believers, but their acquaintance with history, as far as religion is concerned, is typically with the black marks and scandals.  There was religious fanaticism!  Well, yes, and there was far, far worse atheist fanaticism, so which would you rather see dominating society?  They seem uninterested to query why it is that every organised society from the earliest tribes to the most technically sophisticated civilisations have had one form or another of propitiating, worshipping and otherwise interacting with the supernatural and divine.  If they do ask the question, they have ready-made answers handy: ignorance, fear of death, fear of the unknown, opiate of the masses, etc.  It usually does not seem to trouble them that the greatest minds in every period of our history not only acknowledged one divinity or another but insisted on the importance of reverence for God or the gods for the well-being and virtuous life of man.  They were caught up in the superstitions of their time, or they were afraid to challenge the religious authorities, the atheist will reply.  Maybe, but what of the numerous philosophers who claimed to be able to show, by means of reason, the necessity of the existence of God?  Though all these men considered the possibility of atheism, at least in passing, the absurdity of it always prevented them from embracing it. 

It is no wonder then that, when faced with something like the ontological proof, which they no longer even attempt to answer, most atheists retreat to tired arguments from theodicy.  Having repeatedly failed to disprove God’s existence in the realm of logic, which was their only real chance, they now hope to shame believers with the scandal of the fallenness of the world.  “Look, a tsunami!  What about your loving God now, eh?” they cry.  This can sometimes scandalise believers, but it does not do much to disprove God’s existence.  

Doesn’t the awesome weight of all of these historical precedents make the “skeptical conservative,” the conservative atheist, think twice about whether he has gone awry somewhere?  Surely it is one of the marks of conservatism to defer to the authority of tradition on the assumption that the “individual is foolish, but the species is wise” and that the tradition has accumulated the wisdom of centuries as compared against your brief lifespan.  These are not definitive proofs in favour of the claims of the tradition (deference to tradition is based heavily on experience and an assumption that time-tested ways are best, which do not yield proofs as such), but for the conservative they are important claims that have to be taken into account when forming a view about anything. 

Perhaps the most stunning thing about atheism is the sheer presumption of it.  I don’t mean simply the presumption against God, which would be enough in itself, but the presumption that you and a few other adventurous souls have figured out something that the vast majority of mankind has never known about a subject for which the atheist can obviously have no empirical evidence one way or the other.  Heady stuff, indeed.  Say whatever else you will about it, this setting of the ideas of the self over and against the inherited wisdom of ages is one of the main things that is unconservative about atheism.  Even if atheists were right, we should be clear that there would be nothing conservative about their position, but would, if adopted by society as a whole, quite obviously involve a cultural revolution and destruction of a significant portion of our cultural inheritance.  In the end, what is it that atheists would conserve of our civilisation, when so much of the substance of our civilisation has its origins in Christianity or in the cultural derivatives thereof? 

Would greater familiarity with history weaken an atheist’s certainty that religion is unnecessary for the healthy flourishing of society?  I almost have to think that it would.  The nightmare of the 20th century, defined to such a great extent in so many parts of the world by organised godlessness and the official repudiation of all religion, should give any convinced atheist pause.  If man does not flourish in a godless regime, and if godless regimes have a record of unusually great barbarity and human cruelty, it does at the very least suggest that religion aids in human flourishing and probably has some moderating effect on the use of political power.  On sheer pragmatic grounds alone, someone familiar with the historical record would have to conclude that atheism, at least if embraced officially, is bad for the health of society.

I have always been amazed that the liberal media is willing to let stand the right’s equation between “religious voters,” “values voters,” and opposition to gay marriage, abortion, and stem cell research. There is no necessary relation between being religious, having values, or opposition to stem cell research or gay marriage, in my view. That having been said, the current obsession with homosexuality on the part of the Religious Right would seem to assure it a political relevance for the Republican Party for some time. ~Heather Mac Donald

This isn’t all that amazing when you think about it.  The media indulge this conceit, to the extent that they do, for two main reasons.  The first is that specifically tying “religious voters” to abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research helps to confirm their image of these “religious voters” as intolerant, meddlesome, fanatical and potentially dangerous.  By setting things up this way, they have done religious conservatives no favours in the PR battle.  The message that comes across–the message they make sure comes across–is: “These people want to tell you what you can do with your own body and would rather see you die in agony than allow science to save you.”  This is tendentious and wrong in many ways, but that is why the media have been only too glad to emphasise these aspects of religious conservatism.  These aspects obviously exist and are important to religious conservatives, but by making these the end-all and be-all of what the rest of the public knows about “religious voters” the media succeed in making “religious voters” and their views appear very unattractive to “moderates” and independents.  In this way, they make the pro-life view into a test of religious fundamentalism: if you don’t want to be considered a fundamentalist, don’t oppose abortion.  Likewise, according to this narrative, if you don’t want to oppress people, don’t oppose gay marriage; if you don’t want to inflict endless suffering on the sick and dying, don’t oppose any kind of stem-cell research.  Of course, religious conservatives make up most of the people who oppose these things and they certainly make up a large proportion of the activists against all of them, so it is not entirely a media creation.  However, no one has suggested that it is impossible to oppose these things without being religious. 

The second–this is where the “values” scam comes in–is that to call them “values voters” functions a way of avoiding any talk of morality or virtue as such.  Instead of, say, “culture war,” which implied that one side was fighting for our culture and the other was fighting against it (and this had obvious negative political implications for the latter group), talking about “values” helps make the issues in question less powerful and can make the policy implications of the strength of a “values voter” bloc far more obscure.   To refer to someone as a “values voter” is actually not a move that invests them with some special claim to being concerned with living well or doing the right thing and so on.  This move undermines any strong claims about serious moral questions by making support for the virtues and opposition to vices into interchangeable, malleable preferences (“values”) rather than commitments to moral truth.  In end, speaking of them as “values voters” is much less favourable than referring to them as cultural or religious or socially conservative voters, since all of these other terms can sound appealing to many people.  In the end, calling them values voters is a way of lumping together a whole class of people who are voting on a number of disparate cultural concerns and putting them under a bland, meaningless label.  The phrase functions as a way of watering down the significance of these voters and effectively reducing their power by diluting or even negating what it is they stand for.  Voting against moral and cultural decline, for example, which might be conveyed by the label cultural conservative, sends one message and carries more weight, while voting for “values” carries as much weight in its effect on the political debate as going to a clearance sale.  Naturally, secular conservatives such as George Will and now Heather Mac Donald take offense that they have been excluded, so to speak, from the camp of “values voters,” not seeing that the entire “values voter” conceit is a way to reduce and weaken the impact of religious conservatism on the public debate.  They should instead welcome the empty-headed “values” talk, since it helps to reduce religious conservative views on so many questions of social policy to just so many preferences and/or prejudices.  It tacitly assumes that the people who “value” life and marriage are basically sentimental about what they “value” and lack good arguments for their preferences or it can imply that they devalue other people’s rights.  Either way, it is a way of subtly undermining religious conservatives.  It is not a compliment, and the possession of this label is not something that other people should envy.

7) You’ve labelled yourself a ‘skeptical conservative.’ Would you also say you are hopeful about the trajectory that this republic might take into the future, or do you warrant that the corner is likely turned and we’ll be fighting a rearguard action for most of our lives?
I will interpret your question to mean whether I think secularism will strengthen in the U.S. over time. I am not ordinarily an optimist, but I take heart from the incensed response to the existence of a mere three contemporary books debunking religion. While the proportion of Americans who believe in Biblical revelation remains depressingly high and doesn’t yet show much sign of decline, the reaction of religion’s conservative apologists to a few atheists sticking their heads out of the foxhole suggests to me a possible nervousness about religion’s hold in the future. First Things editor Joseph Bottum calls secularists “superannuated,” in the aforementioned book Why I Turned Right. Wall Street Journal columnist Dan Henninger claims a religious provenance for the following “American” virtues: “fortitude, prudence, temperance, justice, charity, hope, integrity, loyalty, honor, filial respect, mercy, diligence, generosity and forbearance.” Yet Classical philosophers and poets celebrated many of these “religious” virtues as vigorously as any Evangelist or Christian divine, and these ideals are in any case human virtues, which is why religion can appropriate them. As for Henninger’s suggestion that mercy and hope had to wait upon Christianity to make their appearance on the scene, I would need more evidence. Do these overbroad claims for the necessity of religion suggest that the theocons are running scared? Perhaps.

Up to half of the conservative writers and thinkers whom I know are non-believers. And yet because of the rule that one may never ever question claims made on behalf of faith, they remain in the closet. At some point, however, they may emerge to challenge the idea that without religion, personal and social anarchy looms. ~Heather Mac Donald

I don’t want to keep harping on similarities between Ms. Mac Donald and Andrew Sullivan, because this really isn’t fair to Ms. Mac Donald.  She is, for the most part, a clear and logical thinker who can make compelling arguments based on solid evidence.  Sullivan is a egoist who likes to throw tantrums and wrap them up in philosophical covering.  For the most part, it is complete coincidence that both he and Ms. Mac Donald call themselves skeptics.  She demonstrates an intellectual rigour and coherence, whatever else you would like to say about her views, that Sullivan does not possess.  She at least has the decency to throw religion right out the window rather than mangle it and distort it to suit her own preoccupations as Sullivan does. 

However, the first part of this comment, which I first saw at The Corner, was the thing that annoyed me and got me to read the interview in its entirety because it struck me as such an unreservedly silly thing to say.  Since there is no one who better embodies unreserved silliness than Andrew Sullivan, a comparison with him was unavoidable, but in this case there is another similarity.  As some may have noticed, whenever someone criticises Andrew Sullivan (not counting me, as he has so far studiously ignored everything I have said) he will write a post citing the criticism and then commenting on it with a remark that goes something like this: “Ha ha!  Now I’ve got them on the run!  I have hit them where it hurts.  See how they mercilessly reject everything I have said?  See how they have eviscerated my rather embarrassingly poor argument?  They will soon be mine!” 

Ms. Mac Donald’s comment, though not nearly as obnoxious as anything Sullivan has written in this vein, reminds me of this.  Strong and perhaps indignant response is, according to this view, a sign of weakness and proof in this case that the grip of religion is slipping.  The theocons must be very perplexed about all of this.  In the space of a few months they have been accused of being virtual masters of the universe and on the verge of destroying secular America (that’s Linker’s thesis) and now they are said to be nervously watching the collapse of religion in America and are possibly “running scared.”  I happen to think both are wrong in different ways, but it is curious how two people equally appalled by religious conservatism can come to such radically different conclusions about the strength of their foe.   

This part strikes me as particularly odd:

Do these overbroad claims for the necessity of religion suggest that the theocons are running scared? Perhaps.

First of all, this has to be the first time I have ever heard anyone call Daniel Henninger a theocon, but leave that aside for the moment.  What is the evidence that “theocons” are “running scared”?  Because they have responded to a few atheists with many arguments?  The “incensed response” to Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, to take two of the three atheists in question, comes from the natural irritation that their insult-laden polemics cause and from what must be the offensive nature of their claims.  Any given atheist advances his view by telling the vast majority of people that they strongly believe in utter nonsense, and everyone else quite understandably responds poorly to being told, for all intents and purposes, he is a fool and a cretin.  If the response were anything other than incensed, then perhaps the meaning that belief in God held for people might be said to be weakening.  Rarely does one see the active, robust defense of something that is shared by a great many people taken as proof of that thing’s decline.  It is when religion no longer inspires and no longer commands loyalty and defense that something can be said to be declining and failing.  Reaction is evidence that something is alive and still able and willing to fight.  If religious conservatives sat still and did nothing while they were figuratively prodded and poked by atheists and secularists, that would be much more clear proof that the spirit had gone out of them and their beliefs were headed for the scrapheap.       

Religion is an important buttress to social order.  Is it possible to have social order without religion?  Yes, but it will often be of a more brutal, unethical and tyrannical kind.  It will be much less likely to be good order.  More to the point, it is not so much anarchy, but the crushing weight of some form or other of totalitarianism that man without religion has to fear.  Dostoevsky reminded us that man has a natural need to worship something.  If he will not worship God, he will worship other men, the state or things of this world.  Personal anarchy is not the great threat of a man without God.  Some atheists have been the most regimented, humourless, abstemious people on the planet.  It is personal debasement and personal degradation within a godless system that makes the conservative turn away in horror from what an atheist society will do to its members.  As Eliot famously and memorably said, “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler and Stalin.”  

Incidentally, if half of all conservative writers and thinkers whom Ms. Mac Donald knows are non-believers, where would she ever get the idea that religion has come to rule over conservatism?

Given that the liberal elites have ignored the 70% black out-of-wedlock birth rate for decades in discussing the causes of black poverty, I am confident that open borders conservatives will prove just as capable of ignoring the 48% Hispanic out-of-wedlock birth rate as they perpetuate the myth of redemptive Hispanic family values. ~Heather Mac Donald

For all of the very criticalthings I have had to say about her remarks about conservatism, religion and the religious, Ms. Mac Donald really shines when she speaks about empirical evidence.  She knows what she’s talking about here, and I don’t say this simply because I fully agree with her rejection of the pro-immigration “family values” rhetoric.

Mr. Bush used to have an old stand-by line that has, thankfully, been retired from service for the time being.  “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande.”  This was supposed to be a clever way to cajole social conservatives into embracing amnesty.  It didn’t work.  It did manage to convince many of us that “compassionate conservatism” was a bad joke.  But Mr. Bush was right in a sense–these values don’t stop at the Rio Grande.  To look at Ms. Mac Donald’s numbers, if 48% of Hispanics are outside of wedlock “family values” don’t even reach the Rio Grande in some parts of the country.  If they had their way, the open borders crowd would help make sure that this family values-free zone increased in size at a steady rate. 

The reason for the open borders crowd’s indifference to such empirical evidence is pretty clearly ideological.  It doesn’t matter that there actually are so many out-of-wedlock births among Hispanics–the ideologue knows that all Hispanics are Catholics (which is increasingly untrue) and that such Catholics must have families probably just like 19th and early 20th century eastern European families (definitely untrue) and that, somehow, social and political revolution has not affected Catholics from Latin America (absolutely untrue).  In this fantasy, to which even some conservative Catholics in this country may be very susceptible (Sam Brownback, this means you), the moral and social changes that have obviously swept over the Catholic world everywhere else to significant effect must have never reached Mexico and points south.  While accusing other conservatives of nostalgia for olden times, the open borders crowd still seems to imagine Latin America as it was maybe fifty years ago or more, or perhaps simply as some ideal type of traditional society that can be used as a way to refuel the drained moral batteries of modern America.  

Ideology is usually the cause for most examples of people ignoring evidence.  In this case, the ideology involves holding at least these three ideas: America is a nation of immigrants, therefore it is inevitably good for American society to have more immigrants, it is even better to have hardy, Catholic immigrants who possess good “values” and because they are hardy, Catholic immigrants it would be hypocritical for Christians to want to keep them from coming here and it would also be anti-Catholic bigotry.  It is a potent little cocktail of cant, ignorance and political blackmail all rolled into one.  It will take a lot of work presenting the evidence to the public to break the spell this ideology has on policymakers.

Around that time, I had started noticing the puzzling logic of petitionary prayer. What was the theory of God behind prayer websites, for example: that God is a democratic pol with his finger to the wind of public opinion? Is the idea that if only five people are praying for the recovery of a beloved grandmother from stroke, say, God will brush them off, but that if you can summon five thousand people to plead her case, he will perk up and take notice: “Oh, now I understand, this person’s life is important”? And what if an equally beloved grandmother comes from a family of atheist curs? Since she has no one to pray for her, will God simply look the other way? If someone could explain this to me, I would be very grateful.

I also wondered at the narcissism of believers who credit their good fortune to God. A cancer survivor who claims that God cured him implies that his worthiness is so obvious that God had to act. It never occurs to him to ask what this explanation for his deliverance says about the cancer victim in the hospital bed next to his, who, despite the fervent prayers of her family, died anyway.

As I was pondering whether any of these practices could be reconciled with rationality, the religious gloating of the conservative intelligentsia only grew louder. The onset of the Iraq war expanded the domain of religious triumphalism to transatlantic relations: what makes America superior to Europe, we were told by conservative opinionizers, is its religious faith and its willingness to invade Iraq. George Bush made the connection between religious beliefs and the Iraq war explicit, with his childlike claim that freedom was God’s gift to humanity and that he was delivering that gift himself by invading Iraq.

I need not rehearse here how Bush’s invocation of the divine gift of freedom overlooks the Bible, the persistence throughout history of hierarchical societies that have little use for personal autonomy, and the unique, centuries-long struggle in the West to create the institutions of limited government that underwrite our Western idea of freedom. Suffice it to say, the predictable outcome of the Iraq invasion did not convince me that religious belief was a particularly trustworthy ground for political action. ~Heather Mac Donald

The remarks about prayer and claims of divine healing or grace are stunning to me.  These are the kinds of objections college freshmen come up with in their religion classes in the first few weeks before they learn that they don’t know anything.  If man is free, prayer must exist.  God is always seeking to draw us to Himself, but He does not, would not compel us to draw nigh.  Likewise, He is willing to provide for us in many specific instances, but will not do so unless we ask it of Him.  There are occasions where God, in His infinite wisdom, will refuse our petition because what we ask for is not what we actually require for our edification and sanctification. There are other occasions when God may approach us unbidden, but it is only through the practice of prayer and the habits of mind and spirit that this practice establishes in us that we are prepared to receive Him. 

Imagine, if you will, a man on an island in the middle of a wide and deep river.  On the far shore there is a fisherman casting his nets.  The fisherman has a boat and has a large catch of fish, and could bring the man food or even take him over to the shore if the man were to ask it of him.  The man has no nets and nothing else on the island with which to fish, and he has no other means of sustenance.  In the course of time, the man will gradually starve if he does not humble himself and ask for help from the fisherman.  If Ms. Mac Donald were there to advise him, she would tell him that he should not say anything to the fisherman.  He should not have to ask the fisherman, because he should already know that the man is in need and should provide for him without any word from the man.  Perhaps Ms. Mac Donald would be more satisfied if everyone spiritually starved in their own autonomy rather than engage in something so irrational as prayer. 

Indeed, it would be even more absurd, according to Ms. Mac Donald, for other people on the shore with the fisherman to ask the fisherman to intercede on behalf of the man.  Ms. Mac Donald would interrupt: “What possible difference could that make?”  (Of course, the number isn’t really what matters, but the spirit in which the prayer is offered and the purity of the petitioner’s intention.)  All that it might take for the fisherman to answer could be one petitioner, but supposing that there were more than just one the fisherman would see the love that these petitions represent and would probably hasten to fulfill the good desire of so many people.  Beseeching the fisherman on behalf of the man is part of the fulfillment of the Christian obligation to love one another, and it is at least partly to instill in men love for one another that we are called to offer up prayers for others.  On this point, I would borrow an idea from Lewis’ apologetics and frame the question this way: “How much worse might a person’s suffering be without others praying on his behalf?  How much better might his condition be because others have prayed for him? ”  If the atheists’ grandmother is truly beloved, does Ms. Mac Donald think that this love is in vain?  Presumably not, or she would not have brought it up.  If it is not in vain, but is indeed truly love, how is it that God will ignore this beloved person, since all love comes from Him and participates in Him?  Will Ms. Mac Donald be grateful for this response?  I am somehow doubtful.

A cancer survivor would credit his survival to God out of humility and gratitude for having been spared a painful death and shortened life.  I literally cannot imagine anyone who gives thanks to God in such a case offering up this praise with the sense that he was saved because he was worthy.  In Christianity, at least, the presumption of wretchedness and unworthiness of all of God’s gifts is strong (this is one of those parts of the Faith that really grates on people, especially those who are pretty pleased with themselves and think that they would be worthy of God’s special attention) because of the recognition of two things: man is fallen and sinful and God is nonetheless merciful and does not treat us according to what we deserve.  If Thou shouldst mark iniquities, O Lord, O Lord, who shall stand? (Ps. 130:3)  As Fr. Rutler once put it simply (I am paraphrasing a little), “The question is not why bad things happen to good people, for the Lord said, There is none good save My Father in heaven.  The question, then, is: why do good things happen to bad people?”  Secularists and atheists, and probably a few Christians, groan when they hear statements like this, not so much because they find the argument lacking but because they don’t like the implications.  The first implication is that we may not ever understand the reasons for why two people suffering from the same disease  have entirely different fates.  These people don’t like this because it means there are things they will never know, which reminds them of their finitude and limits.  The second is that God wills, or in this case permits, different things for different people according to their needs.  If one cancer patient lives and another dies, God has provided for both what is most fitting.  Does that make such a loss any easier to bear?  Often, no, it doesn’t, but it is nonetheless true.         

Was religious belief really the ground for Mr. Bush’s War?  It certainly suits some people to think so.  Nothing would satisfy secular conservatives, who made up the overwhelming majority of the policymakers and pundits who vociferously backed the war, more than to be able to pretend that this war was not the outcome of incompetent policy wonks pushing a senseless conflict based on poor assumptions about human nature, culture, history and politics that have more to do with Ms. Mac Donald’s beloved Enlightenment than with anything found in the Gospel.  Secular conservatives would love to be able to pin the war on religious conservatives, many of whom foolishly trusted the President and lent him their support out of a (misguided) sense of patriotism but almost all of whom had no role in the pushing, planning or execution of the war.  

This line of criticism is to treat Mr. Bush’s references to God giving the world freedom as the source and foundation of the drive to invade Iraq, when I propose that it was at best some platitudinous religious window dressing for what was an avowedly secular, revolutionary campaign that Mr. Bush justified precisely in terms of bringing the fruits of liberal modernity to the Near East.  That his policy instead produced mass theocracy and sectarianism is par for the course, but let us not confuse the undesired results for the goals of the administration.  Let us also not confuse the icing of saccharine religiosity for the cake of democratic revolutionarism and projecting U.S. power for what was supposed to be our hegemonic control of the region (that it turned out to advance Iran’s hegemonic control of the region is again par for the course). 

Ms. Mac Donald also said:

I need not rehearse here how Bush’s invocation of the divine gift of freedom overlooks the Bible, the persistence throughout history of hierarchical societies that have little use for personal autonomy, and the unique, centuries-long struggle in the West to create the institutions of limited government that underwrite our Western idea of freedom.

No, she need not, because I, benighted Christian that I am, had already said very much the same thing in protest against the foolish, unorthodox and dangerous idea that God bestows political freedom on humanity.

I haven’t seen the start of the new season of 24, but I am more than familiar with the nature of the show over its past five years.  In spite of everything that could be said against its insane worship of the Presidency (according to which, if the President authorises it, it is probably permissible to irradiate nursing homes or to drop a nuke on Denver–if it serves the cause of stopping the terrorists), its complete disregard for something we like to call “the law” and the complete implausibility of being able to routinely get across L.A. as easily as everyone in CTU does, it is fun to watch.  It is the action genre’s answer to campy romantic melodrama; it is the American equivalent of Bollywood pics dedicated to episodes of conflict with Pakistan and jihadis.  Unlike those, however, we are spared the sight of Paul Blackthorne’s Stephen Saunders singing to his daughter.  (Unlike most people appearing in 24, though, Paul Blackthorne has had experience with Bollywood, when he played the irremediably unpleasant British captain who challenged Aamir Khan’s villagers to a cricket match in Lagaan.)  

As in those fine Indian action films, the characters on 24 absurdly overplay family and office dramas that somehow manage to fit together with the efforts to prevent the impending disaster.  Noble Arab-American speechifying about being good citizens in season 4 brings to mind Akshay Kumar’s loyal Muslim copper in Sarfarosh.  Shadowy scenes of Geraint Wyn Davies’ Nathanson ordering various terrorist attacks in season 5 call forth, unbidden, memories of scenes of the beturbaned mastermind behind Mission: Kashmir.  The line between 24-ridiculous and hysterically bad is actually a very thin one, and one that the writers have not always stayed on the right side of.  Everyone knows how close it comes to being a really, really silly show, but it is as if we have all agreed to not mention this because, as with some of us and Bollywood, we just like it too much to dwell on the absurdity of it all.  Don’t spoil the fun–we want to see what Jack does next!  Should Amitabh Bachchan ever guest star in a future season (which would be marketing genius), the connection between the two will be complete.   

24 fans know the structure of a season pretty well by now.  In the beginning, there is the progress of a ho-hum, routine day suddenly broken up by some shocking event that only presages the coming string of threats.  This is followed by some terrorist plot or act that would, on its own, be sufficient to fill out a feature film that covers an entire week, but which must, for obvious reasons of time (of which Jack Bauer claims to never enough, but which always turns out to be just sufficient in the very end), be concluded in a matter of two or three hours.  In real time!  Then there are the ludicrous plot devices (e.g., the inevitable uncovering of yet another mole in CTU–don’t these people have any security checks?), and the inevitably tiresome dialogue (which is all too realistic in the constant re-explaining of the situation, such as when the New Guy has just come over from Division, which is 24‘s equivalent of the Inferno).  Then you have the unavoidably cliche “we really don’t want to do this, but we have no choice” scenarios and the increasingly predicatble and de rigueur subplot involving the rulebook-following toady from Division who does virtually everything wrong for the entire season until he is forced by events to become an unlikely hero (the latest–Samwise, er, Sean Astin).  But in spite of all these things, we love our 24.  It is not because it is necessarily all that good or good for us, but because, like Bollywood, it is a complete flight of fantasy away from the real world in which we live. 

That world, for Americans, is largely so safe, dull and humdrum that we hungrily feed on the constant tension and action of 24 the way that hundreds of millions of unhappy Indians feed off of the bubblegum-pop happiness of a masala flick’s star-crossed lovers.  No one would actually want to live in the world that Jack Bauer inhabits, and happily no one does, but it is 24‘s genius to make us think for at least one hour every week that we actually do live in that world and that the plots unfolding in front of us are realistic because they are happening in “real time.”  Fortunately for us, they are not realistic.  Unfortunately, many of 24‘s biggest fans think that this is exactly what the real world is like.  This may explain why the policies preferred by the show’s loudest fans are not even as effective in the real world as the melodramatic romance of Bollywood is at creating the successful template for relationships between men and women.

Rasmussen’s poll from early in January that gave Romney 29/35 fav/unfav ratings tells us a little about the composition of the people who view him unfavourably.  Among Republicans, he has decent 39/28 ratings, and among Democrats his numbers are predicatbly worse: 21/42.  Among independents and third party members (listed as “Other” under political party) the ratings are 28/35.  The 18-29 and 50-64 age groups are most likely to view him unfavourably (with 21/36 and 25/41 ratings respectively) and he does horribly with men overall: 34/44.  He doesn’t do terribly well with white voters (29/36), but for some reason black voters respond relatiely much better to him (41/33). 

He seems to have succeeded at getting just enough of a reputation as a social conservative to put off a lot of young, independent and Democratic voters while somehow managing to also alienate a lot of men and Boomers.  It’s just now the start of 2007, a third of likely voters still has yet to learn enough to know whether they like him or not, but he already has Hillaryesque unfavourables.  As of right now, he is the only one of the Terrible Trio of leading GOP candidates projected to lose to all possible Democratic nominees.  If these numbers have any meaning (which, at this point, they may not), Romney had better hope for a Vilsack nomination, since that is the only one that’s even close.

Thus does the left casually open the door to the baldest sort of bigotry, a first cousin of the anti-Catholicism thought buried in 1960, or the anti-Semitism that continues to plague Europe and of course the Middle East. The not-so-deft substitution of “religious heritage” for “religion” is supposed, I guess, to protect Jews willing to abandon the outward display of their faith, but for anyone believing in the miraculous of any sort, well, those days of the great tolerance in American politics are over. ~Hugh Hewitt

Yes, Hewitt, if someone thinks that Mitt Romney’s Mormonism is a reason not to support his candidacy, he is practically just one step removed from joining the Klan (that would be the anti-Catholicism) or perhaps Hamas (that would be the anti-Semitism).  That’s not an absurd thing to say at all!

There is no doubt that Weisberg doesn’t like anyone who actually believes what his religion teaches and takes it seriously.  He doesn’t trust people like that.  That’s just about what you would expect from someone like him.  But do the 53% of evangelicals who say they will never consider voting for a Mormon for President listen to Jacob Weisberg?  Are their reasons the same as his?  Well, yes and no.  All of them are opposed to a Mormon presidential candidate because they believe he believes things that are plainly false.  They are judging by different standards, and where Weisberg’s test would exclude anyone who believes in claims of revealed religion as actually true theirs would effectively reject anyone who does not believe as they do in Jesus Christ.  

Incidentally, it was precisely this bias in favour of a fellow evangelical that rallied evangelicals behind Mr. Bush.  Identity politics of this sort is not exactly an attractive feature of mass democracy, but it is a central and abiding feature.  Those who actually believe that democracy is the best form of government (I certainly don’t) have absolutely no business complaining when their beloved democratic process is simply working as it always has.  After cheering on the bestowal of the great gift of “democracy” on Iraq, now it turns out that Hewitt doesn’t like this particular expression of the popular will.  Rather than face up to the potential evils of democracy that make it possible for identity politics to dominate all other considerations and shut out ostensibly qualified candidates, Hewitt cries about bigotry, yet the very nature of all democratic identitarianism involves the mobilisation and politicisation of prejudice.  All candidates in democratic elections try to show that they are “like you” and that they represent you, and they want you to identify with them and to see them as a symbol of your hopes and aspirations.  Romney is trying to play this game in a lame, late-in-the-day attempt to prove that he is really “one of us” as far as social conservatism goes, but what his supporters don’t seem to appreciate is that a whole lot of Christian conservatives don’t think of him as “one of us” because they cannot even accept that he is really a Christian.  If a Muslim, Jew, Sikh or Hindu, or any other non-Christian, ran for the Republican nomination, he would assuredly meet with the same icy reception.  For Hewitt to be loudly complaining about anti-Mormon prejudice, he has to pretend that most evangelicals, whose interests and “values” he often purports to defend, do not fundamentally agree with Weisberg’s rejection of the “founding whoppers” of Mormonism.  That Weisberg’s critique involves far more than that and is a general assault on the role of serious religious believers in public life is for the moment beside the point.  The point is that the problem Hewitt has with Weisberg is one that he would inevitably have to have with a huge percentage of evangelical voters.  Ultimately, Weisberg’s opposition will be neither here nor there.  If he and Damon Linker were the only ones who found Mormonism to be a problem for Romney’s candidacy, it would be irrelevant to Romney’s chances and to the rest of society.  Of course, they are not the only ones.  It is huge numbers of voters, both evangelical and otherwise, who also agree that it is a problem, indeed a dealbreaker, and it is they who will be the ones deciding the issue just as it was decided in 1928.  Unlike 1928, though, Gov. Romney will not even get the nomination.     

What Hewitt laments as bigotry would be what a reasonable observer would call the workings of the much-vaunted freedom and democracy in these here United States.  Ever notice how quickly the greatest enthusiasts for both of these modern god-words abandon their commitment to them when they become inconvenient?  Notice how Republicans are the first to start whining about intolerance when it is their ox that is being gored?  Perhaps it ought to be the case that left-liberals should practice tolerance towards all as they demand that everyone else does, but once you recognise that “tolerance” is a tool and a weapon in the hands of the left to dismantle the traditions and authorities that they despise you begin to understand that it was never a legitimate or desirable principle in the first place.  It was always a deception aimed at the exclusion of left-liberals’ enemies from power and influence in society.  It is suicidal for someone on the right to invoke it in the defense of religious conservatives or to use it as a bludgeon to shame religious conservatives into supporting his preferred candidate (Hewitt might as well have said to his conservative audience, “If you don’t vote for Romney, you are also a bigot.”).

Hewitt calls us all to solidarity with Mormons with rhetoric as treacly as anything on offer from the ADL:

Weisberg’s attack on Romney is exactly the sort of attack on other Christians and believers in the miraculous that the secular left would love to make routine. To mainstream Protestants and Mass-attending Catholics, the virtual mob against Romney because of his LDS faith may seem like someone else’s problem, but it is really another step down the road toward the naked public square. Legitimizing bigotry by refusing to condemn it invites not only its repetition, but its spread to new targets.  

In every pro-Romney article that I have read, everyone reaches for the Kennedy comparison, usually followed by a “I thought we had left all of this behind” and an inevitable, “Never again!”  Now the Niemoelleresque Hewitt warns us, “First they came for the Mormons…”  But no one is coming for them.  No one is doing anything to them.  A very few people are writing (critical) columns about Mormonism, and other people are going to withhold their vote from a Mormon candidate.  Never have “oppression” and “bigotry” been so passive and unremarkable.  But we are supposed to believe that this is the “first step” towards a naked public square.  But the public square was stripped down years ago, and it is only in the last 25-30 years that the attempt to cover it up with any sort of decent clothing has been underway.  Who forms the beating heart of the religious conservatives who most wish to “clothe” the public square in a mantle of righteousness, so to speak?  Obviously, it is the evangelicals.  Who also make up one of the most openly and intensely anti-Mormon groups in the country?  Again, evangelical Protestants.  The Christian people who are against Romney’s Mormonism are precisely the people who want a fully-dressed public square with the clothing options provided by their own tailor.  Like it or not, there are limits to what kind of generic religiosity such people want to promote in public life.  Religions that appear to these Christians to be clearly non-Christian or, at best, wildly heterodox are not going to qualify as part of the clothing of the public square.  You will not be able to scare these people with threats of galloping secularism, because they are already convinced that galloping secularism is here.  They are also probably convincced that the last thing they need to fight secularism is to support a candidate who doesn’t even believe in the same God as they do.  That is what this entire controversy is all about. 

For the actual believers we’re talking about, who are not to be confused with any vague “believers in the miraculous,” but who are people who confess Jesus Christ as Lord, are these people supposed to believe that it will be pleasing to God to elect a non-Christian?  Matched against that far more basic concern, Hewitt’s pleas for tolerance and his long-term fears of providing a precedent for future secularist intolerance (which is a rather silly thing to worry about, since they don’t need precedents, as they make up the rules as they go) appear pretty weak and pathetic.

Watching Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, which finally hit the shelves this week on DVD, I couldn’t help noticing its uncanny resemblance to Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men. Sure, Idiocracy is a low comedy, full of kicks to the groin and monster-truck rallies, while Children of Men is a serious dramatic thriller about the extinction of humanity. But both movies are chilling visions of a future dystopia extrapolated, with pitiless logic, from our current moment. Both feature a reluctant hero (Clive Owen in Children of Men, Luke Wilson in Idiocracy) who’s jolted from his depressive complacency and asked to save the planet from destruction. And both posit human reproduction (or the lack of it) as the problem that threatens the future of the human race. 

One other commonality: Both movies were scandalously underpromoted by the studios releasing them. Judge’s film sat on a shelf for two years at Fox before being hacked down to its current 84-minute running time and dumped, unadvertised, into only a few cities on the slowest movie weekend of the year. Children of Men‘s fate has been slightly less ignominious; it was released nationwide, largely untrumpeted, on Christmas Day, and only this week, after countless critics (including me) put the movie on their 10-best lists, has Universal rushed to mount a too-little-too-late push for Oscar consideration.

The burial of Children of Men was lame, but comprehensible. Figuring that few viewers would flock to such an unremitting downer of a film, Universal must have decided to market the movie modestly, hoping at least to break even with attention from art-house audiences. But Fox’s choice to withhold Idiocracy even from the markets where it was most likely to find cult viewers—New York? San Francisco?—and to eschew all advertising is simply bewildering. The shrouding of Idiocracy in what amounts to a marketing burqa is especially ironic given that the film’s most pointed satire is aimed at the ubiquity of advertising in American life. ~Dana Stevens

On Children of Men, I think Ms. Stevens gives the studio too much credit.  It isn’t just that the movie is an “unremitting downer of a film” (some might say that Schindler’s List is something of a downer, too, but that didn’t stop the studio from promoting it like crazy), but that it is a downer with an obvious but decidedly uncomfortable message for the wine-and-cheese set: if every couple in this country had only one child or had no children, the future for our people would be just as bleak as it is for all of the people in Children of Men.  Natalists immediately saw the potential significance of the movie as something that would dramatise their arguments for them.  I suspect that it received such pitiful studio support because it might make natalism the respectable, sane option in the same way that dystopian stories of totalitarianism have made various forms of anti-statism the obvious alternative.  However, as we all know, natalism is the preserve of fundamentalists and fascists and therefore forever off limits to respectable people, or so some people would tell you.

The reason for the opposition to Idiocracy is more obvious: it was not acceptable, even as a big joke, to tell a story about the dysgenic results of the ever-declining average intelligence of humanity achieved through the prolific breeding of morons.  You can’t even talk about that without some penalty, much less put it on screen!  (Here‘s Reihan’s old review of Idiocracy.)  Before it’s all over, Ms. Stevens must also register her own disapproval:

Ultimately, Children of Men‘s vision of the future is more inclusive, and kinder, than Idiocracy‘s. Judge’s gimlet eye is so ruthless that at times his politics seem to border on South Park libertarianism—a philosophy that, as has often been observed about South Park, can flirt with the reactionary. And there’s more than a little classism in Idiocracy‘s fear that the dumb—here pictured as trailer-park trash and fast-food-swilling losers—will inherit the earth. Would we be better off in a world in which the brittle, infertile yuppies shown in the movie’s opening moments had populated the earth with their spawn?

That’s right: the movie that depicts the near-extinction of mankind is “kinder” than Idiocracy.  Ms. Stevens is pulling out all the stops: it’s libertarian! it’s like South Park! reactionary! classist!  (I confess that I have never before seen the word “classism,” but in our age of race-class-gender studies, we would have to have classism to go with racism and–coming soon–genderism to accommodate all the transgendered out there.)  The answer to her question is pretty clearly yes.  The idea behind the movie is that the world would be better off if those yuppies at least managed to reproduce at replacement levels.  That is what frightens the studios.  Here’s a possible reason: studios are having a hard enough time getting people to go to movie theatres in an age of Netflix, DVDs and, soon, the iPhone, so the last thing they can afford is for their childless, moviegoing audience to get crazy ideas about having large families that will consume more and more of their time and leave them fewer occasions to go to the cinema.  Therefore all movies that might encourage middle-class professionals to start having more children must be kept out of sight for as long as possible.  What do you think?